Latest / Liberty + Leadership / Inside the Future of Reporting: Highlights from the TFAS Journalism Forum

Transcript

Inside the Future of Reporting: Highlights from the TFAS Journalism Forum · Liberty + Leadership

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to the Liberty and Leadership Podcast, a conversation with TFAS alumni, faculty, and friends who are making an impact today.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_00: I'm your host, Roger Reen.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_00: On November 11th, the Fund for American Studies held its 32nd annual Journalism Awards dinner in New York City.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_00: Over 50 years ago, TFAS embraced journalism as one of its many important focuses by launching the Institute on Political Journalism, a summer internship program and holding conferences on college campuses.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_00: Then we added the prestigious Robert Novak Journalism Fellowship.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_00: In 2018, we started the Joseph Rago Fellowships in partnership with the Wall Street Journal and the Rago family.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_00: More recently, our stable of programs has grown tremendously.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_00: In 2023, we launched our Student Journalism Association, which works to support independent student journalism on college campuses across the country.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_00: The Student Journalism Association started with 15 student publications and has now grown to 30 publications in less than two years.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_00: The very next year in 2024, our Media Accelerator Fellowship came online to work with young professional journalists in Washington, D.C.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_00: to help them develop their beat and really grow in the craft of journalism.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_00: And then this year in 2025, we began our Campus Transparency Fellowship, which works with student journalists to do critical investigative reporting on their campuses across the country on topics such as DEI, anti-Semitism, administrative bloat, and more.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_00: Also, this year in 2025, we expanded the Joseph Rago Memorial Fellowship for Excellence in Journalism to offer fellowships to three young writers.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_00: So in this spirit of highlighting the impact our donors make through TFAS on our alumni in the field of journalism, this year's awards dinner was preceded by a journalism impact forum, which featured discussions with TFAS alumni, Robert Novak fellows, and student journalists who gathered to examine the state of journalism and the future of the media.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_00: Today's episode of the Liberty and Leadership Podcast will feature selections from those forum discussions.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_00: First, we'll hear from Brian Anderson, who delivered a keynote on the state of journalism.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_00: He is the editor of the City Journal and was the 2024 recipient of our Thomas Phillips Career Achievement Award.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_00: Here's Brian.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_01: It depends on what poll you look at.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_01: About 31% of Americans say they trust newspapers, television, or radio to report fully and fairly.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_01: Among Republicans, the figure is just 10%.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_01: So conservatives, you know, can point to years of selective outrage, you could call it, since Donald Trump entered politics, from the phony Russia gate investigations to the celebration of the mostly peaceful uh George Floyd riots, uh, to the pretense that President Biden was sharp as attack.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_01: One could name countless examples of elite outlets alignment with progressive causes reinforced during the Biden years by what is now shown to be widespread coordination among the press, social media firms, and government officials to suppress and even deplatform controversial conservative voices.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_01: This was a failed effort to restore some kind of control or command over what was becoming a media cornucopia.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_01: And with newsrooms clustered in just a few coastal cities steeped in the assumptions of the journalistic class, the more those institutions declare themselves guardians of truth, the more half the country concluded that truth was a partisan brand.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_01: And yet the hunger for reporting hasn't vanished.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_01: People still want to know what happened, who did what, where, and why.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_01: Engagement with factual storytelling remains high.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_01: I can speak from our own experience at City Journal, our reported pieces.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_01: Abigail Schreier on the sexual trafficking of minors in California, uh, Christopher Rufo on critical race theory in schools, Heather McDonald on policing, much more.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_01: They've reached millions of people and have helped shape the national debate.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_01: So putting a face, as good journalism does, to the abstractions of policy choices can make them come alive, clarifying the stakes in human lives.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_01: It's also about, though, having journalists who do the hard work and have the receipts, as the saying goes.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_01: Contemporary audiences now increasingly seek out individual voices they can trust.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_01: That searched is producing a new ecosystem of journalist entrepreneurs.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_01: Now, this emerging public sphere looks much less like the New York Times and more like a conversation or argument among hundreds of independent or quasi-independent interpreters.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_01: Some rigorous, some reckless or worse conspiratorial, but all accountable directly to their audiences.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_01: So if I were to offer advice to aspiring journalists, it would be to keep these realities very much in mind.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_01: Reporting can still make an enormous difference, but you do have to get the story, and there are many untold stories out there in areas the legacy press, because of its assumptions, has long ignored.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_01: A contemporary journalist should also think of themselves as an entrepreneur, even when working for an institution, and those institutions in turn must adapt to the reality of the journalist as brand.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_01: So the future of journalism, I think, may lie in a kind of unstable synthesis, uh technologically fluent, yet recognizably human, fast but also capable of depth, and drawing on subscription, commercial, and donor funding alike.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_01: So the story of modern journalism is really one of constant transformation to conclude.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_01: The Internet freed up speech, but it's brought cacophony and cultural conflict.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_01: Social media has empowered individuals but eroded institutions.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_01: AI is promising new efficiencies but threatens originality.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_01: Yet the public's need for reliable storytelling, the ancient hunger for a narrative that makes sense of the world remains.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_01: The next phase of journalism will belong to those who can reconcile abundance with authority, harness new tools without surrendering to them, and remember that the press at its very best is devoted to uncovering reality itself.
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_00: Brian captures something that has become hard to ignore.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_00: Trust in legacy outlets has objectively collapsed, yet the hunger for honest reporting remains stronger than ever.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_00: Americans still want facts, they still look for reliable storytellers, and they refuse to believe that only a handful of traditional institutions can provide that.
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_00: That sets the stage for our next segment, where Brian is joined by a panel of recent Novak fellows to continue the conversation on the state of journalism.
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_00: First, you'll hear from Charles Lehman, senior editor at the City Journal, followed by Kate Batchelder O'Dell, a member of the Wall Street Journal Editorial Board, and followed by Mene Ukabarua, also a member of the Wall Street Journal Editorial Board.
• 8:43
  SPEAKER_01: Is this something that's even addressable?
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe some of the things you have just been describing are is one way to address it.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_01: But you know, what can the profession do to prove its position with the public?
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_01: I'll start in the middle and go to the Wall Street Journal.
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, it's easy.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, why not?
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_03: I'm maybe a little bit of a pessimist on this front, in the sense that, to go back to the point earlier about the history of journalism, which I think everyone in this room sort of knows and agrees with, the collapse of trust in journalism is related to the class of trust and institutions generally, which is in some senses just about the sort of disintermediation of institutions or the revolt of the public, the phenomenon by which the middle of the 20th century, the institutions in the middle of the 20th century were able to sort of cloak themselves in unearned authority, and the public's greater insight into those institutions has revealed that to be a house of cards, mixed by metaphors.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_03: You know, I don't think there's a lot that we can do about that.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_03: Like, yes, it would be good if journalists consistently told the truth.
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_03: That would be ideal.
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_03: I would prefer that.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_03: I'd certainly try to do that.
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_03: I think, you know, my colleagues up here try to do that.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_03: But I think you do actually just have to live in a world where there is less trust.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_03: There's like there's very little you can do about that except act as though every time you're interacting with the reader, you aren't owed their trust.
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_03: You aren't owed any authority.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_03: You don't have any authority with them.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_03: And instead, I think you have to be able to share your work.
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_03: You know, part of the virtue of the rise of citizen journalists is that anyone who can do that and who can share their work will end up having influence.
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_03: I know people who have gotten, you know, legislation passed because they wrote anonymous blog posts.
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_03: But like, that's great.
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_03: And then on the other hand, like that imposes a higher standard on journalists because we too have to be able to share our work all the time.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_03: I think that's good.
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_03: It is a much less trusting environment, but I don't think there's any going back.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_03: And I think you just have to live with it.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_06: I mean, I think if you went back four years ago and said that Barry Weiss, our call old colleague at the journal would be running CBS News, that would be a pretty big surprise.
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_06: I mean, I think real change is possible and underrated as a possibility in the media environment.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_06: I mean, I think the loss of confidence is real in reacting to something substantive, but I think that is by no means inevitable to continue.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_06: And I think the country is evincing a real cultural shift that the business will have to respond to to stay competitive.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_06: And I think that's similar to the technology front, where it is a reality, the new mediums are here, but at the same time, I hear from more and more people who are constantly overloaded with information coming at them, and they are basically doing a flight to quality.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_06: They want a curated product that tells them what they need to know.
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_06: And I say, that's a newspaper.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_06: So I I use both of those examples to say that I think some of these changes really can be arrested and that the pendulum is is seems to be coming back in a different direction.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I would agree with that.
• 11:34
  SPEAKER_01: Uh Mene?
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_09: Yeah, I I think that a lot of publications aren't particularly interested in being credible.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_09: It's not their business model.
• 11:43
  SPEAKER_09: They're interested in cultivating an audience of people who are fully on board with the message that they're selling, and it's essentially a form of political entertainment, and that that is what it is.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_09: But if you are a publication that is interested in being credible and drawing a wider audience, I think one of the ways that you do that, of course, is being willing to criticize your own side from time to time.
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_09: That signals to people on the other side.
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_09: I may not agree with the overall worldview or thrust of this publication, but they're doing their best to be fair.
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_09: They're trying to actually look objectively at subjects and come to a conclusion.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_09: And sometimes that conclusion will be the opposite of what their own party tends to think.
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_09: To give an example, I disagree with Ezra Klein about just about everything politically.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_09: I think that he has exercised quite a lot of bias on a lot of subjects, but he is someone who from time to time is willing to criticize his coalition.
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_09: He criticized Democrats for covering up Biden's frailty, criticized Democrats for over-reliance on interest groups and things like that.
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_09: And so I think that he's worth listening to for that reason, despite the fact that I'm a conservative.
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_09: And I think that on the conservative side of the aisle, you have to pick your spots too and criticize your side in a way that's going to signal to your audience that you're actually dealing objectively with the stories you cover.
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_01: Aaron Powell Let's just do a quick final lightning round.
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_01: Basically a short statement.
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_01: If you were advising, you're all pretty young, a young journalist today, um what habits and skills would you emphasize and what have you found useful in your own career so far?
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_09: I think at in the very beginning of your career, doing reporting, uh focusing all of your stories on give my audience new information that they didn't know, Charles?
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_03: The one piece of advice I give everybody is write every single day.
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_01: Which he does.
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_06: Habits of the mind, like Manet said, focus on reporting and developing human relationships, turn off the technology and try to immerse yourself in reading and writing.
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_00: The Novak Fellowship is a year-long program which allows serious and enterprising journalists early in their careers to pursue projects they otherwise would be unable to research and report.
• 13:57
  SPEAKER_00: Next, in a panel moderated by Ryan Wolfe, the director of the TFAS Center for Excellence in Journalism, we get to hear from two journalists who just completed their Novak fellowships.
• 14:09
  SPEAKER_00: The first is Corrine Hajar.
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_00: Corrine was a former Joseph Rago fellow with the Wall Street Journal and a former editorial board member at the Boston Globe.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_00: Soon she will be an opinion journalist and editorial board member at the Washington Post.
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_00: After Corinne, the next fellow is Aubrey Fahlberg, a former politics reporter at The Dispatch, former Robert Bartley Fellow at the Wall Street Journal, and current politics reporter at National Review.
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_10: At these events each year, you guys meet the new class of Novak fellows.
• 14:45
  SPEAKER_10: And some of you who were here last year may have wondered so what did they do?
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_10: What were the results of their projects?
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_10: What kind of outcomes did they have?
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_10: And so I'm excited to be here with Karine Hajar and Audrey Fahlberg, who just recently completed their Novak fellowships to talk a little bit about that.
• 15:05
  SPEAKER_10: Audrey's project was Who's Next?
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_10: The politicians, personnel, and policies shaping a shifting GOP.
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_10: And Karine's project was Iran and its proxies, a return to an unstable Middle East.
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_10: Could you guys share kind of the general thesis of your projects?
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_10: Like what did you sort of expect to find?
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_10: And then maybe a little bit on what you actually found.
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_10: I'll just add that with the Novak fellowships, they last one year.
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_10: So when fellows apply, you might hope or assume events will go a certain way.
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_10: In this case, Audrey applied prior to the 2024 election, and there were some questions about who would win, and that was decided pretty clearly.
• 15:47
  SPEAKER_10: And Corinne applied before the pagers went off.
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_10: And so these are two pretty big events that sort of altered the course of their project.
• 15:56
  SPEAKER_10: So if you want to comment on either of those two, that would be great.
• 15:59
  SPEAKER_10: So Audrey, we can start with you.
• 16:06
  SPEAKER_07: But yeah, I mean, for example, you know, one of the first stories that big stories that I wrote was a profile of Bernie Marino, who's kind of part of this self-described ascending part of the GOP that's very Vance aligned, very, again, skeptical of foreign intervention overseas, open to tariffs, very hawkish on immigration.
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_07: And you know, a lot of people were really dug in on Sherrod Brown being able to win that race.
• 16:25
  SPEAKER_07: But he, Bernie Marino, this, you know, not a career politician, first-time political candidate, he won it very handily.
• 16:31
  SPEAKER_07: And I think that that really spoke to how, you know, Trump's coalition has really shifted politics so much.
• 16:37
  SPEAKER_07: I did a lot of policy pieces from my project, but also focused on, you know, some figures in the Trump administration, for example, um, traveling out to California to do some reporting and a profile for the magazine on Lee Zeldon and how he's leading at the EPA.
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_07: Um, doing another magazine piece on John Thune, who one of the things that really intrigues me about him is he's kind of part of this old guard, this institutionalist type who really loves a filibuster.
• 17:03
  SPEAKER_07: Trump does not.
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_07: We uh remember that this week, of course.
• 17:05
  SPEAKER_07: So kind of watching that tension play out on the hill where you have kind of these steady hands in congressional leadership and how they're trying to understand and work with Trump during the first year of his administration, second term.
• 17:17
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah, I thought I would be in Lebanon approximately a year before I actually ended up getting to arrive to Beirut, which was fine because things changed so much.
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_05: I went in wanting to write about this idea of colonialism.
• 17:32
  SPEAKER_05: And on campus, you were hearing that Israel was colonizing.
• 17:35
  SPEAKER_05: But in my mind, I mean, reality is that Iran is colonizing, and it's that colonization and that imperialism that is destabilizing places like Lebanon.
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_05: And that was the truth that I had seen my whole life.
• 17:46
  SPEAKER_05: Then the pagers went off.
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_05: I think I I forget what swing state I was in on like day three of no sleep before the election.
• 17:54
  SPEAKER_05: And my cousin texted me, she had been in Lebanon visiting family, and she was like, oh, just haha, just got off the last flight out of the Beirut airport.
• 18:03
  SPEAKER_05: All the pagers went off in the hospital.
• 18:05
  SPEAKER_05: I mean, it was super interesting, but I think it was the first time that a lot of Lebanese who really see Hezbollah as the biggest problem in the country felt hopeful for change.
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_05: It just felt like a big shift.
• 18:18
  SPEAKER_05: And because of the Novak Fellowship, it was a great opportunity to sort of reorient and plan when it was safe and feasible to return to Beirut to talk more about that opportunity.
• 18:28
  SPEAKER_05: And also to talk about there was a lot of enthusiasm, and that was important, but also why people were a little too enthusiastic.
• 18:35
  SPEAKER_05: Like right now, I think I think the narrative you hear from a lot of Israeli officials, but also American officials, is that Hezbollah has been smited.
• 18:44
  SPEAKER_05: But even back in August, when I did end up getting to go to Lebanon, we knew that wasn't entirely true.
• 18:49
  SPEAKER_05: Yes, like a lot of their weaponry has been destroyed, but there's still hidden missile caches that we don't know about.
• 18:54
  SPEAKER_05: But that wasn't really the bigger problem.
• 18:56
  SPEAKER_05: It was more about their social purchase with the Lebanese.
• 18:59
  SPEAKER_05: And this comes back to the problem of the Lebanese sometimes being their own worst enemy, that they were tolerating Hezbollah rule.
• 19:05
  SPEAKER_05: And that's the struggle that the country's facing now.
• 19:07
  SPEAKER_05: So that's what I wrote about.
• 19:09
  SPEAKER_10: What did you guys see as sort of the most important, impactful pieces of reporting that came out of your projects?
• 19:15
  SPEAKER_07: Well, I do think it's fitting that, you know, my project is about how the shifting GOP, right?
• 19:20
  SPEAKER_07: And at the end of it, technically two months after my project ends, we have this uh interesting crack up at the Heritage Foundation, which, you know, kind of demonstrates we're at this interesting moment where the party really is in the presidency is up for grabs.
• 19:34
  SPEAKER_07: We're in the first year of the Trump administration, but we have a lot of people who are definitely vying to replace Trump, and there are a lot of arguments to be had about kind of what's next.
• 19:42
  SPEAKER_07: Um, in terms of kind of what one of my favorite pieces were, around the time that Trump bombed Iran, I got this tip from I was just talking to one of my sources, and he casually dropped, oh, yeah, you know, on the 2024 campaign trail, you know, Susie Wiles was just telling everybody that Trump really wanted to go to CPAC Hungary in 2022.
• 20:00
  SPEAKER_07: But he didn't go because he thought that the Secret Service couldn't keep him safe from the Iranians because the Iranians hated him so much after the Qasim Soleimani strike.
• 20:09
  SPEAKER_07: I was like, what?
• 20:10
  SPEAKER_07: So that turned into a huge scoop and a really interesting story about, you know, obviously there were multiple attempts on Trump's life, but also how much the Iranian threat really did spook the Trump campaign.
• 20:21
  SPEAKER_07: And, you know, was that the reason that he bombed Iran?
• 20:24
  SPEAKER_07: No.
• 20:24
  SPEAKER_07: I mean, clearly there were there's a lot of intelligence that motivated that, but clearly that stuck with him.
• 20:28
  SPEAKER_07: And he just it would stick with anybody.
• 20:30
  SPEAKER_07: I mean, I think that was an interesting story for me because again, I'm traditionally on the national politics campaign beat.
• 20:36
  SPEAKER_07: But being able to kind of explore foreign policy reporting a little bit, especially at a time when, you know, a lot of people have panned Trump as an isolationist when it's he's a lot more complicated when it comes to foreign policy.
• 20:46
  SPEAKER_07: So I think that that kind of story helped me kind of really better understand who he is as a leader.
• 20:50
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah, and Audrey has quite literally shaped multiple news cycles with some of her scoops, like from foreign policy scoops to elections.
• 20:57
  SPEAKER_05: So it's just super impressive.
• 20:59
  SPEAKER_05: And it's been really fun to watch and be like, oh, Audrey broke a nut.
• 21:03
  SPEAKER_05: That's awesome.
• 21:04
  SPEAKER_05: My favorite piece that I did from my Novak project was the second long essay I did after returning from Lebanon.
• 21:10
  SPEAKER_05: I think it was in September.
• 21:12
  SPEAKER_05: And I had already sort of gone into a big part of the globe audience's academics, we're in Boston, lots of colleges, lots of professors.
• 21:19
  SPEAKER_05: So I had already made the argument that was surprisingly novel to a lot of people about why Hezbollah was Lebanon's biggest problem and gone into the different dimensions of that.
• 21:28
  SPEAKER_05: But after going to Lebanon, I found that I was really challenged because I did realize how much the Lebanese people were holding themselves back.
• 21:37
  SPEAKER_05: And when you grow up in the Lebanese diaspora, all you hear about is how awesome we are and how, you know, the diaspora is everywhere.
• 21:45
  SPEAKER_05: They're usually successful in business.
• 21:47
  SPEAKER_05: When I was back in Lebanon, in, you know, the motherland, I guess, seeing how much corruption had ruined the government.
• 21:54
  SPEAKER_05: And it wasn't just because Hezbollah was being funded by the Iranians and had been built up into what it was.
• 21:59
  SPEAKER_05: It was because a lot of Lebanese politicians were tolerating this and continue to tolerate it.
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_05: You know, here I am in this amazing country that I've heard so many great things about, and I've always had a good time there.
• 22:08
  SPEAKER_05: You go to Lebanon and there could be bombs flying and there are still rooftop nightclubs going and multiple weddings raging.
• 22:15
  SPEAKER_05: Everyone keeps partying, it's of no consequence to them.
• 22:17
  SPEAKER_05: And I think that that mentality is why the Lebanese are so resilient, but it's also why their government continues to face challenge after challenge is because they've sort of like grown to adapt to the situation.
• 22:29
  SPEAKER_05: So the project really was an exercise in compassion, but also clarity.
• 22:34
  SPEAKER_05: And I really enjoyed that.
• 22:36
  SPEAKER_00: What stands out about the Novak Fellows is their ability to follow a story wherever it leads.
• 22:42
  SPEAKER_00: Whether the topic is foreign policy, national politics, or regional conflicts.
• 22:48
  SPEAKER_00: They do the work, they get the facts, and they bring clarity to issues that are often misrepresented.
• 22:55
  SPEAKER_00: That kind of reporting takes discipline and integrity.
• 22:58
  SPEAKER_00: And TFAS is proud to support it.
• 23:02
  SPEAKER_00: But the most inspiring part of the entire forum, at least for me, was the Student Journalism Association panel.
• 23:09
  SPEAKER_00: These students are not waiting for permission to do meaningful work.
• 23:14
  SPEAKER_00: They are reviving campus newspapers, exposing administrative failures, pushing back against censorship, holding institutions to account and actively transforming the college media landscape.
• 23:28
  SPEAKER_00: In a panel moderated by Novak Fellow and current reporter for the free press, Maya Salkin, you'll first hear from Alex Shea, formerly of The Brown Spectator, then from Natalia Lopez of the Florida Finibus, followed by Max Wayland of the Cornell Review.
• 23:47
  SPEAKER_08: I want to start with how student journalism can change real things on campus.
• 23:52
  SPEAKER_08: When I was at Columbia, I really quickly kind of got kicked out of the spectator because I wasn't the most popular person in the room.
• 24:01
  SPEAKER_08: But you guys have done something really, really remarkable at each of your campuses.
• 24:04
  SPEAKER_08: And a lot of that is because you really were enterprising and you kind of didn't let the existing paper or institutions kind of keep you down.
• 24:12
  SPEAKER_08: I wonder if you can each speak a little bit to how your own publications really help shape campus and student life.
• 24:19
  SPEAKER_08: You want to start, Alex?
• 24:21
  SPEAKER_11: Sure.
• 24:21
  SPEAKER_11: We've historically had this uh conservative student paper called the Brown Spectator.
• 24:25
  SPEAKER_11: And that has been a thing for a while, but in 2014 it just went away.
• 24:30
  SPEAKER_11: There wasn't enough interest in it.
• 24:32
  SPEAKER_11: And that's really a shame because, you know, Brown, people say it's the most liberal of all the Ivies, even more so than Columbia.
• 24:38
  SPEAKER_11: And uh that might be true.
• 24:40
  SPEAKER_11: And so it really gives students the impression that there aren't a lot of like-minded individuals around them.
• 24:45
  SPEAKER_11: And I think part of the reason why Brown is so liberal as well is because it's a school that's overwhelmingly wealthy.
• 24:52
  SPEAKER_11: It's also the wealthiest median income in the Ivy League.
• 24:55
  SPEAKER_11: And part of that is because it's really expensive.
• 24:58
  SPEAKER_11: And so we really just wanted to get to the bottom of what's going at Brown?
• 25:01
  SPEAKER_11: Why is Brown so weird?
• 25:02
  SPEAKER_11: And so we revived this newspaper, The Brown Spectator.
• 25:06
  SPEAKER_11: And one of our first projects off the bat initially was just to tackle this issue of administrative bloat.
• 25:13
  SPEAKER_11: Now, for those of you who don't know, Brown has about 4,000 administrators.
• 25:18
  SPEAKER_11: And to be clear, we're talking about administrators.
• 25:20
  SPEAKER_11: We're not talking about professors, we're talking about deans and associate deans and their administrative assistants.
• 25:27
  SPEAKER_11: And there were 4,000 of those compared to like 1,600 professors and like 8,000 undergrads.
• 25:33
  SPEAKER_11: And so that's a lot of administrators.
• 25:35
  SPEAKER_11: So we sent out a survey, um, sort of in the format of Doge and Elon Musk, just like, we we wanted to know what do you actually do?
• 25:42
  SPEAKER_11: And and this was not well received.
• 25:44
  SPEAKER_11: Um and I would have thought that they would have had some of the foresight to not, you know, instigate disciplinary charges against their student newspaper, but they did.
• 25:55
  SPEAKER_11: They disciplined me and the entire rest of the board of the Brown Spectator because they said that we were using Brown, we were violating Brown's trademark because we had the word brown in the name of the newspaper, the Brown Spectator, despite the fact that the Brown Daily Herald, the other newspaper at Brown, also has the name Brown.
• 26:13
  SPEAKER_11: And Brown is also like a color.
• 26:15
  SPEAKER_11: But um this then becomes, you know, a sort of a snowballing and into a big controversy.
• 26:23
  SPEAKER_11: Eventually, I am cleared because the the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression fire thankfully steps up on my behalf, and I'm invited to testify before Congress about really what's going on at Brown.
• 26:34
  SPEAKER_11: Why is it so expensive?
• 26:36
  SPEAKER_11: Why are there so many administrators?
• 26:38
  SPEAKER_11: After I testified before Congress, after I did this sort of AI-powered project to categorize the administrators, I get hired by Palantir Technologies.
• 26:46
  SPEAKER_11: I don't have a college degree, it's fine.
• 26:48
  SPEAKER_11: They hire me, and so I drop out of Brown.
• 26:50
  SPEAKER_11: And I work at Palantir for a few months, and then I raise$5 million from VCs to start my own company that does sort of investigative journalism projects like this.
• 26:59
  SPEAKER_11: And so what's the moral of the story?
• 27:01
  SPEAKER_11: Unclear, but I I think there's there's one thing that I I was proven correct is that there are too many administrators because Brown did end up laying off about 100.
• 27:11
  SPEAKER_11: And also that maybe college is kind of overrated because the the people who really benefit from this education industrial complex are these hordes of administrators who make you pay$90,000 a year tuition and give you a piece of paper at the end.
• 27:27
  SPEAKER_04: I think it's fairly self-evident that there's a crisis in trust in the education system, higher education system, and thus there's a crisis of trust in the university's ability to prepare students to be citizens.
• 27:40
  SPEAKER_04: And when I was in high school and I wrote for my student newspaper, I was the only conservative opinion writer, and I would write about everything.
• 27:48
  SPEAKER_04: I'd write about why Time magazine decided to name Kamala and Biden as people of the year.
• 27:53
  SPEAKER_04: I thought that was incredibly stupid.
• 27:55
  SPEAKER_04: And so I pretty much covered everything, and I got to college with the expectation that I would, especially at the University of Florida, that I would be able to have an intellectual home on campus where I could publish my thoughts.
• 28:05
  SPEAKER_04: And to my disappointment, that place did not exist.
• 28:08
  SPEAKER_04: I remember my freshman year, the Biden spy balloon, Chinese spy balloon situation happened, and I really wanted to write about it in the spring.
• 28:16
  SPEAKER_04: And I remember just like running around campus trying to find a publication to be able to publish my piece, and no one wanted it because it either didn't tie back to the state of Florida, it was too conservative an opinion, and I was criticizing President Biden too much, and I was like, no, like I'm at the University of Florida, this is a fairly supposed to be a fairly conservative university.
• 28:35
  SPEAKER_04: I should have a home on campus to publish this.
• 28:37
  SPEAKER_04: This is unjust.
• 28:39
  SPEAKER_04: And so that kind of question of creating a home on campus for at least if it's not conservative, a somewhat conservative counterweight to the liberal institutional media on campus.
• 28:49
  SPEAKER_04: And that kind of stood in the back of my mind.
• 28:51
  SPEAKER_04: And I went to DC uh one summer to do a program with the Hudson Institute, and TFAS approached me and I was able to start this paper.
• 28:59
  SPEAKER_04: And I originally envisioned it to be a place to publish foreign affairs and national security issues on campus.
• 29:04
  SPEAKER_04: And the more I thought about it, I was like, no one is gonna read this because who are we college students to be commenting on what's going on in DC?
• 29:12
  SPEAKER_04: No one cares what we have to say, except probably my mom.
• 29:15
  SPEAKER_04: But I was able to figure out a way to combine all the ends of the university.
• 29:20
  SPEAKER_04: So that's where you get the Florida Finibus after day finibus.
• 29:23
  SPEAKER_04: So we combine foreign affairs and national security, campus politics, we have a journal of ideas, and we have domestic US politics as well.
• 29:31
  SPEAKER_04: And so going back to your question, I'd say on campus, we've been able to revive the American intellectual tradition, which is our mission statement.
• 29:39
  SPEAKER_04: I will say that.
• 29:40
  SPEAKER_04: Just getting students to not be passive citizens on campus.
• 29:45
  SPEAKER_04: We've just attracted all kinds of audiences to campus, and it's been really wonderful to watch that grow.
• 29:50
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and I mean I can say, listen, if you're gonna, if you want a glamorous job, um student journalism certainly isn't it.
• 29:57
  SPEAKER_02: If you want applause for your work, I suggest, you know, joining the football team or something like that because you're not gonna find it.
• 30:04
  SPEAKER_02: But you see a lot of great work throughout the IVs, I think, and a lot of these larger institutions that have been dominated by one party, one ideology for for far too long.
• 30:14
  SPEAKER_02: So I mean, I can give you a few anecdotes.
• 30:16
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, I remember the Cornell Review coming back.
• 30:19
  SPEAKER_02: I was editor-in-chief, the main newspaper just wasn't covering certain issues.
• 30:25
  SPEAKER_02: We f found this kind of odd.
• 30:26
  SPEAKER_02: We would try to step in, fill this in.
• 30:28
  SPEAKER_02: We woke up one spring morning and on the sidewalks of campus, spray painted uh death to Israel and death to Jews on campus.
• 30:37
  SPEAKER_02: Something like that was not reported on.
• 30:39
  SPEAKER_02: It's hard to believe, right?
• 30:41
  SPEAKER_02: Uh on a main street to call people out.
• 30:44
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so we believe, and very similar to the Cinnabis, I think, um, everyone has a right, everyone has a right to write in this case.
• 30:52
  SPEAKER_02: We want you to write.
• 30:54
  SPEAKER_02: We want to make campus safe for plurality, of course.
• 30:58
  SPEAKER_02: So in this regard, you can really do a lot of change really quickly.
• 31:01
  SPEAKER_02: And then the second, I'll say, is actually writing to your audience, right?
• 31:06
  SPEAKER_02: Some that's your fellow students, but a lot of it's to the donors, a lot of it's to the alumni, a lot of it's to the trustees.
• 31:13
  SPEAKER_02: You'd be surprised, actually, someone who attended, let's say, Cornell or Brown or the University of Florida in the 1980s.
• 31:20
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, things have changed a lot, actually.
• 31:24
  SPEAKER_02: And to find out who's actually writing these checks, what do they think, how their money is being utilized, in many cases, not well.
• 31:31
  SPEAKER_02: They don't take it very well.
• 31:33
  SPEAKER_02: So we see a lot of the work that we're doing on campuses across the nation get positive and positive messages because to be quite frank, nobody's talking about a lot of these issues.
• 31:45
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, to a great degree, sometimes it's hard for the student journalists because we're so desensitized to the madness, to the insanity.
• 31:51
  SPEAKER_02: There was kind of a breaking story, and maybe not as serious, but a group of individuals at Cornell had hunted and skinned a bear on campus in their residency hall.
• 32:01
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know what's in the water in upstate New York, but that's the stuff they do up there.
• 32:05
  SPEAKER_02: And um, it's just something nobody talked about.
• 32:08
  SPEAKER_02: It was just something that happened on campus, you know.
• 32:10
  SPEAKER_02: Oh well, another DI initiative, oh well, a lot of madness, oh well.
• 32:15
  SPEAKER_02: But actually, when you take a step back, and I think Cornell actually is a perfect example of this for those unaware, it's in Ithaca, New York, upstate.
• 32:23
  SPEAKER_02: Um, if you leave Tompkins County, if you leave the city of Ithaca, you're gonna find a very different place than within Ithaca.
• 32:31
  SPEAKER_02: So sometimes having the perspective to say, okay, maybe I'm gonna take a step back, and this is madness.
• 32:37
  SPEAKER_02: This is not reflective of that of a university.
• 32:41
  SPEAKER_02: This is not reflective of that of maybe the culture that surrounds us, or even some of the mainstream views, center left, center right, or whatever have you.
• 32:50
  SPEAKER_02: So I think to a great degree, I mean, the national media will come in when there's a scandal, but we live through it.
• 32:58
  SPEAKER_02: At the end of the day, we're students, right?
• 33:00
  SPEAKER_02: We write about certain things, but we live through it.
• 33:03
  SPEAKER_02: And sometimes it's hard, but uh taking a step back, I find, is very important.
• 33:07
  SPEAKER_00: This is exactly the type of courage and initiative we hope to cultivate in our students.
• 33:14
  SPEAKER_00: They see problems others overlook.
• 33:16
  SPEAKER_00: They ask questions that others avoid, they work hard to uncover facts rather than accept easy narratives.
• 33:24
  SPEAKER_00: It is remarkable to see this level of drive and professionalism so early in their careers.
• 33:31
  SPEAKER_00: Which brings us to our final selection of this episode.
• 33:35
  SPEAKER_00: How do the journalists of the future view the future of journalism?
• 33:40
  SPEAKER_00: Once again, we'll hear from Alex, Natalia, and then Max.
• 33:46
  SPEAKER_08: I wanted to just ask each of you really what gives you hope about the future of journalism in higher ed?
• 33:52
  SPEAKER_08: Because I feel like when I was in college was not that long ago, everyone told me not to be a journalist because it was dying and my life would be horrible, but that really hasn't been the case.
• 34:02
  SPEAKER_08: So I'm guessing wondering what gives each of you guys hope and fulfillment right now.
• 34:07
  SPEAKER_11: Well, I mean, for me at least, I'd say something that gives me hope is my new company.
• 34:11
  SPEAKER_11: And for those of you who aren't familiar, is essentially what we do is we're sort of flipping the journalism model on its head, is people were talking initially about how journalism is just going down the drain when you have to rely on advertising and that you get trans out to clickbait.
• 34:26
  SPEAKER_11: So essentially what we're doing, which we feel is fairly novel, is we're doing investigative journalism that we give to the government when we find fraud in their government programs.
• 34:35
  SPEAKER_11: So sort of a private version of Doge.
• 34:36
  SPEAKER_11: And we're monetizing based on whistleblower rewards programs, which then give you sort of a percentage of this.
• 34:43
  SPEAKER_11: When you're unveiling billion-dollar frauds, then you might get like hundreds of millions of dollars out of it.
• 34:48
  SPEAKER_11: And so it can be incredibly remunerative, especially compared to, you know, just like Google ads or whatever.
• 34:54
  SPEAKER_11: Um and so I guess I'm hopeful for the future of journalism is because I think new, more innovative business models, people using AI, can produce a better business model that can allow journalists to not only impact um real change, but also um do it with a sort of a fiscal model that makes sense for the new age.
• 35:12
  SPEAKER_04: Say for me, one, that programs like TFAS exist and are reviving these debates and media on campus.
• 35:19
  SPEAKER_04: And then number two, the fact that like students are still curious and still have questions and want to engage in debate and want to find an intellectual community on their campus.
• 35:28
  SPEAKER_04: I'd say I've been in a really interesting position at UF given its growth since I started as a freshman and the expansion of civic education on campus.
• 35:36
  SPEAKER_04: And one of the things I've noticed is that the programs are investing a lot in freshmen and sophomores, but kind of leaving out juniors and seniors that are graduating that didn't reap the benefits of these new programs that are meant to start when you're a freshman.
• 35:49
  SPEAKER_04: And so I've been fortunate enough that I'm a senior.
• 35:52
  SPEAKER_04: I know a lot of juniors, we've all really taken leadership positions within the Finibus and have dedicated it to becoming an intellectual home.
• 36:01
  SPEAKER_04: We have a lot of community events where we all talk about politics, talk about philosophy.
• 36:06
  SPEAKER_04: Um, we were reading excerpts from Winston Churchill's My Early Life the other day and talking about it together.
• 36:12
  SPEAKER_04: And it's been a really beautiful experience to see how curious people are.
• 36:17
  SPEAKER_04: And no matter what corruption there is, what kind of diseases there are in university departments, they can never ever take that away from us.
• 36:26
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, totally agree.
• 36:28
  SPEAKER_02: And I mean, look around.
• 36:29
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, that gives me hope, certainly.
• 36:31
  SPEAKER_02: The Fund for American Studies does an excellent job in promoting student journalists, the new generation, investing into the education of a lot of these student journalists as well.
• 36:40
  SPEAKER_02: So to give credit where credit's due, of course.
• 36:43
  SPEAKER_02: Another reason, you know, I feel people want honesty, people want reason.
• 36:48
  SPEAKER_02: You know, that's maybe not the most popular take at times, but I think you see that with the free press.
• 36:53
  SPEAKER_02: I think you see great reporting, honest reporting based in fact and logic, and lo and behold, it's rewarded.
• 37:01
  SPEAKER_02: I'm also hopeful because as you know, an editor in chief, I can speak to this.
• 37:06
  SPEAKER_02: When I see the student writing a piece at 2 a.m.
• 37:10
  SPEAKER_02: or editing this piece, and they're not getting paid and they're meeting this deadline, that makes the difference.
• 37:16
  SPEAKER_02: It's this longing, the desire, the ambition, the tenacity to keep going, even when everything is stacked against you.
• 37:23
  SPEAKER_00: I have great confidence in the future of journalism.
• 37:27
  SPEAKER_00: The students, fellows, and alumni involved in TFAS programs are thoughtful, independent, and committed to seeking the truth even when it is difficult.
• 37:38
  SPEAKER_00: In a time when trust in the media is low and polarization is high, a strong commitment to journalism has never been more important.
• 37:48
  SPEAKER_00: Before I say goodbye, I'd like to offer a round of congratulations to this year's class of Robert Novak Fellows, this year's class of Joseph Rago fellows, our Thomas L.
• 38:00
  SPEAKER_00: Phillips Career Achievement Award recipient, Mary Anastasio Grady of the Wall Street Journal, and the Kenneth Y.
• 38:07
  SPEAKER_00: Tomlinson Award for Courageous Journalism recipient, John Tierney of the City Journal.
• 38:13
  SPEAKER_00: TFAS is committed to developing leaders who can strengthen our country through principled reporting.
• 38:20
  SPEAKER_00: Visit TFAS.org to learn more about our journalism programs that help shape these young reporters.
• 38:27
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for joining us for this special episode of Liberty and Leadership.
• 38:31
  SPEAKER_00: We'll see you next time.
• 38:34
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for listening to the Liberty and Leadership Podcast.
• 38:37
  SPEAKER_00: If you have a comment or question, please drop us an email at podcasttfas.org.
• 38:44
  SPEAKER_00: And be sure to subscribe to the show on your favorite podcast app and leave a five star review.
• 38:51
  SPEAKER_00: Liberty and Leadership is produced at Podville Media.
• 38:54
  SPEAKER_00: I'm your host, Roger Reim, and until next time, show courage in things large and small.