Episode 89- Rich Helppie and Joe Ferullo
Welcome to Richard Helppie’s Common Bridge. The fiercely nonpartisan discussion that seeks policy solutions to issues of the day. Rich is a successful entrepreneur and the technology health and finance space. He and his wife, Leslie, are also philanthropists with interest in civic and artistic endeavors with a primary focus on medically and educationally under-served children.
Rich Helppie:
So welcome to the Common Bridge and welcome our audience to the Common Bridge. Today our topic is news reporting and why the news is distrusted today. And we’re welcoming to the Common Bridge Joe Ferullo. Joe is an award-winning media executive. He’s a producer, a journalist, a former executive vice president of programming for CBS Television distribution, was a news executive for NBC, a writer producer for Dateline NBC, and he worked for ABC news. He is a regular contributor to publications, including a recent opinion piece in The Hill that we’re going to spend some time with. Joe, welcome to the Common Bridge.
Joe Ferullo:
Thank you, Rich. Thanks very much for having me honestly, appreciate it.
Rich Helppie:
Very much appreciate it for spending some time with us. Our audience likes to know a little bit about the people that are coming on as guests, so tell us a bit about yourself, where did you start off? Where’d you grow up and what were your early days and academic [cross talk]
Joe Ferullo:
Alright, I’ll give you the short version of that. I grew up in the Bronx, New York in a working class Irish-Italian neighborhood. My dad owned a bread bakery with his brother, my uncle, John. And I spent most of my youth working at the bakery with him at four in the morning, delivering bread. But they were-my parents were-very, very hardworking people who really cared about education. So they sent me to a good Jesuit high school in the Bronx and then to Columbia University. And there, I got a real love for journalism and became the editor of the daily paper at Columbia and into a journalism career from there. I started out in print. I worked at Rolling Stone magazine. I worked at the wire services up in Albany, the state capitol of New York, worked for a Hearst newspaper there. And then around ‘82, I was in the business, maybe all the three years out of college, ‘82-‘83, a lot of newspapers began to close and I thought it might be good to get out of that and get into broadcasting. So I went over to ABC News and was there for three years, then worked in local television news in New York, moved out here to LA, worked in local TV news here. Then went from local to NBC national news over to the Dateline NBC. Which back then was a more traditional news magazine. It’s a sort of a true crime show now, but then it was more like 60 minutes, so it was a great gig. I was able to travel all around the world and meet some really fascinating people who I would never otherwise get to meet.
And then after that, I decided to jump over to the entertainment side and was offered a job as an executive at CBS, as you mentioned, in their syndicated programming. And that, sort of for lack of a better way, that’s sort of blue collar TV. And I say that very proudly. So that’s stuff like Judge Judy, the Dr. Phil Show, Rachel Ray, Entertainment Tonight, really just good well-produced meat and potatoes, not the glamorous side of the business, but meat and potatoes television, which I really enjoy and really appreciated. And I was there for about 12 years and then took the opportunity to go, about a year or so ago, and since then have been writing this opinion column on media and politics for The Hill, which is a Washington DC news outlet.
Rich Helppie:
Well, you’ve gotta be very, very busy with that. And I hope that people will read your material. We are going to put some links up on the website, RichardHelppie.com. And that’s why we want to talk about news reporting today. And I think we’re going to hear today that we’ve lost the actual news and why we did, where are we today? And maybe where can we go policy-wise and I know our listeners are going to get some education today and perhaps some policy ideas.
So Joe, that most recent piece that was entitled More Americans Than Ever Distrust the News. Here’s Why and What To Do About It. In your column you mentioned that 60 Minutes correspondent, Leslie Stahl, often quotes a conversation she had with Donald Trump in 2016. And she wanted to know why he hammered the news media so much and his answer-so that eventually no one will believe you. And as you’re say in your column, four years later, mission accomplished. Trust in the news business is at an all time low. So how big of a problem is this? And is it getting worse?
Joe Ferullo:
It’s a huge problem depending on where you’re coming from, Richard. If you’re coming from the place that you are and I am, it’s a huge problem. If you’re an investor in big media, it’s not been bad for you. And that’s part of the problem. Distrust in the media was growing even before Donald Trump came into office. And I make it a point of that in my column, he just exacerbated it I think, because a lot of people in the news media felt that they had to choose sides. The old rules of journalism didn’t seem to work for this particular kind of president. For an example, all presidents, all politicians, get up there and give you their spin on the facts. Very frustrating. I always hated working in Washington, DC because you always had to be alert for the spin and you had to deconstruct it for your reader. But that was the job-president gets up and says to you, the stock market’s up 3% today. It doesn’t tell you that unemployment is also up 3% today, but that’s okay. Your job as a journalist is to say in your article, president says this, by the way, unemployment’s also up, and you can quote an economist saying which one is more important to the overall outlook of the economy. That’s different than a president who gets up there and fabricates something as spin. How do you deal with that? How do you deal with someone who said Dow is up 20% when it was down 12% or makes up a new Dow Jones that doesn’t exist to tell you how great the economy is, how do you deal with that?
Rich Helppie:
I’ve spent a little time on Wall Street, and believe me though, every one of those investment banks can take every one of those numbers and make it sound great. And a large part of your career, I think if memory serves me correct, you operated under the Fairness Doctrine, the Reagan administration decided not to keep enforcing that under the belief a free market could maybe better regulate the content that we’re getting. Remember, some of our listeners are younger, they were not even born at a time when the Fairness Doctrine was in place. So talk a little bit about what it was, how it worked and how things worked out since the Fairness Doctrine hasn’t been enforced.
Joe Ferullo:
Right. It was first enforced back in 1949. I don’t think either of us were around then, but the idea was that television and radio stations, licensed by the FCC, in order to keep their licenses had to make sure that they worked for the good of the community. In fact, it even says that an owner of a TV or radio station did not own it for his “caprices and wins”, that’s in the regulation.
Rich Helppie:
Oh really, interesting.
Joe Ferullo:
Rather, he was there, he was given that license, to serve the community. And so to serve the community the FCC said you had to be fair. You had to air public issues and give all sides of that issue a fair airing. Along with that, there was something called the Equal Time Rule that dealt not with issues, but with politics. So during the political race and election year, you had to make sure both candidates had equal time on your air. You couldn’t just have Rich on from one party and not have me on from the other. And they had to be equal. So both those things were in place since 1949. The Fairness Doctrine, especially, was why we had a lot of public access programs and public interest programs, usually on Sunday mornings, but we at least had them. And people had a place to go to hear issues of local community concern.
That doctrine, and the way it was carried out over the years, began to rankle a lot of people, especially right of center, who felt the establishment media is already leaning left, so my voice is already not being heard in a way that I would like it to be heard. My issues are not treated with the depth I believe they should be treated by the establishment media, this fairness rule, I think protects them. I think it protects that status quo that I don’t like. Then in comes Ronald Reagan, who also genuinely believed, let’s make the marketplaces free as it can be. And so he got rid of the Fairness Doctrine in 1987 and very, very quickly the conservative voices stepped into the void and filled the new atmosphere. Rush Limbaugh was the first big conservative talk radio star who began, I believe, in 1988. So right there, the conservatives had stepped in with political talk radio from one point of view and we were off to the races. And things have never quite gotten the same because then you got into we were on out, this sort of tit for tat. Well, you got all these people on the right, I better have my people on the left. Let’s all choose sides and only listen to the media that agrees with us, that confirms our biases. And then further, I think in the Trump years you got almost away from facts. In other words, we didn’t have a shared set of facts to debate-left or right. It was “other” things and it became much more difficult to at least agree on a certain set of facts that we could discuss.
Rich Helppie:
I think that’s a very important distinction, that saying we’re going to cover both sides or all sides of an issue doesn’t mean every crazy idea or theory or accusation out there needs to be dealt with with equal weight. I did find it fascinating that as talk radio came up and people were losing it over things Rush Limbaugh would say, and I’d say, how come there’s a market for that? And there were lots of attempts to market a competing product that really never were commercially viable. When I think about the Fairness Doctrine, we had an era of very few broadcast television networks and very regulated radio airwaves needing an FCC license. And you could say this is the area where people are going to get their information from and we want to make it as fair and as complete as it can be. But here we are today now we’ve got a vast array of information, resources. We’ve got direct to the scene reporters like Andy Ngo, and a lot of others. And I’m just wondering, can we put the genie back in the bottle, would a Fairness Doctrine work in a world of online news, web pages, social media, 24-7 news coverage and the like, is it possible to even head in that direction?
Joe Ferullo:
I don’t think it would work ultimately. The genie is out of the bottle and I don’t know how you put it back in with all the media we have today. In other words we have right now the very opposite problem that we were confronted with in the forties, fifties, sixties, and seventies. So back then, as you said, the FCC did what it did and the Supreme Court backed it because there was a scarcity of media outlets. There’s only so much bandwidth. Without Fairness Doctrine your point of view might get cut out and you would have no place to go because there were only so many outlets for you. Well, now you have so many, many, many more outlets you still may not get heard because how do you get heard above the noise? How do you stand out in the din? The way you stand out, Rich, is not doing what you do, but screaming as loudly as you can and in full black and white, that’s how you stand out. And that’s the problem we have today.
Rich Helppie:
And also today, that I think about control, the airwaves in 1970s, with a few television stations, few radio outlets or a world where literally a handful of companies, Google, Twitter, Amazon, Facebook, Apple can effectively make someone a non-person and can say, that’s not acceptable thought. And I’m watching what used to be the news industry, do things that I think are kind of conflicting. You’ll say, why don’t you trust us, while doing a lot of distrustful things. And I don’t know how they can reconcile that. I mean, I don’t remember if it was one of your pieces or something else I was reading, about just the way they put the sets together. Everybody’s set is blue because that’s for trust and red, for example, was that something that you wrote? I thought that that I had read that from you.
Joe Ferullo:
It all looks the same because those colors, just to bring your listeners and viewers into it, blue reads as trust to the audience, red reads as important. So when you want to say, hey, this is important and trust us about it, you have a red and blue set, which is what they all have. But part of the problem, this goes back to the earliest part of our discussion which is what you see now-this cacophony-is profitable to everyone involved, which is why it’s very hard to get away from it. People like you and me who want down the middle, give it to me straight news, look over here. And there’s Fox news, extraordinarily profitable. MSNBC quite profitable as well. Facebook makes a ton of money and they don’t make a ton of money because you and I post our family pictures from Thanksgiving, they make a ton of money because angry, politically involved people don’t get off of things. And Facebook algorithm keeps feeding the reasons to stay on. Twitter, they do the same thing. So everyone’s making money on the outrage industry, and it’s very hard to make money on the just the facts industry. People have been trying it and it hasn’t been working out well.
Rich Helppie:
And that’s one of our common messages on the Common Bridge, is you’re not going to come here and get affirmation reporting. My brand promises that everybody will find something to disagree with or dislike every single episode. And you can continue to consume that polarized reporting if you wish. And as long as you do it, you’re going to keep doing it. I’ve been trying to find analogies to break through a little bit. So we had Matt Taibbi, who is an excellent author or journalist and guest. I’m reading his book right now, Hate, Inc., which I recommend to everybody.
Joe Ferullo:
Yes, excellent book.
Rich Helppie:
And it talks about they’ve made it look like sport. And I just was reading Facebook streams from people of a certain political persuasion, and they said if you can’t tell what team to be on be on the team that doesn’t have these villains, and they named who they considered to be the villain. I’m a big hockey fan, a Detroit Red Wings fan, and I watched that phenomenon in sports because there were players like Darien Hatcher who came from Dallas and Chris Chelios came from the Blackhawks-hated when they were playing against the Red Wings. They came to the Red Wings-all of a sudden they were Darien and Chris, instead of that whatever. And in politics, look at this-John Bolton and Michael Cohen went from reprehensible beings, not to be trusted, to all of a sudden heroes. Why? Because it kind of looked like they switched teams. How did we get into that? And how do we get out of that?
Joe Ferullo:
No, it’s very difficult again, because the profit motive is to stay in there. On both sides extremism pays and it’s very difficult. People have tried, as I mentioned to you, and it hasn’t been great. Shepard Smith, who was a straight news reporter on Fox, for a long time, jumped ship back in ‘19 and wound up over at CNBC, The Business Channel, recently got an hour of news at 7:00 PM. Shepard Smith gets only 280,000 viewers while the opinion shows on the other news channels get 2 million plus. Nexstar, which is a great station group, owns a cable outlet called WGN America. And they started an evening block called News Nation-straight news. They get, in their key advertiser demographic, they get-per night-15,000 viewers.
Rich Helppie:
We need to put a link to that up there. And I do see green shoots of people trying to do something. And I think that we need an overarching, not necessarily a corporation, but linking these together, standards and such. And it would not be regulatory. The job of journalists seems to be to push an agenda or to locate an audience versus doing the reporting. Just before we came on today, I was watching CNN, literally salivate over a vote on the constitutionality of impeaching an ex-president. And there was no inward look at, is this a good thing or not a good thing? Is the argument that could you impeach any ex-president? Could you impeach Jimmy Carter? He’s still alive. And I go back to-and I’m not a constitutional scholar, so I’m not going to say you should be able to or shouldn’t be able to-but I remember 1974, Richard Nixon resigned rather than be impeached. And if he was going to be impeached anyway, what would he have dragged the country through? So I think that’s a legitimate question, but there can’t be any sober analysis on this.
Joe Ferullo:
No, I think your story points to one of the key problems in the news business right now, and this is true of print as well as of television and radio. They blend together opinion and straight news to the point where the audience can’t tell the difference. And the studies have been done on this. Audiences have a very difficult time separating opinion from news because they’re not clearly labeled. It used to be that you would find opinions in clear sections of the newspaper, period. Or if there was an editorial on your local television station, there was a big sign saying this is an editorial. And those things are gone. And we use euphemisms like analysis, perspective, reporter’s notebook, rather than saying to people, we’re now bringing you opinion. One thing that all of these cable networks could do is that the top of every hour, even if it’s an opinion show like Sean Hannity or Rachel Maddow, just give you the headlines for five, ten minutes. Here we go to the news desk, here’s Rich. He’s going to give us the headlines. Then you go back and go, now we’re telling you our opinion. And we’re going to bring on people who have the same opinions as we do. And we’re going to all share in our opinion until the top of the next hour when we give you some news again. That kind of thing would go a long way toward making sure readers and listeners and viewers understand exactly what it is they’re consuming, because they don’t like that.
Rich Helppie:
And the headlines would have to be held to being headlines because there’s a lot of inflammatory writing. I love social media. It’s a way to connect with people there, my entire life. And somebody will post an article and I’ll read the article and the article does not support the headline at all. In fact, and I’ll feed it back to them and say, did you see this part in the article? And a lot of times they never even read it. That just seems to me that we’re eliminating critical thinking, like there’s this hair trigger for non-orthodoxy, whether it’s the right or the left. And that audiences are just conditioned to reject facts that don’t fit their narrative.
Joe, in your arc of your career has there been a time when news audiences struggled just to hold two thoughts in their head? Like we had a noble idea to go into Vietnam, but boy, were we wrong about that. Or more recently, Donald Trump was a really bad guy to have as president and the FBI really misbehaved too. I mean, in your career is this something new or something that…
Joe Ferullo:
It’s very new Rich and it’s what we call “what about-ism”, which is, that’s wrong but what about that? What about that, as if it negates, as I often say to people who do that to me, I go, didn’t your mom ever say two wrongs don’t make a right? That’s that inability to hold two thoughts. You can say to yourself, thought A but thought B, that you can say to yourself, yes, it’s awful what’s happened in Portland, Seattle, but it was awful what happened at the Capitol as well. You don’t have to choose sides about those things. It’s okay to hold those two thoughts in your head.
Rich Helppie:
People had to look at arson and wait till the news told them whether they liked the arson or not. I’ve cited this case often because it annoys me, but the damage to the Ronald McDonald House in Chicago, I have yet to find one person on the left that said, that’s just a hideous, despicable act. Can’t bring themselves to say that because it doesn’t fit the narrative. And then I think about this memory erase nature of reporting. Doesn’t it seem odd that the Kavanaugh hearings were not only not an issue in the presidential election, but how about the Georgia Senate runoff? Wouldn’t you think that the seating of judges that goes through the Senate would be a big deal. Threats are hype, there’s no followup and you mention the riots in Portland. Did you see the report last night that the mayor pepper sprayed a guy? It’s like, this is the same mayor that told his police department not to pepper spray people.
Joe Ferullo:
I know, it’s crazy.
Rich Helppie:
I’m kinda off in the weeds there, but yeah.
Joe Ferullo:
No, listen, it’s again, to bring it back to news. Part of the problem has been-and other people have talked about, this is nothing new-it’s the demands of the 24 hour news cycle. I mean, what you’re talking about is the lack of perspective that you see in news and that you read in the news and that’s a direct result of our ADD society run on/by social media and the 24 hour news cycle. So obviously if you’re on a 24 hour cable network, you’ve got to fill it. And it used to be, when I started out in broadcasting, you had to fill 22 minutes on the evening newscast and you had until seven o’clock at night to fill it. So you had time to give things perspective. Something that happened in the morning, you at least had a few hours. If you were in the newspaper business, gosh, you had till the next morning, you had a luxury of time. You don’t have a moment anymore. I feel so bad for people who are on air reporters right now, and print reporters as well, especially in a place like Washington, their phone is always ringing, their editor’s always on the phone-you got to tweet that out, you got to tweet that out, we’re going to go to you live in two minutes. Again, they have no time to sit and think about what the story means in any greater context, because they’re always throwing it out there. And the reader’s is given no time to digest it and think about what it means in their lives.
Rich Helppie:
We had award winning journalist who was a trusted anchor in Detroit for many years, Mort Crim…
Joe Ferullo:
Sure.
Rich Helppie:
You know Mort, okay. Mort made that point. He said, when he was reporting the news, there would be section editors. Somebody would come in with a story and they’d say, okay, did you get this right? Did you ask this question? Did you follow up with this person? And then it would kind of move up the chain until the editor said, okay, are we confident we have it right? And then he contrasted that with what you just described. It’s, he says, we’re just seeing reporting being done. We’re not seeing any kind of editing being done.
Joe Ferullo:
It’s wrong. It’s raw reporting.
Rich Helppie:
Can it be news if it’s just raw reporting? I mean, you and I could go to an event and we each hold up our cell phones and we’re taking a picture, and you’re from your angle and I’m from my angle. But my channel, I’m going to say the villains are over here and you’re going to say the villains are over there. Can that actually still be news if we know we’re going to get that from a certain channel?
Joe Ferullo:
Not only is it not news, it’s opinion. I mean, listen, I find it very difficult to watch any of the cable news channels, because I feel, to your point, I know what they’re going to say before they even open up their mouths. Because they’re not there to say to me, here’s what happened today. They’re going to say, here’s what I think it really means. And I know what you think. And I know what you want me to think. It’s not really worth my time to spend any time with you and I don’t do it anymore.
Rich Helppie:
And I have to tell you when I started this job that I’m doing right now, in some ways I regret it. I said, now I have to watch it to be knowledgeable. And I actually kind of liked the Hannity and Colmes format. Although my father liked Sean Hannity, not that he liked his opinion, but he just liked his pugnaciousness. And I said, Alan Colmes is the Washington Generals of that too. He was brought on the court to get hammered by Hannity. So I don’t watch Hannity. I don’t watch Rachel Maddow, but if there was a program that they were on together, that’d be first thing on my DVR. Joe, here’s a big question. Would a responsible parent teach their children to trust or to not trust the news?
Joe Ferullo:
Wow, that’s a great one. A responsible parent would teach them media literacy, which is don’t trust but verify, use your brain. Go in there with a skeptical point of view about everything you see and you read and try to find out what the real fact is behind it. But don’t accept anything at face value. It’s a tough thing. Now, the studies that I was telling you about that shows that people confuse opinion with news all the time, also shows that younger people do a better job of disentangling those two. And I think because younger people have grown up in this media maelstrom that we find ourselves in, this constant feeding of factoids and that blending of news and information and opinion and all of that, they have a better job. They’re not as intimidated by it and have better radar for BS in terms of the media coming at them than older people do, who were raised on there’s Walter Cronkite, there’s John Chancellor, there’s Peter Jennings. I’m done. This is great. I find that hopeful that there is sort of an innate media literacy, an innate sense of the language of what works and doesn’t, an innate sense of hyperbole and dismissing it, because they’ve grown up with so much of it around, it’s helpful. But parents have the tough job of really instructing if they’re serious, as you said, about their kids consuming news properly, not just ideologically, but teaching them how to be a news consumer in the way you consume anything. How do you read the labeling? Find out what’s really inside the box before you buy it.
Rich Helppie:
Never considered that. But let me just echo back why that resonates with me, is that if a person-say my age-was raised in an era of trust the news, they’re doing a credible job, it’s being edited. My first reaction, when I see something is going to be to believe it. And that may translate to the 30 and 40 somethings a little bit, but also they’re going to have been exposed to a lot of different news sources. They probably have never subscribed to a daily newspaper, a daily print newspaper and such, and that maybe the 15 year old is now getting their own RSS feeds and everything else and learning where to sort things out.
So maybe we can pull back from the brink and you’ve got some really good ideas on where to go from here. And I think that in your recent column on The Hill, you do make mention about labeling things as opinion, and you made the analogy with supermarket shoppers, which I want you to elaborate on, but also let me see if I can articulate this. If I put out a post that says the president should be impeached because he breached his constitutional oath, and also spare me the hand ringing and the pearl clutching, if you didn’t denounce rioting and property destruction over the summer, half of my friends will beat in on the impeachment and half will beat on the other ones-they’ll never see the other side. So if that responsible parent is going to teach, and I love the term media literacy. I mean, I hope you write a lot about this and how to get there, but yet they’re in a household that says, wait a minute, don’t listen to Fox, listen to MSNBC or the reverse, don’t listen to MSNBC, listen to Fox. How do we build that knowledgeable consumer and do the labeling and such. And I’d love to just dive in a little bit about some of the, I think, really strong ideas that you’ve published.
Joe Ferullo:
Well, there are a few things that can happen. One we talked about, which is have a straight newscast at the top of every hour, that’s five or ten minutes long. When your kid watches that and it’s like, okay, Johnny, that’s what news is. Now, we’re going to listen to our favorite guy tell us what we think, but that was the news. And based on that accepted a bunch of facts, we’re going to hear some opinion. That’s one way. The other way is for these news channels to treat their opinion hosts like they treat their news side. And by that, I mean opinion hosts are not really fact checked. So it’s not that the old Daniel Patrick Moynihan thing of everyone is entitled to their opinion, but not to their own set of facts. So if you’re going to do an opinion show based on some things that you’ve read about that are factually true and now you have your opinion about those various truths, that’s fine. But to make things up whole cloth or to just propose things out of thin air and say I wonder if that’s true, is a disservice. And I think the news channels would service their viewers better by doing some fact checking and at least trying to get rid of some of the hyperbole that goes along with some of these opinion hosts, on both sides.
Rich Helppie:
And would that fact-checking extend to the opinions that are kind of embedded in the news? And one of the things that I’ve picked up on in recent years is, we covered that story, but you left out a couple of pertinent facts that would change it. So you didn’t put anything in there that was made up of whole cloth that just wasn’t truthful, you just didn’t put the whole string in there.
Joe Ferullo:
Well that’s where good opinion hosts have real value. Which is they could say, look, I don’t want to talk about X or Y. I want to talk about Z because that doesn’t get enough attention. Now, Z happens to be true. I’m not making it up. It’s not hyperbole to say that Z is very important, but Z, I feel, has been under undervalued. And I want to talk about Z. That’s fun. And that’s not where I think our problem lies in this country. I think the problem is making stuff up or proposing things that just are out of whole cloth. So again, there’s a way to do this stuff responsibly. It’s just that more and more responsibility goes out the window.
Rich Helppie:
And I think some of the brazen things that have been said over the last four years, and I’m blaming our former President Trump, and I’m blaming several of the Democratic lawmakers that sunk to that same level. Where I watched them do things and I’m thinking, do they really believe that? Are they that detached from reality? Or do they think we’re that dumb that we’re going to buy it? And the really curious part is that the interviewers never called them on it. Never said, I think you’re overstating the case or that’s utter nonsense. They just didn’t do it. Is that their fear of not getting guests for their programs or what’s driving that lack of stepping up as a journalist?
Joe Ferullo:
Well, it depends on what programs you’re talking about. If you’re talking about opinion programs people are usually booked on those programs because the host agrees with them and vice versa. So the host is not going to challenge them. They’re there to agree with everybody else who’s there. A newscast is different, you’re right. A newscast, that anchor’s job, that journalist’s job, is not to let you just talk and talk and talk, but to say, well, wait a minute. It still does happen but too often, again this goes to the overall trend, even on straight news shows, they are booking people who agree with the common wisdom, almost, on a topic.
Rich Helppie:
Just to interject. I mean, I was watching, again CNN, before you and I came on today and they said, we’re going to go to a presidential historian at Rice University. And I was like, oh, good. And what did he do? As soon as they switched on the camera, there came the talking points about why are there 45 Republican senators that think this hearing’s unconstitutional. It was just a regurgitation of everything that Jake Tapper and Wolf Blitzer had said. I was hoping that a presidential scholar would come in and say, well, look, we had this situation in ‘74, we had this situation in 1800.
So, Joe, on the pandemic, as you continue to exercise your craft, any change in your thinking or in theories regarding reporting since the pandemic’s begun? Anything that’s leaked on it?
Joe Ferullo:
Listen, the only thing that leaks out to me is it may not leak out to you. It’s sort of clear to me at this stage in the pandemic that there is an East coast media bias. Only because I think you and I remember when the pandemic first hit almost a year ago, it struck New York terribly. That’s all we heard about, as we should have. I mean, you had all those pictures of overflowing hospitals, hospital beds, ventilators. The situation is nearly as bad right now-in some ways worse-in California, certainly down where I am in Southern California, but it doesn’t make the news, the national news, in the same way because we’re out here in LA. It’s easy to cover a New York story when you’re all based in New York or a DC story when you’re all based in DC, but it’s more difficult to bring home to people the severity of the situation in a city that’s 3,000 miles away from your home base. So to me, it’s kind of brought out that flaw in our national news media. Local news media does a good job covering it, but national news is more challenged.
Rich Helppie:
And I concur. At the beginning of the pandemic you’re reminding me now that the crux of the story that was, I think couldn’t be anything other than intentional, to stay away, that most of the deaths still occurred in five states. And they occurred in nursing homes and it was for policy decisions. So in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and Michigan, that they all made terrible policy responses and ended up frankly, killing a lot of people. I just wonder if the governors were of a different party, would we have heard of that? And I guess, thankfully, Southern California has lifted some restrictions just yesterday.
Joe Ferullo:
Look, it’s very difficult. On a personal note, our neighbor right across the street passed away two nights ago, an older man. His wife is now alone dealing with cancer and she has COVID and hopefully she’ll make it, but he was in a hospital in a hallway, on a ventilator right here in our neighborhood. And he passed away within 48 hours of being admitted to the hospital. So it’s a very real thing. And it’s…
Rich Helppie:
No doubt about it. We’ve covered COVID a lot and [cross talk] data, health data, and going to the sources and what works and where we are in the vaccines. And actually my number came up. So after we record here, I’m going to go get my first dose. I think that’s our best way to punch a hole in this.
Joe, when you think about where we’re at today, are we thinking about policies that could be enacted from a government approach? Or are we thinking about change coming from inside the industry or consumer demand for better reporting? How do we exit this thing and get back to, you said, we can all argue opinions, but at least let’s start with the same set of facts.
Joe Ferullo:
I think there are ways that, inside the industry, they can make things better without hurting the golden goose, which is the opinion stuff, by doing some of the things you and I talked about: having a news segment at the top of each program, labeling opinion very clearly, giving it the same opinions, the same fact checking as you do as straight news. I think your point about headlines is well taken because often a viewer just sees the headline as they are skimming through their channels, bringing down the volume of the headlines, not having them scream so much and be so hyperbolic. Those things could all help. In terms of the government, it is hard to get the government involved in so many things, so many times. What it may take is something that the European Union is considering right now, which is treating-and this is more social media-which is treating the big social media companies, Facebook, Twitter, Google, like publishers. Which is you’re responsible for the content on your platform, just the way if you wrote a book and Simon and Schuster published it. They’d be as responsible as you are if you got something wrong because they’re the ones distributing what you’ve written. So if you treat the social media platforms in the same way as publishers, not just as bulletin boards, then that may help them control a little bit, knowing they have to take responsibility for what’s on and make sure that all voices are heard equally if they’ve got to take responsibility for what’s there, that it’s not just a free-for-all.
Rich Helppie:
Right, they have to be accountable that they are scanning, not just for opinion, which I think is a popular notion today that that’s what they’re doing. Only had one bad experience in that. I think the parallels with the book 1984 that we’re seeing today are stark. And I posted something about Emmanuel Goldstein, the two minutes hate. And so they said, what’s Trump going to do after this? And I’m thinking, he could become the Emmanuel Goldstein. So I found a link on a study guide called Spark Nodes that basically just talked about the book, and Facebook blocked it. They said, I talk about COVID on my podcasts. So you have to be careful on my Facebook Common Bridge page, which is fine. I mean, I don’t mind that, but we get credible sources and so forth.
Joe Ferullo:
So that was probably just their algorithm picking up some keywords from your manager and just flagging it without-it’s an algorithm, it’s AI. It’s not a real human being, at least 99 times out of a hundred.
Rich Helppie:
So Joe, this has been incredibly interesting and I’m really looking forward to your future writing and potentially have you come back on the Common Bridge. Because I think this is so important that we get this right.
Joe Ferullo:
No, we’d love to do it. And again, congratulations. I think what you’re doing really trying to just have a decent conversation that brings in all kinds of points of view is really, really important. And I’m thrilled that you’re seeing success because that’s some of the hopeful things that we need. That people can do that kind of honest conversation and other people will find it, recommended it and share.
Rich Helppie:
Well, I do believe there is an opportunity there. What didn’t we cover today that maybe we should be discussing?
Joe Ferullo:
No, listen, I think in terms of the media, we’ve covered a lot of it. And some of your listeners and viewers may feel like gee, but there weren’t any great answers that came out of it. And I apologize, there isn’t any one answer. There is no magic bullet to what you and I have been talking about.
Rich Helppie:
Are there any actions that you could recommend people take today?
Joe Ferullo:
Listen, you can change the channel if you don’t like what you’re seeing and you can write your cable operator and go, please, please don’t put that on here. Some of the crazy things they’re saying that I know are not true. Please don’t do that. That would help. But most of all, I think it goes to what you and I were talking about in terms of viewers now, and viewers to come, which is be media literate. Don’t accept what you see at face value, whether it’s on Facebook or on your TV screen, give it a little more thought than that. Try to go to outlets that you may disagree with and see what they say. And then contrast and compare. Look, it’s tough. It’s taken up a lot of time. No one has time in their lives anymore. I get it. But if you really care, you need to invest some time as a viewer, as a news consumer, to make sure you’re getting everything you need.
Rich Helppie:
I agree with that a hundred percent. And I’d also encourage anybody, my listeners and friends, my family acquaintances, really try to understand the other person instead of rejecting out of hand, because you were told that this doctrine is evil or evil in its origins. Ask them, how did they arrive at their conclusions, listen to them and look for some common ground. What can we do better together? And again, that two thoughts in your head yet we can say that this is wrong, with that’s also wrong and you don’t have to give up that the first thing is wrong.
Joe, any closing thoughts at all? This has been a really fascinating discussion. And I cannot tell you how much I appreciate you being here.
Joe Ferullo:
My thought is again, congrats to you on what you’re doing. I hope you can inspire and encourage other people to try the same thing. And if things like this can crack through the noise, which is rare, it’s very helpful.
Rich Helppie:
Well, thank you. We’re talking today on the Common Bridge with Joe Ferullo. He is a renowned journalist, columnist. Please read his material. I think you’ll like it. He’s got a wealth of experience and he speaks very clearly. This is Rich Helppie. I’m signing off today on the Common Bridge.
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