The Charlie Kirk Show - Responding to the Death of Journalism with REAL Journalist, Sharyl Attkissonn

00:00:00.000 Hey, everybody.

00:00:00.000 Today in the Charlie Kirk Show, the legendary Cheryl Atkinson is with us, author of Slanted, How the News Media Taught Us How to Love Censorship and Hate Journalism.

00:00:08.000 This is one of the most comprehensive conversations we've ever had on the Charlie Kirk Show about the broken news media, where we went wrong, and how we can fix it.

00:00:17.000 If you want to support our program, go to charliekirk.com/slash support.

00:00:21.000 Email us your questions, freedom at charliekirk.com.

00:00:24.000 If you want to get involved with Turning Point USA, the nation's largest student organization fighting and advocating for free markets, limited government, the Constitution, and pro-American ideas, go to tpusa.com.

00:00:35.000 Cheryl Atkins is here.

00:00:37.000 Buckle up, everybody.

00:00:38.000 Here we go.

00:00:39.000 Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.

00:00:41.000 Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campus.

00:00:43.000 I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.

00:00:46.000 Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.

00:00:50.000 I want to thank Charlie.

00:00:51.000 He's an incredible guy.

00:00:52.000 His spirit, his love of this country, he's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.

00:01:00.000 We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.

00:01:09.000 That's why we are here.

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00:02:01.000 Hey, everybody.

00:02:02.000 Welcome to this episode of the Charlie Kirk Show.

00:02:04.000 With us today is a very special guest, Cheryl Atkinson, who is the author of a new book that we want you all to go buy in big quantities called Slanted, How the News Media Taught Us to Love Censorship and Hate Journalism by Cheryl Atkinson.

00:02:22.000 Cheryl, welcome to the Charlie Kirk Show.

00:02:24.000 Thanks for having me, Charlie.

00:02:26.000 So Cheryl, what makes your perspective on this unique is you have been in journalism basically your entire career.

00:02:35.000 Can you talk about just from the beginning, just to start, what has changed in journalism, especially in the last couple of years?

00:02:44.000 I think the most dramatic change has been, as probably a lot of your viewers have noticed, the transformation of journalism from at least what we tried to make to be a fact-finding endeavor and to reveal various viewpoints and facts and studies and information, to something that is used instead to shape public opinion by people who set out to accomplish a narrative and then collect facts and information that support it and deny or disregard

00:03:14.000 it.

00:03:14.000 anything that's against it.

00:03:16.000 So I feel as though our business to some degree has been turned into a propaganda tool used by the interests that we used to report on and try to make sure that we didn't just take their information and put it out straight without looking at, you know, vested interests and how it fit in context.

00:03:33.000 Now we're just being used in many instances as propaganda tools.

00:03:38.000 I think that is perfectly put.

00:03:40.000 And there's almost an idealism in the journalist community, at least there used to be, where journalists will be the ones that keep powerful people in check.

00:03:49.000 They will pursue truth.

00:03:51.000 They will try and break the big story.

00:03:54.000 You know, we think of Woodward and Bernstein.

00:03:56.000 Think of people that really dive deep into these different stories.

00:04:00.000 And it seems now that the reporting class is much more determined to try and use their positions of authority or their followings to try and impact a certain desired social change or political change.

00:04:18.000 Where did you see this change?

00:04:22.000 Basically, I want to start with when did you start to see this change the most?

00:04:26.000 Was there a specific turning point?

00:04:28.000 Was there an event?

00:04:29.000 Was it Donald Trump where it just made things worse?

00:04:32.000 When did this really start?

00:04:34.000 Well, there's always been an element of reporters that seek to, you know, accomplish a certain narrative, whether intentionally or not.

00:04:43.000 And I put myself in that category as a young journalist.

00:04:46.000 It really took a lot of self-examination for me to separate myself from a story and think about what my job really was and to put information on television that sometimes maybe I personally disagree with and to understand it's not about me.

00:05:01.000 And human nature is, I think, as a reporter, even as you train yourself to be unbiased, you find yourself putting your own thoughts and feelings into a story.

00:05:10.000 So it takes, I think, a lot of training and introspection to divorce yourself from that.

00:05:16.000 But at least, as you said, Charlie, we tried to maintain the semblance of a firewall between news and opinion, and we tried to present various views and facts.

00:05:25.000 Whereas there was a stark sea change I see around the 2016 time period.

00:05:30.000 And it coincides with a very organized campaign on the part of certain political and corporate interests to do exactly what they did to take over, in a sense, the Internet and information landscape in much the same way they had successfully dominated the news landscape the prior 15 years through a successful organized propaganda campaign that's accomplished by LLCs and nonprofits that actually are for vested interests and super PACs.

00:06:01.000 and all kinds of methods and methodologies that these interests have figured out to influence the news and now influence what you see online.

00:06:10.000 And so I have some excerpts here from your book.

00:06:12.000 Again, it's called Slanted.

00:06:14.000 And you had a New York Times bestseller called The Smear.

00:06:18.000 And now this is your new book called Slanted.

00:06:21.000 And I just love the title and the graphics are terrific.

00:06:24.000 How the news media taught us to love censorship and to hate journalism.

00:06:29.000 So you go into depth here about the New York Times.

00:06:34.000 And I have to compliment you.

00:06:35.000 I will be using this all the time.

00:06:37.000 You call it the New Woke Times.

00:06:40.000 What a great term that you have here.

00:06:43.000 What do you mean by that?

00:06:44.000 And was the New York Times always this way?

00:06:47.000 Well, I have to tell you, the New Woke Times, that nickname was provided to me by a New York Times insider.

00:06:55.000 So these are people affiliated with the New York Times who called it the New Woke Times.

00:07:01.000 And I think that, you know, everybody has always considered the New York Times liberal leaning, but still a paper of record with some great journalism conducted.

00:07:10.000 It still does some great journalism, but we've seen a drastic change in the era of Trump that I've outlined, whereby now on the front page, you will see as if it's straight news reporting, something that reads very much like either an opinion piece or a novel, you know, where a reporter is opining and theorizing about what's in the mind of somebody with no evidence or proof or sources sourcing in the story,

00:07:37.000 but sort of just talking as if an omniscient viewpoint writing a novel.

00:07:42.000 This was not seen commonly, at least, five years ago.

00:07:47.000 So it's been hugely transformed.

00:07:49.000 That whole chapter about the New York Times discusses the embarrassing transformation of what was once a really great newspaper of record into what is often a laughable joke today, I think, on the part of even people who used to consider it one of the best newspapers in the world.

00:08:06.000 So, you call it, and I believe this is the excerpt, all the narratives fit to print when they say on their front page, all the news that is fit to print, which I love that twist on it.

00:08:16.000 I have a question because you've talked to a lot of insiders and you talk to those insiders in this book.

00:08:21.000 Do the people in the New York Times have any form of self-awareness?

00:08:25.000 I know Barry Weiss did, and she left very publicly, but do the vast majority of the people in the New York Times realize that they have become almost a version of a propaganda arm of a very specific narrative and worldview?

00:08:38.000 Well, I can't claim to have talked to enough people at the New York Times to know how most of them think, but there is an element at the New York Times of people who understand what's happened and they're horrified, but they don't feel like they can do much about it.

00:08:51.000 It's almost like being ruled by this mob.

00:08:54.000 I call it, in a way, tyranny of the minority or tyranny by the minority.

00:08:59.000 And what I mean is, even if the majority of people think differently, they are so drowned out in ways that are so frightening or onerous to those who may be in the majority of thought, who may not like information being managed the way it is, but they are so scared to color outside of the lines in this environment that they stay silent.

00:09:18.000 Or, you know, it can be as simple as they want to keep their jobs.

00:09:22.000 I spoke to a lot of colleagues, including top, top executives at the network, at every network, current or former, and they share much of the concern that I discussed that others have in the book.

00:09:33.000 And you might be surprised because you say, well, then why are these same media outlets seeming to do the opposite?

00:09:40.000 And it's that same reasoning that there is so much control over narratives and there's so much power behind these interests that people are afraid to lose their jobs if they speak otherwise.

00:09:52.000 And, you know, unlike me, I mean, I really to walk away from my job at CBS mid-contract took a lot of contemplation.

00:09:59.000 And I figured I could afford to do that.

00:10:01.000 You know, I wasn't going to walk away and be wealthy, but I was also able to walk away and, you know, get by financially.

00:10:08.000 A lot of people, they have kids in college, they feel like they can't walk away from their jobs.

00:10:12.000 So they just kind of stay quiet and do what they can.

00:10:17.000 And I'll tell you, Charlie, my last couple of years at CBS, when this information was being so controlled by some in the editorial process in an inappropriate way, I tried because I loved my job for so many years at CBS, love what I do.

00:10:31.000 I tried to find stories that they didn't try to shape or dishonestly slant.

00:10:37.000 And I went in many directions. 0.97

00:10:38.000 There's a lot of stories one can investigate, but it got to the point where they didn't seem to want anything.

00:10:43.000 Didn't matter whether it was political, not political, you know, looking at corporations, looking at almost any trend, they just didn't want it.

00:10:50.000 And this is a very powerful thing that's interceded in our news industry.

00:10:59.000 So we all know about conservatives getting kicked off social media.

00:11:02.000 Why exactly are we choosing to give all those big tech companies all of our personal data?

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00:12:14.000 I think you'd agree at this is just news is not as interesting as it used to be.

00:12:18.000 And there are so many stories that aren't being told right now.

00:12:21.000 And the kind of citizen journalists that have the bravery to tell them are getting rewarded online.

00:12:27.000 I mean, whether it be the opioid crisis, big tech tyranny, the fact that the wealthiest Americans have got $600 billion richer.

00:12:35.000 You know, it's really interesting, Cheryl, and maybe you can help explain this to me.

00:12:40.000 The liberals that dominate news media, and I'm not trying to overly politicize this, but that's just a fact.

00:12:47.000 It seems as if a lot of their views, they're not even, they're either afraid or they're not able to even press some of the most powerful people in the country.

00:12:59.000 For example, I do not see the robust type of journalism after Amazon, Google, and Facebook, Goldman Sachs, that I did against the Trump administration.

00:13:12.000 Or it's, I remember a time when journalists really went and did investigative reporting towards corporations and the most powerful people in the country.

00:13:21.000 Is there almost an alliance between the news media and the most powerful people and corporations in this country?

00:13:28.000 Well, yes.

00:13:28.000 And sometimes it is a formal arrangement and it's conscious.

00:13:32.000 And sometimes I think you're seeing the result of what I call self-censorship because you learn after proposing stories over a period of time and having certain editorial intervention, you understand that a certain story is not going to make it.

00:13:46.000 The last maybe five to six years that I worked at CBS, I heard from many colleagues and many news sources that I worked with and did stories on the same story, that there were many reporters who wanted to pursue certain stories.

00:14:00.000 And we're not just talking ones divided along political lines, but that those stories were killed up the line over and over again.

00:14:08.000 Really good stories, really strong stories, really stories that would be very popular from a viewer and readership standpoint.

00:14:16.000 And they're getting killed.

00:14:17.000 And you understand that I better not go in that direction.

00:14:20.000 So it doesn't even have to be somebody stepping in and saying, don't do a story on X.

00:14:25.000 I rarely have that happen.

00:14:27.000 It's a very subtle thing where you put two and two together and you start to understand.

00:14:32.000 So I think many journalists, you know, they know where their bread is buttered and they know they're wasting their time if they pursue certain stories as good as they may be.

00:14:41.000 So they do something else that's going to get them promoted and, you know, on the front page and a story that gets circulated and job security, basically.

00:14:51.000 And so that's one component of your criticism and your indictment, if you will, of the news media.

00:14:59.000 And I completely agree with it.

00:15:00.000 Another part of it, which I really want to get into, is irresponsible journalism.

00:15:06.000 What do you mean by that?

00:15:08.000 Well, because there are so many forces at play inside news journalism now that seek to accomplish a narrative at all costs, regardless of the facts, we have seen a skyrocketing of irresponsible journalism.

00:15:23.000 I call them, you know, I call them media mistakes in the era of Trump because most of the ones I tracked had to do with false information reported about Donald Trump.

00:15:32.000 And I never found a mistake.

00:15:35.000 Maybe there's one out there.

00:15:36.000 I'm not saying there's not, but I never found a mistake made in favor of Donald Trump that was later, you know, found to be wrong.

00:15:43.000 I found all mistakes that were against Donald Trump, outrageous mistakes by some of our formerly top most well-respected news organizations by the same groups over and over again, often with no repercussion.

00:15:57.000 And I explained that by saying, when you understand that journalism is not the goal anymore at organizations that have been propagandized, that the narrative is the goal, even when they make a mistake, an embarrassing mistake, irresponsible journalism, relying on sources that gave false information, that's okay because they accomplished their goal if the goal is the narrative, not the facts.

00:16:21.000 That's what we're left with today.

00:16:23.000 A great example of this is Brian Williams, who hosts a show on MSNBC, who is just a pathological liar.

00:16:32.000 He said he saw bodies in the Katrina in the water.

00:16:36.000 He just, I'm off the top of my head, trying to remember all the different things that came out against him.

00:16:42.000 Well, remember, he said he was on some sort of military flight that had been shot at, maybe he even said had been hit.

00:16:50.000 And it turned out that wasn't the case either.

00:16:52.000 There were, yeah, there were a number of things.

00:16:54.000 So he found a place where the narrative is really important, MSNBC, but he had a soft landing there.

00:17:01.000 And there was another guy, and I don't know what happened to him.

00:17:04.000 You would know he went on during a breaking news event and said that there was credible evidence.

00:17:12.000 It was either NBC or something.

00:17:14.000 My memory, it was in 2017, 18 that there was credible evidence against Donald Trump and it moved markets.

00:17:20.000 The news was so significant.

00:17:22.000 Who was that?

00:17:24.000 Brokaw, I might be misremembering it.

00:17:27.000 I don't know which one you're referring to, but there was an important CNN story.

00:17:32.000 There are so many of them, but there was an important CNN story.

00:17:36.000 There was a story that supposedly Donald Trump's bank had been subpoenaed or had received subpoenas for his personal records, which was not the case.

00:17:50.000 I mean, there were a lot of false reporting incidents by the media.

00:17:56.000 And I do think, like you said, one of them moved the markets.

00:17:59.000 I know in one of the CNN cases, I think two or three reporters that were involved either resigned or were let go.

00:18:07.000 But by and large, these things happened without so much as an apology for the mistake that was made.

00:18:14.000 And that's, I think that's one of the most startling tells out of all of this is that those reporters often end up promoted and heralded and they continue to do their assignments.

00:18:24.000 When I'm telling you, 10 years ago or maybe six or seven years ago, the kinds of mistakes that we see, had they been committed, the reporters wouldn't have a job in our industry again after that, let alone at the same news organization on top beats.

00:18:39.000 That used to be a career-ending decision.

00:18:42.000 It was ABC, it was Brian Ross.

00:18:45.000 I don't know if you remember that one.

00:18:47.000 It was ABC apologized around December 2017 with serious error in Trump report.

00:18:54.000 That was the one where they came out and they said that there is now evidence that Trump had directed Michael Flynn to make contact with the Russians and then just kind of went on a month-long vacation and then came back.

00:19:09.000 So I want to ask you a question more broadly.

00:19:13.000 What do you think the mission statement of the American media should be?

00:19:16.000 What should their mission be?

00:19:18.000 Because if you asked that to a reporter, I don't think they could tell you.

00:19:21.000 I think that a young reporter would say, well, my job is to make America in a leftist image.

00:19:27.000 What should a reporter actually be?

00:19:29.000 What should be the ethos of the American journalistic community?

00:19:34.000 I think to go uncover facts and information.

00:19:38.000 Well, you know, I do mostly investigative journalism, but as a reporter, you want to reflect the facts of what's happening on the ground.

00:19:45.000 As an investigative reporter, what I try to do, particularly in today's environment, I think it's a good mission statement, is to bring to light facts and information, particularly that which powerful interests are trying not to have you see.

00:19:58.000 Instead, you know, we're basically taking what everybody's putting out as they say, you know, special interests and political figures, and we're vomiting that into the information landscape, acting basically as PR agents for those who want to get the message out.

00:20:13.000 Even by the way, when we have two sides dueling over a certain issue, you're still talking to the propagandists on each side who are talking about the issue they want on the table.

00:20:23.000 And as you said, there are so many important, legitimate stories that are not being covered that are being kept off of television and out of the press because we're being kept busy by these same three or four stories that these powerful interests have us on narrative to talk about.

00:20:38.000 So I think we should be looking for stories that are not being put out there or angles on stories that are not being put out there by special interests and bring that information to the public.

00:20:50.000 I also would say, Charlie, that I just try to, I talk to people, you know, in my daily life.

00:20:56.000 I ask rational, normal questions about things that seem unexplained.

00:21:01.000 And those bring up the best stories that are there in my view.

00:21:05.000 And I don't know why these are so ignored by many others in the press.

00:21:09.000 Aren't they too looking for original information about stories and questions that ordinary people have that aren't being answered in the media otherwise?

00:21:19.000 I totally agree with that.

00:21:22.000 And most young reporters, which I'm going to ask you a question about this in a second, would not be able to answer that question.

00:21:27.000 They wouldn't.

00:21:28.000 They'd give you some meandering answer about social justice or environmental justice or how they actually see themselves as a participant in a desired social change.

00:21:39.000 And I don't say that lightly, not as if they're a fact finder and a spectator, but instead they think of themselves as a player on team left.

00:21:49.000 And so I'm not a journalist.

00:21:50.000 I'm a commentator.

00:21:52.000 We explore big ideas.

00:21:53.000 I never mislead my audience, but I definitely have opinions.

00:21:57.000 Whereas some people, they will say, oh, I'm a journalist, when in reality, they're no different than I am.

00:22:03.000 Can you talk about the great conflation?

00:22:05.000 This is what we talk about a lot between pundits and journalists and how they're almost, the journalists are now able to act as pundits while still saying that they're journalists.

00:22:16.000 Well, the funny thing to me about that trend is, in general, nobody hired you as a reporter just out of college as if you're an expert on anything.

00:22:27.000 Your job is to go find what experts say, what people believe, what the facts say.

00:22:33.000 But instead, it seems as though reporters now have appointed themselves as some sort of expert pundit on whatever issue it may be they think they're covering.

00:22:43.000 We are experts on very little, in my opinion.

00:22:45.000 I would call myself semi-expert on a few things that I've done deep, deep dives into.

00:22:51.000 Other than that, who cares what I think?

00:22:53.000 And yet, this sort of opining that used to be discouraged.

00:22:57.000 I mean, when I worked at CBS, I worked at CNN back when it was a news organization.

00:23:03.000 We knew not to insert our opinions in our stories because A, who cares what you think?

00:23:09.000 B, you would have somebody call you, you know, in management if you were just opining about things.

00:23:14.000 That's not your job.

00:23:16.000 That's obviously all changed.

00:23:18.000 And now that behavior is rewarded.

00:23:19.000 That's part of the change that occurred around the 2016 time period.

00:23:24.000 And, you know, I think it's the antithesis of what I feel as though our job is and what I feel is I've trained myself to do.

00:23:34.000 But it's become a very popular thing.

00:23:37.000 Now, I recounted in this book or one of my last books a story told to me by somebody who works who worked at ProPublica.

00:23:45.000 And they talked about a conversation going on via email between some of the more traditional, older, established journalists and some of the younger journalists.

00:23:55.000 And they were arguing over this trend, which was fairly new at the time, some years ago, of reporters putting their opinions in pieces.

00:24:03.000 And the young reporters were arguing on this email chain with the older reporters that it was okay to put your opinions in your stories as long as your opinions were supported by facts.

00:24:14.000 You know, it was just sort of, he thought the person who told me the story, it was just a crazy rationalization of the changing of news and its mission.

00:24:22.000 But I think that's kind of what you would hear if you asked a reporter today who puts their opinion all throughout their stories.

00:24:28.000 They would say, well, as long as it's fact-based, that's okay.

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00:25:37.000 Can you talk about how young reporters are completely different than how young reporters were in the 70s, 80s, and 90s?

00:25:49.000 And you touched on this briefly, but I'm really interested in this.

00:25:53.000 It seems that reporters used to have to go work a local news desk, learn what it's like to get sources, check those sources, be able to build trust, and they might get a less than desirable, let's say, part of a newspaper or news operation for the first couple years.

00:26:11.000 They might have to work the local beat.

00:26:13.000 They might have to go prove that they have the hustle and the grit.

00:26:16.000 Where it seems now you graduate from the Columbia J School or you go to, I think it's Medill.

00:26:23.000 Is that right?

00:26:23.000 Is it Medill at Northwestern?

00:26:25.000 Medille, I think it's affiliated with Northwestern, but yes, there's Medill here in Washington, D.C. that has a lot of internships and clout and so on.

00:26:34.000 Yes, training young journalists.

00:26:36.000 And now it seems they graduate there and they go work for some news organization, Huffington Post or whatever.

00:26:44.000 And that's a journalist now, I guess.

00:26:47.000 Can you talk about how that process has been changed actually for the worse?

00:26:56.000 Well, do you know that even whether we're talking about journalism schools, Columbia, the Columbia Journalism Review, all of these groups now get substantial funding from these very activist foundations and groups that do funding to accomplish certain propagandist goals?

00:27:17.000 They take a lot of money from them.

00:27:19.000 So do these fake fact checks that I call, you know, this explosion of the fake fact checks and the curating efforts and all of that.

00:27:27.000 You know, I've done stories on how those are funded by the same handful of very, very wealthy, powerful players that have very specific agendas at heart.

00:27:36.000 So, the best fact-checking organizations you can think of, at least what some people rely on is accurate and fair, most of those, if not all of them, are taking big money from these groups.

00:27:49.000 They are hardly independent, and their fact checks always come down on the side of those paid interests, although they claim they're independent from them.

00:27:57.000 But if you look at young journalists and how the mission has changed, there's a quote from a journalism professor in the book Slanted that talks about him praising when the New York Times first called Donald Trump a liar in a headline.

00:28:12.000 And he actually said, this journalism professor, that objectivity and neutrality and journalism are overrated.

00:28:19.000 And it was wonderful that this was coming to an end.

00:28:23.000 And if this is what kids are being taught in journalism school, it's no surprise that they graduate with that sort of an agenda.

00:28:29.000 But I say objectivity and neutrality are fundamentals of journalism.

00:28:34.000 They're basic tenets.

00:28:35.000 And saying they don't matter or that they're outdated is like going to your medical doctor and he tells you that diet and exercise are overrated.

00:28:43.000 That's actually the foundation for everything.

00:28:46.000 But this is being changed.

00:28:47.000 If you look at accomplishing a narrative and propagandists taking hold of our information landscape, that's exactly how they want you to think.

00:28:55.000 So if a young person is being taught this by Poynter Institute and Columbia Journalism Review and they're journalism professors, you know, who blames them for thinking that's exactly what they're supposed to do?

00:29:07.000 Totally.

00:29:08.000 And so a email we get a lot, or a note I should say we get a lot, is where do I get my news from?

00:29:16.000 And you have a great show with Sinclair.

00:29:17.000 You do a great job.

00:29:18.000 And I think that we should just promote it.

00:29:20.000 It's really good.

00:29:21.000 It's called Full Measure.

00:29:23.000 And we were just on the border, right?

00:29:25.000 Yep.

00:29:26.000 I have part two of my border investigation coming up.

00:29:29.000 I've been there eight times for full measure with the goal of no agenda.

00:29:34.000 And when I set up the story, people we call say, well, what's your angle?

00:29:38.000 What's your angle on the wall?

00:29:39.000 What are you looking for?

00:29:39.000 And I know it's hard for them to understand, but I say, I just want to come and find out what's going on.

00:29:44.000 That's always the best story.

00:29:46.000 It's usually a different story than, for example, reporters who are talking about the border who've never been there.

00:29:52.000 But yes, we try to do that.

00:29:53.000 And if you don't mind me saying, if you've missed the stories, you don't know where to find full measure on TV, you can go to fullmeasure.news anytime and watch last week's segment and next week's segment will also be posted there too.

00:30:06.000 It's wonderfully done.

00:30:07.000 It's fact first and it's not narrative driven.

00:30:11.000 It represents all sides on the border from the humanitarian side to the refugee side.

00:30:17.000 It's very good.

00:30:18.000 And so I want to ask about that.

00:30:22.000 And before I do, I want to make a point, which is that this problem is more serious than I think people realize.

00:30:30.000 And I think you get this.

00:30:31.000 So looking at the big picture, what you've outlined, what we've talked about right now is in some ways kind of annoying, in other ways very frustrating.

00:30:42.000 But this is also civilization ending type stuff.

00:30:45.000 And I don't say that lightly.

00:30:46.000 And I know that you agree with me.

00:30:49.000 Can you talk about how big the implications are here if you actually don't have a functioning media?

00:30:55.000 Well, it's being expanded, not just that the media is largely controlled, in my view, but you've seen this expand to the basic of everywhere of the place we get all of our information, the internet is now controlled.

00:31:10.000 And I trace that to a very clever propaganda campaign in 2016.

00:31:14.000 Prior to September of 2016, nobody, and I know this is hard to remember or believe, nobody in the public by and large was saying, please fact check and curate our information and ban stuff that we don't want other people to see.

00:31:29.000 Nobody was saying it, but the propagandists who felt like it was dangerous that we could still get unfettered access to information online, they didn't want us to have and see, they understood they had to create a market or a perception of a need for the curation of information.

00:31:45.000 And they did so successfully.

00:31:47.000 They made people think that certain information is harmful and dangerous and akin to violence and sparking violence.

00:31:55.000 And in a country that's always protected free speech, except a very narrow slice of that which is illegal, we now have young people today.

00:32:03.000 According to an ACLU lawyer I spoke to, she is constantly having to tell young people that hate speech in America is not illegal, that it's protected.

00:32:12.000 And I think young people are not being taught why that's the case.

00:32:16.000 They think intuitively, why would hate speech be protected?

00:32:19.000 Because they're not taught about what happens when we go down a slippery slope and put the control of information in the hands of third parties, be it government or corporations, which can be one and the same.

00:32:31.000 But this is a slippery slope we're going down where people are cheering on, including journalist organizations and professional journalism groups, cheering on the shaping and the narrowing of the information landscape in such a way that George Orwell couldn't have been more on point.

00:32:49.000 They don't read these books anymore in school.

00:32:51.000 In 1984, an animal farm, if you look at what he predicted, would be the control of information and the control of language, whereby in the end, we would have such a narrow parameter of how we can speak as dictated by powerful interests.

00:33:07.000 We would cease to become a free and open society and certainly not no longer able to express communication freely.

00:33:14.000 I know that sounds maybe not to you, but to some people as if it's far-fetched.

00:33:18.000 But we are not so far, in my view, from going off the deep end, sort of a point of no return where we look a little bit like North Korea.

00:33:26.000 I imagine for people who even have a TV set in North Korea and can even watch news, that they're told every night on the news how wonderful things are in North Korea and how terrible it is everywhere else. 0.54

00:33:37.000 People sit at home and know that's not the case, but are not free to say otherwise, and they just have to take it.

00:33:43.000 So let's talk in the time we have remaining.

00:33:46.000 And again, the book is called Slanted: How the News Media Taught Us How to Love Censorship and Hate Journalism.

00:33:52.000 And I've just loved this conversation on solutions.

00:33:54.000 We always try to be somewhat solution-oriented.

00:33:56.000 So, number one, a big complaint people have is: where do I get my information from?

00:34:02.000 They can watch your program, but just looking at the landscape without, you can plug names if you want.

00:34:08.000 It might be helpful if you do.

00:34:10.000 Is anyone getting this right?

00:34:13.000 Well, yeah, I mean, there are a lot of people that just don't have the outlet or nowhere to go in this controlled environment.

00:34:19.000 I will name Glenn Greenwald.

00:34:21.000 You have to find individual reporters.

00:34:23.000 And I named some of them in the end chapter of my book.

00:34:27.000 There are some that are citizen journalists that, yes, they're far from nonpartisan.

00:34:31.000 There's some on the left and some on the right, but they're exposing stuff that ordinary journalists used to do.

00:34:37.000 There are, there's good journalism to be found by reporters at many national news organizations.

00:34:42.000 You have to find the topic and the reporter and say to yourself, well, I can trust this reporter on this topic to be giving something that's fair and unbiased.

00:34:51.000 David Martin at CBS.

00:34:53.000 Pete Williams gives high praise from his colleagues when I asked at NBC.

00:34:58.000 So there's a lot of recommendations like that on certain topics.

00:35:01.000 But I think one of the best guides that can pierce this horrible trend that we're seeing now is to say, when anybody tells you that information should be banned or controversializes a source of information, you should seek out that information or that person or that news source.

00:35:20.000 It doesn't necessarily mean that person's telling the truth, but in today's environment, you should say to yourself, powerful interests don't want me to hear from that person or don't want me to hear this viewpoint or this scientific study.

00:35:32.000 I better get to know it.

00:35:34.000 And in that way, it can defeat the goal of the propagandist by, if you say, I'm going to give more of my attention to the very things that they don't want me to see.

00:35:44.000 And in a slight bit of hope, I have a 25-year-old daughter.

00:35:47.000 A couple of years ago, I was asking her, you know, whether this sort of trend is effective among young people.

00:35:55.000 I told her I was worried that young people today would be perfectly fine with their information being censored and curated.

00:36:01.000 And she said something to me like, Mom, the kids I know, when they're told not to read something or hear about something, it makes them want to learn about it more.

00:36:10.000 And I actually think that's good advice and maybe a little bit of hope.

00:36:14.000 Where the harder that they try to shape our information and tell us what we can and can't do, human nature, I hope, will be to seek out that information.

00:36:23.000 I totally agree.

00:36:24.000 And it actually plays into one of my three arguments for not banning hate speech, which is that it actually only further radicalizes people.

00:36:31.000 And so your daughter is exactly right.

00:36:34.000 So let's say you go ban some right-wing identitarian.

00:36:38.000 Well, you have just made him far more popular than he would have been in his own devices.

00:36:44.000 And so you actually give a funnel of traffic.

00:36:48.000 I actually believe if you were to try if someone was trying to create radicalism, you do so in the society we currently live in by actually not allowing those people to speak.

00:37:00.000 Number two, hate speech is unbelievably subjective, unbelievably subjective.

00:37:06.000 Everyone has a different definition.

00:37:07.000 Therefore, it all is on the enforcement.

00:37:09.000 So therefore, it will be abused.

00:37:11.000 Number three, I actually think the best way to defeat those ideas is more speech is better.

00:37:16.000 I'm always a believer that the more ideas, the better.

00:37:18.000 Those are three things we try to bring to young people. 0.99

00:37:20.000 And your daughter is exactly right in the sense that when you shut down XYZ person, you're actually going to make them more popular unintentionally or maybe intentionally. 0.93

00:37:30.000 And so I want to just ask one more question about the solution side of this, which is what should people who have Twitter accounts, they have children, they have energy, right? 0.91

00:37:42.000 What can I do?

00:37:43.000 What can they do on this?

00:37:45.000 Can they put pressure on their local newspaper?

00:37:47.000 Can they stop subscribing, not go to certain websites, go to certain websites?

00:37:51.000 You know, an ideal world, if all of a sudden 100,000 people did something differently when it comes to consuming news and information outside of buying your wonderful book, what would that be?

00:38:01.000 I think that not staying silent, not being bullied into silence, because the whole goal of this astroturf and managed information landscape is to make you feel like perfectly rational and logical and non-hateful thoughts and ideas are off limits to make you not seek or not believe scientific studies that may be perfectly true because powerful corporate interests don't want you to see them.

00:38:26.000 Don't fall for it.

00:38:27.000 And I also tell people to trust their cognitive dissonance.

00:38:31.000 Don't live in what I call the box.

00:38:34.000 If they completely control the information landscape online and you live there, you're subjected to it.

00:38:40.000 But if you do, as I do, for work, I have to travel around the country and around the world, and it's a whole different perspective than what you see on social media.

00:38:50.000 In fact, quite the opposite of what you think is going on is actually happening out there.

00:38:55.000 I would teach my young child today to live off of the box, to spend a lot of time thinking about talking to and listening to people outside of the internet and to understand how managed that information landscape is online and to try to make them get off of it as much as possible.

00:39:12.000 I know that we do so much business.

00:39:15.000 We're so reliant on the internet today.

00:39:17.000 But the more we can diversify our information base and not make it be all online, I think that's even better.

00:39:27.000 I agree completely.

00:39:28.000 And I think that there are so many forces at play from the Apple news push notifications to the curation on these social media channels that the more time you spend on screen time, the more you're playing into this whole business model.

00:39:42.000 But I actually think their business model is far more fickle than people realize.

00:39:46.000 And I think you would agree.

00:39:48.000 They're on borrowed time.

00:39:49.000 They only could do the Donald Trump as Benito Mussolini thing for so long to justify their exorbitant overhead.

00:39:55.000 You're already seeing it with Huffington Post, and I'm not wishing harm upon people.

00:39:59.000 Losing a job is a terrible thing, but I think a lot of these business models are going to go through a lot of disruption.

00:40:04.000 It can only get so much subsidies from the nonprofit world.

00:40:07.000 I'd love your thoughts on that.

00:40:08.000 Well, even if you look at Twitter and Facebook that are cracking down on basic information, vaccine safety information is being banned, certain political viewpoints, certain scientific studies.

00:40:20.000 Even people who want the banning will start to understand, I think, that they can't get full information on these forums.

00:40:29.000 And it puts them, you know, maybe they'll still have a market because people want to use these social media outlets and big tech to censor, but people will understand that's not where they can get their information because they'll be censoring so much.

00:40:41.000 Who wants to go there for that?

00:40:43.000 It's almost like they're putting themselves out of that market the more they do it and the more people understand that they're only going to get a certain slice of what's really out there.

00:40:54.000 Yeah, that's exactly right.

00:40:56.000 The book is slanted how the news media taught us to love censorship and hate journalism.

00:41:00.000 And Cheryl also didn't brag on herself, but she was an award-winning journalist for years at CBS.

00:41:06.000 I grew up actually watching some of your reports.

00:41:08.000 You did a phenomenal job.

00:41:09.000 And so your criticism of the news media is, it carries a lot of weight.

00:41:14.000 And people have to understand and realize that.

00:41:16.000 You're a very serious journalist who took your job very seriously for many years.

00:41:21.000 And honor to have you on.

00:41:22.000 And everyone, check out your new work.

00:41:23.000 It's terrific.

00:41:24.000 Well, thank you for having me, Charlie.

00:41:26.000 I appreciate it.

00:41:27.000 Great.

00:41:27.000 Thanks, Cheryl.

00:41:28.000 Have a great day.

00:41:31.000 Thanks so much for listening, everybody.

00:41:32.000 Email us your questions, freedom at charliekirk.com.

00:41:35.000 If you want to get involved with TurningPointUSA, go to tpusa.com.

00:41:39.000 Thanks so much for listening.

00:41:40.000 God bless.

00:41:43.000 For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk.com.

The Charlie Kirk Show - March 11, 2021

Responding to the Death of Journalism with REAL Journalist, Sharyl Attkissonn

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