[This transcript is automatically generated and may contain errors.]

Robert Carson: This is the virtual Jewel box, the podcast of the Tanner Humanities Center at the University of Utah. I'm Robert Carson, associate Director of the Tanner, and today I'm talking with Jake Nelson, Virgil c Aldrich faculty fellow here in the center. Professor Nelson is Associate Professor of Communication here in the College of Humanities and is working on a project related to public trust in a variety of institutions, including the news media.

Welcome. Uh, tell us about what you're working on this year.

Jake Nelson: Thank you for having me. So the project that I'm currently working on draws on interviews with members of the public where they weigh in on their trust or lack thereof in journalism, in healthcare, and in higher education. Before I became an associate professor at the University of Utah, I started my professional career as a journalist.

So I got my PhD from Northwestern, and then when I. Finished my PhD. I got my first academic job as an assistant professor at the Walter Clark Height School of Journalism, mass Communication at Arizona State University, and I was there for four years before coming to Utah. During that time, basically for the majority of my academic career, I had been focused on understanding why journalists and news audiences think about and interact with each other the way that they do.

So that's led into this project that I'm currently working on now titled Why We Distrust American Skepticism Toward Media Medicine and Higher Education. So the idea for the project. Originated during the pandemic. I was working with my co-author Seth Lewis, who was a professor at the University of Oregon.

And he and I were gathering data about people's news consumption during the pandemic. This was pretty early on in basically spring of 2020, and our guiding question was essentially what? There were two, where are you going to get news about the pandemic and how are you deciding which elder you trust versus those that you do not?

And. What we were hearing very consistently during those early months of the pandemic from the people that we interviewed was that people had a great deal of interest in news. They were consuming so much more news than they ever did before because the pandemic was such a, there's such urgency in that story.

It affected so much of their daily lives, and so they wanted to keep, be kept informed, however. They were incredibly skeptical of essentially all information that they were receiving. It almost didn't matter which outlets they were using. They were approaching all of those outlets and all of the information that they were getting from those outlets with a great deal of skepticism.

And we found that very interesting. And so we have since then been working on this project that is aspiring to understand why. That widespread skepticism has become so prevalent among the public how people, how it's affecting people's interactions with news media, um, and what it says about the moment that we're in that people feel compelled to present themselves as being so suspicious of journalism.

And so that's the journalism aspect of it, the way in which we decided to incorporate healthcare and higher education. Is a bit less, I don't know, academic, I guess not the word I should use. What happened was at that same time that we were gathering these data, my wife, who is a pediatrician and who was pregnant at the time, was doing telehealth because she was pregnant and she was, we were unsure what would happen if she was exposed to COVID.

So she was doing telehealth rather than doing patient care in her clinic. And so I was having these zooms with members of the public about their distrust in journalism at the same time that she was having these telehealth appointments with patients that were increasingly filled with expressions of distrust of the medical establishment, specifically of vaccinations.

Can you specify months that this was? Yeah, so the interviews I believe, began in April, so I think that the interviews took place between April and June of 2020. Okay. So pre vaccine I don't want to guess basically why the skepticism toward vaccines was so prevalent in these conversations. I assume that it was something to do with the fact that there was so much so in distrust towards the medical establishment, uh, within the first Trump administration's approach to the pandemic.

But anyway we were hearing very similar things about distrust. It's just that hers was framed toward one institution and mine was framed toward another. And so Seth and I realized that there's something to that overlap, that there's something compelling about and and important about this distrust toward that is so similar and yet pointed toward these completely different institutions.

And. So much of the time, academic research, just by virtue of being discipline specific and institution specific is focused on one thing. You know, for the most part, my research has focused on journalism specifically, and it's because I don't know very much about healthcare. I don't know very much about higher education except that I work in higher education, but the fact that it seems that people's distrust of the news media.

Seems to originate from a similar place and look very similar to their distrust of healthcare. And our hypothesis is also that it will look similar to their distrust of higher education. We felt that it was important to take a comparative approach, and that's what we're doing with this project and uh, our hope is that we'll be able to show to people who read this book.

That this distrust is not institution specific, and therefore it is important to understand that it is not incumbent on any one institution to solve this problem. You know, like journalism by itself cannot get the public to, to trust it More the same way that I don't believe that people within healthcare can get the public to trust healthcare more.

There is something about where conventional wisdom. Has taken the public that the conventional wisdom now is to be suspicious of everything, and I think that is such a powerful force. I think that it's beyond the ability of any one institution to tackle that on their own.

Robert Carson: A lot of things in, in the narrative you just gave about doing these interviews.

Can you say just a little bit more about finding the people, how you chose, the people you interview, how the interviews were structured when you did them?

Jake Nelson: Yeah. Yeah. So when we first started doing these in 2020 first, we worked with Qualtrics to two. Get a sample, a panel of people of participants that we could reach out to.

And basically Qualtrics gave a very short survey to people that was a representative sample of the US public in terms of gender education, income, political identity political affiliation. And then part of the survey that Qualtrics gave them, asked them for their email addresses and their phone numbers, and if they'd be willing to be interviewed at via Zoom as a follow up.

And so, those that did, yes, were passed along to us. We emailed these people and, you know, we had a list of hundreds and hundreds of names. We emailed them to do interviews. This was at the very start of Zoom becoming a ubiquitous tool that it has now become. And so we would reach out to these people.

They'd get a link to make an appointment with us and then we would do a Zoom interview with them. And these interviews were an an hour long and they were semi-structured, which means that I had a list of questions that had a list of questions. We tried to hit as many of them as we could, but we also left a lot of room for follow-up questions.

Because in my experience doing this kind of work. So much of what makes interviewing a valuable form of data collection and so much of its strength, I think as an alternative to surveys, not that I don't think surveys are valuable, but I think that the values are different. The strengths are different, is the ability to ask follow up questions and to, I think get into the details and to really allow people to work through.

Feelings and beliefs and ideas that they'd never truly articulated until that very moment. And it's a wonderful thing to experience when you're in it, when you're, when you're having these conversations. It's, it's truly one of my favorite forms of data

Robert Carson: collection. So, that, that's a fascinating moment there that you have in these interviews.

You, you have the sense that people are saying things out loud for the first time. Like what kinds of things what kinds of things come out in those moments?

Jake Nelson: Yeah, so I mean, I would say that a very typical sequence of events that happens during these conversations, and I say typical because they did end up following this path, that it wasn't like we were guiding them.

We were asking very open-ended questions that were essentially, where are you going for news? How are you choosing those sources? How much time are you spending with them? How are you determining what's true or false? And basically going from there. And it was infrequent that there was a lot of thought given to the specific sources.

A lot of time it was sort of like, I just go to whatever my search browser defaults to, like if I load, if I open my browser and it's, Bing or something, you know, like whatever that news outlet is, that's where I'm getting my news from. Or I remember I interview someone who said, well, our family, we watch a lot of CNN because that is the app that came on our Roku.

If they're not proactively seeking out sources, it's just what's been presented to them. Which makes sense. In the broadcast era, people were not necessarily thinking, oh, I'm gonna choose CBS because I have an affinity for it. It's just that was what was on, people are sort of falling into these news repertoires and they're spending a lot of time with the news.

Robert Carson: Well, also for a large number of working people, with some major exceptions, people are just at home. Yes. With nothing to do. So everyone is, as they say, terminally online. Huge part. And also the phenomenon doom scrolling, which I feel like that term maybe emerged a little bit later. Yes. So you also have, a lot of indoor life.

Yes,

Jake Nelson: And to be honest, that is what originated the project. There's this term, in my world called audience availability, which refers to exactly what you're describing. The amount of time that people spend with media is contingent upon the amount of time that they have available to spend with media in the first place, which is something that a lot of people in journalism.

Don't necessarily always think about it because in their minds, the formula is the amount of time someone spends with news is contingent among the amount of interest that they have in news. And so if people aren't spending a lot of time with news journalists, in my experience, tend to either assume that it's because the journalists are not doing a good enough job getting the public interested in those news stories.

Like maybe they could be telling the story a little bit differently. But more often they're blaming the public. They're saying, no, people just don't care about the news. This is, they're, they're, they're not invested in these topics because they're just not being good citizens, basically. You know, it's a very dismissive approach to the audience.

Mm. And I have, you know, my advisor when I was getting my PhD, was not a journalism studies person. He was a media audiences person. An audience studies person. And so his approach to understanding how audiences engage with media. Was detached from these sort of like lofty goals that tend to be implicit or explicit in competitions about people's news consumption.

It was just more about, okay, well why are people tuning into this show or that show, or not tuning in at all? And something that he often argued at his work was that audience availability was very important.

Robert Carson: And in this sense, an audience for journalism is no different than. Different than an audience for anything else.

Exactly. The professional sort of self image of the journalist falls away once you start asking this question.

Jake Nelson: Absolutely, and I, I think that's a very important thing to do because I think that, especially in this moment where most members of the public, I think treat the news media as just another form of media.

That is vying for their attention. Journalists do themselves a disservice when they treat their own product as being loftier or more noble or more important I think it is. You know, personally speaking, I do think that it is, but I think that it's a mistake to treat it that way in the news production process because I think then they are assuming that people will feel, like beauty bound to consume news and people do not feel that way. But to get back to your, your question, people did have tremendous availability during the pandemic because they were home. And that is a huge reason why they were spending more news when we asked them that that's exactly what they said.

I'm home, I have more time on my hands because I'm not working. You know? And, and we went into this with that hypothesis because there was already data showing that there was already data that showed that TV news had increased. Also the time in which TV news was most popular had changed. So it used to be the TV news consumption.

Pre pandemic was really at its peak, I think at around like 7:00 AM But during the lockdown it went to midday and it made a lot of sense. You were had the TV on while you're getting ready for work before you got up to the car to go. Then when you were locked down, you just had the TV on during the day or at lunchtime or whatever.

You know who cares. So the audience availability played a really, really. Strong role in compelling people to spend more time with news. Not to mention the fact that the pandemic itself felt like such an urgent story that was affecting every facet of their lives. But what we learned in these interviews was that people felt like they, you know what, what would typically happen in these conversations?

People would talk about how they don't trust one outlet or another and we would say what I often do in these conversations is I just attempt to paraphrase. What people are saying to me and, and sort of ask them to respond to my attempt to sort of synthesize what they've said, almost

Robert Carson: therapeutic

Jake Nelson: in a way.

I, I, I, I do feel that there is a therapeutic component to it. Yeah. Yeah. That is exactly it. And I do feel that people genuinely appreciate it. You know, I do feel at the end of these conversations, people feel lighter than they did before, and, and sometimes the people that I spoke with would say things that I.

You know, I did an interview with someone who was a conspiracy theorist, who was talking about how he mostly got his news from, very off the beaten path YouTube channels. And he believed that the earth was flat and he believed that George Soros was controlling everything. And, he had some, some beliefs that that were completely wrong.

And in those conversations, my approach is never to try to introduce any second guessing or. You're not intervening with these. I'm not intervening. I'm coming at it from a complete place of curiosity. Just tell me more about a hat and and why do you think that outlet is telling you the news? That is correct but, but CNN is not to be trusted.

Like what is the difference there? Really trying to understand what got them on this path toward these news media diets that have led them so straight factually. And it's always very interesting and, and yeah, as I'm saying, where we end up getting sort of the. Building blocks for our argument come from the synthesis where someone's talking about how, oh, well you can't trust that outlet and you can't trust this outlet.

And you're saying, you know, it kind of seems like you're spending a great deal of time with news, but you also don't seem like you have a great deal of trust in news. Is that accurate? And they're like, yeah, you know, I guess I hadn't really thought it before. And then I say. Well, so what do you do then?

How do you know what's true or what's false? And then they say I end up having to do a lot of fact checking on my own. And that's a, that, that was a recurring theme in the work that we did in these interviews with people describing their fact checking processes. You know, basically they're doing their own research to corroborate the stories that they're, that they're reading.

And of course then I often ended up asking, you know what? It sounds like you're doing a great deal of work. To determine if something is true or not, because you're not just reading a new story, you're then going outta your way to conduct this sort of like, de facto scientific process that you've put together.

Are people

Robert Carson: fact checking stories in news outlets, or is that, is that strictly what they're talking about? Or were people also talking about fact checking sort of memes and circulation and d among different political?

Jake Nelson: It's all of it. Okay. It's all of it. Okay. Uh, I mean, what we often heard was. The former, because we were asking about news consumption specifically.

Right.

Jake Nelson: I am sure that they're doing it with memes as well, but I think that from their perspective, these conversations were about checking news stories. Okay. And I will say who knows how much they're actually doing any of that. I

Robert Carson: think that that was my next question. Yeah. A a sense that people, you said in your initial introduction of this, that people were presenting themselves as skeptical.

Yeah. So, on one hand, you're asking people about. To describe their own behavior, which may be more accurate, less accurate, whatever. But then they're also presenting, as you said, presenting an image of themselves for the first time to someone. And did you have the feeling that people were taking extra care to present themselves as skeptical and rigorous?

Jake Nelson: Yes. Here's what I will say, and here's how we describe it, because this unsurprisingly something that when we submit these. Articles to academic journals, and we've submitted the book as a proposal to presses. Reviewers bring this up and I think they bring it up. Rightly, you know, with the question of, okay, well people are saying this, but you don't know if they're actually doing any of it, so why should we believe them?

Like, why should we put any stock in, in, in any of this? And I have two answers to it. The first is, yeah, who knows? You know, like who knows if they are actually engaging in, in these fact checking processes, and if they are, how? Much time they're actually spending view it compared to the amount of time that they are saying that they're doing it.

My sense, if I had to guess, is that probably they're doing it much less frequently than they say that they're doing it, but they are ever doing it. But I, I would almost say that the extent to which what they're saying aligns with what they're doing is beside the point, and it's beside the point because.

What's important here is that they feel compelled to posture in this particular way.

Robert Carson: And so that would, that would be statements, not just about what they're doing, but what they trust, the extent of their trust, how they report, how they think about these things, right. People are horrible at estimating the time they spend on doing stuff.

People, but to be asked, do you trust this? Yeah. That's a moment where there could be a quick presentation of self going on.

Jake Nelson: Yeah. And, but. People say that they don't trust the news. They still spend a great deal of time with news. Presumably they are actually believing some of the things that they're consuming.

Even if they're saying at a general level, I don't trust this entire institution. Mm-hmm. And what I would say to that is that's still important. That disconnect between what they're saying about their relationship with news media versus how they're actually approaching their relationship with news media is important because again, it comes back to this idea of.

This is how they feel compelled to present themselves to the world. And uh, you know, when we went into this project, Seth and I wondered, well, they're gonna know that we are journalism professors. I wonder if that's gonna make people feel compelled to talk more positively about the news. There was no way at all.

No. There was no at all. And uh, finally they had a chance to tell, to tell a journalist what they Exactly. Yeah. Exactly. And, um. As you, as you were saying people are notoriously bad at accurately conveying the amount of time that they spend doing anything. They're they people that have often been observed, exaggerating the amount of time that they spend with news media, and some believe that it's because they just don't.

Do a good job recalling the amount of time that they spend, but others wonder if it's because they feel compelled to posture. Yeah. I spend a, a great deal of time with news because I am an informed citizen, and I understand that, that, you know, that is sort of an important part of conveying myself as a smart person in today's society.

Well, I mean, a student saying, well,

Robert Carson: I spent four hours studying for this test. Why did this happen? Right?

Jake Nelson: Yeah. And but, so that is the reason why it's so important. People feel compelled to say that they don't trust any news right now because it's the same mechanism, the same. I want to make sure that my peers think that I'm smart, and instead of that being all about saying why, how much news I'm consuming, the way in which they are.

I. Attempting to persuade people that they're smart is by describing themselves as incredibly skeptical.

Robert Carson: Were there any differences in age, education, income level, ethnicity, religious affiliation? I'm sure that the outlets consumed are, very unpredictable ways, but what about the structure of one's re people's relationship to it?

Yeah. Were there any trends in that?

Jake Nelson: Yeah, so what we were actually struck by was the overlap among disparate. Subgroups within this representative sample. And the one that most jumped out at us was the bipartisan skepticism toward the news media. You know, I, I think just because there's a lot of very compelling survey data that suggests that conservatives are much more likely to distrust the news media than liberals. And I think that we did find that it generally, it skewed that way a little bit. But less than we expected to. Mm. And, what was interesting was that we heard conservatives and liberals speaking with disdain, with similar kinds of disdain towards the news media, even if they were talking about different outlets.

Conservatives did describe spending more time with outlets like Fox News, however. They would also say, yeah, but you know, you can't trust everything on Fox News either, because they are just telling Trump supporters what they want to hear. They were speaking of this understanding that they were, those Trump supporters.

You know, they're saying like, that Fox just just wants to placate me and because they wanna placate me, I, I have to be a little suspicious of them. Mm-hmm.

Robert Carson: That's quite, that's quite heartening to hear actually, that people, people have a sense that, that they think they have my number. Right. That Exactly.

Yeah.

Jake Nelson: Exactly. And I heard the exact same thing from some of the liberals that I interviewed about NPR. Mm. Mm-hmm. Um, I, I remember interviewing someone who said, NPR is so anti-Trump which I am also, but it, you know, it sometimes it's like, it feels like it's coming at the expense of their accuracy, basically.

Mm-hmm. And so, you know, it, it's like the people that we interviewed. You know, it kind of cuts against like the narrative that gets told about like sort of filter bubbles and echo chambers, which the empirical evidence behind echo chambers and filter bubbles has always been. Spotty to say the least. You know, it's generally been

Robert Carson: well, can you, can you specify that at all?

Jake Nelson: Sure. Sorry. Echo chambers and filter bubbles refers to this idea that people will self-select into news media diets that align with their political preferences. Mm-hmm.

Robert Carson: And that totally ignores the phenomenon of hate reading and hate watching

Jake Nelson: It ignores all that, which is, something that should not be overlooked.

It's an important part for a lot of people's news media, especially news junkies.

Robert Carson: Yeah.

Jake Nelson: Uh. But I think what it also does, well, first I should just say that it's been a very enduring story that gets told about people's news, media consumption, despite the fact that the empirical evidence surrounding it is.

All but nonexistent, for the most part studies into echo chambers and filter bubbles. Find that people generally concentrate on a, a small number of very large, big name brands in news media, rather than spend a lot of time trying to find their sort of like ideological echo chamber, which getting back to sort of.

How people find themselves, news sites and news stations makes a lot of sense because most people don't spend a lot of time with news. And so they're not gonna go trying to sort of curate the perfect news media dive for themselves. They're just gonna go to whatever is right there at the top of their Google search or something like that.

But the other aspect of this that I've always found troublesome is that it kind of, it's not very kind to people, you know? It suggests that people don't. Want to be pushed at all, that they just want to be appeased, basically. They did. They just want stuff that will make them feel good for the beliefs that they have, which might be true, but it's not how people wanna see themselves.

Mm-hmm. And I think that's the important thing. Mm-hmm. And that's what I sort of learned from doing these interviews was that even if these people that I was interviewing were getting news from outlets that were attempted to give them exactly what they wanted from an an ideological perspective. The people that interviewed weren't reacting to that by thinking, this is great, because no, I don't have to think at all.

And I really like to not think they were saying, I'm a critical thinker, and so I'm getting exactly what I want from this outlet, but I know that that's what they're doing. Mm-hmm. And so that's why I have to also look elsewhere and make sure that I'm getting critically engaged in a way by the opposition.

Robert Carson: Yeah. I guess I'm wondering, is this people perceiving, okay, there's this media outlet. It's sort of pandering to me or it's giving me what they think I want. Is that you're saying that's not new or is there signs of that changing in any way? Or, or, or was the time of this interview just an especially fraught moment for that kind of

Jake Nelson: question?

Yeah. It's hard to say if it's, if it's new or not new. I mean, my, my guess would be that people have never wanted to think of themselves as being given news that will encourage them to be uncritical,

Robert Carson: but it's also a, a response in a way that, that some news outlets brand themselves, the resistance on M-S-N-B-C, right.

And Fox News. That is they're responding to a product that. Labels them in a way that feels recent in a way. Yeah. I think sort of like, you know, golden age of, you know, post-war American Network news didn't label itself as we are the news program for these kind of people. Yes. Whereas that is entirely baked into a lot of the way that news is marketed now.

Yeah.

Jake Nelson: Okay. So I, I think that you're right, and I guess my response is that I don't necessarily think that people thinking of themselves as as critical. Thinkers as critical news consumers. I don't think that is new, but I do think that their perception of how news outlets are presenting themselves has changed in that way because we've talked to young people who would say this, and a lot of people that we interviewed were wishing they were pining for Walter Cronkite.

They wanted this performed neutrality, just the facts. Here's today's news. I don't have a dog in this fight. Approach to news consumption. To news production. And you know, we even heard this from people who, there's no way they were alive when Walter Cronkite was on the air, you know?

And there's like, I just missed the era of Walter Cronkite. He's like, what are you talking about? That's

Robert Carson: fascinating. But

Jake Nelson: exactly what you're saying, which is their perception of the news as being oppositional toward one another. Like M-S-N-B-C is. Pitting itself as the opponent to Fox.

And Fox is pitting itself as the opponent to sort of like the, the rest of the news media mm-hmm. Is essentially, uh, the liberal media. Um, and this actually gets to something that is, is a hunch that was always sort of like implicit in, in these interviews. This idea that cable news is, when people talk about journalism, what they're really talking about is cable news.

They're not talking about newspapers. Mm-hmm. They're not talking about news websites. They're not talking about. News radio, they're talking about CNN, they're talking about Fox. They're talking about Amazon, NBC and those brands are so omnipresent. They take up so much space in their minds. The things that they are faulting those channels for is a stand in for how they heal on journalism writ large.

Robert Carson: Are you approaching this mistrust as a problem to be solved? Or just as a phenomenon that has occurred for a variety of reasons. And I guess the first thing I want to ask is you, were you doing these interviews before or after people stopped washing their groceries in the early days of COVID. Right.

That is to say CER is a certain amount of mistrust organically. Necessary and appropriate. And I hesitate to say, but I'll just say natural given a particular set of events and developments.

Jake Nelson: Yeah. I think that how much should people, distrust institutions have weighed very heavily on Seth and me as we've been doing this research.

Well, the first question, should people distrust, I think is a pretty easy question to answer. And, and that it's, yeah, like I think that we would never. Try to argue that people should approach institutions. With complete confidence at any given moment because no institution is perfect. All these institutions are fallible.

They've all made mistakes. They've all done things that are wrong. And that's why people should be a little skeptical, when it comes to them. I think that when we get hung up on this is what is the right formula? 'cause you know what it's a question of degree basically. And really what I think.

We've been sort of trying to come to some argument around, and we're so, sort of hashing it out, is there's a difference between skepticism and cynicism.

Right now it seems like people feel deeply cynical toward these institutions and as a result they, they are not giving these institutions.

Really any credibility. When you embrace cynicism, you sort of shut down any opportunity for those institutions to win you back, to win you over, because anything that those institutions attempt to present to you as a counterargument, you've already dismissed outta hand as being manipulated. If you're coming at to these things from a place of skepticism, then you're open to either being proven wrong or having these that demonstrate to you that they are indeed trustworthy.

Robert Carson: Did that distinction come out in the interviews? People did, people were professing, skepticism and then, and then some probing and it reveals itself as cynicism, or there's a kind of affective or emotional or kind of personal sense of personal betrayal. I almost, under this, we kept calling

Jake Nelson: it skepticism.

You know, we did these interviews in 2020, and for the last five years, four years, we've been referring to these people that we've interviewed as being deeply skeptical towards these institutions. But what we're realizing now is that cynicism actually is a more accurate. Descriptor because of how much more of a dead end cynicism is.

I, I was reading an interview with, uh, the author Marilyn Robinson, and she actually is the one who made this distinction between skepticism and cynicism. And I think that she's actually the one who said that that cynicism is a dead end. And she said skepticism is, is all, is, I forget her exact words, but she was advocating for skepticism, but referred to cynicism as a dead end.

And when I saw that, I thought that is sort of what we need. As sort of our anchor. When I say our, I mean Seth, and Seth and me, as we think about what our answer is to the question of should people trust these institutions? And if so, how much? And to, just to give you an example of sort of what I, I mean by this is so we did these interviews in 20 10, 20.

We get another batch of interviews two years later about people's trust in news as it relates to their understanding of how journalists make money. What we found was that people had this. Idea of news organizations as being completely profit driven at the expense of any other goals that they may have.

As a result, any news that they generate that they produce is always going to be inaccurate because the primary goal is to get a huge audience is to manipulate in hopes that it'll somehow lead to more corporate sponsorships to. Scaling a paywall, right? Yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly. It's all with a bottom, bottom line in mind.

And from my perspective and from Seth's perspective, it's not like we think that the news media is completely pure when it comes to the economics of journalism. We both worked in journalism. We know that it is an incredibly fraught profession precisely because of market considerations. Um. However, we also know that most of the people that we've met, that we worked with that work in journalism are not doing it because they're trying to manipulate the public.

They're not doing it because they want to strike it rich, you know, unleash, you know? Right. And that, I think, is a really important distinction. So we, even if we are consuming news, Seth and I, and we're thinking like, oh, this outlet is. Like we're aware of the shortcomings of an outlet based on its economic, of its economic model, or, you, before you started talking about Jeff Bezos and the Washington Post I have my misgivings about how Jeff Bezos is running the Washington Post, and I may have my, like, ideological argument with that organization.

However, if you put a Washington Post story in front of me right now, I would still assume that it was accurate because I would assume that it was well vetted. By journalists and editors who took a good faith effort to do their jobs with integrity.

Robert Carson: Sure. And, and who would suffer severe professional consequences if they exactly did something blatantly false?

That distinction between what journalists do and the way that the thing that they do is received is sort of mediated by this, media organization. Right. And so I wonder if, if. You could talk about that in the context of the other two big institutions you talk about, or two big industries medicine and higher ed.

There, there could seem to be kind of a structural relationship here where there are professionals in these industries who have one set of values and people I. Regard them individually in a certain way, but then regard kind of the larger industry they're working on in a

Jake Nelson: different way. So I think that what you just said is true, and I think that it's another similarity that we found between these institutions.

And I'm gonna leave higher education now just because we're actually about to embark on the interviews about higher education. So I don't wanna speak for that as yet because I, I don't know for sure what people will weigh in on that. But when it comes to journalism and healthcare. What's, what we found as an interesting overlap between the two is that people trust the individual.

You know, they trust the their primary care provider more than they trust the institution. So people have serious critiques of healthcare. They have serious critiques of the news media, but they trust the person that they deal with. So if you have a doctor, you trust that person. And what's interesting is that there's not really an analog for that in journalism because people don't have like.

Their own local journalists that they deal with. And that is more a result of like the fractured news media environment and the collapsing of the economic model.

Robert Carson: But the, the longing for a figure like Walter Cronkite is, seems like precisely the desire for that kind of figure. Exactly. A

Jake Nelson: connection. A connection that you feel with a, a person that you think is doing this job with integrity.

Yeah. And it's just, it's not. Quite there anymore in journalism the way that it once was. And it's weird to think that it was that way with Ultra Cronkite because, I think that the reason why it works in medicine is because you have your doctor that you actually see these ones. Like, and to me it seems like that the analog to that, if there were to be one, would be you have a local journalist, you know, something that you would run into at like events or city council meetings or whatever.

But I think you're right. I actually think that the news anchor. Fills that gap as well. But for some reason, I don't know. I think that people don't feel like. An affinity with news anchors. I think it gets back to Walter Cronkite's approach of sort of being just the facts and people feeling like there's no new anchors that do that anymore.

I do think that like Lester Holt, you know, I know he's about to retire, but he's trying to do that to me, people's reaction to someone like Lester Holt. And seeing him approach it as though he's Walter Cronkite, but not be interpreted as though he's, Walter Cronkite, be received instead as though he's just another biased news anchor.

Mm.

Mm-hmm. To

Jake Nelson: me, that says more about the moment than it does about the delivery. Mm-hmm. I don't think that there's anything less for Walters doing that makes his approach significantly different from what Walter Cronkite was doing. But we all are existing in this current moment where there's so much opposition, like whatever station he's on.

Someone at another station saying you can't trust him. That people feel like, well, all right, I can't, I can't trust any of it, so I'm gonna just assume it's all it's all compromise. I think if Walter Cronk was on TV right now, people would say, well, he's just another hack. I'm serious. I,

Robert Carson: I

Jake Nelson: think, no,

Robert Carson: I think that's right.

I think that, yeah. So we're talking on February 27th. Within the past few days, uh, Jeff Bezos, owner of the Washington Post, announced a major shift in the editorial. Policy of, of the newspaper that he owns, he posted on X I'm of America and for America and proud to be. So. Our country did not get here by being typical.

And a big part of America's success has been freedom in the economic realm and everywhere else. Freedom is ethical. It minimizes coercion and practical, it drives creativity, invention, and prosperity. And then he says, to that end, uh, the Washington Post will be advocating for. Personal liberties and free markets, right?

The New York Times is reporting this gleefully. We might add thoughts about that kind of turn. Is that an exception? Does that, is that just an acceleration of trends that have already been happening? How much stock should people put in that? What are your thoughts on that?

Jake Nelson: Yeah, so I'm gonna speak to this as a journalism study scholar first and foremost.

So the thing that is most interesting to me about this development is. How quickly the industry is beginning to sour on the idea of a billionaire buying a news organization. Just talking about the economics of journalism right now and of running a news organization. It just feels like there are no good options.

Basically, the advent of the internet killed the ad section of your daily newspaper, which really crippled. The economic model of most news organizations and a lot of these organizations quickly started putting their content online for free, thinking that they would be able to either get digital advertising dollars to make up the difference, or eventually turn those people into paid subscribers, neither of which panned out.

As a result. For decades now. For decades, news organizations have been trying to figure out how can we get a handle on the situation and make news sustainably, and each time there's been excitement about a specific intervention or idea. Or in the case of Jeff Bezos, a person, it's been a disappointment.

And when Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post, I forget what year it was. There was suspicion, but then he invested a ton of money into that organization and hired Marty Baron to be the editor in chief and. It really seemed like there was this commitment to making it just a really high quality news outlet.

And on the one hand it, it probably will continue to be a really high quality news outlet, just the same way that I think the Wall Street Journal. Is a very high quality news outlet and I don't read their editorials either. So,

Robert Carson: well let me ask you, is what Bezos doing an extension of, or actually meaningfully different from Rupert Murdoch?

That is to say in a figure like Bezos, you have, and in fact a lot of what's going on now, you have these already consolidated media empires. And then Silicon Valley big business generally, and government. Right. And that this has been made, this was certainly made visually explicit at the inauguration.

Is that

Jake Nelson: accurate or, or I mean, I think that, at least in the case of what Bezos is doing, it is nakedly transparent. I don't know if that means that, like Rupert Murdoch is emailing the editorial writers of the Wall Street Journal and saying like, what's on the dock today? Can we make sure that it's something that will make me happy?

You know, like I, I don't think, I don't think he cares.

And I think that we, we've been talking sort of about like the professional culture, the professional norms, you know, of these organizations. If you are working for the Wall Street Journal's editorial section, you don't need to be told by Rupert Murdoch what kinda editorial story you believe that already.

That's why you're there. You self-selected for that job.

Mm-hmm.

Jake Nelson: Because you share those values. Mm-hmm. You're, you're not acting disingenuously, you're not writing things that you disagree with. You're doing exactly what you want to be doing in the venue that is most excited to have you sharing that perspective.

And, you know, getting back to sort of like the excitement that greeted Bezos, like the very cautious excitement that greeted Bezos when he first took over the post. I believe he put out a number of statements and gave a number of interviews. That suggests that he didn't really care if it made money or not.

He was invested in it because he was invested in like quality journalism.

Robert Carson: Almost approaching funding or sponsoring journalism as a kind of quasi philanthropy. Yeah. Right. Yeah. And that would be in sharp distinction to a news outlet that actually relies on customers paying for what it gives. Right.

And you would think, well, okay, a kind of philanthropic model would allow more leeway, experimentation, freedom, and so on. Right. But it also has, it's also can be far more contingent. Yeah. Subject to more manipulation. Are there any outlets that were really funded by subscribers?

Jake Nelson: Yeah. And, and you know, the New York Times is increasingly funded by subscribers.

Okay. Uh, like each year, a larger portion of their revenue comes from subscriptions than the year before. Not, it's not easy. And the problem that we're seeing right now with the New York Times is success is that the New York Times is so singular. Yeah, that's what I was about to ask. It's sort of like sucking all the air out of the room for other outlets, but it is possible.

The problem is. That you kind of need money to make money in this world. You know, the New York Times has so much capital behind it, a great deal of their success. It seems to me at least stems from the fact that the New York Times made the very smart decision to bundle its news offerings with non-New offerings like Wordle and the cooking app.

Mm-hmm. And the wire cutter. They bought the athletic. None of these things are hard news. But when you have these incredibly addictive games that people love to play, and you have a cooking app that people love to use for recipes, and you have a review company or review leg of your operation, that's reviewing absolutely every consumer good out there, people will buy your news if it comes with all of that.

Mm-hmm. But also they have the money to invest in the user experience of their offer rates. Their app is seamless. Everything loads so quickly. There's been there, there have been studies that show that, that if people attempt to look at a news story and it takes even like a fraction of a second longer to load, they're gonna close it.

Right? They're not gonna, they'll just move on. That is how quickly these decisions are getting made about people's news consumption. And then talking about knows that. And so you need that money to get that subscription base. Most news organizations don't have that money to begin with,

Robert Carson: right? So we have something like the New York Times, which is sort of singular or sort of very hard to reproduce elsewhere.

We have dependence on advertising and sort of then sort of ownership by larger unrelated industries. And then there's the figure of the kind of, journalists moving to Substack. In different ways, a kind of sort of entrepreneurial journalism journalists who leave a news organization and then cultivate a kind of relationship with their followers, try to get subscriptions out of that.

I'm thinking of Glen Greenwald, Barry Weiss, Ken Klippenstein. Actually a couple people from The Intercept I feel like have gone that. Thoughts about that model of that kind of sort of singular journalist who cultivates their own following? What are the strengths and weaknesses of that?

What's the future

Jake Nelson: of that? So I think that the big weakness of that is you need to have that following before you go. You need to have essentially worked at a legacy news organization or you need to work at an organization with enough of a public presence. To garner enough people that they will follow you.

And if you don't have that, then you will not make it. Because it is very hard to build that following from the very small platform of Substack.

Rather than build that following at a bigger platform and then taking that elsewhere.

So it's a huge burden if you don't already have it.

Assuming that you do have it and you take it with you, it's all on you. It's all on you. You're doing this all yourself. I guess if you make it work, you know, Barry Weiss is now, I think, running the free press or mm-hmm. So she, you know, has this operation that she's in charge of, but I don't think that the money that she's making isn't coming entirely from like public donations.

Via Substack. Like I think that she at this point has a number of like very wealthy donors.

Mm-hmm.

Jake Nelson: Making what she's doing sustainable.

And that brings me to another part of this, which is I think that not all, but a not coincidentally, large number of the people who have left legacy news organizations started as substack and found success.

Have done so by embracing this narrative of I was censored in my legacy, quote unquote corporate media job, but now that I'm untethered from these sinister forces mm-hmm. I can tell you how it really is. Mm-hmm. So, support me and I can finally speak to you. Honestly, I, I hear an edge of cynicism in your account of that.

I find it truly repellent. I really do. So say why The most distinct way I can put it. Is that these people that are taking this approach, are using the public cynicism toward the news media as a way to make money. They're, they, they are profiting from public cynicism toward the very institution that they came from.

And I find it very frustrating. Because they're kind of stabbing their former colleagues in the back. Basically, you know, they're telling the public like, I worked with these people. You can't trust them. Trust me, don't trust those people. I had to leave those people because I couldn't trust them anymore.

Like the most recent example of this is Taylor Loren, who, in her way presenting herself now, argues that she was never sort of a quote unquote good fit. With legacy media, which is true. You know, she always sort of was like towing this line between aspiring influencer, content creator. But also like tech journalist.

And I think that combination made her a very appealing hire from the perspective of these legacy brands that hired her, but also create attention at these organizations as well. I think that the work that she's doing now that she's struck out on her own is valuable. I wish that she didn't feel compelled to say that the reason why her work is more valuable now is because she's untethered from corporate media.

I wish that she could do her job now without suggesting to her followers or supporters or whatever that corporate media as she refers to it, is inherently untrustworthy.

Robert Carson: And so in a way it's sort of a kind of fractal replication of the way that. Say like the big three cable news channels define themselves in opposition to each other.

Right. That same kind of mutually excluding or mutually defining relationship. Yes. Breaks down between media outlets and then even down to individual journalists. Yes. Themselves. Yeah. The same kind of the same kind of competitive logic. Is there any way out of that?

Jake Nelson: Something that I have argued, as you know, is that.

The institutions that are under this attack and the organizations that are facing the consequences of these attacks need to be more transparent about the role that money does play in how they make their decisions, so that they can actually demonstrate to the public that the skepticism is warranted.

But the cynicism is not because right now the attacks are, are explicit. The defenses are implicit.

Robert Carson: Four listeners three. News outlets, relatively unknown, that you would recommend to curious, thoughtful readers that are not household names? Let's see.

Jake Nelson: Well, the first of all will be a local one, and it's a podcast called City Cast Salt Lake.

They've got a daily new podcast about stuff that's happening in our backyard in Salt Lake City, and the podcast itself is great, and they have a newsletter that goes on every day that I really like. I am increasingly a big fan of Axios, both at the local level and the national level. For those of you listening that don't know, Axios is very bite-sized news.

Basically, it's like a newsletter that comes every day that I get for Salt Lake City, but it is available for national also. And it's just sort of like, here's what's happening, here's why it matters, here's what's next, that kind of thing. And um, I like it because I feel like the news. It feels so depressing that I don't wanna look at it, but if I can like, go through a newsletter, feel pretty informed pretty quickly and go about the rest of my day.

I'm trying to think of a third one that is sort of off the beaten path, but instead I'm just gonna give one that is not at all off the beaten path, but says a lot more about where my mind is right now than it is anywhere else. And it's the Hollywood reporter because I honestly I spend a lot of my time reading news about movies.

I think that this is important to include anyway because I feel like oftentimes when we think about news consumption, we think that it has to be hard news. And I think in my opinion, and I tell this to my students all the time, anytime you spend on your device that's not on social media, that is instead consuming content from a reputable brand that makes content.

Even if it's like soft news, like the Hollywood Reporter or you know Eddie, the other places I get movie news from like Variety or Deadline or whatever. Mm-hmm. I think that leaves you so much better off than it would if you were just endlessly scrolling. That is really, I would say the mind news, media diet right now is basically exactly what I just said.

It's these newsletters in the morning, it's the New York Times throughout the day, but also it's primarily movie news. As escapism for me. I actually, I deleted my social media a couple, uh, two years ago now. Um, maybe around then, and I'm still spending plenty of time on my phone, but it's more with this kind of content than it is with anything else.

Mm, great. Great. Thank you so much.

Robert Carson: Thank you for being on the show and, uh, look forward to just talking to you again.

Jake Nelson: Yeah, thank you again for having me.

Robert Carson: This has been a conversation with Jake Nelson, professor of Communication at the University of Utah. I'm Robert Carson, associate Director of the Tanner Humanities Center here at the U. And thank you for listening to the virtual Jewel Box, our podcast. Views expressed on the virtual jewel box. Do not represent the official views of the University of Utah and however much you might mistrust the media, you can always trust our theme song, Jelly Roll Morton's Perfect rag.