Alan Murray - The Future of Facts

I can't think of a more dangerous idea for the future of our society than the notion that facts don't exist or facts don't matter or that everyone is entitled to choose their own facts. Today on KPR presents The Future of Facts, searching for truth in the 21st century. I'm Kay McIntyre and on today's program we'll hear from Alan Murray. Murray has spent his career in journalism and the business of fact-finding. He's currently the CEO of Fortune Inc and was formerly the editor-in-chief of Fortune magazine. Before his work at Fortune, Murray spent more than 20 years at the Wall Street Journal was the chief content officer for time incorporated and was previously president of the Pew Research Center. Murray spoke September 27, 2019 as part of the London Lecture Series at Kansas State University. Being part of the London Lecture Series is quite an honor, a little bit intimidating. When I look at the list of past speakers, I see many of my personal heroes going back

to Robert Kennedy, Jerry Ford, Bob Dole, Sandra Day O'Connor, Paul Volcker, Bill Bradley, of course, President Myers, and my favorite Senator Casabond, who gave it twice. You must have connections. My wife, Laurie, was Senator Casabond's National Security Advisor for almost a decade and I have to tell you watching Senator Casabond work was one of the great honors of my life because you could see when a difficult issue came up in the Senate, she would actually think about it and research it and try and figure out what the right thing to do was. Now you might think that's what senators do. You might think that's what the job is about, but I can tell you that has become increasingly

increasingly rare, that so often senators do what they do based on immediate partisan alliance or because of demands from the states and so that's something we need a lot more of. That's my sense of what the London tradition and the tradition of this lecture is about putting public service above party or partisan identification and certainly this series over the years has had the very best of that breed of public servant and I wish they were all still around and I'm very honored to be added to the series. So thank you for that. The last time I was in Kansas, it was actually at Senator Casabond's invitation, it was about a decade ago and she asked if I would go to Lindsborg where they were having a chest for peace celebration among chest students and asked if I would interview the former

Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, over a game of chess and I said I can't really do that and she said why not? I said I don't play chess and in her way Senator Casabond said oh you'll be fine, don't worry about it. Okay, you'll be fine. So I was a nervous wreck, I went out and bought chest for dummies and I sort of studied up, tried to get myself ready for this because we were sitting on a stage like this and there were about 500 chest students in the audience and Mikhail Gorbachev and I was on this giant chess board with very large pieces so everybody could see everything we were doing and the idea was we were going to make a move and then talk a little bit and then make another move and I really had no idea what I was doing. And what saved me was that it turned out Mikhail Gorbachev also doesn't play chess. And so on the third move he made a completely illegal move with one of his bishops and everybody

in the audience laughed and we didn't have to play chess anymore and we just had a conversation. So it all worked out okay, I'm not sure who's going to save me from embarrassment today but that time it worked out all right. So as President Myers said, I've been a journalist literally my whole life when I was nine years old in Mount Levin and Pennsylvania, I actually started a newspaper. I would walk up and down and live down a street called Outlook Drive and I'd walk up and down Outlook Drive and I'd knock on doors and ask people about their lost cat or their visiting grandmother or the swim meat that they had participated in. And I'd write it all up and then my mother, this is before the days of printing machines or really even omnipresent Xerox machines and so the way I did it, my mother would type it out using a special kind of carbon paper and I had this jelly sheet memiograph machine. And if I put that carbon copy on the jelly sheet the ink would stick and I could run off

about 30 copies of the newspaper and I sold them for a nickel around the neighborhood called the Outlook Outlook, I thought that was pretty clever. And it actually worked out very well because my father who worked for Westinghouse, who was a KU graduate by the way, I'm sorry about that, no one did a thorough investigation before inviting me here today. But he was transferred to Tennessee and we ended up living on Lookout Mountains. So the Outlook Outlook became the Lookout Outlook which I worked out very easily. So my mother saved all those papers, not because there's anything very remarkable about them but because that's what mothers do. So I have them and when I look back at them today I realize it was pretty mundane stuff, just facts about what was going on in the neighborhood. There wasn't any opinion, there wasn't any investigation, there wasn't any deep analysis, but the facts were pretty good.

It's probably better than the gossip that happened over the fence in the backyards. And people in the neighborhood seemed to like to have neighborhood facts about what was going on. And so it became part of the social fabric of those little neighborhoods that I lived in. And that became my life's calling. I edited my high school newspaper, I edited my college newspaper, I worked for the hometown newspaper in Tennessee for a while before I went to the Wall Street Journal and spent many years there always collecting facts, checking to make sure they were accurate, assembling them into stories, using them as the basis for analysis. I'm not saying I never made mistakes, I did make mistakes but I learned and was trained in the importance of facts. President Myers mentioned that I spent a while as the chief content officer for Time Inc. I love the job because it got me out of my wheelhouse, Time Inc. had 24 magazines. The biggest of which was People Magazine. And I used to get a real kick out of walking into grocery stores.

You know you go into the grocery store and you see all those magazines and they're like aliens landing from Mars and Jen and Brad are getting back together and Jen is pregnant for the rumored pregnant for the 25th time. You just see all this crap that's there and the one magazine in that stack that you can count on is People Magazine. They don't print it until they get it confirmed. I'm not saying they've never made a mistake but probably have a 98, 99% accuracy while the others are batting somewhere around 50%. And I was always very proud of that. I asked the editor one time, Jess Cagle, I said, you know isn't it hard? I mean when other people are doing rumors of pregnancies and you have to wait until it gets confirmed. I mean don't you worry that there's going to be some big story and you're going to be late. And he said, yeah I worry about it a little bit but he said you know the good thing? He says if we wait until the pregnancy is confirmed then we get the baby pictures. So there was a little self interest in it as well but it was the right thing to do and

I was proud of that. I built my life on a deep belief in facts as important building blocks of successful society. The discovery of facts is the first step in our legal process. A common understanding of facts is critical to our democratic process. A common basis of factual knowledge is the key to our ability to work together in communities and to work together as a nation. We always will have disagreements, people are always going to fight, people are always going to work to get advantages over each other in one way or another. But if we start with just the facts man, that's a Joe Friday reference, how many people in this? A few people in this audience who recognize the Joe Friday reference, just the facts man. If we can start with the facts, we have a good chance of working things out. Well unfortunately today that simple fundamental bedrock belief in the power and the importance and even the existence of facts is crumbling, it's somehow been called into question.

Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan who also gave the land in lecture, I mean you've had everybody here over the years, he had a saying, you're entitled to your own opinion but you're not entitled to your own facts. Well these days I think many people think they are entitled to their own facts. And the great churning mill of social media is pretty much willing to give them the facts that they want, you can find them one place or another. Some people have even said we're in a post-truth or a post-fact society. And that's what I really want to talk about today because I can't think of a more dangerous idea for the future of our society than the notion that facts don't exist or facts don't matter or that everyone is entitled to choose their own facts. Now let me stop and pause here for a second until you write up front, this is not going to be a speech about the president. I don't do politics, that's not what I'm here to talk about, I'm happy to answer your

questions, I do find it remarkable that in a country where the founding myth about our founding father was that he could not tell a lie, he didn't chop down that cherry tree. And by the way historians will tell you there's some question about the factual accuracy of that story but we'll leave that aside. The founding, in a country where the founding myth about our founding father was he could not tell a lie that we have a president in office today who clearly doesn't care that much about the accuracy of his statements. I mean the fact checkers will argue over certain ones but five or ten times a day he'll put out a piece of information that isn't correct and doesn't seem to care about it. And I'll get back to that in a minute, he's also obscure the very real problem of fake news by using the term fake news as a weapon to basically attack any news he doesn't like. But I don't think the problem we have today started with President Trump, I don't think

it's going to end with President Trump and I don't really want to spend a lot of time talking about President Trump. What I'd like to do is talk a little bit about how we got here and how we might get out of here. Happy to answer any questions at the end. So let me start by talking about what I know best, which is the media. When I was starting my career, there was a pretty small group of people who controlled the information that we all got. Since you knew Joe Friday, how many people watched leave it to Beaver? Wow, this is my crowd. So if you remember and leave it to Beaver, the Beaver's father, Ward Cleaver was always seen at the breakfast table reading the morning newspaper, in fact that's pretty much all he did. I watch the show quite a lot. I'm not sure he had a job. He was just sitting at the breakfast table reading the morning newspaper and you realize that if you wanted to get information to the Cleaver family, it had to go through that newspaper.

Now every community had its own newspaper, but most of the news was coming through a couple of wire services, UPI, Associated Press, or maybe from one of the big newspapers that had a global reporting staff, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune. Really a pretty small group of people who were responsible for getting that news to Ward Cleaver and everybody else. Now those people, a lot of them were in Washington, a lot of them were in New York. They probably spent too much time hanging out together, having lunch together. Did they have biases? I'm sure they were human beings. They had biases, were they more liberal than the average American? I think there's no question about that, you know, when for the students here, when you reach that point in school or after you get out of school and you're making this decision about, geez, do I want to be a banker or a lawyer or a data analyst and have a pretty solid chance of getting a job and a good income and supporting my family, or do I want

to be a journalist, there's something about the nature of that decision that says something about your political lenient, so no question that the people who end up in journalism tend to be more likely to be liberal than the average population. So yeah, it was a pretty small group of people, they had their biases, they probably talked together too much. There was a mainstream media in those days that controlled the information that was getting to people. The other thing, they also had standards. They were the standards that I learned growing up in the profession. You know, you didn't just take a single source and take it to print, you would find other sources to corroborate your facts. If you were writing something that was negative about someone, you had an obligation to try and reach out and contact that person or contact that organization to make sure you heard their side of the story. You would look to see if the person who was giving you information had an obvious ax to grind, were they being paid or have some sort of personal interest in giving you that

information. There was a pretty strong set of standards, they weren't perfect, they didn't prevent mistakes from ever happening, but there was a fair amount of institutional support that helped you more often than not get to the facts and base your stories on truth because all of them agreed that at the end of the day, facts mattered. But then when the day came that Ward Cleaver lost his newspaper and it was all done over the internet, that opened up the world. It became possible for pretty much anyone to participate in journalism, starting setting up a blog and starting a blog was the easiest thing in the world to do and anybody could do it. A couple of years ago, Laurie and I met a young kid named Gabe Fleischer who was publishing a political blog out of his bedroom before he went to high school each day.

Like me, he had started at nine, but unlike me, he wasn't limited by the limitations of the jelly sheet duplicating machine. He would get up, you know, check the news, gather facts, do his summary of political news, and he had something like, at the time we met, something like 70,000 followers. So it just makes the point with technology, how much easier it was for people to reach large groups of people and that was great. I mean, that was liberating. Man, anybody could have a voice, but it also meant those standards that had been shared by the people who were controlling the flow of information pretty much went away. I mean, I had a shocking example myself of this when I was at the Wall Street Journal. We started webcasting doing video webcasting over the website and I had a small team putting it together.

The gocker news site runs a story saying, hey, the Wall Street Journal is doing like eight hours a day of live webcasting over their site. But typical old media, they've hired 60 people to do it. And you know, I looked around kind of my staff. I said, well, 12 is the number I get, not 60. So I called up this reporter and I said, hey, you said we have 60 people, we only have 12 people. It's a pretty spare staff. And he said, oh, okay, thank you for calling. I'll go post that right now. I said, well, wait a minute. I mean, I've been here all week. I answer my phone. Why didn't you call me before you wrote it? Why are you saying you'll go post it right now? And this kid said, oh, this is the way it works. We get some information. We post it. You give us new information. We post that. I said, really? This is the way it works. You have no obligation to try and see if the information somebody gave you is correct. You have no obligation to go to the organization that you're slamming in your story to hear their side of the story.

But this was a legitimate reporter for a news organization who thought this is the way it worked. You're listening to Alan Murray, CEO of Fortune Inc., formerly the editor-in-chief of Fortune magazine. He spoke September 27, 2019 as part of the Land in Lecture Series on Public Issues at Kansas State University. I'm Kay McIntyre, you're listening to KPR Presents on Kansas Public Radio, 91-5 Lawrence, 91-3, Olsberg Junction City, online at KansasPublicRadio.org. We live in a time where nothing is true, an era where reality and hoax look the same on the internet. Whoa, wait a second. There are people who actually know what they're talking about, dangerous people. We call them experts. We're giving these experts a megaphone to drop some truth bombs. I'm Brendan Lynch, and I'm the host of When Experts Attack, a new podcast available wherever you get your podcasts, if you can handle the truth.

When Experts Attack is a brand new production of the KU News Service in Kansas Public Radio. Now back to the future of facts, searching for truth in the 21st century. It's Alan Murray of Fortune Inc. from the K-State Land in Lecture Series. In television things changed as well. The big three networks pretty much controlled the flow of information until 1980s. But then technology again, cable news came along and really opened it up. At first there was CNN, then in the mid-1990s, Fox News came along. And Roger Ailes is a very clever man and saw there was an opportunity because of the reasons I've already talked about that the most of the mainstream news was tilted to the left. He said, I can make a business here by having something that appeals to people on the right. But what was different was it wasn't just a leaning to the right. And Roger Ailes was not a newsman.

Roger Ailes was a political communicator and what he did was create a news organization where he came in every day and he told them, this is what we're going to say today. It was pushed to the right from the top because he was in the business of political persuasion not in the business of informing. And this is a really important point. I want to just take a second on this, language has different uses. In the kind of journalistic setting I grew up in or the kind of academic setting that many of you were in, we use language to try and discover truth, to try and get to the facts. That's what I've been talking about here. But in many other settings, language is used as a tool of power, as a tool of persuasion, as a way to make things happen. I have a friend at the University of North Carolina who told me this story, he said, he's a philosopher. He said, think about it this way. So you're walking down the street and an angry pit bull costs you, teeth blaring. What do you say?

If you're like most people you say, good dog, good dog. Now that is not using language to uncover the dog's essential character. It's not a good dog, right? If this were a journalistic effort, the adjective would be cut out of that sentence. If this were an academic effort, you'd probably fail, say no, you've really kind of missed the point here. That's not a good dog. Somebody somewhere might say you were lying by calling that dog a good dog. But I don't think lying is the right word. You're trying to influence the dog's behavior. You don't want to be bit, so you say good dog. And I think that's what we're now seeing more and more in the journalistic environment. It's not about uncovering facts, it's not about uncovering the truth. It's about political persuasion. We can thank Roger Ailes for setting us down that course, but now it's just as prevalent on MSNBC as it is on Fox News. It's a profound change from the kind of journalism that I grew up with.

For what it's worth, the Israeli historian Yvall Harari says that that sort of manipulative use of language is actually the much more natural use for human beings. Let me read you what he said. He said, a cursory look at history revealed that propaganda and disinformation are nothing new. In fact, you might say humans have always lived in the age of post-truth. Homo sapiens is a post-truth species who conquered the planet thanks above all to their unique human ability to create and spread fiction. We're the only mammals that can cooperate with numerous strangers because only we can invent fictional stories, spread them around, and convince millions of others to believe in them. Now, I think there's something to that argument, but I also think civilization is frequently about how do we construct something that holds into check our most basic nature. I think the search for facts is an important part of that, but all of that is just the

warm-up to what was really the big event in this story, and that is in 2004, in a Harvard dorm room, Mark Zuckerberg creates Facebook, and even though it happened on a university, the creation of Facebook was not about the search for truth or facts. It was about the search for connection, for engagement, and they became very, very good at making those connections and engaging people. That's what the Facebook algorithm does. It makes it almost addictive. You love going there and clicking and connecting. But here's the thing. President Myers pointed out that I was at the Pew Research Center for a couple of years, which is another organization dedicated to facts. In fact, at Pew, we called ourselves a fact tank instead of a think tank, and we did the research that showed then, this would have been 2013, 50% of Americans were getting their news from Facebook, 50%.

So Facebook had become, even then, and it's more so now, had become by far the biggest source of news, biggest single source of news in American society. More important than any newspaper you can think of, or than the evening news. This was how people were getting their information. But Facebook itself continued to insist, we're not a news organization, we're not a media organization, and they took little or no responsibility for the quality of information they were giving you. They had become your front page, but unlike the historic front page editor, they didn't make any effort to see if what they were putting on your personal homepage was accurate, was fair, had any of the standards that I talked about a minute ago, did somebody check to see if the information was correct, or did they go to the people they're criticizing to get the other side of the story, do they make corrections?

That's, by the way, a really important signal of the credibility of a news organization, are they willing to admit mistakes when they make them? But Facebook wouldn't do any of that, in part because, mostly because they didn't want to have to take the liability for the stuff that was crossing over their platform. And by the way, the U.S. Congress had given them permission to avoid responsibility. Even before Facebook was created in 1996, when people were at the height of enthusiasm about the internet, and the internet was still pretty young, no one could really imagine the sort of impact that Facebook and Google were going to have on our society, Congress passed a clause in the Telecommunications Bill in 1996 that explicitly said these new technology platforms can't be held liable for the stuff that goes across the platform. Dramatically different than the rules that existed for the newspapers that had preceded them.

Now, the scandals of the last few years have forced Facebook to back off a little bit, but I think it's been too little, too late, and it's been one of the really unfortunate things that's happened in the search for truth and facts over our lifetime. So where does that leave us? Well, everyone knows the story of Russian influence in the last election. I don't need to go into that, but it's important to understand that that's just a small part of a much bigger global story. As President Meyer said, I just got back from Hong Kong where protests are sort of every weekend now. You have kids on the street protesting, and that whole effort has been caught up in a lot of intentional misinformation. So Twitter took down about 900 accounts which it believed were coming from the Chinese government spreading misinformation about the protests. The protesters themselves have been fed misinformation. One of the most damaging was a report that at the end of August, six people were killed

by the Hong Kong police during one of the mass protests. Not true. Not a speck of truth to it. But that's been a powerful myth that drove the protesters for many weeks. There was another one that Chinese government army officers were dressing up as Hong Kong police in participating in the riot control. Again, no credible evidence that that's true, but it's been a powerful myth spread by social media. Another one was the chief executive Carrie Lam was taking a week-long holiday in the midst of the protests. Again, not true. But all of this is just indication of the degree to which facts and information are under siege. Arthur Sultzberger, the publisher of The New York Times, wrote a column last week where he said correctly that last year was the most dangerous year on record to be a journalist. Dozens of journalists were killed, hundreds were imprisoned, thousands were harassed. The story of Jamal Khashoggi, of course, is well known.

He walked into an embassy and came out dismembered and dead. Maxine Boradun in Russia fell to his death after he wrote stories revealing critical details about the Saudi operation in Syria. In Hungary and Serbia, the government has snuffed out critical journalism and concentrated media ownership in the hands of its allies. In Austria, the leader of the right-wing freedom party, which until recently was part of the ruling coalition, was caught on video trying to collude with Russians to purchase the largest national newspaper and infuse its coverage with partisan bias. In Israel, one of the few democracies in the Middle East, Prime Minister Netanyahu is not only repeatedly excoriated investigative reporters, but now faces corruption charges for allegedly offering regulatory favors to two major media firms in exchange for positive coverage. In India, government-affiliated thugs, hebrated the homes and offices of journalists, critical of the Modi government.

Some of the most disturbing reports have come out of Myanmar, where on the verge of what looks an awful lot like the beginnings of genocide, the Facebook platform was used to spread hate messages about the Rohingya minority. Facebook had monitors in the country, but it turns out the monitors did not speak the language, did not catch the spread of hate messages. And now the reporters who are trying to uncover this thing are subject to a huge harassment. There were two reporters from Reuters who spent 500 days in prison because of some of their reporting on this. Let me just read you a segment from a report that the Freedom House put out recently. As many governments are enforcing criminal penalties for the publication of what they deemed false news. In 2018, 13 countries prosecuted citizens for spreading false information. Rondon Blogger, Joseph Nakusey, was sentenced to 10 years in prison for incitement disobedience

for practicing journalism, police in Bangladesh arrested media activist Shahidul Alam only hours after he live streamed a video on Facebook in which he decried a crackdown on protesters. You can go on and on and on. We have crossed through the looking glass where falsehoods have become truth and truth has become false. It feels an awful lot like Orwood's 1984, where war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength, facts are in crisis. I don't believe we're living in a post-truth world, but I do believe we are living in a world where those seeking the facts and the truth are under an attack to an extent and in ways they never have been before, and also where those seeking to undermine the truth have more powerful tools and weapons at platforms at their exposure than they ever have before, and that is one of the great dangers we face as a society because without facts, I believe

democracy will ultimately fail. So what do we do about it? Well, I think the first thing to do is just recognize it, care about it. I was impressed by the worldwide demonstrations over the last week on behalf of action to address climate change. Those demonstrations show that if enough people care, it can have an impact. Maybe we need similar protests against the war on facts and the battle against truth, because I believe it is as big a threat to the future of our society as climate change. We've kind of become a nerd to it, we kind of collectively shrug our shoulders, we say, oh, well, everybody lies, nobody can be trusted, what of it, we need to make facts a cause, we need to make it clear, we value truth. As you might guess from what I said earlier, I also think there's a role that the technology platforms can play. I've spent a lot of time looking at artificial intelligence and how it's developing.

I am absolutely convinced that technology can approach a new story pretty much the same way I do and ask some basic questions. Hey, does this organization that's publishing this information have published standards? That's pretty important. Does this organization have a history and a willingness to report both sides? Does it make any effort to reach out to the other side to get information? Is it willing to publish corrections? As I said earlier, that's one of the clearest signs that you're dealing with a credible organization. I think technology could help do all of those things and provide people some guideposts to the reliability of the information that they're reading. There are also some outside groups that are talking about doing that with people. There's an organization called Newsguard that was started by the former editor of the American lawyer that's attempting to do that. Then I think there's a critical role for educators to play.

We were talking about this earlier today. People need to be better consumers of information because you can't trust where the information is coming from. You have to learn to look for the signs of what's reliable and what isn't. And then, of course, I think my industry needs to have a reckoning. A lot of news organizations have gotten kind of a sugar high from the Trump era, whether you're for Trump or you're against Trump, as long as Trump's in the headline, you're going to get more readers. He's so consistently and hugely provocative that people can't seem to stop reading about them. But in the process and number of news organizations, I believe, have lost their credibility and lost their bearing. When Trump has gone and that sugar high of attention has ended, I think they're going to come crashing to the ground and really realize that he sucked them into a destructive game that has pummeled their credibility and their ability to provide the kind of factual connective tissue that we need to make society work.

So let me end on a note of optimism because I am, you may not believe this, see, I can tell you don't believe it, but I am at the end of the day an optimist. The journalism business has been through some really tough economic times over the last two decades. It's become a staffs have been cut back. It's just become harder for people to make a living. And I keep waiting for that to reduce the number and the quality of people who are interested in being part of this search for facts and the search for truth. And what I find encouraging is it hasn't. That we still find people really want to be involved in journalism and in the search for truth and remarkable young people coming out of great schools every year who are determined to participate this, who believe in the facts and while it may have gotten harder, it hasn't gotten any less important.

So my message to the school today is to keep that up because truth does matter, facts do matter. They can be found, take some work, but they can be found and I do believe in the end, they will prevail. So thank you for listening to me, President Meyer, so happy to answer any questions. Today on KPR presents The Future of Facts, Searching for Truth in the 21st Century. I'm Kay McIntyre and on today's program is Alan Murray, currently the CEO of Fortune Inc., formerly the Editor-in-Chief of Fortune Magazine. Before that, Murray spent more than 20 years at the Wall Street Journal was the Chief Content Officer for Time Incorporated and was previously president of the Pew Research Center. Murray spoke September 27, 2019 as part of the Kansas State University's Land and Lecture Series on Public Issues. We'll be back with questions from the K-State audience as KPR presents continues right

after this. From the University of Kansas, this is Kansas Public Radio. We are 91-5 Lawrence and 91-3 Olsberg Junction City, online at KansasPublicRadio.org. Support for KPR presents on Kansas Public Radio comes from you. Kansas Public Radio brings you thoughtful conversations, news and analysis with a depth you just can't find elsewhere. A kind of quality programming depends on financial contributions from our listeners. You can become a new member today or renew your membership at KansasPublicRadio.org. And thanks for doing your part. Support for KPR comes from KCPT, Kansas City PBS, discussing the week's top news stories with newsmakers and guest experts on Weekend Review, Fridays at 7.30pm. Today on KPR presents the Future of Facts, searching for truth in the 21st century.

I'm Kay McIntyre. On today's program, it's Alan Murray, currently the CEO of Fortune Inc. formerly the Editor-in-Chief of Fortune Magazine. Before that, Murray spent more than 20 years at the Wall Street Journal was the Chief Content Officer for Time Incorporated and was previously president of the Pew Research Center. Murray spoke September 27, 2019 as part of the Kansas State University's Land and Lecture Series on Public Issues. For the first part of this hour, we heard Murray's Land and Lecture. He now takes questions from the audience. This part of the program is moderated by K-State President General Richard B. Myers. So, wow, I think Alan, first of all, thank you for being here and, Laurie. We always like to say, well, this is a timely topic.

This is not only a very timely topic. It's one that's so important to the future of our democracy that we just are thankful you were here that you were willing to speak on this and hopefully be willing to take some questions on this topic. This is the timing could not be better, so on the left, please. I'm Aaron Simpson, I'm a computer science major. A question was like, you talked about Facebook and how news gets shared on social media. Do you think like advertisement and the way the news is monetized today plays a role in that? Do you think there's a way to change that? Or would you be against the idea of corporate media in general? So, that's a big question. You say any corporate media in general, I suppose I'm a part of corporate media. I'm not against corporate media. I think in a perfect world, all of us who are in this business would love to survive without advertising and just feel like there was never any conflicting pools on our search for

the truth. But again, I think the media business has learned how to deal with advertising. When I, my very first job out of college was at the Chattanooga Times, it was my hometown newspaper, and I wrote, I found out about a merger that was happening, that wasn't public information, that involved the company, that ran all the shopping centers in the area that I lived in. And they went to my publisher and they said, if he prints that story, we are going to pull your newspapers out of all of our shopping malls. We will no longer sell your newspaper in our shopping malls anymore. And by God, they said, we don't care, we're going to go for the truth, they let me print the story, and the company did pull all of the boxes out of all their shopping malls for the next five years. Those are not easy decisions to make, but I think the news business has grown up with some discipline around how to avoid the commercial conflicts that come from being a commercial

organization. And frankly, the only alternative is for it to be government supported, which I think is worse, creates more conflicts. So I have no problems with advertising in general. As I said, I just think the issue at Facebook is they haven't had to develop standards to control the type of information they offer you. They saw their job as just engaging you, getting you to the next click, and they didn't care about the quality of the information that was being spread around by those clicks. And I think that is going to change, and that's a good thing. Thank you. So on the right, please. Yes. My name is Jansen Penny, a senior here at KState. Thank you very much for joining us today, I'm as well, I know you have a long trip. But my question for you, what can we share as students and young adults who are about to enter the workforce within our circles, our communities, our future employers, and

really helping with the speed of dispelling this and encouraging facts? Yeah, I think it's pretty simple, there are two things. One is to develop the habits that enable you to tell good information from bad information. And it can be done. There are, I've mentioned some of them in my talk, but be aware that when you're dealing with social media platforms or almost any platform, you're going to get some good stuff and some bad stuff, and then insist in the organization that you work for that they stand for truth. There's no reason why any organization in our society should not stand for truth, because if they don't, we've got a problem. President Myers, will you buy that? I'd buy that, oh absolutely, yeah. That would include the military, that would include corporations, that would include everyone. And I think you can, you know, one of the very cool things, if I can just take a detour here for a minute.

So I spent most of my career in Washington, and then around 2006, I left Washington and moved to New York, and at the time I left I thought, gosh, things have gotten so bad in Washington they couldn't get worse, and guess what? They did, but one of the things that's been really interesting is to see how companies have changed over the course of the last ten years, in part because of the failure of government, but also in part because you've got a growing workforce, largely millennial workforce, that is pushing them to do better. You have people in companies saying, hey, I want to know that the company that I'm working for is having a positive impact on society, and that's really making a difference. I promise you that is really making a difference. The best companies today, their success, depends not on access to capital, there's plenty of capital out there, it doesn't matter, not so much on access to natural resources. It really depends on their access to great people, so they have to pay attention to their

workers, and it's been amazing the things that workers, the positive change that workers have caused among the companies that I cover over the last decade, so there's a lot you can do. Thank you. So, on our left again, please. Hi, thank you again for coming today. My name is Reed Middleton, I'm a sophomore in ag economics this year, and I really appreciate what you said about the facts being there and being there and being very true, but sometimes you have to dig for them, you have to find where they are. I think part of the appeal of whatever you want to call it, fake news, halfway true news, whatever that may be, is that it's accessible and it's convenient, and so how do you go about making those facts and those truths accessible and concise, because I think so much of that time, there's a lot of information to back it up that people don't really either have the time, nor do they want to search for it, how do you think about finding that?

Yeah, it's a really good point. I mean, one of the difficult things about this is that a lot of it is driven by consumer choices, it's convenient, it's easy, you know, Facebook does a good job of giving people what they want, and it's kind of hard to say, well no, they shouldn't give them what they want, they should give them what I want, which has been kind of a tendency of editors in the past. So I do think the consumer education is an important part of it, but I also think the responsibilities of platforms is an important part of it. You know, I don't know how many of you have used Apple products or have an iPhone. The Apple News Store is a really good, solid, credible distributor of news. They only use real news organizations that they know have published standards and will print corrections and all the thing I talked about. So it is possible for technology platforms to actually nudge folks in the right direction, not the wrong direction.

Now it gets controversial because people, as soon as the platforms start making conscious decisions about what they give you and what they don't give you, people will say, well, there's political bias in those platforms, they're so big, they're so powerful, if they are all left leaning, are we going to be subject to their political whims? And I understand that, but to take the position, no, we're not going to take any responsibility for the quality of the stuff that we're pushing out to you every day, it just seems to me to be indefensible. You're listening to Alan Murray, CEO of Fortune Inc, formerly the Editor-in-Chief of Fortune Magazine. He spoke September 27, 2019, as part of the Land and Lecture Series on Public Issues at Kansas State University. I'm Kay McIntyre. You're listening to KPR Presents on Kansas Public Radio and KPR2, online at KansasPublicRadio.org. And Murray of Fortune will take more questions from the audience at Kansas State University, as KPR presents continues right after this.

Sponsoring Kansas Public Radio says something to our listeners, that you support comprehensive news, intelligent conversation, and community information. KPR listeners often make a point of supporting KPR's corporate sponsors. For more, visit sponsorship.cansispublicradio.org. Is this a post-fact world? No, we're a megaphone for people who actually know what they're talking about. I'm Brendan Lynch, host of OneXpert's Attack. Our guests drop truth bombs on misinformation and misunderstanding. OneXpert's Attack, available wherever you get your podcasts. OneXpert's Attack is a production of the KU News Service and Kansas Public Radio. And now back to the future of facts, searching for truth in the 21st century. It's Alan Murray of Fortune Inc, taking questions from the audience at the K State Land and Lecture Series, September 27th, 2019. My name is Brian Lynch, but I'm a faculty member here. Your last answer kind of goes along with my question. All the evidence suggests that Facebook has crested and is coming down.

And so can you talk about the spread of information or news in a world where Facebook's going to be probably less influential over time or continue to be less influential as far as a news source? It's probably no longer 50% I'm guessing if you would go back at the Pew sort of research now like it was in 2013. I'm guessing it's probably far less that maybe they're using more the Apple source. And so I'm curious on your thoughts on how you vision news and whether that's positive for facts or not facts in the future. Yeah, I actually, I think you're right. I think the role of Facebook and distributing news is declining somewhat. I also think they're being more responsible with what they do distribute, are tilting more towards credible news organizations that do all the things I was talking about. So I think that's probably improvement. As I mentioned organizations like Apple are taking a more responsible stance. You know what I didn't talk about was the effect of the media platforms has been double

edge. One thing they have done is provided you information without making any attempt to verify the quality of that information. The other thing they've done is destroyed the economics of the news organizations, making it very difficult to support news on advertising alone. So to get to your question, I think what's, I know I can tell you exactly what we're doing at Fortune and what I think more and more news organizations are having to do is, is to turn away from the free news, free internet news model towards paid paywall models. If you look at the New York Times, the Washington Post, the New Yorker, they've made some good progress on that. The only unfortunate thing about that is that then, you know, the news goes to the people who have the ability to pay and not to those who don't. Thank you again for your talk. My name is Linda Duke. I'm the director at the Art Museum on campus, the Mariana Kissler Beach Museum of Art. I'd love to hear you say a little bit more about what role you see for education in helping

people be better seekers of fact and independent thinkers. Kansas isn't the only state where state funding for schools has declined. That means other sources of funding have to come in to make education happen, possibly sources that have self interest. I'd love to hear your thoughts about any of that. Well, we were talking about this earlier this morning about the, I see it as part of the broader decline of civic education, you know, what are, what are the things you need to know and understand just to be a good citizen of our society and I think this is an important part of it. But it should also be part of the academic training as well to really understand how you can have a good nose for facts and truth and for what isn't factual or what isn't truthful. Not that hard to teach, but I don't think it's really made its way into the curriculum

yet. I don't think it should be, I don't think it should be a huge budget item. I mean, we teach English, we just need the sort of the attention focused on it and build it into the curriculum because you can't, you can't function if you don't have the ability to distinguish good information from bad. And on the right, all right. Gary Lorcher from the little town of Bern, normally 220 people, the Betty and I are here, so 218 people right now. Two questions. As you look into your crystal ball, what do you see as the relationship between USA and China and secondly, what about the future of our nation? How much time do I have for that? So let's all settle in, this is going to be, I think the two, I think the two questions are closely related.

I think the US-China relationship is probably the most interesting thing, an important thing that's going on in the world today, and look, I just came back from a month where I was in Yunnan Province, Chongqing, Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Xinjiang, spent a lot of time, and fortunately we hold a lot of conferences, we do a lot of things in China. One of the reasons I feel so strongly about the need to shore up the fundamentals of our democratic system, in fact being one of those fundamentals, is to convince ourselves and to convince the rest of the world that we have the right set of values and the right system and that this works well for the largest group of people, because right now the world isn't totally sold on that. And they look over at what China is doing, where they don't have the freedoms that we have, where, you know, I can't even, I actually am not, I am prohibited, it took me two years

to negotiate a visa that would allow me to make repeated trips into China like I did. And one of the conditions on that visa is I can't practice journalism when I'm in the country. So I'm not even allowed to practice journalism in the country, and I can't, it would be difficult anyway because the great firewall makes it hard to get access to the information that's out there. So, you know, that we would be at a moment where some people might think that's a better system than a system that's based on freedom and free expression and democracy is frightening. And if we don't shore up the efficacy of our own system, I think that's the first line of defense. You may have thoughts on that. That's pretty good. I know you have thoughts on that one. You expressed it better than I could, so thank you. On the left, please. Good morning. Lever and Betsy Baldwin, I'm Director for the Multicultural Engineering Program here

at K State. So welcome to Canada State. Thank you. I have a question about demographics, or based on demographics. So in 2040, 2045, that's when it's projected that the United States will be, when they say, minority white, like 49%, we'll say, you know, that's my demographic. How are you, well, what trends are you seeing and how are you encouraging diversity in the media? Yeah. Well, it's, you're right. I think those numbers, you're citing, come from the Pew Research Organization. So I'm familiar with them. You're right, that's where we're headed at Fortune, you know, we believe that's not only important for social reasons, but it's important for economic reasons. You're not going to be able to serve the society if you don't have people who understand the society. Fortune was early on, created the most powerful women's list 20 years ago, when there were,

the only female CEO on the Fortune 500 was Catherine Graham, who had the position because of the death of her husband. We put Carly Fiorino on the cover at the time. She was a senior executive at Lucent, I think, and she subsequently, like six months after that cover story ran, became the CEO of HB, and now you've seen quite a few women in positions of power and companies, although still a pretty, you know, six or seven percent of 100%. We also have a newsletter called Race ahead that's focused on ethnic diversity and the importance and why, and the growing evidence that that makes companies stronger. So in the private sector, I think it's going to happen because it becomes clear that it has to happen, that it will make you better, stronger, more profitable, and I think eventually it's going to happen at society at large.

So Alan, our last question will be on our right, please. Thank you. My name is Graham Boehler, and I'm a sophomore studying marketing here. First off, on behalf of the students here at Case Data, I just wanted to thank you for being here. It's a really great privilege to have the opportunity to hear from leaders like yourself right here on campus. So my question for you is, what did you do to distinguish yourself in the journalism industry early on, and what tips do you have for students who seek to be leaders in their own industries? Well, thank you for that question. Stick to the truth was part of the way that I got where I got in the journalism industry. I think to understand that this is what I was talking about a minute ago, that in the pace of change today is greater than it's ever been before. Things are happening very rapidly, makes it harder for organizations to adapt. Companies have to push more power down the hierarchy into the hands of people who are

closer to the action. And so my advice to young people is being entrepreneur, to realize that your organization wants you to take the reins. Don't wait for somebody up there to tell you what to do, because if you wait for them to tell you what to do, it's going to be too late, and it's going to be the wrong thing to do. So, you know, take control of your destiny, act like an entrepreneur, and charge ahead. All right. Thank you. Well, thank you again. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for being here with us at KC University. And thank you, audience, for being here as well, and thank you for the good questions. You've just heard Alan Murray, the CEO of Fortune Inc., formerly with Time Incorporated, the Wall Street Journal, and the Pew Research Center. Alan Murray spoke September 27, 2019 as part of the Kansas State University's Land and Lecture Series on Public Issues. Audio of this event was provided by Kansas State University.

I'm Kay McIntyre. KPR presents is a production of Kansas Public Radio at the University of Kansas.