Michael X. Delli Carpini, Annenberg School of Communication

School of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia professor Michael Delli Carpini, it is really pleasure to have you in our program un brief we are starting a new model of communications of broadcast Twitter timelines and and we are trying this format using zoom where we can interview people all over the globe and post in our social media platforms as well so I would like to start today by talking to you we do about to bid your books Media Matters and so many others that you you know walk us through a bit your research your long history in researching media politics and how they influence public policy be happy to do that you want me to talk just a little bit at the beginning about my overall research agenda I’d be happy to do that so so I’m trained as a political scientist although I am now in a school of communication and my broad area of research and teaching has has been what’s the role of the media in facilitating or inhibiting the ability of citizens to engage in meaningful ways in the political world and for in particular for them to be able to do it in a way that enhances the way democracies work and most of my work is focused on the United States but the broader topics really apply to any democratic modern developed democratic system and so I’ve looked at that a bunch of different ways one of the ways I focus one of the things I’ve focused on in my research most essentially in a book that I co-authored with Scott Peter is the importance of facts of political information and the ability of citizens to be able to make meaningful and engage in meaningful ways we wrote that book quite some time ago and we made the argument that when is when when citizens as individuals and groups are informed about politics in a broad sense of the word that they are quote better citizens they are better in they are better able to connect their opinions to their political actions they are better able to understand the views of others be more tolerant they are more engaged more participatory all the kinds of things that we associate with a engaged informed active citizen citizenry that can make democracy work the way it’s supposed to is associated with the ability of citizens to get good useful information about politics now I mentioned that we wrote that quite some time ago because it has obviously become a very hot topic again excuse me in this world that we live in where disinformation is which has always been around but is around in a way that it makes it incredibly difficult for people to know what to believe and what not to believe and could talk more detail about that if you’d like the other piece of my work that I’ll talk about I’ve noticed - and that’s when I brought up but you know I was in the UK during the referendum - to leave the EU and I remember seeing all the campaign’s online and I thought this is not quite right this is propaganda there is a propaganda machine behind and then people say oh that’s me always like that in politics these are campaigns political campaigns and I was a bit surprised that people weren’t aware that there is a new form of disseminating this information being amplified by BOTS by through the social media platforms that created this very very chaotic environment absolutely true what you’re saying both the sort of the unwillingness to accept that things are different because there is no question that they’re different but also the role that this new media digital media environment that live in plays in this so and it’s not it’s it’s not just in campaigns I mean there’s a lot of attention appropriately paid to the role that the Russians and the Russian government played in spreading disinformation in the United States during the 2016 election cycle and since then that’s important but what’s missed when you focus only on that is that much of this disinformation is also being disseminated directly and indirectly by other act actors in the United States whether it’s conservative media or whether it is conservative fringe groups that they are complicitous in in spreading this information and most depressingly that our own current administration is is complicit us in spreading this information you saw it during the campaign you’ve seen it throughout the presidency of Donald Trump and you see it even as we try to deal with the koba 19 pandemic that’s taking place right now what seems to have changed dramatically is that is that misinformation disinformation can be said but what’s even also dramatic about it is that it can be countered and corrected and no one seems to pay a price for the misinformation and people still believe the disinformation it’s as if facts no longer matter I mean that’s a bit of an overstatement but only a bit of an overstatement on the things they see that are found false oh the fake news they see people who are impressionable or people who don’t have you know having benefits of having media literacy or who don’t have a media literacy right we say so it is it is really a challenge to work in this environment and particularly now it during the Kofi the nineteen crises we’re seeing again bots coming out extreme right groups paying for campaign on social media platforms well social media platforms have been coming up to to the task of being a bit more responsible corporate citizens right yeah I mean yeah in in fairness it’s a hard issue right I mean because you could slip sometimes we we’re so worried about the current problem that in finding solutions we forget that we might create other problems right and so I worry as much about limiting free speech and limiting access to information from different points of view as I do about the role of misinformation and disinformation so we’ve got a coming up with a good system that could limit the amount of disinformation always runs the risk of throwing the baby out with the bathwater if you will and and creating an environment where things people should be hearing ideas in areas where we’re really not sure what the real facts are could wind up getting centered by that as well but having said that you are absolutely right that we especially in an environment like the United States where there’s already so little regulation we really need these major platforms like Google and Facebook and and of Amazon other places that that are the disseminators of information they’ve got to really think through hard what it’s appropriate and not appropriate to have posted and how one controls that in a way that’s effective but there’s open but my also another way of doing this or in an additional way of doing this is we’ve also got to get better at helping people be able to distinguish what is disinformation and what is not and to be able to counter better when disinformation flows through the system more quickly at a actively counter that information with factual information and those are really really hard things to do they are but they said there seems to be they have been working with the w-h-o here in Geneva actually so there seems to be a movement towards good the corporate citizenship in some ways but I’d like to talk now about your last book - the environment how it’s changing because I was looking at some of the material and it’s so is still relevant even in the book was published eight years ago right I think what Facebook was maybe seven eight nine ten years old but you know we have seen so much change in the traditional media in the luring of entertainment and news I thought it was quite interesting - that’s right so this book which as you said is like eight or nine years old now was an effort by myself and a colleague teachers at University of Virginia Bruce Williams to try to get our hands around what was changing in the media environment and we and we make the argument that media environments change I mean that’s an obvious point and we sometimes compare what we have now to the most immediate environment that we’re coming out of and that’s what we saw happening so we make we argue that that there are these things called media regimes and these media regimes are the systems that are in place in which the relationship between the media the technology of the media political leaders and citizens have certain rules and expectations as now you interact and and they’re in the United States we’ve had several of these different regimes but the one that were most familiar with that we were coming out of was the era of broadcast media where media was very centralized but the entire US population for example really depended on three or four news outlets on broadcast television and maybe a newspaper in their local community to get information and the role of journalists was to be gatekeepers of that information to tell us what was important to think about and know about and they were also in theory supposed to be relatively objected to the extent that they could be and fair and balanced to the extent that they could be and then citizens job was to consume that information and vote occasionally and pay attention enough that they could act they understood in broad strokes what was going on but for a variety of reasons driven in large part by technology but not exclusively by technology we’ve gone through a period since the late 1990s really through the early 2000s where that model no longer applied even though we didn’t know what the new model was going to be and that’s the moment that we were writing this book we were writing it when it was clear that the media environment has changed but nobody was sure what its implications were going to be and so what we tried to do was describe what we thought was going on and the key parts of what we thought were different were that it was unlike the age of broadcast news the late night night 20th century that there was a new blurring of news and entertainment that that distinction stopped making was beginning to stop making a difference that there was a blurring of fact and opinion that what was the fact that what was an opinion was less clear or was emerging as less clear in this new environment that there was a shift in producers and consumers that citizens suddenly could be the producers of information not as powerfully as the mainstream media but certainly you can think of all kinds of examples of where average citizens holding a handheld camera have a shaped the media agenda and and a couple of other kind of shifts like that and at the time we gave some examples of how we saw that happening but I can tell you that if we had given if we had predicted that that what’s going on now would be the result of this but we do think it’s a result of the shifting media environment we wouldn’t have been able to get the book published it seems it seems like you this is science fiction this is a novel it is couldn’t happen and yet it’s exactly the kinds of things that we thought were going to happen no you know I’ll just say one other sorry one other thing is that we make the argument in other work that Donald Trump’s victory was because in a weird kind of way either either either just sort of implicitly or explicitly he understood this new environment better than most people and he was able to exploit it in ways that allowed him to become to become president of the United States absolutely yes that is key is what most people don’t realize was that the surprised if you were studying the news media environment looking at its change and marketing techniques and advertising micro-targeting social media campaigns how they work you know behavioral marketing you would understand very well that this is happening that you know that the this election was sort somewhat not you know you could even say fraud one because they use the techniques that I’m not sure but there is no legislation true that would say well we can’t do that I mean what one of the ways that to say certain things they did in social media because they they told the outright lies some people would say oh but Obama use the same methods you know of behavioral targeting behavioral marketing only using Facebook as a platform to reach for potential voters but I don’t think a bomber came out and made like this absurd horror like stories about their his opponent here the opponents right he just said well the I’m good for this this is my policies may be responded to criticism from the opposition but he never put the blatant lies and this campaign actually made the horrible you know defacing the candidate Hillary Clinton I mean it was pretty oh I mean all those points are exactly right and and one of the things that’s become clear is that so much of the US system at least working as it should was not was not based on rules and law although those are really really important they were based on norms the expectation that someone in was that people in positions of power would stay within certain norms and bounds so you could disagree on opinions you can disagree on policies you can even choose some facts over the other to make your case but what Donald Trump has shown us and the Trump administration and this new environment has shown us is that if you want to you can even make things up and you can make those things up and you could be called on the carpet for making them up and you still pay no political price for them you can still at least what you wind up doing is you leave people confused they don’t know what to believe and once you’ve done that you suddenly have I think at the same time that you might be able to push your ownage personal agenda forward you wind up deeply damaging the core elements of what a democracy needs if it’s going to function effectively and I think that’s what’s happening right now at least in the United States yes I know of course also the question of paternalism why journalism right why do we need journalists actually because everybody can be you know a journalist you know they simply say okay I’m going to tell stories and there are so many you know from across the political spectrum decide they’re going to tell stories and this is the news but they are not journalists because the idea a journalist has some sort of ethical framework right that you work with an ascetical framework is what we don’t see I say often you know particularly in the world of venture capital and new technologies and startups people start writing a blog and they say well this is the news oh now if this is my news outlet I had my own brand my own news outlet but there is a difference between having a certain sense of that you are maybe as a news organization really or a news producer you have to have some sort of ethical framework that you work from those are all exactly right in some ways journalists are less important or professional journalists are less important and more important than they’ve ever been there less important before all the reasons you mentioned that that for for anything I read or hear from a professional journalist even one doing their jobs really well there’s some place I can with one click of my mouse I can find information that contradicts that and is coming from a different point of view and it’s not factual and is is misleading and so we now we could be in the book that you referred to that I wrote with Bruce Williams we call this multi axiality the idea is that journalists are no longer the only gatekeepers of information or at least not as strong as they used to be and instead we get information from so many different places that that it and the information is so different in what it focuses on but also its veracity that that’s what we live in this confusing confusing information environment but they’re more important than ever precisely because that we need professional journalists to at least curate that information professional journalist you have norms and ethics and training in the way you describe and that doesn’t necessarily mean not having opinions but it does mean that opinions have to be tethered to actual facts you can’t debate things if you don’t even agree on the basic facts and that’s one of the roles professional journalists could play but in the world we live in now especially at least again in the United States trust in the mainstream media is at its lowest points that’s ever been measured and so people don’t even trust professional journalists when they’re told something if you don’t try the source then you are free to decide on your own what facts you believe and what facts you don’t and it’s uh it’s a it’s a very confusing difficult environment to try to have any kind of a sense of political community yes particularly because the news media the traditional news media is being attacked constantly by the commander in chief by you know and then so many pundits rather left saying oh the demise completely and the professional journalists have to keep reminding themselves you know compromise with bringing facts to people right to our public so there is this public service aspect right and there are I want to be clear there are journalists there are journalists in many news outlets in the United States print and broadcast and online that are doing very good job and trying to do exactly that but their voices often two things happen their voices often get washed out by all the other information that’s floating and disinformation that’s floating around but also they have been targeted as quote fake news so so it’s ironic that fake news for some people has come to mean tree news that because because President Trump has been read very very effective at convincing his followers that what is being said by more mainstream professional journalists is simply wrong it’s not true and and it seems to be hard to convince them but that’s not the case indeed indeed and what is happening now at the University how our class is going what is changing now what what there are the perspectives we are all virtual I mean I don’t think I knew and I came to admit this as a communications professor I don’t think I knew what zoom was before before the last six weeks or seven weeks but all the class all students are off but I’ll talk about University of Pennsylvania where I teach but this is true at all universities and colleges the campuses are closed down there are very few campuses where even the faculty or staff go to go to the campus that they’re literally closed down that varies a little bit but right now Penn is shut down literally the campus is almost completely empty except for a few very central personnel students have gone home or found other places to stay there’s my students in a hundred person undergraduate class that I teach have scattered across the globe they’re everywhere from China to to Africa to a other parts of Asia to the west and east and south and north in the United States all classes have continued but they’ve continued either through zoom or zoom like apps that allow for live discussion and lectures or they are recorded lectures that have been posted on various websites to allow students to complete their semester I’m happy to say that the two courses on teaching I’m in the midst of grading those exams now they completed and the students have been incredibly great in adjusting to the issue and the new circumstances and I’ll also say that it’s probably not a better time to teach media related courses because everything that’s going on has a media component to it so the papers are all about disinformation the way the media is covering Cova 19 pandemic the way in which in the united states asian-americans and and China are being stereotyped and villainized because of what’s going on so the papers are all are about contemporary issues using classic theories and research that’s been positive but we are all in a holding pattern I don’t think anybody knows whether summer classes have been all turned to online classes and what we we don’t nobody knows whether the fall semester will which students our faculty and staff back on campus or not what kind of been a holding pattern and for a number of colleges and universities that are heavily tuition dependent it could very well be that some of those colleges don’t really survive this so higher education is I think up in the air right now but it’s good well when universities such as the University of Pennsylvania can adapt quite quickly to everything in the students to I believe you want to graduates in time yes absolutely I mean I feel bad for the seniors who they’re graduate usually the last I should probably know though the last month or so the seniors experience at college is a combination of finishing up your courses but also looking forward to the rest of your life saying your goodbyes to friends that you might not see anymore celebrating your accomplishments and all that was unfortunately lost for these students so I feel really bad about that but again they and I can’t imagine for even younger kids kids that are in high school or grade school in elementary school who are going through this as a formative part of their experience how they’re thinking about what this means for the world that they live in but but I’ve been impressed the way most certainly not all certainly not that group of Americans who are out on the streets and large groups protesting the social distancing and the shutting down businesses well I understand the problems there the the reaction has been unfortunate but the vast majority of the public I think it’s really stepped up to the plate in this moment and is trying to address what’s going on though it has really highlighted what we already knew about the inequities in American society in which people with fewer resources or who have never really been fully accepted into the community are suffering more than the rest of us and what about your PhD students are they sort of what’s the challenge there you know it’s I also taught a PhD course a semester and I’m closed because I was former dean close to a lot of the students they’re stressed you know in terms of the classes I think those of all God fine but for example we have PhD students who’s who are working on their dissertations whose work was not was more at the graphic or or interview based and their design of their studies were to go out and talk to people or attend different types of meetings and they can’t do that and so they’re on hold we have students who are going to go on to the academic job market and you can be fairly certain that there’s not going to be a lot of hiring over the next who knows period of time as universities worry about their financial circumstances because of to possibility of tuition being dropped tuition revenues being dropped and the endowments of universities going down so it’s going to be hard for students were going out on the job market so yeah but again is in a media program which also presents opportunities for thinking about out of the study the kinds of media environment that we live in right now but in general I would say most people most students are dealing with it but pretty stressed out about what this means for their future well thank you very much professor Michael the liquor peony and former dean of the American School of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania and professor the communications school was still right and the political science department the pleasure is speaking with you and I hope we can be in touch whenever I need the commentary on things that I’d be happy to do this congratulations on this format and and also on the work that you’re doing I think it’s really important at this moment and I think you can’t think about these issues we’re not thinking about the role of Technology and so it’s a really important role you’re filling so thank you for that yes as much as the person to again because I’m covering the United Nations here so our work was like there are events every day you know so I was on the hallways talking to two different experts and government representatives and suddenly they are not here we can’t access the building so we thought well this is going to be the solution and it looks like also we are new format for us - absolutely yeah okay well take care it’s great to see you and stay safe yes you too thank you very much yeah you .