Dr. Michael Wagner, University of Wisconsin and Journalism professor, thanks for joining
us.
It's my pleasure.
I want to get started by just, you know, giving into you a little bit here.
Give us a sense of why journalism, why did you get into journalism?
I've always loved the news and the media and culture on television and the radio and books
and magazines.
And so I would go to the library and pour through old Rolling Stone magazines to learn
about bands I liked.
I would constantly be practicing doing play-by-play for video games that my friends and I would
play.
In 2014, I got a job as a country music DJ at my hometown radio station in Marshall,
Minnesota, 1400 on your AM dial and we would, it was a summer of achy, breaky heart and
so I basically would do, play an hour of music and then I would run church programs on Sunday
mornings.
I was in high school so I wasn't working during the day.
I was just doing weekend kind of stuff, running the board during Minnesota Twins baseball
games and that kind of thing.
But eventually I got to start to do more stuff on air.
I became the assistant news director when I was a junior because I really loved doing
reading the news and then going out and covering stories.
Went to school for broadcast journalism, was a journalist for a while and then went to graduate
school.
Well you've got great pipes I wish I had.
Thanks for radio.
I'm curious to know how did you get involved with education and how did you become so passionate
about education.
So one thing I loved about being a reporter was sharing things that are verifiably true
with an audience and one of the things I didn't like about being a reporter was the daily
grind of hitting deadlines all the time and there would be times where I thought
God if I had two more days to put this together this would be a really thorough and complete
story but instead the news starts at five and I've got to be done by five and I started
to get sick of that and I was asking my old mentors you know here are things I like about
my job here things I don't like and they said well you should think about graduate school
where you can teach classes and communicate with people but you can also do research where
you spend as long as it takes to learn the answers to the questions you're interested
and that really just turned out to be a great fit for me.
Yeah I'd love to get your sense of what you think of the current climate of journalism
is right now across these United States and I guess the rest of the world.
The climate is a good word right because on the one hand there's a systematic climate
change where there's increasing attacks on journalists both physical and metaphorical
and financial there are increasing struggles journalists face to do their work they have
fewer resources newsrooms closing down around the country for newspapers you have television
stations making money hand over fist during election cycles but not using that to hire
reporters to cover politics and civic issues and those sorts of things and so there's this
trend to less attention to stuff that provides our citizens the critical information they
need to make good decisions in a democracy so there's one trend that's happening in that
way but climate varies a lot right and there are some places that are doing amazing journalism
really great investigative work long-form detailed stories in print on digital on television
as documentaries there is more information available than there ever has been to more
people than it's ever been available to and there's a lot of stuff that covers politics
like a game doesn't have much concern for what's true and what's not and all of these
things are happening in the same environment so you know it's it strikes and gutters some
journalism is amazing and some is poor and some would be better if the resources in the
environment they were working in had could be improved in some way now you and I might
be biased in the answer to this next question but why is it important why is journalism
important we have so few opportunities to learn things that are true about issues that
are fundamentally central to how we live our lives and how we govern ourselves and
so if in a in a democracy a lot of research about the American public comes to conclusions
that that tell us things like the American public doesn't know a whole lot about different
issues in American politics and so like their political knowledge scores maybe aren't that
great but in a in an environment where journalists are regularly reporting the verifiable truth
people can make what what political scientists and others call reason to choices which is
to say they can make a choice with limited information that would be the same as the
choice they might make with full information so the way I explain this to students is maybe
you see somebody at a party they're wearing a Taylor Swift shirt you like Taylor Swift
you strike up a conversation you start dating if after five years you find only have similar
values similar ideas about raising kids about work life balance all those things maybe you
start a partnership and start a family and maybe if you don't have those things you break
up and haven't made a recent choice in a democracy the news media is one of the only
places that can provide us the information we need to make those choices they tell us
what our leaders stand for and what they do and whether they're lying they tell us how
strong the economy is or how weak it is they tell us who's getting advantages and who's
not getting advantages they tell us who's being treated fairly and not and we have so
little access in the day to day to most of our leaders most of the time we have to have
a place that we can trust or we can learn about what's happening and that's that's the news
media it's not social media I'm wondering what do you think the consumer should be doing
to do their part to make sure they're getting you know information that is truthful information
that is you know vetted that sort of thing what should they be doing well I think one
thing they should do is try to get information from a variety of sources and so in our research
that we do at the University of Wisconsin Madison we find that people who have more varied
news diet tend to be less rapidly partisan in their decision making they tend to be a
little bit more likely to split their ticket when they vote they might vote for some candidates
of both parties under some circumstances especially at the local level and so you know people
with a diverse media diet tend to make better decisions I would also say one thing that
that we can just do is people who are interested in the news is not be so quick to believe
stuff that's good for our side and bad for the other side and be a little bit skeptical
of things that we might want to believe it's like when you see a a sideline pass to a green
bay packer and the question is that he have two feet in bounds and control of the ball
before he went out of bounds when we see the packer catch the ball and do that we're biased
to say yeah he caught it if it was a Viking or a Kansas City chief doing that well we didn't
have it but if we're watching a game where the Packers aren't playing we're way more
willing to be honest about those things and so we should try to approach news gathering
in that same way where we're not trying to be motivated to confirm our ideas but be
motivated to be accurate I think journalists should be biased toward the verifiable truth
like I think that's a bias right other people can be oriented toward other ways of thinking
I think journalists should be biased toward pushing and reporting the verifiable truth
and telling us if the verifiable truth changes we thought this was true here's why we learned
this new thing was true here's why that's what journalists should do in my view and I think
they need to be they need to be fearless because telling the verifiable truth opens
you up to attack from powerful forces and it opens you up to some percentage often half
of an audience not liking what it is that you're reporting and so knowing that vegetables
are good is something parents have to push on their kids even if kids don't like it journalists
know the verifiable truth is good sunshine is a good disinfectant we should be sharing
that with people even even in the face of attack which is really really hard easier
to say than to do I think yeah you brought up a misinformation and I think back to I heard
this phrase I'm not sure where I heard it but someone said the truth is no longer what
the truth is it's what you can get people to believe sure in terms of misinformation disinformation
what is in the truth and a lie what is the difference in all these things I think there's
a lot of really fascinating ways to think about misinformation and disinformation so
we might first just say disinformation is when someone knows they're lying to you and
is trying to spread that lie as far and wide as they can misinformation is information
that's not true but people might think they're being a dutiful citizen they saw this on Facebook
and think oh this might be true I'll share it but it may not be true so so misinformation
are both things that aren't true disinformation is misinformation with the intent to distribute
you know and so from the perspective of people our research finds this is the work
I've done with one of my former students John and Lee who's now a professor at Rutgers
what are about to be a professor at Rutgers one thing that we found is really important
for people is to admit it when they don't know something when people are willing to say I
don't know they benefit way more from the news when it comes to learning things that
are true so people can say I don't know when I don't know that's really important
the other thing though is that the kind of the structural level with our political leaders
and their research that other folks have done that I haven't done but others have done have
found that when leaders get fact checked aggressively by news organizations they become more likely
over time to say a higher percentage of things that are verifiably true so when they know
someone's watching when there's a penalty for lying people lie less and so journalists
can can be the referee there and and and call those penalties and I think that's something
that is critically important and and again it's really hard to do let's shift into talking
about politics Wisconsin politics national politics how would you describe the overall
climate in terms of politics right now when Wisconsin politics is relatively contentious
and has been kind of getting increasingly contentious in in lots of different ways
over time and so one way we've kind of measured that in the work that we do here at the UW
is to ask people questions about their tolerance for political disagreement and so we found
that back in 2012 this is the height of Act 10 we you know we found that about one in
three Wisconsinites and said they'd stop talking about politics with a friend of theirs or someone
they knew because of political disagreements they might still talk about the weather or
their kids or school or the Packers but or the Badgers but not politics that's now well
over 50 percent and in some places 60 to 65 percent where they've stopped talking politics
in Wisconsin and in 2022 the last time we did a statewide survey we found that 20 percent
of Wisconsinites had just cut somebody out of their lives altogether because of political
disagreements wow now some of that is because people are sometimes awful to each other and
if if you're a school teacher and an uncle or a neighbor or someone says to you school
teachers are evil and they're a bunch of Marxist and doctorators and a bunch of other
kind of things that turn out to be nonsense you might say I'm not talking to you anymore
you're out of my life but there are other times when we just don't even have the stomach
to talk with people with whom we disagree and when we cloister ourselves in echo chambers
we tend to get more extreme in our attitudes and more sure of ourselves and if we're thinking
about what we were just talking about a few minutes ago about misinformation one thing
that helps us make good decisions is admitting what we don't know and the more sure of ourselves
we become and the more extreme we become the less likely we become to want to compromise
with the other side and if we're telling our lawmakers hey that other side is evil and
they're telling us yes we know that other side is evil there's no real real room to
compromise and so in the public there's this kind of growing dissension and there's a growing
news fatigue people tell us when we look at our surveys over time they're just more overwhelmed
they're more tired of the cacophony of information and the political battles than they used to
be and at the elite level I mean you see gavelin gavelouts of special sessions the governor calls
where the majority party in the legislature doesn't even take time to debate the issue
they call each other names they can't seem to agree on much we see a lot of that happening
you know in our state government and so the contentiousness is not something that's bottom
up it's really it's really more top down and when you say people aren't talking and they're losing
friendships I mean it doesn't I can feel that and I think it back to you know technology in
terms of how people are communicating and the way that we can be on social and and kind of hide
behind you know screen names and those sorts of things do we know how we got here in terms
of that kind of polarization we know some of how we got here right so when when I was growing up
you know when if you wanted the TV on in your house at 5 30 p.m. central time in Minnesota
the news was on all three channels and that's all there was we had a limited amount of information
we had a morning paper, afternoon paper and three TV stations that had the news on at the same time
and after that the local news was on then after that it was a rerun of cheers or something right and
so we all saw the same kinds of things and that news was much more more pitched more toward
moderates because they wanted as wide of an audience as possible enter the late 80s early 90s
in cable television and now you want narrower audiences and enter Fox News in the mid-1990s
and not only do you want a narrower audience you want an audience where you're saying this side
is right and this side is wrong and then MSNBC says well we're going to go in the other direction
and say no that's the other side that's right and the this this other side that's wrong and so
we've had increasingly kind of narrow casted news all of this happens in the environment
where the internet takes off and then it takes off at a speed where people can get a lot of
information on it very quickly and so now we have the traditional organizations offering us news
on the web the cable news organizations offering us stuff on the web and digital only or digital
first sources that are having even more niche markets so there's increasing narrow casting
social media makes that easier to find people who are like you and attack people who are different
than you people you'll never see as you're saying maybe behind a screen name and sending
threatening messages or those sorts of things so all of this is happening at the same time that
our leaders are getting more divided the the voting behavior amongst our members of congress
is more different than at any time in our history including the civil war which was a time where
half the country split off from the other half and spent four years killing each other and so
there's a big difference in how our lawmakers are behaving it's trickling down into how we
behave and it interacts with the information environment that we all live in. I mean is there
a reset button on this can it be reset? I don't know that you could hit the reset button and
start over in the way that I do when I'm failing at a video game right yeah oh I'm
playing a football game and I'm losing nope we'll just hit reset and this time my home state
Vikings will finally win a game right that's not how we get to do it because we hit reset
and we come back to the same information if I remember in with ideological talk radio
ideological cable news digital news traditional outlets increasing animus amongst just human beings
talking to each other on the street all these things are still with us when we hit reset
and we haven't found a good way to kind of navigate through all of those issues in a way that is
productive more often. I've heard before too that people do not like to admit that they're wrong
about something and so meet me worse maybe yeah so I'm wondering if what how does that play into
moving things forward in terms of people being able to admit that you know hey I thought this
person was a good person on this issue and it turns out they're not are people is there a
research out there that shows that people are willing to do that and are they doing those kind
of things. People are willing to change but only when there's no other option available to them and
so a lot of what happens is what a political psychologist called motivated reasoning where
you believe something you get information that trustworthy information that says that's not true
and what you do is you're motivated to find other information to keep believing what you
wanted to believe and it turns out that the biggest offenders are the educated because we've
taught the educated how to use evidence to make arguments and so when you say the climate is
changing and getting systematically warmer people can say oh well it snowed a foot last week what
are you talking about and so they'll always look for something to make that argument back
and but it's a non-ideological human trait it's not that conservatives do this and liberals don't
liberals and conservatives do this in equal measure where they kind of engage in motivated
reasoning there are tipping points there there are circumstances where there's so much information
that people can no longer keep believing a phony thing that they had been believing and sometimes
it's also the case that the presentation of information can help so maybe when someone engages
in what economists call costly talk so when a democrat says something negative about other
democrats right if they say something negative about republicans well that's what we expect
from a democrat and so that's not so novel but if a democrat says hey we're wrong on this
that sometimes can lead people who are also democrats to say okay maybe
if someone on my team is telling me we should do some introspection so that can work and also
visual presentation of information seeing is often believing and so if we show if we tell people
planets getting warmer and they don't want to believe it they might fight back with us and if
we say here's seven different countries measuring the temperature over the last hundred years
and they all go in the same direction and they're all going up people say oh
i can't really deny that evidence that i see and so visual matters talking to people who are
different than you matters being open as you as you say to the the chance that you might not be
right about something also really matters yeah and what is it about wisconsin um wisconsin
politics that has all eyes centered on this state because we know this is one of the critical states
in the upcoming election yeah i mean we are a state where we've elected one of the more liberal
and one of the more conservative us senators we're a state that had a majority of citizens uh
voters picked on all trump in 2016 and a majority of voters not pick him and pick joe biden in 2020
so we're a state where the outcome at the state level is in play governor walker republican
governor evers democrat not very many states are this close this often in the way that that our
state is and so that's one reason we get a lot of attention another reason we get a lot of attention
is that we're we're a microcosm of the country in a lot of ways we have a couple of urban centers
we have lots of rural we have some manufacturing we have farming we have outdoor activities we have
lots of different uh cultural kinds of things we have lots of different sports and it's it's
something that you can find almost anywhere around the country there's a little bit of almost all of
that short of oceans you know here in wisconsin and so we get a lot of attention because we have
citizens who have particular needs to speak to all these different kinds of groups but also to
cultural interests you know civic interests i want to get a little reflective on the the field of
journalism now in terms of uh thinking about how some of our uh i say old school but some of the
folks that aren't in the journalism field anymore retired moved on passed on etc uh people like
sam donnellson um mike wallace like how would those journalists cover today's politics you think
and would it be different than what and how it's covered today i think folks like that had a
reputation for letting the person they're talking to know that their question hasn't been answered
and continuing to ask it and i think too many journalists today are willing to ask a hard question
have it dodged to kind of a mealy mouth return to it have that dodged and then move on and wallace
donaldson helland thomas they did not do that right that they they kept asking a hard question and
and and either you know demanded an answer or got the person to say look i'm not answering that
question right and so which you know is something to do i think right now you know a lot of television
journalism is about asking questions they think that the audience wants to know or that they think
the kind of dc elite want to know so it's a lot of are you going to run for president questions
for a bunch of different u.s senators and these kinds of questions that they interpret as hard
hitting but that is not a hard hitting question right hard hitting questions are about campaign
promises and delivering on them or backing up things that you said how do you know those things are
true those are hard hitting questions and we don't ask enough of those and when we do ask them we
we aren't journalists aren't relentless enough oh always to get them answered now this again like
i said before there are a lot of good journalists out there doing a lot of great work but i think
amongst our most watched most popular most famous um hard hitting and relentless is not the words
i think most people who watch them would would use to describe them and we know now too that um
a lot of what's out there is classified as journalism in terms of people that generate
content on the various social platforms tick check right facebook and youtube and those sort of
thing where do you see the future of journalism where's it going because we you know and we
and i can't say that without talking about you know some of the news publications that are
shutting down and closing up and leaving some you know really good sized cities without any kind
of uh media oversight you know in some ways we're in in crisis mode in a lot of places that have
lost their hometown newspaper or keep hemorrhaging political reporters at television and radio stations
so that that's all problem and still a big problem um we're seeing an increasing number of folks who
are entering the industry knowing that what they have to do in the contemporary and information
environment is just different than what people had to do when i graduated from college in 1998
which was know how to tell stories that were true on the radio or on television now they have to
do those things but they also have to tweet about it they have to post on facebook about it they
have to have a youtube video about it they have to have a tiktok or an instagram reel about it
and so they have to do those things because that's where a lot of the especially younger audiences
they want to develop news habits in that audience so that they're returning to these folks and trust
them for information and so i don't know that that it's bad that younger journalists are doing
these things i think it's probably necessary but it also comes at the expense of getting to spend
the time doing what you want to do which is relentlessly pursue the verifiable truth and and
tell people about it and so that's all hard and it comes in this environment where radio is invented
in the 20s 1920s and they say oh this is going to kill the newspaper and there's still newspapers
and then television comes along and they say oh this is going to kill radio and then cable
television comes along and oh this is going to kill broadcast television but there's still broadcast
television and still radio and still newspapers well the internet comes along well it's got to
kill cable television and broadcast television and we still have all of those things they have
differential power now than they used to have but they all still exist and they all interact in this
really complex information ecosystem and so i think it's just i say this to my students all the time
it is unfair and it's it's harder for you than it was for me but that is how it is and so we have
to figure out how do we tell true stories in a transparent way to as many audiences as possible
and as you stand there teaching this next generation of journalists
what do you think are we in good hands as this field moves forward i'm wowed by most of our students
they are really curious they are skeptical of things they are told by people in power
but they also are willing to believe things when you present them evidence about about you know
things that are verifiably true and so i find them to be really curious really motivated but i also
find them to be curious about things that i wasn't curious about like they're curious about
civic change that's outside of party politics in ways that my generation wasn't that is i think
it wasn't as interested in they're interested in in new technologies and they're interested in how
things like ai are going to contribute to how we learn about things in in the future and they're
also concerned about how all of these changing technologies are going to provide them opportunities
in the field but also maybe take away opportunities in the field you know it's like when you now
go to an airport if you want to you know get an egg big muffin you can touch a screen and never
involve yourself with a human which just taking away some jobs for the humans you might talk to
that those same things can happen in journalism if if a box score can be generated into an ai story
to tell me about the box game what does that mean for sports reporters if if you can pull from
voting data to tell stories about political elections what does that mean for the future
of political reporters and so how journalists interact with these changing technologies i think
is going to be really important for the next 10 20 years yeah final question um i love asking
this question to people especially depending on what their field is something that you tend to
ask a president we know it keeps them up at night what keeps a journalism professor up at night
i'm worried that the attacks on those whose job it is to share things that are verifiably true
are making it so that we have a really hard time ever deciding what's true at all and so
journalists are a big group that does that but so are our researchers and and academics and
people whose job it is is to find evidence about things and share that evidence and as
faculty around the country we go become under attack even from our own congress and as journalists
around the country and around the globe are under attack from world leaders ideological media
uh groups you know white supremacist groups and other kinds of you know really anti-social
activists who who want chaos all these things are happening in an environment where the truth
is up for grabs and the verifiable truth can't be up for grabs in a functioning society and
that that's what keeps me up dr michael wagner thank you for joining us sir it was my pleasure mr
you