[percussive music]
- Murv Seymour: Dr. Michael Wagner,
University of Wisconsin journalism professor,
thanks for joining us. - It's my pleasure.
- I wanna get started by just, you know, getting 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 pore 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.
And then when I was 14, 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 the summer of "Achy Breaky Heart,"
and so I basically would 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 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 them. - [chuckles] Face 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 5:00
and I've gotta be done by 5:00."
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 are 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 in."
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.
- 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 strikes and gutters.
Some of the journalism is amazing and some is poor,
and some would be better if the resources
and the environment they were working in
could be improved in some way.
- Now, I know you and I might be biased in the answer
to this next question. - I'm sure that's true.
- 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 democracy, a lot of research
about the American public comes to conclusions
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 an environment where journalists
are regularly reporting the verifiable truth,
people can make what political scientists and others
call reasoned 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.
And 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, oh, we 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 have made a reasoned 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
where we can learn about what's happening,
and that's the news media.
It's not social media.
- I'm wondering what 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 a more varied news diet
tend to be less rabidly 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 we can just do
as 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 sideline pass
to a Green Bay Packer,
and the question is, did he have two feet inbounds
and control of the ball before it 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,
"Oh, he 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 in the face of attack, which is really, really hard.
Easier to say than to do, I think.
- Yeah, and you brought up 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."
- Dr. Wagner: Sure.
- In terms of misinformation, disinformation,
and 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 mis- and disinformation 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 work I've done with one of my former students,
Jianing Li, who's now a professor at Rutgers,
or 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 at the kind of the structural level
with our political leaders,
and there, 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 be the referee there
and call those penalties,
and I think that's something that is critically important
and, again, is 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?
- Well, in Wisconsin, politics is relatively contentious
and has been kind of getting increasingly contentious
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,
you know, we found that about one in three Wisconsinites
had said they'd stopped 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 or the Badgers,
but not politics.
That's now well over 50%, and in some places, 60% to 65%,
where they've stopped talking politics in Wisconsin.
And in 2022, the last time we did a statewide survey,
we found that 20% of Wisconsinites
had just cut somebody out of their lives altogether
because of political disagreements.
- Murv: Wow. - Now, some of that
is because people are sometimes awful to each other.
And if you're a schoolteacher
and an uncle or a neighbor or someone says to you,
"Schoolteachers are evil
and they're a bunch of Marxist indoctrinators,"
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 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 gavel-in, gavel-outs 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 more top-down.
- And when you say people aren't talking
and they're losing friendships, I mean, I can feel that.
And I think back to, you know, technology
in terms of how people are communicating
and the way that we can be on social
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 a polarization?
- We know some of how we got here, right?
So when I was growing up,
you know, 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, right?
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, pitched more toward moderates
because they wanted as wide of an audience as possible.
Enter the late '80s, early '90s, and 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 gonna go in the other direction
"and say, 'No, it's the other side that's right
and 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 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 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 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?
You know, "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 environment we're 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...
- Me, me, worse, it's me, yeah. [Murv laughing]
- So I'm wondering if, 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 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 political psychologists call motivated reasoning,
where you believe something,
you get information, 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.
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 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?
Like, 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,
"you know, 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 tell people the planet's getting warmer
and they don't wanna 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 say, to the chance
that you might not be right
about something also really matters.
- Yeah, and what is it about Wisconsin, Wisconsin politics,
that has all eyes centered on this state?
'Cause 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 U.S. senators.
We're a state that had a majority of citizens, voters,
pick Donald 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 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 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 cultural kinds of things.
We have lots of different sports.
And 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
that speak to all these different kinds of groups,
but also to cultural interests, you know, civic interests.
- I wanna get a little reflective
on the field of journalism now, in terms of thinking
about how some of our, I say old school,
but some of the folks
that aren't in the journalism field anymore,
retired, moved on, passed on, et cetera,
people like Sam Donaldson, Mike Wallace,
like, how would those journalists cover
today's politics, do you think?
And would it be different than 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, do kind of a mealy-mouthed return to it,
have that dodged, and then move on.
And Wallace, Donaldson, Helen Thomas,
they did not do that, right?
They kept asking a hard question
and either, you know, demanded an answer
or got the person to say,
"Look, I'm not answering that question," right?
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 D.C. elite want to know.
So it's a lot of "Are you gonna 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've 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,
journalists aren't relentless enough always
to get them answered.
Now, 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,
hard-hitting and relentless is not the words
I think most people who watch them would use
to describe them.
- And we know now, too, that a lot of what's out there
is classified as journalism
in terms of people that generate content
on the various social platforms,
TikTok and Facebook and YouTube and that sort of thing.
Where do you see the future of journalism?
Where's it going?
Because we, you know,
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 media oversight.
- You know, in some ways, we're 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's a problem, and still a big problem.
We're seeing an increasing number of folks
who are entering the industry
knowing that what they have to do
in the contemporary 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,
especially the younger audience is.
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 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 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 gonna kill the newspaper."
And there's still newspapers.
And then television comes along
and they say, "Oh, this is gonna kill radio."
And then cable television comes along
and, "Oh, this is gonna kill broadcast television."
But there's still broadcast television
and still radio and still newspapers.
Well, the internet comes along.
Well, that's gonna kill cable television
and broadcast television and radio.
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 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, 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, I think, wasn't as interested in.
They're interested in new technologies,
and they're interested in how things like AI
are gonna contribute to how we learn about things
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 McMuffin,
you can touch a screen
and never involve yourself with a human,
which is taking away some jobs
for the humans you might talk to.
Those same things can happen in journalism.
If a box score can be generated into an AI story
to tell me about the Bucks game,
what does that mean for sports reporters?
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 gonna be really important
for the next 10, 20 years.
- Yeah. Final question.
I love asking this question to people,
especially depending on what their field is.
Something that you tend to ask a president.
We know what keeps them up at night.
What keeps a journalism professor up at night?
- I am 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 researchers and academics
and people whose job it is is to find evidence about things
and share that evidence.
And as faculty around the country 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,
you know, white supremacist groups
and other kinds of, you know, really antisocial activists
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's what keeps me up.
- Dr. Michael Wagner, thank you for joining us, sir.
- It was my pleasure, Murv.