Posted
"We've become two different worlds, it makes me
insane to watch," says Claude, watching CNN in the lounge at JFK Airport
in New York.
Key points:
- News channel brands become shorthand for where you sit within the hybrid of media and politics
- Most Americans don't watch a lot of FOX or CNN and instead watch local free-to-air TV news service
- Online outlets have greater extremes, and most people get their news from social media
He is the very first person I approach when my feet touch American soil. The longer I was in America, the more people repeated what this lackadaisical man from Connecticut was telling me: "You never know if anyone is telling the truth."
Coming to America to talk to its bewildered citizens about their media, I expected cynicism and tribalism. But I wasn't expecting the doomsaying.
I'm addicted to the news and I broadcast it every day. Taking talk-back calls and burrowing into policy detail to try and nail Australian politicians, I thought I knew what a fractured media landscape looked like.
But then I landed in the US and sitting on a couch, flicking between channels, I was hit by a head-spinning divide.
"The President is a disgusting human being." CLICKI've been trying to decipher politics in Australia for more than 20 years. I've reported from natural disasters and foreign elections, so I thought I was hard to surprise.
"Democrats don't care about facts." CLICK
"The media is President Trump's cocaine." CLICK
"It's the beginning of the unravelling of democracy." CLICK
"The mainstream media are almost treacherous." CLICK
"The President's performance was nothing short of treasonous." CLICK
"Immigrants are attempting to invade the country." CLICK
But I was shocked that so many Americans, from newsmakers to the news consumers, think the system is broken.
"That's what the world's all about now, isn't it," Claude says with a resigned smile on his face, before I've even had my passport checked.
He welcomes me to his country and says "you have to decide what you think is true and what you think is false".
'It's hard to know who to trust'
On a warm summer evening, I'm outside the council chambers in Alegheny County, in Pittsburgh's southern suburbs. There's a marble memorial with the inscription "Sacrifice is meaningless without Remembrance", and the names of soldiers go back to the Revolutionary War.
Inside, the local Republican committee gathers for a quick prayer and the oath of allegiance, in front of a large US flag. The rows of chairs are half-filled and the relaxed talk echoes off the marble floors.
Surrounded by art-deco wooden-panelled walls someone warns, "the Democrats are energised, organised and unified". The men wear white sneakers and button-down shirts, the women choose sensible slacks and simply patterned dresses.
These are the people who knock on doors, mail pamphlets and make calls to get their representatives elected.
In March, Republicans lost a Congressional seat here, despite the same suburbs voting overwhelmingly for the President just 15 months earlier. They fear that if a Democrat can win here, in the equivalent of a by-election, what might happen when Americans vote for a new Congress in November?
I'm in America to ask about its media, and the impact on its politics. Natalie Mihalek is not a fan of the President's Twitter activity — "on his own, in the middle of the night, from his bed".
But she is thankful that "he's exposed the media for things that they've been doing, that we just weren't aware of."
Many people at this meeting tell me they've spent the last few decades avoiding outlets like the New York Times and CNN. It's not that they trust everything Fox is saying, but it's pretty good.
Natalie says "it's very frustrating, it's hard to know who to trust" in the media. And so often the distrust leads to darker fears.
The meeting is run by its endlessly cheerful chairman Joe Melaragno. Beforehand, his texts are enthusiastic, "I look forward to meeting you!" He smiles even as he warns the committee that the Democrats have "a level of enthusiasm … that we don't usually experience".
But late at night, when everyone else has gone home, his mood turns.
We talk outside in the dark, close to the marble memorial, on this warm evening. He is the first of many to raise the bitter and bloody Civil War.
"We've had some dark times in our nation," Joe tells me, "we had slavery, which was an abomination, and we had to resolve it.
" But jeez — it cost us 600,000 lives to do that. We do not have a good history when two sides butt up against each other."
The partisanship is personal
The quickest way to gauge an American's view of the media conflict is to ask which TV news channel they trust.It is a simplification because most Americans don't watch a lot of FOX or CNN. Newspapers uncover more facts and more people watch their local free-to-air TV news service. Online outlets have greater extremes, and most people get their news from social media.
But the news channels' brands become shorthand for where you sit within the hybrid of media and politics.
A short drive from Bethel Park is the other side of this divide, in the suburb of Mt Lebanon.
The picture-postcard houses look the same; freestanding with plush lawns and no fences. But here the yards host Democrat posters, and churches display gay pride flags.
In the upmarket Galleria shopping centre, I start chatting to a group of elderly Jewish women, seated at a table playing mahjong.
The women speak rapidly, completing each other's sentences and laughing at their own jokes. One tells me "we're usually more rowdy than this!" Joan Minski wistfully says they've been meeting and playing mahjong together for "50 years, easy".
But the joviality shifts quickly when I ask her friend Lois Balk about the President.
Lois says something that the polls show repeatedly — the partisanship is personal.
"Trump's followers are … I don't want to say … not a nice group of people," an exasperated Lois tells me."They're very much against what I think the average person feels."
Lois is not alone in seeing the other side as abnormal. The Democrats and Republicans are the only two fully functioning national political parties. But each side's view of the other is distorted.
"The left has gone and lost its mind … they break the social fabric of our cities and towns," declared FOX News host Pete Hesgarth.
Any morning's viewing quickly has the other half of the country labelled as extremists. FOX was upset that a Virginia restaurant had refused to serve White House press secretary Sarah Sanders.
With young children being separated from their asylum-seeking parents, such a protest was justified by a regular CNN commentator: "People have seen the President do outrageous things", so for the press secretary "there is a cost to being an accomplice to this cruel, deceitful human being".
FOX's contributor sneered that CNN's contribution was normal for "the mainstream media as the publicity arm for the Democrats".
On the other left-of-centre station MSNBC, eyes rolled at the lack of Republicans reprimanding the President — his party has "devolved into a Trumpist cult".
It's what you expect from "an hysterical left", said one of the President's favourite FOX hosts, "unwilling to accept the will of the American people". She added "the left just doesn't care what the facts are!"
And these are the phrases you hear in cafes and bars.
"Trump's corrupt," says Patricia vehemently, "he's a liar, he's egotistical, he's a narcissist, I could go on and on."She is sitting with her partner Jim, overlooking the mahjong players, in the suburban Pittsburgh mall. We're in a rather bland and rather expensive gastropub where this retiree couple are giving themselves "a special treat" — a sandwich and a beer for both, costing $70.
They both served in the military and then met after their spouses died in the mid-90s. Jim smiles when he says, "we're not married, we don't want to ruin anything!"
The misconceptions are not confined to this suburban divide. One poll shows that more than half of American voters don't want their child to marry someone from the other party.
Another survey shows Democrats assume close to half of all Republicans earn more than $US250,000 ($344,100) per year, when the reality is two per cent. Republicans assume that 38 per cent of Democrat voters identify as LGBTQI, when it's just six per cent.
Trump's an 'incredible communicator': Hockey
An RM Williams-clad foot is up on the coffee table, and his tie is a long way from being close to his neck. We're on couches in his office in Washington DC.
Joe Hockey calls the 24-hour news channels "fringe media", arguing more Americans watch their local news. He agrees it's really hard to find impartial media in the US, so he says he has to "bake my own cake".
As treasurer alongside former prime minister Tony Abbott, Hockey was there when Australian politics went more aggressive and our media became more divided.
While he says the US is worse — "politics here is far more polarised than even in Australia, people are particularly aggressive towards each other" — he worries about Australia's journalism: "I saw [our] mainstream media move from reporting the facts to opining on the facts."In both countries he says the credible journalists are those "that defy the company opinion, the ones who run counter to the brand of the business [they work for]".
The embassy — clad in a massive Qantas billboard when I visit — is less than 2 kilometres from the lawn of the White House.
The ambassador has a close enough relationship to get a recent round of golf with Donald Trump, and the pictures to prove it are on display.
The President smiles widely, his adviser Mick Mulvaney leaps for joy, and Fox News host Brett Baeir grins wryly — all reacting as Hockey sinks a putt from 40 feet.
No-one has changed and challenged the media like the President. But Hockey says he is different in private, asking lots of questions, "always looking for information, there's a great sense of curiosity, that surprised me".
He also admires Trump's use of Twitter, "not the regrettable language", but the President's ability to cut through the media maelstrom: "He is an incredible communicator, it's amazing how much coverage he gets."
Hockey points to the President's character, something that makes Trump the perfect politician for a social media age. "He's emotional to some degree, but is very visual and verbal, that is what drives him, as opposed to someone that deeply contemplates policy issues."
Fake News preys on media tribalism
Trump has an intuitive understanding of the news. After a summit with North Korea in June, Trump returned to the US, and walked out onto the White House lawn unannounced.He took questions from the media for an hour. They directly confronted him with accusations he was lying, being abusive and was praising a brutal dictator. It produced an avalanche of news, and days of fact-checking.
But he got his message out.
Some things he said were demonstrably untrue, but the support from Republican voters was unwavering. Trump is adept at working with the media, at a time when the news is ever more bitter and partisan.
And it is precisely at this moment that the media is being targeted by fabricated stories. Those pushing misinformation use the media's tribalism to their advantage, and we know it has worked. At a crucial moment, in the place where most Americans get their news, it wasn't real.
Fabricated stories were "liked" and "shared" more widely than real news on Facebook in the final three months of the 2016 election.
A widely reviewed analysis showed that articles falsely pushing lies — like the Pope backing candidate Trump — were shared more widely on Facebook than articles from outlets like FOX, CNN, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. And that was in the lead up to voting day.
On TV stations, there is much less made up news, but the facts are often confined to the headlines.
On a Tuesday morning I switched on TV and started taking notes a few minutes before 8:00am on MSNBC. "Donald Trump fundamentally does not believe in democracy, he believes in autocracy," declared retired naval officer Malcolm Nance.
His book accuses Trump of being an unwitting agent of the Russian Government: "He will not betray Putin, he will not betray Russia."
Less than 10 minutes later, on Fox News, Democrats were accused of "dehumanising the enemy, creating mob support, mob protest", by former Trump advisor Anthony Scaramucci.
The small but vocal protests against Trump administration officials when they appear in public are, he said, "straight out of the Joseph Goebbels playbook". Neither reference, to Nazis nor autocrats, seemed exceptional to the hosts on rival stations.
'There are a lot of things we do wrong'
"The idea that public ideas should be debated by people of good faith, trying to reason to a conclusion using facts, is absolutely under assault," says John Dickerson.He is a Washington veteran turned co-host of CBS This Morning — think Barrie Cassidy on Channel 9's TODAY. He says the President's greatly accelerated something that was already happening.
"It's just basically who can stack up the most assertions and has the least shame and not feel compelled to actually make a case built on facts," he says.Last year, President Trump cut off an interview in the Oval Office and gestured for Dickerson to leave. He had repeatedly asked for evidence of one of the President's claims about Barack Obama. Dickerson is yet to be granted another Presidential interview.
Dickerson is worried the absence of facts in news coverage is laying the groundwork for "some kind of disaster". He doesn't only blame the President, admits the media is a big part of the problem, and describes most election campaign coverage as "an abomination".
"There are a lot of things we do wrong," he says, "despite the fact that it's very obvious that we're doing it wrong."
He fears it adds up to a "basic system in real threat and peril".
On the glossy TV set, glass tables and exposed brick walls convey a freshly renovated New York loft. But the bricks are fake, and the food left out for the morning's guests remains plastic wrapped and uneaten.
But there is no artifice with Dickerson. He is eloquent and well-read, writing for The Atlantic and producing podcasts and books on presidential history.
Like many mainstream journalists he's concluded that the President often "says things that are not true and that he knows to be untrue". But he knows that verdict presents a problem.
When some in the media fact-check the President, his supporters see that as more proof of bias.
'Witch hunts' and 'deep state actors'
It's the journalists like John Dickerson who are seen to be part of the problem, by many of the commentators on Fox News."There's an overwhelming magnetism towards this intellectual dishonesty, not just among voters, but in the press," says Harlan Hill, outside Fox News in midtown Manhattan.
He's just come off an afternoon show on Fox, and despite the late afternoon heat, his suit and tie remain impeccably neat.
While not targeting Dickerson personally, Hill disparages mainstream media, and dismisses criticism that Fox is too close to the President because "in the current media environment we need that sort of balance".
A Fox News regular, Hill was a former Obama supporter, but he is now the youngest member of the Trump 2020 Advisory Committee. They're already strategising about how to run that campaign and thinking about what messages will resonate.
As part of that, they're actively pressing to have people push the President's case on a range of outlets. Hill is already predicting that the President will win re-election "in a landslide".
There may be bumps in the road with the investigation into Russia's 2016 interference also examining the President's campaign.
Trump and some on Fox continually attack it as a "witch hunt", initiated and warped by "the Deep State": a group of top level officials in various agencies like the FBI and the Justice Department.
The notion is dismissed by the mainstream media for lack of evidence. But not by Hill.
"I can tell you, that's a real thing," he says. "There are a lot of people in different agencies, and they are doing everything in their power to stop President Trump because they're ideologically absolutely at odds with what he's trying to do."Isn't that a conspiracy theory, I ask: "No, it's a real thing, I've witnessed it, I tell you, I won't name names, but I can point to people in the White House that are some of these deep state actors. It's not a conspiracy."
Hill is not an outlier. Many elected Republicans agree with him publicly, and most Republican voters dismiss the inquiry by Special Counsel Robert Mueller.
It is no simple task to start dissembling these fears because facts are hard to find. But in a digital media swamped by opinion, they are not the only facts that are hard to discover.
New media weakening journalism values
What precisely happens to a family coming over the Mexican border? It depends where they crossed, whether they apply as refugees, which US agency deals with them, and which government directive is followed.What is the actual impact on any farmer of the President's moves on tariffs? What would any of the President's decisions do to the US Government budget?
Some reporting has always been difficult to do, and difficult for a reader to find.
But now, finding out what happened can be like drinking from a fire hose, with facts overwhelmed by opinion and outrage.
It means that not only is there no agreement on facts, there is no consensus on which story is "news".
It is part of the media fragmentation that helps feed a gnawing fear in the US: that our notions about journalism are outdated.
After World War II and before Facebook, reporters could convince themselves they were objective, able to observe their own biases, and could consult experts when needed. But that falls apart in the face of increasing polarisation.
"For the last century we've hidden behind this idea of impartiality as something that we can do, we just need to be balanced — and with the complexity of our politics now, it's very difficult to do that," says Clare Wardle, sitting in her office at Harvard University.Wardle travels the world advising media organisations. Social media hasn't only taken the ad revenue. This new media weakens traditional media because it's social.
Why do we expect an impartial and rational media, when the filter is a "like" button on Facebook or a "favourite" button on Twitter?
"We think that we have a relationship with information that's rational, it's not," Wardle says, "because we are emotional creatures."
The new media's business model relies on your emotions, not your reasoning.
The idea of media objectivity is relatively new. In the 19th century, American newspapers were unashamed political advocates, securing employment and contracts from people they helped elect.
Between Wold War I and II there was a rapid growth in the number of newspapers and news started coming from the radio. Much of it was not what we would today consider to be impartial. It was only in 1947 that American radio and tv stations were required by law to be "fair".
For many the media's high watermark of both a consensus view and objectivity, was the crises around Watergate and Vietnam. But perhaps that was a rare interlude in a longer history. America's fair broadcasting law was challenged for decades and completely scrapped in 2011.
Despite any rules or notions of them, Wardle's focus now is on the most viral of news items.
"Everybody's focused on these fabricated news websites, I focus on memes, these visuals that get shared very, very quickly when they support our worldview," she says.
"Why would you check? It's a visual, you trust a visual, our brains react differently to visuals."Her research at the Shorenstein Centre focusses less on who deliberately manipulates a news story and more on us, the people who pass them on — there is no misinformation without amplification.
"There isn't much we can do about the dodgy content," she says, "but whether or not we send it on is the crucial point."
Stories lost to partisan back-biting
The more I talk to voters and experts, the more news I watch and read, the more all media blends together and looks like static.It's a random word salad, impossible for any one consumer to finish and impossible to separate the good from the bad.
Submerged in that noise are remarkable claims from unlikely places, two startling statements that are worthy of more scrutiny than they received.
These men sat on top of America's vast intelligence apparatus, and both were once reviled by the left as promoters of the darker agendas lurking beneath US intelligence agencies.
James Clapper was Barack Obama's intelligence chief, and then briefed the newly sworn-in President Trump. It was Clapper's agencies that assessed Russia as interfering to help Trump's campaign.
In retirement, Clapper went further than the official verdict of trying to influence the election. "Of course the Russians affected the outcome," Clapper said in his book.
"Surprising even themselves, they swung the election to a Trump win, and to suggest otherwise stretches logic, common sense and credulity to breaking point."Imagine the response in Australia if a former head of ASIO said an Australian prime minister had won because of a foreign power.
Clapper was interviewed by some and dismissed by others, but the average news consumer could have easily never heard the claim.
James Brennan had the same national intelligence role as Clapper. He was once the left's poster child for the evils of waterboarding, when the CIA had to defend itself against allegations of torture.
He was recently shouted down by the right, when he claimed that Trump was "nothing short of treasonous" when he stood in Helsinki alongside Russia's President Vladimir Putin.
That claim did spark the media for a few days, but it too was lost in the partisan back-biting.
Right now in the US, words like treason, conspiracy, dictator, and racist are unexceptional and they disappear in the daily torrent of news.
"I'm old enough to remember what it was like 50 years ago," Ira Jackson tells me outside the White House, "and right here, where we're standing, I was demonstrating, and it was a pitched battle against the Vietnam War, this plaza was filled with tear gas."
A former public servant turned academic, Ira has just come from a youth leadership conference.
"You spend a day with young people in America, black, brown, white, rich, poor, and you're re-energised."
Most Americans I've spoken to, from journalists inside the biggest newspapers, to people on the street who admit they don't read the news, are usually pessimistic.
But not Ira, who places his faith in the next generation: "They're idealistic, they're practical and they're energised."
As people take selfies next to one of the world's most famous buildings, and just before he strides away, Ira smiles and tells me, "so things have been worse, and things will get better again".
Rafael Epstein's trip to the US was funded by the Churchill Memorial Trust.
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