Chuck Todd: Journalists and news outlets must value fact over opinion, strengthen local news to build their credibility

Chuck Todd speaks. (Photo by Patti Cross, Bluegrass SPJ)

Journalism needs to rebuild its credibility, valuing fact more than opinion, and part of that depends on connections between local media and national media, Chuck Todd of NBC News told a largely non-journalist audience Thursday night at the national awards dinner for rural journalism.

"The credibility of national media depends on the credibility of local media, and local media give us a lot more credibility," Todd said at the Al Smith Awards Dinner of the University of Kentucky's Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues (which publishes The Rural Blog).

The decline of local journalism has been bad for national journalism, Todd said: “Even if people in the community disagreed with a point of view, maybe they didn’t like the national news – my father was one of those guys; he’d say, ‘Ah, The New York Times, they think they’re better than us – but if a local paper reported something they did, you know, it gave it credibility. And I do think the loss of local news, if the newspaper on the doorstep, the fact that we were all reading the same thing . . . led to more respectful debate.”

Noting the Institute's mission to help local media help their audiences understand the local impact of national issues, Todd said, “We’re so hyperlocal . . . I think in some ways, bringing more local perspective to the national discussion might actually lower the temperature, right? Make people think that there’s a little more diverse set of voices out there.”

Meanwhile, national news media need to see that their newsrooms reflect the country as a whole, Todd said: “Diversity is not just how people look, diversity is where people live. I’ve said that when you build a diverse newsroom, you gotta have geographic diversity, you gotta have socioeconomic diversity . . . You can have all the diversity on looks in the world, but everybody may have gone to Harvard; you haven’t diversified a thing.”

And the local level could use more diversity of media ownership, Todd said, drawing an analogy from the sports business, which he covered before sticking to politics:

“We have vanity owners that love to buy sports franchises,” he said. “You don’t make money on your sports team. You might, but it’s not a primary method. It’s a trophy, okay? It’s a community trophy. Well, I’m OK if the local newspaper becomes a community trophy for good. . . . I’d like to see more local entrepreneurs, people who succeed, re-investing in their community, and one of the ways you can re-invest in your community is better journalism. That’s a public service that somebody can provide. You can build an art museum. That’s great. I appreciate you putting your name on an art museum, but it would help a lot if you helped give us some more resources to do local journalism better.”

The decline of local news and the rise of social media are disconnecting people from their geographic communities, Todd said: “We’ve seen over the last five years that social media has sort of consumed, in some ways devoured, local journalism. . . . With more and more news deserts that are happening, this is why people are gravitating to social media, gravitating to these digital sites, gravitating to cable news channels – not for information, but for affirmation. . . . There’s been some terrific journalism over the last five years. . . . The good news is, we’re meeting the moment. The problem is, are people seeing it, and are people believing it?”

Todd said journalists “over-estimate how well informed the country is” because Americans are in “information cocoons. I don’t call them news cocoons, but information cocoons. They don’t prioritize news the way any of us in this room might.” Because the cocoon operators want traffic, “They prioritize sentiment: ‘I want to get you angry.’ . . . They want to play to your grievance and in some ways keep you engaged in your anger. . . . Facebook actually had an algorithm that did this.”

He added later, “Facebook would say, ‘You guys are just upset that we’re competitors.’ I said, no, no, no, you’re destroying, you’re perverting the process, and then of course, here’s the evidence. They’ve written these algorithms, and smaller news organizations, which needed Facebook’s traffic, had to sit there and say, ‘Well, jeez, how do we play to the algorithms? More divisive headlines, more divisive content, because the goal is to get traffic. It’s a perverted incentive structure, and it’s something that’s gotta change.”

Todd played off the remarks of previous speakers, including Tom and Pat Gish Award winner Les High, the North Carolina publisher who said he liked the line from the Apple TV series "Ted Lasso" in which the title character is told, “The truth will set you free, but first, it will really piss you off.”

“Reality does piss people off sometimes,” Todd said. “When you do watch ‘Meet the Press’ I hope I do make you mad for five minutes. You shouldn’t watch ‘Meet the Press’ and nod your head the whole time, right? There should be somebody challenging your point of view, making you think, going ‘Well, at least I understand why that side thinks the way they do. I may not agree with it, but I understand the rationale there.’ And if I’m doing my job, I hope I’ve done that for you. But I am gonna piss you off sometimes. It’s not persona, I swear. . . . The left thinks I’m not woke enough and the right thinks I’m too awake. And I will say, I’m stuck covering politics as it is and not as I wish it were, and every Sunday I do my best to try to present what I think is the reality of what’s happening.”

Todd said journalism has room for other types of journalists, including those who deal in opinion, but he said "some of my colleagues have been irresponsible" and have damaged trust in the craft.

“When it comes to rebuilding credibility, I think number one is tone. Be careful of your tone,” Todd said, adding later, “If I started yelling at people instead of asking them questions, I wouldn’t get any answers, and it’s a better way to get answers. It’s a tone. Tone is a big one.

He also said journalists should “Take ourselves out of the story. . . . The second I ever think of myself as a celebrity, I hope somebody punches me and tells me to get out of the job, because I do think there’s been too much celebrifying of the information business. I don’t even want to call it the news business right now, and I think there’s been people who are almost addicted to the fame. They were crappy actors, crappy musicians, so they thought, ‘Lemme try cable television.’ ”

Todd said television incentivizes opinion journalism, and the Times does it online: “Their journalism is great; why do they lead with their op-ed page when you go to their home page? Don’t lead with the editorial. Lead with the information. Lead with the facts. We spend so much time reading and printing and expressing opinion. Let’s spend more time reading and digesting the facts. We’re more worried about takes than we are about the facts. So, I do think we’ve gotta get out of the story; it’s not about us, and it never has been.”