Lauren Burke: 10 Things Comms Directors Need to Know About Journalists
Michael Pope
Hey, this is Michael Pope.
Thomas Bowman
And I'm Thomas Bowman.
Michael Pope
This week we're releasing a podcast. Now we originally recorded this a few weeks ago with Lauren Victoria Burke, and the idea for the original episode is that it would be available exclusively to people who support the show, but now, we're making it available to you right now in our feed.
Thomas Bowman
Lauren has a long resume. She has been a journalist, a PR professional. She's also spent plenty of time in Virginia politics with Representative Bobby Scott and as crisis comms manager for Justin Fairfax, the embattled former Lieutenant Governor.
Michael Pope
Yeah, so if you want to support the show, it's really easy. Just click in the link to the description for this podcast or head over to podvirginia.com and hit the button that says "Become a Patreon" or "Contribute on Patreon." It's really easy to do.
Thomas Bowman
And it only takes $3 a month, the price of a single coffee for Michael Pope.
Michael Pope
Large cup of coffee... Okay, that's enough for us. Let's get to the episode...
Lauren Burke
I'm Michael Pope.
I'm Tom Bowman.
Michael Pope
And this is Pod Virginia, a podcast that's taking you behind the scenes today to show you how the sausage is made.
Thomas Bowman
And this show might be our best one yet, because it's gonna be very helpful if you're a communications director, trying to figure out how to deal with reporters. Or if you're an elected official trying to figure out what journalists are doing, or why they're doing it. Or if you're just a news consumer, trying to figure out why some things are being reported and other things are not.
Michael Pope
Today, we're joined by a friend of the podcast who's been both a journalist and a communications manager. She's worked for ABC, USA Today, the Associated Press, The Hill, The Guardian, and many, many other news outlets ...too numerous to name here. She's also appeared on CNN, MSNBC, and TV-1, she's got a great podcast, the Burkefile, you definitely want to check it out. She's even been a guest host on this podcast a few times. Lauren Burke, thanks for joining us.
Lauren Burke
Thanks for having me. Mike on Thomas saw, this is gonna be great. It's gonna be interesting. There's a lot to talk about. As you know, there's been a lot of changes in the media industry that certainly affect and impact reporting.
Michael Pope
Yeah. And they those changes continue to happen every day, it seems like... So we invited you on the show today to share with us your top 10 list of things today's communications directors need to know about today's journalists. So let's get right into it with number ten: not recognizing motivation. You say some reporters don't give enough thought to why somebody is giving you a tip and what they might hope to get out of it. What are reporters overlooking?
Lauren Burke
Well, I mean, I wouldn't say that just because somebody is motivated politically, that they're inaccurate. But a lot of times what happens in stories is that you see things that pop up and things like what happened in 2016 and Hillary Clinton 11 days before the election, for example, when James Comey decides, oh, I'm going to have an investigation on her emails. Well, I mean, that doesn't just come up out of nowhere. I mean, there were rumors that Rudy Giuliani, although I don't know that that was accurate, was somehow involved in motivating that, but that's the type of thing that really fat may have impacted that election. And it really was up to journalists to figure out that that was probably politically driven. I mean, it's such an obvious example but...
Michael Pope
let me put Let me push back a little bit... So okay, so what if they're politically motivated? Either it's newsworthy or it's not newsworthy? And what if the motivation of the person sharing the information with you is not important?
Lauren Burke
Well, I would say two things, political motivation when something is happening like that first thing everybody has checked to me the primary goal journalism is finding out the truth finding out if something is accurate. And when somebody has political motivation, that tends to be at war with the truth, because, you know, they're doing it because they're trying to impact a political outcome. They're just doing it because 'Okay, well, you know, whatever.' And in that particular case with Hillary's emails, I mean, that derailed one of the best investigative papers in this country, the New York Times that was totally focused on that, and may, in fact, have impacted the election, because they did not properly look at that and say, "Well, wait a minute, why are we finding out about this? Why is this all happening? Like right before the election?" So I do think it matters. I see what your point is about, you know, a lot of the stuff that comes in, it's politically motivated, sometimes it's accurate, sometimes its important.
Michael Pope
Well, I mean, you as you just pointed out, the most important thing here is getting to the truth...
Lauren Burke
Right.
Michael Pope
So you, you, you've got you received the information. And you say yourself, well, what's the political motivation of the person giving this to me that may or may not be important, the important thing is, what is this this thing that I'm looking at? Is it true or not? If it's true, it might have news value. If it's not, it doesn't have news value, but like the I mean, whether or not it's true or not true, can be totally unrelated to the political motivation of the person who gave it to you, though, right?
Lauren Burke
It could be but sometimes it is. I mean, we saw this with the Al Franken case in late 2017. So we can tweet and comes out with this, you know, allegation and ends up blowing him up, he ends up resigning. And we don't find out until a few years later from Jane Mayer in The New Yorker, that there was a political motivation behind that. And that first allegation, got the ball rolling to a bunch of stuff that led to him, leaving the Senate. One of the best Senators, I would argue on the Democratic side, I think most Democrats would argue he was one of the best questioners in the United States Senate. And so it mattered that her motivation may have been political. Now, does that make her information completely irrelevant or not true? Well, we don't know. You don't know until you check. But the initial hit the initial thing, that initial moment, that ended up leading to him resigning that mattered, and her motivation in that moment, I think mattered. And we didn't know that until, of course, Jane Mayer, who's one of the best investigative reporters in the country, writes an almost like, 4000 word piece that uncover a lot of things we just didn't know when, when the story first broke.
Thomas Bowman
Yeah, and I've got a really balanced perspective on this, because I've been a journalist, and a layout editor at a newspaper. I've been political hack, and I currently am a partner at a PR firm, among other things. And so one of the things that at least in print journalism, they're always thinking about is how do we fill space. And so there's often a bias from the print media side, at the very least, to just, oh, great, somebody handed me this, this work. And on the PR side, if you write the story for that reporter, often it gets printed word for word or nearly that.
Michael Pope
That's not my, my experience.
Thomas Bowman
Well, you are also in radio, Michael, too. So that, you know, we work in slightly different fields here. And, you know, I'm thinking about at scale. And this is a thing that happens all the time. And you know, different outlets have different policies, of course, on these things, but this is something that absolutely happens. And the motivation for why it happens on at least the print side, is to fill space. But we don't have that much time to focus on all of these. So let's keep moving along. On to number nine. You say reporters often interview the wrong people, people who are not in a position to have any special knowledge about the topic considered. You say one red flag is when a reporter is quoting a college professor. What's wrong with quoting a college professor?
Lauren Burke
Well, I see a lot of times, particularly in Virginia reporters use the same three people. They get interviewed on every, particularly if we're talking about something that's sort of a general Virginia politics type question. And certainly, look, I have a lot of respect for Dr. Sabato for Larry Sabato. I think he's great. But you know, he, of course, did work in politics. He worked for Henry Howell, I'm sure you guys know. And that was a while ago, though. So, even though his advice has been great, and because he does Crystal Ball, he does a very unique thing. That is a very good reason to interview him. But what I generally see is that people who are in academia, who have never actually worked in politics end up filling the space and a lot of stories and I get it, I've done it as a journalist a trillion times where I'm like, 'Okay, I need to plug in a quote on something.' It's very easy to get an academic into the story. But personally, I would rather have somebody who actually worked in pol--. I mean, this weekend I was, saw Elaine Luria, do a Canvas kickoff in Virginia Beach, there was a 23 year old field organizer that got up, who knocked doors all day for eight hours, I'd rather have that person in the story. That person that knocks doors for eight hours, is talking to voters and knows what the voters are talking about. And they're probably talking about gasoline prices and grocery prices. I'd rather have that person in any academic that you could name.
Michael Pope
Well, I have to say, this part of your list I took umbrage at because I've spent a lot of time talking to college professors and quoting them, and there are, there's a number of good reasons for that. I mean, oftentimes what happens with with me personally, is, I've got data and I want somebody to react to it, or I've got knowledge of something that's happened, and I want people to react to it. And that list that, you know, the short list of college professors, a couple of things about them: One is they're likely to return your call very quickly. I mean, there is a reason that you find that this small handful of college professors who are frequently quoted is because they email you back immediately, and they return your call immediately. There are other college professors who could be quoted if they were faster to return calls and emails. So there's that and then also just reacting to stuff. You know, like, I've got all these campaign finance documents, and numbers, and I need somebody who's nonpartisan, who's not a D, not an R, to react to them and provide context to them. And so these college professors actually are really good at providing context and seeing the bigger picture and saying stuff that's worth hearing. In my humble opinion.
Lauren Burke
Yeah, I've I've certainly done that. Where, okay, certainly on the on the question of having your phone calls return, that I totally hear you. I mean, I've worked in news organizations where it was a small startup, and nobody returned a call, or ABC News and everybody's returning. So that's a big thing, particularly for broadcast because you have that set amount of time in which you have to file something. But for example, I just wrote something for The Guardian on security at the US Capitol. And I had talked to the police chief, he's got a 40 year career in law enforcement. And I talked to 15 US Capitol police officers, some off the record, some on background, some on the record. Well, who better to know what to ask the chief than members of the US Capitol Police (full disclosure, I'm dating a US Capitol police officer as well, but he was part of the story). But the point is, you know, they gave me some great questions to ask the Chief. So when we're talking about the type of stuff that you cover, my I totally understand because politics. So data analysis, and policy analysis is really essential. So a college professor would be really good for that. But when you're doing something that's a little bit more of maybe of a deep dive, I just think that what happens is a lot of journalists just sort of fall into the pattern of just calling the same people and those people tend to be college professors.
Michael Pope
Alright, on to number eight. Number eight is suppressing inconvenient information, leaving out stuff to drive a narrative. Lauren, what are you talking about here?
Lauren Burke
Yeah, that happens all the time. So obviously, on the right, the ecosystem of the media on the right, that was created, right after really President Obama was elected, and Breitbart came along, and we ended up with Daily Caller, and sort of a more politically, right leaning Fox News, which has now just become a PR firm for Donald Trump and the RNC. They just leave things. I mean, you know, you we see it, where they just Caller out the work of the January 6 committee that just doesn't exist anymore. On the left, what you see is, the same-- wouldn't say the same thing--but certainly MSNBC has sort of become the DNC channel that certain narratives they just don't want to talk about. I mean, we had a we had an assassination threat on an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. Okay. And that was on page 20 of the New York Times. I mean, the idea that we're not talking about that, I can't imagine MSNBC would not have talked about that, if that was Sonia Sotomayor or Katanji Brown Jackson talked about it for weeks. So the suppressing of incoming information is sort of couched in. And we'll get to this in a minute, a sort of political narrative of just not wanting to discuss certain things that are uncomfortable. You know, because there is, in fact, unfortunately, I think, a growing trend in particularly political journalism to be on the right or on the left, instead of focusing on what the truth is in any given story.
Michael Pope
You know, I know we're gonna talk about narrative later. But I mean, this sort of gets into that discussion. And one thing that I noticed was really interesting, the, during one of the recent January 6 commission meetings, I'm always flipping the channels to see what people are talking about. And so you know, at all most of the news channels, of course, are talking about the January 6 committee, this is the day of one of their hearings, and then you flip over to Fox and they're talking about Jill Biden's comments about the breakfast taco right like they're not talking about the January 6 Commission there. It was all breakfast taco all day and I actually have a lot of family members that watch Fox News and their their view of the world is shaped by this sort of stuff. So they can tell you all about the breakfast taco comment and Joe Biden and, you know, possibly even Hispanic voters and however you want to interpret the breakfast taco comment. But they can't tell you anything about, you know, the involvement of the Oathkeepers in the insurrection.
Lauren Burke
Exactly, right. Exactly right.
Thomas Bowman
And it's far more prevalent on the political right than on the political left, but the political left is catching up. You started seeing that with the blogs. And at one point, the liberal wing dominated the blogosphere. And then the right wing caught up and then the right wing jumped ahead on TV. And the left wing is now trying to catch up. It's got things like The Young Turks, it's got, you know, other really small outlets, but they do not have the pickup that Fox News has. And by the way, one professor, you quote all the time, Michael, Stephen Farnsworth at the University of Mary Washington put out a report that said, people who watch Fox News are worse informed than if they had consumed no news at all. And he's got all this like academic data and whatnot. But that goes to show you that, like Fox News is not news or entertainment. And they even argued that in court that no serious person would consider them actual news.
Lauren Burke
Wow.
Thomas Bowman
All right. Well, number seven is hot air speaking of you say a lot of today's journalism is based on one person saying something and then everyone else jumping on it when it's not necessarily based on facts or documents or anything hard, more than just somebody saying something that may not even be true. So how can people identify journalism based on hot air?
Lauren Burke
Well, it really depends on what type of story on what type of journalism we're talking about. So if I was writing a piece on the Virginia Senate or some piece of legislation, and I'm quoting champion, Senator Peters, Senator, Senator Lucas, you could argue, I guess that's based on hot air, but I'm quoting them because I'm getting their opinion on a piece of legislation. When we're talking about things that require investigation, I think it's a really bad idea to only go on hot air. The reason I sort of brought this up for this list was, as somebody who has consulted several people in politics, this has been a problem since the me to movement start in 2017. And not just for my consultancy, will Lieutenant Governor Fairfax. But I saw this right at the very beginning, we had a completely false story against Congressman Scott, where it was just it was reported, like somebody says something that was reported. And it turned out that Congressman Scott was actually the first target of Jack Burkman, who is a professional liar, who just gets up at a, you know, a hotel in Alexandria and lies and lied about him and lied about, you know, Elizabeth Warren and Pete Buttigieg. And, you know, Bob Muller and a bunch of other people now, we didn't know it at the beginning. But those stories were written completely on hot air. I mean, nobody was looking at anything. And it turned out in one case that, you know, one person had an allegation that she leveled, where she leveled the exact same allegation in the city of Chicago and in the city of Washington, DC. So of course, when the reporters saw those documents, they then you don't realize that this is a hoax. But my point is that like, so much, because this is such a moment in time for journalism, of content, no matter what it's like, everyone needs content, they need more and more content, we need 24 hours of content. I mean, when I started journalism, the cycle was the cycle of the newspaper, which was roughly 24 hours. Now, there effectively is no news cycle. This is a continuous stream of information, either through Twitter or Facebook, or just the internet platforms that the media runs. So going on hot air is something that is happening a lot more than it was let's say 20 years ago.
Michael Pope
All right. On to number six elitism. You say a lot of today's journalists went to elite schools and they live they live sheltered lives, and they don't know anything about poverty or housing insecurity. So their journalism on those issues suffers is the fourth estate a bunch of elitist?
Lauren Burke
Ah, well...
Thomas Bowman
Loaded question, Michael.
Michael Pope
I say that as someone who graduated from Florida State University in Tallahassee, Florida.
Thomas Bowman
Yeah, and lives in Old Town, Alexandria...
Lauren Burke
Well, we in this area are certainly privileged. I mean, this is one of the wealthiest areas in the country. Um, I grew up in New York, my mother's from Virginia, rural Virginia, actually, but... What I found when-- I guess I'm scarred from the fact that when Cokie Roberts hired me at ABC News, you know, over 20 years ago, I was working around a bunch of people who were definitely... I mean, there's a lot of ivy league, a lot of celebrities. A relative of Kennedy was working at ABC at the time. You know... So what ends up happening is you'll see a bunch of stories about, you know, au pairs and extensions on people's houses. And then, you know, when I see people like, say, Ned Oliver, his reporting, very blue collar reporting about what normal blue collar people deal with in their normal lives... You know, and I know he's at Axios now--we'll see if he continues that. But when people talk about housing insecurity, when they talk about grocery prices, when they talk about the bread-and-butter issues. Those are the things a lot of times that I think a lot of people in media tend to not want to report about. It's not seen as exciting, it's not seen as the thing that's going to get clicks, but we got, you know, 40 million people in poverty in the United States. And it's hard for me to believe that those types of stories would not get attention if they were reported on.
Thomas Bowman
Yes. And that also varies greatly based off what type of news source you're talking about here. Because places like the Roanoke Times and The Richmond Times Dispatch, and local media spend a lot of time on local issues like that, such as housing and whatnot. But it doesn't often connect toward big picture national issues at top level, I'm just making stuff up like CNN and MSNBC, or even Fox, just to name a few. You get some of the stuff in places like the Washington Post and The New York Times. But again, print media is so limited on what it can do, because those column inches are actually not very long. Even if you get a whole page dedicated to your story. It's actually not huge. Not a lot of writing and not a lot of time for going in depth and exploring complex issues. And so, and TV is even shorter, you get about two minutes.
Lauren Burke
Right. That's right. It's a very hard broadcast. It really is because the level of nuance is very low, because you just don't have the time and and it was shocking if a piece is over four minutes, that would be like a feature, you know, so that's right.
Thomas Bowman
All right. Well, we got to take a break, we're halfway through Lauren Burke's top 10 list of issues comms directors need to look out for with today's journalists. When we come back, we'll discuss the dangers of reporters trying to push a political narrative while failing to seek input from both sides. Plus, she'll explain how a lack of investigation is harming today's journalism. And she'll reveal her number one issue people need to look out for with today's journalists. We'll be right back.
Michael Pope
And we're back on Pod Virginia. We're joined by Lauren Burke of the Burkefile podcast. And she's explaining to us the top 10 issues communications directors need to be aware of with today's journalists. Okay, Lauren, let's get on to number five on your list. You say many reporters these days are trying to push a political narrative. Why do you think so many reporters think they're on the Op Ed page?
Lauren Burke
Well, I do think that what has actually happened is that everyone recognizes that the Op Ed pages opinion writing is getting a lot of traffic. So what that really I think encourages is more opinionated and more sharp writing. And of course, we saw that and sort of learn that from Facebook, and Facebook is making a lot of money off of division and conflict. So it follows that the media industry, that's been sort of suffering from the fact that the ads are going to Google and Facebook, has to counter that somehow. And part of how you counter that is divisiveness in the reporting and conflict reporting. What I think we see a lot of is in the narrative of a lot of pieces a sort of conflict that goes on in a political way that I think we didn't see before. It seemed like maybe about 10 or 15 years ago, most reporting was almost always a sort of inverted pyramid environment who, what, when, where and why and how type of thing. Now, it's there's more of a 'I'm going to get an opinion into this narrative.' And certainly on the right. We see that quite a lot. I just keep harping on Fox News, but Fox News has really become nothing more than a mouthpiece of the Republican Party and the RNC. And not much more than that. And even though I do have friends of Fox News, in fact, I have really good reporter friend of mine in Chad Pergram, who covers Capitol Hill...
Michael Pope
He's great.
Lauren Burke
Yeah. He's fantastic. And so I can't say everybody, certainly, but when you put in the anchor chair a commentator... I mean, Sean Hannity is a commentator, Tucker Carlson is a commentator, that's a very interesting thing to think about when we think about today's journalists.
Michael Pope
You know, on the issue of Op Ed writing, true story, full confession. I used to be an op ed writer early in my career in Florida. I was hired to be part of the editorial board for the local newspaper in Tallahassee, and I used to work with the publisher to write the editorials, you know, on the editorial page, and I was an op ed columnist. And I did that for a number of years before I realized it was not for me. And the reason for that is because the first thing you kind of have to do is figure out what your opinion is, and then have everything else revolve around your opinion. And I always got stuck on that part. Like I, in fact, took me a long time to realize this, but there are lots of things in this world I just don't have an opinion on, and I'm never gonna have an opinion on it. And I'm kind of one of these, you know, the shades of grey people. Well, what about this? And what about that? What about the other thing? And what are those people say? And so I've been writing, it's actually not as easy as it might seem.
Lauren Burke
Absolutely. And I, you know, I have to say, as somebody who's worked in politics, and in journalism, every time I get a journalism job, I tell people straight up, you know, I've worked in partisan politics, like, you know, I'm always surprised at, "Oh okay, that's fine." You know, like, I know, we get a reaction like, "Well, no, yeah, we can't do this..." which is what I would get 20 years ago. But to me to have an opinion, I actually think at this point, we should just be admitting our biases openly because it's pretty obvious. I mean, if you watch MSNBC, you know, Joy Reid is leaning left, you know, Chris Hayes is leaning left. So it's like, why are we playing this game of acting like, the people don't have opinions or not, don't have views about what they're reporting on. So it is an interesting situation. And you saw NPR change their policy with regard to allowing their reporters to go to political events. And I remember working in USA Today we had the exact same policy, you could not attend a political event, period end story. And now news organizations would start to get a little bit more lenient about that.
Thomas Bowman
One reason for that is the industry as a whole is moving away from its previous inclination to be a neutral observer of facts and events-- you know, the Walter Cronkite model of news media--and moving toward the realization that it's not possible to be a neutral observer, generally speaking, when you see evil happening in the world. There's moral questions like, "should you even be a neutral observer?" or pretend like you're trying to be a neutral observer when you're not. And so younger journalists are starting to move toward acknowledging their own positions. And then that also gets fed upon by algorithms, I think like Twitter, where Twitter is for two things: 1) disseminating news as a reporter; 2) dunking on people. That's all Twitter is for, and the way you drive more views and more clicks to your website that you're trying to drive people toward, requires engagement, and people commenting on that post and people and the algorithm favors outrage, unfortunately.
Michael Pope
You know, we've seen a huge shift in recent years in terms you're talking about this sort of Walter Cronkite model, and people moving away from that. And I would say there are still lots of people that want to be in that Walter Cronkite model. However, the world that we live in has kind of forced people to use a word like "lie." I mean, in the past few years, we have seen a very sharp change. And the way people openly use the word, "lie," to talk about election lies, you see that in the newspaper all the time, and on the front page of the newspaper, and that that's a word you didn't used to see, several years ago. So there definitely has been a shift there.
Lauren Burke
Totally agree. All right.
Thomas Bowman
All right, well, let's move on. Because number four on your list, are journalists who don't talk to both sides. And this seems kind of like a no brainer. But you say it happens and journalists don't often make the effort to reach out to both sides of an issue. What's going on here?
Lauren Burke
Oh, yeah. So I mean, part of what I've been doing, and what I was doing as a communications consultant, of course, involve crisis management. And as you guys probably know, in the audience probably knows, I was the comms director for lieutenant governor of Virginia, Justin Fairfax, and 2019. And so when everything broke off with Governor Northam and everything else, we lead to this moment a few months later, when CBS and Gayle King decides to interview his accusers. We didn't know anything about it. So we get we get like through this through the grapevine I get a call, like, late at night about, hey, you know, are you aware that Gayle King is going to interview lieutenant governor's accusers? So of course, I called Gayle King, I text Gayle King, I said, "Gail, you realize that there's a lot of things you really need to ask that has not been reported, as you may not know about that you might want to ask for this interview." And that was a great example of a few things, I think, political narrative in journalism, and also just sort of this sort of almost a little tinge of activism. You know, I mean, we've seen it we saw it a little bit with the Johnny Depp Amber Heard case where you had the ACLU writing an op-ed for Amber Heard and nobody at the Washington Post disclosing that. Of course, that is the op-ed section so it's a little bit different than say, what would be considered straight reporting But there was a sort of this attitude of, "Ah, we know what happened here, we don't really have to check anything." CBS, of course, has an amazing investigative unit at 60 minutes, which is not to be confused with Gayle King's show. But as somebody who had been talking to her for three months, I was really surprised that they didn't tell us anything about the interview. So it really to me, I later found out that there was a there's some sort of partnership between Time's Up, which is basically Me Too, and CBS that resulted out of the Les Moonves / Charlie Rose situation... So you know, I get why it happened now, but I was pretty shocked, just from a journalistic standpoint, that in that case, they didn't just say, "Hey, you know, we're doing these interviews, what do you have to say? What should we be asking?" I mean, when you investigate, what you find is that when you do investigative journalism, it really does help to say to somebody, look, 'what what should we be asking here,' because there's just things that you're not going to know particularly when you're talking about things that are 20 years and 15 years old. So that was my example with that.
Michael Pope
So you know, on this issue of not reaching out to both sides, a couple of things about this. One is when I work with young journalists, they often so I'll give you a good example of this. So like if you are putting together a story about how Senator Saslaw takes a lot of money from predatory lenders, and then you do all the research to pull together the campaign finance documents that show all the campaign finance numbers, and then you talk to the people who have opinions about whether or not campaign that predatory lending should influence elected officials. And then you reach out to the predatory lenders. And of course, they don't return your phone calls. At some point, you got to call the Senator. And that's not an easy conversation. And a lot of young journalists don't want to do that. This is, you know, part of the this is part of the job is actually calling people and having difficult conversations. I will say I've recently had my own experience with this. I was on the other side of this, because there's a Republican candidate for Congress up here in Northern Virginia, Karina Lipsmann, who when she was trying to get the nomination to run against Don buyer, she said that Anthony Fauci should be jailed. And I reached out to her to get her explanation for why she said that, and she didn't return my calls, and she didn't return my emails. And so I wrote about her saying this during the campaign, and then she won the campaign, and I reached out to her and I'm trying to get her to answer my questions about why she thinks Fauci should be jailed and had a conversation with her Campaign Manager, and they did not want to talk to me, they did not want to put her on the record. So I wrote a story about how she's now the candidate and she says, Fauci should be jailed, and she doesn't want to answer questions about Fauci being jailed. So then, this organization called townhall.com, writes a story about me. The headline is reporter obsessed with dragging down congressional candidate for offhand comment Fauci should be jailed. Alright, the reason I bring all this up is this reporter never called me like she wrote a whole story about me, and, you know, my reporting about this congressional campaign. I'm in the lead of the story. I'm in the headline, they didn't reach out to me at all. And so I guess this is a thing now.
Lauren Burke
Right? Oh, wow. That is amazing. That is-- that is amazing. You know, and also, you see in that where the news organization is acting as some sort of publicist for a politician, what is that? You know, like, what, right, right there? Like, what is that
Thomas Bowman
Important to point out Townhall's a Trump venture, by the way. You know, I actually have a slightly different take and nuanced view. Because yeah, I totally agree, on the whole, that every story needs to be fair and balanced. But not every issue has an equal and opposite other side. I would point to climate change for one. For a long time, the bias on the reporter side was, what are Republicans saying? What are Democrats saying, If you interview a Democrat, you have to interview a Republican. But if one person is saying climate change is factually happening, right, and it's factually caused by humans, and they've got science behind it. There is not an equivalent opposite side to that to deny it, just because it comes out of the mouth of a Republican. Yeah. And there are other issues like that. But I...
Michael Pope
I would actually add to that. We have actually seen a change in the past few years about exactly what you're talking about Thomas is that reporters are reluctant now to seek out the the anti-climate change argument and those opinions are out there. And you could definitely get them on the phone. I can get them on the phone today and quote them. That would be irresponsible to do, and I would agree with that. I would add to that race and racial issues. You know, like, during the debate about whether or not we should remove Confederate statues or during the debate about the one of the white supremacist that lived here in Old Town, it would be pretty easy to get a white supremacist on the phone and quote them in my story about racial issues and Confederate statues. And the white supremacist guy who lives in Old Town being harassed. And is that responsible? Is that a responsible thing to do? I mean, those opinions are out there. You know, platforming them people are having sort of a different thought about the wisdom of platforming those people.
Lauren Burke
Yeah, you know, it's funny you say the thing about the platforming, and, you know, Thomas, your point is really well taken about issues that don't have any something like the Uvalde shooting. I mean, there's no two sides to that the guy walked in and murdered 21 People like I'm not looking for two sides on something like that at all right? So first, we know what the facts are, we saw them. This is not really anything to talk about. But, you know what I'm starting to hear? No. in terms of consultancy, what I get a lot of times is journalists who have decided in their head that there's no other side. And so I've decided that this is what this is, I've come to a conclusion, this person did this thing. And therefore, there's no reason for me to talk to this person, because I would be platforming that person. Now that starts to get into the realm of PR. That starts to get into the realm of just, 'I want to report report a certain thing and ignore other facts.' So it's a very interesting situation that I see building and getting more and more popular as we go on.
Michael Pope
All right, number three on your list is journalists who don't bother investigating stuff. You say journalists often don't vet information, and that comms directors need to fill that void and vet the information for them. What are you talking about here?
Lauren Burke
Well, you better believe it. I mean, there's so many times where I feel like, that's comp first. And I was effectively writing the story. Now, sometimes this is understandable, because there's certain information that journalists could not possibly be privy to, or, you know, have access to. And certainly as I don't need to tell you guys, the foil laws in Virginia are terrible. And, you know, they're, they're the worst, the worst in the country, probably. And as somebody who's FoId, like, I had the foil one time some court records in Chicago, and thankfully, Cook County. And I mean, they turned that around in 10 days, and it was a lot of documents. And so stuff like that is not the journalist fault. And and sometimes, again, as a comms person, you have the documents, you have access, you have to show them I remember having to show, you know, phone records to the Washington Post, well, there was no way they could have could have had that. But when I'm when I'm talking about like public documents that are in the public domain, like podcast, or, you know, court records, that would not be hard to get, and which in a lot of jurisdictions, they're not hard to get. It depends, of course, but certainly if they're not in Virginia, they're not hard to get. So my point, though, is that I don't see a lot of investigative effort. A lot of times I see people coming to a conclusion, and then I show them all these investigative documents, and they're like, "wow, you know, do I really have to add that?" And I'm like, "Yeah, you really have to add that." These are these are not this is not my opinion, this is not my these are not my feelings. These are documents. This is something that was documented in real time and you know, 2008. So that is something that I'm finding, again, in the Twitter environment that we are where people want things very quickly--want to turn things around very quickly--I think that's where a lot of new journalists are coming up in their use of that quick, quick turnaround and not used to the Carroll Lenning standard of journalism, where you're going through a bunch of documents all day. So I do think that's becoming a problem.
Thomas Bowman
All right, number two on your list is defamation. So the law in the United States allows journalists to say almost anything about public figures. This works differently with people who are not public figures. But if you are an elected official, or you're running for office, or you're a cabinet secretary or a Hollywood star, a journalist has a legal right to say almost anything about you because winning a libel case in court requires proving actual malice, which is next to impossible. So what do people need to know about defamation law? Lauren?
Lauren Burke
Well, I think what they need to know is that I will say this to all the elected officials who probably already know this, who are listening to this podcast. I mean, as the law stands now, it's virtually impossible for an elected official to win a defamation case and in the world that we live in now... So when Times v. Sullivan was established during the 60s, and it came out of a good place, they would try to stop effectively racist actors from suing civil rights folks for defamation for criticizing them. So it comes from a good place, but in the media world that we live in now, or somebody can throw something on Twitter, and blow somebody up with something that is false information. It doesn't work as well. And I actually predict the Times v. Sullivan is going to fall within like the next two or three years, because certainly...
Michael Pope
Ouch. Oh no.
Lauren Burke
...Yeah. I would absolutely say that because what it will absolutely require is for journalists to be a lot more finicky about proving and verifying what they publish. I'm not sure, by the way, that's a bad thing. Because, from my perspective, what I've seen a lot of times as things get into print, and I'll do a podcast on this on Burkefile at some point that were just not true. And they're in print, you know, and it was just nothing because it was elected official, there was no way to win that.
Michael Pope
A good example to look at here is the British media where these laws work very differently. And it's way easier to prove that someone put something in the newspaper that harmed you. And so the lines are very different. So it doesn't harm British media, which is actually thriving and very strong. But at the same time, you know, the British journalists live in constant fear of being sued by, you know, defaming somebody.
Thomas Bowman
I've actually got direct experience from the crisis communication side, where I've seen a news outlet, a trusted news outlet, actually abuse, this ability of theirs to say, basically anything they want about a public figure. In Tennessee, there's a news outlet in Nashville that has an investigative reporting unit that was looking into what they decided were corrupt judges. There was one actual corrupt judge, and they decided the whole, they needed to push a narrative because they needed something to investigate. And so they, found an issue that-- rather, than completely manufactured an issue against our client at the firm, and made up a completely false narrative that they actually had evidence and plenty of documentation showing that, not only was it not true, but this there was no story there. But because they needed to publish something. And because they were trying to get eyeballs, and it was sweeps week, they ran with the story anyway, and completely defamed our client. And when she asked us what can we do? Unfortunately, the answer is, well, nothing legally against that outlet, because they have a complete right to say that. And they can always just fall back on that their perception.
Michael Pope
Did you end up getting a correction out of them?
Thomas Bowman
No. In fact, they kept going and made it worse, but then the judge won her election anyway. And that's an eight year term that will have long since blown over.
Michael Pope
Yeah, well, the counterbalance to all of what we're talking about here is the reputation of the news organization. So I mean, like, you know, if you're a news organization, you want to jealously guard your reputation as being a truth teller. And so you don't want to be in a situation where you are labeling or slandering people.
Thomas Bowman
It was, like, a CBS outlet. [Editor’s note: Actually, it was Scripps.]
Lauren Burke
Wow.
Michael Pope
Well, okay, so Well... On to the number one issue. Lauren, you say comms directors need to know about today's journalist forced narrative, you say a lot of journalists today are not really doing reporting. They're trying to craft a narrative. What should people be looking out for here?
Lauren Burke
Well, if you were a comms director, now, you really should be looking out for any journalists who's trying to effectively create a story that not necessary, so thoroughly a story. And then, and then we are going to create this thing that is going to be what we're going to write about anyway, that happens all the time. And it's really nothing you can do about it. Because at the end of the day, journalists covered properly by the First Amendment. I totally believe in the First Amendment. I just will say to people, make sure that what you're writing is accurate, and it's true, make sure that it happened. And that shouldn't be that difficult in the world we live in with regard to text, email, and everything else that we have to verify that things actually happened. But forced narrative happens all the time. We see it all the time. It's a result of the partisan world that we live in politically that the media, I think, is following along. I think on the right, they do it better than what happens...what we see on the left. The left has a lot of catching up to do on forced narrative. But unfortunately, there is a lot of forced narrative out there.
Michael Pope
So give us an example of how this might be negative. I think a lot of the times when I see narrative in, you know, the New York Times or that sort of thing. They're trying to explain the bigger picture. So this is not a story about an incremental, microscopic thing that has happened. This is a larger picture that shows you the sweep of things. And I think so, actually, you pointed out actually an example of this, which is the Biden's new press secretary, is she having a rough time in her first few weeks of being press secretary or not? And you know, obviously everybody's got an opinion about that. So I mean, I, you know, if the narrative. I mean, there are two ways of going about that. One is you decide what the narrative is. And then you ask people about the narrative, or ask the question is more of an open ended way. So I mean, you could call up people and say, Hey, is she is she having a really rough time? And her first few weeks are press secretary, or you can call people up and say, "What do you think her performance is?" And so you actually don't know what the question is. You just see the the final result there. But yeah, so that's an example of what you're talking about here.
Lauren Burke
That was an example of well, we're gonna write about Karine Jean-Pierre there. She's having a rough time. So that's what we're writing about. Like, that's we we've decided that she's having a rough time. So she's having a rough time.
Michael Pope
What could have been it could have been that they what they decided was, she was a new press secretary, let's ask people about what they think her performance is. And it's possible, most people that they asked said she's having a rough time, that is also a possibility. Right?
Lauren Burke
I'll give you a Virginia example, which happened last year. Okay. So first, I think it was the first debate. It was in April. We have five candidates running on the Democratic side. The moderator of the debate was Barbara Ciara. She writes, he talks about racial justice questions. She says, "Hey, everybody, let's talk about George Floyd and the 2020 racial reckoning..." And of course, all four candidates answer Terry McAuliffe says, "hey, you know, I think everybody should be treated fairly." Delegate Foy says, "Hey, I have two black sons. And of course, I'm gonna have to give them the speech." And then Senator McClellan says, "Look, my parents are traumatized by Emmett Till-- the killing of Emmett Till." Lieutenant Governor brings up his situation says, "Look, I was falsely accused and you guys, you know, came out and assumed my guilt immediately." All right, next day in Washington Post, the fourth false, the forced narrative, in my view, was the headline, "Justin Fairfax criticized for comparison to George Floyd and Emmett Till at debate." Well, that was based on Twitter. So the Washington Post in that moment decided that's what they were going to write. And if you look at what the New York Times and The Huffington Post wrote, they wrote just what happened, you know, he said this, then she said that, and this is why he said this, because this happened in 2019. So you're basically telling an audience, that's probably not looking at the debate, "This is why this moment happened. This is why this tense moment happened." To me, what the Washington Post did was a a forced narrative by really good journalists, I don't want to I don't want to blame Greg Snyder for this, because he's a very good journalist.
Michael Pope
He's a great journalist,nd I would actually totally disagree with you here, Lauren, because I thought, I thought that moment really stood out as something that was a, you know, a blinking light, a kind of thing that broke up the monotony of the debate by hearing something that was kind of shocking. Because he did compare himself to George Floyd and Emmett Till. And I remember I used that audio on the radio the next morning, and we talked about it on the podcast. So it wasn't just the Washington Post with the forced narrative that was actually a blinking light that really stood out there.
Lauren Burke
Actually, what you did was you spoke in detail about exactly what happened. What the Washington Post did was they said, "Fairfax is being criticized on social media, because Whoo, he said something naughty." Which to me, The Washington Post is really a sort of PR firm, a little bit for Terry McAuliffe, very reluctant to criticize Terry McAuliffe. So I think in part what happened with Greg's editor, not Greg, but with his editor is they wanted to send sort of a story out that said, "Look, he said something conversely, he should not have said" that was really pointed specifically at former Governor McAuliffe. So now we're getting into, 'okay, we got to run a story that protects Terry McAuliffe,' instead of doing what you did, Michael, which is report, this moment that happened, that was a hot moment of debate that really, of course, should have been reported about. But I would just say go read how the New York Times did it. They said, Look, you know, Barbara Ciara is the one that brought this whole thing up. And then Emmett Till is brought up by Senator McClellan. Then the Washington Post put Senator McClellan in the piece as a critic of the Lieutenant Governor. So that's a political moment there. So this is about getting a story in that says, oh, what he says wasn't right. What I really don't like about it, frankly, which goes on in Virginia, political journalism all the time, is that nobody travels down to the black people of Hampton Roads, to listen to what they have to say about this. Everybody talks to everybody in NOVA and Richmond, and that is it. And I can assure you that if anybody actually asked anybody, where most of the black folks are in the Commonwealth of Virginia, they would have heard "Wow, I actually agree with what the Lieutenant Governor said." But since that doesn't happen, we have narrative instead of just factual reporting, which is another goal. I mean, so it's a different thing. And I just thought what Huffington Post did and what you did, and what the New York Times did was different than what the Washington Post did.
Thomas Bowman
Alright, well, let's leave it there. Lauren Burke of the Burkefile. Thank you so much for joining us.
Lauren Burke
Love it. Thanks a lot. Very interesting discussion and let's talk again soon.
