Whose fake news?

CHRIS HATZIS
Eavesdrop on Experts, a podcast about stories of inspiration and insights. It’s where expert types obsess, confess and profess. I’m Chris Hatzis. Let’s eavesdrop on experts changing the world - one lecture, one experiment, one interview at a time.

DONALD TRUMP SOUNDBITE COMPILATION

CHRIS HATZIS
Fake news. We just can't get away from it. It’s a new era for journalism and it's getting harder and harder for the public to distinguish between the real and the fake. False information can catch on and quickly spread thanks to our social media-driven world. The resulting reality is fascinating and polarising, perhaps even contributing to the rise in populism and demagoguery.

So what is the responsibility for journalists?

Our reporter Steve Grimwade caught up with Dana Milbank, nationally syndicated op-ed columnist with The Washington Post, to chat about fake news, the ethics of Wikileaks, Russian hackers, his experiences in covering American politics since 2000 and much more. Dana was recently in Melbourne as a guest of the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Melbourne.

STEVE GRIMWADE
I guess I'm interested in how you describe your own work as an op-ed columnist and how you perceive other people and how they describe your work as an op-ed columnist.

DANA MILBANK
Well, I have people describing my work in all kinds of ways that we wouldn't mention in a family podcast. All you need to do is look at social media or the comments section, and I have my supporters and I certainly have my detractors out there.

But that's - it doesn't matter so much, what matters is that people are reading it so it's fine by me if they're stirred up favourably or unfavourably. I look at what I do as just an extension of being a reporter, a journalist. I think people often make a real dichotomy between somebody who's writing an op-ed, an opinion writer, versus a straight news journalist.

But I think the best opinion writing is really just reported journalism that's based on talking with people, observing things, and then it just has an added point of view. I see it as a natural extension of news reporting; that's what I do now.

STEVE GRIMWADE
I've heard people describe what you do and op-ed columnists more generally as political theatre or as covering political theatre. Is that a fair description of what you're currently doing, is it fair of politics more generally, and if it is true, doesn't it reduce politics to pantomime?

DANA MILBANK
Well, I actually have in the past described what I do as writing about the political theatre, the theatrics of what we see in Washington. I modelled the column somewhat after the parliamentary sketches. I used to be a London correspondent, for The Wall Street Journal, and I liked the way they wrote about parliament there - obviously, we have a different governing system - so I tried to do something similar to that there. Obviously, I do a great deal more than just writing about whatever theatrics are occurring that day.

Also, in the Trump era it's not - I think the label probably doesn't apply as well because everything has now become one big theatre. To me, everybody says oh, you must be having so much fun, it's such a crazy, funny time but things are so consequential that I don't find it amusing or funny at all. There are certainly funny elements of what the President does and the people around him, but they're very - it's causing very serious problems for our country and for the world. I guess what I'm saying is I do agree with you that the notion of saying it's just about theatre now reduces it and doesn't recognise the very serious consequences of what's going on.

STEVE GRIMWADE
Has it changed dramatically just with Trump, and has it gone from even Shakespearian theatre to now to just broad entertainment?

DANA MILBANK
Well, there has always been an element of this in American politics and probably in your politics as well. I've seen - I arrived in Washington, I think it was 1995, and things I thought then had really fallen apart. We'd begun to lose the notion of working together, bipartisan cooperation, consensus building. But of course, now you look back those were the good old days and things have continued to deteriorate through the Clinton Administration, the Bush Administration, the Obama Administration, now the Trump Administration.

Things are much worse under Trump, but he's - basically what he did is he exploited the system we have that's all about celebrity and entertainment and branding. So he is the logical extreme of what we've been setting up all along the way.

STEVE GRIMWADE
You mentioned before an English correspondent that you were modelling yourself on. What was it about that correspondent that you wanted to capture?

DANA MILBANK
It was less a - I mean there were guys like Matthew Parris in London, but it wasn't any particular correspondent. It's the notion of the sketch writer, that you're basically creating a visual sketch with your words to describe, to give people a portrait of what's happening, in their case in parliament, in my case what's happening at the White House in the capital, at the Supreme Court and other venues around Washington to give people a picture of what's actually happening, to give them more insight.

STEVE GRIMWADE
You do that very well indeed, and just recently at a lecture at the University of Melbourne you spoke about doing a piece on Trump, and indeed on visiting the Trump Hotel, and you then recited this list of items that were in your room at the Trump Hotel and where they'd come from. The list is extensive and there's not many made-in-the-US-of-A products in that room. So you make a great investigative reporter, turning things over, but it was the humour, it's the irony, it's your perspective that makes it an op-ed piece. How do your own views and your own narrative style inform your work?

DANA MILBANK
Well, I did go through that entire room and I think the only thing made in the United States was the chocolates, so he did have something there that was American-made. I think ideally I like to find the absurd but not for the sake of absurdity, the ideas, you use that to illustrate a larger point. In that case it wasn't just to point out everything here comes from another country, it's the notion of hypocrisy that here is this man running as a protectionist to make sure everything is made in America and well, his company has the option - all the things in that room are also made in America, he just decided to purchase them, as everybody else does, from China and from India and a lot of them from Europe. I'm not sure there were any Australian-made goods in the room, but that was an oversight that I hope they correct.

STEVE GRIMWADE
Your presidential voting record is unique, if what I've heard is correct. I believe you claim to vote for the best person that's not on the ticket. Is that correct?

DANA MILBANK
It has been for many years. I just figured rather than declare allegiance or loyalty in an election - some of my colleagues don't vote. Of course, we don't have to in the United States, and a large number of people don't, but I feel it's a civic duty to vote, and I do vote for offices down the ballot, but what I like to do is write in who I think would be a terrific president, and there's been a mixture of those.

Now, I have to say in this last election when it was a choice of Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton I did vote for Clinton because again, I think we're in completely uncharted territory here and I just felt that my voice needed to be saying no, I'm voting against Donald Trump rather than just a symbolic write-in. I live in the District of Columbia where more than 90 per cent of the votes are Democratic anyway so it's something of a throwaway.

STEVE GRIMWADE
Is it important for journalists or op-ed writers to pledge their allegiance to a particular party?

DANA MILBANK
Well, no, I think - I have no allegiance to a particular party nor to a particular candidate. I have allegiance to certain ideas, but the things I feel passionately about are making the government work.

So in a way I'm a bit of a raging centrist who objects to extremes on both sides. More and more recently, and particularly in the Trump era, things, particularly on the right in our politics have really gone off the deep end, so that makes everybody seem more ideological, but the truth is even many of the conservative commentators in Washington and at The Washington Post are virtually as hostile to Trump as I am.

STEVE GRIMWADE
I think you distinguish well between those that support Trump and Republicans in general.

DANA MILBANK
Yeah. There's a reflex to support the party line and you see that with Republicans in Congress, but the intellectual conservatives were never with Trump, they were never Trumpers in the first place. You can now begin to see that with health care and other things that they're just - they're not openly defying Trump and bickering with him or arguing with him but they are withholding support and you can sort of see less and less cooperation. They're not afraid of him anymore. Republicans I think have been successful to some extent at separating themselves from Trump, just because he is such a unique figure and voters recognise that he's not a typical Republican, he's not typical of anything.

STEVE GRIMWADE
Just before you were talking about the fact that you took pride in being a centrist. Greg Marx, who is associate editor of the Columbia Journalism Review - and I'm quoting from Wikipedia so I hope this is incredibly wrong, but I've checked and I believe he's called you extravagantly contrarian. Does that mean you now wear that with pride?

DANA MILBANK
Well, that doesn't sound like an insult to me, but obviously taking the positions I do against what Trump is doing now is certainly not contrarian. It may have been early on, when he was running, I said let's not beat around the bush here, let's call Donald Trump a racist. That was I think contrarian at the time. I don't think people throw around the label that way but I think that's generally understood that he's been leading this demagogic campaign and it's continued through his presidency.

I don't want to be contrary for the sake of being contrary. What I do like to do is puncture people on all sides. The difficulty now is most of the offences against our democracy are occurring on one side.

STEVE GRIMWADE
Do you accept that there is partisanship in media? Is that an easy question to answer?

DANA MILBANK
Certainly there is, and that wasn't really always the case, in the United States particularly. I think it always has been in Europe but in modern times in the United States there were serious metropolitan newspapers, a few national newspapers and national networks that they might have had a slight leftward tilt but they were generally apolitical and prided themselves on that kind of neutrality.

The media have fragmented in the United States and elsewhere and now basically everybody can just through social media filter out views they don't want to hear and only get those views that they do want to hear. So it's highly fragmented and that emphasises the partisanship. So you'll have Fox News on one side beating the drums for Trump, you'll have MSNBC on the other side, publications like Breitbart News giving the Trump line, and there's equivalent liberal publications.

The Washington Post I think is seen as liberal because it has been very tough on Trump. It was tough on Obama, tough on Clinton and others before it, so it really depends on who's in power at the moment, and certainly our op-ed pages have always been fairly liberal.

STEVE GRIMWADE
Perhaps you're considered liberal if you actually aim for the truth, whatever that is.

DANA MILBANK
Well, the definition is a bit slippery and of course your conservatives are called Liberal conservatives here. Liberal became a dirty word in the United States, done by Reagan and the Bushes; now they've started calling themselves 'progressives' to get around that nomenclature problem. I think I'm mostly liberal in the sense of a liberal democracy that has strong institutions, checks and balances, a legislature, a strong rule of law and a free press and free expression. So in that sense, that's the liberalism I'm defending.

STEVE GRIMWADE
Many people now hypothesise that Trump is actually - actually believes what he's saying is the truth. Do you think that's true of those on Fox News as well? I hear these voices and I hear them being warriors for their cause. I'm not sure I believe that they believe what they're saying.

DANA MILBANK
Well, two different things there. I do think there's a case that when Trump is saying something that's completely untrue and people say he's a liar, I'm not sure he's a liar because I think he may believe that what he's saying is true. He may have trouble distinguishing between what is true and what he wishes were true, so I think he's in one category.

But with the commentators, I think so much of it is play-acting and playing a role and I think they know that they're spouting nonsense, and this can be true on both sides. But you feel like you need to say a certain thing, you need to have a certain amount of extremism or they won't want to have you on the air. So there's two different things there but I think people playing that part, feeding into the fragmented media.

STEVE GRIMWADE
We have what I think is a great weekly show on politics in Australia; it's called Insiders, where journalists of all stripes and politicians come to talk about the latest news. I remember Jay Rosen talking about this show as being emblematic of the problem that we have with political coverage that it's written by and for insiders. How much do you think this is true and do you think it's an issue?

DANA MILBANK
Well, I don't know about the show so I can't comment on that individually. There are constant attacks on insiders and elites in the establishment, at least in the United States, but typically it's done by other elites and members of the establishment just to try to discredit the other side.

People, some of us were arguing during the campaign that it's just wrong of Donald Trump to say I'm going to eliminate the $18 trillion of federal debt in my four-year term and I'm going to cut everybody's taxes and I'm not going to cut any spending. People will say you're an elitist or an insider to object to that false logic. So I think the label is just thrown around all the time.

That said, there certainly is a growing problem that Trump exploited in America with the growing inequality, particularly in rural areas in the middle of the country, there's a lot of people who have been left behind by economic progress because they don't have a high level of education. There is a real problem that I think a lot of the elites in America, of both parties, of all ideologies, are leaving those people behind. They have been forgotten. Trump said he would be their representative; I think he's done at least as poorly for them as everybody else has.

STEVE GRIMWADE
But this can't become a digital literacy or a media literacy program because that's not the job of journalists to be activists.

DANA MILBANK
No. I don't think we should be campaigning for anything. I don't think we should be arguing back, when Trump says we're the opposition or that we're the enemies of the American people, we should just do our jobs, do our best to report the truth and let others worry about the popularity contest.

The media have never been popular. We're certainly not now, but we never were. So I think rather than worrying about a beauty contest we should just break news and keep them honest.

STEVE GRIMWADE
There's an article from 2009 by Jeff Jarvis. It's entitled Product v. Process Journalism: The Myth of Perfection v. Beta Culture. I don't even want to go into the article, I like the title. I believe you're against process journalism. Maybe you could explain what's meant by the term and what you think it's doing to coverage.

DANA MILBANK
Yeah. Another way of naming it is horserace journalism, and that's much of what we do. We say who's ahead in the polls, is something being perceived favourably or not as opposed to the substance of things. This was particularly pronounced during the campaign when I think - I was arguing that no, no, Donald Trump is saying things that are false and a lot of people in the press were missing that point and saying well, that line of attack appears to be working so therefore it's acceptable.

I think people get swept up in what works rather than what's right, so they've lost their - they see it as apolitical or neutral but it's become I think amoral in a sense. It's he-said-she-said, but if he said that the moon is made of green cheese and she said it isn't, it's not a fifty-fifty story, somebody's right. It's not our job to just put out both points of view, it's also our job to say whether somebody is right or not.

STEVE GRIMWADE
You don't need climate change denialists up against 10 climate change accepters, the science has spoken.

DANA MILBANK
Right. That's one area where you seem to constantly - people feel that they need to have both sides represented, and it happens with Trump as well. It's been very hard to get the usual conservative commentators to defend what Trump's doing so they dig further into the bottom of the barrel and just find somebody who will defend him, even if they aren't particularly credentialed or expert in any way.

STEVE GRIMWADE
In your recent lecture you said that we're no longer surrounded by leaks, we have a flood on our hands. Can you talk about the significance of leaks now in political journalism, and indeed, the significance of someone likes James Comey who actually admitted to his leaks?

DANA MILBANK
Yes. I think this is a way that people are pushing back against what Trump's doing. There are multiple levels of leaks. A lot of the leaking is being done by Trump's top advisors in the White House because they want to get their point of view out there, also in hopes that Donald Trump himself will see this on Fox News or CNN or read it in The New York Times or Washington Post. So in a way, they're communicating with their boss anonymously through the media.

Then you have a lot of people in the federal bureaucracy who are opposed to what Trump is doing and alarmed about what he's doing, and particularly in the intelligence community which Donald Trump has taken on, and law enforcement, which he's also taken on. They're I would say doing their patriotic duty to get the truth out there about what's going on. That's why what Comey did I think was important, basically saying there is a place for leaks.

It doesn't mean giving away national secrets but it does mean getting the truth out there one way or the other, and James Comey was using the media basically to make sure a special prosecutor was named - successfully. I think that was a bold and patriotic thing to do.

STEVE GRIMWADE
Do you have an opinion on WikiLeaks's involvement in the last presidential election? Was Assange responsible for thinking about the context in which he was given all this information with regards to Clinton's emails?

DANA MILBANK
Yeah. I think WikiLeaks is a scourge and an awful thing for my country and for the world. When there's a responsible news organisation, we are - my colleagues are often given things that compromise national security, but before publishing it they make sure that they're not giving away sources and methods, other things that would enable and embolden the enemy, that would disrupt our alliances. The problem with WikiLeaks is it's not really leaks, basically it's stolen information that's being dumped out there in the public.

Is there some good that can come out of that? Certainly, they will find that needle in the haystack that actually does reform things, but I think it does a lot more damage than good. The notion that strategic leaks that are done to correct a wrong, as we're seeing right now in the United States with law enforcement and intelligence, is very important, the willy-nilly dumping of government secrets out there. Government secrets are kept for a reason, for national security reasons, and we at the Post try to be responsible about that.

STEVE GRIMWADE
Wouldn't some people argue that transparency cleans everything up in the first instance, and I've just butchered that cliché.

DANA MILBANK
Sure. We all say sunlight is the best disinfectant and all that, and of course I believe that. But do I believe that, for example, it's good for the United States to release the names and identities of all people who informed the CIA around the world? Of course I don't believe that's true. Should we be releasing information about our military that allows our terrorist opponents to exploit it? Should we release information about our homeland security that makes it easier for people to blow up our aeroplanes? No, of course not.

There's a public service and a public good involved, so transparency, if it's done to cause mass destruction I think is of course not what we need.

STEVE GRIMWADE
You've written "the hyper-competitive media environment is vulnerable to the sort of technique the Russian hackers used". I thought that fake news was born from the laptop of a Russian activist, but now the term is being used by everyone to describe any sort of disagreement, white lie, whatever, in the media. Does this render the term 'fake news' meaningless?

DANA MILBANK
I don't think it renders it meaningless. It's an attempt to do that. Basically, what we've seen is anytime Trump is accused of something he turns around and accuses his accusers of the same thing, and in this case fake news, alternative facts has been put out there.

But now we see Trump basically saying any story he disagrees with or is unflattering is fake news, and unfortunately I see your Prime Minister has taken after that as well. So no, in their sense fake news is that with which they disagree and fake news shouldn't be a term because it's not news if it's fake, that's propaganda. We've had this before and there's just new ways of disseminating propaganda because of social media and the web.

STEVE GRIMWADE
It may feel different but we're in the early days of the Trump presidency. How would you describe the current state of journalism? Is there a crisis?

DANA MILBANK
No. I think there has been a crisis that Trump exploited in terms of finding ways to work around the media and basically exploiting the media for I think $2 billion worth of free publicity during the campaign. But I think what you've seen since then is the media catching their balance, pushing back against these attempts to restrict press freedoms, this notion of being called the enemies of the American people.

So I think you do, you've seen a - I've called it a new golden age in American journalism with all of these leaks and the terrific scoops that my paper has done, The New York Times has done, and that really has been able to I think reverse a lot of the assaults that Trump has made on our democratic institutions.

STEVE GRIMWADE
What sort of advice would you give up-and-coming journalists?

DANA MILBANK
Go to law school. No, it's a tough business now financially - it was much easier when I started out -and it is, but if your heart's in it and you're willing to suffer some misery and some indignities, it is rewarding. I just encourage people to get out there and write, about whatever it is, whether it's the local police or the school board or business, sports, politics, but it's a rewarding line of work, if much less so than it was before.

STEVE GRIMWADE
Dana Milbank, thank you very much.

DANA MILBANK
It was my pleasure.

CHRIS HATZIS
Thanks to Dana Milbank, op-ed columnist for the Washington Post for telling it like it is, very much the opposite of fake news. And thanks to our reporter Steve Grimwade.

Eavesdrop on Experts, stories of inspiration and insights was made possible by the University of Melbourne. This episode was recorded on June 29, 2017. You’ll find a full transcript on the Pursuit website.

Audio engineering by Arch Cuthbertson. Production assistance by Claudia Hooper.

Still curious about the world? Visit our sister podcast Up Close which features in-depth and long-form conversations with seasoned researchers across many fields. And don't forget to check out the rest of the amazing content on the Pursuit website.

I’m Chris Hatzis, producer and editor. Join us again next time for another Eavesdrop on Experts.