Paige V Photography
A view from the annual conference of the Center for Journalism Ethics at UW-Madison.
In the weeks leading up to this year’s annual conference of the Center for Journalism Ethics, housed at UW-Madison’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication, late-night host Jimmy Kimmel was suspended for comments he made about Charlie Kirk’s assassin. This came just after Federal Communication Commission Chairman Brendan Carr threatened to revoke ABC’s broadcast license unless it gave Kimmel the boot, saying, “We can do this the easy way or the hard way.”
Around the same time the Department of Defense announced that reporters covering the Pentagon must pledge to report only news officially released by the agency. And Penn State’s affiliate PBS station, WPSU, said it would close, the first station to do so following President Trump’s $1.1 billion cut to public media.
It’s no wonder that Katy Culver, director of the Center for Journalism Ethics, said in her introductory remarks that this year’s conference title, “Journalism Ethics In A Fracturing World,” has never been “more apt” or the subject matter “more urgent.”
And never, perhaps, as pointed.
Sessions held Sept. 26 at the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery included “Spin, Lies and Disappearing Data,” “Building an Audience for Truth” and “The New Age of Censorship.” Playing off the censorship theme, the graphic for the conference was designed to look like a redacted document.
For his keynote address, “In Defense of Journalism,” Keith Woods, the former chief diversity officer at NPR, drew on a personal tale of loss and displacement from his Florida home due to flooding from Hurricane Helene.
“When a hurricane is coming your way your news consumption shrinks to the most trusted sources and the most basic information,” he said. “What is the latest storm track? Where can I get sand bags? You tune to local news. Check digital sites to see who has gas or water or who has plywood. You listen to your NPR station. You take guidance and comfort from familiar voices and trustworthy newsrooms. People and places you otherwise take for granted because they’ll always be there.”
He added: “Now will be a good time to mention that in four days the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, with no budget, no staff, and no congressional appropriation to disperse to the nation’s public radio and TV stations, will close its doors. Some stations will go dark. That’s a jolting sentence to write even in this year of jolting sentences. But maybe we could have seen that storm coming.”
Recalling that Donald Trump declared journalists the “enemy of the people” in 2017, at the start of his first administration, Woods offered a metaphor. The shutdown of CPB, he said, is to public radio journalism what a hurricane’s landfall is to the Gulf Coast: “inevitable, lamentable, devastating.”
Woods went on to cite a “litany” of forces journalism is “defending against,” including government overreach, censorship and retaliation. He said “malevolent winds” have blown away the “veneer of editorial integrity in some news organizations and contorted the flaccid backbones of networks and corporations such that they are in a permanent pose of subservience.”
In one example, he noted that ABC agreed to give $15 million to the president for his library rather than fight a lawsuit over mistakenly stating that Trump was found in a civil case to have sexually assaulted a columnist when it was actually sexual abuse.
The recent attacks on free speech were a recurring theme of the conference.
When asked to define today’s “new age of censorship,” Sewell Chan, senior fellow at the University of Southern California Annenberg Center on Communication Leadership and Policy, said it involved “distraction, deception, duplicity.” It’s a more “sophisticated” approach, he said, than the “highly oppressive, centralized state that is controlling what we read and listen to” fictionalized in George Orwell’s 1984.
It also includes a “veneer of openness,” Chan added, noting that when the White House started hand-picking reporters allowed in the press pool, it spun its efforts as allowing more voices into the mix.
Timothy Karr, senior director of strategy and communications for Free Press, said that while Trump largely failed to control the media in his first administration, he figured out where the “pressure points are” and now, with the help of the chairman of the FCC, is “pushing those points.”
The problem, Karr continued, is that “we have given so much control over our media systems to very powerful corporations that have extensive conflicts of interests.” Take Jeff Bezos, the billionaire founder of Amazon and owner of the Washington Post, who spiked the paper’s planned endorsement of Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris when he had bids out for federal government contracts worth billions of dollars for his space exploration company.
“So when you have a media system that is so consolidated, and you have media owners that are so dependent on government decisions — whether they be approval of a merger or whether they be government contracts — you’ll see that this supposed firewall that separates the newsroom from the corporate side break down and it’s breaking down in ways we’ve never seen before.”
As a result, added Karr, these organizations “simply can’t act as the fourth estate” to be a check against power and to inform people about how to engage in their democracy.
Jessica Yellin, founder of the social media platform News Not Noise, and Kara Swisher, tech writer and Vox podcaster, continued the conversation over media ownership and consolidation in their session, “Building an audience for trust.”
“It seems increasingly billionaires who care about getting a message out are the ones who are increasingly controlling traditional mass media,” Yellin told Swisher, who was recording the interview as part of her podcast.
What’s the goal of these billionaires, Swisher asked?
“Our founders protected the free press as the only private business in the Constitution that’s protected because it was seen as so vital to ensuring we have a durable democracy and informing our citizenry,” said Yellin. “So if the goal of the press is to ensure we have an informed citizenry, then buying up the press is to push one view of our country onto people. It’s to push a particular perspective on information.”
Skewed coverage by networks including Fox News, controlled by the Murdoch family, helps drive polarization and divisiveness, Yellin added. “It’s turning Americans on each other.”
Swisher played devil’s advocate, asking why it mattered given that “legacy media” — broadcast networks and major newspapers — are dying out.
Yellin replied that while legacy media might be less dominant and relevant to young people and others who get their news on social media, “a lot of what they’re getting is coming from people who are picking news from legacy [outlets].... They don’t know that those stories are fundamentally being shaped by choices that traditional media is making because it’s not just in story framing, it’s story choice.”
But the people “buying these dying institutions,” Yellin added, understand “they are creating the fundamental food that feeds everything in the ocean.”
