Every day, millions of Americans begin their days listening to the same voice. The New York Times’ podcast “The Daily” has become something of a cultural phenomenon, with over eight million listeners every month, and, as the show’s brand has grown, so has the ubiquity of the phrase that opens every episode: “From the New York Times, I’m Michael Barbaro.”

Tuesday night, the proprietor of the voice, Michael Barbaro himself, came to Washington University as the keynote speaker of Washington University Political Review (WUPR)’s event, “The Fake News Cycle: Searching for Truth in the Digital Age.”

Sydney Curtis | Student Life

New York Times journalist Michael Barbaro speaks at WUPR’s
“Fake News Cycle: Searching for Truth in the Digital Age” event.

As its name suggests, the event focused on the shifting media landscape and the role of truth and misinformation in the internet era. The event included both Barbaro’s keynote and a panel featuring journalist and Vox founder Sarah Kliff, Berkeley Human Rights Center researcher Anna Banchik and Becca Lewis, who studies right-wing internet radicalization and media for Media & Society.

Barbaro began his address with what he described as “an adjacent phrase” to the titular fake news: “enemy of the people,” the infamous words that Donald Trump has used to describe journalists over the course of his presidency. Since then, polling by Quinnipiac University indicated that over half of Republicans have come to agree with him.

“As a country, increasingly we don’t have a common set of information that we agree on. We live in a world now where facts are in dispute and conspiracy theories are flourishing, and this endangers the very idea of an objective truth, a thing that certainly drew me to journalism, a thing that draws people to places like universities,” Barbaro said during his speech. “And so the question I want to talk to you about a little today is, ‘What do we do about it?’”

In an interview after the event, Barbaro said that mistrust of American media is not necessarily a new phenomenon, but that it has been rapidly accelerated by Trump’s rhetoric.

“I don’t think the distrust has grown so much as the president has amplified what mistrust is there,” he said. “I mean, when the president uses phrases like, ‘fake news,’ ‘enemy of the people,’ the idea of mistrust is so put front and center in the public discourse that it feels like it is greater.”

“I think the polling suggests that there is a greater, more vocal kind of distrust, especially on the Republican side,” he added.

As for the “what next” question, that was the topic of both Barbaro’s keynote and much of the ensuing panel, in which Barbaro and the other panelists discussed how the media can regain the trust of the public. As the panelists emphasized time and time again, there is not exactly an easy answer.

In one exchange, both Kliff and Barbaro pointed to authenticity as important tools in how Vox and “The Daily” have come to become trusted and broadly popular sources in the Trump era. Podcasts and other more personal forms of media have helped to break down some of the barriers to understanding how journalism works and have allowed reporters to be more honest about how news is created.

On the flip side, Lewis pointed out, that kind of “authenticity” has also been a potent tool for far-right YouTubers and internet personalities to radicalize their viewers.

“The ‘fun thing’ about studying neo-Nazis is that you always get to be the killjoy,” she joked.

According to senior Sabrina Wang, WUPR’s executive director and the panel’s moderator, that kind of cross-referencing of expertise was one of the goals of the panel. She said that the impetus for the event came through WUPR’s partnership with the Assembly Series, particularly outgoing Assembly Series Director Barbara Rea, and eventually the organizers decided to try to focus on not only the role of journalism but to include scholars like Lewis and Banchik who could contextualize those challenges.

“[Rea] had approached us about six months ago thinking, ‘Oh we should do a panel on journalism, talking about threats to the First Amendment, and things like that,’” Wang said. “I had been really fascinated by fake news, and so were a lot of the people on our staff. It’s increasingly relevant with the president we have and with the political climate writ large.”

“And so it kind of gradually shifted towards that point of view: Journalism definitely, but incorporating the modern challenges to journalism,” she added.

One of those modern challenges is not simply that we live in an age where the president and huge amounts of the population actively distrust the news media, but that journalists have a new array of tools and modes to tell their stories.

Barbaro, who joked in his keynote that he could not find an optimistic place to end after pointing out that Trump continues to call the press the enemy of the people even after seemingly acknowledging the consequences of the phrase in an Oval Office meeting with the New York Times, was at least more rosy when considering the ways that modern journalists can present stories with more depth and intimacy through newer media forms.

“I think about the ways that we have to tell stories that are going to make them the most engaging and understandable to people, and, as a print reporter, I felt like my job was to break news, advance understanding of my beat, and now the role is to make sure that whatever story we tell … we start the story at the right place, that we use the right reporter, that we are telling it in a way that feels compelling and has a big idea,” he said.

“And that’s a big challenge, but it’s an exciting challenge because I feel like every time I had a beat, I got to own one little corner of the universe, and now with The Daily we have the whole universe, and we get to tell stories, about everything, and it’s like going to the world’s best buffet every day,” he added.

Additional reporting by Sydney Curtis