OSWEGO – SUNY Oswego’s 15th annual Dr. Lewis B. O’Donnell Media Summit discussed a topic from its first year: trust in the media and how it has changed within the past 15 years.
The media summit was held Wednesday, Oct. 23 in the Waterman Theatre on campus and invited media professionals from around the country to speak about their experiences on the theme,“Trust Transformed: Media and the Public 15 Years Later.”
SUNY Oswego alumnus Kendis Gibson ’94, who currently works as an anchor host for MSNBC Live moderated the discussion of four panelists: Doug Schneider, who works for USA Today Network-Wisconsin and the Green Bay Press-Gazette, fellow alumna Sharon Newman ’79, the senior producer for MSNBC’s program “The 11th Hour With Brian Williams,” Jennifer Williams, the Vox senior foreign editor and co-host of foreign affairs podcast Worldly, and Cristina Domingues, anchor of “Your Morning Rochester” and midday shows for Spectrum News.
The discussion began with a short question: “Do you trust the media?” The panel of professional media specialists generally agreed that they do trust media sources with trained journalists and continuously report truthfully.
Domingues said she believes it is up to the consumer to determine which news source, in the vast pool of options readily available now, is trustworthy.
Newman said in her forty years in the industry, if someone working for a legitimate news source ever made up a source or information, they were immediately fired. However, she said she believes the question of trust makes journalists better because they are more careful than normal given the times of heightened scrutiny.
“Trust the people who’ve earned your trust,” Schneider said. “Trust the people who continually get it right, continually deliver the information that’s important to you, that’s valuable to you. Trust the people that do it for a while and have earned that trust.”
Gibson brought up that during the first Media Summit when theme of trust in the media was discussed 15 years ago, Facebook had only been around for a year, and other social media outlets like Twitter and Snapchat did not exist yet. He asked how people can determine which outlets to trust when they first start.
Williams, who works for a website that launched five years ago, said in this digital age, Vox did not have decades of work for people to look at like with legacy newspapers, so they had to establish trust quickly. She said in the journalism industry, news sources are not just held accountable by their consumers, but also by their competition.
“Mistakes happen; journalists are human,” Newman said. “We’re all accountable and we all care about what we do.”
Later in the discussion, Gibson remembered when he first began in the broadcasting business, they would not ask a subject to redo a walk for video because that would be fake, but now the recordings are set up and they are told where to walk.
He then gave a few examples of instances when broadcast news scenes were set up to exaggerate a situation to make it more interesting, only to be caught and called out for it.
Newman said people remember those instances and it impacts the industry in a way that causes news sources to self-police and hold themselves accountable.
Schneider said he does not think it is a good idea to redo walks for B-roll or the like because it can affect someone’s credibility. He said if someone were to find out they faked something small, it could lead to more questioning of a journalist’s credibility.
Williams related setting up a background or B-roll to click bait headlines for online news sources. She said it frustrates her when she clicks on a story with an interesting headline and it has very little to do with the actual story. To avoid this, she said Vox employees all vote on which headline to use.
“The problem is when you cross a line from what is the most interesting version of the story to this no longer represents what is inside the story, and that’s something I think is a very serious problem,” Williams said.
Another topic that came up involved the current White House administration’s distrustful portrayal of the media as a whole and the media’s reaction. This prompted a discussion about at what point does one separate human and journalist, stemming from a video clip of a program host at the BBC criticizing a quote from President Trump, and she breached BBC rules.
Domingues said politics aside, this is also relevant in stories that are difficult to report on.
“You have to balance your personal beliefs and your own personal life in some of the stories you do,” Domingues said. “There are plenty of stories and plenty of people we disagree with, and you have to put on that face and deliver the news in the fairest way possible and not bring your opinion into it.”
The panel discussed several topics throughout the hour and a half-long Media Summit and answered questions posed by current students. For the past 15 years, a board of students and faculty organize to host a group of panelists to discuss themes within the media industry. The summit is sponsored by alumni Lou Borreli ’77 and Al Roker ’76.
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