In this episode, Jason Hartman interviews Steven Brill, founder of Court TV and co-CEO of the new company News Guard. They discuss how to halt the influx of fake news that we encounter as a society and knowing which site to go to to get accurate information. Jason and Steven also talk about Steven’s book, Tailspin: The People and Forces Behind America’s Fifty-Year Fall – and Those Fighting to Reverse It.
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Announcer 0:11
Welcome to the holistic survival show with Jason Hartman. The economic storm brewing around the world is set to spill into all aspects of our lives. Are you prepared? Where are you going to turn for the critical life skills necessary to survive and prosper? The holistic survival show is your family’s insurance for a better life. Jason will teach you to think independently to understand threats and how to create the ultimate action plan. sudden change or worst case scenario. You’ll be ready. Welcome to ballistic survival, your key resource for protecting the people, places and profits you care about in uncertain times. Ladies and gentlemen, your host, Jason Hartman.
Jason Hartman 0:59
It’s my pleasure to welcome Steven Brill to the show. He is the founder of court TV, which is now true TV, and the monthly magazine, the American lawyer. He’s founder of the new company called newsguard, which fights fake news by providing reliability ratings. And he’s also author of tailspin, Steven, welcome.
Steven Brill 1:18
How are you? Good. Thanks. Thanks for having me.
Jason Hartman 1:20
Good. Good to have you. So newsguard, we hear a lot about fake news out there. What is news guard? And
Steven Brill 1:26
how does it work? news guard is a service using journalists to solve a journalistic problem. We think every once in a while real intelligence is better than the artificial kind. So what we’ve done is we’ve hired about two or three dozen journalists here in here in the United States. And they have since last April, been reading and writing nutrition labels and red and green ratings for the 2200 websites in the United States, responsible for 96% of all the news and information consumed online in the United States. If you download at newsguard tech comm our free browser plugin, once you do that, whenever you go online and do a Google search or Bing search, you’ll see the ratings right? Use a Chrome browser and get a Facebook feed or a Twitter feed, you’ll see the red and green newsguard icon next to all the news and information being shown to you. And if you hover over the red and green, you will start to read our nutrition label. Good idea our nutrition labels not just based on Well, we like these guys that we don’t like these guys or they’re liberal and were liberal or they’re conservative and were conservative. It’s nothing like that. It’s based on nine strict journalistic standards. And those nine criteria are would be universally agreed by any journalism professional.
Jason Hartman 2:54
Tell us about some of those days offer rattle a few example,
Steven Brill 2:58
do you have a clear policy for correcting mistakes? Do you disclose your ownership and financing? Have you been found to repeatedly publish false news that you don’t correct? Do you gather and present news responsibly? Meaning Do you rely on reliable sources or only anonymous sources? Are your headlines deceptive to the overstate and they clickbait? Or the headlines accurately reflect the contents? Yeah. Okay. Do you separate news from opinion? Very importantly, no, if I’m writing something, that’s my opinion, it should be labeled as such, it’s reporting the facts of an event it should be labeled as such. So those nine criteria are weighted. And if you get a score of 60, or above, you get a green and a score of 59 or below, you get a red, but the most important thing is the nutrition label explains exactly how we applied the nine criteria.
Steven Brill 3:55
Got it?
Steven Brill 3:56
Okay explains. If anyone has complained about it, you can read the complaint, you can see the bios of the two analysts and editors who wrote the label to see if they have any problems with their backgrounds, any biases they might have. It’s the opposite of an algorithm. It’s totally transparent. We call everybody for comment before we write the label. Algorithms don’t call people for comment. And we want people to game our system. We want them to say, gee, if I had a corrections policy, or if I stopped running these crazy headlines, I’d get a higher score from newsguard. Okay, we launched in September, and we’ve done a Gallup study since of 1000. People at random who’ve used the plugin and by large majorities they agree a that it’s useful be that it’s distinctly non political non biased in any way, shape or form. See that they have confidence in the ratings and most important D they are much more inclined to share articles. In their social media that are labeled green and much less inclined to share articles that are labeled red, and that started the company.
Jason Hartman 5:09
So it sounds like newsguard vets, the journalist or the news organization rather than the specific political, right?
Steven Brill 5:15
The news organization, yes. Okay. So we don’t solve all the problems of the world, your local newspaper publishes something that is incorrect, but is otherwise a reliable, generally professional organization. It’s going to get a green. Okay, we may make note of the fact that they made a mistake here, but
Jason Hartman 5:32
Okay, so it’s always the organization though not the journalists, right?
Steven Brill 5:35
That’s scale.
Jason Hartman 5:37
Okay. Gotta be impossible. How? Tell me about how small Do you go, though? There are so many media outlets nowadays, it’s it’s truly mind boggling.
Steven Brill 5:47
What’s the smallest outlet when you get to 2200? You’re getting pretty far down there. It could be a blog about, you know, the Denver school system. Okay. It could be very typically, it’s the news website of a local television or radio station. That’s important. By the way, that may sound unimportant. But one of the big outlets for fake news that we found in the run up to the 2018 elections, were the sites that would suddenly pop up saying, news nine, Phoenix nbc.com. And it had nothing to do with news, nothing to do with NBC wasn’t totally phony. It just was made to look like a real news site. And it was propagating propaganda or some, you know, crazy anti vaxxer website, something like that
Jason Hartman 6:39
only to reporters peers, or to journalists, do the nutrition label for each?
Steven Brill 6:47
No, it’s two people do a draft. Two people edit my business partner Gordon Crovitz, who used to be the publisher of The Wall Street Journal, and I do the final edit. So we have about three or four dozen people involved in this process here in the United States. And we’re launching next month in the United Kingdom, Italy, France, and Germany.
Jason Hartman 7:10
Okay, so basically six people then it sounds if I got that, right, that each news organization correct. Okay, got it. And so it’s not crowd sourced. Initially, I thought you were having a bunch of journalists that news and I was thinking they just vote their political spectrum. But But you, you six people have beliefs and prejudices and biases, right? Yeah, I’d like anybody. So there’s that. But you’re vetting the organization.
Steven Brill 7:38
It’s hard to have a belief or prejudice about whether a news site has a corrections policy. Yeah, right.
Jason Hartman 7:44
Fair enough. Okay. Yeah, sure.
Steven Brill 7:46
You know, we have debates about things. And when we have a debate, every morning, we have a full staff meeting with everybody. And the stuff that’s ambiguous, so that we don’t agree on we go around the room, you know, it’s a Yeah, it’s a human process. It’s not an algorithm. But the real strength of it is that everything we do, every decision we make, is totally transparent. So you can see how we apply the criteria. And if you disagree, that’s fine. But unlike, you know, right now, as we speak, you know, Facebook, Google and Twitter and everybody else, they have algorithms that are programmed in their own reliability ratings, for every news site in the world. The only problem is if you’re the editor of that news, so you have no idea what your rating is, you can’t contest it. You can’t see it even I can’t talk to anyone about it. Because it’s all one big black box. It says since intolerable.
Jason Hartman 8:37
Yeah, I think it’s totally intolerable in so many ways. I have been saying for years, that I think these big tech companies, the platform companies, the social media companies, one of the few or maybe all things need to happen. They need to make the algorithms public, although even then we may not be able to interpret them. They’re so complicated. There’s so many steps to them, or they need to be regulated like utilities, or they need to be busted up under antitrust or something. I mean, these companies just have so much power, it’s truly mind boggling. They’re bigger than many governments, you know, you know, they have the power to censor, and to censor without people knowing they’re being censored, which is even more scary. Yeah, go sensor. So tell us about tailspin, the people and forces behind America’s 50 year fall and those fighting to reverse it.
Steven Brill 9:28
This is a book I set out to do several years ago where I was trying to figure out, in essence, what happened to America? How could it be that our infrastructure is crumbling? How could it be that it is literally true that the chance that the next generation will be more prosperous and have more opportunity than their parents is no longer better than a 5050 proposition? The whole idea of the American dream was that every generation is increasingly better. How could it be that the idea of income mobility in this case country is, has basically collapsed, right? There’s a graph you can draw in terms of income inequality, just take another example, where from the late 1920s to 1970, income inequality was reduced every year. In other words, the gap between the richest people and the middle class and the poor, was narrowing. Beginning in 1970, it started to widen to weird today, it is back where it was in 1928. So it’s a giant gap, right. And what I attempt to do is take five or six different developments, all of which seemed like positive developments at the time, in the late 1960s and early 1970s. And explain how they ultimately had a boomerang effect.
Jason Hartman 10:46
All right, tell us about those.
Steven Brill 10:47
Well, for example, global trade, obviously a very good thing for the world, obviously, a very good thing at the beginning for the United States in the 1960s, because we had the most efficient, you know, factories in the post war era, we had the most efficient workers, but because we failed at the kind of job training programs that every country needs to keep the middle class constantly engaged in and enjoying the benefits of the economy in because we didn’t enforce a lot of the trade rules, that became the negatives of being negative instead of a positive. Even the First Amendment boomeranged against us.
Jason Hartman 11:27
I know I’m looking at your contents, and I’m really curious about that one tell us.
Steven Brill 11:30
So in 1976, Ralph Nader, the consumer and I remember him well, and lawyer brought a lawsuit on behalf of discount drug is in Virginia. And these drugstores were offering discounts on prescription drugs. But they were blocked because the Virginia legislature passed a law that said, You’re not allowed to advertise the price of your prescription drugs. And that law had been sponsored by the incumbent big drugstores, which didn’t want to worry about that price competition, but later argued in court, that the First Amendment was as much about listeners, as speakers. In other words, the benefit of the First Amendment was, if I can hear a variety of speech, I’m better equipped to be a good citizen in a democracy and be a good consumer in a free market. So the listeners in this case, he said, you know, older people and poor people who could benefit from prescription drugs at a discount, were deprived of that aspect of the First Amendment. And importantly, he said, it didn’t matter. If the speaker was a corporation, a drugstore, or a person. What mattered was the speech and the benefit of the speech to the listener. And the Supreme Court said, You’re right, it doesn’t really matter if it’s a corporation, that speaking, the whole idea is that you have free speech, that more from 1976 into 2009, into the Citizens United decision, which basically gave large corporations a free hand under the First Amendment to give as much money to political campaigns and political causes as they wanted to. And that sort of kept two decades of accelerating dominance of money in politics.
Jason Hartman 13:18
I’m not sure if the listeners, though, get the connection between citizens united and the First Amendment, though. I mean, I know corporations have free speech rights, just like people, but what part of the First Amendment is the right to contribute money to political? Because that’s, that’s a form of speech expresses? Yeah.
Steven Brill 13:37
Another Supreme Court decision, basically said that money is speech that you can’t speak in politics, I don’t have money. I can’t buy advertising. You know, print up flyers, do all the things that a campaign does to be a campaign. So there’s just a blanket statement by the court saying money is speech when you spend money on politics. That is speech? Yeah. I
Jason Hartman 14:00
mean, the idea of lobbying is that we get access to our government. Right. Sounds good on the surface. The problem is, I don’t have lobbyists. But Google does have a vote. Oh,
Steven Brill 14:10
no, that’s right. And in fact, lobbying, even more so than the ability to spend money on campaigns lobbying is directly stated in the First Amendment, you have a right to assemble and bring your grievances to the government. That’s what lobbying is. It’s just when you combine continuing income inequality, and other legal innovations and financial innovations, it turns out that no surprise, the 10s of thousands of lobbyists in Washington work for the people who can afford to pay them the most.
Jason Hartman 14:42
Yeah, you know, most most poor people don’t have an office on K Street do that.
Steven Brill 14:46
Ya know, and it’s pretty hard to write a law that says effect it’s impossible to write a law that says a rich coal company can’t have a lobbyist but someone who wants to petition Congress for more money for blood limb disease can have a lobbyist. What do we do about that it starts with the political money, identify some groups that are working against all odds, you know, to fight for campaign finance reform, they’ve had some success at local and state levels. But ultimately, the solution for our country may oddly be that things get so bad that they get good. And what I mean by that is that at some point, as I say, at the end of the book, there’s a breaking point where people become so disgusted, that they demand change. And that demand becomes something that lobbyists and all the political money in the world can’t withstand. Now, you could argue that in 2016, people were so disgusted, that they demanded change in the form of, you know, an unconventional politician who promised them that he was going to drain the swamp. The trick is for people to swamp
Jason Hartman 15:57
is pretty hard to drain.
Steven Brill 16:00
The trick is, for those that don’t think that turned out to be the right solution is for a political leader, who doesn’t set people against each other as a way of providing an outlet for their frustrations, but unites people. And the principal challenge there, that should be doable is uniting the middle class with the poor. Because the middle class today had been so driven down with income inequality, with the collapse of private sector, labor unions, and all the other things I write about in the book, the middle class, they’ve been so driven down, that they have much more in common with the poor than they have with anybody else. For example, food stamps, which conservatives are constantly trying to cut are basically a middle class program. So working class program, the minimum wage being as low as it is basically means that a large percent of America’s workers work at wages that are poverty level wages, or near poverty level wages. So the idea that you could run a campaign and set that working class off against the poor or rough against, you know, immigrants is seems illogical, if you have the right kind of a political leader, who can explain that those two groups have more in common, and that they’re the victims of what I call the protected class in this country. And they’re the unprotected class. And there are many more unprotected and protected. Democracy might just work. Very interesting.
Jason Hartman 17:29
I think. We just can’t treat entities corporations LLCs like people, they’re just not natural persons and they shouldn’t have those rights. They shouldn’t have the same rights. It’s just abuse like crazy, you know,
Steven Brill 17:42
just you know, when my points it’s because I explained the book, The origin of the corporation, the entity called the Corporation was in common law, that it is a charter granted by the state, but not the federal government. So it was but it has the same First Amendment. Well, yeah, but it people
Jason Hartman 17:58
states have the same kind of reflection of that constitution too, right.
Steven Brill 18:02
Hey, give out your website. newsguard Technologies calm.
Jason Hartman 18:05
All right, Steven, good talking with you. Thank you.
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