Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist Dan Luzadder

Today Alison interviews Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist Dan Luzadder

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:06):
From them. Where's yeah, hie hie. I'm Alison Argream. Yeah,
this is the Alison Argham Show. I am Alison Argham.
Although some of you may remember me as Evil Lillie

(00:28):
Elsen from the Little House in the Prairie. Thankfully, tonight
I am Alison Aringram and this is the Alison Argham Show.
And here on The Alison Aringham Show, we talk about
things that make you feel good, the TV shows and
the movies that made us feel good and the people
who made them, and people who are doing things now
to make the world a better and more interesting place.

Speaker 2 (00:48):
And do I have someone who's doing that. You know
you've seen I get.

Speaker 1 (00:52):
The most amazing people on the show. Yes, I have actors.
I have my friends on. And then every now and
then Harlan caused me says, you know, I have this
guy who's written a book, and I suddenly have these
incredibly fascinating people, and I have another one to day.
I have a man who's written several books. Well, he's
won a Pulitzer, for heaven's sake, Okay, let's just go there.

Speaker 2 (01:10):
He's done it all.

Speaker 1 (01:11):
He's been a police reporter, he's been a newspaper reporter.

Speaker 2 (01:14):
He is now an.

Speaker 1 (01:15):
Author, a documentarian and hes mighty interesting stuff to say.

Speaker 2 (01:19):
About our entire entire state of journalism. Yes, welcome Dan
lose that.

Speaker 3 (01:27):
Thank you, Alison, nice to be here.

Speaker 2 (01:29):
Well, thank you, thank you for hearing. So this is
now how many books now you've written? This is what's
your third or fourth book?

Speaker 4 (01:36):
Here? Well, this is my second published and I have
another one underway that's publisher soon, I hope. And on
the Chicago Models a matter of fact, but yeah to
the Manchurian Journalists, which came out in June, and then
a collection of my newspaper columns from back in the
Pulitzer days in nineteen eighty three and around that year.

Speaker 2 (02:01):
Nice.

Speaker 1 (02:03):
Now, your background, we're starting there. You did star in
Investigate Journalist. Your background you're a police reporter. You reported
on crimes, so your background is very much investigative and
a lot of stuff is very sort of crime oriented.

Speaker 2 (02:18):
How did you first start?

Speaker 3 (02:21):
Well, I was.

Speaker 4 (02:24):
Offered a chance to compete for a job when I
was a teenager as a police reporter on a small
daily newspaper with about eighty thousand circulations, small morning daily,
and I competed with another reporter for one job.

Speaker 3 (02:37):
They had one job open, and.

Speaker 4 (02:39):
That reporter had been actually had been up in the
business and had done quite a bit of good work,
including locating the famous Kent State Girl, the girl who
was photographed on the campus of Kent State during the
shootings there. So we got into a competition to I

(03:00):
to secure that job, and as luck would have it,
he got into a fistfight with the local sheriff and
got fired.

Speaker 3 (03:06):
So I got the job by default.

Speaker 4 (03:08):
But but the the thing about police meat was that
it was gritty and real, and I saw a lot
of drama out there on the street, and I liked
the field and the adrenaline of all that, and that
really attracted me to reporting. And then I went on

(03:28):
to column writing for quite a while, for about seven years,
and then decided that I wasn't doing enough to make
the world a better place, if you will, so investigative
reporting looked like a good avenue to follow, and I was.

Speaker 3 (03:43):
I had some success at that.

Speaker 1 (03:46):
And now your other book is actually it's about a flood.

Speaker 3 (03:50):
Well it's it's a collection of colls, but the main
the main part.

Speaker 4 (03:53):
The first part of the book is about the Great
Flood in Fort Wayne, Indiana. It's the city of three Rivers,
and in nineteen eighty two there was big snowstorms that
year and big floods in the city made national news.
Ronald Reagan came and threw a few sandbags on the
sandbag line. But some teenagers from the local high school

(04:17):
were showing extraordinary courage in battling this effort to save
a neighborhood and all historic neighborhood. So I wrote about
that and several other things, and that those stories got
quite a bit of attention. One of them was collected

(04:37):
in a book on the Best of Field at Surprise
News Writing. So it was a real experience. I was
one of the evacuees.

Speaker 1 (04:45):
Wow, but this is a sort of a normal background.
But what you're talking about, now, what's happening this book,
that the mentoring journalists and the stuff you're talking about,
is that journalism itself as we know it today.

Speaker 2 (04:58):
Everyone says, well.

Speaker 1 (04:59):
Okay, journalism influenced by a lot of things. We're not
getting the full story. News has been dumbed down. But
you're flat out saying, okay, guys, you know how you
kind of notice that, Yes, during the Cold War, a
lot of stuff was pumped out, you know, through the
press to influence things that it's worse than that and
still going on, and you flat out say that, indeed,

(05:19):
the CIA is bungling with our news.

Speaker 4 (05:23):
Well, they have been very interested in news production from
the very inception. The book goes into an interesting angle,
which is that it's not the CIA as agency alone,
but there's an intelligence network that involves many people who
have affiliate roles with or interest in the intelligence community

(05:46):
and who are cooperatives. And I found as I was
researching this book that there was a system for recruiting people,
not people necessarily to be writers, but people who would
work in the publishing industry, or to work in the
film industry, or to work and people who had ideas

(06:07):
that were a copathetic with the intent of more or
less cultural shaping that the intelligence community was interested in.

Speaker 3 (06:18):
So journalists were others were recruited.

Speaker 2 (06:23):
Well, that's kind of alarming.

Speaker 1 (06:24):
Now, is there a set goal and does this goal
change with different departments in the government or different administrations,
or different like problems they feel they need solving.

Speaker 2 (06:35):
Did the goals change?

Speaker 4 (06:36):
Well, over the period of time that I examined, the
goals were pretty consistent and the systematic development of an
intelligence network that was funded actually by foundations that had
legitimate purposes, but also were funneling money into secret programs

(06:58):
that were used to proper gandaize the American people basically domestically,
and when I say propagandaize.

Speaker 3 (07:07):
In many ways. That is a system of influence, and.

Speaker 4 (07:12):
The influence is carried out by having friends in certain
places within the publishing industry and reporters who.

Speaker 3 (07:19):
Get access to.

Speaker 4 (07:23):
Intelligence information because of their cooperation with the community, the
intelligence community as far as publishing those ideas and pursuing
those ideas that those within the intelligence community think are
healthy for the country.

Speaker 1 (07:39):
So it's like who the difference is, who's going to
get access that they need to be a successful reporter,
who's going to get published, and who's not going to
get the access, who's not going to get their phone
call returned, who's not going totally to get published exactly?

Speaker 4 (07:53):
And that's a powerful amount of influence. The book The
Manageering Journalist drills down into the actual program one of
the actual programs that existed for recruiting, and it was
out of Radcliffe College, a little summer course that was
run for people who were interested in entering the publishing

(08:15):
industry in various ways.

Speaker 3 (08:17):
And so this.

Speaker 4 (08:17):
Summer course would teach about seventy students a year each
summer over the six week period, and it was run
by a woman named Helen Benn, who had deep ties
to the intelligence community and also to propaganda programs in
foreign countries to encourage publishers in other countries to publish
Western ideas and Western information in the way that was

(08:41):
deemed beneficial.

Speaker 3 (08:42):
And so among the students.

Speaker 4 (08:44):
At that course was Lawrence Wright, who was a writer
for The New Yorker and who's written many books. He
won a Pulitzer in two thousand and seven for his
work on al Cata, his book The Looming Tower. But
as he had also written Store Boko Comes a story
in a book about the Church of Scientology. And that's
how I got into taking a look at media coverage

(09:09):
of the church, and then Lawrence Wright's coverage of the church,
and then Lawrence Wright's history. And as I dug into
his history, I found he had undisclosed associations with very
powerful members of this intelligence community who were actually designing
and funding the recruitment of journalists.

Speaker 1 (09:28):
And others, you know, a journalism class, an optional course
with fifty sixty people doesn't seem like a big I mean,
that doesn't seem like a very large group.

Speaker 2 (09:39):
The idea that that is where.

Speaker 1 (09:41):
They're recruiting people for what sounds like a massive government operation.
This would obviously not be It would have to be
hundreds of things like this.

Speaker 4 (09:50):
Well, there were other examples of these kinds of programs,
and some of the programs affected support for magazines or
publishing outlets for book publishers and others to produce certain
kinds of books about certain kinds of things, or not
publish things about other things, which is more a worrisome thing,

(10:14):
I think when certain ideas were shunned by the publishing industry.

Speaker 1 (10:21):
So certain ideas, again ideologies are getting a preference in
the publishing world and access of access to an outlet.

Speaker 2 (10:30):
Okay, this is like horrifying.

Speaker 1 (10:31):
Now. Obviously, in the Cold War we saw and that's
something that even everyone goes.

Speaker 2 (10:36):
Yeah, okay.

Speaker 1 (10:36):
During the Cold War there was tolevers, there was a
massive push for all sorts of crazy stuff that was
to make everyone think a certain way and tow the line.
And it was kind of obvious. I mean, I remember
reading stuff about how one point square dancing was being
promoted because the government felt that square dancing was going
to make people be more American and not listen to
race music and all sorts of like wack of do

(10:58):
stuff where you're like, what is that have to do
with DOCI do? For God's sakes, is this why I
had to take square dancing in school? But apparently taking
square dancing in school was a push that this would
incorporate and culculate certain values.

Speaker 2 (11:11):
It was square dancing forgos.

Speaker 1 (11:13):
But there was a lot of stuff in the Cold
War in what would you say in the Cold War
they were going for what were they trying to get
us to do in this sort of insane advertising.

Speaker 3 (11:23):
Well, of course they were fighting communists.

Speaker 4 (11:26):
That was one of the primary goals was to prepare
the country for to defend itself against totalitarian ideas and
communist infiltration. Of course, we saw what happened politically over
the issues of the Domino effect. Communism was spreading throughout

(11:49):
the world fighting communism, and the intelligence community was very
active in that. But part of the program, part of
the ideas behind fighting communism involved bringing people into the
American cultural community from other countries and providing scholarships. But

(12:10):
there were scholarships often for people who were the children
of influential people in other countries.

Speaker 3 (12:18):
So you could get a Fulbright scholarship.

Speaker 4 (12:21):
You could come to Southern Methodist University under the tutelage
of the Dean Robert's story who was also chairman of
the Board of Foreign Scholarships, sending out full rights.

Speaker 3 (12:33):
For the State Department.

Speaker 4 (12:36):
And they made friends this way, and they gained intelligence
this way, and they shared that intelligence, and it became
important not only for developing cultural ideas but also for
making inroads into other countries where economic interests were vital,
particularly in the Middle East for oil and influence within

(13:01):
the Middle East. So these efforts were multi pronged, developed
in many ways.

Speaker 3 (13:08):
And they were extensive.

Speaker 4 (13:10):
There were foundations that were supporting magazines that were looking
at certain ideas in America, cultural ideas, like a magazine
called Race Relations Reporter, which was supported.

Speaker 1 (13:23):
I saw mention that in the book what on Earth
is Race Relations Report? That has an ominous sound to
it when we write a magazine called Race Relations Report.

Speaker 4 (13:32):
Well, Race Relations Reporter was published at Vanderbilt University off campus,
and it was originally a magazine that was covering segregation
in America, and in the process, in the process of
covering segregation, it developed an enormous library. It had more

(13:52):
librarians than it had reporters, and they collected stories from
all over the country anything to do with segregation, school issues,
related things, and became a tremendous resource. But they also
began to report on these things in a magazine format,
and they hired reporters, many good reporters who were interested
in that. But the magazine was also under concert surveillance

(14:13):
by the FBI, because the FBI wanted to know who
was reading these magazines and where were they going, and
who the subscribers were, and who was on the board
of the magazine, and whether or not they were good
Americans basically, And so Race Relations Reporter had a sort

(14:35):
of a very interesting profile in reporting on a very
important issue of race. And so it was interesting when
I found that when Lawrence Wright began his career, he
landed first at Race Relations Reporter, and he was working
there as the magazine was developing more extensive reporting on

(14:56):
issues about Native Americans and other issues of race within
the country. He was fired from that job because the
editor felt that he was racist.

Speaker 2 (15:05):
Oh well, that doesn't really work.

Speaker 1 (15:07):
I mean, it wasn't the point of this magazine to
report on on race and racism. My take is that
you're saying the magazine was seemingly at least intended to
improve conditions for Native Americans and people of color.

Speaker 4 (15:21):
But it also became from an organ that gathered information
about the status of race relations to some to a
magazine that reported on conditions of race disagreements, or racial
tensions or racial flashpoints, and and from that perspective.

Speaker 3 (15:42):
As as the magazine grew and.

Speaker 4 (15:46):
Was taking a more challenging perspective on certain American activities,
it lost its funding from the Ford Foundation, which but.

Speaker 2 (15:57):
It started being successful in doing what it was intended
to do.

Speaker 3 (16:00):
Yeah, apparently.

Speaker 1 (16:04):
The FBI's history with whover what I think would be yes,
wanting to know who the subscribers were because they would
not be for favorable race relations.

Speaker 2 (16:12):
Not At that time, there.

Speaker 4 (16:15):
Was a I think a sincere effort to gather as
much information about racial issues as could be gathered, but
I don't think it was necessarily being gathered for the
purpose of improving race relations reikes, So intelligence become valuable.

Speaker 1 (16:35):
This writer, right, who you focus on heavily in dementia
and a journalist about his writing about everything from scientology
del cata, And then you go, well, wait a minute,
who were his sources and start looking at well, no,
he actually didn't talk to everybody, and what was the
angle and why wasn't he talking to all of these
people over here? And who was funding this? And what

(16:55):
did he tell the truth about? What did he not
tell the truth about?

Speaker 2 (16:58):
And why is this.

Speaker 1 (16:58):
All sCOD He was fired from the race relations spagasine
he was, but he landed.

Speaker 4 (17:03):
With a related magazine, and then he went from there
to doing some freelance work and managed to get a
story published on astronauts in Life magazine or Look magazine,
I belief, And then he landed at Texas Monthly, the
very popular cultural magazine published out of Boston that was

(17:23):
very much like the New Yorker in many ways, with
a Texas twang to it, I guess you would say.
And he wound up a Texas Monthly. It was as
I started examining Wright's own stated history from what he
had written about in a memoir that he published when
he was in his late thirties. I was able to

(17:45):
determine that the same people who were involved with the
Radcliffe publishing procedures course were also involved with Texas Monthly,
and they were also involved with Rolling Stone magazine, and
they had been involved with a lot of other cultural
magazines that seemed to be counterculture or maybe setting a

(18:06):
different tone in cultural reporting. But these connections raised a
lot of questions for me, and so I did, I
guess what you would call a deep dive into into
Lawrence Wright's background, using his memoir to test the truth
of what he had said in that memoir, and discovered

(18:29):
that his father, a banker who worked at a storefront bank,
small bank in East Dallas, but had some connections to
some influential people there was actually working for a man
named Robert Story, who was one of the prime movers
in the cultural Cold War and in the development of

(18:52):
the CIA's interest in publishing and in directing culture.

Speaker 1 (19:00):
This man sudden like, oh, massive access. As you were saying,
certain people are getting the jobs, certain people aren't getting
the jobs, certain people are going to certain magazines, and
other people's resumes are going in the trash.

Speaker 2 (19:11):
And there's reasons and there.

Speaker 4 (19:14):
Were reasons, and not everybody's resume was going in the trash,
and not everybody that was being promoted into magazines or
newspapers was connected in any way. But you don't need
a lot of people in order to set a tone,
establish certain kinds of reporting, to look at certain things

(19:37):
or not look at certain things. And that's one of
the things I found as an investigative reporter. As I
dug deeper into public corruption, or say, as I was
investigating prisons, state prisons, and human rights abuses, I had
a long leash from the newspaper. But when I turned
toward politics that generated funding for major political campaigns and

(20:02):
looked at using corporations, say, to develop illegal campaign contributions,
I had a more difficult time.

Speaker 2 (20:09):
In surprise, surprise.

Speaker 4 (20:11):
Yeah, And I don't think most people would be surprised
to hear that those kinds of things happen. I think
we've heard those stories before, but they're true because I
lived through them myself. I watched those kinds of things happen,
and so I think in the process of all that,
I developed sort of a different attitude in that I

(20:32):
was more willing to go into places and look harder
at situations even within my own profession. And that's a
sort of the experience I had in developing this book
on the Manchurian Journalist, to take a look at how
journalism had been affected and how certain as we watched

(20:53):
the institution of journalism decline rapidly and dramatically over the
past two decades, to see what else was going on
at the time, what other influences there were that were
unseen to the public. So Lawrence Wright never mentioned the
fact that his father worked for Robert PA's Story. Never

(21:13):
mentioned the fact that Story was the chief executive trial
prosecutor at the Nuremberg War trials, or that he was
head of the American Bar Association, or that he was
head of the International Bar Association, or that he was
a good friend of Alan Dahls at the CIA, or
a good friend of John McCloy, the chairman of the
Establishment who ran the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation.

Speaker 1 (21:36):
Gigantically influential, yeah.

Speaker 4 (21:38):
Very influential, So very influential people and very influential connections.
But Lawrence Wright never mentioned them. And I found that extraordinary.

Speaker 1 (21:49):
You'd think possibly he would even rag about that and say, yes,
I know this person and that's why I have access
to so much stuff, and that's why you should believe
my book and believe my articles.

Speaker 2 (21:58):
Be could hey, I know Robert story.

Speaker 1 (22:00):
And think of all the things I found out, But
it was just kind of like, yeah, that didn't happen.

Speaker 2 (22:04):
So that does bag the question it begs the.

Speaker 3 (22:06):
Question is why I was it never mentioned?

Speaker 4 (22:09):
Because he was extremely important in the development of our
intelligence network, as was John McCloy, who was as a
chairman of Chase Manhattan Bank and the Ford Foundation was
extremely influential. He was the Assistant Secretary of War, and
he was the governor for the occupation of Germany after
World War Two, And these people all work together to

(22:31):
develop a central intelligence agency.

Speaker 3 (22:34):
That was.

Speaker 4 (22:36):
New and very powerful and very interested in prosecuting anti
communism on all fronts.

Speaker 2 (22:44):
What are the goals now?

Speaker 1 (22:46):
I mean we go okay, yeah, that was the fifties
and sixties. You remember all the anti CAUs What do
they not change?

Speaker 2 (22:52):
Do the goalpost move?

Speaker 1 (22:53):
Do they not change their goals of what they think
we should all be thinking and reading? And what are
we all supposed to be thinking and reading this week?

Speaker 4 (23:00):
You know, we look through a glass darkly. I think
at these things in some ways, and the publisher wrote
forward to this book, and he mentioned the congressional hearings
that were held into excess excessive activities of the CIA,
and that whether or not the government sanctioned those things,
it makes reference to the fact of how hard it

(23:21):
is to find out about these things, and so we
don't know about them, we don't know what we don't know,
and we don't see these kinds of things. So where
you have the end of the Cold War, and then
we have the War on tear, and then we have
writers pursuing stories about al Qaeda, like Lawrence Wright did,

(23:45):
and under the circumstances, it was a legitimate, I thought
for me to ask the question as to whether or
not these influences played a part in Law's Lawrence writes
a very influential book on al Qaeda Looming Tower, and
whether or not what we believe about al Qaeda and
the war on terror and the actual threat to America

(24:05):
beyond nine to eleven, how great that threat was, and
whether or not the book represents points of view that
come not from an independent look necessarily, but more of
an informed look and an insider look from someone who
had connections undisclosed to the intelligence community.

Speaker 1 (24:26):
So as opposed to a deep dive on al Qaida
and what they were actually up to, more of a
CIA influenced what.

Speaker 2 (24:33):
We would like you to think about al Qaida.

Speaker 4 (24:36):
And as I say, and I make illustrations in the
book about how that book was put together in certain
information challenges to do that kind of work, I can
tell you as an investigative reporter doing complex subjects, covering,
putting up a language barrier, moving about in the Middle East,

(24:59):
getting a says to interview people. Just the logistics of
interviewing six hundred people for that book seemed like an
extraordinary task to me, and well, it took Laurence right
five years. It also made me wonder what kind of
help he had. So a reporter who is going to
present an acceptable point of view and the sources who

(25:21):
have access to helping them make that sensible point of
view acceptable point of view can be of tremendous value.
And independent reporters may not have access to those kinds
of sources as they're trying to develop their independent sources,
and that's their independent stories. And that's how I see

(25:42):
the influence working in subtle ways.

Speaker 3 (25:46):
To help us view things from a particular point of view.

Speaker 1 (25:53):
Well, don't we also have a lot of corporate influence
because we've seen the rise of corporations and their power
and the booksly bud according to the Court's corporation as
a person now that the corporations are allowed to influence things.
And I mean sometimes you'll see programs where they'll say
this is sponsored by you know, Mon Santo or whoever
doing it, so you go, okay, they give you a

(26:13):
hint that's happening. But the corporations, obviously, they have a
lot of money to lose if they don't like an
article or a news story or an independent reporters report
on some issue, and that corporation could look bad. And
if we lose money, they absolutely are going to make
phone calls and complain and ask if that could possibly
not happen.

Speaker 2 (26:31):
That's I mean, that's been documented.

Speaker 1 (26:32):
Sometimes they do not succeed, and investigative journalists succeed in
talking about things that corporations have done. But I mean
we just recently, okay, we've had the whole trial with Boeing,
you know, not tightening the bolts on the doors there
and to the point that people turning up dead on
their way to the courthouse to testify, and people talking
about that, and initially there was a sense of boeing

(26:54):
and other corporations said, Oh, we're just going to not
discuss that this terrible mess is even happening, and we
do have news stories about it, but I would, but
we know the corporation say we rather none of this
ever be discussed at all, And that doesn't always work
for them, but that has to be an enormous influence now,
the corporate influence on what gets reported, what doesn't get reported,
what stories get.

Speaker 3 (27:15):
Killed, it is. It is tremendous.

Speaker 4 (27:17):
And I did a story when I was working for
the Indianapolis Star on a corporation that owned produced trade
schools and they taught truck drivers how to drive trucks.
Ostensibly but normal, seemingly normal, but they were also raising
huge amounts of money for political campaigns. And it turned
out that they were accessing guaranteed student loans for students

(27:41):
at their school, many of whom were recruited from welfare
lines where they would never have been able to drive
a truck because they had alcohol issues or disabilities, but
they would sign them up for the student loans, they
would get the money and the poor individual was left
on the hook for the payment, and of course they
couldn't pay, and so the government was stuck on the
hook for the for the money. But at the same time,

(28:04):
this corporation was using a private jet to fly every
member of the Sended Education Committee all over the country
the Senate shuttle at will and my story was picked
up by twenty twenty and re reported nationally. The But
when I got into the depth of that story and
found direct links to political figures who had high profiles,

(28:26):
people like Bob Dole and Dan Quayle and Ted Kennedy
and those folks, then you know, things got difficult. Had
private detectives watching my house for behalf of that corporation
for a good period of time, and there was influence
loved to try to discourage me from reporting on those things.

(28:47):
Those reports did get made eventually, and the company did
go into bankruptcy and they did have to give up
a lot of money back to the government to.

Speaker 1 (28:55):
Oh, okay, so they got they got theirs in some degree.

Speaker 3 (28:58):
In some respect, well even had.

Speaker 2 (29:01):
The mortgages here, we had the mortgae ware.

Speaker 1 (29:05):
It's now been I came out that mortgage brokers and
worksh went to families who did not have any money,
who did not have a job that paid enough money
to pay that monthly amount on that mortgage.

Speaker 2 (29:15):
They simply did not or they did not have a job.

Speaker 1 (29:18):
And sometimes there were families where English wasn't their first language,
and the mortgage worker literally said, don't worry, I will
fill out the paperwork.

Speaker 2 (29:26):
For you, which is absolutely one hundred percent illlegal. And
it says on the paperwork that they can't do that,
but they did it. They signed things for people. They
told them, don't.

Speaker 1 (29:34):
Worry about the fact that you have twenty dollars in
the bank and you only make this much a month
and the mortgages this much month. I will fix that
and I will fill this out for you. And people
went for it. They were desperate and they lied to them.
And also thousands and thousands of people got into these
mortgage menu which had a floating interest rate that changed
at any moment, balloon payments to name and then chakaru.

(29:54):
A year or two later, none of these people could
pay for a damn thing, and we had the giant
mortgage question. But that could have gone just like jeepers
what happened? Oh why did all those people go and
buy all those houses that they couldn't afford? They must
have all just been idiots. It was revealed that these
people did, in fact falsify payperwork for people and do

(30:15):
this just to clear a profit.

Speaker 2 (30:17):
So that story did break.

Speaker 1 (30:18):
And the boy did those real estate companies not want
that out right?

Speaker 3 (30:22):
And there are many more stories out there like that.

Speaker 4 (30:25):
Actually, maybe not as dramatic and national as that, but
there are other stories that don't get reported because we've
seen the demise of journalism. There is no funding for
investigative reporting on the community. Really, there is some still
good investigative reporting.

Speaker 3 (30:41):
Don I'm in Oregon.

Speaker 4 (30:42):
A little weekly newspaper in Portland did an excellent series
of stories on a state official who was who was
involved with a cozy relationship with people had an interest
in state government and force the resignation. But those things
are more and more rare, and so certain kinds of
stories don't get reported on the local level. You're not

(31:04):
seeing as many reporters out there, and there are very
few investigative reporters left in local communities.

Speaker 2 (31:12):
And on television.

Speaker 1 (31:14):
As an actress obviously might have experiences dealing with like
getting interviewed in stories on television and radio type news.
But in my work with National Association to Protect Children,
we're doing legislative work.

Speaker 2 (31:26):
Haha. Hello.

Speaker 1 (31:27):
We would sometimes have a news story about a specific
bill at the state law federal that we're trying to
get past and try to get the news without fail.
We were told, oh, I'm so sorry, we can't give
you very long. We'd get lucky. We you know, have
very good resources to get and we can only give.

Speaker 2 (31:41):
You a minute.

Speaker 1 (31:42):
We can only give you a minute and a half
tone go wow, okay, well, all right, fine, it's big
news day, and we'd get our minute and get in there,
and then they'd spend twenty minutes discussing shampoo.

Speaker 2 (31:52):
Right, And I watch the news daily.

Speaker 1 (31:55):
I watch all the news, my regular news, and now
now it's la so yes, the entertainment news is considered
the financial news.

Speaker 2 (32:02):
That's going to be a big check of the news.
But I'll sit there and go, okay, this is an
hour long thing. Is good. Half is entertainment news.

Speaker 1 (32:10):
Much of it is discussing television shows that are on
the same network as the news program. When what Dancing
with the Stars ack who from their network is on
Dancing with the Stars, What dous have Dance with the Star?

Speaker 2 (32:21):
Et cetera, etcetera. Which reality show people who are on
shows on their network are currently on.

Speaker 1 (32:25):
And then they stop and they have some products and
they have a nice lady come out and show you
how to make tacos. And the thing is, I know
about the lady with the tacos of the shampoo because
I actually talked to someone who said, Oh, would you
like a job doing that. We have a thing where
the news takes a chunk of time and a corporation
pays them, and they pay an actor, a celebrity or

(32:47):
just a nice looking person who's really good at talking
about where the product is to come on and showcase
a bunch of products who've all paid for placement. And
they get in the news and they go, yes, this summer,
we're showcasing our new taco maker. And they talk with
and this goes on for like the ten twenty minutes
on the this and I know that that's a paid
spot because I know because I almost got to get
doing it, and I wasn't.

Speaker 2 (33:07):
I go, Okay, I know that's paid spot. With the
nice alcohol lady, that's great.

Speaker 1 (33:10):
And then there's an okay, I like this actor, but
they're on the same network as this news program and
that's why they're on here. And then finally they go, oh,
by the way, world War three is broken out and
we're all going to die going and then they go
to commercial and you're like, you know, you think that
possibly you might have reported on that. And so it
was in this meal that we were coming in and

(33:31):
saying we have like boring, complicated stuff to talk about.
That the House has approved something, but the Senate has not,
or the Assembly has cleared this bill of the state,
but these And I had someone go. I had a
person who worked at the news station go, what's an assembly?
And I go, well, it's like the i'mchus to bill cartoons.
He goes to the one house and then I go,
why am I explaining this to a grown person to work?

(33:51):
People who work in news station would say, doesn't the
bill just go and get voted on and get signed?
And I go, well, no, there's two houses.

Speaker 2 (33:59):
It's a state.

Speaker 1 (33:59):
They get it's just like in the big one. They
get to ask no clue, no cline. There was a
grown person who's working in news programming, and we noticed this.
We noticed that the news was not focused on what
we traditionally call news, and the people working in news
did not have any base knowledge of how things worked,

(34:20):
how laws were passed, what a corporation was. As you
said politics, I'm not sure they could have told me
who was in office, and yet they were the ones
pushing the buttons and typing up the memos as to
what story was going on.

Speaker 4 (34:32):
That's right, that's right, and you hit on a really
important point. I think in the decline of American journalism,
we have lost the institutional knowledge that used to exist
with reporting through newspapers, because the newspapers were the foundation
of good reporting. The newspaper in Denver, Colorado generated small
items that associated Press would pick up and you would

(34:55):
read them in the Crenton, New Jersey newspaper when they
needed to fill a hole in the bottom of the page.

Speaker 3 (35:02):
And so you'd read a story.

Speaker 4 (35:03):
News was circulated that way and there was more interesting
news out there, but that was because of an intensive
network of reporters that existed. That network has mostly gone,
and the institutionalized system where older reporters took younger reporters
underwing taught them how to develop sources, taught them where

(35:24):
the you know, where to go in city hall when
you needed something, who could be friendly, who could help.

Speaker 1 (35:32):
You, Which senatorial aid to go get the info from?
And I can tell you actually which bar.

Speaker 2 (35:38):
In Washington, DC to go to.

Speaker 1 (35:40):
Go talk to the senatorial congressional aids and you find
out everything.

Speaker 2 (35:42):
But there you are. But if I tell you, I
have to kill you.

Speaker 4 (35:47):
And that's great, And that's the kind of thing every
reporter ought to be developing. That's what I grew up with,
was the institutional idea of passing knowledge on from one
reporter to another. As a young reporter, on my first
banner byline, it was about some guys who stole some
guns from a doctor's house and it led to a

(36:09):
police chase and an event which I actually witnessed because
between the cops and the thieves a rather brutal takedown.
And I witnessed it because I heard the story unfolding
on the police radio, jumped in my car, drove to
the address that the police had mentioned, and was there

(36:29):
when the police arrived. But you don't see reporters doing
that kind of thing. So as I was doing that story,
and as a cub reporter without a lot of knowledge.
Yet the city editor was on the phone, the payphone
back and forth to the county jail with me saying,
find a door that says janitor down the hall, and
that door is actually to a backstairway that takes you

(36:51):
down to the holding cell. See if you can find
those guys and get an interview.

Speaker 1 (36:56):
Right was the day, So wouldn't you get Yeah.

Speaker 4 (37:01):
And that's that's largely gone, you know, it's it's larger
newspapers still have that sort of environment. I did freelance
work for the New York Daily News for a while
and would visit New York in their newsroom and it
seemed pretty comfortable to me, and the light the good
old days. But there aren't many places like that anymore.

(37:21):
But it's the bigger newspapers had survived. The smaller newspapers
have shrunken size and stopped using newsprint. Well, newsprint maybe
old fashioned, but it was something that people could hang
on to, and it was something that you could access
decades later if you happen to be trying to look
up the history of somebody who was you're doing an

(37:41):
investigator story about.

Speaker 1 (37:43):
But well, I mean, there's a joke on Facebook they
put the Walter krunkt Hey, we hate to tell you this.
There used to be this guy and used to come
on the TV and he would just tell you what happened,
and that was it, and that was the news.

Speaker 3 (37:55):
That was true. That's right, that's right.

Speaker 4 (37:58):
Well things have changed a bit since the pretty dramatically
since then.

Speaker 1 (38:02):
So well, what do we do because I've seen that
there is this vacuum, the sort of dumbing down of
the news. So many reporters and there's got to be
people who go into television news reporting who really want
to be reporters, and there's a handful of and they
want to investigator reporint to but there's a.

Speaker 2 (38:17):
Lot of people who are readers.

Speaker 1 (38:19):
They are on the TV and they're just reading, and
they don't know the story. They didn't get the story
even before they went they're just reading the thing. And
as in half of its advertising and in this thing,
that would be awfully easy for a government entity or
corporate entity or anyone who wants to control the narrative
to do so when you've only got three minutes of

(38:39):
news during the hour and the people reading it don't
even know what the heck they're reading.

Speaker 4 (38:44):
They don't have the context, they don't have the detail,
they don't have anybody explaining to them what this means
for them. It's an event, and that's what we report
on now, as events, and not on situations and cultures
and things. There is that kind of reporting still going on.
Magazine long form reporting can fill in a lot of

(39:06):
gaps in our understanding about certain things. If we can
trust the reporters that are writing a story.

Speaker 3 (39:12):
And the.

Speaker 4 (39:14):
And the the idea, then that that we're absorbing news
is something of a myth now because the news, the
only news we really seem to get, is national reporting
on issues of national importance.

Speaker 3 (39:28):
We don't.

Speaker 4 (39:29):
We no longer have a newspaper that publishes an obituary
free of charge. Anyway, that tells you that someone that
you knew thirty years ago in high.

Speaker 2 (39:39):
School asked away, well, that's what changed books for I guess.

Speaker 1 (39:44):
So, I mean, I read, watched, read a paper, and
I watched TV, but I watched Yes, I read news
on the internet, and I read news news on the
internet where it's a newspaper just printing what they put
in the paper on the Internet. But then there's all
the stuff on the internet. This stuff is just written

(40:04):
by bots and ai and is it even about anything?

Speaker 2 (40:07):
And it's flooding the airways for people.

Speaker 4 (40:11):
Right and it's consuming our attention vastly, and it's distracting us.

Speaker 3 (40:16):
I get a I get a news.

Speaker 4 (40:17):
Feed like most people do, and I take a look
at the top stories that are that are on the
news feed. But intermingled with all those stories are things
I really is about entertainment. I don't really care about
things that don't really add to my general knowledge about
what's going on in the world. So it is, it's overcrowded,
and we don't know how much.

Speaker 1 (40:37):
Of the government or corporate agenda is distraction. Do they
want to just completely is there is there a group
at per se is a in the CI what have
you that feels that, well, what if we just put
out a lot of distracting fluff and nonsense that that's
solved some sort of problem for them, or we put.

Speaker 3 (40:55):
Out some kind of uhh.

Speaker 4 (40:58):
Idea that there is some thing to fear that may
not be as real as we assume that it is
because of the reporting on it, the planting ideas, coloring perspectives,
having friends that help you tell the story the way
you want.

Speaker 3 (41:18):
The story told. Those are all dangers.

Speaker 4 (41:21):
We're seeing greater dangers in journalism, I think also from
the disinformation, purposeful disinformation from other circles, as you mentioned,
from corporations, from other interests, political interests, powerful interests, and
we've seen that historically in our country. What we don't
have is as vigorous a journalistic environment in which we

(41:44):
do get some of the reporting that exposes some of
these things so that we can understand better when corporations
are manipulating us or are trying to color what we
know or believe about all manner of issues I'm at
science to political cooperation or non cooperation, or the tensions

(42:07):
between various countries we do.

Speaker 1 (42:09):
I mean, I've been able to see some stories critically
when it's something at least I know something about, and
it's like, Okay, no, that's a topic I know something about,
so I know that that person.

Speaker 2 (42:17):
Just completely made that up and that that is not true.
So I'm like, okay, I can watch that.

Speaker 1 (42:21):
But there's there's subjects that we couldn't possibly as average
educated people know. Go okay, I'm going to have to
do a deep dive and go find out if that's
exactly how that went down, because I just have this
guy on the television telling me this and it sounds
like bullshit, But I can't tell who do I call?

Speaker 2 (42:38):
How where?

Speaker 3 (42:38):
I mean?

Speaker 2 (42:39):
You do a deep dive.

Speaker 1 (42:40):
You followed this guy and you go all through because
he was reporting on scientology, wrote a book about it,
and you said, well, okay, maybe or maybe not, let's
go talk to the people he talked to.

Speaker 2 (42:50):
Well, let's go talk to the people he didn't.

Speaker 1 (42:51):
Talk to and see what other story was actually there
that he never touched upon and didn't check.

Speaker 2 (42:57):
And oh that other story he told that apparently didn't
really pan out.

Speaker 1 (43:00):
You went, You went, You went back to everybody you like,
followed up, You did like the follow up question that
nobody ever does follow up questions and interviews anymore.

Speaker 2 (43:07):
They did.

Speaker 1 (43:08):
You did the follow up question and found all of
this stuff, and then you investigated him.

Speaker 2 (43:13):
Nobody's doing that.

Speaker 1 (43:14):
So when we're watching television, they say, oh, and this
is what happened, and we even feel the hair stand
up on the back of a net. Now, I don't
believe where this guy is saying, what do we do?
How do we fact check in real time of this
inundation of nonsense.

Speaker 4 (43:30):
That's a It's an excellent question and a very difficult
one because who has the time to investigate these issues
of news to try to determine whether or not we're
being treated honestly and whether or not we're being informed fairly.
The it's it's difficult, and that's why I say, you know,

(43:51):
the vigor of the journalistic enterprise in this country, the
value of the fourth of State is to have a
vigorous sort of reporting environment.

Speaker 3 (44:00):
That's what we've lost. That's what we're missing.

Speaker 4 (44:02):
And none of us have the time to spend to
run downsious and so we have to say, well, okay,
I'll take what I'm hearing and with everything with a
grain of salt, and maybe I won't believe any of it,
and maybe I won't know how I feel about a
political candidate when I finally get to the poll to
make a decision on whether or not they should be

(44:26):
in office or not those and.

Speaker 2 (44:28):
Then that's problematic.

Speaker 1 (44:29):
Now I try to go, I mean, I know people
who pick their political candidates for state office, federalv is
based on what they're wearing. I feel that's not sufficient
they talk about that. I'm like, that's note that. I
go on things like Voter's Edge, what have you, and
I try to see their record. That's something because they'll
say people will say things, and sometimes they say things

(44:50):
at Sundrid sometimes they'll say anything or some I keep saying,
can we run the speech writers for president? Could just
run everybody's speech writer because they seem to be saying
the most important stuff. I go online and I look
and I go, okay, Oh, they've held office before, good
to know. Okay, what, Oh they did vote for this bill,
they voted against this bill, they passed this bill. They
actually sponsored this bill over here, they signed on them.

(45:13):
So these are actual concrete things that are that happened,
and of record of specific legislation they specifically fostered or
tried to stamp out or voted for it against. So
I get some idea, or they were on the committee
for such and such. Okay, well they had to show
up and go to work. They were on a committee
for something. So they did do something while they were
in office. And I can see there is a record.

(45:34):
And you can lose a lot of websites that say
dot gov at the end and a lot of things
like that, there's records, and I go and I look,
even if I look, even if it's ten minutes, I
will go look and go, oh okay.

Speaker 2 (45:48):
So they're like this.

Speaker 1 (45:49):
So I have some idea because I can't just read
bumper stickers.

Speaker 2 (45:53):
I can't just read their posters. I can't.

Speaker 1 (45:55):
I mean, their ads tells me nothing. Their AD tells
me they have a dog and they like sunsets. AD
tells me nothing.

Speaker 4 (46:02):
Yeah, exactly, Well, and this is you know, it's a
and that's a good technique for understanding what you need
to do in a political situation and what you agree
with and what you don't agree with.

Speaker 3 (46:13):
And I think there are people that do that.

Speaker 4 (46:15):
And of course the parties are supposedly responsible for helping
educate people about their individual candidates and what they drew
believe and those sorts of things. But we don't have
the we don't have the independent voices out there pointing
us to various things that maybe we should know, as
at least as with the same kind of figure that
we once did have.

Speaker 3 (46:36):
The because the local reporting.

Speaker 4 (46:40):
Has deteriorated so badly, I moved out to the West coast,
to Oregon, and I went down to the local newspaper
and the largest local city and met the editor there,
and I was surprised when I got there and walked
into the newsroom.

Speaker 3 (46:59):
There was no one there. They were working.

Speaker 4 (47:02):
The people that were working for the paper, there are
very few people they had were working from home, and
they were writing two or three stories a day, or
three or four stories a day, and they weren't getting
out on the street and meeting the people down at
the city hall, and necessarily they were not out in
the community getting a feel for the fabric of the community,
getting a feel for what people thought and believed, and

(47:23):
getting to know that community. That's what we needed from
reporters always, and that's what we had, I think from
reporters for a good part of the journalistic experience in
the twentieth century. But we don't have that same thing now.

Speaker 2 (47:37):
Are we doomed or is there help? Is there something?

Speaker 1 (47:41):
Obviously you're out there, but you're one guy. You're writing
books about this, You're doing detailed, detailed reporting about how
these things go awry, how these people have these connections.

Speaker 2 (47:50):
But besides you, who is doing this?

Speaker 1 (47:54):
And are we just doomed that it's going to get
dumber and dumber, or is there something we can do
that reporters will start asking follow up questions and asking
more than one person in the course of an investigation.

Speaker 4 (48:07):
I tend to be an optimist about the possibilities of
reviving good journalistic practices. I see here and there. I
see nonprofit organizations coming in to help fund newspaper reporting
and projects. I've talked to academians journalism schools at various

(48:30):
places who are doing actually doing some investigative reporting with funding.
Finding the outlet to publish that material is sometimes a
challenge finding a platform. But I think people that truly
are interested in good journalism and in practicing journalism, and
journalism actually can be a lot of fun.

Speaker 3 (48:50):
If you know, if you get the opportunity to do.

Speaker 4 (48:53):
It, and so I think there can be vigorous reporting.
I think we can find platforms and methods to abandon
the old commercial approach to newspapers making sixty percent annual
profit through advertising because.

Speaker 3 (49:10):
They controlled all the advertising.

Speaker 4 (49:12):
We can find other means in ways to fund I
think good journalism and people are experimenting with that. So
I hope something of that nature comes along, and I
hope that it will ingrain some of the institutional knowledge
that still remains about how to do good reporting and
how to do fair reporting and those sorts of things.
But I don't see that happening rapidly.

Speaker 2 (49:36):
Yikes, all right, where do people get your book?

Speaker 1 (49:40):
Because you did get published despite all this, he was
allowed to be published the book to get published.

Speaker 3 (49:44):
I did get published. So it is out there.

Speaker 4 (49:47):
You can find it at Amazon and Barnes and Noble online.
It's available at the publisher Trying Day, which is also
based in Oregon, and so those are the primary.

Speaker 1 (49:59):
Places that Manchurian journalist. I've downloaded it on my kindle.
It is it's written, and I should tell me. It's
not written like, okay, this is going to be a
journalistic thing. It is written in a readable, talking to
your format. I started reading and I said, oh, this
is great. This is not overly dry. But then it
is also alarming because it's like, and know, these people

(50:20):
are not doing any research, and oh and then they're
printing things that they completely made up, and this happens
and it's kind of terrifying.

Speaker 2 (50:26):
But it is written in a very matter of fact, talking.

Speaker 1 (50:28):
To your sort of tone, so it is absolutely accessible
to the average reader. You do not have to be
a journalism student to read this book.

Speaker 2 (50:35):
There you are. Thank you for coming on.

Speaker 1 (50:37):
Yes, shockingly, that is all the time I get.

Speaker 3 (50:41):
Well you for having me.

Speaker 1 (50:42):
Thank Harlan for sending you over. Everyone get this book.
And I don't know people out there. Call your local
news station and complain. Say you got it, and you
got you only need three minutes about the shampoo. You're
good that you would like some of the more news.

Speaker 3 (51:00):
Thank you, awesome, thank.

Speaker 1 (51:01):
You, thank you very much. Thanks for coming. And I'm
Alison Kerman. This is the Alison Ingram Show.

Speaker 2 (51:09):
Come Mollie cos the Graver.

Speaker 3 (51:16):
Hello, says t Botcher.