Liberty and Leadership
TFAS has reached more than 46,000 students and professionals through their academic programs, fellowships and seminars. Representing more than 140 countries, TFAS alumni are courageous leaders throughout the world – forging careers in politics, government, public policy, business, philanthropy, law and the media. Join TFAS President, Roger Ream, as he reconnects with these outstanding alumni to share experiences, swap career stories, and find out what makes their leadership journey unique. The Liberty and Leadership podcast is produced at Podville Media in Washington, D.C. If you have a comment or question for the show, please drop us an email at podcast@TFAS.org.
Liberty and Leadership
How to Rebuild American Institutional Trust with Gerard Baker
Why has there been a sharp decline in institutional trust amongst Americans and how can that confidence be rebuilt? This week Gerard Baker joins host Roger Ream to discuss the loss of trust in American institutions (particularly in the media, government, and big business), the reasons behind that decline, and the impact of globalization. Plus, the true value of objective intellectual diversity in journalism.
Gerard Baker is the editor-at-large at The Wall Street Journal and was recently named TFAS Media Fellow. Baker writes a weekly column for the editorial page and hosts a weekly podcast, both named “Free Expression.” He has written and broadcasted for a wide range of outlets including the Financial Times, The Times of London and the BBC. His latest book is “American Breakdown: Why We No Longer Trust Our Leaders and Institutions and How We Can Rebuild Confidence.”
The Liberty + Leadership Podcast is hosted by TFAS president Roger Ream and produced by Podville Media. If you have a comment or question for the show, please email us at podcast@TFAS.org. To support TFAS and its mission, please visit TFAS.org/support.
Welcome to the Liberty and Leadership Podcast, a conversation with TFAS alumni, faculty and friends who are making an impact. Today I'm your host, roger Ream. I'm pleased to welcome Gerard Baker to the podcast today. Mr Baker, hereafter referred to as Jerry, is editor-at-large at the Wall Street Journal. There, he writes a weekly column for the editorial page called Free Expression that appears each Tuesday morning. He hosts a weekly podcast of the same name where he interviews the world's leading writers, influencers and thought leaders about a variety of subjects. Jerry also writes a weekly column for the Times of London.
Speaker 1:He previously served as editor-in-chief at the Wall Street Journal from 2013 to 2018. Prior to that, he was deputy editor-in-chief from 2009 to 2013. He's been a journalist for more than 30 years, writing and broadcasting for news organizations, including tenure at the Financial Times, the Times of London and the BBC. Jerry is the author of American Breakdown why we no Longer Trust Our Leaders and Institutions and how we Can Rebuild Confidence, published in 2023. In addition to all this, I'm very excited to announce that Jerry has just been named TFAS Media Fellow, a position that will facilitate his involvement in working with TFAS and our Center on Excellence in Journalism. Jerry, welcome to the show.
Speaker 2:So, first of all, thanks very much, roger, for having me on for this discussion and, more importantly, thanks for having me as part of the TFAS team and the alliance the work that TFAS and the Wall Street Journal have done together. I'm really honored and privileged to be a part of that. So thank you very much for all that you do too, and the great educational work that you do.
Speaker 1:Let's begin by talking about your superb book, american Breakdown. The book begins with a discussion of the loss of trust in American institutions. Those institutions you mentioned many, but they include government, the media, education, both higher education, public education science, big business and many others. Let me first ask you what inspired you to write the book and how did you kind of go about the writing process?
Speaker 2:So I was editor of the Wall Street Journal, editor-in-chief of the Wall Street Journal which is the new side of the Wall Street Journal, if you like for about five and a half and then six years, and during that time I hope the two things are not directly connected, but it was very obvious to me, as I think it's obvious to everybody, but I had a kind of a ringside seat of the process the trust in the media was declining at a dramatic pace. I mean, it's been declining for some time. But in that period in particular, which is roughly 2012, 2013 to about 2018, 2019, we saw this extraordinary decline and I mean that I could see that there was a decline in media. You could just see that people didn't really trust what they were reading in the news, but it was evidenced, particularly backed up by data. Lots of polls are done on what institution, how much trust people have in Americans have in their various institutions and trust in the media declined precipitously during that time in what we think of what people call the mainstream media. And again, as the editor of the Wall Street Journal, I was close up to that. Now I should say I'm glad to say too that the Wall Street Journal was a pretty notable exception to that. Trust levels did decline in the Wall Street Journal, but by nothing like as much as the rest of the mainstream media the New York Times or television networks or things of that sort. So I watched. I had this opportunity to see what was going on with the media, how and why the big news organizations in America were basically losing the trust of Americans at a very, very rapid rate. People did not believe what they read or saw, and I tried to address that again, obviously in my day job, as it were, as editor of the Wall Street Journal.
Speaker 2:But when I stepped down as editor of the Wall Street Journal, it seemed to me this was a real profound problem in American politics and culture, that if people don't trust their media then they don't trust the information they're getting. Then how can they beinformed to make decisions that affect their lives, decisions that affect the lives of the country, about democracy? So I started to look at it in more detail. I had more time. I was no longer working as editor. I was then writing for the editorial page.
Speaker 2:I looked into this in some detail, sort of what had gone on with the media. But then it occurred to me in a sort of quite emphatic way that actually this decline in trust was not just trust in the media among Americans. It was trust in pretty much every single major institution of American life, obviously the federal government, both executive, legislative and judicial branches, big business seeing a big decline in trust in big business, academia and education more generally, even public health institutions, technology companies every one of these institutions that play such vital roles in our lives in an American democracy. The polling indicates, the survey evidence is, over the last 20 years trust has declined precipitously. So this is what sort of inspired me to write the books.
Speaker 2:I started out again from my own very much my own direct experience in the media, but it obviously was clear that this was a much broader pathology of American life. And then the answer to your second question is how did I start going about doing that? Well, I really poured over a lot of this data, this survey data we had, which galloped to a polling every year on trust in major institutions. Pew, the big public opinion research organization, does similar polling.
Speaker 2:There's other polling, there's other survey evidence, and then there's a lot of literature on it, obviously secondary literature, academic literature. By the way, one other important phenomenon which I'm sure we'll talk about is not just trust in institutions but trust that Americans have in each other. And there's lots of again social science research on this sort of academic research on how what's called social capital, that is, the mutual trust that Americans have, how that has declined too. So I poured through this data, spoke to quite a lot of people, people who are familiar with a lot of this work drew on my own experience and you know from the book there's quite a few examples from my own experience as a journalist over 30 years here in this country, examples of reasons why trust has declined, and I started to put it together like that yeah, and we'll dig into some of those different institutions.
Speaker 1:But you do distinguish at the outset a difference between mistrust and distrust and that's probably worth mentioning, and also that some level of, I think, mistrust can be healthy. Skepticism or mistrust in institutions is not wholly a bad thing, right?
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly, look, there's a semantic difference. Some people think mistrust and distrust is the same. I was trying to make a distinction between exactly what you described, roger, which is you can have a healthy mistrust. Look, in many ways the history is as I say in the book the United States was founded on mistrust, if you like, or a lack of trust in the ruling authority across the water in England, and that's a kind of healthy mistrust in government, in power, powerful institutions has informed American life and democracy literally since its foundation, very much informs the constitution. So many of the principles of the constitution the separation of powers, federalism, all of those things are built on an understanding that the founding fathers had that institutions can become too powerful and that there is a mistrust of them. So we need to build a set of institutions, if you like, that actually allows for the fact that people are understandably untrusting, if you like, or mistrusting of those issues, so that can be healthy. And again, that I think in many ways, again, that's almost what defines America in distinction, say, from many other countries in the world where you know, people sort of accept authority and say, yes, you know, this is authority, this must be right. These people, again. Whether you can go back to the divine right of kings in Europe for most of European history up until about 150 years ago, or you go to other cultures, there is a sense that authority must and can be trusted. Americans have always been skeptical about that, so that's healthy.
Speaker 2:I think that where it becomes unhealthy is where people simply stop trusting, aren't just skeptical of their institutions, aren't just querying and unwilling to place their faith in these institutions, but actively don't believe anything those institutions say to them and don't believe, crucially, that those institutions are acting in their interest.
Speaker 2:That becomes very, very unhealthy.
Speaker 2:I think that is the situation that we've got to today, where large numbers of people think again. Whether it is the federal government, whether it's the media, whether it's academia, whether it's big business, these big, powerful companies, they not only just have a kind of healthy skepticism about what they're doing, they actively think that they are deceiving them, misleading them and actually not serving them and not acting in the interests of the public. And, by the way, I do want to stress and I stress in the book that one of the reasons there's been this decline in trust and this growth in distrust is that the institutions themselves have forfeited that trust. This is not, and to some extent maybe we can talk about the extent to which this is part of a culture of people sort of believing crazy things and conspiracy theories and stuff like that. There is an element of that, but actually what is at the core of this is that these big institutions have forfeited the trust of Americans through their actions, through their behavior, through some of the things we've seen over the last 20 years.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we'll get more into the source of that problem, but let me just dive a little more into the news media. You know, as you note in your book, it was as early as the 60s and 70s.
Speaker 1:particularly conservatives start to complain about the media bias. But what we've seen in more recent years that you talk about so well from your own experience, is a drifting in the news section of the paper. Even if we thought the papers might be editorially biased and more liberal, you could rely on a newspaper to give you good information, to report the stories, the facts of the stories. But it seems now that most news sections not all, and the Wall Street Journal has been exception in this regard have been pushing an agenda, not just giving us the account of what happened and you note that we've seen so many journalists coming out of elite American institutions of higher education where there's this uniform mindset in many cases. But what's caused this trend where the news sections became indistinguishable from the opinion sections in newspapers?
Speaker 2:It is one of the key questions, roger Look, and just to bring it right up to the present, we're recording this.
Speaker 1:What just Just before Labor Day right.
Speaker 2:After the Democratic Convention in late August. We saw the coverage of the Democratic Convention. Look, there was some you know I don't want to be completely, it's not a blanket criticism there was some reasonably objective critical coverage, but so much of the coverage and I'm not talking here in the opinion pages, exactly as you say, I'm talking in the news pages but also on main news of the TV networks or the cable news networks. We just see this sort of hagiographic, incredibly sort of propagandistic coverage of Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party and that has become pretty well routine. That you see this and this is one of the reasons, as you say, why so much distrust has arisen. Look, I think the reason for this is and there are a number of things again I talk about in the book I think it is partly and again you touch on this it's partly a kind of a demographic phenomenon with journalists actually. So you know, back in the days, especially in the days sort of before Watergate let's go back to the 50s, 60s in particular and before that, people who became journalists tended to be journalism was a kind of a craft. Journalism was a kind of a craft. It was not a profession. People didn't really see it, particularly as a profession. You didn't really require professional qualifications, didn't even require, for most people, a bachelor's degree to become a journalist, but you just had to have curiosity. You know a certain amount of tenacity and intelligence, certainly a kind of lively intelligence, but it kind of just a fundamental desire to find out what's going on, whether it's you know in your locality to write about crime or whether it's writing about what's going on, whether it's in your locality to write about crime or whether it's writing about what's going on in Washington politics. It was just that sense of curiosity, about understanding what's going on. We see the official information that's put out by institutions, what's really going on, and that's what journalism. That's really how journalism, I think, came to be as good as it was in America in the 1950s, 60s and 70s, and because it was done by people who didn't really have a kind of particular ideological position but they just wanted to find out what was happening, beginning in the 60s and then dramatically accelerated by Watergate in particular, and the kind of journalism, the sort of heroism phenomenon that was conferred on journalism by Watergate.
Speaker 2:The demography of journalists changed dramatically. You had to go to college, you had to have a bachelor's degree. In almost all cases you'd have a master's degree perhaps in journalism, in these institutions that would confer journalism degrees on people, and often the people who would go and work for the New York Times, the Washington Post, the news divisions of the major television networks, would then be graduates of Ivy League colleges, very, very well educated, often from a particular sort of demographic in the country and because they were considered themselves, shall we say, of a kind of higher intellectual standing, they didn't really want to just go out there and find out what was going on. They didn't want to go out and find out information, they wanted to tell people They'd sort of grown up in this kind of culture, particularly being educated in these expensive universities, this sort of culture of embracing sort of particular ideology, and of course the dominant ideology was liberal, kind of liberal left, and they wanted to take that into their jobs, into their professions, as journalism became, and so they became kind of proselytizers for kind of an ideological position, whether it was on social issues or you know, the role of, you know, I think, on issues like abortion and guns or gay marriage, things like that, or whether it was on, you know, economic issues, the role of government, the proper level of taxation and government spending and the intervention of government in the economy, or whether it was on international issues like you know, whether or not we should be strong on, you know, us defense or more internationalists. They had all of these. They came equipped largely with these ideas that came with them from again, either from their own backgrounds, their own family backgrounds, or the education, the expensive education they received, and they wanted to kind of promote that. They wanted to promote that in their journalism and that's when I think journalists.
Speaker 2:So again, that phenomenon really took off post-watergate in particular 70s, 80s, 90s, and it just continued to this day. And you know there are various, occasionally there are various surveys done of journalists and it's not just an ideological and political kind of uniformity that so many journalists have Surveys of journalists. You know 80, 90% vote Democrat or whatever. It's also the geography of those journalists that something like. There was a study and again I quote this in the book a few years ago, something like 90% of the journalists at the major news organizations in this country either have been or currently live and work, grew up or live and work in the broader metropolises of New York where I am, washington DC or San Francisco or Los Angeles, in California, it's such a narrow sort of field from which to draw people who are writing and covering news for the whole country. So I think it's primarily a demographic factor, as I say in the book.
Speaker 2:This was then compounded by the radical change that came across the news industry in the 2000s when the internet came along and, briefly, newspapers in particular, but also television news, was largely funded by advertising until the internet came along and, briefly, newspapers in particular, but also television news, was largely funded by advertising. Until the internet came along, the Wall Street Journal something like 90% of our revenue was from advertising in the year 2000. Then, when the internet came along, that advertising went away from traditional news organizations, particularly newspapers, to Google and Facebook and other digital platforms, and newspapers in particular to some extent it's also true of cable news had to find alternative sources of revenue. And the alternative source of revenue that they did find was subscription revenue, which is that people would pay to be subscribers to the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal or the Washington Post or the LA Times or whatever, and when that happens you get a change in the incentive structure, if you like, of the people who are paying the salaries of journalists. When you had advertising paying for it, advertisers, generally speaking, didn't really mind what ideological position or cultural position the coverage took. They just wanted to get in front of as many faces, as many eyes as possible and, depending what they were selling, they wanted to either mass market or particular niches, but as long as they were reaching a wide audience, that was their concern.
Speaker 2:When that's gone away and that's all gone to digital platforms and you now have to rely on subscriptions, you have to produce content that appeals to subscribers so that they will part with $100, $200, $300, $400 a year to get that daily dose of the New York Times or the Washington Post or whatever it is. And when you do that and that has been successful, new York Times has done that very successfully. One of the effects of that is it makes the paper much more responsive to, and indeed accountable to, their readers. And those readers, whatever it is, the six, seven million, eight million subscribers of the New York Times want their news coverage to have a particular kind of a viewpoint. Now, as it happens, it fits very nicely, as we've just talked about, with the kind of backgrounds of the journalists who do that news, but that reinforces what I described as that sort of demographic effect in which journalism changed.
Speaker 2:So you now have an economic and commercial incentive to actually for these news organizations to produce news that appeals to a particular audience and that further drives them in this direction of producing news, essentially increasingly news that appeals to a particular audience and that further drives them in this direction of producing news, essentially increasingly news that used to be opinion, if you like, but increasingly it blurs the distinction between news and opinion. And again, all of that means that the wider trust that people have in the news that they're reading diminishes, because they see news and they think, well, that's just somebody's opinion, that's not. I don't have to believe that because I know that that person is presenting their very, very strong kind of ideological political opinion. So I don't really trust it anymore. And that's one of the key things that's happened to result in trust declining.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, that's a good analysis, and I note in your book you identify a major source of the problem by writing that it's the vast gulf that's opened up in the last 30 years between the elites and the rest of the country, and that kind of captures what you're just saying. But you also only kind of half convinced me about another factor that you mentioned in there, and that's globalization. Now, obviously you include that in the falling trust in big business, but I think more broadly, you include that in what's kind of led to that break between elites and real people is globalization, and you know I've always thought globalization is mostly a good thing. It's helped much of the world develop and become richer, and opening up markets and trade between countries is a positive thing. But can you talk a little more about how you write about globalization as a factor?
Speaker 2:I don't think there's any question that globalization has produced enormous economic benefits. The period since the end of the Cold War, essentially since the late 1980s the period where we associate that period between roughly 1990 and, let's say, the mid-teens, mid-20-teens, 2015, global trade, global capital flows, even global labor flows, took off. I mean absolutely exploded, and yeah, I mean standard economic models will tell you that that will result in dramatically improved opportunity, dramatically, and increased supply, and all of that results in sharp decline in prices, overall global standards of living. I I mean more people have been lifted out of poverty around the world in the last 30 years than have been lifted in the entire history of the world before that. So I don't disagree with you there, roger. All of those things have clearly been benefits. So obviously that benefit, that massive benefit of globalization, does come with costs, and there's an economic cost which we've seen here in the United States. There's an economic cost which we've seen here in the united states, particularly industrialized countries, you know for that long period lost, you know, with, as, as companies moved their production to offshore facilities where wages were much lower, large numbers of jobs were displaced here in the united states. Now, to be absolutely clear, you know, many of those jobs will replace. This is the dynamism of capitalism, that it produced other jobs elsewhere. It also lowered costs for people. So there was, you know, even as we've seen these communities in the United States devastated, if you like, by offshoring. You know places like the Rust Belt, in particular, or the textile industry in North Carolina. They've been replaced by. There's no question, they've been replaced by other economic activities and we can argue about the sort of social merit or economic merit of those, but there's been benefits.
Speaker 2:The reason I cite globalization as a reason for a declining trust is because in America in particular, but in the West more generally, it's been associated with three main phenomena. One is mass immigration, which we've seen particularly intentionally in the last few years, even more than we had in the previous 10 or 20 years. Mass immigration and a sense that leaders, whether they're business leaders or political leaders, are prioritizing immigrants, immigration over the interests of, if you like, people who are already here, whether they be native population, legal immigrants, people who've been here for a long time or whatever. That has created tremendous mistrust, or distrust in both political and business leaders, because people think my interests, my interest as an American, are being essentially subordinated to, or at least put on the same level as, people who don't actually have a right to be here. We're talking particularly obviously about illegal immigration. That's a phenomenon of globalization that's led to a lot of distrust. Second phenomenon is there's just no question that businesses have pursued very successfully profits and opportunities by being global companies and I cite in the book anecdotes, I won't go into them here. But how American companies, great American, the biggest American companies, do seem in the process again to prioritize the interests of foreign activities over US activities.
Speaker 2:And the best example I can give of that is this was a controversy a few years ago when the whole Black Lives Matter thing was erupting here. Take something like the NBA. Basketball has become very, very big business. The NBA has pursued opportunities as all professional sports organizations have pursued opportunities in China. So it pursues those opportunities in China. It has a huge market in China, big following of NBA less recently because of the political tensions, but there's a big following of the NBA in China. Nba teams have gone to China, played there, big stars and popular in China and all of that and they've been very much seen as this has been. And Hollywood is another example of this. Hollywood has pursued these fantastic opportunities by this growing Chinese market, while at the same time being incredibly critical of what's going on here in America.
Speaker 2:The Black Lives Matter movement again absolutely catalyzed this, because you had these companies or organizations, institutions like the NBA, fiercely criticizing the nature of American society and basically saying America was a terrible place where, you know, minorities were oppressed and treated horribly and was an evil country and we had to do something about it, while they were going to china and, pretty well, literally kowtowing before a regime that oppresses its own people and treats its ethnic minorities far, far worse than the united states does.
Speaker 2:So that I think that phenomenon of globalization, where companies pursued opportunities which were not just necessarily to the economic disbenefit of the United States but to the kind of broader cultural elevation of other societies, other countries, at the expense of the United States, I think that led to significant mistrust too.
Speaker 2:And the third way I think, in which globalization has led to mistrust is just this wider political sense that I think a lot of people do have, that we've had governments, successive governments, that have pursued the Middle East, particularly under George W Bush, the invasion of Iraq, or whether it was pursuing, I don't want to get into the details of the argument here but alliances in Europe and NATO.
Speaker 2:There was this sense that globalization in its wider sense meant the United States actually prioritizing, or at least giving too much weight in its foreign policy and in its outlook on the world to the interests of other countries. And again, I think George W Bush a great man in many ways, and in many ways some aspects of his presidency was successful. But that second inaugural address by George W Bush in which he basically said it was the US's goal was to sort of go out and build democracy around the world. I think that created a tremendous backlash. I think the loss of trust that we've seen in business, in politics, in our leadership more broadly, has been significantly influenced by this sense that they have the interests of other countries and other peoples at heart at least as much of Americans or perhaps in some senses even more than Americans, and understandably that makes people mistrustful.
Speaker 1:And when they do in that pursuit, they often do it very poorly.
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly, exactly.
Speaker 1:We're a nonpartisan educational organization, but I do want to ask you a few questions related to the election season, and you've written some very powerful columns about it recently. As I understand, you covered both conventions. One area where trust is certainly a big issue is the integrity of elections. Both sides seem to be attacking the other, as you know, threatening democracy or trying to change rules and cheating, and it's really a thorny issue and it seems like that's one area of a democracy that's vitally important for people to have trust in, and that's the fairness of the elections that take place. And while you don't touch on that a lot in the book, it's certainly related to all the things you do write about there. So do you have any thoughts on how we restore the trust and the integrity of elections?
Speaker 2:So there are two things I think there. One is you're right one of the very specific kind of allegations which have been proliferating, obviously in the last few or four or five years about electoral malfeasance. Shall we say Again whether it's obviously Donald Trump's claim that he was cheated out of the 2020 election by you know you can take your pick but by a range of schemes supposedly that cost him that election. Whether it's the kind of things we're seeing right now, which is challenges on the issues like ballot access concern on the right Republicans that maybe illegal immigrants are being registered to vote and that this could influence the vote. Concern on the left, as you kind of hint at, about supposedly restrictive measures, states like Georgia which have you know whether it's requiring an ID to vote other measures that supposedly are restricting ballot access. So there's that that is a big problem again on both sides, and I think part of the reason for that is we have these close elections now. When Ronald Reagan won in 1984, when he won 49 states, I mean, frankly, if 10 million people had been cheating, it wouldn't have made a difference to the outcome. Every single election we have these days is decided on a knife edge. So a few thousand votes in a few states where there clearly could be fraud, could be decisive. So I think that's one of the things we've seen. The wider thing. The second point, which I do talk about in the book and this is a real problem, and I think this is at the root of the problem about these specific ballot questions and it's about trust too is that in the last 20, 30 years, we've steadily committed to delegitimizing the other party and again this is on both sides.
Speaker 2:I mean, again, I had written very forcefully about Donald Trump and the 2020 election. I think he was wrong to do what he did, legitimate to have questions about many of the things that took place in 2020. But I think you know he tried to challenge the result of the election in the courts. He got nowhere and then he tried to lead a kind of extra constitutional challenge. That, to me, is completely unacceptable and wrong. But it was the worst. But it wasn't the first time that parties and presidential candidates had challenged the legitimacy of the election in the last 20 years. In fact, it's become pretty well routine to do so.
Speaker 2:Again, I cite in the book and written about this before, what happened on January the 6th. They forget that in 2004, when George W Bush won re-election, there were challenges to his election victory and a significant minority over 100 I think declined to endorse his certify his election result the thing that happens on January the 6th every four years after the election. They declined to endorse it. One of them in the Senate opposed, and about, let's say, close to 100 in the House declined again. They didn't lead a riot on the Capitol and all of that, but they believed that his election was illegitimate in 2004. Even more so in 2000, when he was elected, as you know, in a razor-thin margin election ultimately decided by the Supreme Court. There are still Democrats you ask Democrats, a large number of Democrats think that was an illegitimate election.
Speaker 2:2008, when Barack Obama won, there was a lot of Republicans who claimed that Barack Obama was ineligible for election on the bogus claim that he'd been born overseas. So his legitimacy was challenged. When Donald Trump won in 2016, again, you know, winning as George W Bush did in 2000, losing the popular vote, but winning the electoral college, that was again. Hillary Clinton herself said afterwards his election was illegitimate. So we've unfortunately gone into this position and again, just to absolutely reaffirm my point I'm not saying that any of those previous occasions was on a par with what happened in 2020.
Speaker 2:That took it to a new level, and a very new and very disturbing level, but it was in some ways an almost logical progression, where one side simply doesn't accept that the other side's election is legitimate. There's fraud, somebody was ineligible, the Supreme Court intervened improperly, all of this kind of stuff. That is a real profound and very disturbing mark of distrust in our political system, because, essentially, if you can't accept the result when you lose, then you have lost democracy. That is literally what living in an electoral democracy means that you put your case to the voters. If you win, you get to govern. If you lose, you accept the result and you try again two or four years later. If you say, every time you lose now on either side, actually I didn't really lose, they cheated we no really longer have a democracy that can function effectively in the interests of all the people, and I think that's where we've got to.
Speaker 1:You wrote a very interesting piece a while back about in the Times of London about parallels between 2024 and 1968, many of them disturbing parallels and I think you wrote that, as I recall, before Joe Biden decided to step down, which was a parallel to 68, really, when Johnson decided not to run again. Also, it was before the assassination attempt on Donald Trump, which again is another parallel, with Robert F Kennedy being assassinated, and we did not see the violence in Chicago, mostly because of the tremendous lockdown. Friends of mine who live in Chicago said they were basically a police state for a week or so that prevent all that violence. But does that lead you to any kind of thoughts about what we expect in the next two months?
Speaker 2:Yeah, thanks for mentioning that. Actually, you're right, I wrote that piece right at the start of the year and saying how God forbid, but 2024 did look like 1968 all over again, right down to the Democrats having a convention in the middle of a war going on where there was significant anti-war sentiment in their own party. I did talk about the risk of political violence that we obviously the 68, we saw the two major assassinations and the broader political violence that we saw and again, even at that point I didn't expect Joe Biden to step down as LBJ did in 68. I mean, I think you've got a glass half full or a glass half empty approach. You can draw either conclusion from the strong 68-2024 parallels. The troubling, the negative, that glass half empty conclusion is you know that was an example of what happens and how bad things can get. And remember, we are still 10 weeks away, as we record this, from the election. You know, thank God, you know Donald Trump survived that terrible assassination attempt. But the level of rancor and sort of mutual political hostility that we have in this country, I'm afraid, is quite conducive to political violence. And again, we've seen it. We saw it on January the 6th. We saw it in the summer of 2020. That was a form of political violence the riots across the country. So it is a disturbing and this is what I wrote at the start of the year that there are disturbing parallels which could take us down that road that did end up in political assassinations, did end up in mass violence, did end up, in a sense, that the country was falling apart in 1968.
Speaker 2:The glass half full approach is and I tend probably towards this that actually 68 is a useful reminder that, as bad as things seem today, hostility, partisanship, polarization, angry, angry words and actions in many ways on both sides let's remember that just a little over 50 years ago, in 68, was worse. I mean, again, we did have two successful political assassinations, terrible, terrible events that they were, which were devastating for the country. The country was at war. Hundreds of American soldiers were dying at various points during that year Every week. We don't have that today. There was widespread domestic political violence, domestic terrorism, mass protests, anti-vietnam War protests to some extent still some hangover from civil rights or counter-civil rights, if you like protests. There was extraordinary violence across the country which, again, we don't have today. There was the chaos of the Democratic Convention in 68, lyndon Johnson, dropping out of the race in rather different circumstances from Joe Biden.
Speaker 2:So it is a useful sort of corrective to the idea that the country is in the worst state it's ever been, in which a lot of journalists with very short-term memory contend to do, and that democracy is somehow in peril. You know, this is an election in which which may decide whether or not democracy survives in this country. I tend, maybe, maybe I'm I've just been around too long or maybe I'm missing something, but I tend to think I have a great faith in this country. I became an american just last year, as you know, roger, and I think this country has gone through terrible traumas in its past.
Speaker 2:68 was one, you know, the depression of the 1930s obviously was another, wars, then multiple wars and of course that you know the greatest domestic crisis of all, the civil war, you know, was one. The depression of the 1930s obviously was another Wars, then multiple wars and, of course, the greatest domestic crisis of all, the Civil War. I hope that a civil war is not necessary to resolve our current tensions, but I do feel that the US, you can say look as bad as things are, we've gone through terrible situations in the past and we've come out of them better. So I think you can use 68 either as a kind of a terrible sort of parallel to remind you how bad things are, or you can use it as a kind of a, as an incentive, almost to say, look, we went through that it was worse than it is today and we came through a stronger country. So you know, I tend to that sort of latter, more optimistic, side.
Speaker 1:One final question for you. As you know, TFAS is very involved in journalism. We have Robert Novak Journalism Fellowships for Young Professionals, we have the Joseph Rago Fellowships, we have two new fellows starting after Labor Day at the Wall Street Journal. We've been building a network of independent newspapers on college campuses and a big part of the objective of those programs isn't just to help get good news reported by these young people but it's to build a bigger pipeline of young journalists who can go into the news media, into careers in journalism and hopefully bring intellectual diversity to the newsrooms and to the editorial pages. And we can cite a lot of examples of where we're having success in this regard. But I wanted to ask you, given your distinguished career in the field, whether you recommend to young people that they pursue a career in journalism and perhaps any advice you'd give to them as they prepare for that.
Speaker 2:Look, it's so important For all the things I say in my book, for all the things we've talked about, roger, here, about how the media is not trusted. It's important to remember how damaging that is to our society and to our democracy, that without a media that people can trust, without news and information that people can trust, as I said at the start, we don't really have any reason for people to believe that the democracy is working. So it's absolutely essential to go about rebuilding trust in the media and I think what you're doing at TFAS is really an important part of that and I'm very encouraged by that. Again, I've been at the Wall Street Journal now for 15 years. I was deputy editor-in-chief for four years, editor-in-chief again for another five and a half, six years after that, and at the journal, both on the news side, and I've now worked on the opinion side for the last five years, six years. We see this extraordinary continuing flow of highly talented, highly committed and I don't mean in a political way, I mean I committed to the principles of journalism young people coming through who want to do the right thing, who want to do a job, who understand probably better than I do at my age, understand the challenges, the problems that the media have and want to do something to help correct that. And I think, bringing and again I saw that as editor we had wonderfully talented people from across the country.
Speaker 2:By the way, and, as you say again, diversity here is so important. I know there's a lot of emphasis these days, particularly in news organizations, on diversity, equity, inclusion, as it's called, and increasing particularly the racial and ethnic mix in news organizations, and that's important, that is absolutely important and it's something we started to address at the Wall Street Journal when I was editor. But it's more important. I would hug you now, now, given what's happened, to trust in the media that we have genuine intellectual as you say, intellectual diversity and we get away from this, what we've talked about, this kind of monolithic, progressive left domination of our news organization. So having people and, by the way, and I'm not necessarily talking about you know to be obviously the editorial page, the wall street journal is the premier conservative voice of this country, to some extent, you know, of Western world, and it does that job absolutely brilliantly and so having conservative-minded opinion journalists who want to come and work there and again, we have some wonderful, wonderful examples who've come through the TFES internship program has been absolutely brilliant. Having people like that is really important.
Speaker 2:But I would also just stress, I think having people who just genuinely want to discover what's happening in the world, to report with great rigor and integrity on what's happening, not necessarily with a political bias, but just to restore that idea to journalism, that principle of just I'm just going to find out the story wherever it leads.
Speaker 2:If it leads to embarrassing information for Kamala Harris or for Donald Trump, I don't care. The important thing is to go and find out really important information that voters, readers, viewers can trust, and so that is needed more than ever in American journalism. In American journalism Again, you do a wonderful job in identifying, in helping and your student newspaper program, all the things you do in encouraging, giving people the tools and the ability and the exposure to all the kind of people that they need to do that. I think it's incredibly important that we have more of that and I think that is the only way actually that we are going to restore trust in the media. In the end, it comes down to having people. It's the people that are trusted and it's having really talented journalists, talented people who want to go into journalism who are going to restore that trust, and so I'm very hopeful when I see the work that you do, and some other organizations too, I'm actually hopeful that, as bad as it is right now, there's a willingness and a determination to make it better.
Speaker 1:Well. Jerry Baker, thank you very much for joining me today. Thank you for all you're doing in your distinguished career, Thank you for writing a very important, wonderful book and thank you for your work with TFAS.
Speaker 2:Roger, it's a great pleasure. Good luck to you at TFAS and thank you again.
Speaker 1:Thank you for listening to the Liberty and Leadership podcast. If you have a comment or question, please drop us an email at podcast at TFASorg, and be sure to subscribe to the show on your favorite podcast app and leave a five-star review. Liberty and Leadership is produced at Podville Media. I'm your host, roger Ream, and until next time, show courage in things, large and small.
