AMDG: A Jesuit Podcast

What’s a Journalist To Do When We Can’t Even Agree on the Facts? with Scott Detrow

For the third episode of our pre-election series, we’re going to focus on the role of the media in a democracy. Our guest is Scott Detrow, a veteran radio journalist and a host of NPR’s flagship show All Things Considered. You can usually find Scott hosting the weekend editions of the show on Saturday and Sunday, but this month he’s filling in on the weekday afternoon broadcast. He’s also a host of the Consider This podcast. Scott joined NPR in 2015, and he spent eight years covering national politics. He covered two presidential campaigns, Congress and the White House. Before NPR, Scott was a statehouse reporter in California and Pennsylvania for NPR member stations. He's also Jesuit educated twice over -- an alum of Marquette University High School in Milwaukee and Fordham University in New York. Host Mike Jordan Laskey asked him on the show recently to discuss the state of the news media today, which is just as caught up in the challenges of polarization as the Catholic Church is. We wanted to get his take on the state of journalism today and even just to get back to basics: What is the news media for in a democracy? Why is mistrust of media so high these days? Are there any signs of hope out there? And you can trust Scott on this stuff because he’s thoughtful, hard-working and a great old-fashioned journalist. He wants to tell stories that matter to communities, not to spout his own opinions about the latest hot topic of the day. Because he’s not a pundit, this podcast might be the only time you get to hear him share his thoughts on the media landscape today and why journalism is worth fighting for. Scott Detrow: https://www.npr.org/people/444796749/scott-detrow AMDG is a production of the Jesuit Media Lab, which is a project of the Jesuit Conference of Canada and the United States. www.jesuits.org/ www.beajesuit.org/ twitter.com/jesuitnews facebook.com/Jesuits instagram.com/wearethejesuits youtube.com/societyofjesus www.jesuitmedialab.org/

Duration:: 43m
Broadcast on:: 16 Oct 2024
Audio Format:: other

(upbeat music) - From the Jesuit Media Lab, this is AMD G. I'm Mike Jordan-Lasky. For the third episode of our pre-election series, we're going to focus on the role of the media in a democracy. My guest is Scott Detro, a veteran radio journalist and a host of NPR's flagship show All Things Considered. You can usually find Scott hosting the weekend editions of the show on Saturday and Sunday, but this month he's filling in on the weekday afternoon broadcast. He's also a host of the Consider This podcast. Scott joined NPR in 2015 and he spent eight years covering national politics. He covered two presidential campaigns, Congress and the White House. Before NPR, Scott was a state house reporter in California and Pennsylvania for NPR member stations. He's also double Jesuit educated as an alum of Marquette University High School in Milwaukee and Fordham University in New York. I asked Scott on the show recently to discuss the state of the news media today, which is just as caught up in the challenges of polarization as the Catholic churches. I wanted to get his take on the state of journalism and even just to get back to basics a little bit. What is the news media for in a democracy? Why is mistrust of media so high these days? And are there any signs of hope out there? And I trust Scott on this stuff because he's a thoughtful, hardworking journalist. He's a great old fashioned journalist. He wants to tell stories that matter to communities not to spout his own opinions about the latest hot topic. Because he's not a pundit, this podcast might be the only time you get to hear him share his thoughts on the media landscape today and why journalism is worth fighting for. I learned a whole lot listening to his reflections. One quick warning before we start, of course, this interview with an NPR journalist was the one episode I've done in the past few years where the sound quality got messed up by a finicky computer. So if you hear any little clicks or pops in the background, it's not you, it's me. Thanks for joining us. (gentle music) Well, Scott Detra, welcome back to AMDG. Thank you so much for being here. How you doing? Good, it's nice to be here in person. That's right, we've hit like now a few podcasts in person recently, something we can do in 2024 we couldn't do before is always nice to be able to see the person you're talking to in real time. It's a rainy day. We've got kind of like a cozy chat going on. I know, yeah, this is great. We just need some coffee or tea or hot chocolate or something. But here in Washington where we both work. And it's an interesting time in Washington where the national news is our local news and you are involved in national news work. And so as we were getting ready for this presidential election, I've heard this coming. Occasionally I hear people mention that. I was thinking about episodes to do in this little pre-election series. Like, you know, we should talk a little bit about media, democracy, politics. Because it does feel like it's kind of a weird time in media the way it's a weird time in politics and weird time in church world too. Weird time all over the place, and it's definitely particularly. There's a lot of strange dynamics hitting into each other in the world of media and journalism right now. What are some of those strange dynamics that come to mind for you first when you think about the state of your chosen profession? So this is not an order of importance. This is an order of how they're coming through my brain. I think one thing is like, the internet is at a strange place right now that I feel like social media and political news, especially, have really intersected in a way that I think we could talk about this more, I think, has led to bad journalism, but has been a really key part of it. But I feel like right now, just like every other form of media, social media has become very fragmented and polarized and factional, right? Like, if you're conservative, you're on this platform, if you're liberal and you're on this platform, if you're another thing, you're on this platform. And I feel like there's no like common space in the internet and shared reality in the internet. And I think that has made kind of the fractured professional media landscape even more fractured in the sense like I don't have the central place to go to see what people are talking about to put my stories into in the way that I feel like we really did for a decade and a half. So it's been an interesting adjustment. I think by and large, it actually makes you a better reporter 'cause you're not sitting there looking at the conversation on Twitter because I think that kind of became flattened out and not reflective with the whole country was talking about. So you've got that factor. You've got broad distrust of the news media. From I think all sides, like you have in the kind of Trumpified Republican party, like being viewed as an incredibly hostile force who's out to get Trump and similar politicians. But I feel like I've noticed in the last few years progressive being just as distrustful of the media and just as questioning of our motives. And that is not a great, comfortable place to be but I'm seeing it more and more. - It does feel like if you were to work on a story at NPR about anything and I could find it and I'd say, oh, this is cool and I could send it to some people and some people would be like, oh, this is great. And then others would just see the name NPR on it. And then like, ah, I can't trust it. - You know, it's slanted in this way or that way. It used to feel like we could agree that there were maybe like some facts that people could kind of agree on that were facts. But now it feels like even kind of hard news reporting is questioned with that eye toward conspiracy. - And I think this is the continuation and speeding up of something that's been going on for decades. And it's just easier. There are so many different ways that you can, like even if you just think about like I'm watching TV that can mean like 30 different things right now, right? You can have cable, you can have linear broadcast news, you can have some sort of like internet based cable like Hulu or YouTube TV or you can have these like digital news channels that come with your TV and there's like suddenly 600 channels and some of them are these like random news channels you've never heard before. Like even the idea of TV is so fragmented. And on top of that, you've just had this trend of people gravitating towards news sources that they think aligns with what they want to hear. And when the news sources present them a story that they don't like or they don't want to hear, it's easy to just say like, oh, you're biased or I'm canceling or I'm never listening or reading to you again. So that's tricky because I am very convinced that like the very critical role that the news media has to play is to deliver facts to tell you what's happening in the world, to tell you why it matters to help you connect dots. And sometimes it feels a little bleak thinking like do people actually want to hear that or they just want to hear what they agree with already but you have to not let that affect what you're doing because then you're just a partisan outlet or you're just like an entertainment outlet, you're not trying to deliver the news to people which is what I'm always trying to do. - Right, so I guess that leads to the question of how do you do your job knowing these things or knowing that this is the environment and it's getting blasted out into. - I mean, it's almost like a return to kind of like the more like, try to think of the right word for it. I feel like there was like a chip on your shoulder approach to the profession for a long period of time that kind of went away of just like, well, you're not like here to make friends, right? You're here to report on stories and gather facts and tell them to people. I think for me personally, I have by and large left the social media where I was spending a lot of time and then I just simply don't see people tweeting at me telling me that I'm a terrible human. - I think I better off for that. I mean, like sometimes, like, I always accept feedback and sometimes it's really useful and sometimes you realize you did kind of miss something or you've forgotten an element of a story and you're like, that's really good to know. Thank you for telling me about that next time I do that or you know, issue correction if correction is warranted but I think kind of the like, bullying and pressuring dynamics of trying to get people to write stories one way or another are not super useful. I think it's just like sitting back and thinking about what is the story we're reporting on and doing thought experiments of like, okay, if the story, if one or two factors in the story were different, would I be reporting it any differently? If so, why, if you know, what does that mean for the approach I'm taking right now? But it's tricky. It's tricky because just sticking with the political lens, like, I feel like it's a complicated election to cover right now and a lot of it has to do with stories that have been playing out over the past 12 years or so. I remember when I was in school and like, we had a journalism classes and we had a speaker who came as Ken Oleda who was like a media reporter for The New Yorker. He talked about like in newsrooms, you know, the idea of objectivity, that's a false God. - Yeah, human beings are human beings and have their own things. And also like a lot of the time, like how a bias comes across might not be in the actual reporting of a story, but even what stories are chosen to be featured in the first place, whose stories are making it to the front page or in your case, like to within your, within the program. But that for, in his case, what he said is, you know, what you want is you just want balance. You want a lot of different reporters and editors from a lot of a bunch of different backgrounds and like belief systems and you put them all together and kind of hope that comes out together. So like for you, again, someone trying to do news in addition to features, like what is objectivity a word that you think is important? Is that like something you're trying to chase after? Like what is your kind of, your way of proceeding to use a Jesuit phrase? - The way that I put it, and I was just talking to a bunch of students about this a couple of weeks ago and I put it this way and I think it's useful to put it, is if you are questioning whether or not I'm putting facts into a story or keeping facts out of a story to go along with kind of like what my bias is, then you're not going to trust my reporting and you're not gonna, you rightly wouldn't listen to it. So I feel like we can have all sorts of theoretical conversations about is objectivity real or not, right? But I feel like if you are a journalist and if you are a mainstream journalist whose main priority is telling people the news, then you can't be putting on filters of what you would like to see happen or what you wish the news was, but you need to cover what the news actually is. And I think sometimes that can feel hard for people, but to me, like that is the core part of the job. And you know, my job has changed over the last couple of years. I think since the last time we talked for a long time, I was a little political reporter. I covered various beats in the world of politics. So my job, it was a lot more straightforward, right? Like covering Congress, what happened in Congress today was the most important thing that happened in Congress today who were the key people that we need to learn more facts about in Congress than I covered campaigns in the White House and the same thing, you're covering a beat day in, day out. This is the story that you're looking at. And if you're doing it right, you're doing a mix of kind of the reactive news that happened that day, telling people here's what happened today. And the more proactive, like this is a story that I wanna look into, I wanna do a profile on this particular interesting person of the administration or I wanna take a look at this issue or take a look at this political setting. Why are people trying to do this certain thing? So now that I host a show, I host all things considered on the weekends primarily. It's more of being like a hub for all of the reporting that NPR is doing across all of the different beats. The international stories that are happening, the political stories that are happening, stories that are happening in the national news, like the recent flooding. And you're kind of like putting together a menu of one, what are the most important stories that people need to know about today? And two, especially doing it on a weekend where I know that people are trying to relax a little bit or have fun a little bit. I'm also trying to like entertain people a little bit at the same time or like look for stories that are a little more offbeat that they might not have heard of before or might be kind of fascinating or interesting. Like an artsy interview or something like that. And you're kind of making this experience of what is the thing that if you spend the whole hour with me, you will leave the hour knowing more about the world you live in and kind of have a little bit of fun doing it. There's a lot of news stories in the world right now that aren't fun and that's how it is. We're going to give you the latest in what's happening in Lebanon. And we're going to give you the latest on the presidential campaign in the final days of the race. But I feel like it's exciting to have a lot of flexibility to say like, well, what else do we want to talk about? Like I've been doing a lot of stories on space because it's a really interesting moment in like privatized space and also NASA doing this big ambitious stuff that hasn't done in decades. And that's interesting. And there aren't a lot of other places focusing in on it. And frankly, I feel like that's something on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon somebody might want to hear about and it's interesting news. So you're just kind of like always putting that stuff together. So in a way, it's more challenging, but it's also easier to like to sit at the center of this hub in NPR and saying like, okay, who, which of my colleagues work do I want to feature and elevate today or which outside guests do we want to bring in to help explain things? - Yeah, and I want to talk more about all things considered and how you go about putting together that show a little bit later in terms of like, yeah, those decisions that go into, okay, what is interesting? You kind of have started us down that path a bit. So let's come back to that. But I did want to ask like, so there are different ways than a different media companies or people have journalists have responded to the fact that this is this fractured landscape and then also that people are so distrustful of like the media capital M. And so like, yeah, some would like lean into it being more kind of partisan. Like, yeah, let's give the people what they want and we'll just like find our spot and do that. And then like you have the whole kind of sub stack independent world where people have like said, who needs editors, who needs any of these gatekeepers? - Everybody is the answer to that. - Yeah, but like so many are like saying, no, forget that model. I'm gonna go do it independent. And people will pay me a few bucks a month and I'll get a big enough subscriber base that I can support myself doing it that way. And you'll get like my long takes on stuff like with my particular span on my beat. And then there are some who just try to like do it the old fashioned way, I don't know. - So I'm just curious for you, like personally, how you're approaching it. What have you seen at NPR about like, how do we like respond to this news? Certainly NPR has a lot of podcasts, right? More than zero, they would have had say 20 years ago. So that's been a big growing space. But like, yeah, so how do you respond to this kind of strategically or again, even in how you're approaching your own work? - A lot of people do it a lot of your ways that you just said and a lot of people have a lot of values. But I feel like for me, I need to be centralizing the facts and the storytelling, right? And I think that for me is more important than the personality or the personal spin or the personal point of view or the partisanship or any of those things. Like I'm trying to find information and I'm trying to tell it to you in a way that is engaging that you want to keep listening to my stories or my podcast. And I think like those are the central things that I'm trying to organize around. So I don't actually have much interest in starting a sub stack with my thoughts on the stuff that I'm texting my friends about or whatever, I'll just keep that for that space. Or putting like, I don't think I have that much unique political analysis to put on something as opposed to being somebody who can gather facts for you and help you understand a complicated topic. I just did an interview with Robert Caro, the journalist and historian who is one of the journalists I admire most in the world. He's written four books about Lyndon Johnson's life and career. He's working on a fifth book at 88 years old. So he's in this like epic racing against time to write about the entire Johnson presidency. And he was talking, he has taken this to more of an extreme than I think anybody who's been alive the last hundred years, but he was talking in the interview about how he never felt like he could explain a topic to readers unless he fully understood it himself. So he needed to do as much research, as much journalism, as many interviews as possible to understand it. And he felt like if there was still some sort of aspect of this, I don't quite get the answer to that is to keep digging, to keep reporting before I even begin to explain it. And that is an extreme that most people cannot carry out. I live in a world of weekly deadlines now. So even a weekly deadline as opposed to the hourly deadlines I used to live in isn't actually that much time to fully turn over every single stone of the world. But that has stuck in my head because I feel like in a lot of ways, the business model and what consumers seem to want when it comes to news is the total opposite. They want the explanation, they want the takes, they want you to tell you what it means. And there's a big emptiness in the middle of that and that is the actual facts at hand. I feel like they're getting minimized in a lot of different places. It's less about telling you a story and reporting the news and more about having five people on a panel to yell at you about what you're supposed to think about it. - Yeah, I can even think in sports journalism, which I love, my favorite basketball writer just got fired by ESPN and they're putting out these guys, again, who are like job it is to be on TV and to respond with takes. And like, there's some market for some takes, I guess, but it does feel, it feels dispiriting to me as a consumer who wants some of this stuff and it feels like the good stuff is harder to find. Do you find it frustrating to be trying to feel like growing upstream in the take economy of journalism where it feels like that's what gets rewarded as opposed to the, hey, finding really interesting stories about interesting people digging into them and sharing that with your listeners. - Just let a lot of Jesuitical analysis happening here since I came in. Yes, yes, it's tricky and I don't know. And I think it's... I mean, this is the only thing I've ever wanted to do. And from the point I was at some point in high school on, I was like, I wanted to be a reporter, I wanted to write stories, I wanted to cover things. And the whole sense of what the world wants from the media I think has been changing. But I feel like if we can't all agree and what the facts are, we can't proceed to anything else from there, right? Like somebody has to be gathering information and telling people what is going on. And I feel like there's still even if people are out there arguing that it's not what readers and listeners want. And even if the giant conglomerates that own a lot of the news media is pushing in the other direction, like that still needs to be there. Which is why I think public media has a very important role that we are a nonprofit, we are funded by and large by contributions from the people who listen to us. And we have like that core mission at the center. We're not trying to make as much money as possible. We're trying to get information to as many people as possible. And I like being in that part of the world doing this. But yeah, it's tricky. And like, you know, like I like those same sports sites too. And it's like kind of sad to be like, oh, like I feel like like this entire industry has gone into like commodity information about gambling and arguing on TV, like what? - So I guess like some ways we've gotten into deeper things without talking about like the first question, which is like, you know, I was in, I was a journalism minor at school. I was like, oh, we had and we like we would have classes that talked about this, like what is journalism for? Like specifically again, in like a in our democracy within a political season, what's the point? And maybe like going back to that and thinking about that can help us think about like what we want to be consuming when I'm out there making choices. - Yeah. - So yeah, when you think about that, if you're getting ready to interview a politician on the show or like when you're covering a campaign and then like looking for interesting stories to tell and what is it for? - So I think actually I've given very rambling answers because these are things I'm actively thinking about. But this is something I can give you a very concise answer and right, I think it's for knowing what is going on in the world around you and helping you understand what is going on in the world around you, period. That's what it's for. - Got it. - Do you agree? Do you disagree? - Do I disagree? No, then like then I think the then corollary is so that as a voter as a citizen, I can make choices based on what I know and what I have learned and there are times when people need to be held to account or things that we wouldn't like, you know, we wouldn't know about if there hadn't been journalists following stories that would be more in the dark, right? I wouldn't know what was going on around without that piece. - Yeah, and I think they're like one of the particular arguments that's happening a lot in journalism right now is like and many people think it should be, many people think it should not be. Is it the reporter's job to tell you what to think about that? And I feel like no, but it is my job to help you connect the dots, to bring all of the relevant context forward and let's particularly talk about this presidential election because I feel like there has been so many thoughts shared over the past decade about the right way or the wrong way to cover Donald Trump who's running for president for the third election in the row at this point. And the thing I think about and I keep saying when we have internal conversations is like anytime he's giving a speech and says something new, anytime an interview comes up, anytime a truth social post or social media post comes up, the good thing is that we have nine years of context to place it in. When else has he said this before? What else did that lead to? Why did he say these things before? Like there is so much evidence out there to sift through and fold into a story. So I think the wrong way to cover is to just put the narrow vacuum on this thing that was said or happened today and the right way is to fold in and he said a similar thing five times in the past and here's why it mattered and here's what we learned about when and why he said that and didn't lead to any policies that affected people's lives. Like there is a lot of material to draw from and I feel like connecting the dots and doing the work to think through like is this a story we tell through a narrow lens or do we zoom back out and tell you what the five year story of this. Like I think those are the day to day choices and it depends on your deadline. It depends on the type of story you're filing and a whole bunch of other things but trying to contextualize as much as possible which is different from telling people what to think I think. So there's two like now the discussion around well should I feel like certain publications just get yelled at about on social media for like the headline that they're like oh this headline or like not calling something a lie directly enough. Just kind of reporting what someone said as opposed to saying oh and that thing is not true and I know so we're talking on the afternoon the vice presidential debate is happening later tonight so by the time people hear this that will be old news but I saw that CBS for that is like they're putting a QR code on the screen. If you want to scan that and like live they'll have journalists live fact checking. You know I feel like in some ways journalism has been like we talk about journalism or like it's been reduced to fact checking in some cases. Like that's what a journalist does. How do you feel about like the role of outlets or people to like obviously telling the truth and pursuing the truth is an important thing. There are times in which there are certainly clear very clear things that are true or not true but is it the job to do that fact checking is that kind of eroded some of the truth pursuit that journalists are doing that's a lot more than just like checking something off. Yeah what are your thoughts on like that whole debate. I mean to me fact checking is a critical central part of journalism and I actually thought ABC did a really good job at fact checking in that presidential debate. I don't know if we call it the first or second president. The first one between Harris and Trump in Philadelphia. They got a lot of attention and both praise and criticism but I thought it was appropriate and it was measured and it was not like grandstanding. They would just come in and say like actually no. You know like you're saying something that's not true we call the city manager nobody is eating cats and dogs and move forward into the next question. And I thought that was important because like that's what you would do in a new period. Somebody's saying something to you that is blatantly untrue and you know it to be. You say that in the interview or you certainly if you have to go back and do research after the interview before the story airs you say it in the story airing like that is a key part of the job. And I know like you said like the labels. NPR was slow to say things that Trump said that were untrue were lies and got a lot of criticism for that but when I was covering the first Trump campaign I was never like taking a false statement and kind of saying up to you whether or not that's true. Like I didn't use the word lie but I would say like Trump said this and that's not true or Trump falsely said this and like we talked about like the truth sandwich almost where you like say the truth thing. You say the quote because it was newsworthy with whatever he said and then you follow up. And again that's not the case. Here's the reality and then you move forward and I think it's you make it very clear to somebody listening to the story. He said something that was not true. There might have been reasons for that and keep going with the reporting. Like I don't think that should be a controversial thing. - I did want to ask you about like so those choices that go into your reporting and then not even just to the reporting but then like to building a show and trying to present a lot of different types of stories and coming up with the things that you're deciding. And I know like for you're putting together an hour show and you have like is it an hour, hour and a half? It's an hour. - We're an hour on the way. - Yeah so and you have like certain segments that you know you're going to fill with different types of things but like in the course of a week or in a month preparing for certain things like what is going into your mind? What are the questions that you're asking when you're thinking okay what do we need here? What do we want to make sure that we're covering? In addition to like those top of news headlines which have to be there but then yeah. So help us like pull the curtain back behind like what goes into making an episode. - So there's a bunch of us having these conversations throughout the course of the week and the morning of the show and the afternoon of the show and sometimes a story will change. I feel like I keep talking about Donald Trump but it's the final weeks of a presidential race so I can find other examples as well but this is top of mind recently because a story that can change. So I was working the night of the assassination in Tampa, Pennsylvania. We ended up doing four hours of live rolling coverage and then a few weeks ago there was that incident that happened at the golf course, right? Where, so we've got our show together. We're putting our show together. We see this alert, see these reports out there that some sort of gun fire may have happened at this new Donald Trump ago. Okay, we'll keep an eye on that but that doesn't seem to be like too big of a news story. Moving forward, you know? And then it's three hours to show time. Two hours to show time. Around two hours to show time it starts. The story starts to change. We realize no, this might have been something that was Secret Service related. Oh, well, that makes it a little more newsy. Is it newsy enough to tear up our show and put it in? Not quite yet. We'll mention it. You know, there's a few spots throughout the hour where you kind of get like the newscast headlines, like the condensed versions. It'll be covered there, it's up to newsy. And then about an hour to show time, statements come out, facts come out. And it's like, oh, no. Somebody had a rifle near former President Trump. Secret Service engaged them in fire. This might have been an assassination attack. Then you're like, okay, so that is now the very top story in our show because this is suddenly a major news story, which unfortunately for us really came into clarity in the final half hour or so before the show time. So we were able to get, our show starts at five Eastern, but then you kind of do different versions for all the different time zones if needed. So we were able to get the reporting together to have a clear sense of the story. Show airs, we're talking at five o'clock and at like 501 the press conference begins. So we're like, all right, well, we'll be updating this story. But by the time we came around again, next hour, we had a very clear idea of what would happen. But that's just one example of a story that kind of goes from the periphery to, no, we're centering the entire show around it very quickly. So yeah, stuff like that. There's just totally out of your control. But other than that, like I said before, it's kind of like a relevant mix of like, what are the most important stories out there in the world? Hosting a weekend show I like to think about what is a story that was kind of a little more buried throughout the week, but we might have some space or some reflection to kind of take a broader view and catch people up on and maybe do an analysis angle or a slightly sorry bar angle or some sort of a way to tell you something new about it. I'm thinking about the balance of international news versus domestic news. I'm thinking about the balance of, like I said before, stuff that's interesting to hear. Like I really like having the flexibility to have longer segments on the weekend. And I like using that for interviews and for profiles, which are like some of my favorite things to consume as a reader or a listener. Some of my favorite things to write. So like, okay, what's somebody who we can have a longer conversation with until you something interesting, whether it's a musician or whether it's an author, things like that. So I feel like all things considered there's like, there's like the archetypal, all things considered format where the A segment, the top 10 minutes to show the show, that's the day is hard news. The B segment is the kind of hard newsy stuff that's more enterprise reporting for us. Then the C segment is usually like that, that's the shortest, that's like a four minute segment of the show and that's kind of like, is there an interesting local station? Like one of our member station reporters, have they contributed a piece that kind of takes you to some specific community? Here that for four minutes. And then the D segment is the last 15 minutes to show that's where we have kind of the movies and arts and music conversation. So that's kind of like, if you're listening to the show and you're looking at what time it is in the hour, that's kind of that general pattern repeating itself. But obviously within that world, it's not a hard and fast thing, it's just honestly what ends up happening a lot of the times. I like the idea that you're making stuff and choosing things in some ways, like stuff that you'd want to listen to, right? That you wouldn't want to be annoyed by or that you can like stand behind and you find entertaining and interesting all the things that you're aiming for. And I do wonder like, again, in like this kind of media literacy time where it's kind of helpful to know like, where do you go, like what do you find out there that you really are drawn to? What are either the outlets or besides NPR, where we can put them off the table? Like, what is, grabs your attention when you're looking for something? And then, yeah, how do you find it whether or not it's trustworthy or not? And, yeah, what are some of your tips for listeners on building a media diet? Hours before debate, I'm gonna spirit a debate and not direct me, answer that question that you asked me first, but I will come back to it because I do think it's important to say, you are right in terms of like things that interest me and things that I want to talk about. But that's why it's really important to have a broad, diverse staff of different interests and different backgrounds from different parts of the country because everyone has a slightly different view. And if you look historically, I think the broadcast media has really focused on the view of a certain type of person from the Northeastern United States and what they find interesting, right? And that's why I think NPR really has worked very hard over the last decade or so to broaden out the people at the meeting, the people on the show and the stories that they're bringing, say, this interests me. And I feel like some of my favorite stories to do are like musicians that I truly had never heard of before the producer brought it up and said, this is a really big, upcoming person in this particular space. We should talk to them. And I love doing interviews like that 'cause I come in totally blind. I try and read up, I engage myself in the music and I'm asking these kind of like semi-outsidery, like curious questions and I learn a lot and I feel like that at least took a good segment. In terms of news sources, like I was saying before, I feel like I'm still in this like weird death of my social media feed space of like, that was just like my default place. I would just kind of like see what was turning through my Twitter feed and that was my news diet and that had some positives and that had a lot of negatives. So I feel like we're almost back to like the 90s, early 2000s internet where you have to actively seek things out and kind of go through your bookmarks toolbar, which is strange how we have progressed to exactly where we started. I try to re, I try to actively stay up to face with all of the main national news outlets every single day to see what they're doing. Like the Times, the Post, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, things like that, just kind of like constantly looking through the New Yorker, the Atlantic. I feel like the last couple of years I've really enjoyed reading the Atlantic. I feel like they've, they're always like turning out really interesting, thoughtful, long-form reporting that I enjoy reading. I think like internally, like I love the fact that at NPR, we are having all of the key news for our member stations throughout the country being like fed into us. And I feel like I'm mostly just kind of engaging in the internal feeds of seeing, seeing what our local stations are doing. And kind of going back to the beginning part of the conversation, it's a tricky time right now that a lot of like the classic really great newspapers and smaller cities throughout the country are like having a really hard time and struggling or being bought up by these big companies that don't particularly care about journalism. And I feel like that makes it harder to follow the news state to state than it used to. One thing that I do find interesting now is that certain like say podcasts or some of this long form, like writing you describe on sub-stack or whether it's in some of these kind of legacy publications, is that like, or not even to mention like entertainment like series of TV shows that like there was that like, for a long time people thought, oh you have to do really short things in order to catch people's attention. You know, their attention span is only a few seconds long and so you have to do these really quick things. But when you think about like some of these YouTube folks who are super popular are making massively long videos and podcasts of like two people talking four hours about a niche stuff. Or this is gonna be right. Exactly, right. Which just go on for hours and hours. But like, that there, it does seem to be like, or like Game of Thrones, like there are these epics and different formats where it does seem that like if you were able to reach people that people are willing to go longer than previously was like the usual received wisdom. Have you like, have you felt that? Do you feel like there is space now? There is some reception to doing 14 minute segments, 20 minute things, longer podcasts. Yes and no. And it's so funny that you go from medium to medium and it's wildly different. Like I think NPR has cornered the Newsy market of doing relatively short podcasts. And when short, I mean 10 to 15 minutes, right? Like up first, it's like 12 minutes long. Consider this is where, which I co-host now. I do the weekend episodes and sometimes throughout the week, I'll do an episode here there. That's like 10 to 15 minutes or well. And in podcast world, that seems short. But in like radio world, that's like the longest possible stories that we did, like that Robert Carroll story. I felt to do Robert Carroll Justice who's known for writing thousand page books. I had to do a long story. I couldn't like condense that conversation into six or seven minutes. But yeah, that is on the extreme longer side for the magazine shows. I feel like you're doing four to six minute stories. And for a newscast, you're doing a 40 second spot. You're kind of condensing everything to 40 seconds or so. So just from place to place up, it can seem long or short. But I think kind of going back to what we were talking before, like what is the point of journalism, right? Like, like if you're just trying to get people information, you just need to like tell them the facts. But if you're doing it as a broadcast journalist, you're trying to keep them listening, keep them engaged and kind of like be interesting and entertaining as you go along with it. So those are like two things that often can conflict with each other or like there's always a tension between those two things. - There was a story you reported on that you brought to a Jesuit media lab, kind of masterclass you did. From reporting on where that train had derailed in, say East Palestine, Ohio. Yeah, where you talked about going in and like meeting some people early in the story and their kind of specific view on what had happened and then meeting more people and realizing, no, that wasn't like the dominant narrative in the community but that you needed to get other perspectives and then trying to get those voices and then changing as you were going, like really doing the work of reporting, right? Coming in, finding out what was happening and then doing your best to share that. And so for me, I don't know, like that story too was a reminder of like, yeah, this is not like one guy sitting by himself like typing something. This is someone who had to travel with multiple people in order to like capture this story to devote enough time to the reporting to see that it wasn't just what struck you on the surface as one of the perspectives and then had to kind of make those choices. So that's not a question. That's just saying, I've seen that, that you're kind of doing that work but I did want to ask you about whether that story you wanted to talk about or like other things you've done recently, you feel like, you know what? Like our team coming together here to pursue this story that was kind of a surprise. Like we really did this well. We can link to that for folks to hear in the show notes but I'm curious what are you proud of from kind of recent years of your work. And I think that actually kind of clarifies something we were talking about before. Like we're talking about all these undercurrents in journalism and I think for a variety of reasons, including budgets and including just like, there's other factors as well. A lot of journalism is being produced without ever leaving the building, right? 'Cause it's easy to do that. It's easy to turn on a microphone and talk and give your thoughts about things without having to engage with like the actual complications of the story and finding out the facts yourself. So I feel like the answer to a lot of this is just to get out into the world and talk to the voters about the election instead of just looking at the statistical models and going to spend time in the communities that you're writing about, right? Because like I think going into that story, we thought we were gonna go tell a story in the one year anniversary of this train crash of just kind of the environmental damage of this and how the cleanup was going. And that is an important factor and that was a key part of the story but we realized that it was more a story about a community that was really at odds with itself and really just exhausted by people like us coming to report on them and just feeling like they had become this culture war spot that they didn't wanna be. And there were just as many if not more people in the community who were like, you know what? They cleaned it up, I'm glad they cleaned it up. I feel safe now. And just kind of talking about like people were talking about how people with opposing views on that front would like not make eye contact with each other on the street. And I felt like that was the story that we wanted to tell and get to. And I was happy we were able to do that even though because of that media fatigue, we actually had to like try to talk to dozens and dozens of people before we could get enough people to actually talk into our microphones and talk to us on the record and on tape to be able to tell that story. - Last, last question before I let you go. Since it is the Jesuit show and you have some Jesuit education, they're either individual Jesuits or kind of general things you've learned in Jesuit world that you feel like are have been valuable to you in your career. - Oh yeah, I'm pausing because I feel like I wouldn't know where to start with a lot of those fronts. But I feel like one thing I think a lot about is I think it's actually kind of a slight spin off of what I was just saying. Just kind of like approaching your reporting with empathy, trying to empathize with the people, trying to like put yourself in their shoes to understand their perspective, whether or agree with you or not, so you can represent their story. Being just approaching the entire process of thinking about the story, interviewing the person, writing their story, they are entrusting you to tell their story to a broad audience. There's a lot of responsibility there and trying to do that all with humanity and empathy from the beginning of the process to the end of the process is something that I feel like directly comes to me from my Jesuit education. - Cool. Anything else we didn't get to that you wanted to talk about? - Do you want to do more existential thoughts on-- - Yeah, like hey, are you still going to be here and doing this job in a year? - I hope so. - Yeah, no, that would be good. - People are still listening and wanting to consume news. I think there's an audience for it. I just think that there is not to sound like Joe Biden, but I feel like we're at an inflection point which is something he says every single speech, but I think it is true about whatever you want, the broadcast news media, the legacy news media, whether you like it or not, you have a different name for it, but I feel like the people who have been collectively keeping the country informed for the last 75 years or so, I feel like that field is fundamentally changing right now and I am working to keep it changing in a way that keeps the core things that make it most important central to it. - Well, Scott Detra, thank you so much for coming on AMDG and thanks for all the work you do. - Thank you. (upbeat music) - AMDG is a production of the Jesuit Media Lab, which is a project of the Jesuit Conference of Canada and the United States. We're based in Washington, DC. The show is edited by Marcus Bleech. Our theme music is by Kevin Lasky. The Jesuit Conference Communications Team is Marcus Bleech, Eric Clayton, Becky Sandalar and me. Connect with the Jesuits online at Jesuits.org, on Instagram at WeAreThe Jesuits, on X at JesuitNews and Facebook.com/jesuits. Sign up for weekly email reflections by visiting Jesuits.org/weekly. The Jesuit Media Lab offers courses and resources at the intersection of Ignatian spirituality and creativity. If you are a writer, podcaster, filmmaker, visual artist or other creator, check out our offerings@jesuitmedialab.org. If you or someone you know might be called to discern a vocation to the Jesuits, connect with a Jesuit vocation promoter at beijazuit.org. Drop us an email with questions or comments at medialab@jesuits.org. You can subscribe to the show on iTunes, Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts. An ascending nacious of Loyola may or may not have said, go and set the world on fire. (gentle music) (gentle music) [BLANK_AUDIO]