Maintaining Public Trust: The Journalist's Dilemma in the Era of Trump, Social Media, and Fake News
The Yale Club of Washington invites Yale DC area alumni and other Ivy League clubs to an exclusive event featuring a discussion by distinguished panel of journalists, including David Gergen '63 (left), Phil Rucker '06, Eliana Johnson '06, and Perry Bacon, Jr '02.
Possible discussion topics for the panel will include:
I. Election of 2016: The Conflict Between the Recently Developed Role of Journalist as a Political Power Broker and a More Traditional Role as A Detached Observer of the Presidential Horse Race
• Do character, qualifications, and policy positions have a role to play in presidential election coverage by the media? Did they in 2016? How well were they covered?
• Did the press coverage of Election 2016 fail the voters? (Harvard Shorenstein Center study) Has a negative bias moved press campaign coverage from skepticism to"epidemic...cynicism"? (David Broder-mid 1990's)
• What factors produced the Pew Research Center post-November 2016 survey results in which the respondents rated the press election performance as follows:
◦ Grade B or higher--20%
◦ Grade C or lower--80% (with half of those rating it an "F")
II. The First 9 Months
"The power of the press is a primordial one. It determines what people will think and talk about--a power that in other nations is reserved for tyrants, priests, parties and mandarins"
- Theodore White, Making of a President, 1972
• Is White's statement still true in 2017 in the age of Twitter, Social media, and Trump domination of news coverage?
• Has the Press become so entranced with novel and the negative that "there is no point in trying to stay informed?"(David Broder)
• Can the press effectively play its role as First Amendment watchdog when it is routinely attacked as the "enemy of the people"?
• Does repetition of these attacks despite press rebuttals simply reinforce their credibility?
• Does Trump's recent outreach effort to Democratic leaders signify an important policy and tactical reset or just a continued effort to blanket news coverage?
Panelist Biographies
David Gergen '63
David is a professor of public service and faculty director of the Center for Public Leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School. In addition, he serves as a senior political analyst for CNN and works actively with a rising generation of new leaders. In the past, he has served as a White House adviser to four U.S. presidents of both parties: Nixon, Ford, Reagan and Clinton. He is an honors graduate of Yale '63 and the Harvard Law School. He has been awarded 26 honorary degrees.
Philip Rucker '06
Philip Rucker is the The Washington Post's White House Bureau Chief, covering the Trump administration. He previously served as National Political Correspondent and was one of the lead reporters chronicling the 2016 presidential race. He has also covered Congress and traveled the country covering Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign. He joined The Post in 2005 and has covered an array of beats for the paper. Rucker graduated from Yale University in 2006 with a degree in History and worked as a reporter and editor at the Yale Daily News.
Eliana Johnson '06
Eliana Johnson is a national political reporter at POLITICO. She previously served as Washington editor of National Review, where she was the organization’s lead reporter on the 2016 election. She has worked as a producer at the Fox News Channel, as a research associate at the Council on Foreign Relations, and as a staff reporter for the New York Sun. She graduated from Yale College in 2006 with a degree in History.
Perry Bacon, Jr. '02
Perry Bacon, Jr. is a Senior Political Writer for FiveThirtyEight, covering the Trump administration and its effects, in Washington and in the country at large. Bacon previously worked at NBC News, where he was a senior political reporter. He covered President Obama and his administration as well as the 2012 and 2016 presidential elections, making regular appearances on MSNBC and writing extensively for NBCNews.com. Previously, Bacon was a White House reporter and national political reporter at The Washington Post. Bacon also spent four years as a national political writer at TIME.