In a wide-ranging discussion Wednesday about the unsettled state of journalism, two media CEOs weighed in on covering Donald Trump and the decision by the Washington Post and LA Times to not endorse a presidential candidate.
Steve Hasker, CEO of Thomson Reuters, and Almar Latour, CEO of Dow Jones and publisher of The Wall Street Journal, spoke at the Paley Center for Media‘s International Council Summit in New York.
CNN anchor Bianna Golodryga, who moderated the panel, posed the question about the non-endorsements via an audience member. Hasker said that while he sees nothing wrong with “staying above the fray” and not endorsing a candidate, “the timing really was not great and I do think the ramifications on subscribers, on talent and on reputations will take a while to repair.”
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Both news organizations went public with their non-calls in the home stretch of the campaign, with the LA Times revealing its plan at the end of October and the Post following three days later. Staff resignations and outrage from readers followed, with the Post losing more than 250,000 subscriptions, about 10% of its base.
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Latour noted that the Journal has not endorsed a presidential candidate since Herbert Hoover in 1928. Given that he presided over the 1929 stock market crash and the start of the Great Depression, Latour quipped, “we learned a lesson.” While “memories are short” and both organizations can rebound, he added, it was “hard to miss was how subscribers responded. … There was a big reaction that had a big impact on their business.”
Frank Bennack Jr., chairman of the Paley Center and former CEO of Hearst Corp., a major newspaper publisher, also put in his two cents after the journalism panel. “An overwhelming number of papers endorsed the losing candidate in this election,” he said during remarks closing out the summit. “We can debate the efficacy of that.”
Latour was asked about the so-called “Trump bump,” which boosted the fortunes of several media outlets during Trump’s first term. “This ‘Trump Bump’ thing,” he sighed. “Yes, people saw a Trump Bump but that was followed by a Trump Slump, a diminishing of subscriptions.” At News Corp., he said, “We saw a Trust Bump” without any dropoff as the White House shifted from Trump to Joe Biden and back again.
Beyond any short-term impact, Latour said media outlets face a serious challenge now to plot a more down-the-middle course. Without calling out any individual outlets by name, he made the case for a new tack by the mainstream press, which proved to be far less influential than podcasts, YouTubers and social media influencer on the election outcome.
“The election is being covered in very different ways,” Latour observed. “Either ‘Trump wins’ or ‘Trump comes back,’ or very dark words. A gloomy picture. This is not a political statement by me whatsoever but there can be a factual lens or there can be an atmospheric lens. I think look through an atmospheric lens at your own peril because when the home team doesn’t deliver, like, ‘Oh, you’re not endorsing a candidate we were expecting you to endorse.’ Or if the coverage doesn’t live up to reality and you create disappointment, if you play on emotion, if you play on political preferences, and you intermingle that with your coverage and with the photo choices that you make, the headlines that you put there, the word choices, I think that is first of all poisonous for journalism. I also think that it is very, very bad business.
“It might be a nice sugar high that will last a couple of years, but before you know it you’ll have to find other revenue streams to offset the fact that you’ve hollowed out the trust of the people in reliable information. It feels so good to feel your own opinion affirmed, right? Oh, that’s great. But that’s not the task of journalists. That’s not the task of news. And the institutions that get that wrong are doing a disservice to the industry, to their own journalists and to their subscribers.”
The topic of AI also surfaced, naturally, and Latour was also asked about the lawsuit filed recently by Dow Jones against AI firm Perplexity for improperly using copyrighted material for use in training AI models. When Golodryga asked about Perplexity responding to the suit by accusing media companies of being “stuck in the past,” the exec blasted the “disdain” toward journalism shown by a lot of tech companies. “If you have an attitude that news is just content,” he said, “then you have a societal and civic duty to actually be much more discerning than that. … As humans, how can you say that? How can you say that news does not mater?”