Amber Boydstun
Description: Amber Boydstun is Professor and Chair of the Political Science department at UC Davis. Her work looks into the complex ways media shapes our political world—from the front pages of major newspapers to the algorithms of social media. Her research focuses on how news coverage can spark "media storms," shift public opinion, and open windows for policy change. In this episode, we talk about how and why media storms emerge, the FIRE model for understanding which stories dominate the news cycle, and how shifts in the media landscape have transformed political communication. Amber also shares insights on humor in politics, the psychology of outrage, and why building habits around long-form journalism is more important than ever.
Websites:
Publications:
The Role of Humor in Work Group Dynamics in Times of Crisis
Books:
Making the News: Politics, the Media, and Agenda Setting
The Decline of the Death Penalty and the Discovery of Innocence
Mentions:
Show Notes:
[0:03] Welcome and Passion for Media
[0:59] Journey to Grad School
[3:15] The Impact of 9/11
[5:18] Interest in Media Research
[6:54] Challenges of Modern Media
[8:55] Models of Social Media Engagement
[12:41] The Demographics of Media Consumption
[15:45] Trust in Journalism
[19:12] The Golden Era of News
[22:17] Current Media Landscape
[24:04] Trends in Media Coverage
[25:40] Media Storms and Their Effects
[29:57] The Nature of Media Attention
[32:51] Tracking Media Storms
[36:17] The Role of Protests
[39:00] Engagement with Media
[44:02] Humor in Political Discourse
[48:46] The Importance of Long-Form Journalism
[53:37] Humor and Political Connection
[1:03:55] Future Research Directions
[1:08:03] Advice for Consuming News
Unedited AI Generated Transcript:
Brent:
[0:01] Welcome, Amber Boydstun. Thank you for coming on today.
Amber:
[0:03] Thanks for having me.
Keller:
[0:07] Why are you passionate about the research and intersection between media and politics?
Amber:
[0:09] I think I'm passionate because that's where we get our information about the world, right, is from the media. And maybe it's from the New York Times or maybe it's from Snapchat, but you probably get most of your information about the world from some medium, medium, where a medium can include a TV network or social media, but it also includes books, right? We get our information about the world from media in so-and-form, unless we, of course, talk to our friends and family, and they got their information from the media. And so the media matters. And that means that if we're going to understand this wacky political world that we live in, we have to understand the media.
Keller:
[0:46] And when did you decide, or when did you have the epiphany that you wanted to take this interest beyond just a personal interest and really study it as a full-time career?
Amber:
[0:55] I took some years between undergrad and grad school. I taught math at a high school, and that was fabulous. But I was thinking about applying to grad programs, and I didn't really know what I wanted to apply in. And I'm so old that this co-occurred with the 9-11, September 11th terrorist attacks. And it was, I mean, it was a wild time to be alive, And it was a just, you know, a startling event for the whole country. One of the things that really hooked me was in watching the news coverage about it and how there was this rally around the flag effect. I didn't know that term at the time, but that's what it was, where news outlets were all of a sudden quite unified and how they were portraying the terrorist attack and how they were talking about things. But the thing that really struck me was how even Democrats who hadn't voted for President Bush just kind of fell in line behind this idea, not just that there had been this terrible attack, but that we should go to war.
Amber:
[1:55] And President Bush gave this speech at Ground Zero a few days after the attacks. The attacks were on a Tuesday. I think this was on a Thursday or Friday, right that same week. And he gave this speech and it wasn't, he's not, I mean, he was a great president in lots of ways, but soliloquy was not one of his strengths. And this speech was just really powerful. It was kind of off the cuff. He was giving some prepared speech and a firefighter at Ground Zero in the back said, we can't hear you. And President Bush is talking through a bullhorn and he raises his voice and he says, but I can hear you. I can hear you. The world can hear you. And the people who brought down these towers will hear all of us soon. It was just this really powerful moment, and the media spread it all around the world, and public opinion, like public support for the idea of invading Afghanistan, and then Iraq, it just skyrocketed, and it gave him this, you know, policy mandate to make very different choices than the U.S. Might have made, not just before the attacks, but might have made even after the attacks in the absence of that messaging, of that rhetoric, that then got... Pushed around by all these media outlets, disseminated by all these media outlets. And so that was just really interesting to me that, you know, that it's the same reality, but the way that you think about it and the rhetoric,
Amber:
[3:13] the words that you hear about it, that can change hearts and minds. And so, so I went to grad school and that's basically what I study.
Brent:
[3:20] Yeah. And then was your undergraduate education also in line with communications as well? Or was that the pivot when you went to grad school?
Amber:
[3:28] No, I went to this wonderful, delightful, tiny little college called St. John's College. It's the great book school. There's, it's one college on two campuses. One is in Santa Fe, New Mexico. One is in Annapolis, Maryland. There are 400 students on each campus. It's a wildly different world than UC Davis and everyone takes exactly the same thing. You don't major in anything. Officially, everyone gets a double major in math and philosophy. So this in part, I mean, it was kind of the, you know, opposite version of the experience that you guys have here where we didn't have access to research or anything like that. On the other hand, my classes all had 10 people in them and right, it was just a very different world. But because of that, in part, I didn't know what political science was versus sociology versus psychology. I had never read a journal article. And so I just really I didn't know anything about the research world.
Brent:
[4:21] Yeah. And then what keeps you interested in continually researching the communication, politics, all of this world?
Amber:
[4:31] I think it's that it would be, I think, maybe easy if you studied. I don't know. Maybe it's not true. Maybe for any researcher, they see their research in everything all around the world. But for me, most interactions that I have, most of the experiences that I have throughout the day have something to do with politics, right? I mean, if you just think about your day today, when you woke up this morning, right, you woke up in the type of house or apartment that you woke up in if you were privileged to wake up with a roof over your head, in large part because of whatever housing policies or lack thereof are in place, right? You're attending this university for the particular costs that you're paying because of the particular policies or lack thereof that are in place and more
Amber:
[5:17] broadly because of the politics. Everything in our world intersects with politics, and that's why media matters.
Keller:
[5:25] And looking into your research specifically, what are the main types of media that you look at? And are there any terms we should know before diving deeper into the research itself?
Amber:
[5:33] Yeah, well, I'm interested in all media. And it used to be the case that if you studied media and politics, you had a relatively easy job because you could study newspapers and you could study TV, right? And that was already hard enough. But nowadays, you have newspapers, you have TV, right? You have cable news, you have social media, and everything in between, right? And it just makes it really difficult. And so I'm interested in all of it. Some of it is easier to study than others. and social media in particular is more important than ever to study because the you know the younger generation so gen z-ers and gen alphas is that what we're calling them now i think it's gen alphas so gen z-ers and and gen alphas they predominantly get their or the plurality of those folks get their news from social media in some form but even if i know who you follow like even if i know you get all of your news from you know from twitter now x and i know everyone you follow I still don't know what you're seeing because I don't know what their algorithm is. And so it makes it really difficult. Whereas before, if I generally knew that you watched the nightly news, I just needed to look at what the nightly news was playing. And maybe you were off getting a soda and, you know, instead of watching it. But I could be roughly safe in assuming that you had some exposure to it. And now I can't.
Keller:
[6:55] Are there any ways that we can try to model that, I guess, network effect on social media, like what someone might be seeing or have a gauge of that exposure or not really? Like there's just so much smoke and mirrors, but the algorithms that we just can't really tie it down.
Amber:
[7:10] Yeah, it's a really good it's a really good question. So scholars have done this in a number. They've tried to tackle that question in a couple of different ways. One way is, for example, to make two different accounts, right, and to try to keep them parallel except for levels of engagement or following, you know, all the same people except some Republicans versus some Democrats, things like that. That's interesting, but it still doesn't quite tell us exactly what you're going to see on your feed because, again, I might know your followers or who you follow, but I wouldn't know, I wouldn't be able to track your engagement.
Keller:
[7:46] Right?
Amber:
[7:46] I mean, I could track your engagement by going through, but that doesn't tell me how much time you spend on it. And it's not just about whether or not you click the like button. It's about whether or not you sat on the page and read it. Right. So a different approach that a scholar at the University of North Carolina does that I think is just fantastic is more of an anthropological approach where she sits with with people with their social media, like next to them. And they just go through their social media like normal. And she's like, why did you click on that? And tell me why you didn't click on that. And so that kind of more personal approach, I think, is much better at figuring out how someone interacts with social media, but it doesn't scale well, right? So that kind of approach is great at understanding how some youth interact with social media and how they're processing information in a way that we can't get from our traditional ways of studying it. But it doesn't tell us anything reliable about how, you know, lower income youth versus higher income youth or college educated versus non-college educated or whatever. Any of those really important demographic questions that are important to scholars, but ultimately are really important to campaigns.
Brent:
[8:55] Yeah. has there been an approach from like the macro level just tracking like social media wide trends or like talking points and then looking and be like okay like who just seeing like what is the overall conversation within maybe like like the right side of x or the left side of x and then scaling from there but okay like how much are people like probably interacting with it like it'd probably be a little bit more guesswork but kind of more of a top-down approach would be like these news sources are saying these things. Who's like following them and getting a demographic like the top down type of way.
Amber:
[9:32] Yeah, you're both asking exactly the right questions. There have been studies about that. There have been studies that look at to what extent does social media and most of what we're talking about here is Twitter X. To what extent does it kind of map on to the topics that are being talked about in the news? And the answer is a lot because most of the stuff that we're talking about on social media and most of the stuff that journalists are talking about in the news is based on the breaking events that are happening that the news has decided to cover and that in turn people are talking about on social media. So there's actually quite a bit of correlation in terms of what's getting talked about. But in terms of the different pockets of Twitter, there have been some really impressive studies that look at how, I mean.
Amber:
[10:16] Not only do the topics being talked about on the left and the right have different slants, but the rhetoric is quite different the you know the types of words even punctuation like there are all kinds of differences not just on the left and the right but there have been some fascinating uh pieces looking at like the culture of black twitter compared to you know the rest of twitter um but even if even if i know that you follow some of these people i still don't know to what extent are you tapped into that to that group and so what's really scary i think is that we we have the sense now that social media is, I think, I think we have an overestimation of how powerful social media is, because if it's happening on social media, we assume that people are participating in that. But most people on social media are more passive, right? Like they'll maybe respond to their friends, but they're not driving these conversations. So there's no reason to think that these conversations on the left and the right are representative or even maybe are influencing the people that are listening to them.
Brent:
[11:19] I also know the level of engagement while listening is like sometimes pretty low.
Amber:
[11:23] Sometimes very low.
Brent:
[11:24] Like there's one time a family friend posted, like reposted an article that was like inflammatory. And they're pretty outraged over whatever the article was saying. Then I read the article. I was like, you clearly misunderstood this whole thing. They saw the title and that's it. And then reposted it. And I think that type of like action or trend is pretty common too.
Amber:
[11:46] Yeah, I think that's right. Right. And that's an important difference about social media compared to traditional media is that traditionally we really were just the passive audience. They would tell us what was happening in the world and maybe we would agree with it or disagree with it, but we would just receive it. And now we have this ability to interact with it. And so there are lots of different ways of thinking about how people interact with politics on a psychological level. And one of them is a big area of research called motivated reasoning. And one of the key tenets from this is that we're going to be motivated by wanting to think that our team is a good team, right? To wanting to think that we're right. And that drives us not only to seek out information that affirms our worldview, but also to spend even more energy seeking out and arguing with opposing points of view, right?
Brent:
[12:38] Yeah.
Amber:
[12:38] Which is maybe not productive.
Brent:
[12:41] Sure.
Keller:
[12:42] And while we don't have good data on engagement, do we have an idea of the demographics of kind of what media outlets, whether that be traditional or whether it be social media, like what age ranges or just general demographic information fall under those different buckets of is it mostly older people that are getting their media from traditional sources or lower income? Do we have an idea of that breakdown?
Amber:
[13:04] Yeah, yeah, we do. And that's the part that I think makes it more important than ever to study media and politics. And also, how do I put this? Makes me, it occurs to me that if I were starting out right now and about to try to write a dissertation and get tenure, this is not the area of study I would pick because it's so hard. It's so hard to ask these questions. Um, yes. So, uh, so in general, uh, older people, by which I mean, like my parents, right, they tend to get their news from still broadcast TV. And so like the nightly, like the ABC, CBS, NBC affiliates. And that's, um, in a way, a really good thing because they're, you know, they're getting news that is generally trustworthy. The big caveat to that is that John Oliver had a bit on this several years ago now, but when you have a big syndicate that buys up a lot of those different local television networks, they can then feed in messages that are of more dubious quality that then get delivered to you from your trusted local news anchor who has no control over the content that he or she is actually talking about. So, older people...
Amber:
[14:18] Senior citizens tend to get their news primarily from news outlets from ABC, CBS, NBC, and people in my generation like Gen X and older millennials, they tend to get their news from places like New York Times and Politico, but also with a smattering of TV and a smattering of social media. And younger people tend, by which I mean you two, they tend to get their information from social media, right? Which is, if I could just go on a soapbox briefly here, which is totally understandable and is, you know, the people who are putting the information onto social media don't have journalism degrees, right? And it's maybe not quite a good analogy to say, just like you wouldn't want someone who without a medical degree performing surgery on you, you wouldn't want someone without a journalism degree giving you information, but it's not a terrible analogy because there really are, there's a lot of training that goes into how to vet information and how to, you know, how to present information in a neutral way. And so it is deeply concerning to me that so many of us get our social media, use social media for our news information. I use social media. I follow a raccoon named Pumpkin. He's amazing. Somehow he's on a very white couch. How is it still white since he's a raccoon? He lives with two dogs. It makes no sense. Like I am the biggest fan of social
Amber:
[15:41] media for glorifying in raccoons. Right. But not forgetting the news.
Keller:
[15:46] And in terms of the standard quality of journalism, I just don't know a lot about it, but I know a lot of the rhetoric in the media in the past five years talks a lot about fake news or the lack of trust in journalism. Is there i guess an era you could point to in american history where like the the standard of what a journalist is was at its best and they asked like what makes that journalist be of that caliber because i think a lot of yeah what we see is kind of more pointing at the stations themselves, and a lot of our relationship as the younger generation is kind of the transition from stations to individuals on Substack and whatnot, which, to me, I just think was how news started. It used to be just a few people that were kind of the spearheads of journalism. I guess, yeah, could you give a little bit of context to that relationship to the, I guess, the dynamic between the viewer and the trust they have and the person delivering it, not so much in the media outlet Yeah.
Amber:
[16:53] That's a that's a great question. And it matters because of the because of what we know about the importance of those parasocial relationships. Right. So, I mean, our history of journalism in this country is not great. Like it started out as excuse me.
Amber:
[17:10] Our history of journalism in this country is not great. It started out as being mostly a propaganda machine for the political parties that were very quick to rise up after, you know, after we founded the country. And so it was really only in, you know, the advent of the printing press at a lower cost than had been previously used. And then finally, the development of broadcast TV that we settled into this period, I would say, from like, I don't know, the 1930s through the late 1980s of this period of high quality journalism that was mostly uniform in the types of messaging. And so scholars point in particular to this, what they call the golden era of TV news in the 50s and 60s and 70s, where most Americans across the country, even if they didn't own a TV because they're very expensive. They watched either ABC, CBS, NBC, or PBS. And there were those trusted, you know, Walter Cronkite type journalists on, you know, delivering the news. I want to be really clear. The news was not perfect at that time. Like the broadcast industry was very slow to appropriately reflect the civil rights concerns as just one very big example.
Amber:
[18:30] But at least all Americans were getting the same type of news. And what that meant was that people were able to take the information in and then make up their own minds. And so one of the things that I really like talking to my students about is that across the course of recorded public opinion polling in the United States, your partisanship is the best predictor of who you're going to vote for. So if you tell me you're a Democrat, I can have a very good chance of guessing who you're going to vote for, same if you're a Republican.
Amber:
[18:58] That fact has always been true, but it was the least true during that period of TV broadcast news because presumably we were making up our own minds and it was Walter Cronkite telling you what the news was. It wasn't, you know, someone on the left or the right.
Amber:
[19:13] So but then we had the advent of cable news and what that did is it splintered the marketplace so this is really an economic story because abc cbs nbc and even little pbs right they could they could have trust and knowing that there were plenty of viewers to go around they didn't really need to compete with each other directly but all of a sudden they had to compete with cnn and cnn had to compete with them and then fox and msnbc and here we are.
Brent:
[19:37] Yeah and then in that kind of golden era was it most of the, maybe call it untrustworthiness for like a lack of a better term but like most of the skewing of the messaging was via omission and not like outright just bias like kind of like what we're seeing now like take fox on the right seeing on the left people know they're gonna get a skewed message but back then like they felt like it was more trustworthy than it might have been because that was the only source of news they were gonna get and it was pretty uniform across three or four platforms but it was more the mislead like the they were misled at times from omitting certain news or like certain stories.
Amber:
[20:21] Yeah i i think that's a fair way of putting it i think i think the news was misleading in that it was i mean the news is always going to be biased in some.
Brent:
[20:32] Direction because.
Amber:
[20:33] It's human beings who are putting the news together and just like human beings are going to accidentally inflect bias into our large language models. They're going to accidentally inflect bias into our news. Um, I think the difference was that the bias was more homogenous, which didn't make it better. It just made it different. Right. So the bias was towards a, you know, white male homeowner kind of way of thinking about things. And so in general, This period of time was kind of slow to pick up on social movements around racial equality, around women's rights, around everything, right? Just name it. But it wasn't party driven. And that's a big difference. And so it wasn't a team A versus team B. It was just team A. And so, I mean, with notable exceptions, like the black community has always had a really impressive and strong press, but it in general has, even today, it tends to not reach white audiences, right? Yeah. So we're talking about the mainstream news. What was I going to say? I can't remember.
Brent:
[21:40] It's on it.
Amber:
[21:41] Ah, so I got it. So today we have this big difference in that it's not just that news outlets have a political leaning that maybe comes from the top down, even if the journalists themselves don't abide by it, but it's also that they know they have a market incentive to deliver that to their audience.
Brent:
[22:01] Yeah. So would you say now the homogeny is now just split into two, where the messaging across the right is pretty uniform and the messaging across the left is pretty uniform, but you're just getting two different extremes of the messaging?
Amber:
[22:17] Well, in theory, it might have been that way, but I think it hasn't turned out that way. And the reason it hasn't turned out that way is that the doubting of the press has been more on the right than on the left for lots of reasons. And so let's just take that as a given. But what that means is that we've seen the kind of natural conclusion to that, which is that on the right, right-wing presses are more likely to not play by the traditional rules of journalism, and left-wing presses holding up their emblem of being traditional journalists are more likely to play by those rules. And so you have not just a splintering of messaging, but a splintering of the type of messaging and the degree to which those fundamental principles of journalism are adhered to.
Brent:
[23:11] Yeah, that makes sense.
Keller:
[23:12] I know your work doesn't specifically look at comparative between nations, but does the U.S., does our two-party system lead us to have a more unique media landscape? Or are there other countries that might have more of a parliamentary system with multiple parties involved that have the similar level of division that we deal with in our media? Yeah.
Amber:
[23:30] It's really hard to say. So some scholars have looked at this. It's hard to say. And the reason it's hard to say is that we aren't just one of the rare two-party systems in the group of democracies that tend to be compared. But it's also that we're so big. And so it's hard to know how much of what we're seeing is because we're in a two-party system and how much of what we're seeing is because of that market splintering that we talked about, whereby there's enough wealth to go around to fuel lots and lots of different types of news outlets.
Brent:
[24:05] Yeah and then kind of diving into a little bit more specifics of your work like how would you define different like trends in coverage like the media storm specifically versus like normal coverage like how do you define those and what goes into classifying types of media Yeah. No worries.
Amber:
[24:24] Sorry. I don't know where it came from. I'm remembering now that I didn't define the terms. You asked me very politely at the beginning. You said, are there any terms that we're going to need to know about? And I just breezed over that. Let's talk about this concept of a media storm. It's defined as a sudden increase in news coverage at a very high level, lasting for at least a week. And there are ways of quantifying it. But qualitatively, it's that type of news story that is so pervasive in the news that even if you're not really paying attention to the news, you know that it's going on, you hear about it. And the reason that media storms really matter is that it's those moments where the media is so flooded with information about something that it creates this kind of window of opportunity for policy change and for social change because it's in those media storms that policymakers are going to pay attention to something and citizens, if they're going to pay attention to it and get involved, they're going to do it during that time. And so it's this rare opportunity for things to change, right? And you might not like the direction they change in, but those are the times
Amber:
[25:38] that we're more likely to see change. And so that's why I study them.
Brent:
[25:41] Yeah. Is it like an average number per year?
Amber:
[25:44] Oh, it's a great question. I mean, it depends on how you define it. You can kind of adjust the thresholds of the three criteria. So it has to be a sudden change in attention at a very high level for at least a week. Those are the three. You can adjust those criteria and get different numbers, of course. Um, but in general, I would say that there's probably at least one a month that we have maybe fewer. Yeah. There would be probably in a given year, you know, five to 12 in a given year. Um, if you just think about the last year, so what we're in March right now, right. It seems like we're having a media storm around the tariffs, right. I mean, it seems in some way that we've been having a media storm since, um, you know, since inauguration.
Brent:
[26:30] Yeah.
Amber:
[26:30] And so.
Brent:
[26:31] Luigi Mangione before that.
Amber:
[26:33] Exactly. That was in December. That's, yeah, that is a tragically good example of a media storm.
Keller:
[26:40] And what conditions have to be met? I know we talked about the actual definition term of what defines it in terms of the model you explained to us earlier, the FIRE model. What has to be met for the media storm to actually come about?
Amber:
[26:53] Yeah, we use the fire triangle like Smokey Bear. We use the fire triangle model as an analogy to try to understand this. So we did this by looking at we tracked all of the media storms that we could get our hands on that had a parallel type of event that didn't become a media storm to try to figure out, OK, well, if it's this type of event that is either able to get coverage or not get coverage, then what are the facets that that help predict? So something with 9-11, that was always going to be a media storm. There is no counter event, right? And if we just looked at those, we would say, well, it has to be this sensational event that, you know, affects a lot of people.
Amber:
[27:30] But in fact, there are lots of other examples like the case of the CEO killing right in December that you mentioned that that didn't affect a lot of people, but it still became a media storm. And so what's up with that? And the three criteria in the fire triangle are heat and fuel and oxygen, and we borrow those. And for us, the heat is the level of sensationality around the event. So how many people did it affect or were there celebrities involved? Was there graphic photo or video evidence? In the CEO killing, for example, it was a single murder, which was terrible, wouldn't normally make the news, except that there was all this intrigue around it, right? Like there was Monopoly money left at the scene and the guy was wearing a mask, except for when he flirted with the hostel clerk. And, you know, there and there was evidence, right? There was photo evidence and the video of the shooting in Cold Blood. There was all of this intrigue around it. And he got away, right, at least at the beginning. And so that was the heat. And then the fuel.
Amber:
[28:30] But what we say is that that's actually not enough. If it was just a sensational event like that, it would get news coverage for sure. But it probably wouldn't turn into a media storm if it didn't have the second two components. So the fuel component for us is what is the political landscape like? So are there conversations in recent time that allow this new event to be hooked into those conversations in a way that makes it really easily accessible for the American public? And in this case, right, health coverage, he wasn't the CEO of Target, he was the CEO of UnitedHealth, right? And there was lots of groundwork, right? Lots of dry fuel to hook into there to be able to...
Amber:
[29:18] To talk about people's concerns about the healthcare industry. And the oxygen is any kind of amplification of the story outside the mainstream media. And in this case, I'm sure you saw on social media, there was plenty. And so these things are not mutually exclusive. They go together, right? The more sensational something is, the higher the heat it's going to have. Also, in tandem, the higher the oxygen is probably going to be from policymakers, from social media, from other places like that. But still, we think it's a useful kind of mental model to say, ah, that's why that story that I thought was personally very important,
Amber:
[29:55] that's probably why it didn't really catch fire in the news. And that's why this one that didn't seem like it affected a bunch of people, that's why it did.
Brent:
[30:03] Have you ever looked at concurrent stories during a media storm? And like these typically would get significantly more coverage, but because they occurred during said media storm, they got like almost no coverage.
Amber:
[30:16] Yes, yes. I mean, that's the thing about the media that I think we don't, it's such a simple concept, but I think we forget it. It's that in a big way, it's a zero-sum game. That if you have a bunch of attention going towards the tariffs, that's a bunch of attention that's not going towards the ongoing fire crisis in California or whatever else it is, right? And it's not just because even though, you know, the internet in theory has no limit, there actually is kind of a limit to how much journalists can produce, but it's also that we have a cognitive limit and they know that. And so they're only going to, you know, deliver us so many stories at a time.
Brent:
[30:53] Have you ever looked at like hypothetically intentional, like actions that occur during media storms unrelated to the media storm because they know they won't get coverage?
Amber:
[31:06] Ah, that's really interesting. So like a wag the dog kind of approach where...
Brent:
[31:11] I don't know if I'm familiar with the term.
Amber:
[31:13] That's because you're too young.
Brent:
[31:14] Yeah.
Amber:
[31:15] There's a great movie. It has Robert De Niro. You should watch it. Who else was in that? Anne Hesch? So many strange people were in this movie. It was a good movie. So the term wag the dog is typically used for a politician when they don't want you to pay attention to something that's going on. They wave a shiny thing over here so that you pay more attention to that thing. So a classic example is Bill Clinton when he was in hot water about the sexual relationship that he had with an aide. He made a trip to China. Did he have to go to China? Probably not. But he went to China and it was a big thing and it sucked some of the media attention away.
Brent:
[31:54] Yeah.
Amber:
[31:55] Yeah. I don't actually know, well, the tail wagging the dog. I don't actually know why they use that term, but here we are. So it's really hard to know. It's hard to know what the political machinations are behind any kind of media storm. I mean, definitely my sense is that policymakers and crisis management teams are just constantly working all of the time. It's just a constant tug of war. And that when a media storm erupts, it just gives a little bit of leverage to one side or to the other. But we can think, for example, about how the NRA is very quick to act following school shootings, for example, with messages to their followers and with, you know, extra mobility of their related interest groups.
Brent:
[32:41] Interesting.
Keller:
[32:41] Are there ways that you guys categorize media storms so that when you're looking at impacts into policy down the line, you can say, okay, this media storm was,
Keller:
[32:48] we called it this type X media storm and it had this level of impact in policy? Or is there not a way to really standardize across media storms?
Amber:
[32:56] Yeah, you could standardize it in a bunch of different ways. The way that we've been thinking about it, but I am open to suggestions, is about anticipated versus unanticipated media storms. The CEO killing was an unanticipated media storm. Because we didn't know it was going to happen. But like the Paris Climate Accords, that was an anticipated media storm. In that, the Paris Accords were scheduled. It was on everyone's books for months. And a big part of the media storm were journalists knowing this was going to happen, pre-writing stories about it, flying to Paris to be on the ground to do that kind of beat reporting. And that was what in large part helped to fuel that media storm. And so we knew that the event was going to happen. But just because you know an event's going to happen doesn't necessarily mean it's going to become a media storm. But what's interesting is that at least in our research, it seems that the anticipated media storms are more prevalent because there are lots of planned events that happen, right? So, you know, really any U.S. Election tends to be a media storm. We know it's going to be a media storm. We just don't know what it's going to look like. What's interesting for me, though, is that it's the unanticipated ones that I think have the more unanticipated consequences. So just for example, we look at Britney Spears. I don't know if you, Tell me you remember this.
Brent:
[34:19] Like when she was bald?
Keller:
[34:21] No, after that.
Amber:
[34:23] Good social run.
Brent:
[34:24] Oh. Yeah. Her family.
Amber:
[34:27] Yeah.
Brent:
[34:27] Yeah, family.
Amber:
[34:28] I have a tea towel. It says, if Brittany could get through 2006, you can get through today. And it makes me happy. So Brittany was in a conservatorship, a financial and personal conservatorship under her dad. And to make a long story short, she asked to, after years, I mean, she was in this conservatorship for, I can't remember, like a decade, like a long time. And she asked a judge to have a special hearing on the matter. And then she made a statement. But importantly, it was an audio statement that journalists had access to in the courtroom. And so then it went everywhere. And the hashtag Free Britney campaign started. And she got released from her conservatorship. We use this example in the book to parallel Amanda Bynes, who was a Nickelodeon actress, may or may not. She was also in a conservatorship. Similar kind of hard mental health issues, similar in lots of different ways. Her conservatorship ended very soon after Britney Spears' conservatorship ended, in part because this one media storm that might have seemed on the surface like it was just about Britney Spears, in fact, triggered all of these policy changes, at least in the state of California, about how to handle conservatorships, right?
Amber:
[35:45] Sorry, not just in the state of California, across lots of different municipalities about how to handle conservatorships. And so there was actually a big effect from this one media storm that was unanticipated and that kind of caught the social awareness in a way that where the ground was open to change in a way that the Paris Climate Accords, like, it was either going to make an effect or it wasn't going to make an effect. And probably the media storm that surrounded it helped to amplify that,
Amber:
[36:13] but not in the same kind of surprising way. Am I making sense?
Brent:
[36:17] Yeah, yeah. And then, have you ever seen attempted media storms by the news networks and journalists, and just the consumers do not care for it, and it just kind of dies there?
Amber:
[36:33] I don't know about that, because news outlets, that's a good question. But from their perspective, I mean, they care about a media storm because maybe you're going to click on them a little bit more, but you're going to click on news outlets across the board more. So...
Brent:
[36:49] That's kind of a lead-in into, like, the cyclical nature and, like, kind of an inherent positive feedback loop, like, to create a media storm.
Amber:
[36:57] Yeah.
Brent:
[36:57] Like, even for, like, the anticipated ones. They might want to be pushing a narrative. Like, you see, like, a large, like, uptick in, like, a certain messaging getting spread from, like, either side. And then it sometimes just doesn't work. Or then you see, like, the consumers, especially with social media now, like, picking it up. And then they're allowed to, like, run with it.
Amber:
[37:16] I definitely think that what you're describing happens from our political parties and from interest groups more broadly. I don't think it happens from journalists. I mean, it might happen from the particular journalists working with a political agenda within places like Fox News and MSNBC. But I guess one of the things that I that I have really taken away from my work that has included shadowing and interviewing a whole bunch of journalists is that most journalists are fairly are fairly neutral in their views. They, not unlike political scientists, they understand the complexities. They know enough to see most sides of most stories. And they, I don't think that they care so much. I mean, they actually would prefer that we all just calm down a little bit and not run with the fads of a media storm, but instead pay real attention to the stories that they're writing. I think the thing that that frustrates them sometimes is that they'll write a story about a very important policy issue that everyone needs to pay attention to. But they can only write that story so many ways, right?
Amber:
[38:22] They can only write about the dangers of California wildfires and PG&E. I mean, those stories were out there, but they can only write it so many different ways, and we don't pay attention to it. And all of a sudden, there's a fire, right? And we pay attention to that. And I think there's some frustration that our interest peaks when something sensational happens, but not when we're given the information that we need to be given to be prepared for something that is so tragic, right?
Brent:
[38:49] Yeah, that makes sense.
Keller:
[38:49] Have you been able to study, like, on that point, like, the drop-off point of the media? So, like, when people decide, like, okay, like, I've had enough, like, this fire is bad.
Amber:
[38:57] Yeah.
Keller:
[38:58] But I'm not going to policy. Like, well, that's a little bit too much for me. Like, is there a point you can tell whether that's a length of time or, like, I guess the amount of viewers around a story where the level of depth of a story or some aspect of the story is kind of the buy-in from the viewers drops off?
Amber:
[39:14] Yeah. It depends on the media storm. So something like 9-11 went on. That media storm lasted for months, which is an eternity. And some of the journalists that I talked to about it talked about how at their news outlets, there was this sense of discomfort because they didn't have anything new to write about, but they felt because we were still in that rally around the flag effect, they didn't feel like they could be the first paper to not write about it. And so they had to keep kind of, you know, not manufacturing, but they had to keep finding new ways of talking about it so that they wouldn't be the first one to to move on right um other stories in general it takes about two weeks uh for for the interest to die off but it depends on the story so the worse the story the quicker this uh what's called attention fatigue is going to settle in especially if it's something really harrowing and awful where like we can't fix it And there's just like it is just really hard. So like the Gene Hackman death, right? I'm not sure that that would quantify as a media storm by our metrics, but do you know what I'm talking about?
Amber:
[40:26] You should give people like a like a disclaimer like doing this interview will make you feel very old you should have them check a box to say i am ready for that experience so gene hackman my friends was an actor he was a phenomenal actor and he recently died with his wife who was much younger in santa fe new mexico and it was a tragic horror a horrible story involving hantavirus and a dead dog in a closet and gene hackman with autism uh we think wandering around his house for probably a week not understanding enough that his wife had died ahead of him tragic can't believe you haven't heard of this anyway that kind of story is like gripping but it's so awful and so tragic that it's the kind of thing that people will like binge on and consume but then just need to put down right something like the california wildfires or i don't even know if wildfires wildfire is probably not the right term for this particular awfulness in Los Angeles recently, but that kind of thing is different in that there is ongoing information, right? But there is also this feeling of helplessness. So I'm guessing that the fire media storm at the beginning of this year probably lasted for about two and a half, three weeks. But then what happens, and this is a very old concept in political science, back to Anthony Downs, is that we go through this issue attention And we hit this place where we realize how complicated it would be to fix the problem. And we just give up.
Brent:
[41:55] And kind of touching back on like earlier the conversation where younger people are tending to go to social media and whatnot. Have you seen different like media or news coverage attention spans like differ between different generations?
Amber:
[42:08] I'm so glad you asked that. Yes. Yes. So there's research that says I'm very sorry to report that you have a shorter attention span than I do. I don't mean you and me. I mean generationally. Yeah. Which makes a lot of sense. Right. Because your generation grew up with cell phones, right? And TikTok and shorter little bits of pieces of information, right? I mean, this is one of the fascinating things. We just don't know how that's going to turn out. Like, maybe that means that people with shorter attention spans are higher functioning and are going to live happier lives. Or maybe it means that we had a shot at fixing climate change and now we don't because of TikTok. I don't know. but then pumpkin the raccoon so it all balances.
Brent:
[42:51] Out uh just to put devil's advocate on the typical i'm not saying you were being.
Amber:
[42:57] I just want to be clear i'm not making it like a moral judgment but i'm just saying i'm just saying the research has shown that uh that people from the millennial generation and younger have shorter attention spans and older people in a way that didn't used to be the case when older cohorts were at the same age.
Brent:
[43:16] Yeah i think the rhetoric online is typically portrayed that sentiment in a negative light.
Amber:
[43:21] I didn't say it.
Brent:
[43:22] Yeah. But I actually think, so speaking from personal experience, my parents watch the news all the time on TV. And I'm like, how?
Amber:
[43:32] I bet they know about Gina Hackman.
Brent:
[43:34] 100%. I'm like, how do you, how are you okay with this? Like, this is the same story that was played an hour earlier. Nothing's new. And like, I feel like it's a pretend way of like, I'm being informed when I can like literally get a synopsis of this in 30 seconds and move on with the same level of information that you're getting just through like a really slow media.
Amber:
[44:02] Huh? It's such a good question. so i mean my instinct of course of course is to is to justify the longer form of journalism but why is that.
Brent:
[44:16] Because like i know for us we fall it's open news is that the account um ground news.
Keller:
[44:23] Ground news.
Brent:
[44:24] So it's an account called ground news and what they do is that no it's only.
Keller:
[44:29] It's on instagram they have like they'll post um a couple times a day generally only like photos not reels and it'll be like an image of whatever the thing is or tied to the thing a headline that's maybe a sentence or two and then the caption will be a paragraph or two and then it'll show you in the bottom of the image between like white is like center then red and uh blue for different sizes kind of like what of other media outlets whether that be on social media or traditional what amount of coverage they are giving the story.
Brent:
[45:01] So they track like say 50 websites, like 25 or like maybe call it 75, 25 center, 25 left, 25 right. And then they'll track like this topic across those sites. That's how they get the percentages. And so it's just like, I can just like, and it's a pretty non-biased, just like this is what's happened. And within like 30 seconds of it, cool. Yeah.
Amber:
[45:25] So you know, the things that have happened and the amount of coverage that these different news sources are getting them or giving.
Brent:
[45:32] Yeah. And I think that's where we just tend to the younger generation who wants to be informed.
Amber:
[45:38] Yeah.
Brent:
[45:39] I will want to separate those two. There's the ones who want to be informed and the ones who just passively just get fed all the information that they do. I think the older generation would typically talk about, like, oh, the younger generation gets their news like this. I would put that in the more passive way. But where the ones who are trying to be informed, they go seek these different sources that are aggregating and then like synthesizing. Or a journalist, like I know you have a multiple on Substack that they were affiliated and then they broke off because there's a new medium that kind of allowed them to be independent journalists.
Amber:
[46:18] Yeah.
Brent:
[46:18] That's becoming like a lot more popular.
Amber:
[46:20] Well, so I guess, I mean, that's certainly a better, it sounds like a better approach than, you know, just getting the news that you accidentally see between Pumpkin the Raccoon videos. But I guess I would, I would want to know lots of questions. So the first question I would want to know is, what is the aggregation model that they're using? And I think that in the aggregation model, there's an assumption there, which is that each of the pieces of information that they're aggregating are of equal weight or importance, and I would push back strongly against that, right? I mean, I can count on two hands the number of news outlets that are doing original reporting that I would really trust. So there aren't enough to fuel that. And so it seems like probably there's some noise in that. But it's also that I guess thinking about it in terms of left and right just feels I just don't know if that's the way that we should be taking in our information. Right. So if someone writes...
Amber:
[47:27] Article that is pointing out all of the, I don't know, economic benefits to the United States of immigration, right?
Amber:
[47:36] Does that mean it's a left article? Does that mean it's a right article? Or maybe it's just one article and a bunch of different articles that that news outlet is doing that also talk about the, you know, economic downsides to immigration in the United States or whatever, right? So I guess what I would encourage you to do is think about each news source more holistically and what is the overall like diversity of message that they're that they're giving to you um i mean i i also follow individual journalists that i have learned to trust right and part of it is that parasocial relationship that we were talking about but i guess the thing i worry about there is that they are only one person right and these news organizations were built around lots of different people and lots of different voices and uh yeah so those are the two things But I think the main thing I would say is that in your parents' defense, first of all, not only did they know about Gene Hackman and you didn't, but also that by watching a full story, you're being invited to think about that story in lots of different ways, right? Like, if I just tried to summarize to you what's happening with the tariffs
Amber:
[48:41] right now, like, I could do it, but I would have to make lots of choices in how to summarize it. And in making those choices about how to summarize it i am absolutely even if i don't mean to be i'm going to shape the way that you think about it and if you and the more words you allow me to give you in trying to describe it the more information you're going to have to make up your own mind about it yeah.
Keller:
[49:05] Then kind of stepping back to the oxygen because we're talking about like length of time spent on media this making me think about like beyond media consumption what are their political actions people take um and part of the oxygen was you know beyond traditional media what else is kind of giving fire or giving um energy to the to the storm have you seen between social media or potentially not even media tied forms of political engagement like protest, are there different levels of success that kind of lead to, I guess, the increased length of the media storm or transition from a media storm to an actual policy change between those? Because I imagine media, social media, very easy to spread the message along, but like we were just talking about, very short time span. Whereas if people are going outside and they're protesting, you know, that might actually lead to some type of change or force politicians to look at the issue in a different light.
Brent:
[50:01] Would the congressional hearings paper be about that?
Amber:
[50:05] Uh, yeah, a little bit. So the congressional hearings paper was showing statistically that members of Congress are going to pay more attention to a news story if that story happens in the context of a media storm. So statistically, if there's a one unit that is one story increase, that has a bigger effect on prompting a congressional hearing if it happens in the context of a media storm than outside the context of a media storm. And part of the reason is that there's that oxygen of public interest, right? I mean, we define oxygen as being policymaker attention or public attention, but it's almost always tapped into public attention. And sometimes that's on social media, and sometimes it's in the form of something like protests. We study a number of different media storms that really, in a way, you can think of as being very successful social movements, where if you think about the Million Moms March, which you may or may not have heard of.
Keller:
[51:10] People.
Brent:
[51:11] Okay. Okay.
Amber:
[51:14] So there was a Million Moms March about gun control that was very effective and prompted a media storm.
Amber:
[51:42] But other examples are the Black Lives Matter movement, right, which was organized in part on social media, but really mobilized through physical in-person protests. And then the immigration protests in the spring of 2006. So there had been this House resolution passed to make lots of changes to immigration policy, including making it a criminal offense to aid and abet an immigrant by giving them water, for example.
Amber:
[52:14] And this House resolution passed in December of 2005, and no one paid any attention. But then there were marches mobilized through social media, but in-person marches across the country. There was a day without an immigrant protest, and that was so big that it became a media storm. So the media storm ended up informing the public about this House resolution, but they hadn't, you know, we hadn't paid attention to it. To which a journalist would say, we covered it. We told you, Americans, that this House resolution was going on. You just didn't click on it because you weren't interested in it. Right. And that's the kind of story. Sorry, not to harp, but that's the kind of story that I wish that I worry is going to get lost in your aggregation system. Right. Like when there's a very important House resolution that comes through that the New York Times is going to publish on, but that lots of other outlets aren't going to publish on because it's not sensational. Right. They know you're not going to click on it, so there's no point in publishing on it. But a place like the New York Times, right, is going to, right, or, you know, the Los Angeles Times. I mean, pick this stodgy old newspaper that was built to inform you about the things that you should know about, even if you're not interested in them, right?
Brent:
[53:46] But i think back to the color's question have you seen like is there a way to track like in-person movements and protests that like then result in the media storm i think was that kind of what you were getting at.
Keller:
[54:01] Yeah because i just feel like at least from my perspective i think yeah like black lives matter i think we saw a lot of news around the protests and it seems like there was a lot of impact and then now, not with every issue but it seems like sometimes there's like protests and it part and that could be me being judgmental but sometimes it feels like people are just going out for the sake of, protesting with the actual like that's not the most impactful way that it could actually get politicians to listen um and i guess i'm curious between yeah whether it be protesting on social media like we saw a lot with the conflict in gaza or actually going out and protesting physically like how do you get these ideas to politicians in the most effective way.
Amber:
[54:44] Well the most effective way is probably to call your representative on a phone landline.
Keller:
[54:52] On a landline yes or.
Amber:
[54:54] Fax them yeah uh that really is probably the most effective way right um but But I mean, if a social movements person, a scholar were here, they would say that every social movement starts out with people just being frustrated about something and figuring, I don't know what else to do. I'm going to get out and mobilize. Some of those work. And so the ones that that we see that don't work, it's just because either the mobilization wasn't strong enough or because the timing was wrong. And one of the things to pay attention to in the in the media storms that were helped prompted by by social movements is that there wasn't anything else big in the news happening at that moment.
Keller:
[55:36] Right.
Amber:
[55:37] So the Million Moms March that you're going to look up later, that there was nothing else big happening on the scene at the at the time in spring of 2006. For the immigration movement um there you know it was just a relatively slow news week and so they could pick that thing up i mean think about the black lives matter movement um first following, michael brown's death right and then george floyd i mean think about so one of the points we make is that like if george floyd had been killed a couple months earlier it might it would surely have gotten news it probably would have maybe even become a media storm because the video was so graphic but it would have, it would have landed much flatter because a couple months earlier, we were all panicked trying to figure out what this new coronavirus was. And so it happened in May of 2020 when we all knew to be freaked out about the coronavirus, but then we were just stuck at home, like waiting for a vaccine. There was nothing to do. This was the time of, what was that called? Uh, lion, tiger, tiger, king, king tiger.
Brent:
[56:39] Oh yeah.
Keller:
[56:41] Tiger.
Brent:
[56:41] Tiger.
Amber:
[56:41] But now you know what I'm talking about. Yeah.
Keller:
[56:43] See, this is supposed to turn out.
Amber:
[56:45] So we were all stuck at home watching Tiger King, right? And so we had more available brain space, right? And people had more available, like, protest energy, right? To go out and protest and then for a media storm to catch.
Brent:
[57:02] Was it good? Tiger King?
Amber:
[57:05] Yeah.
Keller:
[57:07] I don't really remember.
Brent:
[57:08] It's just like typical reality TV. Just you are enjoying feeling better than the person you're watching.
Amber:
[57:14] Oh, nice.
Brent:
[57:15] Yeah. But kind of on a little bit different note, we saw the paper on the role of humor in group dynamics.
Amber:
[57:25] Yeah.
Brent:
[57:25] And as we're approaching about an hour now, just kind of taking that transition. and what was that?
Amber:
[57:33] That's a weird pivot. I can't wait to see how you're going to make this transition.
Brent:
[57:37] Well, I just feel like a lot of this conversation can feel out of our control.
Amber:
[57:43] Yeah.
Brent:
[57:44] And we can take times of crisis. Maybe there is a media storm.
Amber:
[57:48] Yeah.
Brent:
[57:48] And use humor in a group setting that we do have control over and just kind of like that being.
Amber:
[57:53] Yeah.
Brent:
[57:54] The idea there.
Amber:
[57:54] That was an excellent pivot.
Brent:
[57:55] Thank you.
Amber:
[57:58] Yeah, I loved that paper so much because this was a part of the literature that I had just never gone into. And the work on humor and the role of laughter is fascinating, especially as it applies to crisis situations. So all kinds of fascinating research on the use of humor by police cadets and CSI investigators and even gallows humor can be really cathartic, right? You know, when done respectfully to people trying to get through some kind of crisis. So...
Amber:
[58:30] I think humor is an important antidote. One of the things that is interesting to me that people haven't studied so much is the use of humor in political campaigns.
Amber:
[58:42] But there is fascinating work, including by a friend of mine, Danicle Young, who looks at how humor is used differently on the left and the right in this country. So to summarize an excellent book that she wrote, people on the left just have a different relationship to humor than people on the right. So her book is called Outrage and Irony or Irony and Outrage. And the basic notion is that like if you do like brain scans of conservatives and liberals, conservatives are more likely to feel emotions of disgust and like outrage. And liberals are more likely to feel other kinds of emotions. But importantly, they have a better patience with absence of closure. And by that, I mean, if there's some messy problem that isn't wrapped up and has a solution, liberals are more comfortable with that than conservatives. And so this might help explain why it's not that liberals are more funny. It's just that they have a different relationship with humor. And the humor is more likely to be self-derogatory.
Amber:
[59:51] And yeah, exactly. And so what this means, though, in reality is that our modern landscape has people like the Colbert Report. That's not a thing anymore, I know. But, you know, and The Daily Show and and but those are on the left. Right. And so I think that this, in fact, has has done a great disservice to the media landscape by accidentally painting the stuff we see on TV as being more left leaning because the comedic parts are more left leaning.
Keller:
[1:00:23] Interesting and have you looked at all into like politicians use of media specifically in terms of it's like one could be campaigns using it on their behalf but also politicians and their implication whether it be in speeches or especially now with podcasts like politicians have the opportunity to speak in more formats where they could in theory be funny and it wouldn't be seen as insensitive um have you been able to that is i guess that would be a very difficult thing to track um yeah but i guess you know that reminds me of like the beer test of i don't remember what that was but like people's likelihood to vote for a politician would be like whether they would actually sit down and have a beer with them and i think that format um where they can kind of show the human side of them through humor um and especially i think it could be considered like a proxy for like the tact they can handle the complexity of an issue yeah um how much that like increases someone's willingness to maybe not vote for them but like listen to more of them um especially in the context of people have short attendance points like if someone i hear a politician say a funny joke and they go that was pretty clever yeah i'd probably want to hear a little bit more about you know how they got to that yeah punchline i.
Amber:
[1:01:33] Think what's so challenging i mean i think in general politicians don't use humor and they are very careful to not use humor and i think the reason is that you would have to land the joke but you'd have to land the joke for the right audience.
Keller:
[1:01:47] Right?
Amber:
[1:01:47] And so, I mean, humor can, you know, be categorized in lots of different ways, but basically you're making fun of someone else. You're making fun of yourself. And in general, especially on the left, neither of those brands of humor is really on the board because if you're making fun of yourself, then it's okay to be self, you know, deprecating to a certain extent, but you also want people to vote for you, right? So you need to be very careful on that front. And anyone you're going to make fun of, they're then not going to vote for you, right? And so you could maybe make fun of the opposite party, right? But then there are a bunch of people in the middle who are genuine independents, right? Or partisans pretending to be independents who are going to say, well, I just want everyone to get along. I don't like this partisan bickering. So your joke about the other party is going to turn me off. So my point is that I think, I think I would recommend humor as an antidote for you and me. And I, like, if I were on a campaign, I would not advise a candidate to use humor. Right. And we can see, for example, like Barack Obama, right. Regardless of what you thought of him as a president, he's very funny, but he was very careful not to be funny until at least 2008 when he was elected for the first time.
Brent:
[1:02:59] Yeah, because I was thinking about that before and just, I feel like it's like dependent on the group size. Yeah. Like that's the scale at which like you can use it or not use it. And then, because I think before, like now we're starting to see like politicians going on, I think attempt to use it more, at least on like the right. Throwing jabs that are humorous or if they're on long form content they have the ability like throughout an hour or two three hours to use it but um before what's the one dinner every year the correspondence dinner that's like about the only time i think i used to see politicians be funny i think that was some of the best moments because it's cross party lines too so would definitely like to see it a little bit more humanize it um kind of wrapping
Brent:
[1:03:51] up what are your next biggest questions to research and like.
Amber:
[1:03:56] Uh i think that the question about when do people tune out i think is a really important question but this conversation because right we want people to stay engaged and so understanding like are there are there tactics that journalists could take to present all the information that they want people to get in a way that's not going to disengage them, right? So that they will continue to pay attention to fire safety in California. But this conversation has also prompted me to wonder how do we convince younger people especially to read long-form journalism? That is my next project. I'm open to suggestions. Yeah. Because I can, I mean, can I just make one more pitch? Because I just feel like, Like, what's your favorite book that you've ever read?
Keller:
[1:04:49] Of recent time?
Amber:
[1:04:51] Anytime.
Keller:
[1:04:52] A Hundred Years of Solitude.
Brent:
[1:04:53] Yeah.
Amber:
[1:04:54] That's a good book.
Brent:
[1:04:55] Brave New World, probably.
Amber:
[1:04:56] That's an amazing book. They're both amazing books. You can't summarize those books.
Brent:
[1:05:00] I mean, you can.
Amber:
[1:05:00] You can totally summarize those books, right? You can read the, what are Cliff Notes called these days?
Keller:
[1:05:05] Cliff Notes?
Amber:
[1:05:06] Really? They're still in business.
Brent:
[1:05:08] Oh, they're still.
Amber:
[1:05:09] That's great.
Brent:
[1:05:10] ChatGPT summarize?
Amber:
[1:05:11] Sure. like if you ask chat gpt to summer i i encourage you to go home and ask chat gpt to summarize your favorite book or your favorite movie and like it's kind of gonna get it but it's not really gonna get it right the thing that compelled you about it and that like shaped your worldview was not the topic modeling of what the topic was about and it wasn't it wasn't the summary and it wasn't even the plot line it was the whole thing together and so i mean these these questions that we have on the table in front of our country are really important like how much money are we going to put into tackling climate change it can't be all the money should it be like should it be more money is it this right amount of money like these are very they're hard problems and they are going to require nuanced responses and that means that we have to have nuanced and fully informed, understandings of everything right of of you know uh what kind of peace process to push in gaza to how do we handle the housing crisis in a humane but, way that is also fair to homeowners. I mean, these crises are so complicated, and I don't want you to just know what is in the news. I want you to know what you think about what is in the news. And I think in order to do that, you have to read the whole article.
Keller:
[1:06:35] I think that could be an answer to the next question, last question, but do you have any advice to students, whether that be about how they digest political news and form opinions or just broadly navigating these complicated times?
Amber:
[1:06:47] Yeah, I think my best piece of, my best tip for navigating the news would be, to pick a old school trusted news source. I would recommend the New York Times. It's free for students. You can get access through the library. I mean, there are a lot of news sources out there that I trust. The opinion part of the New York Times does tend to be a little bit more liberal, But in general, it's a very good news source. It's trusted. It's reliable. And the reason is that they have more money. They have more resources. And so they can afford in this splintered marketplace to make decisions based more on journalism than on economic fear. And a lot of the other outlets are not in that privileged position. So I would just take five minutes every day to scan the New York Times. You don't even have to click on anything. Just read all the text that is on the page, right? And then maybe go compare it to your aggregator, right? And maybe compare it to the front page of the news of Fox and MSNBC. And then, you know, if you could spend 10 minutes in the morning doing that, five minutes in the New York Times, and then five minutes comparing to other sources, and then get your news the rest of the day through social media, I'd be very happy.
Amber:
[1:08:04] I would also highly recommend following Pumpkin the Reckon.
Brent:
[1:08:07] There we go.
Amber:
[1:08:07] He's an idol.
Keller:
[1:08:09] Awesome.
Brent:
[1:08:10] Thank you so much.
Amber:
[1:08:10] Yeah. Thank you.