Honoring the Journalists

Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. Coming up later this hour, New York City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams. We'll get her side of her dispute with Mayor Adams, no relation, over how much NYPD officers should need to document their encounters with New Yorkers. We'll take your calls from anyone who's had experience on the NYPD, current or past, and anyone who's had encounters with the NYPD to help us report this story as the council considers overriding the mayor's veto.

This is the biggest point of contention during the whole Eric Adams administration and Adrienne Adams administration leading city council. We're going to get into it with the speaker, who is good enough to be willing to come on and get into it with us and with you. That and more with Speaker Adams coming up. Also today, a call-in for parents who subsidize your young adults' finances, how much, how come, to what age, and how different from your parents and you.

There seems to be some generational change going on, so we'll get to that, but we start here. Let's recognize some of the best journalism of the last year. Last night at Columbia University, they handed out this year's duPont-Columbia Awards for excellence in broadcast and digital journalism. Winners included ABC News for its exposé of the plastics recycling industry, New Hampshire Public Radio for its investigation into sexual misconduct at a local addiction treatment network.

The reporter even faced vandalism and other retaliation for her work, the six-hour Ken Burns-Lynn Novick documentary on PBS called The US and the Holocaust, and others that we'll mention as well. We will talk to New Yorker magazine contributor and Columbia Journalism School Dean Jelani Cobb, who presided over the award ceremony last night, but let's kick it off with a short excerpt from the ABC News investigation into what really happens with plastics recycling. The show was called Trashed. This 40-second excerpt refers to what's called trackers of some of that plastics recycling material.

Reporter: After the drop-offs, we spent months monitoring each tracker's location multiple times a day. Here's where one of those air tag bags ended up. The tracker is pinging whenever a mobile phone or a digital device was near. We checked every location the trackers ping from on their journey and determined they likely did not encounter plastic bags sorting en route. One that could have potentially separated a tracker from a bag. One of the first trackers to move was one we deployed at a Target in Kingston, New York. It showed up about a week later deep inside a New York landfill, an outcome that would happen again and again around the country.

Brian Lehrer: Very interesting way to see if the plastics were actually moving to their alleged recycling destinations, that from Trashed on ABC News. Now, a duPont-Columbia award winner. We'll hear from some of the other winners as we go. With us now is New Yorker magazine contributor and Columbia Journalism School Dean Jelani Cobb, who presided over the award ceremony last night for these awards considered the most prestigious in broadcast and digital journalism. Some people call them the Pulitzers of broadcast news. Jelani, always good to have you. Welcome back to WNYC.

Jelani Cobb: Thank you. How are you, Brian?

Brian Lehrer: I'm doing okay. Thanks. We'll talk more generally about the awards in a minute. Since we opened with that clip, I want to talk first about Trashed and their investigative method of using what that clip referred to as trackers and why the duPont committee recognized it.

Jelani Cobb: Sure. I think outside of the obvious implications of this in terms of our environment and in terms of pollution and all those other kinds of things, this is a great showcase of the fundamental journalistic process, which is to ask a question and then devise a way to get the information that allows you to answer that question. Here, it's just a straightforward, "What happens to this stuff when we put it in a recycling bin and how could we find that out?"

For the team to actually provide this service, we now know what happens in many instances with materials that are billed as being recycled, but that appears to not be the case, at least in the vast majority of the instances. We thought that it was meeting the criteria that we have, which is deeply researched and well-told. This story fell right into both of those categories.

Brian Lehrer: Are you familiar enough with it to say if they got to where the plastics really wind up in many cases and who benefits from their not really going to the recycling destinations that they're supposed to go to?

Jelani Cobb: Well, yes, there are villains in the story, but one of the things that we found as you heard in the clip and that you see more of in the story is that much of this is just sent to landfills as opposed to being sent to recycling centers.

Brian Lehrer: Because it's cheaper?

Jelani Cobb: Well, yes, it appears to be that there's a profit incentive as opposed to actually the resources and expenses that would go into recycling this material. It's just collected and then disposed of.

Brian Lehrer: ABC also won for another environmental documentary about the struggle in various parts of the world, from parts of the United States to South Sudan, to have access to clean water. What might a viewer learn from that documentary?

Jelani Cobb: Well, as we're looking at the effects of climate change, one of the things that we're seeing is not one-to-one relationship. Some places or many places have less water. We've dealt with droughts, particularly in the southwest and in the west of this country. In other places, people are dealing with the opposite, torrential deluges, that have made terrain all but uninhabitable.

That story was particularly important because it highlighted one of the things that we often don't talk about, which is that the brunt of this is being experienced by people who are in the Global South and people who are in the developing world. One unintentional outcome of this was that about $5 million was raised for the UN food support program to be delivered in places that have been really severely impacted by drastically increased rainfall.

Brian Lehrer: We'll go into some of the other winners as we go and, as I said here, a few more clips of the winners. Would you take a step back now and talk about the duPont-Columbia Awards generally? What's the purpose of having these awards and what specifically does the committee look for to honor?

Jelani Cobb: The committee looks for stories that are, as I mentioned, deeply researched and well-told also in the public interest. The awards really are here to recognize work that wasn't being recognized prior. This is in the broadcast arena. We've had the awards here at Columbia since 1968. It's very much a tradition for us here.

One of the exciting things that we got to announce this year was the Jessie Ball duPont Fund, which supports the awards created by Jessie Ball duPont to honor her husband, Alfred I. duPont. Those awards have been endowed with a $10 million gift to make sure that the awards are able to be a perpetual thing into the future. That was our big development and our big announcement this year about the duPont-Columbia Awards.

Brian Lehrer: Interesting. You call them broadcast awards. Before the web scrambled all the categories, these were simply broadcast journalism awards for radio and television as differentiated from print journalism awards like the Pulitzers. I see you're still very much giving them to TV and radio outlets. Now, it seems like everyone does everything in order to survive. Newspapers make videos. Magazines produce podcasts and compete with radio stations. How do you determine what's eligible?

Jelani Cobb: Well, also, those conversations happen yearly. Podcasts didn't exist. Now, podcasts are also eligible. I should say, this goes in both directions. The Pulitzers reconsider what their criteria are. The magazines are now allowed as entries when they weren't previously. Every year, just because there is so much digital innovation happening right now, we sit down and say, "How can we best serve the communities that we are evaluating and the work that we're trying to highlight?" That's how we've come to the categories that we have now. Likely, those categories will evolve and develop in the future.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, for sure. All right, let's play a clip from one of the winners accepting an award last night. Lauren Chooljian from New Hampshire Public Radio. Got to give props to a public radio station that earned an award for its investigation and her investigation into sexual misconduct at a local addiction treatment network. The reporter, Lauren Chooljian, even faced vandalism and other retaliation for her work as she references in her acceptance speech here.

Lauren Chooljian: A law has been written about the vandalism we faced, the lawsuit as you heard, and how dark of a moment it is for journalism to see that we face such repercussions. I'm choosing to see this as a triumph. I'm choosing to remember that women chose journalism when they didn't have an answer to such a big unsolvable problem. They chose telling us their stories when they felt they had no answers. They taught us that recovery is difficult and beautiful and that it obviously should not be a time to be exploited.

Brian Lehrer: Jelani, would you speak about the content of Lauren Chooljian's work as well as the retaliation that she faced?

Jelani Cobb: Sure. The 13th Step was a really difficult story that Lauren reported superbly about--

Brian Lehrer: Can I just jump in and say to clarify for the listeners about the title, The 13th Step? That refers to a 12-step program and here comes the ugly 13th unwanted step?

Jelani Cobb: Right. It had become a dark inside joke to people, which was that the exploitation and abuse of people who were in a vulnerable state because they were in recovery and attempting to grapple with that problem had become a 13th step. That story generated a huge response. In turn, the reporter, Lauren Chooljian, had dealt with vandalism personally, dealt with being doxxed, and dealt with being subjected to a lawsuit, which was ultimately dismissed.

She did this all in the effort of telling what these women had gone through in their attempt to gain their sobriety. That was one of the things we thought. Also, I should say, the duPont-Columbia Awards have consistently had an eye toward local news and toward highlighting stories that really should get a much bigger spotlight nationally. This story was really one of the important ones that we celebrated this year.

Brian Lehrer: In that clip that we played of Lauren, she said, "I'm choosing to remember that women chose journalism when they didn't have an answer to such a big unsolvable problem. I wonder if you would take that cue and talk about the role of journalism generally, which we can too often take for granted, and why she referenced it like that there.

Jelani Cobb: Brian, I think that really applied for all of the stories in one way or another. The through-line where people who were in dire straits and who generally hoped that telling their stories might bring some sort of change. We had the Frontline story on the aftermath of the Taliban taking over in Afghanistan. Women who faced immediate physical consequences for talking to a Westerner, for certainly talking to media, were still saying, "We are being abused." These are people who are talking in front of hidden cameras and so on. The entire interview having to be a kind of surreptitious interaction.

They really felt that the risk of being abused, beaten, or worse had to be counterbalanced by the importance of telling the world what was happening. Time and time again, if we have doubts about journalism or if we're skeptical about journalism, it's always important to hear the other half of the story, which is that there are people who are placing a profound degree of faith in journalism as a remedy for the problems that they're confronting at that moment.

Brian Lehrer: I don't know if you're familiar enough with Lauren's piece or the aftermath to know about the doxxing that's been referred to that she faced. Doxxing is in the news for other reasons these days. A lot of people still don't know what that really is or what that means. Are you up on that in this case to describe it at all?

Jelani Cobb: Yes, I don't know all the particulars of what happened with Lauren. I can tell you that even in the journalism school, it's something that we're teaching about for our journalists to be aware of and to anticipate, which is that, often, people will do a story if someone doesn't like what you reported or doesn't like the way the story has highlighted something they did or whatever.

They can get access to all of your public records and put those out on the internet, which includes incredibly personal information, people's addresses, people's workplaces, all sorts of people's cell phone numbers or social media profiles. That lends itself toward targeted harassment, including, in many instances-- and I don't know if this happened with Lauren. As a matter of fact, I believe this did actually happen with Lauren.

People showing up at your door because they know where you live or driving past your residence in an effort to intimidate you or prevent you from continuing to do your work. That's something that we're very clear about. Even in the building now at the journalism school, we talk about the steps that you need to take to protect and lock down your information when you're reporting on sensitive subject matter. Unfortunately, that's just part of the landscape of doing digital journalism at this point.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, and this is the world we're increasingly living in, right? You're the dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia. We don't have to get into it in this conversation, but some Columbia students were doxxed last fall in connection with Mideast-related protests that they were engaged in. It also made me think that there was Donald Trump on the witness stand yesterday in the defamation case where he was found guilty of sexually assaulting someone, E. Jean Carroll.

He used his few minutes on the stand under oath to say he didn't ask anyone to threaten Carroll because people did, even though the earlier jury found that she was the victim. I don't know if New Hampshire Public Radio saw that as a sign of our difficult times for journalists and others alike. I think you were just indicating some of the ways that it obviously is, but it even made me think of what Donald Trump chose to use as three minutes on the witness stand to testify about yesterday.

Jelani Cobb: I think that that's just a kind of metaphor for the much bigger problem. You would look at a person who occupied the highest office in the land to a guy living stereotypically in his mom's basement. The through-line between the two of them is that you can find someone that you dislike, particularly someone who's operating in the media world, or someone whom you've declared to be the enemy of the people and make their life difficult and make their work that much more difficult.

I also think that that is a testament to the level of commitment that these journalists are willing to bring in order to make sure that these stories get told. Lauren could've just hung up her microphone and gone and done something else. That's not what she did. She chose to stick with this story, and so I think that needed to be celebrated.

Brian Lehrer: Let me try something with you on the phones here because this is a tough time for journalists and a tough time for young people who are choosing a career, a professional path to decide to be journalists. There are so many layoffs at news organizations these days. That's often what we hear of, not to mention doxxing and other things. I'm going to ask you before we play another clip of a duPont-Columbia award winner from last night, which is going to be Lynn Novick, Ken Burns' partner in their latest documentary.

I'm going to open up the phones and invite, just in case we have anybody out there, people who are currently attending any university journalism program. Any of Jelani Cobb's students out there right now who want to call in and tell us why are you going into journalism at this time? 212-433-WNYC. Anyone at the Newmark School of Journalism at CUNY? Anyone at NYU? Anyone listening anywhere around the country who's in J-School? I did it at Ohio State.

Any Buckeyes out there talking about why you're going into journalism these days or anyone else? Any journalism students or anyone who's even the parent of a journalism student or considering going to J-School, journalism school? 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. Tell us why you find this profession meaningful enough to take the various risks involved to get into. 212-433-9692, call or text. Can I ask you, Jelani, to put on your dean cap for a second and talk about who you do see these last few years coming through the J-School program?

Jelani Cobb: Sure. One of the things about the journalism school here at Columbia is that we're an international institution. We have students in any given year, anywhere between 30 and 35 states that are represented in terms of our student body. Then we just represented globally in terms of students. We'll have students significantly from China, significantly from Japan, from India, from the UK, certainly to our neighbors to the North and Canada.

Like many institutions, like many graduate schools, graduate undertakings now, we have a very strong representation of women in the building. Typically, the majority of our student body is female. I think the other through-line that I see here is that these are people who are not really daunted by the landscape. They believe in the power of journalism. They believe that there is a way to make a difference in the world by doing the kind of work that they're doing.

I think that they probably, temperamentally are probably closer to the school of social work if you think about the sense of wanting to do right in the world and to help the most vulnerable recognizing that it may not be the most remunerative undertaking, but you think that there's something that's worthwhile for this field. I think that's been a kind of shared temperament that we've seen.

Also, one of the things that I'll point out is that looking at the landscape of journalism and, particularly, the employment landscape of journalism, we've been moving aggressively at Columbia to make this school more accessible. We just launched a program, a loan repayment assistance program, so that our graduates who are working in non-profit news can get up to $50,000 of their loan debt repaid. That's just the first step. We're trying to make sure that as the business model for journalism changes, the business model for journalism education changes as well.

Brian Lehrer: The other big news in that category this week is that the J-School at CUNY just announced with another big grant from Craig Newmark that they're planning to go tuition-free. I'm not going to ask you if Columbia is going to compete, but it's interesting and a consequential move. Go ahead.

Jelani Cobb: You mentioned this. I should say, it is a consequential move. It's a consequential move. I say congratulations to them. I've never looked at this as a competitive thing. I think we're not competing with each other. We're mutually competing with the world in which journalism has to take place. I sent a text message congratulating the dean there who's a Columbia Journalism School alum and my colleague at The New Yorker as well.

Brian Lehrer: Dean Mochkofsky?

Jelani Cobb: Dean Mochkofsky, yes. Congratulations to her. I think we're all trying to make a landscape in which journalism is a more viable career. That's what we're engaged in.

Brian Lehrer: Here as it happens is one of their students. Willa in Manhattan, you're on WNYC. Hello, Willa.

Willa: Hi, Brian. I'm a journalism student at CUNY Newmark. I deferred a year because the engagement program that I was enrolled in was suspended. I wanted to share that, at first, when I went into journalism, I've never had an idea of what I wanted to do with my life. I just know that I am really curious and I like to talk to people. I was like, "Well, instead of being a bartender, maybe I could channel that into journalism."

I had this really optimistic, naive view of like, "Oh, if we all talk to each other, we'll all find some sort of mutual understanding." That's been shut down. I still want to believe that. I think that mostly these days, I've just been inspired by the new ways that journalism is being shaped by people in my generation. I'm 23. There's Channel 5, Andrew Callaghan, and other people on social media who create a lot of content that it's funny.

It's also really stark and really draws attention to the individual experiences of people. I think that that's really important, especially for our generation. We are on our phones a lot, but we do, I think, have a really strong connection with humanity and other people's feelings and a really great sense of dark humor. I just want to explore and contribute to that. Also, of course, I grew up listening to you, so that's been my biggest influence as well. [chuckles]

Brian Lehrer: I'm glad. That's really inspiring, the way you're putting it out, and also talking about the little-known bartender-to-journalist pipeline. [laughs] Willa, thank you very much, and good luck. Let us know when you get out. Jelani, you want to say something?

Jelani Cobb: Yes, I did want to say something. I would say to the caller, please hold onto that idea that she described as naive because that's what we're all holding onto. Going back to the duPont-Columbia Awards, that's what we were celebrating last night, that these stories, which began with a simple observation, all of them, and they culminated in well-told stories that actually did make a difference. Not every story does if I'm just being brutally honest. Not every story on that same subject does, but enough stories that are done well enough actually do move the needle. Aside from that, I'll say that the bartender and journalist profession, to your point, share a whole lot more in common than I think people probably recognize.

Brian Lehrer: No doubt, talking to people and trying to make them, one way or another, loosen up to open up to you, right?

Jelani Cobb: [chuckles] Exactly.

Brian Lehrer: Lisa in West New York in Jersey wants to comment on one of the winners we talked about before the ABC News investigation of what really happens to plastics that you think are going to be recycled. Lisa, you're on WNYC. Hello.

Lisa: Thank you so much, Brian. I just want to say that my call is precipitated by what I noticed you doing recently, which is saying, does anybody want to help report that story? You bring in the listeners to the reporters to do better on the subject matter. Now, in this area, we've had groups working on plastics. Our local officials have told us, "That's garbage. Just throw it out because we get a lot of those newspaper bags and things like that. Just throw it out." Now, had we been invited to report the story, the ABC could have done even a better job or Columbia University could have reported it or whatever. I just wanted to pull all those things together. Let's have people report along with the college students and the professionals, et cetera, et cetera.

Brian Lehrer: Well, first of all, thank you for noticing, which you accurately quoted, that I do sometimes invite listeners in by saying, "Help us report this story with your personal experiences." That's our attempt to use a talk show, not just for people to spout off when they call in but, literally, to use a talk show as an act of journalism and the public that we have the privilege of being able to hear from by the tap of your phone to help report various stories. We're going to do that in our next segment too with Speaker Adrienne Adams on police stops. Lisa, do you want to give us any particular detail about what you see happening in your community with plastics recycling that you would tell a reporter?

Lisa: The local officials really aren't committed to the issue. We have a couple of recycling bins, but it's nothing like New York. It's not even healthy. People can't get to it and can't use it. The thing for me was I get all these newspapers and the bags say "recyclable," and it's not because there's no place that will accept these. They're called "newspaper sleeves." They're horrible and they're going to last for how many years. There is an organization here, Beyond Plastics. We're concerned about it. We'd like to make sure this doesn't end up in a landfill. If we could have somebody say to us, "Help us report this story," it could be even a better story.

Brian Lehrer: Lisa, thank you very much. Listener writes in a text message as my guest for another few minutes is Jelani Cobb, dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University. If you're just joining us, he presided over the duPont-Columbia Awards for Excellence in Broadcast Journalism last night. We're talking about some of those winners and we're talking about journalism and journalism school. Listener writes, "My son graduated from Columbia School of Journalism two years ago. It restores my hope for the future and democracy when I hear of the work the students are doing." There's an A+ for you and your crew, Jelani.

Jelani Cobb: Thanks a lot.

Brian Lehrer: Listener writes, "I have a quick question for your guest. In a country where the majority of adults read at a seventh-grade level, how does your guest see journalists' role in reaching a broad audience?"

Jelani Cobb: Well, I think that's a really good question. I'm not sure if it is that everyone on average reads at a seventh-grade level, but one of the things that is crucial and one of, I think, the virtues of especially print journalism has been that it is written in a way that is accessible. That's democratic actually that the information that people need in order to make decisions about their lives and, most fundamentally, make decisions about their government should be accessible to everyone.

When you're listening to a podcast or watching a news story, when we say at the duPont-Columbia Awards, deeply researched and well-told, the well-told part of it means people being able to understand what's happening here. I really think that that's a virtue. Sometimes we will lament and we wring our hands about it, but that's one of the better things that we do.

Brian Lehrer: When I was in J-School, there was a cartoon that got posted of an editor telling their reporters, "Eschew obfuscation," which translates as avoid confusing language.

[laughter]

Brian Lehrer: In confusing language, so there's that accessibility lesson. You could find that cartoon if it still exists, posted at the J-School building. All right, we're going to end on this. Ken Burns is still winning awards, I see, along with his filmmaking partner, Lynn Novick. Their six-hour PBS film was The US and the Holocaust. Here's Lynn Novick from the award ceremony last night.

Lynn Novick: We started this project back in 2015 in a very different world. As we were making the film, we all saw just how fragile our democracy can be and how important it is to tell the truth about our past. The series ends with a quote from Guy Stern, who passed away last month at 101. He was lucky enough to escape Nazi Germany as a teenager, come to America, serve in the army, and go back to help liberate Europe. This is what he says, "We have seen the nadir of human behavior and we have no guarantee that it won't recur. If we can make that clear and graphic and understandable, not as something to imitate but as a warning of what can happen to human beings, then perhaps we have one shield against its recurrence."

Brian Lehrer: Lynn Novick, who's not as well-known as Ken Burns but probably should be, they've made basically all of what we call the Ken Burns documentaries together. What did Ken and Lynn add to our understanding of the Holocaust from the US side of the Atlantic that led the duPont-Columbia committee to give them this award?

Jelani Cobb: That's a really exhaustive examination of the issue. I delved into this before I even knew it was in contention and was consistently impressed with the way that they elucidate policy, the way that they elucidate perception, and the way that they elucidate the consequences for the actions or lack thereof for people to take in the midst of the Holocaust as it was unfolding.

One of the elements about this that is unsettling historically and certainly unsettling in the contemporary context because of the echoes was the great deal of sympathy there was for fascism and overt anti-Semitism in the United States in the 1930s. Obviously, we have seen a resurgence of this and a resurrection of some of those ideas in the contemporary context. It really is just a stunning piece even by Ken Burns' standards. A stunning piece of work that I think we thought really needed to be highlighted.

Brian Lehrer: That history of what was happening here at that time is one of the things that caused some European Jews to choose Israel or what was earlier British-mandate Palestine as a safe haven. One of the many points from the many points of view in the current and ongoing Mideast conflict. Not to get into that again today, but this film is one more thing that directly or indirectly feeds the complexity over there.

Jelani Cobb: Brian, I'll just add one piece to this. When we look at the racist restrictive immigration laws that were passed in the United States in 1924, the Johnson immigration restriction act actually, which set the quotas for the number of people who could come into the country, it was specifically meant to prevent so-called undesirable populations from coming. That has disastrous consequences in the next decade. That directly complicates the attempt of many Jews who are fleeing the rise of fascism. It prevents them from being able to find safe haven in the United States. That's absolutely accurate from what you say, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: One of the things that we're planning for later in the year is a look-back at that 1924 restricted Immigration Act in the United States because here we are at the 100th anniversary of that. It had such wide-ranging effects on the United States from then until now. We're seeing echoes, as I guess you were just indicating, of the kind of rhetoric that was around in the early '20s here in these early '20s.

We will leave it there for today with Jelani Cobb, who is the dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University and presided last night over this year's duPont-Columbia Broadcast Journalism Award ceremony on the campus. Thank you, first of all, for proposing this segment, which was your idea, and for highlighting some of the winners with us. I always love talking to you, Jelani. Thank you for coming on.

Jelani Cobb: Well, I will say one thing, Brian, which is that we will extend another invitation to you. We really want to have you in the room with us for the duPont-Columbia Awards next year. Just let us know and we'll have a seat reserved for you.

Brian Lehrer: I will check my calendar for January 2025. Thanks, Jelani.

Jelani Cobb: Okay, take care.

 

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