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Interviews from a multicultural perspective that question the way we understand America
What is the mainstream media? The most watched television network is Fox News, but that's probably the network where you'll hear the mainstream media most referred to. Meanwhile, most people are getting their information on Facebook or TikTok. So is the mainstream media social media now?
AI is a huge opportunity for journalism. The obvious examples are sifting through massive amounts of data in order to look for patterns that create a story. AI can also help the executives teams figure out how to fine tune their product, better reach their audiences and understand how they're being engaged with it.
You can use AI to augment the work that human journalists are doing. If you're tired of arguing with strangers on the internet, try talking with one of them in real life. Welcome to Back in America, the podcast.
Welcome to Back in America. As a journalist, I have long been fascinated by question of price freedom and the economics of journalism, especially now as both are being shaped by the internet and the media. So I'm going to talk about the world of journalism and the world of journalism. The world of journalism is a place where
the world of journalism is being shaped by the internet and artificial intelligence. That's why I'm especially glad to speak today with Clayton Wehmer, the executive director of Reporters Without Borders USA. He leads RSF's effort to defend press freedom and support journalists worldwide. And his perspective feels particularly vital
at this moment. Why you are doing what you are doing. As a child, when were you first exposed to maybe a newspaper or was it even in your mind at the time that journalism was something of interest to you?
Yeah, one of my earliest dream jobs when I was a kid was I wanted to be a writer. I didn't really know what that meant, but I knew that I liked writing. My grandfather was an academic and a writer. I loved reading, obviously. And then in high school, I started working on the high school newspaper
and really started to love journalism as well. And for a long time, I thought that would actually be my career path. And I ended up getting off that path, instead ended up studying Russian in college and then ended up going to graduate school for international relations and found my way into a career in politics.
Nothing was linear about it. But then after about seven years working on political campaigns across the country, I decided I want to focus on a particular issue more and with an organization where I could stay put a little bit longer. And the opportunity to join RSF came up then. At the time, I joined as our advocacy director in the US,
which coming from a background of politics and policy, that made sense. But it was also a return to this original love of journalism, even though I've never really worked as a journalist, but it was nice to come full circle on all of that. I also went to a French grade school growing up and learned to speak French from a young age. And so working for a French based organization
since RSF was based in Paris, it was also a big draw. And that's nice to finally in my career, be able to use my French. How is this organization, Reporter Without Borders, Reporter Sans Frontieres, how is it perceived in the US? And I'm going to tell you where I'm going with that. I was looking at how people talk about the latest report, and we're going to touch on that soon, on Reddit.
And many people go, this is not fair. Come on, the US is a country of freedom, and this core is totally biased. Do you think that has anything to do with the fact that this is a foreign organization? I wouldn't call us a foreign organization. I would call us an international organization. Yes, our headquarters is in Paris,
but we have offices in 13 countries around the world, and we have a network of correspondents in 140 countries. In just about every corner of the earth where it's safe to have somebody, we have somebody. And so we really think of ourselves as a global international organization that just happens to be headquartered in Paris. But you definitely touched on something there
that I feel all the time, which is a surprise at the performance of the United States on our flagship publication, which is the World Press Freedom Index. Though I will say, this year, people seem less surprised, and it doesn't, or at least it's more expected that the United States is where it is. So in 2025, the United States is ranked 57th
out of 180 countries. That's pretty low for a country that prides itself on the First Amendment and on its history of freedom and liberal democracy. It's been a steady backslide for the past decade. And what that tells us is that regardless of who's in the White House, regardless of who's in control of Congress,
American policymakers have really taken their eye off the ball when it comes to press freedom, and are not doing enough to guarantee that freedom of the press is respected in this country. We measure press freedom across five different indicators, economic, political, legal, social, and safety. On all five indicators, the US has seen a steady decline over the past decade.
And back in 2002, US was number 17 in the list. Today, France, my home country, is number 25. And Norway is the first one on the list in terms of press freedom. So you said economic, political, legislative, security, and social. Economic plays a big role in how it's go, especially maybe in the US,
has been attributed to the US. Tell us more, what does it mean? So for the economic score, we look at a number of things, but some of the most important factors for the United States, you look at the massive layoffs year after year in the media industry. You look at the disappearance of local news outlets all across the country, leading to a situation
where today 70 million Americans live in what we call news deserts. There's a general precarity in the news industry that threatens everyone's access to information. And I think that's also, I should back up here, and this is a key distinction of how RSF looks at press freedom compared to what some other organizations might say.
We try to take a very holistic view. It's not just about the safety of journalists and whether journalists are able to do their job. It's also about whether or not ordinary citizens can access that journalistic content. Can they access reliable information? And I think that's a key distinction because at the end of the day, that's what really matters.
We don't protect journalists or journalism because they're some special class of citizen that would protect them because of the civic role that they play in a participative democracy. And so you have to see press freedom as a two-way street. And when newspapers all across America are shutting down, when TV stations are coming under the ownership of just a handful of oligarchs,
that necessarily has an impact on everyone's access to reliable information. I read that you wrote in the Salon that you were talking about the media owners and the fact that they are not pushing back against what's happening today in the US. And you were saying, if you are not willing to be in the business of defending press freedom,
you shouldn't be in the news business at all. Tell us more and impact that for us. Yeah, so that article is a few months old and a few things have happened since then, but I was writing at that time in the wake of a series of lawsuits that the president had launched against media organizations. And we were just starting to get reports
that companies like Disney and Paramount were looking to settle these lawsuits rather than fight them in the courts. Now, the reason that is concerning is because in those particular cases, the lawsuit that the president brought against both companies was incredibly weak. Every legal expert you ask will say it was frivolous
and that Paramount and Disney would have prevailed in court. But for a variety of reasons, namely that it just doesn't look good to be going to court with the president of the United States, they decided to settle and make payments directly to the president's foundation. That's maybe the right decision for their businesses. These are huge multinational companies
with billions of dollars of interests, of which the news media is a tiny portion of it. So yes, maybe for the shareholders, it was the right decision. But for the broader values of press freedom and free expression in this country, it's disastrous. It sends a message that the most well-resourced media companies who undoubtedly could pay for
and win this lawsuit weren't willing to fight back when they were right. What message does that send to the smaller local media outlets who are going to undoubtedly face similar pressures, maybe not from the president, but from other politicians or other industry leaders who are trying to silence them? So that's our concern there is that the media industry
needs to really think of itself not as just defending its bottom line, but as defending something bigger than itself.
So we looked at your index. We looked at the five element composing this number. Why is Norway at the top of your list? What is this country doing that other countries don't do? Yeah, I think it's useful to think of the country, the rankings as cohorts of countries. And generally all the countries in green on the map are doing more or less the same things.
There's always this little competition between who's going to be first and who's going to be second or third, and then there's always minute movements every year. But what's really important is to look at your peer countries all around you and then compare there. And when you look at the countries at the top of the index, Norway included, the things they're doing well is
there is a good availability of funding for journalism that's independent of political control. There's an impressive legal infrastructure guaranteeing press freedom, preventing the interference of the government. There's also a robust judicial system that ensures that any crime against a journalist on the basis of their journalism is swiftly punished.
But in any case in these countries, they have cultures of respect for press freedom such that we don't see a lot of attacks on journalists. We don't see arrests of journalists. Just earlier this year in this country, we saw more than 60 incidents of violence against journalists just covering one series of protests in Los Angeles. That's not something in Norway.
That's not something in Portugal. So that's a clear difference as well.
So you said that this economic pressure is forcing a lot of media outlets to close, creating news desert. And at the same time, we have never seen so much news available online. It's a paradox, right? So how can you help my listener understand what's happening and why should they care about the freedom of the press when they open their iPhone
and have access to all kinds of news? You know, that is the paradox at the same time that we are losing access to so much local journalism. We are inundated with information, and not just journalistic information, but all kinds of information. We have an abundance of content in some ways, but what we're really missing out on are local journalists
who are part of local communities, who are reporting on the things that are happening on the ground. They're going to school board meetings, they're going to town hall meetings, they're showing up at the scene of a crime, and they are reporting out exactly what's happening in your community, and they're holding
your local public officials to account. What is, while we have an abundance of voices in the media and plenty of options to choose from, what we're getting mostly is a lot of media out of New York, D.C., Los Angeles, the Bay Area, not necessarily grounded in so many communities around the country, and that's why I'll come back to that figure I mentioned before.
70 million Americans live in what we call a news desert, and that means that they have little or no access to local news. The radio stations that are in their town are probably owned by someone far away and are probably buying programming from a national distributor because it's not profitable to hire journalists to work the beat
in these small towns and rural communities, and that problem is about to get much worse because the president just rescinded all of the funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which funds the independent public radio and television affiliates all around the country. And so what you're going to see is inevitably some of these radio stations and TV stations,
which in some cases were the only local media in their counties, are going to shut down. So if I live in, I don't know, Janiceville, Iowa, and want to know what's happening at the school board meeting and where my tax money is going to be used, there is no one telling me that. Unfortunately, you're probably going to go to Facebook, and what we know is that you're more likely
to encounter false information, deliberate misinformation, rumors, fear-mongering that isn't being vetted through the ethics of journalism and through someone who's trained in how to report, and the result is a poorly informed populace, which is bad for our democracy. What do you make of citizen journalism, podcasters like me, newsletters, bloggers?
Yeah, that's the good part of the ecosystem that we have is that it has lowered the barriers for participation for so many people, and it's also made it possible for professional journalists to strike out on their own, break away from large legacy institutional media outlets and start their own podcasts, start their own sub stacks, and make a living doing it that way, sometimes quite a bit living.
The format is not what matters. What matters are the processes that undergird the entire enterprise. If you are verifying facts, if you are speaking with sources, if you are being transparent about the work you're doing and who's paying for it, you're doing journalism. At the end of the day, that's what matters. It doesn't matter how you get it out there.
You can do journalism on TikTok. You can do journalism on the radio. You can do journalism on TV. You can do journalism in a newsletter that you mail out to people. The format is not what matters. What matters is the process and the product. So let's talk about trust, right?
And I've got these stats here. Apparently, in 2024, during the Biden administration, 47% of Republicans were extremely concerned about the freedom of the press. And then you forward back to 2025. Now the Republicans are only 28% to be concerned, but the Democrats are 60% concerned about the freedom of the press.
We know this country is divided. We hear a lot of complaints about media. How do you explain that? In so many ways, the media is just holding up a mirror back to society. And so what that poll tells me is those people are looking in the mirror and they're not liking what they see because their preferred political outcome wasn't achieved.
That said, those numbers are low, regardless. Too many Americans are turning away from journalism as a source of information. They don't trust journalists nearly in the numbers that they used to. They don't trust journalistic institutions, but they still need information. And so they're going somewhere.
And the problem is increasingly, they're going to other less reliable sources of information. And so we have this kind of another paradoxical situation, which is that some of the least trustworthy people online have some of the highest ratings of trust with their audiences. How did they build that? That's something that the media industry really needs
to do a better job of looking at is there's this huge booming industry of content creators, influencers, whatever you want to call them. And they're very skilled at building rapport with their audience. Whereas traditionally the news media have really kept the audience at a distance. There's a level of aloofness to it or elitism
that really comes through, or at least the perception, especially of the large legacy media outlets, the coastal ones. That's something that I think is starting to change slowly, but nobody really has the silver bullet for how to solve that problem. But I think it's clear that the news media needs to be studying what works on social media
so well for content creators without sacrificing what makes journalism so valuable. So I noticed that you say legacy media, where quite often another term is used to describe the traditional media outlets, like the mainstream media, which almost become like a negative term, right? It's often associated to elitist or opinionated media.
Well, again, do you think it's part of propaganda that some party use to turn the population away from those outlets? I think the term mainstream media is probably an anachronism at this point. What is the mainstream media? The most watched television network is Fox News, but that's probably the network where you'll hear
the mainstream media most referred to. Meanwhile, most people are getting their information on Facebook or TikTok. So is the mainstream media social media now? I think our traditional conception of the mainstream media, people are imagining the New York Times and CNN, I think that's wrong. We live in a very fractured media environment right now,
and I would be hard pressed to give you a good definition of what the mainstream news media is these days. So with the advance of social media, AI generated content, AI generated propaganda, disinformation, is there any hope for journalism? Yes, definitely. AI is a huge opportunity for journalism. There are things that journalists are already doing
and will be able to do that were never possible before. The obvious examples are sifting through massive amounts of data in order to look for patterns that create a story. Anytime someone is going to leak huge troves of government data, using an AI model to parse it is gonna be really helpful. It's also really helpful for climate journalists who have to deal with an enormous amount of data,
some of it is highly technical. So it's gonna make their jobs a lot easier. AI can also help the executives teams figure out how to fine tune their product to better reach their audiences and understand how they're being engaged with. There's a lot of positive uses for AI in media. A lot of attention is given to bad uses of AI,
understandably, and there have been some really bad uses of AI. And the one thing that really connects every mis-deployment of AI in the news media is removing humans from the loop. You can't use AI to replace the work that human journalists are doing. You can use AI to augment the work
that human journalists are doing. And the second you try to replace them with AI models instead, you get a scandal like Sports Illustrated publishing AI content under a fake author. But even with the best intentions, you'll end up, there are gonna be pitfalls along the way. There's a story not that a week ago
about how Business Insider and Wired had to withdraw a couple of stories because they got duped by a fake journalist who submitted AI-generated content. So you were saying that you came to our meeting late because of an emergency. What keeps you awake at night?
To be honest, I'm kept so busy during the day that I'm exhausted at night and I sleep just fine. But I am really worried that we are only at the tip of the iceberg here in terms of the crackdown on the free press. I think we really need to focus on is making sure that we don't lose more our First Amendment rights because as I said before, we've seen a decline
in press freedom on our indicators for the past decade which tells us that press freedom is being taken for granted. We simply can't take our rights for granted anymore. We need to fight for them. We need to assert them positively. And if anything, we need to be expanding them, not contracting them. But there are definitely things that we can change
about how this country treats the press, on how it treats press rights, on how it treats access to information that could have a concrete and positive impact on press freedom going forward. There are a number of bills that have been on their consideration in Congress recently that could have positive impacts.
There's the Press Act, which would create a federal shield for reporters and their sources. So that federal law enforcement aren't able to do a runaround on the Fourth Amendment to get access to their devices. That would make it much easier for confidential sources and whistleblowers to talk to journalists without fear of government intimidation
or government surveillance. There's other provisions we can do to cut back on the pernicious use of commercial spyware which is really used to target journalists as well as activists and politicians. And there are a number of proposals in Congress to do that right now. Some of which look like they might indeed pass this year,
which is a very positive step. There are a lot of things we can do. Those are the easy things. There are some hard things we can do too. And our sister organization, the Forum for Information and Democracy, just put out a report this week proposing a digital tax on AI systems that would fund journalism,
basically on the polluter pays rationale. It's a system that could definitely work. A dozen economists have signed off on it being a good idea. Realistically, I don't think there's a lot of appetite for that in the United States, but this might be the time to be looking to the European Union for leadership on something like this.
So in your roles and duty, you look at the US and English-speaking countries. Is that it? English-speaking Americas. Americas, right. Essentially Canada, the US, the Caribbean. Okay. Any other countries that you're worried about in your perimeter?
Yes. Though the region is relatively stable compared to other parts of the world. And my colleagues who are working in Africa and Latin America and Southeast Asia are contending with problems on a much grander scale. I have to be honest about that. We're fortunate that in this region, there are not huge numbers of journalists in jail. There is not a regular assassination of a journalist.
So in that respect, things are a bit calmer over here. That doesn't mean there aren't problems. And as of the moment we're talking here during this recording, an election was just held in Guyana in South America. And Guyana is a country where the government has normalized hostility towards the press. High ranking government officials regularly chastise and criticize journalists at press conferences if they let the press into their press conferences at all. And regularly incites online supporters to harass journalists.
There's so many reports of digital and cyber bullying of journalists, especially women journalists. That's a big problem. And these are countries that don't often get the attention that the United States gets on the world stage. There's also a lot of potential there because they are holding free and fair elections. They do have a vibrant press corps that is interested in doing its job. And so there's a lot of room for improvement.
It's just a question of getting the responsible parties to take an interest. And once again, there are concrete things that can change in a country like Guyana. For example, I'll just give you one. The distribution of government advertising spending isn't guaranteed by law to be impartial. And the result is that everyone suspects favoritism amongst the media outlets that get to collect the government ad revenue. It would be relatively easy to pass a law that says the ad revenue has to be distributed equally amongst different media outlets, different media formats, different sizes of media,
all political views, et cetera. And that would go a long way towards creating goodwill between the government and the media.
Good. Maybe two more questions. If one of the listeners wants to get involved, wants to do their part in helping the media, what would you suggest they do? We can certainly start by going to RSF.org. That's our website. We have lots of content published constantly. Like I said, we cover every country of the world.
There's a steady stream of stuff coming out there. You can also follow us on all of the social media channels except for Twitter. We are no longer tweeting. And if you feel so compelled, you can even take it a step farther and make a donation. All of our work is possible because of donors. And here in the United States, we are our own nonprofit organization, 501c3 RSF USA. We don't get funded by the international organization.
We are entirely self-funded through donations from our supporters. And so the only thing that limits our ability to fight for press freedom is the resources that we have, which is money and time. And I can't ask for more time, but I can ask for more money. Thank you. If you have a young person asking you for advice and saying, look, I want to become a journalist. What do you think?
What would you tell that person? I get that question a lot. And I ask them why they want to be a journalist because it's a hard job. Chances are you're not going to make a lot of money. But for the people who do it, they can't imagine doing anything else. It's a calling, but it has to be that way. It has to be your life's work. It has to be your passion.
Otherwise you're going to burn out and you're not going to enjoy yourself. You're not going to be fulfilled from it. So you really have to be sure that it's what you want to do. But I would suggest that anyone who wants to give it a try, jump in. There's not exactly a lot of jobs out there. But especially if you're willing to look out farther afield than the big cities, there are actually, even though there are fewer and fewer of them, there are a lot of small media outlets that are struggling to hire
because journalists don't want to live in those smaller communities around the country or because they can't pay quite as well. But there's no better way to get your feet wet as a journalist than to go work in a rural community, a small town paper or a small town television station. I really learn how to report a story. That's what I would recommend. I get a lot of people come up to me and ask, how do I become a foreign correspondent or how do I become a war correspondent?
And my answer to that is, you don't. Almost nobody sets out to do that and does it. You have to first find the love of journalism and you have to establish yourself as a journalist. And if you're lucky, interesting opportunities will emerge along the way. And finally, what is America to you? Oh, gosh. America is a promise as much as it is anything,
a promise that we're always going to try to do better. That's why our constitution was written with the expectation that it would be changed along the way. We can always make this country better. And just because personally, I see bad developments happening right now, I think all of this comes in waves and cycles. The pendulum is swinging away from press freedom right now. I can't deny it. After what was basically 100 years of expansion of press rights going back to World War I,
we are now experiencing the first contraction of press rights. And it's really up to all of us to decide, is this a blip in our historical record? Or is this the new trend line? And at RSF, we're going to work hard to make it the shortest blip we can.
Clayton, thank you so much for your time today. Thank you for having me.
Thank you.