How Female Journalists are Fighting Fake News
NPR's Mara Liasson gets candid with Emma Brown, the Washington Post reporter who broke Dr. Christine Blasey Ford's story of sexual assault, about fighting fake news, the Fallopian Club, and how women are leading the golden era of investigative journalism for our 2018 #WomenWhoDare series.
Mara Liasson: I just want to start by saying my hat is off to you, you're an example of what's happening in this golden era of investigative journalism. Without explaining exactly how you got to [Dr. Christine] Blasey Ford, can you say whether the Republican charge that Dianne Feinstein leaked it is true or not?
Emma Brown: She came to us long before her story was public. She came to us in July.
Mara: So that's a false accusation that it was leaked by Di Fein?
Emma: Nobody leaked anything to me. Dr. Ford came to me, came to The Post, actually, before [Brett] Kavanaugh was named. He was on the shortlist, but not yet named.
Mara: Was it through the tip line?
Emma: Through the tip line.
Mara: See? It works!
Emma: Yeah, it was just a cold tip. I've reported this in the story too, so this is not necessarily new, but over the summer, she really agonized. It was all off the record at that point, because she did not want her story to come out, she wasn't sure how to handle this, she said she had the civic duty on the one hand but she was worried she was going to get annihilated on the other. By the end of August she decided she did not want to move forward, and then-
Mara: Who outed her?
Emma: The Intercept found out there was a letter; they wrote a piece about how there was a secret letter, and then there was multiple reports after that: BuzzFeed, The New York Times, The New Yorker, each one with more details than the next, meanwhile reporters were showing up on her doorstep and she just decided at that point, "my calculation has now changed, people know my name, so I'm going to tell my story." That's kind of how that all unfolded.
Mara: As a journalist, I'm totally in awe of what you did. As a political journalist, I have to ask, what if Di Fein had handled this differently and explained to [Dr. Ford], "you're going to be outed and you have to be prepared." What if she'd come to [Senator Chuck] Grassley, what if they'd done an FBI investigation, confidentially, even though eventually it would have come out?
Emma: I don't envy the position [Feinstein] was in, with the constituent coming to her and saying, "I have this secret, keep it secret." And then it all unfolding from there. Not an easy situation, I'm sure. [Dr. Ford] said she was terrified at the hearing and I think she felt terrified talking to me, too. I guess the main thing for me was, well, there're two things: one was not pushing or pressuring her, because she was scared, she was clearly scared, and the other was just being really upfront about our process, so: "We're going to do our best to figure out whether you're telling the truth. We're going to ask you about your own motives, and your own politics." The being upfront and being honest about that helps in some way, even though it can be intimidating and scary to hear that.
Mara: I interviewed [Bill Clinton] the day that Monica Lewinsky broke, and I asked him, "gee Mr. President, was there a relationship with Miss Lewinsky that might have been misconstrued?" Just being polite, and he said, "Well, Mara, I don't know anything more about this than you do."He has a big jaw and his jaw muscle is pulsating. He lost his train of thought a couple times, which Bill Clinton has never done before, I've never seen him do that. But anyway, the only alleged abuser I guess I've ever interviewed-although there're probably many more if I really stopped and thought about it-is Bill Clinton. If that story happened today, I don't think Bill Clinton would have been given the deference that he was, and I also wonder if Monica Lewinsky would have looked at it differently-because don't forget, she never said she was abused or sexually harassed. She never said that.
Emma: The whole frame was different then.
Mara: And not only was the whole frame different, she felt abused by Linda Tripp and Ken Starr. That was Monica Lewinsky's position. I don't even think that Bill Clinton's story was looked at as an abuser at all. The whole frame was completely different. He had sex with an intern, which might have been immoral and gross. He lied. That's what led to his impeachment. But I would ask you, can you imagine Blasey Ford calling up and talking to a male reporter at The Post?
Emma: There is a great advantage in being a woman reporter. Not only when interviewing another woman, but people can perceive you as unthreatening and less intimidating, and that can be-
Mara: That is true in general, not just in interviewing people who've been abused, I'd say just in general, being a woman is helpful.
Emma: In what way have you found that?
Mara: Just like what you said, we're not threatening-it's easier to get people to confide in you. I don't want to say women are more empathetic, but many women are. I've gotten this question, obviously, throughout my career: "What are the disadvantages of being a woman journalist?" The only disadvantages are when you're in a group interview situation and all the male reporters talk over you, but other than that, if you're able to stand on your hind legs and assert yourself, I haven't found a lot of downsides to being a female journalist. I think they're upsides, and guess what? We're all just journalists, really.
Emma: It's true.
Mara: I'm not on the sexual harassment beat. I cover politics. There might be special advantages to being a woman covering stories of abuse.
Emma: Although, Ronan Farrow's done pretty well.
Mara: Yeah, Ronan Farrow has done really well, that's true.
Emma: My female colleagues Beth Reinhard, Stephanie McCrummen, and Alex Crites last year broke the story of Roy Moore and his use of girls, minors. I don't think that was an accident that they were three women who wrote that story.
Mara: They've been women breaking [these stories], they're all in this #MeToo era, and they come from news organizations that can put resources behind them.
Emma: We're both lucky to work for news organizations that can do that.
Mara: As much as journalism in general is besieged by people who don't believe in the first amendment, or call it fake news, we're really lucky that there's a lot of news organizations who are really devoting resources to covering the news. And NPR, even though it's a smaller, less wealthy one than The Times or The Post, has always managed to kind of chug along and keep our foreign bureaus open when other people are closing them.
Emma: You have devoted listeners, of which I am one. Do you think that, being a woman, journalism has changed through your career?
Mara: There certainly are a lot more women in journalism than when I started. There are just tons of great young female journalists. That's the best thing-that there's so many of them. I think when I started, there was a handful. I was the second generation, pretty much, of prominent women at NPR. Nina Totenberg, Susan Stamberg, Cokie Roberts, Linda Wertheimer-they all came before me. We used to call them The Fallopian Club. It was not a big deal to be a woman at NPR, because there already were women. I felt that NPR was always a pretty female-supporting institution. I haven't had a problem there.
Emma: And how about when you're walking the halls of congress where you're-
Mara: There are tons of women walking the halls of congress.
Emma: But that's changed, right?
Mara: Yes, that's changed. There's probably more, but even when I covered congress, which was a really long time ago, I was Cokie's number two. In other words, there already were women there. It's funny, I've never viewed my profession, or my career, as a struggle against the patriarchy. I just haven't. There are a lot of other big struggles that we're involved in now.
Emma: The fake news struggle?
Mara: The fake news. Much, much, much bigger problem than the patriarchy if you ask me. It's hard to see that there's any way out of it. First of all, so long as there are institutions like The Post and NPR and The Times, there's always going to be mainstream media that does work really hard to tell the truth and be objective-fact-based journalism, but when you think about the future, how do you put the genie back in the bottle? There are ways to police the internet more, I suppose, to educate people about how to be more aware of fake news-real fake news. Not just news that the president doesn't like. Because there's two ways to define that.
Emma: It feels like-this is not a new observation-but, people stay within their views.
Mara: Oh, we're totally tribalized. The media is completely tribalized. What did they say, Fox and MSNBC don't even cover the same natural disasters? I've been on Fox for 20 years, and I've been at NPR for 33. I'm the exception that proves the rule. I don't say anything different on Fox that I say on NPR, but people want to stay in their own silos. They only want to consume news from sources that agree with them. They want affirmation, not information. That's a real problem.
Emma: People are walking around with completely different stories in their heads about what's going on.
Mara: Republicans found [Kavanaugh] credible, although there's a huge gender gap, even though more Republican women found him credible, there was still a huge gender gap. You go to a Trump rally and you see a guy with a T-shirt on that says "Rope. Tree. Journalist. Some assembly required." It's scary.
Emma: I haven't been.
Mara: I'm amazed that the worst thing that's happened in the United States-journalists are killed every week abroad-is, from The Guardian, [Ben] Jacobs, who was body slammed by the Republican Montana Congressional candidate, [Greg] Gianforte. That's pretty much the worst thing that's happened, which is amazing. But I think it's going to get worse.
Emma: In terms of personal threats against journalism?
Mara: I just think in general. The fake news problem will get worse, because it works so well for Trump, and he's doubled down on it. And that's what the Kavanaugh hearings showed him, and showed the Republicans: that being Trumpists, not just being Trump supporters, but actually acting like him, pays off.
Emma: Do you find that appearing on both Fox and NPR, does that help you with sources?
Mara: It absolutely helps me. It's been great for me, for my personal ability to do my job.
Emma: There's nobody who can say, "I don't need to talk to her, because she's from the other tribe."
Mara: Absolutely, there's no doubt about that. I can tell you that it wasn't just because there were women at NPR that I was able to do what I did, I can tell you really specific situations where Nina and Cokie literally threw their bodies between me and some adverse situation-I'm talking about professional career, not personal. I was specifically helped, guided. I remember I was on a journalism fellowship at Columbia University, and I was going to apply and I really wanted to come back and be a reporter, and I was told by the then-vice president for the news of NPR, "oh why don't you apply, we're having an opening in Atlanta, you should apply for that." So okay, I was going to get ready to do that, and Cokie calls me, "Do not do that! We're going to have an opening on the Hill with me, don't do that!" They were unbelievably helpful.
Emma: I've had a lot of mentors and guides, both men and women, I've been extraordinarily lucky in my career. But definitely women who are older than me have opened the door many times, and vouched for me, and helped me. I think that's how jobs and careers work.
Mara: I wasn't a pioneer, I'm like the middle generation, and already we're talking about three generations of female journalists. Like the pioneers-The Fallopian Club-the people who were at NPR when I got there, and then my generation, and yours. It's pretty great. Women do help each other.
Mara: [Addressing the moderator] I want to thank you for something. You never brought up work-life balance.
Emma: Yay!
Mara: We don't like to talk about that. I don't like to talk about that. Women have raised children under adverse circumstances for thousands of years! I hate that. Usually when you would do these interviews, that would be all they want to talk about.
Emma: Really?
Mara: Well not now that we're in a first principal's moment in American life, but I'm talking about just historically.
Emma: Although, I have to say, especially when I was about to have my first kid, I definitely asked women that question. I was like, "how in the world does anybody do this?"
Mara: There's a lot to talk about, but to me it's like, eh, everybody works it out in a different way. How many do you have?
Emma: Two.
Mara: Yeah, me too. I think I felt like I got those questions from both genders of interviewers, but prior to the moment we're living in. Because it just pales in comparison to the other problems we're dealing with. I always thought it was kind of a funny problem, because mothers have been working forever.
Emma: I think, too, there's also something different about how we are thinking and talking about gender.
Mara: Oh, definitely. And where it goes, especially with Donald Trump deciding that a backlash is a good idea. Deciding that he should deepen the divisions between men and women, and he should make this a men versus women thing, and he should make men out as victims... I don't know where that goes.
Emma: So what is going to happen in the midterms?
Mara: Well, we have a historic gender gap and I guess my question, coming out of Kavanaugh, was "how much more engaged and aroused can white, suburban, college-educated women get?" Somebody said that if they got anymore energized, they'd have a stroke. That's my question. I think there's a little backlash among men feeling they're victimized. I think women are not only the drivers of this election, we're going to have a really different looking congress when we come back in January. The Democratic Caucus is going to be more female and more diverse and younger, and the Republican congress is going to be older, whiter, more male than it is now.
Emma: How are they ever going to be able to pass a piece of legislation in the next congress if the polls are moving further apart?
Mara: That's a good question. I don't know. If he gets shellacked, he can decide, like other presidents who've lost congress, to triangulate; although I don't know if that's possible now. Twenty years ago Clinton could do it, but I don't know if Trump has it in him to want to do it; I don't know if he could do it even if he wanted to. He could theoretically pass an infrastructure bill with Democrats. But I don't think he really cares about passing legislation. He really cares about being re-elected. And there are two really different calculations, what you do if you want to be re-elected versus... Sometimes they can help, if you pass stuff that looks competent and effective, it helped Clinton.
Emma: You have a hard job.
Mara: I've been doing this for a long time. I'm generally more or less impervious to people saying how important it is because we're just doing our jobs and there are many jobs that are important. But after the election, there must have been some kind of an organized effort, I don't know if at The Post they got this, but we started getting a lot of postcards, from people in Vermont, or Idaho, just postcards saying we're standing up for the First Amendment, we really appreciate what you do. It wasn't "stick it to Trump," "it was thank you for doing what you do, we believe in the First Amendment." We got tons of those. It was really nice. How big is The Post's investigations unit?
Emma: Our team is 25 reporters, and that's the rapid team. And then the classic team is about the same size.
Mara: And classic team is like [David] Fahrenthold?
Emma: No, there's a bunch of investigators who are on the political team, so that's Fahrenthold and Carol Leonnig, Rose Helderman, and Tom-
Mara: Fahrenthold has to find out how [Trump] got the $400 million in cash all of a sudden. Investigative journalism, that's what's really having its golden age. It's not journalism in general, it's investigative journalism. The stuff we found out about Russia, and even who figured out the identities of the two Skripal poisoners-it was a European news organization, and they tracked them down in Siberia. And they found out who they were. And then they found pictures of one of them getting a medal from Putin 10 years ago, because he's a decorated intelligence officer. Investigative journalism is definitely having a golden age.
Emma: At The Post, part of it's because we got bought by somebody who can invest. But I think more broadly speaking, we've gone through this phase where it was just "put out as much content as you can," and I think people have realized that anybody can put out certain kinds of content, but not everybody can do investigative journalism.
Mara: This is a really important point. We went from the period of too much content, to now we have a tremendous amount of high-quality content. See, before, it was just content-who cares if it's a cat video, or a really good long form piece of journalism. It was just content. Now, we're getting real, impactful-a word I hate-investigative content.
Emma: I think readers have always wanted that, I really do. I think there's a huge appetite for it, and people really respond to it. They read it, they subscribe.
Mara: At the same time, there's a humongous portion of the population that just consumes propaganda. Whether it's through their Facebook feed, or various partisan news sources. Both are existing at the same time.
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