NPR Illinois and the UIS Center for State Policy and Leadership present a panel discussion on how news media, the press, are under multiple threats to their independence.
Panelists:
- Tim Franklin, Professor and John M. Mutz Chair in Local News, Northwestern
- Don Craven, Attorney, Craven & Craven, P.C.
Moderator:
- Sean Crawford, Managing Editor, NPR Illinois
Transcribed by AI with human editing for readability
Randy Eccles:
On this edition of Community Voices, an event you may have missed, the First Amendment Under Stress, an NPR Illinois Constitution Day panel in collaboration with the UIS Center for State Policy and Leadership.
From the defunding of public media, to presidential lawsuits against national networks, the cancellation or suspensions of late night talk shows, to FCC investigations, and accusations of fake new; it is increasingly difficult for news organizations to maintain their press freedom. The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution states in part, Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech or of the press.
NPR Illinois managing news editor Sean Crawford will moderate the panel of Northwestern Professor and John M. Mutz Chair in Local Journalism, Tim Franklin, and former Illinois Press Association CEO, Don Craven.
As of October 9th, Mary Randolph of the Medill Local News Initiative reports Craven resigned after adding the Illinois Press Association to a lawsuit against the Trump administration for actions toward journalists outside a Chicago area ICE facility. The IPA board disagreed with the decision and told him to do whatever necessary to dismiss the IPA as a plaintiff in that litigation, which Craven did before submitting his resignation, according to an e-mail Craven wrote to an organization of other press associations October 8th. Craven added in his e-mail, “Journalists reported being singled out for detention, being shot by rubber bullets, and being exposed to gas pellets, all because they were doing their jobs.”
The following conversation occurred on Constitution Day, Sept. 17, before Craven's resignation. Listen to what he and Tim Franklin have to say about freedom of the press.
Sean Crawford:
I'm Sean Crawford. I'm the news director at NPR Illinois, the local NPR affiliate here in Springfield and on the UIS campus. Before this role, I covered state government and politics at the Capitol. Before that, I covered a lot of local government and politics.
I host a political roundtable show. Charlie Wheeler is on it. Charlie's been around state government for almost as long as I've been alive. It's called State Week, and it airs across Illinois. It's also available as a podcast, you can find it wherever you find your favorite podcasts.
Joining me tonight is Tim Franklin. He's a professor. and the John M. Mutz Chair in Local News at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. He was also the founding director of the Medill Local News Initiative; a research and development project focused on bolstering the sustainability of local news in America.
Before joining Medill in June of 2017, Tim was the president of the Poynter Institute. It's a leading international school for journalists and a media think tank. He's been the top editor for three metropolitan newspapers, the Indianapolis Star, the Orlando Sentinel, and the Baltimore Sun. He was managing editor for Bloomberg News in Washington, overseeing coverage of the White House, Congress, Supreme Court, and many federal agencies.
Tim was a senior editor and reporter for the Chicago Tribune for 17 years. He covered the Illinois State House in the Springfield Bureau for five years. It's a long resume there, Tim. Thanks for being here.
Tim Franklin:
Thanks, I can't hold a job.
Sean Crawford:
Also with us, is Don Craven. He's been licensed to practice law in Illinois since 1981, serves as president, CEO of the Illinois Press Association*, as well as general counsel to the Illinois Broadcasters Association and other media organizations. He concentrates his practice on the litigation and business needs of Illinois newspapers and broadcasters and has participated in many discussions related to suggested changes to FOIA, the Freedom of Information Act, and the Open Meetings Act over the years. He's testified before committees of the Illinois General Assembly on media issues and is author of the Illinois Chapter of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press publication, Open Government Guide. Don, thanks for being here with us as well.
Don Craven:
Sean, it's a pleasure. My resume… I should have done more. I got to match Tim.
Sean Crawford:
You've got plenty of time.
When we first announced this panel, the thought was we were going to focus on freedom of the press, and we still will. We're talking tonight about the First Amendment under stress. But we'd be remiss if we did not mention the events which put even more of a focus on the First Amendment.
I want to break down the rights that are protected by the First Amendment, along with freedom of the press. We have freedom of religion, freedom of assembly, right to petition, and freedom of speech.
Again, the First Amendment has been discussed more since the death of the commentator Charlie Kirk and other political violence that's occurred in the last months. That was a horrific event. It's led people to question what is free speech. I'm going to let you weigh in on this. What have you seen in the last several days? Has it changed your view of what free speech is?
Tim Franklin:
Yes, it's been a terrible week in many ways. The assassination of Charlie Kirk is horrific and should never have happened, full stop. The result of that is this flurry of disinformation, rumormongering on social media. There's this rush to blame that happens when there's this kind of tragedy. That's what we're seeing now. There's also a tremendous amount of emotion about that. The other day, Attorney General Pam Bondi said she was going to target folks for making threats and for certain types of speech. Now, we can all agree that you shouldn't threaten violence on social media or anyplace else, but there's also a line between criticism and curbing free speech rights. I fear that over the course of the next few months; we're going to be testing that line and figuring out where it is. This is one of the existential moments of our time and of the current administration.
Don Craven:
The First Amendment on a good day is hard. Can the Nazis march through Skokie, and a variety of cases of that ilk that test us. It is hard. We're now in the position where nobody thinks anymore. You type, push, send, and you're everywhere. You're either red or blue, you're either right or wrong, and you're anonymous. You have no fear of looking stupid or being outed. That's a very dangerous proposition. There was a story I saw, somebody announced he's going to run for state rep down in Southern Illinois. A couple of the responses on the radio station's website were, “He ought to be Charlie Kirk before he does something stupid, Charlie Kirk shouldn't be a verb. I'm sorry, that was a tragedy but it's discourse has been reduced to a set of initials -- push, send, and there you go. Is that protected speech? Absolutely. Except for the violence aspect. I defend newspapers and radio stations and encourage them to engage in meaningful discourse with those who disagree with them every day. But it's just getting harder. For that to happen on a college campus was remarkable.
Sean Crawford:
We talk about social media, but in some cases, there are parts of the media that also encourage some of this.
Don Craven:
Absolutely. Then complain about others who do the same thing. The right-leaning media complains about the left-leaning media and vice versa. They don’t listen to what the hell they're saying.
Sean Crawford:
You mentioned the Local News Initiative that you follow. Tell us a little bit about that and what you are seeing, maybe what changes you've seen in that?
Tim Franklin:
At the Medill Local News Initiative, we have a project called the Medill State of Local News Project. We now have the nation's largest database of local news organizations across the country. It's newspapers, digital-only, ethnic media, and public broadcasting. Why do we do that? We do that because we need to be able to see voids that are being created in local news coverage in areas across the country, so that policymakers and philanthropists and investors and others can see what's happening. Also so that you, so people in communities can see what's happening with local news in their areas. We produce an annual report. We're producing one next month.
Let me share some numbers with you. On average, in the U.S. every week, we lose 2 1/2 newspapers. We're losing around 130 newspapers per year. We've lost more than a third of all newspapers in the United States in the last two decades. We've also lost 70% of newspaper journalists during that same stretch of time. A lot of the newspapers that do remain are what we refer to as ghost newspapers or zombie newspapers. They're newspapers in name only and don't have much original local news reporting in them. The net result is that more than 53 million Americans live in counties that are basically news deserts, local news deserts. There are 201 counties, according to last year's report, that number is going to go up, where there's no local news. There's nothing. There's no newspaper. There's no digital site. no public broadcasting, nothing. Then there are another 1,550 counties with only one news source left for an entire county. This is a slow-moving crisis, it's not like there's an epiphany one day and we wake up and go, “Oh my God, we have a local news crisis.” This is happening community by community, county by county, state by state, all across the country. It's this slow, grinding, process. We're all going to wake up, I fear, someday and feel very uninformed. This has huge implications for communities.
Sean Crawford:
Don, what occurs with this is there's no factual news outlet there. Somebody will pick up the slack there. Somebody will put a website together or a Facebook page or X or something. Whether or not that's accurate, whether or not it's researched, in some cases, they're hardly monitored. Yet misinformation gets out that way, too. You're competing with that as a journalist. In some of these counties, there's nothing to even compete with. There's nobody that can say, “Well, that's not right, because I just read that in the local newspaper”, because that newspaper doesn't exist.
Don Craven:
It is a problem. There are many counties in Illinois where there is one newspaper or one radio station, and there's no there's no fact checking.
Sean Crawford:
You probably hear this from people a lot, “I Don't subscribe to my local paper. I don't listen to the radio station anymore. They are not providing what they used to.” Well, they can't. They don't have the resources. They don't have the people. You're probably hearing a lot of those complaints.
Don Craven:
The State Journal and Register used to have 7 reporters in the Capitol building. None. Tribune, none. Sun-Times, none. Steve Sperry, who's a very good reporter at the State Journal-Register, can't cover the entire city, can't cover the entire county. He's swimming upstream. So yeah, we get it a lot, especially in markets, Springfield and bigger. But again, in the smaller markets with small, locally owned, locally sourced newspapers, they're doing fine. They're not making millions, but they're fulfilling their dream of having a newspaper serve their community. Hopefully, the pendulum will swing back to that. I don't know if we're going to swing so far that there's no way back.
Sean Crawford:
The title of this is First Amendment Under Stress. That's part of the stress, the economic, the business part of it. The other part that we're really seeing ramping up is what you might consider a tax on the media. Don, you alluded to some of that. What are you seeing out there? How concerned are you about what you're seeing?
Don Craven:
When you have the Attorney General of the United States saying she's going to prosecute people who say things that she disagrees with, that's an attack on the First Amendment. If I don't like what you say about me, I'm going to sue you. If you're licensed by the FCC, I'm going to sue you and make you hire somebody as your director of news operations who's never been the director of a news operation in any system anywhere. Again, further weakening the product. The clear directive here is to weaken news products, be they print, broadcast, or otherwise, so that there is no check and balance. The role of the press has always been, and I hate the term, but a watchdog, a check on government. If we're not there, they're going to do what they want to do.
Tim Franklin:
To borrow an analogy, journalists in a community are like traffic cops. If you're driving up 55 and you know that there are no traffic cops, the chances are you're going to fudge the speed limit. On the other hand, if you're driving up 55 and you know that there are going to be traffic cops with radar guns, you're going to stick pretty close to the speed limit because you don't want to get a ticket. Now, if you're a government official or a state legislator and you know there are no traffic cops, no journalists in your community, what do you think they're going to do?
There's now research that's being done, not just by Medill, but by others, about the implications of loss of journalists in communities. There's research that shows that civic participation declines. That is, turnout in local elections goes down in communities where there's no local news or a lack of local news. The number of candidates seeking office in those communities also goes down. It tracks, because people are not as engaged with what's happening in that community. They don't know what's happening in local elections. That's not healthy for our democracy, I would argue.
There's also research that shows that government spending rises in communities where there's no local news coverage and that government borrowing costs go up because the Wall Street bond rating agencies know there's no watchdog in that community so they're going to charge higher interest rates on those bonds. Corruption rises in communities where there's a lack of local news. Public officials who are charged with offenses tends to go up in those communities. These are all tangible results of the harm that can come to communities when there's a loss of local news. And then there's something else.
We are swimming in a tsunami of misinformation and disinformation. It is everywhere. One of the sources of misinformation and disinformation are what are called pink slime news sites. Pink slime is like that gooey stuff in ground beef. There are political action committees, ideologues on both the left and the right, more right than the left, but both sides, have created these pink slime news sites to try to fill the void of loss of local news in many communities. One other statistic, there are now more pink slime local sites than there are daily newspapers in the US. What happens in a news desert? Where do people go to get news and information? We just fielded a poll. We've not published it yet. We're probably going to publish it in a couple months. We hired a research firm that did a scientific poll of people who live in news deserts about where they turn for local news and information. We don't have all the findings back yet, but anecdotally people go to social media. That's great that Facebook groups are formed and that people are engaged in Facebook. The problem is there's typically almost always no journalist in that Facebook group saying, “That rumor that you're spreading, that's really not what happened at the city council meeting the other night. That court ruling that you're complaining about, that's not what the judge said.” There's no fact-checking that's happening in those forums. There's a lot of rumormongering that occurs in those areas. That's unfortunate. We're already seeing some of the effects of that.
Sean Crawford:
35 plus years ago, I interviewed a superintendent of schools who was retiring. He'd been there almost 40 years. I asked him, “What's the difference now than what it used to be?” His line to me always stuck with me. He said, “Used to be when the teacher or the administrators would call a parent. A parent would be, ‘What'd my kid do?’’ The kid's in trouble, basically, school's calling. He says, “Now, it's, ‘What are you doing to my kid?’ They immediately went on the defensive.” I see this more and more with the whole fake news terms, things like that. It used to be if a politician or government official of any sort, somebody important, showed up in the newspaper with some scandal, something bad that they had done, the onus went on them. Nowadays, it almost comes right back to, “Why are you doing that?” We know a lot of different politicians who use that tactic. Media is really on the defense these days. What you think that has done to journalism?
Tim Franklin:
A lot of things. When I was president of the Poynter Institute, we started the International Fact-Checking Network. Pointer is now the home of PolitiFact, which is the fact-checking organization. Yes, not all that long ago, if you're a politician and you were fact-checked and you had lied or misled, you would get a pants on fire rating or 4 Pinocchios. The politicians were horrified because they'd been kind of publicly humiliated.
Now, they accuse the journalists of being the enemy of the people to try to deflect from what they've said. It has put journalists on the defensive. We're also seeing local officials who are feeling emboldened by the current environment, who are going after local news organizations legally or in terms of threats. Don, you may be aware of that as well. The concern there is, these local news organizations, they're not CBS News, they're not ABC News, they're not the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal.
The New York Times just got sued for $15 million this week. ABC and CBS were also recently sued. Maybe it's an attempt to get money, but the purpose is to intimidate journalists. That's troubling. My hope is that we'll have a reversion to the mean where quality matters and where citizens look hard at the sources of news.
One of the challenges we have in the social media world that we live in is a lack of news media literacy. If you think about it, and I'm sure many of you are on Facebook, it shows up in the magic mixer. It's hard to tell what's real and what isn't. It's hard to tell what's a legitimate, credible news source and what's not. I understand how people are confused about that when they go into social media and being able to discern what's real and what isn't. B
We encourage folks to ask who are the sources that the post talked to? What documents did they use in reporting the story? Did they talk to people on all sides? Does the story have context? There's so much garbage out there that my hope, and maybe this is just altruism speaking, is that folks will get wise to this and want and demand credible news and information.
Sean Crawford:
Don, newspapers, many of them have taken a certain view, a certain slant on certain news. Some were more conservative papers, some were not. It's gone off the rails is what people say. Especially online, there's nobody to fact check. There's nobody being a gatekeeper. Weigh in on that.
Don Craven:
It's the great divide I talked about earlier. Those who were slightly liberal or tended that way, in order to maintain their market, their market's gone left, they go left. Their market's gone right, they go right. There's nobody left to pick up the middle. We live now with an administration that is very good at requiring personal fidelity. If you say anything bad about him, you are off the list and will be punished. We'll sue the Wall Street Journal. We'll sue whoever says something bad about the president, we will use the forces of the attorney general. We will use the forces of the FCC. We will use the forces of other administrative agencies to punish you. It's retribution. It's simple.
Sean Crawford:
We're not talking about reporters making a mistake. That happens, and it has, nobody's perfect on that. It's not those types of lawsuits. We're talking about lawsuits just because you don't like the subject matter or what the story says.
Don Craven:
Because you take a point of view that differs from the administration, which is what the First Amendment is there to protect us from.
Tim Franklin:
The other thing that's hard, you've used that phrase, it's really good. The First Amendment is hard.
We live in a world where social media companies, the tech companies, are financially incentivized to keep you in their platform. Kara Swisher, who's been a longtime technology writer and now podcaster, uses the phrase, for engagement by enragement. The research shows that if the madder you are, the more likely it is you're going to stay in one of these social media platforms. The more you stay in those social media platforms, the more advertising revenue that Meta, or pick your platform, makes from ads that show up in your algorithm.
Scott Galloway, who's another commentator, calls it violence entrepreneurs. These are folks who want to get into your newsfeed to **** you off in hopes that you will stay engaged on whatever the topic is. Then folks get in their own cocoons and their own kind of news ecosystems and don't venture out of those. Every day you keep getting fed stuff that ticks you off, that makes you want to keep coming back. But the effects of that are profound. Back to your initial question about Charlie Kirk, there's a lot of that going on.
Sean Crawford:
People being fired for appearing to celebrate his demise online by posting this. Yyou have, under freedom of speech, the right to do that, but I think it points out something about freedom of speech. There can still be ramifications for it. It's not absolute in the sense that you will pay no price for what you say. Any thoughts on that?
Don Craven:
The First Amendment protects us from governmental activity. It doesn't protect employees from the actions of their employers, private employers. People have been fired for… celebrating is probably the wrong word, but appearing to celebrate this assassination. There are others who have been fired for celebrating Charlie Kirk. I happen to be of the opinion that both of those things are wrong. That those of us who are in the business of free press and free speech should honor those same principles. But are those companies within their rights to suspend, terminate? Yes. We all have to live within the rules of the companies for which we work.
Sean Crawford:
Tim, that's part of the issue I'm noticing more in journalism. People who want to be activists that work in journalism because they see it online. They see people who say they're journalists and they're taking positions, maybe just with a website or a podcast. That was something when I was first coming up and through the years, I've always felt as though you need to keep your beliefs, your political beliefs cloaked away. You need to cover things fairly and you let the work stand for itself. But that's not how a lot of people view it these days. I see that, especially among younger people.
Tim Franklin:
When I started at the Chicago Tribune, there was a sense of the institution over the individual. We didn't even run the photographs of columnists because it was the voice of the Chicago Tribune that was the ultimate voice. There were some downsides to that for sure, but we now live also in an era of kind of individual brands for individual journalists. It varies from the policies, vary from news organizations. When I was overseeing news coverage in Washington for Bloomberg, I would tell reporters, “Don't say something on social media that you wouldn't be comfortable putting in a news story. That is something that's verified, that you fact-checked, that you have sources telling you because ultimately what you say as a reporter for Bloomberg reflects back on the organization.” The reporters were good about that, varies depending on the news organization. There are outlets that are increasingly picking red or blue sides where journalists are making their opinions known..
Sean Crawford:
There are some who say they should go ahead and do that. They be upfront about it. If you're a Democrat, then say you're a Democrat. If you're a Republican, say it. But it has ramifications.
Tim Franklin:
Yeah, it does. I don't think there is any such thing as pure objectivity. There's balance and fairness in news coverage, which involves trying to get multiple perspectives. But we all bring our own backgrounds, our own belief sets, our own experiences. to the table when we're covering news. The good journalists are the ones who try hard to set that aside and present the news as straight as they possibly can.
Attendee 1:
With the emergence of generative speech, Don, you keep talking about how the First Amendment is hard, and Tim, you've talked about the challenges for the integrity of news. I wonder if either of you have yet confronted the question as to whether or not protected speech extends to generative speech and that we're starting to see some of those news deserts taken over by that kind of outlet.
Don Craven:
Is it protected speech? Probably. Is it going to be protected by the First Amendment? Yes, it's going to be subject to some of those same limitations. But again, it's an example of nobody has to think about what they're doing. They just do it and push the button and here we go. But yeah, from a pure First Amendment perspective, yes, it's protected.
Attendee 2:
I would like to hear some analysis, viewpoint diversity.
Randy Eccles:
Viewpoint diversity and how important it is to get that out. In higher ed, it's very important to get more than just liberal views or conservative views. How's this facing media right now?
Don Craven:
That's part of the mission of local newspapers, local radio stations, and the media generally. It is our job to allow conservative viewpoint, liberal viewpoint, and everything in between. It's our job to seek that out. It's our job to touch all bases in news stories, and it's our job to allow that same diversity of thought in opinion pieces.
Tim Franklin:
There's a good business reason for diversity. Whether you're a non-profit news outlet, and we have many more of those now than we used to, which is terrific, or a for-profit, and 90% of the local news organizations in the United States are for-profit news organizations. Ultimately, it's good business and makes you a healthier business as a newspaper or a news organization to represent your community in all of its viewpoints and all of its diversity.
Reid Kamai (attendee 3):
Hi, I'm Reid Kamai from the Heart Media Group. You've talked a lot about news deserts, pink slime, and other sources replacing traditional media. I'm sure there's an appetite for most, if not all of us in this room, for trusted... ethical reporting. How much appetite outside of this room do you think there is, and how hopeful are you that people might get together, and start a news source from the ground up?
Tim Franklin:
We published a poll last week. We commissioned the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, and we polled more than 1,100 residents in the 14-county Chicago DMA to get their attitudes and behaviors about news consumption and local news. The good news, there were several points of good news in this poll. One of them was 85% of people said they consume local news at least once a week. The majority said they consume local news on a daily basis. That's great. I don't think the challenge is on the demand side. I still think people want local news. They want it in different ways and in different forms. They want it on their smartphones. The poll also showed that a majority trust local news, which is different than national news. People want local news. By and large, people trust local news. As long as there's that demand, we'll see entrepreneurs that will step up, whether it's creating digital news sites, podcasts, or Substacks. The poll also showed this generational gulf between how young folks consume news and how people my age consume news. Younger news consumers are more video oriented than text oriented. They're more likely to go to YouTube or to TikTok to look for news that informs them through video means. Folks 60 and up still primarily get local news through local TV stations or through newspapers. The one thing that we saw in our state and local news project last year was for the first time, there was a net increase of digital-only local news sites in the U.S. It was a net increase of 105. We are seeing entrepreneurs, whether they're for-profit or not-for-profit, step up and create new ways to cover local news. That's when I talk about my optimism or hope for the future, that's one of them.
Don Craven:
You mentioned the defamation suits that seem to be more prevalent now against news organizations. And Mr. Trump was bragging about his $16 million settlement. Those cases are supposed to be hard to win, and yet we've got examples of the news organizations, it seems to me, rolling over, settling the cases and feeding the narrative that it's all just fake news. I agree with you. There's some serious rolling over going on. In kindergarten, you learned to punch the bully in the nose, not to turn and run away. There's some running away going on.
Tim Franklin:
There also were some individual circumstances. Paramount was trying to merge with Skydance. Paramount, the owner of CBS, and that merger was pending. I'm not...
Don Craven:
So you run away.
Tim Franklin:
I don't want to get sued, but one might draw a correlation between the settlement and that merger eventually being approved.
Don Craven:
I have defended many newspapers over the years, and it's been my experience that the last place that I ever want to be is a plaintiff in a libel lawsuit, because the defense lawyer has the opportunity to expose your entire life and put you under oath and make you answer questions. You have to answer the questions under oath. Especially in these days, it's a wonderful system to have, and we ought to use it.
Attendee 4:
I think we'd all agree that what's happening now is just not normal. There are people who refuse to watch the news because they just can't stand it. There are people who watch it all the time because we like to watch train wrecks. Some of us are public policy geeks. A lot of people aren't. A lot of us in this room believe in the institution of government and other people have, frankly, no clue. We're inundated with 24-7 news. My question is, what the hell do we do? What are the solutions? What's our action step?
Tim Franklin:
First of all, you're absolutely right. The poll that we just did shows this problem of news fatigue, which is real, and a lot of people have tuned out. You can vote with your pocketbooks and your time, and turn away from news sources that you think aren't getting it right and not watch them, not buy products that they're hawking on those news sites. If it's done in an organized way, it can really get their attention.
We live in an incredibly fractured news environment. We have multitudes of different news choices. There is no mass media anymore. It's a whole litany of smaller news organizations. Even in prime time, CNN is getting like 90,000 viewers, which is not a ton. Local TV news ratings are also going down. Readership of local sites is going down. What is being built up in its place are smaller, niche, topical sites, or podcasts, or Substacks, or other news organizations. Now, those folks are more economically sensitive to people who either subscribe or don't subscribe or become members or don't become members.
What we are all living through is a historic, really historic transformation of how news is consumed, how it's produced, how it's distributed, and how it's paid for. We are in the early innings of this historic transformation.
AI is dramatically changing the news environment. A couple of years ago, if you wanted local news and information, you would do a Google search, and then up would come a series of blue links. Then you would click on one of those links, and it would take you to the source where you could get the information that you're looking for. Now, that step in the process is being eliminated. You go to a AI platform, could be OpenAI, ChatGPT, could be Perplexity, Claude, pick your platform. Folks are searching for information on what we call answer machines. Instead of doing like an open search on Google, you go to an AI platform and you put in your question, you get an answer fed back to you. You don't know where that answer came from in many cases. You don't know the source of that information, but you know that you've got something that looks like it might be real.
Now, Google is also heavily into AI. It has Gemini as its AI platform. They're also now involved in this race. But this is fundamentally changing how we get information and is only going to become more so in the next few years. This also has profound implications for the business model of news. Because traffic to news sites, local, regional, national, all of them, are going down because they're not getting traffic from search from Google or from Facebook or other platforms like they used to. One of a couple things is going to happen. Either news organizations are going to reach licensing agreements with the AI platforms to get compensated for the content that these AI bots are scraping and training on to get you that information, or we're going to have the mother of all copyright cases.
The New York Times has now sued OpenAI. Some others, I believe Gannett has also sued the AI platforms, and they're saying, “Hey, you're stealing our content. You're scraping our sites. You're taking information that we spent a lot of money to produce with professional reporters and editors and producers reporting it, you're just taking it and spitting it out without paying us for our investment in that journalism.”
Attendee 6:
We've met the enemy and he's us. Back when I was in high school, we learned all the different forms of speech. Mr. Craven understands argument very well. We used to have debate. In high school, we would take a module on debate, we'd have civil discourse as we debated each side. Today, when you see any type of debate on any type of broadcast, what they're doing is talking over each other, and there's really no debate. That is what is happening to the world.
Sean Crawford:
I have a lot of friends I grew up with. I probably never knew if they were Republican, Democrat, what they really thought about a lot of policy issues, because we never talked about it. We just hung out. That wasn't our thing. Nowadays, you're defined by what political persuasion you are, if you like this candidate, if you like this policy. It's amazing how that transformation, leads to this. Everybody has to define themselves instead of having a conversation back and forth. We have to stake out our positions on issues.
Don Craven:
You can't go to Johnny's house. His dad's A Democrat.
Tim Franklin:
I don't know if any of you listen or watch Michael Smirconish, who is a moderate and who casts himself that way, but he talks about that we have a crisis in mingling that we don't mingle anymore like we used to. There was a book that came out a couple years ago called Bowling Alone. It was about this phenomenon. My dad, when I grew up, was in a bowling league. It was every Saturday night. I knew exactly where he was going to be. He was going to be with his buddies bowling at the local bowling alley and trying to kick their butts in a bowling competition. The point being that they were socializing. Whether it's your church, whether it's the Rotary, whether it's bowling, whether it's pickleball, we don't mingle as much as a society as we used to. There are implications to that as well.
Don Craven:
We have to mingle. We have to get along. We have to talk to each other. And we're not doing that.
Randy Eccles:
They have talked a lot in public media about the need for community, finding communities again. That's part of Bowling Alone.
Don Craven:
For those of you who know me and my heritage, I was raised in a bit of a Democratic family. But right now, if I were voting for president, I'd vote for Spencer Cox. The speech he made the other day was remarkable.
Tim Franklin:
It was very good. He made the point, put your phone down, get away from your screens, go out and touch some grass, take a walk, disconnect a little bit.
Sean Crawford:
The fact that he's talking about people just coming together is what's remarkable to me. Why should that be so amazing?
Don Craven:
It's either idealistic or naive or both, but we've got to get back to the basics.
Attendee 7:
Something I've noticed as a relatively young person trying to take in the news is that it doesn't take long anymore for me to find out what happened, to access information. I have noticed that a lot of my peers seem impatient and anxious to know what is happening. The demand for a 24-hour news cycle seems to be a trend that's not going away. How do journalists report with integrity while also giving people something to chew on? There's so much going on, and younger generations especially are reacting in fear and would like to find comfort. It's understandable that they tried to, in earnest, find information to find comfort. I don't know if there's an easy solution to that, because I don't want journalists dropping dead from the stress of trying to meet that demand, but I also don't want to continue consuming crap.
Sean Crawford:
The Charlie Kirk story is a good one to me because if you looked online after that, the internet had the wrong person, two different people, arrested, convicted, the death penalty for them. It was shared by everybody from very suspicious sites. It's amazing misinformation.
Don Craven:
And from the director of the FBI.
Sean Crawford:
That doesn't help. But the misinformation just takes off like wildfire. I'll let you guys answer that question.
Tim Franklin:
Because there's this proliferation of sites, you can stake a reputation by being first and with scoops. There's often a pressure to get those scoops and to be first. I worked for a wire service for three years, and you wanted to be first, but you also sure as hell didn't want to be wrong, because that was that reflected back on the organization. There needs to be more concern about being wrong among journalists. It's know the source, try to understand where it's coming from. Take a look at a news advisory. Who are they quoting? Are they quoting documents? Did it come from a news conference? Did it come from a credible source? I do think media literacy is really part of the solution to this whole thing. Illinois is the first state in the nation to pass mandatory media literacy training in high schools. But my understanding is it's never been funded and has not been implemented yet. My hope is that will happen.
Don Craven:
Again, we're trying to work on that. The answer to your question is we need more good journalists. As I said, Steve Speary can't cover Sangamon County by himself. We need more young, strong, able to stay awake journalists to cover those meetings and to cover those stories. That's why we're starting in the high schools trying to get those kids into the newsrooms at a young age so that there are more bodies to spread around.
Sean Crawford:
I want to give you guys just a minute or two if you want to, anything you want to leave people with.
Tim Franklin:
I know that I can sound like a Dr. Doom. I don't want to. I certainly don't want to sound that way. I think that the upside of this environment is there have never been more choices for news consumption than there are now. That can be a good thing. I look at an organization like Block Club Chicago, which is covering hyperlocal news in neighborhoods in Chicago that were largely going uncovered and providing valuable news and information for those folks. That's great. We are seeing entrepreneurs and innovators get in the space.
We are seeing states beginning to adopt public policy to support local news, including Illinois, with Don’s help in that process, now providing tax credits to local news organizations for retaining and hiring journalists. That can be part of the solution. Philanthropy is stepping up in a big way. There's now half a billion dollars being poured into local news through philanthropy, through a campaign called Press Forward. The MacArthur Foundation in Chicago is one of the foundations that's stepping up, so is the Knight Foundation and many others, Joyce and so forth, around Illinois. There is greater awareness of what's happening. There is a lot of work being done now to try to solve this problem.
Don Craven:
We are putting into place some structural things to try to support local journalism. I've spent 40 years supporting local newspapers across the state of Illinois. I am not a Dr. Doom, but Alden Capital is not doing the newspaper world any favors. Very frankly, Gannett is minimizing their newspapers across Illinois to the point that they're losing communities. We're working hard to replace those newspapers. The folks I mentioned earlier who left their newspaper, they're all former Gannett employees who opened newspapers in their own hometowns. You have to believe. You keep working and you have to pay attention to what you're reading. You need to know where it comes from. Most importantly, elections matter at the state level, at the local level. You got to have people on those school boards who truly have the best interests of those school districts at heart. They're not there for some other nefarious reason to get their buddy the contract to build the new high school. That would never happen in Illinois. No. But elections matter. Democracy like the First Amendment, is hard too. But that's another hour and a half.
Tim Franklin:
What's encouraging to me is you took time out of your week to come here tonight and to listen to Don, Sean, and I prattle on for a long time about these issues. It shows that you care and it shows that you're interested. I applaud you all for putting on this program tonight. I'm grateful to all of you for coming out and caring enough to listen and ask excellent questions.
Sean Crawford:
That's Tim Franklin. He's with the Medill School of Journalism and Don Craven, Illinois Press Association*.
Randy Eccles:
Thanks for listening to this special Community Voices event you may have missed, the First Amendment Under Stress, presented by NPR Illinois and the UIS Center for State Policy and Leadership. Additional thanks to Tim Franklin and Don Craven. Stay tuned to NPR Illinois and read nprillinois.org for the latest updates on First Amendment issues and updates on Don Craven's resignation as CEO of the Illinois Press Association.
*Don Craven resigned from as executive director of the Illinois Press Association October 8, 2025, over disagreements with the IPA board on supporting First Amendment legislation related to ICE activity involving journalists.
