The Northern Kentucky Tribune and PEN America team up to kick off series of community conversations

By Mark Hansel
NKyTribune managing editor

The Northern Kentucky Tribune and PEN America kicked off a series of community conversations March 27, with a discussion about an issue that has been getting a lot of attention in recent months.

Northern Kentucky Chamber of Commerce President Brent Cooper moderated the community conversation (photos by Mark Hansel).

“Real News, Real Issues, Fake News, Fraudulent News” brought together a panel of regional leaders to talk about how news is being distorted, shaped and fabricated, to fit specific agendas, and how to help distinguish fact from fiction.

A group of more than 60 community stakeholders that included elected officials, law enforcement professionals, business leaders and citizens came together at the Kenton County Public Library Erlanger Branch to engage in the discussion.

The morning began with a panel discussion moderated by Northern Kentucky Chamber of Commerce President Brent Cooper that included Thomas More College President David A. Armstrong, Bob Heil, president and CEO of KLH Engineers and Boone County Judge/Executive Gary Moore.

Cooper began the conversation by talking about the population of Northern Kentucky, and the struggles to get mainstream media coverage, just south of the Ohio River. With 400,000 residents in Boone, Campbell and Kenton counties alone, the region would boast the second largest population in the state, behind only Louisville, if it were viewed as one city.

“We’re talking about how the news is challenging in Northern Kentucky and ways we think we can improve it,” Cooper said. “We do not believe we are getting what we should be getting and what we deserve to be getting, being the second largest ‘city’ in the state.”

Until recently, the media presence in Northern Kentucky was fairly robust. The region’s daily newspaper had a staff of reporters, editors and photographers, focused exclusively on Northern Kentucky and it was not uncommon to see television news vans south of the river. As changes to the business model have prompted staff reductions, media outlets have shifted the focus to more exclusive coverage of Cincinnati.

Panelists for the community conversation included Thomas More College President David A. Armstrong, Bob Heil, president and CEO of KLH Engineers and Boone County Judge/Executive Gary Moore.

Armstrong said because Thomas More is a smaller college and it is in another state, local media tends to focus its education coverage on the University of Cincinnati, Xavier University, and even Miami University in Oxford, Ohio.

“Our women’s basketball team has won two national championships…and those young ladies that were seniors on the first national championship team went to the Final Four again this year,” Armstrong said. “This year we weren’t covered at all because UC and Xavier (men’s basketball teams) were playing so well. Which is fair, but that’s a good story that was missed out, so that’s a concern.”

Armstrong also expressed frustration that the mainstream media, when it comes to education, focuses more on the negatives.

“The biggest issue for me, is the lack of balance,” Armstrong said. “It seems to me as I watch more and more of it that there is a lot of political motivation.”

Heil attended a State Chamber of Commerce event at which former Washington Post reporter Carl Bernstein was a featured speaker. Bernstein co-wrote “All the Presidents Men,” which chronicled the investigate reporting by he and fellow journalist Bob Woodward, that led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon.

“His concern is that right now there are so few true news outlets reporting news, the reporting of actual facts and events,” Heil said. “As Americans now, with the slants that are put on and the opinions that are placed on us from the different ‘news outlets,’ we all migrate to those that are aligned with our values. If all we ever do is tune into those outlets that think the way we think, how do we ever broaden our horizons as people?”

Moore said he has learned to look at news reports with a more critical eye since becoming an elected official.

“Before I was elected and started in public service, I believed what I read,” Moore said. “After a short time, I started reading some of the accounts of what was going on, I realized that there are a lot of mistakes, accuracy is not always what it should be. It’s TV media, it’s print media and it’s absolutely social media – when I first started social media wasn’t even in player in this game, but now it’s an entirely different story.”

Mike Phillips, a board member of the Ohio Justice & Policy Center, talks about the series of events that have allowed fake news to become so prevalent

Moore pointed to a website that lists the population of cities in Kentucky as an example of how media outlets that seem to be credible, can provide information that is inaccurate. The site identifies Burlington as the 27^th-largest city in Kentucky.

“The problem with that – Burlington is not a city,” Moore said. “In Boone County, we’ve got three cities, Florence, Union and Walton – the rest of Boone County is unincorporated. So if you live in Hebron or Burlington, Richwood, Verona, Petersburg, Belleview, you’re in a community, but you’re not in a city.”

The morning-long discussion also included a presentation from Mike Phillips, whose long and storied career included stint with the Cincinnati Post as assistant metro editor and the Kentucky Post as managing editor. He also worked as editorial development director for E.W. Scripps and currently serves as a member of the board of directors of the Ohio Justice & Policy Center.

He talked about a number of subjects, including the speed with which fake news now spreads throughout the general population, primarily because of the emergence of social media platforms. He referenced a Science Magazine study that began about six months after Twitter came online and studied 120,000 cases of the spread of rumors, though mid-2017.

“They learned that false news reaches more people than the truth, and not just by a little bit,” Phillips said. “There are hundreds of thousands more people reached by false news than are reached with accurate news by Twitter. They also documented that the speed of lies and false news travels about six times faster than fact on Twitter.”

Put simply, Phillips said, truth doesn’t stand a chance on Twitter.

Complicating matters even more is what Phillips described as the “death spiral” of traditional media.

“It started when the web was made available to civilians and web services started, like AOL, getting people on email and getting people a little news, young people jumped right into that,” Phillips said. Advertisers, who are no slouches, noticed where the young people were going and they went right there with them. So advertising began booming to digital media.”

Policymakers at traditional media outlets believed that as young people got older, they would return to the more established outlets, so they cut costs to offset what they believed would be a temporary shift.

Phillips said that proved to be a monumental miscalculation, because just the opposite happened. Middle-aged people also began to embrace the new media outlets and advertisers began to focus on them as well.

“One day, I realized it was all over, when my then-87-year-old mother called me and said, ‘I want you to get me online,’” Phillips said. “She said the Ohio-Valley Quilters Guild is putting all of their information out online now and all my friends are starting to learn about their grandchildren and stuff.”

Thinking his mother would not adapt to electronic media, Phillips purchased a simple computer and, to his surprise, she became a power-user in just a few months and used it until she died at 93

“That was it. All traditional media, were dead men walking, they just didn’t necessarily know it,” Phillips said.

Newsrooms across the country began cutting staff, a trend that continues. At the same time, advertisers realized that they could set up dedicated sites focused on their target audiences that were cheaper, and more effective than print, or television media.

Community stakeholders prepare for the community conversation at the Kenton County Public Library Erlanger branch.

Traditional news outlets continued to cut staff, in an effort to stem the bleeding, which created the environment that has allowed fake news to emerge and flourish.

The combination of poor performance of traditional media outlets due to dwindling resources and the emergence of sites that are news organizations in name only has just fueled the spiral.

As Moore pointed out, many people still equate the word news with accuracy, regardless of an organization’s credentials. Outlets that deal in fake news capitalize on that by, as Heil said, delivering a message that their target audience wants to believe.

The result is a flood of information being disseminated that has little, or maybe even no basis in fact.

The community conversation wrapped up with lunch, and group discussions about the topic of the day, as well as conversation about gun violence in schools, another serious issue that is the subject of much debate.

PEN America, founded in 1922, works to ensure that people everywhere have the freedom to create literature, to convey information and ideas and to express their views.

One of the goals of PEN America is to provide support for the Northern Kentucky Tribune and other credible news organizations that bring critical issues, such as fake news, to light through this type of community forum.

For more information about PEN America, click here.

The support from PEN America will allow the Tribune to continue its series of community conversations throughout the year.

Upcoming discussions will focus on topics on interest in the region, such as citizen journalism and the opioid epidemic, at sites throughout Northern Kentucky.

To receive the NKy Tribune’s newsletter that provides a daily capsule, with links, to its stories, as well as notices about upcoming events, such as community conversations, click here.

Contact Mark Hansel at mark.hansel@nkytrib.com