Amid declining trust and digital disruption, this Davos 2026 session looks at how journalism continues to shape public understanding and debate.
In Davos, panelists argued the “Fourth Estate” is being squeezed by shifting power structures, collapsing trust, and AI-driven disruption. Kalli Purie reframed the landscape: the traditional “first estate” (clergy) has been replaced by “the algorithms, mixed up with social media,” while tech’s influence fuses the first and second estates, leaving journalism to “keep power in check” amid audience demand for “confirmation bias.” Bret Stephens warned the most alarming metric is trust: only “18%” express great trust in newspapers and “11%” in television news. He urged “physician, heal thyself,” arguing media often blames outsiders instead of acknowledging its role in alienating audiences it “dismiss[es] as uninformed or backward or bigoted.” Marina Romanello highlighted parallel mistrust in science and the danger of false balance: elevating rigorous evidence to the same status as ideologically driven skepticism can make action “practically impossible,” especially as climate risks intensify. On AI, Purie described an “AI sandwich” (human-AI-human) to enhance visuals, drafts, and explainers; Stephens remained wary, saying readers want “a purely human experience” and that accountability “has to be at the human level.” The discussion closed with an unresolved challenge: rebuilding credibility while navigating AI bias, data gaps, and information overload.
Good morning. Let me welcome you all to our panel on the state of the Fourth Estate. I'm Mark Penn, I'm CEO of Stagwell, Inc., a global marketing company. Also have a little hobby of running the Harvard Harris Poll. So I keep in touch with public opinion. And I'm really pleased to have a panel this morning with Bret Stephens, who's an opinion columnist at the at The New York Times, writing principally on foreign policy, and has just filed a dispatch this morning on the state of Davos. Kelly from the India Today group, an incredibly well-known personality in India, leading a really large media company within within India. I always say it's the largest democracy with the largest number of voters. And Mariana Romanello, executive director of The Lancet Countdown, which is really an independent information fact gathering group on health and climate change issues. So welcome. I think we're going to have what will be a spirited discussion of the the state of the Fourth Estate today, how it's being changed with AI and how it's being changed with social media. And if we get through those two topics, we will then, hopefully take some some good audience questions and have some participation. So I think the first and most basic question is just your assessment of today's world. I mean, we see events that are very difficult to cover, such as what happened in Iran, in which governments are able to even cut off the internet and suppress information and make it almost impossible to get the story out. But but luckily, I guess there's Starlink today. So what is your overall impression of the state of the Fourth Estate in the world that we that we live in? Just for simplicity, we'll kind of go around, start with, start with Carly.
So, I actually wanted to talk about a little bit, of the whole structure. I mean, we're talking about the state of the fourth Estate, but I think we need to go back to what is the first, second, and third. When the theory came up, the first estate was meant to be the clergy, the guys who set the narrative, who create the framework, who give the moral framework to the society. And I think right now it's not the clergy. I think that, it's actually the algorithms, mixed up with social media, and that is going to get more pronounced as AI comes in. So that creates a whole different framework of how we're working. The second Estate, which is basically nobility and business people, that remains. But there you also have tech companies which are creating AI. So First and Second Estate are sort of mixing. And then you've got the Third Estate, which kind of remains the same, which are citizens and common people. But I think that they have become a little bit more transactional, a little bit more impatient and a little bit more unwilling to deal with inconvenience, which may be required at times to stand up to authority. And then comes us the Fourth Estate, which is the informal, estate which is supposed to, keep power in check. Now, that problem is sort of getting a little bit more acute with AI and with the mixing of the algorithms and the, business. So second and second and First Estate are sort of coming together is kind of leaving, the Fourth Estate in a position where we have to call out all of these, but in a much more acrimonious environment. And you have the Third Estate, which is sort of not really wanting you to call call out problems. They want more confirmation bias, which puts the media a little bit more on the back foot, because if you're always serving your audience with a confirmation bias, how do you then go around, doing the watchdog job that you need to do? And if you don't serve an audience, then you don't have financial independence. You're back to being sort of dependent on government. So it's a very fine balance. And I think the Fourth Estate is doing a pretty good job of walking that balance between all of these estates.
And just to just to stick with you for a second, would you say that as both a personality on air yourself and running a media company, that that you have freedom to express a wide range of opinions without government restriction in India? Are you satisfied with the state of that?
You know, in everyone always wants more. And I would obviously like, even more freedom to do more things. But I think that we have to work within a cultural context. In the end, media or observers, and we are front row to history being made. We can't just go around giving our own opinions on things. There is space for that, obviously, and we have that. But that's, mix in the bigger plate. So if you are serving a plate of food, every, every bit has a section and opinion does. But a lot of the time we are observing society and sometimes maybe that doesn't align with the way you have, been educated or what was the norm earlier, especially in times of change. And it's very important for newsrooms to be open to that change. We've been very lucky in the India Today group because we have a bilingual newsroom, so we have an entire, Hindi, which is the local main local language, and English. We have newsrooms of both sides. So as there has been a little bit of a change in balance in India, where Hindi as a language and people who were restricted or their talents were restricted because of language came up. And the English educated English speaking journalists and media felt a little bit more disempowered. We had a good balance because we had, the Hindi, journalistic community sort of take more of a central role. And I've seen that change in my own newsroom. Now, obviously, Oxford educated liberal newsrooms found that change quite hard. But I saw a whole, community of journalists and media open up that were sort of held back because of the language. So that change is important to be able to kind of view it in a way where you are also being, disempowered, and being moved from your position of authority, and accept it. So that change has happened in India, and I think it's been quite phenomenal.
Okay, Brett, some of us perspective.
I mean, I would make two points. The first and maybe this is almost too obvious to mention. The fourth estate is in transition, driven by, first and foremost, technological changes. But also by, changing set of ideas both within and without media as to what the media should do, how it ought to perform its tasks, whom it should serve. But the second point, and I should add, I'm speaking for myself, not my distinguished employer, is that I think that, generally speaking, the media is in decline. And it's in decline in the most important metric, which is trust. The Gallup organization for I think well over 40, if not 50 years, has taken a poll in trust in institutions, the trust in newspapers, those who express, I think great trust in newspapers is, is at 18%, something like that. Trust in television, news media, if this is some solace to us newspaper people, is 11%. The distrust is that factor is very high. And, I think that we sometimes we in the media sometimes try to console ourselves by saying, well, trust in all institutions is is going down. Trust in Congress, trust in, in organized religion. Well, fine. But trust in the media not only should be high because we are in, in a trust business, but it has to be high because I don't think you can have a well-functioning democracy where there is pervasive mistrust about, the organizations that seek to purvey core facts about the way in which we organize our societies and, and, and live our lives. And regaining that trust, I think, is going to be the most important task in the technological transition to whatever comes next.
And a former colleague of yours, Barry Weiss, has recently taken over CBS news. Do you view that as a move, as part of the restoration of trust? Do you see that as the opposite, or do you don't want to get anywhere near that? I'll give you I'll give you an out on Barry's.
Barry's a friend, and I wish her I wish her well in that task. I think she did a phenomenal job with, with the Free Press, which, absolutely met a need in the market for people, for many people who had lost trust in, in what we call the, the mainstream press, CBS is just a very different, a very different beast and a very different task. I think there is no question that business as usual for, established, news institutions like CBS is not possible. And whoever the change agent is, change absolutely has to has to come. The days of, Edward R Murrow or Walter Cronkite are long past us. One point I should make is that there is a habit and it's not universal, but there is, I think, a bias in within media to say that if there's distrust in media, it is the fault of someone else. It is the fault of, demagogic politics that call, you know, the media, the enemy of the people. It's the fault of technological changes that have diversified sources of news. We need to adopt a physician. Heal thyself. Mantra. We are largely, or at least partly responsible for the collapse of trust in our own institutions. And at any rate, the only thing we can do is do a much better job of regaining trust, particularly among audiences who we too often dismiss as uninformed or backward or bigoted. They lost trust in us for a reason. We have to figure out what that reason is, and we have to do whatever we can, within reason, to regain trust.
So, Marina, you're you're in the business of trying to shore up trust, right? By getting the media to report. I think what your organization sees as the facts. What is your general view of the state of play and the mission that you're on?
Yeah, for sure. And I should say, I think the only one in this panel that doesn't come from within the media sector. Right. So, I lead a research collaboration. It's an academic scientific collaboration that brings together about 300 researchers from around the world. And our focus is on the intersections between climate change and health, two issues that are highly polarizing, where we see a lot of mis and disinformation going around as well. And we're we're seeing, perhaps polarization to an extent that we have never seen before. Particularly when we talk about health and mistrust, even on health professionals, has grown enormously over the past years. Mistrust in science has grown enormously as well. And I was listening to you talk about that kind of how we saw mistrust. And I think there's common commonalities between what you're talking about in, in the role of the media as reporting evidence and the role of researchers as producing that evidence. And how we communicate that evidence as well. So we're in the business of kind of generating robust, trusted, very rigorous data. We're always our own devil's advocates. And, we are exposed to enormous amounts of scrutiny. And what we strive to do is to ensure that the reporting on these two key issues is neutral, fact based and leaning on evidence and science, not leaning on ideology or on kind of any other underlying bias, which is enormously challenging because we all have those, social media has been really destructive in this conversation. And what we've seen, we've been doing this for ten years. So we've seen that kind of shift as social media also changed the narrative and that polarization we've seen that reflected in the mainstream media as well. And what we see from our end is, kind of reporting that we know is factually incorrect and kind of exposure of mis and disinformation at a very mainstream level that we hadn't seen before. In the climate change world. We had seen some of that in the 90s, but the media had agreed that we needed a more factual based reporting. We agreed that climate skepticism or mistrust in the science should not be reported as facts. And we're starting to see that being reversed. And I think it's in response to the demand that is being fueled by social media and as a reflection of the narrative that happens in social media and mainstream media, trying to kind of cater for those different narratives that are evolving based on mis and disinformation, which AI is making worse because you're seeing this self-reinforcing loop of clickbait with, the narratives being, kind of increasingly diverted because of that self-reinforcing loop of social media. We're at a very critical moment. Again, from the climate change point, we're at a catastrophic situation where we haven't done nearly enough. We're probably going to exceed 1.5 degrees of heating. That was the goal of the Paris Agreement. Heating is committed already, so we haven't seen the worst of the emissions that are already in the air. So the planet will keep on changing. Even if we stop emissions today, we would still see heating and we continue emitting at record levels. So we're in a really dangerous situation, and the risk of not informing the science rigorously is that that polarization is putting us in a situation in which action is practically impossible.
Now, you were saying before that you had a recent debate with someone you I don't know what his or her actual position was, but you, you said, was a climate denier. So do you consider that having that debate was a good thing and a step forward, that an open debate is held or a bad thing that, well, they're giving stages that the stage from climate deniers and that that's a bad thing. How did you view that as good or bad?
Yeah. Well it depends, right. I think understanding points of view and understanding where people come from is always useful. And I think we do need to be very transparent about differences of opinion and how we source our information, and that is crucial. What I think is really dangerous is when we come to a situation in which we're putting at the same level of credibility and rigor, scientific evidence that comes from very rigorous scientific studies, from the best available academic studies, and 99% of researchers will agree that climate change is a catastrophically dangerous threat to the same level as a climate skeptic, which is fueled by political, interests, which is fueled, and whose only kind of grounding only authority comes from fueling disinformation without any knowledge of the subject matter. And I think this is where we have to make a distinction, because discussing opinions is all very nice and good, but discussing facts that needs to be very science grounded. We need to be very careful about what we put forward as being a scientific fact or as being evidence, versus what's kind of opinion and kind of.
Can I ask you a question? Let's imagine you have someone who believes climate change is real happening, profoundly problematic in many places, but does not think it is the principal, catastrophic scenario that we deal with, that the world deals with many problems simultaneously, and that we are going to find trade offs in whatever it is that public policy arrives at to make sure that, for instance, we address climate change, but not at a prohibitive price in terms of energy prices or energy transition. I mean, if you say that climate change is real, but it is not catastrophic in the terms that you describe, does that make you a denier?
I don't think it does. No. I think what would make you a denier is citing evidence that is not based on studies that is not been validated, citing facts that are invented or made up. And that's what I talk when I say my.
The reason I asked that question is that I think one of the ways in which, mainstream media, reputable media has lost trust, which has done grave damage to us, is that we have tended too often to confuse capital T truth, which is almost a religious form of truth, with the lowercase truth, which is truth that is constructed like a cathedral, brick by brick, from facts, with a sense of humility that those facts can change as as new information arrives. One of the things that I find very disturbing in much of the reporting that I see is, a tendency to confuse the word expert or expertise with capital T truth, because the public has time and again encountered an experienced experts who have proclaimed a certain thing as an absolute scientific fact or an inviolable truth, and it has turned out not to be so. And the most obvious example of this is comes from the debates over, say, the origins of the Covid virus, or the ways in which to best contend with the pandemic, where many people around the world felt that they had not only been sold a bill of goods by people in positions of authority, but that it had profoundly damaged their lives and especially the lives of their children. When you think of the effects of school closures in the United States, and I just think that we we in the media have to be very careful about making sure that we're going after the lowercase t truth, and that our reliance on experts and expertise is, is not so absolute that we, we think of them as the sole sources of authority. One of the things that I find really troubling is when I read news accounts with lines that are clearly assertions of a reporter's opinion, followed by comma, experts say, period. Because one can always select one's particular experts to make the point that you're driving at.
Well, I mean, you know that many of these stories are written with holes that are then filled in with the with the expert opinion. Although I think the food pyramid is an even better example.
I was going to.
Mention of how consumers were told to have carbohydrates, and all the experts agreed on that. And then everybody got fatter and now they've. I'm not exactly sure exactly what the food pyramid upside down means, but but I gather now you're supposed to.
Probably another mistake.
Depends which media you're reading.
I don't know what the food pyramid is in India, so, I, I enjoyed that because. Because you're right. The whole debate is, and I think I think President Trump makes this, you know, he basically runs against the experts, right? He is basically always saying the experts that the expert class is wrong. And I think Brett's saying the truth is they have a spotty record when it comes to look, you cannot escape coming to Davos this year, which, by the way, I will say is much warmer this year than it was last year. I don't know if that's a trend. But I will say for sure we have to talk AI that is the trend here. A, how much do you use it in your daily life as part of as part of what you're doing as a journalist is that you're kind of go to source now, right? And so what's fed to you by AI is, in fact, having influence today. And, you know, what do you think is going to happen? You know, a little bit about AI.
So can I just jump into one thing that he said about trust and then.
Yeah.
Go ahead. AI I really liked what you said about trust. And you are absolutely right. That is one of the biggest problems. And media companies that are leaders in their countries have to really work on rebuilding that trust rather than, like you said, put the blame on someone else. Right. So one of the things that we are working on, and I think that it's it's nascent and it has had a good impact is, is go back to creating, constructive, candid conversations. We've actually set up a whole unit just to do that. Triple C's, where you get people from different communities who don't agree with each other to talk to each other and take out the experts, the journalists, the politicians out of that conversation and then let them sort things out themselves and, you know, come to at least see each other's point of view, not maybe resolve something, but see each other's point of view as a way to build a little bit more trust. And the second thing that I think we worked on, which maybe media lost in one of the things you said, that people felt that we were not representing them. Right? And we thought, oh, they are not educated. They don't understand is to actually go back and do stories that will impact people's lives and actually change things. In India, jobs is a big issue and so are exam results and, examinations being done properly. So we've gone back to a lot of stories that just kind of work on that, highlight it, and then actually makes a difference in people's lives because either the exam results get published or the jobs get opened up. And that I think, is building trust back between people and us. Just because you said that and I thought it was a really good point.
That won't get you out of the AI answer.
No, no, no, AI, I'm very gung ho on AI, right? We've been using AI in our media business for the last two and a half years. We do not use it for creating stories. We call it the AI sandwich, whereas there is a human, interference or or it starts with a human may use a bit of AI in the work process, and it then ends with a human. So we have a news magazine. We've created almost 200 covers using AI. Right. To tell that story.
Better in the middle. What's that? What's its purpose?
So so let's say we start off with an idea like, okay, this is what we want to create for our cover. Then the design team may use bits of AI to get that cover or that photograph just the way they want it. And then again, the human editor will look at it and say, I want it a little bit like this, or a little bit like that, and then use the AI to fix that, and then put that together, or use AI to tell stories that we do not have visuals for, for, for example, the war that happened between India and Pakistan, it was all in the air, right? No one saw anything. So we were able, with AI and the information we had, create an eight minute film to actually show our, readers, viewers what that war would have been like in air. We're also using AI, down on the ground when reporters are pushed to do many stories, they put in the first draft of something. Then an AI may make a story for them. Then they will look at it again. So again, the AI sandwich, they'll look at it. Yeah, yeah, yeah that's good good good. And send it to us. So we're using AI in many different ways, to improve our business. I don't think that AI is going to replace storytelling, but it's an excellent assistant and an intelligent assistant that you can sort of talk to.
And is it adding to your bottom line.
Right now, I find that AI is not helping us be more efficient. It's adding more people at the moment because you still, you can do so much more with AI than you need that extra supervision. So you need more supervisors. But I think over time, as it gets a little bit more stable, we're more comfortable with it. It will lead to more efficiencies.
All right. Over to Brett on this one.
You know, I, AI is very far from, my concerns as a journalist, in part because, I like to think I belong to that part, that sliver of journalism where, AI is antithetical to what I do. I write a column. You want to know what Bret Stephens thinks or Tom Friedman thinks? You don't want to know what, AI assisted Tom Friedman or Bret Stephens thinks. And I honestly have to say, I view AI, at least in our business, with a great deal more suspicion. And I would be if I were a publisher of a publication, I would be a very reluctant and cautious adopter because we are, after all, because we are rather because we are in the trust business, the ability of AI to blur the boundary between reality and the human experience, with, a, a version of reality which is a digitized and artificial experience is, is that that boundary is is so amorphous, already in so many walks of life. And I think that part of what the public is looking for is an anchor in something that is, is true. That is a purely human experience. I mean, I want, readers to know that when I think of my sentences, they're coming out of my head and they aren't assisted by an AI, which is giving me a clever lead or a clever, line. Professor of mine once made the point. He said, you know, we don't go to the Olympics to see cheetahs racing. Of course, cheetahs can run much faster than human beings. But what we really want to see is Usain Bolt, because Usain Bolt or whoever it is, represents a form of human excellence. And I think that's what we're trying to do. Also, at our best in the news business, a form of human excellence in our endeavor to try to ascertain at least some small corner of the world as it is.
So. But would you mind? Sorry. Can I come in?
Yeah. Go ahead.
One of the things I was going to suggest was, what if you could write out your column that you had written, and then you could say to the AI, can you now be Thomas Friedman, read this article and tell me what you think? Not as a way to.
Kind of I would tell.
No, I'm just.
Saying you're wrong. No.
But it may get you to rethink some of the things and say, oh yeah, okay, maybe I would want to do that. It still doesn't take away anything from your, brainpower or your genius or your sort of originality, but it may give you another point of view or another input which otherwise you could not have had.
Well.
So that's why the AI sandwich.
Before I answer that, I'm going to gang up on him a little bit with with a similar analogy, because today I could take every column you've ever written. I could load it into an AI, and I could ask AI to write tomorrow's column, and then I could compare to what you write, right? And that could be done. I could, frankly, I could do it right. And I don't know what your reaction will be to that.
I don't think readers would come to a column that they know had been digitally generated. They wanted to know that a human being sat there for a few hours, pulled out his hair, then read the column to his wife, which is what I did. Not to Tom, but to my wife. Who said, you should think about this paragraph, which I did, and add a couple sentences here and there, and this is a clunky sentence. And then that's and that was a I think that was a purely human interaction. I don't want to be so severe. And I understand that there are really legitimate uses within the newsroom, especially for kind of the nuts and bolts news gathering that used to be done, you know, at the Wall Street Journal, ascertaining stock prices that that kind of thing. But for higher order stories, I really do think that part of establishing trust has to come from the sense that a human being is what has generated a particular article or essay in, in, in the news that you're reading. After that, things become quite, quite blurred. I think we're sort of entering a brave new world where it's very difficult for readers to establish not just not just trust, but trust with accountability. And accountability always has to be at the human level.
I'm sorry, are you going to add one little thing because you use the analogy of the Olympics? There is a new sort of Olympics which has just come up, in the world where you can use drugs, it's part, part of it. It's called augmented human competition or championships. And so you, you drug yourself in the best way possible, and then you go and run the 100m. And the whole idea is as an augmented human being, how fast can we be? So I mean, people are wanting all kinds of different things. It's a huge, I mean, it's not the Olympics, but it's a championship of, of, of a very big scale.
Well, I do have in one of my microtrends books, I have a chapter on that, that it's the biggest undone industry because as you point out, cheetahs run faster. You know, dogs smell better. The truth of the matter is that human's five senses is not even remotely as good as most of the animal kingdom. And so one day there will be a big business, I think, in what you in what you say. And an AI may open that up, you know.
Yeah. I mean, just an example, my friends with Gary Kasparov and, you know, 25 years ago, he was defeated by Deep Blue. It was seen as a major inflection point. Now, Gary will be the first person to cheerily tell you that the chess, the chess player on his iPhone can beat him every time. But no one wants to go see an iPhone play chess. They want to see Gary play chess.
Exactly. Do you? How is how is AI treating your issues?
So if I may, before I go there, I wanted to add something to a comment that you made before. If you allow.
Me.
Ahead. With respect to the to how media often confuse these experts with expertise, and I absolutely agree with you, we cannot glorify experts. And that is part of the problem. And I think there's a responsibility for media to communicate science properly, and that entails also communicating uncertainty properly and getting people used to knowing that science is not static, that our knowledge evolves, and that we are leaning always on the best available science, which does not mean it's an absolute truth. And I think that kind of instructing people and building that awareness is crucial to stop the mistrust of science. Because as things change in Covid, we were all operating in uncertainty. That's the perfect example. And people really glorified experts. And you should know that experts have an area of expertise, but they might be wrong about a whole lot of things. So knowing how to communicate that properly is hugely important. And I'm going to give you another example of that. In terms of how I think the media also has to be very careful in how they report science, perhaps on the other side that you'll be perhaps happier to hear of. That is how The Telegraph recently called out the BBC for reporting on climate change that exaggerated the threats of climate change. And it was accidental, and you could tell that the reporter was just talking in ways that were not very scientifically rigorous, talking in common terms. And in that way they exacerbated some threats that were not so. And they were kind of some examples. You can probably find tons of examples on the other end as well. But is that type of thing that's source mistrust. And where I come from, when I say we have to be very careful about scientific based reporting on these issues.
Well, let me just throw into the pile with AI, you may find grok, is a little bit, a little bit more to the right on climate change. What did you say? Maybe. I mean, I don't know that that's happened. I want to say I don't know whether that's happened today, but it could happen where the Lem start to take on the same roles of MSNBC and Fox News. They could evolve. So easy to way.
To to change just ever so slightly, the bias of these AI tools and completely change the narrative and the public understanding of issues that could be life or death as health or as. Wikipedia today. So. Exactly, exactly. But to your point, we don't use AI. I sometimes use it to find better phrases because I'm not a native speaker. So in English it helps a lot, and I find it very entertaining. How AI can help in that sense. But we don't use AI in the in the form that you are. I think referring to what we do use AI for is, to develop new analytical models. And I give you an example of how our researchers have used AI. We do a lot of assessment of how media reports on some issues, and we analyze texts from big media repositories. And we see how the conversation in the media evolves, how disinformation is sometimes portrayed in the media, and particularly our interest is how climate change is portrayed as different types of issues. Kind of polar bears in the year 200, 1000 to 2100 or as a health issue. And AI is really powerful on that, because a human being couldn't possibly read through all those documents and assess it in an unbiased manner. With AI algorithms, you can. But that doesn't mean the chatbots that you're talking about grok or ChatGPT. We try to stay as clear as that as of that.
As possible. Well,
Add something to what you said about AI bias that each of these elements.
Yes. We don't know. It's an uncharted territory right now.
But what we do know that a lot of the data sets that they have been trained on, right, are from the English speaking world, because that's where most of the data sets is. So culturally, the context of AI is far more Western English speaking, and that is problematic for countries like India and many other countries that have regional languages and cultural contexts. And we are worried about that. And you know, how pervasive AI is and it's coming in, and that's why we're all been working on sovereign AI. But, you know, it's too nascent. I don't know where it'll go. So that is a problem area for us.
Yeah.
Can I add one thing with AI as well that I found particularly I think many of us researchers are really worried about that is how AI can be self-reinforcing and feeding itself evidence that it's itself generated. So I was recently talking with people at the World Meteorological Organization. And one of the risks that we're currently facing is that satellite data stops being made public, particularly from the US. There's a risk that NASA data will not be publicly available anymore, and that generates a data gap, which AI could fill in very easily. Now, what is the evidence? What is the underlying observations that we're feeding into AI to then produce that output data that we base our decisions on. It's as good as the quality of the input data.
So exactly. So as I tell people I don't drive my car anymore, my car drives me. Okay. So I'm pretty much 95% I don't drive the car. And in that case, the AI has an objective standard. It does not drive me into a wall. Okay, I know that that's the case. Okay. That's not true in opinion. In opinion, it could drive you into a wall.
It often does.
Right.
Again in this.
Let me just see because we have seven minutes, I wanted to let some audience members throw some questions in. I had intended more, but we kind of got going.
Hi. Hi everyone. I'm Delfina, I'm a global shaper from the Buenos Aires hub, also a data journalist. So very into all these topics. I just want to come back to the trust point. And not only people are not trusting media, they are also intentionally avoiding news. According to the last, Reuters report, 40% of people around the world avoid news. I think that's a problem. And many people say that it's because they find that news are boring. They're very hard to understand. And the question that I wanted to ask you is like, how do you see? How do you think AI can help journalism? In a sense of how can we, think on different formats? How can we think on how people is now consuming information and how can we adapt to those habits?
Anybody want to tackle?
Can I come in with a little bit of a different point of view? I know that consumers very often say that they consume less news, but actually, let's say even in our case, we started off with a news magazine, right, which was once a week. And then we went into a TV channel which is 24 seven. And now that used to be that people used to come in at prime time, right? Prime time was a thing. But since digital came in, people are interacting with us almost ten times a day because they are on our app, notifications are going out, etc. so people say they don't consume news. They're like, oh, news is toxic, we don't come into TV, prime time, etc. etc. but they are consuming news and information right through the day. Right? And media companies, I mean, at least I can speak for my media company is putting out information in all of those different platforms that people are looking at, not just the traditional ones, which is television, newspaper, or, you know, even radio, but Instagram, Twitter, social media. And so, in a way, we've expanded the definition of news and information. So I feel people are interacting even more with news. But yes, trust is definitely a problem. But I think that problem, like you said, trust is a problem across. We're just not trusting each other, you know, on anything. And that's problematic. And I don't know whether that's part of social media coming in and giving everyone a voice. So is that just a transition period?
I'll just.
Add that.
There's probably some mathematical formula you could devise between, I think, an inverse relationship between the quantity of available news and the credibility of it. I mean, since at least the advent of CNN, 46 years ago or so and the present, the amount of available news is just staggering. It used to be the case that a normal human being would say, read a time magazine once a week or the Sunday Times once a week. They would perhaps watch 30 minutes of the evening news, several times a week. And that was that was sufficient. Now it absolutely bombards us. And I think there's a kind of an arrogance on our part in some of us in the news media, that we expect everyone to be fully informed all the time. That's not actually how other people live their lives. And maybe we would be better served if we could reduce the quantity of news and therefore enhance its credibility. I mean, just take what happened at the forum today or this week. President gives a speech. People are, you know, falling out of their their chairs. It seems he's absolutely serious. He's going to take Greenland. I write a column to this effect by the night or by the next morning. There's apparently a framework agreement. And who knows what what in fact is going to happen. And this is just kind of a head spinning pace or a head turning pace of of of of news. Who, who in their right mind can keep up with it. So we, we have those of us who are news junkies should not expect that the public should maintain similar forms of addiction, as as we do. Maybe it would be better if there were just a lot less.
Well, let me just actually throw in because I do a lot of studies on this. Well, two facts, two points to make. And I want to get one more audience question if I can. Number one, what people say about whether they trust things is not necessarily true about whether they in fact trust them. And second, 25% of the people are news junkies who check news five times a day or more right today. So I don't know that I think the news audience or the audience for your column is probably bigger than it ever was, right? Compared compared to the old days. And 10%, by the way, are exclusive news junkies. I have the world as news junkies, sports junkies, entertainment junkies, and if you're none of those, you're a couch potato.
And then there's junkies. and junkies.
And there are junkies. I'll get one more question in, sir, and keep it brief.
I'm public broadcasting. Do you think they're susceptible to the same problems you're talking about, or do they have any advantages?
Public broadcasting?
You mean state public broadcasting?
Well, yeah. Like, let's take the premier one BBC. I mean, it's under attack from all sorts of directions. And yet, in many ways, I think it upholds some very important standards in, in, in news media. And I'm just wondering whether you people think it's also susceptible to the same problems you're talking about.
Well, the thing is that other people in other countries have also set up public broadcasting, and that's where the problem starts happening. Right? Because there is CTV supported by the Chinese government. And then there's RTV and there's Al Jazeera. and yeah, so and so the public broadcasting definition is sort of.
Brett, are you shedding tears over NPR?
No, not particularly, but that's because I think there are lots of credible alternatives, like the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal and the private market. And I think, you know, every, every arrangement in terms of the way in which you fund organized, disseminate news is potentially problematic. I'm not a great fan of the BBC, but I'm a great fan of, Deutsche Welle, the German state broadcaster broadcaster. I think they do a fantastic job. So it's very case specific.
So let me say, this is a topic we are really just scratching the surface on. What I got out of the panel was a number one concern is what is the fourth Estate going to do about its diminished level of trust? We only begin to scratch the surface on AI, and whether or not AI is going to help enable journalism or in fact, be a destructive force. And we didn't even get to to social media. So perhaps next year we will we will come back and see where the state of the Fourth Estate is. Thank you all very much.
Thank you, thank you.