{"id":103883,"date":"2025-10-25T19:53:07","date_gmt":"2025-10-25T19:53:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/103883\/"},"modified":"2025-10-25T19:53:07","modified_gmt":"2025-10-25T19:53:07","slug":"can-the-media-regain-trust-in-age-of-ai-and-misinformation-nab-grapples-with-loaded-question","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/103883\/","title":{"rendered":"Can The Media Regain Trust In Age Of AI And Misinformation? NAB Grapples With Loaded Question"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tThe NAB<\/a> Show is known in large part as a bonanza for tech geeks and engineers, and its New York edition last week was no exception.<\/p>\n

\n\tBut the broadcast<\/a> industry lobbying group made a statement by foregrounding discussion of a central challenge for its members: regaining public trust in the era of AI<\/a> and misinformation. Opinions flew among broadcast and digital execs, a union chief and seasoned journalists, and top station execs weighed First Amendment<\/a> concerns in the wake of ABC\u2019s suspension of late-night host Jimmy Kimmel.<\/p>\n

\n\tNAB CEO Curtis LeGeyt<\/a> moderated a marquee panel titled \u201cThe Future of News: AI, New Revenues and Risks and the Policy Response.\u201d About 70% of newsrooms, he noted, have already implemented AI, raising \u201cserious concerns about copyright, consent, compensation and the credibility of the information being delivered.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tPrior to the panel, campaign strategy firm OnMessage unveiled new survey data from 1,000 likely voters nationwide, an equal mix of Republicans and Democrats, who were asked in mid-September about the rise of AI. The results showed strikingly bipartisan consensus around the technology, with 82% of respondents saying they are \u201cconcerned\u201d or \u201cvery concerned\u201d about the development.<\/p>\n

\n\tA few other pieces of data from the poll spoke more directly to the discussions playing out on NAB stages, OnMessage VP Tommy Binion said. One was the response to the prompt, \u201cHow concerned are you about AI stealing or reproducing journalism and local news stories that are published online?\u201d The \u201cconcerned\u2019 or \u201cvery concerned\u201d responses added up to 76% of respondents, a level that Binion called \u201csky-high.\u201d He called the number \u201cgreat news\u201d in terms of politicians or regulators feeling they have strong popular support to rein in AI companies. He also flagged the degree to which respondents mistrust AI news (68%) and would support Congressional legislation restricting it (77%).<\/p>\n

\n\tNick Radziul, EVP of major local station owner Hearst Television, said he was surprised by the poll\u2019s findings about the lack of trust in AI as a source of information. The extent of such sentiment, he said, \u201chighlights the challenge of how to implement AI\u201d in his company\u2019s stations. For all of the perils of injecting it into the newsgathering process, AI tools have also come to be seen as useful and less-fraught ways to create efficiencies in editing, advertising and other areas.<\/p>\n

\n\tJon Schleuss, President of NewsGuild-CWA, said the union\u2019s members build trust with readers and viewers \u201cbrick by brick,\u201d but the adoption of AI broadly will put that standing at risk given the \u201cgarbage\u201d proliferating online. \u201cThere\u2019s a real tension here,\u201d LeGeyt said. The poll data \u201csurpassed my wildest expectations,\u201d he added. \u201cAnd we\u2019re in the trust business.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe issue is zeroing in on specific outcomes and not inviting in the \u201cflotsam and jetsam\u201d of the internet, said Brad Silver, VP and Global Head of Public Policy, AI,\u202fand IP, for Cond\u00e9 Nast parent Advance. AI search results, namely via Google Gemini, should be delivered with \u201cthe right compensation\u201d to news organizations being scraped for it by the large-language models. (Deadline parent Penske Media is the plaintiff in a pending lawsuit against Google for its current search practices.)<\/p>\n

\n\tLicensing and dealmaking is \u201cpossible,\u201d but \u201cwe need incentives\u201d for AI companies to participate in a licensing scheme, Silver added.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cLeverage is in favor of the Big Tech companies,\u201d Radziul said. \u201cPolicymakers need to step in,\u201d LeGeyt replied. Radziul agreed, saying the scale of the tech sector has made them \u201canti-competitive\u201d gatekeepers for news content. \u201cIf Congress doesn\u2019t step in, I\u2019m not sure there is another solution that comes in time to, frankly, save local news producers.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tAnother NAB panel zoomed out to look at the trust factor more broadly \u2013 and unlike with AI, there is a yawning partisan gap.<\/p>\n

\n\tPatrick Healy, an assistant managing editor at the New York Times who moderated the session, noted recent examples of pushback on the media by the Trump Administration. One was White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt recently firing back, \u201cYour mom\u201d when a reporter asked how Budapest was picked as the site of a summit meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Another was Trump\u2019s response in Texas that \u201conly a truly evil person\u201d would ask him, as one reporter did, about the U.S. response to flooding in the state.<\/p>\n

\n\tHealy asked panelists Brian Stelter of CNN, Sara Fischer of Axios and Oliver Darcy of Status how they think news organizations should build up \u201cresilience\u201d in the face of such attacks. <\/p>\n

\n\tThere are \u201cmany, many bad-faith actors trying to tear things down,\u201d Stelter said. \u201cMost of trust is gained or lost in a way that is outside of our individual control. But we each individually have a lit bit of power and responsibility.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tDarcy, who was Stelter\u2019s colleague at CNN before co-founding the independent news outlet Status, lamented the recent tendencies of many large news organizations. They are \u201clargely led by corporations and billionaires trying to cater coverage to people who have been trained in a lot of ways to hate them,\u201d meaning conservative viewers and readers. \u201cYou\u2019re seeing this at Paramount with CBS News, you\u2019re seeing this at the Los Angeles Times, perhaps at the Washington Post on the editorial side \u2026. Owners are thinking, \u2018How do we get the Republicans to like us?\u2019 And the fact is, the Republicans, or a lot of them, are never going to like you guys.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tWhen networks and digital publishers are \u201ctrying to win over that audience by softening coverage of Donald Trump<\/a>, or softening coverage of Charlie Kirk because you are afraid of offending them, what actually happens is you lose trust among people who rely on the New York Times\u201d or the rest, Darcy said. CNN, he added, has lost ratings over the past year, in his opinion for the same reason.<\/p>\n

\n\tHealy noted that the Times gets plenty of criticism from the left. He cited a headline several weeks ago describing slain conservative activist Charlie Kirk as \u201ccharismatic.\u201d Many readers felt \u201cracist\u201d would have been a more apt word, he said.<\/p>\n

\n\tWhite House reporters for the Times during Trump\u2019s second term, Healy observed, \u201chave been pretty professional. \u2026 When we ask questions and seek information, we get a responses.\u201d He contrasted the current state of play, despite all of the chaos surrounding it, with relations between Times staffers and the Biden Administration.<\/p>\n

\n\tDealing with the previous White House was \u201cmuch more difficult,\u201d Healy said, marveling at \u201cthe amount of pressure that the Times and others came under for our reporting about the fact that Joe Biden was asking the American people to re-elect him and make him the oldest president in the history of this country, and the reporting we did about his age and his cognitive abilities came in for a hell of fire. There was enormous pressure from Biden and the Democratic Party.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe intensity of the squeeze on journalists has only increased, Healy added, and the stakes are likewise continuing to rise. \u201cWe all know this: When you start caving and pre-emptively bending the knee out of fear, it just hardens the determination of authority to chip away further at your independence,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The NAB Show is known in large part as a bonanza for tech geeks and engineers, and its…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":103884,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[220,218,219,3279,64088,969,61,60,64089,27976,64090,8979,80],"class_list":{"0":"post-103883","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-broadcast","12":"tag-curtis-legeyt","13":"tag-donald-trump","14":"tag-ie","15":"tag-ireland","16":"tag-local-tv","17":"tag-nab","18":"tag-nab-show-ny","19":"tag-techline","20":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103883","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=103883"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103883\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/103884"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=103883"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=103883"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=103883"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}