By Santiago Serna Duque
CARTAGENA, Colombia
New York Times CEO Mark Thompson sat down with Anadolu Agency for a wide-ranging interview, including the relationship U.S. President Donald Trump has with his newspaper.
The Brit, who led the Times to surpass 4 million subscribers in the last quarter of 2018, also referred to the success of the president's phrases to address different issues on the political agenda. Among other things, Thompson expressed concern about the dissemination of news through social networks, which, he said, can sometimes distort facts.
Anadolu Agency: The French writer Paul Valery in 1935 assured the radio served Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini to carry their messages effectively and, through this medium, they could distort the world view. Has Trump done something similar with new technologies, mainly Twitter?
Mark Thompson: There is some kind of similarity, but honestly, I do not think Donald Trump really is comparable to those two types, because they certainly had an elaborate and structured discourse. He does not have any of that.
Trump appropriated simple phrases that are very effective on different topics such as security or nationalism -- expressions like "let's put America first". Playing with those prayers, many believe that Trump also addresses racist issues. As I said in my book, “Without Words, What has happened to the language of politics?,” these politicians know about the power of intense and highly compressed phrases such as: “You have to build a wall, the walls work."
In this context I do not really believe that he has a political agenda with a certain purpose. I do not think that he has an ideology either. What is certain is that he knows how to use the states of art and, in particular, social networks to transmit his message. Something that he made very effectively.
I think that in the last 10 years we have seen quite popular political figures, particularly from the right-wing party, who know how to use new media to transmit their message. Starting with the ex-Governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin, who in 2009 promulgated the term "death panel" originated in the federal health legislation debate.
Among all this, I sometimes wonder if his actions as a government are the replica of what he did in his years as presenter of the reality show, The Apprentice. I say this because in that program he managed to maintain the interest of the general public week after week through new stories, new disputes between the different members of the cast.
AA: How does the Times deal with Donald Trump -- an expert in distorting journalistic conversations?
Thompson: The first thing we do with Trump is that we interviewed him "on the record" so that the public have absolute knowledge of what happened in the conversation with him.
Secondly, when he criticizes us, if he says something about the Times that is wrong, that it is incorrect, like when he said that the newspaper subscription base had collapsed, which was not true, we will simply correct it publicly and explain why he is saying something wrong.
For this kind of thing is that Trump does not like everything we say about him and is in all his right. Like all other U.S. citizens, he enjoys freedom of expression and, in that sense, can say what he wants.
AA: One of the main themes of your book is the power of persuasion that language has to impose antidemocratic discourses. Do you think that social networks allow the rise of this type of discourse?
Thompson: I do not think that the main social networking platforms like Facebook and Twitter have been deliberately created to spread those messages. I honestly think that the founders of these platforms saw them as something of ordinary use with what ordinary people communicated.
Later, the way in which they were used as a means of political manipulation produced a shock in their creators and in the consumers. To be honest, I think there was some naivety there and this can be noticed in particular with Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook.
To believe that gathering many people around something is always good, ended up being a pretty innocent assumption. Sometimes people congregate with a bad objective, with the desire to plan something destructive. For the owners of the networks it will be difficult to put the genie back in the bottle.
AA: Last week the image of a group of white students who rejected and mocked a Native American Indian war veteran at a march in Washington was shared on social networks and media. What do you think of this type of actions that are repeated in the media?
Thompson: Well, I think that one of the arguments for good, honest and independent journalism has to do with the media offering the viewer, in this case, a clear context of what happens.
Certainly I am very concerned about commenting on something I see on social networks or on YouTube because you never know if it is true or not and, in most of the times, the context in which events happened is not explained either.
In this way, people are finding that is more difficult to distinguish between false and real news. It is difficult to understand what is important and what is not. You must be careful in choosing news material that is consumed because this can simply reaffirm our prejudices and does not open a space for critical discernment.
AA: In two years of government, has Donald Trump done any good?
Thompson: Yes, the country's economy is incredibly strong and most of the politicians are judged first, and mainly, by money management. In addition, the employment rate in the United States is very high, which is also very strong. To be fair, I think that must be weighed in the balance.
Of course, there are many people who discuss the long-term impact of his methods, but in the short term it seems that Trump achieved a continuous growth of the economy of the United States. Something that he dressed from an objective perspective can be cataloged as a success story for the Trump administration.
I think if the economy was wrong, all his enemies would blame him.
AA: And what he has done wrong?
Thompson: Trump has a foreign policy that may look random and very instinctive; you know, he is very precipitate. At a national level, he focuses, to a large extent, on issues such as immigration in the United States.
He aims to transform what is happening on the southern border of the country as a national emergency. I do not think that anyone who really knows about the problem can catalog it with such a qualifier.
Many of our reporters at the Times have visited the border and almost unanimously conclude that what happens there has nothing to do with a national emergency. Therefore, Trump is appropriating political exaggeration to gain immediate popularity, without giving any thought to the consequences of what he says.
AA: And with this exaggeration and distortion of reality, will he get the support of Congress to raise the 1,300-mile (2,100-kilometer) wall?
Thompson: Who knows, it's complicated. Because in all this we must remember that of the almost 2,000 miles (3,200 kilometers) of border shared by Mexico and the United States, about a third have a physical wall with long sections of fences. Added to that, there are all kinds of security measures along the entire border line.
So, will the Congress allocate part of the nation's money for the security of the border? Probably yes. Will the lawmaking endorse, with the money from the states, the construction of a concrete wall that will go from ocean to ocean? I really do not think that happens.
AA: The scandal of the journalist Claas Relotius, who wrote several false reports for the magazine, Der Spiegel, broke out recently in Germany. Do you, with your famed fact-checking are immune to these things?
Thompson: No, and just to remember the case of Jayson Thomas Blair who plagiarized and invented several stories for the Times. These cases are very difficult to identify because often when a reporter makes an interview he must turn off and turn on the recorder at the request of the source. To give history rhythm and coherence, it is possible that information is distorted, or even invented.
Independent that in the area of fact-checking are verifying all the external facts about a journalistic work, if the way in which the different elements of the story met was made in a dishonest way, there will always be problems. My colleagues in the newsrooms have to be always vigilant.
But are the Times we have a great team of reporters and there is no reason to think that someone there is making up stories.
On the other hand, I must emphasize that there are many newspapers in other countries where the facts are not verified. There the journalists constantly review their information, the testimonies of their stories and verify the data individually.
AA: Finally, the strategy of selling the digital content in order to offer quality journalism worked in the U.S. which seems to bury the idea that there will continue to be a print run of the newspaper. How long will the Times live on paper?
Thompson: Not for many years. At least 10 to 15 years, maybe a little more, maybe two decades.
