The 55th Hays Press-Enterprise Lecture featured speaker Michael Barbaro, New York Times (NYT) journalist and host of the NYT podcast, “The Daily.” The lecture was held in the University Theatre on March 4, 2024 and featured discussion on the role of news in today’s society, trust in media and impact of podcasts and print media.
Barbaro has hosted or co-hosted “The Daily” since its inception in 2017. “The Daily” has won multiple accolades, including a DuPont-Columbia University Award as well as being named a top podcast by TIME and The New Yorker. Prior to his audio experience on “The Daily,” Barbaro had worked in journalism in various capacities for years. Barbaro’s interest in journalism traces back to middle school paper routes and high school publications, then becoming a business reporter at the Washington Post, and has worked as a national political correspondent for the New York Times during the 2016 election, where he wrote the Times’ headline piece regarding Former President Donald Trump’s election.
With an introduction by Elizabeth Watkins, Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor at the University of California, Riverside, the lecture officially began at 6 p.m. On stage, Barbaro covered various topics, briefly explaining the creative process behind “The Daily,” and the reason behind its creation: distrust of news media. He explains how, “Today, trust in the news … is absolutely a hands-on fire, unavoidable, existential question that we have to take with the utmost seriousness.” Barbaro demonstrated this distrust with statistics from a Quinnipiac University Poll where it was found that nearly one-half of all Republicans in the United States stated that “it was more accurate to describe the news media as the enemy of the people than it is to say that the media are an important part of democracy.”
At the time of the 2016 election, specifically on the date of Nov. 8, 2016, Barbaro had no assigned beat as he had already covered aspiring President Donald Trump’s campaign and did some investigative research. Barbaro elaborated on his experience in the newsroom that day and how he was completely unprepared for Trump’s election, with the general “feeling in many different newsrooms that night being that Donald Trump was going to lose.” Much of what they had reported up till that night suggested that Trump would lose the election, and the newsroom was unequipped to write a Trump win story.
The first lesson that Barbaro felt he had learned that day was that he believed he had misread the election and electorate. Given his position as a political reporter at the NYT, he had to reconsider whether or not “news media at that moment really understood the country,” and come to terms with his own reporting shortcomings. Shortly after his inauguration, former President Trump posted on X, formerly known as Twitter, where he claimed that the news is “not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American people.” Barbaro compared Former President Trump’s characterization of the media as the “enemy of the people” to historical figures like Joseph Stalin or anyone who opposed his socialist revolution. It was amidst this time, this “smoldering cauldron of mistrust, that ‘The Daily’ [was] born into.”
This brought rise to the first concept that “The Daily” aimed to combat, which Barbaro defined as “the voice of God.” He explained how for a long time, journalism has taken for granted their ability to give people news and expects thanks in return for their reporting. Barbaro described the goals of the podcast as disrupting the absolute authority maintained by the paper in the selectivity of quotes, embracing opposing voices and increasing transparency.
To achieve the goal, space had to be made to allow for people to be the “elevated center of the show” and have them feel as if they were “supporting players” in journalism. One of the earlier episodes of “The Daily” covered the topic of mass shootings in which they wanted to speak to someone who owned a gun store and sold a gun used in a mass shooting. Barbaro explained how they wanted “people to realize that this was a real person who has real complicated feelings and a messy story.”
John Markell, an owner of a gun store who sold a semi-automatic weapon used in the Virginia Tech massacre, had the opportunity to share his side of the story. The story told in “The Daily” that day surprised many people as they did not realize “how much they wanted to hear from someone like that until they” listened to the account of a man who “suffered tremendous amounts of pain” and is probably “permanently scarred” by his actions. Unlike a print piece which would only use a couple of the quotes from the interview, sharing this story through the podcast allowed the opportunity for people to trust “The Daily” as “tellers of stories,” “[changing] the relationship that people have to journalists.”
Following the opening lecture, UCR professor of philosophy, Barry Lam, joined Barbaro on stage to moderate a question-and-answer (Q&A) session. This allowed the audience to engage with Barbaro and ask questions about the business model of media groups, the concept of misguided trust, podcast journalism logistics and general background questions about Barbaro’s life.
Before the speech at the University Theater, Barbaro spoke with a group of UCR students in Rivera Library for a student Q&A. This event saw Barbaro discuss more about his background and answer questions about journalistic practices. However, the event was mostly consumed by questions and criticisms of the NYT’s coverage of the war in Gaza.
Students cited a controversial NYT investigative report on the use of sexual violence by Hamas during the Oct. 7 attacks, which has raised questions due to internal concerns over the underlying evidence.
In return, Barbaro emphasized that he has purview of “The Daily,” and is co-host of that podcast, not the executive director for the NYT. Barbaro discussed being proud of how the podcast has addressed the war in Gaza, highlighting the work “The Daily” had done in having first-hand accounts of people affected by the war, citing “powerful” examples from the episode, “Voices from Gaza.”
Barbaro did acknowledge that there had been “complicated” moments of coverage for the NYT regarding the situation in Gaza, referencing moments such as when the NYT had to retract parts of an article documenting an explosion at a hospital in Gaza. In this instance, the NYT had led its coverage with claims by Hamas governing officials but did not make it clear that the claims could not be verified, and “left readers with an incorrect impression about what was known and how credible the account was.”
However, Barbaro emphasized the difficulty of reporting conflict, stating, “There’s no perfect way to cover a war … I think that the closest we can get to anything resembling perfect, which we can never achieve in covering a war, is talking to the people who are experiencing the conflict.”
