The NAB Show is known in large part as a bonanza for tech geeks and engineers, and its New York edition last week was no exception.
But the broadcast industry lobbying group made a statement by foregrounding discussion of a central challenge for its members: regaining public trust in the era of AI and misinformation. Opinions flew among broadcast and digital execs, a union chief and seasoned journalists, and top station execs weighed First Amendment concerns in the wake of ABC’s suspension of late-night host Jimmy Kimmel.
NAB CEO Curtis LeGeyt moderated a marquee panel titled “The Future of News: AI, New Revenues and Risks and the Policy Response.” About 70% of newsrooms, he noted, have already implemented AI, raising “serious concerns about copyright, consent, compensation and the credibility of the information being delivered.”
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Prior 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 “concerned” or “very concerned” about the development.
A 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, “How concerned are you about AI stealing or reproducing journalism and local news stories that are published online?” The “concerned’ or “very concerned” responses added up to 76% of respondents, a level that Binion called “sky-high.” He called the number “great news” 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%).
Nick Radziul, EVP of major local station owner Hearst Television, said he was surprised by the poll’s findings about the lack of trust in AI as a source of information. The extent of such sentiment, he said, “highlights the challenge of how to implement AI” in his company’s 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.
Jon Schleuss, President of NewsGuild-CWA, said the union’s members build trust with readers and viewers “brick by brick,” but the adoption of AI broadly will put that standing at risk given the “garbage” proliferating online. “There’s a real tension here,” LeGeyt said. The poll data “surpassed my wildest expectations,” he added. “And we’re in the trust business.”
The issue is zeroing in on specific outcomes and not inviting in the “flotsam and jetsam” of the internet, said Brad Silver, VP and Global Head of Public Policy, AI, and IP, for Condé Nast parent Advance. AI search results, namely via Google Gemini, should be delivered with “the right compensation” 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.)
Licensing and dealmaking is “possible,” but “we need incentives” for AI companies to participate in a licensing scheme, Silver added.
“Leverage is in favor of the Big Tech companies,” Radziul said. “Policymakers need to step in,” LeGeyt replied. Radziul agreed, saying the scale of the tech sector has made them “anti-competitive” gatekeepers for news content. “If Congress doesn’t step in, I’m not sure there is another solution that comes in time to, frankly, save local news producers.”
Another NAB panel zoomed out to look at the trust factor more broadly – and unlike with AI, there is a yawning partisan gap.
Patrick 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, “Your mom” when a reporter asked how Budapest was picked as the site of a summit meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Another was Trump’s response in Texas that “only a truly evil person” would ask him, as one reporter did, about the U.S. response to flooding in the state.
Healy asked panelists Brian Stelter of CNN, Sara Fischer of Axios and Oliver Darcy of Status how they think news organizations should build up “resilience” in the face of such attacks.
There are “many, many bad-faith actors trying to tear things down,” Stelter said. “Most 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.”
Darcy, who was Stelter’s colleague at CNN before co-founding the independent news outlet Status, lamented the recent tendencies of many large news organizations. They are “largely led by corporations and billionaires trying to cater coverage to people who have been trained in a lot of ways to hate them,” meaning conservative viewers and readers. “You’re seeing this at Paramount with CBS News, you’re seeing this at the Los Angeles Times, perhaps at the Washington Post on the editorial side …. Owners are thinking, ‘How do we get the Republicans to like us?’ And the fact is, the Republicans, or a lot of them, are never going to like you guys.”
When networks and digital publishers are “trying to win over that audience by softening coverage of Donald Trump, 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” or the rest, Darcy said. CNN, he added, has lost ratings over the past year, in his opinion for the same reason.
Healy 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 “charismatic.” Many readers felt “racist” would have been a more apt word, he said.
White House reporters for the Times during Trump’s second term, Healy observed, “have been pretty professional. … When we ask questions and seek information, we get a responses.” He contrasted the current state of play, despite all of the chaos surrounding it, with relations between Times staffers and the Biden Administration.
Dealing with the previous White House was “much more difficult,” Healy said, marveling at “the 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.”
The intensity of the squeeze on journalists has only increased, Healy added, and the stakes are likewise continuing to rise. “We 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,” he said.