We have a Women We Laud series, and this Q&A from Qwoted‘s Chloe Kim with the United Nations’s Melissa Fleming is more pertinent than ever. With their permission, we present this thought-provoking interview as an issue that affects us all:
As the UN Under-Secretary-General for Global Communications, Fleming is responsible for getting what the United Nations does in front of audiences worldwide, as trust erodes inside what Fleming calls a “toxic information ecosystem. She came up as a journalist, then spent years as spokesperson for the UN Refugee Agency, traveling to camps and war zones. She told Qwoted Media’s Kim what Google’s AI summaries have done to referral traffic (the UN is feeling it too), why news deserts do more damage than most people realize, and why she’s betting on solutions journalism.
Chloe Kim: Do you mind introducing yourself and your role at the UN?
Melissa Fleming: I’m Melissa Fleming, and I’m Under-Secretary-General for Global Communications. That means I lead in communicating everything that the UN does on all of our platforms, to audiences around the world.
Kim: You’re currently the host of the podcast Awake at Night. Can you talk about how that idea was born, and also how the UN, such an institution, is trying to reach new audiences and younger audiences?
Fleming: Because we’re an institution, I, as a communicator, was finding that people were not feeling that this institution was accessible to them or relatable to them. And so I founded this podcast to introduce people to the really remarkable people who work here. It really just showed their life stories, but also their commitment to service of humanity and for a better world. And it’s through listening to their life stories that they then get a better understanding of what this organization stands for.
Kim: Putting a face to the name and humanizing it a bit more.
Fleming: That’s the whole idea, humanizing the UN. I started it when I was the spokesperson for the UN Refugee Agency, and I used to travel to refugee camps and war zones, and I would meet my colleagues who were actually sacrificing comfortable lives, in places where they couldn’t bring their families, where they were often even confronted with dangerous situations, a lot of human suffering. And I was like, “People need to hear their stories,” because they’re coming from many parts of the world where, if these are from other parts of the world where they could be living comfortable lives, and they’ve chosen this life of sacrifice and service and are finding it incredibly purposeful and fulfilling, and why is that? And so that was the motivation.
Since I’ve moved here to New York and I’m a little bit removed from that frontline field work of colleagues, I have been bringing out more the leaders of the UN and also their backstory. All of them have this thread that they are passionate about changing the world for the better. Even though the majority of people, especially young people, get their news from social media, they don’t trust it.
A toxic information ecosystem
Kim: The internet has changed so much since its inception. Can you speak more about the Humane Internet movement and the core tenets around that?
Fleming: I hope this movement grows because we’re finding that we’re having to communicate in a toxic information ecosystem. The social media for good concept that we all were so excited about when social media came onto the scene, that we could really build communities around humanity and common solutions and sharing, has just been infected with the poison of hate speech and disinformation and misinformation, and it has polarized people a lot.
As a communicator, it’s of course much more challenging to reach people in this environment to get their attention, but also to get their trust. Because the result of this information environment is that, even though people spend their time in these spaces, even though the majority of people, especially young people, get their news from social media, they don’t trust it. So we have to make even more effort to demonstrate that we are a trusted source of information, and also to support the public interest media in that role, which is especially important in this information environment.
Kim: Who is the onus on to fix this issue? Is it regulators? Is it these tech platforms or the media, or a group effort?
Fleming: A group effort out of necessity. Frankly, if the tech platforms would introduce safety by design, then we wouldn’t have to all put all hands on deck to try to make the information space more humane, and where facts would perhaps surface before lies. We have the opposite now.
Unfortunately, we have seen social media companies unwilling to self-regulate, and the world, and governments, not regulating. For the most part, the EU has really stepped up in this space. Those who are the masters of the algorithm dominate in this dimension.
We have introduced UN global principles on information integrity. This is our blueprint for a more healthy information ecosystem, and we have recommendations to not just the tech platforms, and there are many recommendations to them, but also to governments, to media, to advertisers and PR companies, and to the general public, in terms of users. So it has to be a kind of all of society approach out of necessity.
Press freedom runs on individuals
Kim: Shifting to press freedom and journalist safety. It seems like such a lofty problem. If you’re just a regular citizen, you kind of think, “What can I do?” It feels like you don’t have much agency. What would be your advice for people who really want to support a free press?
Fleming: Take out subscriptions to media organizations that employ journalists who do the work of a journalist, who are educated, who are trained, who delve deeply into stories, who investigate, who hold leaders to account. Subscriptions are a very powerful way to support these media organizations, including some of the newer independent media that are springing up who are actually doing responsible work, on Substack or in their podcasts. I think most people can judge who is really doing that work in the public interest and for a public service. So I think that that’s really important.
I think public media is something that we should encourage governments also to support because it’s very difficult to sustain for many news organizations that are smaller, that are in local towns, if you don’t have some government funding or support.
Your attention is very valuable, and if you gift your attention to people whose only role it is, is to get more attention and to monetize based on that attention and not necessarily based on facts or truth, then maybe you should think twice.
New media vs. traditional media: Where you spend your attention
Kim: I’m curious to hear your take on creator journalism, since you mentioned these newer forms cropping up, like Substack and new podcasts. These are great and very accessible, and people are eager to consume them. Then you see people who are being introduced into the White House Press Corps who don’t necessarily have all the ethics that journalists have typically been trained on. How do you see this dynamic fitting into the journalism landscape?
Fleming: I think people need to be educated about what makes a journalist and what makes a media institution real. Training on the five Ws of journalism. Your attention is very valuable, and if you gift your attention to people whose only role it is, is to get more attention and to monetize based on that attention and not necessarily based on facts or truth, then maybe you should think twice.
I think we should embrace new forms of independent media. There are a lot of journalists on Substack, journalists who have left legacy media organizations or have been fired from legacy media organizations who are really doing excellent work. So I think look into people’s backgrounds and see. We have a lot of news influencers on social media who are well-informed, and they’re getting their information from legacy media sources and then trying to interpret that for their audiences, and some of them are doing a good job. I think just to be aware of who it is you’re listening to, where they get their information, and to question it yourself. Really look at the source, and do spend some time on legacy public interest media.
Their large language models will no longer be attractive if they don’t have quality content for their users to refer to.
Part of the Anthropic class action lawsuit: “My book was stolen”
Kim: Outlets are all over the map on AI. AP licensed its archive to OpenAI. Others are rewriting terms of service or suing. Do you think there is a way for journalism as a whole to save itself in working together to confront this problem, or do you see it fracturing more as time goes on?
Fleming: I agree with you. There seems to be those two approaches. It first started with the mass theft of the hard work of journalists, the hard work of book authors. My book, for example, was stolen. I was part of the Anthropic class action lawsuit. I didn’t know it. I just received a letter that said, “Your book was stolen.”
I can’t even tell you how much time, weekends and nights, and a tough work, working on that book and interviews and intimate conversations and tears, and to just know that that was just scraped…If somebody wanted to say, “Write a replica book like Melissa Fleming wrote that book,” to AI, they would just refer to my book and do it. It’s not right.
So it’s journalism, it’s book publishing, it’s the creative community, everyone reached a point where they said, “Okay, we have to do something about this. We have to stop the theft, and we have to be compensated in some way.” There are different approaches. Some are doing licensing deals up front, and that will help sustain them. Others are suing and getting compensated.
What I worry most about are the smaller media organizations that don’t have the lawyers, don’t have the means to fight back, and I really hope that the AI companies will take it upon themselves to place more value in that work, because actually, what’s going to happen is their large language models will no longer be attractive if they don’t have quality content for their users to refer to. We’re already hearing that it’s training itself now. It’s already kind of scraped most of the world on itself, so AI training on AI.
If [AI] is trained on discriminatory information or false information, that’s what you’re going to get.
Garbage in, garbage out
Kim: You wrote on Medium about AI bias against women. Do you see that extending to news itself, where models surface different outlets or headlines depending on who’s asking?
Fleming: I’m worried about that as more of us rely on doing research on AI, very conveniently, but if the AI is innately biased, which we have found against women, it has racial bias as well, then what kind of consequence will that have? In that news article, or in other aspects of life where we’re seeing AI being deployed and then making decisions that then result in a bias against women. So it’s not just in the narrative that I’m concerned about as a communicator.
According to a UN Women study, this might be the result of so few women being in AI, working at AI companies. But we’re trying to really call it out, and we’re hoping that there’ll be more reporting on this issue because we’ve come so far in fighting for gender equality, and we don’t want to see it overturned or diminished.
Kim: It is crazy how much people take what AI spits out as fact. As your Medium article suggested, AI has been trained on previous written works. And if that is biased, then you’re being trained on that bias.
Fleming: Somebody called it garbage in, garbage out. So if it’s trained on discriminatory information or false information, that’s what you’re going to get.
The click was the business model
Fleming: Everybody Googles, right? But now you Google and you get a summary. If you are a discerning citizen, you have to actually go and click on the links to verify that AI summary.
Google used to be an incredible feed for people to click on news organizations’ websites. To go to the original source, to the story. You first do a search on Google, a news story would pop up. You’d click on that, you’d end up on that news website. That allowed those news organizations to sell more advertising and to sustain itself financially. They’re finding a huge drop in user visits to their news organization websites.
We’re seeing the same thing at the UN. The referrals to UN websites have gone down dramatically since Google started its summaries. So we’re all having to scramble now. We need to figure out how to be attractive to large language models.
So it’s really a very complex and challenging information environment to be communicating information that we think people really need to know or should want to know, about the state of our world, about the state of their communities. But it’s harder and harder, I have to say.
Kim: It is a crazy loop, as you said. There’s the AI summary, so you don’t click the link, therefore newsrooms make less money and we’re left with layoffs.
Fleming: That’s exactly the cycle.
People feel overwhelmed by all of the information, but they also feel overwhelmed by the gloom and doom that they feel is dominant in this information ecosystem.
News avoidance and the case for solutions journalism
Kim: How can people still be informed while also maintaining mental health?
Fleming: The Reuters Institute puts out this study every year, and they find that news avoidance is huge, and it’s been growing. People feel overwhelmed by all of the information, but they also feel overwhelmed by the gloom and doom that they feel is dominant in this information ecosystem.
And so this is why I’m a huge supporter of solutions journalism. There’s a similar group in Europe that a lot of news organizations have taken up called Constructive Journalism, which is adding an element to the rigorous reporting that is already being done and highlighting a way out. There is a solution to this. Somebody else has found it. I’m going to interview this person who solved the problem maybe somewhere else. I’m going to follow the story into a conclusion.
This is not just a better public service if you’re thinking of journalism as in the public interest, but, according to the studies of the Solutions Journalism Network, people stay with the stories longer when there is a solutions element there. People want to know that there is hope. People want to know that they may have agency, or there’s someone that they can support, a local politician or a group of activists. There is a way out of problems. They don’t only want to see that some awful thing has been uncovered, but there is justice. There is a light at the end of the tunnel.
Kim: I had taken a class on constructive journalism years ago, but in my near decade in newsrooms, that’s never been at the forefront of reporting guidelines.
Fleming: I think Sweden’s public broadcaster has taken this constructive journalism approach, which also includes involving the community more, having more events that are getting public views, including that in the reporting. Reporting on people who are making a difference. Giving people a sense that there is more to the day’s news stories than the scandals, the natural disasters, the murders, the dark side of what a lot of news tends to move to.
Experts who were never taught to explain themselves
Fleming: At organizations like the UN, we’re often the sources of the statistics of human suffering. The latest huge refugee wave, or people dying of hunger. And again, that does grab headlines, and we feel like maybe we have done our job, but we haven’t. We have to be able to communicate that there is a call to action, there are people on the ground who are helping people, tell stories of lives who’ve been saved, show how donor contributions have really made a difference.
And then, back to what your organization Qwoted does, we need to connect media with experts who can actually communicate. We have tons of passionate people, incredible experts doing amazing work, but have never been trained to communicate in relatable ways to the public.
News deserts and the case for local
Kim: National news might make people feel a bit more detached and maybe apathetic. Do you think that local news is the antidote to news avoidance? By creating a community and a sense of agency for people?
Fleming: Absolutely. I think all the studies show that people rally around and find community around their public news, their town newspaper, their radio station. Look at the rallying around NPR stations at the community level. Private donations just surged. People wanted to keep it. They found it so valuable because it was a reflection of their community. They felt that they were involved. They heard local voices, and they felt agency because they were informed.
So I think news deserts are dangerous, but they also contribute to polarization and alienation. And so I think the more that we can do to support local media is really important. And also, national media could no way cover all of that. So it’s part of an ecosystem that’s just really important for a thriving democracy to have both.
To the journalists still in it
Kim: You were previously a journalist yourself. Do you have advice for journalists who might be feeling the weight of the news cycle. What would you say to them to keep going?
Fleming: I admire the profession so much. I think it is vital for a thriving society. It is so important for fact-based thinking. If you have facts, you can have trust, and if you have trust, you can have stability, and you can also have change in a positive direction, and journalism plays a really vital role in that. So keep going.
The UN and the incredible NGO community, the Committee to Protect Journalists and Reporters Without Borders, need to protect independent journalism all over the world.
Kim: Thank you so much for your time. I really appreciated our conversation.
Fleming: I appreciated it too, and thanks for all the excellent questions and for the work you do.
YouTube: https://youtu.be/b02GtwihO2s
Substack: https://qwotedmedia.substack.com/p/why-you-dont-trust-the-news-anymore
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