How MSNBC Anchor Katy Tur Is Fighting Fake News

Today, she hosts her own hour-long daily news show on MSNBC, but when Katy Tur was growing up, her career goals included doctor or lawyer, not journalist. “My mother and father were helicopter journalists” – they filmed the famous footage of the OJ Simpson low-speed chase – “and I found that boring more than anything,” Tur says. “No one else’s parents had a helicopter…I was a stupid kid, so I found it mortifying.”

But ultimately, Tur realized that the desire “to be on the front lines of cultural change” had to be in his DNA. And she’s been on the front lines ever since, chasing tornadoes for The Weather Channel and covering the search for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 as a foreign correspondent, before spending 2015 and 2016 crisscrossing the country on the campaign trail alongside Donald Trump.

The field of journalism has undergone a seismic shift since its parents’ heyday, the result in large part of that particular news cycle eight years ago. Accusations of “fake news,” TikTok “experts,” and viral conspiracy theories are just some of the challenges journalists like Tur face.

“People who might have felt frustrated by the news in the past could really express it (after Trump), and it exploded,” says Tur, who has sometimes been personally targeted by Trump and his supporters at rallies. . “This makes the job really difficult at a time when there is a greater need than ever to get the truth out there. It’s not just people who decide you’re fake news; these are bad actors and foreign actors trying to meddle in our affairs.”

These issues have combined to bring trust in the media to a frightening level. According to a Gallup poll last fall, only 7 percent of Americans trust newspapers, television and radio “a lot”; 38 percent don’t trust it at all.

Tur is not perturbed by the numbers. “You have to try to reach them where they are,” she says. “It’s the changing media landscape that we have. The world is changing, the way people consume information is changing. Every day, Tur records news videos for MSNBC social media accounts, including TikTok and YouTube; views on both platforms more than doubled year over year, according to Nielsen data provided by NBC Universal.

Tur is optimistic about his current and future audience. “Generation Z and Generation Alpha have an innate skepticism about what they see online. It seems like they don’t automatically believe it anymore. Tur cites his own teenage stepson as an example, noting that a few years ago he needed help separating fact from fiction in the information he found online. “He’s so smart, so savvy and so much more critical in what he sees now… When you grow up with something, you start to see the edges of it,” she says.

Tur herself tries to avoid getting caught up in the noise of social media – “I think it’s probably problematic that a foreign government controls an information space,” she says of TikTok – but in an age where anyone with a smartphone and an opinion can go viral, she will step up. “You try to get to the bottom of what’s going on and try to say, ‘Maybe you’re seeing this online.’ Here’s the story behind it all. This may be where the text was edited misleadingly. Or: “They take up three-quarters of the story and they left out this important context from the beginning.”

Yet she admits that there is little professional journalists can do to combat the epidemic of misinformation our culture is immersed in. “Congress has to step in and it has to regulate. There has been no regulation on social media, no regulation on the Internet since the creation of the Internet,” says Tur. “And there’s so much misinformation and disinformation going around, and it’s only going to get worse with AI.” As an example, Tur cites the recent and widespread problem of middle and high school students creating fake pornography of their classmates.

We hope that schools can be part of the solution too, especially as this year’s presidential election approaches. “(An educated electorate) is the most important thing in the world. I wish we taught civics, as if we were really teaching civics,” Tur says emphatically. “I think people need to understand the function of government, the separation of powers, what a thriving democracy needs, which is a free and fair press.”

For her part, Tur does what she can to educate her own audience, without influencing them, a key difference between traditional journalists and content creators who can often steer the narrative. “When you’re a journalist, not everyone will like you. And it’s not your job to be loved. It’s uncomfortable. And of course, everyone wants to be loved. And I really want people to watch the show.

She continues: “But I want them to come away thinking that I was fair and informed them; gave them enough information so that when they make decisions in their lives, they do so on the best basis possible.

Viewers can tune in Katy Tur Reports weekdays at 3 p.m. ET on MSNBC.