Senator Paul Bailey invites Natalie Allison of The Tennessean USA Today Network and Erik Schelzig of The Tennessee Journal to discuss their thoughts on how social media and other platforms have changed how people get their news and how they as journalists have adapted to the constant changes and hurdles they face in the ever-changing world of journalism.
Guest:
- Natalie Allison, The Tennessean USA Today Network
- Erik Schelzig, The Tennessee Journal
Transcript:
Announcer: For the politics of Nashville, to the history of the Upper Cumberland, this is the Backroads and Backstories podcast, with Senator Paul Bailey.
Sen. Bailey: Welcome back to the podcast. I’m your host, Senator Paul Bailey. In today’s episode, we’re turning the tables a little bit. I will be interviewing Natalie Allison, who is a reporter for The Tennessean USA Today Network, and Erik Schelzig, editor of The Tennessee Journal. Welcome, Natalie and Erik. I’ve been looking forward to asking the questions, instead of being asked the questions from the hot seat.
Ms. Allison: Well, thanks for having us.
Sen. Bailey: [laugh].
Mr. Schelzig: Good to be here.
Sen. Bailey: But before we get started, I’d like to invite both of you to tell us a little bit about yourselves. And we’ll start with the ladies first. Miss Natalie, give us your backstory.
Ms. Allison: All right. Well, I have been with The Tennessean going on for years now. It’ll be four years this summer. I came here to Nashville to work for The Tennessean.
Before that, I was born and raised in North Carolina, where it also started my reporting career. I started off covering the cops and breaking news and that kind of thing, and then switched over to politics, 2018, right after the 2018 primaries with the governor’s race and the US Senate race.
Sen. Bailey: So, what persuaded you to follow a career in journalism?
Ms. Allison: I decided when I was 14, that that’s what I wanted to do. I thought, initially I wanted to be on TV, and then by the time I was graduating high school, I said, “No way. I’m never going to do that. I’m going to stick to writing.” And that is what I did.
And I majored in journalism, something I probably wouldn’t do again, if I could do that over, although I do love this job, I just would probably get a degree in something more useful [laugh] than journalism, but here I am. Yeah.
Sen. Bailey: So, who do you admire most in the field of journalism?
Ms. Allison: Currently or historically?
Sen. Bailey: Both.
Ms. Allison: Okay, historically, I am a fan of Dorothy Thompson. Dorothy was, she was one of the early female radio reporters, but she was best known for going over to Europe, and she was covering, basically, the rise of national socialism. She was one of the first people, really, in the US in journalism to describe what was happening with the rise of Nazis. And she was the first US reporter to get thrown out of Nazi Germany, in 1934 or so, something like that.
She came back to the US and kept writing about it, sounding the alarm on the rise of fascism and Nazism. She interviewed Hitler in the early ’30s and went on to write a book about it. And then in the late ’30 in the US, she would go to some Nazi rallies here in the US, and famously got attacked by someone time when she started laughing during one of them at just what they were doing, and had to get escorted out by the police. But she’s definitely, she’s definitely a role model. Yeah.
Sen. Bailey: Okay. And then currently?
Ms. Allison: Currently, I don’t know. I’m going to have to defer on that. I have a collection of reporters that I follow, but I don’t think there’s any one person that I most admire. I think you have to take in all sorts of media, right? You have to—
Sen. Bailey: Well, you’ve got Erik sitting right across from you—
Ms. Allison: Yes.
Sen. Bailey: —so you know—
Ms. Allison: Besides Erik Schelzig—
Sen. Bailey: —he’s kind of like, waving at you like—
Ms. Allison: Exactly.
Sen. Bailey: —you know—
Mr. Schelzig: The silence is deafening on that one.
Sen. Bailey: [laugh].
Ms. Allison: I take in—
All: [laugh].
Ms. Allison: I take in a lot of different types of news. I’m not the kind of person who just turns on a TV channel and get all my news from that. I don’t even have… cable, so I don’t watch TV—
Sen. Bailey: Really?
Ms. Allison: —but—
Sen. Bailey: Yeah. Very good.
Ms. Allison: Yeah, I don’t know. It takes all types. I think we should all take in a mix of news sources.
Sen. Bailey: Very good.
Ms. Allison: Erik, we’re going to turn to you and let you tell us just a little about your background, and where you grew up, and your journalism career.
Mr. Schelzig: Well, where I grew up is a complicated story. I’ve lived, sort of, all over the place. Mostly I went to high school in the Philippines where my father was working at the time, and then went to college in DC, where I ended up getting into academics and was actually working on my Ph.D. in political science, and got a job at The Washington Post at the time, answering phones and being a sort of news clerk and what in the old days they used to call a newsboy. And basically got seduced by it.
Basically, academics is very much a long run proposal, while news as an instant gratification thing, and so while I was at the paper, watching the reporters do the reporting and have the papers actually running off the presses—which still ran in the building at the time—by 9 p.m. and having that in your hand was an exciting idea. And I ended up dropping out of the Ph.D. program and getting my Masters and going into journalism where I ended up with the AP, the Associated Press, starting in Miami, where I covered a lot of sports, and then courts and politics; transferred to West Virginia for a couple years where I covered the first term of then governor, Joe Manchin; and then moved here to Tennessee in ’05 and caught the, sort of, second term of Phil Bredesen, and then, of course, Haslam and Lee. And I’ve been here ever since.
I moved to The Tennessee Journal, which is a weekly newsletter about politics and government, in 2018. And it’s a weekly; it’s a different cadence than with the AP which was an immediate sort of thing. And it’s been challenging but fun, and I’ve enjoyed it. And I’m now one of the old-timers in the Tennessee capitol hill press corps, which is a—
Sen. Bailey: [laugh]. Yes, you are. [laugh].
Mr. Schelzig: —weird feeling because I used to be the kid. [laugh].
Sen. Bailey: You know, there’s a lot of us legislators that look forward to getting The Tennessee Journal at the end of every week to see if our name has been mentioned in there, especially if we’ve made some comment that’s been during committee or on the floor. So, it’s always very interesting to get your take. And so I know it’s very well-read, as well as a lot of constituents back in my area read The Tennessee Journal because I’ll get messages stating, “Well, did this really happen?” Or, “Did you say that?” And so, you know, just to verify.
Ms. Allison: Have you ever been the subject of the weekly joke?
Sen. Bailey: I believe I was a few weeks ago, about my horse accident that I had. I believe that Erik said something. I don’t remember the exact details. At the time, I was probably heavily on Ibuprofen, so I don’t remember the—
Mr. Schelzig: I think your colleagues made a lot of jokes about that themselves. I didn’t have to pile in too much. [laugh].
Sen. Bailey: [laugh]. So, who do you admire professionally? And it can be past or current?
Mr. Schelzig: You know, it’s—I guess I’d have a, sort of, hybrid answer having had the advantage of letting Natalie answer the question first; I got to think about it a little bit. But given that I’ve been here in Tennessee, now, for about 15 years, I got here when a generation of reporters who have been covering the Statehouse was, I guess, working toward the end of their respective careers. But people like Tom Humphrey, over at the Knoxville News Sentinel who covered the Statehouse for a long time and was the dean of the press corps until he retired, and Richard Locker who was with The Commercial Appeal of Memphis, who had, sort of, long institutional memories, and knew where all the bodies were buried, and helped me out on learning all the contexts and the history. And they really had a great influence on how I covered the Statehouse, so if you don’t like what I write, you might want to talk to them.
Sen. Bailey: [laugh].
Mr. Schelzig: And so those are the people that inspired me and helped me direct myself and my coverage.
Sen. Bailey: Very good. So, that’ll take us from sharing your backstories and your background to questions of today, as we move forward. You know, online platforms, and social media, and podcasts have had major effects, both good and bad, on how we as citizens received the news. And even with the two of you sitting here at this table, Natalie, you are in a news cycle with a daily paper, however, Erik, you’re with a weekly newspaper, and of course, also reporting for the Associated Press. I’m going to start with you, Erik, on this first question. Can you elaborate on how, as an editor and a journalist, have adapted to this change in the news media?
Mr. Schelzig: Well, just to be clear, I no longer write for the Associated Press. I left them, and then I do all my own thing. I do have a blog, essentially, the TNJ: On the Hill blog, which, I guess, is a partial answer to your question.
The Tennessee Journal for 45 years was a weekly publication that came out in print. At some point, they started sending out a PDF, which was a major technological advancement. Now, we also have a blog, which is usually at least one story per day. And it accelerated things because I guess the feeling was and is, that you can’t wait, with Twitter and Facebook and all the social media elements out there. I guess the important thing that I try to remember when there’s a social media frenzy about an issue is that a very small group of people actually get involved with that and read that.
And it isn’t out in the wider world, really, until people see things on the TV news, or in their newspaper, or have a reputable source that is reporting this. So, I find myself caught up sometimes, and feel like, maybe, this has been all over Twitter, why should I report it again? And I remember that a lot of people probably missed that. Or if they were away from their computer or their phone for a couple hours, that the next crisis, the next scandal has struck, and it’s time to make sure people remember important developments as they go on.
Sen. Bailey: How about you, Natalie?
Ms. Allison: I want to add to what Erik said. I think the beauty of what he does and can do is that, while some of us are scrambling to be the first to get the news out there or whatnot, he can also provide really helpful context, like, take a step back and connect dots, and provide some of that context for readers in the hours or sometimes day following. So, it’s good that we have people on different news cycles and with different approaches to reporting the news. Okay, so the question is, how this new cycle effects what I do? Is that—
Sen. Bailey: Exactly. Can you elaborate on how you as a journalist have adapted to the change regarding social media and the reporting of news?
Ms. Allison: So, I am, I’ve been a full-time reporter for eight years. So, as long as I’ve been a reporter, as long as I’ve been in this industry, it’s been digital-first. I’ve always worked for print newspapers, but the digital component, the web component, Twitter, that’s always been a part of the job for me; that is all I’ve known. And so unlike someone who spent years and years and years writing for the end of the day deadline for print, I’ve always had this expectation that as soon as you get a story, it’s going to go up on the website, and there has always been this time-sensitive element to it.
And so being in at a publication like The Tennessean you have to do more than just tweet; you have to write a full story. And so it’s this constant balance of trying to be quick to report the news, trying to be competitive, but also, in the moment, still providing necessary background and context and getting it right, and not jumping to conclusions, and taking the time to make sure that all relevant parties can be heard out in that story. And so I think that’s always just been part of the job for me, but certainly, competition keeps us on our toes, and I do like to be the first [laugh] to report something if I can, but I think with that, it’s very important to make sure that whatever the issue is, is being portrayed as fairly as possible.
Sen. Bailey: So, do you believe that the changes that we’re talking about are better for consumers of media, the media, or both?
Ms. Allison: Ugh. Well, I don’t, I don’t think anything is better for the media these days because it seems like our industry is just declining [laugh] rapidly. So, whatever this current model is, it doesn’t seem like it’s actually better for us, at least from the bottom-line standpoint. I mean, it has its pluses and minuses.
I think that, you know, I guess it’s good for people that they can be informed in relative real-time, but that has its downsides in that sometimes the reporters don’t take the time to get the facts right, or sometimes people jump to conclusions, or you don’t have a full day to flesh out a story that will appear on the nightly news or in the morning newspaper. And so I think that causes a lot of people to frantically report things, and consume news, and develop an opinion on something, maybe, in a way that’s different than it would have in the traditional news cycle. I mean, you guys can weigh in on that. What about you? Compared to how you used to consume the news—which, maybe, was watching the news at night, or newspaper—how do you consume news differently now? And how do you think that impacts how you understand a given issue?
Sen. Bailey: Now, you’ve gone into the journalist mode, and—
Ms. Allison: I’m just trying to be conversation here.
Sen. Bailey: [laugh]. But you’re doing a great j—
Mr. Schelzig: Senator, the correct answer is, “I’ll ask the questions here.”
Sen. Bailey: [laugh].
Mr. Schelzig: [laugh].
Sen. Bailey: How about you, Erik?
Ms. Allison: Oh wow, dodging. Okay. All right.
Sen. Bailey: [laugh].
Mr. Schelzig: [laugh]. You know, I think the social media—I agree with Natalie is that it does give everyone a chance to weigh in and have a real-time… you know, information and also put out their own ideas, and views on things that happened. I guess the problem is that the growth of social media has come at the expense of paid media, which means that newspapers and TV stations can employ fewer reporters, and I think that hurts the overall coverage of things like the Statehouse. In the old days, when our press room was, you know, at 25, 30, 40 people in it during the session, and these days, we have seven. Now, granted, it’s a pandemic, so things are a little bit less—
Ms. Allison: On a crowded day.
Mr. Schelzig: —you know, things even less busy now than they have been, but the AP routinely used to have two, three, four, sometimes five staffers down here, covering various stories, and now it’s down to two. And then for the regional newspapers, there used to be multiple member bureaus, and now they’re single or none, [laugh] and then a lot of newspapers don’t come at all, right? So—
Sen. Bailey: And so, just to follow up on that is, do you think there’s fewer reporters here today because of cost-cutting measures within those media outlets, or because, again, we’re talking about social media, a senator can—or a representative can tweet something, Facebook something, and so you as a journalist can pick that up and go with it sooner than having to run a legislator down in the hallways. I mean, why do you think—I mean, is it cost-cutting measures or is it just the fact that most all legislators have social media, and you can pick up on their stories from there?
Mr. Schelzig: Well, I think that is a helpful element, though nothing beats talking to somebody in person, rather than getting their prepared statement over social media or press release. The cost-cutting goes back to before social media. It goes back to just the development of online news and where people started to expect to get their news for free. And back in the old days, as people around here like to say, everyone used to take a newspaper in the morning, and now a lot of people just don’t and they don’t see a value in spending money on a subscription to many news outlets.
And as a consequence, the newspapers have smaller operating budgets, fewer reporters, and things don’t just necessarily go uncovered. I don’t know that social media—I mean, I guess it’s—you know, through social media, we can make up for some of the loss in news coverage, but it’s not complete. I mean, if you look back at the old newspapers, you’d see pages and pages of copy about legislative hearings on a whole variety of issues that would never make the paper now because we down there have to decide, prioritize what to cover. And necessarily, it’s going to be the bright shiny objects, the most important issues of the day. Which doesn’t mean there isn’t a whole host of issues that aren’t important; they just can’t get covered because the manpower isn’t there.
Ms. Allison: Yeah. And the company I work for, we now—I represent eight newspapers in Tennessee. So—
Sen. Bailey: Oh, wow. Because of the USA Today Net—
Ms. Allison: — because—yeah, because of Gannett. Because of the USA Today Network. So, historically Commercial Appeal, The News Sentinel, I imagine the Daily News Journal, and The Leaf Chronicle all had their own correspondents up here, not to mention—
Mr. Schelzig: And The Jackson Sun for sure.
Ms. Allison: Yeah, Jackson Sun, not to mention several from The Tennessean. And [laugh] the reality today is there are two of us covering the Statehouse for all of those newspapers, which is such a loss in terms of newspapers’ ability to cover various issues. And yeah, we do have to pick issues. That constantly is causing us to get criticism from people, certainly from members about, you know, “Well, why aren’t you covering all the good things we do?” Or, “Why aren’t you writing about my bill?” And it’s just, it’s not feasible to do that. So much going on, and it’s so few of us. And so it does present this challenge of we have to make a judgment call and guess what serves the public interest the most, and what will actually be read, and—
Sen. Bailey: And you’re touching on the answer to this next question. So, take our listeners into the decision process behind what gets reported in the news cycle. I mean, what is it that drives reporters, journalists—to your point, Natalie—to make that decision of what gets reported to the public and what doesn’t get reported? Because many times, there is always a backstory to the story that’s actually printed, and I think that some consumers, if they knew the backstory of the story that was actually printed, they would have a different opinion of either, A) the story or, B) the person or subject that’s being reported.
Ms. Allison: Well, I want to emphasize regarding what you said about what doesn’t get printed, it is very, very, very rarely that we would consciously say, like, “We are not going to cover X issue because we don’t want the public to know about it.” That’s just not, that’s not something that happens in our newsroom. You know, I’m not being told, “Oh, definitely don’t write about [unintelligible 00:18:17] in the legislature.” Or, “Definitely don’t cover any of Paul Bailey’s bills.” [laugh]. It’s just a matter of—
Sen. Bailey: You don’t have to cover any of mine. [laugh].
Ms. Allison: [laugh]. It’s just a matter of we can only get to so much. So, something not showing up in print or not showing up in coverage is pretty much never because we made a conscious decision, we’re just refusing to provide the public with information on that. Now, what we do cover, I mean, there’s kind of multiple criteria there.
Obviously, it’s really important, what are the potential consequences of this legislation? Is this something that the public seems to really care about? Is this something that stakeholders are really trying to weigh in on and trying to provide a voice about? In some cases it’s, this is something that’s really important that no one seems to be talking about; this is something that has flown under the radar that we think needs to be highlighted. There’s certainly a watchdog approach.
Our coverage of things like the TANF issue, or the P-EBT money, that was something that The Tennessean we recognized just wasn’t being discussed, and we thought it was important, we thought it was important for the public now how money, in that case, wasn’t being spent. And so—but, you know, there’s different reasons every time.
Sen. Bailey: Gotcha. And I believe that the governor has brought out a plan on spending some of that money, and maybe that goes back to your reporting on it.
Ms. Allison: You know, sI can tell you that the governor initially did not seem to be too enthusiastic about coming up with a plan, and there was a lot of coverage over the course of over a year on that. And so I’d like to think that—
Sen. Bailey: You had a part in that.
Ms. Allison: Not that I had a part, but just that us keeping this in the forefront of the public’s attention and I think legislators’ attention, too, got the ball rolling. And that’s a great reason to support media, support news media. That’s change that can be affected in a meaningful way for some people, just due to us casting light on something.
Sen. Bailey: I’m going to come to you with that same question in regards to the decision process for what gets reported in news cycles. But as a legislator, there are times that I may see your tweet, I may see your news story before that I actually know about it as a legislator.
Ms. Allison: That’s good to hear.
Sen. Bailey: So, there are times that you actually are breaking stories that I’m not aware of. And I can just say that, you know, Natalie, you or Erik may call and say, “Hey, Senator Bailey, we’d like for you to comment regarding the story that’s just come out.” And I may have to say, “Can I get back with you on that?” Because I have to do the research to find out about the story because, again, it’s breaking faster than what we’re able to receive that information.
And so many times, and I think that that was even part of it, was the TANF money, and the story that was broke there, I think that was one of those stories that, you know, it kind of like, “Oh, wow.” So, thank you. Erik, I’ll turn to you now, and just what do you, decision process behind your reporting of, on your news cycles?
Mr. Schelzig: You know, I’m in a weird spot in my current role just because of the weekly approach, and I, sort of, have to take stock toward the middle of the week when I’m getting close to my deadline and try to figure out what I can cover that hasn’t already been covered extensively in traditional media because there’s not a ton of value in me just going in and regurgitating everything Natalie has so finely reported during the week. I mean, happened sometimes because it’s an important story, but for the most part, I tried to figure out what was going, and then go in a slightly different tack, just as not to be repetitive. In terms of just daily stories you get covered, or just covers decisions, there’s always a tension between the projects, and the ideas, and beats that reporters are following, and then things that spring up and happened during the day. As much as you’d like to plan and look at the list of bills that are up in committee, you never know when somebody’s going to say something wacky, or there’s going to be a—
Sen. Bailey: Yeah, and I would point to my friend, Frank Niceley.
Mr. Schelzig: Well, that’s true. I mean, he’s a great, [laugh]—
Sen. Bailey: [laugh].
Mr. Schelzig: —he’s a great purveyor of interesting comments and ideas. But it’s sort of like when I was with the AP I’d sit down with my editor at the end of the week, and we, sort of, tried to map out what’s going to happen. And then when we look back when the week was over, invariably we had covered a whole different slew of stories and ideas, just because that’s the way things developed. And then there’s a lot of time, longer-term projects that go into a lot of campaign finance stuff, which takes a lot of work and digging to put together.
That is kind of independent from the daily churn of the news that will come out. And people sometimes are surprised, like, “Where’d this come from?” It’s like, well, this has been in the works for a couple of weeks because it doesn’t happen that easily. But yeah, I agree with Natalie that, you know, I think there’s a view perhaps outside of journalism that there’s some kind of invisible hand that’s guiding what the media is going to cover or not cover, and it just isn’t the case. I mean, it all boils down to what’s interesting. And a lot of times conflict sells, so when there’s a big partisan fight, or when lawmakers go at each other and one senator is yelling at another one on the Senate floor—
Sen. Bailey: That never happens.
Mr. Schelzig: It’s happened once or twice.
Sen. Bailey: [laugh].
Mr. Schelzig: Not to current members, so much, but some former ones who you might recall. But these are things that we—for example, we as the press have spots inside the chamber, and these are things you can see when you’re in the chamber and you won’t see in the video stream. And they’re worth reporting. I mean, I had a story last week, where a state representative got angry at a colleague in committee and was, sort of, shouting at him after his bill got killed in the subcommittee.
And again, if you’re watching the video, you wouldn’t have seen it. I just happen to have been in the room. So, of course, it was a great piece of color to include because, you know, [laugh] it’s like, these are things we like to see. Now, of course, whether that’s fair to the members, you know, I don’t know, but I think as people want to know, is that—
Ms. Allison: I think it’s fair.
Mr. Schelzig: —lawmakers—well, lawmakers are human, and personalities come into play, and a lot of times that’s what ends up being interesting.
Sen. Bailey: And so to the point, yes, we are elected officials, but we’re also human, so we all have emotions and I think many times we try to hide those emotions because of our position. Also, I think we try to hide those emotions from the media, just simply because we don’t want you to see our weaknesses, or we don’t want you to basically be trying to—I don’t want to necessarily use the word ‘figure out’ which angle we’re going at, whenever we’re presenting a bill, or we’re talking to a member, or we’re talking to a lobbyist or something. But let me ask this question. Is there a competitiveness between or among the reporters when it comes to a news story? So Erik, you know, you’ve heard something, you’ve seen something, and you want to be the first to break it. Do you share that with Natalie, or do you break it and then share it with Natalie, or she has to just catch it whenever you do the story break?
Mr. Schelzig: [laugh]. You know, we’re not really in direct competition, just by the nature of our respective outlets. I think it was probably different when I was with the AP and also when the press corps was bigger, there was a lot of competition for issues. I find these days when I hear something that’s happening with, for example, the Chattanooga delegation, I don’t necessarily have a great interest in it, but I can lean over to my colleague, Andy Sher at the Times Free Press and be like, “Hey, by the way, Senator Mike Bell said X, Y, and Z today. You might want to look into it.”
I mean, Mike Bell’s from Bradley County, but same coverage area. When I was with AP I might not have been so eager to share because I might want to run it myself. But I feel like as our numbers have shrunk, I see more of an esprit de corps and that people tend to feel like we’re all in this together, and it helps to foster each other than to beat each other down. Whereas in the old days, you heard these great stories about people hiding [unintelligible 00:26:10] opinions, so people wouldn’t—a colleague wouldn’t find them, or trying to break into somebody’s locked drawer to find a document that they really wanted to get. And all these great competitive issues that I think, for the most part, have gone by the wayside. But of course, everyone wants to be first if they have a juicy tidbit, and I don’t think that’s ever going to go away.
Sen. Bailey: How about you, Natalie?
Ms. Allison: Yeah—
Sen. Bailey: The competitiveness? I think we’re all competitive.
Ms. Allison: —yeah, we are. I’m competitive. And like Erik said, I think, especially with the Journal versus other publications is a little bit different because his publication schedule is not a daily thing, necessarily, besides what he chooses to put on the blog. But yeah, among other news outlets, sure.
Yeah, I’m competitive, and I don’t want to get scooped on something. I mean, there’s plenty of times, too, I’ll find out some kind of tidbit. And I’m like, “Oh, should I go ahead and tweet this before Erik puts it out in a blog post, or something?” Because I’m like, oh, Erik probably has this too. So, I mean, even with him, there’s still competition. That’s—
Sen. Bailey: You know, Natalie, she’s contacted me before, and she’s said, “Oh, have… have you heard about this?” And, “Oh, Natalie, are you about to write a story?” “Oh, no, I just wanted to know if you’d heard it or not.”
All: [laugh].
Sen. Bailey: That’s basically, she’s trying to make sure that what she’s about to tweet or say is factual. [laugh].
Ms. Allison: Sometimes—
Sen. Bailey: Worry about her, she—
Ms. Allison: —sometimes you got to check stuff out. Not everything’s a story, but you got to just stay on top of it.
Sen. Bailey: No, I think that’s great. And listen, I totally respect the news media when they’re fair. And I certainly think that capitol news press that I interact with is very fair. And so, which brings us to a question. How do you, how did the either of you or both of you—I want you to comment on this—when you hear the statement, ‘fake news?’, “Well, that’s fake news. That’s fake news.”
Mr. Schelzig: Well, it’s—unfortunately, it’s lazy. If you have a problem with a specific story or a specific issue, then you should just say what it is and have it addressed. And if a correction is necessary, it’ll happen. I mean, newspapers are very conscientious about this.
To, sort of, throw out a blanket statement and say, “This is all just fake news,” without saying what about is purportedly fake doesn’t get anybody anything except for, basically, undermining the veracity or the importance of independent news media coverage of important issues. So, I think it’s a very dangerous term and has potentially wide-ranging consequences for civil society. Not to exaggerate the matter. [laugh].
Sen. Bailey: [laugh].
Ms. Allison: [laugh]. Yeah. I think historically, someone would read a story and they thought there was some kind of factual issue or they disagreed with this premise, and they would write a letter to the editor, or maybe they would reach out to the reporter. And I certainly, I still get thoughtful notes, sometimes critical, from readers, and I always appreciate those types of messages.
But I get many more just tweets or emails laced with profanities, telling me to go do horrible things. And I don’t think there’s as much thoughtful critique of news coverage as there used to be. It’s just if someone doesn’t like the premise of a story, it must not be true. If it doesn’t fit someone’s ideology one way or the other, it’s clearly the reporter pandering to one party or the other. And that’s not the case. And so, I wish more people would take the time to actually think about why it is they just can’t bring themselves to believe what’s in the news and have some kind of thoughtful critique of it.
Sen. Bailey: Okay, so are you offended when you hear someone say, “That’s fake news?”
Ms. Allison: I mean, I just think they sound stupid, for the most part. I mean, if they can’t articulate what—if they said, “This is fake news because”—whatever, but it’s usually just, “Oh, fake news. Liberal media. Don’t trust it.”
Sen. Bailey: Erik?
Mr. Schelzig: Yeah. I mean, like I said, I agree. I mean, it’s just—again, when I worked at the AP adding a correction, having to run a correction on a story was like the black mark against you. You were depressed for days because this had to go out on the wire saying, “The AP erroneously reported X, Y, and Z.”
And that is a big deal to reporters. And it really—these are things we tend to try to avoid as much as possible because, of course, you don’t want to get factual errors in stories, and then for this term to come out that the entire story just somehow fake or concocted, just obviously rubs all reporters the wrong way, which might be the intent. I don’t know.
Sen. Bailey: Well, and so just to follow up, again, I’m going to say that I appreciate the reporting that you do, and certainly hearing you answer this question. I believe that both of you have high integrity. But I’ll just point to a story that came out recently on the national level in regards to the presidential election where one news media outlet reported, and now they have just now come out with the correction and said, “Well, the story wasn’t exactly true.” So, you’re basically 90 days later.
And so I think that’s where people don’t trust cable news networks because they’re sometimes slow about doing their corrections and it appears that they had intent in the way that they reported their story. So, that’s a reason that I just asked about the fake—
Mr. Schelzig: Well, on the other hand, this was, I think, a Washington Post story that originally came out in December, and they had heard from somebody who on the call, we’re given the information of what was allegedly said, but then when the recording came out and it turned out it hadn’t been said, they ran a big correction, and it became a big story. So, it wasn’t—yes, I mean, there’s a long period of time passed, but they didn’t hide from the fact that they hadn’t got it right. They made a—there was a big self-examination of how this happened. And they reported, “Here’s what was actually said, and here’s what we reported, and here’s the difference.” I think if it was truly fake news, they never would have made the fix, and just stuck with what they reported in the first place.
Sen. Bailey: So, how do you handle those… what do you call it? Unidentifiable sources? Anonymous sources? How do you handle that? Because I think that’s where that story centered around. They were basically saying, well, it was an anonymous source. And then again, back to that story, the anonymous source ended up being wrong. So, that’s where I’m assuming you are put on the spot of making sure that if you have that anonymous source, you have to verify that what they’re telling you is true.
Ms. Allison: And usually, as an institution, you have policies about that. So, a long-time news publication like The Washington Post—I mean, the people who broke the Watergate scandal—I mean, they have a long history of, in some cases, using anonymous sources to legitimately cover news that is of the public interest. And as you can see from what happened with this a few months ago, sometimes the people you’re talking to get it wrong. And it’s your responsibility to go back and correct that.
But at most legitimate news publications, you have rules about if you’re talking to someone anonymously, you find more than one person to corroborate the information that’s being told. I know, at The Tennessean if we are going to use someone—we call ‘on background,’ so it’s not truly off the record; it’s for using the information they’re giving us but not attributing it to someone by name, we would call that on background—in almost every situation, my editor wouldn’t let me run something like that without having two background sources to corroborate that. So, if in this particular case, Paul Bailey is telling me something on background, well, I’m probably not going to get the okay to just run that anonymous quote. I’m going to have to go over and ask Randy McNally if he’s heard that, too. And, “Okay, is that something you can verify you know to be true?”
And then we would go from there. And if my editors don’t think those sources are compelling or don’t find them trustworthy enough, then maybe I wouldn’t get the okay to do it. So, it’s a case-by-case thing, and that’s where it comes down to, I think, having a reputation over time of quoting people or picking people as sources who know what they’re talking about, and not just reporting stuff that’s just completely wrong.
Mr. Schelzig: Yeah. I mean, that’s the problem is that you don’t want to report rumors and you certainly don’t want to report opinions. Someone tells me in the hallway, “Did you hear Paul Bailey is the best chairman in the legislature?” It’s like, I’m not going to print that.
Sen. Bailey: No? Well, why not? [laugh].
Mr. Schelzig: Well, because I don’t have a corroborate—right, or worse for that matter. Whichever the rumor might be.
Sen. Bailey: I like ‘the best.’
Mr. Schelzig: But—[laugh]—but a lot of it is based on longtime relationships and people that I’ve known in the 15 years I’ve covered this legislature, and people who tend to know what they’re talking about and people who don’t. And the thing is, if someone tells me something on background that turns out to be intentionally false, that’s the end of it. And it’s not going to happen again. I don’t find that to be the case, for the most part.
Now, a lot of people don’t feel comfortable speaking on the record, especially about sensitive issues but want to inform me and my readership about what’s going on, and I find that tends to be valuable, even if it isn’t something that’s a quotable issue or something we’re reporting as fact is, like, this is the thinking that’s going on behind the scenes kind of thing. Which is somewhat specific to my audience—not entirely, but my people—you know, people who read my publication tend to put value in to know what the Speaker’s office is thinking on a certain issue or not even at the Speaker isn’t saying on the record, “Yes,” or, “No.”
Sen. Bailey: So, to that point, what does ‘off the record’ mean to you, Natalie?
Ms. Allison: I mean, ‘off the record’ would mean, “You don’t do anything with this information. I’m telling you this so you can understand, but it’s not something you allude to in a story, it is not something you go around telling people I said.” It’s… off the record is rarely helpful. Background is much more helpful, but sometimes it’s, you get what you can get, and you take that information and process it in your mind, and that helps you, points you in the right direction of where to go next, and how to get at that information from another angle.
Sen. Bailey: So, have—and Erik, you can certainly weigh in on that. I’m probably going to do a follow up regarding ‘off the record’—
Mr. Schelzig: Well, I think the problem is, what the general public perceives to be off the record isn’t the same thing that most journalists think of is off the record. So, I’ve had happen to me before where someone came up to me and said, “Look, off the record, the governor is going to announce X-Y-Z tomorrow.” I’m like, “Oh, okay.” Well, that’s not really useful to me because off the record, technically, to us means this is not usable.
Do not report this. And then the next day, the governor does X-Y-Z and that same person comes back to me and says, “I told you the governor was going to do that. Why don’t you report it?” I was like, “Well, you told me it was off the record.” So, a lot of times, you just stop and say, “Okay, wait. You mean, ‘on background?’ Like, you know he’s going to do this because you are the person who drafted the press release, and you’re telling me this because you want to get this out into the world to, sort of, give everyone an idea that pay attention when the governor announces this thing tomorrow.” That is on background, as we understand it.
So, a lot of times, an education is necessary, especially for people who don’t deal with the media that often, saying, “What are these terms that we’re talking about? ‘this is not for attribution,’ or ‘this is not to be used?’” and those are two very different things.
Sen. Bailey: And I think that I’ve learned something just sitting here listening to you two regarding off the record, and on background. So, there’s been times that I may have said to either of you, “Hey, off the record,” and it’s my way of saying you need to check this out, this may be something worth [unintelligible 00:37:32], but you’re taking that as, “Oh well, thanks for the information, but I can’t do anything with it.”
Mr. Schelzig: Yeah.
Sen. Bailey: So, I’ve got to learn a new term of ‘on background.’
Ms. Allison: I mean, and I—it’s not that you can’t do anything with it. You can ask strategic questions to other people to get at that information—
Sen. Bailey: Right. Right.
Ms. Allison: But yeah, it’s not something I can put out a tweet saying, “Someone just told me blah blah blah blah.” That wouldn’t really be upholding the spirit of someone telling me something off the record.
Sen. Bailey: So, I’m going to ask this question—and you guys will probably say, “Oh, this is off the record,” but [laugh] I hope you would be more on background—Erik, what kind of big story are you covering right now that you’d like to share with our listeners?
Mr. Schelzig: Oh, you mean what I’m writing for this week’s Journal—
Sen. Bailey: [laugh].
Ms. Allison: [laugh].
Mr. Schelzig: —that’s coming out on Friday? That’s on a need-to-know basis. How about that? [laugh].
Sen. Bailey: So, our listeners don’t need to know right now.
Mr. Schelzig: They can find out when they get their subscription on Friday. Generally speaking, we’ve been following, obviously, the big FBI raids that happened at the—just on the eve of this legislative session—in the House, of course, not in the Senate—and the fallout from that and trying to pick through campaign finance reports and any other information that we can glean because, of course, the feds are being typically tight-lipped about what it’s all about, and everyone sort of on pins and needles about it. So, that’s the overarching thing that I’ve been paying attention to since the session started. Which might be frustrating to lawmakers who are interested in the business of making laws and writing and wanting attention for their bills, but this is dominated—to me at least—the session, regardless of all the other activity that’s going around here. And of course, there’s a lot of it.
Sen. Bailey: Natalie?
Ms. Allison: Yeah, of course. The FBI—how could the FBI not be something we’re all looking into and trying to find out more about.
Sen. Bailey: And what’s going to be the next big news story? What’s—as far as the FBI raid?
Ms. Allison: You know, I wish I could tell you that. Do you know? Do you have any insight there?
Sen. Bailey: I’m waiting on you to tell me.
Mr. Schelzig: Well, the big thing, of course, is going to be whether there’s indictments. I mean, searches don’t mean anything necessarily, but usually they precede indictments, and people being arrested, and all that. So, that’s—and of course we don’t know, and again, the FBI hasn’t said, but three lawmakers had their—three House members had their homes and offices searched, and staffers did as well. And I guess the other the big shoe to drop, the next one is if and when indictments are filed.
And we’ll just have to wait and see. And just for historical comparison, when State Senator Katrina Robertson’s business was searched by the FBI, that was in February, and she was indicted in July. So, if they hold that schedule, I guess we got a couple more months to go.
Ms. Allison: And it’s complicated with the grand jury issues, too, with the pandemic, and I don’t know how much that is or isn’t impacting the situation.
Mr. Schelzig: And of course, nobody might be indicted at all. There’s always that possibility, though—you know, who knows? So, we’ll have to wait and see. But I think that just been the big issue this year, for me.
Ms. Allison: Tennessee legislators could have just been due for a raid, you know?
Sen. Bailey: Yeah. Well, as they typically say, that if the FBI shows up and does a raid, they already have the facts, they’re just making a show. [laugh]. Have either of you ever heard that? [laugh].
Mr. Schelzig: [laugh]. Yes, actually.
Ms. Allison: Seems like there could be something to that.
All: [laugh].
Ms. Allison: Hopefully, they’re not getting a warrant with nothing there.
Sen. Bailey: Exactly. Well, as a lawmaker, obviously, it’s kind of like a family member that gets caught doing something that they shouldn’t do, it’s kind of has a sting, kind of a hurtfulness, just the fact that you feel like that a family member is going through some challenges, especially with a raid. And you’re like, “Did they do it? Didn’t they do it?” And so it’s always concerning to me when lawmakers are in those type of situations. Who is your most memorable legislator, Mr. Erik?
Mr. Schelzig: Well, since I’m speaking to a senator, I’m going to have to go with Ron Ramsey, the longtime Senate Speaker, who was just a great personality, and storyteller, joke teller, and a very effective leader of the chamber. I mean, he really managed to get his will—[laugh] have his will be done when he was running the show here. And he was just a lot of fun to cover.
Ms. Allison: There’s all kinds of colorful personalities here. The type of person who’s going to run for state office is just not someone who doesn’t want to make headlines. And so people have all sorts of motivations for what they do. And I don’t know, but I think probably most memorable, Kent Calfee right? Like he, uh—
Sen. Bailey: [laugh].
Ms. Allison: —that was quite the moment there on the House floor the night of the 2020 State of the State. When we got that photo of him sipping from his Hershey chocolate syrup bottle. And so that was a fun, fun moment.
Sen. Bailey: [laugh]. Yeah, Kent’s a good friend, and he’s also very colorful, and as we say, a character.
Ms. Allison: He is a character. [laugh].
Sen. Bailey: So Erik, what is your most memorable story?
Mr. Schelzig: The election of Kent Williams as Speaker in the House, in 2009, caused a huge uproar because as some of the old-timers, I guess at this point, remember, he banded together with 49 Democrats to have himself elected Speaker over the Republican nominee that year, leading to all kinds of condemnation. And the people in the chamber were booing and screaming and a ring of troopers had to come around and ring the Speaker’s podium and where I was sitting at the time, with the AP was right next door to it, in the glass-enclosed press box. And it was just a wild experience of just chaos and barely teetering on lawlessness, it seemed. It was really amazing.
Fast-forward about a year, and I was sitting in the chamber on a middle-of-session day, and nothing much is going on, and I think I was the only person in the press box. And I suddenly hear commotion to my right and Williams had basically fallen forward and hit his head on the podium, and fell to the ground. And my immediate response was like, “Oh, my goodness.s, I wonder if somebody is up in the balcony thrown something at him or something.” There was still a lot of ill-will toward the guy.
And it soon turned out that there wasn’t anything going on. But my first response was to call it into the—the old-timey—you know, we used to have a landline in the booth; I call the desk and said, “The Speaker has collapsed, and here’s the details and I’ll call in more when I have it.” And as people were assembling up on the podium to treat him and try to help him, I pulled out a little camera that I had in my bag—and this is pre-cellphone cameras—and started taking pictures, snapping pictures. Well, a couple House members didn’t take lightly to that and started blocking my view, so I ended up standing up on the chair and taking pictures over the glass enclosure toward the Speaker’s podium. And when I did that, suddenly there was a mass uproar in the chamber and people started screaming, and I started looking around saying, “What’s going on? Has something else happened?”
Well, it turned out, they were screaming at me. And people had gotten really upset that I was doing this, and people were just hollering and hooting, and next thing you know, a state trooper showed up and started pulling out my jacket, and I got basically pulled out of the chamber. And it was just a huge to-do. And people got up on the floor and denounced me for interfering with rescue efforts. And all this stu—and I was like, what are they talking about?
I was just—I was within my cube the whole time. It was wild. And basically, all these journalism organizations got involved and defended me, and it was really weird going from being, of course, a fairly anonymous wire reporter to being the subject of vitriol. And then as it panned out, a democratic lawmaker filed a resolution to urge the press corps chairman to ban me from the floor for the rest of the session.
Sen. Bailey: Really?
Mr. Schelzig: That good news was, I was the press corps chairman at the time, so I didn’t take the thing. But I was absolved from any crimes when a Channel 4 TV report came out, and they had actually been filming—I don’t know why, but they were there and had raw footage of the whole incident, which of course showed that I hadn’t interfered with the Speaker. And so I went to meet with him later, and he said, “You know, Erik, I haven’t heard booing like that since the day I was elected.” [laugh].
Sen. Bailey: [laugh].
Mr. Schelzig: And if you talk to the members who were around then, several of them are still here, either as members or lobbyists, and they all sort of laugh about the fact that they all got caught up in the furor, mostly because, of course, they were nervous and they were worried for the health of the Speaker, even though they didn’t agree with him politically, they didn’t, obviously, want him to be hurt. But it was definitely an interesting experience to suddenly have the eye turned around and become the subject of a lot of attention. So.
Sen. Bailey: Well, it’s a great story. That’s one that I’ve never heard. So.
Mr. Schelzig: When did you—you came to the House, what year was your first?
Sen. Bailey: In 2014—
Mr. Schelzig: Okay. Okay.
Sen. Bailey: —was my first year.
Mr. Schelzig: So, that that long pa—that era had passed, and we were on to the next one.
Sen. Bailey: I served that one year with Kent Williams. Of course, he wasn’t Speaker at the time, but my office was in War Memorial, so I had an opportunity to visit with him several different times. So. But he was always very nice and very gracious to me. All right, Natalie.
Ms. Allison: Yeah. Well, I mean, speaking of chaos on the House floor, I think from my experience, the voucher vote day was pretty wild. Were you in the chamber for that? Yeah.
So, 2019 was my first session—covering session here at the legislature. And I think that that was a really interesting time to start reporting on the general assembly with the quick rise and fall of Casada. They had the voucher vote, it was hysteria on the floor, everyone shouting. Of course the vote board being held open, Bo Mitchell screaming from the back, “Don’t do it, Ron,” the sergeant at arms preventing us from exiting the media box and keeping us from trying to look out the blinds onto the balcony where, of course, there was—
Mr. Schelzig: The porch caucus.
Ms. Allison: Yes, the porch caucus had assembled. If only we could have been out there.
Sen. Bailey: [laugh].
Ms. Allison: But I mean, that session in general, like, multiple times, troopers were trying to keep us from doing our jobs, or threatening to arrest me at one point for not leaving the first floor of the Capitol where there were David Burt protesters occupying. And, you know, just crazy st—it was just unhinged. We were at a press conference one time, and they tried to block us from leaving. I mean, it—that was just a crazy time to start reporting on this place. And it’s, in many ways, mellowed out since then, at least on the surface. But yeah, the voucher vote day on the House floor is one that I won’t forget, for sure.
Mr. Schelzig: Things are much more stable on the Senate side, which means, of course, we tend to lean over to see what’s happening in the House. You know [laugh] all the excitement and the craziness is usually reserved to the lower chamber.
Sen. Bailey: Well, and the press box in the Senate chamber is right behind my desk, so many times, I’ll turn around to see if there’s reporters in there because it’s like, when the House comes into session, all reporters exit the Senate and go to the House. And I have to say, in your stories that you’re telling, it’s all about the House and just how chaotic that the House can be. Which goes to prove that the Senate is full of mature adults, and the [laugh] House is still full of fraternity and sorority College students. [laugh].
Mr. Schelzig: Mostly, but not always. [laugh].
Sen. Bailey: [laugh]. Oh, they’re all my good friends over there. Most days. But it’s certainly—so we’re going to round this out. And is there any final thoughts from either of you in regards to our podcast today?
Ms. Allison: No, thanks for having us on. This was fun.
Mr. Schelzig: No, absolutely. Just read your local newspaper, and buy a subscription. [laugh].
Sen. Bailey: Well, again, thank you both for participating and it’s certainly been informative, not only for me, but for our listeners. Thank you for listening to Backroads and Backstories. We’ll see you next time.
Announcer: Thank you for listening to the Backroads and Backstories podcast, with Senator Paul Bailey. You can keep up with the latest on the podcast at backroadsandbackstories.com. And subscribe, rate, and review the show on iTunes, Spotify, Google Play, or wherever fine podcasts are distributed. Thanks again for listening, and we’ll see you next time on the Backroads and Backstories podcast.