Cyber threats and the media landscape




Ted Koppel Courtesy photo

Ted Koppel Courtesy photo

Veteran broadcast journalist and author Ted Koppel presented a technological doomsday scenario and critiqued the White House assault on the media to a full house Jan. 23 at the Distinguished Speaker Series at the Thousand Oaks Civic Arts Plaza.

Koppel envisions world destruction starting through a cyberwar against the United States. If an enemy state were to destroy U.S. power grids, chaos would ensue and millions of people could potentially die.

Life without electricity, he said, would mean that water pumps would not function, human waste would spur a massive health crisis, and people would die of the cold or heat.

“There would be panic in the streets,” he said.

Koppel said that Russia, China and the U.S. have the capability of “turning off power grids of nations with the pressing of a key.” Tracking the nation behind such an attack could take a month, and by that time, he said, life as we know it would be over.

From cyberwar, Koppel’s talk segued into how President Trump’s “fake news” label has divided the media, public opinion and citizens of all political stripes.

“It becomes more and more difficult to ascertain the truth,” Koppel said.

Real fake news, he said, could wreak havoc in ways big and small. If a false bulletin that the White House had been attacked and the president was missing were to be taken hold of by media outlets, the stock market could crash, attacks on innocent countries could be launched and other tragedies could ensue, he said.

He quoted late New York Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who said, “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts,” relating it to the current political climate.

Another problem with the media, Koppel said, is that U.S. foreign bureaus have been shut down all over the world to save money, creating a dearth of global news in the U.S.

The FCC’s “Fairness Doctrine,” which required news outlets to present a balance of liberal and conservative views in political stories, was eliminated in 1987, he said, a move that gave rise to cable news shows presenting current events in a distinctively biased fashion.

“Then Rush Limbaugh had no need for fairness,” Koppel said.

He said liberal news shows are as biased as conservative ones. He recommended that people consume news from all angles and that liberal viewers would be well served if they watched Fox News anchor Sean Hannity now and then to understand the full political spectrum.

“We need to understand one another as fellow Americans,” Koppel said.

Understanding was ultimately his message for the night.

When the military draft was in place, he said, people from all walks of life battled shoulder to shoulder, giving rise to compassion and understanding for their fellow man despite political or economic differences.

People who were educated fought with people who worked “using their hands,” he said. Conversely, today’s wars are fought by less than 1 percent of American adults.

Yet the media landscape has been democratized, he said. Anybody can write a blog and, in Koppel’s opinion, the more outrageous the claims made on a cable news show or through citizen journalism, the more likely they are to get a higher volume of viewers or online “hits.”

The result, he said, is the “tribalization of America,” where everybody clings to their own ideology and doesn’t bother to check out the reality of their beliefs or listen to other points of view.

Koppel said the only cure for such polarization is to bring back some kind of universal service, whether it be the military or public service in organizations like the Peace Corps.

“We need to get to know and respect each other as Americans once more,” he said.

During the question-andanswer period, Mark Cohen, a radio show host, asked Koppel if newspapers would survive.

Koppel said they would not in their current form, even though many people, like him, enjoy the physical act of reading a newspaper. He also said he was not a fan of social media like Twitter.

“It’s a debased form of communication,” he said.

When asked by Cohen what he would like to say to President Trump, Koppel said he wanted the president to admit that during his campaign he believed he didn’t have a “snowball’s chance in hell” that he would win the presidency.

Ultimately, Koppel said, he wished the media would return to a more balanced format.

“America is getting a little bit tired of the passion on the right and the passion on the left,” he said. “I’m getting tired of the ideology on both sides. It’s not healthy.”