Chronicle Editor in Chief Speaks at SMC on News and Nonpartisanship

Audrey Cooper, the editor in chief of the San Francisco Chronicle and the first woman to hold that position, spoke about the current state of the news industry to an audience of more than 140 students, alumni, and community members at Saint Mary’s College on Monday, February 26. Titled "Fake News and the Future of Media," the talk focused on the downfalls and failures of the industry as well as describing Cooper’s own nonpartisan philosophy. The event was part of the ongoing Executive Speaker series hosted by SMC’s School of Economics and Business Administration.

“The news is coming at us all of the time, there’s no way to stop it, there’s very few ways to tell if it’s any good or not, and it’s just like a firehose is pointing at all of us all the time,” said Cooper, whose lecture addressed two concerns in particular. The first, she said, was the emergence of a vehemently anti-Trump school of thought that encourages people to feel that they’re contributing to a resistance movement by monetarily supporting certain news organizations.

The second was what she characterized as “increasingly frantic calls . . . to have the press adopt the president’s tactics and become a mantle of activism.” Typical of this pressure, she said, was an email she received urging the Chronicle not to refer to Trump as the president.

Describing her desperate search to find a replacement for a conservative columnist, Cooper emphasized the importance of ensuring that differing opinions are heard. “If anything, it’s my job to make you upset and make you uncomfortable,” she said.

In a powerful moment, Cooper laid out the point she most wanted the audience to remember: “You do not have the right to an uninformed opinion.” She closed the lecture with a description of the tall building housing the Chronicle, citing founder William Randolph Hearst's ideal that “people should look up to their journalists.”

A lengthy question-and-answer session followed Cooper’s talk, during which she fielded questions about her experiences as the Chronicle’s first female editor in chief and the dangers of news echo chambers, among others, and expressed her desire to expose people to the ways news is made in order to earn their trust.