The Oswego State campus hosted the Louis B. O’Donnell Media Summit for the 13th consecutive year Thursday.

Titled “Facts, Fiction, Politics and the News,” the summit discussed the issues the modern news media has to address as it reports on all levels, but especially on political news.

The event was moderated by Benita Zahn, an Oswego State alumna from 1976. Zahn is a health reporter for NewsChannel 13 Live at 4, as well as NBC affiliate WNYT-TV Live at 6, both in Albany, New York.

Four panelists attended the event: Kristin Donnelly, a former White House correspondent for NBC and now a producer for the CNN show “The Lead with Jake Tapper”; Bob Lonsberry, a conservative radio talk show host for WHAM-AM in Rochester, New York, and WSYR-AM in Syracuse, New York; Trudy Perkins, an Oswego alumna from 1993 and the deputy chief of staff and communications for U.S. Rep. Elijah Cummings; and Steven Portnoy, a CBS News Radio White House correspondent.

The four panelists represented the various areas of modern news media, in broadcast TV, radio and opinion commentary, and the other side of the news cycle with a communications representative for a politician.

The summit was hosted in Waterman Theater in Tyler Hall. With doors opening at 2:30 p.m., a line queued up outside.

Attendees streamed into the theatre to take their seats. On the stage, five chairs, a podium and signage for the School of Communication, Media and the Arts pointed out toward the seats.

The summit opened with a statement from event director Boni Quatroche, thanking the panelists for participating. Then, Oswego State President Deborah Stanley spoke about the history of the Media Summit, thanking sponsor Lou Borrelli, who was in attendance. Stanley joked microphone to Zahn as the panel debate began.

Zahn’s first question was about how society can achieve a civil discourse on political issues when the volume of news being given to people is so high.

Portnoy was the first to respond. He said that many people in the modern era have never seen an intensity of political discourse as people are seeing today, but it has happened before.

“We have been through some intense times in our history, back to perhaps the late 1960s, or perhaps the 1860s,” Portnoy said. “There are periods of time when civil dialogue has been as loud as or louder than it is today.”

Perkins took the chance to share an insight she has on how to remain civil when talking about political issues.

“Try to remember what you’re fighting for versus who you’re fighting against,” Perkins said.

The conservative commentator on the panel, Lonsberry, spoke frequently throughout the panel, sometimes putting himself at odds with the other media professionals on the panel and stating something plainly that they all had been hinting at.

Lonsberry said Americans have always been a passionate people, harkening back to the days of the American Revolution, and the American people are a robust group who can handle disagreement in society.

The second question raised by Zahn was on how people can feel comfortable opening themselves to new ideas in a media landscape filled with partisan news, fake news and efforts made to divide people based on politics.

Donnelly said that the best way a journalist can present the information to their audience is to give a clear, transparent representation of the facts and allow their audience to draw their own conclusions.

“What is contributing to the coarseness of our dialogue today is that we’re increasingly able to shout anonymously at and past one another,” Portnoy said.

Lonsberry brought the history of American journalism, saying objectivity has never been a major focus. Newspapers in the late 1800s and early 1900s all reported based on political leanings. He said that the First Amendment of the Constitution was written with a biased instrument in mind.

The topic of fake news took the forefront of the discussion. Lonsberry said that fake news was a passing fad, while the deeper issue of people deflecting the truth will stay around forever.

Lonsberry took the chance to dig at the White House Press Secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders. He called her “Sarah whats-her-name” and said she had “too much make up on.”

Donnelly called out Sanders for her professional discrepancies. Donnelly mentioned a story, written by the Washington Post, that Sanders had described as fake news one day and then cited as fact in a tweet the next day.

The issue of social media was also brought up by Zahn when she asked how media consumers can navigate a world where social media like Facebook has been “weaponized” to spread a certain political point of view to readers.

Zahn posed whether social media companies should be required to report political advertisements the same way broadcast media is required to, sharing the campaign, the amount paid and how often the ad is played on air with the Federal Communications Commision.

Lonsberry said that companies and broadcasters should not be required to report that information and that those regulations were holdovers from the 1930s.

The panelists closed their discussion when Zahn received a signal from someone backstage.  Portnoy asked to finish a thought before the discussion broke to a question-and-answer session for the audience.

“We live in a democratized [media] environment where each of us is a publisher, but each of us must also be an editor,” Portnoy said.

The audience asked a few questions in the short time they had for the Q&A. The first question was from an alumna, who asked if the media would ever find themselves in a position to punch back at Trump.

Donnelly said that Trump had been punching at the media for a long time, and the media was just forging ahead and doing their job.

Another student asked what would happen to local news following the removal of a FCC regulation that required news organizations to have a physical presence in all cities with which they held a broadcast license. The panelists all agreed that hopefully, those media groups would use the money they saved by closing their physical locations to expand their digital and remote coverage of the areas.

One of the final questions asked of the panelists was how to decide which source to believe when the media and the government are providing different information.

Portnoy said Trump sometimes tweets things that are correct and sometimes he does not, and the audience should pay attention to other information sources to confirm whatever they are reading.

Lonsberry joked that, since something he had written was used in a Democrat-funded ad, he did not have to worry about Trump’s tweets.

“I don’t have to read these, because Donald Trump blocked me on Twitter,” Lonsberry said.

Photo: Haofeng Deng | The Oswegonian