I'm a journalist - I know, sorry about that.
I think the world needs better news more than ever.
I'm here today to tell you how and why I have to change,
my colleagues and the news industry has to change,
and how we can reinstall journalism
as an authority in societies where there are none left.
It's not easy, but we need to do it.
Sometimes you need to step in front of the mirror
and take the consequence of what you see.
Normally, in the news industry, we just break the glass,
but maybe we need to shape up a little bit.
And I went into journalism 30 years ago
because I wanted to tell important stories to people
about their lives and the world,
in order for them to make up their own lives.
And then my career went on,
and suddenly I realized maybe I spent most of my time
doing stories that were good for my career,
that my editors liked,
that created good headlines,
that were being quoted,
won me prizes,
and was part of the news culture that I had become part of.
And that part of doing good for society -
maybe I'd forgotten that a little bit.
Not that I was telling stories that were untruthful,
but my ambition about doing something that was right,
maybe I'd forgotten that a little bit.
And that's the problem.
Have you ever thought about journalism, saying,
"Why are you so negative?"
Have you ever thought about that?
If you do, you're not alone.
Millions of people around the world have left traditional news
because they think news is too depressing,
it is disengaging.
Especially women, especially young people, turn their backs on traditional news
because now they have alternatives.
They just go on Facebook
and be reassured about their picture of the world
from their 255 closest friends.
Is that good for democracy?
Maybe not.
Maybe we need to do something.
But each time somebody has criticized me or my colleagues
for being too negative, doing something wrong,
we just stonewall them.
And we say to politicians,
"You just want to avoid our critical questions."
CEOs criticizing us - we say,
"You just want free airtime."
Professors in journalism, whatever, academia comes and say,
"You do something wrong,"
we say, "You are sitting in your tower;
you know nothing about journalism.
You're not journalists; we won't listen to you."
And our neighbors - they're just plain stupid.
So all the time people are accusing us of something,
we say we're just journalists,
and we do what journalists have always done.
So shut up.
We know best.
I'm here today to tell you:
maybe not.
This is the fact.
Do you know Editors' Day?
We in Denmark, we have Editor's Day.
You know, the day of the cat, the day of the dog,
the day of mothers, and whatever - Mother's Day.
We have Editor's Day where editors are good to editors
because that's the only time of year anyone is good to editors.
So we do great speeches for each other telling us we are in the trust business,
and everybody applauds.
But look at this -
this will go in your country as well, but this is Danish figures.
Who do people believe?
Which professions do they trust?
And we go up here, and we see nurses.
And down here, where are we?
Real estate agents, journalists, and car dealers, politicians.
If they had put prostitutes, they would have been somewhere up here.
People don't trust us even though we say we're in the trust business.
We are in trouble.
And if we keep on doing what we normally do,
we'll probably end up getting the same results that we've always gotten.
We need to change something.
I was lucky enough to talk to Helmut Schmidt,
the former Chancellor of West Germany.
Two years ago,
he was at that time 95 years old,
he had just got a new girlfriend - she was 80.
So I thought there is hope for everyone.
And this man,
knowing about democracy, politics,
and being a publisher of Die Zeit, also about media,
he said something very important.
He said we live in media democracies now,
where media have become more influential than politicians.
Because in media democracies,
politicians care more about their own reelection
than about solving problems of people five years from now.
So they spend all their efforts talking into the media's news criteria.
And if the media's news criteria are conflict, crooks, drama, and victims,
which are the tabloid news criteria being adopted by even serious TV stations
and serious newspapers all over the Western world,
then journalism and politics become tabloid.
And then Helmut Schmidt said, "News media no longer help democracy.
It's so full of negativity,
and media democracies produce populists, not leaders."
And then he mentioned one person -
it was Berlusconi -
as one example of a populist.
I was wondering if Helmut Schmidt didn't die one year ago,
who do you think he would have mentioned?
And the question is did we create Donald Trump in the media?
We were part of it.
Donald Trump got free airtime in news media in 2015,
at a time when he was not big,
for 1.9 billion US dollars.
Even though he's a billionaire,
he didn't spend any of his own money, because he got free airtime.
And as he said, "Media loves me."
Because why?
Because he creates conflict,
he creates drama,
and he divides everybody into crooks and victims.
Crooks - that's the Mexicans and the Muslims -
and the victims are all of you.
But you are losers; I'll make you winners.
Vote for me.
That was what happened.
We have to ask ourselves important questions.
One is what is actually journalism?
Carl Bernstein of the Watergate coverage
once told me -
which I've never forgotten,
I think it's the best definition of journalism -
"Journalism is not stenography.
Journalism is the best obtainable version of the truth."
So my moment of truth came one Friday night,
one year after I got my present job as news director at DR.
So I was in charge of all the news, also on TV,
and I was coming home late, Friday evening.
You know, Friday evening, you come home late.
"Ah, finally, weekend!"
And you are sitting there -
the wife is beautiful, and the kids are clean,
and there's red wine in the glass, and there's jelly in the jar,
and there's a movie later, and who knows what will happen?
It will be a fantastic weekend!
But first, we have to watch the news because that's what grown-up people do
in order to get the best obtainable version of the truth, right?
So here it came.
Welcome to TV Avisen.
There's a terror threat against Denmark.
Shooting incident in Copenhagen.
New regional trains not delivered on time -
they're from Italy; what did they expect?
Cervical cancer is now a danger to young girls.
Strike among bus drivers continues.
Woman abducted and abused in a cottage in Sweden -
we have the pictures ...
of the cottage.
The crisis in the Social Democratic Party.
An old man runs for President in US in a crisis.
Court case about an airplane accident with a few hundred dead people begins.
And suppressed North Koreans work out.
A giant mechanical spider creates fear in Liverpool.
Finally, the weather forecast: the rain continues.
Have a nice evening!
(Laughter)
And I was - I was watching this.
I was saying, "What is this?"
None of these stories
are not traditional good stories fitting in sound news criteria,
but is that an accurate picture of the world in Denmark that day,
or is it just what we call news?
The problem is that I started reading newspapers,
watching satellite television all over the world,
and I saw global illness.
All over the world,
we think a good story is a bad story.
The rest is not.
I went to the BBC to have a talk for them.
I was very proud,
and I took a screenshot of that morning's bbc.com page
for BBC News to see -
because we all look at BBC
because what they do is the right journalism.
So we went there, and I just said,
just see the world, the best obtainable version of the world that day.
And you can go today, and you will probably see the same thing.
But just see the words they're using in their headlines:
it's all about misery, wars, people being killed, bad weather,
whatever.
This is good news, bad news.
Who wins the prizes?
Every photographer in the world wants to win this prize:
the World Press Photo competition.
So they point their cameras
to what they think is the right filtering of the world, right?
So look at the category "News Pictures" in 2015.
Fantastic pictures!
But it's the only kind of pictures that we think are good journalism.
Pulitzer Prize Winners 2015.
Great journalism, but just look at the words there.
None of the stories are bad; it's great journalism.
But it's the only kind of journalism
that is the right kind of journalism in our culture.
We have to understand that journalism is a filter,
a filter between reality and the public perception of reality.
So if we now look at the public perception of reality,
what do we find?
Asking people in this country or in my country,
"Are you now more secure or less secure than you were 10 years ago?"
People say, "I'm less secure. It's a very scary world."
And we ask them, "Why?"
They say, "Because of all the murders,
because of all the crime, the terrorism, the wars."
And we say, "Where? In your city?"
They say, "No, in television.
And on headlines and online.
It's everywhere!"
And we say,
the facts of the world is the murder rate has never been lower in Denmark.
The crime rate has never been lower.
The amount of traffic accidents hasn't been as low
as since they invented the car.
In the history of mankind,
we have never had so few people killed in wars as right now,
despite Syria.
But do people know that?
No, because we don't report it.
We haven't had so few deaths due to terrorism in Europe since 1954.
Do people know that?
No, they don't because we don't report it.
Not because we are telling lies, but we forget to tell the perspective.
People have started looking into this.
Professors test people.
It does something to your mind.
Negativity controls news flow
and, therefore, also politics and the public debate.
Apathy or fear is the result.
The risk is that people not only deselect media as sources for news,
but also that they disengage in the public debate.
And if I do that as a journalist, as an editor, a news director,
I do a shitty job.
I have to do something different.
This guy does content analysis all over the world -
what is printed as news, what goes into TV and online.
And he concludes this:
"Negativity is an illness caught by even serious newspapers,
magazines, and not the least, TV news broadcasters all over the world.
The problem is not that their numbers are wrong;
the problem is that the picture, it's wrong."
Look at this.
Asking people in different countries about important issues -
what are the facts, and compare that to the facts.
Look at France, for instance.
How many people are Muslims in France?
The right number, in 2014 when this was done, is 8%.
Let's say it's 8 point something today.
But the average French voter
thinks that almost one-third of all Frenchmen today are Muslim.
If you have in your mind that one-third of your country has become Muslim,
who do you vote for?
Look at the United States -
1% Muslim population,
but the average American voter thinks that the number is 15%.
And look at this - how big is unemployment?
Look at Italy - they have a big unemployment rate at 12%,
which is high.
But the Italians think that almost half of the population are unemployed.
Where does that come from?
Look at the United States -
they had an unemployment rate of 6%.
During the American election, it was down to 4.5%.
But the Americans think that the unemployment rate is 32%.
Who do you vote for then?
Our news culture is still:
a good story is a bad story, and if nobody gets mad, it's advertising.
We say - it comes from America -
"If it bleeds, it leads."
That's the idea.
Not anymore; it's not true anymore.
Things are going down.
So we need to change.
Einstein said, "Without changing our pattern of thought,
we will not be able to solve the problems we created
with our current pattern of thought."
Introducing constructive news.
What is that?
Is that some kind of North Korean version of journalism,
where you ignore all problems and paint the sky blue?
No, it's not.
It's not happy news.
It's not the cute little story before the weather
about cats coming down from trees and other cats on YouTube on skateboards
so we can help people kill time.
No, it's about serious matters.
It's a supplement.
There's a need to supplement our news criteria.
People need inspiration to solutions -
stories that focus on ways out and hope.
And constructive news is about possibilities
and people who do something the rest of us might learn from.
It's about seeing the world with both eyes,
not only the eye
that will confirm the angle we had when we started researching.
That will be new.
Look at this:
News, breaking news -
more and more news organizations are focused on speed.
We think we can beat Twitter.
We can't.
The focus on breaking news is now,
the goal is speed,
the questions are What? and When?,
the style is dramatic,
we play the role of police - dramatic and conflict.
And investigative reporting is something different -
I think there's too little investigative reporting.
It's expensive; it's difficult.
But it's all about yesterday; it's about placing blame
to find the guilty.
We ask the question Who? and Why?,
we've been critical.
We play the role of prosecutors
sometimes judge, and we look for crooks and victims.
And constructive journalism is adding to this.
It's about tomorrow; it's about inspiration.
We ask the questions Now what? and How?,
and we are curious,
and we are facilitators of a public debate about a better tomorrow.
We focus on solutions and best practice.
When we do stories about lack of doctors in rural districts in Denmark
we do all kinds of stories -
the consequences, people die because there's no doctor.
And we ask the minister, and they don't know.
They say, "It's not my fault, it's my predecessor."
Or it's the regions, or whatever.
We do all kinds of stories.
The constructive angle is looking at other countries.
Have they had the same problem? And what did they do?
Look at Norway
How do you get people to move from Oslo?
2.400 kilometers up there, there's a doctor.
It turned out, they had a problem.
People didn't want to live there because it was dangerous -
no doctors.
They had to do something.
And we did a story about what did they do?
Lower interest rates low for studio loans, and whatever.
And that enhanced the quality of the public debate.
Journalism is a filter.
It's a feedback mechanism to help society self-correct,
and we have to remember that.
Does it work? Yes.
93% of all people in Denmark now use news for DR.
They didn't before.
We're now the most trusted news brand, both on radio-TV and online.
And we're now also the biggest news show on Danish TV,
and we weren't before, I can assure you that.
This is a mega-trend.
People are trying to experiment with this all over the world.
Not being very successful
because it's difficult to change the culture.
Constructive journalism answers the question
of why public media and quality journalism matters to society.
It gives our news a clear purpose.
"People who relate to constructive stories
are more engaged in them than traditional news,"
say people working at the Huffington Post,
which is why it's becoming the biggest news provider in the world.
Even the BBC has now,
one month ago,
decided that they will implement constructive journalism
because they could see they have a problem.
They call it solution-focused journalism.
There's a book out - it's even in German,
now in Chinese, Mandarin soon, very nice.
And as this changed, this just took a rundown of our news.
The other day - eight years ago since we started this -
the mindset changed, the culture changed in our newsroom.
And just to see the words in there -
I won't go through them,
but just look at the weather forecast at the end.
Even the weather is better!
(Laughter)
So nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come.
And you know what?
Bob the Builder has a slogan, which Obama stole from him.
[can we fix it, yes we can!]
And I think there's a need for us to change,
and we need to do it more now than ever.
We need to remember what journalism should do in society.
We need to be a trusted source for news if we want to be meaningful.
Not because of journalism, to save journalism,
not because to save the news industry
but to help democracy and the societies we serve.
It's about time, and can we fix it?
Yes, we can!
Thank you very much.
(Applause) (Cheers)