Q&A: Bradley Media President Michael Finnegan on Trust, AI and the Media

Double Hoo Michael Finnegan (MBA ’07) is president of Bradley Media Holdings (formerly Atlantic Media), which owns media, research and advisory services outlets National Journal and Gravity Research, among other holdings. He has served in senior executive roles with media companies for the last 14 years.

In November, he’ll visit Darden for a panel on Trust and AI moderated by lecturer Ben Leiner (MBA ’19) as part of Darden Executive Education & Lifelong Learning’s Driving Ethical Innovation in the Age of AI program. In his own words, he says he spends much of his time thinking about how the media can rebuild trust with society and help people navigate a world full of echo chambers and resistance to open discourse.

How would you assess levels of trust in society’s most important institutions today?

Unfortunately, it’s low and it’s on a downward trend. It’s been on a downward trend for decades. As you look at the U.S. presidency, Congress, the courts, religion, medical systems — trust in everything is declining. Not just from 80 percent to 70 percent, but people who trust is falling below 50 percent for a lot of these. Media has been falling for decades, and it’s now down to maybe one-third of Americans who have some degree of trust in media today.

What’s interesting is that businesses and corporations, in particular small businesses, have seemed to buck that trend and have moved into an area of higher trust.

What is eroding trust?

There is a natural human desire for a person to hear what they want to hear rather than what is true. Finding out that you’re wrong about something you believe to be true is uncomfortable. As a society, we are becoming less accepting of that discomfort. There are several causes to that. The internet and social media have been amazing developments for our society and world, but they’ve also enabled us to more quickly and more easily run away from the discomfort of disagreement or finding out that we’re wrong.

That manifests itself in news outlet consumption choices with people flocking to outlets that reaffirm their world view. I see it particularly in social media where algorithms learn what you like and what you interact with, and they feed you content largely with the goal of increasing your engagement and time on their platform. I don’t necessarily fault the business decision-makers for doing that, but it builds a cocoon of comfort around people that makes them more ignorant of the opinions of others or even of basic facts.

My belief is that the fear of discomfort and cocoons of agreement are being weaponized by bad actors. A lot of what we see is for political power, but you’re also seeing a lot of it being exploited by bad actors for financial gain.

What can institutions do to rebuild trust?

That’s the toughest question of our generation. We in this age have a particular responsibility to rebuild that trust or we are going to be in big trouble a couple decades from now. Rebuilding trust starts with allowing people to get comfortable with being uncomfortable again. The United States of America is the greatest country in the world, and it was built on the principal of accepting debate and disagreement. Right now, people don’t want to accept that disagreement.

I’ve got a couple ideas on how to rebuild trust. Media literacy should be taught in a systematic way to help our children be able to differentiate fact from opinion. We should redevelop safe forums for people to have conversations about topics in which they disagree. I would love to see us move from the standard election primary system we have today to a forced, ranked primary voting system. Our current process has candidates run to the extremes of various political views. It doesn’t encourage consensus building and collaboration, but rather fear and hate of the alternative.

In the end, having and maintaining trust comes down to having a complete picture of the facts that everyone can agree on and reasonable transparency.

How does AI have the potential to erode or enhance trust?

Unfortunately, it’s much easier to see the potential for AI to erode trust. It’s a very new technology. As such, there are questions about how it operates and who controls it. As long as people don’t understand the fundamentals of AI or any technology, there’s going to be a natural instinct to distrust it. There are a lot of bad actors that are going to weaponize any gap in trust or confusion.

Clear communication about how AI operates and transparency about how it learns, who is making the decisions, can mitigate some of that initial fear.

In the U.S. and abroad, we’ve already seen unethical uses of AI to influence elections. How are you thinking about the intersection of AI, the media and the upcoming U.S. election this November?

As much as trust in media is falling, news and information consumers need to realize how much of the wild west they are now in on social media platforms and other information environments where there is no requirement for information to be true or accurate. Left-leaning or right-leaning news outlets may have their biases, but they are legally responsible for the accuracy of what they publish. We have seen many multimillion-dollar lawsuits and settlements where news organizations have not maintained the level of accuracy required by the law.

Social media platforms aren’t interested in the vast spread of misinformation, but at the same time they are not legally liable for the accuracy of the content their users post. We’ve seen foreign actors engage in misinformation campaigns to influence U.S. elections and foreign elections. The rise and power of AI is only going to make those bad actors and manipulators more effective. There is a responsibility for consumers to question the content they consume. There is a responsibility of reputable media organizations to point out viral misinformation. And there’s a responsibility of platforms to identify and stop those bad actors.

I think this collective group has done a reasonable job so far of combating AI-based misinformation. We saw what happened in the election in 2016. It woke the platforms up. It woke the regulators and politicians up. It woke news consumers up. And it woke the media ecosystem up. There are a lot more alerts now that will hopefully stop these things from being as impactful as people feared.

Do you have any advice for business leaders who seek to balance the use AI as an innovation tool with maintaining trust with customers and employees?

Transparency, transparency, transparency. Transparency is the absolute key.

What companies and business leaders need to do to maintain trust is to focus more on the ways AI can improve things for their employees and customers, rather than for their bottom line. The bottom line will come. But if you can get your employees doing fewer manual tasks, a higher level of mental work, better work-life balance — if you can have customers getting better or faster service, lower prices, better products — they will say great, I love that you are using AI to do things that are better for me.

Leading with that focus will create trust and allow people to lean into AI, rather than having them bring out the torches and pitchforks trying to burn it all to the ground.