Here's Where It Gets Interesting - Consume Smarter: Recognizing News Media Bias with Vanessa Otero

Episode Date: May 23, 2022

In this episode, Sharon speaks with Vanessa Otero, the founder of Ad Fontes Media–the media company that is responsible for the dynamic Media Bias Chart. If you’ve follow Sharon on Instagram at @sharonsaysso, then you’ve seen her link to the Media Bias Chart many times. The conversation today centers around the importance of trust and reliability in the media. Ad Fontes analysts use the acronym RELI as news source benchmarks, which stands for reputation, evidence, likelihood, and incentive. As news consumers, it’s important for us to remember that true news  journalism seeks to answer our questions, not provide analysis or opinion. We are used to thinking about news in a binary: real news vs. fake news, but as Vanessa explains, it’s more of a gradient of reliability, from a top tier of fact-based “who, what, when, where” news reporting down to misleading and inaccurate information. Most of our news media falls in the middle. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Whether you're helping that special person take their content up a notch or adding that extra quality to your own shoots, Canon's got you covered. Shop the Level up sales event today at canon.ca. It's hockey season and you can get anything you need delivered with Uber Eats. Well, almost, almost anything. So no, you can't get a nice rank on Uber Eats, but iced tea, ice cream, or just plain old ice. Yes, we deliver those. Goal tend have you. And today I'm chatting with Vanessa Otero. And Vanessa owns Ad Fontes Media. And perhaps you're familiar with their interactive media

bias chart. I have linked it in my profile on Instagram many times. And they analyze media sources for both reliability and bias. And this is an incredible conversation if you care about this topic. So let's dive in. I'm Sharon McMahon and welcome to the Sharon Says So podcast. Thank you so much for coming, Vanessa. My pleasure. I know that the people who listen to this podcast, first of all, love what you do. If they're familiar with you, if they're not familiar with you yet, they're going to love what you do. And this is a topic we talk about on Sharon Says So, especially on Instagram, truly every week. I am so excited to just hear what you have to say. Can you give us a brief introduction about your work and how you got to do the type of work that you're currently engaged in? Absolutely. I love to talk about this.

My name is, as you said, Vanessa Otero. I'm the founder and CEO of a company called Ad Fontes Media, and you may know us for our famous media bias chart. And how I came to be in this position talking to you today is because in 2016, I created the original version of the media bias chart, which was just something designed to talk to my friends and family about reliability and bias of news sources. It got really popular. And then in 2018, I founded this company, Ad Fontes Media, to rate the news for reliability and bias in order to fight

misinformation and polarization. So now I have a team of analysts to do this with me. We can get into more details about that, but I'm really excited to be here because these are problems I know that are near and dear to your heart because we just see how this affects people, families, friends, so many aspects of our society. So really excited to talk about this. You're absolutely right. I recently read a Yale study that took people who were avid watchers of one news channel and paid them to watch a competitor news channel for a period of time. And they ensured that they were actually watching the competitor news channel by giving them quizzes. And the results, this was just recently released. The results were pretty remarkable in terms of the

people who completed the study had a very different picture of what is happening in the world than they did before they started. Yes, that's absolutely the case. I mean, I know it's a study that you're talking about and doing what we do. That's not surprising to me because we have teams of analysts who are politically balanced left, right, and center. And we have to watch and rate and read news articles and shows episodes from across the political spectrum, which means people on our team are just regularly consuming content that they would normally never consume. And at first, it's sort of jarring and shocking. I don't know if you've ever had the

experience or heard someone say, or maybe you've said it yourself, you walk into a room, a certain cable news channel is on that you don't like on left or right. And you say, oh, I can't even watch that. Just turn it off. Because it viscerally feels bad to watch something that you disagree with. And to get over that hump of like, it's just sitting there and seeing it to understand what other people are consuming. We sort of force ourselves to do that every single day. A hundred percent. I hear that all of the time from people in my community as well, where they're like, I don't believe a word blank says pick a news outlet, wherever they align themselves politically. They believe

that the news outlet that aligns with their political beliefs is the true and correct news outlet. Yes. And anything that does not align with their beliefs is feeding you lies. Yeah. And that's, that's pretty tough given that, uh, you've got folks on both sides, all sides thinking the exact same thing. So not everyone can be right. And right now I feel like, do you, do you agree with this? That right now, so many people have the standard of, if I agree with it, it's true. Agreement is the benchmark for truth. And if I don't agree with it, then it's a lie. benchmark for truth. And if I don't agree with it, then it's a lie. Right. And that is what we refer to as a bad heuristic, the bad shortcut. The world is complicated. There's a lot of information out there. We're in this period, this information age where we have access to more

information than we ever have before, which is a net benefit. It's good, but we're going through these growing pains because we don't quite know how to sort through all that information. We haven't developed all the tools necessary to sort through that information. So we rely on these shortcuts and agreement is one of those shortcuts. And there are other more important ways to measure how likely the truth is of something. And in our own system, we have a likelihood of veracity evaluation process, methodology, and our analysts take into account reputation, evidence, likelihood, and incentive. So there's an acronym, R-E-L-I. And often folks will just rely on one or fewer of those.

And you really have to consider all of them, especially evidence. What a weird idea, Vanessa, that you might actually want to have evidence for the claims that you're making. That's revolutionary. It sounds like this is something near and dear to your heart. That is a revolutionary notion. I know wild assertions with no evidence. Yes. Unfortunately, a lot of our news and news like landscape is that it's just assertions, just conclusions, statements of meaning inferences,

and not being able to sort those from fact statements, it's understandable why it's so difficult for folks. I mean, when we have so much information coming at us, sometimes we don't pause to like slow down and say like, what are the facts, the new pieces of information that this supposed news is delivering to me? And we don't necessarily realize that most of it in those formats is not new information, new factual information. It's just opinions and analysis. And there's nothing wrong with opinions and analysis, but we have to be able to differentiate when something is more like news and when something is more like opinion and analysis. I really want to get into your methodology about how you determine the ratings of some of a news organization's both bias and also its factualness.

I do have one other thing that I have observed recently that I wanted to run by you. things that I've noticed that some people in their news-like environments have been doing, which is making wild assertions, but couching them as questions. They're like, I'm just asking questions. Is Vanessa actually an alien? It's a fair question. And in reality, it's not fair question. There's no evidence that you're an alien life force. And asking the question then plants the seed in the viewer's mind that there is some legitimacy to the question that is being asked when there's absolutely no evidence to back up that legitimacy. Yes. And that is a great marker, a great red flag for news-like information that may not be very reliable because news is answers. News is not questions. And it's a logical, the journalists are, they might like start out with the question that they're asking in order to like write the article, but the article itself shouldn't be a bunch of questions.

And even when the article starts, even for reputable publishers saying, this raises the question that blah, blah, blah, when you see that, it's starting to get away from fact reporting into analysis. But the phenomenon that you observe is absolutely a trope. It is a rhetorical device. It's a logical fallacy even to ask questions. It's called begging the question. And so you're making an implied claim because we see it as a question and not a statement, we will sort of dismiss it and allow it and not say, well, that's a lie because the question is not a lie, but the answer, if you were to answer it in the affirmative is a lie. It's just a sneaky way of getting folks to answer the question in the affirmative in their heads. This is a really,

really common trope. And the more you see it, the more you identify it, just seeing this format can help you avoid this sort of misinformation. Our minds like to make up stories. This is a really common trope with conspiracy theories in general. What is the government not telling you? Who is behind all of this? It implies that the government is not telling you something and somebody is behind this, right? Without providing any evidence for what it is or what they're doing. So that's the opposite of news.

And just identifying it is a huge step towards not being susceptible to the underlying implied claims that are not true and not supportive evidence. I really liked what you just said, that news is providing answers. News is not asking questions. Right. Asking questions is not the news. Right. Anyone can ask questions. Journalists are in a position to provide answers, and that's what they should do. That's what we rely on them for. But a lot of people, especially on cable news, are not journalists, nor do they pretend to be in courts of law right and that's that's sort of tricky for folks because literally the name news is in the title of fox news and cnn cable news network right and when it's not they don't shift over at a point in the programming and say, and now we bring to you only

opinion or only entertainment. There's no like delineation. And, you know, there are some newspapers that do that, like more traditional newspapers that have been around for a long time, like the wall street journal or the New York times or the Washington post. But even if you look at our printed media landscape, there's a ton of stuff out there that's just analysis or like a well-argued opinion that's not labeled as such. If you look on the right, there's a libertarian magazine called Reason. There's on the left, there's a explainer publication called Vox. And those are both like heavily analysis. They're just not labeled news or opinion. And we have to make those judgments for ourselves. And even within a channel, a cable news channel, the morning show might be a lot of factual reporting and the evening shows are extremely

different and they're almost all opinion. So important for people to make those distinctions. Such a good point too, that the programming changes throughout the day, just like it does on, if you're just watching CBS, you turn it on in the morning, they have a morning show, they have cooking, they give you the headlines and then it moves into like soap operas, game shows, and then their evening shows, which are more like adult type sitcoms or whatever. So the programming changes throughout the day. And that is also true of cable news channels. The programming changes throughout the day, but the name of the channel remains the same.

And so perhaps some people believe that everything on this channel, again, I'm not picking on any channel in particular. I'm just like making very broad sweeping generalizations, but a lot of people then are led to believe that everything that is on this channel is news. Right. media bias charts. One of the things that you have done that it differs from what other analysis of media bias has done is it's not just how left or right leaning a news sources or a center leading news source. It also evaluates the news sources for fact fullness. What word do you use? So we use the term reliability. Reliability. Very purposefully.

This is a point that I think is very important to make is that a news source can be biased, but also quite reliable. Yes. And people equate the word bias with lie. Right. And we have to admit that we're all biased. Like even things don't necessarily occur to us as bias. Like we have in the United States, an English language bias, a generally pro-democracy bias, a pro-America bias, right? So those are things that exist, but we don't necessarily notice them as much if like a lot of people in our community share that bias. And you'll notice that the way the news sources are plotted on the chart,

if you haven't seen it, bias and reliability are highly correlated, but not perfectly correlated. We have a skews left and a skews right category. And there are news outlets that are very high in reliability in both of those categories. And there are news outlets that are very high in reliability in both of those categories. And there are news sources that are very low in reliability in both of those categories. So it's nothing wrong with advocating for left-leaning or right-leaning liberal or conservative positions and policies, but how well that argument is supported by facts is a big factor in reliability. We deliver those. Goal tenders, no. But chicken tenders, yes. Because those are groceries, and we deliver those too. Along with your favorite restaurant food, alcohol, and other everyday essentials.

Order Uber Eats now. For alcohol, you must be legal drinking age. Please enjoy responsibly. Product availability varies by region. See app for details. Interior Chinatown is an all-new series based on the best-selling novel by Charles Yu about a struggling Asian actor who gets a bigger part than he expected when he witnesses a crime in Chinatown.

Streaming November 19th only on Disney+. Visa and OpenTable are dishing up something new. Get access to primetime dining reservations by adding your Visa Infinite Privilege Card to your OpenTable account. From there, you'll unlock first-come, first-served spots at select top restaurants when booking through OpenTable. Learn more at OpenTable.ca forward slash Visa Dining. The other thing I think a lot of people don't realize about news, I get asked this question literally dozens and dozens of times a day. Well, why aren't you talking about X topic?

Why aren't you talking, fill in the blank? Why aren't you talking about the fact that Vanessa's an alien? You know what I mean? Whatever the topic is. And I think people sometimes misunderstand what makes something news. News is by definition, something new. It's new information. It's not repeating the same information from four weeks ago, just to keep it in the headlines. Right. Yeah. And that's something that we tease out in our reliability scale. So when folks go top, very, very, very top of our

scale, like what makes the news like most reliable and most valuable really to you? It's original fact reporting is our top category. And we include in that things that are high effort investigative journalism. So things that are just difficult for us to know on our own, which rely on other journalists, like hidden information in documents or information from far away, like being on the ground reporting in Ukraine right now, that's high effort journalism that's really important, right? So it's bringing us new information and that's what we put at the very apex of our chart for reliability. Now, below that, there's a category that's still very good, which is called fact reporting.

And what's the difference between original fact reporting and fact reporting? Well, distribution of factual information is also very important. News organizations will syndicate information from other journalists after verifying it. And below that, you have still, again, good, reliable sources, but they start to mix in some analysis, you know, some relevant context. But up at the top, it's who, what, when, where, and just the very, very relevant why. The more you get into why and how, the more it starts to be in that middle section, which is analysis, why and how, the more it starts to be in that middle section, which is analysis, which is still, you still can be good analysis, but it's not necessarily the same as news. It's like, you know,

predictions. And like I said earlier, statements of meaning and inferences and conclusions. Then below that, you've got opinion, which is less factually supported. And below that, you've got all the ways in which news can be problematic. So there's lots of gray areas of news that are just selective or incomplete or propagandistic. And below that, you have misleading information. Below that, you have inaccurate information. So most of our news landscape falls somewhere in that middle, right, between this propaganda opinion analysis range. It's not always so cut and dry, truth versus lies, and people want a short answer to it, but it's just, there's not a short answer. All right. Let's talk about how do you determine where a news source falls on this? It kind of looks like a bell curve. How do you determine that? Take us through your process.

curve. How do you determine that? Take us through your process. So we have a team of 35 analysts that are politically balanced, center, right, and left. And we've got this team of analysts, and we have them self-rate on the front end along 20 different political positions on how left and right they are. And then we have some measures on the back end as well to accurately capture how left and right folks are. But usually people are pretty good about assessing their own bias. So we train them in our content analysis methodology, which is based on looking at the actual content itself with the articles and episodes. And what we do is all day, every day, we have these shifts in Zoom zoom you have three people to a zoom one left one right one center and they have a list of articles that are going to be going through for that day because for every news source we put on there we get a representative sample of articles

or episodes before we put that on the chart so if you go to our site and go to our interactive media bias chart and you just just type in the search bar, New York Times, you'll see all these articles, these hundreds of articles that we've rated for the New York Times. And some are in the middle because they're minimally biased and fact reporting, they're up high. And then some are in the left-leaning opinion section because they're left-leaning opinion columns. And so the overall score is average to that. It's so interesting. And so the, the overall score is average that. It's so interesting. I'm sure you're asked this question all the time as I am.

How am I supposed to stay informed when I look at this and I'm like, well, that's depressing. Yeah. Like everybody is just asking questions. What would you recommend for somebody who does not want to be stuck in an echo chamber? They don't want to just have endless confirmation bias, reading only things that support their already held opinion. What recommendations do you have for a normal human who doesn't have eight to 10 hours a day to read the news? Good question. So like we make choices about our diet, we might want to make choices about our news consumption. So the sources at the top middle of the media bias chart that are most dense with facts, true facts, and less opinion. If you watch the nightly news programs

on the major networks, like CBS, ABC, NBC, PBS, you can watch a half hour or one hour show and get like 13 stories or go to like AP News or Reuters. Those are at the top middle of the chart and they really focus. They have journalists all over the world, thousands and thousands of journalists. If you just purposely go to their apps or to their sites, then you're controlling the way that you get the information because it's so many of us get information from either habits or algorithm. So habit is like, most people usually will have five different sources of news that they go to over and over every day at most, sometimes just one or two. And maybe it's like one website where you like the snarky takes, right? That's confirmation

bias. But if it's by algorithm, it's just the things you click, you're going to get more of those. So mold your actual habits yourself and you'll go to a highly reliable news source, limit your consumption per day. It doesn't take more than five or 10 minutes if you get a good newsletter or half an hour if you watch one of these evening programs to be informed and be well-informed and not overwhelmed and depressed about it. The incentives are aligned to do that. Anybody can create a website at the end, generate some outrage and get some followers and then have that be super engaging on social media and then sell programmatic ads. That system incentivizes the creation of these types of news sources, unfortunately. And like

the barrier of entry for creating something like that has gone down and and for distributing it has gone down whereas you know it's expensive to have journalists in far-flung locations i mean this is what's disappointing to me about the major cable news networks is they have a lot of resources like they're on tv all the time they sell lots of ads all day long and to increase the margins and viewership you know it's attractive and appealing to people to listen to opinions they agree with all day it's cheaper to have a pundit in studio or just by zoom and you can have like six or ten or twelve of them on one show that's cheaper than like flying somebody to Yemen or to Ukraine. And you see the disconnect where like

during this war, each of those networks, the cable news networks has people stationed over there and they're like doing very dangerous work. Two Fox news journalists were killed and one was severely injured recently in Ukraine. Now that work that those journalists are doing is important, important work delivering that information. So to identify the difference between like an AP that's doing that all the time with our journalists all over the world, or a local news station that, you know, they may only have 15 reporters, but like they're all 15 go out in the field and go get stories. That's a kind of work in journalism that we want to value whether it's national or international or local and not so much the stuff that's a punditry that's cheap

and easy to produce. That's one of the reasons I'm not a journalist. I don't identify as a journalist. I don't pretend to be one. A journalist is doing original reporting on something. They are out there obtaining the information directly from wherever it is. A primary source. That's right. They have to call the mayor's office. They have to get an official statement. They have to look up those documents. That is what the job of a journalist is. I don't do any of that. I will help you understand the news. I will aggregate some of the news for you so you can have a better idea of what's going on. But I'm not a journalist. I'm not out here doing original fact reporting, calling the mayor's office. People underestimate how incredibly important fact-based journalism is to a democracy. This is truly the highest importance. Yeah, it is. And you're finding information, the information that journalists try to find often is information that's difficult to obtain. It's hidden, you know? I mean, it's holding powerful organizations to account. Everyone's got reasons for distrust of institutions and the distrust of institutions is at an all-time high according to lots and lots of polls.

Institutions include governments and businesses, even social organizations or religious organizations like churches and the media itself, right? Because sometimes there are bad actors within those organizations and a journalist's job is to uncover that information. And it's very hard to do in our system. Like if we demand more of that as consumers, we'll get more of that, right? People say like the media organizations say, well, that's what people want. You know, they want the opinion. They want the argument. They want the bias confirming stuff. We're just giving them what they want and it happens to be super profitable for us. But when we can realize the damage that that does to our society. I mean, I don't think people quite

connect how damaging it is to have this kind of news landscape where there's so much junk in it. But if you think about how many people out there have a family member or, or more, more than one family member, but they don't talk to anymore because they're down a misinformation rabbit hole. I mean, that's a devastating consequence. How many people can't get along with, won't do business with certain companies or with certain people because of how much they're polarized and how much they disagree? Look at how difficult it is for us to pass legislation about anything right now. These are real consequences. And once we realize that they're tied to our media consumption, we can demand as consumers, better choices, better journalism. We have to do that with our actions. That's right.

We have to stop incentivizing the producers of the junk news, right. Disincentivize them from doing that by refusing to give them our eyeballs and our time, right. Corporations speak the language of money. And if they are not making money on what they're doing, then they will be forced to find a different way of doing business. Yeah. And there's a way that we, there's another way we can vote with our wallets. Look, there are companies now that are starting to become aware of the fact that their ads support misinformation and polarizing junk news. And that's not good. That's not good for their brands. reach consumers. But if you notice that a company whose products you like is advertising on something that's not reputable or something that's attacking and vilifying folks on the other side, you should notice that you should hold that company to account. I mean, there have been advertiser boycotts like, hey, this coffee company is supporting this stuff that's like really way out there and really damaging to society. And people will call them out on Twitter.

I think that's important. I recently gave a talk about why we should care about misinformation, why the average person should care. Because it is sometimes easier to just be like, well, they're just going to do what they're going to do. There's nothing I can do about it. But one of the reasons that I think it's important that all of us need to care is because our fellow citizens are making decisions that have real world consequences based on this information. People die, people lose their livelihoods. Democracy itself is at risk. These have very, very real societal implications when people take actions based on bad information, based on junk news. Absolutely. You see it happen more and more where it spills out into real life violence. I mean, one of the earlier examples is the pizza gate, but there have been so many

incidents that we forget about that fly under the radar that are directly tied to online misinformation. I mean, the biggest example being the January 6th insurrection, right? So like, see, it's not just that it exists online. You're absolutely right. It's real life decisions. And that affects how people interact with each other. The saddest part to me is when people say, how do I reach my family member who just doesn't believe anything that's real? I get asked that question all the time. It's heartbreaking to people.

Yeah. And it's an unanswered question, actually. I think that you've probably realized in your, in your work and I've realized in mine, you know, we, we do the things that we do sort of to prevent folks from falling down misinformation rabbit holes and to teach folks how to discern for themselves, but there's the preventative stuff. Like how do you reach somebody who's already off the deep end? And I think there aren't a lot of good answers. There's, I think a lot related to addiction psychology and their programs for addiction and their like cult deprogramming kind of formats, but being addicted to misinformation, disinformation, fake news,

or extreme polarizing content, I think has a lot of parallels with addiction psychology. And I think it's an unsolved problem. Like there's no 12 step program for like how to get out of conspiracy theories. I hope that's the next phase of work that folks in our field find tools to actually help people repair their relationships because they have similar effects too. If you're an alcoholic, it affects your job. You might commit a crime. You get estranged from your family. You know, if you hit rock bottom, those are signs that you need to do something about

this addiction problem that you have. There's things that we can do to make the world a better place. And it doesn't have to be this way where social media is geared to just take advantage of those addictive things, like engineer things so that it has the most engagement. It doesn't have to be that way, but we have to demand it. And it's not just crazy people that are falling for misinformation. Well-educated, successful people can believe completely inaccurate things because the way information is presented to us right now, it's very confusing. We just need to be equipped

to deal with it. And we can teach people how to do that. to deal with it. And we can teach people how to do that. Well, I so respect the work that you're doing. I absolutely love your chart. I feel like it is such a useful tool because most of us don't have time to sit and analyze 60 articles from one news source for ourselves to plot where they fall on a curve. Right. Exactly. Most of us don't have time for that. And so even though I completely agree with you that I love that you're equipping people with the tools that they need to be able to make these analyses for themselves, but you're also providing resources to people who perhaps don't have the time to do it for themselves, for all of the new sources that they come across. Tell us a little bit more about how to find your

media bias chart, where people might apply this. Like if I just look at it, that's great. But what about people who want to use it, say in a classroom or in a media literacy class at a college level? Can you talk a little bit more about that? Yeah, absolutely. So our site is adfontesmedia.com, So our site is adfontesmedia.com, A-D-F-O-N-T-E-S, media, M-E-D-I-A,.com. Adfontes is Latin for to the source because we analyze the source. And you can see that we've got our free interactive media bias chart. And that's designed for if you just need to look up a source you've never heard of before. We have nearly 2,000 on there now. A podcast, TV shows, just enter it in a little search

bar and it'll pop up and you can search up to five a day on that for free. But folks that want to search more news sources or dive into what we're talking about, like teaching yourself how to analyze this for yourself. We have programs with subscriptions for individuals that give unlimited access and methodology courses. And we have these designed specifically for schools. So what we find in high school, middle schools, high schools, and colleges is that so many instructors and librarians find themselves needing to teach news literacy in this way, whether it's like they're doing current events and they want to make sure like they're doing current events and they want

to make sure that they're getting current events from a reputable source, or they're writing a paper, an English paper in a first year writing class. And all of a sudden somebody's citing stuff from something in the bottom corners and the teacher's like, oh no, we got to take a step back and do a little information literacy. Librarians are, especially like academic librarians, are experts in this, but they don't have a lot of instruction time with all the students. Like not all the students are going to pass through the library, right? So we provide tools, including our interactive media bias chart, our premium and pro editions, which allow, you know, classroom level access or school wide library wide access that's unlimited. And it comes with short methodology courses as short as like 18 minutes.

And then we have lesson plans and activities that go along. So no matter if you have just a little bit of time or you have a whole semester or a year to teach news literacy by analyzing news content, we have resources for schools, educators, individuals. So there's lots of descriptions of this on our site. And for your listeners, your followers, we've got a special code. It's just Sharon says 10, Sharon says 10, just all lowercase. And you can get 10% off of anything that you buy on our site. And that includes like, we've got little mugs and stuff too. So thank you. Thanks for that. I appreciate that. Yeah. I know I have a ton of teachers in my community, you know, as a teacher,

I always have a soft spot for other teachers, librarians. So I know that there are a lot of educators listening to this and the materials and resources you provide are such a massive time savers too. You know, like librarians definitely are experts on this topic, but how much time do you legitimately have in a day to create all of your own resources? So yeah, it's fantastic. Yeah. I mean, you know it, you know, like how limited your time is, how much you have to squeeze in as a teacher. And if it's just like not squarely within what you're planning on covering, you need something that's, that's easy. And, you know, in a world that's like changing so fast, you need these kinds of resources. So Sharon says 10. That's the code. Yep. Nice. Thanks for doing that. I appreciate that.

Yeah. My pleasure. Put that in the show notes as well. Yes. Vanessa, this has been delightful. Love our conversation. We could, I know we could talk for a long time about this stuff, but yeah, I just love it. I love it. Thank you for your important work. I love pointing people to your resources. What you're doing is incredibly valuable. So thank you so much. Thank you. And I love that you have a fleet of govern nerds. We call our folks news nerds just because, you know, it's cool to be a nerd, you know, about this really important stuff. I totally agree. Thanks, Vanessa. Thank you, Sharon. Thank you so much for listening to the Sharon Says So podcast. I am truly grateful for you.

And I'm wondering if you could do me a quick favor. Would you be willing to follow or subscribe to this podcast or maybe leave me a rating or a review? Or if you're feeling extra generous, would you share this episode on your Instagram stories or with a friend? All of those things help podcasters out so much. This podcast was written and researched by Sharon McMahon and Heather Jackson. It was produced by Heather Jackson, edited and mixed by our audio producer,

Jenny Snyder, and hosted by me, Sharon McMahon. I'll see you next time.