Here's Where It Gets Interesting - How Journalism Gets it Wrong (and Right!) with Belinda Luscombe

Episode Date: August 23, 2021

Sharon sits down with Belinda Luscbome, TIME Magazine Editor and author of “Marriageology,” to examine the inner workings of modern journalism in America. As a veteran journalist with over 30 years under her belt at TIME Magazine, Belinda provides a wise perspective on the fate of journalism in the digital world, the importance of fact checking, how to identify credible news sources and the impact money really plays in the editorial process. Coming off the heels of one of the most controversial elections in American history, Sharon and Belinda also participate in a discussion about the value of journalism in a capitalist society. For more information on this episode including all resources and links discussed go to https://www.sharonmcmahon.com/podcast 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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Buy from dysoncanada.ca. With ANC on, performance may vary based on environmental conditions and usage. Accessories sold separately. Hello, hello, and welcome. Welcome to this incredible conversation with the editor-at-large of Time Magazine. Belinda Lescombe has worked in American media for decades. And before that, she was from Australia. So she has a very unique perspective on the American media and having worked her way up to being at such a high level at Time where she can really see the entire landscape

of American news organizations. She has so much insight that the rest of us cannot even pretend to have. So without further ado, let us dive into this conversation with Belinda Lesko. I'm Sharon McMahon, and welcome to the Sharon Says So podcast. I am very excited to get your expert perspective on this topic. Well, I am happy to talk about the media as I have experienced it. I know it's a hot topic for some people. It is. So I would love to hear more about your journey. How did you

get to work at Time Magazine? You may be able to tell from my very Southern accent that I am an immigrant and I arrived in America on the tails of my husband who won a fellowship to study and I just sort of took progressively less terrible jobs until I arrived eventually as a journalist at Time Magazine. Took about four or five years from arriving in New York City to being a journalist at Time. I had previously worked at a newspaper in Sydney, Australia. I decided I wanted to be a journalist when I traveled to South Africa and began to look at what was propping up the apartheid system there. And I realized that the lovely, often very God-fearing white South Africans I was meeting had no idea how bad the situation was in the

black townships and the brutality that was being visited upon their neighbors for their quote-unquote safety. And I realized if people had better information, then they might be able to act more justly. How old were you approximately? Like, were you a teenager? Were you already a married adult? Like where were you in your life cycle? I was just fresh out of university. I guess I was my second year out of university and so super suggestible and had the crazy idea, I guess, that one person could actually enter into the media and make this huge difference. Did you have a light bulb moment where you were like, this is what I need to do? I did. I did. When I was in South Africa, I was with a, believe it or not, performing group, and we were doing these little plays. And we would do plays, you know, that were too obvious

to call them parables. We would do a play about how these people who wore orange mistreated the people who wore blue. it was very you know it was very simplistic we would perform these in schools and white kids would come up to me afterwards and say yes but you don't understand the black man is an animal and it was really shocking a play is too small a tool to affect this kind of disclosure of information that you need something a lot more mass and that I'd always loved writing and I was a terrible performer couldn't sing a lick those things helped as well you realized that was not going to be your life's work I kind of knew it from the outset but I was kind of I love what you just had to say about the idea that spreading information at a mass level is what you felt like in that moment was what was needed to affect change.

So what did you do next? I left South Africa and I got any journalism job I could get, which my first one was for a industry newspaper. These don't exist anymore, that wrote about supermarkets. And then because I had actually trained as a teacher, I got a job as the education reporter for a little local Sydney newspaper called the Daily Telegraph. Not like the fancy Daily Telegraph in London, very small. I used to joke that being the education reporter for the Daily Telegraph was like being the Australian rules football reporter for the Beijing Bugle.

It just wasn't a lot of interest. But it felt like that was a good start to get people to think about schooling differently and education differently. And then when my husband won his fellowship, I came over here and began to, again, start that whole process. Started at another trade paper, got a little job at an in-house magazine at Time Inc., as it was then known, and eventually was promoted to write for Time. Unfortunately, I was given a showbiz beat, unfortunately slash fortunately. So to begin with, I wrote a lot about famous people, which is not that terrible, but isn't exactly world changing. Did you set out to say, this is where I want to land as a journalist? I want to work for

a world famous magazine. What were your ultimate goals? My ultimate goal was to find an outlet that did serious news and took journalism seriously. So I wanted to be somewhere where you could potentially have an effect. I wanted to be in a magazine that people believed that was trustworthy. I want to talk a little bit more about how reporters research their stories. How can we know that this magazine, this outlet, this newspaper, this website uses high journalistic standards? Well, that's a very big question. It is a big question.

How can you trust? is that people are not just quoting other people's stories and linking back to them, but they have gone out and found original sources. So often you find that people in the respectable outlet are not just taking a series of facts and putting their spin on it. They've gone out to find the news. So they've primary sources that are not linked to somebody else. They're not quoting press releases. They have gone to sources usually on both sides of an issue. I have worked in all sorts of areas for time and we're very big on linking to where we got the information from, if it's a report, and of asking the questions that the person that you're interviewing does not necessarily agree with.

Let's just take a sports example. And this is what I'm making up because sports people are actually terrible interviews. But if you go to a team and say, what do you think? Why do you think your team won? And they give you one reason. Then you should really go to the other team and say, why do you think you lost? And they give you their reason. You know, you need to come at both sides of any story. So I think if you find that people are only ever quoting the same people and it's all on one side, also if they are just rewriting a story which they should have linked to and bringing no new quotes, no primary sources, it is extremely hard and a lot of work to find those primary sources. You build it up over

decades of journalism, of calling people and quoting them accurately, and then they'll take your calls and tell you what you need to know. These things do not usually happen overnight. Talk more about, if you can, what is a primary source? Many people don't know what a primary source is. A primary source, there's various definitions of this, but reporting a story, was the person there? Is the person involved? What is the connection of the person to the event you're reporting on or the phenomenon you're talking about? They're not quoting another person's writing about it.

Or they're not lifting the quote from a story that was written by somebody else. They have actually gone out and talked to a human. So we have a rule at time that if you have a fact that, you know, could be in question, you have what's called a red check, which means that you say, okay, this person's age is 54. Here is this person's birth certificate. You don't usually get that, but you know, here is why I would support. They told me this in an interview, or this is what their mother said. That's always a really good way to get somebody's real birthday. Or you can have a black check and you need a three or four of those. This is what New York Times, the Washington Post, whoever, the Huffington Post, this is what these outlets say

so that you have a lot of people saying the same thing for a fact. That is another way you can support a fact. So we have processes in place to make sure what we say is correct. So you use two different methods. I can either verify this using this primary source document of this birth certificate or their mother, or alternatively, we can support it using a list of other outlets that also support that fact. Yeah, and we have, I guess, lists that we regard as serious and that care about fact checking, and that would be the major papers, usually the major TV news outlets, services like Reuters or AAP. If you get a couple of those agreeing, usually that's a good support. What do you say to people who believe that the mainstream media cannot be trusted? I have found that it's very hard to dissuade people of that. But what I guess I would ask them is, well, who do you trust? Because, you know, your cousin on Facebook

posting something from some random YouTube, is that really also trustworthy? I mean, everybody gets their information from somewhere. and I think you have to ask yourself what outlets am I trusting and what you often find is that people who are sharing on Facebook or on Twitter get their information from somebody that they trust you know it could be their pastor it could be their parents it could be their friend. And that person has got their information from somewhere. And there's been a little bit of a kind of a degradation on the information as it goes down the line, you know, like that old game telegraph, you know, somebody tells somebody and somebody tells something else.

I guess I would ask, why do you think the outlets that are not mainstream are more trustworthy than the outlets that are? Like just rationally, I don't understand why that would be the case. Some of the arguments that I hear have to do with money. And they feel that there is some level of conspiracy to cover up information on the part of mainstream media, or that they're being paid not to cover stories, or that the outlets are owned by somebody who has connections to somebody that a story would harm, and so they don't run the story. Those are just some examples that I hear, certainly not exhaustive, but examples I hear of reasons why people may not trust, you know, a newspaper or a magazine.

And then the other big one is what they perceive as their overt bias, that they are overtly biased towards or against something that perhaps they disagree with. Well, I say to people that it is very good to worry about where the money is coming from. It's an old journalistic saying, follow the money. But every outlet is dealing with that issue. Where is the money coming from, from anyone who's posting anywhere? I would say actually that the money you should worry about is in the advertising. And what do advertisers want? They want an audience. They want a crowd. They want lots of people. And how do you get lots of people to read your stories? Allow me to assure you, it's not by telling the truth. It's by telling people what they want to hear. So a very inflammatory post that people really agree with and is outraged that gets people up

they share that a lot that's the kind of stuff that makes money not this kind of well this happened and it could be for this reason or it could be for that reason let's take an example in the news right now and i do this at the risk of getting a lot of blowback, but the president has asked the intelligence agencies to look into Chinese labs where it's possible that the virus may have started. idea early on because it was couched in these terms of China is attacking us and China is attacking us provokes fear and fear drives a lot of response. So a lot of people click on scary stories and stories that make us fear. The sort of more boring response, which is we have never had a virus before that has escaped from a lab. All our new viruses, Ebola, SARS, MERS, they've all come from animals. So this seems unlikely to most scientists. The other story, which is you're an idiot if you think that it came from a lab and you're an enemy

and you're a fool, that drives clicks too, right? Because people are like that's anger anger is a very motivating emotion the middle emotion which is we don't know it could be and it couldn't be which is a story that was told but did not get as much attention uh it just gets lost in the noise so yes money does drive these stories but only because that's what people respond to. They respond to fear and they respond to anger. That's how people get money for ads. It's all about an audience. So that's the first response. Yes, it is the money, but not in the way you think. The second response is, I find it curious that people think that everybody in the media profession is liberal. That would be weird. It would be like saying everybody in the post office is liberal. People

go into the media for various reasons. Mostly what I have found is people love to tell stories. They love to write. I also believe you would have to have an enormous conspiracy of journalists who are insanely competitive for stories. I mean, super competitive for stories. It's an enormous conspiracy for everybody to agree on anything. You know, you get five journalists in a room and you show them a movie and you say, who was the lead character of that movie? You're going to get five different answers. There's every kind of disagreement. So it seems to me implausible that everybody would always agree. I'm Jenna Fisher. And I'm Angela Kinsey. We are best friends. And together we have the podcast Office Ladies, where we rewatched every single episode of The Office with insane behind-the-scenes

stories, hilarious guests, and lots of laughs. Guess who's sitting next to me? Steve! It is my girl in the studio! Every Wednesday, we'll be sharing even more exclusive stories from The Office and our friendship with brand new guests. And we'll be digging into our mailbag to answer your questions and comments. So join us for brand new Office Ladies 6.0 episodes every Wednesday. Plus, on Mondays, we are taking a second drink. You can revisit all the Office Ladies rewatch episodes every Monday with new bonus tidbits before every episode. Well, we can't wait to see you there. Follow and listen to Office Ladies on the free Odyssey app and wherever you get your podcasts. Tell me about why the media is important. The founding fathers of America have explained this much better than I could, but I think it's important to have people tell

the stories of what is happening with no allegiance except to the story. And among my colleagues, that is what we care about. We care about the story. I wish people could see the fact-checking emails that fly around as we are closing a story, could see how late these journalists stay up at night trying to find the truth and trying to research and make sure that what they have written is correct. Certainly among my colleagues, there is such a commitment to like what actually happened? What story can we tell to help people understand the society that they live in? So I think it's very important when you are in particularly a capitalist society, you know, the money always brings the power. So you have to have somebody who is going to speak up for those who are voiceless, somebody who is going to speak up for the vulnerable, for those who have no voice.

You need to have an organization that comforts the vulnerable and discomforts the comfortable. I think I've got it wrong. But, you know, that asks people in power, well, what are you doing? And there's not very many people who have the right to do that. And I think one of the ways that America has become such an interesting and prosperous and functioning democracy is that it does allow these questions to be asked. It does allow people to go to powerful people and say, what are you doing? And can you explain it? And did you think about this? And what do you say about these people? Otherwise, it's all like you form a political action committee,

you raise a lot of money, and then you persuade your local politician or the senator in power to do something. Politicians in America need money. They also need people to believe in what they're doing. I think it sort of balances that out. I sometimes tell people, as much as we like to vilify members of the media, what would you propose that we do without them? Are you personally going to keep tabs on Congress? What are we going to do instead? I sometimes use the dishwasher repairman analogy where you say, okay, your cousin can come in and repair your dishwasher if you like. Maybe he can do it, maybe he can't, and it's going to be a cheap job. But if you want your dishwasher really repaired in a way that, you know, doesn't burn your house down and keeps functioning, you need to bring in a professional, somebody who

knows what they're doing. And I feel like that's a bit with the media. They just, their job is to seek out information and to ask the questions that other people won't ask. I think you need that. You need that for your dishwasher, aka society, to function. What effect do you feel that the media has on society today? How has the media changed us? I think the media in this day and age is much more atomized. It's much more fragmented. So you don't have people gathering around, I don't know, Walter Conkite or, you know, even Diane Sawyer anymore. People have followed the news sources that they agree with or that their friends like to post or that they think have the coolest logo or graphics or that annoy them the least. I think the impact on society and again media is huge. Media is YouTube. Media is Facebook. Media is, you know, video games. So the effect is just much more individual.

And I think the sort of rising distrust that people have in each other and the current state of the discourse in this country. I did a story for Time where I talked to members of families. They were riven apart by their voting habits. Two sisters who were very close no longer talked to each other. And I was like, it's important, but you have to be able to disagree and sort of stay together, stay talking to people who you disagree with. So I feel like the increasing polarisation of the country

has led to an increasing polarisation of the media and we don't have these common sources. I think it's really I follow a lot or read a lot of media that I think I personally do not agree with. I'm an Australian. We have quite serious gun restriction laws. I grew up with those and they seem very natural to me that people should be licensed. There's certain guns that people don't have a business having. You know, that to me feels very normal. But I make

sure I follow the NRA and the people who disagree, all the Second Amendment advocates, to try and understand why they feel the way they do. I have friends who own gun stores. You know, I think it's important to go out of your way to find somebody who feels differently than you. And I think that's true of media, that you should read widely. You should read widely or watch widely. Don't just stick your thing on One American News Network or MSNBC or whatever. Move around. You know, if you're a conservative, read The Nation. You know, maybe you'd have to go that far left. But certainly, certainly I try to read like a lot of editorials on The Wall Street Journal, as well as a lot of editorials in The New York Times. I love that piece of advice,

that it is not just good for our own intellectual development to be able to understand an issue from multiple angles, but it's also good for the health of our society to understand where someone else is coming from. So your family and friendships are not just wrenched apart because you have decided to vote differently. I so agree. I mean, I think, again, it's very important who runs the country. All these issues are very important. But it is pointless if you cannot hold a different opinion from somebody and still respect them as a human being.

I feel like people should just say, let's read less Twitter. It's just an inflaming medium, very short, lots of attacks. The attacks make no sense. I have one of those people who has one of those videos where I read aloud all the people who hate me on YouTube. It's hilarious what people will say about you when they know nothing about you. It's honestly hilarious. One of the things that I like to do periodically is to take a trending story and to take a screenshot of how a variety of different news sources have decided to run

a headline surrounding that story. So what kind of language they use, what kind of picture they run, and then to compare them. I find that a very interesting exercise. What kind of adjectives are used is always very telling about the viewpoint of the person who wrote the headline. Does the author of the story write the headline or is that headline written by an editor? Who writes those? I would say it varies by outlet. I always suggest a headline for my story, but actually a headline in this day and age of social media is very important. So usually there's five or six people weighing in on it. Somebody who is a search engine optimization expert will look at it and say, you need to have these terms in your headline. A person who says this is what the social networks will respond to.

Headlines, I have to say, are very driven by the audience. They're much more driven by the audience than by what the journalists or editors think. It's the art of drawing eyeballs. So those, yes, everybody writes them, anybody. It's usually a group effort. Different on a blog or something, but definitely for the big outlets, those headlines have many people's fingerprints on them. They need to attract the traffic. Right. Because that's how they get money. So if you don't like a headline, if you think it's not fair, don't click on it.

Also, by the way, people don't do this near enough, but a letter to an editor, nicely worded, proper, like email. I thought this was a little unfair. They get read. Do they? For sure. What might an editor do if they get enough letters about a story? Can we take another look at if we're being fair to the Palestinians? Or can we take another

look at if we're being fair to the Israelis? Sometimes it's unintentional. Sometimes you write a headline and then people take it a certain way and you're like, usually a headline is, whether it's true or not, is up for debate, right? You have to fit an idea in like five words. Sometimes they'll re-headline. So sometimes there's a lot of criticism, but usually they'll just ask their editors and writers to make sure they're being fair. That's what usually it will trigger. That's very interesting. I don't know that a lot of people even consider that as an option. They just post their outrage on social media. Well, because they get a lot more likes. That's probably true. More feedback than just writing off a letter. But that's a very interesting idea. If you don't think something is fair,

bring it to the editor's attention. Yes, preferably without using insults. Yes, politely and professionally say, yes, here's why. There's usually a very clickable link on any story or any website that just says, you know, letters to the editor. And I get them a lot and I read all of them. It's a great takeaway. Tell me about some of the favorite stories you've ever written. What do you love to write about? Now, this is like asking me to choose between my children. I think it's easy to talk about the things that didn't work out, or were bad. But again, you know, even those, I guess one of the stories that always fascinates me is I interviewed the American sniper, Chris Kyle, back when his

book came out. And I pulled his book out of our book room. And I think I was maybe the first or second mainstream journalist to interview him. And I found just the idea of a guy who had killed 60 people and was still walking among us, just fascinating. Like I had so many questions. What is it like?

What is it like to kill that many people? And do you regret any of it you know how does that mess with your head like to to do that and what is it like to be under that pressure and can you return to normal life after doing that and you know how do you decide whether to you know so I just found that to be a really interesting interview. And he, as you probably know, later was unfortunately killed by a fellow veteran who was mentally ill. And then they made the movie about him with Bradley Cooper. So that interview gets a lot of viewers, a lot.

And they hate, hate many of them, the fact that I was like, do you feel bad about killing people? Do you think we did the wrong thing? Like, do you ever regret any of it? They really want the interview to be, why are you so awesome? How come you assert a good shot? What kind of bullets did you use? You know, that kind of much more and my feeling is I'm not there to glorify somebody I'm there to understand them and possibly the cost of that war

that we didn't know like what did it do to the people we sent there that interview also because he did so few and also because I had to really persuade my editors this would be an interesting interview they were like no and I was like, no, really? This guy's going to be fascinating. So I'm sort of proud of that, that I think it's actually what journalism does. And I think people want journalism to do something else, like celebrate all the time.

That's advertising. That's PR. That's not what we do.'s public relations yeah have you ever written something you regretted well to be fair in this sniper story at the beginning of the interview which is on video I said I'm going to subject Chris to a little smattering friendly fire which because he was later killed by another veteran, I really wish I had used another intro. It turned out to be an awful and a horrible thing to have said, although I couldn't have known.

So I regret that. I guess when I used to write a lot of pieces where you're being sort of famous people and you're writing little funny stories about them because I wrote a thing called The People Page for many years. And sometimes you have to strain to be funny without being mean. The little means, okay, they're famous, they could take it, but gratuitously mean. And so I sort of regret sometimes, I feel like maybe I crossed onto the other side. It's a very hard line to walk. I can't think of one right now,

but I'm sure people I've written about could tell you some. Reputable journalists issue corrections when they have made a mistake. Do you agree with that? And if so, how would they issue a correction? Yeah, alas, I do agree with that. And I've had to issue corrections and it's like vinegar in my mouth because I hate to get things wrong. I hate it. It's when people email me and point it out, it's just the worst, worst feeling in the world. Oh man, I hate that so much. Like even now I'm having trauma just thinking about when that's happened. But there's nothing you can do. You just have to, it's like apologies, you know.

You just have to front up and go, I got this wrong. Was it an honest mistake? Or I was blind. Usually I have found I make mistakes more in areas where I think I know what I'm doing. So I'm very much more confident and moving fast and less in areas where I think I know what I'm doing. So I'm very much, I'm more confident and moving fast and less in areas where I don't know what I'm doing because there I'm much more like, if I don't know an area really well,

I'm much more rigorous about, is this right? I've got to check this. I've got to get this. There's no way to never, ever make a mistake. And so the appropriate reputable thing to do is to say, this was a mistake and here is the corrected information. If an organization never issues corrections, it doesn't mean that they get it right 100% of the time. It means they just don't bother to correct the record.

We have a very clear template at time where we change the story. We have a very clear template at time where we change the story and then at the bottom we say an initial version of this story said this, which was wrong. That's not correct. This is the correct thing. I mean, if you have four or five of those under a story, you want to shoot yourself. But definitely we make it very clear that originally

we published the wrong thing. New York Times does this. If you want a good laugh, you should see the things the New York Times gets wrong. Some of them are so funny that you can't believe they made that mistake. And they always issue it in a very formal language. So the dog turned out to be a Corgi, not a Jack Russell. The New York Times gets here. Stuff like that. Do you feel that news outlets have varying journalistic standards for fact-checking? Is there a range of fact-checking amongst news outlets? There is.

And unfortunately, fact-checking is becoming a rarer and rarer kind of level of the editorial process because it's very expensive. You hire people full-time. They don't write anything. They just go and check things that have been written and they need to have access to all sorts of research for which, you know, you have to pay. So as the money has gone out of media and moved towards Google and the social media and elsewhere, fact checkers have been considered more and more sort of a value added and the research agencies of many outlets have been gutted. But there are organisations that still really try very hard. We have a fact-checking department at Time.

I would say, you know, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the New Yorker, probably the LA Times, definitely the AP, probably still the major TV news shows. You can sort of tell because the pieces that publish a lot of opinion do not generally, you can't say you're wrong. You're wrong to think that pistols should be licensed, you know. Sure. So that's an opinion. In this crazy world we live in, even people's facts are called into question. You know, in this crazy world we live in, even people's facts are called into question. You know, what is a fact has become very shifting ground. Generally, your bigger newspapers are fact-checked and your smaller, more tabloidy ones, and your sort of buzzfeed-y, you know, they don't do a

lot of news that needs to be fact-checked. I don't think Vice has a fact-checking department, neither does sort of Gawker's, Gawker doesn't even exist, but there's that old saying, never let the facts get in the way of a good story, which, you know, a lot of people abide by that. I have to say, I don't know if the newer TV shows and the newer networks have them. I'm not keeping up with that. But you can usually tell because, as you say,

they'll have issued retractions. What makes something a fact from your perspective? Well, it happened. That makes something a fact. That's the number one thing. I guess the argument often occurs around statistics, like what do statistics mean and what does data show? And that's where I think you get more argument. And I do agree that sometimes statistics have been used

to make a point they were not designed to make, but I don't think that means the statistic is a lie. It's just, it's a can opener that's being used as a weapon, you know? So I think a lot of it is less about what is actually a fact than what have you used your fact to say? Have you bent it? This notion of fact has become weaponized. We're using this guise, this pretense of facts and fact checking to silence certain narratives. The allegation is we don't want those narratives to get out. Do you agree that that's happening or do you feel that that is not

currently an issue? Not completely understanding your question. Are you saying that there are some facts that do not come to light? There are some facts that are emphasized over other facts. For example, Facebook has teams of fact checkers and then they put, you know, warning labels on things that are like, this is not a fact about COVID. This is not a fact about the election. Yeah. The ones I see are all these facts are disputed. Yes. Yes. And there have been lawsuits filed about those fact checkers. People believe that their voices are being silenced purposely by the fact checkers and that fact checking has been weaponized to limit certain narratives that are being espoused by people who have certain ideologies? Haven't we always used facts to silence untruths? Hasn't that always been the way the world has operated since the beginning of time? Somebody says, you know, the world is flat and other people go, actually, we've got pictures from space. So in some ways, I feel like if facts are used to silence untruths, that's a righteous act.

You know, that's what we should be doing, especially if these untruths are dangerous. I'm so grateful for this conversation. This has been extremely interesting and insightful. I know that my audience is going to love hearing what you have to say, but I would love to hear before we close a little bit more about what you're up to now and where people can find you. I am still at Time Magazine. I've been there for 30 years. I'm one of the dinosaurs of that, more of a T-Rex i think i am now actually turning my attention more to business reporting i'm thinking about the effect of money and business on our current society as you know businesses are

incredibly powerful force in america and we've seen them begin to use their force for social change that they believe in. And also, I think there's a lot of really interesting people out there who have created businesses or have run businesses and are in leadership at a time when leadership is an incredibly hard thing to do. So I'll be writing about businesses and leaders for a little while now. I also still dip into kind of relationship. I wrote a book about marriage and I still dip into that world occasionally, but I'm just turning my attention to something else for a little while. If people wanted to find what you have been writing about, would they go to the Time website and search your name? How would they find you?

been writing about? Would they go to the Time website and search your name? How would they find you? Yes, you can do that. Although, you know, I am also on Twitter. I'm on Facebook. I think those are the only two. On LinkedIn, I guess, you know, usually on most social media, you could just type in my name. I'm the only Belinda Luscombe in America. So as far as I know, so, you know, all my many ramblings will come up. That is a claim to fame. You're the only one in America, 330 million people. That is impressive. I don't think Belinda is a very popular name in America. People always say, that's such a pretty name. It's so unusual. And I was like, yeah, they were six in my year at school. It was very popular in Australia when I was young.

So interesting. Well, thank you so much for your time. This was absolutely delightful. I would love to chat with you again. I feel like I have so many things I would love to talk about, but I very much value your insight and your wisdom. And thank you so much for doing this today.

Well, thank you for asking these questions. I mean, I really do believe that the media plays a very important role. I've always believed it. I've dedicated my life to try and tell truthful stories and try to be, you know, a point of light. And so I really appreciate the opportunity to think about those motivations. 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 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. I cannot wait to have another mind blown moment with you next episode. Thanks again for listening to the Sharon Says So podcast.