[audio logo] ANNOUNCER: The following program is a production of Ozarks Public Television.

Welcome to "Sense of Community."

I'm your host, Gregory Holman.

29 years ago, the late Missouri governor Mel Carnahan signed a law that gave Missouri State University a statewide mission in public affairs education.

Part of that promise is an annual conference on public affairs here on campus.

Open to everyone, it features notable speakers from across America and around the world.

This year, one speaker is Scott Tong.

Scott is a journalist for "Here and Now," a live production brought to you on weekdays by NPR and member station WBUR Boston.

It features timely interviews with NPR reporters and important newsmakers.

Scott also served for 16 years reporting the news for "Marketplace," covering the economy, the environment and numerous other topics.

He's reported for more than a dozen countries from China to Kenya to Venezuela.

For several years, Scott was also a producer for "PBS NewsHour."

We're delighted to have him on "Sense of Community."

Please stay tuned.

[theme music] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to "Sense of Community."

"Sense of Community" is a public affairs presentation of Ozarks Public Television.

Scott Tong, welcome to "Sense of Community."

We're so grateful for your presence on campus.

Oh, Gregory.

So good to be here.

Thanks so much.

With our theme for this year's public affairs conference being Between the One and the Many-- Exploring Relationships and Tensions Between Community and the Individual, I wanted to start out by asking you about your work as a news broadcaster.

My understanding is that you got started in the '90s, and pretty early in your career you were working as a producer on "PBS NewsHour."

Can you just talk about how you got into this line of work and what keeps you going at it?

Sure.

I guess one of the early chapters is when I took a journalism class in college-- I went to Georgetown University-- the good Jesuits did not have a journalism school or a journalism major.

They had a couple courses, and the adjunct professor, Greg Gordon, he's a longtime up guy, investigative reporter.

And I got a little bit of an itch then.

But, you know, I, you know, graduated with a liberal arts degree and tried a few things.

Eventually I became a print reporter.

I worked for a health care policy magazine in Washington following health care reform.

You may remember when President Clinton tried to bring you-- deliver universal health care, and it's been a while since then.

So I worked on that and then spent several years as a producer for the PBS-- for the "PBS NewsHour."

And I feel like a lot of my formative understanding, knowledge of how to work in the business and kind of observe how the grownups did it was when-- was the period then where, you know, Jim Lehrer was an old school newspaper and television guy.

And he-- you know, rest in peace-- he probably went to the grave and people didn't know how he voted.

Right.

I mean, he tried to be that religiously evenhanded about any story, politics or otherwise.

And I think that was still-- we still-- you know, we were talking earlier on about how to cover the news and how to present it.

And a new generation sometimes thinks about it differently, but I think I learned from an old school guy in a way of his way of thinking about the news.

And I know we've got some fans of Jim Lehrer watching this broadcast right now, so that's wonderful to have a memory moment there.

Can you just kind of unpack for us what is a typical day for Scott Tong and how a broadcast like "Here and Now," your show on NPR where you're co-host, how does that come to air?

This is a two-hour live on air production every day.

How does that come to be?

Few miracles I guess is-- and some Hail Mary's along the way.

But so our program, right, it goes live at 12:00 noon Eastern time.

It goes from 12:00 to 2:00.

That's the live time on a lot of East Coast stations, and other stations will air it on a delay depending on what part of the country they're in and the station's decisions.

But we start off at 8:00 in the morning, and we have a meeting.

And like all places, it's a Zoom meeting.

WBUR is based in Boston, and so much of the staff is there.

Most of the time I'm not there.

I live in the Washington, DC area, so I tune in either from home-- I host from home next to Josie, our dog.

And it's just the two of us over there for the day.

Or I'll go into NPR'S headquarters building in Washington, DC for someone from one of those places.

And we-- the good team at WBUR at "Here and Now" they have a-- what we call a rundown.

They're like-- these are kind of suggested things that we can have on the show today.

Some of it is taped in advance.

Some of them are stories from different stations across the country of something happening in-- at a particular news station.

They'll deliver a story.

But often the top news of the day, we hash out, we debate, we argue kind of what's happening today, and, first of all, should it be-- you know, should we have six minutes, eight minutes, 12 minutes on something important, something happening in the Middle East, for instance, or in the presidential election.

Or do we think the public might be numbed by overdoing something is another story about an important topic, but if we can't treat it in the right way, maybe we should try to do something else.

The newspapers and the TV shows might be zigging and should we zag and try to start the show with something different.

So that's always the balance and often what we try to hash out.

How might the show sound for the listener with breaking news?

We have cultural segments.

We have authors, musicians kind of sprinkled throughout, and we try to have some joy.

That's the ideal menu.

You know, there's a lot of trade offs along the way, and we just kind of scramble.

We're taping interviews in advance, you know, between 8:30 AM and 12:00 noon, and other segments are live.

And then when the show's over at 2:00, we take a breath, plan for the next day, and tape some interviews in the afternoon, surely similar to what you do here.

Yeah, and I love this, like, in advance.

It's an eternity in news time from 8:00 to noon, and then you're going on the air.

GREGORY HOLMAN: Yeah, it feels like, oh, we have all this time, and then it just-- it evaporates with all the evaporation.

Exactly.

You know, my understanding is "Here and Now" brings in more than 5 million listeners through NPR and WBUR Boston every week.

5 million people is almost as big as the whole population of Missouri.

We have 6.3 million here.

Is that reality?

I'm a local journalist.

Is that reality of having a big nationwide audience like that live?

Is that something you feel is a pressure, or how do you-- how do you experience that?

I don't experience it directly and literally.

I'm either in a studio with, you know, my producer colleague, James, who's right there, or I'm kind of by myself from home.

So in a way, maybe radio on a good day can be intimate because we're actually intimate, right.

There's not a crowd out there.

We don't have to be speaking to the ballpark with that ballpark voice.

We're just trying to talk to one person like you and I are doing right now.

So in that regard, not really.

If it were an audience of five people or 5 million, maybe a conversation like this would be the same.

At the same time, we do know our audience is varied.

They have different views on many things, and we try to respect, you know, different parts of the country, different world views.

It's challenging, and we try to have our staff kind of represent different people, different backgrounds, different belief systems to try to see can we try to represent in our meetings, in our planning, in our story execution the seven or eight, you know, or 80 Americas that are out there.

So it is a challenge, particularly if-- you know, I work for a coastal station in Boston, and we tend to have staff members who live in big cities, kind of urban people.

It honestly can be challenging because sometimes we're a little bit too similar in our backgrounds, who we hang out with, and that's the big challenge of being good listeners is how do we go around the corner and get views of people we tend not to talk to very often.

So it's hard sometimes.

You have led into my next question.

You really have.

So 10 years ago, one of the Sunday morning talk show broadcasters on NBC-- you probably heard of Chuck Todd-- SCOTT TONG: Yeah.

He broke the US into two categories for one of his segments, and one category is Starbucks Nation.

So that's the more urban side of things.

The other one that Chuck Todd came up with was Chick Fil A Country.

SCOTT TONG: Yeah.

So the more rural side of America, and that was his way of explaining that year's midterms ele-- midterm elections with the House and the Senate there in DC.

That's good.

I wonder what you think of that kind of categorization and segmentation, Starbucks versus Chick Fil A, red states, blue states.

I feel like a person could argue these are maybe too generalized.

SCOTT TONG: Yeah, it's a big painting brush.

GREGORY HOLMAN: It's an issue.

It's kind of an issue that it's too generalizing perhaps, but I wonder what you think about that.

Does it hurt more than it helps to think in that way?

You know, when you first said it-- and I hadn't heard that quote from Chuck Todd before-- I found it helpful in an oversimplistic way that-- or how, you know, can those of us from the Starbucks side of the country try to understand-- again, one other half of the country, you know, it's not exactly that way.

And then when we look at electoral or voting map of red and blue, that very-- it's not that clean.

At the same time, I think it presents the challenge for us to go to places that are largely rural.

I got the opportunity to report for a week in Eastern Kentucky, Central Appalachia, very poor part of the country in a former coal mining place.

And it is a conversation-- the nature of the conversations I had with people just about their lives-- so setting aside the stories I was doing-- were just entirely different, what they wake up and think about and do compared to my colleagues in Boston, to my neighbors in the suburbs of Washington, DC.

So I think it presents the challenge that we have to go out there.

You know, a simplistic way of thinking about it that I came home with is, you know, Eastern Kentucky is a place that has fabulous yesterday, you know, East Kentucky coal electrified the country.

It heated up the steel mills that one world wars.

And then we learned the pollution that coal can create, but we didn't know it at the time.

I mean, it was heroic energy story until it kind of wasn't anymore.

And then the people there, they hear these East Coast politicians or others who talk about dirty coal.

And then one of the mayors there said does that mean I'm dirty.

Does that mean my money's dirty?

Does it mean, my family's dirty and what my father or my grandfather and my great grandfather did was dirty?

Now and-- you know, my wife is from industrial Ohio, where, you know, the heyday of yesterday in the auto industry.

And it's understandable I think when we get to go to a place and kind of understand that it's an oversimplification, but maybe it kind of presents journalists a good challenge to say, OK, let's get to the other side of the country, which really means let's get to the parts of the country where I don't understand the people well.

They don't understand me very well.

And the job as a journalist is to go-- GREGORY HOLMAN: And talk to those people.

SCOTT TONG: Yeah.

Get those voices out there.

SCOTT TONG: Yeah.

You know.

And see people for their humanity.

SCOTT TONG: Absolutely, right.

Yeah.

So that's one thing that makes me passionate about working in news.

And I'm curious, at this stage in your career, what are some things that make you passionate about working in news at this point?

I'm still-- I've been a reporter for most of my life, and now it's a great opportunity to be the host of a program.

And it's hard to kind of get out and report, but I think it is the reporting, number one, to find these individuals that you and I were just talking about to understand their lives, the challenges that are there to kind of bring them alive.

And on a show like ours, on a show like yours, you get to spend some-- several minutes understanding a life and a life that, you know, represents something meaningful or different, inspirational, challenging, tragic, and those stories, individual stories, I think can really get beyond the numbers.

They can be numbing, right, the numbers about the war, the numbers about the pandemic, the numbers about what's happening in Ukraine, all of that.

The numbers about the election can just seem very far away.

And when we can focus on a person, on an individual, so number one there.

And, two, when we get to investigate, you know, we're still trying to hold people accountable, right, public officials accountable, something-- You know, I'm ethnic Chinese.

I lived in China for several years.

My folks were born there.

There were a lot of great things happening there.

One additional thing that the Chinese government is doing is it's taking its repression, and it's exporting it.

And it's directing its repression against the minority Uyghurs, the Muslim Uyghurs.

So I was in Istanbul in Turkey on vacation a little bit ago, and I'm developing contacts and just trying to report on the ways-- they call it transnational repression of horrific-- the police and the government have horrific ways of controlling these-- they would say if you want to talk to your mother back home, you have to spy for us, or you have to put patriotic videos online for us, those kind of things because the government has that kind of authoritarian leverage on people.

And those are stories that people need to know.

They're far away, but power is power, you know.

GREGORY HOLMAN: I definitely wanted to ask you about your experience with China.

You happen to be a book author as well as a public speaker and multimedia journalist.

So your book in 2017 published, it's called "A Village with My Name-- A Family History of China's Opening to the World."

Now I've seen some interviews you've given about your book researching family history.

There was one comment that you shared with Minnesota Public Radio, and you said every country has a story it tells itself.

And I was curious what kind of story China told you as you worked on this book project and some of the reporting that you're describing.

SCOTT TONG: That's a good question.

I feel like the big reward for me in working on this book project was going to China with my parents to their home villages and learning about a generation that went out 100 years ago, a century ago.

My maternal grandmother, she was born with her feet-- her feet were bound, and then they were unbound.

And somebody in her family decided let's-- we're going to send her to a boarding school run by American missionary women, middle of nowhere China.

And that's the start of her story because the story China was telling itself was, you know, our country is weak right now.

These foreign powers are attacking, taking land, and we have to open up to the outside world, to the West, all these isms-- Darwinism, feminism, all of these things-- because we don't have enough individualism.

We don't have enough agency.

Our women don't have enough freedom of speech.

And my great grandfather also, he was an exchange student who went to Japan, and interacted with these ideas from the outside.

So one story that I think China continues to tell itself is a bit of an insecure story.

And that is, you know, we're a proud culture, but we need to interact with the world.

We need to connect with the outside world because for us to keep up with it and our recent history has shown that China can be very weak when it's isolated, which is interesting at a time when isolationism is kind of in fashion in a lot of the world, but to me, it's good to be reminded that some cultures-- and I believe China's still telling itself that story now-- is we need the great big ideas and innovations and the creativity of the outside world, right.

Globalization, which is not so much in fashion right now, is very important to the civilization, regardless of whether it's the Chinese Communist Party or whatever party is in charge.

To me, I think that is an essential story.

And the other, you know, it's come up in this conference that Missouri State is having is the long connection people have to each other, right.

That remember our ancestors remember we're going to have descendants, and I think the Chinese culture on a good day achieves that well.

And we just came from talk by Ray Suarez from PBS NewsHour, and he talked about the descendants of people who are coming to the United States and how that might shape our democracy going forward.

That kind of leads me to one of my other-- the flip side of the question I just asked, which is, as you learned about the story China's telling through your own family research, what did that-- did that shed any light on the story that the United States tells about itself.

And I'm just curious if you want to engage with that idea.

SCOTT TONG: Yeah, well, that's a great-- that's a great question.

You know, I think the-- I think for a long time, the American, you know, maybe the founding myth is-- you know, and it's in the Constitution.

It's in of people who came from somewhere else.

And there are parts of the world where-- these, you know, people all come from a different place.

And I think for a long time and it's an on again, off again story, and it can be a repressive story.

We know that is one of Americans thinking about, you know, we are a people.

We're an experiment.

It's a country that keeps changing and evolving, and as Ray Suarez is in his talk, it's going to keep changing.

And I think the proud version of the story that gets told sometimes, sometimes it's frowned on is-- you know, people who are-- the kids who are born today, right.

The majority of them don't have heritage from Europe as Ray Suarez just told us.

So then in 10 or 20 years, what is the-- what are are our colleges going to look like, right, and then what is the workforce going to look like?

And I think the optimistic telling that of America over the generations is that this is a strength of-- a strength of the country.

But the thing about founding myths, thing about demonizing others is it can be flipped in another way because we global connections, globalization is not always a good thing.

There are winners and losers, so maybe there's some tension in that.

So maybe what the connection is as I think about it is both China and the United States over time in the long term have given a thumbs up to, you know, connecting to the best and the brightest people in the ideas of the world.

But, you know, it's like my jacket.

It goes in and out of fashion, right.

Yeah.

Yeah.

A theme I've heard you say in some of your other remarks over the years.

Yeah.

It's great to connect to that.

We've given you a few toughie questions I think, so I'm going to switch gears to one that's a little more lighthearted, which is just what does Scott Tong do for unwinding, for family life, for free time.

Just curious about a little bit of the personal side.

Oh, sure.

Yeah, well, I'm a swimmer.

I mean, I'm not fast or anything, but that's kind of how I start my day.

I have some, you know, pulmonary issues, so it helps me start the day doing a mile or so in the pool.

So that's how my days start.

They start earlier than my-- than I spend my spouse would like.

We like to try a lot of different cooking things.

Our kids have been around, and they're out largely out of the house now.

GREGORY HOLMAN: How many kids do we have?

We have three.

GREGORY HOLMAN: Three.

Two of them are in college.

One is out.

We have a little bit more time to try new things and to try things in the kitchen.

So that's a lot of fun.

So we do that.

We have a lot of conversations about that.

And we now have time to read in a way we didn't when we were young parents.

We're in a book club, and I just like you read a lot of books for work, a lot of nonfiction for work and we talk a lot about that.

But my wife has always been a big reader, too.

So, you know, I guess what's great is when we encounter something that surprises us, challenges our own assumptions.

I think as a journalist, as a human being, those are the conversations that are the most-- that are the most interesting.

And we have a new puppy, so we'll go out and walk a lot and try to corral a rather large golden doodle in our-- GREGORY HOLMAN: Is this Josie, your co-host-- SCOTT TONG: This is Josie.

On "Here and Now."

SCOTT TONG: That's right.

No, she-- and her voice has been on the air.

Not planned but yeah.

She's been on-- she's been on the show as well.

GREGORY HOLMAN: These work from home chronicles that have-- so many us have been a part of since the pandemic.

SCOTT TONG: Yeah, right, right.

5 million people know that the mailman just came by.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Well, you'll always hear me saying journalists are just like people, too.

We even are people.

SCOTT TONG: Yeah, yeah, sometimes, right.

Yeah, sometimes.

So that's really where I was going with that.

If you're just joining us, I've been chatting with Scott Tong.

He is co-host of "Here and now."

That's a weekly-- or a weekday news broadcast, middle of the day from NPR and WBUR Boston.

Scott, thank you so much for joining us.

Oh, it's been so good to be with you, Gregory, and thanks for taking the time and for being interested.

GREGORY HOLMAN: It's our pleasure.

We want to leave you where you can find more information.

I'm Gregory Holman.

Thank you so much for watching the program.

Until next time, goodbye.

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