#140 — Burning Down the Fourth Estate
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Summary
Matt Taibbi is a writer for Rolling Stone Magazine and was the winner of the 2008 National Magazine Award for Columns and Commentary. He has written many books, including The Great Derangement, Grifftopia, and The Divide. In this episode, we discuss the state of journalism and the vacuousness and polarization of our politics, including the controversy over inviting Steve Bannon and then disinviting him to the New Yorker Festival, the Jamal Khashoggi murder, the Brett Kavanaugh hearing, the Rolling Stone reporting on the UVA rape case, the viability of the political center, the 2020 presidential election, the Russia investigation, and the vanishing attention span. He grew up in a journalism family, and he has a unique perspective on journalism and its current state of disease, which he describes as "absurdist" and "dyslexic." He also discusses the financial crisis and its impact on our understanding of what's going on in the world, and how we should be better at discerning the facts and values we're being taught by the information we're getting from social media and other media outlets. He's a good friend of mine, and I appreciate his candor and candor. Please enjoy my conversation with Matt, and remember to share it with a friend or colleague who needs to know what's actually going on around him. Thanks for listening to this episode of the podcast! Sam Harris - The Making Sense Podcast is a podcast made possible entirely by the support of our listeners. Please consider becoming one of our sponsors, by becoming a supporter of the show, becoming a patron of Making Sense. - Subscribe to the podcast, and become a supporter by clicking here. If you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming a member of the making sense podcast. You'll get a better listening experience, and a better chance of hearing more of what we re doing here. Thank you, and you'll be helping us make sense of it! - Sam, too, by listening to the show... Thanks, Sam Harris, and more of the Making Sense? - Cheers, - Yours Truly, Sarah, Sarah and I'll be listening to it, too - Sarah, too? -- Yours: Sarah, -- Thank you for listening? -- Sarah, Matt, , & so on and so much more. -- -- The Good Morning America?
Transcript
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Matt is a writer for Rolling Stone Magazine, and he was the winner of the 2008 National
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He has written many books, including the New York Times bestsellers The Great Derangement,
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And in this episode, we focus on the state of journalism and the vacuousness and polarization
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We discuss the controversy over inviting Steve Bannon and then disinviting him to the New Yorker
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We talk about monetizing the Trump phenomenon, the Jamal Khashoggi murder, the Kavanaugh hearing,
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the Rolling Stone reporting on the UVA rape case, the viability of the political center,
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the 2020 presidential election, the Russia investigation, our vanishing attention span, and many other
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Anyway, many of you have requested that I get Matt on the podcast.
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So, we haven't met, but I've been a fan of your work for quite some time, and no doubt
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we have friends in common, so we haven't figured that out yet, but I'm sure we're in some similar
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So, how would you, people will be fairly familiar with you, I think, but how do you describe your
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I would say I'm an investigative journalist, usually.
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I'm also, I mean, I also do commentary, obviously.
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I kind of, my specialty over the years has been the sort of deep dive into an arcane subject,
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specifically after the financial services crash of 2008.
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I did a lot of stories about how Wall Street works and basically translating all of that
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for ordinary readers, and I'm a humorist, kind of an absurdist.
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I take an absurdist point of view on things as often as I can, and yeah, that's, I think
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people would probably classify me as like, you know, on the left, but I don't really think
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I am sort of more of a writer than I am, you know, a polemicist, I guess.
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Yeah, I want to touch the financial crisis at some point, but let's just start with the
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current state of journalism and its health or state of disease.
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You have an interesting perspective on this because you actually grew up in a journalistic
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He was a student at Rutgers University, and when I was born, he started working very, very
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early and became a television reporter in his early 20s in Boston.
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And so my early, my childhood was actually a lot like the movie Anchorman.
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I spent a lot of time around those goofy 70s affiliates, and my dad was sort of one of
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Yeah, big collar shirts, funny ties, and he had mutton chops and all that cool stuff.
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My father's, my family's friends were all reporters, so it's been my life since I was
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And so I have a perspective on it that's not totally unique, but it's been, it's a big
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part of my life, sort of watching the changes in the business.
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Yeah, I want to talk about how it has changed and maybe changing just by the hour now, because
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we have this, this kind of horrible integration that we've all witnessed of journalism and
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social media and politics that the politics side, you know, since Trump's just seems unrecognizable
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So I'm just wondering, the thing that many of us are trying to get a handle on here is
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how we can have a sane discussion about facts and values, about what's actually going on in
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the world and what we should do about it, when our epistemology appears to have been shattered
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by partisan politics and new technologies and new perverse incentives in media, we just
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How do you view it as somebody who's, who at least has some distant memory of pre-internet
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journalism and, and who's now working as a journalist full time?
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Yeah, I'm actually writing a book about this right now and it's called The Fairway.
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It's sort of like a rethink of manufacturing consent and it's a lot about, um, what's gone
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on in the last three or four decades with the business.
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And I think you hit on a really important word when you talked about incentives, the financial
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incentives in our business have really gone haywire.
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And with the collision of the internet and this, this business, we're now more or less
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all completely, you know, at the, at the upper levels of the media and the big corporate
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outlets, we're basically in the business of telling our, our audiences what they want to
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And there are, there's a, a, a very, uh, a driving pressure on journalists to make audiences
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happy in a way that didn't exist probably a generation ago.
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Almost everybody now, almost all journalists have a social media presence.
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They're all, whether they do so in their day job or not, they're op-ed writers to, to a degree.
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And this is really filtered into the way we cover everything and it's gotten dramatically
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worse since Trump arrived because he's such a polarizing figure that now there's really
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There's, there's pro pro Trump media and there's, there's anti-Trump media and we, we basically
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market those two brands and it's, it's, it's very difficult to write about anything else.
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I mean, I've had, I've really struggled with it because in my career, uh, I really did a
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lot of things that were not about partisan politics that were about bipartisan issues.
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There were, there were things that had bipartisan causes like the financial crisis, uh, or military
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It's just, it's, it's very hard to market, uh, your work if you don't have an overt Trump
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And that's, um, as you say, it's becoming more and more pronounced, I think by the minute.
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It's hard not to be part of the problem in the act of responding to the problem.
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However, constructively you think you're doing that because it is, there's something so demeaning
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about what is now normal and the interest to be, you know, covering Trump all the time.
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I mean, just politically, journalistically on social media, the, the, the status quo is
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And, and it's just so magnifying of what's petty and superficial.
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And yet to try to make sense of it or improve it is to be dragged into the same swamp.
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And it's like, it reminds me of the fears many people had of the large Hadron Collider,
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that it was a fear that some future high energy experiment in physics might rip a hole in
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the fabric of space time and destroy the world.
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Like we just might open up a mini black hole that would swallow everything.
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Right. Or, or a nuclear explosion would ignite the atmosphere or something like that. Right.
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Right. Right. And I mean, however physically plausible those fears have been at any point,
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I actually feel something similar every time I turn on the news, what I'm afraid of and responding to is,
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is not the threat of nuclear war or cyber terrorism or climate change or any, you know, real problem.
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It's this high energy experiment of our own banality and childishness in the face of these real challenges
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that eclipses any prospect of thinking about these challenges intelligently.
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I mean, like yesterday, we're, you know, we're recording this a day after we had Kanye West and,
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You know, where Trump got to look like the sane one for, you know, minutes at a stretch.
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And it's just, we're at this moment where human history is an episode of reality television.
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And it's, it's so appalling. And yet to even talk about it is to be in some ways just participating
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in this circus. It's very hard to see how, as a journalist, you thread this needle where you,
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again, you're, you have to choose how much time to spend on this freak show, which is the place
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that is either determining the course of human events or just preventing us from dealing with
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problems that are just not going to go away on their own magically.
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I spent a lot of time sort of warning about this in the last 12 years. One of the things that I do
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a lot of, um, at Rolling Stone, I, they have me covering the campaigns every four years. So I'm
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now going to start my fifth in a few, few months, unfortunately. Um, you're starting, you're starting
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this early. Yeah, no, of course. That's one of the, one of the problems is that it starts earlier
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and earlier each, each cycle. Uh, but I, but I've been saying for a couple of election cycles now that
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we were turning the, um, electoral process into a reality show and we were making it more and more
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vacuous, uh, with each progressive cycle. And the, the media was sort of, um, celebrating its role as
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essentially judges in a kind of beauty pageant. Uh, you know, we had all these terms and code words
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that we used to identify people who we thought were appropriate presidential candidates. So,
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uh, if, if you saw somebody described as pointed, uh, in a campaign story, that was a, that was a bad
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sign. That was the press's way of saying that this person, um, is going to be offensive or difficult
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for middle America to swallow. If we use the word nuance, that was a good word. Uh, you know,
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of course there was the whole contest over who, which candidate we, you most want to have a beer
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with. Um, and we, you know, we invented all of these little ridiculous kind of, um, reality shows
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sort of events, which one's the most tough on defense, which one is the most, uh, is the warmest
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and the vacuousness of it. I think, um, uh, people started to rebel against it. I started to notice,
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I think in the Romney Obama election that people were just really impatient with that kind of
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coverage. And when Trump came along, I, I recognized right away that this was going to be a problem
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because he was in a way, the, the, the campaign was a bad reality show with bad actors. And here was a,
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an experienced reality TV performer who was going to come in and make a complete circus out of it.
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And the problem I knew, I knew from the very start that the problem was going to be that the
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commercial press was not going to be able to resist, um, that narrative. And I wrote about this
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from the start that, that Trump was perfectly designed to walk through the front door of a
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process that had already been deeply flawed before he even got in the scene. And that's exactly what
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happened. Um, you know, I, I lost a little bit of faith, uh, throughout the course of the election
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that, you know, I initially thought that he had, that he was going to win the against all odds,
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but then, uh, you know, I, I lost a little bit of confidence in that. I didn't want him to win,
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of course. Um, but, um, but I saw right away that, that, that he was going to fit like a glove
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into what we'd created. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I, I've been thinking of him and talking about him as
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an evil Chauncey Gardner, where, I mean, rather than, you know, based on his own talents and,
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and genius and strategy and vision, he was the perfect person to exploit a very flawed system
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and situation where his own personal flaws, his narcissism, his crassness, everything that's
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wrong with him as a, as a human fit like a perfect key into the lock of the present moment. Maybe I'm
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not giving him quite as much credit as I, as I should be for being a, a talented demagogue, but I
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really do think that just being the right ugly character at the right moment explains a lot of his
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success. Oh, absolutely. I mean, he, and I've talked about this actually oddly enough with
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pro wrestlers, um, because one of the first things I, I noticed in the last election was Trump was
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basically doing a heel act. Uh, if you, if you watch any wrestling, he was casting all of his opponents,
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um, as the baby face, you know, the, the good guy. And if you watch any WWE, you know, the audience
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is always cheer when the, the sort of gorgeous George character gets a chair across the face.
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And that's what Trump did with people like Jeb Bush. He made them offended. He attacked their
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families, their mothers, their wives, and they, they didn't know how to handle it and responded,
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you know, in many ways as, as just basically any sane person would sort of acting upset and, um,
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outraged, but that, but Trump made a mockery of it. And he understood that the, the spectacle was
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more important than what he was actually, the actual words that he was saying. And the cameras
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would, would be drawn more to him than they would be to his opponents. And that's a, why he got so
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much more coverage than everybody else would be. If you watch the debates, especially on the,
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the Republican side early on, he just sort of looked physically bigger than everybody else on the
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stage because he just had such a dominating media prep media presence. Um, and he knew exactly how
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to control that WWE dynamic, uh, in each of these events. And he did it with us in the press too.
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I mean, not to, not to drone on about this, but I remember being in New Hampshire and he would point
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to us, we, you know, we're all standing behind the rope line with our notebooks. And he would say
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things like, look at them, look at those blood suckers. They didn't think I could win. They,
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you know, they're elitists. They, they doubted me. They, they hate you. And the, the, the crowd
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would physically turn in our direction and start hissing and booing. And, and, you know, and I
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realized, you know, Trump, Trump is taking this incredibly boring, stultifying stump speech format,
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and he's turning into this intimate menacing television event. And that, I, that, that was going
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to fly. And it did. And that's why everybody just gave him so much attention. He crushed the ratings
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and it was just a perfect confluence of all these factors that made him, uh, his, his celebrity grow
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during that time. Well, I don't want us to get fully pulled by the, the tractor beam that is Trump.
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I mean, I'm sure he'll come up again. And I think when we talk about, I mean, it's, it's no secret that
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you and I are, um, about as critical of Trump as, as any two people that can be found. But I think
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in talking about this phenomenon and the, the underlying politics, I think we should be,
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we should try to bend over backwards to be sympathetic to the millions of people who voted
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for him. I mean, just to put the best possible steel man construal on the reasons for that.
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Yeah. I'm sensitive to the, the charge that at least on this topic in particular,
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I'm in an echo chamber or amplifying one. And I mean, the truth is, there's, I think there really
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is truly zero partisanship in my criticism of Trump. I mean, I think virtually everyone I've had
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on this podcast to talk about Trump is a Republican who, who is criticizing Trump. And I have very
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uncharitable things to say about the Clintons as well. So it's, there's just a unique problem with
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him as a person, which is motivating me to rail about him as much as I do. But so let's just back
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up for a second and talk about how we got here journalistically, because so a couple of days
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before this theatrical event in the Oval Office with Kanye West, we have the intergovernmental panel
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on climate change releasing a fairly dire report, which gets perhaps predictably now very little
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oxygen in the press. And, you know, half of America probably thinks climate change is a hoax. And we
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have a president who will say that it's a hoax. Journalistically, how did we get to a situation
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where it is so difficult to define fake news clearly enough to even address the problem? And
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we're, we're now living in a, with an ambient level of conspiracy theories and an unwillingness to
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engage, you know, in the case of climate change, a fairly impressive scientific consensus about the
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basic problem. And yet journalism can't seem to get a purchase on it. How is this where we are?
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Well, I think the, in that case, it's almost entirely a financial issue. You know, back in
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the day, maybe during the Fairness Doctrine years, when there was more attention paid to the,
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to the public interest standard, I think, you know, we were raising a whole generation that doesn't
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know some of the history here that the press originally was sort of a grand bargain, right? The,
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the government would lease the public airwaves to radio and television stations. And as part of
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the, the sort of negotiation, the private media companies were obligated to create programming
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that was in the public interest and convenience. And for a long time, there was an unwritten rule
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that the news could be a loss leader, right? That you could make your money on sports and sitcoms and
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entertainment and whatever else. And, you know, the news didn't have to make money. And that change
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that began to change, you know, with some very profitable programs, I think 60 minutes was one of
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the first news magazine programs to actually make money. And then in the 80s and 90s, we started to
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see this phenomenon of, of companies like, you know, like Fox, starting to actually make significant
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amounts of money in ways that they didn't have to before because, because they were being more
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overtly commercial than they used to. And so this, it's, it's hard for people to understand,
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but I watched this, the, you know, journalists just sort of grow up with this idea of what,
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what is and what isn't a story. It's something that's more by smell than by discussion. And back
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in the day, I think reporters would have placed more emphasis on how, how important a story is and
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in deciding whether or not something is newsworthy. Now, we probably are, whether consciously or not
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consciously thinking more about what's going to sell more, when we talk about what stories we're
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going to cover, what we're going to pitch to our editors and that sort of thing. And so climate
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change is just, it's just a tough sell. I've, I've done a very few stories on that, but I've done
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stories on topics that are like that, that are, that are difficult cells. And it's really hard to
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get traction. I think the hardest part is you, you might be able to get your own audience interested
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for a little while, but the hard part is getting everybody else to pick it up. And, and that's,
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that's really the difficult part is right now you, in order to affect anything, you need the whole new
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cycle. You need everybody piling on. And that doesn't really happen with that kind of story very,
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very often. Unless there are, there are powerful interests behind trying to get something,
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a lot of ink. It just, just won't happen. And mother earth doesn't have that kind of pull,
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unfortunately. Yeah. Well, climate change, you sort of have every variable working against it
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because it is a, this slow moving problem, which is in each specific instance, something that you
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can't, at least from a scientific point of view, confidently say is happening as theorized. So you
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can't say this hurricane is the result of climate change. You can just say that there's this general
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trend of worsening storms that we would expect, but you can never point to the, you know, the
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devastation from last week and say, there you go, climate change. Or at least if you do, you'll have
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the, all the caveats of scientists working in the background to kind of undercut you. So it's a hard
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problem because to make it journalistically sexy enough, it's certainly tempting to distort the
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underlying science. And then when scientists or people like Al Gore get caught for doing that,
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then it sets the whole conversation back. Yeah. It's very, you need a hook, right? To sell any news
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story. So people are going to look for some kind of event, something historic, maybe water levels
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rising to a certain degree that had never been reached before. Temperature is getting hotter than
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they ever had before. Um, I used to live in Uzbekistan and I remember walking in what used
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to be the Aral Sea, uh, and it's not there anymore. And so people, people look for hooks like that to do
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environmental stories, but they're, you know, if you're trying to compete against Kanye West, giving
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Trump a hug in the white house, that's just not an easy pitch. You know, it's, it's just not going to
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get the same kind of clicks and eyeballs, even from people who claim to be interested in the topic,
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believe it or not. Um, so, I mean, that's one of the reasons why in my own work, I've, I've had to
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resort to some pretty weird tactics to try to get people interested in, um, you know, things like
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the financial crisis or, uh, you know, Iraq war, uh, use storytelling techniques, humor, you know,
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make black hats, white hats, uh, make characters out of the main, uh, people who figure in the story.
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Um, and, you know, you feel not so great about that sometimes, but that's necessary in order to
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get people eyeballs trained on, on, uh, important subjects. So it seems that journalism has now
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essentially monetized domestic political conflict more than anything else. I mean, just like we're,
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especially when you add the, I guess there are a few rungs on the ladder here, which I know you've,
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you've written about, I mean, I think the, the first is probably conservative talk radio and Fox
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news and 24 hour cable news cycles, which just demand a kind of endless polarizing conversation
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about politics. But then when you add the internet and social media and the micro targeting of groups
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with, you know, Facebook ads, and we're now monetizing every individual's confirmation bias
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and addiction to outrage, do you, do you see a way of breaking this spell? What is, what's the,
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the exit from this? I, I don't know. I mean, I'm, I'm in the middle of the, in that book that I'm,
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I'm writing the fairway right now. I just wrote this thing called the 10 rules of hate, um,
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which are, it's explicitly about how, how we monetize, uh, political division, how, how we
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train audiences to be sort of pre pre angry and get them addicted to conflict. I mean,
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pre angry. Yeah. Pre angry is a great phrase. Yeah. I mean, it's, it's, um, I mean, everybody knows
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that we do it and we, and we know that we do it. Um, and it goes back a long way. First of all,
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I think people have to realize they have to think about the logistical challenge of filling all those
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hours on 24 hour cable. And when, when that first happened, the news had a very, very difficult time
00:25:59.720
making all those hours work. Um, you know, what they basically did is they would do a newscast,
00:26:05.820
uh, and have it on a loop every hour or so, but that doesn't work in modern day media. You need,
00:26:11.240
you need something new pretty much constantly. And so what, what works and what they found over the
00:26:18.460
years in terms of what works to fill all the hours and what gets people's attention the most.
00:26:24.400
Um, it's either a, uh, an ongoing crash kind of a story, like, you know, the, the curse disaster or
00:26:33.520
a baby down the well or a storm or something like that, where they can update it every minute,
00:26:38.780
or it's something like the presidential campaign that has 18 months of scheduled conflicts. Uh,
00:26:44.940
and you can create lots and lots of sort of graphic doodads to talk about the, um, your predictions and
00:26:52.360
you can, um, turn it into a kind of sports format where people argue constantly. But the easiest way
00:26:59.280
to fill all that time is just to do the sort of crossfire format where you have, uh, one,
00:27:06.280
one person on one side, one person on the other side, and they argue, um, and the, the show doesn't
00:27:12.160
really work if they try to reach an accommodation during the show, it has to be conflict. All right.
00:27:18.940
I mean, if you think about what crossfire does and, and Saturday night live was lampooning this way
00:27:24.640
back in the seventies with point counterpoint, the idea that people would sort of dress up in shirts
00:27:29.620
and ties and, and scream insults at each other over things that have nothing to do with their lives,
00:27:34.040
with their lives. It's totally crazy, but we do it constantly. And that format works so well as a
00:27:40.960
way to fill the hours that it went from being a variety show that we tuned into occasionally to
00:27:46.520
being the entire news landscape. And we have some channels that are from the left and some channels
00:27:51.940
that are from the right, and they're just lobbing grenades at each other constantly. And the additional
00:27:58.180
factor that you talked about with the internet now means that all of those algorithms are going to
00:28:03.520
be searching for audiences who are already sort of preselected to agree with, with certain topics.
00:28:09.480
So when you create a story, you know, about how, you know, you just say Trump is awful, the 10,
00:28:15.700
the 10, 101 ways Trump was awful or whatever, right. There's going to be an algorithm that's going to
00:28:19.700
identify all the people, um, who are going to like that story or, or likely to like that story.
00:28:24.800
And it's going to feed it to them through the Facebook feed and through various other social media
00:28:29.640
methods. And so there's all these commercial polls that, that push us to try to create that
00:28:37.100
kind of content, which is just about feeding people's hate reflexes. And it's really unfortunate
00:28:42.880
because what ends up happening is that people like me, who, when we come across a topic that
00:28:49.080
isn't partisan or isn't going to make you angry, but is, you know, if you, if you cover it correctly,
00:28:54.840
it's going to make you maybe think about your own culpability, or it's going to make your readers
00:28:59.640
not so pleased with the politicians that they vote for. There's kind of an internal
00:29:04.560
discouragement from doing that kind of material. I mean, I'm sure I've heard you talk about how
00:29:09.820
the certain segment of your audience, you know, turned out to be Trump supporters. It's difficult,
00:29:14.440
right. Went to, to do content that maybe, you know, is going to turn those people off. And that's,
00:29:20.780
I think that's unconscious. That's something that's unconscious and going on at the unconscious
00:29:25.300
level with a lot of reporters these days. It's one of those situations where incentives
00:29:30.100
are more powerful than what most people at least can consciously will themselves to do.
00:29:37.920
You can keep your eye on the public good a fair amount, but if all of your incentives,
00:29:44.600
especially your, you know, incentives for being able to pay your rent and advance your career
00:29:49.100
are running the other way, it's not hard to guess what's going to win there, at least for most
00:29:53.920
people. I noticed you were fairly critical of the New Yorker festival. Beyond there, just
00:30:00.660
disinviting Steve Bannon, which we can talk about. I think you and I had a very similar take on that,
00:30:05.840
but you seemed much more critical than I would tend to be in this environment, just around their
00:30:12.080
business model. They were somehow prostituting journalism by creating events that people
00:30:18.480
would pay a fair amount of money to attend. But again, one of the main problems from my point
00:30:23.820
of view is we're in an environment now where virtually everyone expects to get their news
00:30:28.920
for free. So if the New Yorker can create a, you know, a yearly conference that's expensive that
00:30:35.340
people actually want to pay for, to see, you know, their favorite writers or whoever get up on stage
00:30:40.940
and talk, why be skeptical of that project given the financial exingencies now with journalism just
00:30:48.660
trying to figure out how to stay in business? You're right. I mean, I was probably unfair about
00:30:52.960
that. I just kind of reacted to that whole thing. As somebody who's just sort of been in the business
00:31:00.980
for a long time, it would be tough for me to do that kind of event. And, you know, I don't know.
00:31:06.360
I just have a sort of an old school take on that. It just feels kind of odd to me for some reason.
00:31:14.740
But I understand it. I mean, you know, it's a way to make money now. And it's proven, I guess,
00:31:22.020
to be pretty successful. And people do want to meet their favorite writers and pundits and that sort of
00:31:28.820
thing. So I guess it's analogous to what happened in the music industry where, you know, musicians
00:31:36.340
can't make nearly as much money actually selling their music. So they have to tour. And the problem
00:31:42.220
for writers has always been that there is no real analog for touring for most writers. I mean,
00:31:48.560
some can have careers as speakers, but it seems like this New Yorker festival, which I've never
00:31:53.380
attended. So, you know, I'm just guessing, but it seems like this is a micro example of a magazine
00:32:01.680
figuring out some touring component to its business model, which, you know, not obviously not every
00:32:07.500
magazine can do. But that part seems good to me, provided there's actually a market for it. What
00:32:13.220
really was objectively not good was how they handled the Steve Bannon situation. I don't know if you want
00:32:20.360
to give your, I've already spoken about that briefly on the podcast, but I don't know if you want to give
00:32:24.520
me your take on what happened there. Well, I do think that interviewing Steve Bannon is totally
00:32:31.240
a legitimate thing to do. And when I first heard about that controversy, I guess I didn't understand
00:32:38.460
what the New Yorker festival was. And I should probably just back up and say, again, I grew up in
00:32:43.320
with people who, in an era when the salespeople, the ad people were literally not allowed in the same
00:32:51.580
newsroom as the reporters. Like there was a Chinese wall between the press and the business side,
00:32:58.260
and we just didn't have to think about it. And so the idea of the festival, I think from an old
00:33:06.140
school perspective, it just feels a little weird to me. But if you add the component of we're going to
00:33:12.260
charge an extra special high amount of money to bring Steve Bannon in so that everybody can
00:33:20.480
gawk at the public spectacle of him on stage, I don't know if that's, you know, that's basically
00:33:28.840
monetizing the Trump phenomenon in a way that's a little bit too direct for my taste. I mean,
00:33:35.200
I understand why they did it. And some of the things that David Remnick, the editor of the New Yorker
00:33:40.500
said about, you know, we need to challenge people who are powerful. And, you know, all of that is
00:33:47.300
valid. And in fact, one of the things that I wrote about was that,
00:33:50.480
you know, if you've watched the, if you read the Michael Wolf book, and there's all these
00:33:55.400
amazing questions that I would like to ask somebody like Steve Bannon, like, what did he,
00:34:00.080
what was he talking about when he was cheering the nomination of a money laundering prosecutor to the
00:34:07.100
Mueller, the Mueller's team, and also, you know, about his sort of strategic decisions during the
00:34:12.740
campaign, all that stuff is interesting, and it's worth exploring. But in the context of that,
00:34:18.420
of that festival, it felt like a little bit too commercialized for me. I don't know. What did
00:34:24.740
you think about that? Well, you just brought up two interesting points that are bigger than the
00:34:29.220
festival. One is just that the general phenomenon of wondering who is worth talking to. This is
00:34:36.880
something I've struggled with openly on the podcast. You know, is it okay to, as it's said, give a
00:34:44.560
platform to person X when there's interesting differences of opinion to be aired in that
00:34:52.560
conversation? The other thing you brought up is just monetizing the Trump phenomenon in general.
00:34:58.260
Let's just take that piece first. It seems to me that journalism in general must have benefited from
00:35:04.940
Trump, right? I'm wondering if there's a kind of a perverse incentive now that has crept in where
00:35:09.540
this is the best thing that's ever happened to CNN or any of these other outlets. Is that,
00:35:14.740
has anyone quantified just how good Trump has been for journalism?
00:35:18.440
Yes. I mean, there have been lots of reports about this. The numbers are historic. I mean,
00:35:24.340
typically, the networks in the year after a presidential election, the cable networks anyway,
00:35:30.320
I see significant drops in ratings that didn't happen with CNN. CNN, I think in the first year
00:35:36.740
of the Trump presidency made a billion dollars profit. And there was a really interesting phenomenon
00:35:41.620
for me about that, which was poll after poll showed that there was less trust of the media than ever,
00:35:49.540
including on both sides of the spectrum among Republicans and Democrats, but, you know,
00:35:55.000
particularly among conservatives. But we're, the media has been consumed more than ever. So what
00:36:00.080
does that mean? I mean, that means that we're starting to eat into the entertainment world's
00:36:04.800
budget, basically, because people aren't really consuming us as a product that they trust.
00:36:09.100
They're consuming us as some other kind of product that serves some other kind of purpose.
00:36:13.640
And that's pretty weird. I mean, all the networks have been just amazing ratings ever since Trump has
00:36:19.800
been in office. And that, that's one of the reasons why I have this queasy feeling about a lot,
00:36:26.260
a lot of Trump coverage. It's, you know, they, originally, when he first came on the scene,
00:36:32.600
there was a lot of sort of snickering and let's give this, this clown a little airtime to, to,
00:36:41.840
because we know it's going to get ratings. And then when people felt bad about it,
00:36:45.440
and they realized that they were helping him get, get to the presidency, they just,
00:36:49.820
they sort of started to add this, you know, instead of a million hours of Trump,
00:36:54.040
it's a million hours of Trump is bad. I think it's basically the same thing. And I really worry
00:36:58.840
about that. I think that's not, that's not a positive phenomenon for the, for the press.
00:37:02.960
Because it's so easy now to make money with Trump, Trump content. And that's, you know,
00:37:08.480
that's, that's a bad habit for the press to break. Yeah. So, okay. So back to the, uh,
00:37:15.240
platforming thing. I'd love to talk about that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The nefarious podcast guest or
00:37:20.880
interview guest. When I've described this on my podcast, I've talked about it in terms of this
00:37:26.060
uncanny valley phenomenon, where if someone is bad enough, then it's just, just a straightforward
00:37:33.680
decision. I guess the clearest case is, I mean, you could sit down and talk to Hitler. That would
00:37:38.540
be interesting. But to talk to Richard Spencer is to give a platform to an awful person with his
00:37:44.960
awful ideas. And I just wonder how you, I mean, again, I totally agree with you about Steve Bannon.
00:37:51.180
He's not, he's not Richard Spencer. I think he's, he's unfairly slimed as being that sort of
00:37:58.000
right-wing xenophobe or racist. And he's, he's someone who already has a platform and he's already
00:38:05.720
used it to great effect. So he's somebody who has, who has made the news and in large measure is
00:38:12.400
responsible for who's currently in the Oval Office. So he seems worth talking to. And the idea that David
00:38:19.920
Remnick could not have performed his side of that interview in a way that would have credibly
00:38:27.340
undercut Bannon's bad ideas insofar as they are bad is just to put so little faith in, in Remnick
00:38:35.080
as a journalist and in just the possibility of shedding sunlight on bad ideas that it's just,
00:38:40.960
it made everyone on the disinvite side of the ledger look craven. And so, I mean, it was,
00:38:47.220
it was just the worst possible outcome because it, Bannon gets to say that he destroyed the left
00:38:51.700
without even showing up. Right. Yeah. I, I don't know. I mean, I, the, the, the deep platforming
00:38:56.220
movement on campuses is something that I've never covered. I've never had any reason to really look
00:39:02.880
at it, but in journalism, I don't see that it really has a place because the, the standard is just,
00:39:09.320
is the person newsworthy or not? Do they have something that we want to know or not to talk about?
00:39:14.480
And in the case of Bannon, you know, he, it's easily true that he's newsworthy. There are a
00:39:21.000
million things that I would want to ask Steve Bannon. And I understand the objections. I mean,
00:39:26.180
I heard a lot of them when I wrote about this, that there's, there's nothing you're going to
00:39:29.860
learn from Steve Bannon. He's, he's a racist and a white supremacist and that's all you need to know.
00:39:35.500
Well, you know, I don't, I don't think that's true. I think they're, Donald Trump would not be
00:39:40.200
president right now if it weren't for Bannon and his tactics were very successful among other things
00:39:46.080
in conning a whole lot of journalists like myself. And I would love to learn from him what his thinking
00:39:53.920
was throughout that process in this, you know, in the summer of 2016. I'm sure there are a million
00:39:59.980
things that have happened in the white house that if he were inclined to talk about, I would love to
00:40:05.380
hear about. He's a newsworthy person, you know, Spencer, that's a little bit different because
00:40:11.300
you know, there's, there's no, there's, there's very little news value in what he's done. I think
00:40:19.320
you're, if you're, you know, a big corporate media outlet and you're covering Spencer, you're basically
00:40:25.160
just giving him free advertising. I don't love that. But, but you're absolutely right. I mean,
00:40:32.320
you, we, we, we interview all kinds of crazy people and we don't think about whether they're
00:40:36.400
good people or bad people. I've never, at least I never have. They just, I just think about whether
00:40:40.180
they're, they're newsworthy or not. I mean, would you interview bin Laden? Of course you would. So
00:40:45.020
I don't, I don't understand. I found that whole thing really troubling and I worry about it creeping
00:40:52.740
into reporting because if you add the requirement that reporters now have to sanitize the content for
00:41:01.680
audiences and, and add all these indicators so that audiences know that this or that idea
00:41:07.760
is bad. First of all, that's showing a remarkable, like a lack of, of confidence in your audience's
00:41:16.240
ability to understand things. And secondly, that's just not what we do. We're, we're in the business
00:41:21.760
of sort of finding out what happened and understanding things and letting the, the world do with that
00:41:28.480
information and what it will. We're not, I hope we're not in the business of making political
00:41:33.860
judgments about people, you know, in, in, in the same way that, uh, you know, a campus administrator
00:41:39.880
would have, might have to take into consideration when they're deciding whether or not to invite
00:41:43.780
somebody or something like that. Would you interview Alex Jones? Um, yeah, I probably would.
00:41:50.440
What do you think about it? I know you've written about this, but what do you think about the,
00:41:52.920
the censorship of him by, um, the various social media channels that have censored him? I, what was
00:41:59.260
it all of them or what did, is he still on Twitter? I know he was pulled down from, from YouTube and
00:42:04.740
I'm not sure. I, I know that he's gone for most of them. How do you view that phenomenon? And, and
00:42:10.300
would he be someone you would certainly get a lot of grief for speaking to him, but what do you think
00:42:15.640
about the merits of speaking to him? Well, on this, on the censorship angle, I thought it was really
00:42:20.620
interesting because I think people didn't understand that moment all that well. Um, we have had in this
00:42:27.240
country for a long time since the early sixties, a way of dealing with bad speech. And, you know,
00:42:35.820
the standard has been New York times V Sullivan, right? We we've decided what's, what's libel,
00:42:41.740
what's slander. Um, and the courts sort that out and it's been a very effective system for preventing
00:42:49.580
people from lying or, uh, publishing damaging information. The courts typically react pretty
00:42:56.240
swiftly. And that, that private system has, has, um, has been a great shield to people like me,
00:43:03.120
because when I, you know, if I want to write about a company like Goldman Sachs or something like that,
00:43:09.100
I, I know that I, in order for them to successfully sue me, that I have to get things wrong,
00:43:14.940
that it's going to go to, uh, you know, uh, a courtroom and not some private executive somewhere
00:43:20.360
to make that decision. And so the idea that we're going to switch and now have a new standard
00:43:25.680
where the decision about how we deal with bad speech is going to be dealt with behind closed doors
00:43:33.020
in, um, these sort of gigantic transnational companies, and it's not going to be public and it's
00:43:39.440
going to be, you know, you're not going to really have a say in it if, uh, they decide to, to remove
00:43:45.040
you from the platform. I really worry about that. I mean, I think, uh, as I said in the, and when I
00:43:50.040
wrote about this, to me, it looks like Jones, you know, falls under the category of somebody who,
00:43:55.780
you know, could have been successfully sued on a number of occasions and probably would be out of
00:44:00.280
business in the, in the old days. But instead, because he was, he was so unpopular and he, and
00:44:08.680
he's so noxious to a lot of people when, when they removed him from all those platforms, everybody
00:44:14.220
cheered. And I thought that was a really dangerous moment because we're sort of formally switching
00:44:19.080
from one enforcement mechanism to another. And this other enforcement mechanism is, is kind of scary to
00:44:25.060
me, you know? So, um, I worry about that a lot, uh, for sure. What do you do with the argument that
00:44:30.940
these are private platforms? I mean, these are essentially publishers that by this argument would
00:44:36.760
be forced to publish ideas that are noxious, false, and damaging in the case, in the case of Jones,
00:44:44.480
you know, damaging to the bereaved parents of murdered children is part of the problem here that,
00:44:52.160
that Facebook and YouTube and these other platforms are so big now as to be not best thought
00:45:00.580
of as private companies, but they're essentially your public utilities or, you know, just common
00:45:05.280
space that a person shouldn't be barred from inhabiting? Well, if you just take just the two
00:45:11.340
companies, uh, Facebook and Google, that's where above 70% of Americans... If you'd like to continue
00:45:18.300
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