In this episode, Tucker Carlson sits down with his father to talk about how he became a reporter, how he got into the business, and what it was like growing up in a media family with a well-known reporter's father. Tucker's father was a reporter at NBC News in the late 80s and early 90s. He was a pioneer in the field of investigative reporting, and was one of the most influential people in New York City at the time of the 9/11 attacks. Tucker talks about growing up around his father's media career, and how he learned to be a journalist. He also talks about the challenges he faced as a kid growing up as the son of a journalist, and the lessons he learned about what it takes to be an investigative reporter in the early days of the media industry. Tucker and Tucker discuss the importance of being on the side of the ordinary people, and why it s important to have a reporter on the ground floor of the news business. Check out all of our content at tuckercarlson.co/tuckerandtucker on all social medias, if you're a fan of The Tucker Show, you won't want to miss this! And if you haven't checked out the show yet, you should definitely do so before the next episode! Subscribe to The Tucker Carlson Show on Apple Podcasts! Subscribe, Like, and Share the Tucker Show! Subscribe to the Tucker Carlson Podcast! Subscribe on iTunes Learn more about Tucker's new book, "The Tucker Show: How to Think Like A Conservative: A Conservative Is Killing Liberalism Is Killing Us Allowed by Tucker Carlson? Subscribe on Audible Subscribe on Podul, Podul Connect with Tucker on YouTube Learn more at tuckerandrea.co Learn about his new book: "Tucker Carlson's New Book: How Conservative Is Conservative Is Winning the Fight for Conservativeism?" Subscribe at anchor.fm/Tucker's New York Times bestselling book: Tucker Carlson's "New York Times Bestseller "The New Tucker Show?" Subscribe on Amazon Prime Video Subscribe on Anchor Subscribe on All Things Conservative Is a Conservative Is Tucker's New Thing? Subscribe to Tucker's Podcasts Subscribe on Vimeo Learn More About Tucker's Book Recommendation? Subscribe on Itunes Learn More about Tucker s New Episode: and much more! Learn more on the Tucker and review him on Good Morning America? Subscribe and review his newest book: Subscribe & Reviewed by him on VaynerSpeaker?
00:01:07.460People are like, you know, maybe a child molester can be fixed.
00:01:09.720We don't need to execute them, but NBC News, okay?
00:01:13.000So that's bewildering, I'm sure, for you.
00:01:15.940But for those of us who are having trouble remembering what the media landscape looked like in, like, 1990, when you were finishing college, what were your assumptions about journalism?
00:01:26.600What did you think you were getting into when you started?
00:01:45.460So I used to hang around the newsroom all the time.
00:01:47.680And my father is sort of a reporter's reporter.
00:01:50.740He's very gifted at striking up conversations with people.
00:01:54.540He's really good at that aspect of the job, which is, I would say, probably the most important thing, which is being able to talk to people and get everybody's perspective.
00:02:03.440He would be able to go to, you know, any scene of fire or murder or whatever, instantaneously get people talking to him and trusting him.
00:02:30.700So the first thing I concluded was I'm never going to be able to do that, right?
00:02:34.300So this is, you know, this is like a superpower that he has that I don't.
00:02:38.920And I thought I would have to go in a different direction.
00:02:41.440I also grew up wanting to be a fiction writer, right?
00:02:45.920I was really obsessed with that growing up.
00:02:48.220And then when I got out of college, I realized that the only thing I really knew how to do was his job because I had watched it so much growing up.
00:02:59.220And so it was something that would keep me at least tangentially in the writing business.
00:04:09.120They overwhelmingly sided with the ordinary person just reflexively.
00:04:15.140And they were, you know, they told the news from that perspective very often, right?
00:04:20.800And it was the classic editorialist at the time was somebody like, you know, Jimmy Breslin or Mike Royko, the sort of voice of the people kind of a thing.
00:04:31.220And so, I grew up always imagining that the reporter was somebody who was on the side of ordinary people.
00:05:58.760So, I studied in 89 and 90 when it was still Soviet.
00:06:02.720You know, I took a year and a half abroad and then went back as soon as I graduated.
00:06:10.420Actually, I went back before I graduated and started stringing and working for a bunch of different organizations there and finally got a job at an expat paper.
00:08:07.860Well, I mean, it's like anybody who...
00:08:09.780You come to the United States, if you have no choice and you have to speak English, you learn it pretty quickly.
00:08:14.300Um, so, uh, I studied in St. Petersburg, but then I briefly went to Uzbekistan, uh, because I had this idea that there weren't that many stringers in Uzbekistan, so I would get more work.
00:08:29.820For those who don't notice, I don't know that there are stringers anymore.
00:08:32.840So a stringer is like a person who, um, is not on staff for a newspaper, but just sort of sits in a place and waits for something to happen.
00:08:41.860And then, you know, like the New York Times or the AP will call them and say, hey, can you, can you chase down that, you know, thing that happened?
00:08:49.920In my case, an earthquake that happened in Kyrgyzstan gave me an early chance to write a couple of stories, right?
00:12:03.600Yeah, I think he, he, he thought the whole, you know, adventure thing was interesting.
00:12:08.340And then when he finally visited Russia in the mid nineties, um, you know, and saw what the place was like at the time, he thought it was, you know, a paradise for journalists, which it was.
00:12:19.540Cause there was so much crazy stuff going on, um, and, um, it was a great place to learn the profession, really.
00:12:33.120There was a very vibrant community of, um, really hardcore, great investigative reporters who suddenly appeared out of nowhere.
00:12:42.100Cause remember the, the press had been suppressed almost completely for, you know, 80, 80 years, right?
00:12:49.600And after, as soon as there was a, uh, you know, a little bit of an opening to do real reporting, there were suddenly these very brave, uh, reporters who showed up and, you know, they were, they were risking their lives every time they wrote because the, the way the system was set up was that every newspaper was basically owned by a different gangster.
00:13:14.020They called it selling jeans over there, right?
00:13:16.600So somebody would get, give you a, uh, a packet of information.
00:13:20.660You would write it up about the rival gangline figure or politician.
00:13:26.540And then, but if they wanted you to pay the price, you would, you know, you might get shot in a doorway or something like that.
00:13:32.440Uh, so there were people who got killed by exploding briefcases.
00:13:36.620For instance, there was a guy named Dima Holodov who worked for, uh, Moskoski Komsomolets when I was there who had written about Yeltsin's defense minister.
00:13:47.680Um, but you know, the Russians, the, those guys were my heroes.
00:13:51.740I, I, I tagged on to a bunch of those people really early and that's where I kind of really learned the whole investigative journalism thing was from those people.
00:14:02.240Um, you know, not all of whom stayed in the business for very long, sometimes not voluntarily.
00:14:32.100He was the deputy mayor of St. Petersburg when I was a student in St. Petersburg.
00:14:35.360Uh, he, he was kind of known as, um, well, I mean, he, there were all sorts of stories that were told about him back then.
00:14:44.300And when he first came to, um, to power in Moscow, it was sort of widely understood that he was doing it.
00:14:51.600And Yeltsin even writes about this in his biography, uh, because Yeltsin needed help getting out of the country and escaping prosecution.
00:15:00.480And, um, there, there had been some indication that Putin had done that for his previous boss, the mayor of St. Petersburg, Anatoly Sobchak.
00:15:09.320So, you know, the sort of investigative journalism community was very suspicious of Putin when he, when he first arrived.
00:15:18.140Um, but the Western journalism community loved him.
00:15:25.100And this was, you know, I had already become disillusioned with American journalism before that for, because they had misreported a lot of things about post-communist Russia.
00:15:34.660So, but that was kind of the last straw for me, I think.
00:15:38.180Traditionally, think tanks do a lot of thinking and the Heritage Foundation still does that, but it also, thankfully, has begun doing.
00:15:45.280Heritage has built a massive investigative and litigation operation out of its headquarters to save this country from the corruption that is taking it over.
00:15:55.180Both actual, literal corruption, financial corruption, there's a lot of that, but also ideological and moral corruption.
00:16:01.460And to fight back, Heritage is engaging in almost 50 separate lawsuits against various government entities to try and pry out information to bring a little sunlight to the process that even Congress can't get.
00:16:19.460And help kill the sweetheart deal that Biden's DOJ tried to make with his son, Hunter Biden.
00:16:24.720Heritage has also developed a comprehensive plan to dismantle the deep state, the swamp, by staffing the next administration with people who know what they're doing.
00:16:34.160Thousands of Americans who, on day one, can start to make this country better.
00:18:42.860So they would send somebody out to some provincial town like Samara with an assignment, find the thriving, emerging middle class, right?
00:18:57.920And so you'd go out to a place where there's like a barter economy, right?
00:19:02.240And people are doing subsistence farming, you know?
00:19:05.340And they would ask around until they found somebody who had, you know, a VCR or who had been on a vacation to Ibiza once or something like that.
00:19:15.080And then they would do a whole story like, you know, transition to capitalism, you know, flourishing, you know, the emerging middle class is, you know, everything's happening right on schedule.
00:19:26.420And meanwhile, the country was really, in the Yeltsin years, was really doing very badly, right?
00:19:31.580It's in contrast to now, you know, Russia was experiencing sort of record levels of early deaths.
00:21:06.040But I don't understand, so if you don't speak a language, I mean, I've lived here for 55 years, I speak English as a native speaker, barely understand the country.
00:21:45.200That just seems like a baseline requirement.
00:21:46.980So the way it was explained to us was that this was something that was a hangover from the American diplomatic experience in China before the Maoist revolution, where the diplomats were deemed to have been too close to the local population, didn't warn the people back home what was happening.
00:22:08.080So they made a habit out of cycling people from spot to spot so that they wouldn't become too accustomed to the culture or too acculturated, right?
00:22:20.860Which I can maybe see the rationale for a diplomat, maybe.
00:22:25.280But for a journalist, it makes no sense at all, right?
00:22:28.440So to not understand the place that you're reporting on.
00:22:42.960But so it was a strange activity that a lot of them were involved in, where they mostly interviewed the English-speaking officials in the Yeltsin government, right?
00:22:55.400A lot of them had gone to Harvard, and they were getting one very specific version of what Russia was going through, what its challenges were.
00:23:05.360And by then, I had already branched off.
00:23:09.320I had left the expat paper of the Moscow Times.
00:23:13.540I started up my own newspaper, which was like a nightlife guide.
00:23:16.660And I started doing this thing in opposition to that, which was I would go around the country getting jobs in weird places.
00:23:25.300Like I worked as a bricklayer in Siberia.
00:24:14.860And more of what that was proven relatively quickly, right?
00:24:18.980There was a massive financial collapse in 98.
00:24:21.860And then Putin came in and there was a huge popular repudiation of the American-style version of managed democracy that existed under Yeltsin.
00:24:42.720I mean, Putin, for all of his problems, and I was a real critic of Putin's when I was there, there was no question that he was much more popular than Yeltsin.
00:24:54.480You know, the country was very embarrassed by Yeltsin because he was publicly drunk all the time.
00:25:59.620While I was in Russia, I became disillusioned both with the format of it, you know, the kind of neutral third person.
00:26:10.720A version of reporting where we pretend we're not having a point of view.
00:26:16.240I didn't like that, you know, like, for instance, I would get sent out when I was at the Moscow Times, which was a paper I loved.
00:26:23.320But they would send me to all these events where funny things would happen.
00:26:27.300I would come back and write it up with humor, and they would tell me to take out the humor and write it in some other way that was, like, more serious.
00:26:36.740Like, if you go to a scene that's funny, like, for instance, I had to cover this ridiculous press conference where Prince Philip appeared for, I think, the World Wildlife Fund or something like that.
00:26:47.860And he's giving a speech to all these Russians about, you know, their backward attitudes about conservation and everything.
00:26:54.720And in the middle of the speech, the hotel brings the spread, which includes booze.
00:26:59.940And all the reporters get up and leave Prince Philip talking by himself while they just eat all the food and drink all the booze.
00:27:21.100I didn't really know, but I thought there's something not quite right about this.
00:27:24.880So to what extent, in retrospect, do you think that Western news organizations were taking their cues from Western businesses or Western governments?
00:27:39.800I mean, if you go back and look at the coverage of, you know, the New York Times, the Washington Post, you know, some other organizations, you know, the current Deputy Prime Minister of Canada, Chrystia Freeland, was sort of a colleague at the time.
00:27:56.060She was part of that whole crew of Western journalists there.
00:28:14.860It was a messy transition to capitalism was the word they used for it.
00:28:18.520Now, actually, it was just pure gangsterism.
00:28:20.920And most of the people who got rich did so through absolutely corrupt privatization schemes.
00:28:28.460Like, for instance, there was a thing called loans for shares.
00:28:30.800But the government was literally lending the money to cronies so that they could buy companies like Exxon for pennies on the dollar, you know.
00:28:37.600I mean, like Yukos, for instance, was a gigantic oil company worth, you know, as much as any Western oil company would be worth.
00:28:46.120They bought it for nothing, basically, for a pittance because they were pals of the people in government.
00:28:52.680So they created an instant billionaire class, and that was completely passed over.
00:29:18.520You know, like, these guys didn't do anything except steal, you know.
00:29:22.240They were wealth extractors, and it was amazing watching the hype of these figures, the whitewashing of Yeltsin's complete misrule, his, you know, his brutalizing of domestic journalists, right?
00:29:45.440I mean, like, there was a ton of that going on in the 90s, long before Putin came to office and became infamous from it.
00:29:51.420Yes, there were so many journalists who were killed before Putin came along.
00:29:59.860This started from the very beginning they were doing this.
00:30:03.760I mean, that guy I told you about with the exploding briefcase, that was 1994 when that happened.
00:30:07.920And, you know, there were, there were a lot, I had a friend, not exactly a friend, somebody I knew well, Alexander Hinchstein, who also worked for a newspaper there.
00:30:19.100He got thrown in a mental institution in the Yeltsin years.
00:30:24.060There were, there were all sorts of reporters shot.
00:30:27.000If you go in and shot, shot, killed, beaten.
00:30:30.580Putin, you know, I had another friend named Leonid Krutakov, who was not only fired every time he did an expose, but, you know, he, he would be attacked.
00:30:40.440He had somebody come through his window one night, if I remember correctly.
00:30:44.960So it was a dangerous profession before Putin came to office.
00:30:49.040Now, obviously, it went to a new level once he came in and, you know, there were people I knew who died, right, you know, in the years after he, he became president.
00:31:01.100But it wasn't an appreciably different vibe for journalists.
00:31:05.360The difference was that they, that Putin concentrated government authority in a way that had not been done previously.
00:31:14.160Before it was more of like a gangland free-for-all, Putin came in, he took over the last remaining independent television station, NTV.
00:31:23.980He had the, one of the oligarchs arrested, Vladimir Gusinsky.
00:31:29.780And, you know, the, the owner of Bank Manatep, Mikhail Khodakovsky.
00:33:10.100And again, there's subsistence farming, you know, and, or there's whole stretches where there's no government and people are just setting up toll roads.
00:33:19.820You know, they're, they're putting on cam of fatigues and creating their own toll booths.
00:33:28.220And, and, but if you didn't know, if you didn't go out, you wouldn't see it, you know?
00:33:33.100So I think that was, it was a problem of perception for a lot of these folks.
00:33:37.140And, um, but I thought it was inexcusable because, you know, as a reporter, your first job is to, is to find out, you know, to check for yourself.
00:33:49.960And how were you treated by government there?
00:33:51.920So the, we had a unique position because we were publishing in Russia.
00:33:59.500So unlike all those other reporter, American reporters, I was technically a Russian news organization.
00:34:10.060So even though we were in, in, in English, we were regulated by, uh, you know, the, the, the Russian government.
00:34:17.380Um, we got visited every now and then by the tax police asking for bribes.
00:34:22.160And then, um, after, after I left, they eventually shut the paper down.
00:34:27.160Uh, so, um, but they, you know, they paid attention to us, but it wasn't the same as, um, the way they paid attention to, you know, the New York times and other reporters.
00:34:41.140I mean, there were people who were Paul Klebnikoff, remember that name?
00:34:49.380And I don't, I don't know that it was a Russian government interest that, that did that, but they were paying attention to coverage that went out overseas.
00:34:58.280They weren't, they didn't care so much about what I was doing, which was writing for people who are in Russia.
00:35:02.720Uh, and, uh, you know, and also we were writing in English, so God knows how many Russian officials even understanding what we were doing.
00:36:39.160So it's, it's, it's very difficult to describe what it was actually like, um, you know, gangsters everywhere, bodies, you know, all over the place, people being thrown out of windows.
00:36:49.640There were terrorist explosions happening all the time.
00:36:55.900Uh, and you know, that, that story kind of ran its course while I was, while I was there and the city started to transform into what you saw when you went.
00:37:49.040And it's the best way, as you know, to find peace.
00:37:52.140And this makes it very easy to set aside the time to deeply pray every single day.
00:37:58.740And I was so impressed by Hallow that I tracked down the number of the CEO and I called him and I said, I want to advertise this on our podcast because it's something that I really believe in.
00:39:14.560Well, I mean, I was shocked when I got back.
00:39:21.420And I was thinking about this just the other day because, you know, I think a lot now about kind of America's slide toward autocracy.
00:39:29.100Because I had this vision the whole time I was there.
00:39:31.440You know, watching the Russian government in action was like getting this incredible advanced education into autocratic methods and how things work, right?
00:39:43.780You know, the jailing of political opponents, you know, on trumped-up charges or, you know, blackmail and how things are leaked by the intelligence services.
00:39:53.520Like that stuff just happens out in the open there, right?
00:39:56.060And I always had this image that, well, in America, that doesn't go on.
00:40:00.020And then I come home to post-9-11 America and the whole vibe is, well, we have to start throwing all of our democratic guarantees overboard.
00:40:12.820Because I think as Dick Cheney put it, we have to start exploring the dark side because, you know, the Bill of Rights is inadequate to keep us safe.
00:40:23.900We need to start doing, you know, all these things that I thought were crazy.
00:40:28.380You know, the Patriot Act, the authorization to use military force, right?
00:40:33.100Like, so moving the authority to declare war out of Congress to basically to the White House, mass surveillance, you know, Guantanamo Bay, all these things were really shocking to me.
00:40:50.680And it was kind of, I thought it was also ironic to come back from Russia to this developing situation.
00:40:59.980So was it clear to you then where the trajectory was headed?
00:41:05.380Well, I thought there would be, I was really naive in retrospect.
00:41:09.460I thought there, I took all of my sort of fellow political liberals seriously when they said they were, you know, ardently opposed to this secretive revolution, right?
00:41:22.760And the spy state and drone warfare and all these other things.
00:41:26.800And when Barack Obama, the constitutional lawyer came along and there was this belief that a transformation, he would usher in a transformative presidency that would undo, you know, this Cheney vision, which scared me, you know, which I thought was sort of going to undo this schoolhouse rock version of America that I grew up believing in.
00:41:49.140And I believed it, I believed it, I'm kind of embarrassed now.
00:41:55.740I actually thought that was going to happen that when Barack Obama got elected that all that would turn back.
00:42:02.740But in hindsight, you know, they never had any intention, it seems, of changing anything.
00:42:09.880If you go back and look at the statements, you know, they were saying things like, well, we're not, we're not, we might not change the status quo right away.
00:42:19.220And I had, you know, I had been very positive about Barack Obama.
00:42:24.760I covered him on the campaign trail because my job, by the way, I, when I came back, I lucked into getting the greatest job in journalism, which is covering campaigns for Rolling Stone.
00:42:35.860And, and, and I, I was very impressed by Barack Obama.
00:42:40.860I thought he was incredible, but it was disillusioning to see what happened afterwards.
00:42:46.640At what point did you realize he wasn't what you thought he was?
00:42:49.960So, right after he got elected, I got assigned to cover the causes of the financial crisis.
00:42:56.160And, which was funny because I had no background in finance.
00:42:59.560I didn't have any clue what a mortgage-backed security was or how any of that works.
00:43:04.280But one of the first things that happened was that, you know, I got calls from people in the Democratic Party who said, you should look at the president's relationship, the Citigroup, and, you know, how the Citigroup bailout happened.
00:43:19.660You know, he put a Citigroup executive who had been a college buddy of his in charge of his economic transition, during which they gave a very, you know, a sweetheart bailout deal to, to Citigroup.
00:43:33.420And this was an early indication that, you know, this president was maybe not exactly what I thought he was.
00:43:40.960Not transformative in the way you imagined.
00:43:55.620I mean, everybody in, in liberal media loved Obama, but particularly at our magazine where, you know, the, the people who owned it were, they were, they were just delirious about Obama.
00:44:09.400And so when I came to them and I, and I said, look, I have to do this story about how this, this bailout situation is corrupt.
00:44:19.140If you can go back and look, you'll see that there's a story called Obama's big sellout.
00:44:23.080It was like a 9,000 word feature that they let me run.
00:44:26.400And, um, so that was like a year after he got, uh, into office, but that was kind of the beginning of, um, what did the piece say?
00:44:35.680It basically said that, uh, that the Obama had run as an economic populist, um, and had talked a lot about reforming, uh, certain things that had gone on wall street that had allowed, um, you know, the excesses of the, the mortgage bubble to happen.
00:44:58.260And then as soon as, um, he got elected, he brought in all these acolytes, um, of, uh, sorry, the Clinton's former treasury secretary, Rubin, Bob Rubin.
00:45:14.200Uh, so there, there are all these Rubin was at Citigroup, uh, Obama brought a whole bunch of people close to Bob Rubin into the government.
00:45:24.680And, you know, these were the same kind of people who had caused the crash, right?
00:45:31.660So to me, I wrote it as kind of a bait and switch, you know, he, he ran as somebody who was going to change the system.
00:45:37.660He brought in people who were the system.
00:45:40.140And in addition, uh, there was this bailout deal with city, with Citigroup in particular, that was, that was kind of malodorous.
00:45:48.420And, um, there were, there were people who ended up paying fines in that situation.
00:45:55.120Um, but, uh, it was very critical of basically who Obama had brought in to run his economic policy.
00:46:03.860And the idea was he had run as one thing and he was really another thing.
00:46:08.880Um, so that was one of the first stories of that type.
00:46:11.320How did the Obama administration react to the piece?
00:46:17.180Uh, if you go back and look there, there's, there's an interview with Obama.
00:46:21.920They did an official Rolling Stone interview with him years later where he, uh, he sort of brought up the fact that even your magazine talked about how I didn't do enough.
00:46:32.980Um, and this was like years after the fact.
00:46:35.420And, and by the way, I had been incredibly complimentary of him while he was running.
00:46:41.340So of all of the things that, that had been written about him, what he remembered was this one slight, you know, which I thought was a very telling sign of his character, you know?
00:46:50.720And, uh, but at the time I wasn't paying attention to the other things like about, you know, the continued prosecution of the war on terror, you know, the, the drone assassination thing, the kill list, you know, terror Tuesdays, all that stuff.
00:47:11.260That, that whole thing was incredible.
00:47:13.580You know, when you, I mean, I, I did a story later about another American who sued the government for, cause, cause he thought he was on the kill list.
00:47:21.680Um, and you know, the, the government's response was, you're not entitled to find out whether you're on it or not.
00:47:32.320And the, the, the, the, the whole idea that we even have something called like lethal action, that it might apply to an American citizen, that you can do that without due process.
00:47:43.240And, you know, if you go back and look, they, they basically invented, I mean, I don't know how disillusioning this was for you, but they just made up on the fly.
00:47:54.660Right. Legal, legal, legal justifications for what they were doing.
00:47:58.260That weren't grounded in any law that was passed or any, any court case.
00:48:02.840They just sort of wrote themselves white papers, giving themselves permission to do this stuff, which I think is crazy.
00:48:35.300So the idea that you could kill an American citizen and the first time, I mean, I think they've actually killed quite a few American citizens.
00:52:33.040And, you know, this whole switch, I think, like most Americans, I was like you.
00:52:42.400We all knew that the United States was whacking people all over the world, right?
00:52:48.420I mean, even though the church committee hearings came along and we basically said we weren't going to do that anymore, of course we were doing it, right?
00:52:55.440We were doing all kinds of horrible things.
00:52:57.240We were probably fixing elections, you know, in half the places on earth, but not here, right?
00:53:05.060Like, that was a bright line for Americans.
00:53:07.880Now, maybe that's chauvinistic to believe in that, but I was like you, I didn't think they would ever cross that line and bring these ideas home.
00:53:20.820But, you know, this is what we're finding out now.
00:53:22.840I mean, this is the big theme of the Twitter files was, you know, when we tried to figure out where...
00:53:30.360Can you explain for people who didn't follow it at the time?
00:53:32.780So in late 2022, after Elon Musk acquired Twitter, you know, there started to be rumors that he was going to open up the internal communications of old Twitter and sort of give them to the world, right?
00:53:59.820From somebody at Twitter, let's put it that way.
00:54:01.560And so I was the first person who was put on this project of looking, rummaging through old Twitter's, you know, correspondence.
00:54:17.720And, you know, I think he said that, Elon said that his idea was that he wanted to restore trust in the platform by telling people about the different kinds of censorship techniques that were going on.
00:54:30.520And it's not clear exactly what he was up to.
00:54:33.980But, you know, he seemed sincere at the time.
00:54:57.880And for about three months, we got to look through the internal correspondence of one of the world's biggest communications companies.
00:55:07.280And the big thing that we found was that there was this nexus of communication between government enforcement and intelligence agencies and the Internet platforms.
00:55:18.440And they had a very sophisticated, organized bureaucracy that was involved with controlling content in a variety of different ways.
00:55:29.860And when we started to try to figure out, first of all, this was shocking to us.
00:55:34.240We were seeing all these documents that said flagged by FBI, flagged by DHS.
00:56:01.380And when we started asking questions, you know, it turned out that a lot of the programs that were now targeting domestic speech began as overseas counterterrorism,
00:56:16.700So the State Department, for instance, has a thing called the Global Engagement Center, which is now very much interested in speech, both abroad and at home.
00:56:28.420But they were once exclusively a sort of counter-ISIS platform.
00:56:35.680In fact, they had a different name back then.
00:56:59.060So that's counterterrorism to counterpopulism.
00:57:01.560And the idea was the whole mission abroad of countering ISIS or Al-Qaeda, contracting-wise, it was kind of drying up, right?
00:57:12.620Because those threats had been somewhat neutralized.
00:57:16.440But populism, you know, was now a very serious, it was viewed as a very serious threat.
00:57:22.960But after Occupy Wall Street, the Tea Party, the Arab Spring was something that maybe they didn't see as a bad thing, but they certainly saw the transformative power of the internet platforms.
00:57:44.420Then I think Trump was the last, you know, the last stand for a lot of these folks.
00:57:48.440And that's when you started to see all these communications, like, you know, we have to, we need to get a more formalized, you know, control over these platforms.
00:58:00.760And so, yeah, that's when the war on terror mission turned inward.
00:58:06.240And I think that's a huge story, right?
00:58:09.320Well, it's the end of the country we grew up in.
00:58:12.500You would think, you know, and that's, you know, for me, it's been...
00:58:18.440And I think probably for you too, this new theme of the sudden explosion of illiberal tactics in politics that even if they're directed at somebody that, you know, liberals hate like Donald Trump or Steve Bannon, how can you not be freaked out by stuff like that?
00:58:41.940And we haven't used contempt of Congress to jail people since the Un-American Affairs Committee in 1947, right?
00:58:50.300This is like third world kind of stuff that we're seeing, you know, accusing the front runner in a presidential campaign of a hundred different felonies.
00:59:02.080Is that happening if he's not running for president?
00:59:04.260I mean, who could honestly say that, right?
00:59:07.920It's, but you can't talk about it now.
00:59:10.560I mean, if you mention it, you're out of the club in mainstream press now, which is incredible to me.
00:59:17.620You may have come to the obvious conclusion that the real debate is not between Republican and Democrat or socialist and capitalists, right, left.
00:59:26.880The real battle is between people who are lying on purpose and people who are trying to tell you the truth.
01:00:09.780So, I mean, it raises so many questions, but most obviously then, if uncovering the abuse of power by the powerful, particularly by government, isn't the point of journalism, it's clearly not the point of journalism anymore, what is the point?
01:00:30.980Well, I mean, then you become courtiers, right?
01:00:34.160I mean, I think that's, again, what's ironic for me is that, you know, this is, I saw this process happening full circle.
01:00:44.120You know, when I first got to Russia, the first reporters I met had worked at places like Komsomolska Pravda in the 80s, right?
01:00:52.820Which were, at one time, it was the world's largest newspaper.
01:00:56.100It had a circulation of 21 million or something like that.
01:00:59.260And, you know, I worked in the old Pravda building when I was at the Moscow Times.
01:01:04.800And the people there, you know, they would tell me stories about what their jobs were in the 80s.
01:01:14.120You know, they would get whatever the message of the day was, and they would do it and then go home to their wives, and they would go fishing on the weekends.
01:01:22.500And there was no, you know, intellectual anything involved with it.
01:01:26.580You couldn't take it in that direction.
01:01:28.280It would be hazardous to your health if you did.
01:01:31.920Well, that's what journalism is now in America.
01:01:35.260I mean, look what just happened with the Nord Stream thing.
01:02:08.420So, and if you think CO2 is driving the greatest threat that we face, the existential threat of climate change, then you kind of want to know how that happened.
01:02:21.780So, why wouldn't, I mean, it is, I mean, I've spent a lot of time thinking about this because, you know, I was like the only person in mainstream news to point out that, no, Russia did not blow up Nord Stream and was attacked for it.
01:02:32.580But I was wondering, like, if I'm at the New York Times, like a lot of people I know, why would I just, like, try to report that story out?
01:02:53.580So, in the early 2000s, yes, there were high-profile instances where people like Jesse Ventura were unhired from MSNBC because they mistakenly thought he was pro-war when they hired him.
01:03:16.500And Chris was sort of a classic example of a phenomenon that Noam Chomsky once wrote about in Manufacturing Consent, which is that they don't fire you necessarily, but, like, you just don't get promoted if you're considered the wrong kind of personality.
01:03:31.120Which is weird because good investigative reporters should be difficult personalities, right?
01:05:31.220It was right after he had gotten elected.
01:05:33.480Remember that list that came out, Prop or Not?
01:05:37.240Well, Washington posted this story about this weird blacklist that they had discovered of people who the Russians were supposedly in league with.
01:05:45.940And it was this shadowy organization called Prop or Not.
01:05:49.600And they linked to this list of sites.
01:05:54.680And, you know, without any evidence at all, they were linking all kinds of independent journalists to Russia.
01:09:48.760And then even when things came out that should have been fatal to the story, like when it finally came out in October of 2017 that the Clinton campaign had funded the Steele dossier, I thought, well, it's over now, right?
01:10:13.720But still, once that came out and, you know, you knew that campaign research had ended up in an intelligence assessment, that should have been it, I thought.
01:10:26.760And everybody just plowed ahead like it was still a thing.
01:10:30.580So what happened to you in the middle of all?
01:13:23.000So how—what did your colleagues say to you?
01:13:25.180Because by this point, I think it was becoming public to anyone who was watching, like me, that you were dissenting from the line on this question.
01:13:34.220Yeah, so I would say Glenn Greenwald took the brunt of it.
01:13:38.320You know, there were stories in the New Yorker profiles, you know, the bane of their resistance, right?
01:13:46.420Like, why is Glenn Greenwald being a stick in the mud about this Russia thing?
01:13:50.480That was like a feature topic in magazines, like a bunch of them.
01:13:55.080And, you know, they concluded, by the way, that he was motivated by his impatience with the rise of women and minorities in the Democratic Party.
01:14:52.600Yeah, you would think, you know, and that was becoming increasingly common.
01:15:00.400It was an implication of a lot of the back and forth on social media, you know, that this person is too close to Russia or, you know, he loves Putin, right?
01:15:37.840And I actually did some journalism in Russian for another paper that was very critical of him and talked about the apartment bombings and some other stuff.
01:15:48.340And so, I was no friend of Vladimir Putin's, but that became a common thing in journalism.
01:16:28.420So, when it became clear that, you know, the claim that Putin had installed Trump as the American president, when it became clear that was, like, malicious fantasy, it was a total lie.
01:16:40.480Did any of the people who attacked you and called you a Russian agent apologize or change their mind?
01:16:48.400No, but it's a little different, because by that point, I was, like, such an outlaw that, like, I had no expectation of being treated fairly by anyone ever, other than my wife.
01:18:22.180And when you're in mainstream media, you don't see that there's actually this screaming need for something else that people aren't getting because they don't trust regular media.
01:18:33.480So, I was an early beneficiary of that whole thing.
01:20:02.780And the thing that you need most of all in journalism to be good at it is you need to have some bravery.
01:20:10.200Now, that wasn't true in American journalism for a long time.
01:20:14.140Probably, you know, not since the Vietnam days or the Red Scare, you know, was there a situation where there was a real social price to pay for taking, you know, a certain stance on things.
01:21:06.520But tell us about, like, having been in institutional journalism, you know, at the top of it, really, and then finding yourself, like, having to work for yourself.
01:21:19.160Like, what are the advantages and disadvantages?
01:21:21.140Well, first of all, being in institutional journalism, there is a little bit overrated, right?
01:21:28.660Like, I think, because I came from alternative journalism.
01:21:33.160I had financed my own newspaper in Moscow.
01:21:39.300And, you know, I did everything from printing to running the plates to the printing press and, you know, selling ads, everything.
01:21:49.800So, you know, the business is something that I've always been familiar with and suddenly being involved with a big organization.
01:21:58.800It's nice, but I don't see it as a prerequisite.
01:22:02.200I thought it was really funny at the beginning of Trump's reign when a couple of the reporters were complaining about losing their White House press credentials.
01:22:39.900In fact, one of the first things that I was assigned to do when I went to Rolling Stone, they sent me on a campaign junket with John Kerry.
01:22:49.540So, I was on the plane with Kerry during that campaign for, like, a month or something like that.
01:22:55.620And, you know, it's a similar dynamic to the White House press corps.
01:22:59.240It's the same people every single day.
01:23:28.680And at the time, they were angry at Alexander Pelosi because she had filmed some of them.
01:23:33.740So, she was in the back with a bunch of piles of equipment.
01:23:37.700But I got frustrated very quickly by the fact that all they were doing all day long was just taking, you know, press releases from flax and then they would eat.