TRIGGERnometry - The Best Conversation About News, Opinion and Censorship You've Ever Heard - Richard Miniter

00:00:01.000 They have two conflicting ideas of news which emerged from two different parts

00:00:05.920 of our history. News sort of starts to begin in ancient Rome. They were trying

00:00:10.440 to control rumors and as bad as we think the internet is, ancient Rome was far

00:00:16.520 worse. In the 1400s along the River Rhine is this idea that free speech is

00:00:22.120 necessary for social peace. The Dutch ideas of the Rhine River tolerance come

00:00:29.320 here. The upper class of New York is terrified. They fear the accountability of

00:00:35.600 the opinions of people and what we're seeing playing out with all of these

00:00:40.140 battles on X and on YouTube is these two different ideas are in a deathmatch

00:00:47.340 depending on which side wins. Depends on how we will see reality in the coming

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00:01:27.380 Richard Minniter, welcome back to Trigonometry.

00:01:29.380 Well, it's great to be back, guys.

00:01:30.380 Well, it is great to have you back because the last episode we did with you, the

00:01:33.900 first episode we did with you was on our last US trip. I think it was one of the

00:01:38.140 biggest interviews we've done actually in the history of the channel. Absolutely

00:01:41.740 crushed it. Fantastic conversation about American history. Today we wanted to talk to

00:01:46.340 you about the history of news, history of journalism, the history of censorship, and

00:01:51.340 there's a lot to talk about going all the way back. There is a lot to talk about. And

00:01:56.740 a lot of what people, when people fight about news, which they do on the internet every

00:02:00.340 moment of every day, it's because they have two conflicting ideas of news which emerge

00:02:05.380 from two different parts of our history. And once you understand the history of news,

00:02:09.860 you'll understand why both sides feel so intensely about their point of view.

00:02:14.340 And what are those two sides? Well, let's do the history first.

00:02:17.380 Yeah. Okay. So, as all good histories, let's start with caves and cave drawings, right? And

00:02:25.380 the early humans told stories on the walls of caves. And we think, due to certain DNA evidence,

00:02:36.340 about 100,000 years ago, started telling oral stories. But I would contend, while they were

00:02:42.180 passing on new information, they were passing on speculation, emotional reactions to things,

00:02:48.180 they might even have been telling, you know, recent history, this is how the hunt went, or this happened

00:02:53.220 in the village over the hill. That wasn't news. That was information, speculation, rumor.

00:03:01.620 Just a little aside, also, I think scientists misunderstand these cave drawings, these wonderful animals,

00:03:06.980 some of which are extinct, and we have no evidence of, other than the drawing on

00:03:10.020 on the wall of Lescaux in France, or various different Spanish caves. But during the ice age,

00:03:17.140 you're spending a lot of days indoors. If I go to any, in the wintertime in the northern hemisphere,

00:03:24.340 any person's home that has children, and I go into the child's room, what's on the walls? Animals,

00:03:30.900 pictures of animals, right? So isn't it possible that they weren't necessarily leaving a record for

00:03:37.060 us, which they had no idea about, but to entertain their children during the long ice age?

00:03:43.380 So entertainment is older than news. We knew that already. So this goes on for a while. City-states

00:03:51.620 form, and governments began issuing decrees. They make announcements from palace walls, and we have

00:03:58.100 records of these from the Sumerians, and the Babylonians, and cities of Ur and Lagash. And some

00:04:03.940 of these records are very old, 40,000, 35,000 B.C. But again, that's not news. That is the people in

00:04:11.620 charge telling you what they're doing, and maybe not even why, or what your orders are.

00:04:19.940 News sort of starts to begin, proto-news emerges, I contend, in ancient Rome, with the Acta Diurna,

00:04:27.540 which you can translate as the daily acts or the public acts. And this isn't yet news,

00:04:33.940 but it's very close, because it is presented to the general public. We don't have any copies of

00:04:39.540 these. These have all vanished. We know the Acta Diurna exists only because of quotations from various

00:04:45.140 Roman writers who do have copies of their work. But we do know that these were put up fresh every day

00:04:52.660 for about a 200-year period, starting in B.C. and ending, depending on what sources you see,

00:04:59.300 180 or 220 A.D. And they announce far-off victories or defeats, sometimes other news,

00:05:07.940 gossip that would make the Daily Mail blush. Senators, mistresses caught in embarrassing

00:05:13.620 situations. But these are put up in the forum and in other public places, and then sometimes read

00:05:22.420 aloud to the illiterate, kind of like town criers that you'd see much later in history. 0.65

00:05:28.020 So it has the mix that we would recognize, right? It has gossip, it has politics, it has a bit of

00:05:33.060 economics, it has foreign affairs. But it's controlled by the government,

00:05:38.660 and it is not really accountable publicly. The audience doesn't have a say. And only senators

00:05:46.740 and tribunes, and tribunes, the Romans were ruled by a two-house congress or parliament, right?

00:05:54.100 The senators and the tribunes. So the famous abbreviation you see everywhere, SPQR,

00:06:02.900 is the Senate and the people of Rome. Well, the people is represented in the house of the tribunes.

00:06:07.860 Anyway, a tribune, an elected official, or a senator, another elected official, largely inherited as

00:06:12.980 well. They could object. That was it. And there was no correction process. You couldn't sue. There

00:06:20.660 was no libel. There was no slander. But it's the beginning of news. Now, why did the Romans do it? 0.98

00:06:26.900 No other ancient people had really done it this way before. And it's because they were trying to control 0.93

00:06:33.300 rumors and speculation. And as bad as we think the internet is, ancient Rome was far worse,

00:06:41.220 right? People making up all sorts of wild stories, people thinking of the conspiracy theories of the

00:06:46.660 internet. Ancient Rome had this times 10. And they realized if we didn't do something, if we didn't

00:06:54.980 start to say, like, what the actual casualty figures were in the battle that we lost,

00:06:59.140 or what the actual territory we just took was, wild stories would abound. And that would mean that

00:07:06.420 there would be trials, sometimes executions, coups, upheavals, all sorts of things. So if we could give

00:07:13.460 the public, and this is why it's proto-news, a common share of facts, things that we all know are true

00:07:19.380 and can roughly agree on, that that would cause peace. Not perfect peace, not perfect harmony,

00:07:26.740 but at least we're not arguing about basic facts. And that is the beginning of understanding the

00:07:32.900 importance of news. If we all have the same vocabulary of facts, then we're debating about

00:07:38.820 how important this is compared to that. Why is our politics so polarized today? Because we no longer

00:07:46.340 have this shared diet of facts. But when it works, and we're all agreed as to what is going on, what

00:07:53.060 the facts are, and the debate is about the emphasis, we're in a much less polarized world. That's why the

00:07:58.340 Romans created the Act of Diarna. That's what they were trying to do. Now, news really begins, and maybe,

00:08:05.140 Frances, this differs entirely from what PBS told you, and so I apologize. About in the 1400s, along the

00:08:13.940 River Rhine. Now, the Rhine is a very special river in European history. It begins in the mountains of

00:08:21.540 Switzerland, it goes through Germany, and then it empties into the North Sea in modern-day Netherlands,

00:08:27.940 Holland. And along this river, we see a tremendous amount of Protestant movements emerges.

00:08:37.940 Germany at this place, this time period, is not a united country, even though technically it's the Holy Roman Empire.

00:08:43.860 There's different princes and principalities and dukes and so on. And your royal leader, your princely leader,

00:08:49.940 could decide what flavor of Protestant you were, or whether you're still with the Roman Catholic Church.

00:08:56.900 And you would be on a boat going down the Rhine, and you would be, if you were a Protestant, 0.71

00:09:04.820 you'd look out on Catholic cities, and you know that if you came to shore, the chances of you being 0.99

00:09:10.420 tried and burnt alive as a heretic, were very high. And yet, on the river, 10 feet from shore, in the current, 0.84

00:09:21.460 you were safe. And your cargo was safe, for the most part. And that's not to say that all Protestants were 0.99

00:09:28.900 united either. Protestants executed Protestants. These religious wars were intense. But just as the Gutenberg, 0.80

00:09:37.060 in the city of Mainz, that's sort of on the east bank, or the left side of the, looking from above,

00:09:44.660 of the Rhine River, almost in the dead middle of the German Rhine, is Mainz. And in that city,

00:09:51.460 not far from the docks, is this guy, Gutenberg, with the movable type printing presses. There are others who

00:09:58.500 have similar devices, maybe not as good as his. And he's printing the Bible, and he makes so much money

00:10:03.460 printing than the Bible in the vernacular. He can afford to take speculation and printing other

00:10:08.500 things. So he prints catalogs, he prints opinions, he prints religious tracts, including for denominations

00:10:17.060 that he doesn't share the values of, with the idea that even if it's banned in Mainz, he can bundle it

00:10:22.820 down to the docks, put it on a boat, and the city that's paying for it, further down the Rhine, will take

00:10:28.660 the cargo and he'll make the calf. So as long as he's not caught with it, everything's fine. So why is

00:10:35.300 all this matter? Well, it is competition of ideas. And remember, in medieval times, all political ideas

00:10:42.900 are really offshoots of religious ideas. And the core Protestant idea at this time is that you have a

00:10:50.340 personal relationship with God. You discover who he is in your personal journey, and you have,

00:10:59.220 to use a horrible modern phrase, your truth. And no one, and by the way, that's where that idea comes

00:11:04.980 from. And no one should be able, in the Protestant perspective, no one should be able to interfere in your

00:11:10.740 exploration. And part of your exploration is talking about it, and thinking about it, and reading about

00:11:18.580 it. So in this great, in these religious wars, and this desire for social peace, and just,

00:11:26.100 you know, you guys go worship over here, and we'll worship here, and these third guys will go worship

00:11:30.100 over there, is this idea that free speech is necessary for social peace. Let everyone have their say,

00:11:38.500 let the ideas move up and down the Rhine about religion, but also increasingly about politics,

00:11:45.220 about economics. And believe it or not, we owe this initial idea of free speech, which is essential

00:11:53.620 to the creation of news, to these very tough-minded German Protestants who were stubbornly insisting 0.99

00:12:02.900 they were right and everyone else was wrong, and also their great desire to make money. And capitalism,

00:12:09.780 which is a lot like you have an individual relationship with God, is that you have the

00:12:15.620 right to an individual relationship with your customers and your employees. You can choose who

00:12:21.140 to hire and fire, there are no hereditary employees, it's governed by contract, and you have a right to

00:12:28.420 sell to your customers as they, if they choose you and you choose them, that's it, that's all that matters.

00:12:35.620 So this idea of this personal relationship with God has enormous political and economic effects. And

00:12:41.220 at the mouth of the Rhine, in the modern day Netherlands, it becomes an incredibly tolerant society,

00:12:46.260 especially after the Spanish leave at the end of the 1500s. And this idea of tolerance becomes super

00:12:53.300 important. But what is moving up and down isn't just books. Books are expensive, and people don't have time

00:13:01.460 for books all the time, but the beginnings of newspapers, what are originally called in German

00:13:07.060 news books, but just what's going on in these different cities of the Rhine. And by the way,

00:13:11.300 has the religion of this city changed since you last sailed past, and is now unsafe for you to land?

00:13:17.540 Or do we want to mock these people in Geneva, or in Strasbourg, or what have you?

00:13:22.900 And so these newspapers are quite lively, they caricature people, they make sexual and spiritual

00:13:30.660 allegations. It's as wild as anything on the internet today. And you combine this idea of free

00:13:40.420 speech and capitalism, and you get the beginning of news, where you have news outlets that are only

00:13:47.700 accountable to the people who pay for them. If you start writing about things that people don't trust,

00:13:52.660 don't believe, your audience goes down, and soon your printing costs are higher than your revenue,

00:13:58.100 and you're out of business. If on the other hand, you feed your audience, you give them what they want,

00:14:04.500 and hopefully give them a healthy version of what they want, your revenues will grow,

00:14:10.740 more people will buy your paper. And this is the beginning of news. Independent of the state,

00:14:17.460 lively in its perspective, accountable to its readers. And this idea evolves and changes over time.

00:14:26.580 It comes to England in Europe almost last, but it definitely flowers in the early 1600s

00:14:34.820 in the Netherlands and in Germany. And the Dutch settle and form a colony that they call New Amsterdam,

00:14:43.220 which is the modern city of New York. The Dutch ideas of the Rhine River tolerance come here.

00:14:50.580 And New York has been a decidedly wide open free market of ideas, opinions, and businesses for centuries

00:15:00.420 as a result of the Dutch foundations of the city. And by the way, Canal Street in downtown literally was a canal

00:15:09.140 until they filled it in. I mean, the Dutch deep foundations of our culture are hidden, but still visible,

00:15:15.540 especially things like what is news. And in the 1730s, there's a German immigrant from the Rhineland

00:15:25.620 named John Peter Zenger. And after apprenticing for a printer in Philadelphia, he moves to New York

00:15:36.420 with his wife and opens a small newspaper called the New York Journal. And he begins publishing the news of the day.

00:15:45.540 And he publishes an account, which he says is true, of the royal governor of New York. Remember,

00:15:52.100 the Brits still rule in the 1730s, still rule New York. And about corruption, self-dealing,

00:16:01.700 failure to look after the public, his public duties. What he has to say about the governor is less

00:16:12.420 important than what happens next. The governor cannot, under British law, directly jail him

00:16:18.900 unless he accuses him of a crime. And libel is a crime, which you can be in prison for this time.

00:16:27.460 So he's imprisoned and held for eight months before trial, which is one of the reasons why cases like

00:16:35.300 this is why you have a right to be arraigned in a very specific amount of time under the U.S. Constitution

00:16:41.620 to this day, and why you have the right to a jury trial and so on. So if you're imprisoned,

00:16:50.020 your food in the 1730s in New York at this time has to be brought to you by your wife or friends of

00:16:56.980 yours. Someone has to bring you food every day. The prison doesn't necessarily feed you. So his

00:17:03.780 wife would put out the newspaper because that's how they made the money to pay for the food and pay 1.00

00:17:08.660 the rent. And they keep trying to shut down her newspaper and she works and she would go to jail 1.00

00:17:16.020 every night and provide the food to her husband. And he would say, okay, go over to New Jersey,

00:17:21.220 take this rowboat over and all these little machinations to stay in business. Much later,

00:17:28.180 the New York Journal is merged into a newspaper that you may have heard of called the New York Post

00:17:34.500 after many changes of ownership and splits in ownership. Anyway, so copies of this paper exist to

00:17:42.180 this day. You can find facsimiles online. He finally goes to trial and some slick lawyers

00:17:49.300 from Pennsylvania argue for the first time in the English common law that truth is a defense

00:17:55.620 against libel. Yes, we do not argue that these things, these facts that we presented make the

00:18:03.620 governor open to ridicule. He looks ridiculous. He looks corrupt. But this is the truth. And truth, 0.99

00:18:11.380 I should not be punished for producing the truth. This is a revolutionary doctrine.

00:18:16.340 And because this is a British Empire case, this precedent will change the English speaking world.

00:18:24.580 This German immigrant who's been in the United States, the colonies really, for less than a decade, 0.57

00:18:32.500 is about to change the English speaking world. But the governor and the upper class of New York,

00:18:40.900 which is a piece of the upper class of England, is terrified. How will we stop ridicule that will

00:18:49.700 come from the lower classes? How will we stop the finger pointing? How dare they? Our honor 0.98

00:18:59.380 comes from status. And our status comes from not being ridiculous. And when Quakers from Pennsylvania 1.00

00:19:07.940 tell us that we're going to be made ridiculous, what to do? And their answer is, don't do ridiculous 0.97

00:19:13.620 things. That's not satisfactory. We are. We are important people. They fear the accountability of the

00:19:23.380 opinions of people who are far poorer, far less educated, in some cases literally dirtier than

00:19:30.340 themselves, right? But it's the beginning of a revolution, because the jury nullifies. The jury

00:19:39.620 refuses to find him guilty, even though the facts say that he is, and then he admits that he is,

00:19:45.540 more or less, at trial. So this becomes a principle. The truth is a defense against libel.

00:19:51.700 Much later in English history, you're going to have some unfortunate laws. And so you can't,

00:19:55.460 if you're trying to operate a newspaper in England today, I would not use the Zenger precedent.

00:20:02.340 But in US law, it is absolutely still governance. Truth is an absolute defense in this country against

00:20:07.460 libel. And that case could only have happened in New York, where it really settled as New Amsterdam,

00:20:14.340 with the Dutch sense, and the Quaker sense of, which comes from the Pennsylvanians who argued this in

00:20:20.420 court. And this defense means that you cannot be ruined by the powerful for reporting things about

00:20:29.620 them, which means that suddenly journalists can hold corporations, aristocrats, the famous

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00:22:39.220 Then the next piece of the revolution happens when you start to apply the factory model of production

00:22:47.540 to news. Instead of having to hand print out on something a little bit better than what Gutenberg

00:22:54.980 offered 300 years before, just 50, 60 years after Zenger, you have these massive printing presses,

00:23:03.940 which become ever more efficient at the end of the 18th century and deep into the 19th century,

00:23:09.700 where it's suddenly, by the 1830s, you have the penny press, an entire broadsheet, in some cases 52

00:23:16.260 inches wide, with pages upon pages, all available for a penny in the US. And they are so profitable,

00:23:26.820 they're employing people to translate news from overseas. And this is where the word correspondent

00:23:32.740 comes from. So, in this time period, traveling was a very big deal. Most people did not travel far.

00:23:41.540 Now, today we have jet planes and 19-year-old illiterates Instagramming from Bali, right?

00:23:48.740 Okay, it's a different world. But in 1791, chances that you could travel more than a dozen miles,

00:23:57.940 two dozen miles. To this day, I think, to join the Travelers Club in London, you have to say that

00:24:05.700 you've traveled 400 miles from the founding stone of the club, right? So, even a trip across the channel

00:24:16.100 to Calais, which a lot of people tried to do to join the club back in the day, didn't count. You had

00:24:20.740 to go far afield. And 400 miles was considered to be this enormous distance. So, a correspondent would

00:24:26.660 be someone from this community who traveled and wrote a letter home. And these letters would be

00:24:34.580 reprinted in the newspaper, like, this is what I saw in Paris, this is what I saw in Amsterdam,

00:24:39.300 or Hong Kong, or Shanghai. And they would often print, you know, who the letter was addressed to,

00:24:46.020 and even, like, I hope Sally's okay. Like, that would show up in the piece, right? These were very

00:24:50.580 homespun kind of things originally. But with the mass printing, they begin to think about employing their

00:24:56.900 own correspondence. And the next bit of the revolution comes with the telegraph.

00:25:03.860 The telegraph is the closest thing to the internet that the 19th century has. Because the telegraph

00:25:10.660 means that you can send a large amount of information almost instantly over an incredible distance.

00:25:19.220 Stock prices can move from London to New York, across the Atlantic.

00:25:22.660 And this business still influences how our news is gathered to this day.

00:25:32.180 Reuter, I think Julius Reuter, if I'm getting his name right, notices that there's a gap in the

00:25:37.780 telegraph lines in Belgium. And he uses carrier pigeons to move the news for stock trading and

00:25:44.180 other business news purposes. And from the money from that and various other ventures,

00:25:48.580 he eventually opens a news wire that uses telegraph lines to move news, gather news from around the

00:25:59.140 world and sell it to newspapers. And famously, the Times of London refuses to be his customer for

00:26:06.260 several years. And he keeps getting scoop after scoop. And eventually, they bow and become a customer. And

00:26:12.820 these businesses become quite large. Reuters in London, the Associated Press forms in the 1840s,

00:26:20.820 in the United States. The Germans, the French, and the Spanish, and the Italians all form their 0.96

00:26:26.740 news wires. But theirs are different. In the English-speaking world, these are for-profit ventures

00:26:31.460 that are accountable to their customers. They're doing news. Part of news is being

00:26:36.820 accountable. Letting your audience have a say. How much do we trust you? Do we believe you? Because

00:26:44.020 if we don't believe you, you're not valuable, right? You're just like a government agency,

00:26:50.580 issuing edicts. Like, it's just not interesting. Whereas in Germany and France, Spain and Italy,

00:26:57.540 these were government entities more or less from the beginning. And though they mimicked a lot of the

00:27:03.860 freewheeling style of the English-language news wires. And they did collect information from

00:27:09.460 around the world. And frankly, some of them have very good product. Deutsche Welle,

00:27:13.300 Algernal France-Presse. But there's still, especially in the beginning, in the

00:27:19.060 Telegraph era, in the latter half of the 19th century, those governments had a lot of control

00:27:23.300 over what was presented and wasn't. But in the English-speaking world, it was more wide open.

00:27:28.020 Not to say the government didn't censor troop movements and a handful of other things. But for the

00:27:32.740 most part, it was pretty freewheeling. It was pretty wide open.

00:27:39.780 All that's great. By the end of the 19th century, we're gathering news from all over the world.

00:27:45.140 We're reporting it quickly. Competition is improving things. And we have something like

00:27:52.580 an honest news system. That's not to say there weren't political party papers, because of course

00:27:58.020 there were. To this day, I think there is a, the Hartford, it's not the Hartford Courant. There's a

00:28:08.420 newspaper in Connecticut named, whatever the name of the town is, The Republican. There's the Arkansas

00:28:15.540 Democrat, right? The political parties used to sponsor their own newspapers and decidedly their own

00:28:20.980 point of view. But they were still governed by independent competitors. And they knew their readers

00:28:30.740 would be reading those too, so they couldn't go too far. Competition, accountability, and this idea that,

00:28:37.620 yes, you can have your own individual idea of the truth, just like the medieval Protestant could have

00:28:42.900 his own individual relationship with God. But you're in competition, so you've got to pay attention to the

00:28:49.860 other people's idea of truth. And so it isn't just your truth. It has to be a shared, provable truth.

00:29:00.100 Then two things happen, and this is why we have such fights over news today.

00:29:04.500 One is a group of intellectuals decide, and we could loosely call them the progressives. I'm not making

00:29:15.220 a point about today's progressives. This is what these people at this time call themselves.

00:29:20.500 Which time are we talking about?

00:29:22.100 Oh, so sorry. Let's say 1890 to 1900. The muckrakers emerged just after that, 0.97

00:29:29.620 and they do some fabulous reporting on the evil things that happen in meatpacking plants and so on.

00:29:37.460 A little bit later, by 1920, Walter Littman writes a fantastic book called Public Opinion. And

00:29:46.740 they are criticizing the news as being too slavishly devoted to the audience, right?

00:29:53.940 To put it in British terms, too much like the Daily Mail and not enough like the New York Times.

00:29:57.860 Right. By the way, much later, the New York Times is founded as a Republican newspaper,

00:30:03.940 initially. Funny how things start out. So these progressives want to change the news.

00:30:10.340 The news should not be what the public wants to consume, right? Because from the public's point of

00:30:15.700 view, you consume news for entertainment reasons and to help you make decisions. Who do you vote for?

00:30:24.500 Where do you send your kids to school? Is this a safe neighborhood to build a house in, to buy a house in,

00:30:29.380 et cetera, et cetera, to make decisions? And you don't necessarily expect the media to tell you

00:30:36.900 what your values are. You want to find those out on your own. But there are a great number of

00:30:41.860 intellectuals in this time period who want to tell you what your values are. And they come out of the

00:30:47.060 continental European idea of news. And a great number of the early progressives actually studied

00:30:54.100 in the socialist precincts of Germany in the late 19th century for longer or shorter periods.

00:31:01.860 And they're bringing these ideas with them. This whole freewheeling, anything can happen as long

00:31:09.220 as we can prove it, we can report it. That whole ethos has to go away. And this needs to be calmed

00:31:14.420 down and governed and run by adults. And look, their criticisms are basically correct. I mean, 0.99

00:31:20.980 the newspapers were pretty wild. They would say pretty, you know, pretty outrageous things.

00:31:27.620 So did they need to be professionalized and reined in a bit? Yes. But what they wanted to design was

00:31:36.180 far more than that. They wanted to design a German-French model in which what the media reported

00:31:43.940 and what the governing class wanted was the same. So what they wanted was to reverse the decision

00:31:51.700 that embarrassed the royal governor of New York in 1735. 200 years later, they wanted a do-over.

00:31:58.500 And we, the great and the good, should be safe from your ridicule, from your jokes. And they were

00:32:06.180 going to construct a system to do exactly that. So at first, they tried a frontal assault.

00:32:14.660 And they started, they made friends with a very interesting character called S.S. McClure.

00:32:21.700 And he starts publishing these long-form magazines. And they would publish literally 10,000 word

00:32:28.660 articles on very, you know, wheat production and things of this nature. And no one read those,

00:32:36.180 or very few people read those. And so as a commercial venture, McClure wasn't doing so. McClure's

00:32:41.700 magazine is the famous progressive magazine at this time, but there are others, right. So we're in 1906,

00:32:48.100 1908 here. And they start going after, they start doing what FDR would call trust-busting.

00:32:55.380 They go after Rockefeller and the other robber barons. And they start to realize that these long,

00:33:06.020 dense articles aren't going to work. But they still want to change society. They still want to change

00:33:11.620 the media. So they pull back and they think about the problem. And this is where we see the beginning

00:33:19.220 of a century of changes that give us the kind of news that make us entirely unhappy today.

00:33:25.940 So first they begin with awards. Let's reward people, not just financially, because what the

00:33:35.460 financial rewards are always going to line up with what the readers want. We need to be able to reward

00:33:40.500 people for things that we want. So they invent the Pulitzer Prize. They invent journalism schools.

00:33:47.940 These are the correct people to be journalists. By the way, at this period of time, yes, there are some

00:33:55.860 college people who write for newspapers from the beginning, but most of these are blue-collar

00:34:01.460 observers of real life. So they've been sailors and printers and warehouse guys. So they're not

00:34:12.660 as susceptible to ideology and they're very immersed in the real world, right? So like, wait, you want

00:34:20.900 to do what? You want to open up asylums and let those people live on our streets? And that doesn't 1.00

00:34:24.820 sound like a good idea. What are you thinking, right? What could go wrong? Those kind of people are not

00:34:33.140 congenial for the progressive cause in 1906. So in 1908, they formed the first journalism school in the

00:34:39.620 United States, which is in Missouri. In 1912, you get the Columbia School of Journalism, which later

00:34:45.140 awards the Pulitzer Prize. And they start to distinguish. This is the professional man who went

00:34:52.420 to this law school for lawyers. And by the way, there wasn't always before that. There's the four

00:34:59.300 ends of court in your country. So just as they took the casualness of the training of lawyers and

00:35:05.620 professionalized it in a German way, they did the same thing in journalism. Now, in law,

00:35:12.100 that's a more arguable thing. That probably makes sense. With journalism, it definitely does not,

00:35:16.580 because you get a very particular class at a very particular point of view instead of

00:35:23.140 a newsroom full of competing classes. And some are immigrants and some people were born here,

00:35:29.620 you know, before the revolution. And it's just a constant rolling debate and observation about society.

00:35:34.660 Newsrooms used to be really fun, wild places. When I joined the Wall Street Journal back in 2000,

00:35:41.540 one of the things the HR department made me sign was a document saying I would not keep

00:35:45.620 a bottle of liquor in the office. And that's probably because decades before,

00:35:51.860 this was actually a problem. And in other newsrooms. Okay. So they start to professionalize,

00:35:58.900 they start to hand out awards. And then they realize what they really need is unions. If they can

00:36:04.420 control the means of production, they control what is produced. The problem is that journalists don't

00:36:10.740 like unions. And there is a battle between 1908 and 1933 to unionize. And most of these people

00:36:20.900 simply do not, just like school teachers in this period of time, rejected all attempts at unionization.

00:36:26.500 And in 19, I think it's 1908, or shortly thereafter, the LA Times is bombed by unions for refusing to

00:36:35.620 unionize. The building explodes, several people are injured, I think one or two are killed. And it made

00:36:42.020 worldwide news, right? This half a city block was burnt or damaged by the explosion. And if the

00:36:50.020 dynamite had been placed slightly better, the deaths would have been far more numerous. And ultimately,

00:36:58.420 the Justice Department investigates and discovers a ring of bombers associated with the unions. And this

00:37:06.260 did not help unions appeal. The journalists wanted to be free to write what they saw, what they heard,

00:37:15.460 what they felt, what they thought. It doesn't mean these people were saints, but that's what they

00:37:22.660 wanted. They wanted that freedom of movement. And unions wanted a more formalized, controlled structure.

00:37:32.340 And these early violent acts actually slowed down their appeal. But by 1933, they had their first

00:37:39.300 major newspaper unionized. And between the 1930s, under the New Deal in the United States,

00:37:46.820 and by the early 60s, they had basically unionized all television, all radio, and all the major newspapers

00:37:54.180 in the United States. And of course, the newswires, the Associated Press, and Reuters were unionized this

00:37:58.980 time. All under the same union. So now you have a cartel. Ultimately, this union fractures, and there's a

00:38:05.460 couple of major news unions. But the News Guild of America was the dominant union at this time.

00:38:13.060 And with unionization comes resistance to change and certain habits of mind which don't like dissent.

00:38:23.700 Dissent is not good for being in charge of a cartel, right? Toxic, in fact. And this starts to drive

00:38:32.740 out of journalism. The people who, the oddballs, the innovators, the strange people, the people who,

00:38:40.740 you know, will camp out and go after a story when everyone else thinks there's no story there.

00:38:46.900 The creative and the self-destructive, right? Which often can be the same person. And you,

00:38:53.860 left in its place is a lot of middle-class people looking for a safe, predictable job.

00:39:01.620 This changes what kind of journalism is produced. I'm not saying that Greek journalism wasn't produced

00:39:07.380 in this period, 30s to the 60s, and even after the 60s, because that would be absolutely false.

00:39:12.100 There are some of the most amazing reporting, writing, investigations were in the 60s, 70s,

00:39:17.300 and 80s. So I'm not casting aspersions. I'm just saying the kind of person who went into news.

00:39:23.460 Universities are a bad deal. Six figures of debt for a bachelor's degree that signals less every

00:39:29.780 year. Four years spent navigating ideological rules instead of learning how to think. Grades

00:39:34.900 are inflated, standards are lowered, and dissent is punished. We call it higher education, but it's

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00:40:38.660 actually prepares you to lead, apply to the University of Austin. Visit uaustin.org. That's

00:40:45.380 uaustin.org. Your full Great Outdoors Comedy Festival lineup is here on September 11th through 13th at

00:40:53.620 Arendale Park. Three nights, five shows, huge laughs. September 11th through 13th. Buy tickets now at

00:41:00.900 greatoutdoorscomedyfestival.com. But the progressives, even after all of this, they've created journalism,

00:41:07.380 schools. They've set up professional associations like the Society of Professional Journalists to

00:41:14.420 issue ethics rules. They have awards. They have unions. They still don't feel like they have

00:41:21.860 control over this crazy beast that is the media. So they start to push for public ownership. In the late

00:41:31.060 1940s, we get publicly owned stations, radio stations, in San Francisco, New York, LA, and a few other

00:41:38.580 places. Ultimately, in the 60s, we see the emergence of national public radio and public broadcasting,

00:41:44.740 which is the television arm. And it's like, let me show you guys how it should be done, is basically the

00:41:50.180 approach of public media to try to condition the private market from

00:41:59.780 being too, going off, leaving the catechism, right? And then we also see the emergence of the media

00:42:07.220 critic, the person who criticizes media coverage and basically taps everyone back into line.

00:42:16.180 This starts roughly with Walter Lippmann, but it really takes off in the 1950s. And by the 1970s,

00:42:22.820 a lot of places have media critics. And people, journalists, live in fear of being criticized by

00:42:29.620 the media critic. And so if you look at what they're doing, they're creating more and more institutional

00:42:36.980 strengths to try to drive the media in one direction, to tamp down dissent, to be the

00:42:44.740 anti-internet to the greatest extent possible. And in the course of doing this, they're actually

00:42:52.740 producing a very different kind of news than what I originally described. They want to write the

00:42:59.620 orthodox official opinion. And we see the climax of this in COVID. How dare you report on dissenting

00:43:08.580 views? How dare you cover ivermectin? How dare you say this? How dare you say that? Well, there's no

00:43:16.500 how dare you in journalism. If it's true, report it. If it's not true, say someone's spreading a lie and prove

00:43:24.180 that. Right? But there's no, you're not, without fear or favor is the New York Times's famous saying

00:43:31.860 back in the day. What about that? It's a great standard. And reality is incredibly complex and

00:43:39.060 ever-changing. To think that it always, that the orthodoxy of the people in charge always comports

00:43:45.860 a reality is just a childish point of view. Of course it doesn't. What's really cool is not to be a

00:43:52.660 prosecutor to defend and punish what the officials think is right and wrong, but to be a detective,

00:44:01.300 not a prosecutor. What's really going on? Why are all, why do these people think this and are doing

00:44:07.220 this while these other people? Be a detective. That's the original idea of news. So what we have

00:44:13.620 here are two different ideas of news, which have been with us since ancient days, which we thought we

00:44:20.820 banished in the 1735 Zenger case, but are very much with us today. An official establishment view that

00:44:28.500 is frozen and is negotiated within itself, unaccountable to the general public, or a form of news that is

00:44:38.100 constantly curious, that holds its ideas very lightly because other evidence might emerge. They might have

00:44:44.180 to release those ideas that understands that the world is complex and different and variegated and

00:44:50.740 therefore fascinating. Two different ideas of news. And what we're seeing playing out with all these

00:44:59.380 battles on X and on YouTube is these two different ideas are in a deathmatch, in a duel,

00:45:07.300 and only one can win. And depending on which side wins, depends on how we will see reality in the

00:45:17.300 coming decades. Will it be dictated by the professionals, the experts, the people who know

00:45:23.540 better, or will it be wild and woolly and unpredictable and fun?

00:45:28.980 Well, one thing that's fascinating, by the way, a 40-minute analysis of the history.

00:45:34.900 Sorry, guys. This is why we love you. This is fantastic. So much to pick up on there.

00:45:41.220 The first and obvious thing to me is you haven't said anything so far about the funding model. And

00:45:48.420 that must change at some point as well, because if I am in the Gutenberg era, I am selling a newspaper,

00:45:56.260 or a proto-newspaper, to the audience, to the person who is going to buy it.

00:46:02.820 If I'm running a... I was just miraculously in a TV channel studio this morning, not to do something,

00:46:10.980 to have a coffee with somebody. And while I was waiting, I watched, you know, they have like

00:46:16.340 a 10-screen screen with different TV channels on it. While I sat there waiting for my meeting,

00:46:21.620 within 15 minutes, I probably saw about 20 ads for healthcare of various kinds for a big pharma

00:46:28.420 company. The entire business is basically run... So when you come back to COVID, you're going,

00:46:33.460 that is not an accident that they were pushing a particular narrative on it. Because the entire

00:46:37.460 business model at this point is dependent on the advertisers who dictate to them what they ought to

00:46:45.380 believe. And that's something that I think is probably worth delving into as well, the funding model

00:46:50.180 of the business. Okay, so I don't think there are advertisers like... I know the network news is

00:46:56.900 full of like incontinence ads and things for old people, right? But it's not because those people 0.99

00:47:02.340 run the news. I would be shocked to learn that Bayer or Merck or Pfizer actually says to the anchors of,

00:47:10.820 you know, the evening news, don't do this story, or do this story. That would be shocking to me.

00:47:15.940 But they don't need to. But those advertisers are there because that's who the audience is,

00:47:22.180 right? If you were selling things that were of interest to young people,

00:47:26.660 it would not be a good investment because there's virtually no one under 40 0.99

00:47:31.460 watching those programs. In fact, getting information from broadcast television

00:47:39.860 is something that younger people just don't do in any appreciable numbers.

00:47:45.220 Yeah.

00:47:45.780 So, and it's, I loved, again, loved the opening of the interview. It was so rich and so informative.

00:47:54.500 And what I think I would love to talk to you about is a role between news and censorship,

00:48:00.420 because I was reading in pushback, if this is wrong, and PBS were giving me fake news, as it were.

00:48:06.100 But I was reading that particularly in Spain and Britain, that censorship, the moment the

00:48:13.220 Gutenberg press started to be used, the moment it was used to challenge authority, was the moment the 0.64

00:48:19.540 authorities basically crowning church went, I think we need to take a hold of this.

00:48:25.540 Absolutely. Right. And I think the, is it Tyndale is the first translator of major translator of the

00:48:33.860 Bible into English. And I think he's burnt alive outside the walls of Oxford in 1557, something like

00:48:40.900 this. Yeah, these people paid with their lives. But they were a very hardy and determined lot. And

00:48:50.980 they kept insisting on their right to tell people about their encounter with God and their views

00:49:01.060 thereby, which were heterodox. And the more that society, the state tried to stamp down on them,

00:49:10.100 the more people who didn't share their views developed some sympathy for them. Right? Like,

00:49:14.500 and also it made people question things that had not been questioned before.

00:49:23.060 And this is hard for us to fully imagine, because we are living in a post-religious world, 0.99

00:49:28.900 especially among educated people. But religion was a deadly serious subject in the 16th, 17th, 1800s.

00:49:37.460 And the idea that your baptism might be illegitimate, and you might therefore not be saved,

00:49:43.460 and therefore your death might be meaningless, and you might just disappear when you die,

00:49:50.740 was horrifying. Because if your death is meaningless in this time period,

00:49:57.460 your life is meaningless. And if you take away someone's meaning, you might as well have ripped

00:50:03.620 out their spine. So these were highly fraught issues. And the idea that because it's such an important

00:50:13.380 and personal issue, you as a matter of conscience have the right to explore your connection to the

00:50:20.260 divine, and therefore your connection to the real world as well. And I'm not saying the divine world

00:50:25.700 isn't real. I'm saying the ordinary world, the world we see here now. That's an extension of this core

00:50:34.100 thing. But in a society that takes religion deeply seriously, the right to pursue and figure this out

00:50:41.940 on your own, as long as you're not harming other people, right? If you are bringing children into 1.00

00:50:49.220 dangerous activities that end up in their disfigurement or dismemberment, or you're compelling people

00:50:55.700 not to pay taxes to the king, or things that defy courts, these kinds of things were not tolerated. And

00:51:01.540 the public largely went along with the king stamping down on that stuff. But if it was just a bunch of

00:51:06.740 people sitting in a room singing songs out of key, the public support for this was quite low. And

00:51:15.060 one of the great aspects of the English constitution at this period, we're talking in the 1600s,

00:51:24.100 uh, before Cromwell, the king had to enforce his will through sheriffs. And every county had a sheriff

00:51:30.660 at this point. And the sheriffs would often refuse to do it. They would refuse to collect taxes if they

00:51:37.380 thought the taxes were unjust. They would refuse to imprison people for like, what these people are

00:51:44.020 doing is harmless. You know, I don't like their music. I don't like their view of the Bible, but

00:51:49.620 oh my gosh, they're just sitting inside on a dreary winter day, like doing their thing. Why do I care?

00:51:54.500 Right? The sheriff just wouldn't do it. Um, and the king's ministers knew this and they tried,

00:52:00.580 there's his correspondence, so they're trying to figure out how to, how to get these sheriffs to actually

00:52:04.660 enforce the king's censorship. But also the idea that censorship is a bad idea ultimately came to be

00:52:12.980 embraced by Catholics because it was used against them. The censorship was used against them.

00:52:18.420 But initially this was a deeply, deeply Protestant idea. By the way, censorship always fails in the

00:52:24.340 long run. What's tempting about it is it seems to work in the short run. So let's look at Weimar Germany,

00:52:32.660 1920s, right? Hyperinflation, jazz age. You've got this in your mind now, right? We've all seen the miniseries.

00:52:40.420 The Social Democratic Party, which the SPD, still in German, major force in German politics today,

00:52:46.660 it was the ruling party throughout most of the 1920s. And it was worried about the Nazi party,

00:52:52.980 its main rival. And it had increasing amounts of censorship, banning books, banning magazines,

00:53:00.660 banning public gatherings. And all of it drove actual support for these dangerous, evil lunatics, 0.98

00:53:08.420 the Nazis. And then in 1933, through a series of unfortunate events, Hitler ends up as Chancellor 0.95

00:53:16.260 of Germany and takes all those censorship laws and applies them to the people who put them in place

00:53:22.980 in the first place, the Social Democrats. And there's a famous incident in the fall of 1933 where they

00:53:31.140 cry out in the Reichstag and say, this is wrong. You're violating our rights. You're censoring us.

00:53:39.140 And Hitler is a very cold voice. I would have much more sympathy for you and your free speech rights 0.90

00:53:48.900 if you hadn't been taken hours away for the previous 10 years.

00:53:51.780 And the Hitler supporters and others applaud Hitler's cold, calculating voice.

00:54:03.860 So this is where censorship leads. It's ultimately used indiscriminately against everyone.

00:54:10.820 It's a very dangerous game. What we're seeing in this Trump hatred today is,

00:54:18.020 oh my gosh, you're using the laws against me, but I'm one of the good people.

00:54:24.900 And there are those of us who believe in limited government who say,

00:54:28.340 be very, very careful of the laws you write, because you're not going to be in charge forever.

00:54:33.700 And those laws will still be there. Write rules that you can live with when you're not in charge.

00:54:40.260 And it's such a good point. And yet at the same time, I do have empathy for platforms like YouTube

00:54:48.180 during the pandemic, where you had conspiracy theories like David Icke going, 4G causing COVID,

00:54:54.500 for example, which we all know to be ludicrous, apart from a very sizable minority of people,

00:54:59.940 some of whom burnt down 4G towers or destroyed them or whatever else. And people will go to the

00:55:06.020 the execs at YouTube and going, well, this is your fault. How did you allow this to happen?

00:55:12.500 Yes. Look, there are people, the audience for censorship is quite large and well-educated and

00:55:22.740 well-placed. And they will not just say what you're saying, because that's kind of reasonable.

00:55:27.860 Like, can we really push people to commit violent acts and destroy property? Is that like a good

00:55:34.020 thing? Surely that's actually illegal in many cases. But you can't always get rid of the content

00:55:41.140 that you don't like with such, you know, not everyone's appealing to violence, right,

00:55:47.620 or property destruction. So they use copyright strikes. Oh, this person misused this, you know,

00:55:53.460 he has three seconds of a song, he doesn't own a license to that song, or he's got this photograph.

00:55:58.660 Well, he put it on the screen for a second to illustrate his point, like, but there's no good,

00:56:03.460 at least in the US, no good definition of fair use. And so they'll use copyright strikes to take down

00:56:08.980 unpopular people. Or their claim that they have stolen intellectual property, you know, this, he's

00:56:17.060 copying me, I said this out first, all that kind of thing. So they will be very legalistic and

00:56:22.820 formalistic in taking down these things. I've always wondered why we've decided that the moderation

00:56:32.180 has to be done at a central point. And if the moderation isn't perfect, the company that pays

00:56:38.900 the moderators is somehow at fault. Instead, why doesn't every user get a dashboard and say,

00:56:47.700 okay, I don't want to see any teenage nudity. I don't want to hear any swear words, you turn the

00:56:54.740 dials, right? For all the stuff we hate seeing on our screens, or we don't want our kids to see on

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00:58:33.940 Well, that is a really great point. I think that it would be great if these platforms did move to

00:58:40.420 that kind of model. This isn't a conversation we have. Because let me just say one thing. A lot of

00:58:44.900 this is bad faith, right? Oh, this content is so offensive. No, actually, it's just challenging your

00:58:50.580 point of view. Well, totally agree. And this is what I was going to bring up the example. I don't know if

00:58:55.220 you saw our interview with the CEO of the Center for Counting Digital. Hey, Imran Ahmed.

00:59:01.780 Great name, though.

00:59:02.660 Great name, isn't it? Imran Ahmed, who did turn out to be a bit of a nutter. 0.95

00:59:07.700 But one of the questions I said to him, and this is, I think, where it really is not as simple as

00:59:14.740 I think you're saying for the following reason. I said to him, look, do you think it should be

00:59:20.100 allowed to call for an armed revolution on social media? And she was like, no, do you? And I was

00:59:29.940 like, well, I don't know. But what I'm saying is this country wouldn't exist if people were not

00:59:34.420 allowed to call for an armed revolution on the equivalent of social media of their time. The

00:59:38.420 United States would not exist, right? Well, there were people arrested for sedition against the king.

00:59:44.260 Right. But that's what that's exactly what I'm saying, though. If you think about it in the modern

00:59:49.300 context, though, I think you'd probably find that the overwhelming majority of the public would be

00:59:55.060 like, we don't want a civil war caused by people saying these things online. Do you see what I'm

01:00:00.820 getting there? Yes. They call it the risk of real world harm. Yes. But what we really don't want is

01:00:08.820 these people deciding that these people shouldn't be allowed to say things which aren't really

01:00:14.180 calling for violent revolution. But these people are pretending that it does. Totally.

01:00:18.660 Just to disrupt a point of view they don't like. Of course. And that has happened to a ridiculous,

01:00:24.980 disgusting level over the last 10 years in particular. There's no question about that. 0.92

01:00:30.100 But is it really as simple as saying that there is never a case of restricting what people say online,

01:00:39.060 even when there is a credible risk of real world violence?

01:00:43.540 We don't have to reinvent this. OK. The English common law has been looking at this problem for

01:00:48.580 roughly a thousand years. There's a ton of real world collisions of interests that have produced

01:00:55.140 cases and decisions. And we just have to return to these very common sense ideas. Right. So we can't have

01:01:03.540 people marketing things as food that are, in fact, poison and people die. Right. We, you know,

01:01:09.940 there are you the classic example about shouting fire in a crowded theater. It doesn't mean that

01:01:16.500 everything you say has to be provably true. Some to some of your freedom of speech is the right to

01:01:21.780 freely speculate. Right. I think I will be the end of the world. I think I will be the greatest thing.

01:01:27.060 Well, you know, as Yoda likes to say, always in motion is the future. Right. Like, it's hard to

01:01:32.340 know. It hasn't happened yet. Right. So people should be there should be freedom of speculation.

01:01:38.020 You shouldn't be able to hold yourself out as something that you're not. You say, trust me,

01:01:41.860 I'm a doctor. This is perfectly safe. Well, hang on. You know, you did one semester in biology

01:01:48.100 and you failed out like you're not actually a doctor. Right. You can't represent things that are just

01:01:52.500 not true. Right. And so there's a whole body of law about what you can say and do that has been

01:01:58.740 around for many, many years, in some cases, centuries. We don't need to reinvent this. We just need to

01:02:04.820 return to the common sense and apply it to the Internet. So should you be able to call for an armed

01:02:10.180 revolution on Twitter? Actually, I mean, in my you're asking me about the state of the law or in my

01:02:17.860 heart. In my heart. Yes. In my heart. Yes. Now, that doesn't mean I think you should. And we're

01:02:22.980 going to gather on Third Street and the arm stock is here. And this is how you make the dynamite.

01:02:27.380 No. But if you are saying this is a ridiculous state of affairs, we clearly need a better ruling

01:02:33.460 class. You know, this governor should be, you know, hoisted on his batard and thrown out the window, 0.95

01:02:39.460 whatever. Yeah, I think you should be free to say that and think that and feel that.

01:02:43.540 You know, what's so interesting is that we went from the model you described until very recently,

01:02:50.180 you know, that Roman model, which was, here is the approved news. You know, we're going to give

01:02:55.060 it to you and everybody else. You know, it's going to calm people down because they feel they've got

01:02:59.300 the facts. All of a sudden, I don't know about you, Richard, and I don't know if Constantine feels

01:03:04.340 this way. I kind of feel like I've been in a relationship with somebody and I've just realized

01:03:10.420 they've been lying to me. And not only have they been lying to me now, they've been relying throughout

01:03:16.340 the entire relationship. So I'm now in the position, and I think a lot of people are, when I'm like,

01:03:22.820 you say this, is it true? Can I believe you? Right. And that's the problem with being portrayed,

01:03:28.260 because you re-see the relationship and everything that that person or thing has done becomes instantly

01:03:35.940 negative in every detail. But that's an overreaction. That's wrong. Look, we all have

01:03:41.460 problems with the BBC. What they report and what you see on the, I mean, you, we've, all three of us

01:03:48.100 have had the same experience. And most of the people watching who are familiar with the BBC about this

01:03:52.020 service, they're at an event the BBC covered. They saw what they saw, and then they saw the BBC report,

01:03:57.620 and you're like, hold on. Like, were you guys even in the same room, planet? On the other hand,

01:04:04.820 because we feel betrayed, we say everything they do is bad, they've done some brilliant things over

01:04:09.220 the years. Of course. Yeah. My favorite, and I recommend this to everyone, is the Kenneth Clark series

01:04:15.220 Civilization, which you can watch, I think, for free on YouTube. It's about four hours.

01:04:20.100 And the BBC was going to go to color in 1967. And they conceived this idea of having this Oxford

01:04:26.100 Don talk about the sweep of Western civilization. People actually bought televisions or gathered

01:04:32.660 to watch this series was the first BBC release in color. And the guy at the BBC who decided

01:04:41.140 to give Kenneth Clark this was David Attenborough, who goes on in the 70s, as a Marxist, but as a

01:04:48.020 fabulous reporter of nature to give us those, now that we now satirize them and joke about them,

01:04:54.020 these great accounts of how the natural world works. So, yes, Francis, we feel betrayed by the BBC,

01:05:00.500 but let's not let that color our thinking. They did do some brilliant and beautiful things,

01:05:06.020 right? I gave you a couple examples, but we can all think of others. But quibbles aside,

01:05:14.180 the official version is not the news. The official version is part of the news, but the rest of the

01:05:25.300 news is the tenacious, independent-minded investigation to get the closest approximation

01:05:32.180 of the truth that you can before your deadline. And that's subversive, and it always will be,

01:05:39.620 and that's its appeal. But look, I'm in agreement with you, but let's take that relationship metaphor.

01:05:47.140 Betrayal, it kind of, look, the point you make is true, but let's say you've been in a marriage for

01:05:53.940 30 years, it's really happy, and one day your partner cheats on you. That is a fundamental breaking

01:06:02.180 of the trust relationship. And many times, it doesn't matter what's happened in the 28 years

01:06:09.620 previous. If the two years during that time, they've been off shagging the secretary. It's

01:06:16.180 incredibly difficult to go, you know what? I'm now going to go back to the previous 28 years.

01:06:22.420 In many ways, you can't do it. You have to have a new relationship with media.

01:06:27.380 Right. Yes. And maybe that means they've so destroyed the trust that all of these great

01:06:35.060 brands disappear. Or maybe that's not a good idea, and we're throwing the baby out with the

01:06:40.820 bathwater. I don't know the answer. It's one of those two things, but I really don't know the answer.

01:06:46.500 But I do know this. The so-called great brands, the legacy brands cannot continue in the way they

01:06:54.740 have been doing without restoring the relationship of trust. Without trust, you don't have a relationship.

01:07:04.260 Well, absolutely. And to extend France's metaphor, the thing that I've been somewhat concerned about,

01:07:10.260 hence my kind of pushing back on you to try and find out what the boundaries of what the three of

01:07:14.020 us believe are, is also the fact that when you've been betrayed in a relationship and you leave that

01:07:19.140 relationship, it is very tempting to go, I don't know if you call this in the US, but to go on the

01:07:24.580 rebound. Yes. Which is to get into a series, usually, of terrible new relationships with really

01:07:30.900 untrustworthy, unsuitable characters. Right. So you leave the New York Times,

01:07:35.860 you end up following Crazy Loon on X. Correct. And I think we're also, if we're being fair,

01:07:41.940 seeing quite a lot of that going on. Oh, absolutely. And so that's where it's interesting. But also,

01:07:46.580 I think the technological aspect of this in the current moment is as huge as it was at the times

01:07:51.780 of the printing press and onwards, because one of the reasons people under 40 don't watch the news

01:07:57.220 is just we use a different set of technology. Yes. That's also another thing that's going on.

01:08:02.820 And I imagine if you're a TV executive now, if you've got a brain, what you're going is,

01:08:08.660 how do we make the thing that we currently make more like the thing that the people under 40 are 0.77

01:08:14.020 actually watching? Right. Yes. It's so bad that the term news for people under 40,

01:08:22.660 they're consuming news and not realizing it because they don't go to the established legacy brands

01:08:27.380 anymore, even online. Right. But when you get information from the outside world and use it to

01:08:33.940 make decisions, and it's more or less independently created, that is news. But that's not how they think

01:08:40.180 of news. They think of news as whatever the output is of these legacy brands and that they don't want.

01:08:45.380 That's toxic. That's right. Distrusted. Yeah. Right. And the internet and artificial intelligence

01:08:55.300 presents an enormous opportunity to reinvent how information, what I would call news, is delivered,

01:09:02.900 how it is gathered, how it is processed and verified and fact checked, and then how it is delivered and

01:09:09.700 to whom and on what device. And I think five years from now, it'll be completely different across the

01:09:17.700 English speaking world. And 10 years from now, it'll be completely different everywhere outside 0.98

01:09:22.740 of China. Describe me the picture that you see five and 10 years from now.

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01:10:52.820 Describe me the picture that you see five and ten years from now.

01:10:56.820 I think we'll see a lot more people creating news. I think we'll see a set of

01:11:04.100 enforceable software rules that will verify that this is a real photograph and not

01:11:11.060 an AI creation. It's a real video. You really did interview Kim Kardashian.

01:11:22.180 We will get to see beyond what's in the story to what are the sources behind it.

01:11:28.660 What software now makes possible through simultaneous automatic instant translation,

01:11:35.700 by summing up large data sets, you can create an entirely new kind of experience of news.

01:11:49.220 And that's actually something that I'm working on now, which I'll be happy to talk about offline.

01:11:54.580 But the technology is beyond exciting. And I'm not the only one thinking about this. There are other people,

01:12:00.420 some in legacy places, some in startups, who are thinking about this too. There's a lot going on.

01:12:07.300 And if the great and the good can back off, and the journalism schools can stop telling us

01:12:12.900 how things should be and let things evolve, I think we could get beyond the official version and have...

01:12:21.860 Think about who also could be drawn... This field is... More people have left

01:12:27.140 journalism in the past 20 years than any other field. The US Department of Labor keeps track of this

01:12:34.740 in the United States. And the job description of newsroom reporter has shed more jobs than steelworkers,

01:12:41.700 ironworkers, than any other profession they track since 2000. That should be reversed.

01:12:48.820 Why isn't everyone who's creating a YouTube channel and struggling to monetize it not able

01:12:57.140 to create content that meets a set of verification rules and then goes into a marketplace and becomes

01:13:04.100 available to every device on the internet? You can take it or not take it. Think about the differences

01:13:09.620 in perspective that would be possible if you have a single mother in Mexico City covering something

01:13:17.060 and a college professor in Boston covering that same thing, and a structural engineer

01:13:25.060 out in Kansas, you know, Overland Park, Kansas, looking at that same thing. And they're both...

01:13:30.260 All three of them are following the objective verification rules that the software makes possible,

01:13:35.540 and they're all reporting it. But they're reporting it, asking the questions, and wondering the things,

01:13:40.740 and investigating from their own perspectives. I guarantee you they'd see it all differently.

01:13:48.100 And it's such a good point. But if we focus, for instance, on the Charlie Kirk assassination,

01:13:54.020 which is obviously awful and terrible, you have lots of people talking about it. And it became quite a

01:14:01.140 fascinating case study to look at people's reactions, including established journalists,

01:14:07.940 and seeing how people reported. And the thing that worries me, Richard, is that the incentives become

01:14:15.060 not to tell the truth, not even to sensationalize the truth, but to spread conspiracy theories.

01:14:22.420 Because that's where the money is. The money is not in the truth.

01:14:26.420 Right. Well, I would divide the conspiracy theories into two pieces, right?

01:14:31.700 Some are the native-born conspiracy theories. That is to say, I'm not talking about the citizen status of

01:14:37.060 these people. I'm just saying people who reside in our societies, who think whatever they think.

01:14:42.820 That's sort of item one, bundle one. Over here, we also have a lot of bots,

01:14:47.780 run by the Iranians, the Russians, the Chinese, and other groups, who are trying to sow division and

01:14:58.260 plant ideas in our society. And by our society, I mean the Western world, and divide it over stupid 1.00

01:15:05.620 issues and distract, right? And the medieval mind used to worry whether the ideas in their heads were 0.98

01:15:14.420 their own, or put there by some demon. When we consume the internet, the first question we ought

01:15:19.620 to ask is, is this put here by Qatar, or Iran, or, I don't know.

01:15:28.100 China, Russia.

01:15:29.140 Yeah. Or some interest group in our country, or another European country, or Australian, whatever.

01:15:36.260 So who is putting this out? We do know that during the 2020 campaign, for example,

01:15:43.300 more than half of the followers, online followers, of the Biden campaign were bots. And some of them

01:15:51.060 run out of India and Bangladesh by people who couldn't even speak English. 1.00

01:15:55.780 Yeah. So this is just fake followers, fake social media cred given to conspiracy theories.

01:16:03.860 I don't think the answer is censorship. Let's crack down on all the crazy thoughts.

01:16:08.580 Let other people answer back. And in the balance of things, the truth will sort itself out.

01:16:13.700 But I do think we need to think about homegrown. I think the crazy people here get to have their say. 0.78

01:16:19.780 But I don't think we need to import. We don't need electronic immigration into Western society

01:16:26.900 from Russia, China, and other authoritarian places.

01:16:30.340 And we need to find a solution to that. Because if we don't, then what we have, as you say,

01:16:35.140 are these people spouting crazy theories who are artificially boosted. I go on my social media and I'm

01:16:41.140 going, this is patently nonsense. Yeah, it's got 3 million views. How is this?

01:16:46.100 Right. I mean, all this pro-Hitler stuff online, it's got to be manufactured. I just can't believe

01:16:54.740 that there is any real audience for a failed, evil dictator who died, what, 80 years ago.

01:17:03.620 Right? I mean, it's just, there's no pro-Napoleon groups to pick another dictator from a different

01:17:09.620 country, right? Or pro-Stalin groups online. So it's, why is it all focused on this? Well,

01:17:15.860 that serves the ideological needs of the current Russian government to pretend they're fighting

01:17:20.900 Nazis in the Ukraine. And so therefore they want to say there are Nazis everywhere. Right?

01:17:26.420 Is there some crazy people in a shack in rural Idaho who truly believe this? I can't rule it out. I

01:17:32.980 don't know. But the online prevalence has got to be from a foreign intelligence service or foreign

01:17:40.260 companies aligned with foreign intelligence services. And then we need to look at the payments

01:17:46.660 made to influencers. People who are legitimate members of our society, who have very large followings,

01:17:54.020 who suddenly start saying and doing things that don't fit with the last few decades of our experience

01:17:59.860 of them. Why are you suddenly saying that Churchill was a bad guy or, you know, maybe we weren't the

01:18:07.380 good guys in World War II or this dictatorial regime in the Middle East is actually a great place. Like, 0.92

01:18:14.580 why are we saying these things? Right? Are they receiving money? Who knows? I certainly have no

01:18:20.660 evidence. I'm not going to say things I don't have evidence for. But you do see a lot of out-of-character

01:18:26.420 moves. And we do see people on both the left and the right who seem to have been funded from overseas.

01:18:33.060 And we at least ought to have a rule that if you're taking foreign money, you have to declare it openly.

01:18:39.620 So people know. Fair warning. Hey, you're secretly being paid off by Lichtenstein. That's why your views

01:18:45.380 on banking are what they are, you know. Why not? Right? You have to list the ingredients on the food you buy.

01:18:50.740 If you're taking money from outside of NATO, just tell us. You can say whatever you're going to say,

01:18:56.980 but how about, you know, a little warning label? Well, and maybe one of the... I don't think censorship

01:19:02.500 is the answer to any of it, but I also wonder whether real journalism is the answer to it.

01:19:07.300 Where are the investigative journalists who are... Where are the investigative journalists who are...

01:19:13.380 I can't say that line for some reason. Where are the investigative journalists who are looking into

01:19:19.300 those allegations? Because every time I post anything that's remotely paraisal, people say,

01:19:24.660 I've got $7,000 for that post. Well, I welcome people to look into that theory and find out. Likewise,

01:19:31.460 with the people you're talking about, let's find out who's getting more income.

01:19:34.820 People, first of all, don't understand the economics, right? An online video ad is, what,

01:19:41.620 12 or 15 cents per thousand impressions? Is that about right? Maybe you do a bit better with

01:19:46.900 sponsorships and things. It takes millions of views to make a number interesting at all.

01:19:53.940 Where are the investigative journalists? Investigative journalism is literally, today,

01:19:58.340 is the most expensive form of journalism. Right. So you need a very profitable publication that also

01:20:04.900 has an open and exploratory mind to things together in order to have a crew of investigative journalists.

01:20:11.780 And then, not anyone can be an investigator. You have to apprentice. You have to study how to do it.

01:20:17.460 There are, there's a lot of tacit knowledge, a lot of skills that have to be developed to really do this.

01:20:23.460 And the people who think that news ought to be the official story of something are very incurious.

01:20:31.460 Do you hear the story about the guy running for U.S. Senator of Maine who had a Totenkopf tattoo on his

01:20:36.820 chest? Right. And incredibly, the guy takes his shirt off and displays it in a video. Like,

01:20:43.620 I would think if you had a Totenkopf tattoo, you would have quietly changed that years ago.

01:20:48.660 But here's the thing. Here's my question. Why? He said he got it in Croatia.

01:20:52.980 Are Totenkopf tattoos common in Croatia? I don't know. Probably not. But why hasn't somebody

01:21:00.180 tracked down the tattoo parlor and interviewed the artist and say, do you have a whole, like,

01:21:05.860 special book of Nazi tattoos? Is this a common thing you do? Do you remember talking to this guy?

01:21:11.940 Right. And these kinds of questions, which aren't, it's not with social media, that expensive to find

01:21:19.540 that person in Croatia. But it is time and money. But they aren't minded to do it. They don't have 0.97

01:21:25.780 the curiosity to see, well, how did this happen? Right. What are the facts? And a lot of your online

01:21:34.260 influencer type people don't have the investigative skills. It takes years to hone this. You need to

01:21:41.460 find, you know, you know what databases to consult, what's trustworthy, what's your, how do you design

01:21:47.620 an investigation. That takes time and practice. And frankly, you make mistakes. It's one of the ways

01:21:53.380 you learn. Right. So this has atrophied on the left and never really developed on the right.

01:22:03.540 And until there's a budget and a curious mind to support it, you won't see more of it. You'll continue

01:22:10.740 to see less and less of it. However, I think when technology changes what kind of news is possible,

01:22:18.500 technology can also lower the cost of finding out new things. If you really get smart at writing

01:22:28.260 software, you could find that Croatian tattoo artist in a fraction of a minute. And then you can contact

01:22:37.380 them across the world and say, hey, can I come see you? I'd like to, I'd like to look through your,

01:22:42.500 because they all have sample books of tattoos they make, and they have a portfolio of the ones they're

01:22:46.420 most proud of. Right. And just have an open minded interview with the guy. And what would you,

01:22:53.380 maybe he doesn't remember the night. But if it turns out, oh, yeah, we keep a small book in the

01:22:57.540 back, you have to specially requested for the Nazi stuff. Or no, we don't do that. This guy came in 0.56

01:23:03.700 with the design and showed it to us. And we copied it. Two different set of facts. But how did this tattoo

01:23:10.020 come to be? Just an interesting investigation. Right. And Croatia has, you know, interesting

01:23:16.260 ties with the Nazi party in World War Two. There could be a cultural memory there. If he had this

01:23:22.500 tattoo in Spain, I would be a lot more surprised. But Croatia, the Nazis hung on to that into the bitter

01:23:30.420 end. The militias associated with Croatia did horrible things against not just the partisans of Tito,

01:23:36.900 but ordinary civilians and religious minorities. So is it possible? Sure.

01:23:44.420 And that's the thing that worries me about the death of the mainstream media. I don't know if

01:23:48.100 you've ever seen the movie Spotlight. Yes. Which is a brilliant movie. It's about the Boston,

01:23:54.020 I can't remember the newspaper. The Boston Globe. The Boston Globe, an investigation into pedophilia,

01:23:58.820 into the Catholic Church in Boston. And you watch this, and it's based on a true story.

01:24:05.780 And you think to yourself, that's such an important public service. Yes. It's an important public

01:24:10.980 service because there is always going to be corruption. There is always going to be abuse.

01:24:16.180 And the best of the journalists, in my opinion, I'm sure you probably agree with the people who

01:24:20.900 expose that. And there's never going to be any less of that because human beings are what they are.

01:24:26.260 So if we don't have those people exposing it, then we're going to be in a much darker and more unsafe

01:24:32.820 world. Absolutely. First of all, Boston at the time was a Catholic majority city. Going after the 1.00

01:24:42.180 largest religion among your readership group takes guts. But behind that guts means you have a journalistic

01:24:49.220 culture that has got a sense of fearlessness and recklessness. But it also has the professionalism

01:24:57.300 to structure an investigation, to go about it, to make sure the witnesses are actually independent of

01:25:02.260 each other. Right? So if you have two people who claim they saw something, but they're both friends

01:25:06.980 with each other. They're not really independent eyewitnesses. Now, it's also interesting that

01:25:15.060 their choice of targets, right? If you went after psychologists, especially people dealing with

01:25:23.460 women following divorce or battered women, there's a horrendous amount of sexual abuse there that never 0.66

01:25:28.100 really gets investigated. There's also a tremendous amount of sexual abuse in public schools by teachers

01:25:34.980 against children. Oddly enough, it appears, and I've not made a real thorough study of this, women against 1.00

01:25:41.300 male teenagers. Those things don't get investigated because they don't serve a larger narrative.

01:25:48.580 But still, I think it took guts. Spotlight was a useful thing. The church should be investigated

01:25:55.460 like every public institution. And also, I think it's important that the people in charge of vulnerable

01:26:01.220 people have no sexual or financial interest in those people. That is very important. And we too often say

01:26:13.620 in the name of rights and equality, oh, well, we should let this person supervise these people

01:26:20.580 or be in control of this group of people. And that person could be great on an individual basis,

01:26:28.100 but as a general rule that will cause problems in the end. As we saw in the sort of military training when we have

01:26:35.060 male drill instructors over female recruits, there were abuses. I mean, we have to be mindful of this and we have 0.94

01:26:46.420 to be clever about how we design incentives and how we surveil to make sure that wrongdoing isn't happening.

01:26:53.140 And part of that is the media's job. And thank God for the Boston Globe going after the Catholic Church. 0.98

01:26:59.540 And I hope they go after all the other sacred cows, because accountability is desperately needed

01:27:06.980 in all aspects of our society. And I'm afraid if we lose legacy media, we lose the muscle memory

01:27:15.220 to do these kinds of investigations. Richard, that's us. Thank you very much. Thank you.

01:27:21.140 Other examples of times and places where distrust in media is as high as it is today.

01:27:27.220 If so, how was that trust regained within those societies?

01:27:45.220 Getting ready for a game means being ready for anything, like packing a spare stick.

01:27:52.900 I like to be prepared. That's why I remember 988, Canada's Suicide Crisis Helpline.

01:27:58.420 It's good to know, just in case. Anyone can call or text for free confidential support

01:28:03.380 from a trained responder, anytime. 988 Suicide Crisis Helpline is funded by the government of Canada.

TRIGGERnometry - January 21, 2026

The Best Conversation About News, Opinion and Censorship You've Ever Heard - Richard Miniter

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