How the Right Took Over the Media

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Speaker 2 Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm Dan Pfeiffer.
This is our second Sunday show.

Speaker 2 These episodes are going to be coming out every other weekend and will give us hosts a chance to step back from the churn to have longer form conversations about the big ideas and forces shaping news and politics.

Speaker 2 My guest today is Ben Smith, the co-founder and editor-in-chief of the news site Semaphore. Ben is a longtime reporter.

Speaker 2 He worked for Politico, was the editor of BuzzFeed News, and was the New York Times media critic. So he has a ton of experience covering the coverage.

Speaker 2 From the prominence of podcasters and influencers in the 2024 election to the way Trump is running roughshod over the media, it feels like we are at a critical moment for the role of the fourth estate.

Speaker 2 That's why I wanted to bring Ben on to dig into the state of the American free press, what journalists need to do differently for Trump 2.0, and whether the right has finally won the war on the media.

Speaker 2 Ben Smith, welcome to Pod State America. How are you doing?

Speaker 4 Good. Thanks for having me, Dan.
It's nice to see you.

Speaker 2 Absolutely. We've known each other for a very long time.

Speaker 4 I think we first met on a bus in Iowa in 2007.

Speaker 2 Seven.

Speaker 2 You were a blogger.

Speaker 4 And they were like, they were like, we have an adult here to take charge of you all, and it was you.

Speaker 2 Yes. And the adult, I think I was 29, 30, maybe at the time.
So like a true adult.

Speaker 2 But look,

Speaker 2 Trump's been in office for nearly three weeks. It has been a truly insane and intense three weeks.
But we know that's part of his and Steve Bannon's flood the zone strategy.

Speaker 2 Bannon first described this approach in 2018. He said his strategy for overcoming the media's opposition was to to flood the zone with shit.

Speaker 2 For our listeners, let's take a listen to what he said on PBS's front line back then.

Speaker 5 The opposition party is the media. And the media can only, because they're dumb and they're lazy, they can only focus on one thing at a time.

Speaker 5 And the one thing they'll mainly focus on is either they do the horse race, or once the horse race, who's ins, who's out? It's like the high school, who are the cool kids in the cafeteria, right?

Speaker 5 Because it's easy. It's the reason they do the horse race stuff all the time, right? And they won't do the basic, what are the core things that are going on in the country.

Speaker 5 I said, all we have to do is flood the zone. Every day we hit them with three things.
They'll bite on one and we'll get all of our stuff done. Bang, bang, bang.

Speaker 5 These guys will never, will never be able to recover, but we got to start with muzzle velocity. So it's got to start and it's got to hammer.
It's got muzzle velocity.

Speaker 2 Seems like a pretty accurate description of what at least the first couple of weeks of Trump 2.0 have looked like.

Speaker 2 How have you been covering Trump 2.0 and how have you tried to deal with the flood the zone strategy?

Speaker 4 Yeah, I mean, yeah, it is a very accurate description. And I mean, mean, isn't the media dumb and lazy? Like, often also accurate.

Speaker 4 But I think, you know,

Speaker 4 the notion that the opposition party is the media and that the world is totally mediated by the media and that we shape reality and decide what happens. To me, I don't really buy that.

Speaker 4 But I also think it's kind of poisonous for the media to think that about itself in a way.

Speaker 4 And I get, you know, I mean, we're trying to cover the story.

Speaker 4 We're trying to understand what's happening, why things are happening, who's actually making these decisions, what their actual motives are, things that social media can often be shaky on.

Speaker 4 I mean, I think one of the big stories, one of the stories that struck me early, you know, is that is obviously you have this iconic image of Mark Zuckerberg and et al.

Speaker 4 sort of in you know paying their regard you showing up to support Trump's inauguration and

Speaker 4 to sort of pledge their loyalty to the administration.

Speaker 4 And it was really striking to me, a story we broke over the weekend, that when it comes to key appointments like the general counsel for the FCC, they pick somebody who is the most anti-big tech possible lawyer in America.

Speaker 4 Like this bought them nothing. The Trump people think it's hilarious.
They like it. But it isn't buying them.
It's not buying them anything.

Speaker 4 And then conversely, who has actual influence in the White House? Which, who in media has Trump's respect? Rupert Murdoch, whose publications have been very, very tough on Trump.

Speaker 4 And actually, if you read the Wall Street Journal editorial page, you'll get much tougher, clearer criticism of Trump than you get from, you know, the LA Times, which only writes about Los Angeles now because they feel scared.

Speaker 4 It's an interesting thing.

Speaker 4 I think you see there's these like demonstrations of weakness by a lot of kind of would-be media moguls, which they imagine are going to ingratiate themselves to the White House.

Speaker 4 And there's no evidence that it is.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I want to get into some of those tributes that some of the media and tech are paying to Trump in a minute.

Speaker 2 But I think I'm not going to defend Steve Bannon often in the history of Pot Save America, but I think when he made those comments in 2019, 2018, 2019, whatever it was, he, the role, it was a different place, right?

Speaker 2 The media did play, the legacy media, if you will, just who he's really talking about, right?

Speaker 2 Like when we talk about media in this podcast, that is everything from Semaphore to the New York Times to Fox News, now to Joe Rogan, Alex Cooper, everything.

Speaker 2 But what Bannon is talking about here is he's talking about the White House press score, right? The establishment media, legacy media, regime media, as Republicans call it.

Speaker 2 And back then, it certainly played a larger role, I think at least, and maybe you can, if you disagree, you should say it, in sort of mediating reality.

Speaker 4 Yeah, and they were reacting, of course, to a moment in which the Russia investigation had totally swamped the administration, driven by breathless media coverage.

Speaker 4 And so I think in a way,

Speaker 4 they had gotten onto the back foot in the first weeks of the administration

Speaker 4 and never really got onto the front foot. They were never, they were very rarely were they able to really drive that story.

Speaker 4 It was mostly they were, you know, they were the rabbit being pursued by the wolves. And so like, I think they kind of honestly, reasonably figured we don't want that to happen again.

Speaker 4 And that strategy, I mean, Bannon puts it in really bombastic terms, but I don't know.

Speaker 4 Do you think it's probably a good, like, is that, if you were a White House comms director, would you, would you come out with Muzzle Velocity right now?

Speaker 2 Yeah, I think you would want Muzzle Velocity.

Speaker 2 I think the question for Trump, if I'm stepping back from like the perspective of a political operative, is, are you telling a larger story or are you getting swamped by action?

Speaker 2 Like what they are demonstrating right now is action, right? Just he's doing things, and that is standing in stark contrast to what people perceived of Biden, right? He was largely absent.

Speaker 2 Even though he did a lot of things, most of a lot of those things weren't public. They didn't see him.

Speaker 2 And so, you know, I always, I was thinking about this the other day is that in Trump's first term, in the beginning, he suffered, I think, mightily in public perception with the comparison to Obama.

Speaker 2 Because he was out there. He was kind of saying dumb, crazy things.
He was not thoughtful. And that, and Obama was much more popular than Trump, so that suffered.

Speaker 2 In this situation, I think he actually benefits from the comparison to Biden because Biden was perceived to be, fairly or unfairly, as

Speaker 2 absent, not doing a lot, not showing strength, not being out there. And Trump is out there 24-7, right? Like, when was the last time the public never really saw Biden?

Speaker 2 And Trump is out there all the time. So he benefits from it.

Speaker 2 The question will be. Like, right now, that is a very good short-term strategy.

Speaker 4 What are you, like, what points are you putting on the board in terms of delivering on your campaign promises, right or is it just a bunch of noise and that that it's early to know whether that's actually true or not yeah and the thing that i mean i think bannon is a smart guy in some ways he's so ubiquitous that people can underestimate how consequential he is but notably absent from from the muzzle velocity speech is just like which way is the gun pointed what's in it you know and and right and it's just it's a strategy it's kind of new content neutral like they could be announcing anything and there was this narrative last year that, well, look, like this time around, Trump has a real plan.

Speaker 4 They know what they're doing. They have a set of actions planned.

Speaker 4 And some of the stuff coming out of the muzzle, like some of the, particularly around immigration, I think is actually like, look, we had a plan.

Speaker 4 We're going to do some high-profile, even if they're not massive raids. We're going to try to scare people away from the border.
We have some legal changes we want. Like that all felt.
planned.

Speaker 4 The Elon stuff is obviously, he's just seeing tweets about agencies he's never heard of reacting, canceling stuff, uncanceling stuff. I mean, it's mostly improvisational.

Speaker 4 And I think that's, as you say, like at some point, like these are the fights. I mean, I think, you know,

Speaker 4 the laws of gravity still apply. Like you, the president has this hundred days, has this moment at which to set an agenda, to pick their priorities, to pick the fights they're going to pick.

Speaker 4 And some of the fights they're picking are the fights they planned to pick and wanted to pick, but a lot of the fights they're picking are the fights that Elon saw a tweet about yesterday.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I mean, they're like they are better, it is a better run organization than last time, only in the sense that you have a bunch of people who maybe care about a specific issue that Trump may or may not care about as much.

Speaker 2 And they are finding ways to drive that. Yeah.
You know,

Speaker 2 some of it is not legally sustainable. Some of it is just like a bunch of bullshit.
Like the, like the executive order on transgender sports participation.

Speaker 2 Like that's not something the government has any access to, but by just by being out there and being bombastic, you get, you know, likely the NCAA or someone else to respond to it.

Speaker 2 But they're actually like, they didn't have executive orders in the can last time to do it. Right.

Speaker 2 And the ones they've written, or they're, and I think that they are, Trump is freed this time from caring what the media thinks, or at least he seems to be.

Speaker 2 Like, they were very, they were more sensitive to the, you know, what Maggie Haberman would say about them than they seem to be now.

Speaker 4 Yeah, I think that remains to be seen. I think Trump likes to be able to do it.

Speaker 2 At least let me say the administration. Question about Trump.

Speaker 4 Yeah, I do think that you're, I mean, this is going to be a real question, as, you know, because they're just, they have a lot of muscle velocity.

Speaker 4 And as you write, and as you said, like, some of the stuff, and a lot of it is is kind of organizationally

Speaker 4 you know kind of culture war stuff that doesn't that doesn't really affect the outcomes of government policy in an immediate way is all happening it's moving they clearly had it well planned but again i mean a lot of the most consequential stuff is being decided by elon musk in a pretty chaotic way and when it starts and i think there's a real question of some of it will be very unpopular some of it will get really bad press Do we think Trump wants that?

Speaker 4 Like, I actually don't think Trump likes getting bad press or is comfortable with getting bad press. I think he likes getting good press.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I think that's true. I think it's true.
I guess the way I've been thinking about it is, I mean, the way he backed off the tariffs very quickly for just basically nothing is notable.

Speaker 2 The way they, I know a judge stopped the funding freeze, but Trump also pulled the plug on it and reportedly, I mean, at least in some reporting I read, was that was his choice because it was so noisy and messy.

Speaker 2 And so I think he's still going to be reactive to some of that stuff. The people around him are less reactive to it.

Speaker 2 Like last time he had so many Republican establishment people in his administration that they were more reactive to it. And, you know,

Speaker 2 John Kelly is going to be more reactive to bad press than Christy Noam or

Speaker 2 same thing with his defense. Pete Hagseth is not going to care about it.

Speaker 2 So I think that it will matter. But I guess my question to have is, it seems to me, at least watching this over the first three weeks, that the legacy media, establishment media, right?

Speaker 2 I always want to kind of just at least. the people in the briefing room

Speaker 2 in Trump 1 came in really sort of guns blazing, right? They sort of branded themselves as defenders of democracy. There was a ton of fact-checking.

Speaker 2 And there is a, it feels like,

Speaker 2 at least from afar, a different approach this time, right?

Speaker 2 A little more, not that there is not real, like, I do kind of want to separate the journalists who are covering the White House or covering Trump from maybe the parent companies who own them.

Speaker 2 But because there is like real, like people are, reporters, I will say, are working their ass off and they're writing like a like a really lot of really important stories.

Speaker 4 Whether anyone's reading them or not is an open question, but it does feel like the press is a little more accommodation has more of an accommodationist and less aggressive approach this time do you see it that way am i is this my is my anti-media bias coming through i mean i think that's one way to see it i mean i guess i never really bought the idea that like our choice is to be accommodationist versus collaborationist versus aggressive like we're supposed to be covering reality and I think that there was an almost delusional quality to the media where reporters loved having people they met out in in the world say to them, like, wow, you're so brave.

Speaker 4 Thank you for what you do. It's like, come on, you cover the White House.
Like, you're not a war reporter.

Speaker 4 And I do think the work is incredibly important to democracy, but that's a little different between

Speaker 4 saying

Speaker 4 journalism is this incredibly, is this vital pillar of democracy and journalists are themselves heroes of democracy who

Speaker 4 ride around on white horses. Like, it's a weird job.

Speaker 4 And the best reporters, right, like reporters who are very valuable right now, like spend a lot of time kind of burrowing into Trump world and telling you what's happening there that's you know and that's an incredibly valuable thing but you don't have to

Speaker 4 I don't know but I think there was a level at which the sort of media the media fell in love with a narrative about itself that you know that that that made liberals love them and conservatives hate them and I don't know and that's not the only factor maybe even the most major factor but but I don't think in retrospect that was a good thing and I would say the underlying thing here is just to go back Trump gets elected and a lot of journalists a lot of liberals think there's no way this was legitimate.

Speaker 4 Like this,

Speaker 4 there's been a mistake here. And like, what happened? Maybe it was Facebook.
Like, maybe there's some technical social media trick, or maybe it was the Russians.

Speaker 4 And like, these are two very great lines of reporting inquiry that lots of really smart journalists, and I don't think they were always framing the story that way, but a lot of journalistic effort was expended basically trying to answer the question of how did Donald Trump manage to get elected?

Speaker 4 And those were both factors, obviously, shifts in social media, Russian interference in the election.

Speaker 4 But like, I think they did not like substitut to like sufficiently consider option three which was that he was pretty popular and won a lot of votes

Speaker 4 and so I think that was like some people aren't wrong to be upset that most of the journalistic energy of 2016 and 2017 was expended on trying to figure out what trick got him elected

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Speaker 2 I think one of the

Speaker 2 accommodate, you know, one of the real critiques from, you know, folks, not just on the left, but in journal, but in even a journal itself, is that some of the corporate media entities have been, are trying to curry favor with Trump for reasons separate and apart from their,

Speaker 2 from the specifics, the specifics of their publication itself.

Speaker 2 So you have the Disney Corporation settling a pretty specious lawsuit that a lot of legal experts think ABC could have won involving George Stephanopoulos erroneously calling Trump a racist.

Speaker 2 You have reports that

Speaker 2 sorry, rapist,

Speaker 2 you probably couldn't have gotten sued for the racist one.

Speaker 2 And then you have reports that Paramount, which has a merger, a very large merger before the Trump administration, considering settling what is an even more reportedly absurd lawsuit about the editing of the Kamala Harris interview.

Speaker 2 Just sort of as a publisher, a person, a longtime media critic, what's your response to how some of these entities are doing this?

Speaker 4 You know, it's funny that for years, for our whole careers, there's been a set of advocates who yelled about the corporate consolidation of media. They're like Ralph Nader people.

Speaker 4 There's a group called Free Press. They were totally irrelevant to the political conversation, like nice people.
And you'd be like, yeah, I don't know.

Speaker 4 Like, I work in corporate media and I've never had my corporate overlords cutting secret deals with the government. That's not a thing that happens in America.

Speaker 4 And they were totally right.

Speaker 4 Like what you see now is that this very, very consolidated media is largely owned by, on one hand, public companies that have fiduciary responsibilities to their shareholders.

Speaker 4 And when we say media, we really mean news media, because they have lots of exposure beyond news. Like, you know, the Ellison family isn't buying Paramount because they want CBS News.

Speaker 4 Like, CBS News comes along with the bargain and it's kind of a headache. But they want, you know, they're looking for a content library and

Speaker 4 getting into the movie business. And so

Speaker 4 this, like, CBS News is this liability.

Speaker 4 And actually, the Disney suit is, you know, sort of specious, but it's the kind of suit sometimes you settle because I think they were worried about what was it, you know, disclosing disclosing George Stephanopis' text messages, whatever.

Speaker 4 There's some argument for settling that one. I'm not a great one, but the CBS one is ludicrous.
It's about editing,

Speaker 4 it's about, like, it's a very normal journalistic thing.

Speaker 4 If you edit an interview the way you want to edit it, maybe you screw it up, maybe whatever, but it's, but it's, it's, it's something that is widely viewed as protected and is a specious lawsuit, even if they've found a friendly judge in Texas.

Speaker 4 But see, you know, but CBS is but Sherry Redstone, who's selling CBS, would like to get paid. And the quickest way to getting paid paid is caving to Trump.

Speaker 4 And if that damages the brand, if that blows up the newsroom, that's not a big deal for her. I think similarly, you know, Bezos and Patrick Soon Chong are billionaires.

Speaker 4 And the issue isn't that they're billionaires, it's that they have lots of exposure in other businesses that the government has a lot of power over. Soon Chong is in the healthcare business.

Speaker 4 FDA, incredibly important to him. Bezos is very interested in his space projects.
And Trump will obviously punish them. I mean, he's done it in the past.

Speaker 4 He'll threaten he'll kill those, kill, kill contracts if your publication angers him. And so,

Speaker 4 and Bezos wrote this in his letter about canceling the endorsement, that it would be, and he said it, this, well, I'm not doing this because I'm caving to Trump, but I can't, but I can't blame you for seeing it that way because it sure looks, I recognize that it looks that way.

Speaker 4 And I just think that what you see is that it makes you realize the importance of

Speaker 4 independent media and independent in sort of the old natorite sense, that they are independent of consolidated ownership.

Speaker 4 I mean, the New York Times is the only major publication in the country that is independent in that sense.

Speaker 4 You know, the Murdoch Press,

Speaker 4 for all the many problems I have with them, are at least in the news business in a real way and have some experience in dealing with power and not just caving.

Speaker 4 And then lots of smaller outlets like ours, like yours and mine.

Speaker 4 And, you know, I'm sure like if the Trump administration decided to try to damage your business and go after your advertisers, it could probably do a lot of damage.

Speaker 4 But you're not dealing with a sister company that is heavily regulated, that is, you know, and we already, you know, and I think that's, that to me is actually kind of the scary thing is, is the, is, is the way in which ownership is really being brought to bear for the first time in my career.

Speaker 2 It is, there's just this ultimate irony that like the ABC settlement actually goes to the Trump Library, were it won't ever be built. It's going to be in New York.
And the fact that.

Speaker 2 That's right. Or it could be in Gaza.

Speaker 4 Somebody isn't in Trump's orb, but described it to me as the Trump Library and casino.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I'm sure that I'm sure that is the case, or in amusement park, or whatever, whatever else it'll be. But it's just there's a tremendous irony.

Speaker 2 So ABC, so Walt Disney and ABC have given Trump money for the library. If Paramount settles a suit, CBS will give Trump money for his library.

Speaker 2 Mark Zuckerberg just settled a suit with Facebook against Trump that will go to the library in. That Trump is going to end up with a library built by the legacy media and big tech.

Speaker 2 It's just a sort of a wild thing.

Speaker 4 You wouldn't have to do it.

Speaker 4 You see why he finds that really satisfying.

Speaker 2 I can imagine. I I can imagine that it is quite satisfying to him.

Speaker 2 In the first Trump term, fact-checking was a very important part of how the press was thinking about holding Trump accountable, right? He is telling all these lies.

Speaker 2 It is our job to sort reality for our readers. We're going to fact-check him.
We're going to do it. Bring on people like Daniel Dale and CNN right afterwards.
And

Speaker 2 I'm curious

Speaker 2 how that's going to happen this time. Like here, I want to have you listen to this clip from

Speaker 2 Trump's recent press conference where Peter Alexander

Speaker 2 tries to question the reality reality of what Trump just said. Let's take a listen.

Speaker 8 The cited FAA text that you read is real, but the implication that this policy is new or that it stems from efforts that began under President Biden or the Transportation Secretary Pete Butigej is demonstrably false.

Speaker 8 It's been on the FAA's website. No, it's on the website.
The FAA's website, it was there in 2013. It was there for the entirety of what I read.

Speaker 8 It was there for the entirety of your administration, too. So my question is, why didn't you change the policy during your first administration?

Speaker 9 I did change it. I changed the Obama policy, and we had a very good policy.
And then Biden came in and he changed it.

Speaker 9 And then when I came in two days, three days ago, I signed a new order bringing it to the highest level of intelligence. Okay.

Speaker 2 Please.

Speaker 2 It's on the website.

Speaker 2 So Peter Alexander here, who's the MSC News correspondent, does exactly what you're supposed to do. Trump holds this press conference, makes a series of claims that are demonstrably not true.

Speaker 2 He corrects them on it. Trump runs right over him.
And I guess the question is, what value do you see in fact-checking? Is it still an important part of journalism?

Speaker 2 Is it even possible when you have a president who, you're in an administration or even a political party right now, who's so willing to ignore reality?

Speaker 4 Yeah. I mean, I guess, you know, as you know, I come from a slightly weird corner of the world.
I never really liked the formalized fact-checking.

Speaker 4 Like, I think journalists' job is to get the facts right and that you shouldn't outsource that to some other often Facebook funded or whatever institution populated by 23-year-olds who are learning how to do their jobs.

Speaker 4 But anyway, let me bracket that particular rant.

Speaker 4 No, I mean, I think there's a level of, I mean, the media, the news media is weaker than it used to be. It was weaker in 2016 than it thought it was.
Maybe it realizes how weak it is now.

Speaker 4 But like, what, I mean, I think there's some question of what's the, like, we should get our facts right. We have a responsibility to our readers to tell them what's really going on.

Speaker 4 Are we going to disabuse Trump's supporters of things that they believe or of things that maybe aren't really being received as facts, but more as political statements or as sort of, you know, like, you know, I don't, it doesn't, it doesn't seem like it.

Speaker 4 It doesn't seem like

Speaker 4 those fact checks were changing a lot of minds or reaching a lot of people who were looking to have the facts checked. And so I think that kind of formalized fact checking, like, I mean, I...

Speaker 4 I'm not sure what it was doing in the end. Like, I guess

Speaker 4 there's a fair amount of research on like media effect and media impact that like none of us actually wind up looking at that much.

Speaker 4 But I think it's often interesting to ask, like, well, okay, like, did this, Retrick, did we do some focus groups where this then changed people's minds and people came in thinking that one thing was happening and then what read factcheck.com and left thinking another thing was happening.

Speaker 4 Like, I don't really see a lot of that. I do think in, like, this is a real obvious case where there's a factual dispute.
It is, in fact, this journalist's job to resolve it and say what is true.

Speaker 4 And for people who are looking for it to read the true thing. A lot of things that got fact-checked were sometimes a little hazier, were sometimes more political disputes.

Speaker 4 Is immigration good for the economy? Like, that's not really a fact-checkable claim. That's an argument among economists.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I mean, that was, I mean, even, that's been a problem even in, in my days in government.

Speaker 2 The, like, I would rage at my desk at the Washington Post fact checker for taking a sort of a statement of values or a statement of principle and then assigning some or pinocchios to it because you could find a like you could nitpick it in a way.

Speaker 4 Yeah, it's the most pedantic imaginable approach to politics. And I think sometimes.

Speaker 4 kind of annoyed people and backfired in that way.

Speaker 4 But I think the broader question of, I mean, you know, there is, I mean, this is honestly often true with the first wave of people who come into government, that like they believe some things that are just not true about reality and about how government works.

Speaker 4 And they come in with some things they've said on the campaign trail about, I mean, I think you saw this in the Biden administration with the Saudis, frankly.

Speaker 4 Like they had some views on Saudi Arabia that did not survive contact with reality and wound up being the Saudis' best friends.

Speaker 2 Just to, just to kind of like, well, that's a, but like, yeah, I mean, that's a slightly, to me, that's slightly different.

Speaker 4 But for instance, I wrote about this guy named Darren Beatty, who's going to be in the stage of government, and has some views on how

Speaker 4 they were trying to orchestrate color revolutions, like Eastern European style.

Speaker 4 The people who had orchestrated the color revolutions in Eastern Europe had come back here and were trying to orchestrate against Trump. At some level, that's a factual claim.

Speaker 4 Do we think that happened?

Speaker 4 And I do think that

Speaker 4 I'm sort of more interested in some ways in people who are arriving with Trump with a set of beliefs that may or not may not.

Speaker 4 Because I think the one thing that people underestimate is a lot of the people who are saying things, they believe the things they're saying. Some of it is nonsense.

Speaker 4 Bannon, I think, often will just tell narrow, spin yarns whose details are not all true and doesn't believe all of them. But a lot of these folks believe what they're saying.

Speaker 4 Like, I think RFK mostly believes the things he says about vaccines.

Speaker 2 I mean, I guess on a day-to-day basis, as you cover politics or government or anything in the world you're covering, like, what do you, like, what is your, what it, like, what do you say to your reports, is your task?

Speaker 2 Right.

Speaker 4 Yeah, I mean, I think, I mean, you know, I think we are trying to speak to a really informed audience that has to understand what's actually going on because they're encountering it in the world of business, economics,

Speaker 4 politics.

Speaker 4 I mean, actually, you know, the business press often is more reliable than the political press because they are talking to people who have to make, you know, to have to trade stocks, have to make decisions based on reality.

Speaker 4 So, and I, so I think, you know, so we obviously see that as our responsibility.

Speaker 4 We also, I mean, I do think it's a moment when you sort of have to bring some humility as a journalist, whether you like it or not, because

Speaker 4 we have less power than we did. And we definitely do try to do two specific things.
And one is to try to say to readers, because I do think people live in these deep information bubbles.

Speaker 4 And it's not that you necessarily believe the things that are being said on Fox News, but it is important if you're a listener of Potsive to probably know what they're talking about some of the time.

Speaker 4 Like what, like literally, what Republican legislators are walking into the house with no idea. what their Democratic colleagues like read that morning.

Speaker 4 And the Democrats have no idea what the Republicans were reading. And so we have this very popular feature called Blind Spot.
It's literally like, we're not trying to arbitrate the reality of this.

Speaker 4 Often these are true stories just with different emphasis, totally different emphasis.

Speaker 4 But the Republicans are talking about some crime committed by an illegal immigrant in Colorado, and the Democrats are talking about some just totally different story, right?

Speaker 4 And I think some level of just trying to say like this is giving a glimpse of the reality that the other side is living in is pretty useful. I mean, just sort of actionably useful.
And

Speaker 4 sometimes I do think social media is a machine for taking the stupidest thing that your opponent said and elevate the stupidest version of the stupidest thing they think and constantly barraging you with it.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 4 there might be someone in there who's actually making a reasonable case you could argue with, but it will be totally swept away in social media. And I think we do try to sort of

Speaker 4 elevate the stronger arguments and to try to create some space for reasonable disagreement. So I think there's a fair amount of that too.
Although there is also,

Speaker 4 as you say,

Speaker 4 eroding shared factual factual basis around this for sure.

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Speaker 2 I think the blind spot thing is very interesting because in my career in politics, one of the...

Speaker 2 things that was a fundamental shift in how government and politics worked was the moment Republicans and Democrats stopped stopped reading the same media, which probably happened about midway through the Obama years.

Speaker 2 People would pretend like they were playing a part, right?

Speaker 2 Particularly in the like around 2010, when the Tea Party sort of took off, a lot of Republicans were sort of, they were appealing to the base, but they were still reading the New York Times.

Speaker 2 They were still reading Politico. They were seeing everything else.
And so they, we were operating under the same set of reality, at least in a private negotiation you were having over legislation.

Speaker 2 We all sort of agreed on the same reality. Right about, I would say, midway through the Obama's, through Obama's second term, kind of when Facebook became

Speaker 2 Republicans radicalized a little bit after Obama's reelection, Fox News became sort of more powerful, and then that the sort of right-wing media ecosystem took off, sort of powered by Facebook.

Speaker 2 So the Breitbart era, Daily Caller, right around 2014, is like we stopped having the same reality. We were having completely different conversations.
And it is

Speaker 2 like, so that speaks to governing. And on politics, it is

Speaker 2 the difference has been that, and I think this might be changing a little bit for better, probably for worse, is that Democrats had a media diet that was primarily legacy media.

Speaker 2 Still, we were sort of in the New York Times, so it's the NPR. Maybe it would skew a little on the

Speaker 2 more left-leaning part of that legacy media diet, but it was traditional media abiding by the rules of journalism, as commonly understood.

Speaker 2 And the Republicans, it shifted to something totally different that did not abide by and often sort of spat in the face of those rules.

Speaker 2 And that now we are fully in that moment where the Trump administration and Republicans writ large up and down, you know, it's not just in Washington, it's everywhere, are exists in this wholly other media ecosystem.

Speaker 2 And that media ecosystem is becoming much less clear to anyone else because it's not just, it's not like you could, like, yes, you could turn on Fox News, and that would be a very good idiot's guide to what the right is thinking.

Speaker 2 But that's often, I think, in this day and age, kind of a lagging indicator of what's really bubbling up. Like, are you like, do you know what's happening on Rumble?

Speaker 2 Are you watching, you know, are you listening to the Daily Wire or reading Barry Weiss or some of these other things that are

Speaker 2 really affecting it?

Speaker 4 Yeah, it's a very, I mean, it's an incredibly fragmented system that you're describing. And I mean, like, right, like, there's a big distance between Rumble and Barry Weiss.

Speaker 4 These are all different things.

Speaker 4 I don't think there are parts of it, I think, that I was talking to a really prominent conservative podcaster who was saying that they spend a lot of their time complaining about the

Speaker 4 journalists and everything they get wrong. And then once in a while, there'll be a holiday.
And they're like, where is the flow of news? And it's for me to talk about.

Speaker 4 it's so annoying and it's like oh all the people I hate are like taking vacation with their kids and so there's no fodder for me there's no like underlying information I do think there's this question that you know gets kicked around sometimes actually Tucker Carlson founded the Daily Caller to solve this it did not which is that there's no real center-right, far-right reporting apparatus or not much of one.

Speaker 4 Actually, one of the things that distinguishes Breitbart from the others is they do some original reporting.

Speaker 4 Most of the places, a lot of the places that in that world, podcasters, are really really commentating and reacting or reacting to things they've seen on social media, which really are often made up.

Speaker 4 And there's like a lack of a kind of baseline of,

Speaker 4 yeah, I mean, it would be healthy if the Trump movement developed more reporting muscles, honestly.

Speaker 2 You've mentioned a couple of times here that the media is weaker than it has been and maybe recognized its weakness. I think just to put that sort of in perspective, right?

Speaker 2 We had the 2024 election where the candidates interacted less with the the media than at any point.

Speaker 4 Trump

Speaker 2 was in the no interviews with a mainstream media organization for the last, you know, whatever it was, month of the campaign. Harris did historically few.

Speaker 2 They took few, Harris took few questions from the, from the press.

Speaker 2 Then, and then you have just, you know, you have to, you know, drop in cable, uh, subscriptions, cable subscriptions, ratings, the economics, you know, sort of the Washington Post is losing money.

Speaker 2 Just it's the media has been weaker, is weaker at this point than it has been in any time. And so I kind of like,

Speaker 2 at the same time, and on top of that, sort of the credibility and the reach of the of the legacy media is obviously at its nadir.

Speaker 2 Is it fair to wonder whether the right, who's been waging a decades-long war against the media, has now won that war?

Speaker 4 Yeah, I think that, I mean, yes, I think that's an, that's, that's a reasonable thing to say. Like, what's the prize for winning that war? I'm not sure.

Speaker 4 I mean, there's a couple, just when you talk about trust, like the polling data here is worth sort of looking at because it's interesting.

Speaker 4 And basically what you see is that like starting with Dan Rather, actually,

Speaker 4 all of the decline in trust in the media is among Republicans. Like independents, pretty flat, Democrats, pretty flat.

Speaker 4 But you see this decline starting with Dan Rather in 04, Republicans saying, but the Republicans start saying the media is too liberal.

Speaker 4 And then at some point in the Trump years, it flips from the media is too liberal to the media is making everything up. And that's a huge difference.
And that's sort of what you're talking about.

Speaker 4 It used to be a shared reality in which Republicans complain about the refs, sometimes justifiably, to a situation in which they believe that the whole thing is made up. And that is a big shift.

Speaker 4 And then the final thing that is kind of dispiriting is the one place that trust media is eroding among Democrats is among young people. And that's happening pretty fast now.

Speaker 2 Yeah, and it's, they just,

Speaker 2 I saw a lot of focus groups, a lot of research in how Gen Z gets their news. And just the idea of

Speaker 2 going to a website to get news is like would never, it doesn't even occur to them. The idea that you would turn on the television to watch news does not.

Speaker 4 And years ago, I asked my daughter

Speaker 4 if she knew about How Finity Post. And she was like, oh, is that is that something in Safari?

Speaker 2 Yeah, that's right. Just, I mean, you wrote about this in your book, and you've talked about it a lot in the interviews when you were breaking out a couple of years ago, but is just the,

Speaker 2 and this is sort of where we, so you have, you have two things.

Speaker 2 You you have lack of trust in media which is uh a problem and growing among democrats particularly among young people yeah you have what i think is actually a distribution crisis in news which is you know sort of the yeah the short version history i always do is that if you were a person who was not a news junkie in the pre-internet era you had to see the news some form of the news you would bump into it organically because someone literally threw a newspaper at your door every morning or if you had to open that if you wanted to know when the movies were the baseball score the weather like something happened in your local town, you would see there you see headlines, right?

Speaker 2 If you wanted to know the news, if you wanted to know the weather the next day, you had to turn on the six o'clock news and you would see news that way. And then we kind of, we moved from newspapers.

Speaker 2 I mean, this has been your whole career. We sifted to, we could, we trained some group of people that they should go to www.nytimes.com or www.politico.com in the morning.

Speaker 2 Like the same way you would grab a cup of coffee and read a dead tree newspaper, you would grab a cup of coffee and pull up your laptop or your, if it was at a certain year or your iPad, and you would look at a website and read the news that way.

Speaker 2 Maybe the first thing you did at work, right, was you would sit down and read the news. Then

Speaker 2 social media came and we have like, we have a better plan. Facebook's going to deliver the news to your phone.
You're going to see it.

Speaker 2 And even if you're just like scrolling through for your, to look at pictures of your friend's kids or whatever else you do on Facebook, you're killing time in the grocery store, waiting in line, you would see some sort of news.

Speaker 2 And then some point after 20, and Twitter served the same function for a smaller group of people. Then around 20, sometime after 2020, that all fell apart.
Right.

Speaker 2 And now it's like, how do people get like there is no distributed, there is no major distribution mechanism

Speaker 2 for legacy media to reach people who are not actively seeking it out. Right.
That is the thing that has changed.

Speaker 4 I think that's a really good way to put it. I mean, I would say, you know, that these things keep changing.
Like it's, I don't think it's reached a static point.

Speaker 4 And I think that the thing that you described, which sounds incredibly disorienting and maddening, most people, most consumers hate.

Speaker 4 Like if you ask people like, hey, do you think this is working for you? Do you like how you're getting your news? No, everybody hates it.

Speaker 4 And I think that's, I mean, that was sort of what we were reacting to in Creating Semaphore, was like, just

Speaker 4 why I left the Times, just this sense of like, oh, there's actually an opportunity to like,

Speaker 4 like, to not, to respond to the fact that people feel totally disoriented, feel like they don't know what to trust,

Speaker 4 and try to address that stuff directly.

Speaker 4 And I think, and I think you're seeing, so I think that, I mean, ultimately, we live in this very, very dynamic free market society in which consumers do, even in news, and news is sometimes an exception to that.

Speaker 4 Like the tradition in news is if the consumers say, we hate you and everything you're doing, we say, fuck you, you're wrong.

Speaker 4 But I think there is this opportunity for both legacy and for new outlets to take pretty seriously how terrible the experience of consuming news is. And a lot of the pendulum swing is back to

Speaker 4 some of the older values. Like I think the reason that email newsletters are very popular is they actually are kind of print.
Like they force a kind of hierarchy hierarchy of saying what's important.

Speaker 4 They force a kind of concision because they're not infinite. And I think that's made them very popular.

Speaker 4 And I think, so I guess I, I mean, I'm obviously an optimist because I wouldn't still be doing this stuff, but I do think that the current, the status quo in some ways is kind of untenable.

Speaker 4 And the fragmentation commercially is extremely annoying too. Like how many sub-sects do you want to subscribe to? How many different streaming services are you going to pay for?

Speaker 4 And I think there's a very aggressive push and will be over the next couple of years to reconsolidate that stuff, like for better or for worse. But you'll have one subscription to newsletters.

Speaker 4 You'll have two streaming services. They'll all swallow each other.
Again, that could be bad or that could be good.

Speaker 4 But I think that experience of just like absolute disorientation and fragmentation is terrible and everyone knows it. And so there are a lot of opportunities to fix it.

Speaker 2 Yeah, the question I think, I agree with that.

Speaker 2 Like we are, we're sort of in a moment and this is not, it's like you can do the have the same conversation about, you know, just content services beyond news, right?

Speaker 2 Like, totally, are you really going to, are you going to really pay for, how many people are, how many stream services are you going to pay for?

Speaker 2 You know, YouTube TV, which has become very popular, is basically just cable through the internet, right? Whereas like it looks at the same format.

Speaker 2 So how are you going to, like, is there a way to get back to it? But I want to just sort of get back to the

Speaker 2 role of the media.

Speaker 2 You and I are like right now, this conversation about distribution is about the business of media, right?

Speaker 2 Like how do you, because ultimately you need readers to make money, whether that's going to be subscriptions or advertising or how you get ads in front of people, whatever, or whatever that is.

Speaker 4 Just to stop you, though, because I see where you're like, I think I agree with where you're going.

Speaker 4 The extent to which all of everything we're talking about, the chaos, the disruption, is all fundamentally driven by these huge technological shifts that we've been and business shifts.

Speaker 4 Like, that is the underlying thing here. It's not little choices made by journalists here and there.

Speaker 2 No, no, no, no. I fundamentally agree with that.
And it is,

Speaker 2 like, I think you can, you point out a couple examples. You can point back at various choices made by people in the media, like in the media.
You can do two things.

Speaker 2 You can do the business of media, like giving away your product for free on the internet for a few years, probably in hindsight, not the best move, or,

Speaker 2 you know, optimizing a Facebook or whatever else. Like you can do, you can do some things.
You can also point to some journalistic choices that have eroded trust fairly or unfairly, right?

Speaker 2 You pick the Dan Rather, just the entire coverage of the Iraq war in the run-up to it.

Speaker 4 That is the biggest one. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 But then you also have cultural shifts that have happened, which isn't how how young people think about news.

Speaker 2 Like what it is, one of the things you see when you do sort of focus groups of younger folks is they find more authority and more relatable a piece of content that looks like the conversation you and I are having more than nine pundits at an anchor desk for CNN.

Speaker 2 Like that, like when they think of news, it is, you know, people with headphones on on a couch or around a table having a podcast, or it's a streamer speaking, you know, doing a vertical video.

Speaker 2 And that, like, that is to them what like the sort of traditional image of Walter Cronkite or Dan Rather or Brian Williams at the Anchor Desk is to previous generations.

Speaker 4 I mean, it's funny. We on our podcast, McSignals, we interviewed Colin and Samir, who are big, big YouTubers who think a lot about, who talk a lot and think about YouTube.

Speaker 4 And at one point, I said to Samir, like, I mean, so when did you start thinking of yourself as a journalist? Like, how did you get into journalism? And he was like, what? Don't call me that.

Speaker 4 That's offensive.

Speaker 4 So, yeah, I think it's a,

Speaker 4 I mean, that was a pretty striking thing to me. It's right.
It's a very, it's a totally different ecosystem.

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Speaker 2 I just want to get back sort of to the role that the media has played in sort of politics and public discourse, because that to me has been a fundamental shift is it was a measure of accountability, right?

Speaker 2 We called it the fourth state for a reason. You interacted with the media as a politician or a governmental entity because you, you know, for two reasons.

Speaker 2 One, you needed the media to get your message out. Like that was a fundamental thing.
Like when I, if I was preparing Barack Obama for a press conference, like,

Speaker 2 Mike, the Faustian bargain in my head is I'm going to take a bunch of questions that are going to be annoying. They're going to be about the things that I know voters don't care about.

Speaker 2 But the price of that is the airwaves. It's the way I can get my message in front of people.

Speaker 2 And you would react to,

Speaker 2 you know, the media could, if they picked a thing that they were going to, it was going to become the narrative, we could change government policy, right?

Speaker 2 It would be, it would create such a firestorm that you would have to stop doing it or change course or whatever else.

Speaker 2 I do sort of question after watching this election, the first couple weeks of Trump, whether, like, it seems like that role is so diminished as to be, is that the media becomes, maybe this is for better, not for worse, from your perspective, but more observer, almost entirely an observer and chronicler of the process opposed to a participant when it was a huge participant in politics for basically since the invention of the newspaper.

Speaker 4 Yeah, and I think, I mean, I don't think it's a binary thing, but obvious, yeah, but I think the media's role in being able to sort of set the agenda, essentially, is obviously diminished, you know, to some degree, given over to whatever like Anon on Twitter caught Elon's eye this morning.

Speaker 4 Like right now, that's what's driving. That's what you'll see on Fox tomorrow morning and in the White House the next day.

Speaker 4 Like that's, you know, is literally random people tweeting it in Elon's replies.

Speaker 4 But

Speaker 4 and I guess, yeah, and I think that the media can overplay its, you know, can overplay. Like, yeah, I do have, I do have some ambivalence about that role.
And we definitely, I think

Speaker 4 we are able, like Semaphore has been able to build a lot of trust with Republicans and Democrats, partly because we do, we see our lane as narrower, right?

Speaker 4 Like we're trying to tell you what's going on and provide really good information, but not ultimately resolve the argument. That said, I mean,

Speaker 4 I do think that there's a long tradition of people in American politics who think they can shape reality. I mean,

Speaker 4 there was a famous, was it Carl, who was it in the Bush administration?

Speaker 2 It was Carl Rove in the New York Times, in the New York Times

Speaker 2 magazine too.

Speaker 4 Told Robert Draper that they were going to shape,

Speaker 4 that they didn't have to be accountable to the reality-based community anymore. And at some point, journalism is the reality-based community.

Speaker 4 The power doesn't really ultimately come from,

Speaker 4 to me, it comes from the fact that you're revealing things that are in fact true and the citizen voters and voters are going to wind up having to react to.

Speaker 4 And I don't think we've, I don't, I mean, that's, I think people kind of underestimate that that's really the power of it in the first place.

Speaker 2 I think the what is reality is still reality, right? If let's say the Biden administration had been able to get a bunch of reporters, you like,

Speaker 2 let's, inflation is an example, right?

Speaker 2 It did not matter what the New York Times or CNN or Semaphore or anyone else wrote about inflation, people still went to the grocery store and were paying more for eggs, right? Or milk or whatever.

Speaker 2 Like that, that is reality. The thing that is, I think, harder is people are less informed about what's happening now because it's harder to get news.
And that, like, you have this gigantic gap now.

Speaker 2 We saw this. in a bunch of the polling.
There was NBC polling before Biden dropped out.

Speaker 2 You had Navigator Research polling afterwards, which just shows that the biggest gap in politics is not left and right. It's news consumers and non-news consumers.

Speaker 2 And, you know, which does go to the irony, which I'm sure you might find quite sweet, that all the Democrats who've been screaming, myself sometimes include, who've been screaming about New York Times headlines turned out to be the New York Times readers are the ones who were most likely to support Biden or Harris and people who did not read the news.

Speaker 2 It's not so like you do this sort of have this question.

Speaker 2 Just to me, that chasm is grown so much larger, really since 2020, I think.

Speaker 2 And how

Speaker 2 like, and that to me is a crisis for democracy, right? Like all this stuff, you mentioned Elon 50 times, as you should. It's like, it's one of the biggest stories and

Speaker 2 maybe in generations of American politics. We have the world's richest man possibly running rushshod over laws and rules and norms to just reshape government without any sort of accountability.

Speaker 2 And how many people are actually consuming any of that, right? And how do you get that information to them? And is that your job, I guess, is the question.

Speaker 4 I mean, I mean,

Speaker 4 those are all really good questions.

Speaker 4 I mean, I think, I mean, I guess I would say like it's certainly nothing like the democracy that we grew up in in the 20th century with a very kind of state, unusually stable, unusually centrist media.

Speaker 4 It's a lot like 19th century American democracy, right? I mean, it's a lot like,

Speaker 4 and I think that, you know, a kind of there is something about what we're seeing is a kind of small D democratic media that's an absolutely chaotic, hyper-partisan, untrustworthy mess

Speaker 4 that is very embedded in the history of democracy.

Speaker 4 So, and I, so, and I don't, I'm not, I'm not saying that as a good thing, but I do think that like the kind of thing that we know that honestly, by the beginnings of our careers, was already in trouble, the sort of broadcast, the, you know, the Walter Cronkite thing, that was the blip, right?

Speaker 4 I mean, this is the norm.

Speaker 2 You talk to a lot of Republicans, you talk to a lot of Democrats.

Speaker 2 Do you think Republicans better understand this media environment than Democrats?

Speaker 4 I think that in this moment after the election, everybody thinks that like, that the winning side figured it out and that the losers are morons, and

Speaker 4 everybody is like gearing up to refight the last war. And every CEO, every politician is going to be booking themselves onto a bunch of podcasts nobody listens to for the next four years.

Speaker 4 But that, in fact,

Speaker 4 that I think, and then always the world changes faster than they expect.

Speaker 4 Like, I think we're headed back into a moment of consolidation, basically, and that there's going to be a recentralization of audiences and of content, and that like some poor, hapless congressional candidate is going to spend 300 hours talking to to podcasts nobody listens to, to no discernible effect.

Speaker 4 But also, the Trump, which for the Trump years have, I mean, the consolidation of power in Washington is also really new in media, right?

Speaker 4 Like the extent to which media executives are obsessed with what the administration can do to hurt them. And it's true across business.
We're hosting this huge World Economic Summit here in April.

Speaker 4 And just the appetite of CEOs in America to get to Washington to figure out what is going on is really new.

Speaker 2 Say a little bit more about moving back to a more centralized media.

Speaker 2 I assume you don't mean it ideologically. What do you mean by that?

Speaker 4 I mean, it was technological.

Speaker 4 For the late 20th century, you needed a broadcast tower or a printing press if you wanted to reach a lot of people. And not that many people had them.
The spectrum was regulated.

Speaker 4 And so you really had this very considerable, I mean, for technological reasons, fundamentally, that were, as you said, about distribution. The system was meant.

Speaker 4 And then the business incentives of those were to sell mattresses to Republicans and to Democrats.

Speaker 4 And often that led to something that we look, we that we romanticize, actually, a kind of so-centrist media, but it also did produce this kind of false consensus around Iraq, which, as you say, is part of why everybody lost trust in that kind of media.

Speaker 4 But the fundamental change was technological, the splint in the fact that you didn't need these broadcast towers anymore. And so I just think it's hard to imagine going back to that.

Speaker 4 And, you know, there are out, like, we definitely see for readers part of the value is like, and I think you do this too.

Speaker 4 Like, we can read everything so you don't have to and go out into the, put on the hazmat suit and go out into social media and find the interesting stuff, some of which is on weird sub stacks and right-wing podcasts, and some of which is in the New York Times.

Speaker 4 And it's this very disorienting moment to be a media consumer.

Speaker 2 Yeah, that's one of the things that I think with like my media business head on is that the one of the places where there is opportunity is basically curation. Yeah, and that's all of course.

Speaker 2 And I, and I trust you.

Speaker 2 And you have to build trust with

Speaker 2 the audiences to trust you. And that is like, for better or for worse, that trust is, you know, you can build brand trust, as I'm sure you're trying to do at semaphore, but it's often with people.

Speaker 2 With individuals.

Speaker 4 Totally. Yes.
Yep. Right.

Speaker 2 It's like, I trust Joe Rogan to tell me what's happening. I trust Ezra Klein to tell me what's happening.
I trust Potsdam America, whoever else.

Speaker 2 And I mean, you've done that a little bit with some of your reporters, trying to lift them up, like Dave Weigel, like with his father.

Speaker 4 Yeah, no, we definitely are building around expert reporters on key beats in a way that in the old days, you would just, you're all cogs in the machine dispensable cogs in the wall street journal machine and now if you're liz hoffman on wall street or burgess everett in the senate like that's you know you trust a person i mean it's a very yeah it's a very it's a interesting time to be in this business for sure um speaking speaking on sort of that sort of curation role i was thinking i went back and read your first column as the new york times media critic yeah which was claiming that your brand new employer, the New York Times, had grown so successful that it was bad for business.

Speaker 2 Since then, the New York Times has become even bigger, even better read. And it's, you know, putative competitors that have become, have struggled mightily since then.

Speaker 2 Washington Post most notably, Wall Street Journal still does well, but has head layoffs,

Speaker 2 et cetera. And so, you know, where do you think the New York Times stands right now? Do you still believe it's bad for journalism?

Speaker 4 I mean, I actually think it's scary for the New York Times. Like, you don't want to be the sole strong, independent outlet in a kind of democracy where rule of law is is a little shaky.

Speaker 4 Like that's a bad place to be.

Speaker 4 And it would be healthier for

Speaker 2 the media.

Speaker 4 Yeah, for sure.

Speaker 4 And it would be healthier for the media ecosystem and healthier for the times and better for the leverage of journalists in their salary negotiations if there were lots of big competing outlets with sort of somewhat different outlooks on the world.

Speaker 4 Like I mean, that's just a healthier system. And

Speaker 4 I don't know. I mean, I'm hopeful that.

Speaker 4 A couple of other legacy outlets, the Wall Street Journal, maybe CNN, could get their acts together and that long, long-term places like the Washington Post can pull it out.

Speaker 4 And then I do think there's a lot of, I mean, I do think that, again, if you go back to like, if you ask people, if you ask your listeners, like, do you think this is all great and you're satisfied with what you're getting or do you want new stuff?

Speaker 4 People really are hungry for new ways of getting information, for new voices, for somebody who will go out, as you say, and just like sort through all the lunacy for them.

Speaker 4 And so I think, I mean, I think there's, I mean, I think, you know, we're in this moment of crazy transition and there'll be a bunch of new things too.

Speaker 4 But yeah, no, I do think, I mean, I I think it's in no one's interest to have one absolutely dominant and depending company.

Speaker 2 I sort of feel like the New York Times has become Netflix for news, where it's just, it's the place you go for every, it has replaced, sort of like the way Netflix has replaced television. Right.

Speaker 4 So does Netflix have taste, right? Like Netflix has the stuff that is targeted at. conservative people in the middle of the country and the stuff that's targeted at liberal people.

Speaker 2 They have everything. And the New York Times obviously brings with it a brand that exists, but it is

Speaker 2 like right now,

Speaker 2 if I am just like, I want to find out what is happening right now in this moment,

Speaker 2 my default place to go would just be the New York Times.

Speaker 4 I know, like it's 2005, right? Because for 10 years in the 15 years in the middle, Twitter was

Speaker 4 where I would have gone to see that. Now you can't use social media for that.
Like you just can't ask the question of what is going on and have it answered.

Speaker 2 Yeah, you can't just open up Twitter and have it be at the top of your feed in the way it was before from a trusted, you know, a reporter or a news outlet you knew that had been verified by Twitter.

Speaker 4 Yeah. And you want to know what's going on and you want to know what's more important than what else.
Like you want to know where on the page it is. You want some hierarchy actually in the chaos.

Speaker 4 No, I mean it's that's I mean that's the opportunity that we see ourselves as running at for sure.

Speaker 2 But it's like right now for a lot of people, I think, who are sort of in the serious news consumer, it's like, you want to know what's happening in sports?

Speaker 2 Maybe you go to ESPN or maybe you go to the New York Times and read the Athletic, right? You want to know how to cook something? You go there. You want to play, you want to play a game? You go there.

Speaker 2 You want to know what's happening? You go there. You want to know who's winning the Grammys?

Speaker 2 You open up the New York Times app and they are telling you as they come in where they are. It's just, it is like it is such a dominant position in the ecosystem that it has.

Speaker 2 To me, I really feel like it has replaced the...

Speaker 2 conglomerate of major news sources you were all getting from Twitter or from whatever

Speaker 2 you were using 10 years ago. Yeah.
Yeah. It is the internet for news, right? In the way that Netflix is, the internet for TV and movies.
Primarily.

Speaker 4 Yeah, and then you can get a bunch of different

Speaker 4 stuff around the edges, but ultimately. No, I think that's I think that's really true right now.

Speaker 4 But I think right, but we're also sort of in this moment when podcasts like this one, like, what is this? Is this a podcast? Are we on video? Is it television? Is it a podcast? We're both.

Speaker 2 It's an intram. It is.

Speaker 2 It's long form contact.

Speaker 4 Some people are going to be watching this on a big screen on YouTube. And at some point, somebody is going to come and make us both wear makeup to do this.
So our skin looks less weird.

Speaker 4 And then suddenly we're just like idiots in boxes screaming at each other just like cable.

Speaker 4 And I think like there's a really, really fast convergence happening between what we used to call podcasts and what we used to call television.

Speaker 4 And I don't quite know where that lands, but I think that's people don't quite realize the speed at which that's happening and at which that's going to be a kind of recentralized form of consumption.

Speaker 4 You see it in ESPN, right? You see Pat McAfee out in the afternoons on ESPN. It's like, what's happening here? Like one guy's head is bigger than the other guy's head.

Speaker 2 I mean, there is the conventions of television as we know it are coming down uh in news particular and it and the things that people don't sort of realize and i it who sort of even like people even who work in journalism or who are in the communications fields in politics or pr or whatever else is there is still like a old world mentality that's hard to break out of because you're always people like people a lot of people are generationally like frozen in amber and when they started in media i think that's very true of politicians every single one of them is just but i think some people and i give you credit this point have you know you have been indifferent.

Speaker 2 You, you know, you were sort of, you were a tabloid reporter in New York City. You were a blogger when blogs took off and sort of our ERSS feed became the

Speaker 2 you've ridden the wave. I've tried to ride the wave as well.
But like the facts that people don't sort of realize is one,

Speaker 2 the biggest podcasting platform in the world is not Spotify. It's YouTube.
Right.

Speaker 2 And that a shocking, the numbers of people who watch YouTube on their actual smart TV in their house shocks people that it's so much more.

Speaker 4 Yeah, would you like to put on nicer clothes if you really thought about it?

Speaker 2 I put on a sweat. Normally I'm wearing a t-shirt.
I put on an actual sweat train.

Speaker 2 I would not have put on a sport coat because this is a podcast.

Speaker 2 It's not a funeral

Speaker 2 funeral wedding or

Speaker 2 court date.

Speaker 4 But actually, you're also running a media business. And

Speaker 4 you must be thinking, why don't you have

Speaker 4 some hour of MSN? Why isn't PodSave providing an hour to CNN or MSNBC or something? Like, why are they paying these people way more than you would charge them to provide an hour of programming?

Speaker 4 Like, don't you see that stuff converging?

Speaker 2 I think you can see that converging, whether how it converges, whether it can actually, like, this has been the challenge for most media organizations.

Speaker 2 You've witnessed this is it is truly with the exception of the New York Times, there is not a good example of a previous legacy media organization that has made an actual transition to digital. Right.

Speaker 2 It is just like they cannot do it. Some, you know, some like Politico start digitally, right?

Speaker 2 Like you had, like when you started there, there was an actual newspaper that people read over lunch at Capitol Hill, but it was a digital first publication.

Speaker 2 And, but no one else can do it because they are,

Speaker 2 I mean, it's to the great credit of the New York Times as a business story of pulling that off. But people can't actually do it.

Speaker 2 ESPN is trying to do it and maybe they'll be successful with like Pat McAfee is an example of it.

Speaker 4 Yeah, Disney is trying to do it. It is right.
It is incredibly hard.

Speaker 4 But it just seems to me that people are producing, podcasters are producing shows that are more interesting than most of what's on TV and they have big audience and big followings and they're doing it for like a tiny fraction of the cost of producing an hour of television.

Speaker 4 And meanwhile, television is running out of money. And it just seems to me that set of factors means inevitably that I'm going to like, you know, be in a dentist's office and see your face very soon.

Speaker 2 Well, I hope not. Not my face, but maybe some other face.

Speaker 2 But there is a little of everything as old as new again, which is there was for a long time the thing ESPN ran all morning was just a video feed of ESPN radio shows because ESPN radio was where the money was.

Speaker 2 And so it was just like you would just watch Mike and Mike every morning. Yes.
And I missed another example. I mean, Howard Stern.
Yeah, this is that.

Speaker 2 Right.

Speaker 4 This is not a complicated business. And so, and so what does that, but then, like, what does that mean for this super fragmented political landscape?

Speaker 4 I actually think it means it gets a little less fragmented and that these kind of re-coalesces around really, really big individual voices, probably more than, I mean, i think like the megan kellies of the world like um you guys i mean i think there's there's sort of a reconsolidation around a relatively smaller number of really big voices well it's like how you think of channels is different because it's not

Speaker 2 it's not like a network channel it is um either a media network that is centered around a podcast like crooked media or daily wire or alex cooperator's unwell network or whatever that you like because you trade and then usually you're entering it because of of the talent at the top and then that gives you entry into the other people.

Speaker 2 But it just it exists very differently. I think that you asked me the question about like, why not see it in MSNBC?

Speaker 2 The thing that I watch, you know, I talk a lot of people in the progressive media space is the thing you have to be careful not to do is take your new thing and then just rebuild the failed model.

Speaker 2 You see this in Substack a lot where there are, you know, the economics of Substack are great when you're small. And you're one.

Speaker 2 When you start hiring a bunch of reporters and doing that, you're right back to where you were before, which is it becomes very hard to support it.

Speaker 2 So how can you do something that is new and stays new?

Speaker 2 I think we are just like, this is the reason I want to have this conversation with you, of all people today, is we are just in a fascinating moment in media. And politics is media.

Speaker 2 Politics is the war for attention. Politics is the information war.
And so these things interact in a way that are. you know, sort of critically important to, and it's just, it's happening so fast.

Speaker 2 Like I used to say that when I left the White House in like 2015, that the period of time from when I went to work for Obama, which was before the iPhone came out, to the time I left when Facebook and Twitter and Snapchat were becoming dominant

Speaker 2 was like the fastest period of change in media since the invention of the printing press. And I actually think the change from when I left to now is greater than that, I think.

Speaker 4 Yeah, you were there for this almost very linear story. Like it felt like this rocket ship, but we could see where it was going.
And then at some point, it just exploded and the whole thing is.

Speaker 4 It exploded and new things came and the power of the legacy media changed dramatically because of technology because of economics etc yeah i think there's a big open question of whether this splintering new right-wing media like what becomes of it does it create its own new york times or does it just continue to spend its time basically yelling about the new york times i think that's a really open question yeah i mean it is like that that is a you know it is and some of them are getting quite big right like uh yeah but and does it become boring just to be an attack dog for the people in power Like to me, like that's the most boring and demoralizing form of media, to be an attack dog for power.

Speaker 4 And like that's, you know, if you worked really hard to get Donald Trump elected, that's that's sort of what you've become. And so

Speaker 4 and so I think there's going to be a question of who in the media just sticks with loyalty as their brand and who tries to, I mean, as again, as Murdoch has, establish sort of an independent voice and power base that is not just fealty to the to the president.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 It is an ecosystem grown in opposition uh that you know how it having having there are they the dog that caught the car and what do they do with that i think is going to be a big question going forward it is going to be really confusing to watch for us that is a good summary of where we are yeah in the in the media world ben smith thank you so much for this great conversation it's always good to talk to you thanks for having me on down

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