Is the Public Square Gone?

Here's what they call an evergreen tweet.

This is a crazy newsweek.

From a Monday morning hurricane of misinformation over Rod Rosenstein's position at the Department of Justice to Thursday's momentous Senate hearings concerning Brett Kavanaugh's nomination to the Supreme Court, knowing what's actually true at any given moment is getting harder and harder.

What role are politics, business, and technology playing in obfuscating the truth?

And how can the public get to it?

This is Radio Atlantic.

Hi, I'm Matt Thompson, Executive Editor of The Atlantic.

I am delighted to be joined in studio today by Adrienne LaFrance, the editor of theatlantic.com.

Hello, Adrienne.

Hi.

Thank you for joining us.

Thanks for having me.

Of course.

We are also joined by the Atlantic staff writer, Franklin, for Frank.

Thank you for joining us this morning.

My pleasure.

You're taking me away.

We're taping Thursday, Thursday.

Wait, shit, what are we taping?

This is Thursday morning.

Okay.

Yes.

I already just screwed it up with my obscenity.

No, we could be explicit.

Okay.

We're taping on Thursday morning, right at the time when the epic for the ages historic testimony is happening in the Senate.

So it's an incredible commitment to this podcast.

Yes.

It is from you both, in fact.

I'm secretly watching it on my phone.

I believe Adrian's actually just filing a story while we're talking.

So Frank is right.

Today we're, it's Thursday morning.

We're going to hear Senate testimony from Brett Kavanaugh, a nominee for the Supreme Court, and Christine Blasey Ford, the woman who has accused him of sexually assaulting her when they were in high school.

Meanwhile, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein was supposed to meet with the president today, who gave his first press conference in months yesterday.

All of these events are incredibly high stakes, and it seems like every week the news seems to get a notch more intense.

And I wanted to pull back the lens for the purposes of this conversation to talk about the news itself, the so-called public square, and the intensifying pressures on it.

The big question that I want to poke at with the two of you today, if it's never been more important for the public to get a clear picture of the truth, what are the biggest obstacles to truth in the public square?

And how do we get around them?

Adrian, you run theatlantic.com and you're a former tech reporter, so you're in the thick of these pressures every minute of every day.

Frank, you've been covering systemic corruption.

You covered Ukraine and propaganda.

Your book on the outsized power of platforms like Facebook and Google, which is World Without Mind, is freshly out in paperback.

So you both have a really unique vantage point on this.

I want us to start with Monday morning.

What I'm thinking of is the Monday morning misinformation bomb around Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general.

Frank, could you do the TikTok for us?

What happened Monday morning?

Okay, well, correct me, either of you, if I get this at all wrong, which is likely because

it was a haze of misinformation.

So Axios started it.

Yes.

All right.

So Axios starts it.

Axios, as we know, is this kind of newfangled heir to Politico successor to Politico, where

it's about getting smarter faster, which means that

I think it's actually an incredibly well-packaged product, but it's very, it's bite-sized nuggets of information, oftentimes conveyed very quickly.

And so Jonathan Swan, who is their gifted White House reporter, tweeted an Axios story that said that Rod Rosenstein was in the process of tendering his resignation.

The tweet, the words in the tweet were, quote, scoop, Rod Rosenstein has verbally resigned to John Kelly.

So it's already happened.

But it hasn't actually happened because

there are other competing tweets that are kind of racing back and forth.

Some saying that he was getting fired.

Others said that he was tendering his resignation.

Others saying that the resignation hadn't yet been tendered.

And

reporters are madly googling the federal vacancies act to see how succession will go down everybody is suddenly an expert on solicitor general noel francisco and are wildly speculating about what he's going to do when he assumes rosenstein's post and uh we it's just it was like the the most um intense confusing was it hour two hours day afternoon it was like four hours and i'm looking at these push alerts now actually And if you look at New York Times, 1059,

Rod Rosenstein is expected to leave the Justice Department.

11.04, so five minutes later, the Washington Post, Rosenstein has offered to resign.

1256, Washington Post, Rosenstein to stay in job.

1.16, New York Times, Rosenstein, who was considering quitting, will meet with Trump.

And it goes from there.

But I mean, I can tell you what was happening in our newsroom, which is the minute the Axios thing went out, I like jogged over to the politics reporters and basically was like, let's put someone on this.

The first question is not, is this true?

But of course, that comes up before you publish anything, but you start moving before you figure out what's happening always in these kinds of news events.

In this case, it seems like a lot of that was happening in public.

Yeah.

So let's talk about, I want to talk about some of the distinct pressures that are pressing against the truth.

in this scenario.

One of the big ones is politics and power.

All of these competing narratives and counter narratives, Rosenstein has quote unquote verbally offered his resignation.

He's resigned.

He's been asked to resign.

He's been fired.

He has, he's joked about resigning.

All of these competing narratives

have interests, political interests behind them and political consequences.

So, what were some of those at this moment?

What's the difference between Rosenstein being fired, for example, from his position and being asked to resign or resigning

well there are the obvious political implications so you know because of his position and his relationship with the mueller investigation the stakes are incredibly high there's also been this question for months of is he going to be fired so it's something that newsrooms are already like many of them have pre we had a pre-write ready to go um where you sort of have the basics of the context there, but you can just add what happened.

So a lot of reporters are out there anticipating this event will happen for months.

And so when it seems like it might be about to happen, there's this added level of

just scrambling, I think.

Aaron Powell, let's step back and just think about the Trump era and the way it's changed a lot of the expectations for reporting and the ways in which

media, I mean, I think

Trump represented a break for the entire world, but also represented a break for a lot of mainstream media, where an organization like the New York Times has been on an unending,

has received an unending litany of complaints about its coverage during the 2016 campaign, that it overplayed the Hillary Clinton email scandal, that it was fed misinformation by the FBI or by somebody associated with the FBI about the extent of his Russia investigation.

And because of the way that Trump acts towards media, it's created this

almost expectation among audiences that media is aligned with the resistance to Trump and media has kind of marketed itself in that sort of way.

Well, some.

Let's be careful there.

No, but like

a lot, there's a lot of, and I think it's good, a lot of these changes.

And I think it's like necessary to play an adversarial sort of role, but it does create expectations in the mind of readers.

So when you're all about like, you know, the truth and, you know, the way that the New York Times has kind of thumped its chest after the election as an organ of resistance means that when it breaks a story that does not necessarily fall along the ways that its readers want it to fall, it gets completely pillaged for it.

Now, I mean, I think that there may be problems with

the story that it broke initially about Rosenstein, but

you should talk about that.

I mean, so that's another dynamic here that just days before this Monday misinformation bomb, there was a crazy scoop in the times.

So, if you want to.

Right.

What the scoop was is that Rosenstein had talked about wearing a wire in conversations with President Trump, and that it also talked about the possibility of invoking the 25th Amendment to

yes, to remove Trump from the presidency.

Yeah, right.

So, I

am even just listening to the two of you talk about

the competing contexts that all of this misinformation was circulating in.

It kind of returns me back to this framing question.

Much of this reporting is

premised on anonymous sourcing.

And

there were

also on Monday morning

an apparent flurry of leaks coming from different corners of the administration, of the Justice Department, of Congress even, about

what had or hadn't happened between Rosenstein and members of the Trump administration

over the weekend on Monday morning.

And each of those leaks, each of those anonymously sourced reports was pointing in a slightly different direction.

And one of the meta

stories that I think people were puzzling through in the moment, just watching all of this unfold in our various Twitter, Slack,

Facebook, Google

hazes.

Watching all of this unfold, one of the questions I think that I saw getting asked often was who's leaking what and who's got the incentive to leak what?

Who is incentivized to get out ahead of this as

Rosenstein has resigned and offered his resignation verbally to John Kelly

versus who has the incentive to leak that, oh, no, no, no, no, Rosenstein has courageously said that he is boldly going to stay in the face of a requested resignation.

So those felt like some of the political stakes in the moment.

There are a lot of anonymously sourced reports and people were positioning themselves.

How do you sort through that as an editor?

Well, I mean, it starts with the reporter, right?

So I think a reporter knows, hopefully, knows his or her sources and can piece through what to trust and what the source's motivations may be and what they may stand to gain or lose from the information they're sharing.

And of course, trying to understand their justification for wanting to remain anonymous.

And so there are all of these things that you have to piece through.

And as an editor, you're having a conversation with reporters about whether anonymity is justified and whether we're certain.

You know, obviously, you don't want to run with just one anonymous source

in most cases.

So, yeah, I mean, it's like you hear these conversations all the time.

Of course.

So, this is the calculation from inside our newsroom, inside one newsroom.

Frank, as the public tries to process this on the other end of that, of a calculation like that, you know, we're an editor asking a reporter, do you trust your sources?

How much do you trust your sources?

Which sources do you trust most?

How is the public supposed to process an information bomb like Monday knowing that a thousand different newsrooms are having a version of that?

It can't conversation.

It can't.

I mean, we're, I mean, this is, if you, if you

look at the internet at large, it's like this is kind of a microcosm of it, which is that it is kind of a sea of this like never-ending sea, this ocean of information.

And oftentimes information that you get via Google,

you know, link number one and link number two contradict one another.

It becomes harder and harder in this world to have a sense of who actually

has authority.

And then when you look at the forces at work

that

within the Trump White House, as you suggest,

there are people who are wielding

competing agendas, have various motivations.

I think even for authoritative experienced reporters, it's hard to sort through all of that.

And then this expectation that the public can do it in a way in which

even the seemingly authoritative sources like the New York Times and the Washington Post or Axios, the Atlantic kind of are all giving you competing

interpretations of events or competing descriptions of reality.

I just don't know how an individual citizen could possibly sort through all of that themselves.

But can there be,

This might be me being overly optimistic, but is there any world in which, because, like, as all of us sitting here know, news gathering and truth seeking has always been this chaotic in terms of like the actual process of finding out what's happening?

It's just that we, as reporters and editors, haven't always done it in public in real time.

And so, part of me feels like peeling back the veil and showing, sort of revealing the chaos of finding out what's true to the public, like that level of transparency could ultimately be a positive thing for society.

So let's talk about that.

And let's actually talk about one thing that has changed, which is the technological landscape.

Frank, as you point out, there are reporters furiously Googling, quote, Federal Vacancies Act in the moment on Monday morning to figure out what happens in the event that Rod Rosenstein in

whatever fashion is removed from his position.

Adrian, as an editor, people are processing the story in a ton of places.

Twitter, Facebook, Google, Breitbart.com, CNN.com, The Atlantic.com.

Where do you think you're telling this story?

What's the platform?

How is this story being told?

Well, in terms of where people are getting the story, I mean, I think increasingly it's on their phone, which means that it's being, whatever the story is, in an urgent news situation, it's being pushed to them.

Or they're sort of casually checking Facebook or Twitter or their favorite trusted website.

And that's where it starts to get tricky is if you have people who are only looking at Twitter and they only follow a certain kind of,

you know, a certain partisan group and they're only looking at one very partisan website.

And this gets into the whole sort of like, I mean, to me, if

trustworthy professional journalistic enterprises can thrive, then

we can figure out a way to technologically bring people back to the truth.

But there are all all of these sort of like splinterings within this really chaotic information system that creates all kinds of challenges.

And that's before you even get into the fact of like Facebook and Google and the way they incentivize non-truth.

So I want to get into that fact.

And Frank, I want to ask you about this specifically.

What is the influence of the platforms in that situation?

How do they shape the way the story gets told and then processed?

It's very hard to see the influence of the platforms in a moment quite like that, quite so specifically.

But I think that the broader picture is the one that Adrian just described, which is that

you have the public, you know, does get information through

mediated by these large platform companies, you know, through Google, Facebook, and Twitter.

Google and Facebook kind of more primarily, also Apple News.

And so it's the way that those companies filter and sort information becomes incredibly important to how we receive it.

And so it clearly influences the reception.

And so the source that rises to the top is the source that the algorithm has deemed is going to be the one that keeps you most engaged in the site.

And so just to step the pattern is that, so these companies have amassed all this data on you.

And that data is this portrait of the inside of your head.

They have this cartography of your psyche.

And so they know the things that give you pleasure, that give you anxiety.

And their goal is not to just share the news that your friends are sharing.

It's to keep you engaged for as long as possible.

And so the algorithms are exploiting your weaknesses.

And so when it comes to politics, your biggest weakness is that you want to hear things that you agree with.

And so that, that in a situation like that becomes, you know, maybe it's they're playing off of your

your fear of a constitutional crisis and the Mueller

investigation getting squashed.

So that's the thing that rises to the top.

But I agree with Adrian that

the other underlying dynamic is that media is so dependent on Facebook and Google, especially for traffic that

almost subconsciously that dependence ends up altering the values of the industry because they know that in order to succeed, they need to play by the rules of those platforms.

It's a crazy amount of power, by the way, because if you think about from the citizen standpoint, where so often a Google, for example, is seen as this neutral filter toward information that you're simply looking for.

Federal vacancy tax.

Right.

Or just like, what is the biggest story of the day?

And who is Brett Kavanaugh or whatever?

And the fact that these companies, which refuse to acknowledge that they're in the information business in the way that a news organization would, are completely influencing people's understanding of the world.

I mean,

people should be terrified and angry by this.

But I'm still optimistic.

Frank, your book, World Without Mind, was about the outsized business power in part wielded by the platforms.

In addition to the data advantage that the platforms have accrued in garnering a ton of data on the patterns of individual attention and using that data to power

sort of a kind of brutally effective algorithmic attention sucking machine.

There are a lot of business pressures in play.

Increasingly, our reporting happens in a context where

even

where we might once have had a direct business relationship with advertisers as a media organization, more and more of those advertiser relationships are mediated through the platforms, through platforms like Apple, Google, Twitter, Facebook.

Those business pressures also are material in a moment like Monday mornings.

Obviously,

there's not a significant advertiser interest in being next to

wonky Federal Vacancy Act stories.

But

attention is more valuable than it's ever been, scarcer than it's ever been.

And who wields it and who controls it has a tremendous degree of business success as a consequence.

When you think about what the money incentives are behind Monday morning's misinformation bomb,

what are some of

the lurking underlying business incentives at play that the public might not be thinking about in a moment like that?

I think

Adrian was describing the importance of notifications, which to me are at the core of the way that the devices are being designed, the ways in which we all start to think about this whole ecology and economy, which is that your machines are designed to try to commandeer as much of your attention as possible.

And so having that first notification and being able to be the first one to hijack the attention of the user is a pretty big incentive.

Yeah.

Axios itself, it's, I mean, it's one of the first primary agents of this.

What is Axios' business model?

I think it's actually a complicated question because they're coming, you know, in

it's probably not so different than the Atlantic's business model in that they exist in Washington.

We try to, one of the things that's to our advantage as a business is that, you know, while we're trying to aggregate the biggest possible audience as an organization, it's also advertisers like the the quality, not to be so snobbish about the people who read our stories and the fact that we're based in Washington and we're seen as an agent of influence, I think is important.

I think that's true for Axios, that Axios

has newsletters and

their business model is primarily about

getting

JP Morgan or Facebook to buy

access to those

readers that they have.

Yeah.

Now, I want to fast forward some of these dimensions.

So we've talked about the politics of the misinformation bomb.

We've talked about the technology and the technological influences at stake in it.

And we've talked about some of the business pressures.

Now let's take some of what we've discussed and apply it to the story that's happening right now, which is also this, from the public's vantage point, a giant mystery of information, a set of competing narratives

and a lot of different political pressures pointing in a lot of different directions.

And that's Brett Kavanaugh, Christine Blasey Ford,

and now a second and third accuser that have come forward with all the abortion last night.

And a fourth accuser.

This has been one of the most fluid stories that we've had to cover in a really long time.

I mean, just like the time span,

with many news stories, especially like a Supreme Court nomination, yes, there are unexpected arcs here and there, but you can kind of, as a newsroom, get a general sense of like, okay, there are three paths this thing might go.

And here's how to be covered if it does this.

Here's how we cover it if it does that.

Here's how we cover it if it does that.

For this story, there was like,

of course, the allegation was, the initial allegation was shocking.

Subsequent allegations are shocking.

And then just trying to track like...

sort of, of course, the eventual outcome of the nomination, but there was this question of will

this accuser testify?

Will she not?

What was the president doing?

Like the just the it's I can't even fully describe how fluid the story has been.

Well, and one of the

to narrow in on one political actor in this story,

the penultimate, I guess, allegation brought against Kavanaugh,

the one before last,

came via the lawyer Michael Avenatti, who has represented Stormy Daniels in her suit against the president.

He brought the accusations of

one woman, Julie Swetnik, to the public via Twitter initially.

Avenati himself is an interesting political figure in this environment.

There are lots of speculation that Avenati is interested himself in seeking the office of the presidency and has positioned himself as both a media personality and really a political figure, in addition to a lawyer in these proceedings.

How should the public understand

the presence of a person like Michael Avenatti in a story like this one?

Right.

So if, I mean, there are two different interpretations of Donald Trump.

One is that

he's just an insane egotist, which is probably true.

They're not competing.

They're probably comfortably coexisting.

And the second is that he's kind of this postmodernist who understands how to exploit a post-truth sort of universe and that there's something like deliberately manipulative,

not just insane, about the way that he...

And so Avenati has positioned himself as the guy who can beat Trump at his own tactics.

And so you already know that he's somebody who's looking at truth in a kind of...

in a utilitarian functionalist sort of way.

And so when he comes forward with a claim, your instinct is to is to treat it with some degree of suspicion because he's already described himself as being somebody

who's extremely tactical.

What's a little bit different here is that he has a sworn affidavit.

But

just to return to our broader theme, which is that we live in this world where information is suddenly unfiltered.

And

when you're dealing with something like the war to fill a Supreme Court seat and just how the stakes are so high and it's so emotional,

I think we need to tread pretty carefully.

And

Kavanaugh, I think

I'm totally convinced by the charges against him just because there's a pattern, but largely I'm convinced because the first story was broke by the Washington Post and the Washington Post Post devoted enormous amount of time and resources in order to establish the credibility of Blasey Ford.

Then it was followed by a story in The New Yorker where they were very transparent about the information that they were bringing forward and it was surrounded by a lot of contextual reporting.

But then the third and the fourth claim are basically unvetted.

And so, you know, they're examples of information that's just kind of flying into the public square.

The fourth example was a letter that was sent to Colorado Republican Senator Corey

Gardner.

And it was kind of injected into a report into NBC News.

But

it was so anonymous.

So

like almost unvettable at that stage.

And it felt like you didn't, it's like the Rosenstein stuff.

What is the motive here?

Was Gardner leaking the letter in order to make it seem like there was a swirl of anonymous, unvetted information

that was circulating?

Was it leaked by Democrats in order to apply one more charge to make it seem like the pattern was more than it was?

And as

a citizen, since you've kind of made me the Vox populi,

in this whole conversation, I mean, it's like, how the hell are you supposed to

treat a story like that?

I mean, you know, you can only do it by fitting it into whatever preconceived notions that you have.

Right.

And that could never have been the first story that someone broke, but it becomes a debate for newsrooms when it's the fourth person.

Like, and I actually, I mean, I would, I'd have to listen to how, you know, I'd have to be sitting there with the NBC reporters and editors who debated whether to move with that.

story, but it's a tricky one.

Yeah.

The other question I think that's material, and that also touches again and brings us back to the platforms and their role in this, is there is a big question with the Kavanaugh hearings of how the story is actually defined.

We should note that these hearings are happening in the context of Me Too.

Hashtag Me Too.

Shout out to Rona Burke.

This is a broad confluence.

It's a big, we call it a conversation, Me Too, the public square.

But it is a whole flora of conversations.

It's a conversation bomb, if you will,

that touches on a whole variety of things from sexual harassment to sexual assault

to gender discrimination and pay equity.

How you define Brett Kavanaugh's relationship with any of those conversations, I think, sets a big part of your expectations, what you're listening to these hearings for.

The stakes of this hearing are amplified by the fact that it's part of hashtag me too.

Me too has made more acute the question of whether this is a story you perceive these hearings as being about a specific incidence of sexual assault or Brett Kavanaugh's behavior in a milieu of

really

gross and highly indecorous, shall we say,

misbehavior by the boys of Georgetown Prep.

Adrian, how do you define what these hearings are about, given how many conversations are attached to them in the public square?

I mean, I think first and foremost, you have to cover them as a Supreme Court nomination and

allegations against a potential Supreme Court justice, but you can't fully disentangle them from the larger cultural moment, certainly.

So in our newsroom, our culture team is reporting this with very much with that backdrop in mind.

So yeah, I think, and also just it's very, the Atlantic sort of approach to many topics involves the intersection of culture with whatever the thing is.

But do you treat this as a kind of quasi-criminal court of public opinion trial that this testimony is about whether what was alleged to have happened several decades ago happened in the way that Christine Blasey Ford

recounted it or in the way that Brett Kavanaugh recollected it?

Is it a trial-ish type of thing?

Or is it the question of a Supreme Court justice, a broader question, not criminal at all, but the question of what behavior does the public sanction in a

justice to the nation's highest court?

I think it's really, I think both, probably.

I mean, I think it's, really, I think the the most important thing to focus on in this moment and again we're in a real-time 24 7 news cycle um but in this moment the question is

is not as much

what actually happened but more does this person get to be on the highest court in the land and so like we talked about this in our news morning this morning like we want to of course be watching the the hearing closely and uh seeing how the prosecutor acts and observing the 11 committee members who will apparently silently be sitting there or not, I don't know.

But the real, like, we'll very quickly want to pivot to what happens next.

Is this guy going to be confirmed?

So, to me, that's the thing that's on my mind most now.

But you really can't disentangle that from, and if so, what does that say about our larger culture and where we are and all the rest of it?

Legal, I mean, just on the initial question, which is

how legalistically do we think about

this hearing and these questions more broadly?

And what does that mean for journalism?

I actually think journalism shouldn't really think about them in a legal sort of way.

That if you brought a lot of the Harvey Weinstein cases to court, they would probably fail, but that doesn't mean that they're not extremely important stories or true stories.

And that

our legal system is set up in such a way where it's not, you know, guilt,

the pursuit of guilt is not precisely the same as the pursuit of truth, and that there's a higher standard there.

And that as journalists,

our standard is to is not to establish truth on terms that are

are

the court's terms, but to establish them on our own terms.

Aaron Powell, although it should be noted as a counterpoint to

the argument that

as a legal case,

this might not be a prosecutor's favorite, the Kavanaugh case,

that Bill Cosby was sentenced this week to three to 10 years in prison for also years-old crimes that he was convicted of.

But

one of, I think, the hardest elements to disentangle

if you're not right in the thick of this, is that actually behind the scenes of even the businesses of many of the companies involved here,

there are broader questions.

The head of CBS, the now former head of CBS, Leslie Moonves,

was recently ousted after reports of his behavior at the company

were published in the press.

So

who

runs these companies?

CBS

is now this week.

CBS was supposed to

was set months ago to determine who who is going to own CBS.

It's currently owned by Viacom.

There have been other

bidders to purchase the network,

including, I believe, potentially Amazon.

There is a universe in which

the platform that brings us Alexa and the Kindle and

indirectly the Washington Post could also own CBS.

And what would that mean for the dynamics of a story like the Kavanaugh hearing?

What

would it mean had Leslie Moonvest been in place

at the head of CBS for the way that network covered the Kavanaugh hearing?

These are good questions.

I do think

Jeff Bezos owning multiple media companies should raise a series of questions about

his power and influence, certainly.

But also,

speaking specifically for the Washington Post, I mean, many newsrooms can and do operate independently from their owners.

The question of

it's hard, I mean, I don't quite know how to speak to the Leslie Munvez thing just because I have no idea what degree of influence he had on the editorial staff or anything like that.

But yeah, I mean, ownership is meaningful up to a point, for sure.

Aaron Powell, I mean, I think that the questions for democracy are the ones that we should be focused on, and that the problem with Amazon

swallowing everything is ultimately,

you know,

the questions are more theoretical than they are specific as it relates to as news unfolds in real time.

And it's just, do you want to live?

There's an inherent danger in democracy when you have one company that, you know, that owns,

that controls book publishing because it's the biggest bookstore in the world that owns one of the biggest movie TV studios that owns the Washington Post that owns all these other distribution channels that wants to buy movies actually the movie theaters they're talking about buying right now in the form of Regal Cinema and

like there just has to be a point where we say collectively stop it's unhealthy and I do think that the Washington the Washington Post is a complicated question um

so are they they owned by amazon i would they push back when you say that they are but you know they're part of amazon prime subscriptions amazon advertises them on the their home page has advertised them on their home page i think um there's kind of this fictitious difference but when your your owner owns them both um you're certainly uh thrown favor in the direction of the washington post

and the paper has improved under jeff bezos i mean there's no question about dramatically but

also influenced by Amazon values in a way that I think is also troubling.

And that, like, if you walk into the newsroom, it's become, you know, there are these big boards that show how

stories are doing on traffic and

on the social platforms and they hover over the newsroom.

And kind of there, there's an extent to which the values of Amazon do become the values of the Washington Post.

Now, it's not like that's just version of what's happening elsewhere, but something accelerated did happen when he bought the paper and it shifted a lot of its technological ambitions and the way that

it spends on resources.

And none of this is to say that he's a bad owner per se, but

there are ways in which he's putting his thumb on the scale there for sure.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: I would raise one other business concern that's material here that's aside from the platforms.

It's been interesting to watch the advertising actually that's happened back and forth over

the Brett Kavanaugh nomination and hearings.

The way that, for example, in the past week

A campaign was quickly spun up that I saw in my

YouTube ads.

I think that

a lot of folks probably saw rolling through their Facebook feeds in one way or another, actual commercials testifying to the character of Brett Kavanaugh from his friends and associates at Georgetown Prep and Yale Law School and elsewhere.

Those commercials were funded by someone.

That's fascinating.

Also, just the fact that he did an interview on Fox News was really surprising to me.

It's not something that I'm accustomed to seeing a potential Supreme Court justice operate in the public sphere the way a political candidate does.

And the YouTube ads speak to this as well for me.

So but what is the monetary calculation?

I mean, who's paying for those ads and why?

And would YouTube tell you?

No.

You should find out.

That's a good story.

I'm serious.

Absolutely.

It's just another form of dark money, right?

That you have.

And it's not necessarily new.

I think that's something that's been happening.

You know, Citizens for Brett Kavanaugh type organizations existed

since time immemorial.

Can I also just point out that the top story on Google News right now that I'm seeing is that a SEAL slapped a kayaker with an octopus in a viral video.

So, like, just to, I'm just throwing that out there to point out that, like, if you were just like a person's news habits and where they're going to look for information.

What does that say about your own news habits, Adrian?

This is not personalized.

I was not able to sign in.

I am going to click on it, obviously.

But anyway, it's just really interesting to me.

Like, what a platform decides to show you, like,

I don't know.

Yeah.

And I guess that's probably a good.

Oh, I mean, the YouTube thing is actually just an interesting place to pause, just one further beep, because you do see this way in which YouTube's algorithms lead you from one video to the next.

And there's studies that have been done that show that it actually tends to reinforce extremism or to exacerbate extremism.

Because if you see

one pro Brett Kavanaugh ad, in order to keep you going, it's going to show you the next and it's going to find ways to amp up your emotions so that you stick around.

That's probably a good

place for me to point this conversation forward.

Adrian, I'm going to ask you as an editor, what do you imagine is our way out of this as media organizations?

What is our true north?

What is the compass that you're steering towards to try to get the public to a clear understanding of what's true?

Aaron Powell, I think we do what we always do, which is just careful reporting and rigorous thinking and challenging our own assumptions.

And in terms of if anything changes, I do think being more transparent about the news gathering process without sort of being too pedantic about it can be helpful because there are a lot of sort of standards in journalism that seem really natural and accessible to us that people may not understand.

So even if it's explaining terms we use like off the record or background or whatever it is, I think just being more transparent about our processes can be helpful in regaining some trust.

Aaron Powell, and so, Adrian, how do you think that a ordinary member of the public who is making a very different set of calculations

should navigate this stew of information and misinformation?

Aaron Ross Aaron, I think people should just read and watch and listen to things from lots of different sources and think really critically about

where they're getting their information and

not just buy into assumptions about whether something is perceived as as leaning a certain way or partisan.

I mean, I think people should be more like reporters and

do a lot of their own sort of just rigorous thinking and,

you know,

ask questions about where you're getting things.

Can I just give my,

but

so

take something like food.

So food

can be enormously addictive.

It can be stuffed full of things just like

Facebook posts that are kind of intended to

play to the worst things in our brain and

to remake our palates.

But with food, a lot of people have made the choice to sacrifice convenience, efficiency, to pay a little bit more to consume products that they believe to be more virtuous.

So they buy organic food, they go to farmers' markets.

And it may be a little bit triite, but I think we kind of need to do the same sort of thing with the stuff that we ingest through our brain, that we need to just take, you need to take care.

It's like

you can't just

plunge for the first bag of Doritos that you see.

You want to think

in a very intentional sort of way about what you consume.

I will say as a devil's advocate pushback point that there is a lot of current swirling questions about the power of media literacy and whether or not it is a good, as an actually effective answer at getting people further towards the truth, sort of putting the onus on the consumer of information to process multiple competing claims.

There are a lot of current questions about that from folks

who think a lot all day about those things.

But I want to ask you, Frank, if the ordinary

person

who is navigating this stew said, you know what,

I'm fine being a critical news consumer and exploring a bunch of sources and reporting out what I think

seems most reliable.

But I also want, as a member of the public, to have more leverage over this public square.

I want to end some of the corrosive dynamics and some of the spread of misinformation and whatnot.

What, Frank, from someone who's studied monopoly and monopolies and technology, what do you think is the biggest point of leverage that a member of the public has in changing the system of information that we're currently embedded in?

So,

you know, I'm glad you brought it back to the monopoly as a framework because I think as we've gone on in this conversation, you've seen it rear its head, where we've talked about the problem of dependence that media has.

We've talked about how advertising has been captured by basically two companies.

73% of all online advertising goes to Google and Facebook.

And that's just an unhealthy ecosystem that we've created.

And so

politically,

you know,

Monopoly is having a moment.

And it's, I think it's at the early stages of its political moment.

And

we're going to start to entertain the idea of pressuring government to actually break up.

some of these companies

or you know or at the very least to curtail their ability to protect their dominance through

mergers and acquisitions, which is what, you know, that's the most profoundly unhealthy part of this ecosystem is that the companies are able to kill their competitors before they start to make a move on them by snapping them up.

All right.

With that,

stick with us.

In a moment, we'll turn to our closing segment: Keepers.

olivia loves a challenge it's why she lifts heavy weights

and likes complicated recipes.

But for booking her trip to Paris, Olivia chose the easy way with Expedia.

She bundled her flight with a hotel to save more.

Of course, she still climbed all 674 steps to the top of the Eiffel Tower.

You were made to take the easy route.

We were made to easily package your trip.

Expedia, made to travel.

Flight-inclusive packages are at all protected.

At the end of every Radio Atlantic episode, I ask our guests and listeners, what is it that you do not want to forget?

What have you heard, listened to, watched,

experienced recently that you don't want to forget?

First, we're going to play a keeper from a few weeks back from a listener who's talking about public virtue.

This is Teresa from Pittsburgh, and my keeper is something a friend of mine from China reminded me of as I was talking about McCain's funeral.

I lived in China for many decades and I was there during 9-11.

And as I watched the coverage with my friend in shock, one of the things she commented on was how amazed she was that people were lining up and helping each other to get on buses to get away from the World Trade Center.

And we had a wonderful conversation at that time about civic involvement in America and some of the cultural values that we have.

And as I watched the funeral and the memorial service this weekend, it just reminded me of that.

And I think in times like this, it's really helpful to see that.

Perfect.

Terrific.

Thank you, Teresa.

Frank Floy, what do you want to keep?

Well,

I will definitely remember Christine Blasey Ford's testimony.

I've not seen it, as we've said, but I read it and I found it just to be

an astonishing document because it's so

just so authentic and the details are so

memorable and moving.

And actually, here's the thing that I'm going to remember: which is the second front door, which is where she described how as she was remodeling her house, she wanted to get a second front door, and her husband couldn't understand why that was so.

And in the course of a discussion in marriage counseling,

that was the portal through which she recalled being assaulted by Brett Kavanaugh.

And it's just the way in which

those little details, you know,

that seem quirky or esoteric or whatever, you know, become

really embedded in these narratives of our lives and the ways in which

trauma

just leaves this deep, almost everlasting

impact.

And

it's almost a literary detail, but it's something I don't think I'll ever forget.

Yeah, the second door.

That is a really powerful reference and would be an easy one to miss.

Adrian, what do you not want to forget?

This is a slightly less serious example, but I just started watching season five of Bojack Horseman, and it's so good.

So it's also very deep and thoughtful.

Yeah.

So, yeah, that's what I'm thinking about right now.

Fantastic.

All right.

Bojack Horseman.

Thank you for

sent it, lifted our spirits for a moment.

Now I got to take it right back down.

No, actually, I think it's been useful to have a conversation like this in the middle of a misinformation like bomb like this

and then at the same time be listening to Serial.

The new season of Serial has started.

In it, Sarah Koenig has planted herself in a Cleveland courtroom and is following a number of different tendrils and alleyways of cases that she witnesses as they take place in that courtroom.

It's interesting at the same time to be listening to Slowburn, the wonderful Slate series from Leon

Navak and his colleagues at Slate about the first Watergate impeachment hearings,

and then in this most recent season about Monica Lewinsky, Bill Clinton, Linda Tripp, and all the atmospherics of the late 90s,

mid to late 90s.

What sits with me of living in both of these worlds at once today

and 20 years ago

is the power of just kind of bearing witness in this moment, the power of actually getting to see the details of these things playing out, of trying to unpack them in the moment.

We are going to forget

most of this.

We're going to forget

most of what this week felt like, from Monday's misinformation bomb to the president's press conference yesterday

to today's hearings, to the detail of the second door in Christine Blasey Ford's house.

Most of that is going to be forgotten.

It won't be lost to history, but it will be for historians to excavate it.

And I think that there is actually something about sitting with the chaos, trying to sit with the chaos as much as possible, trying to just actually take it in and remember.

This is happening and this is happening and this is happening all at once.

Because I think the specifics of a week like this are going to be easily lost.

Also, Bojack Horseman.

Also, Also, Bojack Horseman.

But that was lovely.

Adrian, thank you so much for joining us.

It's always a delight to have you.

Thank you for having me.

Frank, likewise.

A pleasure and honor.

And if you want to read more of Frank's thoughts on ownership, media, technology, make sure to check out his book, World Without Mind, out in paperback.

If you buy it on Amazon, I'm okay with that.

It's a judgment-free zone here.

All right.

That'll do it for another episode of Radio Atlantic.

Thanks, as always, to Kevin Townsend for producing and editing this episode and to Catherine Wells, The Atlantic's executive producer for podcasts.

Thanks also this week to the editor of theatlantic.com, Adrienne LaFrance, and to our staff writer, Franklin Forer, for helping us process this craziness.

And once again, special thanks to Kim Lau for production support and to John Batiste for our mortal theme music.

What is your keeper?

Call us at 202-266-7600 and leave us a voicemail with your contact information.

Check us out at theatlantic.com/slash radio.

Catch the show notes in the episode description.

And if you like what you're hearing, rate and review us in Apple Podcasts and subscribe in your preferred podcast app.

Most importantly, though, thank you for listening.

In a chaotic world, may you find your way to truth and beyond it, to understanding.

We'll see you next week.