The Press and the Election of 2016: One Year Later

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It's been one year since Donald Trump was elected president of the United States.

And say what you will about his relationship with the truth, he got one thing right that the news media, by and large, got totally wrong.

He's president.

A year later, what has that outcome taught the press?

And what has it taught the public?

This is Radio Atlantic.

Hi, I'm Matt Thompson, executive editor of The Atlantic.

My esteemed co-host is Jeffrey Goldberg, our editor-in-chief.

Hello, Jeff.

Hi, Matt.

And to join us in our conversation about how Donald Trump has changed the media, we have Adrienne LaFrance, the editor of theatlantic.com.

Hello, Adrienne.

Hi, thanks for having me.

Excellent.

Thank you for joining us.

And we also have exclusively at The Atlantic podcast, Yoni Applebaum, our politics editor.

How did we get these two?

I don't know.

These are huge.

These are huge exclusives.

Hello, Yoni.

Hey, you guys.

Hi, Yoni.

So here we are, four Atlantic editors.

How many Atlantic editors does it take to discuss the first year of the Trump presidency?

I don't know.

How many does it, John?

I don't know.

First, I want to take you back to November 7th.

2016.

We ran several pieces that day, of course, but I want to start with one in particular, a a lengthy one from the investigative reporter Andy Kroll, and it said this: quote, politics is plagued by amnesia.

A campaign ends, win or lose, and the wisdom attained and the lessons gleaned are too often forgotten as quickly as the campaign itself.

One of the mottos of the political consulting industry is never fight the last war, the political analyst Larry Spato says.

That also relieves them of learning the lessons of the last war.

Jeff?

Yes.

Looking back a year later, what lessons do you draw from the 2016 campaign?

Oh, everything's fine.

I think there's nothing really to talk about here.

No one's been arrested.

And no reporter, correct me if I'm wrong, Yoni, no reporter has been killed in the

pursuit of his or her duties in America.

And I consider this a great victory.

Am I wrong?

Nobody's been hurt.

And Jacobs got body slammed.

That counts.

No, but I'm saying, like, this is not, we've not become Turkey.

My point is, or we've not become a place where they throw masses of somebody has tried to throw masses of journalists into jail or physically hurt them.

I mean, it's still sort of like a reality TV show version of a war between the press and a president rather than an actual war.

It's still more pro-wrestling than actual wrestling.

It's a show that's benefited both sides.

My main concern is that some people in America don't know that it's a show and that it's a cynical attempt by Donald Trump to manipulate emotions against the press to benefit his own approval ratings.

And somebody's going to go do something crazy to

a reporter or a television crew or something.

And then it ceases to become a reality TV show and become some terrible reality.

And I think it's possible.

That's why I worry about it.

Well, and I want to focus your your I want to focus my question on the campaign itself.

So knowing what we do, I think it's hard to say that the outcome of that election was not in many ways a surprise, even having just gone back and reviewed.

I was pretty damn surprised.

Yeah, especially, I mean, having gone back and reviewed some of our coverage and the run-up to it,

it was a surprise.

What did that surprise teach you, Jeff, about campaign coverage going forward, about political coverage more broadly?

What have you taken away from it?

I'm not one of those self-flagellating editors.

I mean, I am on other subjects, but I'm not particularly on this.

This sort of whole, oh, we weren't listening to America.

We didn't know what was going on.

We have to send reporters out into America to understand the, take the real pulse of the people.

We could always do more of that, obviously, and people should do more of that.

I think this election was so sui generous.

First of all, the other candidate actually did get more votes.

I mean, we talk about the media living in a bubble and the Democrats and the coastal elites being in a bubble.

Well, the bubble happens to be bigger than the other bubble, right?

So I'm not one of these people who says that

We had failures of imagination, failures of cognition, failures of something,

but there were 40 or 50 different factors that went into Hillary Clinton's defeat.

And each one of those factors alone was fairly unique

in modern political history.

If you add all of these things up,

I think this is more about the confluence of

a large set of incredibly unlikely events than it is about

pollsters and the press not understanding

the pulse of America.

Aaron Powell, Adrian, how about you?

How have you processed the outcome of the election over the past year?

And how does that factor into your thinking now about future coverage?

We can have a fight about this, by the way, because

I'm ready to rumble.

Well, I actually wanted to add to something Jeff said.

I mean, he talked about, you know, it being a learning experience for the media, perhaps, because of a confluence of all of these unusual factors.

To me, there's also this.

One of the main unusual factors is Donald Trump's sort of preternatural ability of how to get the media's attention.

And so you're looking at this person who's been like the god of the tabloid since the 80s, like never too long without an appearance in page six, a hugely successful reality TV host, and someone who just knows throughout his career, you can go back decades and look at coverage of him.

He just knows how to gather TV crews, newspapers.

He knows how to get attention.

And so I think looking at that aspect of his personality as a factor and his victory remains, and in his presidency remains really interesting to me.

Yeah, I mean, he's a, you know, just to add on that one small bit, he's a really compelling character.

You know, and Hillary Clinton is a really non-compelling character, just as a figure of drama.

And it was just, people wanted to watch this show.

People want to know what's going to happen next.

But reporters are actually really good at telling them what just happened.

And I think that one of the things that the 2016 usefully illuminated is the perils of prognostication.

I got a call the day before the election from a writer for a major weekly magazine who wanted to know if we'd actually gone to the trouble of commissioning and queuing up a bunch of Trump Wynns stories.

They didn't ask me whether or not we had any Hillary Wynns stories.

This is before the election.

This is the day before the election.

They wanted to know for an article they were going to run on Wednesday about those publications which had actually

to write articles like this.

And that was a sort of a a striking phone call.

Yeah, of course we queued up Tussa's articles.

We had no idea who was going to win

because what we could do was look at what we knew had happened.

We could look at what people had told us.

We could look at the interviews and the data and all of that and convey that to our readers.

What we can't do is sit here with any degree of certitude and say, and here's what happens next.

And that's like a really useful distinction that I think sometimes gets elighted, particularly as reporters get out of their publications, go on cable news and elsewhere where they're regularly asked to do the sort of sports pundit role of handicapping odds.

And that's not something that the political press is typically well suited to do.

Yeah.

And, you know, Jeff, I want to ask you about the public and

President Trump's supporters.

How did the fact of his victory, how did starting off with this moment in which he called it, he was right.

The narrative that he told was true.

And so all the folks who were conditioned to believe him had this big founding piece of evidence to start with.

How did that make it,

how did you think about, and Yoni, this, I'm particularly curious for your thoughts on this, how did you think about earning the trust of his core base of supporters among the public,

given that context?

Yeah, so, you know, it's not.

Anytime the media ceases to cover things and becomes an actor in the drama,

and President Trump has repeatedly tried to cast the media as his foil in the great reality play that unfolds at the Center of American Political Life.

The press loses its ability to function, loses its ability to

reach readers, to be trusted, if you allow yourself, if press outlets allow themselves to get sucked into that.

And it can be tempting, right?

If you get hit, if your integrity gets challenged, if your honor gets impugned, the human reaction is you push back, you write angry screeds, you frame your questions at a press conference in a way that's hostile or adversarial,

and then you just cycle downward from there.

I think that any article that we publish or any story that an outlet runs,

particularly in this day and age of disaggregated media, it's got to earn the trust of readers on its own merits, right?

So you do that by clearly laying out facts.

You do it by seeking out contrary views.

You do it by building the strongest objections to one kind of analysis right into the piece so that readers aren't left to supply it on their own.

And you do it by being forthright with readers about what you know and what you don't know.

And that kind of journalism, you know, it's a little trite in that that's what we should always be doing.

But it gets a higher premium at a moment when a president is trying to use the media as a foil.

Well, and I would say, too, like,

we almost have to go beyond that because previously the idea was if you just tell the truth and report things accurately, that's enough.

That is enough to earn the trust of readers.

But there's sort of the, well, first of all, the chaos of this informational environment where everyone's a publisher and platforms let all kinds of misinformation circulate at great speed

and at great scale.

And then also the whole Trump narrative of the press being the opposition party creates this dynamic where any negative story of him, even if it's true, seems to confirm this sort of dynamic he's established, which works to his advantage.

Yeah.

So, Jeff.

Yes.

Imagine that I am wearing my Make America Great Again cap right now.

I can't.

And I think.

That's not literally something I can imagine.

But imagine that I'm asking you, you know what?

Listen, I think that you guys called this wrong.

I think you got all of this wrong.

Donald Trump was saying, and I believed him.

He said we're going to win this big election, and he got that right.

You guys called it wrong.

And since, you've been doing all of this coverage, saying that he speaks in inaccuracies, that he's telling false stories, that he lies a lot.

You've done this story about how he's going to turn America into an autocracy.

And why on earth, Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, should I believe you?

And you're going to be able to do that.

I can't convince the Matt Thompson with a red MAGA hat of that.

I can't.

I get asked this question.

I mean, it's a great question, Matt, but I get asked it all the time.

And the way it's framed to me is how do you reach the cross to the 40%, 35% to 40% of Americans who are die-hard-ish Donald Trump supporters and do believe that the media is the enemy and the media is out there get their man.

And

I actually think, and I probably shouldn't use this terminology, but I think it's a little bit of a war of attrition, which is to say all we can do is do the work that we've been doing for a long time, which is to publish observable truth, empirical truth, prove it to the best of our abilities, and wait for some people to come around.

Don't do it in the compulsively condescending way that some people in the coastal media elites, whatever you want to call it, in which some people do.

Just do it in a straightforward way.

But I can't.

I mean, and I know some of these folks.

I can't tell them that the sky is blue when they're absolutely arguing

to the point of frustration and tears that, no, the sky is red.

I can't do it.

All I can do is double down on what we do, recognize that it's a merciless environment for media outlets that get things wrong and

keep plugging away.

I do think at the end of the day, the Enlightenment wins.

The values of the Enlightenment, empirical reality, win.

And if it doesn't, then I guess I have a larger problem,

a larger business problem than I thought.

So I want to ask very quickly, do you all agree?

Is there any way in which that's an abdication that we should be?

How could it be, sorry, I'm not being defensive, but how could it be an abdication to continue to tell the truth?

I mean, the counterargument, not just to continue to tell the truth, but the first,

the idea that we should give up, essentially.

We should write off.

There's a subset of the public out there that just has no interest in facts.

And we should just wave them goodbye and focus on the folks who do.

There's a counter argument to be made, potentially, right?

Which is that it is that one of the core purposes of journalism is speaking to the entire public and getting out there every day and endeavoring to reach.

I cannot make anyone read the Atlantic except my children.

And

so we put it out there.

It's there for everyone.

We try, our reporters try especially to talk to those folks and try to understand their arguments.

We write a lot about that.

I don't think we're ignoring them.

I just think you can't compel someone to read something or watch something they don't want to watch or read.

I've never met the person who isn't interested in facts.

There was a great social science study about this the other day where they went and took both Democrats and Republicans, showed them some statements from their political leaders that were factually wrong, managed to persuade them that those statements were factually wrong, but did not change their opinions of those leaders or of their preferred policies.

So there's a difference here between

being able to be interested in facts, and often people reason the other way, right?

They have a moral intuition, they have a sense of loyalty, that they have a cultural adherence.

Their other values.

And that's what forms their political conviction,

not some sort of sitting down at the table with a printout of seven social science studies, reading through them to the methodology and wondering whether or not that passes the T-square.

Now you know it's Saturday nights in the Yoni Appleton House all the way.

And maybe it should, you know, and I have no reason to think that it should work that way, right?

That that would lead necessarily to better political outcomes.

My job as a politics editor is not to persuade people that they're wrong.

It's not to move the political needle in one direction or the other.

It's to get out there, to document the world as it is, to do that compellingly enough that people want to read it, to make them wrestle with things, to raise interesting questions, to put forward new evidence, to introduce new facts into the debate.

All those things we can and should do.

And the interesting thing is, and we know this from our inbox, that we are right across the political spectrum, that lots of people who may disagree with the conclusion of a particular article that we've run can still read that article and say, look, this was fascinating.

I think maybe it's, well, there are a hedge like that, right?

I think it's entirely wrong.

You guys are crazy, but it was a great read.

And that is what we can aspire to do, right?

To make people think, to get them to engage with interesting questions,

to get them to really grapple with issues of consequence.

I can't determine which way they're going to come out.

And I don't want to be in that business.

I'm not in the business of political persuasion.

I'm not a lobbyist.

I'm not a campaign consultant.

I'm a journalist.

I want to document the world as it is and lead it to Americans to figure out what to do about that.

I'm optimistic.

I think truth wins.

Adrienne LaFrance, taking on the skeptics.

Next, we'll talk about what journalists can do from here to earn the trust of their readers.

After the break.

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This is ServiceNow.

This is Radio Atlantic.

I'm Matt Thompson.

I'm Jeff Goldberg.

We're talking today once again with Yoni Applebaum and Adrian LaFrance, our fellow editors at The Atlantic, about Donald Trump, the press, 2016, 2017, and what we've learned.

Adrian, whether or not we accept his premise, the president has definitely framed himself as being in a war with the press.

And given that, how do you think we go about earning the public's trusts, particularly those supporters who believe the president when he says we're liars?

Yeah, so I think, I mean, to Yoni's point earlier, anytime you can sort of be a trusted guide to the reader or listener, anytime you can bring someone along with your fact-finding process within reason.

I mean, we as reporters know that the actual fact-finding process is deep and grueling and complicated and very often boring, and we're trying to synthesize for people.

But there are ways that we can take people along that shows them a process in the way that can, I think, help people understand the conclusions that we come to in a clearer way at times.

How do you think about doing that with a story like, I mean, with an instance?

I mean, there are a lot of these, like voter fraud is one, there's a widespread voter fraud occurring, millions of people voted fraudulently in the last election, immigrants are crossing the border illegally all the time and are killing people by the hundreds every day.

Is there a way that you grapple with those?

Is there a way that you address those claims by pulling folks along in your coverage?

Well, I mean, I think that one

is

routinely acknowledging the limitations of what we know, as Yoni pointed out earlier.

And also, I think making sure that we don't take for granted what we clearly know as journalists.

Often we can get very close to the subject matter we know best in a way that takes for granted that people aren't following things as closely as we may be.

So those are two ways I think about it.

There's a study I'm obsessed with done by a guy named Brendan Nyan at Dartmouth a few years back on the autism vaccine link.

And he wanted to know, could you persuade people who believe there is such a link that there isn't?

So he created a bunch of packets.

Some had sort of some popular journalism articles and then the other packets grew more and more empirical until he was sending out sort of a bunch of studies stapled together.

And he did a randomized trial and sent them out to folks who believed in the link.

And what he found was that the more empirical the information he was providing, the more definitive the claims,

the more people double down on the link, right?

That you can't bludgeon people into submission with facts.

You can't come at them by studying, by citing a boatload of studies and say, Look, you know, I've got the science here.

You have to believe me.

You know, who understands this intuitively is Donald Trump.

When he wants to talk about voter fraud, he doesn't say, Look, you know, I've got five reports right here which say it's widespread.

No, he says, Look, I got a golfing buddy, and he went to the polls, and the guy had to say that.

In other words, the way most people tell stories.

You know,

the way most people communicate with each other.

I heard from a guy who said that this thing is happening, and you extrapolate the anecdote.

Yeah, and Donald Trump's anecdote turned out to be hooi.

It turned out the guy he was talking about wasn't even an American citizen, was turned away from the polls for a reason.

But that didn't matter because it was a great story.

It was persuasive.

It connected with people at an intuitive level.

So the challenge for journalists, we're actually, we're in the storytelling craft.

This is, for us, this ought to be really encouraging, that if you can tell a really good story, you've got to make sure it's true.

You've got to make sure it lines up with the data, right?

You've got to marry the anecdote

to the data.

But if you can do that, if you can tell a really good story and tell it well, that's actually the way to reach people, not the reams of the social science that you're relying on in telling that story, but not necessarily foregrounding or using it as a bludgeon to tell people: look, the thing that you deeply adhere to, it's wrong, and I'm going to force you to recant.

If instead you tell a story and engage them in that story, then you can actually potentially get them to reassess their views.

Yeah.

I want to look for it a little bit more.

So

as editors assigning coverage, what stories are you paying particular attention to now?

We just cover Twitter all the time now.

I was going to say Facebook, but I'm serious.

Talk more about that, Adrian.

I mean, it's an enormously influential company.

There's just, there's the

information ecosystem that it fuels.

There's the fact of its surveillance, the

user data that it collects, the fact that Mark Zuckerberg may or may not want to run for president.

To me, the Facebook story.

I never understood that because why would he give up all his power to become president?

It seems like the next thing, like the next achievement to unlock.

I don't know.

I think being head of Facebook is more powerful in some ways.

It definitely is, but it's

coming up on radio at length.

Once they go nuclear.

Is it more powerful to be POTIS or president of Facebook?

I think president of Facebook in a lot of ways, seriously.

But I also think that I...

It's having this for a future debate.

Right, no.

I mean, I will place the bet now that Zuckerberg is running.

You can play this clip when I'm wrong in two years.

I think it could happen.

Prognostication from Adrian.

It's a dangerous game.

I would be remiss if I didn't ask after

this year's elections.

which it's a weird contrast with a year ago.

Obviously,

Democrats and liberals all over the Twitter sphere are hailing these results as being, in some ways, a reversal of the outcome of last year, which seems a bit optimistic.

But are there any lessons now, having gone through one campaign cycle since the presidential election, that you're walking away with?

Is there anything looking forward from last night that you're particularly curious about, Yoni?

Yeah, Trump's not an aberration.

I think that's what we learned last night.

It's maybe a little bit ironic, but this set of elections delivered a strikingly different result at the top line level.

But what it showed is that the new cleavages in America are the conjunction of race and education.

Income was not predictive.

It's been predictive in America for a century.

If you tell me how much you make, I can tell you how you're likely to vote.

That's not true anymore.

Now it's geography, it's race, it's education.

It's a deep cultural divide with dense populous blue cities,

vast swathes of the country which are less populous populous are red,

that's actually

should be profoundly worrisome even to the Democrats who are celebrating today because it suggests that some of the divides in America that fueled Trump's rise and surprised them are going to be very difficult to bridge.

These are not populations that are geographically intermingled.

They're not populations that have a lot of close ties to each other.

You can't paper over this by, you know, to the extent that people are voting their economic interests, you can

craft policy that will address their economic interests.

To the extent that voters feel culturally alienated from each other and at odds contesting for ownership of a divided country, that's a heck of a lot harder to craft any sort of a politics of compromise.

So I think you can look at the 2017 and 2016 elections, which delivered diametrically opposed results.

And what they both show is a deeply divided, bitterly divided country and one in which the parties are realigning in in very rapid fashion.

Aaron Powell, so the Democrats are going to be the party of the city-states, and the Republicans are just going to be the party of the countryside?

Yeah, the city-states and their suburbs, right?

The outlying districts, which until recently did not dip Republican.

You know, the group that maybe moved farthest, even from 2016 to 2017, was white college-educated women.

And they have moved from being a reliable Republican constituency in presidential years to being an increasingly blue constituency.

That's a big shift.

And at the same time, we're watching a lot of blue-collar regions of

countryside isn't quite right, but a lot of old industrial towns, those voters seem to have gone out of the Democratic constitution.

I just like the word countryside.

Sounds very medieval.

But go to this one point very quickly.

The trends are not demographically in the favor of the Republicans long term, right?

Although that's the same thing we've been saying for 20 years.

Aaron Powell, Jr.: Yeah, you know, I don't know about that.

I think that's a really interesting question.

There's a lot of policies at the federal level now that will tip the the demography.

If you radically constrict immigration, if you create a system in which assimilating to some undistinguished American-ness

buys you greater access to a variety of benefits and privileges, you can actually shift.

These are not, I mean, something that the social theorists know is that these things are social contracts.

To argue against my assumption,

there's this notion that Hispanics and Asians in particular will stay reliably democratic, but

to impose

a race framework on this,

those groups might become white.

They might vote white once they decide alternatively that people

of color may just become a meaningless phrase.

We know that

it might already be that, but Hispanics who identified that way in the 2000 census, that the very last time.

Trump got 30% of the Hispanic vote, something in the 30s?

He did, but that's a self-identified vote.

Many of those same households that identified one way in 2000 had simply identified as white by 2010.

They're not stable or static categories, and you can actually reshuffle the demographic nature of the country.

And the other thing is, it requires people coming out to vote.

So, what happened in Virginia, for example, on Tuesday was that minorities showed up in large numbers to vote

and did that at higher rates relative to the baseline than many white voters had.

That wasn't as true in 2016, right?

So, lots of policies can reshape the electorate.

You can suppress voters.

You can change the incentives for identifying with certain kinds of ethnic or racial categories.

There is no single demographic destiny.

If anyone's holding their breath and waiting for the nation to tip in their direction, they're probably going to be rudely disabused in short order.

This is an act of battle for the future of the country, and it's only in test of high.

I want to ask a specific question about one theme.

I mean, one difference, one thing that strikes me that feels very different as an editor now versus as an editor before the 2016 election is how we treat fringe or extremist voices.

Before the 2016 election, it was really difficult to make the case to my fellow journalists that we should be spending more time looking at some of the extremist sentiments that were quite visible.

But I wonder now, though, have we gone too far in the opposite direction?

Are we paying too much attention to extremist voices?

Adrian, I'm curious what you think about this.

Can you get, well, you know, I will say that I pay more attention to, I don't know, Breitbart today than I did a year ago, probably, but

I don't see any evidence that people are paying too much attention to extremist voices.

I mean, it's...

Is there such a thing?

Can one pay too much attention to the voices?

I mean, you could panic based on what you read, but paying attention to it, I don't think you can pay too much attention.

No, and I, I mean, it is, it's, it's a good question, especially in the context of journalistic coverage.

I mean, I I know I've looked at some of the reaction to the coverage we've done of Richard Spencer, for example, and the question of perhaps should we not even feature voices of extremist groups?

Is it glamorizing them?

Those sorts of questions.

For our purposes, I mean, we're documenting what's happening in the world, and this is a moment where extreme voices are amplified, not just because of the coverage of them, but because of the sort of forces shaping the political moment.

So I don't think as journalists we can pay too much attention to things of profound influence.

So no, I'd.

I would say, and I'm not equating the moment to the moment I'm about to discuss, but this magazine was covering Hitler in 1930, 1931, 1932.

It was treating it as a serious phenomenon.

I think that

you don't wait to cover extremists until they take over.

You cover them when they're putting out extreme ideas and write about the ideas and fully ventilate it.

And with that,

let's close out this segment and turn to our closer.

Keepers.

At the end of every episode of Radio Atlantic, I ask our guests a question and my co-hosts a question.

What is it that you have heard, read, watched, listened to, experienced recently that you do not want to forget?

What would you like to keep?

Adrian, can I start with you?

Can I give an example from The Atlantic?

Sure.

Julie Beck wrote a piece about Facebook.

Again, I'm bringing up Facebook.

She looked at how people's memories, Facebook has this feature where it shows its users what they posted one year ago.

And for the election, she took a look at, specifically a look at people who'd supported Hillary Clinton and what they were sort of feeling and thinking about their one year ago posts of having vote, perhaps doing voting selfies or whatever it was.

and she had this description of Facebook that I really liked but on this is me reading Julie Beck but on Facebook every day is dedicated to the passage of time the social network was always an obsessive catalog of the present furiously snatching the delicate butterflies of this moment or that and pinning them to a digital corkboard but what's the point in a collection if you don't display it so Facebook has also become a unique sort of a nostalgia machine I liked that.

A nostalgia machine.

And I think it's kind of ominous.

We got some good writing at the Atlantic.

It's really good.

So Julie Beck, thank you for that.

Yay, Julie Beck, yoni Apple bomb.

Instead of a keeper, I'm going to tell you about something I kept.

I came home from the conventions in Philadelphia and Cleveland with two bottles of scotch and tucked them away in my office.

I put one of them out last November 8th to thank my colleagues, the extraordinary team I work with every day for just

killing it for two years of coverage of a remarkable presidential election.

The other one's out on the table this afternoon to thank them for covering the year since that election.

Jeff, if I can get an expense account, I think we may need some more scotch.

You know, more scotch.

Submit the receipt and then apologize.

That was always my trick.

Jeff, my co-host, what do you want to keep?

Yoni's receipts.

Stranger Things.

Although I've actually been thinking, I watched most of the second season.

I binge-watch it between 1 a.m.

and 4 a.m.

one night or 5 or 6 a.m.

I don't remember what it was.

I was traveling.

And I don't even like the show, but I'm obsessed with it.

It's sort of an amazing thing.

I like the first season.

I don't like the second season as much, but

I'm way into it.

And I think it's pure, speaking of nostalgia, I think it's pure nostalgia.

It's created in that sweet spot between Stephen King's Night Shift, which is his early collection of horror short stories, and

E.T., some combination of E.T.

and Close Encounters.

And I guess I'm I'm just old and I go back to the things that I liked 35, 40 years ago.

Thank you very much, Jeff.

Stranger things.

I'm going to share mine.

This is my favorite kinetice, which is something I forgot and was reminded of and now do not want to forget again.

I got to visit some family members I had not seen in some time this week.

And

one of our distant cousins had compiled our genealogy and had done a ton of research to find the backstory of our great, great, great, great, great, several generations of great

grandparents.

And

I had remembered their name once they came to Guyana, Joseph and Mitchie Johnson.

But I had forgotten my great, great, great, great, distance of greats grandmother on my maternal side, I'd forgotten the name that she was born with on the gold coast of Ghana before she was abducted at the age of seven.

And that name was Yabawabuja.

I don't want to forget it.

It's a good name.

It's a beautiful name.

That is not forgettable.

That you'll remember.

It's a thing I want to keep.

So, Yoni, politics editor at The Atlantic, thank you very much for joining us.

Oh, it's always fun.

Is that true, Yoni?

Are you just saying that?

You know, you can't trust the press these days,

yeah.

I don't know.

I don't believe it.

Adrian LaFrance is the editor of theatlantic.com.

Thank you, Adrian, for being here.

Thank you for having me.

And that's it for Radio Atlantic this week.

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

And I'm Jeff Goldberg, the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic.

Thank you very much, y'all.

And now, a couple of announcements as we close out this episode of Radio Atlantic.

First, Jeffrey Goldberg, our editor-in-chief, is also the host of our newest podcast, The Atlantic Interview.

The first episode is a delightful conversation with the novelist Chimamanda and Gozi Adishier about race, identity, and what happened when a nervous interviewer referred to her as Chimicha.

That wasn't me, by the way.

That was not me.

You can find the Atlantic interview wherever you get your podcasts.

We'll link to it in the show notes, so

don't go too far.

Secondly,

I want to thank, as always, the one and only John Batiste, creator of our wonderful rendition of The Battle Hymn of the Republic, which, here's the announcement, is now available on Spotify.

We'll link to this in the show notes.

And so we will not run it in full this week because you can go listen to it on Spotify yourself at any time you'd like.

And may I note, Matt, that John Batiste is also our new music director.

Announcement number three.

For the first time in history of the Atlanta, we have a music director.

We have got a music director.

Yes, and he's going to do interesting musical things for The Atlantic.

And we're very excited about that.

I cannot wait.

Today's episode was produced and edited by Kevin Townsend and Diana Douglas with production support from Kim Lau.

If you've got thoughts or feedback on this episode we want to hear from you, give us a call at 202-266-7600 and leave us a voicemail.

Don't forget your contact information.

Look for us, as always, at facebook.com/slash radioatlantic and theatlantic.com slash radio.

And if you like what you're hearing, please don't forget to rate and review us in Apple Podcasts.

And of course, subscribe.

Detailed show notes and links are in the episode description.

Thank you very much for listening.

We'll see you next week.