James Bennet: Trump Is Still Hacking the Media

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Hello, and welcome to the Bulwark Podcast.

I'm your host, Tim Miller.

Delighted to welcome a longtime journalism hand.

He was previously the editorial page editor at the New York Times, editor-in-chief at The Atlantic.

That's why I've calling you old.

Also a former White House correspondent and bureau chief in Jerusalem.

Now he's the Lexington columnist for The Economist, where he has to spell maneuver, M-A-N-O-E-U-V-R-E,

like a limey freak.

It's James Bennett.

How you doing, man?

I'm good, Tim.

Yeah, they got a different word for everything, the Brits, it turns out.

I had to triple-check maneuver this morning when I was reading one of your recent columns.

I was like, what is that atrocity?

Yeah, it's not just the spelling.

It's like learning a whole new language.

Yeah, the way they shape their mouth, it's got to be related to the teeth somehow, you know, that the pronunciation is different.

Anyway, we've got a lot to talk about.

I want to do some media gossip stuff with you at the end, both candy for people who care about that.

But we have actual real news on several fronts.

And so we have to start with Jeffrey Epstein, as is our obligation until we figure out who killed him.

The Democrats on the House Oversight Committee published portions of the birthday tributes that the Wall Street Journal had written about, the 50th birthday for Epstein.

We've got to see the Trump,

whatever you want to call it, poem scene of a very...

Nubile looking young woman that he drew for Epstein where he talked about how they have so much in common and he's wishing for him a lot of wonderful secrets.

We found another page in the book has a photo of Epstein holding an oversized check, supposedly representing Epstein selling a depreciated woman to Trump.

We don't know if Trump was involved in that, but we know that that check was there.

What do you make of all this, James Bennett?

The White House has gone from saying a letter was non-existent to now saying it's simply a...

is a fake

a forgery.

And we're really playing the long game.

Whoever that forger was, really playing the long game.

It's been 20 couple decades later, you know?

Yeah, but doesn't it feel like this is just headed down now a pretty clear kind of partisan path?

The Republicans in Congress who are already seeing them fall in line and accept the claim that it is a fake.

There's presumably a reality here that may or may not be provable in the end.

It's a good fact for the Wall Street Journal that this is out.

It would seem to strengthen their hand substantially in the libel case or defamation case.

I can't remember which it is that Donald Trump's brought against them.

But in terms of the politics of this, I don't know.

But I feel like I have a bit of a blind spot when it comes to the Epstein story because it has already had much more legs than I thought it would at first.

I don't know.

Where are you on this?

Well, I think it has had more legs because of the way that they've behaved, right?

I mean, when Pam Bondi first, and really this kind of was reignited when Pam Bondi gave those binders to the far-right conservative MAGA, I wouldn't call them conservative, really MAGA influencer world types.

And, you know, it was all this old information and she was trying to, whatever, check this box that there was this demand from the MAGA right to demonstrate that there was, you know, a cover-up of a how-to file ring of elite Democrats and liberals and people they hate.

And so they put that binder out, which was

obviously insufficient at the time, even to like the biggest Trump pluffers.

And so at that point, I was like, oh, you know, I don't know.

This could be an issue for them.

I didn't know how big of one.

It became a big issue when it became more of a traditional cover-up.

When you talk about this moving in a traditional partisan way, like that's true, but it's also more of a traditional type of scandal in a weird way than Trump has dealt with in the past.

Like it's pretty similar to a lot of other presidential cover-ups.

Like there's embarrassing information about Trump or Trump's friends in there.

We don't know exactly what, but it's embarrassing enough that they don't want to put it out.

And so now they've decided to try to block people from seeing it, right?

I mean, it's pretty, it's a pretty straightforward story in that sense.

What has been unusual to me about this so far is that there was like bipartisan demand, you know, and that the Democratic backbenchers got this subpoena and they actually have gotten the document and they got Republican support for that and they actually got the documents released.

And there seemed to be some genuine bipartisan desire to get to the bottom of this question of like,

you know, just how far this monstrous Epstein story really goes and who all is implicated in it.

And what seems to be happening now is the, you know, Republicans are beginning to solidify around the kind of partisan positioning here that the White House has sketched out, which is that this is fake, nothing to see here, nothing to see here.

Let's move on.

There's the other way I think it might be a little different from that partisan fight is that Trump brought in a new part of the coalition that, like, isn't quite as sycophantic as the old part of his coalition.

When you talk about kind of the Manosphere crowd, even some of like the horseshoe type lefties, the RFK, Tulsi.

I mean, Tulsi's gotten pretty sycophantic herself, but like some of the people that sort of fit that mold, right?

I think this makes him extremely mockable to them.

To the extent that some of them care deeply about the story because they've been covering it and following it for years now.

And then others of them maybe just more in like a comedic, like in a South Park Shane Gillis sense.

It's kind of like, like, really?

This isn't you?

And it's his fucking signature.

It looks exactly like his signature.

It sounds like him, right?

Like he's done drawings before.

I mean, it's a preposterous thing, right?

And it's like, you can get Charlie Kirk and the primetime Fox to go along with your most preposterous spin, but some of these guys have at least a little bit of dignity left, you know?

And so I think that that makes him vulnerable on this in a way some of the other stuff wasn't.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I think, was it your

colleague Eggers wrote this morning, though, that in many ways, this is the world that Donald Trump's been preparing us for for many years, which is a world in which we don't know what the truth is, and you turn to your leader to tell you what's true and what's not true, and you don't rely on independent sources for verification.

But you're right, there are these interesting, you know, corners of MAGA world now and in the MAGA media world, the world of influencers, where there are signs of people who are still thinking for themselves and

trying to get to the bottom of this particular scandal.

At least test driving, the possibility.

What will the audience think if I make fun of Donald Trump on this?

See how it goes.

That's encouraging, though.

Test driving is good as we deal with his, you know, whatever, Orwellian desire to

only believe him and

not your lying eyes.

This kind of leads us to your recent, what's the appropriate word for the economist?

You contributed to the cover story.

You're a contributor.

I don't want to go outside of economist style.

It's about America's missing opposition.

In some sense, I just want to like note that Democrats have a new chair of this oversight committee, Robert Garcia, you know, who pushed for this.

You know, who knows?

Jerry Connolly, R.I.P.

had initially been the oversight chair.

Remember, there was this fight between AOC and him.

I think obviously Democrats should have made AOC head of that committee.

But it's noteworthy, right, that like they're starting to do some of the stuff.

And I want to get into your article more broadly, but I don't know if you have any thoughts on that, on like the Democrats' posture on Epstein in particular.

Yeah, I mean, as I said, I mean, they have been effective in getting this stuff released and actually working with Republicans to make that happen.

So, I mean, we're seeing pockets of opposition, I think, in various ways, the Democrats, a very kind of decentralized way.

Obviously, the governors, too, in their own ways, finding ways to

try to push back.

But basically, I mean, it's been pretty ineffective up to date.

So this is how you begin your piece, which is this is a puzzle.

Most Americans disapprove of Mr.

Trump, yet everywhere he seems to be getting his way.

Why?

And like, that's kind of the premise, right?

Which is, so in some sense, you could say, well, I talked to Bill Crystal yesterday.

Like, his numbers are down.

They're soft.

We're not a Bush-Katrina type numbers or anything, but like, it's not good.

But at the same time,

his authoritarian project is continuing apace.

What was your answer to your own rhetorical question there?

Well, this is the piece you're talking about is editorial.

They call them leaders at The Economist.

Again, they've got a different word for everything here.

And so it's kind of the collective wisdom of the whole hive mind.

And the piece itself was written by our U.S.

editor, John Priteau, actually.

And the argument is that it begins from the premise, as he said, that Donald Trump is not very popular right now.

In fact, his net approval rating is about where where Joe Biden's was after his dismal debate performance against Donald Trump last year.

He's net negative about 14 points.

And there's also a tradition in the U.S.

of concern about

too much authority concentrated in one person.

Yet, you know, Donald Trump is overcoming both of those things right now and is partly a function of

a lot of the institutions he's going after and challenging universities, law firms, media organizations aren't able to work collectively.

There's kind of a first mover or collective action problem there where they're all acting as independent agents.

And in some ways, from a law firm's perspective, to the extent that a potential competitor is weakened, that's an advantage for them.

So there's no collective action there.

And on the democratic front, I just don't think they've figured out who they are yet.

And that's natural.

You know, we see this.

This is the cycles of American history.

It's typical for the opposition.

we don't have, it's not a parliamentary system.

We don't have a shadow government in the U.S.

And when a party gets a drubbing like the Democrats did in the last election, it takes a while.

And really, it takes until they have a new nominee, presidential nominee, to be able to say, this is who they are and this is what they stand for.

So it's normal that we'd be in that interregnum.

But the fact is, I think part of the problem is Donald Trump's better at politics than they they are.

He's pretty good at politics, this guy.

He's kind of hacked our system, and he's constantly on offense.

And going on MSNBC to shout back has not turned out to be a very effective strategy for the Democrats.

I want to talk about the ways in which he's hacked our system and kind of the media element of it in a second.

But let's just go to the elite institutions part of this first.

I've been chewing over this tech Titan meeting that Trump had last week for a couple of days now.

And I was thinking about this counterfactual this morning, which is like, imagine what the reaction would be right now.

There's a new pull out this morning showing Zoron up by like 20 points in the New York mayor's race.

I think it seems pretty clear that he's going to be the next mayor of New York City.

We'll see things happen in politics.

But let's say that Zoron right now is gathering big leaders of finance together to come talk to him.

And that what was requested was that they bring him gifts and suck up to him and talk about how great he is.

And if they don't do that, then what Zoron is going to do is, I don't know, install some massive, you know, wealth tax or some massive, you know, carried interest tax or something.

And that was the stick that he was holding over their head.

And that counterfactual, Zoron's doing what Trump, you say Trump is doing.

He's an offense.

He's aggressive.

He's hacking the system.

I think the corporate America's hair would be on fire.

People would be going insane.

It would be in the front page story.

People would be talking about socialism.

coming to America, threats.

Donald Trump did exactly that with the Silicon Valley leaders to almost no pushback.

How do you explain that asymmetry?

I struggle with this one.

You can kind of play this game all day long.

If Barack Obama had done X, if Joe Biden had done Y, if even George W.

Bush had done Z, you know, can't you imagine how everybody would be going berserk about that?

And I don't know.

I don't know how to answer that question.

Because

is it because Donald Trump is this uniquely kind of skilled political actor?

He is an unusually charismatic guy, and my experience always drives Democrats crazy when I say that, but he is.

He has established this very unusual hold over his base.

And he believes in these displays of dominance, you know, which he does over and over again.

So is he a unique character?

Or is the uniqueness that he has just had more political imagination than the rest of these guys?

And it turned out that all the structures these institutional structures that are corporate leaders all of these actors in american life were just weaker than we thought they were you know and all it took was one guy willing to push harder to get him to cake yeah it's just i hear you i understand how we can play this game all day but like that's why i think this oron example is instructive because it's more modern it's happening right now as opposed to like comparing to a past world but like i don't know.

Like, I don't, I don't think everybody would fold for that,

for some kind of left-wing authoritarian.

I don't think that corporate America would fold.

I think they would fight it.

And so I think there's another answer, and it can't just be Donald Trump's charm.

Like, he obviously is charming, and Zoron's charming.

So, like, what is it?

And is it that they kind of want it?

Is it that he's

more scared of him?

The threat is more, they feel the threat more acutely.

I don't know.

I don't know, Tim, what does it mean to be a left or right-wing authoritarian?

Donald Trump has nationalized U.S.

steel, right?

Is that a right-wing position?

I do know what you mean.

More friendly to corporate America, more, you know, more traditional values.

You know what I mean.

I do know what you mean.

I just don't know if Zorin Mondami were the president of the United States with the military at his beck and call, with asserting powers to levy taxes the way Donald Trump is doing with tariffs right now, would he be able to get temporary acquiescence from corporate America because the overlords of capital would be concerned that they might be next in line if they crossed him?

I think it's possible that he would.

Not sure he's that kind of guy.

I'm not being argumentative.

I take your point that America must be argumentative.

It's a podcast.

We can disagree and hash it through.

I'm trying to understand literally.

You talked about the missing opposition, but it's like, why?

Again, the Democrats, we can talk about their strategy in a second.

But for the non-political actors, non-directly political actors, like the degree to which they have acquiesced to him compared to the first time is like truly astounding.

Trump's not any different.

He's not more charismatic now than he was then.

So what is it?

Like to me, it's like, well, they think the threat is real.

Like they really think that he might bring down a fascist hammer on their head.

I guess.

I don't know what else, what other conclusion to come to.

Yeah, I mean, we all know this, right?

He's got different people around him than he did in his first term.

And he is much more confident in the exercise of his own power.

And his people are much more imaginative about how they can apply it you know they've spent a lot of time thinking about how they can do things like remake the bureaucracy and impose these tariffs and you know take the other actions that we're seeing him take you know stretch the definition of terrorists to encompass drug gangs and then you know assert based on a quarter century old you know act

the ability to to kill suspected drug dealers without any kind of trial.

They've been thinking about this for a while.

It's different than the first term.

That's true.

That's true.

The other side of that coin, though, is, I don't know, what did you make of the Barack Obama doesn't talk a lot these days?

It's maybe a month ago now.

Time's kind of a flat circle in the Trump era, but he kind of lambasted.

like the elite institutions and the big corporate CEOs and the and the colleges and saying like what his point was kind of I don't have in front of me it was essentially like what are you so scared of Like, you have huge endowment at Harvard.

Like, he comes for you.

Okay.

Like,

stay to your principles, weather the storm, like, fight it, right?

Push back.

We've seen pushback work against him.

I mean, I kind of wish Obama would be making those points a little bit different for him, but I thought that the point was compelling.

No, it feels like Donald Trump hasn't demonstrated yet that he can cripple one of the 10 SP 10 tech companies with his tariffs.

Like,

they all have a pretty good P ⁇ L still out there.

So it's pretty interesting, like how much they've been unwilling to even do a modicum of like pushback.

Yeah, I agree.

I mean, look, Harvard is fighting, right?

They're still fighting in court.

They haven't reached a settlement there.

And it sounds like the Trump administration is still asking for things that they're not willing to acquiesce to.

But your broader point, totally.

Yeah, I agree with it.

But I, you know, you called me old earlier.

It's sort of making all sorts of discoveries late in life.

But, but like, one of them is like, yeah, a lot of people aren't willing to stand up for their principles, it turns out.

You know, a lot of people who know better aren't willing to have the argument.

And that's the problem, like, even to have the argument.

Like, who's arguing with Donald Trump anymore?

Who's telling him, no, we shouldn't do this?

We should think differently about that.

I don't care whether you believe in Donald Trump or whether you don't.

Like, we all benefit from pushback, you know?

And you're right about the elite institutions.

And we've seen it in the law firms.

We've seen it in the universities.

We have seen it in the media the biggest problem of course has been within the republican party as you know better than i do and still is with these members of congress who i think do have different points of view on a lot of this stuff but they're just letting themselves get rolled over and over and over again

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on to the Democrats, really quick and their pushback or lack thereof.

What do you think they should do about it?

What would you do?

What would I do?

Jakeen Jeffries calls you and says, I need the advice of the editor of The Economist.

Tell me what we should do.

I'd refer him to the editor of The Economist.

Sorry.

You know what I fucking mean?

The Lexington columnist for The Economist.

What would I do?

I mean, there's a series of battles that they're facing.

And the next big one, I think, is the shutdown fight, right that's uh upon them and this stuff's hard i'm not i don't really know how to advise them in that my own view is nobody should go into a shutdown fight without knowing what the end game is my big concern you know for the democrats going into shutdown here is that they would do it to resist to try to draw a line in the sand and say we're not going to be morally implicated in this budget and then they're going to wind up caving and i'm you know we've seen this this movie many times before.

Newt Gingrich shutting the Congress down back in the day was really the beginning of Bill Clinton's turnaround going into the 96 election, although also sowed the seeds of his own destruction and some not destruction, but some of his subsequent bit campaign, as you may recall, because Monica Lewinsky delivered a pizza to him in the Oval Office during the shutdown.

So it was eventually figured in the Star Report.

So anyway, long way to say, I'm ducking your question.

I don't give tactical devices.

I want it to be a big party again.

They need to find a way to have an umbrella.

And Donald Trump has done this for the Republicans, by the way.

An umbrella that's broad enough to encompass, yeah, Donnie in New York, not to be terrified of him all the time.

And also Abigail Spamberger in Virginia and explain why these people are both Democrats and why it makes sense that they are.

And I'm not hearing that from the party.

I'm just hearing a lot of panic.

Yeah, I think they got to be even broader than that.

I don't know.

I think Abigail Spamberger and Zoron probably agree on a lot of cultural issues.

I think they got to expand out on the cultural issues side of things.

Yeah, I agree.

Your brother is running for governor of my home state, Colorado, has left the Senate.

I know that you have conflicts there as a journalist.

I don't want to talk about that race in particular, but he's not the only one that has like left, has decided, fuck it, I don't want to be in Congress, right?

Like a lot of prominent Democrats and establishment, almost all of the established, like my style old school Republican types have self-deported from DC.

And a lot of people very early in their term.

I mean, you know, Michael's been there for a while, but he's not exactly an old man.

You know,

the rules are different for politicians than podcasters.

But, you know, Anthony Gonzalez, you go down the line, Mike Gallagher.

I'm no fan of the congressman from Wisconsin, particularly, but he was 38 or something when he decided, I want to leave Congress.

I can't do it anymore.

What do you make of that?

Like the types of people, both from within the Republican Party and from the Democratic Party that maybe could be the tip of the spear fighting him in D.C.

have decided D.C.

is so broken that I'm just, I'm either going to become a lobbyist or run for state office or do something else.

Last thing my brother would want for me to function as any kind of spokesman for him, and I stay away from his politics and the whole story of what he's up to.

So this is not a commentary on what he may be thinking.

But

I I mean, in general, you look at it and the people who are departing, like there are two classes of people, the ones who are leaving and then the ones who stay way too long, right?

And I think some of the ones who are leaving don't want to be among the group that's there into their late 80s, you know, being propped up by their AIDS.

I mean, we all know that problem, which exists in both parties.

And it's a terrible commentary on how broken Congress is, you know, that I think a lot of people,

people who want to be effective and, you know, want to try to grope our way back to a more constructive politics, are just kind of saying Congress isn't the place where that happens or can happen.

Yeah, we're seeing a number go run for governor right now.

And we've seen people struggle to recruit some serious former governors to run for Senate in the same thing, like to get them to.

In Maine, you're seeing this.

In Maine, you're seeing it.

We saw it in Kentucky, too, right?

Like

they look at the Senate and say, that's not, that's not for me.

It's a dismal reality, I think, of what life in Congress looks like right now.

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I'm going to to go to the Middle East with your kind of background, having covered that from Jerusalem.

We have news this morning.

Israel assassinated Hamas leader Khalil Al-Haya in Doha, in Qatar, inside of Qatar.

Today,

Israel has reportedly attacked Gaza, Hezbollah and Lebanon, Syria, and this Hamas leader inside of Qatar.

So it has attacks in four countries.

A remarkable kind of offensive that this is still going on.

And there's so many different layers to this but i kind of just want to let you kind of cook yeah i i mean the doha thing is is astonishing i just saw the news of that breaking when we started talking so i don't know i don't know the details of that strike we do know that u.s got the heads up i think we do know that now because that was one of my big questions so we knew it i guess let me just say a reporter in israel is reporting that the u.s has a heads up i've i've not heard it from the u.s government or israel government i mean you know tim we're living in it's an age of impunity, right?

Where the powerful do what they can, the weak suffer what they must.

After Donald Trump took the action he took against the suspected drug smugglers the other day, this is the way the powerful act.

And Bibi Netanyahu has shown he's kind of run the table over the course of the last year.

in the region, and he's shown he will not be constrained to act in what he believes to be Israel's national interest.

And the Israelis have, you know, in the past attempted or carried out attacks across borders in Jordan and elsewhere.

Usually they try to hide their fingerprints, you know, and what again is, to my mind, very different.

It's like, this is all happening out in the open and to not just accomplish the immediate end, but to send a message.

And it's a profound change.

And we'll see what the reaction is going to be in the Arab world.

I mean, are they, again,

is there going to be an uproar about this or not?

I would not be surprised if there isn't again, as we haven't seen in response to, you know, Israeli action in Lebanon and Syria and so forth.

What do you think about like the medium-term politics for this for Israel?

I mean,

I guess my view on this, just cards on the table, is I think that initially following October 7th, they had such grave security threats from both Hamas and from Hezbollah on both borders and from Iran and their proxies.

And there's a lot that they needed to do to protect themselves and to protect people of Israel, which is something that I'm extremely sympathetic to.

As it is trudged on

now or coming up on two years, it does feel like particularly the campaign in Gaza and the humanitarian crisis there is leading to a global backlash.

I guess your point about the region, maybe less than we might have expected, but globally globally isolating Israel to a degree.

Obviously, when you were reporting there, all that stuff, stuff that they care, that matters, right?

And it matters from a human rights standpoint, but also matters from them for Israel's stability, right?

They need security from their neighbors, but they also need global friends and allies, right?

Since they're at some level kind of on an island.

And that seems to be a deep risk right now.

Like, how do you think that they're considering all that?

Because based on actions today, I don't know that they seem to care.

Yeah,

i don't think that they do i think the view is they'll work that out over the long haul in the medium in the short to medium term again

pursue their interests as they see it and security as bibi detanyahu sees it i think you're right though tim like it's been a catastrophe for israel's standing i think in the world and in in its standing within america you know this is again another area of rare bipartisan kind of emerging consensus where you're seeing the democratic party to a degree it hasn't been in my lifetime anyway increasingly turning against this Israeli government and in pockets of the party against Israel itself obviously you know it's it goes beyond saying the problem is Bibi Denyahu's government increasingly to

attacking the fundamental you know goals of Zionism you know Zoran Mamdani himself has identifying himself as an anti-Zionist and in the Republican Party we're seeing the same thing now, right?

Like the National Conservative Convention last week.

It's really remarkable.

I think that, you know, BBC's that he feels like he'll have the evangelicals, he'll have Donald Trump in his corner.

And I think that that's true.

Over the longer haul, the direction of travel, though, for the state of Israel, I think, you know, you should be concerning to any supporter of Israel.

In some quarters still, and even more not that long ago, people would say, well, the emerging bipartisan consensus, whatever, against Israel is simply anti-Semitism, and it's just horseshoe politics, and it's far-right and far-left.

They've always been anti-Semitic, and now they are just looking for an excuse to act on that bias, that bigotry.

I think that, of course, there'd be a lot of folks in the Democratic Party in particular that would say that's not true.

This is like a reaction to the policy choices that Israel is making.

How do you, what do you think about all that?

Well, I think some of it is anti-Semitism.

You know, I mean, I think that's that's

an enduring and real, real problem.

But not all of it is anti-Semitism by any stretch.

And a lot of it now is revulsion, you know, against the civilian death toll in Gaza.

And that makes a lot of Americans deeply uncomfortable

or outraged.

I mean, again, these things are really hard to disentangle.

I don't think anti-Semitism has been bound up for a long time,

in my view, and a lot of the anti-Israel politics in the U.S.

has been true on the right for a long time, and it's also been true on the left.

I don't gainsay that.

Like, that's a real problem.

But I think Bibi Netanyahu makes a mistake when he, if he does, and I think he does, tell himself that that's the whole problem.

It's not.

It seems to me, it's like it's more likely than not that assuming we get past our authoritarian project and that's not like Baron Trump ascending to the throne, that the next,

you know, I mean, if the next president of the United States is a mainstream Democrat or J.D.

Vance,

I feel like the idea that Israel is going to get military assistance from the United States is in deep doubt, I would think, in a following administration, if nothing changes.

Do you agree with that?

If we continue on this path.

Yeah, I think that that's right.

I think, look, J.D.

Vance, as on so many subjects, is going to be very interesting to watch.

Yeah, who the hell knows?

This is true.

He might change his name by then.

He might become Jewish.

He may well.

I think it would be the fourth faith in some ways

if you count as atheist, period.

So, I mean,

we're all free to grow and evolve and change, I suppose.

We are.

I've made some changes as well.

Just the one name for me so far.

This takes us into the media stuff, but kind of related to the media stuff.

What do you make of the criticism of the media that there has, I guess you get criticism on both sides?

Like, there's some media criticism coming from you know kind of neo old pro-israel neocon circles that the media has been fully anti-israel up to the point of being anti-semitic there's a big story in the free press about how the pictures of the kids suffering from famine actually had other

issues including one of them was bombed i think and also had famine and also was hungry so There's that critique, critique then from, I think, the pro-Palestine left that the corporate media has been kind of too kind to Israel, right, and too credulous to Israel.

What do you make of those various complaints?

You know, my experience there

is that people are working really hard to get the story out.

We are seeing those images.

We are hearing those stories.

So it's not like reporters aren't trying to tell the truth about what's happening in the conflict as we saw the images and we are hearing about the plight of the hostages.

We are hearing,

I actually happen to be a believer in both sides of them or all sides of them.

I think we need to hear all this stuff and we are.

And we are hearing it because there are journalists who are taking real risks.

Some of them are Palestinian.

Some of them are Israeli.

A lot of them are foreign journalists too.

to get those stories out.

Part of me is a little impatient with the armchair kind of bashing of people, journalists who are taking risks on the ground to do really hard work in real time.

Like, it's hard.

People make mistakes, and they need to own those mistakes very quickly when they do.

Again, and this is where I just sound so friggin wishy-washy, and I'm sorry, but I kind of am.

The truth is that also the criticism is fair.

Like, a lot of the criticism is fair.

There is biased journalism that's done.

There is some bad reporting done.

But you don't think there's across the mainstream media some sort of anti-Israel conspiracy, some conspiracy to make the war look worse than it is?

No, no, no.

I don't, I mean, my experience of journalists generally is we're not smart enough or organized enough to conspire in the first place.

I don't think that that's the case.

Now I'm not on the ground there.

So I'm talking out of my hat a little bit.

And in the media, you know, we're having our own existential struggle and the resources people can devote to those stories are not what they once were.

So that's problem two.

I do think there are people that are doing their damnedest to tell the story.

And I also know that they'll make mistakes.

I think the test is whether they they own up to those, you know, when they do.

Do you think there's a conspiracy, Tim?

Do you suspect that?

When you watch this stuff, do you look at it and think, you know,

this is an ideological struggle and journalism has simply become another ideological player in it?

I mean, look, people have biases.

Like, I don't know, you said you kind of ascribe to all sidesism.

I never really prescribed to objectivity.

There just is no real such thing, right?

Like, I guess there's wire reporting, which is needed and important of a just this happened.

And sometimes that can be biased, right?

And we've seen certainly biased with wire, but I think you can achieve a wire reporting kind of on, you know, neutral that's like this happened.

But like, when you come to decisions about what's on the front page, decisions on what pictures to use, decisions on how to frame it, like all of that, like people come with their own experience.

And I think that there are certainly some

particularly younger reporters who have been extremely radicalized against Israel, and maybe some good re for some good reasons, by the way, you know, who have been maybe too credulous at times in taking Hamas at its,

whatever it's called, the Palestinian Health Authority at its word when they're putting out death reports.

And so sure, like at times, maybe have been too credulous.

I also think that like it's very obvious that there are some corporate media companies that are trying to not touch it that like don't want to criticize Israel because they're worried about backlash among whatever they're bored or they're again i don't think it's a big conspiracy like from this there's some jewish ceo telling them they can't talk about it but they just don't want to deal with it right because they have you know jewish friends zionist friends friends in israel like and so i like i think that you see both of those things happening i think the idea though that like there's not a famine happening in gaza is kind of crazy and a lot of times i think some of the media criticism is overblown to a degree of eye rolling for me i don't don't disagree with any of that.

On the objectivity point, look, I agree that like it's impossible for us as humans, you know, the whole point of objectivity is not to achieve some sort of nirvana where you're a perfectly neutral player.

The whole point is the struggle.

You know, I think for this particular type of journalism, for the journalism that aspires to give people the best representation of reality possible.

And, you know, for me as a reporter in the Middle East, like often, you know, when I got dumped into an assignment, you know, objectivity matters, humility really matters.

You know, it's a lesson in humility.

You don't know, you know, and it's trying to get to the scene, trying to tell the story as vividly as possible, trying to get to the bottom of who actually pulled the trigger, who detonated the bomb.

But ultimately, it's you can't answer some of those questions and all you can do is lay out what happened.

And one of the problems we're having now in Gaza, and this is understandable, but part of the trap is we don't have, it's hard to get people onto the ground there and conditions where they're really able to observe what's going on.

I was lucky when I was, I mean, lucky in the second intifada when I was based there.

You were still able to move back and forth.

It was hard and sometimes a bit risky, but you were still able to get places.

And now it's much harder to do that, obviously.

And when journalists are going into Gaza, they're, and I'm talking about foreign journalists, they're embedded.

And it's just, it's a tougher story to tell for that reason.

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Authors are subject to change and certain restrictions may apply.

All right, we have some other media water cooler stuff on to get your take on.

What do you thought about the ABC and CBS settlements?

You talked earlier about the Wall Street Journal.

I guess Trump is suing them over the reporting of the birthday letter to Jeffrey Epstein.

It's pretty clear that he did the birthday letter to Jeffrey Epstein, but I don't know.

It was also, I didn't really think that George Stephanopoulos or 60 Minutes did anything wrong either.

And they settled anyway.

So what did you make of those choices?

Like, I'm not having been on the receiving end of this kind of suit myself.

I'm not, like, I think it's a terrible, miserable, miserable process.

You know, it's concerning to any journalist, I think, to see a media organization settle rather than fight.

You know, I think the test for all these organizations going forward is,

you know, is it going to compromise their journalism?

You know, that's what really matters to me in the end is what does it mean going forward and again like another i mean you know time will tell too i know time will tell

the possible outcome of this is that they recommit themselves to like getting the story right what does that word mean though recommit did they not get the story right the first time the 60 minutes lawsuit was so preposterous it's a show it's called 60 minutes that's fair like they edit it down to 60 so that it can fit within 60 minutes with four commercial breaks like that's the show so like if you interview somebody for longer than an hour then they're going to cut the interview up the thing is ridiculous and then since then cbs has now said that that on the the sunday show they're only going to do live or live to tape because the administration complained about the way it was cutting yeah what are we talking about here like this is folding this is not

like a legitimate attack on the critic criticism of cbs was it that's the thing yeah i did recommit i didn't want to suggest remotely that that meant they weren't committed to it before i just mean like yeah every morning you get up and recommit yourself to it

if you're in one of these jobs.

Is the live to tape thing that bad?

Like, you know, given the world that we're living in today where there is so much suspicion all the time.

Sure, no, it's not that bad if you decide you want to do it because you're a news organization, you think that's best.

It's pretty bad if the government tells you they're not going to give you interviews anymore unless you do it a certain way and you say, okay.

Yeah, I guess the question of why they did it really does matter in that sense.

The outcome, outcome, I guess, I don't think is necessarily a disaster.

It's nice to see the full interview.

It's nice to hear everything.

Sure, I hear you.

I just think we have some data points about the folding that I'm worried about.

We had, as part of the Skydance's commitments to the Trump administration, when they got approval with their merger to Paramount, they said they'd do an ombudsman who'd look into anti-conservative bias or whatever.

They've hired Ken Weinstein.

He was a donor to the Trump Victory Fund.

He was previously nominated to be ambassador to Japan for Trump.

He's at the Hudson Institute.

Has never worked at a journalism outlet before.

What do you think about having him as the ombudsman?

I don't know the whole story there.

I mean, he was also in Obama.

I was just reading a bio of him yesterday.

And he's a donor to the Trump Victory Fund.

Yeah.

He donated for it.

And he wasn't a journalist.

It's a pretty strange choice for ombudsman.

don't you think?

Yeah.

I also, it's not clear to me what the ombudsman's role is going to be there and what their authority is.

Do you know, like, he going to make public reports?

Is he going to have authority over the journalism to change it if he doesn't like it?

There's a lot I just don't know about.

It said, I think he's reporting directly to the corporate leadership.

So

I think there's a lot we need to know about what this, obviously, having an ombudsman is not a bad thing.

Lots of journalism organizations have had them traditionally.

They've had various degrees of effectiveness.

I just don't know how this is supposed to play out.

I guess we could get into the minutiae of all these things, but like, this doesn't worry you.

Like, it seems like these media institutions are

doing things to appease the leader.

Who knows how it will affect their journalism?

We will watch that.

But, like, media companies saying, okay, in order for us to be able to get a merger or in order us for not to get hassled or sued, we're going to hire certain people that you like or you approve of.

That's a pretty dangerous place to be.

It is concerning that it's being done for those reasons.

How it actually works in practice, it's like the changes at Columbia University.

You know, are those going to be, in the end, like detrimental to the education of the students or not?

I don't think we know the answer to that question yet.

I don't like, particularly when it comes to media organizations, it makes me really concerned when they're changing their practices under government pressure.

But I don't know what the outcome is going to be.

I don't know how they're going to, I think the minutiae matters here, Tim.

Like, what is this job actually going to be?

What's the impact on effect on the journalism actually going to be?

Like, should we be on guard about it?

Like, and worried?

Sure, yeah.

It's hard to answer the question without, again, like, I'm not, 60 minutes is awesome.

I'm not, I'm not, like, this is quite apart from anything that's about that particular case.

Like, yeah, they can't tell us what to do.

They shouldn't be able to tell us what to do.

You can't let the government boss journalism organizations around.

I totally agree with all that.

I totally would risk all that.

You know, the notion that we should just keep carrying on as we're carrying on because we're so awesome, I think, deserves,

you know, continual scrutiny.

And that's where I'm being a little, and maybe I'm just being contrarian for contrarian's sake, but I'm not.

No,

I want to, I want the scrutiny.

This is what I want to actually talk about.

I don't think it's perfect either.

I think that it's a lot harder than people realize about where to go with this.

And I think there are different views.

I'm interested in your view.

Just for the backstory for people who don't know, like you had gotten embroiled in that controversy where you were editor of the New York Times opinion page when the Tom Cotton op-ed was approved and, you know, all the woke staffers got mad.

And so you're kind of a little bit of, I don't know, canary in the coal mine or something around these sort of questions, right?

At the time.

So there were like

roadkill?

Is that what you call yourself?

Roadkill?

Okay.

You're a roadkill over this, these sort of left, whatever word you want to use, lefty, woke, progressive, like outrage, you know, the revolt of the young woke staffers, whatever we want to call it.

And you wrote an Atlantic piece about it a couple of years ago.

And like, there, there was, I think, a real legitimate complaint that I agree with, which was there is this kind of progressive intolerance at times inside media organizations where, you know, if somebody gave a wrong think, then there would be a mob that would come for them.

And sometimes they'd be pushed out.

Sometimes they'd just have to go quiet for a little while.

And occasionally those mobs have legitimate complaints.

Sometimes they were borderline.

Sometimes they were illegitimate.

And that that was like no way to run a news organization.

And I agree with that.

The thing is, though, I worry that we're over shooting the other direction, like that there is this idea that now, okay,

the reaction to that needs to be, we got to make sure we have token pro-Trump voices around.

We got to make sure that we have MAGA opinions here to ensure that we're fair.

And I think that's very hard in this administration because because Trump puts his advocates in a position constantly where they have to lie to advance his point of view.

I'm curious what your thought is on how you kind of achieve a balance as a news organization where you're not being owned by whatever, the most extreme ideological views of the staff, but also you're not just becoming like, okay,

we'll provide a token point of view for something we know is false because we feel like we need to be fair.

Does that question make sense?

Yeah.

Look, I don't think you should ever publish anything you know is false.

Like, I don't know why you would ever do that.

Or let, well, or someone else making an argument that you know they don't believe.

How about that?

Somebody's making an argument they know they don't really believe, or an argument that's BS, or an argument that's.

Well, as an editor, I would never want to publish something like that.

You know, I mean, the Tom Cotton piece, it wasn't a false piece.

It wasn't something he didn't believe.

Right.

And to my mind, it was a totally legitimate point of view that deserved to be represented in the debate at that time.

We were also publishing pieces advocating the abolition of the police.

He was advocating that

at that time, that troops should be used

in places where police were overwhelmed by looting and rioting.

And I thought it would be bad journalism not to have that.

argument in front of the readers.

I agree with that, Franitor.

And I think, by the way, it was also bad politics.

It wasn't my job to make the determination based on the politics, but it was dumb politics, too.

I mean,

you try to cut people out of the debate like that, and you wind up where we are today, I think.

You know, illiberalism on the left and illiberalism on the right results in this pendulum swinging back and forth the way you described.

So what do you do about that?

These are, again, Tim, it's a so unsatisfying answer.

It's a question of the minutiae again, because it's hard to draw lines and say, you know, people occupy different lanes, right?

You've got your journalists who are supposed to be places like the Wall Street Journal or The Times or ABC who are supposed to be struggling towards objectivity and telling you what the facts are.

They need to check their bias to the extent they can and all the rest of it.

And the opinion editors, I think, at those sorts of places need to be, you know, yeah, curating a really wide-ranging debate, but that doesn't mean publishing stuff you know is bullshit.

Like,

you don't do that.

You don't publish stuff that's a lie.

Yeah, I was going to give you a stark example.

Let me try to put it a different way.

I'll give my view after, but do you think that, like, broadly speaking, the mainstream media during the last 10 years has been

unfair in Trump's favor or unfair in his disfavor?

Like, do you think that they've been biased towards him or against him?

I don't think we have a mainstream media anymore.

So first, like, who are you talking about?

The big outlets, CBS, ABC, NBC, Washington Post, New York Times, whatever, you know, the main media outlets.

Do you think that they've been unfair to Trump in ways that have benefited him or unfair to him in ways that have harmed him?

I think by and large, they've covered him in ways that have benefited him in the end.

And some of those ways have been a function of bias against him.

I think the deeper problem has been that they just like, and you heard this from the editor-in-chief of the New York Times said in 2020, the Times still didn't understand why Trump won in 2016.

You know, like it was a failure to like get out in the country and understand what the hell was going on, like to do journalism was the problem, I think.

Is that a function of bias?

Partly, yeah, it is.

It's partly a function of coastal elitism and Ivy Leagueism and all those other issues that God knows I'm myself an exemplar of those qualities.

So again,

I'm falling into the trap of sounding righteous too.

And you're reminding yourself of that.

It is like cultivating an attitude of humility about this stuff and recognizing that the Trump phenomenon was real.

It took a long time for that to seep in, I think, even up through the last presidential election.

Maybe I'm not answering the question.

You're answering it in another way, but that's good because I agree with that.

They certainly were in a bubble and out of touch with what a lot of Trump voters said and thought.

I also just think, though, that like the way, going back to our original topic about how Trump's, what did you say, how he has, other candidates haven't had the imagination that he has like the way in which he breaks the system right like the way in which he does things that no other politician does makes him very challenging to cover and and just the example I always just fall back on because I just think it's an easy I know you know

I love my counterfactuals I think it's an easy game if you put the Mitt Romney 47% tape into the middle of a Donald Trump speech today It doesn't even make the paper.

Like it doesn't even make the paper.

Yeah.

It doesn't.

Like, and like, he says so much crazy shit all the time.

And he did it.

Yesterday he did an aside about how crime rates are wrong because we count all these domestic violence things as crimes, and they're not really crime.

It's just kind of like, you know, it's like a husband and a wife get in a fight, and that's not really a crime.

Like, if any other politician had said that, like, that is a front-page news, catastrophic gaffe that is career ending.

Well, I doubt it was on the evening news last night.

And so, like, you have this cadre of people out there, mostly on the right, who are professional media critics, who are like, you're so unfair to Mr.

Trump.

And, like, you, you got this one thing not quite right.

And you're so, you know, it's, you're always so negative about him.

But on the other hand, it's like, he gets graded on such a curve that my view is a fair rendering of him all day, every day would just be news coverage of all the illegal and inappropriate shit that he did.

But you can't do that as a media outlet.

You got to edit.

And so he benefits from just these media constructs of, oh, we, you know, you only have so much space in the paper and that's old news.

And well, do people care about this?

Right.

And so I don't know how you deal with that, right?

Like, I don't know how, I think that like putting in some like pro-Trump flunkies in your media outlet to like look over the shoulder of the editors.

I don't see how that does anything that deals with our actual problem.

And so I don't know what you think.

Like if you were back in charge of a media outlet, like how would you navigate?

How do you deal with that?

Yeah, I'm going to give you an answer that's going to make you very impatient with me.

But I feel like you're talking about two slightly different problems.

There's a journalistic problem and there's the political problem.

And if I were the editor of a news organization, the political problem would not be my problem.

Like, now, it is for a publication like the Bulwark,

it is that those two things are not separable, I don't think.

Maybe you disagree with me on this.

And that's fine.

No, I disagree with with it.

It's separable on the other outlet because if you were in the news outlet, if somebody, if tomorrow Jeff Bezos called you and said, James, I'm putting you in charge of the paper.

You get to decide what's on the front page every day.

You're the executive editor.

And then you decided then, using your own news judgment over the next 30 days to write a story about the latest insane thing Donald Trump did and made it a banner headline on the front page of the newspaper every day for 30 straight days.

Jeff Bezos would call you in and say, you're creating a political problem for me.

And I don't know that you would have necessarily been not doing your news duty he's the president and he does crazy things all the time and so i i think that the i don't think it's separable in this environment with donald trump i don't think it's separable now at a news outlet yeah but i refer you to our either earlier conversation about principles like at that point i would quit Like, and the problem we have is not enough people are willing to quit.

And yeah, maybe they'll all wind up quitting.

And at that point, we'll won't have news organizations left.

We won't have politicians in office left.

But what we need is people who are willing to say, fuck it.

Like, no, this matters to me.

And I'm reporting the story accurately and fairly.

And it's your right.

And again, we're in hypothetical land.

Like, it's your right, my corporate overlord, Jeff Bezos, whoever it is, it's your paper.

You can fire me.

I've been fired for Christ's sake for exactly this.

Like, that's what, I mean, and again, that's nothing glorious about that.

I'm not bragging about being publicly humiliated and chased out of the New York Times, but I just think that's

anyway, whatever.

We've talked enough therapists.

From my perspective,

it was not anything to be humiliated over.

But do you see what I'm saying?

Like, yeah, then you quit.

But what I'm saying about making a distinction between the journalism and the politics, there's still a deep journalistic problem there that you're talking about, which is Like this guy, this is where I say he's hacked our system.

He understands the media environment much better, certainly, than I ever have.

And in that leader we were talking about earlier in The Economist,

my colleague John made a great comparison between Donald Trump and the TikTok algorithm.

Like, he gets your attention, he does something outrageous, and before you've even processed it, he's doing the next thing.

And you can't look away.

You can't look away.

And our politics can't process it.

Our journalism can barely process it.

All we can do is keep, you know, reporting this stuff.

It's the politics part of it that has to figure this out and grapple with it.

And that's why we need a meaningful opposition in this country.

I don't think we can look to journalism.

The type of journalistic operations you're describing, just they, they aren't the leadership of the resistance.

It's not their role, in my view.

Yeah.

I guess my question, though, is, to me, I think that you said there were two things.

I think maybe I'm talking about two things as well.

Like there is, like, sure, most journalists did not vote for Donald Trump.

Most people with college education didn't vote for Donald Trump.

It's kind of hard.

Like, we're in an education-polarized time, so it would be kind of challenging to find, you know, and you could do it, but like, to get a New Yorker magazine that is balanced 50-50 in a country where 90% of the people that graduated with their journalism crews voted against Trump, that's a broader cultural problem I don't know how to fix, right?

Like, but so, sure, of course, there is bias in institutions against Donald Trump, I would argue, mostly deserved.

But, like, there are also journalistic conventions

that are biased in his favor.

Right.

And to me, like, those end up having more of an impact on the public narrative and the public debate than like the individual reporters' biases.

If you asked, I don't know, you know, whatever, like somebody at the free press or the Fox media of Howard Kurtz, like they would say the opposite, right?

They would say that that's a crazy assertion, that like Donald Trump, like everybody in these institutions is, has deep Trump derangement syndrome.

and

that's the main problem.

You've been in the institutions.

Do you think that the journalists are

clinically biased against Donald Trump and that that is like the issue that we need to deal with?

Or do you think that the issue is more that like Donald Trump has broken the way the journalism works?

I think the problem is more the latter than the former.

And it's not just that Donald Trump has broken it.

It's just the digital economy has broken it.

We've been living in a period of existential crisis for American media and journalism now for 25 years, really intensifying over the course of the last 10 or 15.

So I do think that those institutions were vulnerable again to somebody who had a little more imagination about how you could tip them over than we realized.

Probably, yeah, there are some journalistic conventions that

are hackable.

like both sides is hackable, right?

If you're going to give, if you're going to do that.

Now, I think good journalists give both sides, they give people a fair hearing and they're still able to render kind of, you know, the truth or the closest we can get to that, you know, but it's like a sports team.

Sports teams can hack refs, right?

It's like, if I foul every play, eventually they're going to not call it because they're not wired to call a foul every play on me.

You know, like it's similar to that.

Yeah.

And you can work the ref too.

You can call them and scream at them.

And

there's a lot of the stuff that Donald Trump does that other politicians have done forever.

He's more aggressive at it.

Some ways he's better at it.

I do think a lot of it is just the way the attention economy has changed.

And in this sense, in our politics, I don't think there's any going back, you know, from the idea that the president, this is one of the great failures, I think, of Joe Biden was obviously the failure to be able to communicate at all.

And Donald Trump is at the other extreme of that.

Now, communication at all that they call it the most transparent administration history, it's not, communication is not the same as transparency, much less accountability, I think is what we're discovering.

But man, his ability to just dominate people's attention is something that, you know, we as journalists, like, it's really hard to filter out the signal from the noise, I think.

I totally agree on the.

on the communication side.

And it's something the Democrats need to be awake to next time because it's not going back.

It's not going back.

You have to be able to communicate in different ways than the old days.

Unfortunately, it's like part of the job.

It's kind of like why I got frustrated when people said, like, well, Biden was doing the job.

What they always meant was like behind the scenes.

And like, and I was like, I'm sorry, but actually talking is part of the job of president now.

Like, and maybe not, maybe it wasn't in 1882, but like sure as hell is in 2025, right?

And that is just, I do think, a reality that Democrats need to deal with.

Yeah, and it has been for a long time.

It's especially true now, but it has been for a long time.

Yeah, it's especially true now.

And not to be able to do that, I was reading something about the Afghanistan withdrawal.

There was a news story the other day and

the disaster of the withdrawal.

And there was just a line in there after several days when Joe Biden broke his silence about the withdrawal and said X.

And I'm just like, that's just

the notion that you thought you could live in a world where you weren't constantly communicating with people.

I think we still underrate kind of that dimension of the Biden kind of White House and the hole that it put the Democrats in.

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You're doing your best to be meticulous, which I appreciate.

You told me I'd get impatient with you.

I'm not impatient, not the right word.

I enjoy chatting with you.

Just one last time, circle back to the point.

I think you kind of have become an avatar for people who say that the media is deeply biased to the left, whether you want it to be or not, because of what happened to you.

Like it was just the other day that I was trying to downplay something on social media, and I was like, this is not as bad as people say.

And I had people replying to me,

ask James Bennett if it's as bad as you say.

I'm like, oh, I have him on the podcast next week, so I will.

I think people would be surprised to hear you say that you don't share the view of the right-wing media critics that the big problem with the institutional media outlets is that there's a bias against

Trump and against conservatives.

You don't think that?

I think it is a big problem.

And that big piece I wrote was actually for The Economist, not for The Atlantic, where I went through this.

I think there is a real problem in some of these mainstream, so-called media organizations of illiberalism,

which is fundamentally anti-journalistic.

It's not necessarily biased against, it manifests partly as bias against Donald Trump, absolutely, and bias against the right.

I do think that is a problem.

I don't think that fight's lost, I guess, what I'm saying.

And what I think has gone wrong is the same problem, again, as editors who know better, who don't have the guts to push back.

Now, I don't think that's totally shaped coverage.

I think it is one of the problems.

I just think

also

the bubble problem, which is related to that, but slightly different, is a big part of it.

I'm not giving you the answer you're after here.

I do think it's a huge problem.

I guess I don't think it's the whole problem.

And I think it speaks as much to cultural blinders as it does to political bias.

I'm asking in the context of, I'm not trying to beats out about it.

Like, look, like, CBS is really trying to reshape all this.

They're saying, oh, they might buy the free press.

We don't know.

They're hiring this ombudsman who is a Trump donor.

They're like, we think that there's been this problem.

And CBS seems to identify that the problem was like that there was bias against conservatives in the coverage.

I don't really, I mean, I think that, sure, at times there's been some bias against conservatives.

I don't think that's the biggest problem at all of the news media.

I think the bigger problem is that they have been

unable to deal with the ways in which Trump has hacked the system and worked the refs, right?

And so, to the extent that you might want to get back out there, like if you were starting a newsroom,

do you see those both?

Like, I guess that's what I'm just trying to kind of tease out.

Like, do you think that it's true that bringing in some more right-wing people into these organizations is the answer?

Or do you think there's a different answer?

I think that

bringing in more right-wing people,

I think more diverse newsrooms is part of the answer and diversity in all senses of the term, like people from different walks of life and all the rest of it.

I do think that's part of the answer because it is one way you kind of get your unconscious biases challenged and all the rest of it.

So I do think

that has value in a certain kind of newsroom.

Sure.

My concern.

is partly that this is part of the mess that we're in.

This illiberalism in the press did contribute to the collapse of trust.

You know, I think it really did and helped us dig the hole that a lot of these institutions find themselves in.

Do I think that tilting to the right is the answer?

No, of course not.

Like, you know, ideological bias in a different direction isn't going to solve the problem.

And I also don't think a sort of stupid push-me-pull you dialectic is the answer.

I think we have all sorts of new ways of doing journalism today, including like the conversation you are having right now, although in some ways this is an old way.

If back to the old days too.

But I think the old values matter.

Like I think you have to find ways to instill kind of these basic principles, which are about like journalists generally, they're not experts at anything, right?

Like their job is to like go out and learn and find stuff out.

And if you start from the proposition, and this was a problem I had with some of my colleagues then at the times, like they knew what the truth was.

Like they knew the reality, as opposed to like, Jesus, what the hell is going on in this country?

I want to get out and understand it.

Like, it's the ethos that worries me more than the ideology, and it presents his ideology.

But I'm not, I'm doing a really poor job of explaining myself.

No, no, no, you aren't actually.

They're taking us to a nice place to end because that's the ethos.

Like, this is the thing that I think is totally wrong that I've that I'm seeing CBS do and CNN do.

And they're like, we can solve this problem by having somebody come in who like will be our avatar of MAGA and they can reflect that point of view no matter what.

And I'm like, that's not journalism.

That's you're helping him.

Like that's just, that's a gift to the powerful is what it is.

It's the gift of the powerful.

And to the extent that there is bias in journalism, like of course, like that should, you should have diverse viewpoints of people that work there, of course.

But like the goal is to investigate and challenge the people in power.

And if your answer as a journalist institution is, actually, we want to bring in a few representatives of the people in power to make sure their view is represented like that is leading us to a bad place especially if you're doing it under threat from the leader and like that is the thing that worries me that i'm seeing from cbs in particular and and a little bit from from zaslov too yeah well i think you know it's the journalists should be out talking to those people and understanding that point of view like that's how that's how you get there like And that's where I think that these insular journalistic cultures disserve the readers and damage the organizations over the long haul because they get out of step with where they're cutting.

They're failing at the basic task of journalism, which is try to represent what the hell's going on.

And that's the problem.

And that's what I was trying to warn against in the

piece I wrote.

And so, yeah, bias is part of the, I don't want to,

I'm not here saying there isn't a problem with bias.

There has been.

So anyway, that's James Bennett.

Yeah.

Sorry, Tim.

No, you don't have to apologize.

We're going long.

This is a podcast.

We have unlimited time.

The show isn't over.

It's not 60 minutes.

I don't have to edit it down.

I don't have to, you know, Donald Trump doesn't have to get mad at me because I clipped you out of context.

You know, I guess that you will, there will be probably something on social media from this, which you can sue me if you don't like the two and a half minutes that we choose.

We'll see how it goes.

I appreciate the time.

Good luck over there at The Economist with your spelling, and I hope to talk to you again soon.

Great to see you, Tim.

Thank you.

Thanks, man.

Everybody else, we'll be back here tomorrow for another edition of the podcast.

See you all then.

Peace.

One night in my bed, I keep telling you a story.

One night in my bed, I thought I would

be

some kind of escape.

The Bullwork Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.

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