Let's Find Common Ground - Are Cable News and Legacy Media All But Dead?

Episode Date: March 17, 2025

CPF Director Bob Shrum joins media experts, Martin Gurri, Adam Nagourney, and Gordon Stables, for a discussion on how the changing media landscape has contributed to global populist trends. They discuss the transformation of the media landscape, the role of the elites in the media and politics, and media's impact on the state of democracy globally.    Featuring: Martin Gurri: Former CIA Analyst; Author of "The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium" Adam Nagourney: National Political Reporter for The New York Times; Author of "The Times: How the Newspaper of Record Survived Scandal, Scorn and the Transformation of Journalism" and "Out for Good: The Struggle to Build a Gay Rights Movement in America"; Fall 2019 Fellow, USC Center for the Political Future Gordon Stables: Director, USC Annenberg School of Journalism Bob Shrum: Director, USC Center for the Political Future; Warschaw Chair in Practical Politics, USC Dornsife

Welcome to Let's Find Common Ground from the Center for the Political Future at the University of Southern California's Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences. I'm Bob Shrum, Director of the Center. And I'm Republican Mike Murphy, Co-Director of the Center. Our podcast brings together America's leading politicians, strategists, journalists, and academics from across the political spectrum for in-depth discussions where we respect each other

and we respect the truth. We hope you enjoy these conversations. For those of you who don't know me, I'm Bob Shrum, the director of the Center for the Political Future here at USC Dornsife. Welcome to the latest episode in our program series and our podcast, Let's Find Common Ground. We're here to discuss the transformation of the media landscape and the loss of faith

in institutions, in particular, Martin Gury's book, The Revolve of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium. It is sweeping and magisterial. It's been described by Ezra Klein in the New York Times as a phenomenon in Silicon Valley. And after we're done here today, Martin will be happy to sign books for you. I want to thank a very special thank you actually to a member of our Board of Counselors, Ken Broad, for making this crucial and timely discussion possible.

In addition to Martin, who was a former CIA analyst among many other things, our panelists today are Adam Nagurney, one of the stars of the New York Times, whose book The Times discusses the transformation of that pivotal institution and its adaptation to the world of new media. Gordon Stables is the director of the USC Annenberg School of Journalism, who has studied the evolution of journalism and information technology, not only here in the US, but across the world. For 45 minutes to an hour, we'll see how it goes. We'll talk about Martin Gury's arguments, and we'll hear from him, Adam, and Gordon

about how they apply to the Trump years. We'll then open this up to audience questions. I wanna start with this. Martin, in his forward to the latest edition of your book, Ezra Klein wrote that you, quote, In his forward to the latest edition of your book, Ezra Klein wrote that you quote, saw it coming unquote, with the elites losing their ability to control the narrative and protect their reputations.

Can you expand on this and explain how you sensed what was happening early on and even before the election of Donald Trump, whom you did not mention in the first edition of your book. Well, I get accused of being a prophet a lot. One thing I learned at CIA is that if you want to be wrong, make a prediction. CIA's business model is essentially to predict the world for the president.

And if you predict tomorrow as being exactly like yesterday, which happens 99% of the time, well, you're safe, right? But what the precedent was is discontinuities. When you get a 9-11, you get a Pearl Harbor, you get the Pakistanis suddenly have the bomb, they get that wrong every time. So I am prescient and I did not see it coming. I saw, I was in CIA, probably the least sexy job there,

as an analyst of global media. And it was a very high perch in which to see the media environment. I could see the entire media of the world. And I had the best bench of translators anywhere in the world. So anything I wanted to see, I could read in the translation or in the language if I knew it.

And I could see this tidal wave coming. And it wasn't prescient, I was seeing it. And basically my job had been very simple and very straightforward. The amount of open information in the world, even in the developed countries was at her call. Then around the turn of the century, this digital earthquake, let's say epicenters of what Palo Alto or something like that, generated this

tsunami of information that in volumes that were unprecedented in human experience. And by the way, those that's not just words, they're these Euborghly scholars that tried to measure information from the beginnings of time until, I think, that was 2003. And what they came up with was that in the year 2001, the amount of information produced doubled that of all previous history, down to the cave paintings and the dawn of culture. 2002 doubled 2001.

And basically, as this efforts to measure continue, which they did for only about 10 years or so, that continued. And if you chart it, the chart looks at this gigantic wave. It really does look like a tsunami. The tsunami hit our institutions, which are essentially 20th century institutions. And that's what the prescience comes in, which wasn't prescient, where I could see at CIA and later as this tsunami hit different countries as different countries digitized at different rates. Behind that tsunami, ever increasing levels of social and political turbulence. Now for a while, it never really came to a head until I left CIA. We tried to raise the flag at CIA saying, this is happening.

They didn't buy it. But from the beginning of the Arab Spring, which basically was organized on Facebook, all the way on until this very moment, with some pauses in the middle having to do with COVID and the politics of COVID, What we had was a world that was organized by institutions that were 20th century institutions that were top down. They needed a semi-monopoly of information to function and to have authority because in the olden days, when Walter Cronkite told you that's the way it is, what else could you say? We had no alternative Walter Cronkite told you that's the way it is. What else could you say?

We had no alternative sources of information. So all that, that system depended on legitimacy on information being scarce. And now you had an overabundance and much of what has happened since, and like I said, I could see it from my high purchase CIA as a result of that. And it essentially has created a bottom up surge

in a world that's organized to be top down and those two forces are still fighting it out. Adam? First thanks for having me. Yeah, no, I think that's all really true. And I think you're sort of talking about it from 30,000 feet. I was sort of experiencing it as it was going on. I mean, I remember as early as, I think as early as 2004, seeing

this in the way, this was even still pre Twitter, right? Pre X, seeing this in blogs that were beginning to attack our stories and try to discredit us and the Times. And it was part at first I thought it was part of a law. Well, I do think there's anyway, I think there was a long effort to try to delegitimize the mainstream media by the conservatives, which the New York Times at times played into. We could talk about that later if you want. But I think there was something bigger going on, which you really captured here, which is that the world just changed. And it wasn't just that the Times was any other major papers didn't have the

stage to themselves anymore or were being challenged anymore, it's that there was a million places to get information. More than that, again, as you point out, a million places to get misinformation. I mean, I think one of the things that you had, and I use the past tense advisedly here with organizations like the New York Times and for a while the LA Times and we'll see what happens in the Washington Post here, was at least an attempt to get stuff right, an attempt to present stuff in a full, complete, quote unquote, balanced way.

Not always successful. I don't want to begin to say that, but that was the aspiration. I don't think a lot of these other sources that you're seeing now, sub stacks, tweets slash X's by people, whatever, which are big players now in the information society have those same kind of goals. And I think that adds to the chaos and disruption that we're all experiencing right now. I'm super excited. Thank you all for putting this panel together and Martin for being here. I mean, I think the biggest thing, and I see a couple of my former students and current students here in the audience, I think Martin makes a great point in the book and looking at other moments in history where you've had a radical transformation of information technology

and use the 30 war analogy that I think is, or at least the historical example. I think the way to describe it is 9 11 was viewed as the first global live television event. And if I can, I think most of the folks here that are at least our generation or older can remember how you experienced 9 11. It was by trying to refresh cnn.com or trying to get television news coverage. And when you think about today that we would experience an event, it's almost indescribable. You're almost talking about something that feels of another century of another generation.

And so I really think the value of for us looking at it and the way I approach this in teaching is that we're looking at maybe the most robust transformation in the way that people produce and relate to information in human history. And we're 20 years in to the networking of it, and we're still describing it. I think we finally got rid of the term new media, I think, I hope. But if we realize that we're 20 years in,

if you look at some other analogy of the rise of the printing press, what happened in that first 20 years, and it was slower. Look at what happened with the rise of radio and large scale commercial radio, how quickly the British adopted the BBC or how quickly the German state utilized media for its purpose. And so I think that's kind of the frame of reference of us to think about it. And we're really thankful that

Martin here, because I really, I've assigned your book and it's one of those ways that I think takes history and lets us realize we're in the midst of something and we really need to look for orienting points. That's a nice transition. what Adam said is a nice transition as well to my next question. The elites in the media and politics have always been imperfect, no matter what their aspirations. But Martin argues that now their imperfections exposed through the media ecosystem of the 21st century inspire anger and disdain toward authority. And he suggests that the threat here is a kind of nihilism. Gordon, how do you assess that?

I mean, I think it's the logical factor of the design of media. And one of the things that I promise I'm not going to fanboy the whole time, but one of the nice things that I think Martin does in the book is kind of disabuse us as the notion that communication scholars have long argued that we don't actually have a hyperdermic effect. Despite that that's like an introduction to communication theory. We don't hear something and immediately believe it. Most of what communication theory has developed over the last 75 to 100 years

is empirical validation to the idea of things like agenda setting or narrative framing. And I think that's the critical component of when you describe that the more that institutions and systems are relating to more information, in what way? What's the goal? What's the desire? And I was using as an example of thinking about fandom, thinking about non-political uses of media.

There are moments where we use it for positivity, but my students in class don't enjoy when I describe how will the backlash against Taylor Swift happen. And they giggle at me and I say, but the role of celebrity is to be created, to be destroyed, to be replaced. Media requires attention, media requires constant fuel. And I think that's one of the spaces of if you have institutions, the alternative to Taylor Swift is some other pop star. But when you look at that we're what six of the last seven national elections have been

change elections, it's not difficult to describe that attention generates an interest in something that's different. And I think so that's kind of my take. I think that it requires that negativity because the fuel for being positive fandom doesn't work nearly as well for government as it does for pop stars. Adam, is it frustrating? And do you agree there's this kind of spreading nihilism or rising nihilism? Is it frustrating for you? For you? I mean, it kind of like I'm very Zen about it. Like it is what it is.

I mean, I guess I guess from a selfish point of view, I guess, well, I got to live through a period when it wasn't like this. And now I'm living through an equally period when it is like this. So I guess frustration would be a wasted emotion. I try to adapt to it. I think the New York Times tries to adopt it. I think other, you know, legacy media try to adopt to it. It's not there if we're going to be able to change it. I don't, I think it's pointless to argue whether it's

better or worse. I think in some ways it's better. In some ways, the nihilism, it's not. But again, it is what it is. So I try to, I guess, sort of, I get frustrated with my frustrations. So therefore I'm not frustrated. Martin, talk about this rising nihilism. Well, everything that I see, I see through a particular lens, which is the people who are in institutions such as the New York Times, which I call the elites, and you can give them very, very many different names, versus the people who are not affiliated with institutions, I call them the public, and you can give them very many different names, versus the people who are not affiliated with institutions. I call them the public, and you can give them

different names. The rise of the public is what we have been witnessing for the last 20 years. The public is not a thing. The public is many things, okay? And if you, for example, interview the public that had risen up against Hosni Mubarak in Tahrir Square in Cairo, you

would have found people who were all the way from extreme socialist to extreme Muslim brotherhood people and everything in between. So if you had asked them, what do you stand for? Now that Mubarak is gone, so what are we going to do? They would start fighting among themselves, right? But they're all united against. The only way that the public can unite and mobilize is by being against. And in this world of media where every imperfection is heightened and basically elite failure sets the agenda, there's a lot to be against. Now, if you push against without ever producing an alternative And the second you produce an alternative, the fight starts because not everybody agrees what, they agree with you against,

but they'll agree with you for. You push that far enough, you enter the realm of nihilism, which to me is that you consider destruction to be a form of progress. Now the flip side of that one is the elites. And the elites, in my opinion, their ideal world is very simple.

I was there, the 20th century, okay? When all the structures of not just of authority, but of information, of accreditation, every kind of structure came from the top down and nobody talked back. I mean, my take is that if the elites had their way, they would turn the digital world into the front page of the New York Times circa 1962 or something like that, you know, kind of a lot of time. So we have, yes, there's nihilism, but there is reactionary. So you have a nihilistic public confronting a reactionary set of elites, and we had to

somehow work our way through that one in this difficult moment with democracy in the middle. And my concern has always been, this is a colossal transformation by the way and I think we should say that out, put it on the front. I'm not going to see the end of it. You who are students here will probably see the end of it. The rest of us, probably not, okay? And my concern has always been that through this tremendous churning of opinions and events and people that we carry liberal democracy to the end, please. And given the nature of the digital world, it could be even improved. I mean, there is a democratic element in the digital. It's just we have to watch all these, all these nihilist uprisings

and these very reactionary elites, neither of which are gonna get us there. Adam. Two points, I don't disagree with what you're saying. I will make two points. One is, I think we have to be very careful in talking about the sort of pushback on the quote unquote legacy media

and the changes that we've seen, with also considering that some of that is political. I know we're getting to Trump later, but I think that's a really important part of what's going on. The second part is, and again from my own history working at the paper and writing about the tribes, and I'm sorry for just talking about the New York Times, I don't want to talk about the LA Times, other major papers here. The paper has been slow to change, but I think in fact it has embraced change slowly, reluctantly, but it's done it for two reasons. One is economic, right?

I don't think the paper would have been viable if it continued being the New York Times you were describing a few minutes ago. And second of all, I mean, by nature, I think reporters like disruption and like, you know, stuff happening. So I just think it's a little bit more complicated than that. I don't think that the Times model or the LA Times model that we remember from the 70s or the 80s when it was very top down and we say it's true. At a certain point, they realized that just because you started putting stuff on the front page that people would not read that they would do. I mean, I came across editors who

talked about putting stories on Bosnia on the front page because it was the most important story of the day, realizing that not that many people were gonna read it. That kind of model could not exist today and does not exist today. So let's talk about against. And before we get to more into Trump and America, this technological tsunami, to use your praise, Martin knows no national boundaries.

And the resulting information or misinformation flow has also fed a loss of confidence in institutions and leaders in other advanced countries. Brexit in the United Kingdom is a case in point. Are we witnessing a worldwide crisis in governance characterized by the loss of a common fact-based ground of knowledge that can let people disagree without losing respect for one another and for the truth. Gordon, you spent a lot of time abroad. How does this worldwide phenomenon play out?

Well, I'm going to agree with Martin's assessment that the best way to be wrong is to make a prediction. But I mean, I think the essence of the answer is found in what democratic institutions, if they exist or are produced. And one of the key distinctions whenever I travel with our students and get them to recognize the distinction between freedom of speech

and expression and assembly, and the notion of our First Amendment, which codifies those, but lots of societies, lots of advanced democracies around the world don't have speech protected in the same way. And I think you need to look at the particular history. So if you look at the German elections in the last few weeks, really what you're seeing is a national reckoning on what type of public speech as it relates to notions of nationalism, national identity, race, and those are items that are being re-litigated and re-debated.

And so I think the question is ultimately going to be, we're seeing really, and I think it's the post-World War II consensus among certain liberal democracies of certain types of debates, certain types of arguments that are becoming undone. And that's why I think you're looking at questions that we'll get into in a second of annexing another country, right? Which is, you know, in the pre 20th century, but there was an argument, the rise of the United Nations said nations are sovereign and that the notion of war is by definition an act of hostility. And so I think it's this notion of going back to if a society recognizes the value of debate, it also recognizes parameters around what is acceptable, what is appropriate,

what are the terms and the contours of that. And I think that's how we'll see played out within each society. Martin, you cited Cairo and the protests against Mubarak. Does this go beyond advanced countries to basically every country on earth? Well, you know, this phenomenon has hit every country on Earth, but every culture is different. And the severity with which it has hit each country, each political and cultural national setting has varied a lot. Everybody always tells me, well, what about Australia? I don't know what it is with Australia.

It hasn't happened there. All right. But you look at a place like Chile, this is, you know, and by the way, when you look at the public, the first thing you hear is well, it's economic, it's economic inequality, right? But when you look at the actual revolts, they happened in prosperous countries like France or the yellow vests, as well as in poor countries like, you know, Somalia and many others. So I mean, and usually the people who are in the streets protesting are the affluent and the educated and not the marginalized. Okay. So what was the question again? Where was I headed with this? We know this is happening in advanced societies.

Yeah. Okay. So I want to talk about Chile, which is a really good example. Chile, it's not a poor country. It was actually very much heading up. But all of a sudden, over a five cent change in public transit in Santiago, Chile, these enormous, destructive, lethal protests arose. They were supported by, you know, they could put a million people on the street protesting. Basically, they elected, the president that got elected was essentially a protester.

They elected a new constitutional group that was gonna write a whole constitution. And so now you have a set where denialism can become positive, right? And you can say, well, okay, now what is it you wanna do? You've won, you've won. And they came up with this like 600 page constitution that was essentially, well, you know,

I wrote wings so I could fly and you know, everybody should be happy. I mean, it was every liberal, these are people of the left, so every left ideal and dream and hope that contradicted each other all over was stuffed into that constitution. It wasn't nihilism, but it was a kind of what I was talking about. There was no coherence to it. It got put to a vote and these people

who had just won these elections, the constitution was shut down. So this is global. It has much to do with the ability of the people on top to maintain their narrative because there's no alternatives as it has to do with financial conditions or the wealth and affluence of a given society, I think. Adam, I want to double back for a minute on something you said about the New York Times being very different now than it would have been in the 70s or the 80s or the 90s. What did the Times do to try to catch up with this new environment, information environment, and how hard was it

to get it done? I think the main thing that it did was move away from the front page, which would become a defining, organizing tool for the paper every day. It defined itself to the public that way by saying, you know, per where Martin was saying, this is what we think you need to care about. And it moved away from that and in a very, very fundamental way. The paper doesn't think about the front page anymore.

There's a table, there's a couple of desks set aside in the headquarters on Times Square that deals with it, but the rest of the paper does not. And the top editors don't think about it anymore. They think about the phone. They think about different ways of presenting news. They think about different ways of telling stories. They also think, from what you were saying about Taylor Swift before, they also think about covering things that other editors from years ago would have looked down on their

nose on. I don't think that the New York Times of the 1970s would have paid that much attention to Taylor Swift. She's clearly a huge story and she deserves the kind of attention that the paper gives it. So again, and also again, I think in terms of its self-regard, I don't think that most editors and reporters of the paper look at it anymore as this sort of godlike, you know, we're going to tell you what's going

on and what matters anymore. They might regret it, but they realize it's not true anymore. And I think that's really important. But you have 11 million online subscribers, 12 million, pardon me, far more than you have for the print edition of the paper. Was it hard to get that done? Well, you know, I guess some of the executives might disagree. In some ways it was hard, but in some ways it wasn't.

There was a hunger for it. Part of it was, as some of you might know, the Trump bump. Some of it came after Trump was first elected in 2016. But those numbers continued, I have to say, to their credit, the paper's credit. They thought about different ways to keep people engaged. And it wasn't only news. It was games, which I don't pay attention to, but lots of people engaged. And it wasn't only news, it was games, which

I don't pay attention to, but lots of people do. It was Wirecutter, it was MIT Cooking. They began to reconceptualize what a newspaper was and made it more than just as a way of presenting facts. And the other thing is I don't want to draw too much away from the main topic here at all, but part of what was going on is I think people at the Times, as slow and as traditional as iron, you know, clad as they tended to be, moved quicker than the opposition, right? Like the recent, in my opinion, the Washington Post and the LA Times and other papers are struggling now, Wall Street Journal is a whole different thing. Let's not talk about it here. It's because they were just too slow. Like, is there really a market for two wire cutters? Is there really a market for two MIT cookings?

The kinds of things that produce the income that allows the Times to send a million reporters to Ukraine or spend lots of money on stuff. So I think that's what's going on. Can I offer an alternate interpretation? Yeah. Yeah. And it's actually not mine. I have a friend who I respect that admire a lot

called Andre Meir, and he has a book called Post-Journalism that I recommend to everybody here. And he basically traces the change in the business model of the New York Times as its main, it's called the Death of Newspapers as its subtitle. And he traces the New York Times as it was its original business model, which is selling eyeballs to advertisers, right? So you want to have you don't want to

alienate anybody you have that view from from above style. You you know ghetto eyes opinion in a specific opinion page, everybody knows that's not us. We are very vanilla, we want as many of you and please look at the ads and buy stuff. That's gone with the internet. That just blew up with the internet. Now, more than incidentally, when Trump was elected,

the New York Times was floundering at about one million digital subscribers and flatlining. By the end of the Trump administration, first Trump administration, there were eight million. All right, the New York Times did hit on post-generalism, which is according to Andre is, instead of selling eyeballs, you commodify polarization. They made it so that many people

who were very disturbed by Trump could come into this sheltered garden, be told the right words, be calmed, be given arguments, and they for sure were the first ones to do that. And so they're kind of like the Vatican of this, and my interpretation is not necessarily, Andre, is that you can only have one Vatican. You guys are there. So you have occupied that space. Everybody else is dying. They're trying to do the same thing you are, but you're already there. Right? So that is the Andre interpretation of what happened to the New York Times. And the growth in those first four years of Trump was astronomical. And the theme was very different, very different than it had been before. It was more,

if you come to us, we will tell you why Trump is bad and we will tell you how you're right and think he's bad. And here's some arguments about that. And in my opinion, things were said that were not necessarily true having to do with the Russia collusion thing, but they were useful. They were useful in attracting a huge online readership. You only think I would point out, man, that's basically true, is that those numbers kept growing after Trump left. So, yeah, we'll see.

If Andre is right, sooner or later, it will happen to you too. So I'd like to see him wrong because he's such a smart guy. But I think to your point, I think your book actually disagrees with Andre only to the point to say the collapse of geography is the other thing that the digital tsunami has done. So the piece of it is for everyone here who didn't have a New York Times subscription before because it meant that you got it late in the day or the next day, that there can be one national or international brand that you've correctly described. But in the other piece of it, the notion that institutions need opposition.

I mean, I think by definition, if what we're describing, and I know we're gonna get into the president shortly, but by definition, the president needs an opposition. So if not for the New York Times, even in your interpretation, and we might disagree on the reporting about the Steele dossier and other areas, we could still make the case that by definition,

if the president is the largest brand, what would be the revolt of the public? Because that institution will not. And I think if you've already seen the split, why Steve Bannon is in the governor's podcast today is a broader question for the governor. But when you think about the fracturing of brands, it's hard to envision the last 20 years indicating that this constituency of political forces will keep itself together and there won't be fractions creating opposition within it.

Yeah. Martin, let me move on and ask you, I really a question and a follow up. How has the condition of the economy shaped this wave of disillusion? That's a really good question. And I should probably weasel out of it because it doesn't really have an answer. Like I said, you can have an affluent country like France and you have the yellow vests vandalizing the Arc de Triomphe in Paris and they all have cars and they all have laptops and they all, these are not super wealthy people, but they are not demarginalized, okay? When the Israelis had their social justice protest in 2011, it was the upper-class Ashkenazi golden youth

that was doing this. There is, I think, a sense, and this is, I guess, the way I would plug in economics. There are things about the way that the elites behave that irritate the hell out of the public. So it's a sense of distance. For example, in politics, the fact that somebody gets elected and you can be my neighbor, you're my neighbor, you sound like me, you dress like me, you come to Washington, you become another human

being. Suddenly you're dressing differently, you talk weird, I can't figure, you've ascended to some place, you don't want to talk to me anymore, all right? And I think there's a sense that when they get there, when the elites finally get to the top of their institutional pyramids, particularly in government or in politics, they set up a system where they profit and the rest of the world suffers. And that's always interpreted in terms of corruption,

not of incompetence. It's basically they're setting up a structure that's good for them, bad for us. Is that even right? That could be, you could debate that one back and forth. I'm not sure. Okay. I'm not going to let you weasel out of the follow-up. More broadly, Ezra Klein wrote in that interview with you in, yes, the New York Times, that your work explains the last 15 years of politics. What do you think he meant by that

and how to cite the subtitle of your book again? Did the revolt of the public and the crisis of authority in the new millennium culminate in your own decision to vote for Donald Trump in 2024? Yeah, I mean, my own decision is probably not that important, but the... What I mean is why did you vote for him? Well, I have an article where I explained that I voted for him because I felt that I am Cuban. I spent the first 10 years of my life first under a right-wing dictator

and then the left-wing totalitarian dictator. I feel that when you grow up under those circumstances, you develop these antennae about, for example, censorship, where my entire childhood in Cuba, everything was censored. And I felt that I was seeing that happen in the Biden administration. Who was doing it? I'm not sure because I'm not even sure how far Joe Biden himself played into the administration, but there were things happening that were being done that I

felt violated my sense that I wanted liberal democracy as I knew it to be carried from one sense to the other. Do I like Donald Trump? I have never liked Donald Trump. I did not vote for him the first two times. Politics is the art of the relative. And I very much felt that for whatever reason, the Bidenists, the people who were surrounding Biden

were headed in a direction I found troubling. And that influenced me to vote for Trump because he was the only other choice. What direction? What was the direction that troubled you? Well, I mean, it's all come out. I mean, they didn't want crypto or AI to go very far. It's a very reactionary group.

And they were debanking people who were doing startups. And by debanking, I mean they were just knocked out of the financial system. They couldn't use credit cards. They couldn't put money in a bank. So to me, that is an abuse of power. By the way, this was never legislated. It was some obscure regulation that was used having to do with if you are politically exposed and your name is a politically exposed group or company or person, the banks can just freeze you out, all right?

The Canadians did that, for example, during the drug use revolt. And they created this enormous, bizarre apparatus of censorship that's also been, that's not news, everybody knows about that. But at the time, nobody was talking about it. And I felt that the elites do want to create this information environment that they control. Like they controlled it in the 20th century. And that was one way to do it.

It went back to the pandemic. And for the best of intentions, many of these things begin for the best of intentions. Centership for the best of intentions invariably in my Cuban experience ends up being used for the worst of ways, right? They wanted to filter out bad suggestions that might hurt people in health and ended up of course of course, saying, well, anybody who supports Trump is probably a Russian agent, so we should probably filter that out from social media. It has to do with what are the parameters. How comfortable are you with the parameters of debate?

It's a crazy world. It's what Jonathan Haidt calls it, Tower of Babel. We're all yelling at each other in different languages and not understanding each other. So there is an instinct that it leads to say that we can't do that. We want to save. And they talk about our democracy and their way of saving our democracy. For example, the Europeans have done this, they just canceled an election in Romania and banned the guy who was ahead, who was a populist and had weird ideas. He was a tremendously weird person and politician, so I get that, but he had the advantage. He was going to win and so now they've knocked him out.

He can't do it anymore. So that's when I looked at those things and I took my, I'm sorry, my Cuban background that I keep alluding to. I felt that I didn't like the direction that that was headed. The direction of control. Everything had to do with control. And it extended to that, you know, if you want to drink with a straw that's plastic, you can't do that. If you want a certain kind of car, you can't do that.

There was a sense of an ideology of control that was slowly seeping through and I didn't like it. I'm sorry, I'm just wondering, do you see that now with Trump? I mean, I could see somebody making the exact same case you're making about Trump, you know, taking people off campus for incorrect speech or basically banning or trying to make EVs hard to make. I'm just wondering,

do you think the world's changed? I think the world's changed in this way is that Trump is, he is really a populace. He's a creature of the revolt of the public. The people who supported him were not institutional people, were just people, I've only seen them on TV, but you see a Trump rally and I'm forced to, I mean, I can't, when he talks, I don't even understand what he's saying half the time, so I'll be honest with you, okay? But you see that they're like some combination

of state fair and revival meeting or something, you know? So, and this is bond between this guy and these people. These are not institutional people. These are just ordinary people. And the other side controlled all the institutions. So, if academia and the New York Times and follow on, and Hollywood, and follow on and uh Google certain things without getting opinions in your in your um in your search results. Um whereas Trump and I'm not going to defend the guy because I don't even know what he's doing

right now. Kind of there's so much going on I'm taking a step back into seeing what the hell happens. But Trump doesn't have that power because all the institutions are against them and it was much more concerning to have a drone president like Biden who could barely speak, but surrounded by these powerful institutions that were certainly going in that controlled direction, that to have this semi-crazy man breaking a lot of furniture, but opposed by the institutions.

Gordon, maybe you can comment on that. And in your assessment now that Trump has been elected, defeated, and then reelected, what's the condition of liberal democracy? Well, it seems like the kind of thing that my students would fall asleep in my class while I was answering. I mean, I think the thing that strikes me is Martin in one of your columns last year around New Year's had talked to folks about your desire to wish that we could have a conversation and engage each other.

And I think what you're describing, and I think it's not an accident that the condition of liberal democracy, I think is still inexorably tied to the experiences of the pandemic restructuring the economy, civil life in ways that we're not even beginning to understand. And this is one of the things that I've seen in your work over the last few years,

the, your experience and historians that talk about the, the pandemic in the early part of the 20th century, talk about how there was a historical amnesia. People didn't wanna talk about it. And so we instead think about a few years later, the rise of jazz or other cultural positive moments or affirmations. I think when you describe what you're experiencing, you're very much clearly looking at it. I mean, I think it's the reaction of so much of us were to say, if you were to say objectively, the most wealthiest human being in the world, who owns the media platform that now the government is using to communicate its messages explicitly

is now directly the minister of the United States for practical purposes. I think most of us would recognize an anxiety, but to your point, I think part of the reason that we're in such a state is we've debased the political conversation to have in those fundamental conditions. And so, you know, we're streaming it. So I could put myself at risk by saying this. But if we have the conversation about what are the core free speech principles that would allow you to have a intellectually honest conversation connecting the events of January

6th to the demonstrations on college campuses in the last year. And if your answer to both of them starts with the political ideologies of those there, that's probably not an entire conversation about free speech and free expression. And so I think that's the biggest piece of it is we're so deeply respectful of your work. At the same time, I think all of us are finding themselves, I mean, when you described the experience of being shadow banned does make one fear for our health, but in a way that may be hard for us to describe. But what's the alternative of if the person making the shadow banning decisions and say shadow banning down abortion content, which there's starting to be evidence that's happening,

is government policy. So I think we're in a bad place. And I think part of why we're in a bad place is, is when Martin's work describes is we have lost a common vocabulary because the analogy of the town square or the public market, all of these things were built on a analog sense of speech. And I've got a colleague here that basically makes the argument that our problem is the volume of speech is ultimately the complicator. Like if you grew up with the idea that the bad speech should be tolerated because counter speech and good speech would combat it, inherent in that notion is the ability for that speech to discuss. And I think part of what we're

struggling with right now is things like shadow banning, algorithmic influences and other areas, they're not actually visible in terms of counter speech where, like when I read your work, and it's just like, we want to have this conversation, I think part of it, that's why I think these examples, we have to find subject matter examples that we disagree with politically in order to have a conversation about our core public values. Yeah. Comment on that? Yeah.

Yeah. Okay, I'm not necessarily going to disagree. I mean, everything has to be relative. I guess we live in a relative world. And I said, we're in a moment of just gigantic transformation. And I'm a big believer that what really decides human affairs is how we communicate. The structure, not the words we use, but the structure. Not exactly a McLuhanist, but kind of almost. The structure of communication is basically,

it's an ecological force, it changes the landscape and so it changes our behavior. When was the last time this happened and what happened then? And I have another friend of mine who has this sort of thought experiment. Suppose we went to, took a time machine and went to the 30 years war, right? 30 years war was the worst war, you know, pound for pound, person for person, that Europe has ever had, including World War II. It was massacres upon massacres. It took Germany generations to get its population back up. And he went to the man on the street and said, what do you think of the printing press?

And the person would say, it's the most destructive, nihilistic, horrible invention that has ever been. Because look, there's somebody going out of his church with his little, you know, creed in his hands, and the people over there going out to the other church with a different creed, and they'd have like maybe ten words that are different in their creed, and they're killing each other over it. And if they didn't have that stupid book, nobody would even know, right? So you should destroy the printing press.

You should annihilate it. You should never have it done. Today, we know the printing press was the most liberating technology that has ever happened. I mean, forget about the American and the French revolutions. It would never have happened without it. The scientific revolution, think about it.

You cannot maintain a level of accurate, consistent detail by having manuscripts. Too much gets lost. So we are not killing each other at 30 years war levels. When you're being the tsunami is bouncing you around on your feet up and you're hearing other people scream and yell, it feels like it's terrible and maybe it is. I'm not going to say that there aren't many worrisome aspects of what's going on, but keep it in perspective and keep it relative. We are not killing each other because of our creeds and we are still, it's still possible

to hope that by the end of this transformation, this enormous change, which you students here will get to see, and it will be on your shoulders to make sure that... Because by the way, this doesn't happen because it will happen. It happens because people do what they should. Okay? You make sure that that liberal democracy makes it to the very end. We hear about violence all the time in the news, yet we rarely hear stories about peace.

There are so many people who are working hard to promote solutions to violence, toxic polarization and authoritarianism, often at great personal risk. We never hear about these stories, but at what cost? On Making Peace Visible, we speak with journalists, storytellers, and peace builders who are on the front lines of both peace and conflict. You can find Making Peace Visible wherever you listen to podcasts. to return to the 21st century. I have to say that for me at least shadow banning is not as bad as deporting somebody because you happen to disagree with what they're saying.

But more importantly, you seem to have a univocal notion of the elites. And you talked about Biden and the Times and other institutions like that. I think the Biden folks would complain and have complained that it was the coverage in the New York Times and other places that A, degraded Biden's image, although he contributed to that in the first debate and B forced him out of the race. So I'm not sure that the elites are all together in the way you describe. They are remarkably together

and they remarkably together, not only in the United States of America, but across boundaries in a way that I find kind of amazing, you know, it's like Karl Marx thought that the proletarians across the world were all going to behave identically. Of course, World War Two came, World War One came and each one went fighting for their own country. The elites are, there's a whole lot more solidarity among the elites that you will find even among

the public. I, you know, getting into Trump and the New York Times, all I will say is Joe Biden, to my eyes, for years looked like a person who wasn't there. And the media of the United States of America pretended that he was. To me, that is, I don't think they all got together in a room and said, let's do it. Let's protect this, protect old Joe. Yeah, he's gone, but he's got good people around him. I think that was just somehow the right thing to do. And you can see the same phenomenon going on

in Europe today where, you know, you have a populist in Romania uh in Romania well I'm sorry he can't win he's not allowed to win um and um this free speech under Trump I say let's let I am stand everything that Trump is doing right now I am not commenting because it's like a whirl and let's wait until their their patterns start to emerge right serious patterns start to emerge, right? Serious patterns start to emerge. But in terms of what you were talking about, yeah, I don't consider myself to have, I don't find the elites inimical.

I just describe them the way I see them, the same way I describe the public. The public, its tendency is nihilism. Its dark side is nihilism, and the elites, its dark side is control. So, yeah, I'm going to, I'm going to go to you, Adam, and then I'm going to go to Gordon. I just want to respond to that. I was not getting to the whole argument about newspapers protecting Biden. I mean, I just, with all due respect, I just don't think that's right. I don't think

a newspaper would ever do that. Frankly, the times would never do that. I think the issue here, and again, I don't think we want to get too deeply into this, was that there was a concerted attempt. Let me drop the word concerted. There was an effort by people around Biden who were aware that he was declining at some point at some points in the day to protect him from the kind of coverage. Look at his public schedule. Look how shocked everyone was at that debate. I know that my colleagues in the Times, Washington bureau, the White House bureau tried really hard to get at this and in my opinion, did get at this a lot. And as Bob pointed out very correctly, I think the reason that that Biden ultimately was forced out of the race, right? Remember that was after the assassination attempt. When that happened, I thought this race is set, but was because of coverage by organizations like the Times, they really captured the anxiety of, dare I say, the elites over the declining of the chief executive. Now, whether it was because they were worried about the future of the country or whether they were worried about by losing to Trump, that might deserve in some ways the same thing, whatever it was, I think that's what was going

on. So I strongly reject the idea that there was some big cover up, big elitist cover up of the decline of the man in the White House. That's all. Martin, did you want to? No, I mean, I, it's, I'm not surprised that he disagrees, but I think it's pretty self-evident. I mean, it, it, it, um, and, and of course the second the New York Times called for Biden to resign, I knew that he was finished. At that moment, I knew I said it, he's finished.

But that was after he had already been exposed in the debate. So before the debate, the fiction was maintained that this was a functional human being. How far back he wasn't, that's a mystery because nobody talked about it. You would think in a world of investigative journalism, for example, that people would have gotten in there,

somehow peel some person off, they're now beginning to talk, and gotten some, at least some hints as to, well, when did it change? And has he ever been in charge? I don't know. I mean, I feel like the whole administration is a complete mystery to me.

I'll say one thing and then a question for Gordon. I think from talking to a lot of folks who dealt with him during the last couple of years of the administration, that he was actually pretty good at being president. But he had lost what Richard Neustadt called in presidential power, the single most important power of a president, which is the power to communicate and persuade. So, for example, his leadership on Ukraine, I think, was probably quite effective and quite effective

in terms of how the Europeans saw it. But you put him in that debate and he couldn't talk to the country anymore. I mean, it just didn't work. I wanna go on to another of Martin's points because I don't think we're ever going to settle this in this discussion. So Gordon Martin has suggested that Trump has benefited from the attacks against him in the mainstream media.

Do you agree with that? Absolutely. I think that it's indescribable. And again, I think this may be where we don't all entirely see the same way. Like I actually, Martin, I think in some ways the original version of the book, I think this is maybe where we don't all entirely see the same way. Like I actually, Martin, I think in some ways the original version of the book, I think I read in tension with some of the things that you described today because in my mind, the notion of elite is moving. And I think in that idea, when we say that the most powerful newspaper in the country

has 12 million subscribers, that we agree on as the figure, I don't know what Mr. Beast's subscription count is today. I'm pretty confident that the Joe Rogan shows viewing is higher and I think that's the way that we need to describe. I always think that we teach journalism wrong a lot of times because we view it as a fixed moment in history as a permanent condition. And so I almost think the power of the tsunami analogy for me is the tsunami washed away the buildings that were built. But for places like Indonesia and others, there were buildings that were before and there are buildings that were built after.

I think the power of the Trump experience when you compare it to look at how the rise of conservative media in the late 1990s from Clinton scandal. We saw the beginning of a political media landscape. In some ways, when I teach it in the media literacy class, I say to our students, Ted Turner revolutionized the idea that there could be 24 hour cable news, but it was Rupert Murdoch that figured out you needed a business model, which was polarized based on teams

because there was only so much commercial viability of a generic news channel. And I think we're in the other area. So in some ways, Trump needed the media to oppose him in a way to give him his cultural credibility because if not a divorced Republican with his historical record, and we used to talk about scandal, those things don't exist anymore in some ways because Trump has redefined it. But I also think that's why reading the notion of elites against it in the other way, I think the debates that Dave Portnoy, who I can't believe that I'm referencing in a conversation

like this, he's the founder of Barstool Sports, if you have the good sense to not know what that is. Dave Portnoy has been a Trump supporter, a very vocal kind of anti-woke individual. He's also a very large Tesla shareholder, and he's been very vocal lately saying, hey, Prime Minister Elon, your first job is my fiduciary responsibility to my stock, and as a Tesla shareholder, how are you balancing these responsibilities? I think the notion of elite moves in a way that you could describe the cryptocurrency. It's not an accident here, Argentina and other places.

When we're redefining what the public is, we also have to appreciate that we're redefining what elite is. And that's part of the tension of our moment. I have two more questions and I'll turn it over to you. And first is a hopeful question. Martin, contrary to a lot of mainstream assumptions, you also write that this new world is dangerous to authoritarians like Vladimir Putin. Can you explain that?

Yeah, I mean, I think the revolt to the public is a universal phenomenon, right? And it's in Russia, and you can talk to Andrei Mir because he's a Russian extraction, and it's in China. Now, the thing you have to then address, particularly with Putin, is the fact that, I don't know now with that war going on and all the incredible numbers of deaths

and wounded that has generated, but Putin was a popular figure. The Russians don't like Democrats, they like strength. And Putin was the guy who would have pictures with him, taking with his shirt off. He's like a five foot seven little shrimp. But his image was that of this gigantic superhero that could do judo and could ride horses. So the good test case is China, which everybody says there can be no revolt there because the Chinese government is so clever at covering its bases in the digital space. And there is absolutely no revolt there because the Chinese government is so clever at, you know,

covering its bases in the digital space and there is absolutely no way that can happen. Okay. And then they decided, no, no, we're going to have the zero COVID policy and we're going to weld your doors, your apartment doors, you know, shut and you're going to stay there. And suddenly you had people in the streets by the tens of thousands saying things like, you know, get rid of the communist party. There are a bunch of dictators. And like within three days of that, the zero COVID policy,

which had been adopted by the communist party and one of these committee meetings as the eternal policy of the ruling class was abandoned. All right. They were scared by that revolt enough. So in China, I think it hasn't been that the system or the rules are popular. What has been is been very affluent.

So the Chinese public probably in general doesn't wanna rock the boat. The people in Hong Kong did look what happened to them. But my point is potentially speaking, if Putin and or the communists, for example, really slip on a banana peel, the public can take to the streets and yeah, you'll get a phenomenon there like you had with with Hosni Barak. Okay, my last question, and it's for all of you, how can and should we ultimately cope with what you describe, as a technology driven churning of new people and classes,

a proliferation and confusion of message and noise, utopian hopes and nihilistic rage, globalization and disintegration, all taking place in the unbearable personal proximity of the web and a fatal distance from political power. For each of you, if this is true, what does it portend for the future of our society and of other societies that we have assumed are cast in the image and likeness of ours? Martin, you want to go first? I don't know. Well, you wrote that extraordinary sentence.

So I'm on the record as saying I think we could get, I mean, it's not the 30 years war. All that I said, I stand by. That was a particularly good sentence. Every once in a while I get it right. But honestly, I didn't mean to imply that we were headed for doomsday or that we were headed for social or political disintegration. Those things may happen in these.

It's a revolutionary moment. And we haven't talked about, for example, AI. I think Trump, if you want to give him a label, he's a revolutionary figure. All right? He transcends the revolt of the public. He's clearly doing something beyond what I wrote about. AI is a revolutionary tool, okay? We have no clue how that's going to change the way we live, the way we think, the way we do politics. And now you have Trump with his friend Elon Musk, who is a genius at AI. So suddenly we have Trump plus AI. What the hell did that end up with?

Who knows? But it's going to be revolutionary. And I mean, if just in general predicting is silly, predicting what's going to come next in a revolutionary moment, I'm not going to do it. But it could be good, or it could be bad. It could be terrible. It could be great. I don't know. Gordon, how do we cope with this? I'm gonna agree that I don't know what happens. I'm gonna, the coping is, I mean, I direct the journalism school I teach and I'm going to tell you what I describe is and Adam referenced the story to me earlier that I think is the representative anecdote. I did my research about the war in Bosnia Herzegovina. And I think when you look at the history of a, one of the true significant multi-ethnic democracies

that within a few years went from hosting the Olympics to the site of one of the bloodiest civil wars in the last 50 years, the disconnect was the loss of human and social capital between each other. And I think when I read Martin's book, what it reminded me and reinforced is my definition of democracy may be different than yours.

My values may be different than yours. But the part that I keep going back to the interviews of a Bosnia in the early 1990s was someone saying, they were my neighbor one day and the next day they were a croat. The next day they were a Serb. The next day they were Muslim. And I look at this question to say it is good and it is awesome to have active political disputes you know the 1970s are actually this moment of where the United States the two political parties were as close together as they ever were in the history of this country and there's an argument that that might not have been the healthiest for democracy but today the, the space we have is, can we articulate our differences in ways that can be loud, they can be powerful, they can disagree when we think that our communities are being shorted,

but can we do so when, and I'll give you one concrete example of this. I was really disheartened to see the president come out against the idea of people boycotting Teslas. I disagree with the idea of destroying someone else's property. And that is not a political judgment. That is a judgment about civic virtue and ethics. I've got no problem if you disagree with Musk and you want to put a flyer on someone else's car because the flyers and leaflets are a historical form of democracy. But I disagree when you cross that line in the same way that when we think about protests and demonstrations, protesting in a public place versus threatening

someone's family or protesting in their house or with their kids. And that's why I go back to the January 6th example and the college campuses, not because you're hearing my opinion of the merits of those disputes, but you're asking for, can a public define how we dissent and how we get together? And that's my hope, so that we're not looking up and saying, but they're Texan, they're Californian. I think we see where that goes. Adam, how does journalism cope with this new world?

I guess hiding under the table or, you know, my inclination as a journalist, as a reporter is always to try to, you know, I guess hype stuff. Like this is the most, as a reporter is always to try to, you know, I guess, hype stuff. Like, this is the most never before in the history of the world. There's been turmoil like this, and it's never been this bad. I mean, I do think on many days it does look that way in terms of the amount of stuff that Trump has done over these past five weeks.

But the other thing I've learned is, and this is a variation of what Martin was saying on not making predictions, we just don't know. We're right in the middle of this. And I think it's really a mistake to try to figure out, as tempting as it is, where we're going to be in six months, six years, 60 years, because we just don't know. And I think it'll become clear with time. And I think just sort of write it for now. So I'm not going to try to make any predictions. And I've just learned that other than saying, other than observing what we see right now, which is the period of incredible turmoil, incredible dissolution, the whole point of your book, I think goes to a lot of what's going on in the

society today. I think what Trump is doing over these past five weeks, agree or disagree is incredibly is disruption. Like we've not seen since what the civil war, but I have no idea what's going to turn out. I think we should just, you know, sit back and enjoy the show. I think we have time for several questions. Here's a mic.

Thank you. One of my questions was how traditional media three generations ago and the relationship with wealthy ownership related to today. And I think all of you answered kind of that part of the question. My other interests was in the way that certain commentators or newscasters are more celebrities with these fans who are so devoted regardless of what content they produce. And I think of Rachel Maddow and Joe Rogan and the comment that you made about how you take down a

Celebrity is there something there is there something there both in terms of how? traditional news outlets may be able to latch on to celebrities or vloggers or influencers and use them to Bring in new audiences and consolidate how they distribute information, but also how those of us who are concerned about balanced media can take down those we see as providing imbalanced media. It's a great question.

And I think the part I'm glad you give the early preface because I think the part that I would describe is in a moment and part of why I'm so glad Martin is here because it really forces us to think and talk differently about it is I think everyone should interrogate whether you believe that purely commercial media is viable or healthy. And I there's empirical research, the New York Times is being successful, but there's good research. And when you the next time that you ship something through the mail like you said media mail and you realize that the post

office has subsidized media for now 200 plus years, there's a bit of a misnomer that media in the United States has ever been purely commercial, but I reference the BBC as the other example. We still rely on a lot of our media economics of either the current economy of the day, which your book talks about how that the tsunami broke. And so a lot of what we're looking at now is attention economies or benevolent billionaires. That's still our default environment. And I, you know, your takes on Jeff Bezos, notwithstanding the discussion is if your business model is to find a really, really rich person who agrees with your politics all of the time, I think the problem is that vision is as much as the other part. business model is to find a really, really rich person who agrees with your politics all of the time.

I think the problem is that vision, as much as it is the other part, and I think the way you described it is that where do you want to invest and how do you want institutions to work? The BBC was launched because the British people and elites were terrified of what they saw of the experiment of purely American commercial media. The BBC has all kinds of flaws, but the BBC has an editorial process that's distinct. And I would make this case when people are looking at Patrick Sushun out here and they're saying, you should invest

your billions differently. That's not how we approach other areas. But I think the big way to overlay it is, do we want to attach commercial values to public interests? And if you believe that news is not purely a commercial value, then I think we have to find commercial values to public interests? And if you believe that news is not purely commercial value, then I think we have to find other ways of engaging them. Another question right over here. How you doing? In spaces like this, we obviously all desire to be part of institutions or create platforms of value

that maybe would be seen as the elite one day, the next elite. How do we keep our lenses clean and clear to be able to speak for the masses as we get to a space that we become more impactful? I mean, that's a really hard question and a really fundamental one, I think. And I guess I'll tell you why my druthers more than my thoughts on it because I, it's

hard to wrap your way around that. I think, I think as I understand the elites, I don't feel inimical towards them. I just describe them as being reactionary. They are, they were very comfortable in the 20th century. They looked down and nobody talked back. And it was a, I mean, it was a great time to be an elite. If you were a democratic elite, you could look at the actual pyramids of power, the hierarchies. They weren't that different from what was going on, you

know, in the Soviet Union or in dictatorships. You stood at the top, you talked down. The New York Times model of media is like that. You need somebody who's who owns a lot of overhead, but printing press and distribution system, pay a lot of people and then you do it down. So that's a really comfy model for the elites and it's been swept away and they have not come to terms with it. And to me, it means that we need a new elite class. I mean, I don't think this is going to be a moment of, of, oh gee, now I get it. Maybe I shouldn't be this way anymore. It's kind of like a Pauline conversion on the road to Damascus where the elites will fall down

on the ground and come back, you know, digital geniuses. It's not going to happen. So in part, you know, and I say this as a card member boomer, it's because of the age difference. I mean, so many old people are in charge. In part, it's because it's a lot of young people with old heads. In part, it's just the way you look at the world. It's how you look at the disruption. For some of us, it's just noise and it hurts our head. For those who are in the middle of it, they know how

to navigate it. They know how to shut it out. You know, my daughter is far more adept at shutting out the noise than I am. So I would say what we need is an adapted elite class. And to do that, you need a lot of younger people, and they have to be, you know, in their teens or their 20s, but people who are not in their 70s and 80s, for God's sakes, running the show and bringing the fact that they were their natives to this environment, this media environment, to the institutional life. Yeah, I have to say I'm too old. I'm a boomer too. Actually I'm just before a boomer.

They called us the silent generation. We were not silent. But I'm too old to transition to a new elite. But I this discussion is amazingly enlightening and provocative. One more question. Sure. Just because I think we're and I appreciate the question. And I think that seriously here as part of the university, I think it's the institutions and individuals who desire to have institutional relationship or this broader engagement. It's the core notion of ethics. And I think that not

everyone has to agree with that. But I think you have to know what you stand for and how that works. And I would just give the example. I love when people talk about this university as a static condition where everyone who's been associated with this university for any period of time has watched this university dramatically reinvent itself. So I watched these conversations in other settings and people say like, well, USC is this like really elite elite school. And it was like, you know, in 1993, does anyone know what the admissions rate was here when president sample took over 70%?

Anyone know what the admission rate for this university was this year? It's like seven. Now we probably were still part of a different elite at the time when it was called the University of Spoiled Children, but this notion of how elites and re-transform, and I give that as an example, I'm really proud of this place. We're getting closer to the conversation, assuming the designation still exists, about becoming a Hispanic serving institution, right? which would mean a designation that we're in Los Angeles. We are part of Los Angeles, and I think that's this notion.

Institutions, I always go back to the last anecdote if any of you haven't seen Jimmy Iovine's commencement address from a few years ago at the university when he and Dr. Dre were here. Jimmy Iovine tells the story about talking to folks about Napster and talking to the nerds. He called them the engineers, and he's like, what do we do to about Napster and talking to the nerds. He called them the engineers. And he's like, what do we do to stop Napster

from stealing our music? And the nerds, the engineers told them, not every industry has the right to exist. And I think part of what I read in Martin Street as an evocation is that institutions have to lead with their ethics, whether or not you view there's an existential threat and individuals and institutions.

And if you do that, then you can engage some of these core questions about economic access, affordability, things that are really folks that are struggling about in a way that the last kind of fanboying. I love when Martin describes how we shouldn't be using the same political language and thinking differently about what's a Democrat versus Republican

or a liberal versus progressive. Having a democratic vocabulary, I think, helps us get to some of these other answers. I think I'm going to end here because Martin's going to sign books. I want to thank Martin, Adam, and Gordon for an insightful and at times unsettling discussion of the media and the political world we now inhabit.

And I again want to thank Ken Broad for making it possible. I want to thank all of you here in our audience, along with those who are watching on Zoom or Facebook Live. And we'll hear this on our podcast, Let's Find Common Ground. I invite you to join us on April 3rd here at USC for our annual Climate Forward Conference. Thanks to everyone. Thank you for joining us on Let's Find Common Ground. If you enjoyed what you heard, subscribe and rate the show five stars on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts.

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