Making Sense with Sam Harris - #140 — Burning Down the Fourth Estate

Episode Date: October 17, 2018

Sam Harris speaks with Matt Taibbi about the state journalism and the polarization of our politics. They discuss the controversy over Steve Bannon at the New Yorker Festival, monetizing the Trump phenomenon, the Jamal Kashoggi murder, the Kavanaugh hearing, the Rolling Stone reporting on the UVA rape case, the viability of a political center, the 2020 Presidential election, the Russia investigation, our vanishing attention span, and other topics. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.

Thank you. of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org. There you'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcatcher, along with other subscriber-only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming Today I'm speaking with Matt Taibbi. Matt is a writer for Rolling Stone magazine, and he was a winner of the 2008 National Magazine Award for Columns and Commentary. He has written many books, including the New York Times bestsellers The Great Derangement, Griftopia, and The Divide. And in this episode, we focus on the state of journalism and the vacuousness and polarization

of our politics. We discuss the controversy over inviting Steve Bannon and then disinviting him to the New Yorker Festival. We talk about monetizing the Trump phenomenon, the Jamal Khashoggi murder, the Kavanaugh hearing, the Rolling Stone reporting on the UVA rape case, the viability of the political center, the 2020 presidential election, the Russia investigation,

our vanishing attention span, and many other topics. Anyway, many of you have requested that I get Matt on the podcast. Please enjoy my conversation with Matt Taibbi. I am here with Matt Taibbi. Matt, thanks for coming on the podcast. Thank you for having me. So we haven't met, but I've been a fan of your work for quite some time, and no doubt we have friends in common. So we haven't figured that out yet, but I'm sure we're in some similar orbit of some large and dangerous object now. Definitely.

So how would you—people will be fairly familiar with you, I think, but how do you describe your interests as a journalist? I would say I'm an investigative journalist. Usually, I'm also, I mean, I also do commentary, obviously. specialty over the years has been the sort of deep dive into an arcane subject. Specifically after the financial services crash of 2008, I did a lot of stories about how Wall Street works and basically translating all of that for ordinary readers. And I'm a humorist, kind of an absurdist. I take an absurdist point of view on things as often as I can. And yeah, I think people would probably classify me as on the left, but I don't

really think of myself that way. I am sort of more of a writer than I am a polemicist, I guess. Yeah, I want to touch the financial crisis at some point, but let's just start with the current state of journalism and its health or state of disease. You have an interesting perspective on this because you actually grew up in a journalistic family, right? My father was a TV reporter. He started in the business when he was 17. He was a student at Rutgers University. And when I was born, he started working very, very early and became a television reporter in his early 20s in Boston. And so my early, my childhood was actually a lot like the movie Anchorman.

I spent a lot of time around those goofy 70s affiliates. And my dad was was sort of one of those characters. He had the bad facial hair and he was a big, big collar. Yeah, big collar shirts, funny ties. And he had mutton chops and all that cool stuff. But I grew up around the business. My earliest memories are all journalists. My father's, my family's friends were all reporters. So it's been my life since I was probably three or four years old, I would say.

And so I have a perspective on it that's not totally unique, but it's a big part of my life sort of watching the changes in the business. Yeah, I want to talk about how it has changed and may be changing just by the hour now, because we have this kind of horrible integration that we've all witnessed of journalism and social media and politics that the politics side, since Trump's just seems unrecognizable to many of us. So I'm just wondering, the thing that many of us are trying to get a handle on here is how we can have a sane discussion about facts and values, about what's actually going on in the world and what we should do about it, when our epistemology appears to have been shattered by partisan politics and new technologies and new perverse incentives in media, we just appear to be driving ourselves crazy. How do you view it as somebody

who at least has some distant memory of pre-internet journalism and who's now working as a journalist full time. Yeah, I'm actually writing a book about this right now, and it's called The Fairway. It's sort of like a rethink of manufacturing consent, and it's a lot about what's gone on in the last three or four decades with the business. And I think you hit on a really important word when you talked about incentives. The financial incentives in our business have really gone haywire. And with the collision of the internet and this business, we're now more or less all completely at the upper levels of the media and the big corporate outlets. We're basically in the business of telling our audiences what they want to hear. And there's a very driving pressure on journalists to make audiences happy in a way that didn't exist probably a generation ago.

Almost everybody now, almost all journalists have a social media presence. They're all, whether they do so in their day job or not, they're op-ed writers to a degree. And this is really filtered into the way we cover everything. such a polarizing figure that now there's really only two kinds of media in big media. There's pro-Trump media and there's anti-Trump media. And we basically market those two brands. And it's very difficult to write about anything else. I mean, I've really struggled with it because in my career, I really did a lot of things that were not about partisan politics that were about bipartisan issues or things that had bipartisan causes like the financial crisis or military contracting or whatever it is. But you can't do that today. It's very hard to market your work if you don't have an overt Trump angle on it. And that's,

as you say, it's becoming more and more pronounced, I think, by the minute. And that's difficult. It's hard not to be part of the problem in the act of responding to the problem, however constructively you think you're doing that. Because there's something so demeaning about what is now normal, and just to be covering Trump all the time, I mean, just politically, journalistically, on social media, the status quo is so eclipsing of deeper possibilities, and it's just so magnifying of what's petty and superficial. And yet, to try to make sense of it or improve it is to be dragged into the same swamp. And it's like, it reminds me of the fears many people had of the Large Hadron Collider, that it was a fear that some future high-energy experiment in physics might rip a hole in the fabric of space-time and destroy the world.

Like it just might open up a mini black hole that would swallow everything. Right, or a nuclear explosion would ignite the atmosphere or something like that, right? Right, right. And however physically plausible those fears have been at any point, I actually feel something similar every time I turn on the news. What I'm afraid of and responding to is not the threat of nuclear war or cyberterrorism or climate change or any real problem. It's this high-energy experiment of our own banality and childishness in the face of these real challenges that eclipses any prospect of thinking about these challenges intelligently. I mean, like yesterday, we're recording this a day

after we had Kanye West and Trump in the Oval Office, where Trump got to look like the sane one for minutes at a stretch. And it's just, we're at this moment where human history is an episode of reality television. And it's so appalling. And yet, to even talk about it is to be, in some ways, just participating in this circus. It's very hard to see how, as a journalist, you thread this needle where you, again, you have to choose how much time to spend on this freak show, which is the place that is either determining the course of human events or just preventing us from dealing with problems that are just not going to go away on their own magically. I spent a lot of time sort of warning about this in the last 12 years. One of the things that I do a lot of at Rolling Stone, they have me covering the campaigns every four years. So I'm now going to start my fifth in a few months, unfortunately. You're starting this early? Yeah, no, of course. That's one of the problems is that it starts earlier and earlier each cycle. But I've essentially judges in a kind of beauty pageant. We had all these terms and code words that we used to identify people who we thought were appropriate presidential candidates.

So if you saw somebody described as pointed in a campaign story, that was a bad sign. That was the press's way of saying that this person is going to be offensive or difficult for middle America to swallow. If we use the word nuance, that was a good word. You know, of course, there was the whole contest over who, which candidate you most want to have a beer with. We invented all of these little ridiculous kind of reality show sort of events, which one's the most tough on defense, which one is the warmest. It's the warmest. And the vacuousness of it, I think people started to rebel against it. I started to notice, I think, in the Romney-Obama election that people were just really impatient with that kind of coverage. And when Trump came along, I recognized right away that this was going to be a problem because

he was, in a way, the campaign was a bad reality show with bad actors. And here was an experienced reality TV performer who was going to come in and make a complete circus out of it. And the problem, I knew from the very start that the problem was going to be that the commercial press was not going to be able to resist that narrative. And I wrote about this from the start, that Trump was perfectly designed to walk through the front door of a process that had already been deeply flawed before he even got on the scene. And that's exactly what happened. You know, I lost a little bit of faith throughout the course of the election. I initially thought that he was going to win against all odds, but then I lost a little bit of confidence in that. I didn't want him to win, of course. But I saw right away that he was going to fit like a glove into what we'd created. Yeah, yeah. I've been thinking of him and talking about him as an evil Chauncey Gardner. Right, exactly. and strategy and vision. He was the perfect person to exploit a very flawed system and situation where his own personal flaws, his narcissism, his crassness, everything that's wrong with him as a human fit like a perfect key into the lock of the present moment. Maybe I'm not giving him

quite as much credit as I should be for being a talented demagogue, but I really do think that just being the right ugly character at the right moment explains a lot of his success. Oh, absolutely. I mean, he, and I've talked about this actually, oddly enough, with pro wrestlers, because one of the first things i i noticed in the last election was trump was basically doing a heel act if you if you watch any wrestling he was casting all of his opponents um as the baby face you know the the good guy and if you watch any wwe you know the audience is always cheer when the the sort gorgeous George character gets a chair across the face. And that's what Trump did with people like Jeb Bush. He made them offended. He attacked their families, their mothers, their wives, and they didn't know how to handle it and responded, you know, in many ways as just basically any sane person would instead of acting upset and outraged. But Trump made a mockery of it. And he understood that the spectacle was more important

than the actual words that he was saying. And the cameras would be drawn more to him than they would be to his opponents. And that's, A, why he got so much more coverage than everybody else. But B, if you watch the debates, especially on the Republican side early on, he just sort of looked physically bigger than everybody else on the stage because he just had such a dominating media presence. And he knew exactly how to control that WWE dynamic in each of these events. And he did it with us in the press, too. I mean, not to drone on about this, but I remember being in New Hampshire, and he would point to us, you know, we're all standing behind the rope line with our notebooks, and

he would say things like, look at them, look at those bloodsuckers. They didn't think I could win. They, you know, they're elitists. They, they doubted me. They, they hate you. And the, the, the crowd would physically turn in our direction and start hissing and booing. And, and, you know, and I realized, you know, Trump, Trump is taking this incredibly boring, stultifying, stump speech format, and he's turning it into this intimate, menacing television event. And that was going to fly, and it did. And that's why everybody just gave him so much attention. He crushed the ratings. And it was just a perfect confluence of all these factors that made him,

his celebrity, grow during that time. Well, I don't want us to get fully pulled by the tractor beam that is Trump. I'm sure he'll come up again. And I think when we talk about, I mean, it's no secret that you and I are about as critical of Trump as any two people that can be found. But I think in talking about this phenomenon and the underlying politics, I think we should be, we should try to bend over backwards to be sympathetic to the millions of people who voted for him. I mean, just to put the best possible steel man construal on the reasons for that. Oh, yeah, I do. Yeah, definitely. Go ahead. Yeah. I'm sensitive to the charge that, at least on this topic in particular, I'm in an echo chamber or amplifying one. And I

mean, the truth is, I think there really is truly zero partisanship in my criticism of Trump. I mean, I think virtually everyone I've had on this podcast to talk about Trump is a Republican who is criticizing Trump. And I have very uncharitable things to say about the Clintons as well. So there's just a unique problem with him as a person, which has motivated me to rail about him as much as I do. But so let's just back up for a second and talk about how we got here journalistically. So a couple of days before this theatrical event in the Oval Office with Kanye West, we have the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change releasing a fairly dire report, which gets perhaps predictably now very little oxygen in the press. And half of America probably thinks climate change is a hoax. And we have a president who will say that it's a

hoax. Journalistically, how did we get to a situation where it is so difficult to define fake news clearly enough to even address the problem? And we're now living in an ambient level of conspiracy theories and an unwillingness to engage, you know, in the case of climate change, a fairly impressive scientific consensus about the basic problem, and yet journalism can't seem to get a purchase on it. How is this where we are? Well, I think in that case, it's almost entirely a financial issue. Back in the day, maybe during the Fairness Doctrine years when there was more attention paid to the public interest standard, I think we were raising a whole generation that doesn't know some of the history here that

the press originally was sort of a grand bargain, right? The government would lease the public airwaves to radio and television stations. And as part of the sort of negotiation, the private media companies were obligated to create programming that was in the public interest and convenience. And for a long time, there was an unwritten rule that the news could be a loss leader, right? That you could make your money on sports and sitcoms and entertainment and whatever else. And, you know, the news didn't have to make money. And that change that began to change, you know, the news didn't have to make money. And that changed, that began to change, you know, with some very profitable programs. I think 60 Minutes was one of the first news magazine programs to actually make significant amounts of money in ways that they didn't have to before because they were being more overtly commercial than they

used to. And so it's hard for people to understand, but I watch this. The journalists just sort of grow up with this idea of what um what is and what isn't a story it's something that's more by smell than by discussion and back in the day i i think reporters would have placed more emphasis on how how important a story is and in deciding whether or not something is newsworthy now we probably we probably are, whether consciously or not, consciously thinking more about what's going to sell more when we talk about what stories we're going to cover, what we're going to pitch to our editors and that sort of thing. And so climate change is just a tough sell.

I've done a very few stories on that, but I've done stories on topics that are like that, that are difficult sells. And it's really hard to get traction. I think the hardest part is you might be able to get your own audience interested for a little while, but the hard part is getting everybody else to pick it up. And, and that's, that's really the difficult part is right now, in order to affect anything, you need the whole news cycle, you need everybody piling on. And that doesn't really happen with that kind of story very often. Unless there are powerful interests behind trying to get something a lot of ink, it just won't happen. And Mother Earth doesn't have that kind of pull, unfortunately. Yeah.

Well, with climate change, you sort of have every variable working against it because it is this slow-moving problem, which is, in each specific instance, something that you can't, at least from a general trend of worsening storms that we would expect, but you can never point to the devastation from last week and say, there you go, climate change. Or at least if you do, you'll have all the caveats of scientists working in the background to kind of undercut you. So it's a hard problem because to make it journalistically sexy enough, it's certainly tempting to distort the underlying science. And then when scientists or people like Al Gore get caught for doing that, then it sets the whole conversation back. Yeah, it's very, you need a hook, right, to sell any news story. So people are going to look for some kind of event, something historic, maybe water levels rising to a certain degree that had

never been reached before, temperatures getting hotter than they ever had before. I used to live in Uzbekistan, and I remember walking in what used to be the Aral Sea, and it's not there anymore. And so people look for hoaxes like that to do environmental stories. But if you're trying to compete against Kanye West giving Trump a hug in the White House, that's just not an easy pitch. It's just not going to get the same kind of clicks and eyeballs, even from people who claim to be interested in the topic, believe it or not. So that's one of the reasons why, in my own work, I've had to resort to some pretty weird tactics to try to get people interested in, you know, things like the financial crisis or, you know, Iraq war. Use storytelling techniques, humor, you know, make black hats, white hats, make characters out of the main people who figure in the story. And, you know, you feel

not so great about that sometimes, but that's necessary in order to get people, eyeballs trained on important subjects. So it seems that journalism has now essentially monetized domestic political conflict more than anything else. I mean, especially when you add the... I guess there are a few rungs on the ladder here, which I know you've written about. I mean, I think the first is probably conservative talk radio and Fox News and 24-hour cable news cycles, which just demand a kind of endless polarizing conversation about politics. But then when you add the internet and social media and the micro-targeting of groups with Facebook ads, we're now monetizing every individual's confirmation bias and addiction to outrage. Do you see a way of

breaking this spell? What's the exit from this? I don't know. I mean, I'm in the middle, in that book that I'm writing, The Fairway, right now. I just wrote this thing called The Ten Rules of Hate, which are, it's explicitly about how we monetize political division, how we train audiences to be sort of pre-angry and get them addicted to conflict. Pre-angry. Yeah. Pre-angry is a great phrase. I mean, it's, I mean, everybody knows that we do it and we know that we do it. And it goes back a long way. First of all, I think people have to realize, they have to think about the logistical challenge of filling all those hours on 24-hour cable. When that first happened, the news had a very, very difficult time making all those hours work.

What they basically did is they would do a newscast and have it on a loop every hour or so, but that doesn't work in modern day media. You need something new pretty much constantly. And so what works and what they found over the years in terms of what works to fill all the hours and what gets people's attention the most. It's either an ongoing crash kind of a story like the Kursk disaster or a baby down the well or a storm or something like that where they can update it every minute. Or it's something like the presidential campaign that has 18 months of scheduled conflicts. And you can create lots and lots of sort of graphic doodads to talk about your predictions. And you can turn it into a kind of sports format where people argue constantly. But the easiest

way to fill all that time is just to do the sort of crossfire format where you have uh one one person on one side one person on the other side and they argue um and the show doesn't really work if they try to reach an accommodation during the show it has to be conflict right i mean if you think about what crossfire does and and saturn out live was lampooning this way back in the 70s with Point Counterpoint, the idea that people would sort of dress up in shirts and ties and scream insults at each other over things that have nothing to do with their lives, it's totally crazy. But we do it constantly. And that format works so well as a way to fill the hours that it went from being a variety show that we tuned into

occasionally to being the entire news landscape. And we have some channels that are from the left and some channels that are from the right, and they're just lobbing grenades at each other constantly. And the additional factor that you talked about with the internet now means that all those algorithms are going to be searching for audiences who are already sort of pre-selected to agree with certain topics. So when you create a story about how, you just say Trump is awful, the 101 ways Trump was awful or whatever, right? There's going to be an algorithm that's going to identify all the people who are going to like that story or are likely to like that story. And it's going to feed it to them through the Facebook feed and through various other

social media methods. And so there's all these commercial polls that push us to try to create that kind of content, which is just about feeding people's hate reflexes. And it's really unfortunate because what ends up happening is that people like me who, when we come across a topic that isn't partisan or isn't going to make you angry, but is, you know, if you cover it correctly, it's going to make you maybe think about your own culpability, or it's going to make your readers not so pleased with the politicians that they vote for. There's kind of an internal discouragement from doing that kind of material. I mean, I'm sure I've heard you talk about how

the certain segment of your audience, you know, turned out to be Trump supporters. It's difficult, right? Went to do content that maybe, you know, is going to turn those people off. And that's, I think that's unconscious. That's something that's unconscious and going on at the unconscious level with a lot of reporters these days. the public good a fair amount, but if all of your incentives, especially your incentives for being able to pay your rent and advance your career, are running the other way, it's not hard to guess what's going to win there, at least for most people. I noticed you were fairly critical of the New Yorker Festival, beyond their just disinviting Steve Bannon, which we can talk about. I think you and I had a very similar take on that. But you seemed much more critical than I would tend to be in this environment just around their business model. They were somehow prostituting journalism by creating

events that people would pay a fair amount of money to attend. But again, one of the main problems from my point of view is we're in an environment now where virtually everyone expects to get their news for free. So if the New Yorker can create a yearly conference that's expensive that people actually want to pay for to see their favorite writers or whoever get up on stage and talk, why be skeptical of that project given the financial exigencies now with journalism just trying to figure out how to stay in business? You're right. I mean, I was probably unfair about that. I just kind of reacted to that whole thing. As somebody who's just sort of been in the business for a long time, it would be tough

for me to do that kind of event. And, you know, I don't know. I just have sort of been in the business for a long time it would be tough for me to to do that kind of event and you know i don't know i i i just have sort of an old old school take on that it just feels kind of odd to me uh for some reason um but uh but i understand it i mean you know that's it's a it's a way to to make money now and it's a it's proven i guess to be pretty successful and people do want to meet their uh their favorite writers writers and pundits and that sort of thing. I guess it's analogous to what happened in the music industry where musicians can't make nearly as much money actually selling their music. So they have to tour. And the problem for writers has always been that there is no real analog for touring for most writers. I mean, some can have careers as speakers, but it seems like this

New Yorker festival, which I've never attended, so I'm just guessing, but it seems like this is a micro example of a magazine figuring out some touring component to its business model, which obviously not every magazine can do. But that part seems good to me, provided there's actually a market for it. What really was objectively not good was how they handled the Steve Bannon situation. I don't know if you want to give your... I've already spoken about that briefly on the podcast, but I don't know if you want to give me your take on what happened there well i i do think that interviewing steve bannon is totally a legitimate thing to do and when i first heard about that controversy i i guess i didn't understand what the new yorker festival was and i should probably just back up and say, again, I grew up in with with people who in an era when the sales people, the ad people were literally not allowed in the same newsroom as the reporters.

Like there was a Chinese wall between between the press and the business side. And we just didn't have to think about it. And so the idea of the festival, you know, I think from an old school perspective, it just feels a little weird to me. But if you add the component of we're going to charge an extra special high amount of money to bring Steve Bannon in so that everybody can gawk at the public spectacle of him on stage, I don't know if that's, you know, that's basically monetizing the Trump phenomenon in a way that's a little bit too direct for my taste. I mean, I understand why they did it. And some of the things that David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker said about, you know, we need to challenge people who are powerful. And, you know, all of that is valid.

And in fact, one of the things that, you know, I wrote about was that, you know, if you've watched the, if you read the Michael Wolff book, and there's all these amazing questions that I would like to ask somebody like Steve Bannon, like, what was he talking about when he was cheering the nomination of a money laundering prosecutor to the Mueller's team? And also, you know, about his sort of strategic decisions during the campaign. All that stuff is interesting and it's worth exploring. But in the context of that festival, it felt like a little bit too commercialized for me. I don't know.

What did you think about that? Well, you just brought up two interesting points that are bigger than the festival. One is just the general phenomenon of wondering who is worth talking to. This is something I've struggled with openly on the podcast. Is it okay to, as it's said, give a platform to person X when there's interesting differences of opinion to be aired in that conversation? The other thing you brought up is just monetizing the Trump phenomenon in general. Let's just take that piece first. It seems to me that journalism in general must have benefited from Trump, right? I'm wondering if there's a kind of a perverse incentive now that has crept in where this is the best thing that's ever happened to CNN or any of these other outlets.

Has anyone quantified just how good Trump has been for journalism? Yes. I mean, there have been lots of reports about this. The numbers are historic. lots of reports about this. The numbers are historic. Typically, the networks in the year after a presidential election, the cable networks anyway, see significant drops in ratings. That didn't happen with CNN. CNN, I think in the first year of the Trump presidency, made a billion dollars profit. And there was a really interesting phenomenon for me about that, which was poll after poll showed that there was less trust of the media than ever, including on both sides of the spectrum among Republicans and Democrats, but particularly among conservatives. But the media has been consumed more than ever.

So what does that mean? I mean, that means that we're starting to eat into the entertainment world's budget, basically, because people aren't really consuming us as a product that they trust. They're consuming us as some other kind of product that serves some other kind of purpose. And that's pretty weird. I mean, all the networks have been just amazing ratings ever since Trump has been in office. And that's one of the reasons why I have this queasy feeling about a lot of Trump coverage. Originally, when he first came on the scene, there was a lot of sort of snickering and let's give this clown a little airtime because we know it's going to get ratings. And then when

people felt bad about it, and they realized that they were helping him get to, to, because we know it's going to get ratings. And then when people felt bad about it, and they realized that they were helping him get, get to the presidency, they just, they sort of started to add this, you know, instead of a million hours of Trump, it's a million hours of Trump is bad. I think it's basically the same thing. And I really worry about that. I think that's not, that's not a positive phenomenon for the, for the press. Cause it's just so easy now to make money with Trump, Trump content. And that's not a positive phenomenon for the press. Because it's just so easy now to make money with Trump content. And that's a bad habit for the press to break. Yeah.

So back to the... Platforming thing. I'd love to talk about that. Yeah. The nefarious podcast guest or interview guest. When I've described this on my podcast, I've talked about it in terms of this uncanny valley phenomenon, where if someone is bad enough, then it's just a straightforward decision. I guess the clearest case is, I mean, you could sit down and talk to Hitler,

that would be interesting. But to talk to Richard Spencer is to give a platform to an awful person with his awful ideas. And I just wonder how you, again, I totally agree with you about Steve Bannon. He's not Richard Spencer. I think he's unfairly slimed as being that sort of right-wing xenophobe or racist. And he's someone who already has a platform and he's already used it to great effect. So he's somebody who has made the news and in large measure is responsible for who's currently in the Oval Office. So he seems worth talking to. And the idea that David Remnick could not have performed his side of that interview in a way that would have credibly undercut Bannon's bad ideas, insofar as they are bad, is just to put so little faith in Remnick

as a journalist and in just the possibility of shedding sunlight on bad ideas that it just made everyone on the disinvite side of the the ledger look craven and so i mean it was it was just the worst possible outcome because it bannon gets to say that he destroyed the left without even showing up right yeah i i don't know i mean i the the deplatforming movement on campuses is something that i've never covered i've never had any reason to really look at it but in journalism I don't see that it really has a place because the standard is just, is the person newsworthy or not? Do they have something that we want to know or not to talk about? And in the case of Bannon, it's easily

true that he's newsworthy. There are a million things that I would want to ask Steve Bannon. And I understand the objections. I mean, to ask Steve Bannon. And I understand the objections. I mean, I heard a lot of them when I wrote about this, that there's nothing you're going to learn from Steve Bannon. He's a racist and a white supremacist, and that's all you need to know. Well, I don't think that's true. I think Donald Trump would not be president right now if it weren't for Bannon. And his tactics were very successful, among other things, in conning a whole lot of journalists like myself. And I would love to learn from him what his thinking was throughout that process in the summer of 2016. I'm sure there are a million

things that have happened in the White House that if he were inclined to talk about, I would love to hear about. He's a newsworthy person. Spencer, that's a little bit different because there's very little news value in what he's done. I think if you're a big corporate media outlet and you're covering Spencer, you're basically just giving him free advertising um i don't love that uh but uh but you're absolutely right i mean you we interview all kinds of crazy people and we don't think about whether they're good people or bad people at least i never have they just i just think about whether they're they're newsworthy or not i mean would you interview bin lad? Of course you would.

So I don't understand. I found that whole thing really troubling, and I worry about it creeping into reporting because if you add the requirement that reporters now have to sanitize the content for audiences and add all these indicators so that audiences know that this or that idea is bad uh first of all that's showing a remarkable like uh lack of of confidence in your audience's ability to understand things um and secondly that's just not what we do we're we're in the business of sort of finding out what happened and understanding things

and letting the world do with that information what it will. We're not, I hope we're not in the business of making political judgments about people, you know, in the same way that, you know, a campus administrator might have to take into consideration when they're deciding whether or not to invite somebody or something like that. Would you interview Alex Jones? Yeah, I probably would. What do you think about, I know you've written about this, but what do you think about the censorship of him by the various social media channels that have censored him? Was it all of them or is he still on Twitter? I know he was pulled down from YouTube. I'm not sure. I know that he's gone from most of them. How do you view that phenomenon? And would he be someone, you would certainly get a lot of grief

for speaking to him, but what do you think about the merits of speaking to him? Well, on the censorship angle, I thought it was really interesting because I think people didn't understand that moment all that well. We have had in this country for a long time, since the early 60s, a way of dealing with bad speech. And, you know, the standard has been New York Times v. Sullivan, right? We we've decided what's what's liable, what's slander. And the courts sort that out. And it's been a very effective system for preventing people from lying or publishing damaging information. The courts typically react pretty swiftly. And that private system has been a great shield to people like me because when I, you know, if I want to write about a company like Goldman Sachs or something like that, I know that I in order for them to successfully sue me that I have to get things wrong, that it's going to go to, you know, a courtroom and not some private executive somewhere to make that decision. And so the idea that we're going to switch and now have a new

standard where the decision about how we deal with bad speech is going to be dealt with behind closed doors in these sort of gigantic transnational companies. And it's not going to be public and it's going to be, you know, you're not going to really have a say in it if they decide to remove you from the platform. I really worry about that. I mean, I think, as I said, and when I wrote about this, to me, it looks like Jones falls under the category of somebody who could have been successfully sued on a number of occasions and probably would be out of business in the old days. But instead, because he was so unpopular and he's so noxious to a lot of people, when they removed him from all those platforms, everybody cheered. And I

thought that was a really dangerous moment because we're sort of formally switching from one enforcement mechanism to another. And this other enforcement mechanism is kind of scary to me, you know? So I worry about that a lot, for sure. What do you do with the argument that these are private platforms? I mean, these are essentially publishers that, by this argument, would be forced to publish ideas that are noxious, false, and damaging. In the case of Jones, damaging to the bereaved parents of murdered children. Is part of the problem here that Facebook and YouTube and these other platforms are so big now as to be not best thought of as private companies,

but they're essentially public utilities or just common space that a person shouldn't be barred from inhabiting? Well, if you just take just the two companies, Facebook and Google, that's where above 70% of Americans live. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full-length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber-only content,

including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad-free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now at SamHarris.org