Offline with Jon Favreau - Fox News’s Succession Battle, Breaking Up Amazon, and Twitter CEO’s Disastrous Q&A

Episode Date: October 1, 2023

Brian Stelter, longtime media journalist and author of the forthcoming Fox News exposé Network of Lies, joins Offline to unpack what Rupert Murdoch’s retirement means for broadcast media, American democracy, and his four kids. Will Fox News look any different with Lachlan at the helm? Could his liberal siblings force a sale to an antagonistic, Swedish CEO? But first, Jon and Max put their heads together to break down how a new agreement on AI helped end the writer’s strike, why the FTC has its knives out for Amazon, and what on earth X CEO Linda Yaccarino was talking about at the Code Conference. For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail] and include the name of the podcast.

You know, I said earlier, getting fired was the best thing that ever happened to me. So was having to get off the news hamster wheel and not have to care so much. I used to spend Saturday nights, you know, I'd be in bed. I'd be worried about what's going to happen Sunday morning. What should I do on my show? What guests should I have on? To be off makes me think a lot differently about the news ecosystem and like how the news world functions and sometimes doesn't function.

We oftentimes have the most interest in a news story when there's the least amount of information. You know, something's breaking news and, you know, we really know absolutely nothing about it, but that's when everybody wants to know everything. And then by the time we actually know all the facts, everybody's moved on. There's got to be a better way. I'm Jon Favreau. Welcome to Offline. Maybe the outtake this week should be Linda Yaccarino. Oh my god, cannot fucking get enough. Welcome to Offline, I'm Jon Favreau.

I'm Max Fisher. You just heard Brian Stelter, media reporter. We had a great conversation about the Murdoch succession drama at Fox and the future of media in the internet age. So we're going to hear that a little bit later. But first, Max and I are going to talk about the government's new antitrust lawsuit against Amazon and new ex-CEO Linda Iaccarino's disastrous attempt

to defend Elon Musk during one of the most uncomfortable interviews I've ever heard. Oh my God, it's garbage fires across Silicon Valley lately. It's not a good run for our pals up north. You're just going to want to listen in until you hear the Linda Iaccarino excerpt that we're going to play because it's good stuff. It's really something.

And then you're going to want to watch the whole thing. I've truly never heard anything like it. No. But first, the writer's strike is over. The Hollywood Studios and the Writers Guild of America have reached an agreement. Lots of big wins for the writers. And one of the big sticking points that we've been talking about on this show was over the use of artificial intelligence.

The agreement essentially says that studios can use AI written material. But if they give writers a draft of a script or screenplay that was written by artificial intelligence, they have to A, disclose it. B, give the writers full credit. There's a part in there that says, like, we agree that artificial intelligence is not human and therefore cannot get a writing credit. It's like, wow, great. Wow, way to dunk on the open AI. In love with Kevin Roos and still not a human? Come on. Where's your compassion?

And I think probably the most important provision, they have to pay the writers exactly what they would have if the writers had written the original draft themselves. So you can't say like, all right, here's the draft script and we're just going to pay you for a punch up or a rewrite or whatever. They have to pay them for the original and then the writers get the original credit. There's some other stuff in the agreement on AI, but let's start there. First battle of humans versus the machines.

Who won? I honestly think it's a pretty good compromise because the kind of the give and take is they can use AI. You can use the tools. It's not banished from writer rooms. It's not banished from studios, but it cannot be used by a studio to substitute either credit or payment for a writer. So it's not going to be, at least if everyone follows the spirit and litter of this, not going to be putting writers out of work, not going to be losing credits, not going to be losing money for it. I think one of the risks here was always that if they try to completely banish AI, then there's just going to be AI is still going to exist. So you're just waiting to be kind of competed out. But this allows everyone to kind of coexist with it in a way that seems

like a really good compromise. It does not solve the AI problem. And there's meaningfully, there's some provisions in here that basically punt and say, if the law later says that you can't train AI or there are limits on how much you can train AI on human written material then we'll come back to that later but if this becomes the model for how we kind of deal with AI's role in intellectual property I think that's pretty good yeah and like we should say that at first the writers were demanding like no no ai right and the studios came back with how about a meeting once a year yeah right so this is definitely an improvement on that yeah the one thing i worry about and this is probably longer term is so yeah if the studio gives writers an ai script and says

all right this is it's a little too chat gpt we got to punch this up right then they're then they're set right they're not going to get undercut in terms of their wages but what happens if a studio is like churns out a draft ai script and then it's like yeah that's pretty good we're good to go yeah so that and it's not it's not at that level yet but i'm thinking about my conversation with simon rich from last week and i do if it, now I don't know how you would have guarded against that in the negotiations because I mean, the only way you'd basically have to say studios must never be able to use artificial intelligence on its own without a writer. Right.

I mean, I think that's, that's a good point. And we're negotiating around, I mean, WGA SAG, everybody's negotiating around AI as it is right now, which is probably shrewdest for everyone involved, because you don't want to

make huge concessions for some version of AI that may turn out to never actually come about. But, you know, I think that you're right that this is going to have to be revisited probably many times in the future as AI gets more and more sophisticated. Alex Winter, who is a director, actor, writer, wrote a piece in Wired where he raised a couple of objections to it that I think are worth considering. I'm curious for getting your thoughts on them.

Number one was that the studios will just lie his concern about what they're actually training the AI and what they're actually using the AI for. You can't trust them. You have to assume that they will cut corners at every opportunity. And number two, and this is the one that I thought was actually really smart,

is that the studios need to acknowledge or need to consider something that they haven't, which is that the AI companies themselves could actually be the real threat here, much in the ways that studios did not take the threat of streamers seriously and that streamers could come in and actually displace their entire business. You know, OpenAI, whatever AI company, they could at one point decide we're going to make our own movie production studio, our own TV production studio, where we're not hampered by disagreements with labor and we can do whatever we want. And the studios and the actors and the writers need to understand they're all on the same team and facing that threat.

I think that second point is a very good one because you could definitely see that happening, which is why I think, and of course, the actors are still on strike. SAG is still on strike. And that's going to be important because you could see one of these tech companies eventually having everything they need to create films and television except the actors. Right. Which they're getting closer on there yeah they're trying to do but if they can make sure that they don't get the actors likenesses without some at least some negotiation then they can't do that so i think it's going to be important for the actors to stand for i think the what the actors want on ai is going to be an even bigger deal than on the writing side on the lying yeah so obviously don't trust the studios but what i've always and i've heard this from

some people in hollywood like a real worry is not necessarily right now that um ai is going to turn out a great script but that studios can use ai to turn out a premise yeah for a television show for an episode for a movie even and then the studio, for a movie even. And then the studio says, well, this is ours. It comes from the studio. And so therefore they don't have to pay for that like sort of original, the idea for the premise, right? And I think under this agreement,

it depends on how you read it. You know, it says AI can't generate any source material, literary material without credit. But what's to stop some executive sitting in a meeting being like, hey, we have an idea. Right. Right. Who knows where it's actually going to come from.

It actually comes from the computer. And there's, you know, the kind of the thing to consider is that this has always been an issue with just IP. You know, there's always been this question of like, well, a studio comes up with a script. Did they kind of borrow that idea from a book or from a novel or from a non-fiction book and this is something that it just had to be

we've had to work out the norms over time basically through the courts and now studios are pretty good about like they'll be safe and they'll just buy out the rights for something before they make a script they're very aggressive about buying IP rights for books and articles. But that had to happen by people suing and just forcing them to be proactive about it. So I think we're probably going to,

this is probably one step in a long negotiation over these norms. Some other related AI news, even though I know very little Spanish, just by taking it for five years, you may soon be able to hear me, Max, and other podcast hosts speak that language and others fluently when you listen to our shows. Spotify just rolled out. Just to be clear, that's not an announcement.

No, no, no. Spotify just rolled out a new AI-powered voice translation, which lets you listen to podcasts in other languages in the host's own voice. So their initial experiment is only English to Spanish right now. They have a few of their big name hosts that are associated with Spotify, Bill Simmons, Dax Shepard, an upcoming podcast, I believe by Trevor Noah. No word yet on when they'll do other languages or other hosts. Like I said, we haven't heard anything yet. I'm assuming you're just going to pop down one day. I'm going to hear Farsi coming in through the microphone.

What do you think about that? So there are a few companies that are doing some version of immediate simultaneous translation in the original voice of the speaker. And you look at these videos and it's really amazing. And I think this is kind of miraculous. Like I know I've been kind of a skeptic of AI. I've been kind of a curmudgeon. Like I think this is really cool.

I think that it's important to like think a little critically about what it can actually do and cannot do. I spent a long time as a foreign reporter trying to work across the language barrier. And I think that this is going to be really transformative in some ways. The idea that you can sit down and have a Zoom call with someone who doesn't speak your native language and can just freely converse with them is amazing. I mean, technologically, it's incredible. I mean, potentially world changing.

So that's kind of the question i have been thinking a lot about this like what are the actual uses for it i think forget about and we're not saying that uh let being able to listen to podcasts is world changing no our takes in brazilian portuguese will will save the world but it's right there in the podcast name if you play this out so that ai what is what is now has the power to break down language barriers between people right instantaneously right that that becomes a difference so the thing that i and i'm curious what you're kind of like imagining with this i think the really revolutionary uses are going to be i think the biggest one is going to be movies

and tv and like this will be a big thing i am sure sure, with the SAG negotiations. But there's an entire world of entertainment out there that is not in your native language, whether you're an English speaker or speak another language. And like dubs and subtitles never quite cut it. Like you never get the experience. You never get the full effect of the acting. And the idea that AI can now solve for that. So you can watch a German TV show and you're hearing the original actor's voice and seeing them say the lines in English. That's's amazing and i think that is going to open up a lot of like art and culture and entertainment for a lot of people that it's previously it's been kind of difficult to access um i think one of the big uses is going to be business meetings a lot of

international businesses where they're trying to talk across different languages it's going to be a lot easier to have those conversations now and i think it will be governments and like i'm thinking about the un thinking about like yeah like bilateral meetings that we've been part of on foreign trips i'm thinking of like it's just uh it's it's very interesting well talk more about it from uh the perspective of someone who's who's done journalism abroad so i've tried to do a lot of interviews in person, over the phone, over Zoom, across the language barrier with a translator,

and it sucks. It's terrible. I mean, it's like you can do amazing things talking to people, but it's just like the barrier socially and emotionally that gets introduced when you're talking through a translator, when you're talking through Google Translate,

like really makes it hard to connect with someone. And the idea that I could now, as a reporter, do a Zoom interview with someone where it will feel to both of us like we're speaking in each other's native languages, even if the translation isn't perfect, I think will do really incredible things. The idea that I could call up a dissident in Iran, and we could have a natural free-flowing conversation, you're just going to get much better answers, You're going to get a much better sense of the story you were trying to report. And I think that's journalism, but there are lots of applications to it. At the same time, forms of this technology have existed for a long time, right? Like the Google

Translate app, you can hold it up to someone you were talking to on the street, and you both speak into it, and it will speak the translation back back and forth and that has never been able to bridge the language divide because it's just awkward it's just like if you've ever tried to use it it's just really hard to have a conversation that way so in some ways the like the ai is not going to be able to solve that so like your vacations to france it's still going to be awkward when you go to the cafe like you're still going to be reading out of a phrase book like the tower excuse me can we actually zoom for a second so just talk in person yeah right right a little of that right yeah i think it's easy to see those videos and be like the language barrier of overall we've toppled the tower of babel and like as someone who has worked with more rudimentary versions of this like the

big barrier was never the speed and efficiency of the translation. It was actually speaking through an app or a website is really the big limitation, which we haven't solved yet. So we're not at universal translators, but this is still really cool. Yeah, my first reaction was excitement. And then I'll throw out two things

that give me pause. One, we were talking about this in one of our Slack channels here at Crooked. And you mentioned this is going to be part of future WGA negotiations. People here brought up, okay, well, if there's probably, if we're translating podcasts, aren't there podcasts right now that are translated? And isn't that taking human jobs for people who translate podcasts right now i think that's true to an extent that there are currently podcasts where there are the hosts and then there are two other people who are just translating max and john for a for a new uh audience right what a dream job yeah i was

gonna say uh poor poor people should get hazard pay for that um so to the extent that's happening yes that has to. But there's also a whole bunch of podcasts that would never be translated to other languages and no one would ever pay people to translate them. Right. And so there's a whole bunch of people in other countries who would get access to that. And people also mentioned there that like what is lost culturally when you translate, right? Because translation, even if it's perfect,

sometimes you just lose the cultural meaning. So there's that. And then the other thing I thought about is we have talked a lot on this show about sort of the dangers of the whole world being connected on social media. And like, maybe we aren't all meant to be connected on this large scale. And suddenly, if we are now connecting the whole globe and breaking down language barriers, like, what does that do for people who are trying to cause some trouble? Yeah, that's true. And I like I can't think of anything that any risks that are created by this, but I would have said the same thing about Facebook 10 years ago. And it is there's a been a pattern of just like, open up all the links, connect everybody and then just wait to see what happens. One of the big things that i worry about is spoofing um yeah not so much like high level

political disinformation because you know if you have a lot of money to spend on disinformation you could always fake somebody's voice but how easy it will be now to get you know a recording of someone on youtube and spoof their voice if you're trying to, you know, get their credit card information or try to get their passwords. And the idea that you could be, get a weird call from your buddy or a family member and you only find out later it's a spammer in Moldova

trying to get you to, you know, read out your PIN code is, you know, that's a little scary. Love it says we all need safe words. Okay. What's yours? I we all need safe words. Okay. What's yours? I have not picked it yet. Okay. I keep saying that every time we talk about AI voice thing.

And I think that's probably true. That's terrifying. Yeah. All right. Some more news this week about the government going after big tech monopolies. This is from the Associated Press. U.S. regulators in 17 states are suing Amazon over allegations the e-commerce behemoth abuses its position in the marketplace to inflate prices on and off its platform overcharged sellers and stifle competition

one of the most significant legal challenges in the company's nearly 30 year history new york times headline was a bit spicier lena khan versus jeff bezos this is big tech's real cage match lena khan runs the federal Commission, which is bringing the lawsuit. She's been an antitrust scholar and crusader for years and specifically argued that the dangers of monopolies aren't just about high prices for consumers, but about lack of competition. Right. What's your read on this one? I think this is the big one. I think this is the really big antitrust battle, like maybe of our time. I mean, they have a pretty slam dunk case. I think that Amazon uses its

complete domination of the marketplace as the big online seller where it's like 40% of all online dollars or something or through Amazon to do. One thing that it might be like hard to connect with is just like a regular person has affect me but I think like to try to show the effects of it on society like they use this position to squeeze retailers if you sell something you have to sell it through Amazon and that means you have to sell it on Amazon's term so Amazon can just tell you we're taking 35% it used to be 19% now we're taking a third And you have to lower your prices because we want your price to be lower. And you have to use our distributors and do all these things where it's now basically impossible for a retailer to make much money at all because Amazon is capturing all of that money, not because they earned it through the value they provided, but just because they are exploiting their control. Where else are you going to sell your products? Where else are you going to sell your products? Right. And the thing that I think makes it really dangerous for society, but that is also the big target for Lena Kahn and the FTC is they are using

their control of the online seller marketplace to unfairly dominate other markets. Like Amazon also makes a lot of products, right? They make, you know, toilet paper. And the fact that they control basically the prices and the marketplace because they can dictate it means that they can set their toilet paper at the lowest price. They can push their toilet paper in front of more consumers. And that means that they can make the quality of toilet... It's a weird example to pick. They can make the overall quality of toilet paper worse because what determines the toilet paper that dominates the market is no longer the best price. The best product is whatever Amazon wants to be in front of consumers. We're going to get

some scratchy toilet paper. Well, to use an example that's like close to my heart books. Yeah. So like, just to show that I'm not like knee jerk anti-tech, I actually think that Amazon initially was good for the book market. Like any bookseller, no matter how much you love your local bookshop, only stocks a tiny percent of any of the books printed at any given moment. So that means you can't access most books. If you write a book, it means unless it's a mega bestseller, you can only reach certain consumers, the bookstores that are able to stock your book, and it's only there for a limited amount of time. With Amazon, consumer can access any book pretty much ever written for as long as they want. If you're a bookseller, it means you can reach consumers for as long as you want, if you're a book writer rather. So that's really good for everybody.

But where it becomes unfair is now Amazon says, we are going to make an e-reader. We're going to make a Kindle. And I have a Kindle. I love it. It's a great piece of equipment. But what they use is they use their dominance of the bookseller marketplace to go to publishers and to say, normally when you print a physical book, you negotiate the price with booksellers and you kind of meet at this equilibrium where you share the profits. It works effectively for everyone.

For e-readers, we're going to set the price. We're going to tell you that it's half the price of a book, and we are going to take a much, much larger share of the profits from the sale of any book for us because we control the marketplace so we can set the price for everyone. Books publishers have no choice but to agree to these really stilted terms. And what that means is if you write a book, more and more in your book sales now go to e-reader sales because Amazon can artificially lower the price of an e-reader product, whereas they can't with a book. And you take a much smaller share of that. So even if more books

are being sold, the publishers and the authors get much less money for it, which means it's much harder to make a book commercially viable because Amazon is exploiting its control of the marketplace, take a larger share. So there are fewer books in the world and it's bad for everybody. There's less knowledge being produced. There's fewer novels. So I think that's a longer path to get there for the average person thinking about this, right? Because I think what Amazon has been thinking and their whole theory for a very long time is, well, we're going to sell at the lowest prices possible. So we're going to please the consumer and we're going to deliver faster the lowest prices possible. So we're going to please the consumer and we're going to deliver faster than anyone else.

And so from a consumer standpoint, you want cheap stuff, you want any book that you want, you want choice, that's great. And their argument, of course, is how could this be monopolistic because the consumer is getting unlimited choice at great prices, super fast delivery.

And I think what Lena Kahn has been arguing over these years is like, no, no, no. The lack of competition in the market actually does hurt consumers in the end for the reasons that you and for reasons that are bigger than just prices. Right. And this is what we talked about with Google, too, where, I mean, Google, like Amazon, initially dominated because they had a great product and they delivered it really well, but they reach a certain point where they have effective monopoly control. And this is just like textbook. Every company does this, where once they have an effective monopoly, the entire orientation of the business shifts from how can we make the best product so we can win over consumers to how do we leverage our control of the marketplace to extract more value while delivering fewer services. What do you think could happen here?

Would they break up Amazon? So Lena Kahn has been, she's been cagey on whether they would ask for Amazon to be broken up. That does seem like a pretty clear remedy here. The fact that Amazon both controls the marketplace and also makes all these products is just an incredible conflict of interest in terms of serving consumers. Maybe they'd spin off the product part from the marketplace. Yeah, exactly. Right. Or the e-reader becomes a different company. But they have also said that they are going to ask for injections to stop some of these anti-competitive behaviors like ratcheting up the share of the profits that

they take from retailers, which has almost doubled in the last few years. Well, that should be an interesting one to watch. Finally, Linda Iaccarino, the CEO of the company formerly known as Twitter, gave a truly wild, cringeworthy interview at the Code Conference this week. So she had been booked a long time ago to sit down with CNBC's Julia Boorstin. Like her first big interview, right? Yeah right first big interview um but she found out on the day of her interview that our old pal cara swisher had booked a special guest

to speak an hour before her the old swisherino y'all roth twitter's former head of trust and safety who told the crowd how he received death threats and had to sell his house after Elon Musk publicly accused him of sexualizing children. Publicly and falsely, we should say. Falsely, yeah. After he left the company because Yul spoke out against, you know, criticized Elon. And so he said, oh, you're an advocate for sexualizing children. That's how that went.

Which he just continues to play that card. Never really works out for him. Never works out for him never works out for him so this made things a bit awkward for uh yakarino when she walked out on stage and things only got worse from there uh let's listen to a clip elon musk announced you're moving to an entirely subscription-based service yeah nothing free on about using x did he say we were moving to it specifically or is thinking about it? He said that's the plan. Yeah. So did he consult you before he announced that?

We talk about everything. Who wouldn't want Elon Musk sitting by their side running product? I see a show of hands. There may be a few show of hands to get the cute chuckles you're getting, but I would say the percentages in this room are about 99% who would say no to that and 1% of maybe personal opinion. Oh, my God. god the secondhand embarrassment i feel so the context for that last clip which makes it so much worse yeah is that she was being asked like a polite roundabout way

of saying like are you just a figurehead ceo was like isn't it weird that elon musk continues to run product at your company yeah not you the ceo all the product teams report directly to elon right and so julie was saying aren't you more of a coo or she said a ceo in name only and to which um uh linda said uh that's not nice you know what it's not but like he's the one who did it right so that was awkward how do you here's the thing folks uh you don't have to agree to an interview first of all if you're not gonna be prepared for an interview you don't have to go yeah you don't have to book it she booked it she chose to go to the code conference and get and and do this interview and there's you know there's some complaints by like elon and the elon fanboys and some other idiots on x twitter whatever uh who, who were like, oh, you know,

Kara sandbagged her by booking Yul last minute and blah, blah, blah. And it's like, first of all, most of the problems in that interview did not come from her having to respond to what Yul said an hour before that. Most of them came because she didn't know basic, like, how do you not know?

How do you not know that Elon told BB Netanyahu, which is where you always want to roll out your new product uh your new product moves to bb um that uh twitter was going to move to subscription the questions asked in this interview were the most obvious foreseeable questions she possibly could have and every time it was like she had never considered the question in her life, which is like she got asked about the like ADL suing Twitter, like the Elon Musk anti-Semitism thing. And Yaccarino's answer was everyone deserves to speak their opinion. And then she looked at her watch and said she had to go. What an incredible. Anti-Semitism.

Whoops. It's getting pretty late. I'm going to pull that next time you ask me a question on a pod. I don't know the answer to it. I'm going to say, well, I have to leave, unfortunately. And it just like... Yak attack. The fact that she had not even... Yakity yak.

Don't talk at all. It really gives you... Wow. It really gives you pause. It seems like not only is she just a figurehead which i think we all knew but like it seems like she's like not staffed like if she had any staff they would be like here are the questions you're gonna get here are some bullshit answers to give it's fine and she was the most sympathetic audience in the world and like couldn't hold

on to them and it just like and i think she hasn't thought of these questions in her own head that's the thing that blows my mind. If like you're a figurehead CEO, like whatever. We all take paycheck jobs occasionally. Like I get it. But you would think for your own like ability to look in the mirror in the morning, you would have some answer for yourself about like why this is okay or what your role is. But it was like no one had asked her that, including herself. Feels like she hasn't really thought through that life choice might want to mulligan on that life yeah uh also it's just

like even if she was well prepared it is quite difficult to defend everything elon musk has done over the last however many months that he has been in control of all in pod does it every week and i tip my hat to that. I tip my hat to that. She had listened to one episode of the All In Podcast. She would have been so well prepared for it. She's clearly not. I mean, like, I see her tweeting once in a while,

but I don't think she's an avid user. At least she doesn't know what's going on on the platform. And someone noticed, not even on the home screen on her phone. She held up the phone. Twitter's not on it. No, there was no Twitter on the home screen on her phone. She held up the phone. Twitter's not on it. There was no Twitter on the home screen that we could see. And settings in the dock, which is iconic.

What? Settings in the dock? That's a boomer behavior. What are you doing? I think this is actually significant beyond just being like Linda Iaccarino. I'm so sorry, I'm not sure what you mean like clearly a figurehead clearly like not plugged in at all to the tisans of the company seeing the

crowd which is the like Silicon Valley like elite laughing at her openly I think really tells you something about where people see not just her but Twitter and X and the Silicon Valley ecosystem even Silicon Valley is like this company is a train wreck garbage fire. That's really bad. Yeah. And also her performance on this really matters more than just PR, but because she has to give the same spiel this coming week to Twitter's creditors. Yeah. Twitter owes $13 billion. to New York in a couple of days to meet with the bankers that have made these loans who are panicked and apoplectic to try to convince them that she can steer the ship, that she's got the

company under control. Elon Musk very pointedly is not coming with her. And if she turns in this kind of performance, it's going to start to have real consequences for the company. You don't think that the lenders will be persuaded when she tells them that more people watched Tucker Carlson's interview of Donald Trump than exist in the world? And then humans that have ever or will ever exist. You don't think they're going to buy that? One of the bankers, of course, anonymously told the Financial Times she has to get him out. They need the dollars to come back. Their hair is on fire.

They didn't want to. We know we've talked about this before. Twitter's creditors did not want to hold on to these loans at all. They wanted to make the loans and then they wanted to sell it to other investors. But they can't because they cannot even find buyers for these loans at 60 cents on the dollar. That is how little people think of Twitter's ability to pay back debt that is worth only a quarter of the company when Elon Musk bought it. And so I think when they see that like revenue is down 60% by Musk's own admissions. And when they see Linda Iaccarino come in and she'd be like, I don't even know what the plan is for subscriptions. I don't

even know what's happening at my own company where I'm CEO. I think they're going to panic. Yeah. At one point, Julie was like, well, so, but you, you came from the world of advertising you know that and so don't you find it a little odd that you would stop trying to sell advertising for Twitter and just go to subscription and she's like I was brought in to run this company not to sell advertising it's like so are you going to subscription anyway back to anti-semitism no Elon and I talk about everything do you think they're going to go to subscription anyway back to anti-semitism no i elon and i talk about everything do you think they're going to go to subscription we never we haven't talked about this on the show what a great question i think i don't know they floated it a lot i know i know every new development we say

is going to like kill twitter but i think you make everyone pay that i don't i mean when you start to throw up the paywall people are just not gonna they're not going to continue to log on i mean it's it's like the same problem with you have enough outages you make it hard enough to access the service people are going to stop using it i have to imagine that for that reason cooler heads are going to prevail also if they're going to have a subscription model they're going to have to build it using who using what engineers yeah not linda yagorino Using who? Using what engineers? Yeah, not Linda Iaccarino. You're not excited to be coding next to Linda?

Show of hands, show of hands. Okay, so after the break, my conversation with Brian Stelter, of course, who's formerly of CNN. Now he's a host of Inside the Hive podcast at Vanity Fair. He's got a new book out that's coming out November 14th. It's called Network of Inside the Hive podcast at Vanity Fair. He's got a new book out that's coming out November 14th. It's called Network of Lies, the Epic Saga of Fox News, Donald Trump and the Battle for American Democracy.

We had a great conversation. We talked about all the succession drama at Fox now that Rupert Murdoch has stepped down as chairman. Really big deal. What did you think when you heard that news? I honestly, I first had questions where I think that like so much of how, and this is why I'm really excited for Brian's interview. So much of what this means for Fox News and therefore American democracy depends on the inner mechanics of a like set of like 10 or 20 personalities within Fox News. Yeah. And that is something that is, it's like really opaque.

And so that was why I was really excited to hear from people like Brian specifically, who has been so smart on cable news for so long. Yeah. I'm like, kind of help me understand where does this going to take us? Because it could, it could go a lot of different directions, I think. And I will say like Michael Wolff also has a book out about this. Michael Wolff says a lot of things. Right.

And that's why. So it's like Michael Wolff's out there doing like the, you know, the succession fantasy version of this. But Brian, as he tells me, he's done like a lot of reporting. He's like gone to Fox. He's talked to people. Everything is like very well sourced. So I'm very excited for Brian's book. And we had a great conversation about Fox. And then we also had a good conversation just about the future of cable and network television and journalism. And, you know, how do you, how do all the different ways that we consume information now sort of bear on the larger democratic project, small d democratic project? What are the languages you think Fox News is going to use the Spotify app to translate itself to?

You think Arabic language Fox News is going to be big? You think that's going to be big, yeah. They're already translating Tucker into Russian. So there's an audience there. Oh my God. It's your big market, Fox. It's brutal. Anyway, fantastic conversation with Brian, which will be up right after the break. Brian Stelter, welcome to Offline. Thank you. I think I'm not sure what

to expect. Well, I know you have a very timely book coming out soon about Fox News. So I wanted to talk to you all about Rupert Murdoch stepping down as chairman and the future of the network. But first, how much rewriting have you had to do since the news broke? Well, that's a very sensitive question because earlier today I was going over the PDF, making sure that the new paragraphs about Rupert were in the right place, were formatted the right way. And now I'm just hoping that nothing else happens to him between now and November. Oh, yeah, that's right.

Well, you know, he's 93. I just want a totally normal, calm fall. But look, he did me a solid. You know, he announced his quote unquote, well, he didn't call it this. His aides called it a semi-retirement and he announced it right on the last week that I was allowed to make changes to my book. And it's all going to take effect in mid-November when the book comes out. So I'd like to think Rupert did it for me, but I'm not quite that naive.

Oh, so it sounds like, yeah. So it sounds like the timing is pretty okay then. So my first reaction to the news was that it wasn't a big deal because Lachlan, who's taken over for his father, is like even more conservative in terms of the future of Fox. And it seems to be true for the time being, but I hadn't realized that when Rupert dies, Lachlan and his three siblings, who aren't that conservative, each get a vote on the question of what happens to Fox next. So what are the different possibilities of what might happen at that point? And which do you think is most likely?

Right, well, I do see short-term and long-term implications. Short-term, you could make the case that this is a good thing for Donald Trump because Rupert Murdoch, for all of his warts and flaws of which we could spend an entire episode talking about, he was internally a sharp Trump critic.

You know, internally, he was the one saying, we're going to make Trump a non-person after January 6th. So to the extent that he is diminished, removed, less powerful, less influential, you know, that could bode well for Trump at Fox in the short term. In the long term, anything could happen. You're right. Anything could happen. And it is very much up in the air because we don't really know where all the siblings stand. We know that Lachlan is the chosen son. We know that Rupert wants him to be in charge long into the future. My view about Rupert's announcement was that it was mostly a signal to the siblings.

It was mostly a signal to the siblings and to the marketplace that Rupert has made his choice no matter what. And as a source said to me, and I added this to the book just a couple of days ago, a source said to me, I'm going to paraphrase, but it was something to the effect of now the siblings would have to expressly overrule their father's wishes, right? The father has made the wishes very clear. And if they make a change, they are explicitly overruling him, which could very well happen, right? Because as you alluded to, James Murdoch wants nothing to do with the current

version of Fox News. He's disgusted by the current version of Fox News. He very much wants change and has plans for change. But what his two sisters do, his sister Elizabeth and his half-sister Prudence, that's very much up in the air. Those are the X factors. And, uh, if I were sitting here having to, to guess what could happen, you know, I think I would probably lean toward a sale, you know, some sort of spinoff, some sort of asset sale, divestiture, as opposed to some dramatic, uh, takeover. But now that I've said that on the podcast, now I regret it because I'm going to be wrong. And so I'm hoping that this audio is forgotten because it is just so uncertain. It's when I talk to sources in this world, they make so clear no one has any idea how it'll play out. What do we know about Liz and Prudence and their politics and where they stand?

Like how much how much reporting have you done on that? How much is known? A little bit is known. And the following, you know, comes from public appearances and non-public appearances. You know, Prudence is not very visible at all. I would say she's mostly invisible. She's not involved in the companies. And she likes it that way.

She's a very anonymous figure. Liz is a little bit more visible. There was a moment during the Super Bowl on Fox where Rupert and Elon Musk and Elizabeth Murdoch were all in the same box. And that got tongues wagging in certain Murdoch world circles. Liz is the one who seems to be a bridge between James and Laughlin. James and Laughlin don't speak directly. They have not spoken directly in years, which is really sad on one level and really wild on another. But Liz is the bridge between them. And maybe that makes it harder to know exactly where her politics are on this matter.

I also think there's a difference between personal politics and interest in profits, interest in the cash money that flows off of this company. The cold hard bottom line is that all of these kids have lots and lots and lots of Fox stock, and they're going to want a positive outcome for those shares, whether that means, you know, yanking Fox News back closer toward reality or whether it means selling off Fox News to some billionaire or some sovereign wealth fund. They're going to want a positive outcome. Well, let's play resistance fantasy politics for a second, because I did hear some reporting that like James has this vision where he wants to get the sisters on his side and then uh when rupert dies you know the him and the two sisters because then outvote lachlan take over the company and he wants to then like make fox a force for good or de-radicalize

it like in that scenario like how does that even work does he fire all the talent and start fresh like don't the ratings just crater at that point? What happens to the audience? I don't know how that's even a possibility. This is exactly the question that I have asked repeatedly. And here's the best answer I've heard. The best answer I've heard is, James does not want... Well, okay, the answer always starts with, there is no plan because Rupert Murdoch is alive and James is busy with all well, okay. The answer always starts with, there is no plan because Rupert Murdoch is alive and James is busy with all of his companies. Okay. So the answer always starts that way. He's on the board of Tesla. He has all these investments in streaming and et

cetera. But then you go a little further. The answer is this. James is not trying to turn Fox News into, I don't want to say MSNBC because i hate that false equivalency between fox and msnbc it's total bullshit but he's not trying to turn fox news into a center left network he's not trying to do that he would try to turn it into a center right reality based network right and uh what would that mean well it probably would not mean sean hannity at 9 p.m after a couple of years but it could very well mean a lot of the talent, a lot of the producers, a lot of the shows remain in place,

but they are held to some... Gosh, I don't want you to make fun when I say this. They're held to some sorts of journalistic standards. They're held to some sort of norm. Like somebody is doing some fact-checking sometimes. Which in the current version of fox it sounds

crazy i know right well it sounds like and and also with with his politics and if it's center right it's more like uh instead of covering uh the latest caravan from from mexico they're covering uh tax cuts and and perhaps in a favorable right yeah well and that's the thing right so so james and his wife katherine they had a fundraiser for biden last fall on the upper east side and their mansion on the upper east side and you know on one level that is so revealing about the murdoch family that one guy is holding fundraisers for biden the others are trying to destroy biden with the network fox news but on another level somebody said to me look it's not that james is this strident democrat it's that he's a moderate

who wants to defend democracy. And if you're going to defend democracy, you're going to hold a fundraiser for Biden in 2022, right? This gets to what we see all the time across political news bubbles about Republicans and moderates and folks who would not normally identify as Democrats trying to come to the defense of the system. And so I think that's what we would see from James, a pro-institutionalist, a pro-system, a pro-democracy version of Fox News. Yeah. So until that episode of Succession happens, in the present reality, we've got Lachlan in charge of a Fox that has just settled one massive defamation suit, is facing more, lost its most popular primetime host and has competitors like

you know Newsmax and countless other right-wing media outlets nipping at its heels what what's the plan to right the ship is there one I don't think Lachlan thinks the ship is sinking do you okay yeah that's a good that's I can't it certainly doesn't look like it from the outside but I don't know what the sort of post-domominion internal sort of wrangling has been, if at all. There are definitely some unknowns, and one is about what happens to all the other lawsuits. Dominion was settled, but Smartmatic is next. Smartmatic is very much a live issue. I mean, depositions are supposed to be getting underway.

Smartmatic is not going to be willing to settle until they get what one lawyer called a second bite at the apple, meaning they get to go and read all the Dominion depositions. They get to read all the Dominion discovery, and then they get to go and try to find even more. They get to go and try to get even more. So you can imagine a scenario where some of Rupert Murdoch's or some of Lachlan Murdoch's emails did not get handed over to Dominion, but would get handed over to Smartmatic. So who knows what Smartmatic is going to find? The point is Smartmatic is not going to want to settle until it finds everything. They're going to want maximum leverage. So that's a huge unknown. It's a huge wild card. There are also shareholder lawsuits. And there's this new primetime schedule without Tucker Carlson

that's not quite as popular as the one they used to have. I would argue that the ratings are coming back. The viewers are coming back. The Tucker Carlson fans, at least some of them, have migrated back to Fox, but it's still an unknown. I think, though, when I say Lachlan doesn't think the ship is sinking, what I mean by that is that Fox News remains his profit engine. It remains the way that he brings in cash to then go make investments in streaming like Tubi or make other investments for Fox Corporation. So I think he looks at Fox News and says, by firing Tucker, he sent a very loud message. And we can debate what that message was. And I bet you would say, what is that message? I don't want to play Lachlan Murdoch here, but let me just, I'll go along with it for a second.

Part of the schtick. He might say that he made Fox News 10% less crazy. He might say he made, well, he wouldn't say that because he- He wouldn't acknowledge it was crazy in the first place. Yeah, and he defended Patriot Purge. I mean, he did internally. He was able to defend it. So I don't want to say that. But I think I think Tucker's firing might be viewed down the line as Lachlan Murdoch

sending a message to the rest of the staff, to the rest of the team, that no one's bigger than Fox, that no one can abuse the system the way Tucker did, that there is a limit to some of the conspiracy theories. I know it's hard to believe, but there is a limit to some of the conspiracy theories. I know it's hard to believe, but there is a limit to some of the conspiracy theory rising. You remember last spring when Tucker got a hold of the Capitol Hill tapes, some of the, you know, deleted scenes from the riot and pretended like they showed a peaceful protest. So none of the other Fox shows ran with that story. None of the other Fox shows followed up on Tucker's so-called scoop. I think that was an early sign that Tucker was too far fringe,

even for Fox. When you look at what Jesse waters does now in Tucker Carlson's old time slot, a lot of it is repulsive in my view, but it is not quite as far into the fringe land as far into the wilderness as Tucker was. I think, you know what I mean,

John? I mean, Tucker was not Tucker in 2023 was not the character that he was. I think you know what I mean, John. I mean, Tucker was not, Tucker in 2023 was not the character that he was in 2017. Right. He became unglued. And I do think Lachlan was sending a message to the rest of the staff,

to the marketplace, the public, that there are limits even on Fox and that I suppose as a business calculation, just as a crass business calculation, it's better to appeal slightly more to the to the independents, to the so-called moderates that tolerate Sean Hannity than it is to appeal to the Tucker Carlson fringe. Yeah. Am I making any sense? Because I don't even know if I believe it, but I think that's what Lachlan believes. Well, so the way I think about it, which is it's pretty much the same, but a little slight difference is I've always thought that Hannity Hannity is just like a Trump guy.

Right. He's like a Trump hack. He'll go out there. He'll say whatever Trump needs him to say, whatever the White House wants him to say. Like he's he's the Trump guy. Yeah. Tucker was more invested in Trumpism. And I think I've always thought Tucker was a little more dangerous in that regard because he has just sort of like the company guy, spouting the company line when it comes to Trump. I think Tucker has his own agenda that is independent of Trump, even though it is sometimes aligned with Trump.

And I think that's been borne out by Tucker's behavior since he was fired. And I've had people at Fox say to me, go look at what he's posting on X. That's exactly why we don't want to be in business with him. And the best slash worst example was his interview with that Barack Obama accuser. There was a suggestion that he was trying to get away with stuff at Fox that he couldn't get away with. And so now he's doing it on his own off in the, I don't want to call it a swamp, the quicksand of X.

And so I don't say that in order to defend fox but i i say that in order to understand their business rationale that it made more sense to lose some ratings in the short term to take a publicity hit to create a controversy to create a you know what happened when tucker was fired there's this whole conspiracy there that's all these conspiracy theories now about why was he really fired it has set set, you know, the far right on fire. And you can go and read 10 different theories about what really happened. And they're all bullshit. But, you know, I think Fox decided to take that risk in order to pull the channel just slightly back toward the, again, still hard right, but reality-based world. Maybe. So obviously, Rupert was well reported that he was he was done with Donald

Trump. He initially tried to make DeSantis happen. You could argue, kind of see there was a little Nikki Haley boomlet on Fox since the first debate. Now that Trump is 40 points ahead of everyone else and Loughlin's in charge, do you see any indications that Fox won't be 100% Trump? Is the family or people at Fox still trying to push other alternatives to Trump, or are they just throwing up their hands at this point? The way I see it, Trump leads and Fox follows. And sometimes they resist that. They try to fight it.

They try to pull away, you know. But at the end of the day, they always come back together. So I think that's what's been happening lately. Certainly after January 6th, Fox made a very significant effort to pull away. They said, we're not going to interview Trump live anymore. We're not going to interview him on the phone anymore. And that was partly because of the Dominion fallout and the desire not to be sued by other possible victims of defamation.

But there were clear changes made to the approach toward Trump. Now, however, now that the polls show what the polls show, Fox is following the base. And that includes Rupert Murdoch, who I'm told, according to sources, has resigned himself to the likelihood of a Trump nomination by the GOP. Now, you know, we have seen the reporting that he's encouraging Glenn Youngkin and others to get into the race to challenge Trump. You know, I'll believe it when I see it. And even if I see it, I'm not sure I'll believe it. I mean, well, it's also it's I mean, it's obviously a ratings play as well, because, you know, there's the second debate this week. First of all, it was like relegated to Fox Business, which I found was interesting.

I saw a report that the ad prices for that debate were like cut in half. And none of those Republican candidates make for really good television, you know? And so I'm sure I'm just sure that at Fox, they're probably thinking like, yeah, you know, if maybe maybe there's people at the top of Fox that don't want Trump as the nominee, but like, what else are they going to do? They've got to make TV and make money. At least that's Fox view, probably. Well, I'm of two minds on this because, yes, Fox absolutely wanted Trump at both debates. I mean, look, Suzanne Scott and Jay Wallace drove out to Bedminster and begged Trump to show up. For the second debate, they were not so publicly eager. But I think clearly Fox wants Trump at the debates. That said, I think it's interesting how

highly rated the debates have been without Trump. And tell me if this is foolish, but the first debate, you know, 13 plus million viewers. The second debate, the ratings came in on Thursday. It was basically 9.5 million viewers across Fox Business and Fox News and Univision. So look, they're taking several networks, they're smashing them together. But still, let me try out an idea here. Almost 10 million people still wanted to watch the vice presidential debate. And I kind of, I find a little bit of, not solace, I find that to be a little bit hardening. It makes me hope that there are a good number of Republican voters and independents and Democrats who are curious about the other candidates, even though they probably don't stand a chance. I mean, couldn't the ratings perhaps suggest to us that there is an appetite to move past Trump in the

GOP and people are actually, well, I don't know. I sound crazy when I say it, but we see it in polls. We see, we see in polls that at least there are four in 10 Republicans that say that Trump's not their first choice. They're open. That they're open. That they're open. And I think I heard this when I was in Iowa a couple of weeks ago talking with voters and I was talking with reporters there at Pointer Institute.

And what I heard over and over again was there are Republican voters who really adore and admire Donald Trump, but they know they need a backup. They need a second choice. They're afraid or they're concerned that he'll end up in prison and they want to have a backup. And that might explain the ratings, the high ratings for the Fox debates, but it is a really interesting and frankly, unusual phenomenon, like to feel like you have to have a backup choice. Yeah. I mean, look, people slow down to see a car crash, too. But I mean, it is. I would not have guessed that it would still get nine million. Again, it's you know, they are smashing together a couple networks. But that still is that's a sizable. It's not a lot. It's like if you're Mike Pence, if you're Ron DeSantis, it's not nothing. It means that you at least had a chance in front of a decent number. Now, the question, of course, is, will each debate just have fewer and fewer viewers? You know, the next debate's in November. It's probably going to be on the NBC networks. Is this just

going to be a situation of diminishing returns? And I think at the end of the day, you know, questions about Fox and Trump, Fox will go home to Trump. Trump will go home to Fox. There are times where Trump tries to go on other networks. You know, he does interviews on Newsmax. He goes on random far right blogs and podcasts you've never heard of. He is never accumulating nine point five million viewers. He's never accumulating 13 million viewers. He's never reaching as many people in a single shot as he can through Fox. So as much as he rants and raves and moans about Rupert Murdoch and Lachlan and all the rest, he knows, he knows where his base is. And that's going to create one heck of a clash, I think, in 2024. So I've always thought that Fox has played a huge role in radicalizing their audience.

I still do. the texts, emails, testimony made it pretty clear that Fox's content and editorial decisions have been based almost entirely on what they think their viewers want to hear because they're terrified of losing them to competitors. So I've wondered who's radicalizing who? Like, I'm wondering in which direction sort of the like, is it the viewers that are dictating what fox puts on the air or how much influence does fox have in deciding that they want to move the base in a certain direction i definitely think it goes both ways but after reading all the dominion depositions and all the text messages and emails and i've got like this two gigabyte file on my computer that i used

to write network of lies network oflies.com pre-order. When I went through this for the book, because I wanted to create like a reconstruction of every day in November 2020 and what everybody inside Fox was saying that month. I came away believing the audience is more in charge than the producers, meaning the audience, you know, through the ratings every night has more sway than the producers or the hosts. But it definitely goes both ways. For example, mid-November 2020, you know, when the Fox audience is upset about Trump losing, in denial about Trump losing, and really upset with Fox for saying that Arizona was going to go to Biden when it did go to Biden. But how dare Fox say that? There was, you know, the internal reaction against the decision desk, against the scientists who made the decision

was so intense. And the producers and hosts were looking at the Nielsen ratings for guidance. And there was this moment where one of Sean Hannity's producers says to him, our best minutes from last week were on the voting irregularities. And what he meant by that were the minute by minute ratings. That is the Nielsen version of fentanyl. I never saw minute by minute ratings at CNN for my show, Reliable Services. I didn't know those existed. Wow. They do exist. They are minute by minute. They look like a line graph up and down every minute based on the guest, the banner, the topic, the commercial break, and some of the behavior is predictable, right? Like when you go to commercial, there's always a

dip. But when you put on Trump aligned lawyer, Sidney Powell, you're going to get a spike. When you put on, I don't know, Pete Buttigieg, you're going to get a decline. You're going to get a big drop. So what this producer was saying was not just, hey, I know what guests are most popular. He was saying, talking about fraud is the most popular thing. Like what our viewers really, really, really want to hear right now, what they need to hear is about voting irregularities. And I thought that was so frightening because I've heard about minute by minute ratings used at the Today Show or GMA to figure out, you know, what celebrity to put at the 8 a.m. hour. But to hear producers using those ratings to say, we need to lie more, like,

we need to lie more loudly. That's another level of crazy. And that's not the only example, but that's one that popped up when I went through these filings. I think it shows that the audience is more in charge than any other force, you know, because the host can believe whatever the host believe. The executives at Fox certainly did not believe the big lie. It's very clear that by mid-November, they had moved on. And Rupert said that under oath as well, he had moved on. But the ratings, the audience was basically dictating what was happening. And that, you know, makes you realize that the fever swamps and the internet of whether it's right wing, you know, outlets or blogs or fucking comment sections or wherever it may be.

Yeah. These are really, they can have a huge effect on not just the Republican base, but then the loudest and biggest megaphone for Republican conservative politics, which remains Fox News. Look, the best example of that is from the weekend that Biden was projected to be president-elect. And this example is still relevant today because it could very well happen in 2024. Maria Bartiromo is heartbroken because her president has lost the election. Fox's decision desk has said Biden's the winner. Bartiromo's on the next morning, Sunday morning, and she needs to give her viewers hope. False

hope, of course, but hope. So she latches onto this email from some random viewer who admits she's a wackadoodle. This email full of crazy ideas. This email that says that Dominion, this company Dominion, with these crazy links to Democratic politicians, is somehow responsible for flipping votes. And Bartiromo goes in the air with Sidney Pelt, and she basically reads part of the email verbatim. Even though she admitted later she never fact-checked it. She didn't call the person and ask about it. She didn't like Google about it. She didn't do anything. She just read this, you know, viewers fan letter out loud on live television, hoping it's true. And that was the first mention of dominion on Fox. It was before Donald Trump mentioned dominion. So all of the drama, all the defamation lawsuits, all of the settlement stuff, you know, that it was actually just

like one desperate fan emailing one desperate TV host. I found that to be really sick. I mean, and my description of Donald Trump has always been like a Fox's biggest fan that became president of the United States, right? So it's like, and then Donald Trump sees something on Fox that Maria Barbaromo says, and then he says says it and then he ends up radicalizing more people because Donald Trump said it. So it really is what happened. Yeah, that's that's the cycle. Within five days, Trump was tweeting the word dominion. And that is exactly how it happened. He saw it actually on Sean Hannity's show because Hannity copied Bartiromo. And it is such a sad and And by the way, I think

it's self-defeating. I don't know what you think, John. I think this ultimately hurts Trump. It hurts the audience. It hurts the GOP. They may not realize it. They may be too addicted to the Fox, you know, message machine to realize it. But when you're told in 2022, there's going to be a red tsunami every day and then there's not. I actually think this messaging, this propaganda hurts the party. Look, I wish that that was the case. And I do think it hurts him to an extent in a general election, right? His approval rating and his favorability rating is still terrible. Look, I think about this from a political angle and an electoral angle, and it's like the country's very polarized. And it's like the country is very polarized

and Joe Biden won the last election by 40,000 votes across three states. And so if Trump has the Republican nomination and he has a rabid base who maybe don't vote in midterms, but they come out to vote when Donald Trump is on the ballot, then getting them all whipped up and excited, that benefits him and it benefits him in a high turnout, close election. I think long-term, it certainly has not been good for the GOP. They've now lost a series of elections, but all it takes, when the party is that radicalized as the Republican Party is now, all it takes is winning one. And the flip side of this is that Fox and Newsmax and all of these right-wing media outlets,

they also guide Trump and guide the candidates into what the audience cares about most, into what the base wants to hear most. Do you remember that rally that Trump had in North Carolina a couple of months ago where he mentioned, quote, transgender insanity? Yeah. What happened was people got up and started cheering And he says, I can't believe this. I talk about taxes and y'all just yawn, but I talk about transgender and everyone goes crazy. It was almost as if what Fox had been feeding the audience about transgender issues was coming back to Trump and Trump kind of taken aback by it, but learning from it. You sometimes see him at rallies learning from what the base wants well and that's also he's he's learning he's learning about what the base wants but i also

think that was a signal in the general that he's thinking to himself you know i know the base gets excited about this this trans stuff but i don't when i get to the general i think this is where this is why he is trying to do what he's doing on abortion too. Like I think, and you can see it. I saw him in that, in the interview with Tucker after the first debate. So you were the one person that watched. It's even worse, Brian. I was,

I was on vacation and I decided to watch the debate anyway. And then afterwards, my wife, Emily's like, you know what? I know you want to watch the Trump Tucker interview. Let's just put the laptop in bed and we can watch it there. So that's,

that's what I did. It was really bad. Did Emily watch it too? She did too, although she fell asleep halfway through, thank God. I'm not allowed to watch that stuff at home anymore. No, she wants to do it every once in a while. You have a really wonderful wife. That's so generous of her.

I do, it is. But, you know, at one point, Tucker's leading him down this path about, you know, Jeffrey Epstein and was there a coverup? And you can see that even Donald Trump in that moment is like, the fuck are you talking about, man? Totally, totally. Like, you don't want to go down there. That's what I mean about Laughlin and Fox. They don't want to be associated with Tucker. You see what Tucker is doing now. He did it with Trump. He did with Bill O'Reilly. He keeps implying that Trump's going to be assassinated, that the deep state is going to take out Trump. And that's the kind of thing I think he would be saying on Fox if he had

not been yanked off the air. Yeah. All right. So I have a question that's sort of beyond just Fox. Like this is a network that's struggling with some of the same challenges that is long-term challenges that are facing other television news outlets uh you know including the one you just left audiences are getting older that was so nice of you left you mean fired i'll let you characterize it audiences audiences are getting older most people under 65 getting their news from just about anywhere else oh yeah ad tanking, streaming and digital alternatives haven't really worked yet for anyone. Is TV news dying? Is it in trouble? Can it be saved? If not, like what's next? How are people getting there? How are people getting like trusted information? Well, if TV news is dying,

and it is to some extent, it's been dying for a while. So I would say sometimes this might speed up, it might slow down, but this is a trend we've seen for a while. So I would say sometimes this might speed up, it might slow down, but this is a trend we've seen for a while. When I was at the New York Times, I wrote a piece, must've been 15 years ago at this point, about how young people consume information. And the memorable quote from it was that young people consume news like a sponge. You know, they don't even know where they get it. They just sponge it up.

They soak it up. They get it from wherever they get it. They expect the news to come to them. They don't expect to go and get it. And I think that's even more true today. Information is, you know, you expect it to come to you. You're going to get it a thousand different ways. When it comes to television news, though, in particular, you know, the network where I worked at CNN, I like to embrace the word fired. You know, it was like the best thing that ever happened to me because I got to be a stay at home dad for a while and really, really embrace it. But you know, at CNN, I was hosting a CNN plus show. Do you remember CNN plus?

Briefly? Yes. Yes. Cause it only lasted for a month. It was a streaming service that lasted for one month. It was an experiment to figure out how to build that future, you know, news outlet. Now they're doing it again. They have a channel on the max app, all with CNN streaming programming 24 seven. So I think every network is doing a version of that, you know, trying to figure out what is the streaming option? What's the option that's going to be available to people when they want it, where they want it. Fox News has it too. It's called Fox Nation. It's not doing that well because if it was doing really well, they would tell us how many people had paid for it. But I'm told it has a couple of million subscribers. Fox News reaches about 70 million cable households. So something streaming for Fox is not going to be a replacement for Fox News. But it is a life raft. It is

something that they can use to try to swim or row or whatever. I'm not a big boat guy. What do you do? You use a life raft to get to the future. At least they're building options. They're building alternatives. And I think that's the phase that we're in right now. Other than the New York Times, which has an enviable number of subscribers and has really figured out how to keep people paying online, everybody else is putting life rafts in the water and trying lots of things and seeing what works. I mean, I feel like almost every shift in the way that people consume information over the last decade has made it harder to maintain a functioning democracy, which requires us to pay attention,

have patience, be open to other points of view, and most importantly, exist in some kind of shared reality. Am I being too pessimistic? Are there developments that have made the project of democracy a little easier? I am actually as pessimistic as you are, if not more, which I hate to say because I try to be an optimist and I try to teach the kids to be optimists. Same. I'm the same way, but it's tough. But when it comes to the media ecosystem and this environment, it feels to me like everybody is being poisoned.

And the reason I say that is, you know, information pollution, you know, propaganda, this poison that's in the atmosphere, for example, the big lie of 2020, everybody gets affected. Everybody takes it in. The people that live closest to it, you know, the proverbial plant or the proverbial factory, they get the sickest, but everybody gets sicker. And what I don't see are ways to combat that, that are as successful as the propagandists. The way I think about it is the real news media, the reality-based news media, has to be louder than the liars. We have to find ways to raise our voices so that we're louder than the liars. But that is awfully hard to do, because you're immediately accused of being polarizing,

being ideological, of being partisan, being biased, being sensational, being all of it just because you're trying to be louder than the liars. But I do think there are signs of hope.

I mean, I have to turn. I'm an optimist. I got to find signs of hope. I look at all the nonprofit news outlets that are growing, that are expanding. Yes, there's going to be bumps along the way, but there are lots and lots of these startups that are trying to create new news organizations to replace some of what's been lost.

And especially when you get beyond politics, they're working. You know, there's a hunger for news that's not just political, that's not just about your city council or your board of education or your Senate race. There's a hunger for news that is more broadly speaking and more palatable to people that's not just defined by who you are and what you represent and who you hate. You know what I mean? There's an interest in news that's beyond just the partisan warfare. Yeah.

You're going to say no, Brian, you're bullshit. No, because I've heard you say you've got to be louder than the liars which is absolutely true that i think like the challenge is the truth isn't always that it's not it's not easy to make the truth that loud or interesting or sexy right you know what i'm saying it's like the kind of journalism that we would want for a functioning democracy which is like responsible, like, you know, well-researched, well-sourced journalism, just telling the story like it is. Like, it's hard for that to break through.

And when you try to break through, you necessarily get a little, you know, you try to, you have clickbait and you whip up outrage. You're controversial. Controversial, right? And you're writing headlines that people are going to click on. And I mean, like we you know, we we have a media company here now and we do the same thing. You like find out that the that the rants about Donald Trump get

a lot more views than like a long explanation about some policy. And it's just like this is what the audience wants and like what the fuck do we do about it? Well, number one, the audience is not always wrong uh what you just described indicates that the audience recognizes a grave threat to american democracy that is true that is um hey love you audience love you listeners let me take it out of the media conversation for just a moment because i was watching this house what do we even call it impeachment inquiry it's like a pre-impeachment. It's like a premature impeachment. I was watching this hearing on Thursday and the most memorable moments, all of the clipped moments, all the

social media videos, they were all Democrats. They were all people trying to be louder than the liars. Like they were all from lawmakers who figured out ways to use their 30 seconds in really powerful, vivid ways. And I wondered, you know, again, it's not journalism that is clearly, you know, advancing a political agenda, but they knew what they were doing. They came prepared. They came a lot more prepared than the Republicans who had no clip worthy, newsworthy moments. And I do think there's a version of that that applies in news as well. It applies in the information space. It applies in the policy wonk space. I think there's a version that does apply more broadly.

I think that's right. I think it's no coincidence that a lot of the members that have been successful at doing that are younger. So there's a generational issue there, too. I also think that humor or at least lightheartedness is a good tool in this because I think there's a lot of people both in politics and media who, you know, take their subject matter seriously, but also take themselves maybe a little too seriously. Oh, geez, John, I live in New Jersey and I'm so jealous of my Pennsylvania neighbors.

Look at what Senator Fetterman's doing with his Twitter feed. I'm stuck here in Jersey. Yeah. And you can be, and I think you can be funny and you can poke fun at the absurdity of politics and media without, you know, misinforming people or whipping people up or ginning up too much outrage that's not deserved. So I do think there's possibilities there. One last question for you. You've been very generous with your time. I feel like when you were at CNN, you were one of the biggest news and political junkies in the business, weekly show, nightly newsletter. I know you haven't completely unplugged because you're still tweeting and writing and podcasting and you're on TV. But do you feel like stepping off the hamster wheel has changed your perspective on media and

politics at all? And like, have you been able to reduce your news intake even a little or how has your perspective changed? Yes, it has completely changed my perspective. And, you know, I said earlier, getting fired was the best thing that ever happened to me. So was having to get off the news hamster wheel and not have to care so much. I used to spend Saturday nights, you know, I'd be in bed, I'd be worried about what's going to happen Sunday morning, what was going to happen, what should I do on my show, what guests should I have on, you know, should I cancel Jon Favreau? Like in my head, I was always, you know, I was always on. And to be off makes me think a lot differently about the news ecosystem

and like how the news world functions and sometimes doesn't function. So what I mean by that is the news industry is really, really well built. So what I mean by that is the news industry is really, really well built and really, really well serves news junkies. You know, people like you and me, people that care deeply about politics. You could watch and listen forever. There's never an ending. If you're a more casual news consumer, if you're someone who just instinctively is very, very skeptical or just does not care that much, does not want to be bombarded. The news industry as it works does not really function well for you. It does not feed you what you're looking for.

I just think there's a huge opening, a huge vacuum for more casual news consumers. Not people who are never going to vote, but people who might not vote. You know, people who are on the fence, people who. Here's another way I think about it. We oftentimes in, and I say we, cause I'm still writing for Vanity Fair and doing stuff. And I got this book, like we always start our stories in the middle and not in the beginning. Look at the government shutdown that we're about to go through. Most likely, like we always talk about the shutdown, about how many votes for the CR and what's going to happen next in the, in the house, the Senate. How about starting the story with

why is the government open and what does the government do for you every day? What do these government employees do to help your life or hurt your life? But what do they do every day, right? And why is the Republicans

are always the ones trying to shut it down? Like the story never starts in the beginning. And as I look at this from the outside and I think about startup opportunities and stuff, I think about how to serve more casual news consumers. I think that's

the great opening. No, I think about that from a political perspective all the time because political scientists have done a lot of research on this. And they say that there's 20% of the electorate pays very close attention to the news and to politics and And 80% does not. And it doesn't mean that they never tune into the news. It doesn't mean they don't consume it, but they dip in and out and they're more casual news consumers. And most of them vote. And, you know, they don't, like you said, they don't vote in every election, but they vote. And a lot of times they may, and they don't necessarily always vote for the same party. So they make their decision based on sort of what's out there in the ether, the general news environment, and trying to shape that environment

and to give people good information, I think is, and to do it in a way that is sustainable from a business perspective, which is the trick. I think that's sort of the project for the next generation of journalists. Yeah, it's been really good to be on the outside and think about all the flaws with the current system. Not because I want to tear it down. I don't. I love the American news media. I lived in it for almost 20 years, but I do see ways to make it better. You know, we oftentimes have the most interest in a news story when there's the least amount of information. You know, something's breaking news and, you know, we really know absolutely nothing about it, but that's when everybody wants to know everything.

And then by the time we actually know all the facts, everybody's moved on. There's gotta be a better way. That's why when I spent all this time with all these dominion filings and I'm thinking, wow, there, we all heard like 10 amazing quotes from the filings. We all heard Rupert Murdoch say, and let's make Trump a non-person. We all heard Tucker Carlson saying, I hate Trump passionately. And, and yet when you dig a little deeper, you find all these amazing revelations that are there for the taking, that are in public filings, but never actually surfaced, never actually became public. And that's why I did Network of Lies, because I felt like

there were so many details in here that needed to be surfaced. And I think that's true on every story. I think that's true across every story. I think that's true across every beat that we have to figure out ways to get off of that breaking news cycle and more into, okay, something's broken. Here's how to fix it. That's the more interesting service we can do as journalists. Brian Stelter, thank you so much for joining Offline. The book is Network of Lies. You can pre-order it now, networkoflies.com. Is that right? Yes, you can. It'll be out November 14th. November 14th. I'm very excited to read it.

Brian, thank you so much for joining. Thank you. Offline is a Crooked Media production. It's written and hosted by me, Jon Favreau. It's produced by Austin Fisher. Emma Illick-Frank is our associate producer. Andrew Chadwick is our sound editor. Kyle Seglin, Charlotte Landis, and Vassilis Fotopoulos sound engineered the show.

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