Offline with Jon Favreau - How Jezebel Changed Media and Why TikTokers Are Rizzing Up Osama bin Laden

Episode Date: November 19, 2023

Anna Holmes, the founder of jezebel.com, and Crooked’s own Erin Ryan—the site’s former managing editor—join Offline to discuss the origin and legacy of a publication that redefined feminism for millions of women. With Jezebel shuttering last week, Anna, Erin and Jon question whether the site was a victim of its own success, to what extent it shaped identity politics, and if it’s fair to blame Jezebel’s readers for the anger and infighting we see on the internet today. But first! Max and Jon take a closer look at Osama bin Laden apologists on TikTok, the new device that claims to reduce phone dependence, and Ron DeSantis’ fight to post anonymously online. 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.

When I think about misinformation or disinformation, I think about the ways in which early Jezebel treated women's media. Now, I mean, on the scale of things that are important to the survival of democracy, women's media is further down here than, let's say, I don't know, national newspapers. But, well, at least I think so. I'm going to get yelled at. See, that's what's going to happen. I said that. I'm going to get yelled at. See, that's what's going to happen. I said that. I'm going to get yelled at. What about Teen Vogue?

I could be the comment section for you, Anna. I'll be your bad faith machine. Thank you. Welcome to Offline. I'm Jon Favreau. I'm Max Fisher. And that was founder of Jezebel Anna Holmes and Crooked's own Aaron Ryan. The three of us had a great conversation

about the influence and legacy of Jezebel, the pioneering feminist website that after 16 years of publication shut down last week. You'll hear that conversation soon. Max and I will also dig into how much Google pays to be on your iPhone, a new device that could spell the

end of the smartphone. RIP. I can't wait. And Ron DeSantis' fight with Nikki Haley about the right to post anonymously online. But first, did Osama bin Laden have a point? Guy had takes. I'll give him that much.

He did not have a point, but there were dozens of TikTokers this week who asked some version of that question after their first time i assume first time reading bin laden's 2002 letter to america uh where he tries to justify 9-11 by critiquing the u.s government for among other things its support of israel he also says quote the jews have taken control of your economy through which they have then taken control of your media and now control all aspects of your life. Precisely what Benjamin Franklin warned you against. I know.

I know you might right now. You're like, what is going on? What are you talking about? Franklin would have loved the caliphate. First of all, I love the caliphate. Here is a sample of of one of these TikToks. However, be forewarned that this has left me very disillusioned. And I feel the same exact way I felt when I was deconstructing Christianity. I feel a little bit just confused, like I have entered into another timeline.

What is this? And yeah, so go read it. Yes, you have entered into another timeline. That timeline is 2002 when the letter came out um okay so all of the tiktoks or a lot of these tiktoks are like eerily similar right which is just it's like that's the meme that's how it works it's like a setup right so i don't think there's anything uh weird about that uh that's one thing that's not weird in all of this some of them have someone uh this is the tiktok thing and

they're they're looking and they're it's like me in 2011 when we got bin laden and they're like jumping up and down and then they're like me now reading the letter and then they're just like whoa mind is blown i can't believe this and then people are like re-questioning their lives and they're having existential crises this is like this is the tenor of most of the videos right and a lot of them telling you like wow i didn't the media told me that osama bin laden was bad but i read this letter and y'all you will not believe the truth bombs being dropped he was a real one you gotta go check it out this is blowing my mind okay and it i just i i mean we both watch way too many of these we've literally spent all day doing this.

That's right, yeah. I'm sad to admit. All right, a few things to unpack here, Max. Just a few. What happened to us? Yeah, what happened to us, number one. First is something that you and I have been trying to figure out all day. How many of these videos were there?

What actually made them go viral? Right, so there's a little bit of a point of contention here about how much of this is a real trend versus how much of it is it just like a few select people who like were trying to edge lord and like wildly miss the mark we should say just at the outset that some of the reaction a lot of the reaction online on the internet was like gen z is lost tiktok has brainwashed them all it's all over what are we gonna do hyperbole leads to hyperbole leads to crazy backlash and we are not there but why don't you well we'll arrive at some some bad takes i'm sure just saying that here in case someone clips me the wrong way so you have to like understand how real this is

you have to kind of like unpack like how it came to go to come to everyone's attention in the first place so on wednesday evening a guy named yash raleigh a journalist tweeted out a compilation of like 10 or so of these that he had clipped like highlighting the trend basically and posted it to twitter x and of course it went extremely viral. But in a way to like highlight or to like understand how viral these TikTok videos actually were, this tech blog called Forfo Media looked it up, a bunch of the videos on Wednesday night, they pulled up everything under the hashtag that a lot of these people were posting to and they found that all of those views total had 1.3 million views as of Wednesday night and Yasha Arlie's tweet highlighting the videos had 8 million views yeah so that's that really sent it uh sent it super viral right right so it's just

to say that the like even when it first started the people like us who were like outraged at it or like what the hell is this? Outnumbered the people who were actually watching the videos by six to one. A real Streisand effect. Right. A huge Streisand effect. But it's also been huge on Google Trends and has really picked up on that since Yashar Ali's tweets, but was big before then. A lot of these TikTok videos referring to the letter pointed to a Guardian post that had posted this letter back in 2002. It's like the one easy place on the internet to find it. And the Guardian reported getting like 100,000 views

before Yashar Ali's tweet. So there was real interest in it, but it's now like picked up a lot of just people laughing at it. Yeah. And we should say that, you know, the old internet, the Guardian, just a website. It was the number one trending story on the Guardian website. And so this did, and that started happening on November 9th, the traffic started. So this has been going, this has been brewing for a couple of weeks. Although it's wild that you can be the number one thing on the Guardian, a huge newspaper, and not even in the top hundred trends on TikTok.

Right, yeah. And that's the thing is like you hear. So say there were we don't know, were there hundreds of these videos on TikTok? Were there thousands somewhere between hundreds and thousands? And like you said, the one that had the most views was one million. Right. And in TikTok world, that is not relatively speaking, that is not a lot. Right. It's more people than you want hearing about how smart Osama bin Laden was. Well, I was going to say. So like, even if there were only a few hundred that were like thousands of times,

what the hell is going on here? Yeah. So, okay. The way that I would thread the needle on this is that I agree with some of the people who have been skeptical of like the Yashar Ali framing that this is a huge trend and that maybe this is not that popular on our own only really blew up because someone noticed it and called a ton of attention to it like strice and affected but i think that this episode is getting so much attention from you know not just us but from like it's getting covered by

a bunch of media organizations and everybody's talking about it i think because not just the videos themselves or even just because it's like a shocking and weird and wacky story because i think it feels representative of what so many of us sense tiktok has become and what its role in our culture has become and i'm not referring to the like fox news josh hawley thing saying like tiktok is radicalizing our youth into joining hamas which you know we talked about last last week is bullshit. But what I mean is that I think we all sense that TikTok has become overwhelmingly a place where it's influencers trying to win attention and to ride the algorithm by taking whatever is the biggest topic on the platform that particular day. Right now, we know it's Israel, Gaza. And then just trying to outbid each other with the most salacious, the most radical, the most extreme take in whatever direction they think the audience wants.

And that clearly led some of these people to saying Osama bin Laden is great, but that's happening with every topic all the time. Right. And again, plenty of independent journalists and content creators on TikTok that are not doing this, that are doing really responsible work. Of course. creators on TikTok that are not doing this, that are doing really responsible work and informing us. We know all that. What's happening is just like on Twitter, just like on Facebook, just like on all these social media platforms, the incentives are bad and the extremes, whether it's like the extreme misinformation or the most polarizing content or the most emotional is what we're hearing about. In this case, it's like jumping between platforms, right? Because this is a big thing on Twitter after it was a big thing on TikTok.

I will just say too, like Osama Bin Laden, not great. Not good. Not a great person. But here's, it's, if you are,

and a lot of these folks who are putting these videos up are quite young, like Gen Z, right? Yeah. Now, again, plenty of boomers on Facebook. folks who are putting these videos up uh were quite quite young yeah gen z right yeah now again plenty of boomers on facebook uh you know getting caught in a lot of misinformation spreading a lot of misinformation right it's bad takes it's again it's not necessarily an age thing but in this instance if you're a gen z like you don't have a real good memory of 9-11 and the aftermath. And so maybe you didn't read any of bin Laden's writings or many critiques of foreign U.S. foreign policy that have been very similar to bin Laden's letter.

Because my point is like, there's nothing interesting in bin Laden's letter. A lot of anti-Semitism, a lot of virulent anti-Semitism, homophobia, all kinds of horrible shit. But even if you take all of that out and you just leave the critique of U.S. foreign policy that a lot of people have, and especially with regards to support for Israel, like it's just not interesting, right? Like you could find it in any book anywhere.

And there's this whole like the government doesn't want you to know this and how we've been told for so many years that they hated us for our freedom it's like no george w bush told you that because he's a fucking idiot right but it's like at the time and ever since lots of people the iraq study group report the 9-11 commission report all of these things like and by the way if you want to read bin laden's writings because the guardian then took the took the letter down yeah and tiktok removed all the videos um which they're not i don't know why yeah it's just gonna make it worse it did make it worse because then people are like they the government has been taking it down in the

western media because they don't want you to know it's like like, you know where all of Osama bin Laden's writings are? On U.S. government websites. You can go find them. In other words, you're going to be like, does that mean he was in cahoots with them? He was an asset. Yeah, right. So something that was funny about,

maybe funny is not the right word, was striking about reading the 2002 bin Laden manifesto, which I unfortunately did is that between the like calls for mass murder the like critiques of u.s foreign policy are completely banal and like pretty boring and that's actually something that is like standard for extremist group propaganda is you drop in a lot of reasonable things so then people do exactly what some of these tiktokers do which i'm not suggesting that they've been like radicalized, but people look at it and they say,

I heard this group was crazy, but look at all these reasonable things that they said. So like, it's actually fine. Right. And like, I don't justify what they did, but they made a point. And it's like, you don't need them in the equation. I mean, it is, I think, partly the result of our intense focus on like identity in the age of social media and not on like debating ideas because it's like that these ideas came from this horrible person said it said something that I actually agree with. Therefore, maybe maybe they're more on my team than I thought.

Right. Right. And not just like who the fuck cares what Osama bin Laden like regurgitated a bunch of critiques of U.S. foreign policy that have been around forever. Well, I think it also speaks to your point about if you are a young person who has never encountered any information about the world before the year 2010, because like, again, he's like kind of been all critiques of u.s foreign policy like you and i have both been much harsher about the global war on terror than like this letter was yeah and the thing that was sort of striking to me about seeing tiktokers be like having their mind blown at the idea that maybe american military deployments the middle east have some downsides to them is it like and i think this is part of why it resonated is i think that this speaks to a sense a lot of us have that like a lot of young people today i'm not not saying everybody, I'm not saying the Iraq war, there's plenty of resources and outlets that are like a lot more trustworthy than whatever shows up in your algorithm. And that's not to say that what shows up in your algorithm isn't entertaining or often informative

or often thought provoking. But like But if you really want to learn, there's plenty of resources out there. Yeah, it's good of you to make sure that we make face for the people who are using TikTok for good because they are definitely there. But I have to say, just based off things like the experiment last week of reading about Israel-Palestine, Israel-Gaza on TikTok,

I don't think it's a good place to go. It's like a primary source to learn about something. Oh no, not a primary source. And it's happening. I mean, this is why it's not, it's not great. And I think that I, obviously most kids who are using TikTok are not like learning that Al-Qaeda was good and they were right. And we're going to go like do the caliphate now. Yeah. And like, no one's taken a poll in a month and being like, oh gosh, Osama bin Laden approval among 18 to 29 is like that's not gonna happen it's not gonna happen come on somebody's gotta run that i love a troll poll i feel like what happened to troll polls they were so big in the 2010s what was it ppp used to run polls like this you would get seven percent said they like bin laden and then we would have a whole news cycle about it that's basically what this was we just did it it's true we just did it but it went it's also an example i think of just

the the power of outrage to drive attention and that's not just about the the original hundreds thousands whatever tiktokers who were saying you know give this bin laden guy a try it's all the outrage that we have now all done for all day. And like the White House put out a statement. I know. The White House put out a statement. CNN covered it. Like it's all major media outlets.

I know. We're all, and like we're playing into dignifying it. I know. I like to think that we're like- We're just trying to explain what's happening here. Right, right.

And it definitely, there is a lot of like, I don't know. And it's this weird cycle now where it's like, it was pretty small at first and now it's getting so much attention and condemnation that it's like you're saying now it's become a forbidden thing that everybody like I'm I looked it up, you know, a lot like you looked it up, you know, the other night, like we're all like kind of like what's going on? I want to look into this. this and then we will we will move on i promise his point about propaganda which is like i think what people might not realize is one of the things osama bin laden did all the time in al-qaeda was to push propaganda sure and we are very willing to believe that like uh you know fox news sometimes the u.s government sometimes the is government, right? Like what's a

propaganda? Guess what Osama bin Laden was trying to do? Spread propaganda. So it's like, if you're going to be skeptical of things you hear from the government, at the very least, at the very least, be skeptical of what you might hear from terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden. Well, I think the one last thing that I would add is that like we talked about like, is this real viral? Is it fake viral? And I think it's like a little bit of both. The whole thing actually really reminds me most not of like ISIS propaganda getting exaggerated by the Facebook algorithm in the 2010s.

It really reminds me of the flat earther trend on YouTube. Did you follow this? So as of 10 years ago, nobody believed in flat eartherism. And then at some point, the YouTube algorithm started promoting videos that had flat earther theories. And if you were on YouTube in like the late 2010s, you would see them everywhere. Because it was just like a salacious thing. You were like, flat earthers, that's crazy. I'm going to click on that.

And then all of these creators started making like flat earth, what's the truth videos? Because they would get a ton of views. And like the youth of America were not radicalized into flat eartherism, but it is way up relative to the baseline of zero. And there've been like a few celebrities who got pulled into it. They're like flat earther conferences.

Are you saying if we cut this conversation down to a tight one minute that our, what's going on with Osama bin Laden content is gonna get a lot of views? I just mean that I think that we are right to treat this as a nonsense fringe thing that is not

the vast majority of people who see it are going to laugh at it or they're going to swipe through it. But when you are dealing with tens of millions or hundreds of millions of people something that we have learned from the flat earther effect on YouTube which is very well documented is that that can convert people. Yeah. And kids just, you know, find some good information. Just double check. Yeah. Put down the phone.

You can learn a lot about the US foreign policy of the world, not from terrorists. You can read a book. What's the reading rainbow thing? Check it out. It's in a book. It's not on TikTok. Wow. That was cool. All right, moving on. Everybody in the studio is grimacing right now.

Yeah, I know. Austin looks like he wants to leave. All right, moving on. Some news this week out of the ongoing Google antitrust trial. While testifying in Google's defense, University of Chicago professor Kevin Murphy let slip that in order to remain the default browser on Apple products,

Google gives Apple a 36% cut of all search ad revenue that comes from Safari, which in 2021 alone would have amounted to $18 billion. Max, why was the release of this number such a big deal?

Google's lead lawyer apparently visibly cringed when this information came out, which it was not supposed to. Which is never good. That's never what you want from your legal defense. Yeah. You never want it written in the newspaper that he was cringing. So it's not just the fact that they were paying $18 billion in just this one year and are probably paying maybe even more in subsequent years. Although that in itself is really significant because what it says is that if you want to have a viable search engine today, the barrier to entry is $20 billion a year to Apple to get access to consumers. Which basically means you can't launch a search engine, which is a giant flashing neon sign that says that Google has a monopoly. But I think the really damning one is the fact that they were that 36% number that they had a deal to give 36% of their revenue, which is huge back to Apple, because it suggests that if they're giving over a third of their revenue to Apple just to be on the phone,

it suggests that over a third of the value of Google search doesn't come from the product. It doesn't come from what it's doing for consumers. It comes from the fact that it has this dominance over the search board. It suggests that their business model is not one just of delivering a good product, but it's one that is now hugely focused on maintaining that control of your iPhone.

With money. Right, with money, which is monopolistic. Right, which is probably why we got the wince. That's right. We'll see how that trial goes. So far, not so good. It's not looking good. All right, so Google isn't the only tech giant under threat.

Well, kind of. This week, Humane AI, it's a new San Francisco-based startup, released a new piece of tech that's been called the device that comes after the smartphone with a mission to quote liberate the world from its smartphone addiction i mean right is this for us or what i cannot tell you how skeptical i am that they are making a internet smartphone device to free you from your smartphone come on so here here's here's we'll describe it for folks. The device is a $700 AI-powered pen that you place on your lapel, or really anywhere you want, and is used via...

What were you thinking? Well, they were showing that in the video that some people put it on their bags. Oh, okay. In your purse. You can, I don't know, you can put it on your head, whatever. You can get creative.

Yeah, and it's used via voice command or a hand-gestured controlled laser display projected onto your palm. So you're looking at your palm, you're opening it up, and there's like, it's basically your screen on your hand. My body is a screen.

Yeah, right. The company's founder calls the experience screenless, seamless, and sensing and claims it allows users to be more present in their surroundings than their current smartphones. Go watch the video. There's like a 10-minute intro video

just if you're interested. It was sort of interesting. It was a little slow. I was like, okay, let's get to the point. What do you think about this? So I'm trying to turn off the cranky part of my brain that is just having a visceral reaction against the idea of another device

and this one that is blending seamlessly into my person. I don't know if i want to become robocop but if i could turn that off and look at this objectively it seems like it's an alexa pinned to your shirt basically and i think if you really like alexa or siri yeah or siri or any it's like if your phone was just siri with no screen exactly and anytime you need to see something, it would just show you on your palm. Right. But it's like, play some music

and it plays music in like a small little bubble around you that only you can hear. But then if you want to make it louder, it gets louder. That's kind of cool.

I was watching the video and it's like, so you can, obviously you text people, right? So you can say like, tell Andrew I'll be there later tonight. And then they said,

Andrew, I'll be there later tonight. That's what the voice says and then he goes make me sound more excited and then it goes Andrew I'll be there tonight can't wait and I'm just like that is a lot of steps where you could just be

like typing faster or you could just use your own voice too well that's my other problem and this is why I don't use Siri often. I don't really either. I know a lot of people who do. Yeah, but part of the reason I don't is just because if you're around, if the whole point here is

let's get off our screens, let's have more connection with each other, but we're all walking around talking to ourselves. Like, hey, I got a thing to do. And I'm going to, hey text austin while i'm talking to max and like it's just not right that's that worries me about it yeah i think that the we're going to reduce your screen time pitch is somewhere between disingenuous and optimistic um i mean i think the two models of this are basically it's either going to be google glasses

or apple watch google glasses being the like we have this cool technology and you're going to love just having the tech around you so much you're going to buy our expensive product. No one bought it because it didn't do anything that useful. Or it'll be Apple Watch where it does do useful things and that's helpful. And I know a lot of people who have an Apple Watch, they love it. But almost all of them say the exact same thing to me, which is it makes them spend much more time on their phone because it makes them aware of emails coming in or texts they're getting. So what do they do? They pick up their phone to answer it. I thought the translation option is cool. That's cool. You talk to someone speaking a different language and then it just starts translating it in real

time between the two of you via the voice on the pin. If that works, that would be really cool. That's cool. They use an example of the guy's holding some almonds in his hands and he just said, hey, how much protein is in these almonds? And they just tell you just from seeing the number of almonds in your hand. That seems like a very narrow use case. Well, then you eat them and then it says enjoy your almonds and then it says um and then you're like how much protein have i eaten today

or like what's my nutritional cut so there's like like stuff like that i don't know if that's necessarily the diet tracking that could be i use like the health app i mean this is again it's like google glasses the demo had so many things that looked very cool in the demo but it's this question of like okay is that actually going to plug into my life or is it just if i do exactly specifically the things in the google demo exactly as they did it it'll work i thought that like i was i was interested in the taking pictures and videos while you stay in the moment right because if it's like on your lapel yeah and you just walk around you're just like that's terrifying a little bit right i don't know

if i love that like you're talking to someone like is that your fucking lapel on is that videoing me or what no i mean how much of our culture now is like has adapted to the rise of the smartphone by all of the like norms and awareness we have around people when they're holding their phone in a specific way that says they're going to take a picture like we're very sensitive to that we want to know when someone is taking a picture or video of us that's important to us. Yeah, that is true. So maybe that's not as, maybe staying in the moment is not that important. It's going to be like 10 years ago, people started putting Post-it notes over the camera on their laptop.

Now you're going to carry around Post-it notes and put it over people's AI pens. Yeah, so I don't know. Tell me skeptical about the AI pen. Okay, okay. I'm curious. I'm curious. I'm very curious. Next year we'll be doing this and we'll both have our AI pen. Via AI pen hologram.

All right. Finally, Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley got into a Twitter fight this week over the God-given right to post anonymously on the internet. The core of the Republican Party cultural platform now is posting. I was going to say, it's like a top issue. It is. Yeah. So Haley

gives some interview. She says that allowing people to post anonymously is a national security threat. You know, that it's Russian bots and Chinese bots

and Iranian bots. Ron DeSantis, he's looking for attention. Boy, is he. He's slipping in the polls. He comes out aggressively in defense of the trolls and he tweets this.

You know who were anonymous writers back in the day? Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison when they wrote the Federalist Papers. They were not, quote, national security threats, nor are the many conservative Americans across the country who exercise their constitutional right to voice their opinions without fear of being harassed or canceled by the school they go to or the company they work for. All right. Who's side are you on? You with DeSantis or you with Nikki Haley? So my I'm against both of them. You're going to be shocked to hear. I thought we're going to get that clip so we could get it.

So I think Nikki Haley is proposing this for made up reasons and Ron DeSantis is opposing it on made up grounds. Her whole case that like we're going to get the bots off because the Iranian bots need to be anonymous. It doesn't make any sense. And also like we have a real name use platform. It's Facebook and it is full of like not all the time. It's a wonderful place all the time. It's a wonderful place all the time. Has had a lot of foreign influence operations on that platform.

Famously was the center of it in 2016. Although I'm sure Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis would not be the first people to acknowledge that. So like real name does not address the thing that Nikki Haley says she wants to address. Or said she wanted to address before she rolled it back. And then said that she only wants anonymity for Americans and not for the nefarfarious foreigners i do believe in free speech for americans they can be anonymous but the chinese bots absolutely not i want your names nikki haley bringing moderation in um and then ron de santis is opposing it on made-up grounds and that he's kind of pretending that this is like the chinese version of real name policy which is where you have to use your ID to sign up for it. And it's like very invasive.

But like we've been on Facebook, unfortunately, and it is not a horrifying invasion of free speech. Like it's not, it's not destroying our ability to discuss, unfortunately, our ability to discuss politics.

Also, there was another platform that had a verification system. It was called Twitter. And now... What happened with that? Well, now, it's just... If you paid the... Where's your blue check these days?

It's still there. Is it still there? I haven't paid a cent. I haven't paid a cent. Look, Elon... We didn't even talk about this, but Elon Musk this week, there was some real anti-Semitic garbage

that some blue checkmark account was tweeting. And then it was basically like great replacement theory kind of stuff. And Elon Musk was like, you speak the truth. That is the truth. And now there's like advertisers pulling ads from it. And it was just as we're continuing the dissent. And he got disinvited from the APEC. effect the asia pacific economic cooperation the the like huge international forum but deal books to house them on which yeah which is kind of funny rethink that they had sam

bankman freed on like during the ftx collapse wow okay well there you go what do you think about verification systems in general like do you think that there's, not that like no anonymous posting, but is there a way to sort of, sort of cut down on not just bots, but like the sort of trollish accounts? I mean, this was a huge thing in the like late 2000s and early 2010s where we were like, the internet was becoming

at the center of our society. And like that was what led Facebook to adopt RealName. It was very controversial at the time. And like, that was what led Facebook to adopt real name. And it was very controversial at the time. And I think the effect is just not cut that hard in either direction. It's still pretty easy to set up fake accounts. It's still pretty easy to be an asshole. People are still assholes under their real names. That's the, that's the real, yes. People are assholes under their real names. They'll give you their address and they'll say, I'm an asshole,

come find me. Here's my social security card and here's a racial slur. That is what we get. That is what we get. And I have not seen this actually comprehensively studied. I get the sense anecdotally that it cuts down a little bit on the toxicity. You know, platforms like Twitter are worse for a number of reasons. The anonymity is probably one of them. But I think the reason that we ended up basically not pushing too hard in one way or another is that it just doesn't make that much of a difference.

And there's only one country in the world, China, that has ID-backed real name verification because it is such a privacy nightmare. South Korea had it for like three years, and the Supreme Court struck it down because they deemed it such an invasion of privacy. So I think that what we have is basically what we're going to get for account verification. I agree that something like rolling out something universal, like what Twitter has, would be great to get to eventually, but you need a long-term, long-lasting platform for that. And they're just all too unstable. You know who wasn't afraid to post in his name? Osama bin Laden.

That's true. That's where we're going to end. Alright, some quick housekeeping before the break. We are closing out the year with two final live shows of Pod Save America. You can catch us in El Cajon on December 7th or San Jose on December 13th. Get your tickets now at cricket.com slash events.

And if you are already feeling queasy from the 2024 Polar Coaster, don't fret. We can help you turn that anxiety into action. Join the Vote Save America community for all the tools you need to take action in this presidential cycle. From volunteer opportunities to making sure you're registered to vote, head to votesaveamerica.com

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They make the perfect gift for the holiday season with free returns just head to cricket.com store that's cricket.com store anna holmes and aaron ryan welcome to offline thanks for having me hi yeah thanks for having me too so uh some of my favorite writers and people come from Jezebel. One is sitting across from me. Kara Brown is a good friend who also hosted a Crooked Pod. I was lucky enough to talk to Gia Tolentino for the very first episode of this show. But because I was chained to a desk writing speeches during the Obama years,

I kind of missed the dawn of the digital media era, in which Jezebel played a central role. And I know that your vision for Jezebel was in many ways shaped by your time working at Glamour. But what did you want readers to take away from the site when you first started it in 2007? I wanted them to know that there were other young women like them. And maybe I shouldn't say young women, because we had readers who were at the time older than I am now. And I'm not telling you how old I am. But I was in my mid 30s. And I was looking to try and bring in an audience that was as young as let's say 18 and going up into their 50s. But to back up and answer your question with more specificity, I wanted the readers and the guests, I'd say, I described guests as being people who stumbled upon the site and hadn't decided to stay yet, to know that there were other young women like them who cared about

a myriad of things, could walk and chew gum at the same time, who cared about politics and pop culture and race and the intersection between all of those things. And the other thing I wanted was to create a kind of 21st century version of Sassy Magazine, even though Sassy Magazine was for teenage girls. And we were doing a publication that was for, as I said, older, older young women, or older women, but that it that it would have a personality to it and that readers would identify with it and with the writers in such a way that they felt compelled to come back or compelled to stay. It's interesting too, because I think people who are younger right now might not realize that

back then, all the way back in 2007, women's media didn't have that right like that wasn't what you guys were trying to do was was unique and different at the time right it was unique well it was it wasn't it wasn't it was unique in the sense that we had the support of a for-profit company you know who paid us salaries and had we had resources like tech people and licenses to photo agencies and etc, etc. There were what I would call feminist blogs that existed at the time, and I'm sure you're familiar with a bunch of them. They were, to my mind, more labors of love, they didn't have the privileges that we had at Jezebel in terms of resources and infrastructure and potential for growth. And there were certainly women's magazines that were not in the glamour mold, like bust or bitch, that covered popular culture and

politics through a gender and racial lens. But there wasn't really anything in terms of a popular blog that was taking on those sorts of conversations. Erin, why do you think it took off so fast? I think for the reasons that Anna mentioned. I started as a reader in 2008 during the primaries. It was, it's a shame that you missed that time. Yes, it is. Because I missed all of it.

It's really a shame because during the Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama primary battle in 2008, it was, Jezebel was lit. It was so irreverent. I found it because two of the site's original writers started a controversy, and it ended up on Huffington Post. And I was like, these ladies sound cool, even though what they said was not cool. I was like, I think they would be my friends.

I started reading the website, and was very like irreverent uh it wasn't condescending it was honest it was it was like not afraid to pick i mean i don't want to say pick fights it wasn't afraid to like get in there it wasn't afraid to kind of be a little bit confrontational and i loved it and there was also a commenting community attached to it that was really active and vibrant. And every single article would be hilarious. And at the end, there would be all these comments that were super funny or thoughtful or incisive. And there would be arguments. And it was just so entertaining. And I worked at a bank at the time. And I liked Jezebel way more than I like my job. I was gonna, I was gonna ask Anna, like the idea that readers could communicate directly with writers and each other in a

comment section was fairly new back then. How much did that factor into your thinking about what you wanted the site to be in those early days? That is a great question. And I'm not sure that I did factor that in because I don't know that I understood the importance that the commenter community would have on the site and the influence they would have on how we wrote what we wrote and what we wrote. And, you know, I think we were very hesitant to admit that they were so empowered or that they were so powerful. But when I started the site, you know, the comments felt like they were something that happened on blogs. They were secondary. And for a long time, I thought of them as being secondary on Jezebel until I realized that they were almost as primary as the actual work of the writers and editors that got paid to do that. You know, it's funny when Aaron

talks about 2008 and the fights that broke out, maybe arguments is a better word, between commenters and between and among editors and commenters about the Democratic primary. There wasn't so much fighting about, listen, the site was very pro-Obama. Like it just was. We were not trying to be fair and balanced. We were all in for President Obama. But yet there would still be kind of skirmishes that would break out, particularly when Hillary was still in the running for the nomination. And Aaron, the fact that that drew Aaron's attention, I think is representative or reflects what was happening with a lot of our readers, which is that they were interested in a place where they could talk about politics and where you could talk about politics and be very funny about it as

well. And, and not to like blow smoke up Aaron's ass, but she was one of the funniest. I know that. I know that. I mean, it was,

it was also a place where our opinions on politics was taken seriously. I feel like so much political media was just a bunch of old smarmy white guys that haven't really probably had a conversation with anybody under 30 for a really long time. Or, you know, I guess New York City, I guess regular 30 is New York City 40. But you know what I mean? Like it was, it was, it lacked a youthful sensibility. And it was almost like at Jezebel during that time and after but specifically that's what drew me to it was it was like our opinions and our experiences were taken seriously as ways to contribute to a political conversation what made you what made you take the leap from i

hadn't realized by the way until i knew you didn't know of course i knew you worked at jezebel but i didn't and i knew you worked at the bank too but I didn't know that the leap from the bank to Jezebel was because you were like a commenter who then became a staffer. Yeah, so this is one thing that I think, I don't think Jezebel is totally unique in it, but it's one of the places that did this the most. There were like little, I think, there were like little extra jobs that active commenters were given on the site. Like a comment moderator was picked from the large group of commenters. And then she wrote sometimes on the website under her commenter name. And like weekend shifts were sometimes picked up by people who were like trusted commenters or whatever.

And I was like asked to just try out a Sunday shift by Anna's successor, Jessica Cohen. And so I did and I ended up working like Sundays. I got paid $100 to write. That's it? I got paid $100, $100 a Sunday. And I would wake up at six in the morning and I would post until like every half an hour until the posting day was done. Oh, my gosh. That's a lot of posting.

I know. Some of it was like, oh, here's a funny picture from AP and here's some commentary on the picture, whatever. And then I would like go to bed and wake up and go to my bank job. And I did that for like a year. And I was like, I really hate my bank job and I really like writing. So I asked to be hired full time and I didn't look back. I moved from Chicago to do this. Like I did. Like it changed my whole. What was it like being on the other side? So I asked to be hired full time and I didn't look back. I moved from Chicago to do this.

Like I did, like it changed my whole. What was it like being on the other side? As a writer? Yeah. I think the transition was slow because there was a period of time where I was like doing both things. I had a lot of sympathy for the staff and how entitled some of the commenters felt to like controlling the content of the site. Like it was almost like a fandom sort of, you know, how people who are like really into something feel like betrayed when they change, you know, the race of one of the Marvel characters, you know, it almost felt like a fandom where if somebody wrote something

that a reader did not agree with exactly, they would take it as an affront because they saw the website as something that was supposed to be their personal voice box. And that's not really possible to do, and that's not really fair to expect writers to do that. And lo and behold,

that's what the entire internet is today. Yes, exactly. Exactly. Well, Anna, you've talked about sort of the constant struggle of feeling politically and personally in agreement with some commenters, but alienated by their rhetoric. And this is something I always wrestle with when I'm following some progressives on social media, mainly because I'm always worrying about like, what's the most effective way to persuade someone on some political issue? But what was that tension like for you sort of running Jezebel? to what you have done, John, but I definitely felt that because I knew that there were people who were reading the site, people who were watching, who were not commenting, and that we were having some influence in the culture, which it took a while for me to realize that, that there were ways to get at one's point across and rhetoric to use that wasn't always

so alienating. And I did feel sometimes that the tone of the comments on the site were alienating, not just to me. And again, I was an ideological ally, but to some of our readers, I didn't want to bring in Fox News readers. That's not what I was concerned about. But because there was often bad faith assumed on the part of the editors, writers, and I guess, you know, going the other direction, the commenters, the tone often felt somewhat tense to me. Looking back on it, I realized that that was, for the most part, a plus, you know, that we were engaged in passionate conversations. But being on the site as like a site lead and editing the copy and

reading the comments and having to moderate them. Um, it, it, it, I was always in the moment, but also aware of the moment and aware of the ways in which, um, what we were saying and what the commenters were saying might be taken the wrong way or just might be turning people off. This was before trolls, though. I'm not saying trolls didn't exist on the internet. But like for the most for the most part, that commenters were irritating were irritating because they were over the top in their rhetoric, but we were not having outsiders, quote unquote, coming in and trolling or if they did, they were banned immediately, the comment section was moderated. So it did feel like a protected space. And within that protected

space, there was a lot of stirrum and drang, but it was still felt like a protected space. And maybe Erin can talk more about this because she was in the comments. Yeah. Yeah, I think I was Anna, I was gonna ask you, if you think your time time like kind of developing an awareness of how to get things across without pissing people off has given you kind of like a like you you have kind of a reflex when you see something that was worded where you agree with in principle, but was worded wrong where you you almost are like, oh, I know they should have said that to not make people mad. Like, do you feel like you have that? I feel infected by it. Well, yeah. I mean, when you use the word infected, I think that that's a pretty, that's a good word to use because I don't always think that's a good thing. I think, I think that the fact that I'm constantly wondering how this or that or the other is going to be taken by this or that or the other

constituency, for lack of a better word, has hampered me in some ways as a writer and as an editor. I'm oftentimes thinking too much about how something might be received or who might get mad or how they might get mad and in what ways they might express that anger. So I'm not sure if that's what you meant, Erin, when you used the word infected, but it has definitely put a damper on how I think about my own writing. It can be like, I think it trained us to kind of defang some of the things that we were going to say.

I think it infected you, Erin, in a way that I recognized when you started doing stuff for Crooked, because so many of us that are hosts here do have backgrounds in politics. But in you, I was like, oh, that's someone who like really has something to say and will say things that are controversial,

but knows how to say them in a way that is like funny and sharp and biting, but is like thinking about, as you said, Anna, the various constituencies, which again, I think about all the time and that's because of politics and my background politics. But there are also times I wish I did a little less of that, too. Yeah, I mean, at its best, it's like, oh, I like got that in there. I like got that really in like, intense opinion. I got it across people understood what I

meant. Didn't read it in bad faith. That's like, that's it at its best. At its worst, I find myself almost writing in a legalese that is meant to cover every possible thing, you know, like not leave anybody out or make sure that I'm making a point that when I say this, I don't mean this group of people when any reasonable person would read it and not, unless they were looking for a reason to get mad, any reasonable person. Which many people are. I know, exactly. And I think that sometimes, and Anna, you wrote a lot about this in your piece for The New Yorker. Sometimes I think people would come to Jezebel because they were looking for fodder to get charged up.

And charged up doesn't necessarily mean mad, but it does in some cases mean mad. And sometimes I think that people just came to the site and commenters were like ready to be mad at something without really giving it a chance and trying to find the way to justify being mad at something. It's also easier for them to be mad at the writers on the site than it is, well, it's easier for them to express that and to feel like maybe they are having an effect than it is for them to be mad at concepts or things that feel beyond our control for example the erosion of reproductive rights you know um that's that's a much more amorphous big thing with no one person to get angry at so the you know there was i'm sorry

to go on about this, but there was a dissertation that, and I mentioned it in the New Yorker piece, by a woman who focused solely on the Jezebel comments, I think for the first three or four years that the site was around. And she described, she used a phrase, the phrase negotiating feminism in the Jezebel comments, which is, I think, what was going on. I think that that's a perfect way of putting it because there was not just negotiation on, there was policing of one another and of the site's writers and readers. But it did, you know, again, in the moment, it may have felt uncomfortable, but it was building to

a conversation and perhaps, you know, a way forward in terms of how we talk about gender politics. The New Yorker piece was fantastic. And Aaron, you were quoted in as well. It's partly to ben smith's take on jezebel uh in his book traffic um which i've talked to him about on the show and a central question you wrestle with in the piece is what part if any jezebel may have played in the evolution of derisive online discourse um yeah where'd you come down on that um i came down on the side of i don't know how we could possibly qualify or quantify that and also i don't think that jezebel was unique in any way whatsoever in terms of how it influenced discourse online particularly on social media

i think maybe well ben seemed to be saying that in his op-ed he didn't really say that in his book but the reason i took issue with the op-ed is because it did feel like he was blaming Jezebel for any number of things that you could blame any number of sites for. And I think that he's on to something, though, not with regards to Jezebel, but with regards to comments and the ways in which they were, as he put it, proto-social media. So there was something happening in the community of the comments that was happening in other communities of comments on other websites that you then saw replicated on Twitter and on Facebook. But I don't think it was specific to Jezebel. I just, I'm not sure why he pinned it on the site. It just, it's very, I mean, it's almost kind of flattering that the idea that we had that

much power, but I don't think that we did. Um, and you know, Aaron jump in because I don't know that you and I have talked specifically about what you thought of his piece. Um, I think that it's, it's a pretty, um, it's pretty reliable that a man is going to interpret passion from a woman as anger. That's a pretty common misconception. All intense emotion from a woman is anger. And I thought that that was, it was a little bit, I don't want to say hacky because I don't think Ben's a hack. But I thought that that specific conclusion is a little bit hack. I also think that there were plenty of other places online that were a lot angrier at the time.

I honestly had attributed to Tumblr. Tumblr between 2009 and 2016 was a real social justice warrior policing place. I also missed that. I had no idea. Yeah, I was on Tumblr, and part of the reason was because I was bored at work and I didn't want to do my job, and part of it was because a lot of people

that I had met from Jezebel were also on Tumblr. And so there were like these little clicks within Tumblr that people, but there was so much more anger over there than there ever was on like Gawker Media websites. I found in Ben's analysis of the situation that the what you said anna about how um comment section was like the proto social media like i found that very insightful though i was wondering like what i mean the same was true in the gawker comments and and other sort of digital media publications at the time too and

i'm i wonder if he if he landed on jezebel right there could be uh reasons because he's just a white guy doing it but it also could be i was i was wondering if that like you guys were almost more explicitly political than a gawker or than some of the other gawker properties absolutely and i was just gonna i was just gonna say that i mean when you looked at the comments at least on gawker.com and i can't speak for the comments on the other Gawker media properties because I wasn't paying attention to them, but on Gawker, to whom we were most closely related, they were much more, you know, the commenters were much,

they were snarky, but they were kind of removed and cool. The site itself, Gawker.com, didn't tend to express political opinions. Its writers didn't tend to express political opinions. Or if they did, they weren't necessarily accompanied by emotion or expressions of irritation, frustration, anger, what have you. We were much on Jezebel much more straightforward about that stuff. So I think that the tenor of the comments on Jezebel were different than the ones you saw on Gawker were different than the ones you saw on one cat, which was a blog about politics. A very funny one, I might add. So it's, it's possible that Ben is thinking or was thinking of things through the lens of New York media guy who

was paying attention to, you know, Gawker Media and a couple other blog networks, but not things like, you know, as Aaron just pointed out, Tumblr. And that in that kind of sphere, media sphere, yes, Jezebel stood out. I would also add that I think that Jezebel is writing about, we're writing about politics, but the way that politics impacted women at the time was a lot of times in negative ways. So we're writing about things that a reasonable person would become angry about. So why is that noteworthy that we wrote about things that should make someone angry and then people got angry. Well, the other thought that kept running through my mind reading all this was, as opposed to like Jezebel contributing to what would later become sort of the complete mess of social media,

it seems like social media is so much worse than any of the sort of digital media, bloggish properties, the comment sections back then. I mean, social media is like the comment section come to life, but now I feel like it has, you know, the comment section became social media and then social media started sort of eating away at the line between journalism and comments. And now that line is you almost can't see that line at all because there's still journalists posting on social media, obviously. But then there's so many people whose job is just like,

I'm a pundit. I just talk on social media. I'm there's so many people whose job is just like i'm a pundit i just talk on social media i'm just a personality yeah and i wonder if you think that's i mean i i feel like it's a bad development but i don't know what you guys think like hearing you talk anna about this like controlled environment where there's negotiating feminism in the comments and it is somewhat police but you're letting people do it it sounds like a good old day it was pretty pretty policed. It was like, it wasn't like, you know, you're under arrest, but it was like, there were like, there were distinct rules, you know, like we had a, I think when Annie, when you were at the helm, it was like, there was a no body snarking rule. So if there is an article about someone, you couldn't say something shitty about their body, whether

it was a big body or a small body, you just body snarking and there was another one that was like you can't i anyway there was a bunch of different the no body snarking one stood out to me because it really put up guardrails for like how the comments could go and if you broke one of the commenting rules you could just get banned yeah um temporarily or permanently and that putting those guardrails up required like human labor you know there was at one time and this was after you were gone anna there were like five comment moderators that we were we were going through and like they're making sure that like okay we got to bounce this one down we got to block this person um because we also had more trolls at the time but in order for that in order for that to exist you need people that are like working and like

sifting through it by hand you can't do it with a machine you can't do it you can't just like do it with the honor system you have to have somebody actively in there that's like all right this is a rule you broke it you're out anna what is it what's your view on the fact that a lot of these guardrails have fallen away now? Well, I mean, I don't know that this is a good answer to your question. But so I left the site in 2010. I was very exhausted. And in part, I was exhausted because of the moderation of the comments. I then migrated to Twitter immediately. Like I went from like running Jezebel to spending all my days on Twitter and then writing here and there for different publications. But I was really obsessed with Twitter and I could see maybe not at the time consciously, but I could see the ways in which

commenting culture online was influencing Twitter. Um, but I then left Twitter, which is to say that I stopped engaging with it about four years after I started. So this would have been in 2014, because the tenor of the commentary on Twitter became very toxic to me. In a way that was not dissimilar from the Jezebel comments becoming more and more and more difficult for me to handle, Twitter commentary and rhetoric became more difficult for me to handle. And what it seemed, it seemed to me that there were just certain people, not maybe not that many in the aggregate, but who liked causing trouble on Twitter. I think we all know who we've all experienced folks like that. I'm now kind of, I'm not sure how to answer the question, except that again, it was a protected space on jezebel it was highly highly

highly irritating at times to have to moderate them but at least there was we had some measure of control erin mentioned in her piece about jezebel something called disemboweling this is when someone this is when someone made an obnoxious comment and instead of banning them, you just pressed a button and took all the vowels out of their... Yeah. And when you saw one, when you saw... It was like a tarring and feathering, like a digital tarring and feathering. Yes, it was. Because everyone would gather around, I mean, digitally gather around and try to figure out what the comment was and be like, uh-oh. That's so funny yeah yeah it was it was almost worse than having the person banned or having the comment deleted which we didn't tend to do we didn't tend to delete

comments because yeah it did attract attention but it was also really fun it was so much fun to do it i loved it that's like a proto quote tweet or a screenshot of a tweet yeah yeah piles on so jezebel had to shut down last week for the same reason a lot of digital media outlets have had to shut down or downsize recently. Anna, how optimistic are you that someone will eventually figure out a more sustainable business model for the kind of written content that Jezebel did? Well, let me first say that I don't know that it had to shut down. Like I don't know the ins and outs of what happened. But it seems to me what I've heard from what I've heard from the staff, not directly, but from the staff on the site that they felt very strongly that the site had been mismanaged by

the company that owned it. Again, I didn't work for the site, I have not spoken to the staffers directly. But I guess I have to keep reminding myself, when talking about the end of the site, that it maybe didn't have to happen. So that's the first thing I just want to get across. The second thing I want to get across is that I'm not a business person. So I kind of feel like I'm not a good person to answer the question about what the future is. Well, for sites or for content like that, that you found on Jezebel, you know, one of my former staffers said, well, maybe Jezebel was a victim of its own success, that, you know, it changed the culture enough and its writers and editors and readers moved on and moved into positions in traditional mainstream media in such a way that you see those conversations happening all over the place, as opposed to to one particular location in this sense jezebel but i do think it seems to me from what i've heard is that people have a hard time getting advertisers to put advertising against um stories uh or sites that have content around sexual assault or abortion rights or what have you, I would hope that we are advanced enough

and savvy enough media consumers that advertisers would not see those things as being risky to them. Let me put it this way. There was a period of time when I was at Jezebel where I got the sense that the advertising folks at Gawker Media were having a hard time selling advertising against it. I had like some sympathy for them, not a lot, because how I felt and what I felt was that I didn't know how we, meaning the staff,

could have created a more loyal, educated, or brought in a more loyal, educated audience with disposable income of women. They were on the site all day long, refreshing it all day long. Again, this is really before social media. So people were typing in the URL Jezebel and hitting refresh. If they, meaning the ad sales folks, wanted to have that sort of audience, you know, that they could sell advertisers on, whether that was makeup advertising or television advertising, you know, like about TV shows. Again, I don't know how we could have engineered it

better. And it wasn't engineered, it was organic, which made it even more powerful in my mind. I don't know what the, you know, what, what the readers thought about the advertising that did show up on there. Sometimes it was a little weird. Um, it would oftentimes be packaged or rather the advertiser would buy ad ad space on Gawker, and then we would get the same ads. Um, I don't know what you call that, but, uh, there was, there was oftentimes there was advertising that felt a little off-brand. But I didn't get the sense that – I'm trying to think how to put this because I don't want to put it all on the advertising people at Gawker Media. I think I want to put it all on the advertising industry and their lack of imagination in terms of what young women were interested in talking about and the ways

in which they wanted to talk about it and the places they went in order to talk about it. Last question for both of you. Jezebel challenged a lot of institutions that weren't used to being challenged, still need challenging. We are also now in a period where trust in institutions has never been lower, especially media. And that's obviously causing all sorts of other problems. If you were starting Jezebel or another outlet like it today, how would that factor into your thinking? And what are some ways you think about dealing with that dynamic today? Wow, I mean, that's a really tough question. And I haven't thought about it before you just asked it. So you got to this is a sort of a progressive thing right you're challenging institutions you're holding power to account right and then it can go so far in the

other direction that suddenly everyone's like well now i don't believe anything and now i don't trust any institution and then you have chaos which is i feel like what we're heading towards i mean i was I mean, I was number two on the masthead at Jezebel from like 2013 until late 2015. And I would imagine that the way that we like chose and assigned stories at that point was different even when Anna started it. And part of the reason was because even then, I mean, we were ramping up to 2016. Trump was never going to win. The escalator thing had already happened. We were like, what an idiot. He's hiring people to show up to his rallies.

Even then, disinfo and misinfo was ramping up. I found that we sort of had to put in some positive stories, even though they were not as fun to write. It's way more fun to write a takedown it's way more fun to like you know be kind of like snarky about a politician that everybody likes and yeah but what about this but um we had to do some like stories that were a little bit more like get a load of these women who are like running for office for the first time and they're they all sound really cool one of them in one of the articles was tulsi kabar um whoopsie good job eric yeah i'm a news brief normal seeming period i'm a news genius um but we did we did have to make calls we're like okay how

do we like write about politics in a way that isn't just relentlessly doom and gloom can we find something to celebrate can we find something to be positive about but not necessarily it it's also like real it's it's really cringe to be like a fangirl of politics yeah and i feel like during that era we were trying to still navigate how do you be enthusiastic about the work a politician is doing without veering into like daddy cuomo ism and there's and i think right that i look back on some of the stuff that was written when i was doing like the running politics at jezebel and it was like some of it just didn't quite work it was cringe it went too far to the celebratory side but what was happening at the time was there's so much bad shit happening all the time that it was like, okay, how do we – okay, who are we going to be happy about today?

Like who am I going to write something – who am I going to be excited about today? And because I think that like our readers got kind of beaten down by feeling like it was just a relentless stream of bad news. Yeah. You know, it's funny because when I think about misinformation or disinformation, I think about the ways in which early Jezebel treated women's media. Now, I mean, on the scale of things that are important to the survival of democracy. Women's media is further down here than let's say, I don't know, national newspapers. But well, at least I think so. I'm going to get yelled at.

See, that's what's going to happen. I said that, I'm going to get yelled at. What about Teen Vogue? I could be the comment section for you, Anna. I'll be your bad faith machine. Thank you. Thank you. I'm going to hold you to that.

But part of what we did with women's media in the beginning was we called out the ways in which it was engaging in misinformation and disinformation. That was part of what is animating our anger about the culture at the time. And so I'm not sure this is answering your question, Dawn, but the idea that we would maybe lean into discussions of misinformation or disinformation as it's happening. And I'm not talking about the time that I ran the site, but going forward in those years when, well, when Aaron was there, before Aaron was there on staff, after Aaron was there, maybe that would be something I would have attempted to do to not to embrace disinformation, but to

talk about it openly. On the other hand, to do so might increase people's disbelief or trust in media outlets. It might have a bad, a bad effect. So I'm not, I'm not, I think it's a great question and I'm not sure I have a good answer for it, but, um, uh, and, you know, I'm also not immune to as someone who comes from a journalism background and, you know, understands for the most part, the ways that publications and news outlets work. Um, as I've gotten older, I think the cacophony of, of things going on around us, um, has, has made me a little less credulous about the things that I read on the internet I hate to say it yeah yeah I would say if I was trying to set up a print Jezebel like publication one of the things that I would try to get into more is like a peek under the hood at how like

journalism and media works in general and like make it really conscious like uh most people don't know what beat sweetening is so if you see if you read like that jeff bezos uh lauren sanchez profile in vogue was like an obvious okay why are they putting them in vogue they're not attractive people and those pictures are weird they look like ai pictures yeah it's really weird i feel i we talked about this on hysteria this morning and like i felt like i was in a gadzook store remember that mall store it's just like what is this but i feel like if people understood like okay vogue is a magazine that needs advertising jeff bezos controls a company that has so much advertising money this is what this is like maybe one of the reasons why this is happening or like why was there a weird, I don't know, if there was like a profile of Kellyanne Conway in the Washington Post, huh, why would they do that? Probably because somebody on staff is using her for a really important source.

Right. And this is a way to do it. So just basic stuff like, of course, publications sometimes do things that don't make sense on the surface for background reasons. And getting into those background reasons i think it's like super interesting it's like good to know why things work the way they work anyway and it also kind of indulges uh the conspiracy mind that we all have at this point but it indulges it in a way that's like no there are things going on that you don't see but this is what they are it's not like you know q anon uh you know. Robert F. Kennedy is not going to save you from

vaccines. It's like the media works a specific way. The information you get goes through a process before it gets to you. And another thing, I remember during a lot of the Me Too stuff, and Jezebel was publishing Me Too style stories about powerful men before it was cool. I'll say that is one way that it was a pioneer. But I think a lot of people reading the stories would say like, oh, there's only like two things in this article. And I don't think a lot of readers understand that like when something gets published on a website that has a fact checking process or like a journalistic process to it, there's always more than can be printed. And it's just like the Louis C.K. stuff that ran in the New York Times. People were like, I don't know, why is that a big deal? Well,

there was more. There was more that they weren't able to totally nail down. And that sort of information, I think, gives you more literacy when it comes to just encountering the media, the world, whether it's true information or disinformation or mainstream media or more niche media. Yeah. No, I think those, look, I asked the question, it's true information or disinformation or mainstream media or more niche media. No, I think those... Look, I asked the question. It's a very tough question because I have not answered it and I think about it all the time at Crooked.

And I think it's a tough one. And I do think that it's fantastic that Jezebel gave people a space to be angry, but you also want to try to ensure ensure that people have agency right and to like do something about that anger and giving people a space to have the conversation right that is yeah whether it's guardrails lightly policed whatever you want to call it it's just it seems like it's the best you can do especially in media is like give people the space to have the conversation and to have it honestly with each other and sometimes to have it um to have it with humor i mean i just i can't a lot of a lot of the

kind of post jezebel um commentary that i've seen has been focused well and even my piece for the new yorker was focused on the idea of jezebel and its expression of anger one thing i don't think that we've gotten into enough over all these conversations is just how funny the writers were and how much fun we had and then how funny the commenters were. And I hate to keep bringing it back to Erin because she was one of many who were very funny,

but she's a good example. We had a lot of fun on that website. One of the commenters, Anna, went on to be the head writer of SNL. See? Literally. Literally, yeah. She was in the commenting community at Jezebel site and so one of the commenters anna went on to be the head writer of snl see literally literally yeah she was in the commenting community at jezebel not under her real name and i interviewed her not long ago and we talked about it a little bit but yeah and her and her real name is what anna dresden anna dresden okay there's lots of annas yeah but yeah it was it was really really

really fun as much as i didn I wanted to tear my hair out. And so I do think it's important. I want people to remember it in that way as well. Yeah, that's important. Anna Holmes and Aaron Ryan, thanks for chatting about Jezebel with me. This was fantastic. Thanks for having us.

Thank you. Yeah, thanks for having us. Offline is a Crooked Media production. It's written and hosted by me, John Favreau, along with Max Fisher. It's produced by Austin Fisher. Emma Illick-Frank is our associate producer. Andrew Chadwick is our sound editor. Kyle Seglin, Charlotte Landis, and Vasilis Fotopoulos provide audio support to the show. Jordan Katz and Kenny Siegel

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