Pod Save America - How the Right Took Over the Media

Episode Date: February 9, 2025

Ben Smith, former media columnist at the New York Times and now the editor-in-chief of Semafor, joins Dan to talk about today's ultra-challenging news media landscape. The industry is significantly weaker than it was in 2016, and Trump's aggressive lawsuits have the executives in charge of CBS and ABC scrambling to appease him. Will the death blow for America's free press come from within? Smith runs through what we should have learned from the first Trump presidency, how cults of personality rule in journalism just like they rule in politics, and why the dominance of the Times is terrible for fascism-proofing the country.

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ziprecruiter.com slash crooked and go now to try it for free. That's the same price as a genuine smile from a stranger, a picture-perfect sunset or a cute dog running up to you and licking your hand. Again, that's ziprecruiter.com slash crooked, ZipRecruiter, the smartest way to hire. Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm Dan Pfeiffer. This is our second Sunday show. These episodes are going to be coming out every other weekend and will give us hosts a chance to step back from the churn to have longer form conversations about the big ideas and forces shaping news and politics.

My guest today is Ben Smith, the co-founder and editor in chief of the news site Semaphore. Ben is a longtime reporter. He worked for Politico, was the editor of Buzzfeed News, and was the New York Times media critic. So he has a ton of experience covering the coverage. From the prominence of podcasters and influencers in the 2024 election to the way Trump is running roughshod over the media, it feels like we are at a critical moment for the role of the fourth estate.

That's why I wanted to bring Ben on to dig into the state of the American free press, what journalists need to do differently for Trump 2.0, and whether the right has finally won the war on the media. Ben Smith, welcome to Pod Save America. How you doing? Good, thanks for having me, Dan. It's nice to see you.

Absolutely, we've known each other for a very long time. I think we first met on a bus in Iowa in 2007. Seven, you were a blogger. And they were like, they were like, we have an adult here to take charge of you all. And it was you. And the adult, I think I was 29, 30 at the time. So like a true adult. But look, we are, Trump's been in office for nearly three weeks.

It has been a truly insane and intense three weeks, but we know that's part of his and Steve Bannon's flood the zone strategy. Bannon first described this approach in 2018. He said his strategy for overcoming the media's opposition was to flood the zone with shit. For our listeners, let's take a listen to what he said on PBS's frontline back then.

The opposition party is the media. And the media can only, because they're dumb and they're lazy, they can only focus on one thing at a time. And the one thing they'll mainly focus on is either they do the horse race or once the horse race, who's in, who's out. It's like the high school, who the cool kids in the cafeteria, right? Because it's easy.

It's the reason they do the horse race stuff all the time, right? And they won't do the basic, what are the core things that are going on in the country. I said, all we have to do is flood the zone. Every day we hit them with three things, they'll bite on one and we'll get all of our stuff done. Pang, bang, bang. These guys will never be able to recover, but we got to start with muzzle velocity. So it's got to start, it's got to hammer. What does it word? Muzzle velocity. Uh-huh.

Seems like a pretty accurate description of what at least the first couple of weeks of Trump 2.0 have looked like. How have you been covering Trump 2.0 and how have you tried to deal with the flood the zone strategy? Yeah, I mean, it is a very accurate description. And I mean, isn't the media dumb and lazy? Like often also accurate. But I think, you know, he think the notion

that the opposition party is the media and that the world is totally mediated by the media and that we shape reality and decide what happens to me, like I don't really buy that. But I also think it's kind of poisonous for the media to think that about itself in a way. And I get, I mean, we're trying to cover the story.

We're trying to understand what's happening, why things are happening, who's actually making these decisions, what their actual motives are, things that social media can often be shaky on. I mean, I think one of the big stories, one of the stories that struck me early, you know, is that, is obviously you have this iconic image

of Mark Zuckerberg and et al sort of, in, you know, paying their, showing up to support Trump's inauguration and to sort of pledge their loyalty to the administration. And it was really striking to me, a story we broke over the weekend, that when it comes to key appointments, like the general counsel for the FCC,

they pick somebody who is the most anti-big tech possible lawyer in America. Like this bought them nothing. The Trump people think it's hilarious, they like it, but it isn't buying them, it's not buying them anything. And then conversely, who has actual influence in the White House, which who in media has Trump's respect, Rupert Murdoch, whose publications have been very, very tough on Trump and call actually,

if you read the Wall Street Journal editorial page, you'll get much tougher, clearer criticism of Trump than you get from, you know, the LA Times Journal editorial page, you'll get much tougher, clearer criticism of Trump than you get from the LA Times, which only writes about Los Angeles now because they feel scared. It's an interesting thing. I think you see these demonstrations of weakness by a lot of would-be media moguls, which they imagine

are going to ingratiate themselves to the White House. And there's no evidence that it is. Yeah, I want to get into some of those tributes that some of the media and tech are paying to Trump in a minute, but I think I'm not gonna defend Steve Bannon often in the history of Pod Save America, but I think when he made those comments in 2018,

2019, whatever it was, it was a different place, right? The media did play, the legacy media, if you will, just who he's really talking about, right? Like when we talk about media in this podcast, that is everything from Semaphore to the New York Times to Fox News, now to Joe Rogan, Alex Cooper, everything. But what Ben is talking about here

is he's talking about the White House press corps, right? The establishment media, legacy media, regime media, as Republicans call it. And back then, it certainly played a larger role, I think at least, maybe if you disagree, you should say it, in sort of mediating reality. Yeah, they were reacting, of course, to a moment in which the Russia investigation had totally swamped the administration,

driven by breathless media coverage, you know, and so I think in a way, like, and they had allowed, and they had gotten onto the back foot in the first weeks of the administration were, and never really got onto the front foot. They were never, they were very rarely were they able to really drive that story.

It was mostly they were, you know, they were the rabbit being pursued by the wolves. And so like, I think they were kind of honestly, reasonably figured we don't want that to happen again. And that strategy, I mean, Bannon puts it in really bombastic terms, but I don't know, do you think it's probably a good, like is that, if you were a White House comms director,

would you come out with muzzle velocity right now? Yeah, I think he would want muzzle velocity. I think the question for Trump, if I'm stepping back from like the perspective of a political operative is, are you telling a larger story or are you getting swamped by action? Like what they are demonstrating right now is action, right?

Just he's doing things and that is standing in stark contrast to what people perceived of Biden, right? He was largely absent. Even though he did a lot of things, most of a lot of those things weren't public, they didn't see him. And so, you know, I was thinking about this other day is that in Trump's first term, in the beginning,

he suffered, I think mightily in public perception with the comparison to Obama. Cause he was out there, he was kind of saying dumb, crazy things. He was not thoughtful. And that, and Obama was much more popular in Trump. So that suffered. In this situation, I think he actually benefits

from the comparison to Biden because Biden was perceived to be fairly or unfairly as absent, not doing a lot, not showing strength, not being out there. And Trump is out there 24 seven, right? Like when was the last time the public never really saw Biden and Trump is out there all the time. So he benefits from it.

The question will be like right now that is a very good short-term strategy. What are you, like what points are you putting on the board in terms of delivering your campaign promises, right? Or is it just a bunch of noise? And that it's early to know whether that's actually true or not. Yeah, and the thing that, I mean, I think Bannon is a smart guy in some ways.

He's so ubiquitous that people don't underestimate how consequential he is, but notably absent from the muzzle velocity speech is just like, which way is the gun pointed? What's in it? You know, and it's just like, which way is the gun pointed? What's in it? You know? And, and, and it's a strategy. It's kind of new content neutral. Like they could be announcing anything.

And there was this narrative last year that will look like this time around Trump has a real plan. They had, they know what they're doing. They have a set of actions planned. And some of the stuff coming out of the muzzle, like some of the particular end immigration, I think is actually like, look, we had a plan. We're going to do some high profile, that have actions planned. And some of the stuff coming out of the muzzle, like some of the particular immigration, I think is actually like, look, we had a plan.

We're gonna do some high profile, even if they're not massive raids, we're gonna try to scare people away from the border. We have some legal changes we want, like that all felt planned. The Elon stuff is obviously, he's just seeing tweets about agencies he's never heard of reacting,

canceling stuff, uncancelling stuff. I mean, it's mostly improvisational. And I think that's, as you say, like at some point, like these are the fights. I mean, I think, you know, the laws of gravity still apply. Like you, the president has this hundred days, has this moment at which to set an agenda

to pick their priorities, to pick the fights they're gonna pick. And some of the fights they're picking are the fights they planned to pick and wanted to pick. But a lot of fights they're picking are the fights that Elon saw a tweet about yesterday. Yeah, I mean, they are better. It is a better run organization than last time,

only in the sense that you have a bunch of people who maybe care about a specific issue that Trump may or may not care about as much. And they are finding ways to drive that. Some of it is not legally sustainable. Some of it is just like a bunch of bullshit, like the executive order on transgender sports participation. Like that's not something that government

has any access to, but by just by being out there and being mobastic, you get, you know, likely the NCAA or someone else to respond to it. But they're actually like, they didn't have executive orders in the can last time to do it. Right. And the ones they've written,

and I think they are, Trump is freed this time from carrying what the media thinks, or at least he seems to be. Like they were more sensitive to the, you know, what Maggie Kaeperman would say about them. They seem to be now. See, I think that remains to be seen. I think Trump likes to press it.

At least let me say the administration, question about Trump. Yeah, I do think that you're, I mean, this is gonna be a real question as, you know, because they're just doing, they have a lot of Muslim law, and as you said, like some of the stuff, and a lot of it is kind of organizationally,

you know, kind of culture war stuff that doesn't really affect the outcomes of government policy in an immediate way, is all happening, it's moving, they clearly had it well planned. But again, I mean, a lot of the most consequential stuff is being decided by Elon Musk in a pretty chaotic way. And when it starts, and I think there's a real question

of some of it will be very unpopular, some of it will get really bad press. Do we think Trump wants that? Like I actually don't think Trump likes getting bad press or is comfortable with getting bad press. I think he likes getting good press. Yeah, I think that's true. I think it's true.

I guess the way I've been thinking about it is, I mean, the way he backed off the tariffs very quickly for just basically nothing is notable. The way they, I know a judge stopped the funding freeze, but Trump also pulled the plug on it and reportedly, I mean, at least it's the reporting I read, was that was his choice because it was so noisy and messy. And so I think he's still gonna be reactive

to some of that stuff. The people around him are less reactive to it. Like last time he had so many Republican establishment people in his administration that they were more reactive to it. And like, John Kelly is gonna be more reactive to bad press than Kristi Noem or- For sure.

Or same thing with his defense. Pete Hickseth is not gonna care about it, you know? And so I think that it will matter. So, but I guess, I guess my question to have is, it seems to me at least watching this over the first three weeks that the legacy media, establishment media, right? I always wanna kind of just at least

the people in the briefing room, in Trump one came in really sort of guns blazing, right? They sort of branded themselves as defenders of democracy. There was a ton of fact checking or it, and there is a, it feels like at least from afar, a different approach this time, right? A little more, not that there is not real that like, I do kind of want to separate the journalists who are covering the white house or covering Trump from maybe the parent companies who own them, but, because there is like real, like people are, reporters I will say are working

their ass off in the writing, like a really, a lot of really important stories, whether anyone's reading them or not is an open question, but it does feel like the press is a little more accommodation, has more of an accommodationist and less aggressive approach this time. Do you see it that way? Am I, is this my, is my anti-media bias coming through?

I mean, I think that's one way to see it. I mean, I guess I never really bought the idea that our choice is to be accommodationist versus collaborationist versus aggressive. We're supposed to be covering reality. And I think that there was an almost delusional quality to the media where reporters loved having people they met out in the world say to them like, wow, you're so brave. Thank you for what you do. It's like, come on, you cover the White House. Like you're not a war reporter. And I do think like the work is incredibly important to democracy, but that's a little different between saying, you know, journalism is this incredibly, is this vital pillar of democracy and journalists are themselves heroes of democracy who

wide right, you know, who ride around on white horses, like, it's a weird job. And the best reporters, right, like the reporters who are very valuable right now, like spend a lot of time kind of burrowing into Trump world and telling you what's happening there. That's, you know, and that's an incredibly valuable thing. But you don't have to, I don't know, but I think there was a level at which the sort of media, the media fell in love with a narrative about itself that made liberals love them and conservatives hate them. And that's not the only factor, maybe even the most major factor,

but I don't think in retrospect that was a good thing. And I would say the underlying thing here is, just to go back, Trump gets elected and a lot of journalists, a lot of liberals think there's no way this was legitimate. Like, there's been a mistake here. And like, what happened? Maybe it was Facebook?

Like, maybe there's some technical social media trick or maybe it was the Russians. And like, these are two very great lines of reporting inquiry that lots of really smart journalists, and I don't think they're always framing the story that way, but a lot of journalistic effort was expended basically trying to answer the question of how did Donald Trump manage to get elected? And those were both factors, obviously, shifts in social media, Russian interference in the election.

But like, I think they did not like to like sufficiently consider option three, which was that he was pretty popular and won a lot of votes. And so I think that was like, Trump people aren't wrong to be upset that most of the journalistic energy of 2016 and 2017 was expended on trying to figure out what trick got him elected. Paz de America is brought to you by Sundays for Dogs.

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and use code crooked at checkout. I think one of the accommodate, you know, the real critiques from, you know, folks, not just on the left, but in direct by, and even a journal itself is that some of the corporate media entities have been, are trying to curry favor with Trump for reasons separate and apart from their, from the specifics of their publication itself, right? So you have the Disney corporation settling

a pretty specious lawsuit that a lot of legal experts think ABC could have won involving George Stephanopoulos in erroneously calling Trump a racist. You have reports that- Rapist, rapist. Get it right, Dan. Sorry, rapist, calling him a rapist, yes. You probably could have gotten sued for the racist one. But the, and then you have reports that Paramount,

which has a merger, a very large merger before the Trump administration, considering settling what is an even more reportedly absurd lawsuit about the editing of the Kamala Harris interview. Just sort of as a publisher or person person that meet a long time media critic, what do you, what's your response to how some of these entities are, are doing this? You know, it's funny that for years, for our whole careers,

there's been a set of advocates who yelled about the corporate consolidation of media. They're kind of like Ralph Nader people. There's a group called free press. They were totally irrelevant to the political conversation, like nice people. and you'd be like, yeah, I don't know. Like I work in corporate media and I've never had my corporate overlords cutting secret deals with the government. That's not the thing that happens in America. And they were totally right.

Like what you see now is that this very, very consolidated media is largely owned by, on one hand, public companies that have fiduciary responsibilities, their shareholders. And when we say media, we really mean news media because they have lots of exposure beyond news like you know the Ellison family isn't buying Paramount because they want CBS News like CBS News is in this comes along with the bargain and this kind of a headache but they want you know they're looking for a content library and you know they're getting into the movie business and so this like CBS News is this liability and actually the Disney suit is you know sort of spe the movie business. And so this, like CBS News is this liability.

And actually the Disney suit is, you know, sort of specious, but it's the kind of suit sometimes you settle because I think they were worried about what was it, you know, disclosing George Stephanopoulos' text messages, whatever. There's some argument for settling that one. I'm not a great one, but the CBS one is ludicrous. It's about editing, it's about,

like it's a very normal journalistic thing if you edit an interview the way you is ludicrous. It's about editing. It's about, like, it's a very normal journalistic thing if you edit an interview the way you want to edit it. Maybe you screw it up, maybe, whatever. But it's something that is widely viewed as protected and as a specious lawsuit, even if they've found a friendly judge in Texas. But CBS, but Sherry Redstone, who's selling CBS, would like to get paid.

And the quickest way to getting paid is caving to Trump. And if that damages the brand, if that blows up the newsroom, it's not a big deal for her. I think similarly, you know, Bezos and Patrick Soon-Chang are billionaires. And the issue is that they're billionaires is that they have lots of exposure in other businesses that the government has a lot of power over. Soon-Chang is in the health care business. You know, FDA, incredibly important to him. Bezos is very interested in his space projects, and Trump will obviously punish them. I mean,

he's done it in the past. He'll threaten that he'll kill those, he'll kill contracts if your publication angers him. And so, and Bezos wrote this in his letter about canceling the endorsement that it would be impo- and he said it is why I'm not doing this because I'm caving to Trump, but I can't, but I can't blame you for seeing it that way. Cause it's sure, I recognize that it looks that way. And I just think that what you see is that it makes you realize the importance of independent media and independent in sort of the old nato rights sense

that they are independent of consolidated ownership. I mean, the New York Times is the only major publication in the country that is independent in that sense. You know, the Murdoch press, for all the many problems I have with them, are at least in the news business in a real way and have some experience in dealing with power and not just caving.

And then lots of smaller outlets like ours, like yours and mine, and you know, I'm sure like if the Trump administration decided to try to damage your business and go after your advertisers, it could probably do a lot of damage. But it's, but you're not dealing with a sister company that is heavily regulated that is, you know, and we already, you know, and I think that's, that to me is actually kind of the scary thing, is the way in which ownership is really being brought to bear for the first time in my career. It is, there's just this ultimate irony that,

like the ABC settlement actually goes to the Trump library where one can ever be built. Yes, it's gonna be in New Greenland. And the fact that, that's right, or it could be in Gaza. That somebody in Trump's orbit described it to me as the Trump library and casino. I'm sure that is the case or in amusement park or whatever else it'll be. But it's just there's a tremendous irony.

So Walt Disney and ABC have given Trump money for the library. If Paramount settles a suit, CBS will give Trump money for his library. Mark Zuckerberg just settled a suit with Facebook against Trump that will go to the library and the Trump is going to end up with a library built by the legacy media and big tech is just a sort of a wild thing. You see why you see why he finds that really satisfying. I can imagine that he's quite satisfied in in the first term. Term fact checking was a very important part of how the press was thinking about holding Trump accountable. Right. He is telling all these lies.

It is our job to sort reality for our readers. We're going to fact check them. We're going to do it. Bring on people like Daniel Dale and CNN right afterwards. And it, I'm curious what, how, how that's going to happen this time. Like here, I want to have you listen to this clip from, uh, Trump's recent press conference where Peter Alexander, uh, tries to, tries to question the reality of what Trump just said. Let's take a listen. The cited FAA tax that you read is real, but the implications of this policy is new or that it stems from efforts that began under President Biden or the transportation secretary.

Pete Buttigieg is demonstrably false. It's been on the FAA's website. Who said that? You? No, it's on the website. The FAA's website. It was there in 2013. It was there for the entirety.

Take what I read. It was there for the entirety of your administration too. So my question is, why didn't you change the policy during your first administration? I did change it. I changed the Obama policy, and we had a very good policy. And then Biden came in and he changed it. And then when I came in, two days, three days ago, I signed a new order bringing it to the highest level of intelligence. It was on the Okay. Please. Quiet, quiet.

So Peter Alexander here, who's the MSC news correspondent, does exactly what you're supposed to do. Trump holds this press conference, makes a series of claims that are demonstrably not true. He corrects him on it. Trump runs right over him. And I guess the question is, what value do you see in fact-checking?

Is it still an important part of journalism? Is it even possible when you have a president who you're an administration or even a political party right now who's sort of willing to ignore reality? Yeah, I mean, I guess, you know, as you know, I come from a slightly weird corner of the world. I never really liked the formalized fact-checking. Like I think journalists job is to get the facts right

and that you shouldn't outsource that to some other often Facebook funded or whatever institution populated by 23 year olds who are learning how to do their jobs. But anyway, let me bracket that particular rant. No, I mean, I think there's a level of, I mean, the media, the news media is weaker than it used to be.

It was weaker in 2016 than it thought it was. Maybe it realizes how weak it is now. But like, I mean, I think there's some question of what's the, like, we should get our facts right. We have a responsibility to our readers to tell them what's really going on. Are we going to disabuse Trump supporters of things that they believe,

or of things that maybe aren't really being received as facts, but more as political statements or as sort of, you know, like, you know, I don't, it doesn't, it doesn't seem like it, doesn't seem like we're, those fact checks were changing a lot of minds or reaching a lot of people who were looking to have the facts checked. And so I think that kind of formalized fact checking, like, I, I mean, I, I'm not sure what it was doing in the ad. Like, I guess I, like, there's,

there's a fair amount of research on like media effect and media impact that like none of us actually wind up looking at that much. But I think it's often interesting to ask like, well, okay. We like, did this retro, did we do some focus groups where this then changed people's minds and people came in thinking that one thing was happening and then what red fact check.com and left thing, you know, things happening.

Like I don't really see a lot of that. I do think this is a real obvious case where there's a factual dispute. It is in fact, the journalist's job to resolve it and say what is true and for people who are looking for it to read the true thing. A lot of things that got fact-checked were sometimes a little hazier,

were sometimes more political disputes. Is immigration good for the economy? Like, that's not really a fact-checkable claim. That's an argument among economists. Yeah, I mean, that was, I mean, even that's been a problem even in my days in government, the, like, I would rage at my desk at the Washington Post fact checker for taking a sort of a statement of values

or a statement of principle and then assigning some of their Pinocchios to it because you could find a, like, you could pick it in a way. Yeah, it's the most pedantic imaginable approach to politics. And I think sometimes kind of annoyed people and backfired in that way. But I think the broader question of, I mean, I, you know, there is, I mean, this is honestly often true

with the first wave of people who come into government, that like they believe some things that are just not true about reality and about how government works. And they come in with some things that they've said on the campaign trail about, I mean, I think you saw this in the Biden administration with the Saudis, frankly. Like they had some views on Saudi Arabia that did not survive contact with reality and wound up being the Saudis best friends. Just to kind of like think about. Well, that's a, yeah, I mean, that's a slightly, to me that's a slightly different one.

But for instance, I wrote about this guy named Darren Beatty, who's going to be in the stage for a moment. And it has some views on how like there were they were trying to orchestrate color revolutions like Eastern European style the people who had orchestrated the color revolutions in Eastern Europe had come back here and We're trying to orchestrate against Trump like at some level. That's a factual claim Like do we think that happened and he's yeah and I do think that they I'm sort of more interested in some ways in people who are like arriving with Trump with a set of beliefs that may or may not, like they, cause I think the one thing

that people underestimate is a lot of the people who are saying things, they believe the things they're saying. Some of it is nonsense. Bannon, I think often will just like tell, tell Nare, spin yarns whose details are not all true and doesn't believe all of them. But a lot of these folks like believe what they're saying.

Like I think RFK mostly believes the things he says about vaccines. I mean, I guess on a day-to-day basis, as you cover politics or government or everything in the world you're covering, what do you say to your reports is your task, right? Yeah, I mean, I think we are trying to speak to a really informed audience

that has to understand what's actually going on because they're encountering it in the world of business, economics, politics. I mean, actually, you know, the business press often is more reliable than the political press because they are talking to people who have to make, you know, to have to trade stocks, have to make decisions based on reality.

So, and I, so I think, you know, so we obviously see that as our responsibility. We also, I mean, I do think it's a moment when you sort of have to have, bring some humility as a journalist, whether you like it or not, because we have the industry, like we have less power than we did. And we definitely do try to do two specific things. And one is to try to say to readers, because I do think people live in these deep information bubbles and it's not that you necessarily believe the things that are being said on Fox News,

but it is important if you're a listener or a positive to probably know what they're talking about some of the time. Like what, like literally what Republican legislators are walking into the house with no idea what the Democratic colleagues like read that morning. And the Democrats have no idea what the Republicans were reading. And so we have this very popular feature called blind spot.

That's literally like, we're not trying to arbitrate the Republicans were reading. And so we have this very popular feature called blind spot that's literally like, we're not trying to arbitrate the reality of this. Often these are true stories just with different emphasis, totally different emphasis. But the Republicans are talking about some crime committed by an illegal immigrant in Colorado. And the Democrats are talking about some just totally different story, right?

And I think some level of just trying to say like, this is giving a glimpse of the reality that the other side is living in is pretty useful. I mean, just sort of actionably useful. And sometimes I do think social media is a machine for taking the stupidest thing that your opponent said and elevate the stupidest version of the stupidest thing they think

and constantly barraging you with it. And there might be someone in there who's actually making a reasonable case you could argue with, but might, there might be someone in there who's actually making a reasonable case you could argue with, but it will be totally swept away in social media. And I think we do try to sort of elevate, you know, to elevate the stronger arguments and to try to like, create some space for reasonable disagreement. So I think there's a fair amount of that too, although there is also, as you say, like some, like eroding shared factual basis around this, for sure.

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playing a part, right? Particularly in the, like around 2010, when the Tea Party sort of took off, a lot of Republicans were sort of, they were appealing to the base, but they were still reading the New York Times. They were still reading Politico. They were seeing everything else. And so they, we were operating under the same set of reality, at least in a private negotiation, you were having a legislation. We all sort of agreed on the same reality. Right about, I would say midway through the Obama's, through Obama's second term, kind of when Facebook became,

Republicans radicalized a little bit after Obama's reelection, Fox News became sort of more powerful, and then the sort of right-wing media ecosystem took off, sort of powered by Facebook. That was like, so the Breitbart era, Daily Caller, right around 2014, it's like, we stopped having the same reality.

We were having completely different conversations. And it is like, so that speaks to governing. And in politics, it is, there's the difference it has been that, and it's, I think this might be changing a little bit for better, probably for worse, is that Democrats had a media diet that was primarily legacy media still,

we're still reading the New York Times, we're still on NPR. Maybe it would skew a little on the more left leaning part of that legacy media diet, but it was traditional media abiding by the rules of journalism as commonly understood. And the Republicans had shifted to something totally different that did not abide by and often sort of spat in the face of those rules. And that now we are fully in that moment where the Trump administration and Republicans writ large up and down, you know, it's not just in Washington, it's everywhere, exists in this wholly other media ecosystem. And that media ecosystem is becoming much less clear to anyone else because it's not just, it's not like you get like, yes, you could turn off Fox news and that would be

a very good idiot's guide to what the right is thinking. But that's often, I think, in this day and age, is kind of a lagging indicator of what's really bubbling up. Do you know what's happening on Rumble? Are you listening to The Daily Wire or reading Barry Weiss or some of these other things that are really affecting it? Yeah, it's an incredibly fragmented system that you're describing. And I mean, right, there's a big distance between Rumble and Barry Weiss.

These are all different things. I don't think they're parts of it. I think that I was talking to a really prominent conservative podcaster who was saying that, you know, they spent a lot of their time complaining about the, you know, journalists and everything. They get wrong. And then once in a while, there'll be a holiday. And they're like, where is the flow of news? And it's for me to talk about. It's so annoying. and everything they get wrong. And then once in a while, there'll be a holiday. And they're like, where is the flow of news?

And for me to talk about, it's so annoying. And it's like, oh, all the people I hate are like taking vacation with their kids. And so there's no fodder for me. There's no underlying information. I do think there's this question that gets kicked around sometimes. Actually, Tucker Carlson founded the Daily Caller

to solve this. It did not. Which is that there's no real center-right, far-right reporting apparatus, or not much of one. Actually, one of the things that distinguishes Breitbart from the others is they do some original reporting. Most of the places, a lot of the places that in that world, podcasters, are really commentating and reacting, or reacting to things they've seen on social media, which really are often made up. And there's like a lack of a kind of baseline of, yeah, I mean, I could be healthy if the Trump movement developed more reporting muscles, honestly. You've mentioned a couple of times here that the media is weaker than it has been and maybe

recognize its weakness. I think just to put that sort of in perspective, right, we had the 2024 election where the candidates interacted less with the media than at any point Trump did famously. Or with the legacy media. No interviews with a mainstream media organization for the last, you know, whatever it was month of the campaign, Harris did historically few. They took few, Harris took few questions from the press.

And then you have just, you know, you have to, you know, drop in cable, uh, subscript, cable subscriptions, ratings, the economics, uh, you know, sort of the Washington post is losing money. Just the media has been weaker, is weaker at this point than it has been in any time. And so I kind of like, at the same, you know, on top of that, sort of the credibility and the reach of the, of the legacy media is obviously at its nadir. Is it fair to wonder whether the right who's been raising a decades long war against the

media has now won that war? Yeah, I think that, I mean, yes, I think that's a reasonable thing to say. What's the prize for winning that war? I'm not sure. I mean, there's a couple, just when you talk about trust, like the polling data here is worth looking at because it's interesting. And basically what you see is that like starting with Dan Rather actually, all of the decline in trust in the media is on the Republicans.

Like the independence pretty flat, Democrats pretty flat. But you see this decline starting with Dan Rather, you know, for Republican to say, the Republicans start saying the media is too liberal. And then at some point the Trump years, it know, for Republican to say, but the Republicans start saying the media is too liberal. And then at some point, the Trump years, it flips from the media is too liberal

to the media is making everything up. And that's a huge difference. And that's sort of what you're talking about. It used to be a shared reality in which Republicans complain about the refs, sometimes justifiably, to a situation in which they believe that the whole thing is made up.

And that is a big shift. And then the final thing that is kind of dispiriting is the one place that trust media is eroding among Democrats is among young people. And that's happening pretty fast now. Yeah, and it's, they just- And this is Gallup poll. I participate.

Right, and I've done, I saw a lot of focus groups, a lot of research in how Gen Z gets their news. And just the idea of going to a website to get news, is like, it doesn't even occur to them. The idea that you would turn on the television to watch news does not end. And you know, the thing that happened. Years and years ago I asked my daughter,

if she knew about Huffington Post, and she was like, oh, is that something in Safari? Yeah, that's right. Just, I mean, you wrote about this in your book and you've talked about it a lot in the interviews when you're talking about a couple of years ago, but it's just the, and this is sort of where we, so you have two things.

You have lack of trust in media, which is a problem and growing among Democrats, particularly among young people. You have what I think is actually a distribution crisis in news, which is, you know, sort of the short version history I always do is that if you were a person who was not a news junkie in the pre-internet era, you had to see the news, some form of the news, you would bump into it organically because someone literally threw a newspaper at your door every morning. Or if you had to open that, if you wanted to know what the movies were, the baseball score, the weather, like something happening in local town, you would see headlines, right? If you wanted to know the new, you wanted to know the weather

the next day, you had to turn on the six o'clock news and you would see news that way. And then we kind of, we moved from newspapers. I mean, this has been your whole career. We shifted to, we can, we trained some group of people that they should go to www.nytimes.com or www.politico.com in the morning. At the same, like the same way you would grab a cup of coffee and read a dead tree newspaper, you would grab a cup of coffee and pull up your laptop or your, if it was at a certain year, your iPad and you would look at a website and read the news that way. Maybe the first thing you did at work, right? Was you would sit down and read the news. Then social media came and we have like, we have a better plan.

Facebook's gonna deliver the news to your phone. You're gonna see it. And even if you're just like scrolling through for your, to look at pictures of your friends' kids or whatever else you know on Facebook, we have killing time in the grocery store, waiting in line. You would see some sort of news. And then some point after 20,

and Twitter served the same function for a smaller group of people. Then around 20, sometime after 2020, that all fell apart, right? And now it's like, how do people get, like there is no major distribution mechanism for legacy media to reach people who are not actively seeking it out.

Right, that is the thing that has changed. I think that's a really good way to put it. I mean, I would say, you know, that these things keep changing. Like it's I don't think it's reached a static point. And I think that the thing that you described, which sounds incredibly disorienting and maddening, most people, most consumers hate. Like if you ask people like, hey, do you think this is working for you? Do you like how you're getting your news?

No, everybody hates it. And I think that's I mean, that was sort of what we were reacting to in creating some before was like just why and why I left the times, just this sense of like, oh, there's actually an opportunity to like, it like to not, to respond to the fact that people feel totally disoriented, feel like they don't know what to trust and try to address that stuff directly.

And I think, and I think you're seeing, so I think that, I mean, ultimately we live in this very, very dynamic free market society in which consumers do even even in news and news is sometimes an exception to that, like the tradition in news is if the consumers say, we hate you and everything you're doing, we say, fuck you, you're wrong. But but I think there is this opportunity for both legacy and

for new outlets to take pretty seriously, how terrible the experience of consuming news is. And a lot of the pendulum swing is back to some of the older values. Like I think the reason that email newsletters are very popular is they actually are kind of print. Like they force a kind of hierarchy of saying what's important.

They force a kind of concision because they're not infinite. And I think that's made them very popular. And I think, so I guess I, I mean, I'm obviously an optimist because I wouldn't still be doing this stuff, but I do think that the current, the stats group is kind of untenable

and the fragmentation commercially is extremely annoying too. Like how many sub-stacks do you want to subscribe to? How many different streaming services are you gonna pay for? Like, and I think there's a very aggressive push and we'll be over in a couple of years to reconsolidate that stuff, like for better or for worse, but you'll have one subscription to newsletters, you'll have two streaming services,

they'll all swallow each other. Again, that could be bad or that could be good, but I think that experience of just like absolute disorientation and fragmentation, like is terrible and everyone knows it. And so there are a lot of opportunities to fix it. Yeah, the question I think, like I agree with that. Like we are sort of in a moment and this is not,

it's like you can do the, have the same conversation about, you know, just content services beyond news, right? Like, are you really gonna be gonna really pay for how many people, how many streaming services are you gonna pay for? You know, YouTube TV, which has become very popular, is basically just cable through the internet, right? Where it looks at the same format.

So how are you gonna, is there a way to get back to it? But I wanted to sort of get back to the role of the media. Because it, like, you and I are, like right now, let's just say, our distribution is about the business of media, right? Like how do you, because ultimately, you need readers to make money, whether that's gonna be subscriptions or how you get ads the business of media, right? Like how do you, because ultimately you need readers to make money, whether that's gonna be subscriptions

or how you get ads in front of people or whatever that is. Just to stop you though, because I see where you're like, I think I agree with where you're going. The extent to which all of everything we're talking about, the chaos, the disruption is all fundamentally driven by these huge technological shifts that we've been, and business shifts. Like that is the underlying thing here.

It's not little choices made by journalists here and there. No, no, no, no. I fundamentally agree with that. And it is, I think you can, you point out a couple of examples. You can point back at various choices made by people in the media, like in the media, you do two things.

You do the business of media, like giving away your product for free on the internet for a few years, probably in hindsight, not the best move, or optimizing a Facebook or whatever else. You can do some things. You can also point to some journalistic choices that have eroded trust, fairly or unfairly, right? You picked the Dan Rather, just the entire coverage

of the Iraq War and the run up to it. That is the biggest one, yeah. Yeah, but then you also have cultural shifts that have happened, which isn't how young people think about news. Like what is, one of the things you see when you do sort of focus groups of younger folks is they find more authority and more relatable, a piece of content that looks like the conversation

you and I are having, more than nine pundits at an anchor desk for CNN. Yeah. Like when they think of news, it is people with headphones on, on a couch or around a table having a podcast or it's a streamer speaking, doing a vertical video. And that is to them what the sort of traditional image of Walter Cronkite or Dan Rather or Brian Williams

at the anchor desk is to previous generations. I mean, it's funny, we on our podcast, Mixed Signals, we interviewed Colin and Samir, who are big, big YouTubers who think a lot about, who sort of talk a lot and think about YouTube. And at one point I said to Samir, like, I mean, so when did you start thinking of yourself as a journalist? Like, how'd you get into journalism? And he was like, what? Don't call me that. That's offensive. So yeah, I think it's a, that was a pretty striking thing to me. It's a very, it's a totally different ecosystem.

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Stop putting off those doctor's appointments and go to zocdoc.com slash crooked to find and instantly book a top rated doctor today. That's z-o-c-d-o-c.com slash crooked, zocdoc.com slash crooked, zocdoc.com slash crooked. I just want to get back sort of to the role that the media has played in sort of politics and public discourse, because that to me has been a fundamental shift is it was a measure of accountability, right?

We called it the fourth state for a reason. You interacted with the media as a politician or a governmental entity because you, you know, for two reasons. One, you needed the media to get your message out. Like that was a fundamental thing. Like when I, if I was preparing Barack Obama for a press conference, like, like Mike, the Falstein and bargain in my head is I'm going to take a bunch of questions that are going to be annoying. They're going to be about the things that I know voters don't care about. But the price of that is the airwaves to get, it's the way I can get my message in front of people. And you would

react to, you know, the media could, if they picked a thing that they were gonna, it was gonna become the narrative, we could change government policy, right? It would be, it would create such a firestorm that you would have to stop doing it or change course or whatever else. I do sort of question after watching this election

the first couple of weeks of Trump, whether, like it seems like that role is so diminished as to be, is that the media becomes, maybe this is for better, not for worse, um, from your perspective, but more observed, almost entirely an observer and chronicler of the process opposed to a participant when it was a huge participant in politics for basically since the invention of the newspaper. Yeah. And I think, I mean, I don't think it's a binary thing. But yeah, but I think the media's role

in being able to set the agenda, essentially, is obviously diminished, to some degree given over to whatever Anon on Twitter caught Elon's eye this morning. Like right now, that's what's driving. That's what you'll see on Fox tomorrow morning and in the White House the next day. Like that is literally random people

tweeting in Elon's replies. But, and I guess, yeah, and I think that the media can overplay, it's, you know, can overplay. Yeah, I do have some ambivalence about that role. We definitely, I think, we are able, like Semaphore has been able to build a lot of trust with Republicans and Democrats, partly because we do, we see our lane as narrower, right? Like we're trying to tell you what's going on and provide really good information, but

not ultimately resolve the argument. That said, I mean, I do think there, I do think that there's a long tradition of people in American politics who think they can shape reality. I mean, there was a famous, was it Carl, who was it in the Bush administration? It was Carl Rove in the New York Times magazine. Told Robert Draper that they were gonna shape, they didn't have to be accountable

to the reality-based community anymore. And at some point, journalism is the reality-based community. Like the power doesn't really ultimately come from, to me, like it comes from the fact that you're revealing things that are in fact true and the citizen is that voters are gonna wind up having to react to. And I don't think we've, I don't think that's,

I think people kind of underestimate that that's really the power of it in the first place. I think the, what is reality is still reality, right? If let's say the Biden administration had been able to get a bunch of reporters, inflation is an example. It did not matter what the New York Times or CNN or Semaphore or anyone else wrote about inflation.

People still went to the grocery store and were paying more for eggs or milk or whatever. That is reality. The thing that is, I think, harder is people are less informed about what's happening now, because it's harder to get news. You have this gigantic gap now. We saw this in a bunch of the polling. There was NBC polling. Before Biden dropped out, you had Navigator Research Polling afterwards, which just shows that the biggest gap in politics is not left and right. It's news consumers and non-news consumers, which does go to the irony, which I'm sure you might find quite sweet,

that all the Democrats who've been screaming at myself sometimes, including who've been screaming about New York Times headlines turned out to be the New York Times readers are the ones who were most likely to support Biden or Harris and the people who did not read the news. It's not so, like you do just sort of have this question, just to me, that chasm is growing so much larger,

really since 2020, I think, and how, like, and that to me is a crisis for democracy, right, like all this stuff, you mentioned Elon 50 times, as you should, it's like, it's one of the biggest stories and maybe in generations of American politics, we have the world's richest man, possibly running rush shot over laws and rules and norms to just reshape government without any sort of accountability. And how many people are actually

consuming any of that? Right? And how do you get that information to them? And is that your job, I guess, is the question. I mean, those are all really good questions. I mean, I think, I mean, I guess I would say like, it's certainly nothing like the democracy that we grew up in in the 20th century with a very kind of unusually stable, unusually centrist media. It's a lot like 19th century American democracy, right? I mean, it's a lot like, and I think that,

you know, a kind of, there is something about what we're seeing is a kind of small D democratic media. That's an absolutely chaotic hyper partisan untrustworthy mess. That is very embedded in the history of democracy. So, and I'm not saying that is a good thing, but I do think that like the kind of thing that we know that honestly, by the beginnings of our careers was already in trouble. The sort of broadcast, the Walter Cronkite thing, that was the blip, right? I mean, this is the norm. You talked a lot of Republicans, you talked a lot of Democrats. Do you think Republicans better understand this media environment than Democrats? I think that in this moment after the election, everybody thinks that like that the winning side figured it out

and that the losers are morons and everybody is like gearing up to refight the last war and every CEO every politician is going to be booking themselves onto a bunch of podcasts nobody listens to for the next four years. But then in fact, the that I think and then always the world changes faster than they expect. Like I think we're headed back into a moment of consolidation basically, and that there's gonna be a recent realization of audiences and of content, and that like some poor hapless congressional candidate

is gonna spend 300 hours talking to podcasts nobody listens to, to no discernible effect. But also the Trump years have, I mean, the consolidation of power in Washington is also really new in media, right? Like the extent to which media executives are obsessed with what the administration can do to hurt them. And it's true across business.

We're hosting this huge World Economic Summit here in April and just the appetite of CEOs in America to get to Washington to figure out what is going on is really new. Say a little bit more about what you're moving back to a more centralized media. I don't think I assume you don't mean ideologically. What do you mean by that? Oh, just that, you know, I mean, it was technological there. If you needed it for the late 20th century, you needed a broadcast tower or a printing press. If you wanted to reach a lot of people and not that many people had them. Spectrum was regulated. And so you really had this very, I mean,

for technological reasons fundamentally. There were, as you said, about distribution. The system was meant. And then the business incentives of those were to sell mattresses to Republicans and to Democrats. And often that led to something that we romanticize, actually, a kind of so centrist media. But it also did produce this kind of false consensus

around Iraq, which as you say, is part of why everybody lost trust in that kind of media. But the fundamental change was technological, the splint in the fact that you didn't need these broadcast towers anymore. And so I just think it's hard to imagine going back to that. And you know, there are, like we definitely see for readers part of the value is,

and I think you do this too, we can read everything so you don't have to and go out into the, put on the hazmat suit and go out into social media and find the interesting stuff, some of which is on weird sub stacks and right wing podcasts, and some of which is in the New York Times.

And it's this very disorienting moment to be a media consumer. Yeah, that's one of the things that I think with my media business head on is that one of the places where there is opportunity is basically curation. Yeah, I mean that's at Semaphore, that's so much of what we do.

And you have to build trust with the audiences that trust you and that is, for better or for worse, that trust is, you can build brand trust as I'm sure you're trying to do at Semaphore, but it's often with people. With individuals, totally. Yes. Yeah. It's like, I trust Joe Rogan to tell me what's happening. I trust Ezra Klein to tell me what's happening. I trust Positive America, whoever else. And I mean, you've done that a little bit with some of your reporters trying to lift them up like Dave Weigel. Yeah, no,

we definitely are building around expert reporters on key beats in a way that in the old days, you would just, you're all cogs in the machine, dispensable cogs in the Wall Street Journal machine. And now if you're Liz Hoffman on Wall Street or Burgess Everett in the Senate, like that's, you know, you trust a person. And it's a very, yeah, it's a very, it's a interesting time to be in this business for sure.

Speaking of sort of that sort of curation role, I was thinking, I went back and read your first column as the New York Times media critic, which was claiming that you're a brand new employer of the New York Times had grown so successful that it was bad for business. Since then, the New York Times has become even bigger, even better read and it's, you know,

putative competitors have become, have struggled mightily since then, Washington Post most notably, Wall Street Journal still does well, but has had layoffs, et cetera. And so, where do you think the New York Times stands right now? Do you still believe it's bad for journalism? I mean, I actually think it's scary for the New York Times. Like, you don't want to be the sole strong independent outlet

in a kind of democracy where rule of law is a little shaky. Like that's a bad place to be. And it would be healthier for the media. You have a target on you? Yeah, for sure. And it would be healthier for the media ecosystem and healthier for the Times and better for the leverage of journalists and their salary negotiations if there were lots of big competing outlets with sort of somewhat different outlooks on the world. Like I mean, that's just a healthier system. And, and I don't know.

I mean, I'm hopeful that a couple of other legacy outlets, the Wall Street Journal, maybe CNN, could get their acts together and that long, long-term places like the Washington Post can pull it out. And then I do think there's a lot of, I mean, I do think that, again, if you go back to like, if you ask people, if you ask your listeners, like, do you think this is all great

and you're satisfied with what you're getting or do you want new stuff? People really are hungry for new ways of getting information, for new voices, for somebody who will go out, as you say, and just like sort through all the lunacy for them. And so I think, I mean, I think there's, I mean, I think, you know,

we're in this moment of crazy transition and there'll be a bunch of new things too. But yeah, no, I do think, I mean, I think it you know, we're in this moment of crazy transition and there'll be a bunch of new things too, but yeah, no, I do think, I mean, I think it's in no one's interest to have one absolutely dominant and defending company. I sort of feel like the New York Times has become Netflix for news, where it's just, it's the place you go for every, it is replaced, sort of like the way Netflix

has replaced television, right? You want- Yeah. But does Netflix have taste, right? Like Netflix has the stuff that is targeted at conservative people in the middle of the country and the stuff that's targeted at liberals and the police. Yeah, I mean, they have everything. And the New York Times obviously brings with it

a brand that exists, but it is- Political, cultural lines. Like right now, if I am just like, I wanna find out what is happening right now in this moment, my default place to go would just be the New York Times. I know, like it's 2005, right? Because for like 10 years and then 15 years in the middle, Twitter was where I got,

where I would have gone to see that. Now you can't use social media for that. Like you just can't ask the question of what is going on and have it answered. Yeah, you can't just open up Twitter and have it be at the top of your feed in the way it was before from a trusted, you know, a reporter or a news outlet you knew that had been verified by Twitter. Yeah. And you want to know what's going on and you want to know what's more important than what else? Like you want to know where on the page it is? You want some hierarchy, actually, in the chaos? No, I mean, that's the opportunity that we see ourselves is running at for sure.

that we see ourselves as running at for sure. But it's like right now for a lot of people, I think who are sort of in the serious news consumer, it's like, you want to know what's happening in sports? Maybe you go to ESPN or maybe you go to the New York Times and read the athletic, right? You want to know how to cook something? You go there. You want to play a game?

You go there. You want to know what's happening? You go there. You want to know who's winning the Grammys? You open up the New York Times app and they are telling you as they come in, where they are. It's just, it is like, it is such a dominant position

in the ecosystem that it has, it is, to me, I really feel like it has replaced the conglomerate of major news sources you were all getting from Twitter or from whatever. It's replaced like the internet. You were using it 10 years ago. Yeah, yeah, it is the internet for news, right? In the way that Netflix is the internet for TV and movies.

Primarily. Yeah, and then you can get a bunch of stuff around the edges, but ultimately, no, I think that's, I think that's really true right now. But I think, right, but we're also sort of in this moment when podcasts like this one, like, what is this? Is this a podcast? Are we on video?

Is it television? Is it a podcast? Both, it's? Is it television? Is it a podcast? It's true. It is. It's long form contact. Lots of people will be watching this on a big screen on YouTube and at some point somebody's gonna come and make us both wear makeup to do this.

So we like our skin looks less weird. And then like suddenly we're just like idiots in boxes screaming at each other, just like cable. And I think like there's a really, really fast convergence happening between what we used to call podcasts and what we used to call television. And I don't quite know where that lands, but I think that's, people don't quite realize the speed

at which that's happening and at which that's gonna be a kind of recentralized form of consumption. You see it at ESPN, right? You see Pat McAfee out in the afternoons on ESPN. It's like, what's happening here? Like one guy's head is bigger than the other guy's head. I mean, there is the conventions of television as we know it are coming down in news particular.

And the things that people don't sort of realize and who sort of even like people even who work in journalism or who are in the communications fields in politics or PR or wherever else is there is still like a old world mentality that's hard to break out of because you're always people like people, a lot of people are generationally like frozen in amber and when they started in media.

I think that's very true of politicians. Every single one of us. But I think some people, and I give you kind of this point, have, you know, you have been indifferent. You know, you were sort of, you were a tabloid reporter in New York City. You were a blogger when blogs took off

and sort of the RSS feed became the, you ridden the wave. I've tried to ride the wave as well. But like the facts that you wanna sort of realize is one, the biggest podcasting platform in the world is not Spotify, it's YouTube. And that a shocking, the numbers of people who watch YouTube on their actual smart TV in their house shocks people. That it's so many people doing that.

Yeah, would you like put on nicer clothes if you really thought about it? I put on a, normally I'm wearing a t-shirt, I put on an actual sweater. Yeah, that's very nice. I would not have put on a sport coat because this is a podcast. That's not you.

But don't you think? It's not a funeral court, funeral wedding or court date. But actually you're also running a media business and like, you must be thinking like, why don't you have like some hour of MSN, why isn't Podsave providing an hour to CNN or MSNBC or something like,

why are they paying these people way more than you would charge them to provide an hour of programming? Like, don't you see that stuff converging? I think you can see that converging, how it converges, whether it can actually... This has been the challenge for most media organizations. You've witnessed this. It truly was with the exception of the New York Times, there is not a good example of a previous legacy media organization that has made an actual transition to digital, right? It is just like, they cannot do it. Some, you know, some like Politico start digitally, right?

Like you had, like when you started, there was an actual newspaper that people read over lunch at Capitol Hill, but it was a digital first publication. And, but no one else can do it because they are, I mean, it's to the great credit of the New York Times as from a business story of pulling that off, but people can't actually do it.

ESPN is trying to do it and maybe they'll be successful with like Pat McAvee is an example of it. Yeah, Disney is trying to do it. It is, right, it is incredibly hard, but it just seems to me that people are producing, podcasters are producing shows that are more interesting than most of what's on TV. And they have big audience and big followings.

They're doing it for like a tiny fraction of the cost of producing an hour of television. And meanwhile, television is running out of money. And just seems to me that set of factors means inevitably that I'm gonna like, you know, be in a dentist's office and see your face very soon. Well, I hope not, not my face, but maybe some other face. But there is a little of everything is old is new again,

which is there for a long time, the thing ESPN ran all morning was just a video feed of ESPN radio shows. ESPN radio was where the money was. And so it was just like, you would just watch Mike and Mike every morning. And I miss another example. I mean, Howard Stern.

Yeah, this is that. Right, this is not a complicated business. And so, what is that? But then like, what does that mean for this super fragmented political landscape? I actually think it means it gets a little less fragmented and that these kind of recoalesces around really, really big individual voices, probably more than I mean, like the Megan Kelly's of the world, like, you guys, I mean, there's, there's sort of a reconsolidation around a relatively smaller number of really big voices. What's like how you think of channels is different

because it's not like a network channel. It is either a media network that is centered around a podcast like Crooked Media or Daily Wire or Alex Cooper's Unwell Network or whatever that you like, because you try, and then usually you're entering it because of the talent at the top. And then that gives you entry into the other people.

But it just, it exists very differently. I think that you asked me the question about like why not CNN MSNBC. The thing that I watch, you know, I talk a lot of people in the progressive media space is the thing you have to be careful not to do is take your new thing and then just rebuild the failed model of health.

You see this in Substack a lot where there, the economics of Substack are great when you're small. When you're one person. When you start hiring a bunch of reporters and doing that, you're right back to where you were before, which is it becomes very hard to support it. So how can you do something that is new and stays new? I think we are just like, this is the reason I wanna have this conversation

with you of all people today is, we are just in a fascinating moment in media. And politics is media, politics is the war for attention, politics is the information war. And so these things interact in a way that are just sort of critically important too. And it's just, it's happening so fast. Like I used to say that when I left the White House

in like 2015, that the period of time from when I went to work for Obama, which was before the iPhone came out, to the time I left when Facebook and Twitter and Snapchat were becoming dominant, or was like the fastest period of change in media since the invention of the printing press. And I think, actually I think the change

from when I left to now is greater than that, I think. Yeah, you were there for this almost very linear story. Like it felt like this rocket ship, but we could see where it was going. And then at some point it just exploded and the whole thing is- It exploded and new things came and the power of the legacy media changed dramatically

because of technology, because of economics, et cetera. Yeah, I think there's a big open question of whether this splintering new right-wing media, like what becomes of it? Does it create its own New York Times, or does it just continue to spend its time basically yelling about the New York Times? I think that's a really open question.

Yeah, I mean, it is like that is a, you know, and some of them are getting quite big, right? Yeah, but, and does it become boring just to be an attack dog for the people in power? To me, that's the most boring and demoralizing form of media, to be an attack dog for power. And if you worked really hard to get Donald Trump elected, that's what you've become.

And so I think there's going to be a question of who in the media just sticks with loyalty as their brand, and who tries to, again, as Murdoch has established sort of an independent voice and power base that is not just fealty to the president. Yeah, it is a ecosystem grown in opposition that, you know, how it, having, are they the dog that caught the car and what do they do with that?

I think it's gonna be a big question going forward. It is gonna be really confusing to watch for us. That is a good summary of where we are in the media world. Ben Smith, thank you so much for this great conversation. It's always good to talk to you. Thanks for having me on down. If you wanna listen to Pod Save America ad free

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