The Bulwark Podcast - Ben Smith: The Rise and Fall of the Social Media News Age

Episode Date: May 3, 2023

The pioneers of the digital media age thought they were building a progressive answer to Drudge—that would help get a Democrat elected in '08. But the architects of the new rightwing populism were also there, watching and learning. Ben Smith discusses his new book, "Traffic," with Charlie Sykes today. show notes: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/678592/traffic-by-ben-smith/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes. It is May 3rd, 2023. Breaking news, the alpha man running away from both debates and testimony in the E. Jean Carroll case. CNN is still struggling to explain why it is giving the twice-impeached, indicted, accused, rapist, sedition-inspiring ex-president primetime town hall meeting. The Texas legislature moving toward allowing Republican officials to overturn elections. And my Morning Shots newsletter focuses on the 26 women who have accused Donald Trump of sexual misconduct. There's so much going on. So we are joined by Ben Smith, co-founder of Semaphore, previously the media columnist at the New York Times, founding editor-in-chief at Buzz

Feed News. And he has a brand new book, which just came out this week, Traffic, Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion Dollar Race to Go Viral. So, first of all, good morning, Ben. Thanks so much for having me, Charlie. Well, I want to talk about this book, which I told you I read on a plane to Phoenix last week. The origin stories of this incredible shit show that we now find ourselves in the middle of. Yeah, that's honestly what the subtitle should have been. That should have been the subtitle. But some editor said no. Before we get into all that, I'm really conflicted, and I'm having a hard time parsing through this latest story about

Tucker Carlson and the New York Times report that they have this bombshell text that apparently alarmed the Fox board and might have contributed to his firing. This is the New York Times reporting a text message sent by Tucker Carlson that set off a panic at the highest level of Fox on the eve of its billion-dollar defamation trial showed its most popular host sharing his private inflammatory views about violence and race. And he talks about how he was watching a video of some Trump guys beating up an Antifa kid. And he said, I found myself rooting for the mob against the man, hoping they'd hit him harder, kill him. I really wanted them to hurt the kid. I could taste it. Says, you know, this is not the way that white men fight, but he was still into it.

And then he goes on a little bit later to say, yeah, but then I had to ask myself, do I really want to be this? So, Ben, I wanted to get your take on all of this because there's a lot going on in all of that. And I wonder whether or not it's as bad. All of my instincts say, do not cut this guy any slack. But is it as bad as it sounds? And the reason I'm asking that is because there is a certain introspection in the text where he says, okay, this is what I was feeling. And I don't want to feel this way. You know, I want to remember that somebody probably loves this kid and would be crushed if something

bad happens. If I don't care about those things, if I reduce people to their politics, how am I better than he is? So shockingly, it's evidence that Tucker Carlson had a bit of conscience embedded in all that racism. Yeah, I mean, I guess I think there are sort of three different things happening here. And the first one, which, this isn't brand new news. The Fox News has fired a series of people working for Tucker Carlson who turned out to be, again, just like stone cold racists talking the way people talked in the 1920s, right? About race. This isn't the way white men fight. Like, what?

I mean, if you were shocked and surprised that that is how Tucker is talking behind the scenes, you just obviously haven't been watching the show, haven't been reading any of the coverage for the last 10 years. But I find that genuinely shocking. I guess the board, who also presumably don't watch television, found it shocking. It's pretty shocking. I agree with you that then there is a second and really kind of unrelated thing. The racist remark is basically an aside, that he's kind of staring into the abyss and seeing his own kind of, you know, attraction to mob violence and pulling back. And I tend to,

I guess in to cut people slack in private messages that weren't intended for publication when they reflect, it's a very dark, strange exchange. He just makes a casually racist remark sort of in the course of this other reflection. But the third thing is, I mean, I believe the great New York times reflection. But the third thing is, I mean,

I believe the great New York Times reporting that this was the thing that sent the board into a panic. I mean, ultimately, this wasn't that new. I mean, none of this is that new. And the sort of notion that they just discovered and were shocked to discover that Tucker is peddling racial division, that he says disgusting things about women. They were just the last people on earth to find this out. And so very strange. Ultimately, too, this is a company run by Rupert Murdoch, not by anybody else. The board is famously supine. Who knows?

And I think Fox is always after these little crises, tries to piece together a story in which it operates like a normal company, like the board exercises governance, for instance, like a normal company. That's not really how that place works. Rupert Murdoch makes decisions on the fly and always has for 70 years. Seems unlikely he would stop now. So I think you'd really have to ask him exactly what happened. And I'm not sure there's another way of explaining it. Well, you make a great point that if you look at this and are shocked by this text message, then clearly you have not been paying any attention to what Tucker Carlson has been saying on the air over and over and over again. You know, I still have that image sort of, you know, burned into my retina of Tucker

Carlson holding up the front page of the New York Times with this big shit-eating grin, you know, this big expose of how he had been running the most racist show in the history of cable television. I mean, this is not a secret. If you read about it, if you followed it, if you watched it, you knew who Tucker Carlson was. Yeah, it was literally on the front page of the New York Times. Which again, maybe these folks are Wall Street Journal readers. I don't know. But just the notion that the Fox board is acting super responsibly is, I mean, come on. Well, it's an interesting story.

So your book examines the rise and fall of the social media news age through the lens of BuzzFeed News and Gawker. And yet it comes out at this moment that BuzzFeed News is shutting down. One of the first digital media pioneers is coming to an end. Now, you were the founding editor-in-chief of the news division at BuzzFeed. What happened? Yeah, I mean, that makes me really sad. And I think a lot of things happened, including just mistakes in running the business that I have some responsibility for. But the big story and the reason Vice is heading into bankruptcy, a whole generation of media is really struggling,

has to do with this big bet we all made on social media. You know, I think there was an idea, and again, this part of it is a business story. There was an idea that just like, you know, when cable came up in the 80s, they laid these cables and they needed content. And these great media companies, MTV, CNN, what would become Viacom, ESPN, were born into that new world, providingPN, were born into that new world,

providing content that was suited for that new world, and became these huge sustainable businesses. And the cable operators needed great profitable businesses to make content for them. And it was a symbiotic relationship. Our strategy at BuzzFeed was rested on the idea that the social media platforms similarly would realize that they needed quality, trusted content, premium, awesome entertainment that was purpose-built for their platforms, but also professionally created and competitive. And they never came around to that point of view. And maybe we were insane to think they ever would. Consumers, for a different set of reasons, got pretty freaked out by social media, I think, and are moving away from it. But I think the business story, that's ultimately it, that ultimately these platforms loved getting everything for free and didn't like paying for anything. I mean, fair.

Well, I think the extraordinary thing about your narrative, though, is the way it describes the unintended consequences of all of this. You go back to the early digital media scene in the early aughts, in the early 2010s, these mostly young, mostly progressive people who thought that they were growing this new progressive media. And they thought that the election of Barack Obama was, this was the culmination of many of their efforts. And of course, it didn't turn out that way, did it? There was a meeting in Hollywood after the 2004 election. We can't let this happen again. The drudge report is this big thing. We need like a left-wing answer to the drudge report that will channel all this new digital energy into electing a Democrat in 2008. Huffington Post was very focused on that. Barack Obama visited Facebook

and it just went without saying that Facebook was a democratic place because it was where college kids got on the internet. Who are college kids going to vote for? Barack Obama. And so there was this sense in that world that in a way, Obama's election was like the culmination of this new digital media and this new digital moment. I've certainly felt that way at BuzzFeed. And we had, you know, we did this incredible stunt with Obama where he sort of riffed on the thanks Obama meme and a video that went everywhere and put on sunglasses and used a selfie stick. And there was just a sense of like,

not necessarily that every outlet had the same politics, but these were youthful progressive places just because that's who was on the internet. Then when I went back and reported on reported on this kind of like slightly kind of insane Coke addled scene of the early aughts in downtown Manhattan with all these great characters. One of the things that I hadn't realized, and I think a lot of the people in that scene hadn't noticed, was that a lot of the people who would kind of build this new right wing populism were kind of there. The guy who built

4chan was working out of BuzzFeed's offices for a while. Yeah, I was amazed by that. Andrew Breitbart was a co-founder of Huffington Post. You have to put your head way back into a different place to think like, oh sure, I'm starting a left-wing thing, so I'll go hire the guy from the right-wing thing. Totally makes sense. Because they were all on the internet, and the internet was a small place.

Steve Bannon went by HuffPost and learned a lot from it. To me, like it really crystallized when I was watching the, you know, January 6th, and there was a guy live streaming from the Capitol, you know, cheerfully marauding around, who had been my colleague at BuzzFeed. Would this be Baked Alaska? Yes, Baked Alaska, as he was known. I probably should have known this, but the fact that, you know, Gavin McInnes was a co-founder of Vice. I mean, all of these people were there.

And so it took a weird turn. So let me just tell you, you know, one of my, and I'm not trying to be personal about all of this, but as I'm reading the book and all the characters that, you know, were involved in all of this and how it took the dark turn that it did, I keep thinking to myself, man, please, please do not tell me that a bunch of over-caffeinated, over-medicated, narcissist, you know, cokeheads and assholes with hammers destroyed Western civilization. Is this what happened? Because you have so many of these sort of colorful characters, and I have to tell you that I had a hard time. Maybe I had a hard time rooting for them because I know what the end game story is. So maybe that's unfair. I think that's unfair, Charlie. We weren't all cokeheads. But all the rest of the stuff?

No, I mean, I don't think these are simple stories or that you can just point to causes of Donald Trump or whatever. And I do think to sort of understand it, you have to kind of look at where the media was in 2004. I think there was a sense that the media was totally out of touch. I mean, the sort of mainstream media with this new digital world that a lot of us were starting to live in, you know, television stations, newspapers, just had no way of communicating on the internet.

And then we were coming out of the Iraq war in particular, where I think there was a pretty broad sense that the mainstream media had totally screwed up and had contributed to this incredible debacle. And that there was a lot of appetite for new voices and new perspectives. It's not like it came out of nowhere. So let's talk about some of the main characters of your book. You have Jonah Peretti, a co-founder of the Huffington Post and BuzzFeed, who really had the insight that media could be, you know, distributed by what your friends were sharing. I mean, he saw that.

And then you also have sort of the doppelganger, Nick Denton, the founder of Gawker, who thought, let's share gossip, let's share pornography, let's share prurience, let's, you know, let's go there. And the fact is, as you point out, I mean, the content on each site would be distributed, you know, so it became what became known as viral. And as you explain, they didn't see and we didn't see the extent to which this really toxic politics would be the thing that people wanted to share and talk about right i mean you know that what the idea was hey let's share with people

what they're interested in and nobody knew that it was going to be the toxic politics that was going to supercharge the whole thing yeah or at least i don't know if nobody knew it but we sure didn't and in fact at buzzfeed where i worked I worked, the slogan early on was, no haters. That wasn't just a talking point. There was a real theory that if you're in the privacy of the search bar, you might type in something really noxious, because that's, as Tucker Carlson, in a way, was talking about earlier, people's private selves aren't always their best selves.

But the theory was, if you're posting things in public, you're going to be sort of showing what a good person you are. And you're going to be posting thoughtful articles and fundraisers for earthquake victims and funny memes and jokes and baby pictures. But like, what kind of person would go post confrontational, divisive politics on social media? Like what an insane thing to do. Everybody would hate you. Who would do that? And that really was the theory under which we operated. One of the questions that I've gone back and forth on, and I'm sure you've given it a lot of thought as well, which is does the new social media, does it actually change the way that people think and behave? Or does it just reveal and expose what was already there?

How do you parse that out? I guess I really think both. You know, certainly all these elements of human nature are there. And it's not like social media invented, you know, all of our worst qualities, but also specific features of these different platforms can dial them up and dial them down. And Facebook in particular made a series of very specific choices that I think at times were aimed just for totally commercial reasons to produce more engagement on their platform. Which is to say you were spending 4.8 minutes a day on the platform and they would like you to spend 5.2 minutes.

And really the way most of the folks at that business are thinking, that's all they're thinking about. And if you think of them as a political institution, you're kind of looking through the telescope backwards. They're basically a commercial entity trying to get you to use their product more and buy more stuff. Really the course of this on Facebook is really worth looking at. And they see and are criticized that people are sharing made-up stories that Hillary Clinton has been replaced by a body double. And so they think, oh, let's find a new metric that keeps people more engaged but in a more meaningful way.

And they have this idea of meaningful social interactions, which is meant to be, well, you're not just blindly sharing some stupid thing. You're engaging with it. You're commenting on it. It kind of makes sense in theory. In practice, what it is, is I share some insane Donald Trump meme, you comment, kill yourself, 17 times in a row. And then the system is like, wow, look at this great engagement, shows it to everyone, both of us know. So when did it become clear that the most engaging posts were the ones that created the most

enragement? At what point did people go, okay, so the fake news actually gets more traffic than the real news. The stuff that makes people angry, in fact, is what's supercharging this engagement. It was before the 2016 election, right? You know, I would say something like 2015. You know, I think it's hard to say what's cause and what's effect. I think people were really angry. I think the message that Donald Trump was sort of selling that the establishment had forgotten you, that you were getting screwed,

and that globalization had sort of left you behind were all things people really felt and were really angry about. And so it's not like Facebook or Donald Trump necessarily just created that out of sort of some technical trick. And the fact that these social platforms all over the world, not just in the US, became sort of overrun by this surging right-wing populism wasn't just about the social platforms. Like, that was happening in the world. And I think, I don't know, I just think it's too simple to say one caused the other. Well, I mean, that's what's interesting is, you know, was this festering rage out there that now had an outlet as opposed to have recreated something that is just pumping the rage dopamine into people is just injecting it into people so that, you know, as people are scrolling through, they're getting angrier and anger and more willing to express their rage and their hatred. Because, I mean, it doesn't seem that long ago that, as you pointed out, that you wouldn't expect that

somebody would want to advertise their derangement or their hatred. They wouldn't do that in public. They wanted to present their best selves. So what happened between 2004 and, say, 2020, where people said, yeah, I'm going to spend a good portion of my day being a complete and total asshole in front of the whole world? You know, I think, you know, the unsatisfying answer, I think two big things happened, right? A huge technological change and the great financial crisis, which was not a technological thing. I mean, I think people were genuinely really angry. And also there were these new tools for expressing it, and those things fed each other. But I don't think that you pull out social media, you pull out Facebook, and nationalism goes away, right? I mean, I think it's more

complicated. So, you had an interview with Walter Isaacson the other night, and you suggested that you thought that maybe the election of Joe Biden signified that people are getting tired of all the drama and the conflict. And the last few weeks, it kind of felt like everything was drawing to a close. Why would you think that? Because as I look at social media, I still see the crazy and the anger continuing to ramp up. So what is coming to a close? Well, I think, I mean, in a way, I mean, there's a bunch of things that have happened in the last few weeks. I don't think, again, this is sort of a neat line you can draw under it. But, you know, the end of BuzzFeed News and Vice reflected the end of, I think, an idea of a media business that you could build on social media. And then, you know, the firings of Tucker Carlson, which I think we probably agree, like, it wasn't just one text message.

It was whatever, however Murdoch makes decisions, it was time for a change. And CNN firing Don Lemon is a totally different kind of a figure, but was very associated with a period at CNN when they were defining themselves as this anti-Trump voice. And where's that pressure coming from? From the audience to some degree, from advertisers, from corporate media executives, all great reasons. But I think it's not that social media is getting, that Twitter in particular is getting less crazy,

it's that it's getting less relevant. And Facebook similarly. I mean, they'll argue with you about whether it's shrinking or growing, but certainly discussion of matters of public interest on Facebook is sort of fading. And these are no longer the places that politics gets shaped the way they used to be. Well, one of the fun things in your book is the way that you sort of fading. And these are no longer the places that politics gets shaped the way they used to be. Well, one of the fun things in your book is the way that you sort of capture this media startup craze in New York in the early aughts, that kind of untold story. And you wrote,

you know, it was a real moment of dynamism and interesting stuff that was happening. You had, you know, Peretti out there, the idealistic data whiz kid, Denton, founder of Gawker with his acid pen. The story of Gawker is really something, including the, speaking of relevant, including the, is it too strong to use the actual well-funded conspiracy led by Peter Thiel to destroy it? No, that's a real thing that happened. It's a real thing that happened. It's amazing that you had a billionaire who basically said, I'm really mad at you i'm going to kill you i'm going to destroy you and he did yeah and they gave him ammunition

i mean they were right and gawker was this it was almost sort of the flip side of us the reason i focused on those characters was that they were they're great characters who were also real personal rivals and who also saw the world very differently i think nick looked at the same tools that jonah looked at these tools and saw wow this is going to be this utopian paradise. Denton looked at these tools and said, okay, this is going to rip the mask off of all this hypocrisy. Journalists can just say what they think. Readers who, if they want pornography, they can just look at pornography. They don't need to pretend they look at anything else.

And that this will sort of be a more honest new medium. And at times, I think that led to real, you know, real progress and real good things. I think if you look at the rise of this website called Jezebel in 2007, that was this sort of frontal attack on all the worst things about the women's magazines, the way they distorted women's sort of body images, how there were only white models, things like that. And they just like, I mean, this is so fun.

They like launched with a $10 thousand dollar bounty for an unretouched photo and somebody like stole one from red book and gave it to them i guess and of faith hill where like before they had removed her freckles and smile lines right and like that was a really positive movement in some ways but also in a way that would really presage the future generated this incredibly intense and sort of toxic relationship with their own audience, actually, in a very Twitter-like way, in this sort of birth of this kind of online outrage culture. And then the other side of it was just this ideology that everything should be exposed, led in a fairly logical way to them publishing a series of sex tapes and intimate photographs that I think it's hard to think back to the mid-aughts when most people didn't have digital cameras on their phones. And so this was sort of a slightly exotic thing that you didn't know what to make of. Because now I think enough people have embarrassing images on their phones

that it's appalling that some journalist would go around exposing this stuff. It's just so far outside the pale. It was the Hulk Hogan tape that brought them down, the invasion of privacy case that really led to the demise of Gawker. Right. And as you said, it was a well-funded conspiracy by a billionaire that brought that case to court. But the reason Gawker lost it in court was because Buckcom 2015, 2016, a jury in Florida is just totally appalled that they're putting this stuff on the internet and they can't explain it. Have judgments like that changed the culture

of this new media? And I'm thinking about, you know, the role of litigation. What just happened with Fox? Will that have any, you know, sobering effect? Did the demise of Gawker for publishing sex tapes, did that have an effect with them? I mean, did that have ripple effects throughout the culture, the social media culture? I mean, in the most narrow sense, I think it made really clear that people's intimate pictures are off limits. And I think you've since seen a term called revenge porn sort of come into the lexicon. And I think that was a salutary change in the culture.

And then on the very dark side, I think it made everybody a little that much more scared of challenging powerful rich people who have a new tool to wage war on their enemies. And powerful rich people have always abused the courts to attack their enemies that's not totally new but this is a another reason for publishers to be scared about printing printing true things about powerful rich people and that's a real concern but i think most broadly like in the united states the legal guardrails on journalism are pretty pretty far out they're pretty loose you You know, I mean, Fox managed to find, like, the single most damaging tort it could violate, which is just, you know, attacking a company

that could show commercial damage from very specific lies about that company, you know, in the context of the highest-stakes story in the world, the election. But Fox hosts can lie all day, as long as they're not committing defamation that causes damages to people within pretty narrowly defined strictures. And there's a limit to what the law is going to fix. There's a great line from one of my favorite writers that you get justice in the next world. In this world, you have the law. Well, I mean, they can lie all day as long as they don't write emails and text messages to each other, you know, admitting that they're lying and

why they're lying. And if they're not lying about a well-heeled company, I mean, I think that's one of the lessons, right? Yeah, it's specifically, it's that they were lying about a company that could claim damages in a lawsuit in a very specific way. This point, I don't think can be overstressed. It is extremely difficult to win a defamation suit like this. So Fox's behavior had to be really extraordinary to put them in the position where everybody thought that they were at real legal risk. Do you think they would have lost that case? They obviously think they would have lost. The facts were just so catastrophically bad for them. As you say, it's like if you were trying to make up the worst possible case of defamation, it would be this.

So let's go back to the Gawker Buzzfeed story. Your book was reviewed in the Washington Post by Max Reed, who was an editor at Gawker, who wrote that the race to go viral seems kind of pathetic in retrospect. At best, a brief, wacky interregnum between periods of sustained dominance by big national news publishers. At worst, a pointless waste of journalistic creativity and resources spent pursuing a doomed business strategy. Of the many delusions in the book, the grandest is the idea that digital publishers could build sustainable businesses by chasing immense audiences with free content. So, I mean, I guess I have a couple of things on that. One is that it's very easy to say things are doomed after they've failed.

But the reality is you don't know in advance. And I think that this notion, this analogy of cable, maybe it was totally insane all along, but maybe the social media companies themselves could have chosen different paths and created a healthier ecosystem that would have been better for them. That's actually what I think. But who knows, honestly. And obviously, in retrospect, we were wrong.

So, you know, hard to argue with that. But I think there's a kind of easy cynicism of looking at things that failed and say they were doomed to failure and everybody involved was a moron. You know, maybe that's me being a little defensive. But I think actually there was an enormous amount of journalistic creativity and work that wasn't wasted.

Just a lot of good work that existed in the moment, which is all that journalism ever does. And the other thing is, for better and for worse, I think you can see the DNA of BuzzFeed and Gawker and all these places and the people very deeply absorbed into the mainstream journalistic culture. And then, of course, that's one of the stories, you know, how many of the people who got started there went on to what we want want to call it? Legacy media, established media, but also you have the proliferation of outlets that are doing good journalism. You know, Vice News had some very powerful reporting, very, very powerful, you know,

movies and videos, Buzzfeed News broke a lot of things. And now I think that we just take it for granted that there are other news outlets and news sources other than, say, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times that are doing this kind of groundbreaking, credible journalism. And we're not going back. And I want to talk to you about Semaphore in a moment. Since we're talking, I mean, I have to ask you the question that everybody asks you. Your decision to have BuzzFeed publish the Steele dossier in January 2017. You took a lot of flack for that. In retrospect, what do you think about that?

In retrospect, I have complicated feelings about it and wrote about it in the book. I mean, I think in some big picture sense, the context of that digital media world where, and I'd come up kind of reading and copying Gawker actually, and with that sharing that kind of belief in transparency. And so in a big sense, I probably had a kind of reading and copying Gawker, actually, and with that sharing that kind of belief in transparency. And so in a big sense, I probably had a kind of impulse to say, hey, like if Charlie and I have seen this document, and so has every member of the Senate, intelligence official, political consultant, journalist in Washington, like why shouldn't you?

Like I do have that impulse. That said, there were pretty good reasons weighing the other way too, which was that it was full of lurid allegations that weren't proven. And it's a pretty heavy thing to sort of throw those out there. I mean, the thing that tipped the scale for me was there were two. One was that it had clearly like become part of politics. It was this dark matter in politics. Harry Reid was right, had written a letter referring to it. McCain was acting in a certain way toward Trump that you couldn't really explain without knowing about it. It was affecting the course of things without, and we weren't allowed to tell our audience what was happening. But the thing that tipped it for me was CNN reports that, you know,

it's been briefed to the sitting president, Barack Obama, and the president-elect Donald Trump by the director of the FBI, which obviously turns it into a document. I mean, if you had any doubt about its public import, that's sort of a very formal way of verifying it. And CNN also says this document says Donald Trump's been compromised by the Russians. And this is certainly something you could argue with, but I think if you say there is a secret, super serious document

that says Donald Trump's been compromised by the Russians, it is healthier for democracy for people to see it than not see it. And actually, I think a lot of people saw it and said, this is total nonsense. And that was healthier than having people wave around a list of suspected communists and not show it to anyone. Right. I mean, you know, there was the decision, of course, you know, do you publish the Pentagon papers?

Do you put out other information that actually is having an effect right now? And I do think that there is that moment. I was thinking about this a couple of weeks ago. I was watching a reporter on one of the cable channels, and he was talking about some piece of information that clearly he knew, but he wasn't going to share it. And yet you couldn't really understand what everybody was talking about without it. It was like, okay, so, you know, I'm telling the public everything they need to know, except exactly what they need to know about all of this. And now I'm going with the screen, just show us, tell us what it is. I know. And the, but the real problem was, we didn't know, you know, like other publications, we sent reporters to Prague and to Moscow and tried to, I mean, ultimately what you want to do is like, is this true? Is it not true? And we could not have been able to stand it up or knock it down. And that's a very frustrating place to be.

And I think it would be reasonable to say we're not talking about this at all. I think it is not reasonable to say we've got this secret document. Here's basically the most inflammatory claim it makes. And we're not going to give you any way to weigh that. So we've talked about these, and this is a really extraordinary moment that we're having this conversation that your book has come out, BuzzFeed News shutting down, Vice News apparently going bankrupt. Obviously, we're in another period of transition after all of this turmoil. Who's getting it right? And again, this is part of the bet about where we're going here. So cable is struggling. CNN is struggling.

There are a few outlets that are prospering. But this has been a real sifting and winnowing for media at every single level. Who's getting it right? I mean, obviously, Semaphore. That was a high lob. I apologize. Yeah, exactly. Obviously, Semaphore.

Obviously, the Charlie Sykes Bulwark podcast. Though, I mean, I say that in jest, but also, I mean, one thing is that I think that the media that gets it right is the one that's listening to people where they are now. Like, not just sort of having some abstract theory about what people ought to want. But I think, like, you know, if the problem when we were starting out 20 years ago was we're all just, like, desperate for alternative voices and for more voices and for more perspectives for ordinary people's opinions getting injected into the news now we are totally overwhelmed by those things and swimming in content from all over the world and unsure what to trust and so i think the people who are connecting are trying to deliver the news in a very human direct way that you know that in our case it's done before news in a very human, direct way that, you know, that in our case at Semaphore, we in a very stylized way try to say, here is the news in the story, and here's the reporter's

opinion, and here's somebody else's opinion. And we're going to separate those things, not try to kind of like inject it all into you. And we're also going to try to read all over the world and bring you all the relevant stories on a topic, not force you to go Google them all. I think we're trying to sort of like answer what we see as the challenge people have now. I think part of the reason audio works well now is because it has the same sense that you're like just genuinely talking to somebody you can trust. There's a real human being. So you mentioned this sort of very stylized approach. So give me your elevator pitch for the personality of Semaphore and why it is different from other media. How do

you think about this? Yeah, I mean, I think that we are trying to blend sort of news from a great journalist who knows the difference between facts and their opinion and is distilling the best journalism from all over, giving it to you all in context with their own original reporting, with their own expertise, but leaving space for you to disagree with them and for other people to disagree with them. And actually, that's really core to trust right now, is leaving that room for disagreement. What is the future of the media in relationship to AI? Is that going to play a role at all? You know, I'm sure it will. God, it's an incredibly powerful technology. And these large language models are basically like technology that what it does is it does

stuff with words, which is what you and I do. I haven't found myself consuming a lot of AI written stuff, and I don't really see the use case for it immediately replacing what you and I do. I mean, it's not that far out from you being able to say, you know, I want to interview Ben, but he's on a plane. So I'm going to rip his voice off YouTube and have the AI read a corpus of everything he's ever read and do a passable interview without me being there. But I'm not sure that's what your audience wants. Like, I think if you said I'm talking to an AI version of this person, people would be less interested. If you told them.

If you told them. I think they're actually, I think, I mean, the most powerful immediate use for media, and this is both kind of like boring and positive, which I realize is not what anybody, everybody wants the apocalypse, but is there's this explosion in video tools. And if you want to sort of like produce a gorgeous animated documentary,

if you want to produce everything everywhere all at once that won all those Oscars, you know, they did that with like seven animators. Whereas if you watch a Disney movie, you'll see they're like screen and screen and screen of animators. And some of these tools that have been very limited to Hollywood studios, they spent $100 million, are going to get democratized in a way that's interesting and positive, I think. Okay, so wait.

So do you think right now, given current technology, that I could have done an AI interview with Ben Smith? You've spoken, you have written, all of your thoughts are out there, right? All of this stuff has been published. You've given all these interviews. So how easy would that be to do something like that? I'm not saying I'm going to do it. Right now, you would have to like hack together a bunch of different tools to do it, right?

Like it would be hard, but not impossible. I think in a year, it'll be easy. And so what does that mean? See, I don't know. I think that's a thing nobody wants. So I'm not sure that means anything. It does mean, for instance, that we could... We started to play it at Semaphore with...

It's sort of nice sometimes to have the article read out loud by the author. Right. But honestly, it's sort of annoying for the author to do it. And the author is not always in a place they can record. I can sample my voice, give it to a tool, and it will read the article in my voice. And that could be present with every article. I don't know.

There's a French site called Brut. It's pretty interesting. There's this reporter they have who, big star reporter in the French media, who's interviewed Macron a number of times. And he has sort of given them permission, or he's participating in a project where every morning his AI avatar reads the news.

Oh my. Yeah. So I don't know. I mean, I don't know. I just wonder at some point that 10 years from now, we'll look back on this and go, why do you even think that that was controversial? Because that's become completely normalized.

Of course, this is just a new tool. It's like doing all the cable interviews from people on Zoom at home. And we figured out that we could actually do this. We don't have to have people in studios. We don't have to actually have live human beings do it. This seems like this could happen very easily. Sure.

I mean, I guess it just depends like what does the audience want? Like I think that, right, you can think of all this devious stuff you could do, but I'm not sure who's really like there for it. I mean, I think you could sort of create certain kinds of like personalized disinformation that's scary.

You could kind of, you know, trick people in criminal ways that seems very scary. I'm actually, maybe this is wrong. I think in national politics where there's a huge amount of attention and scrutiny on everything that is said and done, it's going to be pretty hard to insert a deep fake. I think in a city council race, in a school board race, in places where there's way less attention, no kind of professional journalism apparatus fact-checking, that that's where some of the – in people's personal lives, that stuff is pretty scary, I think. Well, I mean, I was just looking yesterday at a sort of a shallow fake video of Kamala Harris, which apparently has been seen by 5 million people.

And you can see how that's going to affect our politics in a while. And I'm not sure how many of those 5 million people would actually care if you told them it was a complete fake. Okay, I have one more question. So I was reading an article about the bankruptcy of Vice News. And again, I admire a lot of the things that they do. And one detail jumped out at me that they had 3000 employees. Is that right? Yeah, I think so. I mean, I think that is right. I think they 3000 employees, they value themselves at $5 billion, I think. How do you have that many employees? And I guess part of the question is,

is one of the reasons why you're having many employees? And I guess part of the question is, is one of the reasons why you're having these, just from a business point of view, the business failures, is they have been grotesquely bloated. And of course, we're seeing Facebook and Amazon and other companies, Google, who really loaded up with staff, we're now letting them go.

But those are high margin profitable businesses that use some of their profits to hire too many people. We're talking about money losing businesses that were raising venture capital and hiring too many people, which certainly we did at BuzzFeed. How did that happen? Advice is an unusual case. They were the best brand. It's such a pure brand. You really know what they stand for. They never had much traffic on the internet, but they parlayed that brand into other businesses. They had an ad agency. They sold a television show to HBO, which is a real business, but it's great, but a challenging business because you're a production company for HBO. And one

day they canceled the show and you have to lay everybody off. And that is what happened to them. So, I mean, you know, is part of it just the temptation? Is it a culture of growing all the time, losing focus on what exactly your core mission is. I mean, how do you get a company like that with three? I keep coming back to this. I mean, how many employees does the New York Times have? They have 1,700 journalists, I would think. So how does Vice News have 3,000 employees, not obviously all journalists?

Yeah, I mean, I don't really know. And I remember when there was a transition in management, the new management came in and kept finding out, like, what? We have a team in Montenegro? Like, you know, like months in. Like, what? I mean, so I think there was... Which is impressive. Yeah. We all thought we had kind of the wind at our backs and we're growing into these huge companies like, you know, Disney and NBCUniversal. And that did not turn out to be true. Ben Smith's new book, which came out Tuesday, is Traffic, Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion Dollar Race to Go Viral.

Ben is co-founder of Semaphore and was previously the media columnist at the New York Times and the founding editor-in-chief at BuzzFeed News. Ben, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast today. Hey, thanks so much for having me, Charlie. And thank you all for listening to today's Bulwark Podcast.

I'm Charlie Sykes. We will be back tomorrow and we'll do this all over again. The Bulwark Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper and engineered and edited by Jason Brown.