The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – In the Mouth of the Wolf: A Murder, a Cover-Up, and the True Cost of Silencing the Press by Katherine Corcoran

Episode Date: December 9, 2022

In the Mouth of the Wolf: A Murder, a Cover-Up, and the True Cost of Silencing the Press by Katherine Corcoran Regina Martínez was no stranger to retaliation. A journalist out of Mexico’s Gulf Coast state of Veracruz, Regina's stories for the magazine Proceso laid out the corruption and abuse underlying Mexican politics. She was barred from press conferences, and copies of Proceso often disappeared before they made the newsstands. In 2012, shortly after Proceso published an article on corruption and two Veracruz politicians, and the magazine went missing once again, she was bludgeoned to death in her bathroom. The message was clear: No journalist in Mexico was safe. Katherine Corcoran, then leading the Associated Press coverage of Mexico, admired Regina Martínez’s work. Troubled by the news of her death, Corcoran journeyed to Veracruz to find out what had happened. Regina hadn’t even written the controversial article. But did she have something else that someone didn’t want published? Once there, Katherine bonded with four of Regina’s grief-stricken mentees, each desperate to prove who was to blame for the death of their friend. Together they battled cover-ups, narco-officials, red tape, and threats to sift through the mess of lies―and discover what got Regina killed. A gripping look at reporters who dare to step on the deadly “third rail,” where the state and organized crime have become indistinguishable, In the Mouth of the Wolf confronts how silencing the free press threatens basic protections and rule of law across the globe.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times, because you're about to go on a monster education rollercoaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. This is Voss here from the chrisvossshow.com, the chrisvossshow.com. Welcome to the big show, Chris, everyone. I'm your host, Chris Voss, the man that George Clooney calls for beauty tips.

Anyway, guys, welcome to the show. We certainly appreciate you. We're going to be talking to an amazing journalist today about a murder. A murder, you say? It should be an Angela Ansberry joke right there, or a little sound bit that comes in and goes, murder? Murder, a cover-up in true cost of silencing the press. We'll be talking about her amazing new book.

I'll read that right when we get to it. Also, be sure to refer the show to your family, friends, and relatives. You know the drill. You know, this is a great time of holiday and everything and gift-giving. What better gift to give people that's more valuable than just about anything you can buy?

A subscription for free to the Chris Voss Show podcast. So go to iTunes, go to all those crazy places across the internet webs and subscribe. Tell your friends to subscribe. Tell them to go ahead and subscribe to the show. It makes a great gift if you show up at that Christmas party and someone gives you something and you weren't going to get them anything.

Just say, hey, you know, I have a gift for you. Go subscribe to the Chris Voss Show. YouTube.com just chris fos uh goodreads.com for just chris fos all the crazy places we have over there on linkedin the big 130 000 group and all that sort of stuff going on she is with us today uh katherine corcoran is on the show with us her new book in the mouth of the wolf a murder a cover-, and the True Cost of Silencing the Press. Just came out October 18, 2022. We're going to be talking to her. Amazing about this book.

I've always been interested in stuff like this. Murder, you say? Catherine is a former Associated Press Bureau Chief for Mexico and Central America. She has been an Alicia Patterson Fellow, the Hewlett Fellow for Public Policy at the Kellogg Institute at the University of Notre Dame, and a Logan Nonfiction Program Fellow.

At the AP, she led an award-winning team that broke major stories about cartel and state violence and abuse of authority in Mexico and Central America. Her columns about Mexican politics and press freedom have appeared in The Washington Post, The Houston Chronicle, and Univision Online, among other publications. Welcome to the show, Catherine. How are you?

Good. Thank you so much for having me. Thanks for coming. We really appreciate it. And this is going to be an amazing interview. I'm really intrigued by the story when I saw it come up on new books that were coming out. Give us your dot coms or wherever you want people to find you on the interwebs to get to know you better. Yes, you can find me at www.kathryncorcoran.com. There you go. So what motivated you to want to write this book particularly? Well, I was working as Bureau Chief, Associated Press Bureau Chief for Mexico

and Central America at a time when there was literally an explosion in journalist killings. It happened very suddenly. And because previously Mexico was a very safe place to, for a journalist to go. And I went there many times working for U.S. media by myself without any concern about my safety. And all of a sudden, when I was bureau chief, there was this explosion. And so I was living it on two levels. First of all, we were covering these killings of journalists and trying to figure out what was going on. And second, it really changed our landscape for covering Mexico. And so the Bureau Chief is in charge of security for all the teams of journalists. And so I was very heavily involved in creating security protocols and a

completely different way of covering the country than what we were accustomed to. And so I always say that I didn't find this story. The story found me. From my very first day on the job, I was just in the middle of it. And over time just said, I need to write something bigger about this. Now, did the journalist killings just start happening? And what time period was this? Well, they started spiking right around 2006, 2007. And I first came to Mexico working as an editor for Latin America in 2008. And the numbers then were astonishing. They were six, seven, 10 a year, which was just completely out of range for a country, a democracy that was not at war. And it's only gotten worse. This year was a record for, there are various counts because of how people categorize journalist killings, but at least 13 so far this year. And it just,

nothing was being done and still nothing is being done. And so I thought, well, what I can do as a foreign correspondent is at least bring the story to a wider audience and try to bring some understanding to a wider audience. And as most of the killings that are taking place, they're exposing the cartels or Mexican government corruption or both? Well, both, but the majority would be Mexican government corruption. And that was another surprising fact about these killings. And one of the reasons I chose the Regina Martinez murder to delve into this topic, because it was definitely,

she did not cover cartels. And one of the things about these murders is people will say, oh, the cartels are killing journalists and they just leave it at that. And it turns out not to be true in a lot of the cases. And the journalists in Mexico say, we fear the government more than the cartels. And it was something that's just not widely known. And again, I wanted people to understand what's really going on behind these murders. You know, it's interesting to me because you don't look at an example of what happens when people lose a democracy. I'm not sure. Did Mexico ever have a functioning democracy?

But how people can live in a different country that doesn't have the rules and regulations or maybe the constitution or freedoms that we have, or the importance of, you know, our constitution's value on the press and, you know, the protections under the amendments. You know, most journalists that we have on the show, most journalists I know carry around a copy of the constitution with them in their hip pocket because that freedom of the press and protection of the press is one of the most important things. We saw a couple of years recently where the press was being under attack. So what happens with, you pronounce it differently than I would pronounce it because I'm not

fluent in Spanish, Regina? Regina, yes. So with Regina, what happens? What happens to her? Well, she was found beaten to death in her bathroom. And yes, it was a particularly violent killing. And I read about it on the AP wire because I was about to leave the country going to a conference in the U.S. and it really stopped me because I had actually spoken to her on the phone. I tried to hire her to do a story for us. And so she was beaten to death, found beaten to death in her bathroom. And from the minute this crime was discovered, there was a story created about what happened to make sure that they could say that this killing had nothing to do with her

journalism. From literally hours after they found her body, there were postings online saying this had nothing to do with her journalism. The investigators were saying that it was a robbery. That was the motive before an investigation had even begun. And so it was a very suspicious crime from the very beginning. And most people did suspect that the government was somehow behind it. But the government did a very good job of just creating a story that said it had to do with a personal relationship she had with this man who had come over to rob her. And to make it look like and that she had opened the door and let him into the house to make it look like basically it was her fault that it happened. And it had nothing to do with her work.

And that was what was so intriguing about it because everyone knew that wasn't true, but no one knew the real story. And that's why I decided to try to find out the real story. So what journey does it take you on? I mean, people need to go buy the book and read it, but give us an overview of what goes into it. And did it put you in some dangerous situations, et cetera, et cetera? Well, it was very tricky because the state where she worked, Veracruz, which is on the Gulf Coast of Mexico, was basically being terrorized by all the violence going on at the time by the cartels, but also often unbeknownst to them at the time by the government itself.

The government was victimizing its own people, which is why it wanted to silence the press. And her killing was very effective in scaring the rest of the press. She was a very tenacious journalist of high standards. She covered government corruption and social justice issues her whole career. And she was well known for the quality and the boldness of the stories that she produced because especially when she started her career in the 1980s no one was writing those kinds of stories the press was very much controlled and so she was known throughout her career as being very brave uh very dedicated to finding the truth a journalist of high standards. And so when she was murdered, the other journalists who were practicing that kind of journalism left because a lot of times their media companies in several cases pulled them out and said

they didn't have a choice. They had to get out for their safety. The journalists who decided to stay basically self-censored for their security. And so there was a complete shutdown. And so even when I went there, when I first went there three years after the murder, people were so afraid to talk. Nobody wanted to talk about this case. And I actually thought with the passing of time that, you know, people would relax and things would loosen up a little bit. And they didn't at all.

And I had a stroke of luck in that one of Regina's best friends came to work at the Associated Press. I hired him to be our collaborator in Veracruz. And so he and I got to know each other completely in a different arena as colleagues. And we got along very well. He's a very good journalist. We work together well. And so we established a relationship of trust before I even attempted to do this story. And because of that, when I wanted to do the story, he opened a lot of doors for me.

And he got a lot of people to talk to me who hadn't talked to anyone else. And I really think without that stroke of luck, I certainly couldn't have written the book I did, and maybe not at all. Because he was my guide into this world where nobody wanted to talk, where no one trusted anybody, and kind of helped me gauge, well, who are going to be the good sources and who are the sources working for the enemy, so to speak. And so that was a big help in putting this together. But I had to be very discreet. I had to think constantly about how to protect the people I was talking to because it was very dangerous for them to talk to me.

I didn't personally feel a lot of danger against myself, and also I had the ability to leave whenever I wanted to. And the people I was talking to lived there, and their families were there, and they had a lot at stake. And so I had to be very careful about how I approached them and how and where we did our interviews. Wow, because you probably could have people watching you, or there would be retaliation against those people if it came out you were talking to them.

Exactly. It was a state that was where everyone felt under surveillance, particularly the journalists. They knew that their phones were probably intervened, that they were being followed. There are security cameras everywhere in Mexico, and they're obviously run by the state. And so, yeah, there was a lot of concern about that and a lot of consternation on my part on how do I do this and how do I not expose anybody.

You know, this is the thing I'm always trying to understand about Mexico. They put on airs of being a democratic government. But you wonder what goes on between the cartels and the outrageous there and then their government. I mean, I guess they have a government far worse than ours. I mean, ours is fries, I guess. I don't know. I'm not going to be embarrassing. I guess that's out of my league.

But why did you entitle it In the Mouth of the Wolf? What made you choose that title? Again, that title came to me because so many people referred to the state or actually more like the type of work that I wanted to do as going into the mouth of the wolf. And they even described themselves as being in the mouth of the wolf. If you were in that environment where you did feel like you were being watched and, and you had to be careful about every move and, you know,

publishing a news article could get you killed. They, the people I interviewed referred to that as being in the mouth of the wolf. And so after I heard it three times, I remember I said, that's going to be the title of the book. Yeah, that's that. I mean, that, that really strikes you too. This is a great one of those movies that, you know, like George Clooney is in, I referenced him on the show, I mean, that, that really strikes you too. This would make a great one of those movies that, uh, you know, like George Clooney is in, I referenced him around the show, seems redundant, but you know, like one of those, one of those foreign movies they do where they, um, you know, they're over in a foreign place or Jed Damon does, Matt Damon does.

Um, so, you know, this is one of the things that is important to me because journalism, journalists are important. The press is important. You know, we lived through several years where the press was being attacked. And certainly if we didn't have the standards and laws and regulations and constitution that we did, you see what happens in countries where the press can be attacked. The press can be exploited. The press can be, you know, clearly when they do some of these killings in Mexico, you know,

where they hang the guys from the overpasses and stuff, they're not just doing it to kill someone or put a silent someone they're doing it to send a message that's chilling. Like you've talked about where it's designed to chill people from investigating or looking into it. Um, so tell me a little bit about that. Cause you talk about what, when someone tries to silence journalism, journalism is the target you are. Right, exactly. I would just want to tell you, maybe give you a little bit of background about Mexico. Mexico is a democracy and freedom of the press is guaranteed in the Mexican constitution. And so but the problem is that the country was ruled for many decades by a single party, an authoritarian system. And so the country is still coming out of that system as a democracy and trying to find its way. And so there wasn't a tradition in Mexico, like there is here, of trusting the press and considering the press as a pillar of the democracy, because for much of the time under

the authoritarian rule, the press was controlled. So the public doesn't really have a tradition of trusting the media. They just looked at it as an arm of propaganda for the government. investigations, there's not really the public support and there's not the appropriate level of outrage if a journalist is murdered. And the government has been very successful also in saying that if a journalist is murdered, it's because they're corrupt. They were involved with the wrong people. And so between that narrative and the history of the press in Mexico, there isn't public support there or even public our founding documents that the free press was essential for this new system of democracy that was being created. And over the years or over the decades, I guess, I mean, the press has always been criticized. And if you look at the press or the history of the press in the United States, it's not really pretty in a lot of places. I mean, it was propaganda sheets and it was, I mean, the press supported things like Jim Crow laws. And,

you know, it's a very checkered past, But because we have that sense, like we learn in our history class and civics class, that it's important to have a free press, that we've thrived and we've made our mistakes. And we're under tremendous criticism right now. The mainstream media is one of the big evils in the country. But there's this understanding that we need freedom of information to have a free society. And what concerns me there, and this is why I, in Mexico, and this is why I wrote the story. I wanted to show what the free press does. What does it mean when we do our jobs well, when we're speaking truth to power, when we're investigating. And the fact that that system, through the murder of Regina Martinez, other factors as well, but that was a big blow, that they were able to shut

down the freedom of information, and they were able to literally prey on the citizens of that state. It was a criminal government preying on their own citizens. And I wanted to show that that's really the potential when you have no reliable independent sources to look to sources that you trust for information, the people there were living in terror. And so I wanted to show that despite, you know, the horror and terribleness of killing journalists, the ultimate victims were the society. That is what I wanted to show in that story, is in the absence of reliable information, this is how people had to live. And people were disappeared. There's thousands of people who were disappeared in that state. There were billions of dollars stolen from

the public coffers. The police acted like death squads. This was the government actually carrying out a lot of these crimes with no counterweight. And so I wanted to show that example, which is quite extreme. It doesn't exist here. But what really concerned me here is when I started hearing the same attacks on the press in the United States that I saw used very effectively in Mexico, like the press is corrupt. The press is the enemy of the people. I have an example in the book where the press was called the enemy of the people in Mexico back in the 1940s. So long before it was that those words were ever uttered by a president here,

the officials were calling the free press the enemy of the people. So when I started hearing that here, it was very concerning because it's a different kind of rhetoric or narrative than the usual, you know, the press is bad. The press is sensationalist. The press is always where they're not supposed to be, et cetera, et cetera. That kind of narrative that's always been critical of the press, to me, is a narrative that says, do better. You know, have ethics, have standards, which many journalists do that no one really sees or understands. But this new narrative of the press is bad, the press is the enemy,

the press is fake news, that is a narrative designed to shut down freedom of information. It's a narrative of control to say, you don't need to believe them. Just believe me. I have the truth. And whenever leaders start talking like that, it's because they want to control you and they have a certain agenda that they need you to follow without question. And that again, is what happened in Mexico in the void of having a free press. And that's the intention here. And I think that's why we need to, you know, we need to ask ourselves, do we really want to go down that road? And, and, you know, we have to ask ourselves, do we really want to go down that road? And, you know, we have the discussion now at the very beginning of this kind of talk,

like what is the press, what is the press for? What does the press do? Because I think that's really been lost here. People don't really understand what journalists do and how we do our work. And so I think that we need to think about that now as a democracy. Do we really want to go down that road of basically silencing the press? Yeah. I mean, there's a reason. The reason it's one of the First Amendments.

You know, it's important to value the press. It's the fourth estate that keeps everyone honest. And to me, that was important in the story when I saw it because I'm like, this speaks to it. You know, I was joking with Carol Lennig of the Washington Post about how Biden doesn't have enough crises going on, so I don't have enough book authors on the show, as I did with Trump. I'm like, where are all these books authors that I used to have on the show two years ago that were all about Trump? I had two a day of an endless supply of great authors, and Biden's boring, and there's nothing going on. She said to me something to the effect, it sounded, of course, much more intelligent coming from her, but it was something to the effect that, Chris, there will always be people in power that want to get away with stuff or they want to hide their mistakes.

And that's why the press needs to be there is to cover those. And they make all of our lives better. I mean, you think of abuses of power like Watergate, Pentagon Papers. You can probably go on and on. And it seems like we've entered this world where idiots can run the gambit. I remember when blogging started and everybody started declaring themselves as a journalist or a press person. And I'm like, you know, a lot of press people, when they go to college or wherever they go, they go through teaching on how to ethics and,

and how to, you know, be good at what they do, how to try to be unbiased. And they also, all sorts of training to go through there. You know, this, this new blogging sort of environment came up that pretended to be journalism that really wasn't, you know, they would have their bias, their right wing or left wing, you know, and then you've even got one of the biggest, I mean, one time, I think a couple you've even got one of the biggest, I mean, one time I think a couple years ago was one of the biggest cable watch networks in the world calling being mainstream media, calling other people mainstream media and you shouldn't believe them. And you're like, you have the largest ratings ever. Well, it's interesting.

The way I look at it is in the old days, not too long ago, newspapers, television and radio were the monopoly on information. And that's and when I started journalism, that's how it was. That's where you went to get your information. There weren't other options. And I remember I actually just thought of this story recently. I worked for the San Jose Mercury News for a long time in California. And I had forgotten that when I went to work there and I would show up on a story, covering a story or wanting to talk to somebody, and I'd say, I'm from the San Jose Mercury News. They would almost always say, great newspaper. And they would say, you know, we're glad you're here. Well, those other guys make mistakes, but you guys, you know, we like your paper. And there was that kind of connection with the readers and the community.

But with this information explosion, not just blogging, but internet, social media, the whole thing. I mean, you're bombarded with thousands of things per minute. And so we are not, obviously not the monopoly. And we, I think, need to do a better job now to explain exactly what journalism is and how our information differs from all the other things that you're consuming every minute of every day. And that we do have standards and we do have ethics and we do have, we don't just print what we get. We have to evaluate at what point we think it's the truth and if and it's ethical to print it and we don't run around and pretend to be other people and trick you into telling telling us things like you see in hollywood all the time um and so um i think that's what the the issue is now when people

attack the press we're an easy target. And that's why for these people who want to put out this narrative of control, we're an easy target, but we're only the first target. And that's why they go for us first. I mean, if you look at authoritarianism 101, the first thing you go for is the press, you discredit the press and but that's only step one, because ultimately the the control is of the people and the society. And so I think that we can do a better job explaining how we do what we do and how our information is different. And and also, I think that people conflate the media with a lot of things that really aren't journalism. Like, for example, when people say to me, because they know I'm a journalist, why is the media so biased? I always say, well, what exactly what media are you referring to? And the and inevitably,

it's the what I call the screaming heads on cable, whether it's from the left or from the right, people think that's journalism. That's not journalism. It's opinion making, it's punditry. And so if you kind of break it down, you can say to people, what is journalism? And where do you go? What sources do you have that you trust to get your information? Because there's a lot of journalism out there that helps people get through their days. And as you point out, there's good investigative journalism going on all the time, often at a local level about, you know, food supply contamination or drinking water or, you know, some entity robbing the school district or, and so that's the kind of journalism that I think we need to talk about more and show people that, yeah, they see good journalism every day.

They just don't know. They don't know what I guess they don't know what to call it or what to how to differentiate it from all the other things that they're seeing. But but when when a journalist is doing their job and speaking truth to power and and uncovering the things like Carol said, people want to hide. That's for the good of the society. We're giving information to people so that they can make decisions about how they want to live their lives or how they want their government to work. We're not the advocates. We just provide them the information. And that's ideally how the system is supposed to work.

And all of that is just getting buried in, you know, internet, social media, Elon Musk, Donald Trump, you know, it's just getting buried. And it makes it much easier to discredit people who are doing really good work. Yeah. When you heard Trump say the word, he was talking to the press and say words like I alone can fix it. You trust me. Don't trust the press. You know, you,

you saw that going down the roads of, uh, of, uh, fascism. And, uh, you know,

you bring up a good point too. Like I'll talk to people and they'll be like, they'll cite something. Well, so-and-so did this in the government. Right. And you're like, where did you source that from? Oh, the Washington Post. Well, Washington Post usually is good stuff. And then you go Google it and it's the opinion page of the Washington Post, which is usually biased. They have, you know, easily balanced left and

right people over there. They try to, I think most big newspapers do, but you're like, that's the opinion page and they don't understand the difference between the opinion page and the true journalists and reporters out there doing stuff. I remember we had Kevin Sullivan and Mary Jordan on from the Washington Post. There's a lot of Washington Post talk today. Sorry. I need to plug the AP more or something. And the AP tries to cut it down the middle as best they can.

They try and really source the story in and out there. But I remember having them on and they just, it was like a week after the Trump had said that they were making dossiers on all of the Washington Post reporters to chill them. And we got to talk about what that's like. But that was clearly what you talk about in the book, where people are trying to chill reporting. They're trying to chill reporters. I mean, I'm sure whatever that government was or the evil people that were in that government were doing, once all the bureaus pulled their reporters out of that area, they were happy because there's no one giving them oversight in the fourth estate.

Exactly. That was the plan. And I do worry when I see those things happening in the United States. You'll see in the book that there were dossiers made on the journalists there who they considered unfriendly and that they had a whole list. They wanted all their personal information. They wanted all their family relations. And there was a plan for how to spy on these journalists. It was leaked to one of the journalists in this story that there was actually

a plan on how to spy on each one of them. And they were very aware that this was going on. And Regina in particular was very careful. She lived a very hermetic life for that reason, because she knew she didn't want to endanger anyone in her family. And she kept to herself basically for her own security. So that was a reality there. Then here you hear about dossiers, you hear about under Obama, the Justice Department was looking at journalists' phone records without subpoenas. And that is extremely dangerous because you're exposing the people who are talking to you. You're exposing the whistleblowers. And the idea in that is to terrorize them, to keep them from speaking. Because for a journalist, one of the worst things that can happen is if you blow the cover of a source, because the way the relationship works

is it's all on trust. And it's all on the fact that you're going to not reveal where this information came from. And if the government goes in and can do that, that shuts down all the people who want to talk to journalists and who want to give who want to tell journalists what's really going on. So that's very scary to see that in our own country. And you see it more and more, which is why we need to have this conversation. Why is the free press important in the United States, not just in Mexico? But another element of the story and why I wanted to tell the story is that what ultimately brings down this criminal government is the press. A team of investigative reporters go in and investigate this government. They had to go from outside from Mexico City because it was too dangerous to do it locally.

But they did the investigation. They revealed what this government was doing, and the whole thing fell apart in a matter of weeks. So it's kind of – I wanted to really show through this story what the press does and what happens when it goes away. Yeah, you think about – you think of police, you know, death squads and the stuff that you cover in the book going on. And the press makes people's lives better. I mean, you think of, you know, stuff like Roundup and other things that have gone on. And people don't realize, you know, even the press in our country, you know,

that you guys get death threats, you guys get hate mail, all sorts of attack stuff. I remember we had Catherine Stewart on the show, and I believe she was with the New York Times at the time. And she started getting some death threats or some attacks over her book on religion, of all things. And the New York Times, I think it was, if I recall, has a whole security department, and I imagine most news bureaus do now. Like you mentioned, you built out yours. They have a whole security bureau of countermeasures of how to give protection to these folks, going through their emails, maybe sometimes even giving them escorts to go around in public.

It can be really scary. uh, put it, maybe sometimes even giving them escorts to, to, to go around in public. Um, it can be really scary. And these are the people that we trust to speak truth to power and without them power is, uh, you know, can do whatever it wants. It's, there's no one calling them out. And, you know, most people don't have the ability to go file Pfizer requests and, you know, all the things that a lot of journalists, uh lot of journalists and big news agencies can do because they've got the money behind them to do that and fight the fight. Well, I think that's a really important point, what the journalists in the United States have to suffer now. For me, for many decades, I never worried about being a reporter in the United States. And news agencies would always give you security training, et cetera, to go overseas,

to go to another country like Mexico, but never to work in your own country. And that's very common now. People have to have security teams for reporters working in the United States. And that's really shocking to me. But it's true. I mean, it's is what you have to do ethically, that you will become a target, a target of some person who hates the media or who doesn't want to let you in, doesn't want to give you access when you're, you know, legally allowed to have access. And that's a scary thing to consider on every single story that you, just by saying you're a journalist, could become the target. And as I mentioned before, in the old days, it'd be like, oh, great newspaper. I mean, I never had anything like that happen to me. And so when I started seeing the things happening in Mexico, happening here in the United States, I really felt like I have to tell this story. I have to show if you go down that road where it ends up, this is a worst case scenario to do the job that we're out there to do. And that needs to be a message.

That needs to be a discussion here in the United States. Do we really want that? Do we really want journalists fearing for their safety just by saying, I'm a journalist. You know, Jamal Khashoggi paid a price for being a journalist, calling out the government of MLB, MBS. MBS, there you go. The other one is baseball. There's a lot going on in the old brain there. There's the Palestinian journalist who's killed.

They're still looking into and trying to figure out, and maybe Israel had a hand in that or who knows. But, you know, I think you're right. We need to realize that, you know, the fourth state, the journalists and the freedom of the press help keep things accountable. And if it wasn't for them, it wouldn't be accountable. Would you, were you able to solve her death or find who killed her? Or were they at least, I guess, able to hold the government accountable? Well, unfortunately, nothing's happened in this case. And I am hoping that the new information that I uncovered would hopefully lead somebody to open the case. I'm not optimistic because of the state of the justice system in Mexico right now, and particularly in, in Veracruz, but I'm,

I'm not a, you know, I'm not a prosecutor. I can't, I can't subpoena. I can't get physical evidence, but I do think that I uncovered some new information that supports the idea that one of the people who was suspected all along from the very beginning was probably involved. And I, again, I can't be more specific because I don't want to libel anyone, but the information's there in the book. And I was able to uncover some new information about who might have been behind it. Does the Mexican government have a, you know, an FBI sort of division that, I know they have something that's a variant of it, but did they have one that's objective like ours and well, assuming ours is objective. Unfortunately, no, they do have, um, they've had over the years, many iterations of an FBI and every new president tries to set up a new system

and then that system gets corrupted. And so there's so basically under the new the latest administration, those federal police, they were called federal police at one point. They were disbanded and now they're called the National Guard and they have a different purpose. They're still national police, but they've had various investigative units over the years that have been completely infiltrated and corrupted. And one of the issues in Mexico is that Mexico became a democracy, people say pretty much in 2000, when there was a democratically elected president who kicked out the old authoritarian party for the first time in 2000. It was an open election and the opposition was democratically elected.

And since then, the country has been inching along, trying to create a democracy. But one of the problems is they never reformed the institutions. The institutions are still pretty much in the model of the old authoritarian rule, which was the institutions did not serve the people, they serve the party, or they serve the power structure. And the idea was to keep the party in power. And one of the biggest examples is the justice system. There have been reforms of the justice system, but frankly, it just doesn't work. It's not independent. It's still used for political vendettas and to go after enemies. And in this particular case, it was used very effectively to just shut down the case.

It was very controversial. It was an international story that this woman had been murdered. Everyone assumed for her work and for the trouble she was making for the government. And the justice system was used to completely shut down that story and create a whole new one, grab some guy off the street and throw him in jail and say, case closed. Because that's traditionally what the justice system was used for. It was used to make political problems go away. And that still is the model. And so that's one of the problems that has kept Mexico from becoming other than,

I mean, electorally, it's a democracy, but the one of the things that's really kept it from a full blown democracy where there is truly rule of law and no impunity is the justice system and the lack of reform in the justice system. And that's why these kinds of cases continue to this day. Yeah, it really states the importance of the rule of law in our country. I mean, you see with our Attorney General, you know, him appointing the special counsel to oversee Trump to, you know, try and maintain, you know, impropriety of, you know, what you

talked about in Mexico, where the justice system is being used for a thing, probably won't ally any of the sort of BS that goes on with Fox News and other places that, I mean, no matter what he did, they'll accuse him be walked in chains in front of the thing. It's insane what's going on with that whole case. Well, I think that's why rule of law is so important and why you need journalists, because sometimes rule of law isn't followed in this country. You know, if you have IRS agents going after your enemies, or if you have

the FBI going after your enemies, if you have, I mean, those are the kinds of things that we're the watch dogs to keep an eye on. Or if you are looking at journalists phone records without legal subpoenas to do so. I mean, those are the kinds of things that need to be exposed

to maintain our rule of law. I mean, there are a lot of abuses in our justice system. And I mean, it's not anything like Mexico, but we do need that independent watchdog to, like, that's why we're there, to expose the places where our system fails, our system goes wrong, or someone tries to abuse power, frankly. And people, I mean, that's human nature. They get power, they're going to try and abuse it. Exactly. Power corrupts. And so I think it's great. You've shined a light on this and the importance of the press, the importance of oversight,

the importance of, of, of, you know, we have so many great journalists that have come on the show that have shared so many amazing stories and without seeing the light of day, you know, people need to realize they make our life better. Um more we need to touch on or tease out about the book before we go? Well, as I said earlier, I just wanted to show people, I think people don't really understand what journalists do and how our information is different. So I wanted to show people what the press does and what is at risk if we in our own country follow this narrative of basically distrust of the press and this idea that we're corrupt and that we're evil and that whatever else it's that the idea is if you can't trust facts and you can't trust the information that you're reading, the reported verified information that you're reading, you are you are confused and you are easily manipulated. And that's why that narrative is there.

They don't want you to believe facts. Facts have changed dramatically in the idea of facts in our own country. There's no belief now in facts. And so I just wanted to show what role the press plays in maintaining the system and maintaining an open society. And so that's really the point of the story. And I would very much like to see more conversation about that in our own country. Yeah, we definitely need to have it. You know, one of the things I was going to mention earlier when you're talking about

it is I meet these people now that they get their news from memes. And it's been going on for a while. But I'll talk to somebody and they'll be like, well, but, you know, so-and-so did this. And I'll be like, what's the source of that? I find myself constantly on social media going or what's the source in that i'm i find myself constantly on social media going what's the source for that again where's it sourced that it's like in the news it's like what what news that's a really important question we all should be asking now when somebody says they heard or read something really outrageous. What was the source? Look at the source and see if it's reliable.

And the other thing, conversely, that I always hear is people come up to me and say, why isn't the media covering X? And they'll say something like the Women's march or something ridiculous where the media was all over it and and um but sometimes they'll say you know some scandal or something why isn't the media covering this and then i'll always ask well how do you know about it i like that that's brilliant and and so and and it's because they read it in the media yeah and and so um we're an easy target and i think we need to um we need to explain ourselves more and we have to have more conversation about what is the meaning of a free press and and what's the importance and and why should journalists be able

to do their jobs without threat or harassment yeah or danger when it comes to sourcing you guys source from multiple things you guys do follow-up leads you guys really dig into stuff you just don't publish it like you know some jerk on the you know just putting stuff out it goes through teams of lawyers usually uh at the bureaus i mean, it's not just, you just don't publish it. I think we could be more transparent about that. And I think with the internet, a lot of times we are able to be more transparent because in a lot of investigations now, the organization will put their source materials on the internet so that you can actually go and see the documents that the story was written from and hear the interviews. And I think that's a good thing. I think we need to be much more transparent about

our process and how we do things and why we do things. And I think that could engender more trust. And, and, and we know the social media world that we live in, I mean, social media is destroying the world. I mean, it just really is. That's my opinion. Uh, it's, it's gone from this beautiful thing that maybe in the air of spring or the early 2010s was like, Hey, this union utopia democratization of information and you know, yada, yada, yada. But it just seems like now it's just the most pervasive thing, especially when you see what's going on with TikTok and our society and stuff. But with the burgeoning of the bloggers' fear and the YouTube newsmakers, quote-unquote journalists, I mean, I saw it on TikTok a lot recently.

There were people that go on and they were going, this is what's going on with FTX and this, you know, FTX guy. And you're not seeing it covered in the news. And I'm like, wait a second. I've seen a lot of the news. Like the big, yeah, everyone's covering it. Like, and you have to understand the motive of what those people are trying to do as a consumer where you go, this guy just wants me to listen to him and his slant on it. And, you know, anytime I hear that thing when someone says,

you know, believe me and not the Main Street media news, you realize they're setting up that game where they're trying to, you know, they're trying to, what's the word, circulate their power. They're trying to get power. what's the word? I'm circulate their power. They're trying to get power and usually there's money involved. So like it's, you know, QAnon, there's recent QAnon got busted, you know,

he's getting millions of dollars. It turns out he's a pedophile and come out and discovery over lawsuit. You mean, um, you know, it's, it's, it's usually about money.

You see a lot of these things where they're just trying to create their own noon source where they can make a couple bucks and, and people are, aren't smart enough to vet them and go wait you don't have a journalism degree you've never you know some guy in his basement absolutely i mean first of all the new york times did a live interview with the ftx guy i i don't really follow it that much but whoever the head of the company was that lost all the money, they did a live interview with him where they asked him every question and he responded. So to answer to the fact that the media is not covering it. But the other thing is, this idea that, well, basically, when people are trying to, when someone is trying to manipulate people, it's always about money and power, period. In any case, you can always trace

it to money and power. And those aren't my words. I'm quoting Maria Ressa, who won the Nobel Peace Prize as a journalist fighting and speaking truth to power in the Philippines. And she says, everything boils down to money and power. And she's absolutely right. If you look at any of these scandals, that's really what's behind it. And that's why no one wants you to see it. And no one wants the truth to get out. We should, we should, uh, we should value our journalists more and we should stand up when they're, they're abused and called out. I mean, and we, we need to be able to identify, I think maybe that's what you mean when you say, you know, be more transparent and also explain the jobs better so people understand the difference between real journalists and just some hack on the Internet who decided to start a YouTube channel last week.

And he thinks he's Walter fucking Cronkite. And, you know, if you're going to have freedom of information, you're going to have all that. And unfortunately, you need to have all that. That's the idea of freedom of information and a free society. And Salman Rushdie says a free society is very messy. It is very messy. It is very messy. But the clashing of these ideas is how we eventually come to consensus. And that, again, is a value in a free society, that at some point you do come to consensus, which seems less and less so now.

But so that's why you need all of that. You need your, your bloggers and your YouTube people, but, but the consumers of all this information need to understand what they're consuming. And I think that's, what's gotten lost today is that you need to be able to differentiate and you need to, you need to know what sources you trust and why you trust them. And some people will trust these maybe less than reputable sources, but they have to understand themselves, why they trust them and why and how they differentiate. But yes,

we, we need all that stuff because if you start shutting down on one, you shut down on everybody. And so unfortunately, that's how a free society and freedom of information works. And it's messy. Yeah. I've been kind of really disturbed at what's going on with CNN and how it's being taken apart. And if you know the billionaires behind Discovery Channel, you understand why. Because they're a bit on the right slant there. And it seems like they're disassembling one of the,

I mean, you could say CNN, maybe it wasn't totally unbiased, but they seem to be close to the center, at least in my opinion, I don't know. But you see what's going on there and it really worries me. Well, I have a little bit different view of that because when people work overseas like I did or abroad, there's no C between us and Mexico. When you work abroad, traditionally, CNN was the flagship. We had CNN. I had CNN on my desk all day, every day.

And that was our news source to see what was going on, mainly in the rest of the world, because we were in charge of telling people what was going on in our neck of the world. And it was very much like a television wire service. And I do think under Donald Trump, they lost their way a little bit because the anchors, Donald Trump went after CNN.

And so CNN went after Donald Trump. And I do think that the anchors spoke more openly of their opinions and their counterattacks on Trump. And I do think that at least in the prime time, they did lose their way. They became the anti-Trump. And I think that hurt what was their bread and butter, which was this news service around the world that we would watch 24-7, we in the journalism profession. And I do think that hurt CNN. I saw some things on primetime that I thought were pretty shocking for journalists

and compared to what you would have seen on CNN in the past. So I do think there needed to be a correction in some way to bring, and I don't want to weigh in on whether it's the right correction or not, but I do think they needed a correction to bring themselves back to this sort of um the credibility and the independence that they had before donald trump was elected yeah it was it's it's a real interesting journey they've been on because i think jeff zucker is the ex-ceo of CNN, has commented on it that they may have gotten Donald Trump elected because they were covering all of his rallies on CNN and playing him live. And they just became a free propagation arm. It almost seemed like maybe they overcorrected to go that way.

Well, that's also true. And that's also, I mean, that's very much true. And in fact, when Donald Trump announced, they were there again live. Yeah. And I just thought to myself, here we go again. I mean, really? I mean, in fact, I tweeted, you know, I try to be independent and balanced. But when it comes to the media, my gloves are off.

But I tweeted and I said, so are you going to cover every person who announces for president live? That's my question. If you're going to do that, then I'm okay with this. But really, so yeah, that was a little something. Where CNN got really in trouble, I think, too, is with the opinion panels. I had to quit watching CNN because they were trying to be balanced. They'd have like three or six people on the left, three or six people on the right, and there would just be noise. But it became noise because you knew what everyone was going to say on the panel like i don't even have to hear them speak i knew and you know when rudy giuliani comes on or

chris christie i know what they're going to say like they're not going to be like yeah these damn republicans you know i'm just using that example people um you know it's like why do you even have the panel if i know you know what's that there It's an old Shakespeare thing about I know what you're going to say, who you are speaks more to what you say. But let me ask you this. Let me run this by you because I'll have friends that will say to me, why is the media always writing? And this is during the Trump years. Why is the media writing always about Trump? They seem very against it because they're always writing all these things.

And I'm like, well, there's a lot of scandals going on. You know, it's not that they're biased. There's just a lot to cover. I don't know. Is that an appropriate analogy? I think, I mean, Donald Trump changed the game. And he changed the game for journalists by going directly at them. And I think that he rocked the mainstream press back on its heels, because they were using an old playbook to cover a whole new game. And which is why now we're being

criticized for what they call other side ism. Because instead of calling out or saying that Donald Trump was lying, they would have to go to the other side to say he was lying. And I remember there was a really funny example of the New York Times when Donald Trump said that the CDC should investigate injecting Clorox to treat COVID. And the New York Times and its other side had a phrase in a story that, or had a sentence in a story that say, most experts say it's not a good idea to ingest Clorox. And that was like one of the examples that people use of the other side-ism is that this idea of balance and getting both sides doesn't work if somebody's outright lying or has created a propaganda machine very deftly to raise emotions, to confuse people, to incite people. And so I think that's what happened. I mean, I think

maybe the media is more onto it now and has more countermeasures. Although I still worry sometimes, like when CNN does his his announcement live that he's going to run again. But I think it's been a period of adjustment and a lot of introspection for for for journalists and how we normally cover stories and how we normally do journalism because he just broke all the rules. He broke all the rules, and he was very effective at it, and he knows how to manipulate a story and the public. And so then the media has to think about how are we being manipulated in the process, like showing everything live because, you know, people can't get enough of Donald Trump. So I think there is a big correction going on in that regard, too,

in terms of how we cover somebody like Donald Trump, but you kind of have to stay ahead of the game and not be fighting the last battle on those kinds of things too. Yeah. There was a perception. A lot of people had that, you know, the, the, if it bleeds, it leads got little a little too out of control for making headlines. I think some different outlets were accused of making headlines. I think someone sat down with all the Washington Post headlines and like, you know, there's a little bit of sensationalism going on here. And so there's always that battle, that discussion, which I think is healthy. But I have seen more journalists, especially on TV, news outlets like CBS, CNN, and other places, where when some politician tries to shovel something across the thing, they go, Whoa, whoa, whoa, hey, whoa, no, you're shoveling disinformation there.

So hopefully that's a better way of going about it. I see that a lot, too, and I think that's a good thing where they'll say that's just not correct. You can say to someone who's peddling propaganda that's not correct. Yeah, and I think that's where the press needs to be. Don't be on if it bleeds it leads, be on let's call it out and let's speak truth

to power and call it that propaganda. Well, you know, it's very difficult because there's a case when Barack Obama was debating Mitt Romney and Mitt Romney said some falsehood and Martha Raddatz corrected him in the middle of the debate. And she was right and she corrected him. And what the,

what she and the media suffered for doing that because she was seen as being biased toward Obama. And, and so again, it's, it's, it's, it's very difficult. It's difficult to negotiate because there's also this whole idea of the media being having left wing bias, which I don't, difficult to negotiate because there's also this whole idea of the media being, having left-wing bias, which I don't, I don't believe. I think the media has corporate bias, things like CNN showing Donald Trump because it makes them a lot of money.

But I think that the media has internalized that idea that they're, you know, we can't be left-wing biased. And so sometimes goes to the other extreme to sort of prove that we're not lefties, you know? And so, and, and that makes the coverage of stories tricky too. And the idea of calling someone out in a political setting and telling them they're wrong and what the consequences of your image might be in that case. But I think most of the time we're talking about political reporting and political coverage

because that's what dominates all these news shows and all these nighttime talk shows. And I really think we do need a serious reform of political coverage in this country. And I think we do need our critics. And I do think we can also look at the 90% of other journalism that's produced in this country outside of political reporting and look at that. There's a lot of good journalism going on in this country outside of political reporting and look at that. There's a lot of good journalism going on in this country that helps people and that is doing its job. It's just that we see, you know, if you turn on cable news at night, you see what you see and everyone thinks, oh, that's it. That's the full spectrum.

And it's not even close. It's a very small piece of of coverage and more so we need to support you know uh newspapers journalism and everything else you know i i pay the washington post the new york times the wall street journal the guardian i think there's some other ones in there but you know being paying for them like we did used to do a paper that's what we got away away from when we got away with newspapers. We quit reading all the hard-hitting journalism, and then we started just believing stupid memes that were posted

by sometimes other countries on the Internet and then taking that for news. Well, yeah, the financial hit that newspapers and traditional media took and that we still haven't recovered from has been very difficult. And I've come to the conclusion that good independent journalism cannot be a profit-making venture. It needs to be some other kind of model where the purpose is not to pay the shareholders. The purpose is to produce good journalism, period. And no one has really come up with that model yet. And I think in the meantime, we are suffering for it because people, when the internet started, weren't accustomed to paying for their news. It was

going out free and now they don't want to pay. But I'm like, you are, I pay for all of my news because I want to support these organizations and want to make sure they continue. Democracy dies in darkness. There you go. So this has been really insightful, Catherine. And this is why I like having journalists like you on. And the story that you were telling, I was like, I really want to have this because I want my audience to be educated and realize the importance of great journalism. And of course, we've had great journalists on the show like yourself and the value of

what's out there. Because if not, you know, it just becomes a meme sort of world and fascism can rule, authoritarian rule. You know, we've seen what can happen in countries in 2020 with Viktor Orban. Is it Viktor Orban? Hungary and different places where democracies can be turned off overnight. So there you go. Anything more you want to tease out before we go on the book? Well, thank you again for having me,

because this is exactly the kind of discussion that I want to have. And I wrote the book so people can see, first of all, what it's like to be in the mouth of the wolf if you're a journalist, and also to see what's at stake. See what journalists do for their society, what information, what care they have, why they do it. All of that is in the book. The tragedy of this very special journalist being brutally murdered, and just what the cost is to the society. That's really what I wanted to show in this book. There you go. There you go.

Give us your.com so people can find you on the interwebs, please, and get to know you better. Yes, it's Katherine Corcoran, and that's K-A-T-H-E-R-I-N-E, Corcoran.com. There you go. Folks, order up the book wherever fine books are sold. Remember, see all those alleyway bookstores because I stubbed my toe and I got Ted and a shot in one, and I think I got mugged in another.

So go wherever fine bookstores are sold. In the Mouth of the Wolf, a murder, a cover-up, and true cost of silencing the press. This is really important. Whenever you hear somebody bash the press or speak out against the press, realize the protection they offer you for. I have a joke here. If you did a book about Donald Trump, it would be like the Big Mac in the mouth of the orangutan. I don't know. There's a joke there of orangeness. I don't know where it's at. Anyway, thank you very much, Catherine, for coming on. I really appreciate it. Thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure to talk to you.

And thank you for the brilliant discussion. I hope people listen to the full thing if they've caught pieces of it and learn something new. Teach your kids about the important about the press because, I don't know, these new generations, I'm like that old man Clint Eastwood on the lawn these days. Anyway, thanks to everyone for tuning in. Go to goodreads.com, 4chesschrisfoss. Go to youtube.com, 4chesschrisfoss. LinkedIn, all of our places across the Internet.

Thanks for being here. Be good to each other. Stay safe. And we'll see you guys next time. And that should have us out.