The Dispatch Podcast - Censorship Through Noise

Episode Date: May 29, 2020

McKay Coppins, staff writer at The Atlantic, joins Sarah and Steve to discuss his piece on disinformation in the 2020 campaign, Trump, Twitter, and the social media wars, and his advice for young reporters. Show Notes: -McKay's piece The Billion-Dollar Disinformation Campaign to Reelect the President -McKay's book The Wilderness -McKay's piece on The Dispatch -Jonah's piece The Media Are Not on the Ballot -McKay's piece on flying during a pandemic -McKay's piece on the stockpile of food in his garage Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to our special Friday Dispatch podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Isgir, joined by Steve Hayes. The podcast is brought to you by The Dispatch. Visit the dispatch.com to see our full slate of newsletters and podcasts, and make sure to subscribe to this one, so you never miss an episode. Today we are joined by McKay Coppins, staff writer at the Atlantic, an author of The Wilderness, a book about the battle over the future of the Republican Party. Recently, he wrote a piece entitled The Billion Dollar Disinformation Campaign to Reelect the President, which makes him the perfect person to talk to about the social media wars that have come to ahead this week as Twitter has attempted to take on President Trump. We'll also talk to him about his advice

for young reporters and follow up on another piece he wrote about, well, us here at the dispatch. Let's dive in. We are joined again by McKay Coffins of the Atlantic. McKay, protests escalated throughout the night and throughout the country in response to the disturbing video of the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis. An important and ongoing conversation about race and justice that our nation has not yet resolved. As a reporter, how do you approach this with everything else in the news going on? on as a long-form reporter, especially?

Yeah, I mean, look, you know, I think I approach it first as just like an American as a person who's experiencing this onslaught of horrible news. And, you know, I think that what's grim about it is how much it feels like history repeating itself, you know, like the feeling of watching the footage from Minneapolis just it brought back to mind so much the feeling of watching the coverage out of Ferguson, you know, all those years ago. And the same issues are still so front and center in American life. There has been very little progress. There's been very little movement. So, you know, I think I'm trying to digest it all. As a reporter, and I think that this, you know, applies to long form and, you know,

breaking news reporters, to the extent that it's possible, I think that you kind of have to pick a lane and focus on it. You know, there are a lot of big, important things happening right now. What's happening in Minneapolis is extremely disturbing and worrisome and gets at these issues of systemic racism that are really important. There's also a deadly pandemic. There's also the administration's response. There's also a presidential election happening right now.

That, you know, I mean, there's a lot going on. And at least my approach always is to, you know, figure out where I can. be of most, you know, where I can add the most value as a journalist and then focus there while also amplifying the good work of other journalists. But I'm actually curious how you guys kind of approach this with a smaller staff. Like, I imagine your writers have to cover a broad array of issues. Like, how do you go about covering the kind of, you know, hurricane of big stories that's happening right now. Steve, why don't you jump in on that one?

Because our morning newsletter this morning was entirely dedicated to the George Floyd video in the current protests instead of having multiple stories in the newsletter as we normally do. And I really liked that this morning, Steve. Yeah, I mean, I think it felt appropriate given what we all watched transpired yesterday and then into the wee hours of this morning. that felt like the right thing to do. You know, I think the first instinct of any reporter is to want to be there and to be out covering the news.

And it's been, speaking personally, it's been frustrating that there are, you know, legitimate public health reasons not to have people out and about. So that's my first reaction. I think maybe one of the reasons you've succeeded where I've failed so often over the years is that I can't ever pick that you pick and dive deep or I just am not very good at it. And I suppose maybe my role is a little bit different or has evolved over the years, whereas I used to be able to do those kind of deep dives and loved to just get lost in a story and live in the story for several weeks or more. I guess my evolving roles don't really allow me to do that as much as I used to. I mean, I think one of the things that we're trying to do is to try to help keep this all in perspective and to the extent that we can be a voice that doesn't contribute to the hysteria, we want to do that.

And, you know, that's an ongoing challenge. I mean, I think you get hysteria coming from a lot of different places. You get hysteria coming from the administration, from the president himself, from his Twitter feed, from some of our colleagues in the media. We're sensationalizing some of the stuff, making big deals out of things that aren't big deals. I think that's one role that we seek to play. Now, of course, when there are big moments, and I think Sarah's right, this is a big moment. I think, you know, we never want to be in the business of downplaying big moments. or being so straight and calm that we fail to give our readers and listeners an understanding

of just how important these moments are or can be. So trying to find that balance, I think, is an ongoing challenge. Is that fair, Sarah? I think that's fair. McKay, though, just diving in a little further on your role, your evolving career. So you and I, by the way, bond over milkshakes in 2013. You've just left covering the Romney campaign, and you were with BuzzFeed. Yep.

Which is, you know, if journalism is the first draft of history, BuzzFeed is like the first listicle of history or the first tweet of history, maybe. I would dare you. How dare you? I'm still going to defend the honor of my BuzzFeed News colleague. No, no, you know what? Like, that actually was not meant as a slight at all. It's that it's so front edge of what's happening. And now, fast forward, we're still milkshake buddies.

Although it's been a while. We need to get a milkshake sometimes. Well, there's a pandemic going on, McKay. I'm sorry. And I believe a baby is being born very soon. Anyway, well. 14 days. I've got 14 days.

I make, it's like my number one craving at home, by the way, is milkshakes. Really? They're on my mind all the time. Wow. But now you're with the Atlanta. And your ability, or rather, you have to really pick and choose what stories you're covering and then do a deep dive. And when you're only publishing, you know, once every several weeks, one of these deep dives, how do you take the news onslaught that you were talking about today? And for instance, make sure it's still relevant three weeks from now after you've written several thousand words for Atlantic readers, but also maybe,

That's the second draft of history. Yeah, you know, it's... How do you capture a moment? Yeah, I mean, look, that is one of the great things, but also one of the disadvantages of this kind of job, which I love. And I love... This is basically my dream job. I always wanted...

I mean, even when I was at BuzzFeed, I would always be like begging editors to give me a little space to go a little deeper on a story. I took a leave when I was at BuzzFeed to write a book. Like, this was always what I wanted to do. I will say, like, right now, you know, Steve talked about getting lost in a story. Like, right now I'm working on a magazine story that won't come out until, like, the fall probably, and is completely unrelated to what's happening in the news right now. And I still do have that reporter's instincts when something is happening. I, you know, I want to go to where the action is, and I want to cover it.

And I want to, like, you know, go deep on that story. You know, so one of the things that I've had to teach myself is, like, there are very good reporters covering this right now. And there are very good writers at the Atlantic who are on this right now. And I don't have to be that person. I think that, you know, when I was covering the Romney campaign, I wanted, it was my first, you know, one of my, my first, certainly job covering a presidential campaign,

but my first real reporting job. I had been at Newsweek before that, but was kind of chained to my desk. And so I had gotten used to kind of following the candidate around the country and being there when something happened and covering a beat. And now I don't have that experience anymore. And honestly, it's probably good for, you know, my wife and kids. I'm not chasing every single story around the country.

But I still do have it. So, you know, when I'm working on a big piece, and something is happening like what's happening in the country right now. I do look for opportunities to, or I try to think about how this affects what I'm working on, but you have to think about it in a really long term way, right? Like my story is going to come out in September or October, right? How will the country look at that point? How will we be thinking about these issues then, right?

And so it does kind of force you, push you to get outside of the immediate kind of Twitter cycle, right? And think more long-term, which I think is good in a lot of ways. At least it's healthy for me. Speaking of Twitter and that current war, Steve, I mean, McKay has written the definitive piece on disinformation, perhaps. Yeah, really incredible piece that you did. And it's one of those kind of pieces. When you read it, it reframes how you see an issue. And that, I think, if you do what you do for a living, is really, you know, the highest compliment.

Yeah, thank you. And your disinformation piece did that for me. Maybe I've got a bunch of questions about it, but maybe you could just give our listeners a sense of what your thesis was and what you found as you reported it out. Yeah, well, so what the way it actually started was. you know, I got one of those great, very abstract, broad magazine assignments that you sometimes get, which was, we want to do a story on the Trump campaign. Can you figure out something related to the Trump campaign and maybe their internet strategy? You know, it's like a very broad, and that's not a downplay.

My editors are actually very smart about this and help me own it over the course of the reporting. But what I decided to do was to start was to create a fake Facebook account. And this was last fall, so it was just as impeachment was ramping up. And I created a Facebook account with a fake name and a kind of profile picture with my, you know, MAGA ad on and my face substeered. And just started clicking like on all the official Donald Trump pages. So his page, the campaigns page, the White House's page, and then followed the Facebook algorithm to follow other things that they suggested. So Anne Coulter was one of them, Fox Business, things like that. So I started following kind of all these different pages.

In Trump We Trust was one of my favorite Facebook groups that I joined. And then the idea, honestly, was just to kind of keep tabs on what they were serving to their fans, you know. But what I found was that over the course of the next several weeks, as I was following the impeachment hearings, I would kind of do this weird thing where I would be following the impeachment hearings for my day job. So watching the hearings, calling sources, you know. And then later in the day or often at night, I would go on to this Facebook feed and spend time scrolling through what the Trump campaign and the president's allies were putting out, kind of the content they were putting out to frame what was happening. And it was really disoriented. And so what I found was that over time, the more time I spent doing that, the more time I, the more cynical I got about. kind of the information that was being put out, not just by the Trump campaign, but by everyone.

Like the kind of onslaught of noise, the constant barrage of like warring headlines and, you know, distorted facts and all of that got me to the point where I almost could, I started to unwillingly lose faith in the idea of objective reality itself. You know, it was almost, I don't want to overstate it, but it was really like, I would like be like, well, who knows that that's true? What even is true? Who cares? You know, like that was that kind of cynical, that citizen, I could feel that in myself. And so I started to do some more reporting and research and found that this is actually a very common tool used in political propaganda and disinformation around the world. Scholars call it censorship through noise. And so the idea is that, you know, maybe half a century, ago, illiberal political leaders would try to lock up, you know, journalists and shut down newspapers and censor in that way. But in the current era of information abundance where we have so much access to so much information all the time, the new strategy is to overwhelm the public square with information and misinformation. And so that was kind of what launched me into

this reporting, which was realizing that this is a very deliberate tactic being deployed by the president and his allies, but also a lot of political actors right now in the U.S. Well, and isn't it the case that, you know, the Trump, Trump himself and some of his top advisors haven't been coy about the fact that this is what they're doing, right? I mean, there was the famous comment that Trump made to Leslie Stahl back in the, I think, before the 2016 election where he said something like, I'm attacking you and I'm attacking the media, I'm paraphrasing here,

so that when you say bad things about me, nobody will know, that people won't believe you, nobody will know what you believe. And there was a Steve Bannon quote, I wish I had it in hand, you know, flood the zone with shit or something. Yeah. I was avoiding the curse word, but you just went for it. Well, you know, we're so raw and authentic that way, a lot like Joe Rogan, really.

I think of the dispatch is kind of like a punk podcast, you know. You guys are. That's what we are. That's what we're going for. My mom will be horrified when she hears this, I will tell you, that I actually said it. Mom, I was quoting somebody in my defense. But that's, to me, that's a very interesting. place to get as a society, as we think about sort of our national discourse.

It's disorienting for people like you and me, and we do this for a living. Like, our job is to ferret out the truth and to try to figure out what's what. Think about what it's like for the average citizen who, you know, feels an obligation to keep up with the news, cares about the future of the country. But doesn't know who to trust. And what was what, what, what's been so interesting over the past really five years as we've seen this, this information explosion that goes back further than that. But, you know, more recently, is the number of times that I've gotten that question, if I'm giving a speech, like, how do I know who to believe? Like, how do I know who to trust?

What's your answer? That's the question I get most often when I give speeches about this or lectures. Like people will come up and ask, like, do you have like a list of trusted news sources? Who should I, what should I be reading and what shouldn't I be reading? And, you know, I'm always kind of like flummoxed by the question, unfortunately, because I think for us on this podcast, like, we have very high media literacy because we're in the media world. Like it's not like a, you know, a comment on our education or character. It's just literally this is what we do for a living.

And so people who don't do this for a living who are busy with regular jobs and don't have time to throw it out, like, which, what, you know, how, how is this news source slanting this particular subject? Like, it's really difficult to understand. And for me, this was thrown into especially sharp relief by the coronavirus pandemic. Because I don't know about you, but I have people in my life who, who, you know, they're just not, they're casual news consumers, right? They like might listen to the radio, they might watch a little TV, they might click on stories that are in their Facebook feed, but they don't have a good sense of which sources are reliable and which ones aren't. And especially when in these last couple months, as information is

constantly evolving, even from the best sources and from, you know, public health institutions even as our evolving understanding of this virus changes the official guidance and the conventional wisdom about it. I've just found that a lot of people I know are just, you know, gravitating to whatever grabs their attention. And so sometimes those are things that reinforce their existing worldview. You know, if you're somebody who is prone to be really suspicious of these lockdowns or of mask wearing or whatever, you're going to find a whole information universe that reinforces those opinions, or if you're somebody who is really, really scared of the coronavirus and thinks it's going to get much worse than it currently is, you can find a lot of alarmist

headlines that reinforce that. And I just have found people in my life, you know, people on Facebook, people I know personally, who are just, you know, amplifying bad information. And it's not deliberate, but they just literally don't know how to separate what's true and both. And My answer is not good because my answer is always, you know, read a lot of different things and expose yourself to a lot of different things. And that's great for me because I can do this for my job. And I know, you know, not only do I know the various editorial slants that different publications have, I know a lot of the individual writers and journalists. And I know exactly where they're coming from. And I can parse all that.

But if you don't have that background knowledge, it is really difficult to navigate this kind of chaotic. information ecosystem that we're in right now. Can I just ask one quick? Okay, so through the lens. Go ahead. Go ahead. Well, let me do one quick follow up on that. When you dove into Facebook the way that you did and talking about the sort of self-reinforcing

media consumption of so many Americans, I don't know if you saw that there was a Wall Street Journal story a couple days ago about how Facebook contributes to this point. to this polarization. Is that true? And if it is, is there anything that could be done about it? Specifically thinking of Facebook? Well, Facebook is a really interesting case because Mark Zuckerberg, you know, has actually given this a fair amount of thought and has landed on a fairly controversial position, which is, which I think is actually an interesting one.

And I think it's worth debating. And it gets a lot of kind of, it's glibly dismissed by a lot of people. But I think it's worth thinking about, which is basically what he says is, you know, we're not, political speech is the most scrutinized speech in America, right? Journalists, watchdog groups, politicians, activists, ordinary people are constantly debating what public leaders, especially what the president says. And there is plenty of accountability for that. So his argument is Facebook should not be in charge.

of arbitrating political speech. And that should be left up. What we're doing is providing a platform for people to say what they want and then people can hash it out in the public square. They know, as we've seen in that Wall Street Journal story and a lot of other reporting, that they have research that shows

that the way that their platform works and the incentive structures that it creates contribute to more division and polarization. We know that the longer that somebody, you know, there is, I love, I can't remember who did this study, but I remember one person, or one study found that the longer a Facebook conversation goes on, you know, somebody posts something and people are responding

in the threat, the longer it goes on, the more radical the positions become and the more incendiary the rhetoric becomes, So, like, it might start off with kind of everyone's being polite and moderate, but by the end, people are accusing each other of being Nazis and invoking Hitler and... I'm pretty sure MTV dedicated an entire reality show to that in the names. In a way, that's kind of the premise of all reality TV, isn't it? Yeah, yeah. The real world, when people stop being nice and start getting real.

Well, and so this is the thing. They know it, but they basically decided that it's okay. that like contributing to that polarization and division is worth providing this platform for public discourse. And I think that, you know, there's a lot of different ways we could come out that issue, legislative questions, legal questions, you know, common good questions. But it is just an undeniable fact that the way these big social platforms, and I think especially Facebook are set up, they have just made the calculus that we're going to allow a lot of political speech that is harmful to society because it's not our place to arbitrate or to determine what's harmful

and what's not. So then let's move to the other end of the spectrum and what's really, I think, ramping up today. Twitter posted a fact check of sorts on the president's mail-in ballot tweet. It said, had a little link and it said, you know, find out more about mail-in ballots. You could click through and see a fact check that Twitter had sort of put together on the president's tweet. The president responded through a number of tweets about Twitter and then signed an executive order that involved Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Want to learn more about that? Check out advisory opinions podcast where David and I did a deep dive on the legal side of that. And then last night, so all was well, right? The war was over

for a time being. Last night, early this morning, he posted a tweet about the George Floyd situation in Minneapolis, and it included the line when the looting starts, the shooting starts. Twitter appended a note to the bottom of that that said that it was in violation of their policy against incitement and glorification of violence, but that they were going to leave it up because they thought that it was in the public interest. The White House official account then reposted the same tweet, and that has been taken down by Twitter for violating their policy. You described Mark Zuckerberg's take on this and Facebook's take. He has said, we have a different view of this than Twitter does. You've written about this extensively, so you in particular, I think,

have unique insight into how this fight is going to play out and where it's going to go from here, because clearly this is not winding down. It is winding up. Right. It's being escalated, you know, deliberately by the president for, I think. And by Twitter, I think. Yeah, I, no, I think that's right.

Well, I think that's a decision to place that notification. I'm actually on the president's Twitter feed. Now, what's interesting is if you're on his feed, that tweet is actually completely blocked right now with that thing that says the tweet violated the Twitter rules about glorifying violence, then you can click view. if you want to see it. So, which is kind of an interesting escalation even further from what they had done with the mail and ballot tweet.

I think that the decision by Twitter to do that was kind of a response in kind by saying, we're not backing down from this either, right? So I think it's interesting that, you know, the debate over Section 230, I will leave the legal debate to you. But what I think is interesting is that this is one of those things that, like, that the political, the partisan political lines are not that clearly drawn or at least haven't been up until the president, uh, jumped in the fray and now maybe they will be more cleanly thwarted. But, you know, but when I was reporting that piece for the Atlantic, I, I talked to Richard Stengel, the former Time magazine editor who then went on to work in the Obama State Department. Um, and he was saying that the, uh, Communications Decency Act should be amended in a way that. that demands social media companies do more aggressive moderation, right? He was saying that we want more moderation, more, you know, fact-checking, and that if they don't do that, then they shouldn't be shielded from liability.

What the president is trying to do is get less moderation, but is also doing it by attacking or going after the Section 230 of the Communications Dacency Act. So my point is the politics of this have been a little bit scramble. And I think you see people on both the far left and the far right and libertarians saying that they don't want to see social media platforms exerting more editorial influence because they, you know, doing that kind of thing is just going to make it harder for the free flow of, you know, debate and information. I really, I don't have a clean prescription for this. Like, I actually can kind of feed Twitter's argument that allowing the president's statements to exist on their platform is a, in the public interest, right? On the other hand, I think this particular tweet, which is, can very easily be read as an incitement to violence, not just from, you know, the National Guard of the military, but you can see all kinds of people reading that tweet as permission or encouragement to, you know, be violent. toward these protesters.

And so in that case, I do think that kind of test the limit of the logic that Twitter is putting out here. But in broader terms, like this question, and I heard you guys this conversation about this earlier this week, this question of how much fact-checking Twitter should do for the president is kind of decide the point to me because I think that a lot, so much of, the people who want this to happen, it's born out of a desire for, basically a wish that the president wasn't the president, right? And to me, I think that the president of the United States cannot be meaningfully de-platformed, you know?

Taking away his Twitter feed is not going to shut him up. It's not going to limit his ability to put out these incendiary statements. He might just do it on Facebook. He might start issuing press releases from the White House making these statements. He might go on camera, you know, he might go on Fox and Friends. He might, you know, hold a press conference every day or five times a day. He has the presidential bully pulpit is very large and he's going to have a lot of ability to say what he wants to say. And, you know, I think that the debate about how much Twitter should silence or

censor or fast-check him, it's not going to accomplish what a lot of people wish it would accomplish. I think part of the problem, and David French has made this point, is that Twitter has already created a double standard for Donald Trump. They've allowed him for a long time to get away with things that they would hold, you know, Twitter users with 200 followers who get reported responsible for. And those are people who could be de-platformed for saying and doing some of the things that the president does. So they've already created this sort of presidential exception for Trump.

And I think what they're trying to do now is claw some of that back. The challenge, and we talked about this on the Dispatch podcast earlier this week, was that if they're doing this for President Trump, they're going to have to do it for other world leaders, other, you know, significant American politicians, what have you. And, you know, those double standards exist as well. And we've now seen them. Going back on Wednesday, we talked about statements that had come from leading Chinese diplomats, suggesting that the United States was responsible for creating and basically planting the coronavirus in China for it to spread. And those were not fact-checked in real time. Now Twitter has started to go back.

and fact check those old statements, but think about the mess that that creates for Twitter. I mean, think about how many erroneous statements currently exist in the Twitter feeds of, you know, everybody, I mean, you know, journalists who were way, way over their skis on, on what Bob Mueller had, you know, other things that the president has said, things that the president's defenders have said. it's they can't they can't realistically go back and fact check all of twitter it's sort of crazy and i think the biggest problem with this is it's it's a totally ad hoc process they're pretending that they have these standards and principles twitter is and it's it's manifestly untrue somebody should fact check that it's not true they're going back and making up the rules as they go along. And I think that's what's getting him in trouble. People have to know what to expect what's permissible and what's not, how they're going to be treated. And Twitter's failed that

way. Well, they're absolutely making it up as they go along. There's no question about that. The question is how, what should they do going forward, right? I think the idea of retroactively, like, that's just insane, right? But going forward, you know, what standards are they going to apply? a world where they say, we're going to do some limited fact checking for and moderation of just world leaders or just heads of state or, you know, just government officials or something like that. You could see some kind of situation like that. But I think that we're not saying what the real thing here. And so much of this debate avoids this reality, which is that Twitter could just suspend Donald Trump.

They could delete his account. They don't want to. And the reason is because Donald Trump makes Twitter extremely relevant to the national political discourse, right? There's a reason, I mean, clearly with all the pressure they've received from the left from probably the majority of their, you know, users, I'm sure that they could have just made the decision, well, let's just boot him off. he's violating the rules.

They're not doing that because they know that it's not in their interest. If they remove the president of the United States, not only are you going to lose one of the biggest content generators, right? The thing that the magnet of national and global attention to their platform, they're also probably going to lose a lot of the president's fans who are going to leave in frustration and maybe they'll go to another, you know, another social media platform. They're just trying to figure out a way to still allow for this to happen while also making small concessions to critics of the president.

And you're right that it's just a complete, it's been a mess so far, and they're opening themselves up to a much bigger mess going forward, I think. So here's the bigger mess that I see coming, McKay, and it, you know, goes to your past life and mine as well, which is the presidential campaign. It is not, you know, what we're experiencing now in terms of a presidential campaign will not be what it is in September. It's about to be far more consuming both of reporters' lives, media lives, but also just regular people, you know, the post-Labor Day advertisement blitz and just overall partisanship of the country starts moving after Labor Day.

where people really start identifying with their political parties, at least as we've seen every four years in the past. I don't see this being different this year. And so whether it's Twitter or Facebook, social media, this disinformation that you point to, and we saw a little skirmish of it with the two videos, one put out by the Biden campaign and one put out by the Trump campaign, both of which were sort of deceptively edited

and how those were treated. Is this current conversation we're having in May, almost June, what is that going to look like in September when we're talking about the stakes being higher for a lot of people, more videos from each side and the sort of tit for tat. Well, you took down this video, you fact-checked this tweet, but Biden said this thing, and we want that video taken down. And is that going to just contribute to the polarization

that would ramp up anyway. Yes. But I also think it will, each individual instance will matter a little less because everything is going to be so much noisier and so much crazier that, you know, it'll be hard to focus on any one story. But I do think, look, you're right that every,

this is my third presidential election that I've covered, like every presidential election gets really, really nuts in, September and especially October, right? I mean, I don't even want to recount all the, you know, the parade of horribles from October 2016, but Sarah, you and I were talking throughout that period. That was an intense few weeks.

So it was weird. It was weird. So the answer is I think that the whole public square is going to get a lot noisier. It's going to get a lot more vicious. we are going to see much more, I think, disinformation, both foreign but especially domestic. That's part of the reason that I wrote this piece is that we have been so focused on foreign disinformation since 2016. And I think the much more potent, you know, force in our politics

is going to be domestic disinformation, you know, whether it's coming from political parties or campaigns or all these kind of shady groups, that that's going to ramp up a lot. in September and October, especially as people feel like they can pump things into the bloodstream without being held accountable before the election. This working of the rest that you're talking about is it's already been happening. It'll be happening a lot more, especially because I think President Trump has made a calculation that it's just like it's good politics for him. You know, I remember Jonah said on your show earlier this week that he's not clear exactly why

it's good politics for him, but the, you know, these constant, like, eruptions, kind of a way from where most voters actually are focusing their attention or, you know, it is straight. I think it is worth challenging the conventional wisdom, but that's good politics. But for some reason the president's made this calculation,

the president's son, Donald Trump Jr., who have also written about a lot and reported on a lot, has kind of made this his hobby horse for the last couple of years. And it's part of the reason that he's such a folk hero, to the kind of online MAGA rights, you know, taking on big tech and accusing them of censorship and bias toward conservatives. And I think we're going to see a lot more of that kind of culture war drum beating as we get closer to the election. I'm frankly less worried about what it will do to the social platforms, you know, like these are very wealthy, big

companies that will, you know, they'll do fine. But I am worried about, you know, just the, the further erosion of our kind of collective trust in any kind of American institution. And I think we'll see a lot more in that vein as we approach November. One quick follow up to that. What advice do you have to a young McKay Coppins out there covering their first presidential campaign in 2020 with all of this background? So just be very, I mean, my real advice is tweet much less. than I did in 2012. But honestly, just be careful.

And this isn't just a young reporter coming up. Yeah. All my colleagues, like, be very careful about what you see. I have a policy of I do not retweet or weigh in on viral videos for at least like a day or two after they first start to go viral. And that's because we've just seen so many times now that some kind of thing. video will go viral and then additional context comes out and we find that oh it wasn't quite what we thought or it was still it was but also we missed this side of it or or in the worst

cases actually this is completely misleading and you know I just think that more I think journalists we need to be really careful because there are very savvy operators out there who are going to deliberately try to trick us and deceive us and misleasing us and this lead us. And in part to drive their own agenda and sometimes just to make us look bad. They'll try to get journalists to fall for something so that then they can turn around and say, look how stupid these journalists are. So anyway, just be careful. You know, it's dangerous out there is kind of my, my advice. And we should do as much as we can not to contribute to the noise, basically. Steve. It's good advice. We will be sure to copy that and send it to all of our youngans. Steve, I know you wanted to talk to McKay in particular about our youngans, but also the overall project here. Yeah, of course. I mean, journalists love to do nothing more than talk about journalists and themselves. I think most people find that. I think, no, no, people love to love it. I think, no, people love it.

They love to hear people in the media talk about the media. It's their favorite. I know you're being sarcastic. They like it more than I thought, honestly. I mean, I would go, you know, when I would go give speeches, whether it was to Rotary clubs or business groups or conservative movement groups or whatever, I usually went out of my way not to spend much time talking about the media because I've been sort of obsessed with the media for as long as I can remember.

I gave a speech in 1988 in the Wisconsin State Forensics Championships about media bias. So I've been sort of obsessed with the issue forever. And I didn't want to. That was like a weird, humble, but also really nerdy rack. Yeah, no, I didn't mean it as a, I didn't mean it as a humble right. I should have just said a forensic speech in 1988. Uh-huh. You're not going to ask me how I did.

You're not going to ask me how I did. you don't you i know my score my exact score um so i've been obsessed with this that's weird because i think you have the metal like right behind your head you see you still have it framed in your house false over the mantel place where your children have to walk by it every day i left it with my parents they were very pleased with it um so i i i was always worried um you know in in giving these speeches are talking to people about this, that I was kind of projecting. This is something I'm very interested in. So, of course, everybody else is. And, you know, I guarded against that impulse to talk about the media much. And then, you know, really as we've seen this

kind of democratization of the media, and we've seen this explosion of sources, you started to see, or I started to get many more questions about the media itself. People. People did want to talk about it, which was really surprising to me. I think you're right. I just want to add quickly, I remember my editor at Buzzfeed, Ben Smith, who's now the New Times, he used to always say, even like right when he hired me that all politics is media, he was saying like, like, you know, political candidates, politicians, elected officials, they're all kind of their own media, many media outlets, right?

And so much of the debates we have about politics are also debates about media. And it's not a surprise then that Ben Smith went from being a long-time political reporter to now the media columnist at the New York Times. He basically sees those beasts as heavily overlapping. And Jonah had a very good column about this the other day, pointing to a piece of direct mail that he'd gotten from the Trump campaign. The Trump campaign basically, I think, again, paraphrasing, but started this direct mail piece saying something to the effect of,

we're not running against Joe Biden, we're running against the media. And I mean, as a descriptive, as a matter of descriptive reality, that's more or less true these days. And, you know, I think most of the sort of anti-anty-Trump right just uses the media as a deflection mechanism. They don't want to talk about this crazy thing the president says. they'd rather talk about the media and how it's being covered. Now, there are some very, I think, legitimate critiques of media that, you know,

people on the right have been making for years, and there's a reason, I think, that this kind of anti-media talk resonates as much as it does, frankly. Anyway, that's a long sort of digression wind up before we get to what we really, really want to talk about, which is us. So as the famous Toby Keyes song said, I want to talk about me. So you, um, you did a piece about, uh, the dispatch for the Atlantic. Uh, I don't remember exactly when it was a few months ago. And, um, you're, you're here on our podcast.

So obviously we didn't regard it as a hatchet job. I think it was fair to, to describe it as, as, uh, it was a fair piece, but skeptical. piece. Is that, is that, do you accept that description of it? Sure. I think I was skeptical, not of the, like the enterprise itself, but of the, the market for it and kind of where it would fit in the broader media landscape. I had questions about it. So, so here, I mean, it's like, it's like you teed this up perfectly. Here's one of those questions. This is what you wrote. One could be forgiven for wondering whether the incentives in conservative media can actually support a project like

the dispatch, have audiences on the rights simply been conditioned to expect validation and nothing else from their news? Fair question. I think the skepticism is fair. I mean, you went into some of the history of the kinds of media outlets that have been launched like this, and they've sort of changed their focus or have it succeeded. So my question to you is a very simple one. Are we doomed? I thought you were teeing me up for like a told you so. I thought you were going to like pull out the subscription numbers and start reading them off to me. We're off to a good start. We're very happy with the start. That's for sure. No, I mean, look, I think that one of the reasons I wanted to write about you guys was because I do think there is, it's really important

that there are conservative publications and outlets that are rigorous and, you know, upholding conventional journalistic standards, right? Like that, I am not somebody who thinks that that is the province of the left or the center exclusively. Like, I think that there need to be more serious, rigorous news publications on the right. And so far, I, you know, I think. that you guys have held to your mission statement like it seems like you're trying to do what you set out to do and you haven't haven't followed the daily caller drift is what i would call it

which was you know it started out with a lot of the same rhetoric as you guys and ended up in a very different place um i mean maybe we should check back in in five years and see there's the skepticism I was looking for. No, no, no, but here's what I will say. I think that the media industry in general is shifting in a way that actually is potentially more conducive to the kind of project you're doing, by which I mean there's a lot more emphasis on subscription and a lot less advertising emphasis. And when the whole thing, when all of digital journalism,

was premised on how can we get the most traffic and the most eyeballs so that we can sell more ads and make more money from advertising revenue, that did create some bad incentives, right? You know, on the more benign end of things, it created, you know, FEO's incentives where you're trying to game Google's algorithm with dumb headlines, like, you know,

the famous Huffington Post one was they would always do every year a story that was headlined, what time does the Super Bowl start? Because they knew that millions of people would Google that. So they would get a bunch of traffic. But then in the more, you know, sinister side of things, there was, you know, it incentivized conspiracy theories and incendiary headlines and, you know, race baiting and all the rest. And the fact that now we've shifted, you know, that model just basically didn't work.

that I think almost every digital news outlet has started to realize that you can't sustain a serious newsroom or a growing media outlet with advertising alone. And so the shift towards subscriptions, which, by the way, the Atlantic has also followed, it creates an opportunity to identify an audience that wants what you're doing,

that may be center rights, but also wants more than what a lot of the conservative media is offering. They want new information. They want backchecking. They want context. They want thoughtful essays and commentary. And so if you can identify that audience, it doesn't have to be 25 million people. You know, you don't need to be drawing tens of millions of people to your website every day in order to just, you know, pay the bills.

You can identify a small but loyal audience and charge them for what you're doing and it can be successful. I mean, five million members would be fine. We would be happy with that. Well, I was actually about to ask you. I do think the question I still have is how much do you want to scale this, right? Like, do you see this as kind of a boutique outlet that is well respected and well regarded and doing good work? is, you know, profitable and working, or do you see this as, you know, the, I don't even know, the New Yorker, the new, you know, the center right New York Times? Like, do you, do you want to

see millions of subscribers? Like, this is the danger. This is the danger of asking you questions about this. Inevitably, you were going to turn this around on me, right? There was no other, I should have seen this coming. There was no other way this was going to go. You were going to find a way to put me on the spot. You didn't invite me on to ask probing questions about your business model. That wasn't the point of this podcast. No, I'll bite. I mean, I think that, I think, you know, what we would like to do is offer something that is

certainly different, I think, than what many places on the center right are doing. Not everybody. I mean, you know, it should be said, there are outlets on the center, right, that are doing really good reporting. And I tried to give some props to those in the piece. You're not an island by yourself. No, no, not at all. You know, I think we want to start small, you know, build a loyal audience.

And, you know, we're open to growing. We don't want to, what we didn't want to do was try to grow quickly by doing all the wrong things. things. So when we, we may have told this story before, but, you know, when we were going and looking for investors and we sat down with some venture capital firms, you know, we did that enough and talked to them enough that we ultimately decided that we didn't want to take venture capital money because venture capital firms are making lots of bets and they want hockey stick growth. And we thought the kind of things that we would have to do to get the kind of hockey stick growth that our investors would then have wanted would have compromised the editorial

integrity of the project. So we didn't do it. And we decided we weren't going to take venture capital money because we weren't going to do that. So we want to grow. I mean, I think there is a pretty big audience out there for this. I mean, certainly the early returns are encouraging both in terms of nonpaying readers and listeners and in terms of paying members.

We think that there's a lot to build on. We think there are a lot of people who still don't know what we're doing. And sort of broadening that reach will help us convert a lot more people and make them low readers. But I think the key, you know, the key to it all, this is not rocket science. The key to it all is to do good work, to produce things that are different from what a lot of other people are doing and to do it well so that people are willing to pay for something they value. And we are almost out of time with McKay, but lest anyone think McKay that all of your pieces are these, you know, deep philosophical, investigative thoughts on perhaps the writer, the Trump administration, I just flew. It was worse than I thought it would be, was one of my favorites. But my favorite piece is the stockpile of food in my garage, which was this wonderful, I don't know, personal look into the life. of McKay Coppins, you are Mormon, and part of that culture is to have food on hand. It was this wonderful piece, actually, that I highly recommend, because it goes to, like,

your view of your role in your community, that, you know, you should be a source of comfort to your neighbors in the time of crisis, like the beginning of the coronavirus. But here's my question to you. Now, several months later, after that wonderful, thoughtful, inspiring piece, have you pulled out any deep tracks, if you will, in your stockpile or in your pantry that you just never thought you'd get to. Well, okay, so I will say we have not cracked open the dehydrated bell peppers. We haven't gotten to that point yet in the pandemic. We, you know, we had a bunch of water as part of that. I think we've tapped into that. We got, there are a couple of like canned goods

that we needed to eat because we couldn't get an Instacart delivery slot, you know, and the grocery delivery thing. But we have not had to dig in too deeply. Thankfully, you know, the doom, the doomsayers who said that there would be massive disruptions to the supply chain in America that hasn't come to pass. So we've been able to stick to regular food. But it is a source of, you know, the piece is about the comfort that comes from knowing them down there, you know. And I think that having the stockpile, while it seems strange to a lot of people, it does give me an appreciation for this kind of odd religious tradition that I grew up practicing.

I also happen to know that you have small children. And when I read about the dehydrated carrots, I was like, good luck to you, McKay. I got to say, my five-year-old not banging down the door to have a dehydrated carrot snap. Well, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you, listeners, for being with us through this journey with McKay Coppins. Wonderful writer at the Atlantic, highly recommend all his pieces. And we'll just have to look forward to this one in the fall. We don't get any clues about what it's about, right?

No, but, yeah, tune in August, September, October, and you'll see what I've been working. Okay. So sometime later in the year with a wide range of dates, we'll have another big thought piece from the K. Coppins. Thank you again for joining. Thank you. You know,