The Press Box - Infighting in the News Media and Canada’s Liberal Brand | Damage Control (Ep. 530)

Episode Date: September 26, 2018

The Ringer’s Justin Charity and Kate Knibbs talk about a crazy week in U.S. politics that led to the news media jumping over each other to get scoops (1:20) and how that affects our news consumption (5:21). Then, they turn their attention to Canada’s version of Donald Trump (15:34). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey, it's Liz Kelly. Here's what Ringer content you should be looking out for before the end of the week. From the star of Slow Newsday, check out Kevin Clark's new video series, Worst Picks of the Week, where he offers up the worst NFL and pop culture beds each week. This will be up every Thursday throughout the NFL season, and you can watch on YouTube, Facebook, or Twitter. Also, up on the site, we have two pieces on The Good Place, and Juliet Lippman is writing about the 20-year anniversary of Felicity. Check it out on the ringer.com. I'm Justin Charity. Welcome to Damage Control on the Channel 33 Network, a podcast where we unpack what upsets, excites, and divides us in popular culture.

Like Canada, which is exciting and upsetting and divisive. Canada is usually thought of as like the least upsetting, exciting, and divisive place. It's often talked about like America's reasonable northern neighbor, the easiest place to escape to whenever shit will really hit the fan here. But Canadian politics has developed its own, like, mini Trump figure, and we're going to talk about it. But first, Rod Rosenstein, Brett Kavanaugh, there's way too much breaking news out of Washington, D.C. this week. The news media is eating itself alive. We're going to talk about the rivalries that have turned a lot of this week's big political stories into a cluster fuck and have pit all the big news publications against each other.

sometimes quite furiously. Okay, if you had to eat a member of the DC News Corp? As in Devour? Yeah. I would eat Chris Saliza. I would, okay, but so long as you're eating Saliza, right? Like, I would eat. Who would I eat?

I would eat the entire staff of Axios. You know what I mean? I just feel like I would just go for it, just the whole staff. Who would I eat? Yeah, that's it. That's the answer. Okay, just curious. All right. Okay, so the week began very dramatically with a scoop, a big new scoop from Axios. So Axios reported that Rod Rosenstein, the Justice Department figure who is overseeing Robert Mueller's investigation of Donald Trump, Axios reports that Rod Rosenstein is resigning. And this is like Rod Rosenstein is this figure who has had a lot, has had a lot.

a lot of static with with Trump. Trump obviously resents the Mueller investigation. And, you know, last week there was a New York Times report suggesting that Rod Rosenstein maybe joked about invoking the 25th Amendment to get Trump out of office. Fair enough. So basically, Axios on Monday reports that Rosenstein resigns, except it's apparently a misunderstanding because there are follow-up news reports, namely from NBC, that were like, no, he hasn't resigned.

He's on his way in a car to the white. House to get fired to force Donald Trump to fire him. So that's like playing out an hour after the initial report. And then an hour after that, reporters basically point out that Trump isn't even at the White House. Is he golfing? No, he was in New York at the United Nations. It's so wild.

It's like for two hours, everyone's like, oh, there's going to be the showdown at the White House. And I don't remember who first pointed out. They're like, Trump's not even at the White House. What are you guys talking about? He's literally at the U.N. So then there becomes this whole, like on Monday, there's just hours and hours of weird uncertainty and conflicting news reports about where Rod Rosenstein is, where Donald Trump is, whether Rod Rosenstein resigned on Saturday, whether he resigned on Monday, whether he was fired, whether he was like going to be fired. So wait, but he has he resigned?

Like, he's still the dude, right? No, he is still the deputy attorney general at the U.S. Department of Justice. This is the weird, this is why I would have talked about this, because this is the weird case of, the norm of the Trump administration is Trump firing people. That's like the norm of his career, right? Is dramatically, you fire it. Yeah, it's a recurring theme. Right, right. It's the light motif of Donald Trump is you're fired.

And like this is a weird instance where not only was it a big, huge, confusing news story that this guy wasn't actually fired, but the one person who sort of clarified. everything was Trump himself. Because after, it's like hours into this, after Trump gets out of meetings at the UN General Assembly, you know, he emerges and a reporter asks him about it. And he's like, oh, I'm supposed to meet with Rod Rosenstein on Thursday. Like, what do you guys?

And then Sarah Sanders puts out a statement. And he's like, he's still, what's going on here? So it felt uncanny. It felt like the rare instance where like the media is why I was like anxious and confused about what was happening in the world.

and it took the Trump administration of all people to, like, restore sanity to the news cycle? Yeah, set things straight. I don't know. I mean, I think this is sort of an example of the problem of outlets just, like, putting the scoop priority above the, like, solidity of the news. Right. Because all of these stories did not need to exist.

And it's upsetting for me personally because I and a lot of, of other people like I feel like I have Trump news fatigue where like I can't process all of the news so I need to figure out what is actually important. And this was a story where I got like very frustrated because I was like, what is happening? I don't know. I'm not even going to pay attention to this because like I don't understand it. That's not good. Like I should want to be in the know especially like I'm not a political journalist but as a journalist. But when stuff like this happens, it just like exacerbates that impulse to two. out because you're like, well, none of this was necessary to put in front of my face.

Right. Right. It's like that new story after all that confusion basically landed on. Nothing had changed. Nothing had changed and also like check back on Thursday. You know what I mean? And it would be one thing if it were just one scoop and then that was a follow-up. But there were, it was like a, it was a Mexican standoff of news organizations all shitting

on other news organizations' reports and saying, no, that that person's sources screwed them over. This is the actual story. And there was, like you said, that very palpable sense of, like, I, as a, we both work in media, but I just sort of reverted to the role of, like, feeling like a reader and a consumer of news. And I just was sitting there the whole time thinking, I am poorly served by this. Yeah.

And I do have a lot of sympathy because I understand that it would be incredibly difficult to get your facts straight. covering an administration that doesn't like even believe in the concept of a fact right like you have to be reporting the words of untrustworthy people like I am like definitely sympathetic to that but this Rosenstein story just it's bad like they need things should be better than this one thing I have a hard time with with political journalism in particular is like the logic of scoops the the impulse toward getting a scoop sort of led

one reporter to trip over their own shoes and then there are a bunch of reporters standing behind him that also end up like tripping over their own shoes because you know what I mean? It's like I'm trying to understand that

because it seemed like in the beginning like Jonathan Swan who was the Axios reporter he seemed like very proud of not just reporting the news but it being a scoop and it's like the fact that throughout the day I was just like following his Twitter feed and the fact of the

confusion that the story calls did not at any point seem to mean nearly as much to him as the value of being able to say, but I got a scoop though. Where does that come from? Ego. I think that, well, there's also a lot of pressure. Luckily, we don't really feel it at the ringer because we have sane bosses. But like a lot of news organizations are just obsessed with scoops. They're like, it doesn't necessarily matter what the exclusive content is as long. as it's exclusive. Right. And like obviously like breaking news is an essential part of journalism, the most essential

part. But like that doesn't mean that you should just not have any judgment of what that news is. And it doesn't mean that you should value being first over being right. Right. I just think that gets lost in like the current environment. And it leads to dumbass stories that aren't right and confuse people. I think the ultimate big-ass, dumb-ass story that confuses people is the Mueller investigation itself. And like Rod Rosenstein is a crucial figure in the whole orbit of that investigation.

And I do feel like at this point, all reporting about it is confusing to me. Like it has this quality, basically, of seeming like the sourcing on the stories is just totally inscrutable. the fact that the Mueller investigation team, they basically don't leak and they don't talk. And so I am all the time feeling like I'm not reading reporting about a thing so much as I'm reading like fan fiction and like really weird, zany speculation about somebody who clearly is not leaking that many details.

And so it's like you're not having background conversations with Mueller. you're probably having background conversations with like Steve Bannon or some person who both is crazy and also has just really glaringly like interests that would totally change my perception of whatever reporting results from conversations with them if I knew that that's who the sources were on these stories. And I got to confess like when you were talking about, to me about talking about Rosenstein, I was a little like hesitant at first just because I feel like I don't know. enough about the Mueller investigation. Like, I am not an expert.

I haven't, like, been reading up on it as thoroughly as I normally would a story of this much important just because I feel like I'm constantly reading about it and then not really enriching my own understanding of what's happening. So I'm sort of pausing until, like, we're able to assess it, like, until something happens. Like, the investigation is ongoing. I feel like I'm not going to actually learn much more about it. Right. until it concludes.

Right. Yeah. Or it's like you have these indictments and sentencings along the way for like... Yeah, the Manafort thing was, I mean, very entertaining and great, but... Right, but that's like an actual development. Yes. As opposed to, like, somebody parsing these weird factoids that come out. But it's funny.

Like, Jonathan Chate wrote this cover story for Newark Magazine a couple months ago about, like, I would say the totality of Russiagate and the skepticism in the... some corners of the left, I would say, to paying attention to it this much. And it's like, I think he's kind of clueless about it in the story, but he is describing, I think, what we're both getting at, which is there's this chasm of like, you're either the sort of person who reads a ton about the Mueller investigation just because it's on cable news and it's on the web all the time. And you come away from that coverage thinking, not only do I not feel like an expert, I feel like I just don't basically understand the state of play. Or you come up.

away in the completely opposite vein of like that meme of Charlie Day from It's Always Sunny of Philadelphia where he had like he's making a conspiracy uh board and he thinks he has like all of the pegs together and he's figured out the mystery yeah and those are the extremes and there's no one in the middle yeah like you either have to be like a resistance grifter who is insisting that like Putin literally has his hand up Trump's ass or you have to be like Glenn Greenwald who's insisting that like Russia has nothing to do with anything. Right. Like both completely crazy polls and the truth pretty evidently exists somewhere in the middle,

but like it's it's very unclear right now. Right, right. And like I don't, yeah, it seems as though like those two stances, a lot of the speculation comes from either of those places. And like I just, I am very, very curious to see what comes to the Mueller investigation. But I couldn't be less curious to see what, like, fan fiction gets written in the media about it, like, until it's concluding. Wait, especially because there's so much of it. There's just too much of it.

I would read some good fan fiction if it were, like, periodic, but it's every day. All cable news. Like, do you watch a lot of cable news? Well, I did just watch a lot of cable news a few weeks ago when I was visiting my parents because, like, they have it on in the background all the time. It's wild how stupid everyone is. Like no, sorry, actually, offense to you, pundits. Like, but, like, I've, like, been on cable news before, and I'm just going to tell you right now, I had no idea what I was talking about. Like, it's just a bunch of people saying words that sort of make sense.

And they, like, have a bunch of bronzer on, and that's it. Like, you're not going to get any information. Do you watch a lot of cable news? I used to. That's the thing. When I lived in D.C., I watched cable news all the time. Which channel? I would watch Fox MSNBC and Ziennet.

Oh. I actually watched Fox News a lot just because I found, especially like Glenn Beck era Fox News. Oh. I watched Fox a lot. And I think I was just sort of morbidly fascinated by specifically Glenn Beck. And then I would just end up watching like Megan Kelly, you know, news segments or. Santa's White. Santa's White.

Yeah. I thought a lot about cable news on Monday when the Rosenstein story was playing out just because the sort of contentiousness between publications and reporters that played out and the messiness and just the news chaos where I just felt like I lived in a dystopian state of disinformation. It just reminded me of how cable news sounds. Like if you just leave cable news on, I don't know. I feel like the Mueller investigation is dragging a lot of non-Cable News journalism toward the sort of logic and zaniness of cable news. And I think cable news is among the worst things that ever happened to the United States of America. I was just thinking, like, I also went through a phase of watching cable news when I lived in Canada. And that sort of leads us to the next thing I want to talk to about, which is Canadian politics.

It's better than American politics, right? Well, okay, here's the thing. It's so much better, right? We're moving to Canada. It's going to be great. For sure. Like, it is better. But, like, people should not idealize Canada the way that they have been.

Why not? Drake, Poutine, Trudeau. What else? Do you remember Rob Ford? He smoked crack cocaine. Yes, yes, he did. Okay. I remember that.

He was the mayor of Toronto. He died a few years ago. His brother has risen to power in Ontario. And I honestly was sort of only, I was vaguely aware of this because I used to live in Toronto and I have friends there. And so I sort of have, I think about Canadian politics, I think more than most Americans. So he is the premier of Ontario. He's sort of like the head of the province's government, which is a bigger, more important job than his brother held as the mayor of Toronto. because it's for a larger, you know, population and geographic area.

Anyways, so when I was in Canada, I was talking to people about it. I was like, to be honest, I'm in America and we only think about ourselves, like, what's going on? And it seemed very clear to me. People kept saying, you know, he's our Trump. He's our Trump. Like, everyone keeps focusing on Trudeau and talking about Canada, like it's this beacon of liberal hope. but the rise of Doug Ford, I think we should be paying attention

because it's just like indicative that this like nativist, white supremacist, buddy buddy, isolationist, bully government that Trump is running, like is now spawning, like bootleg copycat. Like Trump is spawning copycats.

Little, he's spawned at least one little Canadian. in copycat. So I wanted to talk to you about it because first of all, like, had you ever heard of Doug Ford before? Yeah. This is a whole dynasty, though, of people. Sort of.

Why? The Ford's dad owned a very successful, like, printing company. Like, they made labels. Like, you know, when you open, like, a chicken breast and it's like chicken in plastic wrap? I'm familiar with me. So that is how. That's how they got rich in Canada. And then Rob Ford and Doug Ford got involved in local politics, and that's like how the whole thing started.

And so when Rob Ford was mayor, Doug Ford was a city counselor, so they like sort of were a tag team. A Mario Brothers type situation. Yeah, so, okay, so Doug is the Luigi. Oh, no. Okay. So Rob Ford was like, obviously, his career is mayor. was plagued by scandals. There was the whole thing that he was

an active addict and he also made a lot of like really inappropriate comments. In a way, Rob Ford spawned Trump who spawned Doug Ford because Rob Ford I think was like

before Trump, the most prominent politician to like talk about a pussy. Like he made like this horrible joke about like I'm not even going to go there. I like hate saying that word. But anyways, he was just this like vulgar populist who like railed against the elites. And his tenure as Toronto mayor was like a huge embarrassment.

Like he like went on Jimmy Kimmel. He was like how a lot of people remember that Toronto existed. People sort of thought that the Ford era was over. And then now Doug has come back into power. And he's only been in power for a brief period of time. But it's like it's been bad. The Washington Post recently said that Doug Ford needs a lesson in how democracies avoid authoritarianism because he's been basically doing everything he can to like rest a lot of executive power for himself. What does he want to do?

I don't know if he has necessarily like a super coherent plan. Also like come. Yeah. Yeah. But he is in favor of basically like deregulation. He's basically trying to destroy the municipal government. Like he's pissed that when he was city councilor, he made a lot of enemies. So he's trying to like reduce the number of municipalities, like cut it in half.

Basically he wants to make the government a lot smaller. Right. And then he's doing like one of his big policy proposals was that beer should be $1. agree agree what is there like a no it was just like people were like okay

and like all of this is happening and I feel like no one knows about it in America because it's like on a smaller scale but still indicative of like how this like the Trump doctrine is spreading and like getting its hooks

and like even places that we consider super liberal. Right. I mean, I do think part of the problem, too, is that Americans don't care about any place that's not America. I just, you know what I mean? I think especially in the past 10 years of American politics, Americans just don't perceive, like, movements of any stripe in other countries at all.

And I, there's some weird closure of, like, American foreign policy and, like, American political concerns. And maybe that's part of it. But I'm curious. like it is a stereotype in the American imagination to imagine Canada as this inflexibly liberal alternative to the United States. And it's funny because like what you just described to me seems like a nuanced reactionary picture. So why does that liberal idealization of Canada endure? Like I don't really. I don't know.

Well, I think they see the broad strokes. And, like, for sure, Canada is more liberal and it has a better social safety net than America. Right. Like, that's true, for sure. But that's all people see because they're not paying attention. They're missing a lot of the reactionary stuff that's actually happening. Right. And so it's also, like, super comforting to imagine, like, a chilly land where everyone's nice to each other.

Right. But, like, think about the things. fact that there's still a huge difference in how Americans perceive Canada versus how they perceive Mexico, right? Like, Americans aren't really, outside of immigration, Americans aren't paying attention to Mexico, but the result of that is that they don't really have any conceptions about, like, Mexico's political identity. Whereas, like, with Canada, Americans aren't paying attention, and yet they have fallen for

this weird branding of Canada. So the fact that that brand exists at all is what's weird to me. that Canada has a brand as we have a better social safety net than the United States, ergo, like, we're basically France. Well, I think that Americans do have a really broad idea of Mexican politics, and it's just like cartels, oh my gosh, you know, like, which is just as incorrect as portraying Canada as like this wonderland of health care. Health care.

Did you know that Jordan Peterson is Canadian? Yeah, let's talk about this. Because that's the other thing when people are sort of like, yeah, all Canadians, they're basically, like, friendly and an offensive. And then meanwhile, I just, I would say for the past year, I have not been able to think about Canada without thinking about Jordan Peterson. And Gavin McGinnis. Right. Right. Like, there's this whole wave.

And there, like, a lot of the influential, like, all right people are Canadian. Right. And we don't talk about, I don't really, I don't know why they're Canadian or what that says. But anyways, it's weird to me that so many of these influential alt-right people are not even American. Right. I mean, I do hesitate to describe it as like Trump spawning forward or the other way. Like, I do think that for the past several years, there has been, or for the past few years, there's been a global, a pretty, like, diversified global resurgence of right-wing politics in advanced democracy. democracies.

Marie Le Pen. Right. And it's sort of, I think that that, I think people have written about that trend, right? From like Western Europe to Japan. Like there is a sort of moment of right-wing politics happening across the globe. I think with Canada, it's just surprised. Like, Americans have been inattentive to it. And Canada, it's just especially jarring because Canada's right there.

Yeah. Yeah. And, like, now it's... Like, it's one thing not to see Brexit, because Brexit, it's like, you know, Brexit. Brexit, at least, is on people's radars, I think. But I don't think the fact that there is this whole reactionary movement in Canada is. Right.

I just wanted to talk about it because I feel like it's one of those things where, like, busting the myth or, like, complicating the myth of Canada as a liberal paradise is important right now because it's like... a reminder that politics is a lot more complicated than most people. Right. And it's also just not a thing you can, I mean, obviously, there are extreme examples of, like, refugee crises in countries where politics are literally violently breaking down.

But I think on a sort of, on a level more akin to the United States, like, it's not a thing you can run from. It's not a thing you can just be like, or you can just wait out and be like, Trump is bad or whatever. I guess we just wait till the next election or I flee to Canada. Well, yes. And okay, this is the other point I wanted to make is that I moved to Canada when I was 18 because I was like Bush won, fuck you America, I'm going to Canada. I did that. And that was really stupid. I did have fun there. Like I love Canada. But it's just like it's a bad idea to even have this fantasy that there is a place you can run away from America from. Right. I mean, America specifically, because you really cannot run away. from America in any part of the planet.

Like, it's better in my mind to just try to make America better than to... You mean make America great again? Shut off. No! Make it better. So I'm obviously, honestly, not going to be like subscribing to the Globe and Mail and following Canadian politics like down to the minute. But I do think it's really important that people pay a bit more attention. to what's going on with our political neighbors and allies,

because what is actually going on is a lot more complicated than it might appear. And that's all. All right, I'm American. I'm Canadian and American. And that's damage control. You'll hear from us again in two weeks. Yes.