The Press Box - The New Gawker and Leon Neyfakh on the 'Fiasco' Podcast

Episode Date: August 2, 2021

Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker break down Gawker 2.0 and discuss how it compares to the older site (0:35). Then, host of the 'Fiasco' podcast, Leon Neyfakh, joins to talk about the new season that dives deeper into Benghazi (6:22).  Hosts: Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker Guest: Leon Neyfakh Associate Producer: Erika Cervantes Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Ring or Dish is the place for all things celebrity, for major celebrity moments like the Met Gala and the Oscars, to the weird habits of the stars you love, to refreshers on the biggest tabloid stories from the last 20 years, Ring or Dish has all the vital details. On Tuesdays, catch jam session with Juliet Lippman and Amanda Dobbins for Royal Family Rumors, Celebrity Real Estate, and Industry Analysis. And on Fridays, listen to Tea Time with me, Kate, and Amelia, for lightning fast coverage on pressing celebrity news and gossip. Check out Ringar Dish on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. David, can we spend a few minutes talking about the new gawker? Yes. It's just the new gawker, right? Not the new new gawker.

This is just 2.0. There wasn't a zombie gawker in there somewhere that I missed. No, there was a zombie gawker. Wait, there was? Wasn't, didn't it relaunch like two or three years ago and it published like two pieces? Or did it never actually relaunch? See, I was just wondering, my misremembering zombie, my conflagging. Zomby Deadspin was zombie Gawker?

No, I think there, I mean, it wasn't zombie Gawker because it was the same owner that owns it now, but it was sort of a very, it was, I don't think there was any, any of the old Gawker staff or much of its DNA. It was more of just like, like, you know, they took Gawker's IP and did Gawker in space. So this is an interesting relaunch, because we have had some zombies like Deadspin,

which is the name, but not the Piper, spirit of the original. In this case, Leah Finnegan, who was a big editor at Old Gawker, is running New Gawker. So it's coming back and it can't be what it was because nothing is what it was at a moment in time, moment in media time. But it is trying to recapture and rechannel some of the spirit of Old Gawker. Is that a fair way to describe it? Yeah.

I mean, and like you said, Leah Finnegan was a part of the old Gawker. I think there's some more people involved to a part of the old Gawker. And there's, I mean, I think a couple of things have happened. I mean, obviously, there's zombie deadspin and there's the defector, right? I mean, a lot of the, you know, the people that were involved in Gawker and Gawker-affiliated publications then have sort of found a new outlet, right? but there's still a giant hole in our consciousness where Gawker used to be, right? I mean, there's a, I think, it's weird. There's so many sites that I read every single day at some point in my life that either

they went out of business or they went behind a paywall or, you know, whatever happened. And I was like, I don't know how I'm going to replace that. And then 15 minutes later, I, you know, an angel came down and removed it from my bookmarks list and I never thought about it again. Gawker is not that way. You know, Gawker is both because of the, I mean, you know, you read articles about the new Gawker, you're going to hear a lot of words repeat, voice, spirit, ethos, because of all those things of the old Gawker.

I mean, it had a very specific personality, and probably for all the reasons that it was despised in some quarters, it's been impossible to reproduce. And it's been. really missed. I love the day one stunt where they reached out to people in the Gawker expanded universe like Tina Brown and Lena Dunham and Glenn Greenwald and asked them what they thought about Gawker coming back. That was a really, also the Philly Fanatic was in that roll call. That was an appropriately gawker thing to do. Also like the look of the website. I wonder if you had thoughts on this as an art guy. It has a lot of really bigger type than we're used to

too. It almost reminds me when you go to the bistro and you get the long menu that has lots of like pictures and type on it. It's like, and I mean that at compliment, it's sort of like reading one of those menus, the sort of look of the site. Yeah, it's really well designed. You know, I mean, there was a, there was a period and, well, Gawker is probably emblematic of this, but a lot of the sites that were really big over that sort of decade got redesigned. It seemed like every year, right? I mean, we probably talked about this before, but I feel like, you know, there was a period where that, you know, Slate.com redesign was, you know, always got a New York Times write up, you know, and for that reason, I'm sure it kept on going. But it led to people sort of, every time a website was redesigned, it was universally despised the redesign. But it did create an environment in which we were sort of constantly trying to reimagine what interactivity on the internet. that was supposed to feel like and look like.

There's been a lot of sameness for a long time. And I think that Gawker is, you know, Garker, it's a little bit of an old magazine aesthetic. It's a little bit of a new, not new magazine, but it's a little bit of like the aesthetic of a, you know, one of those really kind of self-important magazines that only exist in, you know, Brooklyn Boutique newsstands, you know, with like really fancy paper, you know what I mean, but there's definitely like a strong design aesthetic that's still really, and everything's so really accessible. I think it looks great.

And I think it's, I think it's, it's a new, it's a nice way to accent, like I talked before, like I mentioned before, the old Gawker spirit, because Gawker was sort of always kind of half zine and half, you know, spy magazine. And this is sort of upselling it a little bit, just by the look.

And I think that it gives it a sort of, I mean, I mean, it's, it's marketing, but it gives it a sort of, you know, if not urgency, then it brings another level of interest to it. Coming up on today's show, Leon Nafok, the host of the Fiasco podcast, stops by. He's got a new season about the 2012 attacks in Benghazi, Libya, what happened before, what happened after. How do you make a long-form podcast? He tells us. All that more on the press box, a part of the Ringer podcast network. Hello media consumers, Brian Curtis and David Shoemaker here, along with Erica Servantes.

We are joined David today by an old pal. Leon Nafok is the host of the Fiasco podcast. Before that, he hosted Slow Burn over at Slate. He's got a new season of Fiasco out right now about Benghazi. And back in the 2000s, he stood across the room from us at literally dozens, dozens of Paris Review parties. Leon, welcome to the press box. Thank you for having me on. Great to see you both.

Let us step back, Leon first to about 2017, when you did the first season of Slow Burn about the Watergate scandal. What kind of podcast were you trying to create? So this was, you know, in the couple years after serial sort of blew the roof off of what a podcast could be and how much of an audience a podcast could reach. And so I was really, you know, eager to make something that was journalistic as well as sound rich, you know, something where you were hearing not just one person telling a story or, you know, an interviewer sort of talking to an expert in a conversational mode, but rather like a documentary style narrative series. where, you know, you have real characters, you have a real story arc, and, you know, there are cliffhangers and archival footage and music and, you know, something that sounds meticulously put together and is meticulously put together. So that's what we were going for with Slowburn. I mean, I think the animating idea was whether Watergate, whether living through Watergate felt in any way similar to what it was feeling like at that point to live through Trump and the

Mueller investigation. And then after you did that, you struck out on your own, which I remember at the time seemed like an incredibly bold move. You know, you launched prologue projects and a new podcast called Fiasco, which had a sort of, the way that you described Slow Burn, there's obviously a lot of kind of spiritual connectivity there. Yeah, for sure. For sure. Was it, did it feel, how crazy did it feel to just, you know, step, you know, step. out and do your own thing. No one really, I mean, podcasts, like you said, some of them were incredibly successful, but there wasn't a track record for, you know, people starting your own podcast shingle in the way that you were doing. Yeah. I mean, I sort of backed into the, you know, starting a business part of it. We, you know, we got this opportunity to make the show, make a show for Luminary, which was just launching at the time, you know, as a sort of Netflix for podcasting subscription service.

And they were being really generous about budgets, which is, you know, something that, we were kind of angsty about at Slate because we were sort of working on a shoe string on Slow Burn. And so when it became possible, you know, thanks to Luminary to sort of hire a full staff and to take a little more time on each season of the show, you know, it felt worth, you know, the risk, which was, you know, not just kind of going into the unknown, but also turning away from something that we had built at Slate and had obviously, you know, built a big audience for. And so, yeah, I mean, I think I was pretty confident about it editorially. I sort of was able to bring the core team with me, you know, minus the editors, including our mutual pal, Josh Levine, who I was very sad not to get to work with anymore.

But, you know, it felt like we had the DNA of the show we wanted to make in our heads. And, you know, we knew that there were a bunch of other political stories that we wanted to cover in our, you know, in the mode that we had, you know, created at Slow Burn. What kind of topics, Leon, work for these shows? So it needs to be something that can, A, sustain listener interest over a number of episodes. You know, like we did six episodes on the Bush v. Gore election, and then just now we did six seasons on Benghazi. You know, both of those could have been longer. You know, they could have been eight or ten episodes. We had to leave a bunch of, like, subplots on the table in order to fit them into six.

But it also felt like we're not going to be able to get anyone to listen to more than six, you know, our long episodes about this topic. I mean, I think Benghazi especially, I don't know, I'd be curious to hear what you guys' 's first reaction is when you hear that word. Like, my assumption going into this project was that for a lot of listeners, Benghazi was going to be a kind of unappetizing subject, right? It's like something people remember as this kind of nuisance and this, you know, bullshit machine, right, that no one was like particularly eager to revisit. But our gamble was that, you know, each of these stories that really captures, you know,

captures the country's imagination for better or for worse, has a lot of stuff under the hood that you can, actually, I was reaching for a different metaphor. I'm reaching for the rock metaphor where you pick up the rock and you see what's underneath. We felt like there was a lot under the rock with Benghazi. And I think, like, what do you need under the rock? You need, like, you need to be able to divide the story into chunks that have sort of coherent edges, right? You want listeners to feel anxious to hear the next one. You need stories where there's a lot of characters, people who are alive and willing to talk to you. You need a story where there's archival footage for you to use, to sort of illustrate your points. And it just needs to be like complicated enough. It needs to be like not just in terms of

the plot, though that helps too, but in terms of like the moral questions that are being raised, like you don't want to tell an obvious story where it's clear who the sort of good guys are and the bad guys are. You want a story that has sort of room for gray area. I mean, one thing that occurs to me when I look back over sort of the different subjects you've covered is a lot of them seem to be sort of hiding in plain sight, right? I mean, these are stories that you're almost, I mean, there's a lot of newness to the form, I guess. But Benghazi, I think, more than anything else, you're just like, yeah, of course. Why do we not know more about this story? Is there a, you know, you just describe what works, but is there a way that you go about, like, identify.

them? I mean, is it just, is it, is, is, is one controversy better than another controversy? I mean, I think the, the, the, the, the, the ones that, um, resonate the most are the ones where your listeners have some semblance of a, of, of, of, of, of understanding about what happened, um, but not so much that they don't, that there's not room to correct their misappressions or to deepen their understanding. Like, I think Benghazi was this, again, just like this word that, that, that, that, that people associate with conspiracy theory, they associate it with like partisan politics. But if you ask someone to like, A, tell you what happened during the attack, they probably won't be able to tell you. Maybe they've seen 13 hours. They could tell you a version of what happened

if they saw that movie. But in terms of like who the four guys were who were killed and, you know, what the accusations were that were being made against the Obama administration, I think most people would not be able to come up with an answer. And like, I think as time passes, you know, it's not been that long since Benghazi. It's the most recent story we've covered by far. I think a lot gets forgotten, right? And I think also, like, decontextualized. Like, I think most people probably don't remember that Benghazi attack happened, like,

on the eve of the 2012 election and that it was a major, you know, plot point in the Romney Obama race. And so I think, like, putting these stories back in their place and kind of, you know, helping people connect the dots in their own. head. Like, they might remember the 2012 election. They might remember Benghazi, but they don't remember that they went together, that they, that, that Benghazi was this pivotal attack, you know, this, you know, it's a pivotal weapon that the Romney campaign tried to wield against Obama, you know, the night of the attack, in fact, you know, I was sort of astonished to realize

that the Romney campaign sent out a press release, uh, attacking Obama for their, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, before the attack was even over, right? Like, the attack, again, this is one of these things that I didn't, necessarily appreciate before starting to work on this. The attack was really two attacks. There was an earlier one at the diplomatic compound where Ambassador Chris Stevens was staying. And there was a separate one, you know, hours and hours later on the CIA compound nearby. And, you know, I think the Romney campaign put out a press release before that second part of the attack had even happened. And so it just kind of goes to show you like how quickly this thing was politicized and how

how eager Republicans were to take any opportunity to, you know, make the argument the Obama administration was, if not soft on terror, then like incompetent on terror, which is what they thought this was. So Romney in the 2012 election would use the Obama administration's response against Obama. And then the Obama campaign would use that press release you mentioned, and I remember this from the debates and otherwise, against the Romney campaign. as a weapon. Yeah, I think the thing that people might remember is this debate over whether Obama had used, you know, the word terrorism to describe the attack. Because one of the big sort of controversies early on was that the Obama administration initially portrayed the attack as a protest gone wrong. There had been a bunch of protests around the Arab world in response to this, like, very weird low-budget video called Innocence of Muslims. Do you guys remember that?

It was like it was the latest in a string of, you know, blasphemous, you know, free speech kind of hardline activism, you know, trying to provoke Muslims by using, you know, depictions of Mohammed. And so this video was uploaded to YouTube and then it made its way to Egyptian television when it was translated into Arabic. And that inspired this pretty intense protest in Cairo against the American embassy. and the American embassy in Cairo put out a statement basically saying that they condemned the video, that this was, that they're all for free speech, but like this video was wrong. And so they distanced themselves from it. But that was before the Benghazi attack happened. And then after the Benghazi attack happened, like later that night, it looked like if you sort of like smeared or blurred the timeline that the Obama administration

first reaction to these attacks, to this, you know, this attack or these attacks, sort of, you know, no one was really making distinctions, that it looked like the first reaction was to apologize, you know, for the video. And in fact, like, that apology, such as it was, came hours before the Benghazi attack even happened. And so it was interesting, like, after the attack, the Republican criticism of the Obama administration was that they were falsely pretending that this video was in any way connected to what happened in Benghazi. But as I realized, like, it was the Romney campaign that did that first by conflating the, you know, the Cairo embassy's statement about the Cairo protests, which were peaceful, with the,

with the administration's response to the attack, which hadn't happened yet. Does that make sense? Yes. The story is very confusing, though. It's a much more, obviously, you have six episodes and you could have done more. I mean, it's a big story that we've sort of, you know, stored away in a little jar on the shelf since well since some point in the past at least since Hillary Clinton's candidacy um it did you find

how did people react when you told them you were going to do a podcast about Benghazi both in-house and in the world because it seems like as necessary as this sort of is and interesting a point of view it's obviously like one of the most politicized words of you know recent memory yeah I mean

our goal with the show was to sort of you know depolitize it as much as we could and kind of restore some context to the word. I think, like, I don't want to say most people don't even realize Benghazi is the name of a city, but, like, that's not the first thing probably most Americans think of. They don't realize it's a city in Libya that had had its own history and, you know, in order to understand why that attack happened and why circumstances were such that there were even American diplomats there at all, it requires you to go to go back and like tell the story of Libya in American Libyan relations going back to, you know, the rise of Muammar Gaddafi, who is a character in the podcast, you know, as someone who ruled over Libya with an iron fist. And, you know, there's a lot of famous anecdotes about how eccentric he was, but he was also extremely brutal. You know, we started the series in episode one with the story of what's known as the Abu Salim Prison Massacre, which was a

an incident in 1996 when Gaddafi's regime ordered the, you know, killing of some 1,200 prisoners in this prison in Tripoli in Libya. And as it turned out, like one of the attackers, or actually multiple attackers who were involved in the attack in 2012, it had sort of time in this prison under Gaddafi. They had, you know, come up, they had started battalions and militias during the Libyan Revolution as part of the Arab Spring. and were involved in the rebel coalition. But then after Gaddafi was ousted and killed and it was time to create a new government, you know, that rebel coalition splintered. And one of those splinters was this like coalition of, or rather this, this, you know,

collection of radical militias that were generally like Islamist in their political orientation. And so, you know, I think when we realized that the story of that, of the attack and the politics, around the attack actually needed this background. We got much more excited about it because it felt like, okay, we don't have to spend six episodes in this swamp. We can kind of widen the lens, especially in the first half of the series and really try to explain, and not just explain. You know, I always hate that word because it sounds so boring, but like tell the story of this strange relationship that America has had with Libya. You know, one thing I didn't remember is that during the Bush administration, after 9-11,

the U.S. kind of opened the door to a reconciliation with Gaddafi. And this was a guy who not so long ago had been number one public enemy, like the face of international terrorism. And after 9-11, because Gaddafi sort of shared some enemies with the U.S. in the war on terror, he became our ally. And that is, you know, an incredibly important chapter of the story that you need to understand it, to grasp why the attack happened when it did. All right, David, in just a second, we'll ask Leon Nafok about what kind of sound he gets

on the Fiasco podcast. But first, let us break for the overworked Twitter joke of the week where we celebrate a gag that was so obvious that all of media Twitter made it at exactly the same time. Send your nominees to at the press box pod where they are always gratefully received. David's sad news for children and grown-up children everywhere, the beloved cartoon Arthur has reportedly been. canceled. It was an

overwork Twitter joke to write. Arthur wasn't canceled. It's called accountability and it's necessary. Thanks to our

pal Derek Burke. David, in a particularly trolley piece of speech making, Texas Senator Ted Cruz asked, has there ever

been an institution in American public life that has more discredited itself more rapidly than the CDC? It was an overword Twitter

joke to write, um, the Republican Party? maybe thanks to Joel Landau and Aaron Warenko for that sorry Aaron and finally David during Thursday's NBA draft the Los Angeles Clippers traded for a player named Brandon Boston Brandon Boston resulted in kind of a funny tweet from ESPN's Adrian Wojnerowski quote Clippers are acquiring Boston in a deal per source would you like to hear some of the funniest responses to that tweet yes please uh Jerry West does it again uh

Wow, Kauai's demands are out of control. This ruins an otherwise fantastic summer for Ben Affleck. And finally, even the clippers don't deserve this. Next to Alex Ungerman and Scott Tobias, if you thought America could somehow get even more Boston than it already has, congrats. You made the overworked Twitter joke of the week. You mentioned Leon wanting to create a sound rich podcast.

And like a good child of the 80s, my ears perked up as soon as I heard Barbara Walters, interviewing Gaddafi, which I feel was that shot of them talking to each other was something that just ran again and again when we were kids. How do you go about creating a sound-rich podcast using that archival sound without being the obligatory and now here's some archival sound from 1980, whatever? You mean in terms of like the fair use of it all? No, just the strategy I would say more of just aesthetically weaving it all together. Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, we identify what people are hearing when it's crucial to understand, like, to know, like, oh, it was on this network or was this interviewer. I think the Barbara Walter's clip, we might not even identify as being heard. She mean, her voice is recognizable. You don't really need to. But I think the moment you're talking about is when she says, you know, people call you a madman. You know that, right? He's like, yeah. And you like, laughs devilishly. You know, I think a lot of times archival footage can, you know, serve the purpose of just conjuring.

the moment, especially, you know, I think this is less true about the season like the one we just finished on Benghazi. It's more true about something like Iran-Contra or Watergate, you know, where the sound of TV news and radio news is so different. It just instantly takes you back, like just the tone of the recording. Like, you know exactly what era you're in when you hear it. I think archival can be really useful there. I think there's like a tendency sometimes to, you know, one that we avoid, I think. It's just sort of used. use archive as water as sort of like wallpaper you know like you're or even just like as a you know how sometimes when you're texting with someone uh and like you'll you'll you'll say hey i'm going i'm going

to the grocery store and then like someone will just because they don't have anything else to say they'll send you like an emoji of a grocery store you know is that ever right yes it's like you don't want that you don't want you don't want your archive to just like be the grocery store emoji um you want it to like serve a purpose and to like kind of give people um you know a sense of of of being on the receiving end of that broadcast at the time. Like, you want it to feel almost like time travel, you know, and I think sometimes archive gets sort of deployed in a more facile way where, you know, it's almost just like proof that you aren't lying, right?

Like news networks did this and then you like hear a bunch of clips of news networks doing that, right? I think we mostly try to stay away from kind of that, what do you call it, like, I don't know, paint by numbers approach or just like, yeah, we'll call it the emoji approach. Yeah, it sounds it's a little bit like the strategy of using quotes in a piece or an example in a piece. Yes. You wanted to push forward. You wanted to add, as you say, atmosphere or something without just saying, and now time for a quote after three paragraphs. Yeah.

Yeah. Did you find yourself in related question? Do you find yourself like, you know, this wasn't the first podcast to do this. And obviously, like, radio, it existed for a million years before. And you talked about, you know, documentary and stuff. But coming from a career as a writer, do you find a writer? Do you find yourself sort of like creating a whole new vocabulary to have these sort of conversations? I mean, you're using almost probably all the skills that you already had, but you are,

I can just imagine, I mean, I know the conversations that we have when we talk about podcasts and you kind of stumble over words, right? It's like, I want to do like that podcast, but different and better, you know, like you, do you find, does the kind of creative side come with a whole new set of challenges and a different mindset, or is it the same thing? No, it's, I mean, you're absolutely right that, like, most. of what I learned how to do as a print reporter I'm using now. But there are a bunch of new things that I've learned how to do, you know, including like how I approach interviews. You know, I used to,

you used to not worry about like how someone sounds when they said something, you know, if they stumbled over a word or if they like interrupted themselves in the middle of a sentence or a thought, like, you know, you could use an ellipsis or whatever. And sometimes when you, when you're doing an interview for a podcast, like you hear someone say the thing you want them, did you hear them say, but you can tell in the moment that they, like, screwed it up somehow. And so sometimes, like, I'll ask someone to repeat themselves or tell the story again. You know, sometimes someone will tell a story way too long, you know. And, you know, sometimes instead of kind of deciding, well, we'll fix that in post by editing it down,

I ask them just, like, tell it again faster, you know. We've had to do a couple interviews over during COVID because of, like, various technical snafus that we've encountered, which is always, like, really difficult to learn that you have to, you know, you have to reach back out to someone and say, hey, you know, we talk to you for an hour, but actually we need to talk to you for another hour about all the same stuff. Really sucks. But, like, I find that the second interview is always better. And part of it is, like, because it gives you more, you know, you can kind of like,

you kind of know how the person talks already and maybe you know the boring parts to not revisit. I guess that's all kind of the same as if you were doing for print. But in terms of, like, new vocabulary or new concepts, like, I'm definitely thinking a lot more about stripping stories down to their, to their, most necessary elements. Like, like, what I was telling you before about the, about the Romney campaigns press release and, like, the timing of it relative to, like, the Cairo statement and all that, like, I have a feeling that some of the listeners that heard that, or we'll be hearing that, will be lost. And I think when I'm not speaking extemporaneously, and we are, you know,

sort of meticulously drafting these paragraphs and, uh, over, you know, over a period of months, like, we try to tell the story as simply as we can with as few, you know, proper nouns as possible with like the right number of, you know, dates where people can kind of know ambiently, like, when things are taking place. Because I think with podcasts, you've got to have to assume that people are doing other stuff while they're listening to them. And that's, I think, part of the reason why they're popular, because you can take them in when you're doing other stuff in a way that you can't with, you know, visual journalism or print.

But at the same time, it means you're competing with, for people's attention, right, even though they are choosing to listen to you. And so, you know, you have to kind of like have a feel for like what to repeat more than once. You know, we always like have debates over, you know, do we need to re-Ide this person? Or is there a voice like sufficiently recognizable that we don't need to say, oh, by the way, this is like, you know, Brian Curtis again speaking. And it's like a lot of mechanical little tools like that that I've picked up, you know, shorter sentences. Like that's a really simple one, but important one. Like you just can't have a bunch of subordinate clauses in a sentence on audio because people's ear will just like lose the thread.

But yeah, I mean, I think I don't think that the shift is as radical as I might have expected or as people might expect who work in print and are interested in trying podcasting but think they can't. You say in the first episode that Benghazi and the ensuing scandal changed history. Remind us or tell us if we don't know how Benghazi changed history. So my, you know, my assessment of it having finished the series now is that this really was, if not a turning point, which is a first. I try to use judiciously, at least like a milestone, a major milestone in sort of the evolution of the Republican Party. Because I think Benghazi was, you know, just a really sort of huge, hugely important proof of concept for the Fox News outrage machine, which we discuss in one of our episodes with, you know, with an interview with Alist Camerata who left Fox News, I think, in 2014 and spoke to us very candidly about like how the Fox News Outrage

rage cycle was engineered and how she, you know, was a mouthpiece for it until she quit. And so in looking back on it, I think with the way Benghazi was played on Fox News, the way it was used by politicians in Congress, it really sort of like demonstrated how easy it is to just like filibuster your way to a scandal. I think like one big question I had kind of going into a production on the final episode was like, wait, what exactly was the like theory of the, of the case being presented by people who were criticizing the Obama administration. And I didn't have that question because I thought that Obama administration was blameless or anything. I wasn't thinking about that defensively. It was more like,

what did all these various conspiracy theories that were leveled against the administration, what did they add up to? Like, what was the underlying premise? Because you had like so many different threads being pulled on Fox News and by different congressmen. You know, And it was almost like there were three phases that the conspiracy theories kind of took root. You know, you had the before the attack where the question was, did the Obama administration screw up by not providing enough security to the compound in Benghazi? Did they turn down requests for additional security? And then the during was, did the military basically like miss an opportunity to rescue the Americans in Benghazi?

did they choose not to on orders from Hillary Clinton? And then the after was concerning the question of the video, you know, did the Obama administration lie in telling people that it was about, you know, that it was a spontaneous reaction in protest of this anti-Muslim video as opposed to a, you know, orchestrated terrorist attack? And so there were various conspiracy theories that sort of took root in each of those realms. And so the question to my mind was like, why, like what was the, what was the, what was the, what was. was the, what was, what did they all have in common? Or what was like the, what was the shared premise of all these accusations? And, you know, what I realized and frankly didn't, didn't appreciate before was that Ben Ghazi was just sort of this perfect weapon for the Republicans to use against Democrats

who were already vulnerable for various reasons to charges of, you know, being insufficiently tough on terrorism and tough on Islamic terrorism specifically. You know, it resonated with like the narrative of Obama being a secret Muslim. It resonated with the narrative of Obama going to the Arab world, you know, to Egypt and sort of at the beginning of his presidency and saying that, you know, we're going to be different than the last guys. We're not going to be treating the Muslim world as an enemy. And so I think Benghazi, to get back to your question of how it changed history, like, it really emboldened, I think the Republicans to use, you know, A, use Fox News. I think Fox News like became an instrument of political attack in a way that it, I mean, there had been smaller versions of it before Benghazi, but to the extent, the extent to which

there were real, real sort of lies, I think, told about what Hillary Clinton did and didn't do during the Benghazi attack and afterwards, it was just on a different level. And I think the sort of bloodlust you saw from especially like the super right wing fringe of the GOP, it really kind of took over, right? Like in the final episode of the series, we talk about the special select committee that was created by John Boehner in 2014 to investigate Benghazi, even though there had already been, I think, six congressional investigations up to that point that had already been, you know, undertaken by different committees. The calls for that special select committee were coming from the like the fringes of the Republican Party initially. But

because Fox News was sort of like amplifying all the fear mongering and the conspiracy mongering, you know, what you would call like normal, you know, country club Republicans started to kind of echo those calls. And John Boehner, who was Speaker of the House at the time, finally, you know, after resisting those calls and recognizing them for what they were, which was like a fringe point of view being expressed in extremely sort of like crude ways, he kind of gave in. And he said, okay, fine, we're going to install, we're going to, we're going to, we're going to point to special select committee. We're going to put T-Gowdy in charge of it. He was like, you know, one of the kind of standard bearers of the Tea Party. It was really a victory for that part of the party. And I think it's hard when you kind of connect the dots between that and like

Donald Trump rising in the GOP primary in 2016 and using Benghazi and the email scandal, which came as a direct result of Benghazi against Clinton, you know, I think there's a very straight line there. And while I, again, hesitate to use the word. turning point because that sort of implies that things wouldn't have turned out the way they did, if not for this event. It was like a very important stop along the way. You use the phrase connecting the dots. I know connecting the dots isn't the same thing as breaking news or uncovering something that literally no one knew. But I feel like there's a real aspect of service, of service journalism to what you're doing that's, that's, I mean, the Benghazi series, the Benghazi series,

maybe because it's so recent, really feels like I'm learning so much listening to it. And you described a lot of what I'm learning on this show. How do you feel like it's being, is it being covered? Is anything that you're doing being covered in the press? I mean, are people treating your narrative as a discovery on any level? And how do you feel like in general, you sort of, you know, traditional media grapples with America or, you know,

listeners like learning things and and sort of reliving the past through podcasts. I mean, I, you know, I'll be honest. Like, it hasn't gotten the kind of attention that I want so far. I mean, it only just, we only just aired the last episode last week, so might still be to come. But, I mean, it's true that we don't have breaking news in the, in the series. Like, I don't think, you know, we've added texture, I think, to the story. We've added sort of first person testimony from a lot of really important people, including, you know, the security official or a security agent who was with Ambassador Stevens when he was killed. He had never spoken to the media before. And so we've definitely added, you know, important material to the record.

And we've sort of captured stuff that people haven't heard before. I don't know. I found it, I found it hard to get journalists interested in the story, just from, you know, pitching it around to people as something to cover. And I think part of that is because people don't have an appetite for Benghazi. I think there's like just an allergy that that is just there. People maybe, maybe six episodes was too many even if even if we

thought we were making it shorter than we could have. And the other part, you know, this is not a secret. Like we're behind a paywall. And I think paywalls are still a really new thing in podcasting. You know, we are available on Apple Podcasts now through their new subscription platform where people can pay five bucks or whatever it is for a subscription to the Luminary channel on

Apple Podcasts. And people are doing it, but, and it's, and it's easier now to hear the show when it's, now that it's not just on the Luminary app, which is how it was for the first three seasons. But it's just true. I mean, there's so many free podcasts that it's, it is hard to, you know, get the same kind of attention if you have one that is, um, is locked up, you know. And so it's just like, it's just a, I think it's a fact of the podcast industry right now that like, in order to get the kind of budgets you need to make a show this ambition. and this sound rich and this labor intensive, you sort of need to be working with, you know, the paywall streamers. And I think that's fine and I think people will catch up. But yeah,

I mean, for now it's it's pretty tough sledding out there. Last question for you, Leon. We jokingly mentioned the Paris Review Party of the mid to late odds. Yep. This awkward right of passage for us self-involved literary types. You told me in an email you went to one the other night. Can you give us a report on the state of the Paris Review Party Circuit 2021. Yeah, it was a party for Christopher Cox and his new book about the deadline effect. It was pretty small. I mean, it was COVID, you know, COVID protocols were in full effect. You had to show proof of vaccination to get in.

There were, you know, there were a lot of the same folks that I remember seeing at the old Paris Review parties. But maybe some of them have moved upstate. I don't know. Yeah. There was still a pool table, but I gather Emily, the new editor of the Paris Review is getting rid of the pool table. So, I mean, the other thing to say, right, is that this was a Paris Review party at an office that I think they only moved into relatively recently. So I think, like when I imagine the Paris Review Party, I'm imagining one at that big old loft. What was on White Street?

Mm-hmm. Yeah. So it's not there anymore. So it's different in that respect. They had really, they had radishes in the spread that had like the leaves attached to them. And so I had this moment where I like, I took a bunch of radishes and I like tore off the leaves and I was like about to try to find a trash can. And then Chris started giving a speech and I like stood there with a fistful of radish leaves that I didn't know what to do with for a while. And then I like, and I discarded them in some in some assistance wastebasket.

So in our era, people were moving to Brooklyn or Queens and now they're moving upstate. That's the that's the news here. That's the takeaway. Yeah, I'm not sure that's news to anyone. But yeah, it's definitely happening. Leon Nafok, new season of fiasco about Benghazi is out right now. You are hereby encouraged to listen. Leon, thanks so much for coming on the press box.

Thank you guys so much. All right, it's time for David Shoemaker. Guess is the strained pun headline. Yeah. Friday's headline about Chip Gaines' new book was No Pain, No Gaines. Oh, my gosh. Today's headline comes from W. Joel Smith. It's from the New York Times, David.

It's a review of the bad movie Jungle Cruise. and if this were a different kind of podcast, I'd be asking you right now. Now, is the Rock going to make a good movie one of these days? It's not already an existing franchise? Because I've been waiting a few years, and there have been a lot of turkeys in there. Anyway.

I don't know. Rewatch the tooth fairy. Tell me what you think. Your keyword here, David, is Amazon. Amazon, because I guess Jungle Cruise is on the Amazon. What was the New York Times' strained pun headline? Amazon Grime? Amazon.

You were on the right track. Amazon slime. Amazon. Is it Amazon? You're on the doorstep. Crime. Crime. Yeah.

So Amazon. What kind of mortgages were involved in the 2008 financial crisis? Wait, what? Oh, subprime. Amazon subprime. Amazon subprime. Oh my gosh. That's ridiculous.

He is David Shoemaker. Brian Curtis. Production Magic by Erica Servantes. We are back Friday with more lukewarm takes about the media. See you then, David. See you later, Brian.