What A Day - Meme-Lord Mike Bloomberg

Episode Date: February 14, 2020

Major US newspaper publisher McClatchy, which owns The Miami Herald and dozens of other daily newspapers around the country, has filed for bankruptcy. We discuss what we’re missing out on when local journalism outfits bite the dust.Former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg has been spending immense amounts of money to promote his presidential campaign and now, it’s brought him attention both good and bad. We look back at some of his more troubling stances. Plus, how he’s running to become the first ‘meme-elected’ president. And in headlines: the Seattle City Council votes to end winter evictions, Apple retail employees win in court, the US men’s soccer team sticks up for their Valentines.What A Day will be back after's President's Day, see you Tuesday!

It's Friday, February 14th. I'm Akilah Hughes. And I'm Gideon Resnick, and this is What A Day, where we got struck by Cupid's arrow and fell in love with the hustle. Rise and grind, my Valentine dudes. I hope they take us off the air. On today's show, a check- in on the state of local media, the Bloomberg campaign, and of course, some headlines. McClatchy, the publisher of the Sacramento Bee, the Kansas City Star, the Miami Herald, and 27 other daily news outlets across the country, has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and is expected to be taken over by a New York-based hedge fund.

And it's not just sad because the print industry is declining and we all look smart when we read the paper. Local journalism provides on-the-ground, contextualized reporting that big national media can miss and also gives direct accountability for people in the communities they serve. We'll get to that in a minute, but Akilah, what gives? All right, so top line, here's what the bankruptcy means. McClatchy is going to keep its 30 papers afloat while it tries to sort out more than $700 million of debt it has racked up. About half of that debt could be forgiven through the Chapter 11 filing, so that's good, but that would still leave hundreds of millions of dollars to account for. In the meantime,

while the court decides whether or not to approve this filing, McClatchy has secured $50 million in funding to maintain operations. So that's where things currently stand, but what do we know about where this is going? Well, McClatchy is hoping that they can buy some time, sort out their debt, and come out of this. For some background here, the company is 163 years old. It's a family-owned company, and so far the McClatchys have been able to weather this digital media storm. But now there's a real possibility that this could end the family's control of their business and turn it over to a hedge fund, which is currently their top shareholder.

The News Guild, which represents about 150 McClatchy employees, isn't really happy about that. Makes sense. Yesterday, the president of the union said, quote, financialization of local news will destroy our democracy. So there's the ownership issue and also the overall decline of the industry. 20% of all newspapers have closed in America since 2004. And according to Pew Research, newspaper jobs have been cut in half. Yeah, it's a crisis and digital journalism runs newspapers out of town and then digital journalism isn't even sustainable and stable

itself. How did we get here? How did we get to this moment? Yeah, well, the obvious thing that changed in the journalism industry is the popularity of the Internet and Internet content. It's just cheaper to buy ads online. So these newspapers that could secure annual brand contracts suddenly had to prove that they were worth all of that extra money, which is hard to do when you also have a smaller readership than ever. So the idea is basically, you know, why would you pay to get the paper

when you could just read the news online for free? And since most digital ad dollars live on Facebook and Google, the problem has only gotten worse for local media, whether that's print or digital. Right. But specifically for McClatchy, their money problems started in 2006. That was when they bought out a competitor for $4.5 billion. That coinciding with the digital journalism boom and also the recession made it impossible for them to just break even. Yeah, it was like a perfect storm in a way. So we hear a lot of vague praise

about why local news matters. But specifically, the truth is that it is an incredibly powerful force in speaking truth to power and also just digging up the good, good dirt that you can get, as well as sometimes literally the only means by which local governments can be held accountable. And in its absence, there's a vacuum that might only be filled with, you know, telecom conglomerates like Sinclair that sort of push the propaganda type content to local news networks. What are some examples of the work that McClatchy has pulled off? Yeah, I agree with everything you just said. But between the 32 papers that

McClatchy has ever owned, they currently have 30, they've won more than 80 Pulitzer Prizes. And a perfect example of that excellent investigative journalism comes from the McClatchy-owned Miami Herald. So by 2018, the public had more or less just moved on with their lives and gotten over the very suspicious plea deal that Jeffrey Epstein got in 2008. And it wasn't until Herald journalist Julie K. Brown dug into the case in a three-part series that was called Perversion of Justice that the story really cracked open. It was Brown's stories that encouraged the FBI to give Epstein a second and third look. And it was precisely that reporting that reopened investigations into him, his behavior, his connection to the rich and powerful, all of that stuff. So, you know, we know how his story ended, or at least we kind of think we do. But it's important

to remember how it started, too, because of a local story out of Palm Beach, Florida, and someone who was just familiar with the area. So we're going to keep following the story and what it means for McClatchy's employees because the pension obligations are still up in the air and the future of the papers are uncertain. Please, please just support your local papers. As we talk about the 2020 presidential primary, there is one name that continues to hang over it all, despite the fact he is not competing in the first four early voting states.

So former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg has spent an immense amount of his money on a massive campaign, blanketing the airwaves, amassing a large staff and even investing in a paid meme operation. The money and the resulting media attention has led to a rise in the polls, and with that, more scrutiny over his record, particularly troubling policies and statements on race. We've already seen two glaring examples of this in the past week alone. So Gideon, you want to go through these? Yeah, so the first instance is probably the most high profile of the week. This was a comment that Bloomberg made in 2015, in which he was defending stop and frisk policy in New York, that was sort of a hallmark of his time as mayor in the city. And it disproportionately

targeted people of color. Here's one M.O. You can just take the description Xerox it and pass it out to all the cops. They are male, minority, 15, 25. That's true in New York. It's true in virtually every city. Now, because the audio sounded like it was recorded in a dungeon. Yeah, it was underground. To be clear, what Bloomberg was saying was,

quote, 95% of your murders, murderers and murder victims fit one M.O. You can just take the description, Xerox it and pass it out to all the cops. They are male minorities, 16 to 25. That's true in New York. That's true in virtually every city. End quote. Wow. So pretty fucking racist.

Yeah. But also, you know, I lived in New York at the time and everybody thought it was pretty fucking racist back then, too. Yeah. But also, you know, I lived in New York at the time and everybody thought it was pretty fucking racist back then, too. Yeah. He went on to describe police tactics by saying, quote, We put all the cops in minority neighborhoods. Yes, that's true. Why do we do it? Because that's where all the crime is. He was saying later in the clip that the goal was to get guns off the street, quote, And the way you get the guns out of the kids hands is to throw them up against the walls and frisk them. In a statement following the circulation of the clip, Bloomberg apologized to throw them up against the walls and frisk them. In a statement following the circulation of the clip, Bloomberg apologized for not cutting back the practice, which he had

long defended sooner in his term. Right. And just a reminder that a judge ruled that New York City's stop and frisk program was carried out in a manner that violated the Constitution. Anyway, so after this, there were additional comments from Bloomberg that resurfaced on Thursday about the housing crisis. Tell us about those. Yeah, sure. So in 2008, during the height of the housing crisis, Bloomberg was at this forum where he said that the elimination of the discriminatory housing practice of redlining contributed to the collapse. You've made some reference to the elements that led to where we are today. Could you go a little bit deeper and tell us from your perspective, how did we get here? What are the root causes of the crisis? You can go back. I would say it probably all started

back when there was a lot of pressure on banks to make loans to everyone. Redlining, if you remember, was the term where banks took whole neighborhoods and said, people in these neighborhoods are poor, they're not going to be able to pay off their mortgages, tell your salesmen don't go into those areas. And then Congress got involved, local elected officials as well, and said, oh, that's not fair, these people should be able to get credit. And once you started pushing in that direction, banks started making more and more loans

where the credit of the person buying the house wasn't as good as you would like. Okay, so just to take a step back here really fast, redlining is a discriminatory practice in which banks denied mortgages to neighborhoods with high populations of people of color and immigrants. And those neighborhoods were quite literally marked off on maps with red lines and not provided investment. And that over the years has contributed to the massive racial wealth disparities that we have in this country. The Fair Housing Act of 1968, 40 years prior to these comments, sought to outlaw this. And so not only is what Bloomberg is saying offensive here, but it's also factually inaccurate. It's widely understood that predatory loan practices

and bank speculation were what fueled the financial crisis, you know, not undoing these racist mortgage practices. After this, the Bloomberg campaign pointed to his current plans on housing for increased home ownership. But of course, this was something that Democratic opponents seized on pretty quickly. Yeah, I mean, he's fucking up.

It's honestly like you shouldn't have a paper trail or, I guess, an audio trail of all of the racist things you believe. Anyway, meanwhile, even as all of this is happening, Bloomberg has been getting a number of coveted endorsements from some moderate members of Congress in swing states like Florida and Michigan and from black members of Congress. Tell us about the most recent representatives to back him. Yeah, so this week, the endorsements for Bloomberg came from reps Lucy McBath, Gregory Meeks, and Stacey Plaskett. And McBath specifically was talking about some of the late career stuff that Bloomberg has done, specifically his extensive gun control work. It's obviously a very important issue to her specifically, you know, because of what happened to her son. He was shot and killed by a white man for playing

music too loud before she was elected to Congress. And another note of context for why these things are happening right now, why these endorsements are coming in, it's sort of an uncertain moment in the Democratic primary as a lot of these folks are looking for a moderate candidate to back. And so Biden may have been the beneficiary of some of these members supporting him, but his poll numbers are dropping as Bloomberg's have gone up. So that's another reason why folks might be saying, okay, well, you know, maybe we don't love everything that he's about, but it seems like he's doing well and he could win. Those poll numbers, though, could also be attributed to just the amount of money that Bloomberg is spending and then the earned media that he's getting off of that money that's being spent. And like, even when we talk about him here,

I'm sort of thinking like, are we contributing to this broader goal of you know just bloomberg being in the ether all the time um but you know it is worth being skeptical of what could happen next when this guy with you know the past comments that he's made the fact that he was a former republican is is further scrutinized and has to face these opponents um all right and on to a more ridiculous element of the campaign we need to talk about the memes. Yeah, so this is like, even as I read it again, I don't believe what I'm actually reading. The New York Times reported that the Bloomberg campaign is working with this company called Meme 2020

to do groan-worthy sponsored content on Instagram promoting his campaign. It did work, yes. It produced groans. Meme 2020 is headed up by the CEO of Jerry Media, who you might remember from doing all the marketing of Fyre Fest. Yeah, that was a noted success. It was just a great line on the resume. The accounts, all these accounts that have done it so far have posted what are Bloomberg campaign ads, and they're made to look like direct messages from the candidate himself. And they are putrid. If you want to go check them

out, just one man's opinion. And in a sign of our dystopian future hellscape, the Times quoted the teenager who runs a meme page named at Big Dad Whip saying, quote, I would be down. Bread is bread. That would be kind of dope. I could say I helped a presidential candidate. Good luck to you, Mr. Whip. Though apparently it was a bridge too far for another meme page operator and joke thief, the one they call the fat Jewish, who cited Bloomberg's stop and frisk policy as one reason why he didn't want to do it and why Bloomberg is, quote, a total hoe. OK, I mean, I mean, I don't want to shade the teens for getting that cool six grand a month, but come on. Here's a meme.

I want to drink soda and a lot of it sometimes. And that's what I remember from Bloomberg. He's trying to make us not have a big gulp. So how about that? Is that a meme? Make that a meme. It could be a meme. If we make it a meme, it'll be a meme.

Pop mom. Soda queen. Well, you know, we'll make that a meme. It could be a meme. If we make it a meme, it'll be a meme. Pop mom. Soda queen. Well, you know, we'll make that a meme and we'll keep an eye on Bloomberg's campaign for, you know, more scrutiny of these past stances and his record, as well as the effects of this enormous campaign spending on the Democratic primary. Let's wrap up with some headlines. Headlines. Colin Kaepernick announced he'll be releasing a memoir through a publishing company he founded.

Kaepernick told USA Today that the book will cover his decision to start kneeling during the national anthem in protest of police brutality. The book is also expected to fill in the gaps in the years since 2017 when he was unsigned by the NFL, read blacklisted. Kaepernick Publishing's goal is to create opportunities for black and brown writers to control their narratives. As of now, the title and release date for his memoir have not yet been confirmed. Interesting. The Seattle City Council voted this week to end residential evictions in the winter in an attempt to protect renters from being left homeless during the coldest months of the year. Some U.S. cities have passed laws against evicting tenants in bad weather, but if this law passes, Seattle would be the first to instate a months-long ban. Seattle's mayor, Jenny Jerkin, had warned the council against enacting

the legislation, saying that it would definitely face a lot of legal resistance. That didn't stop council members from voting for it 7-0. Winter evictions in Seattle disproportionately affect women and people of color. Apple announced it will start paying its retail workers for the time it takes for someone to check their bags before leaving the stores. For those of you who have been blessed to have never worked in retail, many stores check employees' bags at the end of their shift to make sure they didn't steal anything. Awesome. Usually it's off the clock. The California Supreme Court ruled that employees are still under Apple's control while waiting for and during the searches, which under state law means they should get compensated for that. Unfortunately, this ruling only applies to

Apple workers within the state of California, but it's great news for the over 12,000 Apple employees involved in the suit. Apple's expected to shell out millions to affected workers, which means somebody's getting AirPods. Somebody's losing AirPods, too, five minutes after you get them. The U.S. men's soccer team is using their salary negotiations to call for higher pay for women. Turns out you can't spell goalie without ally. Oh, man. I think you actually can. Male soccer pros told the U.S. Soccer Federation that players for the women's league

should make triple the men's players' pay based on the revenue they generate. The U.S. women's soccer team is wildly popular and has won the past two World Cups. God bless the men's team, but they didn't even qualify in the last one. A gender discrimination lawsuit brought by the women's team against their federation will go to trial in May. People were waiting for the men's team to break their silence on this lawsuit, and now that they've done it, I can finally give them a red card, which of course is what I call my Valentines.

That's so sweet. Yes, you are all very welcome. And those are the headlines. That's all for today. If you like the show, make sure you subscribe, leave a review, invite us to a Sonic the Hedgehog rowdy screening in your town or municipality, and tell your friends to listen. By the way, if you're into reading and not just lovingly assembled local newspapers like me, What A Day is also a nightly newsletter. Check it out and subscribe at crooked.com slash subscribe.

I'm Akilah Hughes. I'm Gideon Resnick. And have a happy red card day, which is what I call Valentine's Day. That's my kind of penalty. This is all I'm getting. What a day is a product of Crooked Media. It's recorded and mixed by Charlotte Landis. Sonia Tunn is our assistant producer. Our head writer is John Milstein, and our senior producer is Katie Long.

Our theme music is by Colin Gilliard and Kashaka.