Air Date 2/7/2025
JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: [00:00:00] Welcome to this episode of the award-winning Best of the Left podcast.
Trump came in with a plan to subdue the media, and large swaths of the media came in with a plan to acquiesce. But it's important to understand why; because it's not a conspiracy or people wanting to do harm. It's structural to the system.
For those looking for a quick overview, the sources providing our Top Takes in about 50 minutes today includes The ReidOut, On the Media, Meidas Touch, The Zero Hour, The Majority Report, The Gray Area, and the Dean Obeidallah Show.
Then in the additional Deeper Dives half of the show, there will be more in three sections: Section A, Money; Section B, Attention; and Section C, The Free Press.
Revenge- Trump throws lawsuits at the media and demands compliance - The ReidOut w Joy Reid - Air Date 12-17-24
JOY REID - HOST, THE REIDOUT: Donald Trump ran for president for one reason and one reason only: to make all of his legal problems -- poof! -- go away. And for the most part, he was successful, with one exception. Yesterday, the New York judge who presided over Trump's hush money trial [00:01:00] denied his bid to toss out his guilty verdict, meaning Trump will have to live with the infamy of being the first convicted felon president.
And yes, MAGA, you are still a convicted felon before you are sentenced. That's how it works.
But that isn't stopping Trump from trying to hit the delete button on every other bad headline ever printed about him, going so far as to sue Iowa pollster Ann Seltzer and the Des Moines Register, saying he's seeking "accountability for brazen election interference" over a November poll that showed Kamala Harris up 3 percent in Iowa.
Never mind the fact that Trump won the election and won the state of Iowa by double digits. He's clearly feeling emboldened by ABC News agreeing to pay a $15 million settlement in a defamation lawsuit. Nearly every legal expert said that they would have won. And as others in the media show, they're increasingly willing to comply in advance, like the owner of the LA Times, Patrick Soon-Shiong, [00:02:00] who Oliver Darcy is reporting, requested that the newspaper's editorial board outright take a break from writing about Trump and balance any critical editorials or articles with positive ones.
Yeah, but here's the thing: these CEOs who are thinking, "Let me just give him what he wants this one time and he'll leave me alone. He won't hurt me or my company or he'll give me goodies like tax cuts or tariff exemptions or federal contracts. A pat on the head."
That is not how it works with Trump. His ego is too fragile and his needs are endless. As any parent knows, if your toddler is having a tantrum in the middle of the grocery store, the solution isn't to just buy them the cookies they're screaming for. Because then they'll just do it again and again, and you'll be out of money and sanity, and their teeth will be rotten.
And right now, Trump is that toddler. And he wants nothing short of complete obedience, and constant adulation. For everyone to say they love him and praise him, and tell him he's the best president ever! And it'll [00:03:00] never be obsequious enough, or vigorous enough. He'll always want more. And punish and humiliate even those who do comply, just ask Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, and all the Black Republicans who went to the mat for Trump during the campaign, only to get snubbed as he builds his administration.
He will always reward weakness with more humiliation. And that includes foreign leaders like Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who went to Mar-a-Lago last month to kiss the ring, behaving like Trump was already president, which he's not. And how does Trump reward him? By publicly mocking Trudeau on his social media sites, once again calling Trudeau "the governor of the great state of Canada."
Joining me now is Tim O'Brien, Senior Executive Editor of Bloomberg Opinion and MSNBC Political Analyst. And I have to tell you, this Trudeau thing really bothered me. Let me just put up this tweet that Trudeau posted on his -- why is he still on X Twitter? But he posted this tweet of himself, Look at me next to Donald. Look, what [00:04:00] is he doing? When will people learn, Tim, that emasculating yourself before Trump, as Ted Cruz did, as so many have done, doesn't help and just makes him worse.
TIM O'BRIEN: And it's also a reminder, Joy, that he has been this way forever.
He came up, as you know, and as I know, we've talked many times, at the knee of Roy Cohn, who taught him how to weaponize the legal system. And he's learned that you don't necessarily need to go to court. And you don't necessarily need to ultimately break people. If they're scared enough in the first innings of any action you take, to capitulate, whether they're politicians, members of the business community, members of the media, members of Congress, or members of the judiciary. And, we can pull down examples of each and every one of these institutions and some of their leading members, deciding in advance [00:05:00] that the safest way and the most productive way to deal with Donald Trump is to kiss the ring.
And we see example after example of once they do that, he then shames them in public.
JOY REID - HOST, THE REIDOUT: Yes.
TIM O'BRIEN: And he is not ultimately delivering on some of the things they want. And he does it to the people he even holds close to them. I mean, think about how many days was it after RFK Jr. got nominated for HHS.
And there was a picture of him eating fast food with Don Jr. and Donald on the presidential plane. Eat your food. Take your punishment. And for Trudeau, who you set up in your previous clip in the introduction of this segment, his government, his own government is fractured because of this. And, he could very well be out of a job because of this.
So I do think that people in the near term right now are petrified. They're not sure how to respond to the fact that Trump was [00:06:00] reelected again, other than to capitulate. But they should keep, I think, their eyes on the prize.
JOY REID - HOST, THE REIDOUT: Well, I mean, yeah. And there's a game people play of mocking Canada. Well, now Canada has been mocked by its own prime minister. Justin Trudeau went down to Mar-a-Lago as if Trump is already president. He's not president yet. He didn't go running to the White House of the real current president. He went to him as if he could just become a supplicant. And now Christia Freeland, who is his finance minister, she's out of there because she's like we need to come up with a strategy to deal with Trump's tariff plan. That is not a strategy and it is humiliating. And if I were a Canadian, I'd be absolutely disgusted.
it's interesting that it's said that there's a crisis of manhood, right? That is being said a lot on the right. There is a crisis of manhood. But it's on your own side, guys. It's people like Jeff Bezos, it's people like Mark Zuckerberg. Is this manly behavior to go and fall on your knees to Donald Trump? No!
I want to show you one reason why people might be doing it though. Los Angeles Times wrote this. I'm sorry, [00:07:00] not Los Angeles Times. I apologize for that. Robert Reich wrote this. Much better. he says that part of the reason the media is doing this, no large American corporation wants to be actively litigating against a sitting president, especially one as vindictive as Trump.
A $15 million settlement is chicken feed compared to the myriad ways Trump could penalize Disney, which is a $205.25 billion corporation that has other businesses besides the media. So talk a little bit about that, because some of these media are actually owned by bigger conglomerates with other business that could be before the president, and so he wants to save his SpaceX and wants to save his other thing or not SpaceX. Whichever one is his. Bezos is one. Everyone's thinking about their other businesses.
TIM O'BRIEN: Blue Origins. I think it's--
JOY REID - HOST, THE REIDOUT: Blue Origin for Bezos. Yeah. Yeah.
TIM O'BRIEN: I think that this is, in the American media model, it is always dependent on the integrity of the owners, because they're privately held concerns for the most part in less, or, publicly traded, but with close ownership.[00:08:00]
PBS is the only media entity of note that is in there, some very powerfully funded nonprofits like ProPublica that do wonderful work. But when we talk about the legacy media and the mainstream media, we're talking about corporate media. In the era we're in now, corporations have multiple interests that aren't only tied to their media holdings, and their CEOs are thinking about those things.
And I think you're seeing some media owners decide to dispose of media assets because it's troublesome. I think you have others doing anticipatory knee bending, because they don't want to go into battle in a courtroom with the president. it's bottom line thinking, it's strategic thinking, but it's not journalistic.
And, it's not tied to the idea, just that core basic idea, that the role of journalists in the world should be to seek the truth, and hold the powerful [00:09:00] accountable on behalf of the public interest.
JOY REID - HOST, THE REIDOUT: Yeah, at this point, the Los Angeles Times is essentially saying if you report a negative fact about Trump, you have to balance it with a positive fact.
I'm not sure how that is serving journalists, and I can tell you that people inside the Los Angeles Times apparently, at least allegedly according to the reports, are not happy. And inside of Bezos operation, it's difficult in this moment when you just want to do the journalism. it's difficult.
Fox News is Back at the White House. Plus, No Joke, The Onion Buys Infowars. - On the Media - Air Date 11-15-24
BROOKE GLADSTONE - CO-HOST, ON THE MEDIA: On Thursday, Donald J. Trump presided over a gala at Mar-a-Lago.
Sylvester Stallone: We are in the presence of a really mythical character.
BROOKE GLADSTONE - CO-HOST, ON THE MEDIA: That's actor Sylvester Stallone who compared the president-elect to the protagonist of his Oscar-winning Rocky, among others.
Sylvester Stallone: Guess what? We got the second George Washington. Congratulations.
BROOKE GLADSTONE - CO-HOST, ON THE MEDIA: Trump's own speech touted the names of his freshly announced cabinet picks.
Donald Trump: I guess if you like health and if you like people that live a long time, it's the Most important position, RFK Jr.
BROOKE GLADSTONE - CO-HOST, ON THE MEDIA: Robert Kennedy Jr. anti-vaccine activist and conspiracy theorist [00:10:00] is Trump's choice to head the Department of Health and Human Services. For now at least.
Donald Trump: People like you, Bobby. Don't get too popular, Bobby.
BROOKE GLADSTONE - CO-HOST, ON THE MEDIA: Among the 20-odd names Trump announced this week, many share or have shared a common employer.
Female Reporter: Tulsi Gabbard is a former army reservist. She's also a Fox News talking head who once ran for president.
Male Reporter: Fox News host and army veteran Pete Hegseth was nominated as defense secretary. He unsuccessfully ran for Senate in Minnesota in 2012 before joining Fox News.
BROOKE GLADSTONE - CO-HOST, ON THE MEDIA: Tom Homan, Trump's pick for "border czar," became a Fox contributor in 2018. Michael Waltz, national security adviser to be, perhaps, was a contributor too. Mike Huckabee, tapped his ambassador to Israel hosted his own show on Fox from 2008 until 2015.
MATT GERTZ: Donald Trump is using Fox News as a staffing agency.
BROOKE GLADSTONE - CO-HOST, ON THE MEDIA: [00:11:00] Matt Gertz is a senior fellow at the left-leaning Media Matters for America. He says it's worth revisiting all that we learned in the first term about Trump's relationship with his cable news channel of choice.
MATT GERTZ: Fox & Friends, has for a long time been his favorite show. Pete Hegseth, the potentially incoming Defense Secretary, has been working as a co-host of Fox & Friends Weekend Edition for the last several years.
BROOKE GLADSTONE - CO-HOST, ON THE MEDIA: What should we know about him and his career trajectory from Fox News contributor to secretary of Defense nominee?
MATT GERTZ: What Hegseth was able to do after catching Trump's eye was get Donald Trump to sign on to his own aims, which during Trump's first administration was securing executive clemency for several service members who had been accused or convicted of war crimes.
BROOKE GLADSTONE - CO-HOST, ON THE MEDIA: [00:12:00] Yes, the killing of civilians.
MATT GERTZ: He put family members of various accused or convicted war criminals on the show to talk up how they had been persecuted.
Pete Hegseth: These are men who went into the most dangerous places on earth with a job to defend us and made tough calls on a moment’s notice. They're not war criminals, they're warriors who have now been accused of certain things that are under review.
MATT GERTZ: This is how Trump gets his news. This is how his worldview is shaped. It's one segment at a time.
BROOKE GLADSTONE - CO-HOST, ON THE MEDIA: He has particular skills, certainly, as a Fox News host, right? But Secretary of Defense needs a different set of skills.
MATT GERTZ: Right. The set of skills that you need for being a Fox News host is understanding how to push the buttons of the MAGA faithful. The way that Fox hosts traditionally do that is by making those viewers afraid, making those viewers angry--
BROOKE GLADSTONE - CO-HOST, ON THE MEDIA: [00:13:00] Providing enemies.
MATT GERTZ: Providing enemies. Obviously, that is not the job of Defense Secretary. We're talking about a sprawling bureaucracy that employs nearly three million service members and civilian employees that has a budget of hundreds of billions of dollars. It's a serious job for serious people.
BROOKE GLADSTONE - CO-HOST, ON THE MEDIA: You've also noticed that this revolving door also works the other way. Several Trump staffers signed on with Fox News after Trump left office.
MATT GERTZ: During or after his term. Yes. Tom Homan was previously the head of ICE. After he retired from ICE in the summer of 2018, he got a job at Fox News. He would denounce Democrats for standing against Trump's border policies. He would call forever more draconian measures. He would say the things that Donald Trump wanted to [00:14:00] hear.
Tom Homan: I keep hearing the wall is ineffective from them people. I don't know what data they're basing it on, but every place a border barrier has been built, illegal immigration has declined. That's a fact.
MATT GERTZ: Now he's gone through the revolving door. Now he's coming back into the administration.
BROOKE GLADSTONE - CO-HOST, ON THE MEDIA: You have observed that the more often you go on Fox News, the more likely you are to clinch one of these top jobs in the Trump administration. One Fox frequent flyer was Congressman Matt Gaetz, just nominated attorney general.
MATT GERTZ: We have counted at least 347 weekday Fox appearances that Gaetz did from August 2017 through Election Day of 2024. He's actually not the most frequent Fox guest to be taking a jump to the administration, though. His Florida colleague, Representative Michael Waltz, who is Trump's pick for national security advisor, actually made at least 569 weekday Fox appearances, 176 [00:15:00] since January 2023, which is of any member of Congress over that period.
BROOKE GLADSTONE - CO-HOST, ON THE MEDIA: Wow. The last nominee, Tulsi Gabbard, is a former Democrat turned MAGA Fox News contributor and more. Is that how she caught Trump's eye?
MATT GERTZ: In Gabbard's case, she became a favorite of Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News star host. As she underwent a sort of political transformation that brought her further and further onto the right, Fox was an option opportunity for her to rebrand herself. Tulsi Gabbard is the pick for Director of National Intelligence. It's a position that oversees the 18 US intelligence agencies. It's also responsible for the presidential daily brief, though that is somewhat less important in a Donald Trump administration. As Donald Trump rather famously ignores his daily briefing, he would take advice from Fox News hosts either [00:16:00] through their programs or he would reach out to them directly. Those were the experts he wanted to hear from, not people with actual subject matter expertise.
BROOKE GLADSTONE - CO-HOST, ON THE MEDIA: You wrote that during Trump's first term, he consulted privately with an array of Fox stars, creating a shadow cabinet of advisers with immense influence over government affairs. You dubbed this the Trump-Fox feedback loop.
MATT GERTZ: Take you back to January of 2018. One morning, Donald Trump sends out a tweet criticizing a surveillance bill that the House is supposed to vote on that day. The administration theoretically supported the bill, but all of a sudden he was sending out a tweet criticizing that very bill. What happened, I discovered, was that shortly before Donald Trump's tweet, a Fox contributor had turned directly to the camera and said--
Judge Andrew Napolitano: Mr. President, this is not the way to go. Spying is [00:17:00] valid to find the foreign agents among us, but it's got to be based on suspicion and not an area code.
MATT GERTZ: And that was enough to send Washington into chaos for hours. There are so many more. There were federal investigations that were launched on the basis of Trump watching Fox News and hearing some conspiracy-minded nonsense and instructing publicly or privately the Justice Department to look into it.
Trump SECRET Meeting with Media before Payoff EXPOSED - The MeidasTouch Podcast - Air Date 12-16-24
BEN MEISELAS - HOST, THE MEIDASTOUCH: A secret meeting between an ABC executive and Donald Trump's team seems to have precipitated the awful settlement whereby ABC engaged in a total capitulation, giving Donald Trump 15 million dollars arising out of a defamation lawsuit Donald Trump filed. $15 million to go to a future presidential library of Donald Trump's and also ABC and Disney agreeing to pay -- Disney's the parent company -- agreeing to pay Donald Trump's attorneys fees and costs and issue a written apology. More on that [00:18:00] in a bit. Let's talk about the secret meeting that took place last week, the Monday before ultimately that settlement took place that following Saturday. Here's what's being reported in ABC and Trump's team want us to believe, Oh, they weren't discussing the settlement at that point in time. All right, sure. Add insult to injury and try to treat us all like we're stupid. That's what corporate media thinks about us anyway. Here's what we're learning from the New York Times and reporter Michael Grinbaum. "Deborah O'Connell, who oversees ABC News, dined with Susie Wiles in Palm Beach on Monday, per two people briefed." Grinbaum goes on to say in his report, "The meeting was part of a visit by ABC News execs to meet with the Trump transition team. Another person familiar says the purpose was to talk transition, not the defamation case." Okay. Sure. We're supposed to believe that the ABC news exec, who shortly [00:19:00] thereafter settles for $15 million to a future Trump presidential library, when the ABC news exec is going to Palm Beach to meet with Donald Trump's chief of staff, Susie Wiles, to kiss the ring to obey in advance.
Oh, I'm sure they didn't talk about that settlement. Oh, I'm sure that's not what happened. But what if I told you this? That actually all of this, all of what you're seeing now with Mika and Joe from MSNBC kissing the ring at Mar-a-Lago, with Zuckerberg going there with all of these people showing up at Mar-a-Lago, Tim Cook from Apple. What if I told you that this was all part of a broader plan that we had reported and, frankly, Politico had wrote about who was there. They didn't talk about the conspiracy that was taking place. Well, I don't even use the term "conspiracy" because that makes it seem like a conspiracy theory.
Just what actually was happening. The collusion that was going on in front of [00:20:00] all of our eyes back during another secret meeting in Milwaukee on August 23rd, 2023, right around the time when there was a Republican primary debate, which Donald Trump refused to participate in.
But do you remember our reporting back from August 23rd of 2023? It was after Politico wrote the following in its Politico playbook. There was a secret meeting that took place at a restaurant at a steakhouse in Milwaukee, super fancy steakhouse. The Trump team invites all of the media there, buys them steak, gives them all of this lavish stuff right there. They were plotting, they were planning, they were wineing and dining and devising this then.
Here it is, August 23rd, 2023. Spotted in Milwaukee, Team Trump wineing and dining with a number [00:21:00] of top reporters at a steakhouse called Rare and passing out pudding snacks, a swipe at Ron DeSantis pudding fingers story, as well as debate bingo cards to troll the Florida governor. Squares included Dismisses polls, wipes snot, red ears, De-Santis, Duh Santis, flip flops on social security again, woke and pudding mentions. See the pictures here and here. So who was at this meeting? Reporters Dana Bash, Shane Goldmaker, Kristen Welker, Bob Costa, Finn Gomez, Dasha Burns, Rachel Scott, Rick Klein, Josh Dawsey, Rob Crilly, Mario Parker, and David Chalian, basically all of the top reporters and execs from all of the major networks, meeting, colluding in front of our eyes at a fancy five star steakhouse called Rare in Milwaukee, and they were there [00:22:00] with Chris LaCivita, one of Donald Trump's campaign managers, and Jason Miller, and Stephen Chung.
Politico goes, "We're assured the reporters picked up their own tab."
Mickey Huff The Mainstream Media is [CENSORED] - The Zero Hour with RJ Eskow - Air Date 1-11-25
RJ ESKOW - HOST, THE ZERO HOUR: It's just so important. And you and the State of the Free Press 2025, you guys quote Ben Bagdikian on the need for a functioning media to have a functioning democracy. And the fact is that this kind of playing fast and loose malinformation, only sometimes through omissions, sometimes through lies of commission, has harmed democracy more than they can imagine. I'm thinking, for example, of our new, and our once and future president, Mr. Trump.
I'll give you one example that's disturbed me for a long time. he's been widely quoted on CNN and in a newspaper, major, national newspapers, as having said [00:23:00] after the Charlottesville, the racist rally there, he was widely quoted as saying there are "good people on both sides," but he immediately, if you watch the clip, then went on to say, "but not the White nationalists. I don't mean them". And Now, it's still, you could criticize that statement a lot, and I would, but by leaving out the latter part, which is easy enough for Fox News or anyone else to play the longer clip, then when media figures wonder why they haven't been more effective in communicating what's corrupt and debased and disgusting about Trump, well, that's one reason why. Because your Overstating of the... and I hate that they make me seem like I'm defending trump But...
MICKEY HUFF: And you're not! You're defending the role of the free press to inform accurately the public and let the chips fall where they may.
RJ ESKOW - HOST, THE ZERO HOUR: [00:24:00] Right. And absolutely. And if you burn your own credibility, then when you have a real story to tell, people won't listen.
MICKEY HUFF: There are so many right wing attacks against the press. It's not hard to find them and to debunk them, right? So why the establishment press made conscious decisions to do these kind of things? Just like they did, and Nolan Higdon and I wrote about this in Let's Agree to Disagree, as well as United States of Distraction, you might remember the young Student from I believe a religious school or private school in Cincinnati with the MAGA hat that had the confrontation with the the Native person in the nation's capital, right? And the way that they framed that it was all the disrespectful MAGA youth Having racist attacks against this person and it turned... i'm not saying that that doesn't happen... but in this instance, that's not what was happening at all.
RJ ESKOW - HOST, THE ZERO HOUR: Right.
MICKEY HUFF: And the corporate media framed it exactly backwards and falsely and what was happening. They led to their own sort of [00:25:00] denigration of their own integrity in it, and they inadvertently boosted a political signal that is often racist. And is often based on intolerance, right? So it's as if, they're shooting themselves in the foot, and it's very, very frustrating because The corporate media has this huge platform and this megaphone, right? And the independent press struggles to get these reports out and they struggle for attention. And even through social media, through shadow banning and so on, and so many, and algorithmic suppression and demonetization. There are so many challenges for public interest, grassroots journalism. it's very painful to see the corporate media willfully go into these things and act as if they're surprised with the outcome, like you mentioned, over at Bezos' Washington Post, where they just got caught censoring a newspaper and then claiming it was news judgment for redundancy.
You know what? I was just talking to my buddy, Nolan Higdon, on the Project Censored show about that very [00:26:00] thing, and Nolan reminded me, because we wrote about this, he said, Well, you know, the Washington Post didn't have any problem running 15 or 16 stories about Bernie Sanders in 16 hours that were all negative. They didn't have any problem with redundancy then, but now they have a problem with redundancy because they're now criticizing potentially the owner of the paper, the fealty being paid to an incoming oligarch, etc. I mean, really, it's enough to make one rip their hair out, actually, it's very frustrating.
And look, let's go back to this, what I call, an ah ha moment, when the mask really comes off. Before the 2016 election with then CEO Les Moonves of CBS, who said at a big tech convention in San Francisco, "Sorry, it's a terrible thing to say, but bring it on, Donald. Keep going. It may not be good for America, but it's damn good for CBS". Right? That has stuck with me for now nine almost years, because it's somebody in the press that's telling the public that they don't [00:27:00] care. They're after eyeballs, advertisers, profits, and money, and even though this focal point is toxic, they're giving six billion dollars of free coverage, double what they gave to Clinton, triple what they gave to Sanders in the 2016 election alone, only to turn back and then say, Oh, we messed up. Democracy dies in darkness. And then that same newspaper that, mea culpa, is now censoring the very kind of criticism of the oligarchs that own the press that we need right now. Whether it's Musk, or people at the LA Times or Bezos himself or others, we need to be critical.
Last year at the Censored Book, the 2024 book, Andy and I took aim at the billionaire free press, right? As A. J. Liebling quipped in the early 60s, a free press belongs to anyone who can own one. Well, we've seen that model writ large and the people then that own that press do not have the interest of the general public at heart. And again, I have to say [00:28:00] it democracy dies in darkness, especially when Jeff Bezos is turning out the lights,
Why Is Mainstream Media Still So Bad At This - The Majority Report - Air Date 2-2-25
EMMA VIGELAND - CO-HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: There's not much you can say about his pardoning and commutation of these Jan Sixers except that it's wrong, and these people should have faced their full sentences most likely, probably, but I would say that even more importantly, people like Trump and the Republicans, lawmakers with power who enabled this, should have been prosecuted.
Thanks a lot, Merrick Garland. But, it is an example of how Trump delivers for his base and is extremely transactional. And I wish, God, that the Democrats would just take a little bit of a lesson, in the way that he pardoned that Silk Road guy because he got the Libertarian Party's endorsement. And that was one of the things that they asked for. And He just does it on day one. And could you imagine if the Democrats were responsive in that way? Like, just for little things like that.
SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: The thing that he understands that, [00:29:00] I don't know, the thing that he understands and the thing that he seems to be able to get away with, and I don't know if it could be replicated by anybody in the Democratic or the Republican side is. And I say this as somebody who professionally goes through the news. It has been like the past two or three days, just the past two days, the amount of stories that we have to go through and the things that we can't pay attention to, and the Republicans in opposition are much better at sticking with one dumb thing because they have no shame. Because they are so honed in on winning, and people can make their own value judgment on that.
But it is, I mean, the only thing that Biden's been able to get away with on some level was waiting until two minutes before his presidency end to essentially pardon all his [00:30:00] family members and Milley and Fauci and others. When you pardon, somebody accepts the pardon, there is an implicit, I don't want to say a confession, or admission of guilt, at least that's the way it's perceived legally. Now, a lot of these people are like. I don't care. If I'm Fauci, I'm 85, I'm like, I'll pretend that there's some implicit thing, unnamed thing that I'm guilty of, that way they're just not going to come after me and bankrupt me by making some type of show trials or something like that.
But aside from that, any tiny thing, Trump is smart enough to know that, I'm going to put out 50 executive orders. Now, half of those, maybe more, are [00:31:00] meaningless. because they're like, I'm instructing people to think about doing this and that and it gets reported in a different way, but there's so much news that it gets overwhelming, I think.
And, that's the way he gets away with. Oh, I mean, the guy from Silk Road, I think he was over punished, at whatever he, I think the amount of time, like a lifetime of this seems to be excessive based upon what they, got him on. But there is, at least, some charges out there that were not pursued that he hired hitmen, he certainly had created a marketplace where all this stuff was happening,
Public Broadcasting Is In Danger (Again) - On the Media - Air Date 1-10-25
BROOKE GLADSTONE - CO-HOST, ON THE MEDIA: Donald Trump, who says journalists are scum and thinks fact-checking is really unfair, won the election. Now, all those accused of scummily fact-checking are scrambling to adjust. [00:32:00] After all, Mr. Trump has already vowed to seek retribution for media offenses by, say, suing CBS for $1 billion doll because of "biased editing of a Kamala Harris 60 minutes interview," suspending ABC's broadcast license because of fact-checked him during a debate and suing The Des Moines Register for printing a poll suggesting Harris would win. A poll that turned out to be, wait for it, wrong. There's more.
Donald Trump: We're involved in one which has been going on for a while and very successfully against Bob Woodward where he didn't quote me properly from the tapes. Then on top of everything else, he sold the tapes.
BROOKE GLADSTONE - CO-HOST, ON THE MEDIA: This week, the Washington Post's budget was cut by its stupefyingly rich owner, Jeff Bezos, two months after he killed its endorsement of Kamala Harris, and just as Amazon signed a big deal to bring out a Melania Trump endorsed Melania Trump [00:33:00] documentary. He's also given $1 million bucks to Trump's inauguration, as has Meta's Mark Zuckerberg, who just announced that Facebook is ending its fact-checking program, leading the president-elect to say that Zuck's company had "come a long way."
MICAH LOEWINGER - CO-HOST, ON THE MEDIA: The point is fact-based journalism is in trouble. This hour, we're going to look at the plight of public radio, which we are, because who else is going to do it? First, a quick history. Back in 1967 when President Lyndon Johnson mired in Vietnam was trying to build the Great Society at home by passing the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Act, creating Medicare, and crucially, for the purpose of this story, creating the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which has been marked for death repeatedly. What is it?
President Lyndon Johnson: The Corporation of Public Broadcasting will assist stations and producers who aim for the best in broadcasting [00:34:00] on the whole fascinating range of human activity. It will try to prove that what educates can also be exciting. It will get part of its support from our government, but it will be carefully guarded from government or from party control. It will be free and it will be independent and it will belong to all of our people.
MICAH LOEWINGER - CO-HOST, ON THE MEDIA: It was a hard sell. Conservatives worried the CPB would promote liberal ideas. After all, Johnson's agenda was indisputably liberal. Some suspected its funds would flow more to some regions than others. Commercial broadcasters feared the competition. Even after the dust settled, well, actually the dust never really settled, it's been kicked up by every Republican administration since. Yet through the decades, somehow every effort to slash or burn the CPB has failed, thanks to such battle-scarred warriors as [00:35:00] Big Bird and this guy.
Fred Rogers: I end the program by saying, you've made this day a special day by just your being you. There's no person in the whole world like you, and I like you just the way you are. I feel that if we in public television can only make it clear that feelings are mentionable and manageable, we will have done a great service for mental health.
BROOKE GLADSTONE - CO-HOST, ON THE MEDIA: Despite Fred Rogers' appeal to empathy, Richard Nixon, not known for manageable feelings, viewed public broadcasting as an enemy to slay. In 1975, it was left to Gerald Ford to set up a funding scheme to shield it, theoretically at least, from the immediate political winds. Congress was directed to appropriate CPB's funding two years in advance. Of course, Congress [00:36:00] could kill future funding or even rescind what had already been allocated, but some insulation was better than none. Fast forward to 2017. Donald Trump tries to cut CPB's funding several times in his first term.
KAREN EVERHART: This morning, President Trump made public his proposed budget blueprint for the coming fiscal year. Among the items included, the elimination of all funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
BROOKE GLADSTONE - CO-HOST, ON THE MEDIA: He didn't get it done.
KAREN EVERHART: No, he did not. Those proposals did not fly in Congress.
BROOKE GLADSTONE - CO-HOST, ON THE MEDIA: Karen Everhart is the managing editor of Current, a nonprofit newsroom covering public media.
KAREN EVERHART: Members of Congress, particularly in rural states, recognize that public broadcasting is one of the only local originating sources of news and information and programming, and they value that. Their constituents value that. What typically happens is the House goes along with a recommendation, especially when it's [00:37:00] dominated by Republicans. The House will eliminate CPB's funding from its appropriations budget and then the Senate will propose an alternative number, and that number or something around that amount will end up in the final budget.
BROOKE GLADSTONE - CO-HOST, ON THE MEDIA: More than 70% of CPB's annual appropriation goes directly to public media stations in the form of community service grants, CSGs, of which about 45% are rural. They can be used as they need to be to keep the station running and for programming, both local and national. They're not obligated to buy programs from PBS, nor do they have to buy from NPR.
KAREN EVERHART: Although most of them do because they're very popular with their audiences. They can choose to buy programs from American Public Media or PRX or the BBC.
BROOKE GLADSTONE - CO-HOST, ON THE MEDIA: Last year, CPB received $525 million plus another $10 million in interest, about half of which [00:38:00] went to local public TV stations and direct grants, about 15% to local radio stations. A big chunk went out in programming grants, mostly to TV. More went out to support the distribution system, et cetera. That said, the bigger stations are less vulnerable to attacks on CPB because it's not a significant part of their budgets.
KAREN EVERHART: They don't rely on CPB funding for essential services. That doesn't go towards their programming budget. It's the small stations where it really makes the biggest difference in what they do on a day-to-day basis. Those are the stations that are most at risk.
Attention pays (with Chris Hayes) - The Gray Area with Sean Illing - Air Date 1-27-25
SEAN ILLING - HOST, THE GRAY AREA: It's wild. Again, I... ah, fuck it, I guess I'll just go full philosophy seminar here. But if we no longer have meaningful conscious control over our attention, at some point we do reach a level of passivity that makes us more of an object than a person.
CHRIS HAYES: Yes. And that has profound implications [00:39:00] for, for instance, democratic theory. It's interesting because there was a round of these conversations, particularly in the 20s and 30s, a sort of collision of mass media, mass propaganda, mass advertising, and industrial democracy, all coming together, and these debates that happened during that period of time, where everyone's trying to deal with this exact same question that we're now dealing with; which is, Can people be subjects in a meaningful sense under these conditions of mass media? If everyone is just listening to the same propaganda all day on their radios, in what sense do we have individual subjects with free wills making decisions about self governance?
And this is Lippman's big experience, right? He's the chief propagandist to get us into World War I, and again, I think it [00:40:00] was much easier to manipulate public opinion then to be honest, but he does it and he's like, Oh my God, that was way too easy. What does it mean about democracy if you can just propagandize a whole population? And we have a different set of questions now that aren't about... in some fascinating way are sort of the converse, right? That was all about massness. It was like, everyone's listening to the same thing. So it's subsuming the individual and we're watching fascism as this sort of mob, basically, come to life and the mob is all getting the same propaganda. The mob is acting as one.
We're now seeing this like weird hyper individuation , which like no one sees it seems exactly the same content all day. And what is that radical individuation and self selection do to the democratic project?
SEAN ILLING - HOST, THE GRAY AREA: I love that you went here because this is where I wanted to go.
CHRIS HAYES: Well, this is what your book's [00:41:00] about.
SEAN ILLING - HOST, THE GRAY AREA: in a lot of ways it is. Yeah. And to the point you're making here and in the book, if we also lack the capacity to pay attention together, what the hell does that mean for democracy? I mean, democracy on some level is a shared culture. So if mass culture isn't possible anymore, is democracy?
CHRIS HAYES: There's a few things I say. One is, I want to always in this book, and I try very hard to resist the temptation do dehistoricize everything, like, as I say in the book, they didn't need Facebook in Salem to start having viral rumors that so and so was a witch, like people are very good at spreading disinformation just analog style, which is like the core of the human condition. And that's our lot and democracy is incredibly fallible with a bunch of fallible people. So I just want to say that.
But yes, I think there is a profound question about [00:42:00] what this is doing to our democracy. And particularly because, as I write in the book, and this is really key and it's something that I live every day, attention is not a moral faculty. It is distinct from what we think is important. Lippmann, in Public Opinion, whines about this. He whines about a lot of things. He says, he's talking about Versailles actually, right? So talking about the end of the war and the reparations, he says, Americans have an incredible interest in this, but they're not interested in it. He's like, the same way the child has an enormous interest in his father's business that he will inherit, but is not interested in it.
So this problem is old, but I think it's so sheer right now, that overcoming the compelled, the sirens call, the sort of lowest [00:43:00] common denominator tabloid casino effect of everything in a very competitive attention environment where we're driven towards the lowest common denominator, we're driven towards what compels it, malforms the public collective ability to reason collectively, to think of issues independent of what just sustains our attention from moment to moment. Because what sustains our attention of a moment is distinct from what is important and we all know that. Everyone understands that. And yet it's very hard to counteract what's being done to us through the technologies
SEAN ILLING - HOST, THE GRAY AREA: And of course look the problem isn't just that we're losing control over what we pay attention to, we're also losing the capacity to pay attention for more than 10 seconds. You talk about the Lincoln Douglas debates in the book. We talk about it in ours as well. It really is striking how much more sophisticated the language was. It's [00:44:00] wild. And people had the capacity to pay attention to it for so long. And there's just no question that more people think and speak in soundbites now because that's how we consume information. Maybe it started with the telegraph and radio and TV, but it's ratcheted up to a whole other level with digital tech.
We are a meme culture now, and if you live in a meme culture, you're going to have a meme politics and a citizenry that can only communicate at the level of memes. I don't know what you do with that.
CHRIS HAYES: Yes, no, you're right. And yes, and your discussion, I think your discussion of Lincoln Douglas actually was what sent me originally back to read them.
SEAN ILLING - HOST, THE GRAY AREA: I also have no doubt if, those people attending the Lincoln Douglas debates could go home and stream CSI: Toledo or whatever, they would.
CHRIS HAYES: Dude, this is one of these challenges with this whole discourse. What's distinct, what's old? All Marx did is just fight with people online, [00:45:00] essentially, for what is his day was like. That's all he spent his whole life, like he was a compulsive poster. He's constantly having 15 different factional fights. People always forget the Communist Manifesto, it's so funny, it's basically, it's 15 pages of all this stuff people know, workers a world unite and then there's an addendum That's like why every other Factional tendency in the broad anti capitalist movement is wrong, goes through each one, like this one's wrong for this reasons.
And then there's this like weird formation of monarchist right wing Catholics who are also anti bourgeois and anti capitalist. They're wrong for this reason and literally just it's just like a set of fights he's picking with every different person. So some of this again, this is a thing that I say all the time.
Democracy is a technology for managing the conflict endemic to human affairs. It's the best technology we have come up with for managing conflict endemic human affairs. But [00:46:00] conflict is endemic to human affairs. So that, doesn't go away. people are going to be disagree and fight with each other.
And the question of how we manage that is the question of how we collectively govern. And I do think that all of us having our brains stripped to the studs is not helpful in that enterprise. What a hot take there, Chris.
Jim Acosta's powerful last words as he leaves CNN- -It is never a good time to bow down to a tyrant - Dean Obeidallah Show - Air Date 1-28-25
JIM ACOSTA: People often ask me if the highlight of my career at CNN was at the White House covering Donald Trump. Actually, no. That moment came here when I covered former President Barack Obama's trip to Cuba in 2016 and had the chance to question the dictator there, Raul Castro, about the island's political prisoners.
As the son of a Cuban refugee, I took home this lesson. It is never a good time to bow down to a tyrant. I have always believed it's the job of the press to hold power to account. I've always tried to do that here at CNN, and I plan on going doing [00:47:00] all of that in the future.
One final message. Don't give in to the lies. Don't give in to the fear. Hold on to the truth. And to hope. Even if you have to get out your phone, record that message, "I will not give in to the lies. I will not give in to the fear." Post it on your social media, so people can hear from you, too.
Fox News is Back at the White House. Plus, No Joke, The Onion Buys Infowars. Part 2 - On the Media - Air Date 11-15-24
BROOKE GLADSTONE - CO-HOST, ON THE MEDIA: You also say that not everything can be fact-checked, that the political ether is lousy with lies large and small, that reporters should concentrate on the ones with the highest impact, or liars, where everything is said to a large audience. But how do you curate Trump?
BILL ADAIR: Well, I think the solution for fact checking Trump is to get some funding to literally fact check everything he says.
BROOKE GLADSTONE - CO-HOST, ON THE MEDIA: Fact-checking all of those claims, hiring someone to do it, wouldn't that have a numbing effect?
BILL ADAIR: Well, yes, but there are also people who transcribe everything he [00:48:00] says.
BROOKE GLADSTONE - CO-HOST, ON THE MEDIA: So how exactly does more fact-checking help our current environment?
BILL ADAIR: People would say, with me, like, when you're a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Here's why. I think that, first, if you look at just the most basic thing, we talked about Trump, but this also exists at the state and local level.
BROOKE GLADSTONE - CO-HOST, ON THE MEDIA: Even more important, because those local papers have been hammered so hard.
BILL ADAIR: Exactly, and so here's proof of that. My team looked at fact checking across the country and found that in half the states, there are no fact checkers holding governors, US Senators, members of Congress responsible for what they say. That's like driving on the interstate without any fear of getting a speeding ticket. You can go as fast as you want. Those politicians can say anything and never worry about [00:49:00] getting fact-checked. We need more fact-checkers. The simple process of holding politicians accountable for what they say is a useful exercise that provides a ground truth. So that's step one. Okay, so is fact-checking working when it's done? No.
BROOKE GLADSTONE - CO-HOST, ON THE MEDIA: And part of that is structural. Our media is crafted so that we never have to encounter an idea or a fact that we don't like.
BILL ADAIR: Exactly. So we have to get creative in thinking about how we might get fact checks to people who aren't seeing them. Two thoughts on that. One, I'm not sure that shouting pants on fire is going to have an appeal to conservative audiences. I'm not sure that Truth-O-Meters are going to have an appeal to conservative audiences because they're associated with fact-checkers that probably conservative audiences have been [00:50:00] told not to trust.
In researching the book, I searched how often PolitiFact and its fact-checking has been mentioned in negative ways on Fox, and it gets insulted a lot. We probably need to think about how we package fact-checking for conservative audiences. The other thing we need to do is to get more conservative media organizations to do their own fact-checking. Now, this is already happening. The Dispatch, a center-right publication, does fact-checking and it's very popular, and we need more conservative media organizations to do fact-checking. I think those two things could really help because what we're doing now is not working.
BROOKE GLADSTONE - CO-HOST, ON THE MEDIA: In writing this book, you stepped away from the day-to-day role of fact-checking and you've come to the conclusion that maybe pants on fire isn't the way to go. [00:51:00] But have you gotten yet any insights or any really compelling ideas about how to package the truth in a way that can cross party lines?
BILL ADAIR: Not yet. That's kind of next on my to-do list.
BROOKE GLADSTONE - CO-HOST, ON THE MEDIA: To me, that's a sort of, aside from that Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play?
BILL ADAIR: That's a big task. I think that we need to figure out what could appeal beyond this NPR listening, New York Times reading, New Yorker subscribing audience and so.
BROOKE GLADSTONE - CO-HOST, ON THE MEDIA: But nothing yet.
BILL ADAIR: Nothing yet.
BROOKE GLADSTONE - CO-HOST, ON THE MEDIA: You got nothing?
BILL ADAIR: I got nothing for you, Brooke.
Note from the Editor on the liberatory power of the humble RSS feed reader
JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: We've just heard clips starting with The ReidOut laying out Trump's game plan to bully media into submission. On the Media looked at the revolving door between Fox News and the Trump administrations. Midas Touch described some of the behind the scenes meetings between Trump's team and media outlets. The Zero Hour discussed [00:52:00] media accuracy and trustworthiness. The Majority Report looked at the politics of pardons and punishment. On the Media focused on the threat to public broadcasting. The Gray Area spoke with Chris Hayes about the attention economy. The Dean Obeidallah Show featured Jim Acosta's final words before leaving his show on CNN. And On the Media looked at the importance and complexities of fact checking.
And those were just the Top Takes. There's a lot more in the Deeper Dive sections.
But first, a reminder that this show is produced with the support of our members, who get access to bonus episodes and enjoy all of our shows without ads. To support all of our work and to have those bonus episodes delivered seamlessly to the new members-only podcast feed that you'll receive, sign up to support the show at BestOfTheLeft.Com/Support (there's a link in the show notes), through our Patreon page, or from right inside the Apple Podcast app.
And as always, if regular membership just isn't in the cards for you, shoot me an email requesting a financial hardship membership, because we don't let a lack of funds stand in the way of [00:53:00] hearing more information.
And we've been trying something new and offering you the opportunity to submit your comments or questions on upcoming topics, so you can join the conversation as it happens. Up next, we're doing a deep dive on the age of oligarchy, which dovetails nicely with Elon Musk's ongoing administrative coup, followed by a broader look at Trump's efforts to simply break the government in as many ways as he can. So get your comments or questions in for those topics now. You can leave a voicemail or send us a text at 202-999-3991.
We're also findable on the privacy-focused messaging app Signal at the handle bestoftheleft.01 and there's a link in the show notes for that. Or you can simply email me to [email protected].
Now as for today's topic, I just want to touch on a specific element of media consumption that is near and dear to my heart.
We were already actually planning on having a bigger discussion about this on the show for members this week, but I will go ahead [00:54:00] and give you the headline now: "You should be using an RSS reader to get your news." Now this won't break the stranglehold of for-profit media and the nature of the attention economy by itself, but it is definitely part of the mixture of impactful actions that will benefit you personally, and help prod the industry away from the algorithm apocalypse we're currently living through
Now, aside from trustworthy podcasts, I hasten to mention, which also use RSS feeds, by the way, any scrolling you're doing to catch headlines should be done away from the prying eyes and manipulating business models of the algorithm-based social media and newsfeed apps. RSS, which stands for Really Simple Syndication, is a near universal standard that is the backbone of podcasting and blogging and is already incorporated into the vast majority of news sites you could ever [00:55:00] possibly want to get articles from. The biggest difference between using an RSS reader and one of those infinite scroll social media apps is that -- I will grant you, social media feeds are more exciting than a collection of RSS feeds that you pick and choose what sources you want to subscribe to -- but that's because algorithms have been tuned to be maximally exciting, which wouldn't be a problem if the truth were as exciting as fiction and lies.
So just remember that social media feeds are more exciting because they're full of bullshit. That is the fundamental element of how they work.
So if you've got that twitch that has you reaching for your phone and opening an endless scroll app to keep up on the news or whatever, take an hour out of one day, maybe less, download an RSS reader, and manually subscribe to all the sources you actually trust and want to follow. And then throw in some fact checking sites as well. Then when you have the urge to scroll, you'll just be seeing [00:56:00] those sources that you actually trust.
And don't fear picking the wrong RSS app, because you can always export the sources you follow from one app to the next. So if you find a better one later, switching is a breeze.
Now, look, I know what you're thinking. You don't want to have to do your own research and you'd love if I would just tell you what app to use. I know, I have been there. So I will do that. For starters, if you're just looking for a free app with good basic functionality, try Feedly. It's fine. I've used it on and off. It gets the job done. It's not exciting, but it doesn't need to be. If you fancy yourself a power reader or maybe an aspiring power reader and you want the real cream of the crop, then I recommend the Readwise Reader. That's two words: first word Readwise, second word Reader.
Up to this point I've been talking about RSS readers, apps that let you subscribe to feeds. There's another species of app called Read It Later. [00:57:00] It's like Instapaper and Pocket apps like that, that let you easily bookmark articles that then get imported into your app for easy reading. The Readwise Reader is the best marriage of the two that I've been able to find, and I went looking for something like that specifically that could manage my needs for research that go into the member show. I used to just use Apple News Plus to get access to all the media outlets, but I really wanted to take control and curate my sources, including a bunch of sources that aren't in Apple News, and I didn't want them organized by an algorithm, at all. And in addition to all of that, I wanted to be able to add any articles I come across in the wild.
Now unsurprisingly, the Readwise Reader costs money and doesn't have a free tier, they just have a free trial, because it's really a "you get what you pay for" kind of situation. Now obviously it's suited to real power users like me whose work depends on reading lots and lots and lots of articles, so it's not for [00:58:00] everyone.
But those are the two basic ends of the spectrum to get you started. Feedly for free basic stuff. Readwise is the absolute, like it does everything you can imagine it might do and probably a bunch more. So explore, enjoy, go forth, free yourself from the algorithm, and then spread the good word.
SECTION A: MONEY
JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: And now, we'll continue to dive deeper on three topics today. Next up, Section A: Money, followed by Section B: Attention, and Section C: The Free Press.
Tech Moguls and Journalism w Eoin Higgins - Behind the News - Air Date 1-30-24
DOUG HENWOOD - HOST, BEHIND THE NEWS: If you spent a lot of time immersed in online punditry, you may have wondered what happened to two stars of that world, Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi.
Once more or less in the left, though perhaps they would dispute that, they now lean pretty far to the right, though perhaps they would dispute that too. Greenwald was a sharp critic of the Bush era Republican Party. Now he carries water for Donald Trump. Taibbi once wrote scathing critiques of Goldman Sachs for Rolling Stone.
Now he carries water for Elon Musk. Both now are featured on media outlets like Substack and Rumble, which are [00:59:00] financed by right wing tech moguls like Marc Andreessen, Peter Thiel, and Elon Musk. At this point, one doesn't need to say too much about Musk by way of introduction. The other two are less well known.
Both are venture capitalists and investors, one of my favorite occupational categories. Andreessen got rich and famous 30 years ago as one of the founders of Netscape, and Thiel, along with Musk, was one of the founders of PayPal. He's also been a longstanding patron of right wing politics and politicians, most notably J.
D. Vance. Owen Higgins, his first name is spelled E O I N, is just out with a book on these consequential unions, Owned, how tech billionaires and the right bought the loudest voices in the left from bold type books. It's a look at how tech moguls are creating a journalistic landscape that's more about heat than light and personalities rather than institutions.
Owen Higgins. Before we get to the dubious stars of this show, uh, Greenwald and Taibbi, I do want to call attention to the centrality of the thuggish billionaires who are close to the re inaugurated Emperor Trump. Uh, [01:00:00] Peter Thiel, who also had a lot to do with J. D. Vance's rise. As well, Mark Andreessen and the Nazi saluter Elon Musk.
What does it mean that this unholy trinity is now so close to state power?
EOIN HIGGINS: Well, I don't think it means anything good. If you kind of look at their evolution and the way that they have maybe manipulated and Controlled communication and discourse over the past three, four years. This has been an investment that has paid off for them.
They wanted a more conservative, much more importantly, I think more tech friendly administration in power, and now they have it. With each one of them, there's something different. So Andreessen has for a long time been a real proponent of crypto. He has a lot of his capital in there. He wants to make sure that that pays off.
So he, it seems like he's going to get what he wants. Trump is making noises about some sort of more crypto friendly administration. One of one of Andreessen's big complaints [01:01:00] about Biden was that he was crypto unfriendly. And Lena Kahn's attacks on the industry, or what he saw as attacks on the industry.
So, for Andreessen, I think that's kind of what we'll probably see. You know, there's some culture war stuff here, but I think that ultimately he just believes in the money part. Thiel probably sees Trump as part of a long standing ideological mission that Thiel has had. Thiel is maybe equally Invested in, you know, his material wealth and also the ideology, maybe more than the others are where, where he's kind of maybe a little more 50, 50, he's been pushing for this far right politics for a long time, decades, but he did this interview with the Atlantic's, uh, Barton Gellman.
I think this was back at the end of 2023 where he said he was done. He didn't want to invest anymore. Money or time into politics. He was disappointed in Trump. He didn't like Biden and he was quiet for most of 2024. And then he started to pop up [01:02:00] again on podcasts and doing talks around like the summer, and I think that one of the reasons that he started to do that is he, he realized.
That Trump was ascendant, or at least that the right wing project that Trump was a part of was ascendant. And he made a calculation, a bet, I think, that this was going to be successful. It paid off. That he has such closeness as well to Mark Zuckerberg is also very, very important with Zuckerberg cozying up to Trump.
And then finally, Musk, I mean, there's just a lot to say here.
DOUG HENWOOD - HOST, BEHIND THE NEWS: None of it very good.
EOIN HIGGINS: Yeah, none of it good. Yeah. I mean, he invested in Twitter, I think, in order to have something like this happen, you know, not necessarily maybe the presidency, but to shape domestic and global opinion. It's hard to argue that it didn't pay off.
He may be losing a lot of money on Twitter. Twitter may be a borderline unusable website, but to do what it's doing and to shape the conversation, to make himself. Like an [01:03:00] indispensable, important person who everyone has to listen to is probably equally important. This is a guy, if you're, if you just watch his body language and the way that he acts, is desperate for approval and massively insecure and at the same time has a huge ego because he's one of the richest people, no, he is the richest person in the world on paper, and is now basically living in the White House.
So effectively what's going to happen is that now the Department of Government Efficiency, this is what I predict will happen, is going to just funnel money to these big tech companies. And that just is probably works out for a must quite well. It's hard to argue that it hasn't paid off for all three of those guys.
They're probably pretty happy with the way things are going right now.
DOUG HENWOOD - HOST, BEHIND THE NEWS: The politics of these guys is often characterized as libertarian, but the whole industry has been close to the Pentagon forever, and Thiel in particular has made immense amounts of money from the CIA, so that really is the wrong descriptor for these characters.
EOIN HIGGINS: They would probably describe themselves as libertarians or former [01:04:00] libertarians, but you're completely right. All three of these guys, and Bezos as well, well, I'll talk about Bezos in a second, but all three of these guys have made a lot of money investing in companies that do surveillance, uh, in, in Teal's case, Palantir, Starlink, and SpaceX, and Tesla, in Musk's case, have, I mean, Musk's made billions and billions of dollars from government contracts, and this has been a, a bipartisan spigot of cash.
It hasn't changed, really, administration to administration.
Trump SECRET Meeting with Media before Payoff EXPOSED Part 2 - The MeidasTouch Podcast - Air Date 12-16-24
BEN MEISELAS - HOST, THE MEIDASTOUCH: By the way, now that we know about this meeting between, uh, Deborah O'Connell, who oversees ABC News, A few days later, five days later, a 15 million settlement happens.
I wonder how the people who work, what are the employees at, uh, ABC, what do they think about this? Right? Because, um, you know, there have been budget cuts and, uh, layoffs and things like this. Well, according to Yasher Ali. ABC News [01:05:00] talent and staff that he's been talking to over the past few hours are stunned and furious about the settlement.
Their anger primarily stems from the fact that they have faced repeated budget and compensation cuts in recent years, experienced layoffs, and yet the network, even if insurance paid it, has paid this huge sum of money. To settle this matter and I'm not quite sure that insurance paid it because why would insurance pay it?
If they're classifying it as a political donation to a future library, which sounds like a tax deduction To me or a tax write off uh to me and often if you're admitting to engaging in defamation and issuing an apology like that publicly. Insurance doesn't necessarily cover intentional acts where you're apologizing for what you did like that.
So, um, but you know what, what's interesting here? Look, it's true. Significant [01:06:00] layoffs have hit ABC News. For example, 19 million in cuts were made to Good Morning America last year. Think about that. 19 million in cuts, people lost their job, dozens of people get fired, and all of that money that would have saved those jobs was now given to a Trump presidential, a future Trump presidential library.
So I understand that, but it's still, when you think about it, the ABC News and Talent, what made them most pissed is the compensation issue and not the obeying in advance to authoritarianism. Issue, because to me, that's the bigger issue right here. I mean, look, if you're talent, if you're a journalist, I understand your compensation is as important and I understand how frustrating it must be if your company is reducing it, but don't you want your integrity first?
More than anything here. [01:07:00] I mean just think about it over here when you have Mark Zuckerberg who Donald Trump has called You know, I'm coming after you Zucker box and Trump's called him all these names Standing there at Mar a Lago next to Donald Trump, by the way Tim Cook of Apple went to Mar a Lago to kiss the ring as well Joe and Mika we've reported I just realized this now in that political playbook report.
Guess who it's brought to you by Zuckerberg It's brought to you by meta Right, the, the signs, the stamps of the oligarchy all stand, all staring us in the face, but But remember all the statements that Donald Trump would make about the media and that he would post over and over again, you know, during the election and over the past four years and when he was in office, the enemy, the media is the enemy of the people.
The media is the enemy of the people. These long all caps, they're almost all dishonest and corrupt, but Comcast with its one sided vicious coverage by NBC news and particular [01:08:00] MSDNC often correctly. Referred to as M-S-D-N-C, democratic National Committee should be investigated for country threatening treason.
They're the enemy of the people Fox. The fake news is the enemy of the people posting memes like this of the news networks holding vice President Kamala Harris up and saying, enemy of the people post after post enemy of the people. So all you gotta do is go on social media, call people, enemy of the people, just threaten the media.
And the fourth estate boom folds like that folds like that. And you see talent, they're worried about compensation over integrity. You've got the corporations that the oligarchical corporations that run these media networks want to kiss the ring. It's all a money grab. It's a race for money. Put your integrity first over all of this.
You could have integrity and make money too. And if they come after you, if they go after you, so be it. That's life. Stand up for yourself, but [01:09:00] no secret meetings at lavish steakhouses behind our backs, focusing on their bottom line, not the bottom line of our democracy.
Tech Moguls and Journalism w Eoin Higgins Part 2 - Behind the News - Air Date 1-30-24
EOIN HIGGINS: So when you're trying, in a book like this, trying to track this political evolution and the things that they talk about and the stuff that they write about to any kind of, like, financial motivator, it's often hard to find, like, somebody, like, giving them just, you know, a stack of cash and being like, here, please write this.
But there have been investments in a lot of alternative media outlets and platforms. By the same people who we were talking about earlier, right? So Mark Andreessen invests in Substack after that Substack starts investing in writers. Some of the writers that they start investing in are pretty far to the right.
They start boosting that kind of stuff. Substacks right wing tilt, which they deny. And I should definitely say that they do deny this, but their right wing tilt has been noticed by a lot of people, including writers. I am, I guess, still part of a collective called the Discontents, which [01:10:00] were a group of Substack writers who were kind of opposed to this.
Substack did not give money to Taibi and Greenwald, but they did make their money on that platform, and I would argue that there were incentives there to Promote a certain politics in a certain way. There's, there's something called substack brain where you're kind of, you're, you're always trying to get a reaction from people.
You're kind of pushing things to the right a little bit. You're being contrarian. So you start to see that kind of stuff with Greenwald. The real payoff comes when JD Vance and Peter Thiel, vice president, JD Vance. Uh, which is, yeah, that's something. And Thiel is his mentor. And Teal is his mentor, yeah, so, and they both invest in Rumble, which is this Canadian based right wing YouTube alternative, and Rumble gives a large contract to Glenn, uh, in order to move System Update, which is his podcast slash video show, over to Rumble exclusively, they also paid, um, [01:11:00] fellow right wing pundit and soon to be DNI, Director of National Intelligence, uh, Tulsi Gabbard, Glenn also had to move over his writing from Substack over to Locals, which is a blogging platform founded by a guy named Dave Rubin.
If you know who he is, then you're, you're as unfortunate as I am, but marginal right wing figure, but you know, they moved that over. They also, uh, they also purchased Colin, which was a David Sacks founded audio platform, which, which I recorded podcasts for, for a year for, for some money from them. So I'm certainly not blameless here.
Like I've, I've also taken this money.
DOUG HENWOOD - HOST, BEHIND THE NEWS: You can't, uh, fault somebody because there's, you know, there's just so little money in journalism these days unless you're, uh, servicing these characters.
EOIN HIGGINS: Right, right, right. Well, you know, I mean, I was offered, I was offered the money and there was no guidance provided or anything, but, um, it was, it was kind of obvious.
Glenn's, you know, just taking the money from this, um, and, and it's just exclusively putting this stuff there. Uh, he would argue that Peter Thiel has nothing to do with Rumble. It's kind of hard to make that [01:12:00] argument when, you know, Thiel and Vance invest all of this money into Rumble and then Rumble gives money to Glenn.
Taibi is selected because of influence from Andreessen and Saks by Musk to expose the Twitter files, uh, the reporting of which is not particularly strong, but it certainly gets an ideological point of view out there. And more importantly, I think for, uh, for Taibi, probably doubled and maybe more his income from Substack just over the course of, of that brief reporting.
The financial incentives for helping these guys are pretty clear. If you help them, you'll have money. That's kind of how it all wraps together. They're investing in an alternative media superstructure in large part, because they want something they can control where it's not as critical and where it serves their purposes and there are figures of prominence.
In the alternative media sphere, people whose, whose independence is part of their brand, like Taibbi and Greenwald, who are then happy [01:13:00] to help with that mission and to take the funding.
Mickey Huff The Mainstream Media is [CENSORED] Part 2 - The Zero Hour with RJ Eskow - Air Date 1-11-25
RJ ESKOW - HOST, THE ZERO HOUR: Yeah, it's very rare that those corporate sponsors have to call up and, you know, because they, they know what they need to do to get ahead, right? So it's that, plus it's a cultural thing, and I really think, you know, 40, 50 years ago, there was the culture of, you know, a crusading reporter out to get the truth.
And I mean, there was a lot of BS in the media then too, but, but That was the ideal was the truth and you did what you did for the truth and let's face it reporters were not the best paid you know they were the ink stained wretches who came up as copy boys or copy girls and and uh you know finally you know got into the newsroom but Now, it is a kind of elite tribalism, if you're in a place like the New York Times, where you've gone to a fine school, Ivy League school, and you, you know, you're comfortable with these [01:14:00] people, uh, to use Gore Vidal's phrase, it's, it's not just a conspiracy, it's a conspiracy of shared values.
That's my take on it. What do you think?
MICKEY HUFF: Yeah, it's very interesting. Interesting. You bring up the doll too. I'm always reminded by his, his, his very pithy th pithy phrase, um, that we live in the United States of amnesia. Right? We don't even remember. We had a vibrant press some 50 years ago and a lot of competition and a lot of local media where we now live in news deserts.
We, I mean, part of what I'm doing at the park center is honoring the The, the legacy of the late great I F Izzy Stone,
RJ ESKOW - HOST, THE ZERO HOUR: right?
MICKEY HUFF: We do the Izzy awards every, every, uh, spring started by Jeff Cohen there and continued by Raza Rumi. It'll be our 17th celebration of Izzy Stone coming up this, this April. And, but that's, but even then you take a look at George.
Those folks often had to go outside the establishment press to report what they were doing. IF Stone did it for [01:15:00] over 20 years. He printed his own
RJ ESKOW - HOST, THE ZERO HOUR: newsletter. Yeah.
MICKEY HUFF: He had to go outside of the system to critique it, right? And, and, and there's a lot of interest, uh, there's a lot of interesting analogies we can, we can draw from that.
That relate to what you were just saying. It's very difficult, and this is now riffing off of another muckraker, Upton Sinclair, going back a hundred years. When Upton Sinclair ran for governor of California in 1934, he was complaining in some way about the press coverage and the anti socialism and so forth, even during the New Deal period, right?
He was a socialist candidate. But he said, you know, it's difficult to get someone to understand something whose job it is to not understand it. Right. I was paraphrasing and avoiding the sexist language that he employed at the time. But you get the drift here is that like a lot of the folks that are in the corporate media, the so called mainstream, they're like the fish in the water.
That's unaware of what they don't talk about the water. But they rely on the water to exist, right? So they know what [01:16:00] to ask and not ask if they want to keep their jobs, but then they also bemoan simultaneously that they can't always do what they need to do, but they have to keep their jobs. It's a catch 22, right?
But, you know, this is why independent media is so important. This is why at Project Censored every year, and in our book again this year, we highlight, you know, what we think are the top stories coming out of the independent press that the corporate media either couldn't be bothered with, Maybe didn't address at all, or if they did cover it, they did so in a partial way that amounts to what we call news abuse, or the new technical term for it is mal information.
Misinformation is unintentional, making mistakes, and we're all human. We all make mistakes. That's why there's retractions. That's why there's corrections. We don't expect people to always get things right the first time. We get that. But misinformation that's left unaddressed is a very, is a significant problem that leads to lack of trust.
We're back to that. Disinformation is purposeful, [01:17:00] is purposefully putting out false or misleading information, which leads to declining trust. Malinformation is information that appears on the surface to be factually accurate. but is framed in such a way that it excludes important historical background information or other relevant perspectives that lead the public to potentially come to a certain conclusion even though that collusion, I'm sorry, that conclusion would be undermined if further information that is known would have been reported, right?
All of those things contribute to what, RJ? Lack of public trust in journalism. They contribute to a less well informed electorate, and they now are helping produce what the media is calling the low informed voter. Well, where did that come from, RJ?
SECTION B: ATTENTION
JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: Now entering Section B: Attention.
Attention pays (with Chris Hayes) Part 2 - The Gray Area with Sean Illing - Air Date 1-27-25
SEAN ILLING - HOST, THE GRAY AREA: And you grapple with some of these questions, um, in a really interesting way in the book. Um, you know, [01:18:00] you, you have a point of view, uh, as a journalist, as a TV host, you want to inform and presumably persuade your fellow citizens, but you also work in TV.
You work in the attention industry and the logic of that industry and the logic of that medium It's constantly imposing itself on you. So how do you navigate this? How do you play the attention game without compromising yourself?
CHRIS HAYES: It's really hard. It's, it's what I spend most of my life thinking about.
Most of my working life. I mean, it was the rudest awakening when I moved to primetime, partly because the first TV show I had, which was on weekend mornings, I just didn't think about intentional. Attentional imperatives at all and I was just like wouldn't it be cool to do a two hour sort of like seminar about 80 topics at a roundtable And then it did well it it it rated pretty well and it was like, oh well And then I tried to do that at 8 p.
m after people had just gotten home from like a day teaching [01:19:00] third grade or a shift in the hospice and Didn't really work. Um, Partly because I think people just started to have different attentional capacity 8 p. m. On a weeknight than they do at 9 a. m. on Saturday morning. Like you're pretty clear. You can sit and think a little.
So I had to deal with those attentional Um, Imperatives and I always have to I mean, the thing about attention I say is that it's mere it's it's it's always necessary and never sufficient. That's what that's what's so fascinating about it. You always need it to do anything else like in a relationship.
It's necessary, but it's not sufficient. Like what you want in a relationship is love, but you need attention to get love. Like, you need your spouse to pay you attention and listen to you, and they need you to do the same to them. But if all you're doing is paying attention, and sometimes people get into toxic [01:20:00] relationships where they're paying negative attention to each other, and they're fighting with each other in this desperate attempt to get that, it's not enough.
So, that's the same about the conundrum I have, right? It's necessary, but not sufficient. I need to keep people's attention as a means to the end of doing something that I think Improves civic life to be as highfalutin as possible.
SEAN ILLING - HOST, THE GRAY AREA: Yeah, I mean, when I first started in journalism, I was more of a, I guess you would call it a take writer.
Um, and I did some cable hits and it didn't go well, um, in part because I just didn't understand how performative it was, especially when you're in the guest room. You know, I wanted to be deliberate and make arguments, but that's hard to do when you've got a few minutes. Maybe it's entertainment, right?
And so you have to capture and hold attention and that incentivizes a certain um, Style [01:21:00] of communication so I kind of just stopped doing TV if I did it again It would go better because I understand that world now and I can perform if I need to but I didn't Think it brought out the best version of me.
CHRIS HAYES: Yeah, I don't know if it brings out the best version me either totally honest I mean one thing that you mentioned there that I think is part of this discussion is just time and the speed that's right people don't realize how The pace at which they talk and how compressed it is on television, um, and actually, this is a thing I kind of love about the kind of podcast resurgence and like to my point about like, not everything's terrible, like Lex Friedman's a great example, um, he's a podcaster, he's a very, very popular podcast, um, I listen to him sometimes, some of them I love, some of them I'm not that crazy about, but he, his, he's very deliberate and he's very slow and it would never work on television, and I love the fact that it does work in the medium he's working in.
But one thing about TV for people that haven't done it is [01:22:00] if you've ever had the experience of going to a batting cage and putting it up to like 70, 80, 90 like professional and you're standing there and the ball is just past you before your, your, your muscle even twitch, you're just like, Whoa, that ball got on me very fast.
That's how TV feels when you, if you're not used to it, it just, it's like trying to hit major league pitching. All of a sudden, everything is moving way faster. Then it does in normal conversation in normal thinking, anything you do normally, it's happening way, way, way, way faster.
Mickey Huff The Mainstream Media is [CENSORED] Part 3 - The Zero Hour with RJ Eskow - Air Date 1-11-25
MICKEY HUFF: well, look, and more, more to that, it's almost as if the more you keep repeating flagrant falsehoods and double down on them, it just, it just doesn't even matter. Um, the fact that so many people are migrating or flocking, you know, to the incoming Trump administration is really, uh, uh.
I mean, it's, it's an extraordinary display of, uh, of sycophancy, the likes of which we, we haven't seen [01:23:00] really for, for some time. And granted, the last, this, this Biden administration has done a lot to earn the mistrust of the American public. They were meddling in social media, um, and now it makes it even easier for people like Zuckerberg to come out and say, well, I always thought that was the wrong approach.
And then they go back to the notion that pretends that Musk is some kind of. You know, hero of free expression, which is the most preposterous thing to say of all time. The guy is willy nilly censoring people, de platforming people, constantly cancelling. They cancel far more people on the left end of the political dial than other places, and more so, they're just interested in suppressing anybody that, like, puts a sort of, like, a dent in their narcissistic armor.
Um, I mean, it's, it's, the things that go on that are being discussed in the political ecosystem right now are completely Um, but now, uh, they're, they're, they're, they're, they're dumbed down to such an extraordinary degree, um, that we, we can't even have any kind of sober analysis of it. People like Musk are openly [01:24:00] embracing fascist movements in Europe.
I mean, they're openly embracing far right neo Nazi movements, and, and, and, and the press here is just like, He's a gadfly. He's a maverick. Look at him go. He's a million. He's a billionaire. That's amazing. What will he do next? Let's remember the guys never invented anything. He was born on third base, thought he hit a triple, was born in apartheid South Africa to, you know, an emerald mine owner, an oligarch that has bought everything that he's ever had.
And he squandered even the money that he's had to create huge prevaricating machines over at X. Former Twitter that now people like Zuckerberg are saying we're gonna make ourselves more like X and Twitter and it's like well So you're gonna generate more environments that are like media cesspools. So a fair question RJ What do the establishment press do given that that's now seen as the competition for the eyeballs, right?
And i'm not saying all [01:25:00] social media is bad part of the reason that they have the ban on tiktok Was because that's where a younger generation of people were learning about the horrors of gaza,
RJ ESKOW - HOST, THE ZERO HOUR: right? Absolutely, and you know, I think the answer for some in the mainstream media is only college graduates will watch TV news and read newspapers, and they're all centrist Democrats, so we'll woo them with the kind of coverage that floats their boat, and then the giant, you know, I mean, even malinformation doesn't begin to describe it when you're, when you're talking about social media, it's really like the creation of it.
Individual mutant universes for, uh, every individual to just drive their lizard brains, you know, crazy, and, uh, they're not just being misled, they're being, they're, they're in individual hallucinations and, [01:26:00] and, uh, you know, algorithmic hallucinations and where the hell, you know, we've got to find, uh, how we nurture Uh, real independent press, the kind where if you get a single fact wrong, you're depressed for three days because you're that committed to the truth and, uh, where you do an analysis where you connect the threads, where you, you know, get the matrix of forces outline that's affecting story A or story B.
I don't, I know you have a section in State of the Free Press. Do you guys have a section about, uh, good projects that are going on? You know, I'm just not sure how we do that. It's a massive assignment.
MICKEY HUFF: It is a massive assignment, which is again, why I'm teaching journalism and teaching critical media literacy, hopefully to another generation of people that really care about the same kind of ethics and values that drove people like Izzy Stone or that drove people like Ida Tarbell over a hundred years, or Lincoln Steffens, or [01:27:00] even Walter Cronkite, who was at CBS, right?
You know, there are examples in our history of people that really told stories that made a difference. Journalism does matter, but it needs to, it needs to redefine itself as the ethical, transparently sourced, um, vehicle to expose corruption and report the truth in a public in a way that leads to meaningful civic engagement.
What you were describing on social media, uh, just moments ago, RJ. It's more like, um, it's more like this, uh, algorithmically created prison, um, that is, you know, uh, siloed confirmation bias echo chambers, right? That are like dope, dopamine hitting machines, right? Absolutely. Yeah. And it's been shown over and over, you know, the social, you know, the, the, the social science research on this is pretty clear.
We've even had a. A surgeon general come out and say that there's a serious social media [01:28:00] addiction problem in, in this country that is contributing to some of the other problems you and I are talking about right now,
RJ ESKOW - HOST, THE ZERO HOUR: right?
MICKEY HUFF: And we have so many of these multiple challenges that are now intertwined. The privatization of education, the collapse of critical pedagogy, the conglomeration of corporate for profit media, even if independent media is expanding and has new outlets, it's gate kept at so many different layers and levels that it atomizes us back into those siloed echo chambers where.
We're we only think we're, you know, we think we're talking amongst a large, diverse group of people, but we're really only glad handing each other. We're not doing anybody favors by staying with our 1, favorite media outlets. We really need to diversify and understand what messages are getting out to the rest of the public.
What information the public should have ready access to to be able to see more clearly what's actually going on around us. Let's remember, [01:29:00] back to Seldes. He said the job of journalism isn't to both sides anything or to feign objectivity. It's to tell the public what's actually going on. Right. And that means you gotta speak truth to power and speaking truth as power.
And you gotta call out the owners. We should have a vast, vibrant free press, public press in this country. Scholars like, uh, um, Victor Picard have pointed out that we could do this in an extraordinary way for four or five billion dollars. We really need more like thirty billion dollars to do it. Well, come on!
Some of these oligarchs could just shave that off of money they didn't even know they had and donate it for some kind of cause like this. Just like they get in poverty. Just like they get in homelessness. But you know what the oligarchs aren't gonna do? Any of that and the corporate media instead of calling out one of the most obvious things Their conflicts of interest in their rank hypocrisy you and I before we got on here We're talking about the late great george carlin, right?
Let's not have a double standard here. One standard will do just fine [01:30:00] Um instead of doing that they just kowtow to it because they're part of the profit making machine and journalism itself Itself needs to be rescued from the industry that it has created around itself. It needs to go back to the grassroots, back to independent public interest journalism and needs to be bottom up, not top down.
Needs to stop. Its ranker partisanship with corporate media, and it needs to truly start telling the public what's going on,
RJ ESKOW - HOST, THE ZERO HOUR: to which I extremely eloquently said, Mickey. And to which I can only add, uh, we have to resize. Truth.
MICKEY HUFF: Yes,
RJ ESKOW - HOST, THE ZERO HOUR: you know, just if you were, if you're on MSNBC and you report that Mueller is going to find, Robert Mueller is going to find this and that and it doesn't happen, you should be miserable.
You should, you know, offer ritual penance, penance. You should
MICKEY HUFF: learn something. Yeah.
RJ ESKOW - HOST, THE ZERO HOUR: Yeah. And you should say, Guys, I got it wrong because I care about the truth and I want you to hear the truth and until we do that I think uh [01:31:00] You know, it's going to be a million echo chambers
SECTION C: FREE PRESS
JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: And finally, Section C: The Free Press.
A Shake Up In The Briefing Room - On The Media - Air Date 1-15-25
MICAH LOEWINGER - CO-HOST, ON THE MEDIA: During the first Trump presidency, the briefing room was a contentious place. The White House took away credentials from reporters seemingly on a whim. CNN, you might remember, went to court for an injunction to get their correspondent Jim Acosta back in the room after his pass was revoked.
This time around, there are hints from the Trump team of a reshuffle in the room. Traditionally, the front row is occupied by the four major networks along with CNN, the AP, and Reuters. The big newspapers have assigned seats in the row behind them. Last November, Don Jr. on The Daily Wire Podcast said this.
DON JR.: We had the conversation about opening up the press room to a lot of these independent journalists. If the New York Times has lied, they've been adverse to everything. They're functioning as the marketing arm of the Democrat Party. [01:32:00] Why not open it up to people who have larger viewerships, stronger followings? That may be in the works. Let's see. That's going to blow up some heads. We'll see.
MICAH LOEWINGER - CO-HOST, ON THE MEDIA: There's been no official confirmation of a shakeup, but with or without it, we know from past experience that the Trump White House is likely to be combative with the outlets that cover it. Not that Donald Trump is the only president in history to have a contentious relationship with the press. Back In January of 2017, just before Trump's first inauguration, Brooke spoke to Time Magazine's Olivia Waxman, who with the help of the Time Archive, had traced the path of the White House press corps and found that it never did run smooth.
Brooke began the interview by asking her to take us back to the very beginning, to the birth of the relationship between the press and the government. At the founding of the country.
OLIVIA WAXMAN: Journalists were not allowed to attend the Constitutional Convention, [01:33:00] nor were they allowed in early state legislatures or the Continental Congress. Actually, a gossip columnist named Anne Royall literally had to steal John Quincy Adams's clothes to get him to grant her an interview. She sat on his clothes on the bank of the Potomac until the bathing president granted her an interview.
Brooke: [chuckles] Was there anything that really jumped out at you as surprising when you went through the archive of Time Magazine?
OLIVIA WAXMAN: I was surprised that women had been the first to argue that everything in the White House should be public knowledge because taxpayers paid for its upkeep.
Brooke: Emily Briggs of Philadelphia.
OLIVIA WAXMAN: She said, "When we go to the Executive Mansion, we go to our own house. We recline on our own satin and ebony."
Brooke: Then we get to President Grover Cleveland and you say, that's when we begin to see the emergence of the White House reporter [01:34:00] that we'd recognize today.
OLIVIA WAXMAN: Right. There's a historian named Martha Kumar who pinpoints it to “Fatty” Price of The Washington Evening Star. He was one of the first reporters to work the White House beat. He sat at a table in a hallway and would pepper people with questions who were walking by. Martha Kumar found a letter that “Fatty” Price had written a White House staff member saying, thank you for the tablecloth. That seems to be the first sign we have that reporters were camped out, so to speak.
Brooke: We're talking there the 1880s, 1890s, you get to the 1900s to Teddy Roosevelt, who really loved reporters.
OLIVIA WAXMAN: Yes. He had a newspaper cabinet that typically would meet with him during Roosevelt's early afternoon shave. If you can imagine, reporters got that kind of access in the early [01:35:00] 20th century, enviable now. Teddy Roosevelt did banish reporters to what he called the Aeneas Club if the stories proved to be embarrassing for the President. Fortune magazine reported that the journalists would readily forgive him because he made "such astounding copy."
Brooke: Roosevelt had his favorites, whereas President Wilson seemed to open up his doors to a wide range of reporters. A lot of people. Less intimacy.
OLIVIA WAXMAN: Yes. Wilson's private secretary, Joseph Tumulty, told reporters that the President would, "look them in the face and chat with them for a few minutes." On March, March 15, 1913, 125 newspaper staffers showed up and Wilson said, "Your numbers forced me to make a speech to you en masse instead of chatting with each of you, as I had hoped to do, and thus getting greater pleasure and personal acquaintance out of this meeting."
Brooke: [01:36:00] Now, FDR, like his relative Teddy Roosevelt, was catnip for the press. He gave, you write, nearly 1,000 press conferences almost twice a week.
OLIVIA WAXMAN: Time reported that he kept most White House news hawks fluttering happily. Those press conferences were ones where they had a real exchange of information. It was being compared to Prime Minister's Question Time in the UK. He also locked the doors so no reporters could walk out.
Brooke: Of the press room?
OLIVIA WAXMAN: Yes.
[laughter]
On occasion he would call correspondents liars or tell them to put on dunce caps.
Brooke: Really? I guess it's okay to call a particular correspondent a liar if it's not being televised. That's when the next big change happened under Eisenhower.
OLIVIA WAXMAN: That's a watershed moment. James Haggerty, Eisenhower's press secretary, had been on the [01:37:00] campaign trail. He had worked with the press corps before. He knew what a difference the press made. January 1955 was the first televised news conference.
Brooke: With the president?
OLIVIA WAXMAN: Yes.
Eisenhower: Well, I see we're trying a new experiment this morning. I hope it doesn't prove to be a disturbing influence.
Speaker 3: With tomorrow, the second anniversary of your inauguration, I wonder if you'd care to give us an appraisal of your first two years and tell us something of your hopes for the next two, or maybe even the next six.
[laughter]
Eisenhower: Looks like a loaded question.
OLIVIA WAXMAN: They were thinking about it in the same way that Trump thinks about Twitter. This is our chance to get to the public directly, to be seen by the public directly.
Brooke: But Haggerty edited the thing. It wasn't in the control of any TV network.
OLIVIA WAXMAN: That's right. The New York Post was surprised at how scripted this was. I'll quote from that article. "What is most notable in all the [01:38:00] comment is the absence of protest over the censorship imposed by the White House, a censorship which the networks have supinely accepted. Thus, after Wednesday's conference, Haggerty deleted 11 of the 27 questions and answers before letting the show go on the road. For example, when asked about his delay in the reappointment of Ewan Clague as Commissioner of Labor Statistics, the president confessed he had never heard of the fellow."
Brooke: [laughs] Now, when you described LBJ's relationship to the press, in a way, it reminded me of Teddy Roosevelt's shaving. You note that Johnson was pretty unceremonious as well.
OLIVIA WAXMAN: Oh, yes. A White House reporter said that he once answered reporters' questions about the economy aboard Air Force One while stripping down until he was standing buck naked and waving his towel for emphasis. Johnson just didn't have any boundaries apparently.
Brooke: It was President Nixon who [01:39:00] gave the press corps their current home. But he wasn't thereby doing the press any big favor, right?
OLIVIA WAXMAN: Right. He wanted to keep presidential visitors and White House staff away from reporters, to designate a briefing room by putting a floor over the White House swimming pool. When it opened in 1970, the Washington Post said it looked like the lobby of a fake Elizabethan steakhouse when the stage is hidden behind the curtains. Ronald Reagan's press secretary, James S. Brady, for whom the briefing room is named, used to joke that he and Reagan always planned on installing a trap door so reporters who got out of line would fall into the swimming pool if he pushed a button on his podium.
Mickey Huff The Mainstream Media is [CENSORED] Part 4 - The Zero Hour with RJ Eskow - Air Date 1-11-25
RJ ESKOW - HOST, THE ZERO HOUR: And, of course, we've already seen, uh, the kowtowing, uh, by corporate owners of newspapers and other outlets, the genuflecting, including, uh, cartoon, the Washington Post cartoonist, literally doing a cartoon cartoon of Jeff Bezos, owner of the Washington Post, among [01:40:00] other things, and others genuflecting, including Mickey Mouse, representing the Disney Corporation, genuflecting to, uh, the incoming president, for which, which was censored.
So she, to her credit, she left her position rather than accept that, and I, I'm afraid more of us in the journalism profession will have to do that kind of thing, uh. As censorship accelerates. So, um, let's start with this. You mentioned public trust and project public confidence. Uh, you cite, uh, you and your co author of the introduction or overview section of state of the free press.
2025 you cite to you. It may be three, but I'm thinking of two statistics that are especially striking when they're conjoined the way you guys did. One is the ranking of the United States in freedom of the press, which has dropped [01:41:00] significantly. Never great, never what it should have been for a country that likes to call itself we're number one.
We haven't been close to number one for a long time. But it's dropping and at the same time public trust in the media. Is dropping. And yet, uh, we hear a lot of complaints from our colleagues in the media about especially mainstream media, uh, about wondering why people don't trust the media more. Well, you know, it's a matter of degree.
Fake news may have been weaponized against factual information, but there's a lot. I can't say You know, there's a lot of bullsh out there. Uh, I just have to edit it out. You
MICKEY HUFF: said it! You know,
RJ ESKOW - HOST, THE ZERO HOUR: and in the mainstream media, as well as, you know, the right wing media sphere. So let's start with this. I mean, I would argue that fake news would not [01:42:00] As, uh, Democrats define it, let's say, which is the right wing media sphere, would not be so successful if there weren't an overall, uh, authenticity or, uh, or authenticity.
Right. Truth problem. Credibility problem. Number one. And number two, that that includes casting a skeptical eye everywhere in the corporate media because they're all dependent on making profits for their owners and keeping their owners politically secure, as we've seen with this genuine flexion toward Trump.
But I mean, that's my thesis. Anyway, that's what I took away from that very first conjoining of two statistics. So what do you think?
MICKEY HUFF: Yeah, well, RJ, so much there to unpack and talk about. And again, I'm honored to have the opportunity to do that with you. You know, um, the U. S., by last count, I believe it was 54th, which was, or in the 50s, it was a pretty significant drop of, [01:43:00] I believe, nine places, perhaps, on the, the Press Freedom Index.
Um, by the way, Israel is not far, uh, from, from that status as well, openly censoring Al Jazeera and, and much of what's been happening in Gaza the past year. Um, but those, the, the conjoining I think is where it's again, the connecting of the dots, something that if corporate media reporters would connect more dots in an historically contextual way.
They may be able to actually reverse the trend of the lack of public trust. I mean, you're talking about an integrity problem here. And we just saw it writ large at the Washington Post, even though the editorial page editor, David Shipley, said that, well, that they didn't censor the cartoon because of the content.
It was because they already had. Um, they had already addressed some issue about it and it was redundant or something, but, you know, again, what, what echo chamber this person must be living in, in the Beltway there, you know, to not understand how these oligarchs have been lining up, genuflecting to [01:44:00] kiss the ring of the Trump 2.
0, um, behind Musk on these coattails, now Zuckerberg at Meta saying they're going to drop fact checking, which, by the way, was always a problem.
RJ ESKOW - HOST, THE ZERO HOUR: Right,
MICKEY HUFF: right. We can get into that later, but. But the trend is clear, right? We see even more people in big tech throwing money at the inauguration that wouldn't even do it for the Biden administration.
Um, we, we see more kowtowing to the Trump administration in, in the corporate media. MSNBC has basically tanked in its ratings. The whole Team Blue approach to media of pretending, uh, that everything is just going along fine and they can, they can just run their, You know, whatever candidate they choose.
Let's not forget that in the 2016 election, RJ, the Democrats illegally argued in court that they could choose their candidate in back rooms, smoking cigars, Tammany Hall style, because there were no laws preventing it. This is a party that has lost, really, total Connection with, um, you know, rank and file Americans in many ways.
And this is the reason too, that [01:45:00] we see in the elite media, the corporate media. Uh, I mean, Fox literally lies through its teeth and has to pay nearly billion dollar settlements for it. So it's not like we're letting them off the hook. Um, but the media haven't really tapped into, uh, issues that the public really cares about.
Look what happened recently. With the killing of the health care CEO, I mean, a majority of Americans came out almost gruesomely celebrating it for lack of a better phrase, but that again, that's that's that shows us that there is extraordinary perception gaps, right? The American public has certain ways that they're viewing what's happening that often is based on harsh economic realities.
Where as the democratic establishment and the corporate media, uh, they just want to keep, you know, kind of like it's that meme where you have the picture of the big horn that's placed over someone's head and just blasting it at them whether they want it or not. Um, and I just don't think that they've really learned any, any, any lessons about what's been going on in this country and what's been [01:46:00] driving this country.
Unfortunately, further to the right with such great irony because the solutions for many of the challenges and things we face are not going to be solved by the oligarchy that's created it. It's not going to be solved by a con man, grifter, and convicted felon coming in for a separate term who has great hostility towards journalists and the press in general.
But, you know, we're left with very few alternatives in our political system, RJ, because we've spent the last 50 years getting rid. Of it grassroots programs and having the Democrats become more and more right right center more and more based on the support of silicon valley and Uh, you know oligarchic money and corporate money So let's let's unpack the one thing that you said and i'd love to hear your views on this too You talked about again where we're we're declining in press freedom status worldwide We also have this massive credibility gap and now the fourth estate is polling at less favorability and less trustworthy [01:47:00] ratings than Congress.
I mean, that's pretty riveting, right? Given the negativity that many Americans have. Towards Congress, the Supreme Court in general. Um, what does that tell us? Well, it's interesting, RJ. I was interviewed by the New York Times, believe it or not. I'm glad you were sitting down. I was contacted by the New York Times a few months ago.
And they, it's the first time they've interviewed, uh, they've really covered anything that we've done at Project Censored since our inception 49 years ago, to my knowledge. Curiously. The subject was, uh, this was a, a correspondent based in Europe covering the Davos, uh, not Davos, I'm sorry, the Athena, the Democracy Forum in Athens.
Sorry. Um, and, and one of the themes of it was declining public trust in institutional journalism. Lo and behold.
RJ ESKOW - HOST, THE ZERO HOUR: Right.
MICKEY HUFF: As if the media started to find out that people weren't believing it anymore. And so they kind of went out and said, let's talk to some people about that. And somehow I got on the short list for [01:48:00] that.
So, which was great. It was a great opportunity. Let me just very, very briefly explain to you what happened, and all, all respect to the reporter who reached out and did this story. Um, but they were literally, they were just flabbergasted by what I had to say, which basically was just like, look, have you held up a mirror?
Have you read your paper? Have you really talked to people in the general public about any of the things that you report about regularly?
Public Broadcasting Is In Danger (Again) Part 2 - On the Media - Air Date 1-10-25
MICAH LOEWINGER - CO-HOST, ON THE MEDIA: We all know that local news is in retreat. As you just heard, the Medill Local News Initiative found as of 2023 that more than half of US counties have no or very limited access to anything other than national outlets.
BROOKE GLADSTONE - CO-HOST, ON THE MEDIA: One well-observed impact of losing local news. Local officials were more inclined to misbehave. Researchers at George Mason University in Tulane tallied corruption charges in federal districts that had lost a major daily newspaper [01:49:00] from 1996 to 2019. After those papers closed, the districts collectively saw a 6.9% increase in charges of bribery, embezzlement, fraud. The authors noted that only counts the people who got caught. The study also checked if the some 350 websites that sprang up as substitutes for those papers could make a dent in that number. They didn't.
MICAH LOEWINGER - CO-HOST, ON THE MEDIA: Wouldn't it be great if a solid piece of accountability reporting always resulted in a change for the better? It's rarely so simple. Its power is in the act of showing up with a microphone to every statehouse hearing or school board meeting, reading through police files, or putting in that umpteenth FOIA request. Even after all that and more, it can take years to see results, if at all, but sometimes all that tedious incremental reporting does start to add up. [01:50:00] Government malfeasance is exposed and good things happen. Take this example from Colorado in 2022 when the state was still recovering from the Marshall Fire, which destroyed over 1,000 homes. Scott Franz, a government watchdog reporter for KUNC Public Radio serving northern Colorado*, noticed that a popular bipartisan bill to fund investigations into the origins of wildfires mysteriously died.
SCOTT FRANZ: Why did this bill die? How did it die?
MICAH LOEWINGER - CO-HOST, ON THE MEDIA: Scott Franz.
SCOTT FRANZ: When I started talking to lawmakers, I discovered that there was a secret ballot system that lawmakers were using to anonymously rank the bills that they thought should get funding and ultimately get passed at the state house. The sponsor of this bill blamed its death on this secret ballot system.
MICAH LOEWINGER - CO-HOST, ON THE MEDIA: He wasn't the only one reporting on the new system, but he was the first to ask.
SCOTT FRANZ: Hey, wait a second, is this legal?
MICAH LOEWINGER - CO-HOST, ON THE MEDIA: Franz spent two years reporting dozens of [01:51:00] stories on this secret ballot system used by state Democrats, probing how the system worked and its impact on legislation.
SCOTT FRANZ: The public has a right to see how bills go through the process because, at the end of the day, if bills can just die quietly without explanation or accountability, it shut the public out of an important part of the decision-making process.
MICAH LOEWINGER - CO-HOST, ON THE MEDIA: In early 2024, a judge ordered lawmakers to stop using the system because it violated state law. In the state's most recent legislative session.
SCOTT FRANZ: For the first time, lawmakers made this process public. They published the results down to how each individual lawmaker voted in this process.
MICAH LOEWINGER - CO-HOST, ON THE MEDIA: Here's another example of the grind of accountability journalism paying off. In 2018, Matt Katz, former WNYC reporter and current executive producer of City Cast Philly, started reporting on immigrants detained by ICE in three New Jersey [01:52:00] county jails. He spent the next few years covering how these counties, run by Democratic politicians who publicly protested Trump immigration policies, were at the same time raking in millions of dollars from ICE under Trump.
MATT KATZ: There was immediate concern about this because people didn't know that in fact, their county budgets were being subsidized by ICE and therefore their taxes were lower.
MICAH LOEWINGER - CO-HOST, ON THE MEDIA: The public was also unaware of the horrific conditions in these jails.
MATT KATZ: I reported on allegations of sexual assault by officers, inhumane medical care like Bengay prescribed for a broken rib, or long delays in access to treatment for chronic illnesses.
MICAH LOEWINGER - CO-HOST, ON THE MEDIA: Other local outlets picked up on Katz's reporting, and people showed up outside the jails to protest. In 2021, New Jersey banned ICE detention facilities from opening in the state, but that ban was contested by a federal judge in 2023, [01:53:00] and now New Jersey is appealing that federal decision.
MATT KATZ: It's always hard as a reporter to know if something you reported is directly what caused some change. We were told on background that our reporting is what led to this. Certainly, the addition of reporting from other news outlets, editorials from local newspapers also put pressure on policymakers to do something about this.
BROOKE GLADSTONE - CO-HOST, ON THE MEDIA: Sometimes the grunt work of investigative reporting kicks in long after the spotlight on a story fades. In early 2015, ACLU reporter, Curt Guyette, broke the story of the Flint water crisis in Michigan to a national audience, painting a picture of millions of Flint residents exposed to tap water contaminated with staggering amounts of lead. Soon after Flint switched to a cleaner, safer reservoir in late 2015 and Barack Obama's emergency [01:54:00] declaration in January 2016, much of the national media moved on. That's when local reporters like Michigan Public Radio's Lindsey Smith doubled down.
LINDSEY SMITH: We really held onto it and did not let go. It was really wild, the number of times that we had to keep saying, "No, State, this is your responsibility. No, EPA, pretty sure that is your responsibility." That continued just for months and months.
BROOKE GLADSTONE - CO-HOST, ON THE MEDIA: Smith and her environmental reporting team spent years covering the state's response to the crisis. They also turned their eyes to other districts in Michigan.
LINDSEY SMITH: After the dust settled with Flint, it was very intuitive to turn our attention to places like Grand Rapids, Saginaw, Midland, Battle Creek. They had tons of lead lines. They had not been testing at any homes with lead lines for decades. We really were able to keep the pressure on to see, [01:55:00] "Okay, let's resolve this in other places."
BROOKE GLADSTONE - CO-HOST, ON THE MEDIA: As the government started admitting its wrongs and implementing new water safety rules, Michigan Public Radio was still pushing.
LINDSEY SMITH: Michigan now has adopted the toughest rules in the country because of the water crisis and because, frankly, we kept reporting on it as they went through this rulemaking process. Now the EPA has gone in and finally adapted some changes to their federal lead and capital rules, too.
BROOKE GLADSTONE - CO-HOST, ON THE MEDIA: They didn't do it alone.
LINDSEY SMITH: Flint Journal has some great reporters who did excellent, excellent job reporting on the Flint water crisis throughout, the Detroit Free Press, the Flint Journal, Curt Guyette at the ACLU, and us. I would really package those together. It was almost what needed to happen to make the state not ignore us.
BROOKE GLADSTONE - CO-HOST, ON THE MEDIA: This kind of painstaking reporting takes [01:56:00] time and money and the trust of bosses who might not have anything to air for years. It's certainly not profitable. It's merely a public trust, what Jefferson called the agitation produced by a free press. He said that, "It must be submitted to. It is necessary to keep the waters pure."
‘Do not forget’- Bernie Sanders has a message if you’re worried about Trump 2.0 - All In w/ Chris Hayes - Air Date
CHRIS HAYES - HOST, ALL IN: Senator Bernie Sanders, independent of Vermont, joins me now. Um, Senator, you know, it's striking to me that Members of your august body, who, say whatever you want about them, generally like their own power, would willingly move to confirm a man in Russell Vought, who's before the Budget Committee, to head OMB, when it is the position of that individual, that the President has every right to completely bypass the Senate and the Budget Committee on matters of spending.
Do you, what do you think is going to happen here?
SENATOR BERNIE SANDERS: Uh, I think everything being equal, uh, [01:57:00] vote is going to win. I suspect all or virtually all Democrats will vote against him. I think all Republicans will vote for him. You know, what Raphael Warnock was just talking about a moment ago, about the devastating, uh, cuts to programs that working families, low income people need, is absolutely correct.
And I'm glad that we fought back and, uh, for the moment, at least, uh, we have Uh, managed to get that freeze rescinded. The key point here is that what Trump did is illegal and unconstitutional. The power of the purse rests with Congress. Your point. And not with the executive, you know, the founding fathers, fathers were pretty smart about that.
They divided up the power. But I'll tell you something, when you talk about authoritarianism, Chris, it is not only vote and the power of the OMB and what Trump is doing, it is also, is, I'm sure you have noticed, his lawsuits against the media [01:58:00] when they do things that he's not happy with. So you got a suit against ABC, you got a suit against the Des Moines Register, you got a, Meta apparently gave him 25 million today.
So, what goes on, you know, if you say something tomorrow that Trump doesn't like, maybe he will sue NBC. And maybe your bosses will say, hey Chris, you gotta calm it down a little bit. We can't afford 50 million to Trump. So this is a real movement toward authoritarianism. And, when you add on top of that the movement toward oligarchy.
Three richest guys in America standing beside Trump at its inauguration. We got a lot of problems facing our country right now. I just want to
CHRIS HAYES - HOST, ALL IN: note since you brought it up, um, one thing that has been amazing to me is that the, is all the encouragement we've gotten from the folks here, uh, that run this news organization, that we're going to do what we do, under the First Amendment, fairly and precisely, with neither fear or favor.
Um, and, and I, you know, I'm confident in that. I really am. And I think your, your [01:59:00] point about the suing is wild. I want to actually stay on that for one moment. I don't think we've ever seen president as plaintiff before. It's a very bizarre situation that I don't think everyone's gotten their head around.
There's, there's a, there's a bunch of Supreme Court president about whether the president can be sued. But the idea of the president doing the suing and other people paying him settlements, that seems kind of odd.
SENATOR BERNIE SANDERS: It's not odd. It is extraordinarily dangerous. That is, if that's not undermining the First Amendment, I don't know what is.
So if you think that, you know, people in media are not going to be looking over their shoulders worrying about a lawsuit from Donald Trump, uh, you are mistaken. So we are in a dangerous situation. We are in an unprecedented, uh, situation. But here's what I want to say to listeners who are justifiably very worried.[02:00:00]
Do not forget that while Republicans control the House and the Senate, their margins are slim. Slim. Alright, they don't have 60 votes in the Senate, they got what, is it a 4 vote majority in the House? That ain't a lot of votes. And a number of republicans won by a small margin in democratic districts.
They are susceptible to citizen outrage. So, get on the phone if you see these guys doing something like wanting to give huge tax breaks to billionaires while they cut medicare. If they want to go drill baby drill while we have been facing an existential threat of climate change. If 20 million people in this country.
Stand up, fight back. We can beat them. So let's not act in a hopeless way. Oh my God, we can't do anything. We can. Longer term, obviously, we need to do what the Democratic Party has not done, has become the [02:01:00] party of the working class, developed a strong grassroots movement with labor unions, with young people, with people of color, and organize and fight back.
The progressive agenda, and I say this over and over again, It is the people's agenda. It is wildly popular. People understand the current healthcare system is broken. They want universal healthcare. Healthcare is a human right. They want to raise the salvation minimum wage.
Credits
JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: That's going to be it for today. As always, keep the comments coming in. I would love to hear your thoughts or questions about today's topic or our upcoming topics. We're gonna be looking at the rising oligarchy and Elon Musk's administrative coup currently in action, followed by a broader look at the long list of ways Trump and company are working to dismantle the government. You can leave a voicemail or send us a text at 202-999-3991. You can now reach us on the privacy-focused messaging app Signal at the username bestoftheleft.01. There's a link in the show notes for that. [02:02:00] Or simply email me to [email protected].
The additional sections of the show included clips from Behind the News, Midas Touch, The Zero Hour, The Gray Area, On the Media, and All In with Chris Hayes. Further details are in the show notes.
Thanks to everyone for listening. Thanks to Dion Clark and Erin Clayton for their research work for the show and participation in our bonus episodes. Thanks to our transcriptionist quartet, Ken, Brian, Ben, and Lara for their volunteer work helping put our transcripts together. Thanks to Amanda Hoffman for all of her work behind the scenes and her bonus show co-hosting. And thanks to all those who already support the show by becoming a member or purchasing gift memberships. You can join them by signing up today at BestOfTheLeft.Com/Support, through our Patreon page, or from right inside the Apple Podcast app. Membership is how you get instant access to our incredibly good and often funny weekly bonus episodes, in addition to there being no ads, and chapter markers in all of our regular episodes, all through your regular podcast player. You'll find that link in the show notes, along with a [02:03:00] link to join our Discord community, where you can also continue the discussion. And don't forget to follow us on any and all new social media platforms you might be joining these days.
So coming to you from far outside the conventional wisdom of Washington, DC, my name is Jay!, and this has been the Best of the Left podcast coming to you twice weekly, thanks entirely to the members and donors to the show from BestOfTheLeft.Com.
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