Air Date: 9-13-2026

Today we trace the two-front war on the American press. On one side, government regulators and members of Congress are going after news outlets for the stories they choose to run. On the other, politically friendly buyers are taking ownership of major networks to turn them into free-market versions of state media.

Full Show Notes

 

Welcome to this episode of the award-winning Best of the Left podcast.

Today we trace the two-front war on the American press. On one side, government regulators and members of Congress are going after news outlets for the stories they choose to run. On the other, politically friendly buyers are taking ownership of major networks to turn them into free-market versions of state media.

For those looking for a quick overview, the sources providing our Top Takes in about 55 minutes today include

Blonde Politics

The Beat

This Is Hell!

BreakThrough News

Last Week Tonight

Democracy Now!

and Adam Conover

Then, in the additional, Deeper Dives half of the show, there'll be more in 4 sections;

Section A, The FCC Weaponized

Section B, Journalists in the Crosshairs

Section C, Who's Buying, Who's Cashing In

And Section D, Building Something Better

And now, on to the show.

Why does it matter if a big media corporation buys another media corporation? When Eisenhower left office in 1961, he gave a speech warning about the now infamous military industrial complex. 

The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist 

He affirmed the importance of an alert and knowledgeable citizenry.

The thing is, you can't have an alert and knowledgeable citizenry without a free and strong media. When the media becomes too consolidated, it's easy to control because this concentration leaves the media too centralized to resist pressure, too dependent on government approval to advocate for their journalists, their content, their entertainers, and their audiences.

When people think about state media, they tend to think of countries like North Korea, but there are countries around the world, countries that Donald Trump is fond of, that he could be looking to as a blueprint, where the corporate-owned media tend to work for the state. The infrastructure of state media is bought by private capital, which avoids problems like legal obstacles, while achieving basically the exact same outcome: the machinery for propaganda.

The US is in the first stages of doing this. You have a president using the bully pulpit to discredit the media. You have a president encouraging his friends in the oligarchy to buy out media outlets. You have a president willing to use regulatory approvals as bargaining chips, and you have the promotion of media companies which work to sanitize the administration.

This doesn't look like an overnight coup of the media. Instead, it's a creeping phenomenon. Let's look at the media in Viktor Orbán's Hungary as an example. When Orbán took power in 2010, Hungary was considered free But by 2017, 90% of the media was owned by people allied to Orbán's political party, Fidesz.

Money from the state went to pro-government media, while opposition media faced extreme regulatory pressures, and by 2019, 80% of public affairs programming was financed by people connected to Orbán's party. Same is the case in Turkey, where Erdoğan's friends own 90% of the nation's media, and they use it blatantly to favor Erdoğan and to disadvantage his opponents.

And of course, the same is happening in Putin's Russia. When Putin took power in 2000, the media was more diverse. There were three national networks that were giving differing coverage to politics, and that was completely done by 2004. Putin and his administration have complete control over the daily news coverage, and they have the ability to dictate content and censor certain topics for conversation.

Don't for a minute think that I'm trying to suggest that the situation in America is a perfect comparison for these countries. There are a lot of things that are not happening in America. Journalists aren't being thrown in prison. The First Amendment seems to be holding up in court. There is still plenty of negative coverage of the administration on television, and there is no state censor dictating content.

That said, these things happen quickly, and indirect forms of suppression, like economic pressure, legal harassment, regulatory punishment, that's how this private consolidation starts. 

How did we get to the point where four or five corporations aligned with the current administration own the media? This may come as a shock. But things started to fall apart under the Reagan administration.

The Fairness Doctrine was eliminated, so were financial syndication rules. The limits on concentration of TV station ownership were eliminated. That facilitated Rupert Murdoch's purchase of the TV stations that became the foundation of the Fox Network. But it was actually under Bill Clinton that things truly picked up pace.

Bill Clinton and the Telecommunications Act of 1996 did the most damage. Republicans at the time saw the Telecommunications Act as a chance to overturn some of the restrictions on media consolidation and caps on ownership that still existed from the New Deal. Al Gore intervened to stop the complete elimination of limits, but the caps were loosened significantly.

There used to be a strict bright-line rule about media ownership, and that moved to a more discretionary system where regulators could approve such acquisitions. Basically, the situation that we're looking at right now. These mergers have resulted in big media. As things get further consolidated and as technology expands, the strict lines that divide up the media ecosystem get blurry.

But for the sake of this very quick overview, I want you to think of the media like this. There are production companies. They are responsible for making content. Then there are networks that distribute content. Obviously, many of these also produce their own content, but this is where content libraries are really built in the media world.

This level of the media ecosystem is similar to book publishers. A lot of you will be able to recognize network names from commercial and cable television, which now compete with other platforms, namely streaming platforms. So this is where we consume actual products, and I know it's confusing because these guys produce now, too.

I told you it was messy now. But throughout the entire ecosystem, most of the things you see are owned by the five major players I mentioned. The concerning thing is that some of these companies have very close ties to the current administration. Skydance Paramount, for instance, is owned by Larry Ellison's fail son, David, and the Fox Corporation is obviously owned by the Murdochs.

Even Comcast has put money in to fund the building of Trump's new ballroom at the White House. So that's three out of the Big Five with an explicit connection to the Trump administration. On top of that, both Sinclair and Nexstar, which are the dominant forces in local television, are big supporters of Trump.

In 2016, Sinclair's chairman, David Smith, told Trump, "We are here to deliver your message." Added to all of this is the fact that the Federal Communications Commission has been using things like merger approvals and interpretations of certain regulations to overtly apply pressure to the networks. Nexstar, Warner Brothers, Disney, all of them have merger deals waiting for FCC approval, and the commission has made no secret about their willingness to use those approvals politically.

Brendan Carr, the chairman of the FCC, has already stated in the Project 2025 chapter that he authored that the FCC should be interpreting Section 230 in a more overtly political way. Section 230 is there to protect service providers so that they're not treated as the publisher or the speaker of information that another person puts on their platform.

More strictly interpreting Section 230 would mean that streaming platforms and networks would be able to be held liable for any and all of the content on them. The same is true for Twitter and Facebook and Instagram. This would mean that these platforms would crack down far harder on the content that they air because they'll be legally and financially responsible for it.

It doesn't take a genius to understand why administration-friendly corporations owning all commercial news stations is a problem. In fact, we've seen what happens when that occurs in front of our very eyes. 

They said you can't come home again, but here I am. And if you thought the president hated Jimmy Kimmel Live when it was hosted by Jimmy Kimmel, buckle up, people. Buckle up

Rosie O'Donnell making a rare return to television where she exercised her First Amendment rights that we have in this country. She is a longtime Trump foe. The president has threatened and attacked her in all sorts of ways, and yet here she is. It is obviously quite symbolic, but also literally powerful when it comes to the role of the free press and free speech in this country, which spans from the serious to the comedic to the cultural, as we've covered, that she is there for Jimmy Kimmel, who successfully fought back Trump's efforts to censor him through the abuse of government power.

Now, Rosie made her own choice to actually move to Ireland days before Trump's second inauguration 

I've been living in Ireland for the past two years because of Mango Mussolini. I read that Project 2025 and said, "Gotta get myself out of here," And I decided to go to Ireland, a place where people are driven to drink regardless of who's running their country

O'Donnell discussing her own recent history, her political sort of situation, while also doing what she and Kimmel do so well that makes them such potent foes to this president who can't take a joke, mixing in a little humor. But this is also in the news tonight because of a wider development. ABC fighting back against those efforts to censor and bully and abuse power against Kimmel and other ABC programming.

So ABC's filed this new lawsuit against the Trump FCC over their threats and retaliation campaign to potentially try to force some stations off the air. ABC coming out swinging says the Trump FCC is waging this retaliatory campaign for one reason, the Trump administration, quote, "disapproves of ABC's editorial choices."

The suit also says these ABC stations have no choice but to seek judicial protection against this Trump FCC's assault on their, quote, "right to speak." And that's what this comes down to. We have never seen the Federal Communications Commission blatantly abused in this way with its leadership, and of course the president above it, admitting the plot.

Here is the Trump FCC chair. 

I'd be surprised if we ultimately don't go down the path of license revocation for some. 

President Trump is fundamentally reshaping 

the entire media ecosystem. Look at the changes over the last couple of years that I think are attributable to Trump running at the fake news media.

You've got NPR defunded. You've got PBS defunded. You've got CBS having new ownership. CNN is getting new ownership

They admit it. The government is not supposed to, quote, "reshape the independent press" at all. And you don't need to be a constitutional scholar to remember why this is the very first amendment, the one that so many people are familiar with. There's a bunch of other sort of less important amendments and certainly didn't put-- the, the founders didn't put first.

Because a democracy governed with the consent of the public needs free speech for the public, the candidates, and the people they rely on, or you don't really have a democracy at all. That's how serious this is. That's what ABC's up against. And so they are taking a rare step here to suing the government, the Trump administration.

And remember, if you're thinking, well, that's unusual, right? It, it is because news networks usually go out of their way to try to remain both neutral in fact and certainly in how they'll be perceived. And so if you are suing and thus criticizing the government, not as part of your news coverage, but as part of the arm of your station, well, you risk people saying, "Oh, I guess they really are against the government."

That's what's happening. And it wouldn't have happened without Jimmy Kimmel's brave stand, where he risked his whole career saying he wouldn't just give in and say whatever they wanted him to say, and then eventually ABC found its strength. Now, that is my observation. If you follow this show closely, you might recall I practiced First Amendment law before I came in full time to this network.

But here's how The New York Times put it today. The ABC lawsuit is, quote, "unusual for this reason, a rare example of a major media organization suing the administration over its unrelenting campaign to punish the press through re-regulation and lawsuits." And of course, it is usually Trump and his many lawyers who are suing everybody else.

In fact, you can see there's many different cases we've tracked against media companies, the tech companies which increasingly matter in media, right? YouTube is a platform, and on the left, so many outlets, including the Rupert Murdoch-owned Fox News sister paper, The Wall Street Journal. Trump's suing them all, and usually on nights like this, I'm here reporting to you about what those companies have to say in response in court.

But tonight I'm telling you about how they are picking the fight, so to speak. Why they are bringing the FCC to court. And again, that's only because Kimmel fought and he won, and ABC found that something a lot of liberals were saying, frankly, from day one of this experiment, giving in only makes it worse.

If you are right, if the law is on your side, and I don't mean in a liberal or conservative way, the liberals just happen to be the ones to point this out, but if you are right about the First Amendment and free speech, then yeah, you better fight, not give in. what do you see as important in ABC taking a, a relatively rare step of suing the Trump administration over free speech?

Well, it's a pretty straightforward and bold declaration, right? If you look at the first two words of their legal brief, and you're the lawyer here, Ari, but it said, "Government censorship." And it defined the stakes very clearly as the idea that a media company was essentially having retribution or, retaliation taken against it for news coverage, for, commentary, and for, satire, that the president didn't like.

And it said that this, rush to accelerate the review of these local lic- TV licenses that, that ABC and its parent company, the Walt Disney Company, hold, i- it, it is this effort. It's the means through which the leverage that the government has to do this. and so, they're saying, very stark terms, this is about free speech and, freedom of the press in the era of Donald Trump, and I think a lot of other media companies are paying close attention.

times have changed nearly 15 years later. People behind many of the institutions that were once threatened by Greenwald now fund the companies that pay him.

They do so as part of a push by the tech industry to build a new media ecosystem, one that seldom critiques those in power and eagerly punishes those agitating for change. So Upton Sinclair obviously famously said, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

Do you think that is happening with journalists like Greenwald, like Taibbi, when the tech industry buys up and creates a new media e- ecosystem, that they cannot see or report on any criticism because it is criticism of the bosses that pay them? Is that the... Are, are they going through this Upton Sinclair journalism model, if you will? Yeah, that's, that's certainly my thesis. that's, that's what I see them doing. I think that They, just to, just to, I guess, go back a little bit to their shift right. this was a, an- and I'll give a, a really condensed version of this, but, Glenn, I think after eight years of frustration with Democrats and their, their liberal allies in the media during the Obama m- years, where they were supporting all this war on terror stuff, when Trump came along, the way that the Democrats were going after him were these, conspiracy theories about Russia and, these, these, embracing the national security state in opposition to Trump and pushing the party to a right wing that I think that he did not care for, and frankly, I did not either.

I, I am with him on that. but he allowed that to take over his politics to the point where he started to, treat Republicans, far-right Republicans, like they were allies in, in this fight, as opposed to, maybe people who you had a brief alliance of... you might believe in the same thing or be saying the same thing, but you're saying it for completely different reasons, if that makes sense.

And, that kind of became his politics through, through the, the Biden, through the, through the Trump years, then when Biden was elected, he, he pretty much flipped to the right at that point. He went to Substack, and then, he took a deal with Peter Thiel's Rumble in 2021, and since then he has been working for them. he has not really been criticizing Peter Thiel, not that he did a whole bunch before, but he did a little bit. but same thing with... I, I, I did this report, this analysis in, early 2021 where I looked at Glenn's tweets about Fox News before and after Tucker Carlson and Fox started having him on a lot, and I graphed them out to show, negative versus positive, and it's just, I mean it's, ridiculous. the amount of positive just, explodes once they start having him on. and it was pretty negative beforehand. And, and you can do the same thing in, in the reverse with MSNBC. so I think that his... It, it just like his, his material interests here are pretty clear. and, him, him not cr- criticizing, Peter Thiel.

He is very careful in how he goes after Palantir now. he is just, he... One, one example that's not in the book, but, but one thing that I think is, is pretty funny is that, Jack Dorsey, the former, Twitter CEO, was, we later found out, was planning to or did give a bunch of money to Glenn's dog, nonprofit in Brazil.

And at the same time, Jack was very interested in crypto, and around the time that they were starting to negotiate this, Glenn started tweeting approvingly of crypto all the time. so it's like you can kinda do this one-to-one of, of a lot of the things that he's interested in or promoting or deciding not to criticize anymore can often be, directly related to his, pecuniary interests.

As far as Taibbi, I think his shift came around the same time he was frustrated with Russiagate. Liberals decided that they didn't like him anymore, and he tried to do this kind of hard reset with them with this Eric Garner book Called I Can't Breathe. And during the promotion of that in, fall of 2017, the Me Too movement hit, and, his past writings of The Exile were, were, were brought up again, and torpedoed that book tour.

And I think a lot of liberals who were angry with him about Russiagate and, his reporting on that went after him and, and, and were, were eager to use that as, as a way to, to attack him. So I think that for him it was maybe a little more personal, but he certainly has embraced his role as a right-wing culture warrior at this point. everything he says at this is just... you- if you go onto his Twitter page, it's just like anti-vax, anti-trans. he's talking about Russiagate from, 2017 and, and about the Twitter Files. And the Twitter Files is an important point here because while Matt makes his money on Substack and doesn't have, a paid deal with them, he just, uses the service. Elon Musk chose him to, ex- quote-unquote, "expose" the Twitter Files, which were these kind of carefully curated documents from within Twitter that Musk wanted released in a certain way that would, help his, help his kind of ideological aims. And, Taibbi was suggested by David Sacks, a fellow billionaire, and he, he was only too happy to, promote Musk's, preferred narrative there.

So, I, I think that these guys, their, their decisions in what to cover, the way that they have turned to the right, I, I find this stuff... it, it... Everyone's complicated, right? this is a nuanced story. It's not a, it's, it's not a easy, like one plus one equals two. but you can look at all of their behavior and their actions and trace it back to where they're making money from and, and, and what that money looks like, and it, it, it usually tells a pretty clear story.

We are speaking with journalist and historian Owen Higgins, who is author of Owned: How Tech Billionaires on the Right Bought the Loudest Voices on the Left. He can be found on X at E-O-I-N Higgins, Owen Higgins underscore, where, he regularly engages with a large audience on tech and US and world politics.

Is, is a fantastic follow. So, you point out that decades since the wars for controlling the new media began, we ne- may never kn- prove who bought whom, but we certainly know who is owned, as in the title of your book. If a journalist is owned, as you say, by tech billionaires, do they immediately lose all credibility, not only fr- from the left, but from everyone?

Does everyone become skeptical and quit following journalists who have been bought and owned, abandoned, a- a- after they abandon their journalistic ethics, in- including those that may be reflected in the mainstream edia- media? To what degree are they held accountable for their choices? Yeah, that's a really good question. I guess in the court of public opinion, one of the things that's happening here is these tech guys are intentionally decentralizing and disrupting institutional media. Now, this isn't, necessarily a bad thing, right? I'm not saying that mainstream and/or institutional, independent critical media are, above reproach or that they, should should be treated with, a, a- an amount of respect and deference.

But I do think that They are being attacked and shaken by this decentralization for a very specific and explicit reason, which is that these tech guys, these Silicon Valley billionaires do not like critical media, and they do not like media that's l- that, that is looking at them in a critical way.

They don't like feeling that their behavior, their business interests are under the microscope. And so for, for their purposes, it's much better to have this overall decentralized media where they can control some of it and... But there's no like- There's no universally agreed on ethics or truth 

Breakthrough News, as many of you may have seen, has been subpoenaed by the Republican-run House Ways and Means Committee. They didn't send us a letter. They didn't send us, a polite request. They sent us a subpoena demanding our internal communications, our financial records, and, and a lot more, which is just wild 

Yeah, and I think it's important for us to be clear of what we're actually accused of, which is nothing.

there's no crime, and we have not been charged with anything. 

Yeah, that's, that's, that's certainly true. We haven't been charged with anything because there is no crime, right? We are a non-profit newsroom, and as a non-profit newsroom, we already comply with every tax rule, with every audit, every public reporting requirement there is, we have already complied with.

We haven't also taken a dime from any foreign government as these people are trying to insinuate. 

So yeah, I guess the question is, what is the actual offense? what did we even do? 

That's a, that's a really good question, Zoe. What did we do? Because from my vantage point, what we did wrong in the eyes of these people who have subpoenaed us, is we've covered the Palestine Solidarity Movement, with staunch opposition to the genocide in Gaza.

We have showed people what ICE is actually doing in the streets of America, which is something that these people are very upset about. we've reported on Washington's crimes around the world, from Cuba to the Congo to Iran to here in Lebanon, where I'm speaking to you from. That's it. That's what we've done.

That's the whole indictment. That's our big crime, which actually is not a crime, Zoe. 

Right. it is literally journalism. That is literally just us doing our jobs and, a- and, and doing, doing journalism. I don't really know what else to call it. 

Yeah, I think that that's the journalism, the kind of journalism that these people would like to shut down.

and that's the strategy here. they know that our budget at Breakthrough News is, literally microscopic compared to the billionaire-funded networks that literally run the airwaves. they don't even need to win here or prove we did anything wrong. 

I think this is really just about trying to bury us in legal proceedings, until we basically, run out of money or just stop reporting out of intimidation, which is also a part of the tactic here.

Yeah, and that's what people need to understand, is that this is a playbook that they deploy. and again, they, they target us, because of what we've been covering, but also because we're small, and it really sends a message to every independent media outlet- Mm-hmm ... that this could be you next if you don't fall in line.

Yeah. Which is basically shut up and don't do your job. 

No, no, no, that's exactly right. It sends a message. this is... I think people really need to recognize this is not just an attack on little old Breakthrough News. this is an attack on all independent media, and literally freedom of the press itself.

And it's, it's ironic, Zoe, because it's coming from the same politicians who ran on, defending free speech, mostly from, the woke left. but right now actually what they're doing is they're attacking free speech that they don't like. 

Yeah. And I think probably our viewers are wondering what can people do to help, to join us in this in, as we, as we are facing really an unprecedented attack?

Well, first of all, I wanna say there's been an outpouring of support from people who are outraged, as they should be, by this very unconstitutional attack on journalism. But there are two very concrete things that you can do right now, if you are outraged about this and if you do support Breakthrough News and support independent media.

First, go sign the petition. you can find it at our website, breakthroughnews.org. this petition is telling the Ways and Means Committee to stop muzzling the press and to drop this investigation, this witch hunt against Breakthrough News. And the second very concrete thing that you can do is you can donate.

we've retained legal counsel, and we are absolutely going to fight this, but fighting costs money, and our funding comes from viewers, not from billionaires, and certainly not from foreign states. It comes from you. So go to breakthroughnews.org, sign the petition, and go find the donation link there and donate so you can help us push back, again, against this attack on independent media and on press freedom.

And people should know, all of those friends and foes who are watching, we are not going to be quiet. we're not gonna stop doing the journalism that we've been doing, that has defined us, that has grown us this audience that we have today, because we know that's the journalism that's needed.

We know that's the journalism that's actually needed in a moment where freedom of the press is under attack. 

in America, almost all public media falls under the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which until recently distributed funding to over 500 radio and TV grantees, representing more than 1,500 locally managed and operated stations nationwide.

Together, the system reaches nearly 99% of the US population with free programming and services. And public media's been truly innovative in reaching underserved audiences. It was public TV station that, first invented closed captioning in the 1970s, and stations around the country offer programming in Haitian Creole, Navajo, Vietnamese, and many other languages.

But as you undoubtedly know, it is now facing a serious threat as over the summer, Congress decided to eliminate $1.1 billion that had been allocated to fund public broadcasting for the next two years. It was something that Trump celebrated like this. 

Public broadcasting, they've been looking to get it out of there for billions and billions of dollars, and very, very unfair.

Very, very unfair reporting. They would, I would say they make CNN look honest. And, we got rid of it finally. We got rid of it. We got rid of billions of dollars that was wasted on that. 

In July, Congress approved Trump's plan to eliminate the CPB's funding entirely. It is one of many egregious actions this administration has taken, which is why the number one search on Google this year is probably gonna end up being, "Wait, can the government do that?"

And all of this has understandably upset a lot of people, even some that you may not have thought would be fans of public media, like this guy. 

Public radio, it's a national treasure. where else would you go? As a young man, I watched Ginger Baker have a drum-off against the drummer from Ratt. And, on Rock School, on PBS.

You're not gonna find that on network television. And not, not to mention Sesame Street. look, this is, this is a, Mr. Rogers. It's quality programming and it always has been, and it's a, a damn shame to just throw it in the toilet like that. 

But I know what you're thinking. You are thinking, "I had no idea that the berserker Blothar, lead vocalist of heavy metal band Gwar, was such a fan of public media," but apparently he is, and it is both beautiful and confusing- ... to watch him utter the words Mr. Rogers. As it's hard to imagine them in the same universe, although I'll say, I would love to have seen Gwar on Mr.

Rogers. Blothar, you are special just the way you are. Your diseased undercarriage composed of abscess-riddled penises makes you, you. But he is right. This budget cut is devastating. Actually, may- maybe take that down. This cut, this cut will be felt all over, but especially in rural, remote, and tribal communities.

One analysis estimates that as many as 115 stations collectively serving 43 million Americans are likely to close by mid next year. And as a DJ at this Colorado station explains, these stations can fill a vital community role. 

One of the things that we do is provide public service announcements that, inform people of meetings that are important to the community that they don't always get in a timely fashion otherwise.

Some examples that I just read on this morning's show include, an announcement about a distribution of school supplies that is occurring today. Here's an announcement about a free sloppy joe luncheon- ... for veterans and homeless. 

Exactly. That man who looks like Santa Claus if he got just the right amount into the Grateful Dead is completely right.

He should also, by the way, probably be public radio's new mascot, given he has the quintessential public radio voice, beard, and general vibe. Honestly, if the next NPR tote for sale does not have that man's face on it- ... they're leaving money on the table The point is public media provides incredible benefits to the communities that it serves, and it has just suffered a gigantic blow.

So given that, tonight, let's talk about public media, how it works, what it does, and how we go forward. And let's start with the fact that the system as we currently know it started when LBJ signed the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 into law, announcing it like this. 

This corporation will assist stations and producers who aim for the best in broadcasting good music, in broadcasting exciting plays, in broadcasting reports 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. 

Yeah, that was a bold move. The kind of thing that takes some truly enormous balls, which as you should know from recordings that we've played of LBJ complaining to the head of the company that made his trousers, that the crotch down where your nuts hang is always a little too tight, he definitely had.

And quick side note, you may remember a few weeks ago, we had this potentially life-sized replica of LBJ's balls made and offered them to his presidential library. Well, I've got good news and bad news. The good news is we heard from them. The bad news is they politely declined our offer, but in doing so said, "Please accept this basket of fruit and nuts as a token of our appreciation for all you do."

This is the basket they sent, which contains, and this is true, a variety of nuts and fruits all in sets of two, which is- ... excellent. Anyway, as Lyndon Balls Johnson just said- ... that one act authorized the creation of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which then in turn created PBS and NPR. But the CPB's role wasn't to directly produce content or oversee public media as a state arm.

It was primarily to distribute funding for it while crucially remaining independent of the government. That is why the CPB's a private nonprofit corporation. The only issue is that despite not being a government agency, it is still funded like one, as its funding is embedded in the annual congressional appropriations process.

And because Congress controls its funding, that's always left the CPB vulnerable to political attacks. Almost from the start, it has been a punching bag for Republicans. Just two years after it was created, Nixon proposed slashing its funding in half, reportedly to help meet the financial demands of the Vietnam War, because apparently the CPB was a bad use of public money, unlike, Vietnam.

That is what led to this famous moment in a hearing about the CPB's funding when Fred Rogers arrest- addressed a skeptical senator and described what his show was all about. 

This is what I give. I give an expression of care every day to each child to help him realize that he is unique. 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." And 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 

I think it's wonderful. I think it's wonderful. Looks like you just earned the $20 million.

Wow. That is a truly heartwarming thing that would never, ever happen today. If Mr. Rogers had given that exact same testimony this year, Ted Cruz would have called him a radical left lunatic, Fox News would have run with the headline "Mr. Rogers' Socialist Neighborhood," and the White House would have posted an AI video of President Trump kicking him in the balls.

But while public media's funding was saved on that day, it has been threatened consistently ever since, usually with complaints about its so-called liberal bias. 

Why is it a small elite group at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting that gets to spend money they didn't earn? What right do they have to dole out your money?

I think the people at PBS, see themselves as social agents. They see themselves as having this great forum, this great platform to push what they think will be the good society. 

It is brainwashing the American people, and more significantly, American children with un-American, anti-family, pro-crime fake news.

Okay, so a few things in order. First, what right do they have to spend money they didn't earn applies to literally any use of taxpayer money, and also congratulations to Newt and Callista Gingrich on their documentary Journey to America, released this year on guess what, PBS. Second, if you're curious why this guy was speaking on behalf of a group called Concerned Women for America, so am I.

And finally, as for Marjorie Taylor Greene's comment, I think we all know what she means by anti-family, but I'd love to know what PBS programming is being interpreted as pro-crime. Is it the episode of Arthur where the brain gets himself into a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde situation? 

I'm sitting here and I'm wearing, red, in honor of The Washington Post guild. I'm a proud union member, and my ability to even challenge my firing, to file a grievance, and then to go to arbitration was all thanks to the fact that, The Washington Post guild and the Washington-Baltimore News Guild had in their contract, for binding arbitration.

So as much as this is a victory for me, this is a victory for guilds, for unions. and as well as, I'm feeling very much like this is beyond just a job, beyond just me, beyond just The Washington Post. This is a victory for journalism, for anyone who wants to stand up, for just speaking the truth, for...

I was just doing my job. so I really do see this as, a, as a symbol that it's worth it to stand up and fight for freedom of expression, for journalistic freedom. And when you fight, sometimes you win, and sometimes you win big, like in my case. 

So Karen, could you tell us, have people from the Post been in touch with you since this was announced, and in particular, the Post's former opinions editor, Adam O'Neill?

I have heard nothing from Adam O'Neill. the only time I've heard from him was once last year in a meeting, and then secondly during the arbitration where he testified against me. my lawyers and reps, at the moment are going back and forth, with the Post, as I understand. But for me, I have still not heard anything yet from The Washington Post.

And, and explain, Karen, why exactly, what the justification was that was given, for The Washington Post decision to, to sack you from, from your post. They cited, among other things, security threats, but not security threats against you. 

Right. So two things. the Washington Post argued that my posts, disparaged white men and were in violation of their social media policy.

Of course, anyone reading with any reasonable amount of, reading and grammar comprehension could see that I was talking about white men who choose to engage in hatred and violence. So there was that. And then the Post tried to make the argument that because the Charlie Kirk killing was such an overly emotional time that they had no choice but to distance themselves from me, and I think this is actually a really, really important point of the arbitrator's decision.

she reminded the Post of their own policies to protect their journalists, especially in times of heightened social media abuse a- a- and attacks. I can say from my experience, frankly, the posts that I made did not engender that much backlash. I was not aware of any threats. And instead of the Washington Post calling me, telling me about the posts, they didn't even tell me to take them down.

Instead, they threw me to the wolves and basically blamed me for any, supposed threat. The Washington Post basically manufactured a crisis of their own making in terms of the, in terms of posts and used that as a reason to get rid of me. 

And could you place this, Karen, in the context of broader attacks on the media, under the Trump administration and also about what's going on internally and has been going on at the Washington Post?

So my firing, at the time, of course, people familiar with, the Washington Post trajectory, particularly over the last couple of years, this came after, Jeff Bezos said that the opinion section was only going to cover personal liberties and free markets and nothing else. So there was already a chilling effect and a, a sense of censorship.

there were buyouts that were offered to the entire opinion section, of which I refused. I decided I wanted to stay, and part of the reason why I wanted to stay was because I was the last full-time staff Black opinion columnist in the section. And, for a city that has historically been majority, Black, I, I guess I just felt a sense that I needed to stay and do as much of the work, as I could.

and in terms of the broader, broader picture, there's been an attack on the media. We've seen how, specifically in the Charlie Kirk case, how, JD Vance, members of the right wing were explicitly telling people to go after any critics of Charlie Kirk, and explicitly telling them to go after their jobs.

of course, we saw what happened to Jimmy Kimmel. All of this is coming, in an environment where more and more media are f- are facing pressure to kowtow to Trump, to kowtow to MAGA. and so for me, again, I think this is why my reinstatement and this win means so much for so many people because they see this as a proxy for standing up to, this, wave of censorship and oppression and targeting, particularly of Black voices and removing, Black voices deemed as DEI from the public sphere.

And could you talk about in your, recent Substack piece, you mentioned Marc Thiessen, the col- Post columnist who encouraged Charlie Kirk critics to be doxxed and said on social media, using an expletive, "F the media and liberal Democrats," but he still has his job at The Post 

Right. Well, it all goes back to how ironically the Post's treatment of me versus my white male colleagues just goes to the point of how men who encourage harm or at least support it or appear to platform it are coddled, are, are, are given a, a pat on the back and, and, allowed to keep going.

Whereas myself, a woman journalist, a Black woman journalist, I get the harshest of punishments. And not just the harshest of punishments, but I myself am labeled a threat. So for the Post saying that my post went against journalistic integrity, perhaps they were more afraid that I actually, clocked the behavior of America and The Washington Post when it comes to, white men who choose to engage in violence.

I, I, I was just calling a thing a thing. and they, The Washington Post, once again in their treatment of me versus my white male colleagues, proved me right. 

a lot of people who make commercial art, a lot of people in Hollywood, don't actually get paid that well to do it for every particular gig, right? Often they'll take a pay cut, or they'll work for below their rate because they're told, "Hey, the movie's gonna come out, it's gonna do super well, and that'll improve your career.

That'll make, it easier for you to get the next job. Hey, you might even feel good about yourself because you got to make a piece of good art, and isn't that why you got into the business to begin with?" But you can't get that boost on your resume, you can't get that swell of pride in your chest if the movie you made never comes out to begin with.

And to be clear, the movie didn't get shelved because it was bad. It tested well with audiences, and we know now that it was, in fact, a very good movie. No, it was shelved because the judgment of the executives in charge of Warner Brothers, the judgment of David Zaslav and his cronies, was that this movie was unlikely to make money.

Even though it's good, "Ah, it doesn't have a big enough of a star, animated, is it for kids or adults? Who knows? Ah, you know what? Better to just bank the guaranteed $30 million tax break than roll the dice with this piece of art or whatever the creatives are calling it." And they did this even though doing so caused a public outcry.

Fans were mad because the movie sounded cool and they wanted to see it, and people in the film industry w- were mad because Warner Brothers was basically saying it was getting out of the business of making movies. what kind of movie studio are you if you try to make money by not releasing movies?

It's like a bookstore trying to make money by burning books, or a restaurant trying to make money by throwing their food in the trash. This made so little sense that even the famously nice Will Forte publicly called it fucking bullshit. Now, Warner Brothers said that the creatives could salvage the movie by shopping it around, but then they turned down several offers to buy the rights.

And the movie basically languished for years on end until Ketchup Entertainment was finally able to buy the rights for $50 million. And finally, we, the public, got to see whether or not this movie was bad enough to be thrown in the garbage. And guess what? It was not. Spoiler alert, the movie was good. It was very good, in fact.

it wouldn't have been surprising if this had just been another IP piece of schlock, right, like so many films that come out. But no, it was a movie that was funny, it was written with heart, the story beats are hit perfectly. The audience of adults that I watched this movie with at 9:10 PM in Glendale on a Sunday evening burst into applause at multiple story beats.

And in the climactic scene of the movie, you could hear people crying. And I know that seems hard to believe that you could cry at a Wile E. Coyote movie, but if you have seen the movie, you know the scene that I'm talking about, and you can't tell me your heartstrings were not tugged at. It was genuinely moving.

And part of that is because the story actually means something. first of all, it's a story about, the little guy fighting and prevailing against some evil corporate suits who are trying to destroy cartoons in order to make a buck. Oh, I wonder where they got that idea. Hey, maybe that's why David Zaslav didn't want to release the movie in the first place.

Who's to say? But more importantly, the themes that the writers found underneath this endless battle between Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner, it was genuinely, a powerful set of ideas. The theme of this movie is about the nobility of trying and failing over and over again. The movie explicitly connects Wile E.

Coyote to the myth of Sisyphus, not just the, Greek legend about the man who's forced to roll a boulder up a hill over and over again only to have it fall down the other side for eternity, but it also explicitly connects to the famous book by Albert Camus. I don't know how to pronounce it. I, I don't speak French.

But, Camus, the Camus book that I read when I was, getting my bachelor's degree in philosophy. This is one of the most influential works of philosophy ever published. And to really bluntly summarize it, too reductively, but, the point is that even though life is an absurd struggle that one can never win, that has no purpose and has no ending, all one can do is love the struggle.

Right? That's all that we can do at the end of the day, and that's a beautiful message. And the fact that I was reflecting on that message, on the very absurdity of human existence in the course of watching a fucking Looney Tunes IP movie, that's a feat of writing and directing and acting. It w- it was really impressively done.

So why did Warner Brothers say it wasn't worth releasing? Why did David Zaslav himself say it wasn't worth releasing? Well, the answer, as we all can see very vividly, is that they didn't know what the fuck they were talking about. In fact, everything the suits have been telling us about the movie industry has been proven wrong by the success of Coyote vs.

Acme. We've been told that comedies can't do well at the box office, that movies need to be either really clearly for kids or really clearly for adults. We're told that nobody likes animation anymore, that the movies are dead, people don't wanna go to the theater at all, and that lead actors are essential to getting a movie over the finish line, that you gotta have Tom Hanks or Jacob Elordi in order to sell a film these days.

The success of Coyote vs. Acme shattered all of the bullshit that the people in charge of the industry have been saying for years. And you know what? The artists and audience knew that it would. That's why we were all clamoring to see this film. 

The only people, the only people who thought this movie would not succeed were the failure-addicted morons in the C-suite.

And I think they really are addicted to failing. I mean that quite literally. I think the new class of capitalists that run some of our favorite media companies, that run the economy at large, they are no longer in the business of succeeding. They are no longer in the business of trying to make successful products.

When you go to them and say, "Hey, I have a good idea for a movie or a product or something that people would like," they say, "Are you stupid? We don't do that. We don't make things that people like. We just do math on a spreadsheet to make the business fail because somehow that lets us sell it for more than we bought it for."

And I guess that works to some degree because David Zaslav is gonna walk away from Paramount buying Warner Brothers with hundreds of millions of dollars more than he walked in with somehow, even though all he did was drive the company into the ground. But Americans don't want that. We don't want to watch companies fail.

We want good movies. We want good TV shows. We want products that work and lettuce that doesn't poison us. And you know what this movie proves? Is that we can trust the people who make the thing to know how the thing should be made. 'Cause you know what? The movie business turns out to be pretty simple.

You just gotta make a good movie that makes people feel things, you gotta tell 'em about it, and you gotta make it easy for them to give you $20 and sit in an air-conditioned room and watch it. Like newsflash, it's possible to make money by making movies. And seeing that proven so vividly by Coyote vs. Acme also proves the falsity of the biggest lie that we are being told by Hollywood right now, which is that Hollywood, meh, it's a, it's a lost cause.

It's dying. Warner Brothers is dying. In fact, the only way to save it is for Paramount to merge with Warner Brothers, lay off tens of thousands of people, make less movies. That's what we have to do because, oh, Hollywood can't survive anymore. The only way to win is by failing. So why should we believe them?

Well, we don't have to. We can fight back and as stupid as it sounds, like, that's what Coyote vs. Acme told me. It told me that there is value and power in fighting back because it is the people who fought back against this movie being shelved that saved it. The only reason we have this movie is because people, from Will Forte to Dave Green, to people on Reddit, to the guy who paced around in front of Warner Brothers in a Wile E.

Coyote suit, made it happen. And, you might ask, well, isn't that kind of a dumb cause, right? Like, why go through all this effort for a movie? It's just another piece of IP. It's just another piece of corporate media. It's not gonna take down capitalism. It's not gonna be revolutionary. It's just a fucking movie.

And yeah, I don't expect Coyote vs. Acme to change the world, and I don't even expect it to take down the people who shelved it. Like I said, they're gonna walk away with more money than they came in with. But, maybe it doesn't have to change the world, and maybe Wile E. Coyote never has to catch the Road Runner, right?

Maybe the point of the story of this film is to remind us that sometimes the struggle is worth it all by itself. Sometimes the doomed struggle of the artist to push back against the boulder of cynicism and capitalism and doom and despair that presses down on all of us, maybe that struggle is enough.

Maybe at the end of the day, we can imagine Wile E. Coyote happy

We've just heard clips starting with

Blonde Politics tracing how Trump discrediting the media, encouraging allies to buy outlets, and weaponizing merger approvals mirrors the creeping state-media playbook of Orban, Erdogan, and Putin.

The Beat detailed how ABC sued the FCC for its retaliatory campaign to force stations off the air after Jimmy Kimmel refused to give in and won.

This Is Hell! laid out how Glenn Greenwald stopped criticizing Peter Thiel after taking a Rumble deal, while Matt Taibbi promoted Elon Musk's preferred narrative in the curated Twitter Files.

BreakThrough News revealed how its internal communications and financial records are being subpoenaed by the House Ways and Means Committee over its coverage of ICE and Israel's ongoing genocide in Gaza.

Last Week Tonight recounted the decades of Republican attacks on public broadcasting, from Nixon trying to halve its funding to Congress eliminating it entirely this summer, likely closing 115 stations.

Democracy Now! described how an arbitrator ordered the Washington Post to rehire columnist Karen Attiah, who was fired over posts about white male violence after Charlie Kirk's killing, citing the paper's own policy protecting journalists.

And Adam Conover celebrated how 'Coyote vs. Acme,' shelved by the Warner Brothers CEO for a $30 million tax break, finally reached theaters after years of outcry and proved the executives wrong.

And those were just the top takes, there's lots more in the deeper dives sections,

If you get value out of the show - and want to make sure we can keep going while getting it delivered ad-free 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 Podcasts app.*

If you have a question or would like your comments included in the show you can record a voice message - re-recording until you're happy with it - by tapping the link in the show notes,

You can message us on Signal at the handle bestoftheleft.01,

or you can simply email me to [email protected]

As for today's topic,

To find the right solution, it's always important to understand the problem first. Or maybe admit you have a problem first and understand it second. When it comes to our media ecosystem, how it's being cowed by the Trump administration and sometimes taken over by his allies, it's important to remember the underlying structure of the mega corporations that own so many of the newsrooms in America.

When it looks like there's a fight between a news outlet and Trump's government, remember that most of the big broadcast and cable news operations, and some major newspapers are very small line items inside the larger corporations that own them. In many cases they aren't allowed to stand up to the government on their own terms, because they're closer to bargaining chips amid much larger corporate goals.

When a mega corporation wants to do a multibillion dollar merger or acquisition that needs approval from federal regulators, that is the biggest thing on the minds of its executives. It also becomes the point of leverage, where an authoritarian government can refuse approval unless changes are made to the news division to suit the propaganda needs of the regime. In the big scheme of things, those executives will see that as a small price to pay, a sacrificial lamb and not much more. When you're running a corporation, you don't feel like you can afford to worry about the future of journalism and the threat to democracy when there's stock value that must be generated.

We've seen this play out a couple of times already. Paramount gave 16 million dollars to Trump's future presidential library to settle the 60 Minutes lawsuit, a case that was probably unwinnable for Trump, and Skydance promised the FCC the merged company would have no DEI programs, all to pave the way for the FCC to approve the 8 billion dollar merger on a 2 to 1 party line vote.

There was also a complicated and underreported multibillion dollar acquisition between lesser known companies that own local affiliate stations right when the whole Jimmy Kimmel suspension controversy was happening. Nexstar needed a waiver from the FCC at the same moment its affiliate stations were taking the Kimmel show off the air.

Back in the mid-1900s, before Reagan and then Clinton took a hatchet to the regulations meant to ensure the public airwaves were managed in the public interest, the understanding was that the news was expected to lose money, and nobody minded. Media companies were allowed to use the public airwaves and make boatloads of money on their entertainment, while running the news was understood as the cost of doing the public interest work required to keep their license.

Reagan removing the Fairness Doctrine reshaped what the news could look like, mostly on talk radio, where the repeal gave rise to single-opinion programming, to Rush Limbaugh, and accelerated the hard rightward shift among conservatives that followed. Then Congress and Clinton deregulated the industry with the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which set off a wave of consolidation. Radio stations by the hundreds ended up under one owner. Local TV stations got rolled up into national chains. And the network newsrooms ended up as small divisions inside enormous entertainment companies, where news was expected to pay for itself or justify its existence some other way.

So here's the basic shape of it. News went from being pretty boring and nonpartisan, an obligation the companies had to fulfill, to something the owners of those companies can use however suits them, not the public.

It's too simple to say corporate news media is bad because corporations are bad, or because the people running them are bad. Corporate news media is bad because it is structurally vulnerable to being turned into something that isn't designed to serve the public interest.

It can be designed that way by the corporate owners, as with Fox News. Or the structure can be targeted by an authoritarian government that uses its leverage on corporations that see their news divisions as a footnote on the balance sheet. A regime with self-interested motives can get corporations to trade the integrity of their news divisions away for regulatory approvals they value more than their journalists having a healthy, adversarial relationship with the state, a relationship the founders considered so important they wrote it into the Constitution.

So, if the fundamental problem is news agencies living inside giant for profit corporations, then at least part of the fix is ensuring that a substantial amount of news lives outside those corporations and has only one obligation, which is to serve the public.

Last year, Trump signed the bill to defund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting on the very same day the FCC approved Paramount's merger. It's been known for a long time that conservatives wanted to kill public broadcasting, even though far more Americans support public media than oppose it.

What's important to understand is how the Corporation for Public Broadcasting was allowed to be that vulnerable, instead of being given a self-funding endowment. It lived hand to mouth on an appropriation Congress could always cancel with one vote.

The endowment idea isn't theoretical. A nonprofit in Virginia held the licenses to two TV stations in the D.C. suburbs. When that independent public broadcaster sold those stations, which weren't serving its core audience, in 2017 for 182 million dollars, the money went to the nonprofit, and about 160 million of it was used to build the Virginia Foundation for Public Media, which can't be tampered with by politicians.

For national context, the FCC has been selling wireless spectrum to carriers at auction for the past 30 years and has generated more than 200 billion dollars. If Congress had taken just 10 percent of that and set up an endowment for public broadcasting, that endowment would pay out more each year than Congress ever had to appropriate, and it would keep paying out like that indefinitely.

The spectrum the FCC auctioned was publicly owned. The money that came in belonged to all of us. But it was sent to the general fund to barely offset the deficit, a rounding error, while we spent a trillion dollars on disastrous wars during the same period. When the licenses were held by a purpose driven nonprofit in Virginia, the money from the sale of public assets stayed in public media.

And over the years, they reorganized and strengthened public media in Virginia, all while knowing their funding was assured, not dependent on whoever was running the state house. So when Trump killed the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the CEO of the Virginia Foundation for Public Media said they were lucky to be on such solid financial footing while stations around them scrambled to make up the difference. Being protected from politicians by an established endowment wasn't theoretical anymore.

Funding public news that is beholden only to the public interest is not a money problem. And despite the right wing propaganda, it's not a trust problem either. Across the country, trust in PBS runs nearly three to one over distrust, and support for funding it runs nearly two to one. Just think what it could do if it had the funding it needed to compete with the for-profit corporations that are currently experiencing a trust implosion. 

And now, we'll continue to dive deeper on 4 topics today. First up;

Section A, The FCC Weaponized

Followed by Section B, Journalists in the Crosshairs

Section C, Who's Buying, Who's Cashing In

And Section D, Building Something Better

the suit in particular points to a decision the FCC made in April requiring eight Disney-owned local news stations to renew their broadcast licenses, in some cases, years before they are set to expire.

Just for context, how common is it for the FCC to take that kind of step? 

It's extremely unprecedented. never has the FCC gone after network content by targeting all of its local broadcast stations, and it's been over a half a century since the FCC actually called in any license for early renewal. 

So in a statement, we know the FCC says it's been examining claims Disney engaged in what it calls illegal DEI discrimination for over a year.

Chairman Carr told Reuters today he thinks Disney went to court to try to stop this proceeding because he says Disney is nervous. In his words, he said, "Disney seems to be a little concerned about what the record's showing." ABC says they've handed over thousands of documents already in compliance with this investigation.

Have you, in your role, seen those? Do you believe there's any evidence that Disney is nervous about what those documents show? 

No one believes that this is about Disney's diversity, equity, and inclusion policies. clearly this is just a pretext to go after Disney because this administration does not like the content it's seeing on Disney, and Disney has refused to bow to the intimidation and to the pressure.

I'm very heartened to see Disney stand up for its First Amendment rights and its editorial decisions, and filing to challenge the actions that this, FCC has taken. It's very important to note that the FCC is not the EEOC. in fact, the FCC has lost previously in court, where it was told the FCC is not the EEOC, and license renewals are not proceedings, that can challenge Title VII rights.

So the FCC is outside of its remit, with this pretext, but it's clearly it's about the content of, of Disney's and ABC's, programs, not about this investigation. 

Well, there's a separate probe we should mention into the ABC daytime talk show, The View, and Chairman Carr was asked about these probes recently in an interview on Fox Business late last month.

Take a listen to what he had to say. 

You broadcasters get subsidized access, free access to a valuable public resource, the airways, worth billions of dollars. And in exchange, you have to operate in the public interest. That means you can't run news distortions, broadcast hoax. You can't be engaging in this invidious form of DEI discrimination.

And so the FCC is really enforcing rules that have been on the books for a very long time. 

Commissioner Gomez, what do you make of that argument that broadcasters, the chairman alleges, are not operating in the public interest in terms of what they broadcast? 

The FCC cannot target content based on this nebulous public interest standard.

The public interest, for the FCC traditionally has been whether, these broadcasters are serving their local communities. You serve your local communities when you have weather, sports, when you are talking about breaking news. That is serving your local communities. The problem with the way this administration is banding about the f- term public interest is they basically use it to mean anything this, this administration doesn't like.

we are bound by the First Amendment and by the Constitution. There is no generalized exemption to the First Amendment just because you're a broadcast licensee. 

I wanna point out the FCC in different forms is looking into a number of networks, CBS, ABC, NBC, notably not into Fox. Chairman Carr has also sent a letter to the BBC about its editing of a Trump speech.

In full disclosure, we should note that last year the FCC opened a probe into NPR, PBS, and some of their member stations alleging they might be airing prohibited commercial ads. PBS and NPR insist they are in compliance with federal laws and regulations. But Chairman, Commissioner Gomez, the fact that ABC is now suing the FCC after earlier settling with the administration for some $15 million, does this signal to you a, a change in tactics or a change in the landscape?

Why now? 

I think what we've learned watching this administration over the last year and a half is that you cannot, buy peace from this administration. You only buy time. This administration demands that it be covered in the way that it wants to be covered. It demands that there are to be no critics.

and it will simply keep coming back, and that is what we have seen. So I am very glad that Disney has found its courage, and it is, it should be encouraging to all other broadcasters not to cave to this administration's pressure, but rather to support the First Amendment, the freedom of the press, and viewers' rights to see and to hear, editorial content of their choosing.

You'd think with 500 different channels to watch, there'd be something interesting on. An even bigger problem, our media is controlled by just a handful of billionaires and their corporations. And Trump is making things worse. Trump's FCC just approved a massive merger that would let one huge media company control what over 80% of American households see.

One of these merging companies, called Nexstar, tried to silence late night host Jimmy Kimmel. 

Trump and his, Brendan cartel is coming for us again. 

Trump's FCC also cleared the way for billionaire Larry Ellison and his son David to buy Paramount, which includes CBS News. The Ellisons are huge Trump boosters.

Under their ownership, CBS News has already seen a massive shift toward a Trump friendly agenda. 

CBS News abruptly pulled an investigative report on 60 Minutes just a day before it was set to air. 

That report examined allegations of abuse and torture suffered by men deported by the Trump administration and sent to a prison in El Salvador.

Which is probably why Trump gave his blessing for the Ellison's company, Skydance Media, to also acquire Warner Brothers Discovery. If that deal goes through, Trump allies would also control CNN. Larry Ellison has reportedly had discussions with Trump about firing CNN hosts Trump doesn't like. And thanks to Trump, the Ellisons can also count TikTok as part of their growing media empire.

Did you know that one out of five Americans gets their news from TikTok? And you thought Fox News was bad. Don't forget the other media billionaires Trump has in his corner. Trump's billionaire suck-ups already control a huge portion of the information Americans get. The more his cronies control, the less Americans will know.

A free press is vital to democracy, but for Trump and his billionaire buddies, it's all about accumulating more power and more wealth. They know that a well-informed public could stop them from acquiring both. So what can we do about this? Pressure our state attorneys general to sue and block these mergers.

And when Democrats take back power at the federal level, bust up these massive media conglomerates. And we should support our local independent media, as well as outlets like NPR and PBS. News funded by the public, not owned by billionaires. As a once respected newspaper says, "Democracy dies in darkness."

We can't let Trump's billionaire helpers turn out the lights.

for years, many of us have been pointing out that platforms like Facebook are making design choices that are harmful. The business model of Facebook and other social media platforms is selling us, our attention, our eyeballs, and our kids' attention to advertisers. The business model is predicated on getting us addicted, on essentially having us spend as much time as possible on these platforms.

it's really interesting to see a case finally make it to trial and, and, and to actually have this, these issues litigated. but, but the truth is that Facebook knew a lot about the impacts of its platform on children and on others, and the business model really is about collecting a lot of data about us and using that data to micro-target us with the type of content that makes us keep coming back.

You're a member of the Big Tech Oversight Board. What is that?

This is a collection of people who came together after Facebook appointed its own oversight board, which was, a list of folks who were on the Facebook payroll who were meant to provide some oversight over what the company was doing. In reality, they didn't have any authority to hold the platform accountable.

And so a collection of folks from ac- around the world, led by Car- Carol Codweller, who broke the Cambridge Analytica story, Maria Ressa, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, and others came together to really try to provide some critique about what Facebook was doing, the design choices it was making, and the hate and disinformation that they were spreading all throughout the world.

Now, c- your organization, Free Press, and hundreds of journalists are demanding USA Today end, their Palantir partnership. Nearly 800 journalists at USA Today newspapers signed a statements urging the company to, end this newly announced partnership with the software, company Palantir, whose products have been used by the US government to assist with immigration raids.

Talk about what they and you are calling for.

Listen, journalistic entities have no business making special deals and having special relationships like with companies like Palantir, which the US government is using to assist in crimes against humanity. We need to have editorial independence from big companies that deserve oversight from journalistic institutions.

And so, I support the call. We support the call from, the USA Today journalists because th- this is going to impinge upon independent reporting that holds this company and this administration accountable. 

Let's turn to ABC's lawsuit against the FCC. I want to read more from the lawsuit. Quote, "This case boils down to a simple question: Can the administration use its control over the federal regulatory apparatus to punish a media organization for editorial decisions and news coverage it dislikes?

Because the First Amendment provides a clear answer, of course not. This court's intervention is necessary to stop the Federal Communication Commission's extraordinary assault on free speech," the lawsuit states. Explain what is at stake. This lawsuit came down right about the time we were broadcasting yesterday it was announced.

Well, I'm so thrilled that finally a major media company is sticking up for itself to the administration. We have seen Brendan Carr, the FCC chairman, relentlessly jawbone at broadcasters over which he has regulatory authority. He has, he has threatened them with investigations. We don't even know the full extent of the investigations that the FCC has ongoing against ABC and other licensees.

He has called ABC's licenses in for early renewal. That comment process just closed, and so at any time now, the FCC can do what's called designate those licenses, the only eight broadcast licenses that ABC still holds, for a hearing, and that is the next step in revoking broadcast licenses. And there has been every indication that the reason that Brendan Carr is going after ABC is because Donald Trump wants him to, because Donald Trump doesn't like what ABC is airing.

He doesn't like it when they bring on his political opponents for conversations. He doesn't like it when Jimmy Kimmel makes jokes at his expense. But see, this is what the First Amendment protects. The First Amendment protects us from government intrusion into the editorial decisions of our media, and we've seen them time and again go after broadcasters.

ABC isn't the only one. They're just the first one to say, "Enough already," because the Trump administration has elevated this risk to the point that it's going to do serious damage to their business. In fact, if you look into the filing that went into the court yesterday, they cite numerous examples of how they've already altered their news coverage to keep the president happy.

For instance, they, they aired, a speech that they didn't wanna air on their live stream. They said they felt pressured to do so. They haven't brought anyone, any political guests onto The View, out of fear that the president would retaliate against them. the list goes on and on, and this is just what's happening inside of ABC.

We know this is happening at other broadcasters, other regulated entities as well, but they're all just kind- trying to duck and cover and not catch the president's attention. So it's really, a good move on ABC's part that they're finally sticking up for themselves. I think they've finally learned that when bullies go after you, you can't just cower in a corner, because they keep coming.

it was amazing. ABC, settled, for what was it, $15 million gave the president when- 15 million ... men- when many felt they coulda gone to court and won. then the whole, kerfuffle over Jimmy Kimmel, and the outcry across the country that led these organizatio- these, licensees to restore Jimmy Kimmel's late night show, because President Trump doesn't like him.

s- so this is a new approach here. don't bend the knee. 

This i- this, this is a new approach, and listen, when, when ABC yanked Jimmy Kimmel off the air, Free Press immediately launched into action. We set up a tool, and thousands of people called their local ABC stations and demanded that he be reinstated.

Of course, there was a tremendous uproar from the public above and beyond. People canceled their Disney+ subscriptions. And so, the actions we take as regular people make a difference. If we, mass protest, we can make a difference. And I think in a lotta ways that, that was encouraging to ABC, 'cause they saw there was going to be business impacts if they didn't stand up for free speech.

Next, Section B, Journalists in the Crosshairs

the FBI raided the Alexandria, Virginia home of a 29-year-old Washington Post reporter, Hannah Natanson, who covers the Trump administration's reshaping of the government and its effects.

The president of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press called the raid a, quote, "Tremendous escalation in the administration's intrusion into the independence of the press." FBI agents searched Natanson's home and seized a phone, a Garmin watch, her personal computer, and one owned by The Post.

Agents, agents reportedly told Natanson the raid was related to their investigation of a government contractor and Navy veteran named Aurelio Perez Lugones, who's accused of illegally retaining classified government materials. He was reportedly messaging the reporter at the time of his arrest last Thursday 

Just last month, Hannah Nuttinson wrote a piece headlined, I Am The Post's Federal Government Whisperer.

"It's been brutal." unquote. She said her reporting had led to more than 1,000 new sources who were current or former federal workers, quote, "Who wanted to tell me how President Donald Trump was rewriting their workplace policies, firing their colleagues, or transforming their agency's missions." unquote.

Nuttinson was also part of a Washington Post team that won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for public service for their coverage of the January 6th Capitol insurrection. Readers of the Washington Post coverage of Wednesday's raid on the reporter's home left thousands of comments noting the paper's owner, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, had so far not commented on the raid.

For more, we're joined in our New York studio by Jameel Jaffer, director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, previously deputy legal director at the ACLU. Welcome back to Democracy Now, Jameel. Thanks, Amy. Why don't you explain to us what you understand happened on Wednesday morning when the FBI raided the home of a reporter?

Yeah, th- this is, a reporter who's been covering the, the federal government, talking to government employees, publishing stories about her conversations with government employees, and, her home was raided by the FBI. It's a very unusual thing. extremely rare in this country that the FBI raids the home of a reporter or, or raids a newsroom.

thankfully, very rare, in our recent history at least. but that's what they did in this case, and they seized her, electronic devices, including two laptops, one of which was issued by the, the, The Post, and a cellphone as well. And not at all obvious to me why this search was necessary at all.

They had already searched the home of this contractor a week before and obtained, apparently, evidence that, he was sharing classified information. So they, already had that evidence against him. They filed a criminal complaint against him, and a week later, they, execute this search of a journalist's home.

And we don't yet have the, affidavit in support of the search. So we don't know what they told the court to justify, this search, but it's hard not to see it as an effort to imi- intimidate not just the- journalists, but the sources that would, would communicate with them. 

So Jameel, could you explain what kind of legal authorization is typically required for this kind of search, in particular- Yeah

of a journalist's home? 

Yeah. So it's a, it's a very complicated legal l- landscape, mainly because the Supreme Court issued this decision in 1972, which, is, is, to, to put it generously, very cryptic. nobody understands what that decision really means, but, essentially the court said, "We're not gonna extend constitutional, special constitutional protection to, journalists, with respect to their sources.

You, you, we're not gonna let journalists refuse to testify, for example, before a grand jur- jury, when they're subpoenaed for their sources." But in the same decision, the court, said, "Obviously there are constitutional, implications to some of these requests, and we're gonna be very careful that, the government doesn't cross constitutional lines."

So it's a cryptic opinion. There's a, a concurrence by Justice Powell that, uh, d- people have, taken to be the controlling opinion of the, the, the court. But the result is that there's this very messy judicial landscape Congress has been asked over and over again, urged over and over again by press freedom organizations, including the Knight Institute, to pass legislation that would give reporters clearer protection against, compelled process, so not just subpoenas, but also, court orders and, search warrants of the kind that was, at issue in this particular search.

but Congress has failed to do that. and in the meantime, the only protections that journalists have are the ones that the Justice Department wants to... Or the main protections that journalists have are the ones that the Justice Depar- Department wants to provide. And the Biden administration had provided, had, had strengthened the rules protecting journalists in very important ways.

but, the attorney general, the current attorney general, Pam Bondi, weakened those rules, last year. y- press freedom advocates, knew that the weakening of those rules would result in, a kind of stepping up of investigations of, of the press and their sources. And, and this search, I think, is a sign that we were right to worry.

it, it's really serious when you look at... She's not even the actual target- That's right ... they're saying. Yeah. they get the information. You can't help forget here that she is a winner of the Pulitzer Prize. She was part of the team that investigated, what President Trump doesn't want to talk about- Mm-hmm

which is the January 6th insurrection. 

Yeah, 

yeah. Well, so I, I think that one of the really worrying things here is that, presumably they justified this search to the judge by saying, "This relates to this contractor who was sharing classified information, was taking classified information home unlawfully and then sharing it," and that's how they justified the, the search to the judge.

But this reporter has all kinds of information, all kinds of communications with sources that have nothing to do with classified information, right? All these communications with current government employees, for example, including conversations that are, are not national security-protected. They don't touch on national security issues at all.

And now the government has, possession of all of those communications, and we don't know whether, uh, any protections have been put in place to, to, segregate those communications or whether the Justice Department is just sifting through them right now. 

And what kind of recourse, if any, legal recourse does the reporter, Hannah Nattansen, or indeed The Washington Post have- And let's not forget-

in light of what's 

happened? It's o- his, the owner, Jeff Bezos, quite close to President Trump. 

Yeah, it's, it's quite striking that, at least to my knowledge, and I think you said this in the, i- in- in the intro as well, that Jeff hasn't said anything about- Mm-hmm ... this search. this is, this is, a huge attack on not just press freedom, but his, his outlet, The Washington- The Washington Post, and, that he hasn't come to the defense of the, the, the newspaper or the journalist is, is, is, y- is pretty striking.

we at Novara Media, of course, are part of the media. We reported on Jason Arday over the past fortnight. It's time for us, or at least me, to reflect on that. I, I want to park that just for a moment because we're going to come to that in a second. and first of all, I want to get your more general comments on, on this tragic story, the tragic sequence of events that, that led to what happened last Friday.

Yeah, I think it's a, I think it's a terrible tragedy, and I think that it's very clear that it has really deeply affected a lot of people in the country. People are heartbroken. But people are also enraged because I agree with Professor, Kehinde Andr- Andrews, who was, you showed the clip of on Channel 4, that this, that Jason, Arday was hounded to his death, that there is a strong case to be made that he was, in effect Killed.

I, I, I hesitate to say that, but, the, it's, he would still be alive today, I agree, if he was white. He would still be alive today if the media hadn't engaged in this absurd feeding frenzy on something that never met the bar for the national interest at all. I think we have to go right back to the beginning, and we have to understand where this story came from.

I think that's so important, and you had spoken about it there. it came from a guy called Nathan, Clonas, who was, formerly at Cambridge. This is a man who is fiercely racist. This is a man who's an effective geneticist. This is a man who's a racial determinist. He's a crank. He's a hate monger.

He's made it clear that it's his mission to effectively take down Black people and non-white people in an effort to prove his crank science that intelligence is, partly dictated by race. when you look into some of the things that this man has said, that if, there were no DEI pol- policies, that, quote, "Blacks would disappear from prestigious positions."

He said that if there was no DEI policies, Black people would only be known for entertainment and sport This man goes and writes a Substack post. He's clearly been trying for a long time to find that case, that case that will help him to prove his hateful theories, and he focuses in on Jason Arday, puts it on his Substack.

I think that was July 21st, if you wanna see how this then made it into the mainstream media. The first story that hit the mainstream media was The Telegraph on July 24th. So that was three days later, it was picked up by The Telegraph. Let me just tell you what The Telegraph headline was. The Telegraph headline, and this is the first mainstream story to come off the back of the Substack, was Cambridge's Diversity Poster Boy in Plagiarism Row.

Cambridge's Diversity Poster Boy. To me, that indicates that that was what the coverage was going to be like. This wasn't The Telegraph looking at a Substack post and picking it up as a news piece and saying, "Data in a, in a Substack has suggested that," No. This was them saying, "The diversity poster boy is in trouble."

And I think that the, that the coverage maintained that sort of tenor all the way through. Six hours later, it hit The Times. The Times obviously saw it in The Telegraph. They decided they would jump on it, and then quickly, quickly the feeding frenzy begins. And the thing that I wanna say is that this wasn't ordinary news coverage.

you have some journalists out there who are saying, "No, no, this was, uh, this was just, news coverage of, of a story that was in the public interest." No, it wasn't. Even when you look at some of the stories that were purported to be news stories, they were, they were, they were, they were gleeful.

They were sneering. They were shot through it like very thinly veiled racism. And again, as, Professor Kehinde And- Andrews said there, some of it was, also inaccurate. I think if you talk to nine out of 10 people and ask them about this story, they would probably say that, Jason Arday, plagiarized his PhD thesis, when we know that actually he was cleared of it.

But that didn't seem very important for the headline writers. didn't seem very important for the columnists. And like I say, it was just a, it was just a feeding frenzy. It was just a, a witch hunt. look Am I saying that there should have been no stories at all, that it should have been completely ignored?

No. Could have been covered in the Times Higher Education Supplement. Seems like a good place for it. Could be covered in Varsity, the Cambridge newspaper. That seems like a good place for it. A couple of pieces in the Telegraph that are straight and newsy, not the diversity poster boy is in trouble. Fine.

A day inside the newspaper, not on the headlines, not on the front pages, not on breaking news, not on alerts, not in live discussions on, on, on, on cable news. And the thing that was ignored was that the story was about race. This is my contention. It started about race, and racism was shot all the way through that coverage.

And I think that for journalists to be out there arguing that it was a story about academia, if it was a story about academia, it would have been a tiny little story. The fact that it was a story about race and the fact that it became a pylon is what made it such a big story. And I think ethical news journalists shouldn't have covered it in any way without centering race after that feeding frenzy, begun.

And just to show how manipulated the media was, because that's the other thing. The media just rides the wave. Here's the shiny thing. Here's somebody we can kick when he's down. Here's something that we can pull in the clicks with. Here's something that all our, our, our Instagram videos will go viral with.

Like the Times advertising its hit pieces on Jason Arday on Twitter so that more people would see them. And where I want to talk about the little, the touch paper being lit, this horrible video came out, a discussion between Kofnas, who started this whole thing, and David Starkey. And it was appalling to watch.

Now, this is before Jason Arday's death, but I actually took the quote from it. They're grinning at each other in this video. And David Starkey says, "The reason we are both grinning is that we are enjoying vengeance, good, honest, straightforward, un-Christian vengeance. We can rejoice together." Now, that's the man who started this.

He is in that conversation with David Starkey, and then they're sitting there rejoicing. Why? Because Kofnas lit the touch paper and the media just followed, and now a man is dead. 

Earlier this month, the State Department hosted an international summit where White House advisor Stephen Miller described the left as enemies of civilization.

This is part of Stephen Miller's speech. 

Here in the United States, we have taken the necessary and essential action of formally recognizing left-wing violence as a form of political terrorism that is a direct threat to our national security and the survival of our Republican form of government.

President Trump issued a directive, in our parlance it's called a National Security Presidential Memorandum, or NSPM, NSPM7 to be exact, that directs for the first time in American history all of our law enforcement and intelligence agencies to work together to disrupt, identify, defund, de-bank, arrest, and prosecute these political terrorists that are operating in our country.

It's very important to understand that left-wing political terrorism seeks as its ultimate end the overthrow of our system and form of government. 

Finally, Medea Benjamin, that's Stephen Miller. if you can respond to what he's saying. 

Well, what I think is that we are seeing the results of his twisted, mind in the attacks on so many of our organizations in the US, and it's a time for us to come together.

We encourage people to go to the Code Pink website. there is a, a note now that you can sign to send a message to Marco Rubio about what do you think of his garbage Cuba report and attacks on US groups. we can't be intimidated. This is really a moment in history that is so dangerous for us in the United States and for the world.

Let's come together and fight harder. 

So last week, the Republican-led House Ways and Means Committee subpoenaed three left-leaning non-profit organizations, including Breakthrough News, demanding the independent online news l- outlet hand over internal communications. We're joined now by Rania Khalek, a Beirut-based journalist at Breakthrough News, where she hosts programs Dispatches and BT Live.

your Substack post is headlined Congress Just Subpoenaed Our Newsroom For Doing Journalism. And this came out soon after, that speech of Stephen Miller and their so-called terrorism summit. If you can respond about what's happening to Breakthrough News and how you're responding to your, to the subpoena.

Yeah. Thanks so much, Amy, and you're absolutely right. this, this subpoena came on the heels of that anti-communist summit where Stephen Miller, spoke from that clip you just showed, and on the heels of that Cuba report that basically identified opposition to the blockade in Cuba, as well as all kinds of other criticisms of US foreign policy, as being part of some foreign plot.

And this subpoena we received is part of a long-standing attack against us. we've been under attack from Trump's right-wing allies in Congress for years now. however, we started receiving letters from the Ways and Means committee earlier this year, basically pointing to our viewpoints as a problem and justification for why they wanted us to turn over First Amendment protected materials.

In fact, in these letters they've been sending us, they specifically mention our coverage of Israel's genocide in Gaza and of the ICE kidnappings and killings across the country that have sparked massive uprisings, and they also accuse us of anti-American rhetoric, which is just, summoning the ghosts of the House Un-American Activities Committee during the McCarthyism era.

So this is a flagrant attack on our First Amendment rights as an independent media outlet, and everybody should be alarmed. Everybody who cares about a free press and cares about free speech should be alarmed about an attack like this. the Ways and Means committee is supposed to be reviewing tax policy, and they're coming after a tiny nonprofit.

If they really wanted to review tax policy, they could go after the massive nonprofits across the country, and they're explicitly saying it's because of our viewpoints. 

So you mentioned Joe McCarthy, and especially for the youngest generation who's listening right now, they might not know who you're talking about.

I wanna turn to Senator Joe McCarthy speaking in 1952 during the Red Scare 

One communist on the faculty of one university is one communist too many. Even if there were only one communist in the State Department, that would still be one communist too many 

So that was Wisconsin Senator Joe McCarthy. if you, Rania, can talk about w- how this is affecting Breakthrough News, having to deal with news and US foreign policy, of course, around the world, and at the same time, how you answer this subpoena.

Well, we have legal counsel. Our lawyers have been responding to the letters, and they are aggressively challenging, these violations of our constitutional rights, and under no circumstances will Breakthrough News be compromising or surrendering our First Amendment rights or the freedom of the press, so we will absolutely be fighting this, through our lawyers.

Mm. as for the McCarthyism here, Amy, I think it's interesting 'cause there's a important lesson I think we should take from the McCarthyist era, and that is, during that time, they got the public on board. That's the reason it worked. It wasn't the committees. It was because they got the public on board.

What's interesting a- about what's happening right now is they're attempting to criminalize dissent and an independent press. because they're losing the argument. we at Breakthrough News, our, our viewpoints are not fringe, right? It's opposition to the genocide in Gaza. It's, desiring, free healthcare across the US.

It's opposition to these ICE kidnappings and killings. These are actually in keeping with the majority of Americans across the country. And so this administration is deeply unpopular. Its agenda is unpopular. Meanwhile, we see progressive politics are ascendant. Socialist candidates are winning primaries.

The movement, against the genocide in Gaza is growing. So this foreign plot smear is all they have left because they can't win on their merit, and that's what people need to understand this as. So we at Breakthrough News, we're con- gonna continue to do our reporting. People can go to our website, breakthroughnews.org, sign the petition to drop this, this attack on the First Amendment.

And if you can, donate to our legal expenses because at the end of the day, we're a tiny outlet. We have a microscopic budget compared to the, massive corporate media outlets that run the airwaves. Every dollar that we spend on, these legal fees is a dollar we can't spend on reporting, and I think they're just trying to drain us of our resources to silence us, but we're not going to be silenced.

Let's talk about this America deserved 9/11. I don't think anybody or anything deserves anything, but the idea of blowback, We had Chalmers Johnson on the program, 20 some odd years ago to talk about this. The idea of blowback is a rather uncontroversial one

And, the idea that what you do in a region

Every reaction has an equal, counter-reaction or whatever it is. What, I, I've lost it. What is it? The opposite. Equal and opposite. Equal and opposite. It's blowback. 

Very dangerous conversation for a morning show to even get this close to, frankly. 

What's that? A morning sh- That 

blowback could exist, like- 

Oh, yeah.

The idea that our implications if we, I don't know, kill people in Afghanistan or in Iraq or if we, I don't know- 

Topple governments ... 

topple governments in Iran, that somehow we could suffer some consequences from it is a, is a pretty straightforward concept So I don't think anybody deserves anything, positive or negative, frankly.

Yeah. But physics exists 

The other little move he does here is he says, "Okay, Hasan's walked back and clarified what he meant by those 9/11 comments, but there's so many other comments which I, I guess I don't need to even cite now, that are also bad that everyone should run away from." That's what he does in this next moment here.

Deserve 9/11. Now, he backed off from that. 

Yes, yes. He's apologized. 

but he said a lot of, he said a lot of controversial things. Is he, is he somebody that should have a, a role in the progressive movement going forward? 

I think when we look at our elections that have happened, we have lost young people.

Much hay was made about the fact that we lost young men in the last election. Mm. And many of the same consultants that are wringing their hands today were the same ones s- Mm ... talking about how we need to go on Joe Rogan- Right ... and we need to be not, not so, willing to engage in cancel culture.

And, I think that the flip-flopping on this is a tactical debate that they may be hap- having. I think the fact of the matter is, is that Democrats can go on Joe Rogan, Democrats can go on Fox News, Democrats have a responsibility to build a winning coalition. And young people are engaging in mediums and conversations that we have a responsibility to attend to and be responsive to.

And even right now, when we look at this insurgent wave of what is happening, oftentimes when people are doing that Monday morning quarterbacking and what demographics voted where, the big one that's being ignored is the generational tidal wave. 

It, it- 

Phenomenal ... 

and you see it in, in the polling.

It is- And- ... it is significant ... 

millennials are not, punk kids anymore. 

Yeah. 

We're grown adults with mortgages and kids. And- 

We, that generation is starting to be decisive at the polls, and there is anger at being ignored, sidelined, having our economic futures mortgaged by the generations that came before us on everything from the economy to climate, and we're taking the reins.

So

the, it just, it's a good answer. I think, they're gonna continue to ask this question, and I think, Democrats have to just plow through it. My- I think Hasan Piker's gonna end up being a household name by, the end of, November. And if Democrats manage to still gain control of the House and, are competitive, if not, victorious in gaining the Senate I don't know that he would take it, but, they should offer Hassan Piker the chairman of the DNC 

Mm-hmm.

clearly it will have worked. Absolutely. the question is, is he a liability or is he an asset? And we're gonna find out. 

Politicians keep treating him like he's an asset. 

It's weird. 

Despite all this talk that he's a big liability. 

It's weird It is very weird. But, listen, the, there's a twofer here for the media because the media always bites at, when, Republicans dangle shit like this, and it's so much easier for them to make these races about these questions Medicare for All's all fallen by the wayside.

all, all these things. There's two things that are important in these elections, in every single one of them. That is, do you actually agree with 80% of the American population on Israel? And have you not in any way distanced yourself from Hasan Piker? Those are the two most important questions facing this country right now.

And I get that in the media it's a lot easier to pick up one person and be like, "This is what this is about." But this is why a lot of people get so frustrated about politics and political media, because it doesn't actually speak to the challenges they face. Look, I did a whole interview- 

It's not, it's not just the media, a- and I, I reject that framing.

I- it's six in 10 Americans don't know who he is. Exactly. I'm not saying he's the most important person in the world, but when you have a state like Michigan, where again, Alyssa Slotkin only won by 22,000 votes- 

But Katie- 

Is it worth- 

10 in 10 Americans- ... 

potentially losing the, the few votes you need to win?

10 in 10 Americans agree that they can't afford the things that they need in their life. So if folks want to make this about a streamer in California, they're welcome to do that, but I'm focused on Donald Trump. I'm focused on addressing the affordability crisis. I'm focused on getting you healthcare, and that's what I'm gonna stay focused on.

Let's 

talk about J- 

El Sayed is a great orator. We'll get to him in a second. Katie Tur is an absolute clown This is how fascists governments take over. When the media starts to bend a knee to the wannabe dictator, this is what you get. Hasan Piker is some streamer. He's talked about universal healthcare and gun reform, and he's talking out about how Israel shouldn't spend money here.

One comment about nine eleven, four trillion years ago is what she's focused on. are you kidding me right now? He clearly wants to focus on what's important to Michigan. But Hasan Piker, but Hasan Piker. And his opponent today, as an example, in Michigan, you know what he talked about? Saying that El-Sayed was from Egypt and that he should go back home.

He was born in Michigan, and I don't see Katie Tur grilling that racist piece of shit. No, no, no. But the nice guy, she's gonna go all over him, and he has to go on here and defend himself. This is a shame, and this is part of the reason that this country is failing because the reporting have done an absolute shit job.

When they're on the airplane, and that president, that white supremacist is telling a woman to shut up, why isn't every reporter speaking up saying, "You know what? There's more important things than my job, having some damn integrity." How about when you're in a room and asking people a question with, with that president, and he ignores it and calls it fake news, why doesn't somebody else ask the very same question and the next one and the next one and the next one until he gets so mad that he walks out like a little-- sniveling little bitch that he is?

But they won't, because you're all bending a knee to this guy that's, eight hundred pounds, that's about three cheeseburgers away from meeting Jeffrey Epstein. They're failing us, and this is the prime example of that. And she wants Katie Tur. She should have her license revoked. This is malpractice.

This is not journalism. This is clearly biased. And Bari Weiss, she basically destroyed sixty minutes. She has her hand in a lot of these cookie jars too. Just today as an example, I think it was CBS, right, made an article about nine eleven. El-Sayed, they need to revisit what he stands on with 9/11 coming up.

Why? Because he's Muslim? What, what the hell does that have to do with anything? Well, he had nothing to do with it. Why does he have to refigure anything? It's bullshit. This is what's happening to our media. Donald Trump isn't doing what he's doing in a vacuum. He's getting help from all the cable places because they're all scared of the orange man because FCC will come after them.

What do you think's gonna happen when a bully beats you up, hmm, and you give him your lunch money? You think he's gonna leave you alone, or is he gonna come after you the next day, and the next day, and the next day? That's, it's just, it's so stupid. I cannot believe that so many of these companies, like CNN, who's just bootlickers for Donald Trump, keeps bending a damn knee Now let's get to El-Sayed.

That is what I want from the Democratic Party. Stay on topic. Don't buy for the crap. Don't be like Hakeem Jeffries that has no balls and no backbone. He's fighting for the people. He's pushing back on the orange fascist in the White House, the rapist, making fun of him, pushing back. "Hey, how's Natalie Harp doing?

Do you need her to change your diapers?" Yeah, it's a little off-color, but you know what? At least he's pushing back against the bully because bullies only feel emboldened when you let them do whatever the hell they want, and he's not letting them do that. He's pushing it back. JD Vance, he made a joke about him today.

"Hey, JD Vance, there's no couches here. You won't like it in Michigan." Where is that from Jeffries and Schumer and the Democratic Party? They're too busy getting paid from fucking Israel. Billions and millions and millions of dollars. "Give us more money, we'll shut our mouths." And he even separated the issue with Vice President Harris.

He's like, "Look, I did not agree with her stance on Gaza," and I don't either. I didn't agree with it. But he said, "You know what? She was the better option of two by a lot, so I voted for her." You can support her and still take a stand on what you believe in. That's what has to happen, and it's not happening enough in the Democratic Party.

They're just touting the line, and they're not fighting back. He's an incredible debater, and they put millions of dollars, and he still won against the candidate that Israel wanted to, to win. But it's just-- it's mind-boggling how many news organizations have absolutely bent the knee and kissed the ass of Donald Trump.

It is disgraceful. And this is why there is a mass exodus in views from the CNNs and MSNBCs, and they're going to local people because they're reporting the news. They're not beholden to the orange man and all this FCC crap and ads and people telling them what they wanna hear. Bari Weiss has had multiple people come out and tell her they wanted them to-- Example, ice.

Okay? Ice. She was asking them to basically lie and fudge the truth. Well, was Rene Good really trying to get away, or did she really turn the car towards him and then turn at the last minute? She was literally encouraging them because it was good for clicks and views. That is not journalism. And shame on Katy Tur.

Maybe one day, Katy Tur, you can have as much integrity as El-Sayed, the man you just interviewed. 

I would love your sense of what do you think is the most grievous thing that mainstream, so-called corporate money media are doing or failing to do.

You've alluded to some of it, and then I want to talk about some of the freedom perhaps that, that you and we have being outside of those structures. Joy, what do you think's the fundamental biggest thing you'd like to fix right now? Well, I think that going back to when Trump first came in, the media would not use the word lie, and there was a big struggle.

I was working in corporate media at the time. There was a big internal struggle about whether you could call an untruth a misstatement, whether you could just say it was a lie. That was a stupid fight, right? And there have been a lot of those kinds of stupid fights where the media has been so reluctant to be in conflict with the, with any administration, not just Trump, with Bush, with e- well, Obama they didn't care, 'cause that was the, that was the Dem- if it's a Democrat, they don't mind being in conflict.

But when it's a Republican, because the media is so, afraid of what Roger Ailes did, which is to present this notion that the media is biased against white conservatives. And now they've committed an even further crime, which is to become co-opted by the same oligarchs who directly benefit from the regime.

They've now bought up most of the administration, including CBS. I just want to read this very quick thing to you. The Times is reporting that Bari Weiss, who is the podcaster or Substacker, who for whatever reason is now in charge of the Tiffany Network, CBS News, she, sent a note to her staff

She said, "Let's make sure every single night has something with viral potential. The goal for this road show of Tony Dokoupil's is not to deliver the news so much as it is to drive the news.

We need to be the news for these 10 days." It is a crime against journalism for the editorial director of a news network to say, "Our job is not to deliver the news, but to go viral." That's crazy. That's the commercial interest, the commercial motive playing itself out and saying the quiet stuff out loud.

Again, Dean, if you had to change one thing, what would it be? I will say this. I think we are all more journalists in the realm and in the form of Edward R. Murrow than they are, 'cause Edward R. Murrow famously said there are not two sides to every issue. you, there are not. There are not two sides to the Klan.

I remember a cable news network, and I won't say which one it is, said to me, during Trump's first term, they wanted me on to talk about Trump's anti-Muslim bigotry, and I said, "Okay." And they said, "We just need someone from the other side." I go, "Someone who's pro-anti-Muslim bigotry?" And the producer was just like, "Stop talking."

He's like, "Oh, we'll get back to you." And then they just killed the segment because they couldn't, in their mind, do a segment where it wasn't two sides. There are not two sides at w- as, and we know this. There are not two sides to a lie. There's not two sides to Trump's fascism. I would go on Joy's show, and me and Joy would say fascism, and Mehdi Hasan say fa- and all the other people there, "What are you doing?

How outlandish." And so, we're at the point where I'm literally quoting Hannah Arendt and The Banality of Evil to explain to people what ICE is doing, and that's not over the top. I am not even close to over the top. And so what I would like corporate media to understand, their job is not to make money for shareholders and executives to get bonuses, but serve the people, make them smarter, even if it means losing access.

I know that's a lot to ask, but that's what I would like because an educated, informed electorate is the key to saving this republic. The problems that you've both just described go back so far, really to Spiro Agnew managing to create this bugaboo of the quote unquote liberal media that put all the media organizations on the back foot, bending over as far backwards as any yogi could possibly manage. and then everything that we've seen since in terms of commercialization o- of even the news. The crisis, so-called, in legacy media is real. but it has opened up some incredible opportunities, and you both have seized them, as have I. talk about the sort of pros and cons of this moment. Dean? L- look, if there was ever a time for corporate media to implode, thankfully it's now in the ascendancy of independent media.

Because years ago, if they still controlled all the ways to get information out, we'd be dead. they would be just all gatekeeping and just doing pro-Trump, pro-regime propaganda, and we would not be able to get our message out there. So look, technically I work at Sirius XM, which is a big corporation.

For sure. But I don't think they even know I'm there. it's really like there's no executives that even talk. No, I do meet with an executive, but it's never about the content and stuff. It's "Do your thing unless I get a complaint about something," and it's rare. we're just doing our thing. So we have the freedom of independent journalism.

Also, I write for Substack, where it truly is independent. I don't have to pitch anymore to editors who I liked and they were great, and wait for a day and then change it and then dilute what I wanted to say. I think we have more freedom. We're also building allies in the independent media world that weren't there.

Laura, you were the first independent media person I met. I'm not kidding. You and probably Amy Goodman, right? So now there's so many. There's too many. There's all these young guys have a million followers on TikTok. How did they get that? They're like 26. But the point is like there's so many more of us.

I'm more confident the future is brighter, that we can get our message out. Well, but what about that, Joy-Ann? there is a huge morass out there. how do you keep your head above water, get your head above the, the parapet, as it were? I go back to two things. I'll give two examples. I wrote this book about Medgar Evers and Myrlie Evers-Williams. Medgar Evers, one of the jobs he had was he was a journalist. He actually started a newspaper because they couldn't get real news out of Mississippi into rural communities where they were just being lied to about civil rights, lied to about the NAACP. So he and a white woman, her name was Hazel Brannon Smith, she was pretty amazing.

She actually was an award-winning journalist and she had a press of her own, but she decided to lend the press to Medgar Evers. She was shunned by white society. She was disinvited from the white community, and what she did in response, she had all the Blacks over for tea. She said, "All right, y'all. Come on, let's

I got nobody to have tea and hang with me. Y'all come on to my house and let's do this." That is the kind of underground radical advocacy journalism that was needed to fight Mississippi, fascism. And if you go to Russia, I think of Alexei Navalny, who was also using outside of the very closed system of Russian media to get information to younger people through the internet and through all these alternative means unfortunately he died for.

But that is true activism and true heroism. So I think that the great thing about this moment and not being having to answer to a corporate, overseer- Is that we can get on the ground. We can get on the ground like Medgar. We can get on the ground and try to fight this fascism that's overrunning our country at a rapid rate.

They had a plan, Project 2025. We didn't have a plan, but we have huge community. We have the Midases of the, Midas touches of the world. We work together. We work as a system. We're like an amoeba, So we're, it's harder to stop us because there's so many of us, and we're working in tandem.

Now, Section C, Who's Buying, Who's Cashing In

I've talked about this so many times, going after ABC and CBS with those ridiculous lawsuits, kicking the Associated Press out of the Oval Office, arresting journalists like our friend Don Lemon. Everything that we've been seeing, it might pale in comparison to what we're now seeing come down the pipe, which is the rapid consolidation of MAGA media, MAGA-controlled media in this country.

The Ellisons, who recently bought CBS, are now making a bid to buy Warner Brothers Discovery, which is the parent company of CNN. And so, a- and that's why you see this Trump, social media post behind me, because Trump stupidly put it out there the other day.

this is their vision of what they wanna do to the media in this country. And one of the, great folks out there who helped me, through this hearing process is a democracy warrior, Norm Eisen. Of course, Norm fights these, incredible legal battles on, on our, behalf on so many different fronts, and you're also doing it when it comes to the media too, Norm.

And this, I, I don't wanna oversell this. I don't think you can oversell this. This is the whole ballgame. If MAGA and Trump are allowed to create a propaganda empire in this country- 

That's right, Jim, and you testified so eloquently in Senator Schiff's hearing. Members of Congress were there, Congressman Correy, Noah Wiley, Jacks- Well, that was great, 

great Noah Wiley was here.

That was amazing. 

Jack's DeLuca that leads the organization of documentarians who are fighting this takeover. Look, we've seen this movie before. The MAGA media monolith, where the Ellisons seize, seized CNN, they broke it. They've got control of TikTok, and now they wanna take, after doing CBS and TikTok, they wanna take CNN also.

Yeah. No. It's too much. They're gonna get movies and TV shows, Paramount and Warner's merged. They're gonna have that as a propaganda microphone. It's straight out of the Putin playbook. Yeah. And man, I watched that hearing, Jim. I got to watch my back as a congressional talker- Yeah ... because, you blew the hinges off.

Y- you called it out the way it is, a danger to free media and to American democracy. 

It, it 

is a danger. 

And that is- That, and this is the hearing room right here. You're looking at images of the hearing room, the, the city council room of Burbank, California, where we're just a, a stone's throw away from the WBD studios and the Paramount Studios and- You're camped 

out in that room.

You're camped 

out there, Jim. We are. We've taken it over. Hopefully they don't mind too much. we'll give it back, we promise. We won't break anything. 

Jim is the new mayor of Burbank. 

Well, and, and it's, they, they'd try to run me out of town I would think, the industry did, if I took over as the mayor of Burbank.

But, but I, I, to me, Norm, I, I think this is extremely important. we saw, Amazon, make this Melania documentary the other day. Can you imagine if a combined Warner Brothers, Paramount- Film studio starts putting out propaganda movies about Donald Trump and God, and Pete Hegseth, and God knows who el- where does it end?

And I think there's, it's really possible you could see, you could see CBS and CNN brought under one roof, then they try to get NBC, then they try to get A- I mean, th- we have 

to 

stop this in its tracks. And it's not just the 

news. Right. It's not just the news, Jim. 

Yeah. 

It's the entertainment there.

Trump has already renamed the Kennedy Center after himself. That's right. What's next? The Trump Avengers? That's right. will he, will he- He's getting 

all the stones, as they say in the 

movie, yeah ... will, will he be a part of the successful television shows also? Trump's Dangerous Housewives.

Where will it end, Jim? Yeah. We can't, we can't have this media consolidation. Look at the other oligarchs. Putin did it. He rolled up the media. That's right. Down the block, Orbán in Hungary. Across, the canton- continent, Erdoğan in Turkey. Yes. It's standard operating procedure. Donald Trump understands. He wants to bring the government under his heel, and he wants to bring independent media to boot.

He's going after business enterprises. He's praised the Ellisons. Pete Hegseth, you testified about this, Jim. I did. He said, "I can't wait until the Ellisons are in control of CNN." Why? Yeah. Because he doesn't want independent reporting. 

You know something? It used to be so simple back in the Donald Trump Twitter days. Twitter, before it was Elon Musk's X. Trump's viral midnight covfefe tweet. Remember that one? His emotional investment in Twilight stars Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart's relationship. He told Robert to be smart.

Be smart and dump her. His hot takes on the health benefits of Diet Coke. Quote, "I have never seen a thin person drinking Diet Coke." Those were the days. Those were the days. We are still getting some classics now in the form of Truth Social AI slop. This was just this week, Trump as Elvis complete with a bedazzled white jumpsuit.

How about Trump escorting a very ripped, handcuffed extraterrestrial across what appears to be a military base? Trump signing a historic document with a feathered quill alongside his pals George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. Stay with me, guys, because I'm, I'm, I'm going somewhere with this. The AI slop and the late night spam posts and the unhinged rants do not appear to be going anywhere, but all the actually important stuff the president posts amidst all that, you know, the, the stuff any other president would reserve for a press conference or a cabinet meeting or his own private freaking thoughts, or the stuff that moves markets, well, that's now for sale.

Trump Media and Technology Group, which owns Truth Social, just launched a brand-new subscription service. They are calling it Truth API. According to the CEO, the subscription, gives users some very special access. It says, "A direct licensed real-time feed of the platform's most m- market-moving truths from the highest ranking Truth Social accounts."

FYI, Donald Trump is the highest ranking Truth Social account on the platform. He's got around 13 million followers. The company says these high-value truths will be fed to users through a machine-readable data feed within what they say are milliseconds of posting at a significantly faster pace than a regular push notification on Truth Social.

And it can be yours for a boatload of money, of course. According to multiple outlets, Wall Street firms are paying roughly $100,000 per month for the subscription. Not kidding. So why exactly is Wall Street just so pumped about what essentially amounts to a Donald Trump Truth Social paywall? Because if they receive valuable information first, say, a last-minute decision to tariff Canada, the market can buy or sell based off of it.

That's the market movement that I was talking about. Let me give you a few examples. Just hours after Truth API launched, the president announced on Truth Social that he was canceling major planned strikes against Iran. Oil prices tumbled almost 5% when the markets opened. There was a similar situation that happened back in March when Trump paused Iranian strikes through an all caps Truth Social post, and then crude oil fell by more than 10%.

It's not just Iran announcements that send the markets into a frenzy. It's whatever he says about tariffs or crypto. The list goes on and on and on. I know what you're thinking or, or yelling at me through your TV screen right now. Is this not insider trading? Democrats sure think so. This week, Senators Elizabeth Warren and Adam Schiff wrote a letter demanding that the SEC investigate whether Trump Media is breaking the law, saying it, quote, "appears to be outrage- an outrageous abuse of the president's office for his personal benefit that undermines everyday investors and the integrity of our markets while enriching Wall Street and other wealthy insiders."

Hmm. Trump Media and Technology Group says that the posts are already public when they reach Truth API. They say what the company is actually selling is the time gap, those teeny-tiny brief moments between publication and widespread public awareness. you can't make this crap up. For years, Truth Social just burned through money, recording a $712 million net loss just last year.

Now, millisecond latency gaps are for sale.

Studies have found that many teens are using social media not for mindless doom scrolling, but instead for their direct messaging and group messaging features with their friends.

Especially for kids that came of age during a global pandemic where their worlds were severely limited outside of the Internet, it makes sense that the Internet would be the place where they developed habits around communicating with their friends. Social media can also be an incredibly important lifeline for LGBTQ+ folks, especially those who are looking for resources for help or how to cope or for connecting with other similar kids.

That's not to say, of course, that there aren't horrific things happening to kids being facilitated by the Internet. Bullying, harassment, trafficking, those are all things that the Internet helps to facilitate. Anyone who uses social media can also attest that spending too much time on it often makes you feel bad.

It facilitates self-comparison. It can reinforce negative stereotypes. It can lead down a horrible rabbit hole of misinformation, fake news, and radicalization that we have seen and we know can be very, very dangerous. However, as much as I am loathe to agree with big tech, it is really, really hard to directly link mental health outcomes as being caused by social media usage.

For example, I had raging, horrific body dysmorphia long before the advent of social media. I didn't need Instagram to help me with that Instagram certainly helps to make it worse some days, but it didn't cause the underlying phenomenon. I have depression and anxiety because of childhood trauma. Is social media a tool I use to help me dissociate from it sometimes?

You bet your sweet ass it is, but it didn't cause the underlying phenomenon. That being said, even if you can't point to social media and say it's an exact comparison to tobacco, for example, in terms of addictiveness, you might be able to say it's a pretty close comparison to gambling. Same manipulation of dopamine-seeking behavior, same random rewards that make you keep coming back for more, and we don't let kids gamble.

But I think that comparison, too, underestimates the importance of social media as a tool for communication and connection for all of us, including teens. And regulating gambling doesn't have as profound an impact on free speech as regulating social media does. And that's where you also start to get into the weeds.

How much do we want the government to be stepping in and regulating the platforms where we exercise our free speech? How much power are we willing to hand to the federal government? What should the government's role be in relation to our access to social media, whether we're teens or not? We have now seen from the Trump regime what it looks like when authoritarians take control in the United States and attempt to wield social media as a weapon against dissenters.

They have been sending out endless streams of subpoenas against social media users who speak out against ICE, for example, a very basic exercise of free speech. In fact, one of the central and most important aspects of free speech, criticizing the government. What happens if we empower the government to order sweeping changes from these social media companies?

What kind of power are we really handing over? The reality is that even if these changes to the Meta platform do seem designed to help teens, first and foremost, teens will just jump to TikTok or YouTube instead, so these platform-specific reforms don't do much. But also, that these are problematic band-aids to larger issues that don't actually solve the underlying problems, especially those plaguing the youth of today.

During the trial that was just settled between the states and Meta, protesters stood outside the courthouse with a giant, many feet-long banner listing the names of young people who died due to social media harm. It had hundreds of names on it, representing individual tragedies of a truly unthinkable magnitude.

But the reality is that the leading cause of death for young people in the United States isn't social media usage. It's gun violence and accidents. That giant banner listing all the young people that died from social media harm represents about the number of kids who die from gun-related incidents every single month in the United States.

According to Johns Hopkins University, over twenty-five hundred children died from gun-related incidents in twenty twenty-two alone in the United States, amounting to about 

seven dead children per day. Per 

day. 

Attempting to fix dangers to youth by barring teen access to social media might do literally nothing according to the data, while comprehensive gun reform could literally save hundreds of kids every single year.

As I already said, there is no really good science decisively linking teen social media use as a cause of teen depression and anxiety, and the stats show that a lot of the harm perpetuated against teens online is being perpetuated by a person that that teen knows in person offline, from school, from church, a family member.

There's also reason to believe that it is the mental health of parents that has a much more profound impact on the mental health of the kids than any access to social media ever would. For example, during the 2008 financial crisis, teen mental health suffered because of the instability caused by the financial collapse and the emotional turmoil of their parents.

There are systematic fixes to these issues that are actually backed up by science and that would actually have a profound impact on teen thriving more than any social media regulation or ban ever could. Mental health issues have for years been conclusively causally linked to things like childhood poverty, childhood access to basic resources like a safe home, food, and early education.

Funding initiatives aimed at improving these resources for children and supporting their parents along the way would do so much more good than any social media ban ever would, and we have the data to prove that And hey, what do you know? If you removed all the tax loopholes given to giant companies and to their ultra-rich owners, those initiatives would be affordable too.

And I think these individual and state lawsuits against Meta for harming children and the resulting settlements and court wins offers the public a misplaced sense of redemption or of vengeance. Yes, we are finally holding these big companies accountable. The problem is that we're actually not, not only because the settlement is pennies for these guys, absolutely calculated into the cost of doing business, but also because it doesn't actually really benefit the public in the way that it could.

This is barely a slap on the wrist, and it absolves everyone of responsibility for doing the things that would actually benefit teens or actually hold these big tech companies responsible. 

Truth Social is the president, president's means of speaking to the world.

If you wanna know what the federal government is doing, you have to follow Truth Social. Truth Social is where the president hires and fires people, it's where he announces wars, it's where he announces ceasefires. It's where he exclusively announces many, if not most, of the core initiatives of his administration.

What's being proposed is that Truth Social is offering what's called an API, a data, a data feed that will give early access to his posts to those who, as you said, are willing to subscribe for $100,000 a month. this means that folks who are willing to pay that money are going to get early access to what Truth Social's parent company itself describes as, quote-unquote, "Market-moving information."

They're gonna have access to that early, which they can then use for trading, they can use it for gambling. They could use it for national security purposes, if they are, for instance, working for a foreign power. So there are all sorts of ways that the president is literally selling government information for private profit.

as you say in the lawsuit, "The scheme is profoundly corrupt. The president stands to gain financially by giving market-moving government information to those who are willing and able to pay his personal company," unquote. I want to go, to a clip right now of Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, assuring reporters that anything on Trump's social media site is straight from the horse's mouth.

this is, Leavitt speaking about Truth Social during a news conference in February 

The post should be taken as the policy of the Trump administration. It's coming straight from the horse's mouth. When you see it on Truth Social, you know it's directly from President Trump. That's the beauty of this president and his transparency in, in relaying, uh, this administration's policies to all of you and to the rest of the world.

So Brendan Belew, talk about the significance of what she's saying, that this is the mouthpiece of the administration, that President Trump personally will be profiting from. 

Yeah, well, the White House did itself no favors by having Karoline Leavitt say that, at least from a legal perspective. So, part of the case is alleges that Truth Social is what you would call a public forum.

A public forum is one where you have First Amendment rights, First Amendment rights to speak, First Amendment rights to access information. When the White House, when the press secretary says that this is the official place for finding information from the president, that makes it a public forum. And so the basic legal problem that you have here isn't just that it's profoundly corrupt, the scheme, but that it's also unconstitutional.

that by posting on the Truth Social platform in ways that people who pay more get earlier access, that actually interferes with people's First Amendment rights to public information. One of the things that the First Amendment protects, not only is the right to speak, but the right to equal access to government information.

The government can't discriminate, who it gives information to based on, who they are, what they believe, what they're willing to pay the president. and so really, that statement was really counterproductive for the White House and helps our case a great deal. 

The named defendants, in your lawsuit include President Trump and two of his closest aides, Natalie Harp, who we talked about on Democracy Now yesterday, and Daniel Scavino, as well as the executive office of the president and the White House office.

Why did you choose these people and entities to sue? 

Well, it's clear that this isn't just the president typing on his phone and posting this on Truth Social. There is a whole operation that makes Truth Social the official mouthpiece of this administration involving Dan Scavino, involving Natalie Harp, involving Harp and Scavino's employers, the executive office of the president and the White House office.

So this is really helpful in building the case that this i- that Truth Social is intimately entwined, with the White House operations, and again, helps build the argument that this is in fact a public forum where constitutional rights apply. 

When you a- approach a, a grocery store and the doors open magically, there is a radio transmitter above the door that detects the presence of a person and opens the door.

All these radio devices, they start with a transmitter. They encode sound or data or images into a beam of this invisible light on Natalia's invisible rainbow. 

The light gets sent out on a specific frequency to your home radio set or your cell phone or that little sensor above the grocery store door.

Your receiver decodes it and voila, the door opens, you check Instagram, you hear the radio. It all happens like that. So radio waves can do a lot, and it turns out the shortwaves, which are basically a stretch of frequencies above AM, like if you imagine your AM dial going off really far to the right, the shortwaves, while they aren't good for too much, they can do more than just carry scratchy voices.

They can carry data, codes, instructions for a computer to follow. And that brings us back to Bennett's sleuthing. He knew that these applicants wanted to use the shortwaves for trading, but the trail had gone cold because the FCC, at the request of the guys with the experimental licenses, was withholding information.

The details were off limits to the public. That is, until 2023, when the parent companies behind many of these experimental licenses got together and made a formal on-the-record request. 

They have come out publicly with a petition to the FCC stating, "Yes, we have been operating these experimental stations for trading purposes."

These parent companies have names like Virtu Financial Incorporated, Tower Research Capital LLC, DRW Holdings LLC, Jump Trading Group, and what they said to the FCC was, "Hey, those secret applications? We're the ones behind them. We've been using them to show that high-speed trading is possible on shortwave, and we think it's time that you, the FCC, let us use some of those shortwaves to do this for real.

No more experiments. It's time for us to make some money." 

And as a group, they call themselves the Shortwave Modernization Coalition. 

The Shortwave Modernization Coalition. Not radio lovers who love broadcasting, but a bunch of Wall Street guys, tech bros, and venture capitalists who want the FCC to let them use the airwaves to make more money.

In their vision for the future of the shortwaves, there's no human touch. 

The trading is arranged by computers. There's not, a human voice speaking. And then, of course, you wouldn't know what they were transmitting. Nobody could decode it. 

To everyone and everything other than the computers receiving the instructions, data sounds like nothing.

Maybe some static. Just blips between computers.

I wanna clarify something. The Shortwave Modernization Coalition isn't proposing to do away with shortwave broadcasting. Within the shortwaves, you have some frequencies allocated for broadcasts, some for emergencies, some for the ham radio guys, et cetera. And at this point, the Shortwave Modernization Coalition has only asked the FCC to give them a small portion of mostly unused shortwave frequencies, ones that are currently set aside for things like backup emergency communications.

And the FCC hasn't made a final decision yet. But what this group is asking for essentially is that the FCC fundamentally change the purpose of this portion of the shortwave band away from public interest and toward private gain. Because remember from season one, the electromagnetic spectrum are radio waves.

They're supposed to belong to the public. Natalia Fotic again. 

These frequencies, although they're invisible, this invisible rainbow, is a public resource. 

A public resource owned by all of us and regulated by our elected governments. 

national parks or waterways, which means that it should be managed always thinking about the public interest.

But like water or the land beneath national parks, the airwaves are really valuable, and over the years, more and more of the public land of the spectrum has been privatized, often leased out to for-profit corporations like Verizon and AT&T. For many decades, that's been the model of how the US government makes money off this public resource.

They lease out these frequencies, often with long lease terms, by auctioning them to the highest bidder. And those companies then use part of the electromagnetic spectrum they're leasing from us to sell us things like WiFi access. Legally, those corporations are still required to serve the public interest.

But with things like broadband internet still unaffordable to many Americans, it's easy to argue that they don't always do that. Historically, this land grab has happened on the more capable parts of the spectrum, the frequencies that are good at, say, carrying Wi-Fi from a 5G tower to your phone. Telecom companies haven't seen the shortwaves as worth trying to get.

They're not used to transmit the internet. A solar flare can knock them out. Even the FCC has tended to ignore them. In fact, right now, the FCC doesn't even auction off the shortwaves. You can just apply, pay some fees, and if you qualify, you can get on there rent-free. 

But you see, this is what's so interesting about it.

First of all, as the other radio frequencies get more and more jammed up with things like Wi-Fi and microwave and satellites, where is the available real estate? Well, it's in the shortwave. But technology is improving its ability to use frequencies in general, and the trading is a perfect example of that.

Who would have thought that shortwave is now fabulously valuable to Wall Street? 

I asked Bennett if he thinks there's any possibility this thing might not go through, that the FCC might say no to the Shortwave Modernization Coalition's request to use some shortwave frequencies for trading. He thinks not a chance.

I don't think that's likely at all. I, I think in general, this whole area is such a backwoods that the people wanting to take advantage of it are counting on the widespread lack of knowledge. I think given the predilections of this administration, I think they'll say, "Go knock yourself out. make a ton of money and go have fun with it, and we don't care," A- And the FCC will make major PR gains from that. They're gonna announce how they're unleashing American innovation. 

The Shortwave Modernization Coalition's formal petition to use the airwaves for trading is going to force the FCC to look at their shortwave rules for the first time in decades. And so, this April, after the FCC opened what they called the delete, delete, delete proceedings, in which they asked for public comment on any regulations that people thought could be rolled back, very Trump 2.0, Bennett and some buddies, including an old Voice of America guy, they made a parallel proposal.

I have recommended that the FCC do what is being done in Europe, which is to reduce the minimum power to a lower power level and a smaller investment, and allow- 

The FCC has this old World War II era rule that says that if you want to get a legal shortwave broadcast license, you have to build a station that puts out at least 50,000 watts of power.

That's a ton of power. 

Which means it's very expensive. The old rules make it impractical to do this except illegally, which is what the, pirates are doing. But I predict that if the power level were lowered, more people would do it, and I say, let them do it. let flowers bloom. See what people would do with it.

So the big question is, is the FCC going to allow that, or will the FCC simply take the Shortwave Modernization Coalition, give them what they want, and forget the rest of it? 

And Finally, Section D, Building Something Better

what is your basic assessment of why so many major media outlets shuttered or underwent huge job cuts in the last, I don't know, year, 16 months, 18 months? it's been ongoing for a while, but it, it does feel like something accelerated in that time period.

Well, first of all, per our previous discussion, I would like to take this, this slot to plug my new podcast. Please. Please. But, but no, but seriously, y- pr- I, I'm not paying you for it- ... but I would. wh- which, which is, is about a lot of these questions called Mixed Signals from Semafor. Yeah. but I do think th- and the, the reason we launched it is because you see these things in media, and you can't figure out why they are happening from what's promoted where.

But also too, right, like what is going on in news, and why are there all these closures? And there's an impulse, I think, and journalists like loved a mono- a good like mono-causal explanation. And so there was, there was a great line in The New Yorker that this was an extinction-level event for media. But I actually think what's happening, there are a couple different things happening in media, and three-quarters of it, in a certain way of speaking, is very positive.

There are a lot of new things. There are a lot of small and medium-sized outlets like yours and mine on totally different lanes trying to figure things out, trying to figure out new models. There are trade publications of all sorts just absolutely thriving. We're in a golden age of, of niche publications.

If you wanna news about Capitol Hill or about the waste management industry or about a million other things, it's never been better. Um, and there's a lot of national political coverage, national investigative reporting, and all of that is just subsumed in this massive wave that is the collapse of local news in America, and which, which erases all those gains and way more.

And so in a way, there are two different stories, and one is lots of interesting green shoots and leaves, but the bigger one is just that local is still collapsing. What happened this year, part of it was that a, some billionaires who had bailed out local publications a few years ago got bored and were like, "This is annoying.

I'm still losing money." And that was what happened in Los Angeles. That's to some degree what happened in Washington. And, and, and, and the struggles of local news, and I would say in the United States, it's actually not a global phenomenon, it's an American phenomenon, are, just they're so dire.

The threat of billionaires getting bored is as much a threat as billionaires, steering the news, right? I think like there's, there's, there's the billionaire Citizen Kane- They might, they might be the same phenomenon actually. Y- yeah, yeah. I mean, there's the Citizen Kane who is the billionaire- Right

using the news to, to, for their political agenda, and then there's the billionaire who, dabbles, like a little bit, and then pu- and then pulls out and creates... there's no, there's no m- media stability when, when that happens. But, but I would also ask about the other, the other factor, which is, private equity, hedge funds, the, the financialization of at least part of the news.

Tell us a l- your, your, your thoughts of that. y- when you hear about that, I'm, I'm talking to you from Denver, right? Denver people think about hedge fund news, they think about The Denver Post and the h- and the, the thinning out of The Denver Post at the hands of a hedge fund owner. W- what is all of that about?

Is, are... Do you think we're coming to the end of that, of that era? how much money is there left for them to squeeze out of me? Yeah. l- let me give my priors here, which is I'm a person who often when I reads the l- read the lever, I think, "You know what? This is capitalism at work. God bless creative destruction."

If the car wash industry or the veterinary industry is getting consolidated, maybe it's for the better, who knows? I think that this is a case where the consolidation and the, and the sort of, the, these chains, basically these chains in the early 2000s, Gannett, McClatchy, and then Alden being the worst and bottom-feeder of them, took on all this debt to buy up what I guess they thought at the time, although somebody should have told them otherwise, were gonna be great businesses, and they were gonna create these big consolidated businesses where they could share back ends and printing plants, and they could produce great newspapers.

They weren't, they weren't thinking, "We're, our business is collapsing and we're going out of business." They were thinking, "Let's borrow some money so we can build big businesses." And it was just an absolute catastrophe, and these companies took on debt that they couldn't handle in a declining industry, particularly after 2008, and, and are in just various stages on the, circling the drain.

And it is a, it's a specifically American story. It is not what happened in Asia. It's not what happened in Europe, where you have chains, but they're family-owned, and, and are very focused on stability and continuity. it just, like some comp- Th- th- there was just, th- we got into this death spiral of debt and mismanagement and, pension, unfunded pension liabilities that, and, and v- v- very little help from the government, specifically with the pension liabilities, that produced these zombie newspapers all over the country, and it's just a total disaster.

Well, so, so if it, if a, if there is an American exceptionalism story here, that, that we stand out, our media, dystopia stands out from other, other countries- It does ... other societies, why do you think that is? I, this, I'm with you on this one. I think it was this rush to financialize and to the, this opportunity to borrow money at a huge scale and a- and culture of, and, and then particularly in the later stages, figuring out that the real estate assets were more valuable than anything else and, and milking them. but, and I think it's, but I think, I think the newspapers industry is it's like the poster child for the lever. I disagree with you on a lot of the other ones, but I'm just totally with you on this one. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I, I, I then would ask, where do you think, where do you think we're headed? G- or give us the two branches.

There's, the, Back to the Future II, they fly ahead to the future, and it's like a complete dystopia. And then by the end of Back to the Future II, where they've fixed everything, there's the fly ahead to the future- ... and, and everything's, everything's better. Yeah. So, so give us the two branches in your mind. I, let's see. I think that the ch- there are these huge challenges that don't really have to do with news that overlay this, you know, the, a lot of collapse in trust in institutions of all sorts. And so, and I, and I don't think that the news business caused that or it's gonna fix it. It's obviously this huge macro social trend. I think when it comes to local news- The best case is sustainable local companies that are some mix of for-profit and nonprofit, and a lot of them are, for-profit corporations that, that don't make any money or nonprofit corporations that are actually very well run and, and, and turn a profit, just don't return to shareholders. I think that, I think those models aren't as different as people say. but companies that are run, for ultimately for the benefit of the city, not 'cause it's the best business in the world, and that rebuild, never the scale of the old Indianapolis Star where I started, started out that had hundreds and hundreds of reporters. there's just not a business model for that. And the amount of money you'd have to extract from the local wealthy donors to build a paper on that scale, you would like regret ex- you, you'd be working for them to too much, to too great a degree. But I think there is an opportunity to rebuild just, but ultimately still on a smaller scale in the best case, this kind of ground level local information ecosystem which can feed up to the national publications.

And I think part of what you see now is we just live in this kind of fantasy land where there's so little reporting happening on the ground in localities that if people get their information of what's happening in the country from four-second clips on social media of somebody punching somebody. And, and no local reporter ever went out and figured out what happened.

And I think even like you saw around some of the campus protests, there was like a weird lack, outside college newspapers, which are a funny little niche, of just "Okay, what is happening? Who are these people?" When like, when that guy was hitting that other guy with a stick, like who were they? And there was just this sort of strange absence of that.

So here's what I, I worry about, whether, whether... I, I would, I would actually put into this discussion, there's local news that's not happening or is being hollowed out. There's also a longer form, deep dive, longer lead time investigative reporting that takes, a lot of time and resources. these are both, I think, business challenges.

A-and what I worry about is a media-- there's a lot of, there's the corporatization of media. There's... But, but there's also this, we live in an information ecosystem where essentially what we're, I think what we're saying is is that local media and/or deep dive, long form, expensive, investigative journalism is hard to get a return on investment.

It's hard to make financially, sustainable. So there's this kind of baked in, incentive to do shorter form, more shallow, kind of clicky news. I'm using clicky as kind of not, not to say it's all, all vapid, but it's just a, as a placeholder. And, and I worry that we get to a point where everything is surface level and none of the either hyperlocal or deep dive stuff actually gets done because it's simply not a good business decision necessarily to, to fund it. 

We had Omar Bartov wrote a, write a piece saying that it is a genocide after two years, and then immediately had Bret Stephens write the piece countering it.

I think that that's exactly right. It's, it's hard to imagine a piece written by somebody sympathetic with the Palestinian cause magically changing what Times readers think ab- about the situation. It's also worth noting that, we have cases of people trying to write pieces that are sympathetic with, with the Palestinian cause that are having their political statements edited out of existence, right?

and then, turning around and The Times, will publish 25, 30 pieces about, trans children that have clearly no fact-checking at all. It's, it's very clear where their allegiances lie. 

The asymmetry of, of extreme fact-checking is a reoccurring theme we, we, that I see in my book.

It's like, 'cause you can't just come out and say, "I support Israel and I hate, and I hate Palestinians and Arabs." That's gauche, so you have to reverse engineer these ostensibly universalist or, or categorical principles that you simply enforce in one direction and don't enforce in the other direction.

Yeah. 

I will say, if you're a high-level person, quote unquote, who potentially could write for The New York Times, and you are listening to this, I cannot overstate how valuable it would be to join the boycott. Because it, it matters when leaders and people seen as influential join it. It legitimizes it, it normalizes it, and that's really what we need to be doing right now.

We need to take these things That are maybe perceived by some as fringe and be like, these are not fringe positions. You cannot claim it's a genocide, which I think is now more or less liberal consensus. I know there's, it's still contested, but just percentage-wise, 70% of Democrats, every major human rights organization.

I think that liberals are good at, or increasingly better at acknowledging the fact of genocide, but not taking the implications of that to its next step. And, we're at the point now where you can't simply signal your outrage. You have to, you have to take it to its logical endpoint, which is to de-legitimize the newspaper that was so central to creating the thing that you yourself acknowledge is a genocide.

And I think that's the next step that people need to get behind. And e- and even if they're maybe squeamish about boycotts as such, or they, or it's viewed as, too, I don't do blacklist or whatever, I, I would say that, these things become normal very quickly. Yeah. And everything is nothing until it's something.

Yeah, because it's the Times, even though it is pro-genocide in its structure, in its ideology, in its, editorial standards, right? Still saying, "This should be boycotted. I will refuse to write for this paper. I refuse to be published in this paper." It has this kind of veneer, right? And this, and this clear reputation where that seems ooh, maybe that's too far.

Well, right. I'm imploring to people. I'm saying, it's expres- it's, it's, it's expression, it's expression in writing, kill your darlings. you, you have this thing that exists in your head, which is The New York Times, this is gold standard, and everybody in the media, everybody in the media, let's say 99%, want to work at The New York Times, and everyone who's not at The New York Times is auditioning to write for The New York Times.

And you can tell in their prose, their style, the topics they choose to cover. It is, it is, it is, again, it is the black hole at the center of the media galaxy, and its pernicious influence on the bounds of acceptable discourse and its role in the genocide, I think have thoroughly discredited it as such on a fundamental level.

And so what I'd say is, no gods, no masters, man. Kill that little thing in your head that says this thing has to exist as some kind of liberal bulwark against Trumpism or liberal bulwark against, I don't know, authoritarianism or whatever some, whatever some such generic, liberal banality. that, there, there is better institutions that have to be built to replace that.

Like, we ha- I think you have to get out of that mindset of this, this idea that, that The New York Times is like gravity or, or, or, or the tides. It's just ever present and always will be, and I, and I think that that's hard for a lot of people. Because again, it is viewed as having good journalism on this or sometimes good labor reporting, but, there, there has to be a line you cross of genocide incitement where you're, where you're, as an institution, fundamentally discredited 

Well, I think what's really powerful, and Chris, I'd love for you to speak to this, is that this is a call not just for, writers or journalists or commentators, or analysts, not providing their, voice or their writing, on this issue, right?

on Palestine, on Israel, on, say, Iran or other foreign policy. This is a wider call, right? this is a writer's and a media and a cultural and an academic boycott because of the power of that. 

It's a call to unsubscribe, but also let them know why you unsubscribe. 

Right. So Chris, if you could just talk about kind of the implications of the wider cultural boycott, why it's just as important for someone who is a national security writer, to boycott as it is for someone who is, say, in the writer's room of, a popular Netflix series.

Yeah, definitely. I think, so for us, obviously, Palestine is the compass. We, our criticism is centered around it, but- The New York Times is the enemy of so many progressive movements i-i-in this country. we mentioned earlier their really awful trans coverage. ending up being cited by Clarence Thomas in Skrmetti is not exactly a good sign for, for a news outlet.

And we also saw, last summer with, Zohran Mamdani's mayoral campaign, this very, tepid vote for anyone but him thing, right? 

Well, let's not forget the blockbuster Watergate-like coverage about his Columbia application. That was- Oh my God ... that was, that... They met, they met us, they met their source in the parking garage in Foggy Bottom.

No, no, no. It's, it is true. but I think, yeah, we, we want to build, a broader critique of The New York Times. We held an event, I think two months ago now in New York City with, um, trans activists, as i-in conversation with Mohammed El-Kurd, who has obviously been very critical of The Times for its Palestine coverage.

And, finding points of commonality in how The New York Times, plays on the side of the powerful, in these cases. And we've also, expanded our coalition in the last few months. We've gotten endorsements from, Planet Over Profit, Climate Focus Group, Black Alliance for Peace.

It's, very focused on American imperialism. And I think what this shows is that, yeah, there is, there, there, there can be a broad movement to de- to delegitimize The New York Times for all of the ills that it, that it causes, Palestine being the central focus there. I also just briefly, you asked about, what else to read apart from The New York Times, and I think it's been quite heartening to see, I think, over the last couple years, this wave of new media ventures that are taking Palestine very, very seriously.

Drop Site, The Key from PalFest, and Equator, just to name a few. and I think, we don't take a super strong position on, on this as an organization, but we always encourage people to read, local news outlets, especially ones with strong unions or even worker-led organizations like Hell Gate here in New York City, where I'm based.

It, we wanna just really make clear that Writers Against the War on Gaza, we think that journalism is incredibly important. We are, strong supporters of journalists on the ground in Gaza, in the West Bank, and in Lebanon, and we want there to be better media in this country. And I think that The New York Times campaign is a really strong start.

As you're saying, it's, it's at the center of the media universe. 

Yeah, I love that you actually pointed that out, Chris, because I think all too often, calls for boycott, of certain institutions can be generalized, obviously disingenuously weaponized, I'd say, but also generalized to be, "Oh, so you're against journalism," right?

oh, if you're gonna take down this, the kind of biggest, biggest paper in the world, or at least the country, are you pro-censorship, pro-silencing? It's like, no, it's actually in service of the importance of journalism, of how much you respect, the media as an entity for accountability and for meaning, and for, and for the, sharing of voices that don't have the other kinds of political or powerful platforms.

This work against The New York Times specifically is strategic in its pro-journalism stance. And so, just before we let you go, Chris, this has been so great, but before we let you go, I just wanna note, for anyone who has not checked out Writers Against the War on Gaza, please do that. the website is writersagainstthewarongaza.com.

and also check out The New York War Crimes paper, which you can find at that website. But also, especially this, prisoner's edition, which, was published on April 17th, 2026. I have it in my hands right now. It is remarkable. I urge everyone to check it out. But Chris, how can more people get The New York War Crimes in their local bookstores, at their local bodegas?

tell, tell the people what to do. 

Thank you so much for the kind words. Yeah, we distribute the paper, at a lot of protests in places that we have strong presences, so New York, Toronto, Philadelphia. We also have, membership in Los Angeles and the Bay and in Montreal. And if you are interested in getting The New York War Crimes to distribute in your area, reach out.

We have a form or an email on our website, and we can talk to you about finding printers and getting, the War Crimes out there. We, yeah, it's a really important political education project and, thank you so much for, the shout-out. 

How do you think about your legal vulnerability, and how do you protect yourself when you're not a company with enormous high-paid, lawyers?

Yeah. So we actually did think about that quite a bit when we were starting up. So, like most news organizations, we have insurance that kind of takes care of... We have libel insurance. and we were very fortunate to partner with a legal firm that has agreed to provide us that sort of legal review and legal counsel pro bono.

I think, not every news outlet has access to that, unfortunately. But, we knew, we would be reporting on the Eric Adams administration, we'd be reporting on the NYPD. we needed to have that sort of legal backing, legal counsel to be able to do our work. And so we, we were able to find it.

I think, when I think about that question in the context of, what do news outlets, maybe like news startups need, right? something that I think is really powerful about the kind of like worker-owned co-op movement is that, we share these kinds of resources with each other, right? we're not just like our own little ship going it alone, but, we, we have a lot of support and provide that kind of support to each other. And I think as we look at the news landscape and think about, okay, like, how can we support these organizations to thrive, it, it's that kind of like really practical support that I think is, is needed, right?

That kind of thing, what Tammy was talking about in terms of like pots of money so that reporters can do more in-depth pieces. All of that I think is really needed. It's one of the principles of cooperative ownership that one helps other co-ops. It's, it's written in right there. It's written into the name.

The other thing, Alex, we've been focusing on some of the challenges, but there's incredible freedom that comes from the independence that you've gained, and that freedom includes editorial freedom. You've at Defector written a lot about Palestine and what's happening in Gaza and the West Bank and Israel.

Can you talk a little bit about that? What's gone into the decision-making there, and what you're seeking to accomplish? Our, our colleague Samer Kalaf, who's the managing editor at Defector, has been writing really brilliant pieces about what's happening and, and also doing, media criticism about, just the way that people are talking about what's happening. and it's been so refreshing to see, just the way even in our Slack, the way that people respond when something like that publishes. The, the biggest response that we get just from the fellow coworkers is like, "Wow, I'm so glad we work somewhere where we can be honest. I'm so glad we work somewhere where we're allowed to say this."

I was on the hiring committee for our interns, this spring. we hired two interns for the summer, and one of the biggest things, one of the biggest reasons people mentioned wanting to work for Defector was actually citing the Palestine coverage, because it was so refreshing for them to see, journalists speaking frankly about their opinions about what's happening, um And, and not, being beholden to really archaic rules of, journalistic objectivity.

All right. Well, you're definitely none of you are going to get any break, 'cause this is election year, and, I don't know about you, but it's distracting. Esther, I should say, to be serious, you're going to be covering very important elections. How do you imagine prioritizing over the next few months, and what do you see as your role in a media ecosystem, as big and as often as celebrity focused as ours is, which is to say, as focused at the top of the ticket?

Yeah, so at Hellgate, I think because we're a very New York City focused outlet, our coverage of the election year I think is going to be a little bit less intense than, say, like an outlet like the New Yorker or even Defector or a place like The Times. we're actually very much looking to 2025 when there are big city elections coming up that'll have a really, really big impact on our city.

But I will say when I was a senior political reporter at Jezebel, I was working there during 2020, right? Huge election year for us. and we, we, we really tried to cut through the noise, I think, in our coverage of the president- of the presidential election. I think rightfully point out- How much of it was, was so absurd, right?

But I think also remind people of, of the real stakes and, and talk really sensitively and, and critically about what those real stakes were, right? not just looking at it as a horse race, who's gonna win what state and why, like which demographics are being moved and why, but you know, really talking about like what it meant for people, what it meant for people's real lives, and really trying to, to keep the focus on that. and because we were Jezebel, we also had a lot of fun too, right? like poking fun where, that was due, and it was like certainly due quite a lot. Tammy, you've been looking at, you've been talking to young voters, as I understand, have a piece coming out about young voters in this election?

Yeah. We, we've obviously over the course of the year tried to figure out who should cover what and, exactly how, and so I have my sort of list of things that I'm, I've been on. And one of them over the past year has been to follow kind of teenagers and 20-somethings about how they've been feel, how they're feeling about the election and party allegiance and, it's, it's, it's been a really interesting time to do that because obviously the war on Gaza started in the fall, and that has really scrambled allegiances and people's feelings about, the Democrats in particular, I would say.

Some of the people I've been interviewing, are young teenagers, and so obviously they don't really have a memory of that time, which is also very interesting, like how could these people who will soon be voting, like not remember anything that Trump did? I want to ask each of you something about the future and, and what you think the future looks like, not for the country, but for this field, for this field of journalism.

It seems to me the old model of a journalist having a lifelong career at a single outlet, that model is probably not the model for the future. it seems to me we all jump from outlet to outlet and recreate ourselves constantly, and I'm just wondering if that's what the future looks like to you. Yeah, I, I think that I never went into my career expecting to stay in one place. so you know- It hasn't been a surprise necessarily the way things have turned out. Although, I think I've worked five places, and three of them don't exist anymore, which is really sobering. I think that for a long time the way that we've thought of journalists has been so-and-so from s- whatever media outlet. and I think that because people are not staying at outlets because outlets are not staying in existence long enough to really build a legacy, I think more and more it's gonna be people standing on their own names, and I mean that for better and worse. I don't necessarily think that's a good thing, but I think that seeing the ways that so many journalists have eked out a living on Substack, by writing a newsletter for subscribers and maybe also doing a podcast, and then writing a book, and occasionally writing freelance pieces, Like keeling over.

It's, that's the hustle, and I feel you see so many people doing it in part because that's what works right now. I don't know how long that will last. I don't know how many of these independent journalists our market can support. but it does feel like- This, building your reputation and doing your work based on who you are rather than where you work or who you work for, does feel like a lasting, trend that's gonna keep going in the future There needs to be, I think, a lot more experimentation with different kinds of structures.

There needs to be stronger unions at places, like at more corporate news outlets. And I think ultimately at the n- at the end of the day, what we really need is actually more government support, right? that's something that I think people are starting to talk about a lot more. and we're starting to see movement on legislation to really strengthen and support local news. in New York, for example, Hellgate and a bunch of other local news outlets were part of an initiative to, to get, a new bill to support local news included as part of this year's budget. And incredibly enough, much to our surprise, it actually was included. what it is is a tax credit for really for smaller outlets, and a way to support local news in an environment where Google and Facebook have really killed off all of the revenue streams for local outlets.

So I think that those, those kinds of initiatives are the things that really give me hope

going to be it for today.

As always, keep the comments coming in.

You can record - and re-record - a voice message by tapping the link in the show notes,

You can reach us on Signal at the handle bestoftheleft.01,

or simply email me to [email protected]

The additional sections of the show included clips from;

The PBS NewsHour

Robert Reich and Inequality Media

Democracy Now!

Novara Media

The Majority Report

Paul Lamce

Laura Flanders and Friends

Progressive Perspectives

Jim Acosta

Connect

Leeja Miller

On the Media

Lever Time

and Citations Needed

Further details are in the show notes.

Thanks to everyone for listening, thanks to Deon and Erin for their production work for the show, thanks to Amanda for all of her work behind the scenes, thanks to our editors and thanks to those who already support the show by becoming a member, purchasing gift memberships, or making one-time donations.

You'll find the link to support us in the show notes along with links to join our Patreon and Discord communities for free where you can also continue the discussion. And don't forget to follow us on all the social media platforms as I prepare to relaunch our social media strategy!

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.