248: What Side Are You On?

Summary

Conspirituality Podcast Episode 248: "What Side Are You On?" – Detailed Summary

Hosts: Derek Beres, Matthew Remski, Julian Walker
Release Date: March 13, 2025

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I. Introduction: Navigating the Media Landscape

In Episode 248 of Conspirituality, titled "What Side Are You On?", hosts Derek Beres, Matthew Remski, and Julian Walker delve into the intricate and often perilous intersections between traditional journalism, new media influencers, and the resurgence of conspiracy theories. The episode explores how historical precedents of media influence compare to contemporary challenges posed by digital platforms and media moguls.

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II. The History of Journalism and the Quest for Objectivity

Timestamp: 14:23

Derek Beres initiates the discussion by tracing the evolution of journalism from its sensationalist roots to the pursuit of objectivity in the 19th century. He highlights the founding of the New York Times as a pivotal moment in striving for unbiased reporting, contrasting it with earlier newspapers like the New York Sun, which balanced factual reporting with sensational stories to maximize readership and advertising revenue.

Derek Barris [14:23]:
"The New York Times was founded as an attempt to remedy the sensationalist gossip that dominated earlier newspapers."

Beres emphasizes that the ideal of objective reporting is relatively recent and not entirely free from inherent biases. He introduces a heuristic for identifying quality journalism: a commitment to following facts wherever they may lead, even if it diverges from initial narratives or biases.

Derek Barris [15:36]:
"There's no such thing as purely objective reporting... Great journalism is not linear."

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III. Objectivity and Bias in Modern Journalism

Timestamp: 17:49

The conversation shifts to the complexities of maintaining objectivity in today's media environment. Beres argues that complete objectivity is unattainable, as reporters inevitably bring their own biases to the stories they cover. He suggests that transparency about these biases and a willingness to adapt narratives based on emerging facts are crucial for maintaining credibility.

Derek Barris [17:49]:
"There's no purely objective reporting, but reporters can strive to be better by following the facts wherever they lead."

Matthew Remski adds that readers often remain unaware of journalists' biases, which complicates the discernment of genuine reporting from opinionated commentary.

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IV. The Rise of Media Influencers and Conservative Media Networks

Timestamp: 45:01

Julian Walker and Matthew Remski explore the emergence of conservative media networks like PragerU, Daily Wire, and The Free Press. They discuss how these platforms have transitioned from traditional talk radio influences to powerful digital entities that shape political discourse through engaging, often propagandistic content.

Julian Walker [47:53]:
"PragerU relies on short animated videos that propagate falsehoods about climate, slavery, racism, Covid, immigration, and fascism."

Beres underscores the significant influence these new media outlets wield, particularly among younger audiences who increasingly consume news via social media rather than traditional sources.

Derek Barris [48:35]:
"These platforms are optimized for algorithms that favor propagandists who rely on populist and emotional appeals over factual reporting."

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V. Comparing 1930s Media to Today’s Digital Landscape

Timestamp: 37:49

The hosts draw parallels between the media's role in the rise of fascism in the 1930s and today's digital media environment. They highlight how both eras saw media owners wield significant influence, often aligning with political agendas that served broader oligarchic or authoritarian interests.

Matthew Rimsky [37:49]:
"The oligarch class today mirrors the media tycoons of the 1930s, shaping narratives to maintain power and influence."

Beres references historical figures like William Randolph Hearst and modern equivalents like Jeff Bezos and Patrick Soon-Shiong, illustrating the enduring relationship between wealth and media control.

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VI. Billionaires and Media Ownership: A Double-Edged Sword

Timestamp: 59:45

A critical examination is conducted on how billionaire ownership affects legacy media outlets. Beres argues that significant financial interests can compromise journalistic integrity, leading to biased reporting that serves the owners' business and political agendas.

Derek Barris [64:30]:
"No, keep oligarchs far away from the fourth estate. Even if Bezos was a good owner initially, his other business interests inevitably corrupt the news."

The discussion includes specific examples, such as Jeff Bezos' Washington Post and Patrick Soon-Shiong's LA Times, questioning the ability of these major publications to remain impartial when their owners have vast and varied business interests.

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VII. The Role of Social Media in News Consumption

Timestamp: 45:28

Matthew Remski cites a Pew Research study indicating that a significant portion of Americans, especially those under 30, source their news from social media platforms. This shift exacerbates the spread of misinformation and reduces reliance on traditional journalistic standards.

Matthew Remski [45:28]:
"One in five Americans get their news from social media, and for those under 30, it's 37%."

The hosts discuss how social media algorithms prioritize content that generates engagement, often favoring sensationalist or emotionally charged material over accurate reporting.

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VIII. Interviews with Controversial Figures and Platforming Extremist Voices

Timestamp: 73:52

The episode critiques mainstream media outlets that provide platforms to extremist voices, arguing that such interviews can inadvertently legitimize harmful ideologies. Examples include Steve Bannon and Curtis Yarvin appearing on The New York Times podcasts, where their views on authoritarianism and fascism are given airtime.

Julian Walker [70:38]:
"How do you possibly position yourself as part of the Rebel Alliance when you're the wealthiest people with the most influence?"

Beres and Remski express concerns that allowing these figures to speak freely without rigorous challenge can embolden their followers and obscure the true dangers of their beliefs.

Derek Barris [72:45]:
"There's something very valuable about having those conversations... but without challenging their bullshit, it can be dangerous."

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IX. Conclusions and Recommendations: Safeguarding Journalistic Integrity

In wrapping up, the hosts propose solutions to mitigate the influence of biased media and promote genuine journalism. They advocate for diverse ownership models, such as nonprofit media, cooperative structures like the Associated Press, and publicly funded outlets that remain independent from governmental control.

Derek Barris [62:53]:
"In an ideal world, media that's taxpayer-funded yet remains separate from government intervention would be a boon."

Matthew Remski acknowledges existing models, like Canada's CBC, while noting their vulnerabilities to political pressures and the inherent challenges in maintaining unbiased reporting.

Matthew Remski [64:07]:
"Publicly funded media is a tougher sell today, but it supports regional and marginalized news effectively."

The episode concludes with a call for media consumers to critically assess their sources and support journalistic efforts that strive for transparency and integrity amidst a fragmented and polarized media landscape.

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Notable Quotes with Timestamps

• Derek Barris [14:23]:
  "The New York Times was founded as an attempt to remedy the sensationalist gossip that dominated earlier newspapers."

• Derek Barris [17:49]:
  "There's no purely objective reporting, but reporters can strive to be better by following the facts wherever they lead."

• Julian Walker [47:53]:
  "PragerU relies on short animated videos that propagate falsehoods about climate, slavery, racism, Covid, immigration, and fascism."

• Derek Barris [48:35]:
  "These platforms are optimized for algorithms that favor propagandists who rely on populist and emotional appeals over factual reporting."

• Matthew Remski [45:28]:
  "One in five Americans get their news from social media, and for those under 30, it's 37%."

• Julian Walker [70:38]:
  "How do you possibly position yourself as part of the Rebel Alliance when you're the wealthiest people with the most influence?"

• Derek Barris [72:45]:
  "There's something very valuable about having those conversations... but without challenging their bullshit, it can be dangerous."

• Derek Barris [62:53]:
  "In an ideal world, media that's taxpayer-funded yet remains separate from government intervention would be a boon."

• Matthew Remski [64:07]:
  "Publicly funded media is a tougher sell today, but it supports regional and marginalized news effectively."

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Final Thoughts

Episode 248 of Conspirituality offers a profound exploration of the evolving media landscape, drawing historical parallels to illuminate the challenges of maintaining journalistic integrity in the face of concentrated ownership and the rise of digital influencers. The hosts underscore the necessity for diverse and independent media structures to foster informed and resilient public discourse amidst growing conspiratorial and conspiratorial-mad influences.

Transcript

[Julian Walker]

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[Matthew Rimsky]

What's up?

[Julian Walker]

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[Matthew Rimsky]

Wow.

[Julian Walker]

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[Derek Barris]

Hey, everyone. Welcome to Conspirituality, where we investigate the intersections of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism. I'm Derek Barris.

[Matthew Rimsky]

I'm Matthew Rimsky.

[Julian Walker]

I'm Julian Walker.

[Derek Barris]

You can find us on Instagram and Threads, Conspirituality Pod, as well as individually on Blue Sky. You can search our names there. I know I spend most of my time there. You can access all of our episodes ad free, plus our Monday bonus episodes on [e-mail] conspirituality. You can also just get our bonus episodes every Monday via Apple subscriptions. As independent media creators, we really appreciate your support.

[Matthew Rimsky]

In the second half of the 19th century, the newspaper world was roiling with intellectual changes and market pressures that encouraged a shift away from old timey propaganda, scuttlebutt and sensationalism toward the ideal of objectivity in reporting. But to the extent that the intellectual desire for fairness was complicated by the economic drive to reach across political demographics and sell ads that would appeal to everyone, a critical challenge emerged. What did truth in reporting and fairness and opinion mean in relation to escalating power and class struggles by the 1920s? This challenge peaked in the problem of how one should write about Hitler and Mussolini. How much will you risk versus how much will you normalize and hope for the best? Are you there to observe fairly from both sides, pretending your hands are clean, avoiding confrontation whenever possible? Are you there to call it as you see it from a commitment to human rights? Sound familiar? Lately there have been a lot of folks, including us, doing the fascism comparisons, and sometimes the Twitter hot takes are helpful, but often the compressed format obscures dimensions of time and chaotic variability. How long it takes for fascism to fully dig its roots in, and how varied the opposition is along the way in terms of speed, Hitler gave his first speech to 111 thugs in 1919 and was jailed for eight months after the Beer Hall Putsch in 1923. It took him another decade to consolidate power under the Enabling act and another six years after that to invade Poland. Now it's not clear where we start the clock on Trump, given that he ramped up his presidential run in 2015. But wherever it starts and however fast he seems to move, the road is long enough for there to be opportunities to stand in the way or stand on the curb and wave as the tanks roll by, or even offer the soldiers sandwiches and the tanks fuel. But first.

[Julian Walker]

This week in conspirituality, conspiracy minded MAGA supporters who bought into claims about the corrupt deep state, creeping woke Marxism and the stolen 2020 election and maybe some form of the wild pizzagate qanon fantasy about satanic pedophile Democrats finally had their day in The sun on February 27. I wonder if they were served sandwiches. Matthew Right, or did they? On that day, the new Attorney General Pam Bondi released what she called the first phase of declassified documents on pedophile and accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. An elite group of conspiracy influencers were invited to the White House to receive and then pose for socials with their special Epstein Files Phase one binders. The group included major Pizzagate booster and noted great replacement theory white supremacist anti Semite. That's a lot of descriptors. Jack Posobiek along with fellow Pizzagate early adopter Mike Cernovich. Then for some reason there was the vicious anti gay and anti trans activist Chaya Racik, Stop the Steal organizer Scott Pressler and unhinged OANN personality Liz Wheeler. Within hours of their photo op they would take to social media to complain that their binders contained only information already in the public record, complete with the redactions of names in Epstein's address book.

[Derek Barris]

Now, are these different from Mitt Romney's binders, Julian?

[Julian Walker]

Well, they're binders full of women, but in a much more disturbing way. And this prompted an embarrassed Pam Bondi to publish a detailed letter on justice.gov scolding Cash Patel and ordering him to deliver all documents related to Epstein by 8am the following day. Which is really the way you handle this kind of thing, I guess. During the 2024 campaign, we know that Trump threw red meat to his conspiracist base by vowing to get to the bottom of the mysterious New Jersey drones and to declassify UFO information. And alongside this, documents about the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. Robert and John F. Kennedy. And he repeated those assassination document promises at the Maga victory rally the day before his January 20 inauguration. But some noted that the Epstein topic was absent from his list of promises. And there was a Fox News interview from June of 2024 that featured this telling exchange. Would you declassify the 911 files? Yeah.

[Matthew Rimsky]

Would you declassify JFK files?

[Derek Barris]

Yeah, I did. I did a lot of it.

[Julian Walker]

Would you declassify the Epstein files?

[Derek Barris]

Yeah, yeah, I would.

[Julian Walker]

All right.

[Derek Barris]

I guess I would. I think that less so because, you know, you don't know it's, you don't.

[Julian Walker]

Want to affect people's lives if it's.

[Derek Barris]

Phony stuff in there because there's a.

[Julian Walker]

Lot of phony stuff with that whole world. Yeah, I don't know about Epstein so much as I do the others. Yeah, we wouldn't want anything phony to be declassified. I love the change in his tone of voice there. He couldn't hide that. So think of the people it might hurt if something would get out there that was, you know, of course we all know that his equivocations about Epstein having. Because Epstein has, has said on tape that for a decade he was Trump's best friend. And there's plenty of photo and video evidence of the two of them together around young women acting in very kind of seedy ways as well as of Trump making risque statements about Epstein liking them young. This is a fact that would lead to the conviction of EPSTEIN In a 2008 trial of procuring a child prostitute. And then there were much more serious charges in 2019 involving the sex traff of as many as 250 minors. And then famously, Epstein suspiciously died by Apparent suicide in his cell before he could stand trial. But notice the list that the the Fox interviewer presents to Trump. 9, 11 assassinations of the new head of Health and Human Services, father and uncle, and then Epstein, alongside of course, the election fraud staple that's always going to come up. This shows the popular belief that conspiracies have been covered up by their government and they will be exposed once declassified documents are released. And so far there's been absolutely nothing new on any of it, despite his promises to his base. But meanwhile, this past Saturday, prominent MAGA mouthpiece Dana White, head of the ufc, that's that mixed martial arts promotion some of you know about and now also board member of Facebook Meta, hosted two front row guests. They were also at the UFC run power slap event, which is one of the most God awful things you never ever want to expose yourself to. The night before where White hugged them before the show began and said loudly on a video that was captured and shared on socials, welcome to the States, boys. You may know that I'm talking about Andrew and Tristan Tate, who were until recently forbidden from leaving Romania as they awaited trial on rape and sex trafficking charges.

[Derek Barris]

Well, now that Andrew has announced he's living in Los Angeles, Julian's going to be going and finding him for some exclusive footage for the podcast.

[Julian Walker]

Yeah, I'll invite him on a nice walk with my dog and we'll see what we can talk about. Right, Matthew?

[Matthew Rimsky]

Well, I think you should do. I think you should power slap him.

[Julian Walker]

Yeah, power slap him. The Tate brothers arrived in the U.S. here's the irony for you. On the same day as the Epstein Binder conspiracy influencer White House visit after their case had been brought up by top Trump officials during a visit to Romania. Remember, they were forbidden from leaving as they were waiting to stand trial. And then all of a sudden here they are flying into Florida. Andrew Tate is best known for luring young women into his web by pretending to fall in love with them. Calls it the lover boy method. Gaining control over their lives and then coercing them into working for him as webcam sex performers. He's made millions by running online and in person courses that teach other men how to use these cruel and deceptive methods. And he drew a lot of criticism, kind of high profile in 2023 for having gained huge and worrying influence over young boys by creating viral misogynistic social media videos and a whole network actually of young boys who were posting that stuff for him on a, on a basis where they would get paid if People signed up for his courses and also in attendance at the UFC this past Saturday, snapping pics with the same Dana White was the new FBI director, Kash Patel.

[Matthew Rimsky]

Well, they want to start a training program, right, for FBI officers based on ufc like fitness techniques.

[Julian Walker]

Yeah, something like that.

[Matthew Rimsky]

I mean, one of the things about this Tate visit is I really have to wonder whether there's an incipient culture war within the culture war here. Because, you know, Tate is literally on tape bragging about torturing girls. People know what he's done. This is the kind of person who if he goes to prison, he needs 24,7 protection from the other prisoners. So, you know, I just have to wonder how upside down does the White scene have to be for them to be celebrated, you know, let alone safe in public?

[Julian Walker]

You know, I wonder about that. I wonder if in prison he arrives as a hero, as a kind of, you know, powerful figure, someone who is aligned with Trump. I think in terms of the people who are at the ufc, who are Trump supporters, who don't maybe have as much access as we do to a lot of this information, they may just see the Tate brothers as victims of woke cancel culture who are being censored by the left and by weaponized lawfare, just like all of the other MAGA deplorables and their king, Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile. I don't know if you knew this, but anyone can get the same premium wireless for 15amonth plan that I've been enjoying.

[Derek Barris]

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[Julian Walker]

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[Matthew Rimsky]

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[Julian Walker]

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[Matthew Rimsky]

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[Julian Walker]

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[Matthew Rimsky]

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[Julian Walker]

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[Matthew Rimsky]

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[Julian Walker]

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[Matthew Rimsky]

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[Julian Walker]

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[Derek Barris]

Moving on to our main story today, I've covered the history of news a few times on this podcast, so I'll drop those episodes in the show Notes if you want us more holistic view on what news is and how it was created what's important for our conversation today is to remember that the attempt to convey objective reporting is pretty new, and it was started by a group of reporters in 1851, pushing back on the sensationalist misinformation. You know, think of stories like Bat Boy on the Moon that was circulating around New York City and also in the Boston area and as well as nationally. But those were the two vectors for where news was covered. New York Times, which I know we'll be discussing today, really made the first regular attempt at giving readers the objective news. And I say regular because the Bat Boy paper, the New York sun, began publishing nonpartisan reporting a good 20 years earlier when Benjamin Day, who was the publisher, realized he could get more advertising money if he played it straight. Still, the reporting was mixed with those sensationalist stories that kept readers purchasing copies, and the New York Times was founded as an attempt to remedy that.

[Matthew Rimsky]

But Listener put a pin in that because Benjamin Day, realizing that there was more money and playing it straight, that has big implications down the line.

[Derek Barris]

I want to add a caveat here that I'll return to, and it's my belief that there's no such thing as purely objective reporting. Even when I used to work for daily and weekly news outlets in the 1990s as a reporter, the topics that I chose to cover in the questions that I asked politicians during interviews were part of my own reporting bias, and no one can escape that reality. But that said, I'm going to offer an important heuristic for what I believe to be identifying good journalism. If the reporter sets out to tell one story and the facts lead elsewhere, you have to at least honor that fact or chase that trail down to weigh out as many sides and takes as possible. A lot of great journalism is not linear, and writers willing to update their own perceptions as new information is acquired reflects the original spirit of that New York Times team in the mid 19th century. Before that attempt, newspapers were generally gossip broadsheets. The News put that in quotes that started in Europe a few centuries earlier in Italy specifically. And this involved men going to the docks, interviewing ship workers who had traveled to faraway lands on the trade routes. And then they repeated verbatim what they said, predominantly to an upper class audience, because this was sold to local business owner owners and landlords who all paid a subscription fee to access those rumors that might in some way help their businesses. There was no fact checking. There was no real investigative reporting. Wealthier people paid for access to information before those stories spread throughout the public, in part to control the narratives when they did spread. Now, only later, when those broadsheets became advertising vehicles for local businesses, did the public start to have more access to information. In this light, opinion journalism is much older and more pervasive than actual investigative reporting. Some argue that Socrates and Aristotle were the OG opinion writers, which laid the ground for a form of shadow structured public discourse.

[Julian Walker]

Well, we should check in with Mickey Willis because he loves to say that Plato said that he who controls the narrative controls the society.

[Derek Barris]

So Plato was the first columnist, that's what you're saying? Yeah. So as I flagged earlier, early broadsheets were gossip driven, but also gave an opportunity for local religious leaders and business owners to pen columns, which definitely falls under the opinion column. In the early 19th century in America, the New York Post, which was actually founded by Alexander Hamilton, was explicitly tied to political parties. Then, as I also mentioned, Benjamin Day understood he can pull in more advertising revenue if his New York sun reflected a range of ideas that was sort of a response to the Post and other papers that were very partisan. This set the stage for the modern incarnation of what we call news today. But it wasn't until 1841, when Horace Greeley introduced the editorial page in the New York Tribune, that opinion writing became a separate section from news reporting. Opinion and news reporting have always been separated in media organizations since that time. For the most part, the New York Times introduced the op ed page only in 1970. And to this day, there remains a wall between news reporting and the op ed page, which is overseen by the editorial board. So when people complain about opinion writing they don't like in the paper, that's totally fair. That's part of the whole point of expressing an opinion. But in an ideal world, it should be removed from the news reporting division. And I know we're going to discuss the roles of each section soon. So you can imagine how propaganda spread through the publication of news. In fact, while the New York Times was doing on the ground reporting during the Civil War, most newspapers were little more than propaganda machines for whatever political climate the government of their region espoused. Confederate commanders refused to have published stories about Union victories in an attempt to keep the morale of their soldiers high. And papers in all regions regularly publish stories to shame deserters in order to ensure loyalty to their army. Now, my feeling is that objective reporting is not indicative of how news functioned for most of its history since inception. And while we had a brief period in American history where the three major television stations generally relayed consistent stories which, to be clear, had their own biases, that's more of a misnomer than the reality of what role journalism has played in societies for most of time. To put it another way, the bifurcation of media between left and right that we're seeing today is more natural than we sometimes portray it. And this has been accelerated by social media and the creation of thousands of small media organizations and podcasters with no media training, sharing the news from their angle. And this has hindered our ability to recognize the differences between reporting and opinion because the latter is sometimes, sometimes, often, I would argue, treated as reporting. This is especially true when someone has a political agenda and then uses their opinions to justify their views under the guise of reporting. And yes, in my opinion, that includes us, which is the framework through which I'm viewing this episode.

[Matthew Rimsky]

Yeah. So, Gary, I have two questions for you, or comments like you're naming this heuristic on the reporter side. If they have the integrity to pivot on new information, they're legit. If they're doing that work. I think the paradox is that for the reader, the process is usually in a black box. It's hard, if not impossible, for a reader to know whether the reporter pivoted from their priors unless they say so openly, or unless the reader has some familiarity with sort of like the longevity of the reporter's work and how the editorial process works in general. But that gets into conversations around, like, transparency in modern journalism or the practice of revealing your positions and biases within the reporting. But, like, even if readers do have access to that process, like, let's say the facts don't lead the reporter elsewhere. Like, the reader is stuck with not really knowing whether or not the bias or the reporter's lack of curiosity that they started out with is actually still running the show, that they didn't actually just write the story that was already in their head.

[Derek Barris]

Well, I don't really understand how you would rectify that. I mean, from what I'm hearing here, it's Sort of like, first off, let me say that because most news is accelerated through social media, how many times have we come across people who read a headline, maybe the lead, and that's it, they don't actually read the story? I mean, so many times I've posted somebody something and somebody will reply, what about this? And I'm like, well, it's in the third paragraph of the story. If you actually read it, you would have known that.

[Matthew Rimsky]

Sure.

[Derek Barris]

So we're already dealing with that sort of barrier to entry. But then beyond that, when you're talking about reporting bias, I mean, I don't even understand how that would operate. I mean, does the reporter have a sort of CV on the media organization's website that lists all of their biases and previous positions? And then would you expect a reader to go check that every time they read a story by that person? Or if are they supposed to list their biases within every single article so that it half the article is now a sort of anecdotal reflection on who the reporter is? So I just don't understand how that would function in reality.

[Matthew Rimsky]

Yeah, I guess that's what I'm bringing up. Right. Because I think, I think like you, I don't believe in the objectivity of reporting. Right. And so then the question becomes like, how do I show my reader that I'm trying to approach something with integrity? How do I show that I'm having my work checked? How do I show that? Because this is at the heart of whether or not a media organization or a particular journalist can build trust within a readership or the institution can build institutional trust. Right.

[Derek Barris]

I mean, in terms of us, we've already talked about, in terms of our podcast, as media, we try to fact check each other, but that is not a very huge firewall as compared to when I did a story for Mother Jones, for example, where I spent a month writing the story and then two months fact checking and going through editorial. When we worked with Time magazine, we know how long. When we published our book with Hachette, we know how long that process was with lawyers. So we know as reporters or as writers in that situation. But like, we can tell the public, but then it's up for them to believe it, right?

[Matthew Rimsky]

It is kind of up to them to believe it. And that's. That's a bit of a problem, right? Yeah, yeah.

[Julian Walker]

It strikes me that, you know, fact checking is one thing, right? Like do, do the facts or have the facts been established? Have they been backed up? Can we cite good sources? Bias to Me, seems like usually something that's unconscious. Right. So. So how do I report out my biases? It's like. It's like saying, how do I report out the contents of my unconscious every time I go to, like, express an opinion?

[Matthew Rimsky]

Yeah.

[Julian Walker]

So, yeah, it's. It is a very difficult thing for. I can imagine a reporter in the vein of what Derek described, tracking down a story and saying, you know, at first when I found out these facts and I talked to this person, yeah, it seemed like it was this, but then I found out this additional information and it seems like it's this. Now, let me be clear. Support this point of view because I think it would be better for society. However, in this case, the story has taken a different kind of shape. And so here's what I have for you.

[Matthew Rimsky]

My second thought is related because it's from the readerly side. And I'll just take myself as an example. I cannot engage with the content from a mainstream paper or news network without feeling that news and opinion are not firewalled from each other, actually, because that. That is part of what makes the New York Times the New York Times and the Intercept. The Intercept as a package, as a platform. I know that the news direction, the editorial sort of biases and the opinion sort of scope of what's reasonable is going to be within a certain pocket. And so I guess we're troubled about this firewall between news and opinion all the time.

[Derek Barris]

First, I just want to go back to say something about the objective to qualify. I did say purely objective. I do think that reporters can be better at it than others just because that's my stance. So I don't think it's any purely objective in terms of your recent one. I mean, what you've just expressed is a feeling. But I don't know how many newsrooms you've worked in. I've worked in two of them for the largest newspapers in New Jersey. And there was the firewall now. And not only was there a firewall between opinion and between editorial, there's also a firewall between advertising and those two departments. They. They were not allowed to speak to each other. Not only that, there was also someone who worked on staff who was not allowed to talk to other people who wrote the headlines for every story back then because they wanted to keep it consistent.

[Matthew Rimsky]

Yeah, yeah, right.

[Derek Barris]

So what I'm saying is, like, I've experienced those firewalls. I know that they're real. But again, like, first off, you have to. You have to take my word for it as someone who's lived through this. And then secondly, you, you know, every, every paper is going to be different. Now. There's been reporting on some legacy media that is more porous. And I totally believe that we can't believe, like I worked for a magazine as an editor where that firewall between advertising and stories definitely did not exist. Now that was in Music magazine, but I can imagine that existing elsewhere. So I think in these, in these situations, sadly, it really is a case by case basis and it's going to be corrupted in some organizations by pressures from advertisers, for example. So it's a, it's a really hard landscape to navigate. And I don't think, you know, you can ask that question of the totality of journalism, but I do think in terms of specific organizations, you can go to the people and you can try to assess for your own, you can.

[Matthew Rimsky]

Do journalism on the organization.

[Derek Barris]

You're asking a lot of people, though.

[Matthew Rimsky]

Yeah, exactly. Yes, I believe what you're saying about your experience in newsrooms. You have experience that I don't. But like, I would also have to believe that the, from, from the top, the organizational struct, that there isn't some sort of, you know, you experience the firewalls as the journalist, but, but, you know, as you get up towards the editorial or the board of directors top, there isn't some sort of like unified vision about what's going to be chosen, what direction the entire ship is going to sail in, that sort of thing. So that's there too, right?

[Derek Barris]

Well, that's kind of good in my sense. Like look at again, the New York Times editorial board. I, I went through in preparation for this and looked at all of their histories and they're, they're diverse and I think that would create healthy journalism. If I, if I saw a board where everyone believed the same, same thing, then I would be more worried.

[Julian Walker]

I also want to want to add here too that in terms of any topic like this, part of what starts to define the arc of a conspiracy theorist is that they, they get into this absolutism where, oh, you think they're, that, that these organizations are purely objective. Well, I have found some instances in which they were not.

[Matthew Rimsky]

Right.

[Julian Walker]

I have found some instances in which Big Pharma was corrupt. I have found some instances in which the government lied to us, therefore all of it is completely untrustworthy. So it's an all or nothing black and white proposition. And then therefore, ironically, I end up trusting whoever I get the vibes from that, you know, resonate with my gut.

[Matthew Rimsky]

Well, it all comes to a head in the 20s and 30s, doesn't it? Because journalists have the chance to use this new model of truth seeking, opposed to commentary, to sharpen their ability to say two things if they could. On the reporting side, you know, fascism is verifiably happening. On the opinion side, fascism is verifiably bad. And a lot of people didn't go in that direction, but a lot of people did, and it cost them a lot, up to, you know, being interned and being murdered. And so I want to ping a few of the good guys off of the top before getting into the more depressing fact that a large chunk of the news and opinion biz either went passive or they protected their own asses. You know, at times invoking principles of fairness or some sort of blind hope that you can strike a deal with madness and stay sane. So here are some notables who got the memo from Pete Seeger singing what side are you on? In the late 1920s, there's a guy named Carl von Ozietzki. He's the editor of Die Weltaboene who exposed Germany's violation of the Treaty of Versailles by building up what would become the Luftwaffe. So they jailed him over and over again for these reports, but he kept running these stories of illegal militarization and they kept jailing him until they let him die in jail of tuberculosis in 1938 in Berlin. Conrad Haydn wrote these immensely useful books about the Nazis out of his deep experience. He covered Hitler from 1923 after being a student protester in Munich. And by the way, Trump has just announced that the University of munich is losing $400 million in federal grants. Actually, sorry, that's the wrong timeline. Haydn actually coined the term Nazi. Did you guys know this? He took it from an old Bavarian term that means bumpkin or yokel. So Haydn did try the weirdo tactic.

[Julian Walker]

Actually didn't work.

[Matthew Rimsky]

It didn't work. Yeah. So then there's Fritz Gerlach, who was a hot headed proto fascist and anti communist to begin with. But then he flipped when he saw what went down at the Beer Hall Putsch and he became one of Hitler's chief irritants. But his audience was conservative, maybe comparable to Never Trumpers. He attacked Nazi criminal activities, but he also shitposted about Aryan racial theory as if it could be applied to Hitler himself in articles like Does Hitler have Mongolian blood? So he's a big troll and talk about it takes all types. This was a conservative who was also a staunch opponent of antisemitism but then he became enamored of the German Catholic stigmatomistic Theresa Neumann, who he consulted on all of his business decisions. So the Nazis killed him at Dachau in 1938. But the core journalistic resistance to Hitler congregated at the socialist paper, the Munich Post. Hitler called it the Poison Kitchen, in line with his broader epithet of Lugenpresse, or the lying press, which pretty much lines up with fake news and, you know, enemy of the people. But actually, the Munich Post was the first to publish a Nazi document outlining a final solution for Munich's Jews. Their headlines also slapped Nazi party hands dripping with blood was one. And outlaws and murderers in power. This is all before their offices are destroyed in 1933. This is six years before Poland Stormtroopers destroy the offices. And that echoes the destruction of the Avanti socialist paper by Mussolini's men. This is about a decade prior, I think, 1923. At the same time, Goebbels is driving the passing of the Schrift Leitergesetz Law, which outlaws any journalism by non Aryans and makes all journalists subordinate to his Ministry of Propaganda. So this effectively stitched up resistance media for the following decade. Except for an incredibly brave underground network of newspapers and pamphleteers, often Jewish holdouts, before they got swept out, there was solid resistance press in other occupied territories. The territories the French Communist paper Lumanite published throughout the war. It's still publishing today in occupied Holland. Amazing stories of 1300 Underground resistance papers pressed on home presses, sometimes using cardboard to make prints of metal plates. So they weren't using movable type. They would like take the metal plates, they would press them into cardboard, take the cardboard etching into their briefcases onto trains so that they could carry them between. Between secret sites. So crazy stuff.

[Julian Walker]

Wow.

[Matthew Rimsky]

Then we have a turn because there's the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, the jta, which provided early evidence of mass violence against German Jews. And it's the example to pivot on towards this path of lesser resistance. Or, you know, as Robert Evans puts it in two excellent behind the Bastards episodes, I'll link to the liberal media always fails against fascism. So I'll link to that. From the outset of getting JTA cables on Nazi violence, the New York Times and other publications were often dismissive of the service as Jewish anti Nazi propaganda. So the times stopped using JTA's content altogether in 1937. Terrible time to cut them off. And that meant that they largely ignored the telegraph associations reporting on the unfolding Holocaust. So, for example, the Times did not publish JTA's reports on the Babi Yar massacre in 1941, where 52,000 Kiev Jews were killed. So readers of the New York Times were long protected from news about cattle, cars and gas chambers. Now, there are countless reasons for this happening, but the consequences are the consequences. A lot of histories describe distinct patterns of underestimating the fascist threat, minimizing violence against minorities, a kind of cross our fingers and hope for some kind of return to normalcy policy, and then plenty of pulling punches on criticism for fear of losing access to sources. Then probably one of the more uglier parts was a craven fascination in the stories about economic and infrastructure gains. Right. Like nice trains, bro. And those things were actually inseparable from the remilitarization that was outlawed under Versailles. And then we come to the outright Nazi sympathizers who were all very wealthy. So maybe that sounds familiar. And I'll link to a Jacobin interview with historian Catherine Olmsted about her book, book the Newspaper Six Press Barons who Enabled Hitler. Because she shows how the top UK and US media moguls of the 1930s were all aboard the fascism train and they either celebrated or they normalized Hitler. So the UK tycoons were aristocrats. They boasted about 50 million readers at the height of fascism in the UK. The Americans had family dynasties amongst them and they reached equal or more numbers. So among them we have in the UK, Harold Harmsworth, who's the first Viscount Rothamir, owner of the Daily Mail, Max Aitken, the 1st Baron Beaverbrook, the owner of the London Daily Press, which becomes the biggest paper in the world for a while. William Randolph Hearst in The states own 28 different newspapers and movie reel distribution services. And then there's a family. Robert McCormick owns the Chicago Tribune. His cousin Joe Patterson owns the New York Daily News, and Joe's sister Cissy owns the Washington Times Herald. So those are Catherine Olmsted's six press barons.

[Derek Barris]

I think all of this is really important to consider given the current stakes. I'm also thinking, because I'm trying to catch up to you guys. I'm reading Paxton's the Anatomy of Fascism right now, and something early on he cites that I think is really relevant is that fascism cannot be replicated exactly in any country due to nationalist interests. So that there. There's no. You can do a one to one. No, but. But using as he does in the book Mussolini and Hitler and Hungary, you know, for precedent, sort of points out patterns. We should note this was written decades before Trump even started to think about power. But this nagging question remains in the back of my mind covering this is how precise is it to compare right now where there were relatively few reporters on the ground. Sorry, like to compare this time in, in Hitler's time, especially American reporters on. So you had to rely on secondary and tertiary accounts. And today the opposite. There's just so much access to information and yet so much more access to inaccurate and biased gossip and propaganda that's being spread through social media.

[Matthew Rimsky]

Isn't ground level reporting here though being destroyed as we speak? Or is it what you're saying, that social networks are providing just more of everything from eyewitness accounts to propaganda?

[Derek Barris]

More of everything? I mean, yes, well, yes, from local, and you can argue national newspapers. Ground level reporting is being destroyed from people who decide to start their own. Like Scooter Caster is a great example. She goes out and she shoots where a lot of media organizations won't. It's actually a really fertile time in on the ground reporting. But then you get what you else you, you hint at here, Matthew, is that a lot of people with no experience of what reporting means putting out their opinions and then other people reading that and considering that reporting. So it's a real kerfuffle in every direction.

[Matthew Rimsky]

Yeah. So I mean, I agree with you that the technological changes, the coverage changes are immense. They disrupt any simple comparison. You know, Paxton speaks about that a little bit with regard to time periods and technology. But I think the overlap that I see most is this philosophical adherence to, you know, the marketplace of ideas notion, plus the affinities between oligarchy and fascism. And those seem to be consistent.

[Julian Walker]

Yeah. And one of the places where I think the comparison is quite strong is with Ukraine and with the number of people, especially in the digital new media sphere, which I'm going to talk about in a minute, who are willing to get into these conversations about how. Well, if we want peace and we want the war to end, then Ukraine really does have to come to the table. And, and it's like they're, they're completely blinded to the reality of Putin as a really dangerous, expansionist, invading, you know, completely power hungry force in the world right now. That's dangerous for everyone in the way that Hitler really was. Maybe not quite to that level yet.

[Derek Barris]

Welcome to the I Can't Sleep podcast with Benjamin Boster. If you're tired of sleepless nights, you'll.

[Julian Walker]

Love the I Can't Sleep podcast.

[Derek Barris]

I help quiet your mind by reading random articles from across the web to.

[Julian Walker]

Bore you to sleep with much soothing voice.

[Derek Barris]

Each episode provides enough interesting content to.

[Julian Walker]

Hold your attention and then your mind lets you drift off. Find it wherever you get your podcasts. That's I Can't Sleep With Benjamin Boster, Foreign.

[Derek Barris]

This is Chris Christensen from the Amateur Traveler Podcast. The Amateur Traveler Podcast is about the love of travel. It's about where to go and why you should go there. We're going to open up to you different destinations you haven't heard of or places you have heard of but things you didn't know to do while you were there. Each episode is about 45 minutes long and it's typically an interview with someone who wrote the guidebook on that destination or who has been there, or who's a local tour guide, or someone who is an expert on that destination and knows how to tell you what to do to get the most out of your precious vacation time. So if you value your vacation time and you want to use it wisely, listen to Amateur Traveler and learn about destinations both domestic and international, places you've heard of and places you haven't. Amateur Traveler has almost 900 episodes talking about different destinations, so if there's a place you want to go, odds are we've already covered it and can help you plan a trip there. Amateur Traveler Subscribe Today.

[Julian Walker]

Comedy fans, listen up. I've got an incredible podcast for you to add to your queue. Nobody listens to Paula Poundstone. You probably know that I made an appearance recently on this absolutely ludicrous variety show that combines the fun of a late night show with the wit of a public radio program and the unique knowledge of a guest expert who was me at the time, if you can believe that. Brace yourself for a rollercoaster ride of wildly diverse topics, from Paula's hilarious attempts to understand QAnon to riveting conversations with a bonafide rocket scientist. You'll never know what to expect, but you'll know you're in for a high spirited, hilarious time. So this is comedian Paula Poundstone and her co host Adam Felber, who was great. They're both regular panelists on NPR's Classic Comedy Show. You may recognize them from that Wait, wait, don't tell me. And they bring the same acerbic yet infectiously funny energy to Nobody Listens to Paula Poundstone. When I was on, they grilled me in an absolutely unique way about conspiracy theories and yoga and Yoga Pants and QAnon, and we had a great time. They were very sincerely interested in the topic, but they still found plenty of hilarious angles in terms of the questions they asked and how they followed up on whatever I gave them like good comedians do. Check out their show. There are other recent episodes you might find interesting as well, like hearing crazy Hollywood stories from legendary casting director Joel Thurm or the their episode about killer whales and killer theme songs. So nobody listens to Paula Poundstone is an absolute riot. You don't want to miss find nobody listens to Paula Poundstone on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen to your podcasts.

[Matthew Rimsky]

So Julian, we know all about our current media tycoons who have that old timey big money firepower, but that's not where the majority of of outright maga apologetics is coming from today, is it?

[Julian Walker]

No. You know, as we know, there's been this huge sea change in how the media shapes the discourse even when it's not straight maga apologetics. There's a lot of enabling and there's a lot of whataboutism in the name of some kind of heterodox open mindedness. You know, in November of last year, Pew Research did a really excellent study, excellent study that they published data showing that one in five Americans get their news from social media.

[Matthew Rimsky]

Okay, is that people reading headlines in their feed as we were talking about before, or are they actually clicking through?

[Derek Barris]

That says research poll. So that's people saying they get their information from social media.

[Matthew Rimsky]

So it's saying that they read the headlines or they clicked through.

[Derek Barris]

Who?

[Matthew Rimsky]

We don't know.

[Julian Walker]

Yeah, we don't necessarily. I mean, we'd have to read the study in depth to get to answer some of those more granular questions. But essentially it's like when people are asked, where do you get your media from? Newspapers, tv, social media? That's the percentage of people who are choosing social media as their primary news source. And for people under 30, that number is actually 37%. Voices from across the political spectrum, as we know, have flocked to become online creators. But I would say the medium really does favor propagandists who rely on populist appeals and emotional appeals and care very little for the facts. In 2021, NPR reported case in point, that conservative personality Ben Shapiro's Facebook page had more followers than the Washington Post. And in May of that year, Daily Wire, his organization, got more Facebook engagements. We're talking about likes, comments, shares than the New York Times, Washington Post, NBC News and CNN combined. This trend moves away from journalistic standards and fact checking and qualifications towards the ST News influencer content that has clearly been optimized for the algorithms. New Media's blurred lines between influencer, salesman, political pundit, and preacher are a propagandist dream. You talk about no firewall. Right. They also drag the Overton window toward misinformation and conspiracism. So I want to talk briefly here about three examples from today's digital new media as it has sort of evolved. Pragerus, the Daily Wire, and the Free press. So in 2009, this is just five years into the existence of YouTube. PragerU was co founded by conservative talk show radio host Dennis Prager, who'd been on the radio since 1982. And contrary to the name Prageru, which suggests the university, it's not a school of any kind.

[Matthew Rimsky]

What?

[Julian Walker]

No, sorry. I know you've been laboring under that illusion.

[Derek Barris]

I spent $60,000 there for my diploma.

[Julian Walker]

You'll be paying off those student loans forever. It's actually just a website built around a YouTube channel, and estimates vary, but their view count is certainly in the billions. Seed money for Prageru came from the fracking billionaire Wilkes brothers, whose grandfather founded an ultra conservative Jews for Jesus style church called the Assemblies of Yahweh. They preach that abortion and homosexuality are sins that should be punishable by law. Other funders include Sheldon Adelson, the National Christian foundation, and the DeVos Family Foundation. So no, no doubt about their orientation.

[Derek Barris]

People who love public education across the board, absolutely.

[Julian Walker]

Prageru has relied quite heavily on short explainer style animated videos about politics, history and religion. Their budgets run over $25,000 per video, so roughly what we spend per per podcast episod. Experts say. Experts say that they propagate falsehoods about climate, slavery, racism, Covid immigration, and fascism itself. As an example of cultural penetration. In 2015, PragerU developed a school partnership program that provides secondary school and college teachers with lesson plans to accompany the already available videos. And in 2023, they became an official education vendor to the Florida education system. As of 2024, New Hampshire, Montana, Oklahoma, Arizona and Louisiana have all followed suit. So what this means is as a generation of kids who are growing up with Prageru's ideas about government, civics, political history, all being sort of taken as a given in terms of what they learn in school. This impact matters, I think, as an example of a transition from the old opinion media of talk radio, where Prager came from, into a YouTube channel serving viral political propaganda to young people, and then becoming institutionalized into the education system, which is supposed to teach kids facts during this overwhelming political period that we're in right now, the only coverage we see from Prageru is pro Israel and anti trans commentary as well as culture war stuff about education and how climate change is a hoax. So that's Prageru. Next in this timeline comes the Daily Wire and the Daily Wire was co founded by Ben Shapiro in 2015, but the Wilkes brothers once again provide the seed money. And not only that, they become majority owners of what has now become a media company. Shapiro also came in through the doorway of a much shorter run on traditional talk radio. And the Daily Wire differs from Prageru in that most of their content repackages news stories through a conservative culture war lens. So they're they're topical in terms of what's going on in the world, even though Shapiro is the top dog. They've also actively developed a stable of TV host style personalities with social media influencer aesthetics. They also have a children's video branch as well as an on demand video subscription service that generates at least $15 million a month. That's not all. Daily Wire has a film studio that has produced six documentaries and one feature film and has announced plans for more. And documentaries there of course should be in quotes. Consistent with the many overlaps between the two companies I've been describing so far, Daily Wire bought Prageru's entire library of content for 2020 to include as available in their subscription service. Now we've been talking mostly about right wing media so far, but my sense is that there has been an evolution from Prageru's fun but pseudo educational and sometimes wonky propaganda to Daily Wire's slick camera ready personalities and well packaged culture war shows that are frank about their political stance. We have something that emerges next Joe Rogan's I'll Talk to Anyone Interesting Dominance inspired other comedy, MMA and health optimizer bro culture type podcasts, centrist YouTube channels that cover news synergized a similar vibe. I'll talk to anyone as long as it's interesting. And then you start to see the cancel culture gripe, the free speech, heroism, censorship, martyrdom, all priming this online subculture for Covid contrarianism and the conspiracy theories that flared up in 2020. And during this period, my favorite person in the world, Bari Weiss, made a very public show of resigning from the New York Times to start her own podcast and she cited the left leaning bias and the censorious wokeism of the New York Times. And when she started her own podcast it was called Honestly and then the substack blog called Common Sense which would eventually turn into what we now know as the Free Press, currently valued at $100 million. And in some places it bears the tagline Think for yourself. So I'm citing all of that, honestly, common sense Free Press. Think for yourself. This is all the vibe that captures the appeal of heterodox digital media, which claims to sort of be in the middle and objective and willing to have the difficult, complicated conversations. Bari Weiss is the queen of this domain. Vanity Fair has called the Free Press a salon for the disenfranchised. And that positioning brings in over 10 million a year in subscription fees alone. You'd also be hard pressed to find another news and opinion outlet that's actually more completely intertwined with the right leaning big tech tech billionaire class than the Free Press. Marc Andreessen and David Sachs are investors. So is British hedge fund billionaire Paul Marshall, who owns the Spectator. But other outlets similar to this Unherd and GB News, these are all conservative outlets based in England. Between the Free Press and the misleadingly named University of Austin, which is really an anti woke think tank she co founded.

[Derek Barris]

What?

[Julian Walker]

Yeah, I know.

[Derek Barris]

I spent a hundred thousand dollars to get my diploma there.

[Matthew Rimsky]

It's terr.

[Julian Walker]

That's terrible, Derek. You're going to be. You're going to be working multiple jobs to pay all of this off and it's all a grift. Yeah, it's really just a think tank that, you know, masquerades as being some sort of academic institution that's going to reform the problem with woke tertiary education. She's also enmeshed here with Peter Thiel and his Palantir protege Joe Lonsdale, as well as legacy GOP donors like Harlan Crow and Jeff Yaz. Now with Bari Weiss. Her salaries and net worth are not publicly available, but her position and profile in relation to these investors suggest to me that financially all of this has turned out very, very nicely for Bari Weiss. No surprise then that right after the 2024 election, Weiss had Peter Thiel on her show to preen about the death of Woke elitism. But then in the conversation, as it often does with Thiel, because he's so awkward and incoherent, it took a turn because he proceeded to critique the Democrats for not being elite enough. And this led Barry and her team to title the video the Triumph of the Counter Elites, which to me is just amazing. And Derek, we covered this for conspirituality 242 gaslighting the election. And to be fair, the Free Press does occasionally push back a little and hosts conflicting Opinions. Like right now, if you look at their website, there are a couple opinion pieces criticizing the MAGA stance on Ukraine, as well as criticizing Trump dabbling in cryptocurrency. But the Free Press's clickbait model also thrives on a stream of culture war pieces like why aren't young people having sex? How California leaders caused the wildfire devastation, how Tiger mom beat the woke mob, and my favorite 1950s sex culture got it right. And then you have, of course, I don't know if you guys have noticed this. There was a whole wave of this while all of the Trump, you know, speed run toward authoritarianism has been happening, where all of these outlets are covering the UK grooming gangs, which is a story from about 10 years ago, and the cowardice of the west in terms of dealing with the grooming gangs. Right?

[Matthew Rimsky]

Yeah. So with the triumph of the counter elites, like is there an impending crisis coming over none of these positions actually being countercultural anymore, like the heterodox is now orthodox. Do they need to exist? Like has. Has Thiel's investment just paid out as it peaked?

[Julian Walker]

Yeah, that's, that's such an interesting question. I think, you know, one of the trends that I notice in this whole set of heterodox sphere is they're continuing to recycle all of this stuff about wokeness and trans issues and how the universities have been taken over. And then of course, you know, how the pro Palestine protesters are anti freedom and you know, anti Western civilization values or something like that. So it's, it's a tricky spot they're in.

[Derek Barris]

While we record, sometimes I like to open up Blue sky and just thumb through because I like to see if anything happens. It's kind of like a roulette and see if anything happens that is in resonates with what we're talking about. And as soon as I open Blue Sky a moment ago, I see that Carolyn Levitt has just announced, quote, the Washington Post is overhauling their newsroom structure. It appears that the mainstream media, including the Post, is finally learning that having disdain for more than half of the country who supports this president does not help you sell newspapers. Oh, pretty good timing there because rounding up here, the last section, we're talking about the opinion sections of the Washington Post, which has been owned by billionaire Jeff Bezos since 2013, and the LA Times, which has been owned by billionaire Patrick Soon Xiong since night 2008. Now, both owners refused infamously to endorse presidential candidates in 2024, and both have their hands on the scale when it comes to the opinion section now, they're not identical stories. Washington Post staff I've heard Eugene Robinson talking about this. For example, they've generally stated that Bezos was mostly hands off with the paper for most of the time that he's owned it, which ended up being a net positive for a legacy paper that was bleeding cash. Now with the LA Times, their staff has long been suspicious of Chiong and have been in public about it. And many, many people have left the paper because of it. The common speculation is pretty simple, access to power and money. This resonates back with what Matthew was bringing up about the oligarchs owning papers during Hitler's time. So in this example, Bezos's Amazon Web Services has billions of dollars in government contracts that I'm gonna guess he would like to keep. Sun Shiong's company is called Immunity Bio, and they have numerous products that need FDA approval at the moment. Now, given the pay to play environment that the Trump administration has created, it would be easy for him to tell Bobby Kennedy to make sure those products are not going to be approved. There are likely other reasons around access to power, but those two jump out in my mind.

[Matthew Rimsky]

So what's the scale of Immunity Bio like? Does Soon Xiang really need it to fly?

[Derek Barris]

Yeah, I would argue yeah, they're a biotech company. They have a market cap of $2.35 billion. It's the reason he's a billionaire. They have investors to appease and the only pathway that a biotech company has forward is FDA approval for their products, devices or drugs. So yeah, I would say he needs it to fly. It's pretty important. I don't think he's making his billions from the LA Times, which brings up the question, should billionaires own media companies? Now, as Julian just flagged, that's been happening in new media. And we can debate how much power the legacy media has compared to upstarts like the new the Free Press. I mean, you pointed out that in terms of social media and that awareness, the, you know, the daily wires trumping the Washington Post and New York Times. So I would say they have a lot of influence here. But my personal feeling about this is that no keep oligarchs far away from the fourth estate. So even if Bezos Bozo. Even if Bozo. Even if Bezos was a good owner for some period, and to be clear, I'm not claiming it was ever a utopia because other former reporters are on record about its approach to news, but we see what happens when their Other business interests become entangled with the news. So in an ideal world, which I fully recognize we do not live in, but as someone who's been in media for over 30 years and, and does appreciate what it aspires to and what it often accomplishes, I imagine three ownership models that could work work. You have nonprofit media. In my opinion, one of the best outlets around is ProPublica. They are nonprofit. Any form of organization that does not maximize profit in exchange for reporting is good because the other way around always seems to be corrupted on some level. So keep single owners out of any income level out of the news. So no matter what you're, what you're making, whether you're a billionaire or this is your business, that's a dangerous path. Then you have cooperative media and we already have a huge one, the Associated Press, which is owned by 1700 newspapers and 5000 TV and radio broadcasters. Then you have smaller organizations like Defector Media. They, they're not cooperative specifically, but they use a similar, similar collective ownership structure because all 19 founding employees each own around 5% of the company and they all have an equal voting rights rights share. And finally, you have publicly funded media, which is honestly a tougher sell in today's climate, given that any media that has ties with the state is likely to be compromised. Project 2025 actually has a whole chapter on how it wants to dismantle and control Voice of America, which is America's publicly funded international news organization. But like I said, in an ideal world, media that's taxpayer funded yet actually remains separate from government intervention would be a boon. And I again, I'm having humility here. I know how hard that would be to accomplish in reality.

[Matthew Rimsky]

Well, we actually have nationally funded media here in Canada with some revenue from advertising. But you know, as you're mentioning, in this current political climate, if you have a single source as opposed to a donor base, because like NPR and PBS are majority listener and small business funded, that makes it really vulnerable to any Trump wannabe wants to turn off the tap. So, and also like here, the pressures of capitalism are always fucking with our socialized programs. There's always a downward pressure, like on the content side. CBC works okay, but it's going to be prone to the same confirmation and selection biases that any centrist project is going to have because it has to keep everyone happy. And more than often that just defaults into sort of like passivity. Like nobody is going to look to the CBC for like strong opinions, opinions on this or that. What they can be good for is the support of regional and marginalized news. Like, some of my tax dollars go to a programmer named Rosanna, dear child of the Cree Nation in Manitoba. It's like she reports on first nations issue. Her show's called Unreserved. And the feds pay me to. Or pay her well, they pay for me to listen to news from somebody like that. And I think that's pretty cool.

[Derek Barris]

You said a moment ago the sort of market pressures that centrist media is beholden to fully agree with with that. But what type of media doesn't? I mean, I feel like conservative or leftist or all the organizations that Julian flag, like the Free Press, are also beholden to their messaging. So I don't see any media existing that isn't beholden to some of these pressures we've been discussing. Would that be correct?

[Matthew Rimsky]

Yeah, that would be correct. I would say that. I would say that the broader you want your reach to be and the broader your advertising base has. Has to be, the more pressure there's going to be to sort of generalize and. And, I don't know, centrist eyes your menu of options and sort of like the framework of general conversation. Right.

[Derek Barris]

Well, I mean, so let's just briefly define that, since this is sort of the peak moment here, like, in terms of centrist, is the view having as broad of an opinion as possible to try to pull apart the story. And I'm separating this for the march to fascism, which I'm fully on board that that's a problem that some organizations don't recognize right now. I want to be clear on that. But like, when I hear centri, just hear also sometimes, let's look at this range of opinions and weigh them out and present them in a way that makes sense holistically.

[Matthew Rimsky]

Well, in an ideal world of balanced reporting in which you want to come to the sort of closest approximation of truth from many different sources, then, yeah, that's the reporting practice. But that's not really the story of the type of media that was able to like, very specifically resist the rise of authoritarianism in the early 20th century. And like, we see it, we see the sort of complications in these three floods of news and this subtext that we're chewing on that we're ultimately taking out, you know, our own positions within, you know, two of the things that we've talked about, two floods are pretty toxic. There's an oligarch class that will take an obvious side. There are heterodox disruptors who like, pretend to offer some sort of scrappy countercultural Take that just happens to be reactionary most of the time. And then the third carries these contradictions, like legacy media outlets, you know, who are trying to abide by these old rules of engagement, noble rules of engagement, which depend on trying to, or pretending to separate reporting and opinion and trying to maintain the sort of marketplace of ideas principle tied in with maintaining, growing the readership always, and also drawing in advertisers. And I think that's the situation in which there are pressures for some reason, for the New York Times to platform Steve Bannon and Curtis Yarvin for hours in feature interviews that go out on video channels as well, and during those. And it's not like that's my entire entire take on the New York Times to which I subscribe, because I value a lot of the on the ground reporting. But why is he there? How does that choice get made? And Bannon absolutely rolls Douthit, by the way, right off the bat, like his opening statement that Douthat makes. He introduces the interview by saying, I've interviewed other people from the right, including Marc Andreessen, who's a right wing thinker. And Bannon interrupts him, takes the wind out of his sails right from jump and says, you know, I have to correct you and say that Marc Andreessen and the oligarchs are nothing but a bunch of progressive leftists. Right. I find it disgusting and revolting that they're trying to like co opt this movement. So this guy is really caught flat on his feet. He doesn't challenge the bullshit. David Marchese does slightly better with Yarvin, but he still ends up in a very exasperated way, debating the benefits of slavery.

[Julian Walker]

Yeah, I mean, Matthew, this is very interesting, right, Because I've been very public about my criticism of New York Times for hosting Curtis Yarver. And I think obviously he's an awful human being and he's also not a good faith interlocutor. You're not going to actually get a coherent, honest conversation about political philosophy from the guy because he's a troll and he's a really, really ugly human being in every aspect of what he talks about and what he tries to accomplish in the world. And I think it's an example of New York Times podcast podcasts especially, you know, including the fact that they have the, the video version on YouTube, really trying to lean a little bit more in the direction of the kind of heterodox media success. Right? Yeah, but, but, but, but let me say this. I, I think that, that these, you know, Bannon and And Yarvin are awful human beings. I don't like to see them getting more exposure. I don't like to see them legitimized. But I do think there's. There's. There's something going on in both of those interviews that maybe is a good thing with Steve Bannon. We get to hear from him, oh, here's this fracture line within the coalition around Trump. There really is tension between the Bannon style kind of faux populism and the tech billionaires, and he's threatened by that. Thank you for letting us know that, Steve Bannon. We know where one of the weak points is within that group. And with Yarvin, you know, there is a little bit of that sunlight is the best disinfectant thing. Where give him enough rope to hang himself, where he's going to start telling everyone that's listening that he thinks slavery might have actually been good for black people. That's a. That's a pretty awesome way for people to know who they're dealing with.

[Matthew Rimsky]

Yeah, except that. Except that Marchese knew that. He said that before he invited him on. So he says it and then he invites, like, these are the types of interviews you do on background for the piece that you write. Right? Like, why would you work this out on air and then publish it? Because you don't have control of the. The framework. I mean, I can't imagine that either of those two interviewers want to promote the views of Bannon and Yarvin, but because they can't effectively, you know, curtail them because they're not skilled that way like this, these people have made their lives out of rolling over, you know, mainstream liberal norms that I just don't see how it works.

[Julian Walker]

The only way I can imagine it perhaps having a positive impact is that the kind of person who. Who's listening to a New York Times podcast anyway, may not fully know the extent to which Curtis Yarvin is as evil as he actually is. And so, hey, go ahead, guy, tell us what you really think. And now people know.

[Matthew Rimsky]

I guess all I'm thinking about today is that the history that I know says that at some point, the marketplace of ideas model, the sunshine is the best disinfectant model, is going to embolden bullies in some way because they're clipping those podcasts and they're going back to their, you know, their own crowds and they're saying, look how I rolled, Russ. So, you know, it's a format that's beholden to manners and processes, you know, or its own desire to be central or popular. And it really wants to believe until it's way too late that it can debate and persuade people who are busy building internment camps. And you know, from an anti fascist point of view, the word has always been, if you want to argue the benefits of slavery free, shut the fuck up. No pass around, I'm not talking to you. And I also want to point out that Bannon and Yarvan and the whole heterodox sphere, they don't care about presenting their content via some kind of view from nowhere. Their brand is, you know, exactly where they come from and what side they're on. We have to listen to Russ Douthat for like probably six months to really nail down, you know, where he's coming from. That's not true for these people and their followers think they're producing knowledge and not propaganda. So they blow past this objectivity trap almost and they hack into that audience that isn't buying the impersonal, archetypal, sort of, you know, classic American anchor Walter Cronkite, rather Ted Koppel Walters. You know, it's like we have a model of American believability in the distant past. I think Derek, you referenced, referenced it, you know, with regard to the three television stations that everybody used to watch back in the 60s and 70s. I think we still kind of remember that time of a unified epistemology. But I think too many people have doubted it at this point for it to, to work. And so I don't know, what do you, what do you guys think first.

[Derek Barris]

Off, in terms of you are completely correct that people like Yarvin and Ben and their media ecosystem only care about propaganda and agenda. I don't think that the opposite of that is to do the same same. When I think about like my own work, if I'm wanting to think about sort of how did we get to the place where we are in capitalism today? I'm going to go read Keynes, I'm going to read Shmter, I'm going to read Polyani, I'm going to read Hayek. Because these are for the main people who all have conflicting ideas about how the, the structure of capital was working in post World War II. And they have, they have conflict, there's some crossover, but there's conflicts there. Now I know that's not an example, that's extreme when we're talk about fascism. But I, I don't know Marchese's metacognition. I don't know why he chose that interview or what he was going for there, I would lean toward Julian Sunlight theory, and we could definitely debate whether or not that's true. But I think there's something very valuable about having those conversations. And I, I know that Gavin Newsome, and this is his own podcast, he's.

[Matthew Rimsky]

Been a lot of.

[Derek Barris]

I don't love that he platformed Charlie Kirk in any way. But, but when you're thinking about, instead of your very specific viewpoints on things and you look at what he's going for about having conversations with people, I'm not inherently against that, because if we don't have conversations and we're not able to cross boundaries, we are heading to some sort of civil war here or some form of fascism. So I'm a little more forgiving of media organizations that are willing to engage in such a way because without those sort of dialogues and conversations, I, I think a certain richness is lost in the creation of a culture.

[Julian Walker]

Yeah. And, you know, we talked about the Peter Thiel interview that Barry Weiss did like two days after the election, which was basically just the victory lap where, you know, she does the thing where she'll like give one little pushback and then laugh about it and have no follow up questions. But she could have had Peter Thiel on and really held his feet to the fire, really asked him difficult questions, not let him wriggle out when he gets incoherent and starts like making references to Star wars, yours hold, you know, say, hold on a second. Here's what I'm really getting at. How do you possibly position yourself as being part of the Rebel alliance when you and your friends are the wealthiest people in the world who have the most influence over our tech sphere? Like, like there's a way to get in there and expose these people. And if, if you're prepared enough. And I, I would say that Marisi and Douthat failed in that regard on those two interviews. And I also, also, you know, am really uncomfortable with the fact that those people got that kind of seemingly legitimate legitimizing platform. I just think these are difficult questions, especially for these times when everything is so polarized. If not, if we're never exposed to these figures, we don't, we don't know what we're dealing with. Right.

[Matthew Rimsky]

I just, you, you had a very compelling segment about how much exposure they get get. And so I'm just wondering who gets exposed and who gets won over by the open conversation that prevents civil war, which I think is the train has left the station on. Right. Like not civil war, like you know, shooting in the streets, but, like, we're not at a stage where somehow, you know, Gavin Newsome and Charlie Kirk making common ground over anti trans positions is going to help anything. And it's not like it. It does. It's not like it breeds mutual understanding.

[Derek Barris]

Newsom did not express an anti trans. He. He expressed his reservations about trans inclusion in sports, which is its own debate. But he also pushed back on Kirk about the existence of transgender people. So this is what I mean. It's important and even in these conversations to reflect the nuances that are going on in these conversations, even if we don't agree with the overall, like, like, vibe that's going on around them.

[Matthew Rimsky]

Yeah, well, to my point, about who has to run to the center in order to maintain position and power, I mean, I think that's a really good example. I mean, my answer is, you know, Derek, you said I don't want to mimic something like, I don't want to mimic Steve Bannon and Curtis Yarvin in my own work. I don't think you could. I don't think I can either because. Because I would foreground my own positionality. I would be transparent in my sourcing because I want readers to, and listeners to understand where I'm getting information from. I would be open about, you know, processes and biases. I would always show how I'm looking at how economic and political pressure influence stories. I'd be clear about what I don't know. There's a whole range of tools that. That can position you as a political actor and a journalist at the same time that don't have to do with mimicking propaganda. And I think overall, that gives a chance, you know, to be clear that my reporting is driven by my values that say that fascism and conspiracy theories that, you know, drive it come out of capitalist crises. And so I'm going to tell the stories from that particular place. And so we can debate the values or we can, you know, fact check the story, or we can do both. But I just can't pretend that they are somehow separate or that I can transcend the politics of how I think.

[Derek Barris]

I think in terms of the. The overall, you know, idea of what you said is nice, but I also don't think it's how media functions in general because Seth Godin, you know, one of the most famous Marx marketers of the last 15 years, arguably, like, he just talks about how he writes a hundred blog posts or a thousand blog posts for that one to go viral. And so what you're suggesting here is presenting the biases and the background and everything of who you are. But people don't consume media that way. They. They find little, little pieces that come out, and then they have their own set of assumptions that go into all of it. So to be able to express all of that information every time you put a microphone on or every time you sit in front of your keyboard would just be impossible for anyone to do. So. I, I am going to advocate for a little bit more holistic, in terms of centrism, for the sort of reporting that I think actually moves, Moves things along, all the while agreeing fully that I do believe some legacy media organizations should be a little bit more concerned about what we're moving toward right now.