Transcript
A (0:00)
Foreign. Welcome back to Firewall. I'm your host, Bradley Tusk. My guest today is a legend in American journalism. Joe Klein has worked at every major outlet that you've heard of. The New Yorker, New York Magazine, Time, Newsweek, Rolling Stone. Famous for writing Primary Colors, but has also written a biography, Woody Guthrie. And we're just very lucky that he said yes when we asked him to join us. And so, Joe, thanks so much for. For being with us today.
B (0:36)
Good to be here.
A (0:38)
And you're down in. In Key West? You live there full time now?
B (0:42)
No, no, we're just here for a couple of months in the winter every year we. We rent a place here.
A (0:47)
That's smart. There's no reason to be anywhere cold in winter if you don't have to. So, you know, given that you have sort of seen so much change in your own industry over the past, you know, 40, 50 years, I have two questions. One or a question and a thesis. So the question would be, if you went back, however many, into the 80s, whatever it was, and you saw the media landscape today, with a lot of mainstream media being much weaker than it was, but also a lot of new forms of media existing, would you automatically say things are worse than they used to be? And then two, I would. The thesis is that if you look at the big institutions that have lost trust by the American people since probably the Vietnam War, so government higher ed, Wall street, the church, media, I would argue the media has actually done the best job kind of adapting to a changing world because it had to, because of market forces. And whether you like the new form of media or not, it has been much more nimble as an industry, even though it seemed the opposite than the others that I just mentioned. So take that any order you want. And it was a lot. So I can, I can repeat.
B (2:02)
Well, you know, as for the structure of the media, that was inevitable. If we're living in the golden age of anything right now, it's the golden age of marketing. When I was a kid, we had three flavors of ice cream, vanilla, chocolate and strawberry. And we had three TV networks, but an awful lot of newspapers. And over time, you know, the technology enabled us to develop, you know, a thousand TV stations and now the Internet and places like Substack, where I now reside. By the way, my substack is called Sanity Clause, after the. The Marx Brothers famous line, there ain't no sanity clause. The biggest difference in the business, I hesitate to call it a profession, is that is the basic rule of journalism changed as things became far more competitive. When you have more than three TV networks, when you have a whole bunch of news networks, when you have a whole bunch of websites, you have to do something to bring in the customers. And that thing has been controversy. So the biggest change from when I started at the turn of the 1970s, the Stone Age, is that the default position for journalists in those days was skepticism. My favorite question to ask as a journalist was, oh, really? Then they would have to say something and they would never be prepared for that. Or another, another good one was, no kidding? And then they would have to say something. But the change has been this. We've moved from skepticism to cynicism as the default position. And I think that that has done great harm to the Republic. It has splashed over into the political sphere, which is now a very, very, very cynical place, and into the public. I mean, you know, the reason why Donald Trump gets away with being the most corrupt president in American history is that people just say, aren't they all like that? And the answer, by the way, is no, they're not all like that. None of them should be.
