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- [00:00]
Akilah Hughes
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- [00:31]
Marc Jacob
They are at war with facts. The thing that gets me about that whole NPR and PBS thing is, you know, most of what they do has nothing to do with politics. But stuff that is politics is really very carefully straight down the middle. It has nothing to do with saving money at all. It has everything to do with Trump trying to scare journalists since recording the.
- [00:50]
Tara McGowan
Interviews for this episode, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting announced that it would be shutting down the futures of Elmo, Big Bird, Terry Gross and company. Not clear. The fate of local public radio and television stations that are crucial to rural communities across the country. Pretty grim. But that's not all that's been placed on the chopping block because of, you.
- [01:13]
Marc Jacob
Know who in my mind they went after Colbert because he criticizes Trump all the time. Even have Trump criticism, you know, posting on Truth Social. I think he said Jimmy Kimmel is next.
- [01:23]
Tara McGowan
Yes. Yeah. For years, well to do, aging comedians griped about how you can't say anything anymore for fear of cancel culture. Michael Barbaro at the New York Times sighed through episode after episode about the topic. Hmm. Media clutched their pearls and claimed that so called woke had gone too far. Never mind that no one can define woke as anything more than the appearance of anybody not white or straight. It was imperative to kill the beast that so desperately compelled people to have empathy and to be thoughtful. Now it's 2025, Trump's in power and we have reached the stage of fascism where that very same media that insisted on their right to punch down is getting punched hard for saying anything the President does not like. Lawsuits settled to the tune of millions of dollars have plagued network after network and is making me wonder how is it better to defang the fourth estate to protect one small man's feelings? Before we dive into this episode any further, I just want to let you all know that we're going to be taking a production break so that we can work on a bunch of new episodes that we'll release this fall. In the meantime, you can subscribe to our brand new YouTube channel@YouTube.com howisthisbetter that will be a video home for all things. How is this better? Subscribe now so you don't miss a thing. Anyway, before we can talk about the sorry, scared state of media in 2025, we have to talk about how we got here, which was with the abdication of D. In terms of truth seeking, both sides were considered, even when one was obviously lying. For the past decade, we've seen an erosion of journalism, literally with magazines and newspapers shuddering and philosophically with the delicate hand holding demanded from conservatives who simply wanted us to believe their lies.
- [03:11]
Marc Jacob
People in journalism have been following this for many years. Yeah, they're supposed to be the smart ones. They're supposed to be the ones that understand what fascism is, how it displays itself, and all the steps that are taken to slowly but surely take away our freedoms. They're supposed to have a historical context to it, but they seem to not. They seem to be involved in this kind of what I call performative objectivity, where they know what the truth is, but they know that if they say the truth, they will be considered partisan or unfair. And so they just, you know, let Trump lie and then they let somebody who opposes Trump correct him, and then they leave it at that. I have another term for that. I call it jump ball journalism. You know, where you just, here's what he said, here's what they said. And the people who are supposed to decide is the audience. When the journalists know what the answer is, they know what's true and what's false, but they're avoiding it.
- [04:07]
Tara McGowan
This is Marc Jacob, longtime journalist, former metro editor at the Chicago Tribune, and the author of Courier's Stop the Press's newsletter.
- [04:15]
Marc Jacob
What is especially alarming to me is that the news media seem to easily forget they're in a special category in our Constitution. They have the First Amendment to protect them. They're supposed to be challenging powerful people and fact checking them and explaining to the audience and to the electorate what's happening so that good decisions can be made. When they don't do that, they're showing no regard for the special place they have in our society. And they're also helping a would be dictator ultimately take away their rights.
- [04:50]
Tara McGowan
And if that sounds like an exaggeration, the whole helping a would be dictator thing, remember that the New York Times published a story with the headline Trump calls for unity versus Racism shortly after his good people on both sides comment in regards to the Charlottesville white supremacist riot where Heather Heyer was killed. So we know that the right is graded on a Curve with coddling, hand holding and exception. But it wasn't always that way. When we come back, what the corporatization of the media has done to journalism and its poorest consum.
- [05:25]
Marc Jacob
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- [05:55]
Akilah Hughes
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- [06:24]
Unnamed Expert
I mean, I think what's interesting in how the media has changed and become so fractured and decentralized with, you know, just the rise of the Internet originally and then social media and algorithms now. When I look at the American population, I really think it is divided into haves and have nots, but people that have access to good quality news, journalism and information, and those who don't, and the ones who do are actually just elite, higher educated, wealthier Americans.
- [06:56]
Tara McGowan
This is Tara McGowan, the founder and publisher of Courier, which is the organization behind this show.
- [07:02]
Unnamed Expert
That is in part because of the business models of media and journalism have changed where they're really prioritizing smaller paying audiences.
- [07:11]
Tara McGowan
Yeah.
- [07:12]
Unnamed Expert
Putting journalism and information behind paywalls, creating paid products. Really amazing. Journalists leaving legacy news outlets to start their own substacks. And YouTube.
- [07:21]
Tara McGowan
Yes.
- [07:21]
Unnamed Expert
Which I think is great. But it has meant that everybody else is left behind and have really turned into passive news consumers who are still getting an enormous amount of information, but it's the information that's hitting them for free on their social media newsfeeds or in their inboxes or from their friends and neighbors. That has meant that there really are different realities and just a bigger divide between people that are proactively reading a lot of news and information and are just more by that nature, politically and civically engaged. And everybody else.
- [07:55]
Tara McGowan
Yeah, absolutely. And I think that, you know, good journalism has to be funded. We talked A little bit about journalists who are going to start their own substacks. They're now on YouTube, they're figuring these things out. But those models haven't really necessarily proved to be especially sustainable yet. Like substack's pretty new in the long run, I guess. What do you think the future of media looks like if that's the trend we're, we're on?
- [08:18]
Unnamed Expert
It's hard to say because the, the pace of evolution and change in media and technology is so fast right now. You know, just having run Courier for the past six years. When we started Courier, TikTok was not a thing. And now it's our biggest and arguably most important platform to reach audiences, especially audiences under 40 or 50 years old and really young audiences. It's their primary place to get any news and information. It's a really interesting moment that we're in and I wish that I could say I felt more hopeful about it, but kind of in this transitional period where there's still so many old guard media executives and companies and corporations and stakeholders who still believe they're like still clinging to this ideal of the old model of a centralized media ecosystem where there's a top down delivery so everybody has a shared reality and sense of trut that hasn't existed for a long time.
- [09:14]
Tara McGowan
Yeah.
- [09:15]
Unnamed Expert
And I would never argue that that was better than where we are now. With the exception of the fact that we haven't also seen regulation adapt and evolve. Right. There hasn't been regulation pretty much ever. There's never been in the United States on big tech. It's really messy. And I think a lot about one of the really, really high up executives at Facebook I used to know in a different, in a different life a number of years ago, he said to me, you know, I think that the Internet and social media is actually the most democratic information ecosystem we've ever had. But do people really want democracy? And I think that's a really interesting point. Right. Because it is a competitive marketplace. But there are people like Mark Zuckerberg, et cetera, who have way too much power and control over the levers of what information reaches people, how often, what gets rewarded and monetized. And that's where I think it could be course corrected with government intervention and regulation. There's just no chance of that right now.
- [10:19]
Tara McGowan
It makes sense that the Trump administration would want things to keep going as they are in the media, with the Internet being a completely unverified wild west, if suddenly the news had to be verified and not be simple entertainment meant to spike our blood pressure, he probably would lose support. And Trump knows this, which is precisely why he has sued countless traditional news organizations into submission. So let's talk about lawsuits. Normally when someone sues you for defamation, it's because you said something provably false. But with Trump, suing is more like a power move, attacks on truth, a mafia esque. It'd be a shame if something happened to your newsroom type of vibe.
- [10:59]
Marc Jacob
Corporate media is a giant problem. You had these people whose first priority is making a ton of money and journalism is what, second, third, fourth or fifth on the list of their priorities. They do things, you know, like this. Cbs, you know, surrendered to Trump and before that the ABC surrendered to Trump, and before that the Washington Post surrendered to Trump. He's slowly but surely doing what, what fascists have done, you know, for a long time, which is subvert the news media and get rich oligarch friends to buy and control it and have the oligarchs cooperating with a authoritarian government to lie to the people and punishing people who are trying to tell the truth, creating this giant cost for people who are trying to do hard stories. I was a metro editor at the Chicago Tribune. I used to meet with lawyers a lot. We had story sensitive stories. We wanted to make sure they were right. We wanted to go through and we'd send them to the lawyers, lawyers would go through them with us. They'd say, well, how do you know this? Are you sure this is true? Our lawyers were trying to help us get the stories published. I just know there are conversations happening in high levels in journalism now where they're talking about not publishing stories because they're afraid of getting sued. We have a situation where President, the United States, the most powerful person in our country, is suing people, is suing news organizations. He's in a position to destroy their businesses and yet he's suing them. And therefore I view that as extortion. I view that as a demand for protection money. And Trump is demanding that money and, you know, weak kneed, cowardly journalism outfits are paying it.
- [12:40]
Tara McGowan
After the break, we dive deeper into corporate media's capitulation to Trump. Okay, so I'm a little bit curious because there's been a lot of news recently between ABC and CBS agreeing to settle with the Trump administration. Obviously, Paramount is working through a major, you know, deal to be acquired by Skydance. It happened, by the way, the FCC approved the Paramount Skydance merger. Jesus wept. It's just sort of being reported that there's a lot of bending the need to appease this administration, notwithstanding South Park's episode last week, which is pretty intense. But what are your thoughts about these giant networks, basically, you know, doing whatever they can to stay in the good graces of a president. And what does that say? I think about the objectivity of the kinds of information we're going to be exposed to in the future.
- [13:30]
Unnamed Expert
I'm not going to mince words. I think we're seeing the most explicit corruption happening specifically between these negotiations that are happening, you know, behind closed stores. But we know a lot of publicly shared and reported information about it. I mean, it's pretty transparent, right? A. A huge media corporation wants to cut a deal to do a merger with another huge corporation. And in order to do that, they need the approval of the administration. And so they are bending their knee and making the concessions that Trump is requiring. And the thing that I don't really understand in terms of these corporate execs and shareholders calculation is that there is no floor to what Trump is going to ask them to do there.
- [14:20]
Tara McGowan
Mark made the same observation.
- [14:22]
Marc Jacob
He's compromised them. He owns them, and he'll be back again and again demanding more. That's not what you do with bullies. You have to, like, confront bullies and fight back. Journalism is in a very special place in a democratic society. You can't do democracy without doing journalism, frankly, because the public has to have a set of agreed upon, documented facts. The propagandists on the right want to turn everything into an opinion. Well, that's just your opinion. That's just. You can't operate a free and fair country with a situation where everything is. Everything's an opinion. There are no facts.
- [14:57]
Tara McGowan
It's giving. If you give a mouse a cookie every dollar you hand this man emboldens him. And the very people who are supposed to stop this are chickening out.
- [15:05]
Unnamed Expert
It's not like they cut a settlement deal and then it's done. We've seen that with cbs. There's a settlement deal in the tens of millions of dollars, and then Colbert show is canceled. And we know that that was not a financial decision as they claimed. That doesn't make any sense. It doesn't add up. And then there's also been reports that Skydance is going to offer free programming and air conservative voices and causes. And so where does it end, really? We're living in a country right now where what the President wants is what the President gets, because he is abusing his power to actually cut these deals and basically say, you know, show Me, the money. And by the way, that's not enough. I don't like that guy. Cut him. And by the way, I don't like that report. Or he said something nasty about me. Cut him. Fire him. And it's happening every day. It's so hard to keep up with the news cycle in general. But even just the news cycle of these media networks actually cutting deals and giving favors out of fear to this administration, it's the absolute inverse of what independent free media and journalism needs to be for a healthy democracy.
- [16:21]
Tara McGowan
Ah, democracy. That pesky idea that this whole country was about for the first 220ish years. It's unfortunate that the founding fathers never could conceive of something as insidious as Fox News or as indoctrinating as reality television. But I digress. People are rightly disturbed by CBS ending the Late Show. Even if late night shows aren't dominating culture like they did decades ago before the Endless scroll was introduced. Their clips are also mega viral. They're an advertising sales powerhouse for networks. And in an era of streamers trying desperately to figure out how to turn a profit, it doesn't make much sense. And it's more than a little naive to think the Trump administration would still stop at linear television. There's been some unconfirmed reporting that, you know, TikTok this fall is going to release sort of a US only version of itself so that the Trump administration can have, you know, their hand in that programming as well. What would that mean for, you know, Courier, but also other news outlets that are, you know, really doing numbers there and getting reporting out on that platform? If the Internet is no longer a safe place that is democratized, what is the worst case scenario?
- [17:31]
Unnamed Expert
We think about the worst case scenarios all the time. When I started Courier, I wanted to start a new kind of media company because I knew that any media company in this era of American history needed to be really nimble because it's incredibly hard to predict the future of these platforms or what platforms are going to come about and capture people's attention and different generations will migrate. And so we are really prepared for that. We've seen the most rapid growth on TikTok. We're going to keep churning and growing there because it is such a massive relevant platform. But yeah, there's a very good chance that the new version of it or this version are going to turn into essentially state run media with the cuts, which I'm sure we'll talk about too, though to PBS and NPR by Congress recently, which was directed by the administration and the FCC chair. They are getting rid of quality journalism and they are cutting deals with the owners of companies and platforms so they can control what information is censored and what information. Information is spread on their terms. We need to be really, really clear eyed about that. And I think that, you know, it's use what you have now while it's not being censored and pivot accordingly when it is. And something that we really focus on it at. Courier is making sure that we are building direct relationships with our audiences as often as possible. How do we get them to sign up for newsletter letters or text message alerts or updates so we have a direct connection to them that isn't reliant on TikTok or, or Zuckerberg's platforms on Meta, et cetera. We have to be where people are and then we need to figure out ways to, to create more community with these audiences off of those platforms. And you know, every time, like when Musk took over Twitter and turned it into X and then created a, you know, a Hitler AI bot.
- [19:22]
Tara McGowan
Yeah, just minor stuff like that. Yeah. Yes.
- [19:25]
Unnamed Expert
We see people leave the platforms. Right. And then they're going to go somewhere else. And so I do think that there is starting to be more of sort of a literacy around this. So if you are a trusted brand or a trusted messenger, like you as a creator and a host, that gives you an enormous advantage with your audience because they're going to follow you or they're going to follow the brand. And so we really emphasize that. But it's a really scary time. I mean I often talk about worst case scenario to your, to your question is like we need to go back to, you know, underground communications. We need to be able to have in person meetings and, and you know, the modern equivalent of telephone trees and text group threads on unencrypted platforms to really continue to inform our communities. And that would be the worst case scenario is that we're reliant solely on those forms of communications. We're not there yet, thankfully. But I definitely don't put it past this administration. If they're able to stay in power, how far they will take this.
- [20:28]
Tara McGowan
Speaking of NPR and pbs, there's been massive backlash to this administration's move to gut public media funding. The thing is, public media is incredibly popular. The only people upset about it are the ones who don't like the truth getting out or solid reporting that doesn't always paint them in the best light. Back to mark facts.
- [20:48]
Marc Jacob
They hate facts. They're scared of facts. They are at war with facts. The thing that gets me about that whole NPR and PBS thing is, you know, most of what they do has nothing to do with politics. A lot of it has to do with informing people about, you know, amazing things about America's history and highlighting people who are great achievers. But stuff that is politics is really very carefully straight down the middle, frankly, just to the extent of. I mean, I've criticized NPR for, you know, letting Republicans lie and then thanking them for lying on their air. This idea that, oh, there's some sort of liberal establishment. No, they're not. I'm center or left of center and I have problems with them trying too hard to be performatively objective and therefore letting people lie on their airwaves. Generally, they're trying to serve the public. You know, in some of these stations in rural areas, which are going to be especially hard hit, I mean, they warn them about weather emergencies, they tell them, you know, where to get help. This is like a key task of journalism, is to warn people about threats to their well being and tell them where they can get help. If these stations don't exist anymore, where are they going to go? It has nothing to do with saving money at all. It has everything to do with Trump trying to scare journalists.
- [22:00]
Tara McGowan
If public media collapses, is it really going to come down to GoFundMes and billionaires to keep NPR and PBS alive? How can this be corrected? I've seen on Twitter, you know, some people have suggested that Jeff Bezos ex wife used some of her money, Mackenzie Bezos to pay for some of these things. But do we think that it's going to come down to individuals funding public media or is it just over?
- [22:23]
Unnamed Expert
I think it's definitely going to come down to individuals and individuals of every level. The small dollar donations to your local NPR affiliate or your local pbs, those matter. I mean, my local NPR is where I get most of my news and information. I love it. And it's the best local news we have in Rhode island, where I live, all the way up to the McKenzie caucuses of the world. And I do, I really do believe good quality journalism in all formats has to be subsidized in part by philanthropy and individuals if we want to keep it. Because the information industry today is one that prioritizes disinformation, misinformation, entertainment over news. And when you add the political levers from the Trump administration to it, no other model is going to be sustainable. Because in order to make money off of these platforms, you have to you have to acquire attention really quickly and we don't have those guardrails anymore. And I do think there's something beautiful happening. It's just happening too slowly in my opinion. But it is a competitive marketplace. The good guys and gals can actually be really competitive. They just have to invest in it and be innovative and creative. We don't need the bad guys to own these feeds unless they actually are using their levers, which of course is possible. So I'm still of the belief in the optimism that like we too can flood the Zone and be able to build our own infrastructure like Courier and like other and even social media platforms and things like that. Because that really is the the what this moment calls for. If you don't own it, you are subject to those those platforms terms and those folks terms. And we just need some better billionaires too, honestly.
- [24:12]
Tara McGowan
Yeah, if we have to have them.
- [24:13]
Unnamed Expert
I mean.
- [24:14]
Tara McGowan
So basically regular everyday people are going to have to rely on the benevolence of the mega rich to fight the mega rich. Yeah, I'll go ahead and say it. None of this is better. Does democracy even work if the truth is skewed in favor of an autocrat? Is that democracy? Or does this media control hearken back to well documented and failed dictatorships? And when the misinformation and censorship touches everything from politics, yes, but health, science, art, everything, what chance do we have to progress, to move forward, to make anything better? Thanks again for watching. Listening. However, you've been consuming our episodes reminder that we'll be back with new episodes in the fall and to subscribe or follow the show on your platform of choice, including our brand new channel on YouTube@YouTube.com Howis this better? How is this Better? Is written and hosted by me, Akilah Hughes. It's produced by Devin Maroney and edited by Shane Verkhest. Courier's national Managing Director and Executive producer is Kevin Dreyfus. RC Demezzo is their VP of Brand and Social and Charlotte Robertson is the Deputy Director of Brand and Social. Tracy Kaplan is senior Vice President of Sales and distribution and Marianne Kuga is Director of marketing. Show artwork by Danielle Del Plato. An original theme music is by you people.
- [25:51]
Akilah Hughes
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