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Mixed Signals from Semafor Media
Can the Supreme Court keep its secrets? With Jodi Kantor of the New York Times
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- [00:00]
A
Foreign. Welcome to another episode of the Mixed Signals podcast from us here at Semaphore, where we are talking to all of the most interesting people shaping our new media age. I'm Max Tawney. I'm the media editor here at Semaphore. And with me, as always, is the co host of this show, the boss, our editor in chief, Ben Smith. How's it going, Ben?
- [00:28]
B
It's good. I'm glad to be here.
- [00:30]
A
Well, I'm glad you've brought your enthusiasm to the show, Ben, because we have a really serious and interesting topic this week. Our guest on the show is Jodi Kantor. She is an investigative reporter with the New York Times, most famous, of course, for breaking the Harvey Weinstein story. She's now investigating the United States Supreme Court. We break up this show sometimes into episodes that really just focus on the guest. We book an important guest and we ask them all the interesting questions we can think of. That's how we approached our interview with, like, Mark Cuban. That's how we approached our interview with Malcolm Gladwell. We're just. We're happy to have these guys on. They can talk about kind of whatever. But we approach other episodes with a more kind of a thematic lens. And I think we wanted to think about this one through a question that both you and I, Ben, have had, which is, is the Court leaking more? Are we learning more about the inside workings of the Supreme Court, a very serious and secretive institution? Ben, what do you think about that premise? Do you think that's a smart way to think about the story that Jodi's covering?
- [01:27]
B
Yeah, I think the question of, is the Supreme Court becoming more transparent? And then more broadly, how does this, like, closed institution clinging to its prestige and to its secrecy deal with this swarming, crazy media age that we're in?
- [01:41]
A
Yeah. One of the interesting things that Jodi has done over the last year or so is gone behind the scenes of these very important decisions and revealed some of the interesting dynamics at play. One of her latest stories is about the division between the liberal justices on the court and how they're thinking about how they wanna push back against this moment of conservative strength and dominance. And she's got these really interesting, fascinating dynamics that we usually don't see reported in the pages of the New York Times. And so I was just curious, and I wanna ask her how she's getting that information, of course, without revealing her sources. But if she senses that people close to the justices, and maybe the justices themselves are talking a little bit more or are willing to do their jobs more in public than they have been in the past.
- [02:27]
B
Yeah, I can't wait to find out. Let's take a quick break and bring Jody on. In an era where AI is rewriting the rules and consumer behavior is changing by the minute, how do you stay relevant? You turn to the experts. Think With Google brings you insights from top CMOs, practical guides on emerging tech and strategies that drive real growth. It's like having a marketing guru in your pocket. Visit thinkwithgoogle.com to become a forward thinking marketer. Your next game changing idea is just a click away. Jodi, thank you so much for joining us.
- [03:08]
C
It's great to be here.
- [03:09]
B
I just wanted to start with a big picture question about the context of your job. How secretive is the Supreme Court?
- [03:17]
C
Pretty secretive. The justices might say that it's the most transparent branch of government because they have oral arguments and we read their opinions. But remember that the Supreme Court doesn't have visitor logs. The justice's papers belong to them and they are not released for a very long time. I think we still have not seen justice Sandra Day OConnors papers from Bush v. Gore, making it hard to know everything about what happened in that case. Everybody who works there takes a vow of silence. And basically the justices have built something of a moat around themselves that says we control the lens through which you see us. I'm sure you've noted they give relatively few interviews. Some of them have been on book tour recently and have done a few. But the chief justice, for example, limits the moments in which he speaks to the public at large.
- [04:17]
A
When was the last time that he spoke publicly, do you know?
- [04:20]
C
Well, a few months ago, something really important happened, which is that he reprimanded President Trump. It was during the kind of high point for the attacks on judges, the MAGA attacks, and he pushed back publicly. Now what's interesting is how different the court's culture is from the general political culture that we're used to day to day. Right. So for the chief justice to have said even something short is a big, big, big deal for him to wade in. If you sort of hear it against the rest of our political discussion, it can sound sort of small.
- [05:04]
A
You mentioned that everybody takes kind of a vow of silence, yet it seems like people seem to be increasingly breaking that vow of silence. In particular to you and know about Politico getting the leaked Dobbs decision. Is the Supreme Court leaking more than it has in years past?
- [05:21]
C
You know, I don't know that we can say that. And here's why. There is actually a pretty long tradition in journalism of trying to figure out what is going on inside the locked box of the Supreme Court. Bob Woodward has done it, Jeffrey Toobin has done it. And when I started on this beat a couple of years ago, one of the things I reread was, was this behind the scenes story that Linda Greenhouse did about Bush v. Gore. At the time, it just felt like the ultimate important decision. So I think journalists for a long time have wanted to understand this institution. Nine of the most powerful people in the country who make decisions that govern our lives, work in silence and listen. I mean, job one in journalism is to scrutinize power. So I mean, to be honest, mine is only one of many, many, many attempts over the years to understand this place.
- [06:19]
A
It feels to me like I'm learning a little bit more about the inner imaginations of the Court. And obviously the Dobbs decision and what happened there was a huge kind of precedent breaking situation. If you're not sure if it's leaking more than it used to, why does it feel to us as media consumers that it is?
- [06:36]
C
I think I can only talk about what I'm trying to do. And what I'm trying to do is establish an independent lens to through which we can view the Justices. These chops are so singular to be confirmed for life to that high an office. There's essentially no accountability because we want the Justices to be truly independent and they serve for a very long time. We're the only constitutional democracy without term limits or age limits for these judges. So part of what I'm interested in doing is not just covering this decision or that decision, but answering fundamental questions about the institution and the Justices. The traditional coverage, which I and everybody else has relied on for years, and colleagues like Linda Greenhouse and Adam Liptak have done it masterfully. And now Ann Marimau is doing it with Abby Van Sickle. That's a case by case approach, right? It's totally focused on the law. This decision just came out. What does it mean? Et cetera, et cetera. Really focused on are two other things. What is this institution? What is this place? It's really different from the rest of the culture. How does it work? What does it mean to hold power for 40 years at a time? And then also, who are these justices? Like, they're individually confirmed. The famous phrase about them is that it's nine separate law firms inside the building and there's very little else. They each have four clerks. The clerks are like, I don't know, 28 years old or something like, they are the principals. They don't have the chief of staff and 20 assistants that a president or governor or even a senator has. It's really just them. So who are these nine people? I don't think we see any of them quite clearly, especially in this era of distortion and attack. Who's working hard, who's not? What are their relationships like with each other? How do they conceive of their own responsibilities in a job that's designed without any accountability? How do they assure their performance and their standards? How are they dealing with conflicts of the age? How do you organize your work when the job is so unusual and the stakes are so, so, so high?
- [09:07]
B
How do they relate to you? Like, do they appreciate your project of making them, you know, known and visible, or do they hate it?
- [09:13]
C
Oh, I mean, Ben, if you could get them to answer that, I'd be fascinated. I can only say generally, which is my experience as a reporter for many years, is that nobody likes being scrutinized. Nobody likes being written about.
- [09:26]
A
It's hard.
- [09:26]
C
Like, it's hard. You know, what I think is very hard about it is that I see the culture that surrounds them, and I think it's really extreme. And I don't mean so much ideologically, although that's certainly true in a way, too. What I mean is that the obsequiousness and reverence shown the justices is extraordinary. Everybody wants their vote, and that actually transcends ideology. Because if you're a conservative lawyer arguing in front of the court, you want the liberal justice's votes, and if you're a liberal advocate, you want the conservative justices votes as well. So there is this kind of bowing and scraping that happens towards the justices that is very marked. But then there's also attack, right. It's also this, like, frankly, sick culture that we live in where somebody shows up outside of Justice Kavanaugh's home and tries to hurt him, and people say unkind things about Justice Barrett's children. So I am trying to be neither of those things. Right. I'm not, certainly not trying to be the obsequiousness and certainly not trying to be the attack. I'm trying to hold up a mirror to these people so that we can see them and, I don't know, maybe so that they can see themselves.
- [10:56]
A
Are some of the newer justices taking a more outward facing approach, like a more public approach, do you think? I was paying attention, of course, to Amy Coney Barrett's book release. You wrote about this, about how she wanted to explain kind of how the Court works to people. I was reading another one of your stories in which you talked about how Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was really seemingly writing for the public in a lot of her dissents. Are the younger Justices taking a more kind of outward, public facing approach?
- [11:27]
C
I think you're really smart to notice that. And I'll push your point a little further, which is that Justice Barrett and Justice Jackson have been, in my observation, the two most outward facing Justices recently, and they are both talking to the public about the Court, but with different messages. The entire thrust of Justice Barrett's book and book tour is trust us, even when you disagree with the decisions. We're doing these jobs honorably. The Court has integrity here. Let me walk you through how I make decisions. And she's clearly trying to promote trust in the Court and Justice Jackson in her opinions. You know, she speaks more forcefully in her opinions than she does in other settings. And she is saying she's used the word disillusionment. And remember, this is a very formal culture in which every word has weight. When she says that she is dissenting with disillusionment, to me, that sounded like her saying, don't trust this Court.
- [12:34]
A
Do you think her tactics are effective? You write that she is kind of trying to reach the public, to reach people through these Supreme Court live streams. Do people think that that's worthwhile? Do the Court watchers think that this is something that's working?
- [12:47]
C
Well, just to summarize the reporting a little bit, for anyone who didn't read the story, my story was really about the fracturing strategy on the liberal side of the Court. And it was about how Justice Elena Kagan is a true diplomat. I mean, devoted from the beginning of her career on the Supreme Court to winning conservative votes. And so even though she can be a very forceful writer, and even though she can be very critical of conservative decisions, she has mostly chosen the traditional Supreme Court way of decorousness in public and persuasion behind the scenes. And Justice Jackson has really been willing to challenge the Court and the Justices publicly. And she has, on purpose, with great, I think, thoughtfulness, broken a rule of the Supreme Court, which is you're not really supposed to trash your colleagues or the Court. It's fine to criticize the legal decisions, but you're supposed to sort of criticize ideas, not people, and not do anything to lower the faith in the institution. So as far as whether it's effective, I mean, I definitely don't want to settle that dispute because I wrote that story really, really trying not to take sides. And in fact, my editor, Ros Helderman and I had people read it internally, and we would ask them, does this lean Kagan? Does this lean Jackson? Because we don't want to seem like we have some private view that's visible in the text.
- [14:21]
B
The only institution where words are weighed more carefully than the script, the Investig Allegations desk of the New York Times.
- [14:27]
C
We could do the Washington bureau of the New York Times, which I am now thrilled to join. We could devote this entire podcast to the similarities between the New York Times and the Times.
- [14:38]
A
The Times is a little bit easier to penetrate, I think, than the Court.
- [14:41]
C
But maybe, maybe, maybe. But back to your question about Justice Jackson. I'll ask a question which is to say, how many people really listen to the oral arguments or read the opinions? Yeah, these things don't really take place in English. Right. Like some cases do that have very relatable scenarios. But this is a highly technical court that is often speaking in the Latin of the law. And I think even Justice Jackson's most populist opinions, like, they're not that easy to understand. The material is inherently very dense. So I think that question of could a justice really have a kind of mainstream conversation with the American people and how would he or she do that is pretty interesting.
- [15:32]
B
I mean, we are, you know, in this social media age that has been just unbelievably corrosive to every institution and the Times very much among them, journalists among them, you know, and basically this sort of pulling the flawed individuals out from behind the faceless institution that you thought you could trust is in some sense like the basic populist move of undermining institutions? Do you worry that both the kind of prevailing social media culture and specifically your work essentially do that? And under my trust in the institution.
- [16:03]
C
First of all, our attempts to find out what happened at the Court are pretty selective, right? Like, this is not a reality show in which what justices do every day is broadcast. These are very specific inquiries. Like Adam Liptak and I have done two kind of behind the scenes case stories. One was about Dobbs, one was about largely the immunity decision. And we said that these are like the two essential cases of our age. And we don't think the public can wait 40 years or whatever it is to find out what really happened. So I would say those inquiries are selected, they're targeted. I am not asking around about forthcoming opinions. Like, the stuff that's being decided, like the Tariffs case is a good idea. I'm not making phone calls to find out.
- [16:56]
B
Wait, why not? Isn't. Isn't that your job?
- [16:59]
C
I don't. As an investigative journalist, you have to decide where to aim and you have to craft queries that have a chance of actually succeeding. Not only do I think that wouldn't succeed, but, Ben, it's not worth it because it's going to come out anyway. Like, if I only have so much capital and so much time. What I'm trying to do year after year in investigative journalism is take things that are on the secret side of the ledger, that are in the public interest and that we need to discuss. And I'm trying to move them over to the public side. So if something is going to become public anyway, I'm not going to spend my effort on it.
- [17:42]
B
It sounds a little though, like maybe you've also come to believe part of your job is at some level also kind of propping up the mystique of the court because there's also a school.
- [17:50]
C
No, I don't think that's.
- [17:51]
B
These are just politicians in black robes. We should cover them like everybody else.
- [17:55]
C
Before we get to that, your previous question, I want to say one more thing. One of the big things I learned during the Weinstein investigation is that there's a difference between privacy and secrecy. And we often confuse the two. Take Weinstein's victims. Did they deserve privacy? Of course. Of course. We weren't gonna drag them out into the light against their will. Was secrecy a good thing in that system? Absolutely not. Absolutely not. So what? So I'm not trying to, like, I don't know, pull the pants down on the Supreme Court and strip the deliberative process of any confidentiality. I'm saying this institution is so important that we need a better way of understanding it.
- [18:46]
A
Well, we have a lot more that we want to get to with Jody, but we have to take a short break. So we'll be right back after this.
- [18:56]
B
In an era where AI is rewriting the rules and consumer behavior is changing by the minute, how do you stay relevant? You turn to the experts. Think with Google brings you insights from top CMOs, practical guides on emerging tech and strategies that drive real growth. It's like having a marketing guru in your pocket. Visit thinkwithgoogle.com to become a forward thinking marketer. Your next game changing idea is just a click away.
- [19:24]
A
Are the most interesting people on the court right now women? I feel like the focus of your reporting over the last several months has really been about three justices in particular. It seems like Kagan Jackson, and Merritt. And it seems like they are doing stuff that seems to be the most consequential in some ways, at least as it relates to the reporting. But I'm curious. Are the most interesting and important people on the court right now, the female justices?
- [19:52]
C
I don't agree that they're necessarily more interesting than the others, but I think it's true that I have been drawn to them. Sorry, Let me think about your question for one sec, because I want to give you a good answer.
- [20:04]
B
Talking to you is like talking to a Supreme Court Justice. Jodi, you really measure your words out.
- [20:09]
C
We. You know why?
- [20:11]
B
People just come on this podcast and yap.
- [20:13]
C
Yeah, but remember. Well, I'll tell you something when we're done.
- [20:17]
B
No, no, say it now.
- [20:18]
C
No, no, no. I have to tell you when we're done. Okay, I'll say it now. I think when you're an investigative reporter, one thing you have to think about is that one of your sources or somebody associated with the Court could be listening to this at some point. You know, this work is pretty sacred to me, and I would never want to give anybody the wrong impression.
- [20:38]
B
Yeah. Usually three or four of the justices will listen to a mixed signals episode. That's what I hear.
- [20:43]
A
We got a Trump tweet once, so, you know, some member, important member of the federal government was listening.
- [20:47]
C
Okay. So to answer your great question, I don't know if I would go with the statement that they're the most interesting people on the court, because, for instance, the question of how the Chief justice is countenancing the second Trump presidency is a pretty interesting question. But what I would say is that, first of all, for the first time, we have four female Justices, and that's significant. I am definitely drawn to making sure that women in public life are seen. Like, if you take Justice Barrett, she was stereotyped by the right and the left when she came onto the public stage. I think what happened is that people saw a woman who had seven children, and they decided they knew what that meant. And she's a really complex and interesting figure. I think she's kind of caught between multiple projects that sometimes conflict with one another. I think what I would say is that I just. I definitely want women in public life to be seen and seen accurately and with depth. But I'm not going to shy away from writing about the men on the court.
- [21:57]
A
I'm really curious, how did the leak of the Dobbs decision change the court?
- [22:02]
C
I'll give you a really simple answer, which is that Justice Thomas publicly compared it to adultery. Like what he. Which is a pretty. Again, these people choose their words really carefully. Like the thing you just said, Ben, about how people just come on this podcast and talk. That is the least Supreme Court equality you can imagine. So, like, for Justice Thomas to give a speech in which he says this betrayal is tantamount to adultery, and you can never really look around this house the same way again. I suspect that he was being very sincere in that statement.
- [22:41]
B
On a more mundane front, you had lined up. I think Max reported this. You'd lined up an interview with Amy Coney Barrett on the Daily, which she then bailed on. Did she say why?
- [22:52]
C
I am so sorry. She canceled that interview. And it's because I was so excited about the questions. We had huddled for weeks, the Supreme Court editor, Ros Halderman and I and the team from the Daily. And what we really wanted to do was draw Justice Barrett out. We had questions that we thought were original and interesting and not overly prosecutorial, like, that's not really what we do or what the Daily does. But these justices are. I mean, they're really, really smart. And the chance to ask her to think on her feet about some big questions about the law and the culture, that was really exciting. So I'm sorry she canceled, but, I mean, I'll go right back to covering her as I did before, and, like, of course, would never want anyone to think I would cover her differently because she canceled.
- [23:43]
A
Part of it is what we were talking about on this show. And one of the reasons why you're choosing your words very carefully, Jodi, which is that podcasting is a pretty loose format. Even an edited show like the Daily or a minorly edited show like this one, it's loose. And there are a lot of opportunities to choose the wrong word. Right. I'm sure she wasn't. That's not necessarily the reason why she canceled, but it is interesting to think about it in the context of what we've been talking about here.
- [24:07]
C
It's true, her book kind of has this contradiction, because on the one hand, she said, I want to show you the Supreme Court. I want to take you in. I want to tell you things. And then, of course, there are many things she wouldn't discuss. And in fact, I went to an interview with her in D.C. where she would not answer the question of what podcasts she listened to, which I think proves your point, Max. I think the reason doing it is a good thing for her or for anyone, is that audio is also a very intimate and human Medium. It's not sound bitey. There's like something about having somebody literally in your earbuds that promotes connection. And I think even for New York Times audience members who disagree with her, I think there would have been some sort of fruitful meeting to hearing how she thinks, especially off the bench.
- [25:04]
B
So, Jodi, just because I think, you know, obviously it's very hard to speak really improvisationally about the Supreme Court, I wanted to turn to like a much lighter and kind of easier topic to riff on, which is the Harvey Weinstein case and the sort of journalism of MeToo that you were a real hero of and you broke, I think the most consequential story of that era, probably, which was the Harvey Weinstein investigation. And I guess I had a few questions now that it's, you know, it's been almost, gosh, almost a decade. I'm curious, first of all, what you make of the reversal by the state court of appeals of his conviction?
- [25:37]
C
Oh, I wasn't surprised at all. So we had been tracking that very thoroughly and Megan Tuohy, my partner, and I knew from the beginning that Weinstein was going to be very hard to convict. And we knew that the appeal had a chance. And the reason for that, and I'll try to be short because we could have a whole other conversation about this, is that, remember that Weinstein's main trespasses were sexual harassment. He's been accused and convicted of rape. But there was, there were fewer allegations of that than of sexual harassment. You can't go to jail for sexual harassment. Right. So then if you couple that with the statute of limitations and who was willing to come forward, the amount of stuff that Harvey Weinstein could be tried on was very small relative to the totality of the allegations, then the real complicated factor is that for some of the women who were involved in the New York case, there was also some consensual sex with Weinstein. And that can be a complicating factor, especially for juries. So this was kind of a boundary pushing case because prosecutors said, yeah, yeah, we get that there is some consensual stuff here, but we are going to bring this case anyway.
- [26:57]
B
Prosecutors also brought in, in a quite unusual way, a number of women in which their situations weren't being charged in that case to testify that Weinstein was a bad gu. And I think the court ultimately found that was inappropriate. And I was curious if, I don't know, if you at the time thought that essentially that the prosecutors were being unfair to Weinstein, because that's what the.
- [27:15]
C
Court found, I think we reported that argument and we took it seriously. It's a really big legal debate, right? Like, on the one hand, there's a sacred legal principle that says you're only on trial for the thing you're on trial for. This thing has to have boundaries to be fair. On the other hand, women in particular said, you can't understand the truth and the reality of what Weinstein did without looking at the pattern. Because any of these cases in isolation, like, whatever, it may not look like much, you have to have some sense of the totality to accurately read what happened. So it was. I mean, it was like a really big, hard legal debate. And we reported. And I think it was a little hard for some people to understand why Meghan and I weren't, you know, taking sides or cheering for the conviction to be upheld. But as with everything related to Weinstein, we're after the truth, and we felt like we had to cover the trials very fairly.
- [28:23]
B
I'm curious how you like looking back at this sort of landscape of MeToo journalism and of MeToo social media, like, how you reckon with that if you wish it had gone differently? Because we're now living in a moment that's part of, I think, a backlash to a period that you helped begin.
- [28:38]
C
I'll just give you the really honest answer, which is, I think about Justice Kavanaugh all the time because that was the story that split everybody apart. You know, in that first year, you'll remember, like, we broke the Weinstein story in October of 2017, and there was enormous factual consensus about what happened. And the first almost year of MeToo reporting didn't feel particularly ideological. The Times did. Bill O'Reilly and then Harvey Weinstein, a figure from the right, a figure from the left. And there were major Republican political figures who fell. The Kavanaugh allegations really politicized everything. And it was such a difficult situation because the thing that made Christine Blasey Ford a heroine to some people, which is she said, all I have is, like, my own memory, you know, I don't remember every single thing that happened, but I feel compelled to share this. And she stood up, you know, and she was a riveting witness, and she bravely told her story. And so some people really admired that. But other people saw it as the problem because they said, this happened in 1982. Both of you were very young. Since when do we look at stuff that happened in high school when we're deciding whether somebody's qualified for office? You don't have the Kind of contemporaneous corroboration or evidence that was at the heart of the Weinstein story. People's memories of these things can be different. And so there were people who saw her as the villain and the person who took me, too, too far.
- [30:25]
B
Do you think there's a path back to the kind of journalism that you were doing, particularly on Weinstein? I'd say to a kind of essentially like a journalism that is about, in this case, sexual assault and other really complex, difficult topics where a bipartisan audience says, you know what? This is so ironclad that we can't argue with it. Or is that irregist over the story can be as ironclad as you want, and people will choose not to believe it.
- [30:48]
C
I am trying to do it every day, Ben, Like, I am. I am totally, totally, totally devoted to that idea. I'm glad you asked me, because I know that there are conservatives who see my work on the court as an attack on the court. Right. There's a theory on the right that all of the journalism on the court, not only mine, but the great work that ProPublica did is like a Post Dobbs critique of a court that we personally disagree with. And I can just tell you that that is not my motivation. The way I feel is that journalists scrutinize power. But what I have seen is the way the atmosphere has degraded since 2017. I'll give you an example. You know, I broke the story a year and a half ago of Justice Alito's flags, the Alito household's flags, at their two homes in Virginia and New Jersey. And I saw just from looking online, that a lot of conservatives discovered those stories in a frame of. The New York Times is attacking Justice Alito and his wife. That was the first thing they read, not the facts. And that troubles me. You once said something really smart to me, Ben. You said, we're never gonna go back. Like, we're not gonna go back to the past. Right? We're not gonna go back to some era where everybody read Time magazine and watched the network news together at night. The question is whether we can go forward to something new that involves factual consensus. And I still think that's the right question. And my question is, like, is there a plan for saving the truth?
- [32:28]
A
Well, that feels like a dark place to leave it. I was gonna say that feels like a great place to leave it, but I actually think that that's a incredibly dark place to leave it. But I actually think that that's something that we talk about and explore on the show all the time. So we really appreciate you leaving that there for us. So, Jodi, thank you so much.
- [32:44]
C
Thank you for the great questions. Thank you.
- [32:46]
B
Thank you. Jody. This was fascinating. You know, it's a complicated time to be a sort of an optimist and an institutionalist, which I think you are. And this is really interesting.
- [32:54]
C
Thank you.
- [33:00]
B
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- [33:31]
A
So, Ben, you're a little bit more invested in the Supreme Court media watching than I am. So I'm curious. What did you think about what Jody had to say?
- [33:38]
B
You know, Jodi has kind of got this magic touch as a journalist. Like, she is blown up huge. Stories about Starbucks, about Michelle Obama. Me too. Like, there's something about the way she operates and the way her brain works that is like, very unusual as a journalist. And I did think, like there was at most just sort of an X ray of how she thinks that I found, as somebody who's read her for a long time, really fascinating. Like that thing about she's in a meeting with somebody, they ask some question that she could answer and she doesn't answer it. She doesn't want anybody to think that she's ever had a conversation with that person and then goes up to them after and says, I intuit that you're gonna have a huge story for this.
- [34:12]
A
That was insane.
- [34:13]
B
That was ins. The way she reports tactically is really, really interesting. And I think. And the fact that basically every single word she said to us was aimed primarily for the consumption of Amy Coney Barrett and secondarily for everybody else listening was also, to me, like, totally fascinating. There's a level of kind of discipline there that is part of why she is just such an incredibly successful journalist.
- [34:37]
A
Well, one of the nice things is that one of the things that I learned from this interview was that Justice Barrett will not even say what podcasts she listens or doesn't listen to, which gives us a little bit of license to imply that she listens actually to our show because it doesn't seem like she's gonna say what show she listens to or not. So I feel like, can we say at this point that she listens to our show, considering the fact that she won't deny it. What do you think about that, Ben? I think.
- [35:01]
B
I mean, I think if I was her, I would listen to this one because this incredibly gifted journalist who is, you know, really, really trying hard to write about her, showed a few of her cards. But I bet it's more that she listens to something like, kind of embarrassing and off brand. Like maybe she listens to flagrant.
- [35:14]
A
I actually think it's probably that she listens to conservative political podcasts that like 30 people listen to, right?
- [35:22]
B
Yeah. And it would drive them insane if they thought the justices were among their, like, dozens of listeners.
- [35:26]
A
You know what it would do, though, is it would drive up the ad rates for ads on that show. I think that you could get some pretty good advertisers on that show. What did you think about her hesitance to say that the court was leaking more than anything? Cause to me, it seems like it's obvious that the court is leaking more than it used to and that there's more public disclosure and fighting going on. The younger justices seem to be more willing to be out there in public. There are more stories about how the sausage is getting made, but she wasn't willing to kind of go that far. But what did you make of her hesitance to do so?
- [35:57]
B
Yeah, it's funny. I mean, I would interpret it tactically, like she was saying what she thought was gonna get people to talk to her more. I mean, I think in her shoes, I would have been. I'd be saying to my sources, like, your enemies are all leaking. You've gotta leak to me. Because Justice Jackson is clearly leaking, so we gotta get back at them. Or something like that would've been probably my tactical approach, but she's a different kind of reporter. I don't know. Max, what'd you make of it?
- [36:16]
A
I found it to be really interesting, and obviously it is part of her project of reporting. But I do think that it seems clear that there's more real time reporting about what's going on in the court. And obviously this all comes after the Dobbs leak, which was a huge breaking moment. And I do think that clearly we're gonna have to have Jodie back on our show when she writes a book or something about all of this, to talk about it when she can speak more freely, because it like there is some real shift happening that we're going to see continue to play out over the course of our lifetimes because that's how long these people are going to be on there. But anyway, Ben, this was a really interesting conversation. Really appreciate you inviting Jody on. That is it for us this week. Thank you so much for listening to another episode of the Mixed Signals podcast from us here at Semaphore. Our show is produced by Manny Fadal with special thanks to Josh Billinson, Chad Lewis, Rachel Oppenheim and Anna Pisino, Garrett Wiley, Jules Zern and Tori Kaur. Our engineer is Rick Kwan and our theme music is by Billy Libby. Our public editor is Mixed Signals super fan Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who listens to every episode of the show. She won't say so. She won't say any podcast that she listens to, but we know she listens to this show.
- [37:26]
B
And if you are a Justice of the Supreme Court or just on an appellate court or, you know, a circuit court, please follow and subscribe wherever you get your body.
- [37:33]
A
And if you want more Semaphore Media action, you can always sign up for Semaphore's media newsletter, which is out every Sunday night.