How the Right Took Over the Media

Summary

Pod Save America: How the Right Took Over the Media

Release Date: February 9, 2025

In the February 9, 2025 episode of Pod Save America, hosts Dan Pfeiffer and Ben Smith delve deep into the evolving landscape of American media, focusing on how political right-wing forces have significantly influenced and, in many cases, overtaken the traditional media ecosystem. This comprehensive discussion sheds light on strategic maneuvers, shifting trust dynamics, and the challenges facing journalism in the current political climate.

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1. The "Flood the Zone" Strategy and Media Overwhelm

The conversation kicks off with an analysis of Steve Bannon's strategic approach, termed "flood the zone," aimed at saturating the media with information to overwhelm and control narratives.

• Ben Smith introduces the concept:
  “Bannon first described this approach in 2018... 'They hit them with three things, they'll bite on one, and we'll get all of our stuff done.'" [04:26]

• Dan Pfeiffer concurs on its effectiveness in the early weeks of Trump’s administration:
  “It is a very accurate description... they've been trying to implement this muzzle velocity approach from the start.” [05:04]

2. Media’s Changing Role Under the Trump Administration

Pfeiffer and Smith discuss how the Trump administration's aggressive media tactics have altered the traditional role of the press.

• Ben Smith observes:
  “Trump is out there 24/7... he benefits from the comparison to Biden because Biden was perceived to be fairly or unfairly as absent.” [08:25]

• Dan Pfeiffer adds:
  “The media fell in love with a narrative about itself... that made liberals love them and conservatives hate them.” [14:17]

3. Declining Trust in Media Among Republicans

A significant portion of the episode addresses the erosion of trust in mainstream media among Republican audiences, highlighting a shift from viewing media as simply "too liberal" to believing it fabricates information.

• Dan Pfeiffer references polling data:
  “The decline in trust in the media is among Republicans... it flips from the media is too liberal to the media is making everything up.” [37:43]

4. Media Consumption Shifts Among Younger Generations

Smith and Pfeiffer explore how younger Americans, particularly Gen Z, consume news differently, favoring conversational and podcast formats over traditional news outlets.

• Ben Smith states:
  “The New York Times app... is what they go to for everything... it has replaced the conglomerate of major news sources.” [45:26]

• Dan Pfeiffer notes the confusion in media consumption:
  “Podcasters are producing shows that are more interesting than most of what's on TV... it’s going to be increasingly consolidated around big individual voices.” [63:12]

5. The Challenge of Curation and New Media Models

The hosts discuss the importance of curation in the fragmented media landscape and how new media outlets like Semaphore aim to bridge information gaps.

• Ben Smith emphasizes curation:
  “Curation is a place where media can rebuild trust with audiences... trust is built with individuals.” [56:45]

• Dan Pfeiffer highlights Semaphore's role:
  “We see our lane as narrower... providing really good information but not ultimately resolve the argument.” [29:00]

6. Fact-Checking and Journalism’s Evolving Role

The efficacy of traditional fact-checking in an era where political narratives often disregard reality is critically examined.

• Dan Pfeiffer questions the impact of fact-checking:
  “I don’t think those fact checks were changing a lot of minds... formalized fact checking, I’m not sure what it was doing in the end.” [25:14]

• Ben Smith adds:
  “What matters is the reality remains reality... the crisis is that people are less informed about what’s happening now.” [49:58]

7. The Current Media Ecosystem and Future Outlook

Pfeiffer and Smith conclude by contemplating the future of media consolidation and the potential resurgence of centralized media models amidst technological and economic shifts.

• Dan Pfeiffer reflects on media consolidation:
  “There's going to be a recentralization of audiences and of content... it’s going to get a little less fragmented.” [55:19]

• Ben Smith envisions the future:
  “We’re in a moment of crazy transition... politics is the war for attention, politics is the information war.” [66:00]

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Key Takeaways

• Strategic Media Dominance: The right’s "flood the zone" strategy has effectively overwhelmed traditional media narratives, reducing the press’s ability to set agendas.

• Trust Dynamics: A significant decline in media trust among Republicans has emboldened right-wing media ecosystems, making it harder for legacy outlets to maintain influence.

• Generational Shifts: Younger generations prefer conversational and decentralized news formats, leading to further fragmentation and challenges for traditional media.

• Role of Curation: New media models focusing on curated content and trusted individual voices are emerging as potential solutions to the fragmented information landscape.

• Future of Media: The consolidation of media around major voices and platforms is anticipated, potentially decreasing fragmentation but raising concerns about diversity and accountability in journalism.

Notable Quotes with Timestamps

• "They hit them with three things, they'll bite on one, and we'll get all of our stuff done." — Ben Smith [04:26]

• "It is a very accurate description... they've been trying to implement this muzzle velocity approach from the start." — Dan Pfeiffer [05:04]

• "Trump is out there 24/7... he benefits from the comparison to Biden because Biden was perceived to be fairly or unfairly as absent." — Ben Smith [08:25]

• "The decline in trust in the media is among Republicans... it flips from the media is too liberal to the media is making everything up." — Dan Pfeiffer [37:43]

• "Curation is a place where media can rebuild trust with audiences... trust is built with individuals." — Ben Smith [56:45]

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This episode of Pod Save America offers a compelling analysis of the shifting power dynamics within American media, the strategic maneuvers of right-wing forces, and the challenges facing traditional journalism in a rapidly evolving political and technological landscape.

Transcript

[Jon Stewart]

This podcast is supported by Comedy Central's Emmy Award winning series the Daily Show. Jon Stewart and the Daily Show News team are kicking off 2025 with brand new episodes covering a brand new administration and a not quite brand new president. While it may feel like we've all been here before, it's never been covered like this with Jon Stewart behind the desk kicking off every week, Comedy Central's the Daily show new weeknights at 11 on Comedy Central and streaming next day on Paramount Plus Pod Save America is.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

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[Jon Stewart]

Way to hire this podcast is supported by Comedy Central's Emmy Award winning series the Daily Show. Jon Stewart and the Daily Show News Team are kicking off 2025 with brand new episodes covering A brand new administration and a not quite brand new president. While it may feel like we've all been here before, it's never been covered like this. With Jon Stewart behind the desk kicking off every week, Comedy Central's the Daily show, new weeknights at 11 on Comedy Central and streaming next day on Paramount. Plus.

[Ben Smith]

Welcome to Pot Save America, Dan. I'm Dan Pfeiffer. This is our second Sunday show. These episodes are going to be coming out every other weekend and will give us hosts a chance to step back from the churn to have longer form conversations about the big ideas and forces shaping news and politics. My guest today is Ben Smith, the co founder and editor in chief of the news site Semaphore. Ben is a longtime reporter. He worked for Politico, was the editor of BuzzFeed News, and was the New York Times media critic. So he has a ton of experience covering the coverage. From the prominence of podcasters and influencers in the 2024 election to the way Trump is running roughshod over the media, it feels like we are at a critical moment for the role of the fourth estate. That's why I wanted to bring Ben on, to dig into the state of the American free press, what journalists need to do differently for Trump 2.0, and whether the right has finally won the war on the media. Ben Smith, welcome to Pod Save America. How are you doing?

[Dan Pfeiffer]

Good. Thanks for having me. Dan. It's nice to see you.

[Ben Smith]

Absolutely. We've known each other for a very long time.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

I think we first met on a bus in Iowa in 2007. 7.

[Ben Smith]

You were a blogger.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

And they were like, they were like, we have an adult here to take charge of you all. And it was you and the adult.

[Ben Smith]

I think I was 29, 30, maybe at the time. So, like a true adult. But look, we are. Trump's been in office for nearly three weeks. It has been a truly insane and intense three weeks. But we know that's part of his and Steve Bannon's flood the zone strategy. Bannon first described this approach in 2018. He said his strategy for overcoming the media's opposition was to flood the zone with shit for our listeners. Let's take a listen to what he said on PBS's Frontline back then. The opposition party is the media. And the media can only because they're dumb and they're lazy. They can only focus on one thing at a time. And the one thing they'll mainly focus on is either they do the horse race or once the horse race. Who's in, who's out.

[Jon Stewart]

It's like the high school.

[Ben Smith]

Who are the cool kids in the cafeteria?

[Jon Stewart]

Right.

[Ben Smith]

Because it's easy. It's the reason they do the horse race stuff all the time. Right. And they won't do the basic. What are the core things that are going on in the country? I said all we have to do is flood the zone every day. We hit them with three things, they'll bite on one, and we'll get all of our stuff done. Bang, bang, bang. These guys will never, will never be able to recover. But we got to start with muzzle velocity. So it's got to start. And it's got a hammer muzzle velocity. It seems like a pretty accurate description of what at least the first couple of weeks of Trump 2.0 have looked like. How have you been covering Trump 2.0 and how have you tried to deal with the flood the zone strategy?

[Dan Pfeiffer]

Yeah, I mean, yeah, it is a very accurate description. And I mean, in the media, dumb and lazy, like, often also accurate. But I think, you know, he think the notion that the opposition party is the media and that the world is totally mediated by the media and that we shape reality and decide what happens. To me, I don't really buy that, but I also think it's kind of poisonous for the media to think that about itself in a way. And we're trying to cover the story, we're trying to understand what's happening, why things are happening, who's actually making these decisions, what their actual motives are. Things that social media can often be shaky on. I mean, I think one of the big stories, one of the stories that struck me early, obviously you have this iconic image of Mark Zuckerberg and et al, sort of paying their showing up to support Trump's inauguration and to sort of pledge their loyalty to the administration. And it was really striking to me, a story we broke over the weekend, that when it comes to key appointments like the general counsel for the fcc, they pick somebody who is the most anti big tech possible lawyer in America. This bought them nothing. The Trump people think it's hilarious. They like it, but it isn't buying them. It's not buying them anything. And then conversely, who has actual influence in the White House, which. Who in media has Trump's respect? Rupert Murdoch, whose publications have been very, very tough on Trump. And call. Actually, if you read the Wall Street Journal editorial page, you'll get much tougher, clearer criticism of Trump than you get from, you know, the LA Times, which only writes about Los Angeles now because they feel scared it's an interesting thing, I think. You see, there's these, like, demonstrations of weakness by a lot of kind of would be media moguls, which they imagine are going to ingratiate themselves to the White House, and there's no evidence that it is.

[Ben Smith]

Yeah. I want to get into some of those tributes that some of the media and tech are paying to Trump in a minute, but I think I'm not going to defend Steve Bannon often in the history of Pod Save America, But I think when he made those comments in 2018, 2019, whatever it was he, the world, it was a different place. Right. The media did play the legacy media, if you will, just who he's really talking about. Right. Like when we talk about media in this podcast, that is everything from Semaphore to the New York Times to Fox News now to Joe Rogan, Alex Cooper, everything. But what Ben is talking about here is he's talking about the White House press corps. Right. The establishment media, legacy media, regime media, as Republicans call it, and back then, certainly played a larger role. I think at least maybe you can. If you disagree, you should say it in sort of mediating reality.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

Yeah. They were reacting, of course, to a moment in which the Russia investigation had totally swamped the administration, driven by breathless media coverage. And so I think in a way, they had gotten onto the back foot in the first weeks of the administration and never really got onto the front foot. They were very rarely were they able to really drive that story. It was mostly they were, you know, they were the rabbit being pursued by the wolves. And so, like, I think they kind of honestly reasonably figured, we don't want that to happen again. And that strategy, I mean, Bannon puts it in really bombastic terms, but I don't know, do you think it's probably a good. Like, is that if you were a White House comms director, would you. Would you come out with muzzle velocity right now?

[Ben Smith]

Yeah, I think you would want muzzle velocity. I think the question for Trump, if you're. If I'm stepping back from, like, the perspective of a political operative, is are you telling a larger story or are you getting swamped by actually, like, what they are demonstrating right now is action. Right. Just he's doing things. And that is standing in stark contrast to what people perceived of Biden. Right. He was largely absent, even though he did a lot of things. A lot of those things weren't public. They didn't see him. And so, you know, I was thinking about this other day, is that in Trump's first term in the beginning, he suffered, I think mightily in public perception with the comparison to Obama because he was out there, he was kind of saying dumb, crazy things, he was not thoughtful and that, and Obama was much more popular than Trump, so that suffered in this situation. I think he actually benefits from the comparison to Biden because Biden was perceived to be fairly or unfairly as absent, not doing a lot, not showing strength, not being out there. And Trump is out there 24 7. Right. Like, when was the last time the public never really saw Biden? And Trump is out there all the time, so he benefits from it. The question will be like, right now, that is a very good short term strategy. What are you, like, what points are you putting on the board in terms of deliver on your campaign promises?

[Dan Pfeiffer]

Right.

[Ben Smith]

Or is it just a bunch of noise and that, that it's early to know whether that's actually true or not.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

Yeah. And the thing that, I mean, I think Bannon is a smart guy and in some ways he's so ubiquitous that people can underestimate how consequential he is. But notably absent from, from the muzzle velocity speech, it's just like, which way is the gun pointed, what's in it? You know, and, and right. And it's a, it's a strategy. It's kind of content neutral. Like they could be announcing anything. And there was this narrative last year that, well, look, like this time around, Trump has a real plan. They know what they're doing. They have a set of actions planned. And some of the stuff coming out of the muzzle, like some of the particular. And immigration I think is actually like, look, we had a plan. We're gonna do some high profile, even if they're not massive raids. We're gonna try to scare people away from the border. We have some legal changes we want like that all felt plan. The Elon stuff is obviously he's just seeing tweets about agencies he's never heard of reacting. Canceling stuff. Un. Canceling stuff. I mean, it's mostly improvisational and I think that's as you say, like at some point, like these are the fights. I mean, I think, you know, the laws of gravity still apply like you. The president has this hundred days, has this moment at which to set an agenda, to pick their priorities, to pick the fights they're going to pick. And, and some of the fights they're picking are the fights they planned to pick and wanted to pick. But a lot of the fights they're picking are the fights that Elon saw A tweet about yesterday.

[Ben Smith]

Yeah, I mean, they're like, they are better, it is a better run organization than last time, only in the sense that you have a bunch of people who maybe care about a specific issue that Trump may or may not care about as much. And they are, they are finding ways to drive that.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

Yeah.

[Ben Smith]

You know, some of it is not legally sustainable. Some of it is just like a bunch of bullshit. Like the, like the executive order on transgender sports participation. That's not something the government has any access to. But by, just by being out there and being mobastic, you get likely the NCAA or someone else to respond to it. But they're actually like, they didn't have executive orders in the can last time to do it.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

Right.

[Ben Smith]

And the ones they've written, and I think they are. Trump is freed this time from caring what the media thinks, or at least he seems to be like, they were very, they were more sensitive to the, you know, what Maggie Haberman would say about them. They seem to be.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

Now, I think that remains to be seen. I think Trump likes, at least let.

[Ben Smith]

Me say the administration question about Trump.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

Yeah, I do think that you're. I mean, this is going to be a real question, as you know, because they're just doing, they have a lot of Muslim velocity and. Right. Like some of the stuff. And a lot of it is kind of organizationally, you know, kind of culture war stuff that doesn't, that doesn't really affect the outcomes of government policy in an immediate way is all happening. It's moving. They clearly had it well planned. But again, I mean, a lot of the most consequential stuff is being decided by Elon Musk in a pretty chaotic way. And when it starts, and I think there's a real question of some of it will be very unpopular, some of it will get really bad press. Do we think Trump wants that? Like, I actually don't think Trump likes getting bad press or is comfortable with getting bad press. I think he likes getting good press.

[Ben Smith]

Yeah, I think that's true. I think so. I guess the way I've been thinking about it is, I mean, the way he backed off the tariffs very quickly for just basically nothing is notable. The way they. I know a judge stopped the funding freeze, but Trump also pulled the plug on it and reportedly, I mean, at least in some reporting I read was that was his choice, cuz it was so noisy and messy. And so I think he's still gonna be reactive to some of that stuff. The people around him are less reactive to it. Like last time, he had so many Republican establishment people in his administration that they were more reactive to it. And, you know, and John Kelly is going to be more reactive to bad press than Kristi Noem for sure. Or same thing with his defense. Pete Hegseth is not going to care about it. So I think that it will matter some. But I guess my question I have is it seems to me at least watching this over the first three weeks, that the legacy media, establishment media, I always want to just at least the people in the briefing room in Trump won came in really sort of guns blazing, right? They sort of branded themselves as defenders of democracy. There was a ton of fact checking. And there is a, it feels like, at least from afar, a different approach this time, right? A little more. Not that there is not real. Like, I do kind of want to separate the journalists who are covering the White House or covering Trump from maybe the parent companies who own them, but because there is like real, like people are. These reporters, I will say, are working their ass off and they're writing like a, like a really, a lot of really important stories. Whether anyone's reading them or not is an open question. But it does feel like the press is a little more accommodation, has more of an accommodationist and less aggressive approach this time. Do you see it that way? Is my anti media bias coming through?

[Dan Pfeiffer]

I mean, I think that's one way to see it. I mean, I guess I never really bought the idea that like, our choice is to be accommodationist versus collaborationist versus aggressive. Like we're supposed to be covering reality. And I think that there was an almost delusional quality to the media where reporters loved having people they met out in the world say to them, like, wow, you're so brave. Thank you for what you do. It's like, come on, you cover the White House. Like you're not, you're not a war reporter. And I do think, like, the work is incredibly important to democracy, but that's a little different between saying, you know, journalism is this incredibly, is this vital pillar of democracy and journalists are themselves heroes of democracy who, wide right, you know, who ride around on white horses like it's a weird job. And the best reporters, right, like reporters who are very valuable right now, like, spend a lot of time kind of burrowing into Trump world and telling you what's happening there. That's, you know, and that's an incredibly valuable thing. But you don't have to. I don't know, but I think there was a level at which the sort of media. The media fell in love with a narrative about itself that, you know, that made liberals love them and conservatives hate them. And I don't know. And that's not the only factor, maybe even the most major factor. But I don't think in retrospect that was a good thing. And I would say the underlying thing here is just to go back, Trump gets elected and a lot of journalists, a lot of liberals think there's no way this was legitimate, there's been a mistake here. And what happened, maybe it was Facebook, maybe there's some technical social media trick, or maybe it was the Russians. And these are two very great lines of reporting inquiry that lots of really smart journalists and I don't think they're always framing the story that way. But a lot of journalistic effort was expended basically trying to answer the question of how did Donald Trump manage to get elected. And those were both factors, obviously, shifts in social media, Russian interference in the election. But I think they did not sufficiently consider option three, which was that he was pretty popular and won a lot of votes. And so I think that was the Trump people aren't wrong to be upset that most of the journalistic energy of 2016 and 2017 was expended on trying to figure out what trick got him elected.

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[Jon Stewart]

This podcast is supported by Comedy Central's Emmy award winning series, the Daily Show. Jon Stewart and the Daily show news team are kicking off 2025 with brand new episodes covering a brand new administration and a not quite brand new president. While it may feel like we've all been here before, it's never been covered like this. With Jon Stewart behind the desk kicking off every week. Comedy Central's the Daily show new weeknights at 11 on Comedy Central and streaming next day on Paramount. Plus.

[Ben Smith]

I think one of the accommodate. You know, one of the real critiques from, you know, folks not just on the left, but in, but and even in Journal itself is that some of the corporate media entities have been, are trying to curry favor with Trump for reasons separate and apart from their, from the specifics of their publication itself. Right. So you have the Disney Corporation settling a pretty specious lawsuit that a lot of legal experts think ABC could have won involving George Stephanopoulos erroneously calling Trump a racist.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

You have reports that get it right there.

[Ben Smith]

Sorry, rapist. Calling him a rapist. Yes. You probably couldn't have gotten sued for the racist one. And then you have reports that Paramount, which has a merger, a very large merger before the Trump administration considering settling what is an even more reportedly absurd lawsuit about the editing of the Kamala Harris interview. Just sort of as a publisher, a person, a long time media critic, what's your response to how some of these entities are doing this?

[Dan Pfeiffer]

Funny. For years, for our whole careers, there's been a set of advocates who yelled about the corporate consolidation of media. They're kind of like Ralph Nader people. There's a group called Free Press. They were totally irrelevant to the political conversation. Like nice people. And you'd be like, yeah, I don't know. Like I work in corporate media and I've never had my corporate overlords cutting secret deals with the government. That doesn't, that's not a thing that happens in America. And they were totally right. Like what you see now is that this very, very consolidated media is largely owned by, on one hand, public companies that have fiduciary responsibilities to their shareholders. And when we say media really mean news media because they have lots of exposure beyond news. Like, you know, the Ellison family isn't buying Paramount because they want CBS News, like CBS News comes along with the bargain, and it's kind of a headache, but they want, you know, they're looking for a content library and, you know, getting into the movie business. And so this, like CBS News is this liability. And actually the Disney suit is sort of specious, but is the kind of suit sometimes you settle? Because I think they were worried about what was it, you know, disclosing George Stephanopoulos, text messages, whatever. There's some argument for settling that one. I'm not a great one. But the CBS one is ludicrous. It's about editing. It's about, like, it's a very normal journalistic thing. If you edit an interview the way you want to edit it, maybe you screw it up, maybe, whatever. But it's. But it's something that is widely viewed as protected and as a specious lawsuit, even if they found a friendly judge in Texas. But cbs. But Sherry Redstone, who's selling cbs, would like to get paid. And the quickest way to getting paid is caving to Trump. And if that damages the brand, if that blows up the newsroom, that's not a big deal for her, I think. Similarly, Bezos and Patrick Sunshine are billionaires. And the issue isn't that they're billionaires, it's that they have lots of exposure in other businesses that the government has a lot of power over. Soon Chong is in the healthcare business, fda, incredibly important to him. Bezos is very interested in his space projects, and Trump will obviously punish them. And he's done it in the past. He'll kill those kill contracts if your publication angers him. And Bezos wrote this in his letter about canceling the endorsement that it would be. And he said, I'm not doing this because I'm caving to Trump, but I can't blame you for seeing it that way, because it sure looks. I recognize that it looks that way. And I just think that what you see is that it makes you realize the importance of independent media and independent in sort of the old Naderite sense that they are independent of consolidated ownership. I mean, the New York Times is the only major publication in the country that is independent in that sense. The Murdoch press, for all the many problems I have with them, are at least in the news business in a real way, and have some experience in dealing with power and not just caving. And then. And then lots of smaller outlets like ours, like yours and mine. And, you know, I'm sure, like, if the Trump administration decided to Try to damage your business and go after your advertisers. It could probably do a lot of damage. But it's. But you're not dealing with a sister company that is heavily regulated. That is, you know, and we are, you know, and I think that's. That to me is actually kind of the scary thing is the way in which ownership is really being brought to bear. For the first time in my career.

[Ben Smith]

There'S just this ultimate irony that, like the ABC settlement actually goes to the Trump library. Were one to ever be built.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

It's going to be in New Zealand.

[Ben Smith]

That's right. Or it could be in Gaza that.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

Somebody isn't in Trump's orbit. Described it to me as the Trump Library and Casino.

[Ben Smith]

Yeah, I'm sure that is the case. Or in Amusement park or whatever else it'll be. But it's just there's a tremendous irony. So Walt Disney and ABC have given Trump money for the library. If Paramount settles the suit, CBS will give Trump money for his library. Mark Zuckerberg just settled a suit with Facebook against Trump that will go to the library. And that Trump is going to end up with a library built by the legacy media and big tech. It's just a sort of a wild thing.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

You would not see why. You see why he finds that really satisfying.

[Ben Smith]

I can imagine. I can imagine that it is quite satisfying to him. In the first Trump term, fact checking was a very important part of how the press was thinking about holding Trump accountable. Right. He is telling all these lies. It is our job to sort reality for our readers. We're going to effect check them. We're going to do it. Bring on people like Daniel Dale and CNN right afterwards. And I'm curious how that's going to happen this time here. I want to have you listen to this clip from Trump's recent press conference where Peter Alexander tries to question the reality of what Trump just said. Let's take a listen. The cited FAA text that you read is real.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

But the implication that this policy is new or that it stems from efforts.

[Ben Smith]

That began under President Trump, Biden or the Transportation Secretary, Pete Buttigieg is demonstrably false.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

It's been on the FAA's website.

[Ben Smith]

Who said you.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

No, it's on the website. The FAA's website.

[Ben Smith]

It was there in 2013. It was there for the entirety.

[Jon Stewart]

It was there for the entirety of your administration, too.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

So my question is, why didn't you change the policy during your first administration?

[Ben Smith]

I did change it.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

I changed the Obama policy.

[Jon Stewart]

And we had a very good policy. And then Biden came in and he changed it. And then when I came in two.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

Days, three days ago, I signed a.

[Ben Smith]

New order bringing it to the highest level of intelligence. Okay, please, quiet, quiet. So Peter Alexander here, who's the MSC news correspondent, does exactly what you're supposed to do. Trump holds his press conference, makes a series of claims that are demonstrably not true. He corrects him on it, Trump runs right over him. And I guess the question is, what value do you see in fact checking? Is it still an important part of journalism? Is it even possible when you have a president who, an administration or even a political party right now who's so willing to ignore reality?

[Dan Pfeiffer]

Yeah, I mean, I guess, as you know, I come from a slightly weird corner of the world. I never really liked the formalized fact checking. Like I think journalists job is to get the facts right and that you shouldn't outsource that to some other, often Facebook funded or whatever institution populated by 23 year olds who are learning how to do their jobs. But anyway, let me bracket that particular rant. No, I mean, I think there's a level of, I mean the media, the news media is weaker than it used to be. It was weaker in 2016 than it thought it was. Maybe it realizes how weak it is now. But like, what, I mean, I think there's some question of what's the. Like we should get our facts right. We have a responsibility to our readers to tell them what's really going on. Are we going to disabuse Trump's supporters of things that they believe or of things that maybe aren't really being received as facts, but more as political statements or as sort of, you know, like, you know, I don't. They. Doesn't. Doesn't seem like, it doesn't seem like we're, that those fact checks were changing a lot of minds or reaching a lot of people who were looking to have the facts checked. And so I think that kind of formalized fact checking, like, I mean, I, I'm not sure what it was doing in the end. Like I said, there's a fair amount of research on like media effect and media impact that none of us actually wind up looking at that much. But I think it's often interesting to ask, well, okay, did we do some focus groups where this then changed people's minds and people came in thinking that one thing was happening and then read factcheck.com and left thinking another thing was happening? I don't really see a lot of that. I do think this is a real obvious case where there's a factual dispute. It is, in fact, this journalist's job to resolve it and say what is true. And for people who are looking for it to read the true thing. A lot of things that got fact checked were sometimes a little hazier, were sometimes more political disputes. Is immigration good for the economy? That's not really a fact checkable claim. That's an argument among economists.

[Ben Smith]

Yeah, that's been a problem even in my days in government. I would rage at my desk at the Washington Post fact checker for taking sort of a statement of values or a statement of principle and then assigning some Pinocchios to it because you could find you could nitpick in a way.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

Yeah, it's the most pedantic imaginable approach to politics, and I think sometimes kind of annoyed people and backfired in that way. But I think the broader question of, I mean, you know, there is. I mean, this is honestly often true with the first wave of people who come into government that, like, they believe some things that are just not true about reality and about how government works. And they come in with some things they've said on the campaign trail about. I mean, I think you saw this in the Biden administration with the Saudis, frankly. Like, they had some views on Saudi Arabia that did not survive contact with reality and wound up being the Saudis best friends. Just to kind of like, yeah, I.

[Ben Smith]

Mean, that's a slightly. To me, that's slightly different.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

But for instance, I wrote about this guy named Darren Beatty who's going to be in the States and has some views on how, like, they were trying to orchestrate color revolutions, like Eastern European style. The people who had orchestrated the color revolutions in Eastern Europe had come back here and we're trying to orchestrate against Trump, like, at some level that's a factual claim, like, do we think that happened? And he's. Yeah. And I do think that I'm sort of more interested in some ways in people who are, like, arriving with Trump with a set of beliefs that may or may not like. Because I think the one thing that people underestimate is a lot of the people who are saying things, they believe the things they're saying. Some of it is nonsense. Bannon, I think, often will just, like, tell nary spin yarns whose details are not all true and doesn't believe all of them. But a lot of these folks believe what they're saying. I think RFK mostly believes the things he says about vaccines.

[Ben Smith]

I mean, I Guess on a day to day basis, as you cover politics or government or everything in the world you're covering, what do you say to your reports is your task? Right?

[Dan Pfeiffer]

Yeah, I think we are trying to speak to a really informed audience that has to understand what's actually going on because they're encountering it in the world of business, economics, politics. I mean, actually, the business press often is more reliable than the political press because they are talking to people who have to make trade stocks, have to make decisions based on reality. So I think we obviously see that as our responsibility. We also, I mean, I do think it's a moment when you sort of have to bring some humility as a journalist, whether you like it or not, because the industry, we have less power than we did. And we definitely do try to do two things, specific things, and one is to try to say to readers, because I do think people live in these deep information bubbles. And it's not that you necessarily believe the things that are being said on Fox News, but it is important if you are a listener of Patsiv, to probably know what they're talking about some of the time. Like what? Like literally what Republican legislators are walking into the House with no idea what the Democratic colleagues like read that morning. And the Democrats have no idea what the Republicans were reading. And so we have this very popular feature called Blindspot that's literally like we're not trying to arbitrate the reality of this. Often these are true stories just with different emphasis, totally different emphasis. But the Republicans are talking about some crime committed by an illegal immigrant in Colorado and the Democrats are talking about some just totally different story. Right. And I think some level of just trying to say like this is giving a glimpse of the reality that the other side is living in is pretty useful. I mean, just sort of actionably useful. And, and sometimes I do think social media is a machine for taking the stupidest thing that your opponent said and elevate the stupidest version of the stupidest thing they think and constantly barraging you with it. And there might be someone in there who's actually making a reasonable case you could argue with, but it will be totally swept away in social media. And I think we do try to sort of, you know, to elevate the stronger arguments and to try to like create some space for reasonable disagreement because I think there's a fair amount of that too. Although there is also, as you say, some eroding shared factual basis around this for sure.

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[Jon Stewart]

This podcast is supported by Comedy Central's Emmy Award winning series the Daily Show. Jon Stewart and the Daily show news team are kicking off 2025 with brand new episodes covering a brand new administration and a not quite brand new president. While it may feel like we've all been here before, it's never been covered like this. With Jon Stewart behind the desk kicking off every week, Comedy Central's the Daily show new weeknights at 11 on Comedy Central and streaming next day on Paramount. Plus.

[Ben Smith]

I think the blind spot thing is very interesting because in my career in politics, one of the things that was a fundamental shift in how government and politics worked was the moment Republicans and Democrats stopped reading the same media.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

Yeah.

[Ben Smith]

Which probably happened about midway through the Obama years is for, you know, like you there was like the people would pretend like they were playing a part.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

Right.

[Ben Smith]

Particularly in the like around 2010 when the tea Party took off, a lot of Republicans were sort of, they were appealing to the base, but they were still reading the New York Times. They were still Reading Politico, they were everything else. And so we were operating under the same set of reality. At least in a private negotiation you were having over legislation, we all sort of agreed on the same reality right about, I would say midway through the Obamas, through Obama's second term, kind of when Facebook became Republicans radicalized a little bit. After Obama's reelection, Fox News became sort of more powerful and then the sort of right wing media ecosystem took off, sort of powered by Facebook. That was like so the Breitbart era Daily caller, right around 2014, it's like we stopped having the same reality. We were having completely different conversations. And it is so that speaks to governing and in politics. The difference has been that, and I think this might be changing a little bit, for better or probably for worse is that Democrats had a media diet that was primarily legacy media. Still, we were somewhere in the New York Times. Listen to npr. Maybe it would skew a little on the, the more left leaning part of that legacy media diet. But it was traditional media abiding by the rules of journalism as commonly understood. And the Republicans had shifted to something totally different that did not abide by and often sort of spat in the face of those rules. And now we are fully in that moment where the Trump administration and Republicans writ large up and down. It's not just in Washington, it's everywhere exists in this wholly other media ecosystem. And that media ecosystem is becoming much less clear to anyone else because it's not like, yes, you could turn on Fox News and that would be a very good idiot's guide to what the right is thinking. But that's often, I think in this day and age is kind of a lagging indicator of what's really bubbling up. Do you know what's happening on Rumble? Are you listening to the Daily Wire or reading Barry Weiss or some of these other things that are. Yeah, and that's really affecting.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

Yeah, that's a very, I mean, it's an incredibly fragmented system that you're describing. And I mean like, right, there's a big distance between, between Rumble and Barry Weiss. These are all different things. I think there are parts of it, I think that I was talking to a really prominent conservative podcaster who was saying that, you know, they spend a lot of their time complaining about the, you know, journalists and everything they get wrong. And then once in a while there'll be a holiday and they're like, where is the flow of news? And for me to talk about, it's so annoying. And it's like, oh, all the people I hate are like taking vacation with their kids. And so there's no fodder for me. There's no like underlying information. I do think there's this question that, you know, gets kicked around sometimes. Actually. Tucker Carlson founded the Daily Caller to solve this. It did not, which is that there's no real center right, far right reporting apparatus or not much of one. Actually. One of the things that distinguishes Breitbart from the others is they do some original reporting. Most of the places, a lot of the places that in that world, podcasters are really commentating and reacting and, or reacting to things they've seen on social media, which really are often made up. And there's like a lack of a kind of baseline of. Yeah, I mean, I think it would be healthy if the Trump movement developed more reporting muscles, honestly.

[Ben Smith]

You've mentioned a couple times here that the media is weaker than it has been and maybe recognized its weakness. I think just to put that sort of in perspective, we had the 2024 election where the candidates interacted less with the media than at any point Trump.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

With the legacy media.

[Ben Smith]

No interviews with a mainstream media organization for the last, you know, whatever it was, month of the campaign. Harris did historically few. They took few. Harris took few questions from the, from the press then. And then you have just, you know, you have to, you know, drop in cable subscriptions. Cable subscriptions, ratings, the economics, you know, sort of the Washington Post is losing money. It's just the media has been weaker, is weaker at this point than it has been in any time. And so I kind of like at the same. And on top of that sort of the credibility and the reach of the legacy media is obviously at its nadir. Is it fair to wonder whether the right, who's been waging a decades long war against the media, has now won that war?

[Dan Pfeiffer]

Yeah, I think that, I mean, yes, I think that's a reasonable thing to say. Like, what's the prize for winning that war? I'm not sure. I mean, there's a couple. Just when you talk about trust, like the polling data here is worth sort of looking at because it's interesting. And basically what you see is that like starting with Dan Rather, actually all of the decline in trust in the media is among Republicans, like the independents, pretty flat, Democrats pretty flat. And. But you see this decline, starting with Dan Rather in oh for Republican saying the Republicans start saying the media is too liberal and then at some point the Trump years, it flips from the media is too liberal to the media is making Everything up. And that's a huge difference. And that's sort of what you're talking about. It used to be a shared reality in which Republicans complained about the refs sometimes justifiably to a situation which they believe that the whole thing is made up. And that is a big shift. And then the final thing that is kind of dispiriting is the one place that trust media is eroding among Democrats is among young people. And that's happening pretty fast now.

[Ben Smith]

Yeah. And it's. They just.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

This is Gallup poll.

[Ben Smith]

Right. And I've done. I saw a lot of focus groups, a lot of research in how Gen Z gets their news. And just the idea of going to a website to get news, it doesn't even occur to them. The idea that you would turn on the television to watch news does not.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

Years ago I asked my daughter if she knew about how Finnian post and she was like, oh, is that something in Safari?

[Ben Smith]

Yeah, that's right. I mean you wrote about this in your book and you've talked about it a lot of the interviews when you're talking about a couple years ago. But is just the. And this is sort of where we. So you have two things. You have lack of trust in media, which is a problem and growing among Democrats, particularly among young people. You have what I think is actually a distribution crisis in news, which is, you know, sort of the short version of history I always do is that if you were a person who was not a news junkie in the pre Internet era, you had to see the news, some form of the news, you would bump into it organically because someone literally threw a newspaper at your door every morning and you had to open that. If you wanted to know when the movies were, the baseball score, the weather, something happened in your local town, you would see headlines, right? If you wanted to know the weather the next day, you had to Turn on the 6:00 news and you would see news that way. And then we kind of, we moved from newspapers. I mean this has been your whole career. We sifted to, we. We trained some group of people that they should go to www.nytimes.com or www.politico.com in the morning at the same like the same way you would grab a cup of coffee and read a dead tree newspaper. You would grab a cup of coffee and pull up your laptop or your. It was at a certain year or your iPad and you would look at a website and read the news that way. Maybe the first thing you did at Work, right. Was you would sit down and read the news. Then social media came and we have, like, we have a better plan. Facebook's going to deliver the news to your phone. You're going to see it. And even if you're just like scrolling through for your kid, look at pictures of your friends, kids or whatever else, you know on Facebook, you're killing time in the grocery store, waiting in line, you would see some sort of news and then some point after 20. And Twitter served the same function for a smaller group of people. Then around 20, sometime after 2020, that all fell apart. Right? And now it's like, how do people get. There is no major distribution mechanism for legacy media to reach people who are not actively seeking it out. That is the thing that has changed.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

I think that's a really good way to put it. I mean, I would say that these things keep changing. I don't think it's reached a static point. I think that the thing that you described, which sounds incredibly disorienting and maddening, most people, most consumers hate. Like, if you ask people like, hey, do you think this is working for you? Do you like how you're getting your news? No, everybody hates it. And I think that's. I mean, that was sort of what we were reacting to in creating semaphore was like, just why and why I left the times. Just this sense of like, oh, there's actually an opportunity to like, to not to respond to the fact that people feel totally disoriented, feel like they don't know what to trust, and try to address that stuff directly. And I think. And I think you're seeing. So I think that, I mean, ultimately we live in this very, very dynamic free market society in which consumers do, even in news. And news is sometimes an exception to that. Like, the tradition in news is if the consumers say, we hate you and everything you're doing, we say fuck you, you're wrong. But I think there is this opportunity for both legacy and for new outlets to take pretty seriously how terrible the experience of consuming news is. And a lot of the pendulum swing is back to some of the older values. I think the reason that email newsletters are very popular is they actually kind of print. They force a kind of hierarchy of saying what's important. They force a kind of concision because they're not infinite. And I think that's made them very popular. I'm obviously an optimist because I wouldn't still be doing this stuff. But I do think that the status quo in some ways is kind of untenable. And the fragmentation commercially is extremely annoying, too. How many substacks do you want to subscribe to? How many different streaming services are you going to pay for? And I think there's a very aggressive push and will be over the next couple of years to reconsolidate that stuff, for better or for worse. But you'll have one subscription to newsletters, you'll have two streaming services. They'll all swallow each other. Again. That could be bad or that could be good. But I think that experience of just absolute disorientation and fragmentation, like, it's terrible and everyone knows it. And so there are a lot of opportunities to fix it.

[Ben Smith]

Yeah, the question. I think I agree with that. We're sort of in a moment and this is not like you can have the same conversation about just content services beyond news, right?

[Dan Pfeiffer]

Yeah, totally.

[Ben Smith]

Are you going to really pay for. How many streaming services are you going to pay for? YouTube TV, which has become very popular, is basically just cable through the Internet. It looks at this same format. So how are you going to. Like, is there a way to get back to it? But I wanted to sort of get back to the. The role of the media because it, like. Like, we're like, you and I are like, right now, this conversation about distribution is about the business of media. Right. Like, how do you. Because ultimately you need readers to make money, Whether that's gonna be subscriptions or advert or how you get ads in front of people or whatever that is.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

Just to stop you, though, I. Because I see where you're like, I think I agree with where you're going. The extent to which all of everything we're talking about, the chaos, the disruption, is all fundamentally driven by these huge technological shifts that we've. In business shifts. That is the underlying thing here. It's not little choices made by journalists here and there.

[Ben Smith]

No, no, no, no. I fundamentally agree with that. And it is. I think, I think you can. You point out a couple examples. You can point back at various choices made by people in the media. Like, in the media, you do two things. You do the business of media, like giving away your product for free on the Internet for a few years. Probably in hindsight, not the best move or, you know, optimizing to Facebook or whatever else. Like, you can do some things. You can also point to some journalistic choices that have eroded trust, fairly or unfairly. Right. You pick the. Dan Rather. Just the entire coverage of the Iraq war in the run up to it.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

That is the biggest one. Yeah.

[Ben Smith]

Yeah, but then you also have cultural shifts that have happened, which is in how young people think about news. Like, what is one of the things you see when you do sort of focus groups of younger folks is they find more authority and more relatable a piece of content that looks like the conversation you and I are having. More than nine pundits at an anchor desk for cnn, when they think of news, it is people with headphones on, on a couch or around a table having a podcast or it's a streamer speaking, you know, doing a vertical video and that. Like, that is to them what, like the sort of traditional image of Walter Cronkite or Dan Rather or Brian Williams at the anchor desk is two previous generations.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

I mean, it's funny, we on our podcast Mixed Signals, we interviewed Colin and Samir, who are big, big YouTubers who think a lot about, who talk a lot and think about YouTube. And at one point I said to Samir, like, I mean, so when did you start thinking of yourself as a journalist? Like, how did you get into journalism? And he was like, what? Don't call me that. That's offensive.

[Ben Smith]

Yeah.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

So, yeah, I think it's a. That was a pretty striking thing to me. It's a totally different ecosystem.

[Ben Smith]

We're going to take a quick break, but before we do that, look, it pains me to self promote like this, it truly does, but Crooked Media is offering a 30 day free trial of my newsletter, the Message Box, and I hope you'll consider signing up in the months ahead. I'll be breaking down how we got to this terrible place, exploring how Democrats can rebuild our coalition and strategizing about how we can take on the right wing media machine. I'll also be sharing specific ideas about how you can fight back against Donald Trump and his minions, where to volunteer, which campaigns matter most, and how to talk to the persuadable voters in your life about the threat Trump poses. My most recent post lists several things you can be doing right now in your personal capacity to fight back against Trump, Elon Musk and the rest. You can sign up for the 30 day free [e-mail] yeswedan that's crooked.com yeswedan.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

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[Jon Stewart]

Is supported by Comedy Central's Emmy Award winning series the Daily Show. Jon Stewart and the Daily show news team are kicking off 2025 with brand new episodes covering a brand new administration and a not quite brand new president. While it may feel like we've all been here before, it's never been covered like this with Jon Stewart behind the desk kicking off every week. Comedy Central's the Daily show new weeknights at 11 on Comedy Central and streaming next day on Paramount. Plus.

[Ben Smith]

I just want to get back sort of to the role that the media has played in sort of politics and public discourse. Because that to me has been a fundamental shift is it was a measure of accountability, right? We called it the fourth state for a reason. You interacted with the media as a politician or a governmental entity because you for two reasons. One, you needed the media to get your message out. That was a fundamental thing. If I was preparing Barack Obama for a press conference, the Faustian bargain in my head is I'm going to take a bunch of questions that are going to be annoying. They're going to be about the things that I know voters don't care about. But the price of that is the airwaves. It's the way I can get my message in front of people. And you would react to the media could if they picked a thing that was going to become the narrative could change government policy. Right. It would create such a firestorm that you would have to stop doing it or change course or whatever else. I do sort of question after watching this election, the first couple weeks of Trump, whether it seems like that role is so diminished as to be is that the media becomes maybe this is for better, not for worse from your perspective, but almost entirely an observer and chronicler of the process, opposed to a participant when it was a huge participant in politics for basically since the invention of the newspaper.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

Yeah. And I think, I mean I don't think it's a binary thing, but I think the media's role in being able to sort of set the agenda essentially is obviously diminished, you know, to some degree given over to whatever. Like Anon on Twitter caught Elon's eye this morning. Like right now that's what's driving. That's what you'll see on FOX tomorrow morning and in the White House the next day. Like that's, you know, is literally random people tweeting in Elon's replies. But. And I guess, yeah, and I think that the media can overplay it, you know, can overplay. Yeah. I do have, I do have some ambivalence about that role. And we definitely, I think we are able, like Semaphore has been able to build a lot of trust with Republicans and Democrats partly because we do. We see our lane as narrower. Right. Like we're trying to tell you what's going on and provide really good information but not ultimately resolve the argument. That said, I mean, I do think there, I do think that there's a long tradition of people in American politics who think they can shape reality. I mean there was a famous. Was it Carl, who was it in the Bush administration?

[Ben Smith]

It was Karl Rove in the New York Times. In the New York Times told Robert.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

Draper that they were going to shape. They didn't have to be accountable to the reality based community anymore. And at some point journalism is the reality based community. Like the, like, it's not like the power doesn't really ultimately come from, to me, like it comes from the fact that you're revealing things that are in fact true and the citizens and voters are going to wind up having to react to. And I don't think we've, I don't, I mean that's, I think people kind of underestimate that. That's really the power of it in the first place.

[Ben Smith]

I think the. What is reality is still reality. Right. If let's say the Biden administration had been able to get a bunch of reporters you like. Inflation is an example, right? It did not matter what the New York Times or CNN or Semaphore or anyone else wrote about inflation. People still went to the grocery store and were paying more for eggs, right? Or milk or whatever. Like that is reality. The thing that is I think harder is people are less informed about what's happening now because it's harder to get news. And that like you have this gigantic gap now. We saw this in a bunch of the polling. There was NBC polling before Biden dropped out. You had Navigator research polling afterwards, which just shows that the biggest gap in politics is not left and right. It's news consumers and non news consumers. Which does go to the irony, which I'm sure you might find quite sweet, that all the Democrats who've been screaming, myself sometimes included, who've been screaming about New York Times headlines turned out to be the New York Times readers are the ones who were most likely to support Biden or Harris and people who did not read the news. You do just sort of have this question just to me, that chasm has grown so much larger really since 2020, I think, and how that to me is a crisis for democracy. All this stuff you mentioned Elon 50 times, as you should. It's one of the biggest stories maybe in generations of American politics. We have the world's richest man possibly running rush shod over laws and rules and norms to just reshape government without any sort of accountability. And how many people are actually consuming any of that? And how do you get that information to them? And is that your job? I guess is the question.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

I mean, I mean those, yeah, those, those are all really good questions. I mean, I think, I mean, I guess I would say like, it's certainly nothing like the democracy that we grew up in, in the 20th century with, with a very kind of state, unusually stable, unusually centrist media. It's a lot like 19th century American democracy. Right? I mean, it's a lot like. And I think that, you know, a kind of there is something about what we're seeing is a kind of small d democratic media that's, you know, an absolutely chaotic, hyper partisan, untrustworthy mess that is very embedded in the history of democracy. So, and I, so, and I don't remember, I'm not saying that as a good thing, but I do think that like the, the kind of thing that we, you know, that honestly by the beginnings of our careers was already in trouble. The sort of broadcast the, you know, the Walter Cronkite thing that was the blip, right? I mean, this is the norm.

[Ben Smith]

You talk to a lot of Republicans, talk to a lot of Democrats. Do you think Republicans better understand this media environment than Democrats?

[Dan Pfeiffer]

I think that in this moment after the election, everybody thinks that like that the winning side figured it out and that the losers are morons and everybody is like gearing up to refight the last war. And every CEO, every politician is going to be booking themselves onto a bunch of podcasts nobody listens to for the next four years. But that in fact, and then always the world changes faster than they expect. I think we're headed back into a moment of consolidation, basically. And that there's going to be a recentralization of audiences and of content and that some poor hapless congressional candidate is going to spend 300 hours talking to podcasts nobody listens to, to no discernible effect. But also the Trump years have. I mean, the consolidation of power in Washington is also really new in media, right? Like the ext to which media executives are obsessed with what the administration can do to hurt them. And it's true across business we're hosting this huge world economic summit here in April. And just the appetite of CEOs in America to get to Washington to figure out what is going on is really new.

[Ben Smith]

Say a little bit more about moving back to a more centralized media. I assume you don't mean ideologically. What do you mean by that?

[Dan Pfeiffer]

Oh, just, you know, I mean it was technological there if you needed a. For the late 20th century, you needed a broadcast tower or a printing press if you wanted to reach a lot of people and not that many people had them. And spectrum was regulated. And so like you really had this very. I mean, for technological reasons, fundamentally there were, as you said about distribution, the system was meant. And then, and then the business incentives of those were to sell mattresses to Republicans and to Democrats. And often that led to something that we look we, that we romanticize actually a kind of so centrist media. But it also did produce this kind of false consensus around Iraq, which as you say, is part of why everybody lost trust in that kind of media. But the fundamental change was technological the splint in the fact that you didn't need these broadcast towers anymore. And so I just think it's hard to imagine going back to that. And you know, there are like we definitely see for readers part of the value is and I think you do this too. Like we can read everything so you don't have to and go out into the put on the Hazmat suit and go out into social media and find the interesting stuff, some of which is on weird substacks and right wing podcasts and some of which is in the New York Times. And it's this very disorienting moment to be a media consumer.

[Ben Smith]

Yeah. That's one of the things that I think with like my media business head on is that the. One of the places where there is opportunity is basically curation.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

Yeah.

[Ben Smith]

And you have to build trust with the audience, has to trust you. And that is for better or for worse, that trust is you can build brand trust, as I'm sure you're trying to do it semaphore, but it's often with people, with individuals.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

Totally. Yes.

[Ben Smith]

It's like, I trust Joe Rogan to tell me what's happening. I trust Ezra Klein to tell me what's happening. I trust Pot Save America, whoever else. And I mean, you've done that a little bit with some of your reporters trying to lift them up like Dave Weigel.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

Yeah, no, we definitely are building around expert reporters on key beats in a way that in the old days you would just. You're all cogs in the dispensable cogs in the Wall Street Journal machine. And now if you're Liz Hoffman on Wall street or Burgess Everett in the Senate, you trust a person. It's an interesting time to be in this business, for sure.

[Ben Smith]

Speaking of that curation role, I went back and read your first column as the New York Times media critic, which was claiming that your brand new employer of the New York Times had grown so successful that it was bad for business. Since then, the New York Times has become even bigger, even better read, and it's putative. Competitors have struggled mightily since then. Washington Post, most notably Wall Street Journal, still does well, but has had layoffs, et cetera. And so where do you think the New York Times stands right now? Do you still believe it's bad for journalism?

[Dan Pfeiffer]

I mean, I actually think it's scary for the New York Times. You don't want to be the sole strong independent outlet in a kind of democracy where rule of law is a little shaky. Like that's a bad place to be and it would be helpful if you.

[Ben Smith]

Have a target on you.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

Yeah, for sure. And it'd be healthier for the media ecosystem and healthier for the Times and better for the leverage of journalists in their salary negotiations if there were lots of big competing outlets with sort of somewhat different outlooks on the world. Like, I mean, that's just A healthier system. And I don't know. I mean, I'm hopeful that a couple of other legacy outlets, the Wall Street Journal, maybe cnn, could get their acts together and that long, long term places like the Washington Post can pull it out. And then I do think there's a lot of. I mean, I do think that again, if you go back to, like, if you ask people, if you ask your listeners, like, do you think this is all great and you're satisfied with what you're getting, or do you want stuff? People really are hungry for new ways of getting information, for new voices for somebody who will go out, as you say, and just like, sort through all the lunacy for them. And so I think. I mean, I think there's. I mean, I think, you know, it's. We're in this moment of crazy transition and there'll be a bunch of new things, too, but. Yeah, no, I do think. I mean, I think it's in no one's interest to have one absolutely dominant and defending company.

[Ben Smith]

I sort of feel like the New York Times has become Netflix for news, where it's just. It's the place you go for every. It has replaced sort of like the way Netflix has replaced television. Right.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

Though. Does Netflix have taste? Right. Like, Netflix has the. The stuff that is targeted at conservative people in the middle of the country and the stuff that's targeted at liberal. Yeah, I mean, they.

[Ben Smith]

They have. They have everything. And New York Times obviously brings with it a brand that exists, but it is like, right now, if. If I am just like, I want to find out what is happening right now in this moment.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

Yep.

[Ben Smith]

My default place to go would just be the New York Times.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

I know, like, it's 2005. Right. Because for, like, for 10 years in the. 15 years in the middle, Twitter was where I got what I. Where I would have gone to see that. Now you can't use social media for that. Like, you just can't ask the question of what is going on and have it answered.

[Ben Smith]

Yeah. You can't just open up Twitter and have it be at the top of your feed in the way it was before from a trusted, you know, a reporter or a news outlet you knew that had been verified by Twitter.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

Yeah. And you want to know what's going on, and you want to know what's more important than what else. Like, you want to know where on the page it is. You want some hierarchy, actually, in the chaos. No, I mean, that's. I mean, that's the opportunity that we see ourselves as running at for sure.

[Ben Smith]

But it's like right now for a lot of people, I think, who are sort of in the serious news consumer, it's like, you want to know what's happening in sports, Maybe you go to ESPN or maybe you go to the New York Times and read the Athletic, right? You want to know how to cook something, you go there, you want to play, you want to play a game, you go there, you want to know what's happening, you go there. You want to know who's winning the Grammys. You open up the New York Times app and they are telling you as they come in where they are. It's just like it is such a dominant position in the ecosystem that it has. To me, I really feel like it has replaced the conglomerate of major news sources you were all getting from Twitter or from whatever it's replaced like you were using 10 years ago. Yeah, yeah. It is the Internet for news, right? In the way that Netflix is the Internet for TV and movies, primarily.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

Yeah. And then you can get a bunch of stuff around the edges. But ultimately, no, I think that's. I think that's really true right now, but I think. Right. But we're also sort of in this moment when podcasts like this one, like, what is this? Is this a podcast? Are we on video? Is it television? Is it a podcast?

[Ben Smith]

We're both. It's true. It is long form contact.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

Some people will be watching this on a big screen on YouTube and at some point, somebody's going to come and make us both wear makeup to do this so we, like, our skin looks less weird. And then like suddenly we're just like idiots in boxes screaming at each other, just like cable. And I think there's a really, really fast convergence happening between what we used to call podcasts and what we used to call television. And I don't quite know where that lands, but I think that's. People don't quite realize the speed at which that's happening and at which that's going to be a kind of recentralized form of consumption. You see it on ESPN, right? You see Pat McAfee out in the afternoons on ESPN. It's like, what's happening here? Like one guy's head is bigger than the other guy's head.

[Ben Smith]

I mean, there is the conventions of television as we know it are coming down in news particular and the things that people don't sort of realize, people even who work in journalism or who are in the communications field in politics or PR or whatever else is. There is still a Old world mentality that's hard to break out of because I always feel like people, a lot of people are generationally frozen in amber in when they started in media. I think that's very true of politicians.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

Every single one of us is just.

[Ben Smith]

But I think some people, and I give you kind of this point, have, you know, you have been in different. You know, you were sort of. You were a tabloid reporter in New York City, you were a blogger when blogs took off and sort of RSS feedback became the. You've ridden the wave. I've tried to ride the wave as well. But like the facts that you don't sort of realize is one the biggest podcasting platform in the world is not Spotify, it's YouTube.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

Right.

[Ben Smith]

And that a shocking. The numbers of people who watch YouTube on their actual smart TV in their house shocks people that it's so.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

Yeah. Would you like, put on nicer clothes if you really thought about it?

[Ben Smith]

I put on a sweater. Normally I'm wearing a T shirt.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

I put on an actual sweater.

[Ben Smith]

I would not have put on. I would not have put on a sport coat. Because this is. This is a podcast or it's not a funeral court. Funeral, wedding or court date. So.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

But actually you're also running a media business and like, you must be thinking, like, why don't you have like some hour of msa? Why isn't podsave providing an hour to CNN or MSNBC or something like, why are they paying these people way more than you would charge them to provide an hour of programming? Don't you see that stuff converging?

[Ben Smith]

I think you can see that converging whether how it converges, whether it can actually. This has been the challenge for most media organizations you've witnessed. This is truly, with the exception of the New York Times, there is not a good example of a previous legacy media organization that has made an actual transition to digital. Right. It's just like they cannot do it. Some, like Politico start digitally, right. Like you had, like when you started, there was an actual newspaper that people read over lunch at Capitol Hill, but it was a digital first publication. But no one else can do it because they are. I mean, it's to the great credit of the New York Times as a business story of pulling that off that people can't actually do it. ESPN is trying to do it, and maybe they'll be successful with like Pat McAfee is an example of it.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

Yeah, Disney's trying to do it. Right. It is incredibly hard. But it just seems to me that people are producing. Podcasters are producing shows that are more interesting than most of what's on tv. And they have big audience and big followings, and they're doing it for like a tiny fraction of the cost of producing an hour of television. And meanwhile, television's running out of money. And just seems to me that set of factors means inevitably that I'm going to, like, you know, be in a dentist's office and see your face very soon.

[Ben Smith]

Well, I hope not. Not my face, but maybe some other face. But there is a little of everything as old as new again, which is for a long time, the thing ESPN ran all morning was just a video feed of ESPN radio shows, because ESPN Radio was where the money was. And so it was just like you would just watch Mike and Mike every morning. Yes. And Imus, another example. I mean, Howard Stern.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

Yeah, this is that, right? This is not a complicated business. And so what does that. But then what does that mean for this super fragmented political landscape? I actually think it means it gets a little less fragmented and that kind of re coalesces around really, really big individual voices probably more than, I mean, I think like the Megyn Kelly's of the world, like you guys. I mean, there's sort of a reconsolidation around a relatively smaller number of really big voices.

[Ben Smith]

Well, it's like how you think of channels is different because it's not like a network channel. It is either a media network that is centered around a podcast like Crooked Media or Daily Wire or Alex Cooper's Unwell Network or whatever that you like, because you. And then usually you're entering it because of the talent at the top, and then that gives you entry into the other people. But it exists very differently. I think you asked me the question about why not cnn, msnbc? The thing that I watch, I talk a lot of people in the progressive media space is the thing you have to be careful not to do is take your new thing and then just rebuild the failed model. You see this in substack a lot, where the economics of substack are great when you're small, when you're one, when you start hiring a bunch of reporters and doing that, you're right back to where you were before, which is it becomes very hard to support it. So how can you do something that is new and stays new? I think we are just like this is the reason I want to have this conversation with you of all people today is we are just in a fascinating moment in media. And politics is media politics is the war for attention, politics is the information war. And so these things interact in a way that are sort of critically important too. And it's happening so fast. I used to say that when I left the White House in 2015, that the period of time from when I went to work for Obama, which was before the iPhone came out, to the time I left, when Facebook and Twitter and Snapchat were becoming dominant, was the fastest period of change in media since the invention of the printing press. And I actually think the change from when I left to now is greater than that. I think.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

Yeah, you were there for this almost very linear story. Like it felt like this rocket ship, but we could see where it was going. And then at some point it just exploded. And the whole thing is it exploded.

[Ben Smith]

And new things came and the power of the legacy media changed dramatically because of technology, because of economics, et cetera.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

Yeah. I think there's a big open question of whether this splintering new right wing media, like what becomes of it? Does it create its own New York Times or does it just continue to spend its time basically yelling about the New York Times? I think that's a really open question. Yeah.

[Ben Smith]

I mean it is like that is a. And some of them are getting quite big, right?

[Dan Pfeiffer]

Yeah. And does it become boring just to be an attack dog for the people in power? To me, that's the most boring and demoralizing form of media, to be an attack dog for power. And that's. If you worked really hard to get Donald Trump elected, that's sort of what you've become. And so I think there's going to be a question of who in the media just sticks with loyalty as their brand and who tries to. I mean, as, again as Murdoch has established sort of an independent voice and power base that is not just fealty to the president.

[Ben Smith]

Yeah. It is a ecosystem grown in opposition that are they the dog that caught the car and what do they do with that? I think is going to be a big question going forward.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

It is going to be really confusing to watch.

[Ben Smith]

For us, that is a good summary of where we are. Yeah. In the media world. Ben Smith, thank you so much for this great conversation. It's always good to talk to you.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

Thanks for having me on, Dan. If you want to listen to Pod.

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[Ben Smith]

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