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- [00:04]
Jon Podhoretz
Hope for the best, expect the worst.
- [00:11]
Abe Greenwald
Some preach and pain Some die of thirst the way of knowing which way it's going Hope for the best Expect the worst Hope for the best. Welcome to the Commentary Magazine daily podcast. Today is Thursday, February 27, 2025. I am Jon Pod Horowitz, the editor of Commentary magazine. With me, as always, executive editor Abe Greenwald. Hi, Abe.
- [00:37]
Christine Rosen
Hi, John.
- [00:38]
Abe Greenwald
Media commentary columnist. Not media commentary columnist, but rather social commentary columnist, because we have retired the media commentary column in favor of the social commentary column. Christine Rosen. Hi, Christine.
- [00:49]
Matthew Continetti
Hi, John.
- [00:50]
Abe Greenwald
And our Washington Commentary columnist, who was once our media commentary columnist but is now our Washington commentary columnist. We no longer have a media commentary columnist, Matthew Continetti. Hi, Matt.
- [01:01]
Jon Podhoretz
Hi, John. And you know, it's ironic because I would like to engage in some media commentary today.
- [01:07]
Abe Greenwald
Today. Yes, we are going to be doing some media commentary today. One piece of media commentary, just to get out of the way. If you are watching us on YouTube, and I do recommend you try the podcast on YouTube, go to commentary Magazine podcast and look us up. We have almost 9,000 subscribers over the last couple of months. Please go. Please, like, please subscribe. Help us. You might enjoy watching us. For you watchers, Google Chrome offered me the option of using some filters, and I clicked on a filter. You'll look, you'll see that it looks like I am floating in heaven against a blue screen. I cannot figure out how to turn it off so that you can see my bookcase, which is what you usually see. And so if you're watching, I am in fact a godhead floating in space.
- [01:55]
Jon Podhoretz
You look like you're about to. To star in a Sesame street skit. And Elmo or Grover is going to appear alongside you. Yeah, exactly. And you'll engage in a colloquy with them.
- [02:07]
Abe Greenwald
Right. That's another good way of looking at it. Or as I say, I'm Zardoz, flying in from the. Flying into the screen. So there's a lot to talk about. And of course, because we are people in the media and we're obsessed with the media, we're going to start with the least consequential matter at hand, because it's just something that we can't get away from. I would say two different things to talk about the media. One is the Washington Post, and the other is the Jake Tapper Nick Thompson book.
- [02:37]
Jon Podhoretz
And there's also the White House Correspondence association fight.
- [02:41]
Abe Greenwald
Yes. Okay, so we have three.
- [02:42]
Matthew Continetti
Alex Thompson, John. Alex Thompson.
- [02:44]
Abe Greenwald
Excuse me, Alex Thompson. That's right. Nick Thompson was the editor of Wired, I think. So I'm getting my. My Thompson's confused. You know, you go, and you all look alike to me. Anyway, so to get to JE Bezos, yesterday morning, the owner of the Washington Post announcing that he was redirecting the Washington Post's opinion policies to focus exclusively on free markets and personal liberties. And of course, the entire world went insane. We're once again back to the world of people announcing they're going to cancel their Washington Post subscriptions. People on staff at the Washington Post attacking the owner for his temerity in announcing this change in policy. David Shipley, the current opinion editor, leaving the Washington Post because he cannot possibly defend free markets and personal liberties. It would appear that's just a bridge too far, people.
- [03:43]
Jon Podhoretz
Bridge too far.
- [03:43]
Abe Greenwald
And that is personal liberties. What are you talking about? This is 1933. It's the Reichstag fire. We need to limit your personal liberties in order to prevent the guy who wants to limit your personal liberties from limiting your personal liberties. So you are not allowed to praise personal liberties. Anyway, quick take Jeff Bezos has lost $300 million in the last three years on the Washington Post. He owns it outright entirely. Paper would not exist without him because nobody is buying a paper that loses $100 million a year. I mean, maybe somebody like Elon, maybe some. It's his version of buying Twitter. He bought it. He bought it 12 years ago. He was sold on the idea that making it a resistance paper was the future and maybe they could stop Trump and maybe they could become a new voice with democracy dying in darkness. And clearly he woke up with Trump's presidency in the offing in September, October and said, these guys just sold me an unbelievable bill of goods. I'm just a guy out here in Seattle. I don't want to be crosswise with this administration. They've been making me preach things in my paper that I don't believe in, and I'm done. We're not going to endorse, which is what the first thing that he did when he said he wasn't going to endorse her president. And now he's saying, I don't like this editorial line anymore. I'm changing it. And for the fact that he is employing hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people at a dead loss, subsidizing their salaries, they have the temerity to whine and complain that he is, you know, becoming a monster, a terrible person. Good. So quit. How dare you. How dare you attack the guy who is basically literally taking money out of his wallet to pay you when you are doing absolutely nothing to help his bottom line. And he is doing this kind of out of the goodness of his heart.
- [05:31]
Jon Podhoretz
Well, they're complaining that he likes freedom.
- [05:33]
Abe Greenwald
Which is, you know, he's interesting. They're right.
- [05:36]
Jon Podhoretz
I just want to correct the timeline a little bit. You know, I think Bezos, like a lot of people in the tech industry, really soured on progressivism over the past four years under Joe Biden and the Biden economy and Biden's policies on regulation, taxation and antitrust, among other things. And then a tipping point for me, or for me as I look at Bezos evolution was the assassination attempt in July. I believe that after that assassination attempt, Bezos issued a tweet that was very positive toward President Trump, saying that he demonstrated courage under fire, which was true. And then a process of reconciliation began. Some of the reporting I've seen suggests that my favorite American governor, Doug Burgum, now our Secretary of Interior, played a key role in brokering this new relationship between President Trump and Jeff Bezos. And then of course, as you say, John, the non endorsement controversy happened in the fall right before the election. I have to say I am so excited by this news. I love this news. What we're going to have another editorial page devoted to freedom and arguing for constitutional rule of law and free markets and individual liberties protected by our Bill of Rights.
- [06:57]
Abe Greenwald
It's.
- [06:58]
Jon Podhoretz
I love it.
- [06:59]
Abe Greenwald
It's outrageous. How dare you. I know that, I know that I'm.
- [07:02]
Jon Podhoretz
This Neanderthal, but I think it's a great thing to have. I mean, just think about the monopoly that the liberal media has. And what do you have? One paper, the Wall Street Journal, which stands for free minds and free markets as its long standing motto puts it. And now we're going to have another paper, the Washington Post, a storied paper arguing for these ideals. I saw this news and I've just felt happy ever since.
- [07:29]
Abe Greenwald
Abe, you wrote a newsletter the other day, our newsletter available for you in the afternoons. Go to commentary.org, click on newsletter at the top of the page. Subscribe. You can read abe's newsletter around 3 to 4pm and you said, look, something's going on in America. There's this survey suggesting that religious belief, that the decline in religious belief seems to have halted or reversed itself a little bit. And that you say basically the last five years have been the five years of a God that failed, meaning socialism plus wokeness. And I think it's not just that Bezos went through the Biden years not liking the policies of Biden. This was the long dark night of the soul for people who own corporations and businesses. Their internal 20, the revolution from within by the 25 year old know nothings who for some reason they were convinced needed to be kowtowed to the Trump election. It was 24 hours after Trump won that people were like, well, There goes our DI department. Okay, we're done. Okay, no more DI department. Hey, get out of here, go retire. We're firing 250 people in this category company, business after business after business after business because they allowed these radicals free reign inside their companies.
- [08:58]
Christine Rosen
Yeah, I mean, as I said in the letter, you know, the leveling off of the religious decline happened over that five years from 2020 to today, which is exactly when radicalism became institutionalized. And it was institutionalized public in the government, but also in industry, in the private sector. I mean, with all these businesses taking on their DEI departments, as you say, John, and clearly it's a loser. So you need someone like Abezos to come along and just speak it and change the policy and say, okay, this is, whatever else it is, it is commercially a loser and this has to change. But it's also a kind of growing up at a strangely late age.
- [09:50]
Matthew Continetti
You know, there's a sense in which he just one day randomly in the last maybe six months, picked up the newspaper he owns and perhaps read it cover to cover or page, every single page. And what he would have found is, is an institution that has been in decline not just because of its ideological bent. Some of its most outspoken columnists and writers, people like Karen Attia, are, are openly, gleefully anti Semitic. You have the absolute decline of local coverage. This used to be a newspaper that for those of us who live in DC, we could rely upon for local news, including local news on crime, on what the city council was doing. That's gone. That's decimated too. So what purpose does a paper serve if it's only in resistance? And the resistance is done because the American people said the resistance is done. We're putting this guy back in. I think it's rather savvy of him. And he, he is an outsider to the media industry, but he's also very close to government. I mean, Amazon Web Services hosts a huge number of federal government services. Like he, he's a huge contractor for the federal government. So it's not as if this guy just has a one note, you know, he, I think he means what he says when he says he cares about free enterprise and freedom because he Himself, as a businessman, takes that into account when he's dealing with the federal government. So I'll be curious to see what this looks like in practice, how he implements this.
- [11:07]
Abe Greenwald
Well, obviously, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. Who will he hire to replace? Whom will he hire to replace? Who will he hire to replace? Okay. Whom will he hire to replace David Shipley? What will happen to the columnists and people at the paper who are not subscribers to the principle that free free markets and personal liberties are the key themes that they wish to cover? Will Jennifer Rubin survive? Will Karen Attia survive?
- [11:33]
Jon Podhoretz
Jennifer Rubin's gone. She's on substack.
- [11:35]
Abe Greenwald
Oh, she's. She's on substack. I'm sorry.
- [11:37]
Jon Podhoretz
She left. Atiya is still there. This announcement, as Christine alluded to, came just a couple days after.
- [11:43]
Abe Greenwald
A day, A day.
- [11:45]
Jon Podhoretz
One day after a Free Beacon reporter went to a book signing with Atiya and asked her if she still stood by her pro hamas tweet on October 7. And she said yes.
- [11:58]
Abe Greenwald
Two things happened. That freebie reporter showed up and so did an average reading citizen. The footage is on YouTube. It's astonishing. This was a book event for Peter Beinart, may his name be cursed. And a book that he has written about how to be a Jew after Gaza, which I believe means how to be a member of Hamas. I think that's basically his answer. And Karen Attiah was his interlocutor. I think it was at Politics and Prose.
- [12:30]
Jon Podhoretz
Yes.
- [12:31]
Abe Greenwald
Which is the sort of the. One of the leading bookstores in D.C. and Northwest D.C. and someone stood up and said to Karen Attia, how do you. Are you still willing to stand behind your. What you said about how this is what decolonization looks like? Which is what she said. On October 7, a colonist for the Washington Post, who was made a columnist and a leading figure because of the outrage she expressed at the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, the Saudi sort of the anti government Saudi journalist who was killed in Turkey by Saudi intelligence forces, presumably under the direction of Mohammed bin Salman. And the years of rage and horror at the monstrous murder of Khashoggi, which was pretty horrible. The same person celebrating the slaughter of 1200 people on the grounds that this is what decolonization looked like. And she said, I make no apologies for what I said. And like 36 hours later, Bezos is like, you're all out of here. Unless you want to change your tune. I would love to believe that that was the last straw. I hope there will be reporting on How Bezos got to this conclusion and decided to do what he is doing. And by the way, I'm going to make a defense of the cravenness, if you want to call it that, of him trying to make nice with the President of the United States. Grow up. Everybody in media, people who own newspapers and have owned organs of, you know, magazines, things like that, when they do so at a loss, they're doing so not out of the goodness of their heart because they are hoping to spread the message that democracy dies in darkness. They do so for all kinds of complicated reasons. But when you work for them and they lose money. And I have been in two such circumstances in my life. One with Rupert Murdoch, when I was the arts and editorial page editor and a columnist at the New York Post, when Murdoch was losing 30, $40 million a year on the Post, and once earlier in my career when I worked for Sun Myung Moon at the Washington Times, who was also losing tens of millions of dollars, they did so for complicated reasons. What was allowed to me and to the people who worked with me at the Post and at the Washington Times was the ability to apply our trade in a functional news organization that produced a daily paper in which I was allowed to edit and write and other people were allowed to edit and write and do reporting and make a living and do all that. And if what they wanted was for the paper to say we should create a space force to send people to live on Pluto, and I was the editorial page editor, I would write that editorial or I would quit if I couldn't really support that.
- [15:50]
Matthew Continetti
Can we add another layer of context to this as well that I think goes missing in this story about Bezos. And that's that reporters in legacy media have for decades, and most recently for the four years of the Biden administration, actively cozied up to people in power. I mean, Kamala Harris was notorious for having lots of reporters come to the Veep's mansion and you'd have dinners and cocktails and all kinds of socializing which then redound to their benefit when they try to, I don't know, cover up someone's cognitive or physical decline or get themselves installed without any sort of democratic process to become a new nominee to replace said declining figure.
- [16:30]
Jon Podhoretz
Maybe that's a good segue to one of the other media stories. Just before we get to Biden, this whole controversy about the White House Correspondents association and the press pool that follows President Trump and Caroline Levitt, the White House press secretary, saying that now the president, the office of the President will decide which reporters are following President Trump at a given time. You know, one of the reporters who was very close to Kamala Harris is Eugene Daniels, formerly of Politico, who's now an MSNBC person.
- [17:09]
Abe Greenwald
Well, he just quit because he's gonna have a show on msnbc.
- [17:12]
Jon Podhoretz
He's going, yeah, quit Politico.
- [17:13]
Abe Greenwald
I imagine he is going to display the latest in fashions.
- [17:17]
Jon Podhoretz
He's a very fashionable person. I've met him many times. He's extremely friendly. He's fun to talk to. But he's also extremely close to Harris and the Democrats. Now he's going to be on msnbc, and he's the head of the White House Correspondence association that's complaining about the Trump treatment of the press. But it just shows you not just the bias of much of the mainstream media, but also the guild mentality. And I think that's kind of what you're speaking to, John. There's a sense. There's a sense of, well, we. It's. This is ours. You can't touch this. Even if you literally own the paper, you can't. You can't interfere. And I have to say, that's kind of a. I'm going to be. I'm going to speak ill of other generations here or my generation. It's a kind of a millennial thing, you know. How dare you tell me what to do. Who are you, Mr. Bezos, with your incredible businesses that send Matt Continetti books on a daily basis and feed the world and house the government secrets and send commercial spacecraft to the stars? How dare you tell me that I shouldn't be pro Hamas on my Slack channel? That mentality is widespread in our press corps, and it's unhealthy, and people need to say, quit it.
- [18:47]
Abe Greenwald
Look, there is now this new way of being in journalism, which we alluded to with Jennifer Rubin, where individual people can try to sell their own brands on the free market, mostly using the platform called Substack, but they also start your own YouTube channel. You know, if you don't want to do it in words, you could do all that kind of. So there is now the barrier to entry, to try to make your own business out of yourself is now almost zero. And so go do it. Go do it. Really. Like, you know what? Now it's cowardice if you don't. If you're going to take money from somebody whose views you detest or whose businesses you don't like or whose behavior you find abhorrent, go see how you do on your own. That's what a brave person does. That's what a person of integrity does. That's now that now that you can. It used to be that you couldn't. There was no how are you going to get into the public prints unless you knew somebody who owned a giant printing plant at a 19th century industrial factory that was producing this giant paper object that was delivered by hundreds of trucks. You couldn't ply your trade. And now you can. And anybody who is sitting there inside the Washington Post disgusted by the behavior of Jeff Bezos, go see what you can do. Enjoy. As for me, just as I am extraordinarily grateful to the donors who make Commentary, Inc. A nonprofit 501C3 Keep the Lights on and help us continue to publish and do this podcast and try to influence people on matters of great importance. My presumption is that people choose willingly to give me and give Commentary the money to do that because they are in harmony with how we feel and want that view to be out there and part of the common discussion. I am awash with gratitude for their illamosynary generosity. And I think it is disgusting for David Marinus, who is one of the storied writers at the Washington Post who has been collecting hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, again directly out of Jeff Bezos's pocket because he has run that thing at a loss pretty much since he bought it, to say, I will never write for this place again, so don't write for it again. And can I just go resign? Go resign and go write your filth somewh. This guy gave you money. He gave you money for years so you could do whatever it was you wanted. Write a book about Vince Lombardi, you know, piss all over Donald Trump. I don't care. He let you do it. And now he's like, I think I'm done with that now. And the thing to do is to say, gee, that was really a great run. I'm really grateful to you for what you did for me.
- [21:54]
Christine Rosen
I just want to add also that, like, what do these liberal journalists think the world of media has been like for conservatives for decades until. Until the sort of new age of substack and everything. For decades, if you were picked to be the token conservative somewhere, you were the luckiest there was. It was either that or like sort of conservative ghetto that you had to like, you know, find work in that. Was it interesting to see? I wonder how much that's gonna flip if this is the start of that. I mean, obviously the sort of the mammoth thing here The New York Times is gonna survive as the New York Times. I mean, so that's not gonna change.
- [22:42]
Abe Greenwald
Yeah, but it's not because of the news coverage. It's because of the recipes and the puzzles.
- [22:49]
Matthew Continetti
Wordle saves the New York Times.
- [22:51]
Abe Greenwald
Wordle and Wirecutter Consumer Reports. Yeah, exactly. Like that's what saved the New York Times. It wasn't, you know, lying about Trump's. It wasn't publishing Trump's tax records, which they had no business doing. And it wasn't lying about Russiagate. But that's not what. That's not what kept them going.
- [23:11]
Matthew Continetti
The lesson that Bezos should take from that reality of the New York Times is to give people not what they want. You know, you don't just want to serve them up, but practical things. So I want some more local news. Jeff Bezos, if you're listening. More local news about what? How D.C. as a city actually functions. Very powerful place. And a lot of stuff goes on here that we need to know.
- [23:31]
Jon Podhoretz
Money on it. You would need to have like a Pokemon Go version of local news. Like you put on your augmented glasses and then you can go, and this is my nightmare. But I mean, that's kind of what I'm saying. The New York Times model is. The New York Times model is the same as the publishing industry. And I think it gets again to the self conceit of a lot of people who write and talk for a living. I'm one of them. But a lot of people who write and talk for a living think that people actually like what we do and value it, when in fact the cost of writing and talking is literally zero. And so in the publishing issue industry, it's like, oh, these great books that come out. Another Pulitzer Prize winner, the National Book Award winner. Why does publishing exist? Bibles and cookbooks. Why does the New York Times exist?
- [24:16]
Abe Greenwald
Romantasy and Romantasy now, right.
- [24:19]
Jon Podhoretz
Why does the New York Times exist?
- [24:20]
Abe Greenwald
It's rest.
- [24:22]
Matthew Continetti
We're free writers.
- [24:25]
Jon Podhoretz
That's what actually subsidizes the 800 page biography of Vince Lombardi.
- [24:33]
Abe Greenwald
I got two important anecdotes for you. So in the 1970s, my late mother went to work at Basic Books, which is still, still extant, which was part of Harper and Row. And Basic Books published social science works with social science stuff. Irving Kristel started Basic Books and actually made money. Produced a couple of gigantic bestsellers in her time. Godel Escher Bach being one famous one, wealth and Poverty by George Gilder being another, various other ones. And one day her boss, Irwin Glick has said to her, how do you think we stay in business? And she hadn't worked in publishing before. So she said, I don't know how we stay in business. And he said this entire firm, ARPA and Rowe, is supported by one book. It is called Linda Goodman's Sun Signs. And it was a book about astrology and it sold 3 million copies a year. And the royalties from that book and the proceeds from that book were what supported the publication of Visible man by George Gilder. Or there are 15 books on Matt's bookshelf behind him.
- [25:45]
Jon Podhoretz
If you are watching Thomas Sowell.
- [25:47]
Abe Greenwald
Thomas. Exactly. All of that, that's publishing. That's what Matt's talking about, right? There's that, that, that in publishing. And a famous survey done at the Washington Post in the late 70s, early 80s, they spent a huge amount of money on a readership survey. Papers generally didn't do readership surveys. They were too hard or they were too expensive. No one really cared. But they decided they wanted to know what people read in the paper. And it was until that moment really in American journalism, people thought things like, people are buying the paper to read George Will. People are buying the paper to read. I don't know. Flora Lewis, though, she didn't write for the. She wrote for the New York Times. That's really what's important. That's what people go there. They go to the op ed page. They want to know what the editorials are saying. They want this, they want that. Washington Post discovered that the single most read thing in the Washington Post, a paper that had 60% of the market, 60% of its market, that was Washington, the DC, the Virginia suburbs, the Maryland suburbs, millions of people, 60% of the market. The single best red thing in the Washington Post was Walter Scott's personality Parade, which was the inside front cover of Parade magazine, which was an insert into the Washington Post published by Parade magazine, not even produced by the Washington Post. The most read thing in the Washington Post was something that was inserted into the Washington Post. Either Parade paid them or I don't even know, or Parade gave it to them for free. I don't remember. Parade was this, you know, like Sunday ins, Sunday supplement with, you know, was like 16 pages long. It's hard to believe it was a huge thing in its day. And of course, this was a long dark night of the soul for everybody in journalism learning that in fact what was read by people was this is. Are Sonny and Cher still friends now that they've gotten divorced? Why, yes, they are co parenting their Child chast, chastity together and they try to maintain a good friendship. That is what people read in the Washington Post in the late 70s and early 80s.
- [28:05]
Matthew Continetti
Okay, but this, this example, as well as the ones we've given of the more recent New York Times suggests something that, that journalists are not embracing. And that's a sense of humility and gratitude. And, and that's actually where we, we must talk about the gaslighting that's entered the chat with Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson's big book about what, what went wrong? What, what was the big cover up and on Joe Biden and his health. This, to me is going to be a hinge moment for me, for media, because the immediate response of the public, as judged by some social media commentary and other stuff I've seen, mainly online, granted, but also folks I've talked to in the last 24 hours, is people are appalled at this. The hubris of the very people who, who manufactured the COVID up for four years and happily did so and denounced those who raised any questions at all. Coming out with a big book. And I will say I, I'm surprised Alex Thompson is co authoring this with Jake Tapper. Thompson actually is one of the few reporters who did raise some of these issues towards the end of Biden's term and got absolutely slammed for it. So maybe it was a strategic decision on his part. But I cannot wait to see what the response is to this book.
- [29:20]
Abe Greenwald
I think that this book is now a hinge moment. So this book, it's called Original Sin, and the topic of it is the COVID up of Joe Biden's decline. So there are several questions that are going to be raised before anybody gets a chance to read it. Number one, in what year does the narrative begin? Will it begin in 2018 or 2019? I'm sure it'll begin with some anecdote from the night of the debate or something like that. But where does the narrative of the book, how long does it extend, number one? And number two, how much will be dedicated and devoted to the role of the Washington press corps, the White House press corps, and people like Jake Tapper in perpetuating the idea that Biden was fine? And as we do every single time that we talk about this, I am going to say that if you, if you were obsessive enough to go back three or four years into this podcast's archives, you would find that at least once a week we said something beginning probably in the middle of 2021 about Biden's decline and probably in 2020 and maybe even in 2019, if you remember those debates. And this, of course, is why I say, I wonder what's going to happen. Whichever Castro brother ran for president, and I can't remember which one it was, neither Raul nor Fidel, but it was the. Was Joaquin or Julian. Julian. Right. Which one was it?
- [31:10]
Jon Podhoretz
I think it was Joaquin who.
- [31:11]
Abe Greenwald
Okay, I can't remember which one ran for president, attempted to do a cognitive decline trap on Biden during a debate. And his candidacy was ended by the outrage expressed at the disrespect being shown to poor Joe Biden by this effort on his part to call attention to the fact that Biden had just contradicted something that he had said two minutes earlier. And then he said something like, did you forget? Oh, how dare he? How dare he do such a thing? This is just awful.
- [31:48]
Jon Podhoretz
There was another famous moment at one of the debates too, afterward when Dr. Jill went up to the stage and grabbed Biden by the hand right as soon as it was done. And of course, that same gesture when it was repeated at the Democratic fundraiser in June of last year with Obama was one of the signal moments and of course became the subject of the most important op ed ever. George Clooney's New York Times piece.
- [32:21]
Abe Greenwald
It was the George Kennan. It was the George Kennan memo.
- [32:24]
Jon Podhoretz
The ex telegram of our time was George Clooney in the New York Times saying, it's time for Joe to go. Yeah, but you know, you can start earlier. Yeah, oh, yeah.
- [32:33]
Christine Rosen
I mean, by the way, we definitely talked about it in 2020 because part of the, what we said, part of the advantage of that Biden had in sort of running from the quote basement because of the pandemic was that people didn't, weren't exposed to his cognitive decline.
- [32:50]
Abe Greenwald
So let's talk about this for a minute.
- [32:52]
Christine Rosen
I just want to say one thing, though. With the book, they can, I don't know if they're going to do this. They can focus the story entirely on the administration. Right. And in doing that, they could say, so this is how the administration fooled us. That's our story. This is how the media got conned by the White House.
- [33:18]
Matthew Continetti
And they will throw under the bus the people closest to Joe Biden in order to protect their own furtherance of this lie.
- [33:26]
Abe Greenwald
Okay, so let, let, let's offer, let's, let's, we're all going to read this. Everybody is going to read this book. This is the hidden. This is the story that we all want to read. I mean, even Though Biden's long gone. I mean, we're all. We all want to know. We all want to know what the details are.
- [33:43]
Matthew Continetti
We all want to know One copy and share it. I don't want to fund. I don't want to encourage this kind of behavior in reporters.
- [33:48]
Jon Podhoretz
Now, you know, Biden's not gone. He got the MCA Republic. And maybe I'm thinking he should star in a remake of On Golden Pond. You know, kind of put him out there and talk about aging in a very kind of, you know, Twilight type drama. Twilight Years drama, not Twilight, the vampire saga.
- [34:08]
Abe Greenwald
Yeah, there's. There's. And Jill Biden going, you old poop, you're my knight in Shining Island.
- [34:15]
Jon Podhoretz
Don't you think that it would win a bunch of awards on Golden Pond.
- [34:19]
Abe Greenwald
Between the Bidens On Golden. On Golden Rehoboth.
- [34:23]
Matthew Continetti
Yeah.
- [34:24]
Jon Podhoretz
A golden beach.
- [34:25]
Abe Greenwald
Yeah. Okay, so there is a scenario in which they're honest. There's a scenario in which this book is half about the government and half about the media.
- [34:39]
Matthew Continetti
No.
- [34:39]
Abe Greenwald
Now, here.
- [34:40]
Matthew Continetti
Okay, you're saying Jake Tapper would have to implicate himself, and Jake Tapper is never going to implicate himself. He won't do it.
- [34:47]
Abe Greenwald
Okay, I'm now gonna. People aren't gonna like that. I say this. When George Stephanopoulos left the Clinton White House, he wrote a book called All Too Human, which is one of the best books ever written about working inside a White House. And much of it was about his own hubris and misbehavior. And it was a clarifying moment. It actually helped him move on to the second part of his career because he was willing to say things and reveal that most loyal White House aides wouldn't necessarily do and talk about his own malfeasances and arrogances and stuff like that. There. There is a world in which I.
- [35:29]
Christine Rosen
Think it's different, though.
- [35:31]
Matthew Continetti
Yeah. I gotta say, I'm gonna be the cynic here, because the only reason that. The only reason he betrayed those internal White House discussions is because he wanted to pivot to a media career. And that is how you make your bread and butter in. In the current political media. And he. He saw that. He was the first to do it. He certainly wasn't the first aide to betray his president, let's say. I'm not buying that.
- [35:50]
Abe Greenwald
Let's say we're all editors. So let's say that we are Jake Tapper's and, and, and Thompson's editors. Right? And they come to us and they give us the manuscript and they Say what's missing? So I would say, let's say they produce the book that you, the cynic say, and that we have infinite amounts of time for the release of the book comes out to say this is how you actually do this. What would you tell them they need to reveal that they do not reveal in your cynics version of what they will produce, which is, as I say, just the White House. Here's what they did. They had a meeting and Biden, you know, like drooled into his pencil cup and nobody said anything. And Jill said, if you say a word, I'm going to, you know, have the Secret Service make, you know, make, make the dog bite you or whatever. I mean, so what, what, what would you, what would you tell them? You would say, okay, you know, what's missing here are the paragraphs that are missing. What would you, what would you, what would you insist they insert? I'm serious.
- [37:01]
Matthew Continetti
A description of who, what they thought when, for example, they'd go to a White House press conference, having already pre submitted their questions to the White House and seeing Joe Biden hold the card that has their face on it with the pre screened question.
- [37:15]
Jon Podhoretz
All three White House press conferences.
- [37:17]
Matthew Continetti
Yes, exactly.
- [37:17]
Jon Podhoretz
I mean, it's interesting. Tapper was one of the moderators of the Trump Biden debate, so you could begin the narrative there saying, one of us was there and here's what happened. The Free Beacon, though, has a pretty remarkable supercut on its website, going through all the times that Tapper shut down discussions of Biden's age prior to the debate in 2024. So as an editor, you would probably say, hey, you have to kind of reckon with that. I mean, the media piece is interesting because remember when the Thompson, Alex Thompson has been following the story forever and he's been the best Biden reporter. And so there are going to be a lot of scoops. But when the Wall Street Journal last spring tried to talk about Biden's age and broach the subject, it was denounced by the Media Guild in the same way that Bezos is being denounced by the Media Guild. So that has to be part of the story too. But I think you're right to suggest that this story, the book they're going to tell, is really about the Biden family's attempt to hide Joe Biden's condition from the American public for about six years.
- [38:33]
Christine Rosen
But you know, I just also want to say, I mean, what I would say is missing. Would, would Tapper would never be able to work again. I mean, you know, What I would say is what. What were you really all thinking during all of this? Because there were some glimpses. I mean, there were very few people. But one of the reasons that I actually respect the hell out of Van Jones is that he was one of the few who got on like CNN way before the debate and said, you know, we're hearing a lot of. In whispers from Democrats who are really concerned about Biden's decline. So we know there were conversations.
- [39:16]
Jon Podhoretz
We know that Axelrod was saying similar.
- [39:18]
Christine Rosen
Absolutely. Right.
- [39:19]
Abe Greenwald
Early on.
- [39:20]
Christine Rosen
So come on, how did you handle all that stuff as it was, the whispering and the rest of it.
- [39:27]
Abe Greenwald
Yeah. Okay. So in the world in which the book that is produced is the most honest and, and authoritative, I would say, look, Jake Tapper worked at cnn. I think they're now on their fourth. He's on his fourth boss. Third or fourth boss since Biden came in. I mean, I can't remember who they were. There was Jeff Zucker, then there was whatever the hell his name is. The delict.
- [39:54]
Jon Podhoretz
Peter, Paul and Mary. Yeah, they're cycling through now.
- [39:58]
Abe Greenwald
There's, now there's the, you know, the Thompson, another Thompson, I think is now running it. I don't. Anyway, so three or four people, right. So got nothing to fear from them. So what if there had been guidance from above? I mean, that's what I'm saying. Like, was there guidance from above? Was it the corporate line that CNN was not to cover Biden's.
- [40:26]
Matthew Continetti
It doesn't excuse it.
- [40:29]
Abe Greenwald
No, no, no, no. I'm not saying it excuses it. I'm talking about whether if you are writing a history of a cover up and the COVID up has two faces. One is what went on internally to cover it up. And then the other is the communication across this weird amalgam that people are now worried about with the new White House press corps rules of the administration and all of its friends in the press and everybody in the administrator in the Biden administration whose spouses worked at the networks and places like that, and were the commentators and all of that, how were those. How was the shut up. He explained message transmitted. And was it transmitted or was it all understood? Because I'm telling you, some of it was transmitted and there's more of it than we realize. Katherine Herridge yesterday came out with footage like pictures she took of CBS seizing her notes on investigations she had done into Hunter Biden and other things that it took her a year and a half to get back from them. They took the notes that she had taken, claiming they were CBS's property because she was an employee of theirs. In order it was catch and kill. They took the stuff to prevent it from being used.
- [41:58]
Matthew Continetti
Right. But this is the point. This is why this book, I think, cannot do what a book that wants to actually tell the story truthfully must do, which is that it doesn't. It's bad enough what happened internally and particularly the role of people like Hunter Biden and first lady Jill Biden played in this cover up because we know they were central figures. But it never would have survived and continued if the press hadn't also joined in the COVID up. And that's where I think whatever they try to do to focus on one and not the other or to maybe throw some corporate bosses under the bus as a token, they are not. Maybe Alex Thompson could have told this story himself because he was on this feed and he was raising these issues. But once you add Jake Tapper to that mix, I do not trust that they are going to have an honest accounting of what went on among journalists, what they knew, when they knew it. All of this stuff with someone who was an insider participating in the COVID up, unless he's had some dramatic mea culpa, is shifting careers and is going to blow up everything behind him and walk away from his TV career. In that case, maybe he can tell the truth, but I'm doubtful.
- [43:02]
Abe Greenwald
Well, you know, a great book that is cited for generations as a new example of a work of political media self criticism and honesty is not something to sneeze at. And so Jake Tapper is somebody that I like personally. I like a couple of his novels. I would suggest to him that he think long and hard about making that leap because there is a gigantic he said, he was quoted as saying Toni Morrison said the book to write is the book that you want to read. And that's the book I wanted to write. That's the book I want to read. And that's why I have joined with Thompson to write this book. Original sin. Well, there are two original sins, right? That's what I'm saying. There's the original sin of the Biden family and the Biden political team covering up Biden's infirmities. And then there is the original sin of the communications by the mainstream media that allowed this to continue.
- [44:08]
Jon Podhoretz
There's also the sin of quoting Toni Morrison.
- [44:13]
Abe Greenwald
Can we find somebody else to quote mea culpa? I'm quoting Toni Morrison too, but that's what he said. And if he means it, then write the book that you want to Read. Because the book that Christine says you're going to write, Jake, is not the book you want to read, and you know it full well. You want to know what was going on at msnb. You know what was going on at CNN and in your own office. Maybe you want to know what's going on at msnbc. Maybe you want to know what's going on at ABC and at NBC and at CBS and at the New York Times and at the Washington Post.
- [44:44]
Matthew Continetti
Well, you're asking a whistleblower, basically, you're asking him to write a whistleblower book about his own industry.
- [44:49]
Jon Podhoretz
The times are. They are changing, right? I mean, Joe and Mika are going to mar a lago. MSNBC is in this huge upheaval. Jeff Bezos is saying the Washington Post is going to stand for individual liberty and free markets. This cultural shift that we've been talking about could also apply to CNN's signature anchor.
- [45:13]
Abe Greenwald
Can we go back to the point you made about the White House Correspondents Association? Because, you know, the line is, this is terrible. What's happening now is that the White House is choosing what reporters will be allowed to be in the press room, which is a very, very small room.
- [45:26]
Jon Podhoretz
Well, Peter Baker thinks that's the beginning of Putin.
- [45:28]
Abe Greenwald
Peter Baker went on Twitter yesterday and said, comparisons to Russia are always bad. But here's one. This reminds me of the Kremlin. Like, didn't you just say that you're not supposed to do that in the same sentence that you wrote?
- [45:49]
Jon Podhoretz
And didn't you belong to a White House press corps for four years that silenced all discussions of Joe Biden's physical and mental impairments?
- [46:00]
Abe Greenwald
So let's talk. The elephant in the room is why did they cover up? And, you know, the reason they covered up is anything that they might have done to do this would strengthen Donald Trump and the purpose of the world of American liberalism from 2016, 2015, 2016, when it became clear that he was actually going to be the nominee of the Republican Party.
- [46:19]
Jon Podhoretz
May 2016.
- [46:20]
Abe Greenwald
Right. 2016 through November 5, 2024, was stop him, stop him any way you can. Stop him, stop him, stop him. And the argument was, you cannot do anything that will hurt the Biden. Not the argument, the emotional. Well, no.
- [46:38]
Jon Podhoretz
Jim Rudenberg wrote it in the New York Times. He said, with Donald Trump, the rules of journalism no longer apply because of the threat he presents. Therefore, we can take emergency action to stop him from, from becoming.
- [46:53]
Abe Greenwald
I've used this quote 10 million times, right? That's the line in the Blues Brothers, right? The use of excessive force in the apprehension of the Blues Brothers has been approved. Says the cop. Says the Chicago cop in the All Points Bulletin. Right. That was the idea. Now, that's why. And that's also a question. That's the other thing that needs to be explored. How much of that was conscious? How much of that was discussed? How much of that was open and part of the way? People. I'm sorry, we're thinking about this. And that's the other thing that Tapper and Thompson need to cover if they want this book not to be an intellectual disgrace. So, okay, here's the point I wanted to make. So they're shifting it around. They're gonna let the Free Beacon have a seat and the Daily Wire have a seat. And whoever is, Dan Bongino's gonna take over his show. He'll have a seat. And Charlie Kirk will have a seat. The T coming back from Romania, maybe they'll have a seat. It doesn't matter. Okay, here's what I wanted to bring up. Somebody tallied. So yesterday there was the Cabinet meeting. I watched the Cabinet meeting. I don't know if you guys watched. It was like, 90 minutes. It wasn't a Cabinet meeting there. So I suppose there was a Cabinet meeting afterwards. It was a press conference, and Musk dominated the first 20 minutes, and then Trump dominated the next 70 minutes. According to some tally, Trump has now, since January 20, answered 1489 questions posed to him by the press. And Biden, I think, in the course of his entire presidency, answered360. He's been there a month. There doesn't need to be a White House press corps. Anybody can ask the guy anything. He'll answer anything. He'll talk forever. He won't shut up. You remember this in 2020, when he was coming to the press room every day to talk about COVID and then people were like, stop covering it. He shouldn't be allowed to speak. This is how psychotic. He's the President of the United States. This was a very revelatory 70 minutes.
- [49:07]
Jon Podhoretz
Interesting difference between this Cabinet meeting and the first Cabinet meeting in the first term as well. Right? Because that cabinet meeting in 2017 was the kind of politburo style.
- [49:19]
Abe Greenwald
You know, every praise of the leader.
- [49:22]
Jon Podhoretz
Every single person around the table began talking about how lucky they were to be. And this was different. This was. He was. He was in charge. He delegated to Elon. Again, that whole storyline is so meaningful, and there's so many angles, but. But then he was just in charge in answering questions, probably because he doesn't feel threatened by some of his Cabinet members like he did eight years ago.
- [49:51]
Abe Greenwald
And he doesn't feel threatened by the press.
- [49:53]
Jon Podhoretz
No.
- [49:53]
Abe Greenwald
You know, is it the Churchill line? There is nothing so exhilarating as being shot at without result. So they spent 10 years trying to destroy him, and he is now stronger than ever, and they are weaker than ever. And Jeff Bezos is changing the editorial policy of the Washington Post, and Joe and Mika have half the audience that they had on November 4th. And MSNBC is flailing and crashing and burning and calling. Everybody is being called a racist by everybody else. And he is standing there in the high 40s, in his approval ratings, doing some good things, doing some bad things, whatever it is, but he is not the same person. And as I say, the weirdness here is it shouldn't be allowed that the White House Correspondents association isn't picking who gets to be in the press room. And Trump is proving that it doesn't matter who's in the press room. And by the way, who asked the most questions yesterday? James Rosen. James Rosen, who was a long time, you know, I mean, first met James Rosen. He was reporting for News Channel 12 in the Bronx. Contributor, commentary, by the way, and biographer of Antonin Scalia. Biographer of Antonin Scalia and of John Mitchell, and a very serious guy, and not. And, you know, not like Jake Tapper, a cartoonist. Anyway, I'm just saying it's not like he was not being asked substantive questions by a serious and intellectually sober.
- [51:35]
Jon Podhoretz
Now James is with Newsmax.
- [51:37]
Abe Greenwald
James with Newsmax.
- [51:38]
Jon Podhoretz
Of course, he was with Fox for many, many years.
- [51:39]
Abe Greenwald
Right. So I'm just saying that. But it doesn't matter, because Trump will answer like any good politician or businessman. He will answer whatever question he wishes to answer, not the question that he was asked, which is what they. Consultants tell, you know, CEOs when they go in and they're gonna be interviewed by 60 Minutes how to handle themselves, which is, don't answer the question you're asked. Answer the question you wanna answer. Trump has that down. But it was, you know, like, it was the most substantive performance by a president in, I don't know, decades. You know, I mean, it was. He went through tour, Doris, on everything. Energy policy, Ukraine, the Middle East, Gaza, whatever. You know, as I say, some of it I was horrified by some of it. NATO, Europe, inflation, the big beautiful bill. Like, you know, he just. He was. So what do you need the press corps to ask him questions for? You want to write them down? Hand them. Hand them to Jen Psaki so that she can then put them on a card for Biden. There is can complain that Kaitlan Collins is being mean to him. That's what you want. Congratulations.
- [52:56]
Matthew Continetti
But there is, I would argue there was a, there was a section of the legacy media press court that did like that and they liked it because you know, who was running the government with a figurehead president, all of their sources, all of their friends behind the scenes, the ones who actually aren't accountable to voters because they're pulling strings without anyone even knowing it. And so keeping the consent seat alive, that he was making these day to day decisions and was really, you know, nimble on his feet and turning cartwheels in the West Wing, allowed this unelected, unaccountable group of people who we still don't quite know how many of them there were and how they operated, but we know to have existed given his condition, it allowed them to run the country for four years. And I think the press corps positive response to that is also worrisome because there were people, whether they're connected through marriage or friendship or social circles to those people running the country were getting a lot of inside information. They were getting a lot of perhaps what they felt to be powerful, persuasive pull over some of those people. They liked that there was a core group of them who liked that and that those. That's why I'm very doubtful that people like Jake Tapper are going to expose those people because those people are also their friends.
- [54:12]
Abe Greenwald
And those are the politburo. That's a politburo.
- [54:14]
Matthew Continetti
Yes.
- [54:15]
Abe Greenwald
I'm saying the weird thing is that Trump resists the accusation that he is, you know, Hitler by not behaving like Hitler. You know, he's totally unvarnished. You know, he doesn't have Leni Riefenstahl set up his camera angles. He's like, come on in, ask me whatever you want. I'll just, we'll just keep going, you know, I'm hungry. So you can see, I think he ended it because he probably wanted to eat a sandwich. It was like 12:45, you know. But, you know, and I don't say this because I'm happy with a lot of what Trump is doing, although I think it's. We might want to close out here to say that last night an important thing happened, which is that the Supreme Court made its substance. It's a complicated ruling. It's not that interesting. Ruled against a lower court judge placing, you know, forcing the administration to start paying USAID bills by Time, certain right. That was the administration before the hearing to hear whether or not they were going to have to do this legally or whatever. This judge had announced that they would have to start paying the bills at midnight. And John Roberts came in and said, no, this is going to follow proper procedure. You know, you don't get to go in and like order the administration to do something like this without it being fully adjudicated and going through the court process. We grant the executive branch the rights of the executive branch and it does not work for the legislative branch and not the legislative branch, the judicial branch. Yes. Any, any thoughts on that big ruling for Trump?
- [56:12]
Jon Podhoretz
I mean, another win. And I think it shows that when these cases reach the Supreme Court, as almost all of them inevitably will do, the court is going to choose its battles pretty carefully, I think, and on this sort of procedural matter, we'll follow the rule of law. The big fights, of course, will come down the line probably next year and that's over the president's asserted power to impound congressional spending and challenge. And then there's another fight that's going to come down probably later this year on the president's control over the independent agencies, which he's asserted over an executive order and which is teeing up basically a challenge to a long standing precedent called Humphreys executor, whose very name puts me to sleep. So I'm not going to elaborate any further, only to say that the Trump administration wants the Supreme Court to overturn that decision as well as the decision on the presidential impoundment power from the 1970s. And you know, we don't know, I think the court may reserve some of its capital, you know, to rule on those two cases rather than say, interfere with the fate of usaid.
- [57:39]
Abe Greenwald
I have such detritus, cultural detritus in my head that every time I've read in the last week about Humphrey's executor, it puts me in mind of a song by my favorite little known band, Fountains of Wayne, from Fountains of Wayne's genuinely great album welcome Interstate Managers.
- [57:56]
Jon Podhoretz
The song album with Stacy's mom.
- [57:58]
Abe Greenwald
It is Stacy's mom is a classic.
- [58:01]
Matthew Continetti
That is a classic anthem.
- [58:03]
Abe Greenwald
But I mean, there are songs, they were unbelievably witty and literate. And there's a song called All Kinds of Time, which is about what happens as a pitcher is literally deciding how he whether he's going to throw to first or throw to home plate. That's the entire song. He's got all kinds of time. Anyway, there is a song called Haley's Waitress which is why Humphrey's Executor rhymes with Haley's Waitress. And Haley's Waitress is a song about a guy who was waiting for the waitress to come back with the coffee pot to give him more coffee and it's been so long so long I miss you when you go. And she's of course called Haley's Waitress because she's like Haley's comet. She only comes around once every 76 years. Anyway, it's a great song. Welcome Interstate Managers is a genuinely great album. That's going to be today's Commentary recommend.
- [58:55]
Matthew Continetti
Great listen to Haley's going deep into the archive today.
- [58:58]
Abe Greenwald
I know. Well, it just occurred to me I had another idea but you know, that's a. Anyway, let's do it. Welcome Interstate Managers by Fountains of Wayne Today's Commentary recommends one of the wittiest and most literate sort of rock pop albums of our time. So that's all the time we have. We'll be back tomorrow for Matt, Christine and Abam John Pod horiz Keep the candle bur.