Ben Smith On Truth At A Lower Resolution

Summary

The Gist: Ben Smith On Truth At A Lower Resolution

Host: Mike Pesca
Guest: Ben Smith, CEO and Editor-in-Chief of Semaphore
Release Date: July 23, 2025

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Introduction: Questioning Reality

Timestamp: [00:32]

Mike Pesca opens the episode by delving into the elusive nature of reality, particularly in the context of high-profile cases like Jeffrey Epstein's. He highlights the cognitive dissonance within different political bases, especially among Trump supporters who grapple with conflicting narratives about Epstein’s reality. Pesca draws an analogy to schizophrenia to illustrate how fragmented and uncertain our understanding of reality can be when information is scarce or contradictory.

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Navigating Media and Reality with Ben Smith

Timestamp: [10:10] - [37:45]

Mike Pesca: "What is reality? Oh no, you're starting there."

Ben Smith joins the conversation, bringing his extensive background from former roles at The New York Times and BuzzFeed News to the table. They explore the intricate relationship between Donald Trump and the media, debating whether Trump is a boon or bane for journalistic freedom.

Key Discussion Points:

1. Trump's Dual Role in Media:

   • Ben Smith: "You say, you know, I mean, he's obviously hostile to independent journalism and he has a great story. Those two things are true at the same time." ([10:25])
   • Analysis: Trump serves as both a challenge and a catalyst for media outlets, pushing them to navigate between hostility and the demand for news dissemination.

2. Corporate Media’s Pressure:

   • Ben discusses the increasing pressure on corporate media to align with political agendas, particularly under Trump’s influence.
   • Ben Smith: "You see both big corporations for whom news is a tiny little annoying loss making slice that might get in the way of really important sale, just twist themselves into knots to please the White House." ([11:45])
   • Insight: This alignment can lead to self-censorship and compromises in journalistic integrity.

3. Wall Street Journal’s Stance:

   • The Wall Street Journal is highlighted as an example of a traditional media outlet maintaining its journalistic rigor despite external pressures.
   • Ben Smith: "The Wall Street Journal's editorial page has offered like this very lucent and sometimes strident criticism of Trump when they feel he's violating principles they care about." ([16:26])
   • Notable Quote: "Murdoch understands that the strength of being a newspaper proprietor is not that you're going to micromanage and kill deals for your friends. It's that you own these basically unguided missiles that are out there playing huge roles in the culture." ([20:51])

4. Credibility and Public Trust:

   • Discussion on how media missteps, such as inaccuracies in reporting, have eroded public trust.
   • Ben Smith: "When you get small things wrong... journalism doesn't really have a mechanism that says, hey, we ought to write, you know, a really big correction of that." ([35:05])

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The Rise of Alternative Media: Substack and Beyond

Timestamp: [39:00] - [43:10]

Pesca and Smith transition to discussing the evolution of media platforms, focusing on Substack's emergence as a significant player in independent journalism.

Key Discussion Points:

1. Substack’s Business Model and Influence:

   • Ben Smith: "Substack really does contain multitudes. And I was talking to one of my kids the other day who said, hey, did you see that article about how all the girls on Substack sound the same?" ([40:30])
   • Insight: Substack offers a platform for diverse voices, but also faces challenges in distinguishing credible content from homogenized or sensationalized material.

2. Media Martyrdom and Personal Branding:

   • The concept of "media martyrdom" is explored, where journalists gain followers by positioning themselves against perceived adversaries.
   • Mike Pesca: "The model, the business model is what I call the media martyrdom monetization model..." ([42:36])

3. Creating Stars in Alternative Platforms:

   • The discussion highlights how platforms like Substack allow creators to build personal brands and followings outside traditional media structures.
   • Ben Smith: "It's a playbook. I don't know if it's a good playbook for the rest of us, but this seems to be the playbook." ([43:10])

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Misinformation, AI, and the Erosion of Truth

Timestamp: [45:35] - [48:19]

The conversation shifts to the pervasive issue of misinformation and the role of artificial intelligence in shaping perceptions of reality.

Key Discussion Points:

1. Fact-Checking and Its Limitations:

   • Ben Smith: "There was this pseudo academic framework around fact checking and misinformation that should have just been left. Journalists figure out what's true, what's false." ([45:35])
   • Insight: Reliance on external fact-checking mechanisms can sometimes undermine journalists' own capacity to discern truth.

2. Impact of AI on Information Authenticity:

   • The rise of AI-generated content has heightened skepticism about the authenticity of information.
   • Mike Pesca: "How a certain kind of person protects themselves by telling themselves they're sophisticated is to not believe truth. Is to believe nothing." ([46:56])

3. Erosion of Trust in Media Institutions:

   • The decline in trust is compounded by both misinformation and the inability of media to consistently uphold factual reporting.
   • Ben Smith: "And this was what, yeah, the Epstein stuff really embodies that kind of, like, lazy skepticism." ([47:22])

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Concluding Insights: The Struggle for Truth in Modern Media

Timestamp: [48:19] - [49:16]

As the episode wraps up, Pesca and Smith reflect on the current state of media and the ongoing challenges in establishing a universally accepted reality.

Key Takeaways:

• Complex Media Landscape: The fragmentation of media sources has made it increasingly difficult for audiences to identify and rely on credible information.

• Journalistic Responsibility: There is a pressing need for journalists to maintain integrity and resist external pressures to preserve public trust.

• Future of Media: Platforms like Semaphore and Substack represent both opportunities and challenges in redefining how information is disseminated and consumed.

Final Quote: "The reality is such a vortex of unreality at the center of it, it's very hard to correctly predict the real implications of this unreality." ([unknown timestamp])

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Closing Remarks

Timestamp: [49:16]

Mike Pesca thanks Ben Smith for his insights and wraps up the episode, emphasizing the ongoing quest to understand and navigate the complex interplay between media, truth, and reality.

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Notable Quotes:

• Mike Pesca: "It's just reality folding into itself, reflecting and refracting unreality." ([00:32])

• Ben Smith: "Our audience flee to partisan media, that flatters their prejudices." ([36:45])

• Mike Pesca: "How do we know that? The reality of the Jake Tapper book and the Alex Thompson book in microcosm, the reality is that this was a success that added to our knowledge and not a failure that exposed him for whatever flaws his critics are alleging." ([26:32])

• Ben Smith: "What adds to your understanding of what really happened? I sort of go back to what's happening with the Epstein stuff right now where there are these bipartisan incentives to indulge in just like, absolute nonsense." ([29:13])

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Conclusion

In this thought-provoking episode of The Gist, Mike Pesca and Ben Smith dissect the tangled web of media credibility, political influence, and the elusive nature of truth in the modern age. They underscore the challenges journalists face in maintaining integrity amidst external pressures and the evolving media landscape, urging listeners to critically evaluate the sources and veracity of the information they consume.

Transcript

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[Mike Pesca]

It's Wednesday, July 23, 2025 from Peach Fish Productions, it's the gist. I'm Mike Pesca and what is reality? Oh no, you're starting there. Yes, of course. Because what is the reality of Jeffrey Epstein? We don't know. We think we know that a bunch of people who love Donald Trump think they know what happened with Jeffrey Epstein. And so a decent enough analysis is there's some cognitive dissonance among the Trump base because they're blaming him for not exposing what they think is the reality of Epstein, though they can't know the reality because we don't know the reality. And then with the learned people who make sense of reality who maybe we turn to, people who will say, well, this is the first time that the Trump base is more upset with him than not, but they didn't do a good job of that. Or maybe they did a great job, but Trump was so adept at throwing out the MLK tapes or John Brennan accusations that he distracted them in a way that we couldn't have even understood. But it, it doesn't seem such a well run plan. It seems like garden level distraction and it worked. But the reality sense makers who look at this instance where we don't even know the reality and tried to say the reality is this will hurt Trump, they were wrong. Then again, I'm not saying I know the reality or I could have predicted what would happen with the Republican base turning against Trump. I'm saying it is such a vortex of unreality at the center of it, it's very hard to correctly predict the real implications of this unreality. Let me give you an analogy. Schizophrenia, okay? We have phrases about some of the aspects of schizophrenia, phrases like echolalia or Florida delusions. But we don't really and can never really know what goes on in the brain of the schizophrenic. Even the schizophrenic who's on their medications and can you how they feel. They don't know what is really going on in the brain of the other schizophrenic. We could come close. We could have a DSM 4 diagnoses. Just like experts on cults can tell you about the adherent properties of unknowing at the center of a cult and how that makes a cult more strong sometimes. But we don't know anything about the reality of Jeffrey Epstein. Therefore how could we say we know or why do we defer to people who think they are correct or adept at predicting the ramifications of the Jeffrey Epstein case as regards Trump's political future? It's just reality folding into itself, reflecting and refracting unreality. Another example I probably have come back to this to a fare the well Jake Tapper who in my opinion wrote a book that added to the sum of human knowledge along with Alex Thompson. He was on the show last week and there were huge amounts of questions on a huge story what was going on with Biden and his brain. And then Jake Tapper went after the Biden White House was not the Biden White House were just a bunch of ex officials. And then they would talk to Tapper and then he found out a lot of stuff. Thanks Jake Tapper. I say, you know who else agrees with me? I think no one. I mean as you'll hear in my interview today, which is about trying to make sense of media reality, there are some rubrics to call the Jake Tapper investigation into reality very successful. But I'm not seeing any of those rubrics represented in the media that we use. That tells us reality. How do we know what reality is? We perhaps go on social media, we perhaps read Reddit boards or we perhaps read a newspaper and they try to reflect reality. And sometimes you would say, well if the comments are 2 to 1 or 3 to 1 or some Republicans hate it and some Democrats hate it, maybe you're somewhere in the middle of truth. I don't think we can apply that to Jake Tapper here. I have an Instagram page, it's called Pesca Gist. That's the Instagram page. You should go and look at it. About 750 people have it hasn't been up for that long and usually we get hundreds of views. Sometimes we get thousands of views. We got 5,000 views for me talking to Jake Tapper and there were 52 comments. Now of these 52 comments, guess how many were negative? Criticized Jake Tapper unfairly I think for not going after Trump hard enough or obsessing on this good man, Joe Biden. Of the 52, how many were negative? The answer is 52. All of them. And there's even this little section at the end where Instagram hide some comments. I guess you can't take them. So I'm like, oh my God. I'll delve into these hidden comments. And the hidden comments are exactly the same as the non hidden comments. I've lost all respect for you. Where's your Trump book? That's what everyone is saying. But what is the reality of the Tapper project? And this is why I had to talk to Ben Smith. Ben Smith is the CEO and editor in chief of Semaphore. And what is a semaphore if not a system of signals that only the that only the skilled can interpret? So I listen to Ben's podcast and I read Semaphore on occasion. Ben's a wise guy. I ask him about Tapper, I ask him about the unreality of Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein, and we talk about a whole bunch of other things in the media. I have more questions than answers. Luckily, Ben was here and he had a fair amount of answers. Ben Smith, up next. Listen, I can't help you with everything in the bedroom, like different sleep numbers or different comfort zones, different climates, sometimes not even climates that touch each other, tundra, rainforest, that sort of thing. But I can help you, or at least give you some advice for what happens between the sheets or if you're feeling frisky, without a sheet at all. Which brings me to Hims. Through Hims, you can access personalized prescription treatments for ED, like hard mints and sex remedy plus climax control. 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Okay, we're getting more into the present, but now we should note that he runs Semaphore and to my mind, very importantly, the co host of the Mixed Signals podcast. Now if this were an introduction of Mixed signals, Ben would jump in and say something like, you know, I'm really interested to hear from Ben what he thinks the direction of or whatever. That's how the Mixed Signals classic introduction goes. Ben's been on the show before. We're going to talk media. Welcome back to the gist.

[Ben Smith]

Thank you so much for having me. Mike, you. You know me well.

[Mike Pesca]

Yeah. You know, what I'm really interested in is where we're going from here.

[Ben Smith]

Aren't we all?

[Mike Pesca]

Donald Trump, good for media or bad for media? I just want to start with the simplest question.

[Ben Smith]

I mean, he is media, so it's.

[Mike Pesca]

Like a question about a God in a way. But the case for bad is he traipses all over concepts of free speech, he sues media, he's trying to instill a chill in media. On the other hand, if free speech or free expression is the ability to gather the news and, and the ability to disseminate it, he's a godsend for the dissemination of news. So on net, good or bad, do.

[Ben Smith]

You say, you know, I mean, he's obviously hostile to independent journalism and he has a great story. Those two things are true at the same time.

[Mike Pesca]

So how much fretting should be done by those within the media about the threat of Trump? I wouldn't want to not cover these stories. But isn't it also the case that the threat of Trump is really the blessing of Trump?

[Ben Smith]

Yeah, I don't really see. I think that, like, fretting is not a particularly useful activity for journalism. Like, the point is to figure out what's going on, and there are great stories happening that other people can fret about. I mean, I think the sort of, you know, essentially, in particular, the pressure on corporate media to toe a kind of party line, using financial leverage and regulatory leverage with places like Paramount, like, that's a great story, and that's a really big story right now that I think, you know, is central to what Trump is doing.

[Mike Pesca]

Yeah. So how worrisome is that? Do you look at the fact that he's been able to win a couple of lawsuits that legal experts say he wouldn't have come close to winning if he took them to court. But he's been able to use leverage and the reality of what the corporate owners of these media want in terms of mergers, should we look at that as one offs or maybe two offs? Should we look at that as the exception, or should we look at that as, you know, legitimately chilling? And if not, fret something, that's a real worry if we're fans of free press and First Amendment.

[Ben Smith]

Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, for most of your and my careers, there's always been a group of people who would say things like, you know, you can't trust the corporate media. Their corporate bosses are entangled with powerful forces. And so they're going to censor the journalism to serve these powerful, you know, forces that they're making secret deals with. And honestly, that was always basically nonsense. And like the people who were saying it were kind of Bernie Sanders lefties mostly. And I remember actually when we started BuzzFeed News, I went to visit Senator Sanders and he said to me, thank you for providing an alternative to the corporate media. And I was like, I don't know, like we're trying to do as good a job in a different way as the corporate media. But I don't really question the independence of the Washington Post or of CBS News, even though in theory you could. Like they do have these potential conflicts. There are these pressure points. And I think people like him have been totally vindicated by the last six months. And you see both big corporations for whom news is a tiny little annoying loss making slice that might get in the way of really important sale, just twist themselves into knots to please the White House. And you see wealthy individuals who own publications, Jeff Bezos and Patrick Sounchong in particular. Similarly, Patrick Soon Chong has, yeah, he owns the LA Times, but that's his hobby. His life is drug development and that's where he made his money. That's where he spends most of his time. And that requires FDA approval. And so of course. And so, I mean, I'm sure he. And I don't think people are necessarily, I think often people, I think people usually believe what he said, they say. I'm sure he actually also has persuaded himself or genuinely thinks that his publication is too anti Trump and should be more pro Trump. But people do seem to do things that align with their business interests.

[Mike Pesca]

So has Sanders been vindicated or was he actually wrong? For decades and now he's in a period of being right. I think it's a little more than semantics. But what's your answer to that?

[Ben Smith]

No, I think, yes, I think, yeah, I think that's a better way to put it.

[Mike Pesca]

Okay. And what's interesting is that, I mean this is not exactly 100% true, but in general, the media that has kowtow the corporate media has been hostile to Trump. The news divisions have been either hostile to Trump or Trump would certainly say they're hostile to him. Whereas the Rupert Murdoch owned news. There's a whole bunch of different versions of Rupert Murdoch own news, but they continue to go hard at Trump. Look at the recent Wall Street Journal story detailing the letter the birthday letter drawing that he gave to Jeffrey Epstein.

[Ben Smith]

Yeah, I think that the Wall Street Journal in particular has shown a kind of courage that you don't see from a lot of other publications. I don't think that's necessarily true across the Murdoch universe. The New York Post in particular did a kind of catch and kill where they got and then refused to and then spiked a story that would have been mildly embarrassing to a Trump nominee. And the emails leaked and the reporter left. The Fox News is, is trying to figure it out, but the Journal's editorial page has offered like this very lucent and sometimes strident criticism of Trump when they feel he's violating principles they care about. And the news pages have just gone at him extraordinarily hard like this, this story about this quite creepy and embarrassing exchange with Jeffrey Epstein birthday greeting. You know, I was surprised the way they framed it. And I guess, I mean I, you know, I'm an editor and sometimes a source calls you, behaves really outrageously, threatens you and you say, you know what, I'm going to dial this story up to 15 just to like show them that's not how they ought to interact with us. And that's what that story felt like to me because it's a good story. Right. It's a like a, I mean, but, but the, but it doesn't, it's not revelatory to say that Donald Epstein, Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein were good friends in the 80s and 90s and chased women together. That's like, that's widely known, widely reported. Trump's. Trump said it to New York magazine. It's like, you know, it's, do you.

[Mike Pesca]

Think, you know, the tail end of that quote is, and he does have a taste for women on the young side.

[Ben Smith]

Yeah. Like, and you know, if you think that Donald Trump's, you know, that Donald Trump shouldn't be elected president because he was not a model of moral propriety. And the sort of like loose 1980s and 90s in New York, like that's been pretty well litigated. The letter genuinely doesn't say let's go commit crimes together. And so from my perspective, I bet my read of this is that the Journal was probably have used it in the context of a story about Trump and Epstein's long, well documented public friendship and the way in which Trump reacted to it and threatened them in my, this is, I'm speculating here about Rupert Murdoch probably prompted them to say, okay, we're putting just this on the front page and we are going to go as hard as we can, because to show strength. And I think that's something that Murdoch understands in a way that Bezos in particular doesn't. Is that the way that you, that that traditional, powerful newspaper proprietors have operated is to understand that they're in a position of strength, not a position of weakness. And Murdoch does seem to understand that in a way that a lot of his peers don't.

[Mike Pesca]

That's really interesting. Murdoch, probably because a little bit about who he is and how he came up, understands the Trump mindset very well in a way that the kowtowing law firms and colleges didn't. He does respond to strength. I mean, I think there's a through line between the success of Ukraine's Operation Spiderweb and Trump's policy. And so Murdoch is operating like hundreds of drones in the Soviet airspace. That's really, really interesting. Yeah, I think you're right. Now, that article was lawyered up. I mean it was written by three journalists and probably 17 lawyers. And there are, I think we counted, there are 17 instances of hedged language. But you're talking about the placement and you're talking about some of just that.

[Ben Smith]

They decided we're just going to do a story about this document we found. We're not going to mention it in the 15th paragraph of a broader story that gives lots of context, right? Yeah, we're just going to be like, I mean this, you know, the basic, I mean the reason this is such a fun story for people is because like it's.

[Mike Pesca]

Well, because the signature stood in the place of where the pubic hair should be.

[Ben Smith]

Because it's gross. And it's also just the world's dumbest revolution eating its children. Right? It's these Keystone Cop, Twitter and podcast conspiracy theorists in a position of power to finally, you know, reveal their made up conspiracy. Failing to do it, but in the process reviving like the single most embarrassing thing in their boss's life. I mean, it's so dumb. And also, by the way, like, I do think it's really important that people who would like to be sane and not captured by conspiracy theories understand that like a lot of the Epstein stories is basically qanon for people with college degrees. Like, there is not evidence that he ran a vast child trafficking and trafficking and blackmail ring. There's evidence that he disgustingly abused young women in Florida. There is some evidence that he may have arranged trysts with grown up sex workers for friends or there was something like that happening.

[Mike Pesca]

Right. Friends whose names we know possibly, but.

[Ben Smith]

This has been investigated by every law enforcement agency in the world. For 15 years it's been by every journalist in the world. And there is a kind of absence of evidence. Becomes evidence of absence here. Like a lot like most of the things that people, by the way, people in both parties now have an incentive to believe. So they seem to believe it like the biggest picture QAnon level conspiracies. There really isn't evidence for that. And I find it very frustrating to watch people who ought to know better out there peddling it.

[Mike Pesca]

Yeah. By the way, if we illustrate this portion of the talk, I want to take the Goya picture of Saturn devouring his son and just say, but add clown hats and stink lines. So I. Okay, that's a really good analysis of Murdoch. And I was going to ask you before you said he understands how deal with Trump and stand up to a bully. What's the Wall Street Journal theory of the case? Such that they could pursue journalism more strongly. Is it a deeper commitment to the journalism? Is it deeper understanding of what's really going to scotch a deal? Because Murdoch has been involved in many, many more deals than Sherry Redstone. But your theory of the case is that.

[Ben Smith]

Yeah, but yeah, I think Murdoch understands about it. Yeah, I think Murdoch has always understood that, that the strength of being a newspaper proprietor is not that you're going to micromanage and kill deals for your friends. It's that you own these basically unguided missiles that are out there playing huge roles in the culture. And the second that it becomes clear that you're meddling and that you're subject to pressure and that you'll kill stories that people don't like, you lose your own power. And also, I should just say, like, you know, the Journal editor, Emma, Emma Tucker just like knows a good story when she sees one. And it is obviously been given full authorization to go after the hardest targets in the world.

[Mike Pesca]

Yeah, I remember I talked to you. When? In 2024. Wait, did I? Maybe I'm. Maybe I'm hallucinating this. And maybe you just said it on mixed signals and I thought maybe it was chat GPT. Yeah, maybe. But it was about that Siobhan Use and Annie Lynskey story which broke from the rest of the pack that demonstrated behind closed doors Biden was slipping and your analysis was essentially the Wall Street Journal understands some basics about journalism and they're also influenced by more of a European model which tries to be, I don't know if the word is puckish, but a little bit thumb in the eye. And not as yet, not as toeing the line. And so maybe the Wall Street Journal and maybe Murdoch has something to teach the rest of the media. Could the Wall Street Journal or the LA Times have adopted those tactics and be successful?

[Ben Smith]

Oh, yeah. If people thought the Washington Post was fearless, if they thought the LA Times was fearless, rather than like really worried about what the boss is going to think about every story, of course they would think more highly of those publications and they'd probably. And it's, it's also like, you know, every journalist in the building in those places is thinking, huh, like if I get something really good, is this going to be a problem for the boss's powerful friends? And that does mean that certain stories don't get rid. It also means that certain sources won't come to you.

[Mike Pesca]

Yeah, yeah, there's self censorship there. And also when you say every journalist in the building, there are fewer journalists in the building. And I'm not just talking about attrition or firing. The good journalists are leaving the Washington Post. That's.

[Ben Smith]

There are lots, lots of great people there. I mean, these things have their cycles and I feel like these publications have their highs and lows, but a lot of them do kind of survive the, you know, survive, survive the dark eras.

[Mike Pesca]

But your answer, could the Wall street, could the Washington Post have been more robust and brave and would it have strengthened the credibility of the Washington Post? Yes, but what about the question, if you're Bezos's advisor and you got paid just to maximize Bezos profit, would you tell him it's a bad strategy, not just for the Post, but for the rest of his empire to bend the knee a bit?

[Ben Smith]

You know, I think he's, I think, I think. I can't think of anybody who's done more damage to their kind of public image and reputation than Bezos. I mean, he's sort of made himself into a laughingstock and in a way that I think doesn't give him strength and leverage in dealing with Donald Trump. He's looked and he's looked very.

[Mike Pesca]

Elon Musk is close, but.

[Ben Smith]

Yeah, well, Musk is Musk is Musk, right?

[Mike Pesca]

Yeah. Yeah. He did start off as more of a chaos agent, that Bezos was correct. Yeah. So here's another strain of questions I wanted to ask you. I had, I've interviewed Jake Tapper twice about his book and about the media and did you have Tapper on your show?

[Ben Smith]

Did not Conscious choice. No zigging.

[Mike Pesca]

Where the rest of the media.

[Ben Smith]

Yeah, maybe we just got to it late but obviously very high impact book. And I really enjoy Jake Tapper.

[Mike Pesca]

So at first I was considering asking him this question, but then you know what his answer is going to be and you wouldn't begrudge him the answer. And the question is the observation is this. I did a public event with Jake Tapper and people came up to him and told him how much they love his work and his book, and they should. The book has a lot of revelations. It added so much to our understanding of an extremely important question. I think nothing about it has been proved untrue and it reads well. So it is an accomplishment. And on the other side of a ledger, arguing for genuine accomplishment are things like number one on the New York Times bestseller list. On that list for eight weeks sold 100,000 copies. And in all of the places that the elite turned to for reviews, it's gotten very good reviews. So I would say that's real, that's tangible, that's what you're trying to do as a journalist. And yet if you look at the discussion around the book, and I'm not just talking on the most left wing or most right wing circles, he has been assailed. And if you just type the name Jake Tapper a little less Alex Thompson into Reddit, it's something like a 12 to 1 ratio of people criticizing him for what he did and how he did it. And so if I asked that to Tapper, he would say, look, all I could do is the work and the work is the work. But my question is more of what is reality? I mean, if this were a political candidate who came out with something tangibly good, but everyone hated it, we would say it failed. And this is, it's a, it's media, so it's supposed to get attention, but it's supposed to also get likes. How do we know that? The reality of the Jake Tapper book and the Alex Thompson book in microcosm, the reality is that this was a success that added to our knowledge and not a failure that exposed him for whatever flaws his critics are alleging.

[Ben Smith]

I mean, I just think that anything, any, any new piece of information now enters this hyper partisan cycle where there's an enormous amount of partisan attacks and they took a lot of that. And maybe some of the criticism was valid. It sort of depends on the specifics. But, but it did, as you say, add a lot of kind of detail and texture to something that I guess I don't really buy the idea that this was the world's best kept secret or that there were huge journalists Lived in fear of writing about it. Like I wrote about it from time to time, about how old Biden was, how it seemed old in person, how it seemed weird that he couldn't give a good speech. And I didn't actually get sort of like, you know, sinister threats from the White House or canceled by my audience. I just think there was a sort of, you know. Yeah, I think so. I think. I mean, the White House did obviously go to great lengths to conceal elements of his infirmity, but I think there's a little revisionism about what a total blackout it was. I think. I mean, obviously every voter in America was totally aware of it and threw him out of office partly because of it. So they must have learned of it somewhere.

[Mike Pesca]

Yeah, my analysis is, yeah, hyper partisan. When someone comes out with a book that one of the two parties doesn't like or one of the two ideologies, it's going to get filleted. So this was a little bit interesting in that it was a bipartisan filleting of the book and the sheer tonnage of criticism from both sides or all sides, or the people saying Joe Biden was a hero, or the people saying, you're still soft playing how Joe Biden was a vegetable. Maybe to me, it just adds up to, wow, if everyone hates it, maybe they're right. But I got to throw that away. The question is, what are the mechanisms? And is it just the sales of the book or the elite approval, but what are the mechanisms that we can as sense makers say, yeah, this was. This is. This is fact, this is information. This is worth it. The critics are wrong.

[Ben Smith]

I mean, I just think. Does it add to your understanding of what really happened? I mean, I sort of go back to what's happening with the Epstein stuff right now where there are these bipartisan incentives to indulge in just like, absolute nonsense. And you see Democrats and media figures who ought to know better just gleefully peddling just sort of disgraceful innuendo, in my view. So I just think. I think the partisan incentives are often terrible, and you should really think about what adds to what you're actually learning from and what makes you smarter and what adds to your understanding and not so much about what's hitting on blue sky.

[Mike Pesca]

And we'll be back in a minute with more of Ben Smith. We're back with Ben Smith. He's the CEO of Semaphore, and on that show he interviews people in media like Ezra Klein. And when you had Ezra on the show, you were talking about the Trump administration.

[Ben Smith]

I mean, it was also a media environment, which at least I felt I was running BuzzFeed then, you know, that a lot of our readers felt and a lot of Democrats felt like, there's no way this guy was legitimately elected. There are two theories. One, it was Facebook. Two, it was Russia. And lots of media energy went into chasing those two things. The White House felt totally under siege from, like, that set of questions. I think I have some regrets about that in retrospect.

[Mike Pesca]

And Ezra also said, and I think you agree it's totally legitimate to have investigated the possible Russian angle. So let me stop there. You think that's totally legitimate? Of course. Right?

[Ben Smith]

Yeah, I do.

[Mike Pesca]

Yeah. So I agree with you. And when you said that, you articulated something that I.

[Ben Smith]

And by the way, I should say not just the possible Russian angle, but like the very extensive campaign of interference in the election, by far the most important part of which was WikiLeaks was a very important story.

[Mike Pesca]

Yes. But those two things as driving the conversation and also provoking the counter mobilization of Trump very much brought us to the place where we are. So if we, looking back, which parts of it were excessive.

[Ben Smith]

I mean, I think that there was a, like a sort of, you know, really, like, there just was not evidence that Donald Trump was personally working for and with the Russians and that people believed that and sort of chased it, like, beyond the, like, well beyond the moment when it hits really, there was just like, you had to. Where the evidence didn't support it. I mean, the moment that I recall, like, I very vividly remember thinking, like, wow, this has gone totally around the bend, was there was a woman named Louise Mensch, a former British parliamentarian who, you know, who had a very sort of like, totalizing theory of how Donald Trump was secretly in league with the Russians and Robert Mueller was going to save us. And at some point, and she just kept accusing people of being Russian agents. And at some point I asked Joe Bernstein, a reporter at Buzz V, just to. I was like, should we just like, list everybody that she's accused of being Russian agent? Then we realized that that would be defamatory. So we couldn't do that.

[Mike Pesca]

You couldn't do that.

[Ben Smith]

Repeating is defamation may be considered a.

[Mike Pesca]

Loon by many, but.

[Ben Smith]

But we could count them. And I think the number was like, 280.

[Mike Pesca]

Yeah.

[Ben Smith]

Like, and we wrote that. And I think. And she had been a big talking head. She was all over msnbc. Right.

[Mike Pesca]

That's the point. When she put this out there, it's not like it was ignored.

[Ben Smith]

She actually, she came by. She was doing the rounds of offices, and she came by buzzfeed to sort of like, tell her story, which was, you know, very compelling in the way these narratives can be compelling. And one of my colleagues said, you know, because she's this very kind of put together, charismatic, you know, Oxbridge, former British parliamentarian. And one of my colleagues said, you know, would you feel the same way about this story if that had been like, an older man with, like, a white shirt that didn't quite fit and, like, wild hair and, like, bags full of paper? Because that's what that was. And so we did a story about how many individuals she had accused of. Of being Russian agents. And I think she. That was sort of. That MSNBC then stopped putting her on television. And, like, it felt like, to me, at least, that was when, like, okay, like, you know, that. That was. That. That was, I guess, when I very consciously thought, this is totally, totally around the bend. But there were. There was lots of other stuff. I mean, to me, like, a lot there. And you see it, flickers of it now, that people with Russian names or people who, like, have some connection to Russia, it's suddenly like, did you know that that, like, Sergey O. Gore, who works for Trump, was born and is in the Soviet Union? Like, what. What are we talking about? Like, that's just unbelievable nonsense. And there was. It ruined people's lives. The most notable was this researcher who. The one really stuck with me, who. He. He was the one who scraped the Facebook data that Cambridge Analytica later bought for. And I just don't want to, like, go back into this particular rabbit hole, but it's basically irrelevant nonsense. But this guy happened to have been born in St. Petersburg. And Michael Lewis did this very moving, compelling podcast on how these absolute nonsense allegations by crazy people that he was a Russian spy, on the strength of his having been born when he was a baby in St. Petersburg, totally destroyed his life and career.

[Mike Pesca]

I think, though, to this day, good people, good citizens, people who really worry about misinformation and disinformation, Democratic voters, not even necessarily MSNBC viewers, still believe a lot of that. And I think that the media has. Not the media. What does this mean? But I think that the New York Times, CNN and Washington Post and a bunch of these other places, although the Washington Post has a columnist who did a great job on this, has not come close to making it clear a fraction of what you just said.

[Ben Smith]

Yeah, I mean, it is interesting, right? I mean, it's just. It's a truth of media that when you get small things wrong.

[Mike Pesca]

Yeah.

[Ben Smith]

Like if, like, like I actually should correct. The number of people she accused of. Of being Russian agents was 210. Okay. If I had written that it was 280, I would have to correct.

[Mike Pesca]

Yeah.

[Ben Smith]

But if you get, like, things totally wrong, like the Iraq war, like, you know, like, then you don't have to correct. But no, you only correct. Then you're maybe that one they did. But, like. Well, that's basically.

[Mike Pesca]

This is my point.

[Ben Smith]

Basically, you correct the small. The smaller. Like. And like, the smaller the error, the more hand wringing there is about the correction.

[Mike Pesca]

Oh, yeah.

[Ben Smith]

And if it's sort of a. Of a. Like we just got this whole thing totally wrong. Journalism doesn't really have a mechanism that says, hey, we ought to write, you know, a really big correction of that. Well, as long as all the details were correct.

[Mike Pesca]

Yeah. I'm not sure they would say they got it totally wrong, but they got enough of it wrong that it very much hurt the credibility. I do think it hurt their credibility, and I think it hurt their credibility in ways that many people within the organization don't think it did because of, you know, their politics and social pressure. Pressure. And that's why I think the Iraq war was different, that they wouldn't be able to continue unless they really addressed the yellow cake and Judy Miller, et cetera, but because of how the politics align on this.

[Ben Smith]

Well, the New York Times specifically did, but the whole American media, mostly, with a couple of exceptions, bought into a false narrative about just a story that wasn't true about Saddam Hussein and mostly never did anything about it.

[Mike Pesca]

Oh, most of the media never did anything about it, you're saying, but the New York Times did a bit about it.

[Ben Smith]

Yeah.

[Mike Pesca]

Yeah. Do you think that credibility is why people have flocked from traditional news outlets? Because I think that. My opinion is that they've done many things that have hurt their credibility and that has had to have some effect. But I think it's mostly structural and how we get news and not what the actual reporting or misreporting was.

[Ben Smith]

Yeah, that's the frustrating part. Like, I think. I think if these. I think if the sort of legacy media had done a fantastic job and been extremely fair, they would be facing basically the same crisis of trust and the sort of. And being. And seeing their audience flee to partisan media, that flatters their prejudices. And so, yeah, I kind of agree with you. The legacy media could have done better at the margins. It probably would have affected their credibility. But actually, like you know, the story that we're talking about this week, Donald Trump is pretending that the Wall Street Journal fabricated a document from 2003, or that somebody in 2003 looked into the future and fabricated to sabotage his presidential term in the second 22 years. I mean, total nonsense. And the President, Vice president, United States are going to, like, die on that hill. So I don't. I don't think that Donald Trump's. I mean, Donald Trump is very unhappy when the media reports true things as well as false things. So, yes.

[Mike Pesca]

One piece of evidence that it's. Even if the media had gotten everything right, they'd still be facing this crisis, is that the very successful corrective to the mistakes of the media substack, which allows media apostates to share their truth, has. Some of the most popular sites are just that. Some are arguably not that. But, you know, it's all ideological. And some are just as fallacious as the Louise Mensch tweets. And they're unbelievably popular. So even if Substack and there are a lot of other outlets say we're the corrective to the media, you can go through and pick out Michael Shellenberger here or some other, you know, crazy conspiracy theory there, and they're unbelievably popular on subs.

[Ben Smith]

I know. And with Shellenberger, it's like you can't quite tell is he trying. Maybe it's a deliberate parody. That's how I read it, of like, the kind of worst sloppiness and ideal.

[Mike Pesca]

It's like an Andy Kaufman thing. And he's going to expose himself.

[Ben Smith]

If you're like. It's sort of like, if you wanted to do a sort of mirror image of what you thought, the most irresponsible and paranoid things that the left, the mainstream media was doing in 2020 was you would do it that way.

[Mike Pesca]

Yeah.

[Ben Smith]

I don't know.

[Mike Pesca]

He's also a partner of Matt Taibbi, who. I'm glad he's doing what Taibi is.

[Ben Smith]

Doing, what he's doing. Yeah. I think it's been really interesting to watch some people who, some of who come from, like, much further right than that. There's a publication called Public, you know, that's very concerned with whether the Davos elites are going to make us eat bugs. And also about. About, you know, and to me, sort of anti, you know, hostile to vaccines in a way that I don't really understand. But also, you know, as people sort of start to commit journalism, they have a lot of contact with Reality. And they start to say, hey, wait, wait, wait, like, I know this isn't true. Why are you saying it to their friends? And it's been interesting to watch that develop in some ways.

[Mike Pesca]

Tell me about Substack. They have a billion dollar valuation. I'm on Substack. This would be the logical place for me to do the plug for my substack, but I won't. Now here's.

[Ben Smith]

Don't sign up for Mike Substack, whatever you do.

[Mike Pesca]

They're making 40, $45 million in repeating revenue because their business model is they take 10% of all. All the money their creators make. There's no way to get to $1 billion that way unless you have advertising. So they've said they are open to advertising and then they got to $1 billion. Will this not make it substack? You've. You're very interesting on Substack and I like to hear people outside the Substack ecosystem give an assessment of the future of Substack either as its own business or maybe a corrective and way forward to everything else. We're talking about the media.

[Ben Smith]

Yeah, I mean, I think I was skeptical of Substack and have been proved kind of wrong. I think they have built this core center of gravity around this where people, independent creators go to write sometimes to make videos. I think to the degree they can get people making more videos, video advertising is much, much more valuable. And presumably that's where they're trying to go is to sort of provide a, like, competitor to some slice of YouTube. They also have a social platform that's not bad like that social feedback. They have an app that is getting some traction if it's too annoying to recite a conversation with one of my kids. But it's just like Substack really does contain multitudes. And I was talking to one of my kids the other day who said, hey, did you see that article about how all the girls on Substack sound the same? And I was like, what are you talking about? Like, what article? What girls on Substack. And she's like, oh, every young woman who wants to be a memoirist or writer has a substack. They send to 20 of their friends. Okay, News to me. And there was an article on Substack about how all those essays sound the same news to me. But sure. And I was like, wait, where did you see that? And they were like, on Substack. And what do you mean on Substack? Do you mean email? And she's like, no, no, what's email like? Nobody gets email. What are you talking about? And I was like, oh, in the Substack app. You think Substack is an app? Like, obviously. And how did you. How do you find something in the app? Well, Internet Princess reposted it on Substack. Who's Internet Princess? She's like this huge substacker with hundreds of thousands of followers who just got a huge book deal. Which is just to say it does have huge, huge subcultures beyond the one that you and I are in of insane people yelling at each other about the media.

[Mike Pesca]

Yeah. One thing that annoys me about Substack, and maybe it's too much in the. I don't know if you want to call it mainstream, but not enough about the Davos bug eating conspiracy and not about Internet Princess is how do they make their own stars? The model, the business model is what I call the media martyrdom monetization model, where someone.

[Ben Smith]

You have some experience with that, my friend.

[Mike Pesca]

Well, not. I haven't monetized it.

[Ben Smith]

You weren't like, shameless enough to martyr yourself.

[Mike Pesca]

I didn't, I didn't pivot as I'm being oppressed by Trumpian forces. But that's what Jan Rubin did and that's what Terry Moran did, and that's what the cartoonists from the Washington Post and telling us did.

[Ben Smith]

Jim McGuire.

[Mike Pesca]

Hundreds of thousands of followers. I mean, this is a playbook. I don't know if it's a good playbook for the rest of us, but this seems to be the playbook.

[Ben Smith]

Yeah, you gotta get into a fight with Donald Trump, man. That's your problem.

[Mike Pesca]

That's. Yeah, that's my problem. I fought with the wrong people for sure. All right, so the last thing I want to talk about is.

[Ben Smith]

Well, no, it's more that you didn't want to then just make a career for your enemies were. Because I think you could have honestly, like, done that and gotten more followers too. You could have been like, I was canceled by the Woke mob and I will fight to the death against whatever, something mind virus. And like Elon Musk would have, you know, retweeted you maybe.

[Mike Pesca]

Right. A couple Bill Maher show appearances. So I. Yeah, why didn't you do that? So I cast ahead and I say, in three years, what do I want my life to be? And the reaction I wanted was, oh, yeah, Mike, he's still. He's pretty much doing the same show he's doing. And wait a minute, wasn't he. Why did he leave Slate that's what I wanted. Right. I didn't want.

[Ben Smith]

I think you've succeeded.

[Mike Pesca]

You know, I have my own thing now, and I'm definitely able to say what I'm able to say. So the last thing I wanted to ask you about was the part of your analysis with Klein, looking back, that some portion of the audience blamed Facebook, some portion blame Russiagate. Actually, the Venn diagram has huge overlaps. So when it comes to the Facebook part, it wasn't just Facebook, but it was the threat of misinformation and disinformation. And this stuck in my craw. Not that it didn't exist, but I was very mostly worried about the government defining disinformation in ways that suited its purpose. And we saw a bunch of that. But also media defining the misinformation and especially disinformation beat as essentially just things we don't agree with. And we saw a lot of this, too. I would say that Ben Collins of msnbc, I don't want to. I don't know all the work he did, but the work that flitted across my radar was like, this is just stuff you don't agree with, Ben, and you're calling it misinformation, disinformation. Not to pick on one person, but where are we with that? Have we moved past that? And have we moved past that for logical reasons? And by move past that, I mean getting obsessed and with the idea that we're being misinformed and especially disinformed and it's affecting our life and this being a prominent lens to look at media, have we moved past that? And have we moved past that for essentially correct reasons or just because we got exhausted and let our eye off the ball of a very important threat?

[Ben Smith]

I mean, so basically, I think there was this pseudo academic framework around fact checking and misinformation that should have just been left. Journalists figure out what's true, what's false. You don't need some whole other layer of, well, this might be true technically, but it's also misinformation, which is where some of this stuff went, which to me was really depressing. So the good. I do think there's some good news in that line of thinking kind of running its course and going away. But, like, obviously we're out of the frying pan and into a totally insane fire of AI where. I mean, the thing that I've noticed lately is that there's just a level of kind of haze around information. Like, I'll go to ChatGPT and ask them, like, I'm talking to Mike Pesca in 10 minutes. Like, remind me his CV and I'll read it. Knowing that it's, like, 80% true.

[Mike Pesca]

Right.

[Ben Smith]

And there's probably something in there that's not really true.

[Mike Pesca]

I was not a rookie of the year in 1985.

[Ben Smith]

Yeah, you're not from Norwalk, Connecticut, but, like, maybe you're from somewhere nearby. Like, the gist is probably right, so to speak. But, like, it's not. It's not going to be factual. I know it's not factual. I'm going to a source I don't really trust because it's convenient. And I think that's true with video. Like, I figure, like, 80% of the videos I see on the Internet are real, 20% are fake. Do I know which are which? Not really. It's kind of directional. And I think that, like, that's really scary that we're sort of in this moment when people are just getting used to a lower resolution around what's real.

[Mike Pesca]

Yeah. And how you. How a certain kind of person protects themselves by telling themselves they're sophisticated is to not believe truth. Is to believe nothing. Is to throw their lot in with the opposite of truth and crazy conspiracy theories. And they could justify it by saying, oh, really? Aren't you the sucker for believing the 20% that isn't true?

[Ben Smith]

Yeah, that's already in the culture. And that's. The Epstein stuff, to me, just really embodies that kind of, like, lazy skepticism. Like, yeah, they probably. Obviously, we all know the elites are trafficking in children. Like, who worries about the details? And then added to that is just that any document you see, any video you see, it's like, some chance it's fake. Like, not a huge chance. But I mean, I remember for most of my career, I remember somebody saying to me, you know, I would get leaked documents all the time, and I was covering politics and broke tons of news and was just. People were constantly leaking me documents, and I'd basically just take a look at it and know that the source was good and post it. Once in a while, somebody would say to me, like, aren't you worried that, you know, that you're going to get tricked with a fake document and be like, well, like, in theory. But I have, in fact, been leaked thousands of documents, and they've all been. I've never, ever once encountered a fake document. And this was from, you know, I guess I started doing this stuff around 2000 till, like, 2013, 2014, 2015, and then suddenly people are shopping. You fake documents and you have to be really careful.

[Mike Pesca]

The operation security around journalism, which is not a burgeoning field, is just another cost center now. Ben Smith is the co founder and editor in chief of Semaphore and the co host of the excellent Mixed Signals podcast along with Max, Tanny and Ben. I want to thank you and wish you what we always say to each other when we end these conversations may every day be another wonderful secret.

[Ben Smith]

Thank you Mike and the same to you.

[Mike Pesca]

And that's it for today's show. Cory Warra produces the gist. Astra Green is our social media Director. The production coordinator is Ashley. Ashley Khan, Michelle Pesca is all there as our head of commissions on commissions Improve G Peru Duparu and thanks for listening.

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