Urban (4:56)

And how you feel about that, do you think it's. It should be that way or not?

Mike Pesca (5:00)

Well, Urban, who is my former editor, he's a former NPR editor, was there for decades. He left NPR and wrote a big piece in the Free Press, which got a Lot of attention about NPR's ideological swing. And today URI had an article titled NPR. I'll read the title. Happy Independence Day. Hahaha. The Senate just voted to cut federal funding for the news organization I worked, organization I worked at for 25 years. It only has itself to blame. I would say it does have itself to blame. It's not only itself, it's Republicans in Congress who have wanted to defund them for years and years and years. It also has, you know, it has politics to blame. It has the current doge trend of just cutting a lot of money from government. But yeah, I say that John Kennedy is a senator from Louisiana. He was tweeting, he put up threads of him on the House floor reading about 40 headlines from NPR. And, you know, 10 of them are defensible or 10 of them are. So NPR reported on, say, transgender care. What are they supposed to not report on it? They're a news organization that said the way they reported on it was definitely in favor of transgender care and definitely portraying people who had misgivings about them as bigots. And then when it comes to issues of race, just reading, not all, but just reading, you could read a dozen headlines from NPR's coverage and any reasonable person would have their eyes roll. And if you say, look, if it's whatever, the Nation magazine, if it's the Root, I can name a whole bunch of private news organizations that, you know, they'll go in for this kind of coverage, you could say, all right, you know, we got a First Amendment. But if your money is going to a news organization that spends a lot of coverage into issues of why we're trying to diversify the lobster fisherman community, they've been too white for too long. You might be saying, what? My money's going to this. And it was absolutely a trend. It was absolutely a trend that NPR was captured in the same way that a lot of news organizations were by a social justice fervor around the year 2020. But a little before, a little after. And the shame of it is they got, they got slapped down and they are changing. And if you listen to them, it is clear that older, wiser people who used to be scared to speak up, like the people like Uri who were there for 20 years, who used to be able to say to a young reporter or editor, well, we could say mother, we don't have to say humans who have children. But for, for a while, that older person was fearful of speaking up. And now they're asserting themselves a bit, though a lot of that Language still creeps in.

Urban (8:09)

Do you feel it's a start of, you know, jumping on media outlets? I don't want to say attacking, but, you know, holding him more accountable to things based on the party. I mean, I always had a problem with, you know, I mean, you gotta get money somehow. But, you know, if you funded by certain, you know, ideology, whatever that is, you know, you, you have an agenda, you know, so. And same thing with the political candidates and stuff like that, you know, do you feel like this could be start of like everybody have a news, you know, and then you see a lot of the, the outlets now people do it on their own and it's become very successful, you know, and I have so many guests or requests to be guests in this show, but like, oh, we have a new news outlet. It's like, we're not biased, we're right in the middle. Is that. Yeah, it's like. Yeah. I don't know if that's a good thing either. You know, it's, you know.

Mike Pesca (9:08)

Well, it's not a good thing if that's always what your take is. Exactly. Sometimes. Sometimes the world is biased or it's appropriate to have bias or it's not biased. It's just there aren't two sides to things. Sure. I do think Tangle and Isaac Saul, he has this great. He's running a very successful business because he'll give you the right's take, the left's take, and then he'll say Isaac's take and Isaac's very fair guy.

Urban (9:30)

But people actually have it on my podcast here.

Mike Pesca (9:31)

Yeah, he's good, right, isn't he? Really good. You could see why it's very effective niche. I'm on the gist today. I'm talking to Jake Tapper and I say, and I think I get him to agree, I make him agree that the kind of journalism that CNN does, or if people are hearing this saying the kind of journalism CNN does is left wing. They don't think they are. I think MSNBC does think they are. They think they're right to be left of center or progressive. But cnn, much of cnn really doesn't want to be that. So let's just say that's kind of journalism that CNN aspires to be. Like, they'd love it if everyone said, oh yeah, CNN plays it down the middle. I think that's a minority of what journalism is. And I also think it's a minority of what the public wants. Which gets back to there's pro Trump and anti Trump journalism and the Word niche is. It's niche. What was mainstream journalism where a person can check in and sometimes get their worldview turned a little bit upside down and sometimes be told, Donald Trump's totally right. The evidence lines up with him and sometimes be told, no, he's lying, just like you said. And then you trust the news organization. People say they want that, but the revealed preference of what they actually seek out is not that.

Urban (10:46)

Yeah.

Mike Pesca (10:47)

And so to bring but the analogy I would use when people say, well, you know, everything's ideological and shouldn't news organizations, shouldn't everything they do be down the middle? There's a lot of ways to talk about that. But I think of it as a library. If you're running a library or if the town is a library, that's a civic good, you'd stock books that the librarian might not agree with. Right. Bill O'Reilly used to always call for defunding NPR. And I always told him, when I told him is like, wait, the library should have your book, the Bill O'Reilly book. And they should also have the books of the last four authors of npr. That's how the library should work. And it's funded by the government. I'd like NPR to be more like that, where most of the books are and I have some of the headlines that are cited and there are others out there. Microfet, micro feminism, the next big thing in fighting the patriarchy. Which skin color emoji should you use? The answer can be more complex than you think. Women's groups find health and healing on hikes, but sometimes racism to bringing diversity to Maine's nearly all White Lobster fleet. The these drag artists know how to turn climate activism into a joyful blowout. All right, you can I guess some of these articles could be good, but the sheer tonnage of them amount to is this really a news organization trying to speak to most Americans or is this kind of a news organization talking to itself? It's also reflected in the numbers people turned away from NPR after their coverage got more and more like that. Unless here's what's in the big beautiful.

Urban (12:21)

Bill and is is the, the coverage itself because I know like titles, there's an art of writing. The title is like what you get. You either emotional somehow either angry or happy. So you start reading and it's none of this. It's not what the title says at all. Is the coverage itself also kind of like that?

Mike Pesca (12:41)

Yes. And so there are a bunch of. So there are two things. A couple of these stories may be interesting. The Skin color emoji. I don't know if it's more complex than you think, but it's the story about people who were.

Urban (12:52)

Yeah, actually that's the one that came in my mind. I was like, I would read that.

Mike Pesca (12:56)

Yeah, yeah, that could be like, how is it complex? And then appropriation. So, like, it's good to know that someone's having this debate. Even if you as the reader, listener are like, well, that's a stupid debate. But it's kind of. It's newsy that it really is a debate. So sometimes that does happen. A lot of these, I read all of these and many of these stories, I would, if I were commissioning the story, say, let's not do this, but in 2021, I would dare not say, let's not do this or else I'd worry about my job. But then there's a whole lot of just the incensed insistence on phrases that are very ideologically pointed. Like back to gender affirming care is when you give kids puberty blockers. And I always thought, without even weighing in on it, it's obviously putting your finger on the scale if you call it gender affirming care, is it not? Yeah. Or they do use the phrases of people who breastfeed. So, like, that is not. I think that you could have a 2025 very cutting edge, factual news organization that says women who breastfeed and you're not really engaging in an act of harm and discrimination. And if a young staffer asserts that you are, you can say something like, no, no, we're not. We're trying to meet the public where they are, not the activists where they are.

Urban (14:18)

So, you know, news reporting, the news is supposed to be like, hey, this happened today. Yeah, there's an accident outside my door right now. A car, two cars, you know, crashed into each other. Yeah.

Mike Pesca (14:32)

Including one driver who was a human who was breastfeeding.

Urban (14:35)

Yeah.

Mike Pesca (14:36)

But then, sorry, the war.

Urban (14:37)

I mean, we see that in wars a lot. You know, when they say like, you know, even, you know, you want to say like, oh, 20 children died or people under 18 attacked versus, you know, like these little words, you know, that use.

Mike Pesca (14:53)

And in a second, I will talk more with Hatem. We're going to finish up this part of the media conversation and get on to the 33 year old, charismatic, possibly African American only in the broadest sense. And it didn't even work on the Columbia application. That's in a minute.

Urban (15:24)

Okay, so back, back to if you, if you are hiring, you, the boss and organization now you hired me. And do you think that I go with the ethics and ideas of the news room or news channel PA or whatever, and then I start doing and writing things that doesn't represent the channel? What happens next?

Mike Pesca (15:46)

Yeah. So this happened with a lot of organizations. And of course, as social media became to get bigger and bigger, they had to figure out rules. There was, there was a reporter for the Washington Post who is a little bit of a complicated story because she was a sexual assault victim and she wanted to talk about this a lot online, but she also did so through, like slicing through the corpses of some of her colleagues at the Washington Post. And it just became too much and she was fired. But it was all, it was a huge, huge battle to get to that point. New York Times writers know, and I frequently see them adhering to what the rules are for social media posting. Even last week there was a story where Jamelle Bouie, who is one of the New York Times columnists, he's black, he objected to a story they did about Zoran Mamdani applying to college and listing African American. He. He started criticizing the story itself. And then he took all those tweets down. Of course, he's not on Twitter. That's. He took all those Blue sky posts down because he knew that didn't adhere to the policy of Blue Sky. I also think that npr, their reporters adhere to policy. But there was a time 2021, 2022, and that wasn't the case. And there was a time when after a lot of New York Times reporters went to Twitter after Tom Cotton wrote an op ed about protests. And what the New York Times staff did was they wanted to publicly object to this. So they did so under the umbrella of a union organization. And they all tweeted out that what the New York Times just did by running a Tom Cotton op ed put our colleagues at risk. And the people who got in trouble for that were. Was the guy who commissioned the op ed and he was James Bennett. He was fired. Wait, I want to get that right. I want to make sure. He might have been, you know, quasi fired or all but pushed out. I don't know exactly what the HR designation was, but he was gone. He separated himself for the time separated from him. This was about the time that Barry Weiss left. But the whole point is there was a time when the editor in chief of the New York Times was not as powerful as Nicole Hannah Jones, who is a very famous reporter for the New York Times, who is behind the 1619 project. And there was A time when the. The collective of the New York Times reporters could assert themselves and say to management, implicitly or explicitly, no, our opinions in this matter are more than your corporate rules. And that time is no longer. That has been reset and rebalanced to the paper. Management now has more. More control over the paper. The newspaper workers.

Urban (18:36)

Nice. Okay, so, you know, you're a New Yorker. You lived here all your life, and. And all that. So how do you feel about the mayor election? You know, in the beginning, like, the problem with, you know, the Mamdani issue is, like, when people criticize his policies, you know, that's fair game, obviously. You know, that's how it should be. But then they start going to being Muslim, being this, being that, and just. And I feel like that is making him even more powerful, you know?

Mike Pesca (19:09)

But just like what you were saying with Trump, he's a little similar to Trump. They have a lot of the same voters that. Bad critiques of him give him power, and you can turn around and say, look at what I have to deal with. And his supporters feel more energized, and they're right, too.

Urban (19:24)

Yeah.

Mike Pesca (19:24)

Yeah.

Urban (19:25)

So what's. What's your thoughts in Merrill, a race in New York City? Now that Andrew come. I feel Andrew Como. I don't know if you saw his first commercial or whatever. It's just like he's. And this is the thing. And this is the thing that actually, again, for Trump versus other politicians in general. And to be fair, Trump obviously was in show business for a long time. It's just like, he's very entertaining. He's second nature to him. The cameras and all stuff. The rest are like. So, like, that commercial was so bad from the way he's just like, it's obviously, this is not you. You know, the shirt you're wearing, the way you walk in, the way you're talking. But what's your.

Mike Pesca (20:05)

Repairing a car or something?

Urban (20:06)

Yeah. And. And I love. Like this. So have to, like, shake hands with certain people in the street. Like, this is making. Oh, you're the mirror. Okay.

Mike Pesca (20:15)

Yeah.

Urban (20:16)

So what's your thoughts on a mom, Donnie, running and beating Como, and then Como coming back again and Como asking Eric Adams to drop, and Eric Adams don't want to drop.

Mike Pesca (20:26)

Yeah. I. I'm a little surprised that Cuomo came back, because I thought he. He's not stupid. And I thought that he would take the lesson and say, all right, I've been rejected for a reason, and it wasn't unfair. It. Cuomo ran the race. Exactly. That he wanted to run. He wanted to not do interviews. He wanted to buy a lot of ads on tv. And he lost. And he lost really badly. You know, not by percentage, but where. Where he was supposed to. And, you know, he outspent Mom Donnie enormously. So I thought he would say, all right, I gave it a shot, and it was the shot I wanted to take, and it didn't work. But I guess he can't let it go. And he does. See, some people who are not happy with Mom Downey, people who didn't vote in the Democratic primary might not be inclined. So it is true that if there was this really good centrist, or probably not a Republican, but maybe a kind of.

Urban (21:26)

A lot of the Republican register didn't vote in the Democratic thing.

Mike Pesca (21:29)

No, no. Right. And the Republican primary was lightly attended because Curtis Sliwa was the only candidate. So, yeah, I guess that Cuomo is saying, oh, maybe there is a shot for me, too. But Cuomo's whole point is, look, you might not like me, but I'm the competent guy, right? I'm the get things done guy. But didn't he run a totally incompetent campaign? Is he evincing competence in just the campaign? Because that's. It does annoy me that when they ask Mamdani, you've only run an office of five people. How are you going to run a government of 30000? His answer is, look how good the campaign was. Okay? So you could run a campaign of 20 something, actual employees and a bunch of volunteers. It doesn't scale. It doesn't mean anything. But to some extent, Cuomo is not showing the competence that he himself says is his calling card, because it's not his warmth and it's not his progressivism. Meeting the moment. I think that. I think Mamdani is a generational talent. I also think AOC is. And so it's like, wait, those two people from Queens, and they're within six years of each other? That's not how we define a generation, but it kind of is. And places like that. And for people like that who are learning from each other, the style points are off the charts, and they carry a lot of weight. And the style also is not just these great videos and this great color and things like, you know, just where he sets, you know, from being a TV and video professional where he sets the camera. So it's always kind of slightly shooting up in the most flattering way. And he's always wearing, like, his iconic. He's always well dressed and he's, when he meets someone on the street, they're more excited to meet him than the other way around. It's the most fantastic campaigning I've ever seen.

Urban (23:19)

And he's, yeah, he's getting a lot from the Trump playbook as well. And I think one of the things, one of the key things is the way he answer questions. Not politician anymore. Like, you know that question with who are you going to, what country you're going to visit first? You know, it's such, I think people are so sick not, not with, you know, traveling to Israel or doing that. They're just so sick of the politicians repeating the same things. So when he says something different, even if you agree or you don't agree with it, you know, you know, it was like, oh, I'm not going anywhere. I'm staying right here, you know.

Mike Pesca (23:54)

And another big overlap with Trump in that each of them are good at. And this is really all we want from our politicians. We say we want solutions. We want them to correctly articulate the problems and they both give voice to the right problems that the people are feeling. Now Trump has no ability to correct those problems. He almost always makes the problems worse. I don't see in any of Mamdani's plans the actual path forward to correcting the problems of affordability because it ain't going to be rent free freezes. I mean, I think his buses, I think a few bus lines could be free and we'll see if that works. But it'll be teeny tiny addressing of the problem. But that's what, you know, people say, I want a solutions oriented politician. They really want a problem articulating politician. I think that's what Madonna does.

Urban (24:44)

Yeah. I think that people don't understand is like when you can have a politician that's, you know, that's going to resolve this. It's a system, it's embedded system. You have to change everything. You have to. But that's the thing is like, if you get a lot of people with, with ideas like that in different positions, then maybe it's gonna change. But the way he answer questions, it reminds me when, when Trump says, because you'll be in jail, all only Rosie o' Donnell or stuff like that. Just like it's, you know, and it's fun. And they almost set them up because they ask all the politics, all the candidates one by one and had mom Dani at the end and they always like, I'll go to Israel, to go to Israel. And he's like, I say, right Here and I'll talk with people like it's almost was set up, you know, in a way that how could you not see this? Especially in like this is. I think a lot of politicians are just not either arrogant or dumb. I don't know, you know, but you know, that's why when, you know, when, when Trump is have these questions, even his ability to solve or not solve, it's just like the way he answered the question. You feel like he's one, he's a regular person and that's what mom Donnie did. And the bad thing is like it gets people elected and maybe Mamdani's policies are horrible, or Trump policies are horrible, but they get some elected. So somebody like Como, you know, not seeing that, I, I feel like he's probably, maybe he thought that. The only thing I can think of is like, okay, let me see all the attacks that are going to come on me running the first time and the attacks now, when you repeat it, it's kind of like a repetitive story. It's not going to hurt me the second time, you know, so maybe that's his policy.

Mike Pesca (26:25)

Sorry. Except Cuomo doesn't do anything to neutralize the attacks. He didn't do. He didn't do a press conference. He didn't do a really soul bearing interview. I don't even need soul bearing, like getting into the details. Ask me anything. We'll talk for an hour on the record. So why wouldn't the effective attacks also be effective just because people will get used to them? I don't know. Wouldn't the evidence be that they resonate and if you don't say anything different, they're still going to resonate?

Urban (26:53)

Yeah. What do you think of Eric Adams?

Mike Pesca (26:55)

I've never seen an incumbent politician with a lower reelection percentage. People do not want him to be mayor again. And you know what's weird? He has a good record to run on. I don't think he is responsible for the record. But murder could be the lowest in New York City history under a guy who ran it as a cop and a tough on crime mayor. And car death rates are the lowest since they've been recording car death rates, you know, since post horse and buggy era. There are so many. Sure, the streets still smell like shit and sure rents are going through the roof. But there is more tangible success than I think we thought we'd have. A good politician, he's not the worst politician. He's actually kind of a nutty guy and that gets in the way. But a very good politician who didn't have these scandals would be able to maybe take advantage of them. I think, by the way, about the playbook, even if the playbook's good, if you have 11 competitors and they're all playing from the same playbook, just by doing anything different, you give yourself such an advantage, right? If you're in, if you're in a state fair and you have the market research that says people want hamburgers over hot dogs, so 10 hamburger stands pop up. Even if only 45% of the people want a hot dog. You should have a hot dog stand and maybe a sausage, right? Yeah, maybe.

Urban (28:19)

Maybe.

Mike Pesca (28:19)

I have a big stand for Latin food and call it global. Globalize the empanada. That's my idea. All right, we will talk to you on Monday. Thanks to the producer of this and all the segments, Cory Wara, and the rest of the Gist crew. See you then.

Cory Wara (28:45)

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