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The Best Conversation About News, Opinion and Censorship You've Ever Heard - Richard Miniter
01:29:28
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- [00:02]
Richard Minter
They have two conflicting ideas of news which emerge from two different parts of our history. News sort of starts to begin in ancient Rome. They were trying to control rumors. And as bad as we think the Internet is, ancient Rome was far worse in the 1400s. Along the river Rhine is this idea that free speech is necessary for social peace. The Dutch ideas of the Rhine river tolerance come here. The upper class of New York is terrified. They fear the accountability of the opinions of people and what we're seeing playing out with all these battles on x and on YouTube. These two different ideas are in a death match. Depending on which side wins depends on how we will see reality in the coming decades.
- [00:56]
Francis
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- [02:34]
Trigger
Richard Minter, welcome back to Trigonometry.
- [02:36]
Richard Minter
Well, it's great to be back, guys.
- [02:37]
Trigger
Well, it is great to have you back because the last episode we did with you, the first episode we did with you was on our last U.S. trip. I think it was one of the biggest interviews we've done actually in the history of the channel. Absolutely crushed it. Fantastic conversation about American history today. We wanted to Talk to you about the history of news, history of journalism, the history of censorship. And there's a lot to talk about going all the way, all the way back.
- [03:01]
Richard Minter
There is a lot to talk about. And a lot of what people. When people fight about news, which they do on the Internet every moment of every day, it's because they have two conflicting ideas of news, which is. Which emerge from two different parts of our history. And once you understand the history of news, you'll understand why both sides feel so intensely about their point of view.
- [03:21]
Trigger
And what are those two sides?
- [03:23]
Richard Minter
Well, let's do the history first. Okay. So as all good histories, let's start with caves and cave drawings. Right? And the early humans told stories on the walls of caves, and we think due to certain DNA evidence, about 100,000 years ago, started telling oral stories. But I would contend while they were passing on new information, they were passing on speculation, emotional reactions to things they might even have been telling recent history. This is how the hunt went, or this happened in the village over the hill. That wasn't news. That was information, speculation, rumor. Just a little aside. Also, I think scientists misunderstand these cave drawings, these wonderful animals, some of which are extinct, and we have no evidence of, other than the drawing on the wall of Lascaux in France or various different Spanish caves. But during the Ice Age, you're spending a lot of days indoors. If I go to any in the wintertime in the Northern hemisphere, any person's home that has children, and I go into the child's room. What's on the walls? Animals. Pictures of animals. Right. So isn't it possible that they weren't necessarily leaving a record for us, which they had no idea about, but to entertain their children during the long Ice Age? So entertainment is older than news. We knew that already. So this goes on for a while. City states form and governments began issuing decrees. They make announcements from palace walls. And we have records of these from the Sumerians and the Babylonians and cities of Ur and Lagash. And some of these records are very old, 40,000, 35,000 BC. But again, that's not news. That is the people in charge telling you what they're doing and maybe not even why or what your orders are. News sort of starts to begin. Proto news emerges. I contend in ancient Rome with the acta diurna, which you can translate as the daily acts or the public acts. And this isn't yet news, but it's very close because it is presented to the general public. We don't have any Copies of these, these have all vanished. We know the Acta Dion exists only because of quotations from various Roman writers who do have copies of their work. But we do know that these were put up fresh every day for about a 200 year period, starting in B.C. and ending, depending on what sources you see, 180 or 220 AD and they announce far off victories or defeats, sometimes other news, gossip that would make the Daily Mail blush, senators, mistresses caught in embarrassing situations. But these are put up in the Forum and in other public places and then sometimes read aloud to the illiterate, kind of like town criers that you'd see much later in history. So it has the mix that we would recognize, right? It has gossip, it has politics, it has a bit of economics, it has foreign affairs, but it's controlled by the government and it is not really accountable publicly. The audience doesn't have a say and only senators and tribunes. And tribunes. There's the Romans were ruled by a two house congress or parliament, right? The senators and the tribunes. So the famous abbreviation you see everywhere, SPQR is the Senate and the people of Rome, while the people is the house represented in the house of the tribunes. Anyway, a tribune, an elected official, or a senator, another elected official, largely inherited as well. They could object, that was it. And there were no, there was no correction process, you couldn't sue, there was no libel, there was no slander. But it's the beginning of news. Now why do the Romans do it? No other ancient people had really done it this way before. And it's because they were trying to control rumors and speculation. And as bad as we think the Internet is, Ancient Rome was far worse, right? People making up all sorts of wild stories, people thinking the conspiracy theories of the Internet, Ancient Rome had this times 10. And they realized if we didn't do something, if we didn't start to say like what the actual casualty figures were in the battle that we lost or what the actual territory we just took was, wild stories would abound and that would mean that there would be trials, sometimes executions, coups, upheavals, all sorts of things. So if we could give the public, and this is why it's proto news, a common share of facts, things that we all know are true and can roughly agree on that that would cause peace. Not perfect peace, not perfect harmony. But at least we're not arguing about basic facts. And that is the beginning of understanding the importance of news. If we all have the same vocabulary of facts, then we're debating about how important this is compared to that. That is, why is our politics so polarized today? Because we no longer have this shared diet of facts. But when it works, and we're all agreed as to what is going on, what the facts are, and the debate is about the emphasis, we're in a much less polarized world. That's why the Romans created the acta diurna. That's what they were trying to do. Now news really begins. And maybe, Francis, this differs entirely from what PBS told you. So I apologize about in the 1400s along the river Rhine. Now, the Rhine is a very special river in European history. It begins in the mountains of Switzerland, it goes through Germany, and then it empties into the North Sea in modern day Netherlands, Holland. And along this river, we see a tremendous amount of Protestant movements emerges. Germany, at this place, this time period, is not a united country, even though technically it's the Holy Roman Empire. There's different princes and principalities and dukes and so on. And your royal leader, your princely leader could decide what flavor of Protestant you were what, or whether you're still with the Roman Catholic Church. And you would be on a boat going down the Rhine and you would be, if you were a Protestant, you'd look out on Catholic cities. And you know that if you came to shore, the chances of you being tried and burnt alive as a heretic were very high. And yet on the river, 10ft from shore in the current, you were safe and your cargo was safe for the most part. And that's not to say that all Protestants were united either. Protestants executed Protestants. These religious wars were intense. But just as the Gutenberg in the city of Mainz, that's sort of on the east bank or the left side of the. Looking from above of the Rhine river, almost in the dead middle of the German Rhine is Mainz. And in that city, not far from the docks, is this guy Gutenberg with the movable type printing presses. There are others who have similar devices, maybe not as good as his. And he's printing the Bible and he makes so much money printing them the Bible in the vernacular, he can afford to take speculation and printing other things. So he prints catalogs, he prints opinions, he prints religious tracts, including for denominations that he doesn't share the values of with the idea that if it's. Even if it's banned in Mainz, he can bundle it down to the docks, put it on a boat, and the city that's paying for it further down the Rhine will take the cargo and he'll make the cash. So as long as he's not caught with it, everything's fine. So why does all this matter? Well, it is competition of ideas. And remember in medieval times all political ideas are really offshoots of religious ideas. And the core Protestant idea at this time is that you have a personal relationship with God. You discover who he is in your personal journey and you have to use a horrible modern phrase, your truth. And no one. And by the way, that's where that idea comes from. And no one should be able, in the Protestant perspective, no one should be able to interfere in your exploration. And part of your exploration is talking about it and thinking about it and reading about it. So in this great, in these religious wars and this desire for social peace and just, you know, you guys go worship over here and we'll worship here and these third guys will go worship over there, is this idea that free speech is necessary for social peace. Let everyone have their say. Let the ideas move up and down the Rhine about religion, but also increasingly about politics, about economics. And believe it or not, we owe this initial idea of free speech, which is essential to the creation of news, to these very tough minded German Protestants who were stubbornly insisting they were right and everyone else was wrong. And also their great desire to make money. And capitalism, which is a lot like you have an individual relationship with God, is that you have the right to an individual relationship with your customers and your employees. You can choose who to hire and fire. There are no hereditary employees, it's governed by contract. And you have a right to sell to your customers as they, if they choose you and you choose them, that's it, that's all that matters. So this idea of this personal relationship with God has enormous political and economic effects. And at the mouth of the Rhine in the modern day Netherlands becomes an incredibly tolerant society, especially after the Spanish leave at the end of the 1500s. And this, this idea of tolerance becomes super important. But what is moving up and down isn't just books people don't want. Books are expensive and people don't have time for books all the time. But the beginnings of newspapers, what are originally called in German news books, but just what's going on in these different cities of the Rhine? And by the way, has the religion of this city changed since you last sailed past and is now unsafe for you to land? Or do we want to mock these people in Geneva or in Strasbourg or what have you? And so these newspapers are quite lively. They caricature people, they make sexual and spiritual allegations. It's as wild as anything on the Internet today. And you combine this idea of free speech and capitalism and you get the beginning of news, where you have news outlets that are only accountable to the people who pay for them. If you start writing about things that people don't trust, don't believe, your audience goes down. And soon your printing costs are higher than your revenue and you're out of business. If, on the other hand, you, you feed your audience, you, you give them what they want and hopefully give them a healthy version of what they want, your revenues will grow, more people will buy your paper. And this is the beginning of news, independent of the state, lively in its perspective, accountable to its readers. And this idea evolves and changes over time. It comes to England in Europe almost last, but it definitely flowers in the early 1600s in the Netherlands and in Germany. And the Dutch settle and form a colony that they call New Amsterdam, which is the modern city of New York. The Dutch ideas of the Rhine river tolerance come here. And New York has been a decidedly wide open free market of ideas, opinions and businesses for centuries as a result of the Dutch foundations of this city. And by the way, Canal street in downtown literally was a canal until they filled it in. I mean, the Dutch deep foundations of our culture are hidden but still visible, especially things like what is news. And in the 1730s, there's a German immigrant from the Rhineland named John Peter Zenger. And after apprenticing for a, for a printer in Philadelphia, he moves to New York with his wife and opens a small newspaper called the New York Journal. And he begins publishing the news of the day. And he publishes an account, which he says is true, of the royal governor of New York. Remember, the Brits still rule in the 1730s, still rule new York. And about corruption, self dealing, failure to look after the public, his public duties. What he has to say about the governor is less important than what happens next. The governor cannot, under British law, directly jail him unless he accuses him of a crime. And libel is a crime which you can be in prison for this time. So he's imprisoned and held for eight months before trial. Which is why one of the reasons why cases like this is why you have a right to be arraigned in a very specific amount of time under the US Constitution to this day. And why you have the right to a jury trial and so on. So if you're imprisoned, your food in the 1730s in New York this time has to be brought to you by your wife or friends of yours. Someone has to bring you food every day. The prison doesn't necessarily feed you. So his wife would put out the newspaper because that's how they made the money to pay for the food and pay the rent. And they keep trying to shut down her newspaper and she works and she would go to jail every night and provide the food to her husband. And he would say, okay, go over to New Jersey, take this rowboat over and you know, all these little machinations to stay in business, Right. Much later, the New York Journal is merged into a newspaper that you may have heard of called the New York Post. After many changes of ownership and splits in ownership anyway, so. And copies of this paper exist to this day. You can find facsimiles online. He finally goes to trial. And some slick lawyers from Pennsylvania argue for the first time in the English common law, the truth is a defense against libel. Yes. We do not argue that. These things, these facts that we presented make the governor open to ridicule. He looks ridiculous, he looks corrupt. But this is the truth and truth. I should not be punished for producing the truth. This is a revolutionary doctrine. And because this is a British Empire case, this precedent will change the English speaking world. This German immigrant who's been in the United States, the colonies really for less than a decade is about to change the English speaking world. But the governor and the upper class of New York, which is a piece of the upper class of England, is terrified. How will we stop ridicule that will come from the lower classes? How will we stop the finger pointing? How dare they? Our honor comes from status and our status comes from not being ridiculous. And when Quakers from Pennsylvania tell us that we're going to be made ridiculous, what to do? And their answer is don't do ridiculous things, that's not satisfactory. We are, we are important people. They fear the accountability of the opinions of people who are far poorer, far less educated. Some cases literally dirtier than themselves. Right. But it's the beginning of a revolution because the jury nullifies, the jury refuses to find him guilty, even though the facts say that he is and that he admits that he is more or less at trial. So this becomes a principle. The truth is a defense against libel. Much later in English history, you're going to have some unfortunate laws. And so you can't. If you're, if you're trying to operate a newspaper in England today, I would not use the Zenger precedent. But in US law, it is absolutely still governance. Truth is an absolute defense in this country against libel. And that case could only have happened in New York where Tilly settled as New Amsterdam with the Dutch sense and the Quaker sense of which comes from the Pennsylvanians who argued this in court. And this defense means that you cannot be ruined by the powerful for reporting things about them. Which means that suddenly journalists can hold corporations, aristocrats, the famous accountable in a way they never could before.
- [21:48]
Trigger
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- [23:32]
Richard Minter
Now get up to 20% off select online storage solutions. Put heavy duty HDX totes to good use, protecting what's important to you. The solid impact resistant design prevents cracking, and the clear base and sides make items easy to find even when the totes are stacked. Find select online shelving and Tote storage up to 20% off at the Home Depot to organize every room in your Home from your garage to your attic. Visit homedepot.com how doers get more done Then the next piece of the revolution happens, when you start to apply the factory model of production to news. Instead of having to hand print out on something a little bit better than What Gutenberg offered 300 years before, just 50, 60 years after Zenger, you have these massive printing presses which become ever more efficient at the end of the 18th century and deep into the 19th century where it's suddenly by the 1830s, you have the penny press, an entire broadsheet, some cases 52 inches wide, with penny pages upon pages, all available for a penny in the US and they are so profitable, they're employing people to translate news from overseas. And this is where the word correspondent comes from. So in this time period, traveling was a very big deal. Most people did not travel far. Now today we have, you know, jet planes and, you know, 19 year old illiterates instagramming from Bali, right? Okay, it's a different world. But in 1791, chances that you could travel more than a dozen miles, two dozen miles. To this day, I think to join the Travelers Club in London, in Pall Mall, you have to say that you've traveled 400 miles from your, from the founding stone of the club, right? So even a trip across the channel to Calais, which a lot of people tried to do to join the club back in the day, didn't count. You had to go far afield. And 400 miles was considered to be this enormous distance. So a correspondent would be someone from this community who traveled and wrote a letter home. And these letters would be reprinted in the newspaper, like, this is what I saw in Paris, this is what I saw in Amsterdam or Hong Kong or Shanghai. And they would often print who the letter was addressed to. And even like, I hope Sally's okay, like that would show up in the piece, right? These were very homespun kind of things originally, but with the mass printing, they begin to think about employing their own correspondence. And the next bit of the revolution comes with the telegraph. The telegraph is the closest thing to the Internet that the 19th century has, because the telegraph means that you can send a large amount of information almost instantly over an incredible distance. Stock prices can move from London to New York, across the Atlantic. And this, this business still influences how our news is gathered to this day. Reuter, I think Julius Reuter, if I'm getting his name right, notices that there's a gap in the telegraph lines in Belgium and he uses carrier pigeons to move the news for Stock trading and other business news purposes. And from the money from that and various other ventures, he eventually opens a news wire that uses telegraph lines to move news, gather news from around the world and sell it to newspapers in famously the Times of London refuses to be his customer for several years and he keeps getting scoop after scoop and eventually they bow and become a customer and these businesses become quite large. Reuters in London, the Associated Press forms in the 1840s in the United States. The Germans, the French and the Spanish off and the Italians all form their news wires, but theirs are different in the English speaking world. These are for profit ventures that are accountable to their customers. They're doing news part, part of news is being accountable, letting your audience have a say. And how much do we trust you? Do we believe you? Because if we don't believe you, you're not valuable, right? You're just, just like a government agency issuing edicts like it's just not interesting. Whereas in Germany and France, Spain and Italy, these were government entities more or less from the beginning. And though they mimicked a lot of the freewheeling style of the English language news wires and they did collect information from around the world and frankly some of them have very good product. Deutsche Bella algen France press. But there's still, especially in the beginning, in the, in the telegraph era in the LATTER Half the 19th century, those governments had a lot of control over what was presented and wasn't. But in the English speaking world it was more wide open. It's not to say the government didn't censor troop movements and a handful of other things, but for the most part it was pretty freewheeling, it was pretty wide open. All that's great. By the end of the 19th century, we're gathering news from all over the world, we're reporting it quickly. Competition is improving things and we have something like an honest news system. That's not to say there weren't political party papers because of course there were. You know, to this day I think there is a, the Hartford announcement. It's not the Hartford Current. There's a, there's a newspaper in, in Connecticut named. There's the, whatever the name of the town is, the Republican. There's the Arkansas Democrat. Right. The political parties used to sponsor their own newspapers and decidedly their own point of view. But the, but they were still governed by independent competitors and they knew their readers would be reading those too. So they couldn't go too far. Competition, accountability and this idea that, yes, you can have your own individual idea of the truth just like the medieval Protestant could have his own individual relationship with God. But you're in competition, so you've got to pay attention to the other people's idea of truth. And so it isn't just your truth. It has to be a shared, provable truth. Then two things happen, and this is why we have such fights over news today. One is a group of intellectuals decide, and we could loosely call them the Progressives. I'm not making a point about today's progressives. This is what these people at this time call themselves.
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Trigger
Which time are we talking about?
- [30:44]
Richard Minter
So sorry, let's say 1890 to 1900. The muckrakers emerge just after that, and they do some fabulous reporting on the evil things that happen in meatpacking plants and so on. A little bit later, by 1920, Walter Lippman writes a. A fantastic book called Public Opinion. And they are criticizing the news as being too slavishly devoted to the audience. Right. To put it in British terms, too much like the Daily Mail and not enough like the New York Times. Right. By the way, much later, the New York Times is founded as a Republican newspaper initially. Funny how things start out. So these progressives want to change the news. The news should not be what the public wants to consume. Right? Because from the public's point of view, you consume news for entertainment reasons and to help you make decisions. Who do you vote for? Where do you send your kids to school? Is this a safe neighborhood to build a house in, to buy a house in, et cetera, et cetera, to make decisions. And you don't necessarily expect the media to tell you what your values are. You want to find those out on your own. But there are a great number of intellectuals of this time period who want to tell you what your values are, and they come out of the continental European idea of news. And a great number of the early progressives actually studied in the socialist precincts of Germany in the late 19th century for longer or shorter periods. And they're bringing these ideas with them. This whole freewheeling anything can happen. As long as we can prove it, we can report it. That whole ethos has to go away, and this needs to be calmed down and governed and run by adults. And look, their criticisms are basically correct. I mean, the newspapers were pretty wild. They would say pretty, you know, pretty outrageous things. So it did. They need to be professionalized and reined in a bit. Yes, but what they wanted to design was far more than that. They wanted to design a German French model in which what the media reported and what the governing class wanted was the same. So what they wanted was to reverse the decision that embarrassed the royal governor of New York in 1735, 200 years later. They wanted a do over. And we, the great and the good, should be safe from your ridicule, from your jokes. And they were going to construct a system to do exactly that. So at first they tried a frontal assault and they started, they, they made friends with a very interesting character called S.S. mcClure. And he starts publishing these long form magazines and they would publish literally 10,000 word articles on very wheat production and things of this nature. And no one read those or very few people read those. And so as a commercial venture, McClure wasn't doing. So McClure's magazine is the famous progressive magazine at this time, but there are others, right? So we're in 1906, 1908 here and they start going after, they start doing what FDR would call trust busting. They go after Rockefeller and the other robber barons and they start to realize that these long dense articles aren't going to work. But they still want to change society, they still want to change the media. So they pull back and they think about the problem. And this is where we see the beginning of a century of changes that give us the kind of news that make us entirely unhappy today. So first they begin with awards. Let's reward people not just financially, because what the financial rewards are always going to line up with what the readers want. We need to be able to reward people for things that we want. So they invent the Pulitzer Prize, they invent journalism schools. These are the correct people to be journalists. It's not you, by the way. At this period of time, yes, there are some college people who write for newspapers from the beginning, but most of these, most of these are blue collar observers of real life, right? So they're, they've been sailors and printers and warehouse guys and so they're, they're not as susceptible to ideology and they're very immersed in the real world, right? So like wait, you want to do what? You want to open up asylums and let those people live on our streets? And that doesn't sound like a good idea, me thinking, right, what could go wrong? Those kind of people are not congenial for the progressive cause in 1906. So in 1908 they formed the first journalism school in the United States, which is in Missouri. In 1912 you get the Columbia School of Journalism, which later awards the Pulitzer Prize. And they start to distinguish. This is the professional man who went to, you know, this law school for lawyers. And by the way, there wasn't always before that. There's the four ends of court in your country. So just as they took the casualness of the training of lawyers and professionalized it in a German way, they did the same thing in journalism. Now, in law, that's a more arguable thing. That probably makes sense with journalism. It definitely does not, because you get a very particular class at a very particular point of view. And instead of a newsroom full of competing classes, and some are immigrants and some people were born here before the revolution. And it's just a constant rolling debate and observation about society. Newsrooms used to be really fun, wild places. When I joined the Wall street journal Back in 2000, one of the things the HR department made me sign was a document saying I would not keep a bottle of liquor in the office. And that's probably because decades before, this was actually a problem in the jerug and in other newsrooms, okay? So they start to professionalize, they start to hand out awards, and then they realize what they really need is unions. If they can control the means of production, they control what is produced. Problem is that journalists don't like unions. And there is a battle between 1908 and 1933 to unionize. And most of these people simply do not. Just like school teachers in this period of time rejected all attempts at unionization. And in 19, I think it's 1908, or shortly thereafter, the LA Times is bombed by unions for refusing to unionize. The building explodes, several people are injured. I think one or two are killed. And it made worldwide news, right? This half a city block was burnt or damaged by the explosion. And if the dynamite had been placed slightly better, the death would have deaths would have been far more numerous. And ultimately, the Justice Department investigates and discovers a ring of bombers associated with the unions. And this did not help you union's appeal. The journalists wanted to be free to write what they saw, what they heard, what they felt, what they thought. Doesn't mean these people were saints, but that's what they wanted. They wanted that freedom of movement. And unions wanted a more formalized, controlled structure. And these early violent acts actually slowed down their appeal. But by 1933, they had their first major newspaper unionized. And between the 1930s, under the new Deal in the United States and by the early 60s, they had basically unionized all television, all radio, and all the major newspapers in the United States. And of course, the newswires, the Associated Press and Reuters, were unionized this time all under the same union. So now you have a cartel. Ultimately this union fractures. There's a couple of major news unions, but the News Guild of America was the dominant union at this time. And with unionization comes resistance to change and certain habits of mind which don't like dissent. Dissent is not good for being in charge of a cartel. Toxic effect. And this starts to drive out of journalism the people who. The oddballs, the inner both the innovators, the strange people, the people who you know will camp out and go after a story when everyone else thinks there's no story there. The creative and the self destructive right, which often could be the same person and you left. In its place is a lot of middle class people looking for a safe, predictable job. This changes what kind of journalism is produced. I'm not saying that great journalism wasn't produced in this period 30s to the 60s and even after the 60s, because that would be absolutely false. There are some of the most amazing reporting writing investigations were in the 60s, 70s and 80s. So I'm not casting aspersions, I'm just saying the kind of person who went into the news.
- [40:47]
Trigger
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- [42:11]
Richard Minter
Progressives, even after all of this, they've created journalism schools, they've set up professional associations like the society Professional Journalists to issue ethics rules. They have awards, they have unions. They still don't feel like they have control over this crazy beast that is the media. So they start to push for public ownership. In the late 1940s, we get publicly owned stations, radio stations in San Francisco, New York, LA and a few other places. Ultimately, in the 60s, we see the emergence of National Public Radio and Public Broadcasting, which is the television arm. And it's like, let me show you guys how it should be done is basically the approach of public media to try to condition the private market from being too going off, leaving the catechism. Right. And then we also see the emergence of the media critic, the person who criticizes media coverage and basically taps everyone back into line. This starts roughly with Walter Lippman, but it really takes off in the 1950s and by the 1970s, a lot of places have media critics and people. Journalists live in fear of being criticized by the media critic. And so if you look at what they're doing, they're creating more and more institutional strengths to try to drive the media in one direction, to tamp down dissent, to be the anti Internet to the greatest extent possible. And in the course of doing this, they're actually producing a very different kind of news than what I originally described. They want to write the orthodox official opinion. And we see the climax of this in Covid. How dare you report on dissenting views. How dare you cover ivermectin. How dare you say this? How dare you say that. Well, there is no I dare you in journalism. If it's true, report it. If it's not true, say someone's spreading a lie and prove that. Right, but there's no you're not without fear or favor is the New York Times famous saying back in the day. What about that? It's a great standard and reality is incredibly complex and ever changing. To think that it always that the orthodoxy of the people in charge always comports with reality, it's just a childish point of view. Of course it doesn't. What's really cool is not to be a prosecutor, to defend and punish what the officials think is right and wrong, but to be a detective, not a prosecutor. What's really going on? Why are all why these people think this and are doing this while these other people be a detective? That's the original idea of news. So what we have here are two different ideas of news which have been with us since ancient days, which we thought we banished in the 1735 Zenger case, but are very Much with us today. An official establishment view that is frozen and is negotiated within itself, unaccountable to the general public. Or a form of news that is constantly curious, that holds its ideas very lightly because other evidence might emerge. They might have to release those ideas that understands that the world is complex and different and variegated and therefore fascinating. Two different ideas of news and what we're seeing playing out with all of these battles on X and on YouTube is these two different ideas are in a death match, in a duel, and only one can win. And depending on which side wins, depends on how we will see reality in the coming decades. Will it be dictated by the professionals, the experts, the people who know better? Or will it be wild and woolly and unpredictable and fun?
- [46:37]
Trigger
Well, one that's fascinating, by the way. 40 minute analysis of the history of. Sorry guys, this is why we love you. This is fantastic. So much to pick up on there. The first and obvious thing to me is you haven't said anything so far about the funding model and that must change at some point as well, because if I am in the Gutenberg era, I am selling a newspaper or a proto newspaper to the audience, to the person who's going to buy it if I'm running a T. I was just miraculously in the TV channel studio this morning not to do something, to have a coffee with somebody. And while I was waiting, I watched, you know, they have like a 10 screen screen with different TV channels on it while I sat there waiting for my meeting. Within 5, 15 minutes I probably saw about 20 ads for healthcare of various kinds for a big pharma company. The entire business is basically run. So when you come back to Covid, you're going, that is not an accident that they were pushing a particular narrative on it. Because the entire business model at this point is dependent on the advertisers who dictate to them what they ought to believe. And that's something that I think is probably worth delving into as well. The funding model of, of the business.
- [47:58]
Richard Minter
Okay, so I don't think there are advertisers. Like, I know the network news is full of like incontinence ads and things for old people. Right? But why? It's not because those people run the news. I would be shocked to learn that Bayer or Merck or Pfizer actually says to the anchors of, you know, the evening news, don't do this story or do this story. I that would be shocking to me.
- [48:22]
Trigger
But they don't need to.
- [48:23]
Richard Minter
But, but those advertisers are there because that's who the audience is. Right. If you were selling things that were of interest to young people, it would not be a good investment because there's virtually no one under 40 watching those programs. In fact, getting information from broadcast television is something that younger people just don't do in any appreciable numbers. Yeah.
- [48:52]
Francis
So. And it's. I loved, again, loved the opening of the interview. It was so rich and so informative. And what I think I would love to talk to you about is a role between news and censorship. Because I was reading in pushback if this is wrong, and PBS were giving me fake news, as it were. But I was reading that, particularly in Spain and Britain, that censorship, the moment the Gutenberg press started to be used, the moment it was used to challenge authority, was the moment the authorities basically Crown and Church went, I think we need to take a hold of this.
- [49:33]
Richard Minter
Absolutely right. And I think the. Is it. Tyndale is the first translator of Major translator of the Bible into English. And I think he's burnt alive outside the walls of Oxford in 1557. Something like this. Yeah. These people paid with their lives, but they were a very hardy and determined lot. And they kept insisting on their right to tell people about their encounter with God and their views thereby, which were heterodox. And the more that society, the state, tried to stamp down on them, the more people who didn't share their views developed some sympathy for them. Right. Like. And also it made people question things that had not been questioned before. And this is hard for us to fully imagine because we are living in a post religious world, especially among educated people. But religion was a deadly serious subject in the 16th, 17th, 1800s. And the idea that your baptism might be illegitimate and that you might therefore not be saved, and therefore your death might be meaningless and you might just disappear when you die was horrifying. Because if your death is meaningless in this time period, your life is meaningless. And if you take away someone's meaning, you might as well have ripped out their spine. So these were highly fraught issues. And the idea that because it's such an important and personal issue, you as a matter of conscience, have the right to explore your connection to the divine and therefore your connection to the real world as well. And I'm not saying the divine world isn't real. I'm saying the ordinary world, the world we see here now, that's an extension of this core thing. But in a society that takes religion deeply seriously, the right to pursue and figure this out on Your own, as long as you're not harming other people. Right. If you are bringing children into dangerous activities that end up in their disfigurement or dismemberment, or you're compelling people not to pay taxes to the king or things that defy courts, these kinds of things were not tolerated. And the public largely went along with the king stamping down on that stuff. But if it was just a bunch of people sitting in a room singing songs out of key, the public support for this was quite low. And one of the great aspects of the English constitution at this period, we're talking in the 1600s, before Cromwell, the king had to enforce his will through sheriffs. And every county had a sheriff at this point. And the sheriffs would often refuse to do it. They would refuse to collect taxes if they thought the taxes were unjust. They would refuse to imprison people for, like, what these people are doing is harmless. You know, I don't like their music, I don't like their view of the Bible. But oh, my gosh, they're just sitting inside on a dreary winter day, like, doing their thing. Why do I care? Right? Sheriff just wouldn't do it. And the king's ministers knew this and they tried. There's his correspondence. So they're trying to figure out how to get these sheriffs to actually enforce the king's censorship. But also, the idea that censorship is a bad idea ultimately came to be embraced by Catholics because it was used against them. The censorship was used against them. But initially, this was a deeply, deeply Protestant idea. By the way, censorship always fails in the long run. What's tempting about it is it seems to work in the short run. So let's look at Weimar Germany, 1920s, right? Hyperinflation, jazz Age. You've got this in your mind now, right? We've all seen the miniseries the Social Democratic Party, which the spd, still in German, major force in German politics today. It was the ruling party throughout most of the 1920s, and it was worried about the Nazi Party, its main rival. And it had increasing amounts of censorship, banning books, banning magazines, banning public gatherings. This and all of it drove actual support for these dangerous, evil lunatics, the Nazis. And then in 1933, through a series of unfortunate events, Hitler ends up as Chancellor of Germany and takes all those censorship laws and applies them to the people who put them in place in the first place, the Social Democrats. And there's a famous incident in the fall of 1933 where they cry out in the Reichstag and say, this is wrong. You're violating our rights. You're censoring us. And Hitler said, is a very cold voice. I would have much more sympathy for you and your free speech rights if you hadn't been taken hours away for the previous 10 years. And the Hitler supporters and others applaud Hitler's cold, calculating voice. So this is where censorship leads. It's ultimately used indiscriminately against everyone. It's a very dangerous game. What we're seeing in this Trump hatred today is, oh, my gosh, you're using the laws against me, but I'm one of the good people. And there are those of us who believe in limited government who say, be very, very careful of the laws you write because you're not gonna be in charge forever. And those laws will still be there. Write rules that you can live with when you're not in charge.
- [55:47]
Francis
And it's such a good point. And yet, at the same time, I do have empathy for platforms like YouTube during the pandemic where you had conspiracy theories like David Icke going 4G causing Covid, for example, which we all know to be ludicrous, apart from a very sizable minority of people, some of whom burnt down 4G towers or destroyed them or whatever else. And people will go to the. The execs at YouTube and going, well, this is your fault. How did you allow this to happen?
- [56:19]
Richard Minter
Yes, look, there are people. The audience for censorship is quite large and well educated and well placed, and they will not just say what you're saying, because that's kind of reasonable. Like, can we really push people to commit violent acts and destroy property? Is that like, a good thing? Right. Surely that's actually illegal in many cases. But you can't always get rid of the content that you don't like with such a. You know, not everyone's appealing to violence. Right. Or property destruction, so they use copyright strikes. Oh, this person misused this. You know, he has three seconds of a song, and he doesn't own a license to that song. Or he's got this photograph. Well, he put it on the screen for a second to illustrate his point. Like, but there's no good, at least in the US no good definition of fair use. And so they'll use copyright strikes to take down unpopular people or their claim that the. That they have stolen intellectual property. You know, this. He's copying me. I said this out first, all that kind of thing. So they will be very legalistic and formulistic in taking down these things. I've always wondered why we've decided that the moderation has to be done at a central point and if the moderation isn't perfect, the company that pays the moderators is somehow at fault. Instead, why doesn't every user get a dashboard and say, okay, I don't want to see any teenage nudity, I don't want to see any hear any swear words and you turn the dials right? For all the stuff we hate seeing on our screens or we don't want our kids to see on their screens, there are other people who love it.
- [58:10]
Trigger
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- [59:50]
Richard Minter
Me just say one thing. A lot of this is bad faith, right? Oh, this content is so offensive. No, actually it's just challenging your point of view.
- [59:57]
Trigger
Well, totally agree. And this is What I was going to bring up the example. I don't know if you saw our interview with the, the CEO of the center for Counting Digital. Hey, Imran Ahmed.
- [60:08]
Richard Minter
Great name though.
- [60:09]
Trigger
Great name, isn't it? Imran Ahmed, who did turn out to be a bit of a nutter. But one of the questions I said to him, and this is, I think, where it really is not as simple as I think you're saying, for the following reason, I said to him, look, do you think it should be allowed to call for an armed revolution on social media? And she was like, no. Do you? I was like, well, I don't know. But what I'm saying is this country wouldn't exist if people were not allowed to call for an armed revolution on the equivalent of social media of their time. The United States would not exist. Right?
- [60:47]
Richard Minter
Well, there were people arrested for sedition against the King.
- [60:51]
Trigger
Right, but that's what, that's exactly what I'm saying though. If you think about it in the modern context though, I think you'd probably find that the overwhelming majority of the public would be like, we don't want a civil war caused by people saying these things online. Do you see what I'm getting there?
- [61:08]
Richard Minter
Yes.
- [61:09]
Trigger
They call it the risk of real world harm.
- [61:12]
Richard Minter
Yes. But what we really don't want is these people deciding that these people shouldn't be allowed to say things which aren't really calling for violent revolution. But these people are pretending that it does totally just to disrupt a point of view they don't like, of course.
- [61:28]
Trigger
And that has happened to a ridiculous, disgusting level over the last ten years in particular. There's no question about that. But is it really as simple as saying there is never a case of restricting what people say online, even when there is a credible risk of real world violence?
- [61:50]
Richard Minter
We don't have to reinvent this, okay? The English Common Law has been looking at this problem for, for roughly a thousand years. There's a ton of real world collisions of interests that have produced cases and decisions, and we just have to return to these very common sense ideas. So we can't have people marketing things as food that are in fact poison and people die. Right? The classic example about shouting fire in a crowded theater. It doesn't mean that everything you say has to be provably true to some of your freedom of speech is the right to freely speculate. Right? I think AI will be the end of the world. I think AI will be the greatest thing. Well, you know, as Yoda likes to say, always in motion is the future. Right. Like, it's hard to know. It hasn't happened yet. Right. So people should be. There should be freedom of speculation. You shouldn't be able to hold yourself out as something that you're not. You say, trust me, I'm a doctor. This is perfectly safe. Well, hang on. You did one semester in biology and you failed out. You're not actually a doctor. You can't represent things that are just not true. And so there's a whole body of law about what you can say and do that has been around for many, many years, in some cases centuries. We don't need to reinvent this. We just need to return to the common sense and apply it to the Internet.
- [63:15]
Trigger
So should you be able to call for an armed revolution on Twitter?
- [63:19]
Richard Minter
Actually, I mean, you're asking me about the state of the law or in my heart? In my heart, yes. In my heart, yes. Now, that doesn't mean I think you should. And we're going to gather on 3rd street and the armed stock is here, and this is how you make the dynamite. No, but if you are saying this is a ridiculous state of affairs, we clearly need a better ruling class. You know, this governor should be, you know, hoisted on his batard and thrown out the window or whatever. Yeah, I think you should be free to say that and think that and feel that.
- [63:50]
Francis
You know, what's so interesting is that we went from the model you described until very recently. You know, that Roman model, which was here, is the approved news. You know, we're going to give it to you and everybody else. You know, it's going to calm people down because they feel they've got the facts all of a sudden. I don't know about you, Richard. And I've done. If Constantine feels this way, I kind of feel like I've been in a relationship with somebody and I've just realized they've been lying to me. And not only have they been lying to me now, they've been relying throughout the entire relationship. So I'm now in the position, and I think a lot of people are, where I'm like, you say this, is it true? Can I believe you?
- [64:33]
Richard Minter
Right. And that's the problem with being betrayed, because you re see the relationship and everything that that person or thing has done becomes instantly negative in every detail. But that's an overreaction. That's wrong. Look, we all have problems with the BBC, what they report and what you see on the. I mean, you've. We've all three of us have had the same experience. And most of the people watching who are familiar with the BBC about their service, they're at an event the BBC covered. They saw what they saw and then they saw the BBC report. And you're like, hold on, were you guys even in the same room? Planet, on the other hand, because we feel betrayed, we say everything they do is bad. They've done some brilliant things over the years. My favorite, and I recommend this to everyone, is the Kenneth Clark series Civilization, which you can watch, I think for free on YouTube. It's about four hours. And the BBC was going to go to Color in 1967 and they conceived this idea of having this Oxford don talk about the sweep of Western civilization. People actually bought televisions or gathered to watch. This series was the first BBC release in color. And the guy at the BBC who decided to give Kenneth Clark this was David Attenborough, who goes on in the 70s as a Marxist, but as a fabulous reporter of nature to give us those now that we now satirize them and joke about them, these great accounts of how the natural world works. So yes, Francis, we feel betrayed by the BBC, but let's, let's not let that color our thinking. They did do some brilliant and beautiful things, right? I gave you a couple examples, but we can all think of others. But in quibbles aside, the official version is not the news. The news, the official version is part of the news, but the rest of the news is the tenacious, independent minded investigation to get the closest approximation of the truth that you can before you deadline. And that's subversive and it always will be and that's its appeal.
- [66:47]
Francis
But look, I'm in agreement with you, but let's take that relationship metaphor, betrayal. It kind of. Look, the point you make is true. But let's say you've been in a marriage for 30 years, it's really happy and one day your partner cheats on you. That is a fundamental breaking of the trust relationship.
- [67:11]
Richard Minter
Yes.
- [67:11]
Francis
And many times it doesn't matter what's happened in the 28 years previous, if the two years during that time they've been off shagging the secretary. It's incredibly difficult to go, you know what? I'm now going to go back to the previous 28 years. In many ways you can't do it. You have to have a new relationship with media, right?
- [67:35]
Richard Minter
Yes. And maybe that means they've so destroyed the trust that all of these great brands disappear. Or maybe that's not a good idea and we're throwing the baby out with the bathwater. I don't know the answer. It's one of those two things, but I really don't know the answer. But I do know this, the so called great brands, the legacy brands, cannot continue in the way they have been doing without restoring the relationship of trust. Without trust, you don't have a relationship.
- [68:11]
Trigger
Well, absolutely. And to extend France's metaphor, a thing that I've been somewhat concerned about, hence my kind of pushing back on you to try and find out what the boundaries of what the three of us believe are, is also the fact that when you've been betrayed in a relationship and you leave that relationship, it is very tempting to go, and I don't know if you call this in the us but to go on the rebound.
- [68:32]
Richard Minter
Yes.
- [68:32]
Trigger
Which is to get into a series usually of terrible new relationships with really untrustworthy, unsuitable characters. Right.
- [68:41]
Richard Minter
So you leave the New York Times, you end up following crazy loon on X.
- [68:45]
Trigger
Correct. And I think we're also, if we're being fair, seeing quite a lot of that going.
- [68:50]
Richard Minter
Oh, absolutely.
- [68:51]
Trigger
And so that's where it's interesting. But also I think the technological aspect of this in the current moment is as huge as it was at the times of the printing press and onwards. Because one of the reasons people under 40 don't watch the news is just we use a different set of technology. Yes. That's also another thing that's going on. And I imagine if you're a TV executive now, if you've got a brain, what you're going is how do we make the thing that we currently make more like the thing that the people under 40 are actually watching.
- [69:21]
Richard Minter
Right? Yes. It's so bad that the term news for people under 40, they're consuming news and not realizing it because they don't go to the established legacy brands anymore, even online. Right. But when you get information from the outside world and use it to make decisions and it's more or less independently created, that is news. But that's not how they think of news. They think of news as whatever the output is of these legacy brands and that they don't want. That's toxic, that's distrusted. Right. And the Internet and artificial intelligence presents an enormous opportunity to reinvent how information, what I would call news, is delivered, how it is gathered, how it is processed and verified and fact checked, and then how it is delivered and to whom and on what device. And I think five years from now it'll be completely different across the English speaking world and 10 years from now it'll be completely different Everywhere outside of China.
- [70:30]
Trigger
Describe me the picture that you see five and 10 years from now.
- [70:33]
Francis
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- [72:00]
Trigger
You see five and 10 years from.
- [72:02]
Richard Minter
Now, I think we'll see a lot more people creating news. I think we'll see a set of enforceable software rules that will verify that this is a real photograph and not an AI creation. It's a real video. You really did interview Kim Kardashian, right? We will get to see beyond what's in the story to what are the sources behind it, what software now makes possible through simultaneous automatic instant translation by summing up large data sets, right? You can. You can create an entirely new kind of experience of news. And that's actually something that I'm working on now, which I'll be happy to talk about offline. But the technology is beyond exciting. And I'm not the only one thinking about this. There are other people, some in legacy places, some in startups, who are thinking about this too. There's a lot going on. And if the great and the good can back off and the journalism schools can stop telling us how things should be and let things evolve, I think we could get beyond the official version and have. I mean, think about who also could be drawn. This field is more people have left journalism in the past 20 years. Than any other field. The U.S. department of labor keeps track of this in the United States. And the job description of newsroom reporter has shed more jobs than steelworkers, iron workers, than any other profession they track since 2000. That should be reversed. Why isn't everyone who's creating a, a YouTube channel and struggling to monetize it not able to create content that meets a set of verification rules and then goes into a marketplace and becomes available to every device on the Internet? You can take it or not take it. Think about the differences in perspective that would be possible if you have a single mother in Mexico City covering something and a college professor in Boston covering that same thing and a structural engineer out in Overland Park, Kansas looking at that same thing. And they're both, all three of them are following the objective verification rules that the software makes possible. And they're all reporting it. But they're reporting it, asking the questions and wondering the things and investigating from their own perspectives. I guarantee you they'd see it all differently.
- [74:55]
Francis
And it's such a good point. But if we focus, for instance, on the Charlie Kirk assassination, which is obviously awful and terrible, you have lots of people talking about it and it became quite a fascinating case study to look at people's reactions, including established journalists, and seeing how people reported. And the thing that worries me, Richard, is that the incentives become not to tell the truth, not even to sensationalize the truth, but to spread conspiracy theories because that's where the money is. The money is not in the truth.
- [75:33]
Richard Minter
Right. Well, I would divide the conspiracy theories into two pieces. Right. Some are the native born conspiracy theories. That is to say, I'm not talking about the citizenshadow status of these people. I'm just saying people who reside in our societies who think whatever they think. That's sort of item one, bundle one over here. We also have a lot of bots run by the Iranians, the Russians, the Chinese and other groups who are trying to sow division and plant ideas in our society. And by our society, I mean the Western world and divide it over stupid issues and distract. Right. And you know, the medieval mind used to worry whether the ideas in your, in their heads were their own or put there by some demon. When we consume the Internet, first question we ought to ask is, is this put here by Qatar or Iran or, I don't know, China, Russia. Yeah. Or some interest group in our country or another European country or Australian, whatever. So who is putting this out? We do know that during the 2020 campaign, for example, more than half of the followers, online followers of the Biden campaign were bots, and some of them run out of India and Bangladesh by people who couldn't even speak English. So these are just fake followers, fake social media cred given to conspiracy theories. I don't think the answer is censorship. Let's crack down on all the crazy thoughts, let other people answer back, and in the balance of things the truth will sort itself out. But I do think we need to think about homegrown. I think the crazy people here get to have their say, but I don't think we need to import, we don't need electronic immigration into Western society from Russia, China and other authoritarian places.
- [77:37]
Francis
And we need to find a solution to that. Because if we don't, then what we have, as you say, are these people spouting crazy theories who are artificially boosted. Like, I go on my social media and I'm going, this is patently nonsense, yet it's got 3 million views. How is this right?
- [77:53]
Richard Minter
I mean, all this like pro Hitler stuff online, it's gotta be manufactured. I just, I just can't believe that there is any real audience for a failed evil dictator who died, what, 80 years ago? Right. I mean, it's just there's no like pro Napoleon groups to pick another dictator from a different country. Right. Or pro Stalin groups online. So it's. Why is it all focused on this? Well, that serves the ideological needs of, of the current Russian government to pretend they're fighting Nazis in the Ukraine and so therefore they want to say there are Nazis everywhere. Right. Is there some crazy people in a shack in rural Idaho who truly believe this? I can't rule it out. I don't know. But the online prevalence has got to be from a foreign intelligence service or foreign companies aligned with foreign intelligence services. And then we need to look at the payments made to influencers, people who are legitimate members of our society who have very large followings, who suddenly start saying and doing things that don't fit with the last few decades of our experience of them. Why are you suddenly saying that Churchill was a bad guy? Or, you know, maybe we weren't the good guys in World War II or this dictatorial regime. The Middle east is actually a great place. Like why are we saying these things? Right? Are they receiving money? Who knows? I certainly have no evidence. I'm not going to say things I don't have evidence for. But you do see a lot of out of character moves. And we do see people on both the left and the right who seem to have been funded from Overseas. And we at least ought to have a rule that if you're taking foreign money, you have to declare it openly. So people know fair warning. Hey, you're secretly being paid off by Lichtenstein. That's why your views on banking are what they are. You know, why not? Right? You have to list the ingredients on the food you buy. If you're taking money from over, from outside of NATO, tell us, just tell us. You can say whatever you're going to say, but how about a little warning label?
- [80:06]
Trigger
Well, and maybe one of the. I'm so. I don't think censorship is answer to any of it, but I also wonder whether real journalism's answer to it. Where are the investigative journalisms who are. Where are the investigative journalists who are. I can't say that line for some reason. Where are the investigative journalists who are looking into those allegations? Because every time I post anything that's remotely pro Israel, people say, I've got $7,000 for that post. Well, I welcome people to look into that theory and find out. Likewise with the people you're talking about, let's find out who's getting the money.
- [80:41]
Richard Minter
Well, people, first of all don't understand the economics, right? An online video ad is what, 12 or 15 cents per thousand impressions? Is that about right? Maybe you do a bit better with sponsorships and things. It takes millions of views to make a number interesting at all. Where are the investigative journalists? Investigative journalism is literally, today is the most expensive form of journalism, right? So you need a very profitable publication that also has an open and exploratory mind. Two things together in order to have a crew of investigative journalists, and then not anyone can be an investigator. You have to apprentice, you have to study how to do it. There are. There's a lot of tacit knowledge, a lot of skills that have to be developed to really do this. And the people who think that news ought to be the official story of something are very incurious. Do you hear the story about the guy running for US Senator Maine who had a Totenkopf tattoo on his chest? Right. And incredibly, the guy takes his shirt off and displays it in a video. Like, I would think if you had a Totenkopf tattoo, you would have quietly changed that years ago. But here's the thing, here's my question. Why he said he got it in Croatia. Are Totenkov tattoos common in Croatia? I don't know. Probably not. But why hasn't somebody tracked down the tattoo parlor and interviewed the artist and say, do you have a whole, like Special book of Nazi tattoos. Is this a common thing you do? Do you remember talking to this guy? Right. And in these kinds of questions which aren't. It's not with social media that expensive to find that person. Croatia. But it is time and money. But they aren't minded to do it. They don't have the curiosity to see, well, how did this happen? Right. What are the facts? And a lot of your online influencer type people don't have the investigative skills. Takes years to hone this. You need to find, you know, you need to know what databases to consult, what's trustworthy, what's your. How do you design an investigation? That takes time and practice and frankly, you make mistakes. It's one of the ways you learn. Right. So this has atrophied on the left and never really developed on the right. And until there's a budget and a curious mind to support it, you won't see more of it. You'll continue to see less and less of it. However, I think when technology changes, what kind of news is possible? Technology can also lower the cost of finding out new things. If you really get smart at writing software, you could find that Croatian tattoo artist in a fraction of a minute and then you can contact them across the world and say, hey, can I come see you? I'd like to, I'd like to look through your. Because they all have sample books of tattoos they make and they have a portfolio of the ones they're most proud of. Right. And just, oh, have an open minded interview with the guy and what would you. Maybe he doesn't remember the night, but if it turns out. Oh yeah, we keep a small book in the back. You have to specially request it for the Nazi stuff or. No, we don't do that. This guy came in with the design and showed it to us and we copied it. Two different set of facts. But how did this tattoo come to be? Just an interesting investigation. Right. And Croatia has, you know, interesting ties with the Nazi party in World War II. There could be a cultural memory there. If he had this tattoo in Spain, I would be a lot more surprised. But Croatia, the Nazis hung on to that until the bitter end. The militias associated with Croatia did horrible things against not just the partisans of Tito, but ordinary civilians and religious minorities. So is it possible? Sure.
- [84:51]
Francis
And that's the thing that worries me about the death of the mainstream media. I don't know if you've ever seen the movie Spotlight.
- [84:56]
Richard Minter
Yes.
- [84:57]
Francis
Which is a brilliant movie. It's, it's about the Boston. I can't remember the newspaper, which is the Boston Globe. The Boston Globe in an investigation into pedophilia into the Catholic Church Church in Boston. And you watch this and it's based on a true story and you think to yourself, that's such an important public service. Yes, it's an important public service because there is always going to be corruption, there is always going to be abuse. And the best of the journalists, in my opinion, I'm sure you probably agree, were the people who expose that. And there's never going to be any less of that because human beings are what they are. So if we don't have those people exposing it, then we're going to be in a much darker and more unsafe world.
- [85:40]
Richard Minter
Absolutely. First of all, Boston at the time was a Catholic majority city. Going after the largest religion among your readership group takes guts. But behind that guts means you have a journalistic culture that is got a sense of fearlessness and recklessness, but it also has the professionalism to structure an investigation, to go about it, to make sure the witnesses are actually independent of each other. Right. So if you have two people who claim they saw something, but they're both friends with each other, they're not really independent eyewitnesses. Now it's also interesting their, their choice of targets. Right. If you went after psychologists, especially people dealing with women following divorce or battered women, there's a horrendous amount of sexual abuse there that never really gets investigated. There's also a tremendous amount of sexual abuse among, in public schools by teachers against children. Oddly enough, it appears, and I've not made a real thorough study of this, women against male teenagers. Those things don't get investigated because they don't serve a larger narrative. But still, I think it took guts. Spotlight was a useful thing. The church should be investigated like every public institution. And also I think it's important that the people in charge of vulnerable people have no sexual or financial interest in those people. That is very important. And we too often say in the name of rights and equality, oh well, we should let this person supervise these people or be in control of this group of people. And that person could be great on individual basis, but as a general rule, that will cause problems in the end. As we saw in sort of military training, when we have male drill instructors over female recruits, there were abuses. I mean, we, we have to be mindful of this and we have to be clever about how we design incentives and how we surveil to make sure that wrongdoing isn't happening. And part of that is the media's job. And thank God for the Boston Globe going after the Catholic Church. And I hope they go after all the other sacred chaos, because accountability is desperately needed in all aspects of our society. And I'm afraid if we lose legacy media, we lose the muscle memory to do these kind of investigations.
- [88:24]
Trigger
Richard, that's us. Thank you very much.
- [88:26]
Richard Minter
Thank you.
- [88:27]
Francis
Other examples of times and places where distrust in media is as high as it is today in if so, how is that trust regained within those societies?