When veteran media reporter Brian Stelter first started reporting on the state of the Washington Post earlier this year, its future looked relatively bright. Jeff Bezos had installed a new team to turn things around at a paper that had fallen on hard times since Donald Trump was voted out of office. Yet by the time his piece for The Atlantic was published this week, the sprawling 9,000-word report painted the picture of a paper in crisis.
Stelter appeared for an interview on this week’s episode of Mediaite’s Press Club about what he found, after months of reporting and interviews with more than 70 people. “He’s lost the newsroom,” Stelter, a special correspondent at Vanity Fair, told Mediaite editor in chief Aidan McLaughlin about Will Lewis, the man appointed by Post owner Jeff Bezos to turn the fortunes of the paper around. “Whether he can regain the newsroom is a question.”
Indeed, the mood within the paper is dire, Stelter said. He quotes one “well-respected” journalist at the Post as saying: “either Will goes or a hell of a lot of us go.”
Lewis is currently embroiled in a controversy over his involvement in the clean up of the phone hacking scandal that erupted across Rupert Murdoch’s UK newsrooms, with victims as famous as Prince Harry. Lewis was not involved in the hacking, but he was tasked by Murdoch with handling the clean up job — and maintains he did so ethically.
“Lewis has said he didn’t do anything wrong, but then he’s refused to talk about it. And incredibly, he’s even refused to talk to The Post’s own reporters. So we’re in this really strange situation where The Washington Post is reporting on its CEO. One of the reporters on the team joked to me that it feels like a suicide mission because you’re literally writing tough stories about your boss,” said Stelter.
Stelter also explained the role Bezos plays in the newsroom, former editor Sally Buzbee’s exit, and the future of the publication. Mediaite’s Press Club airs in full Saturdays at 10 a.m. on Sirius XM’s POTUS Channel 124. You can also subscribe to Press Club on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. Read a transcript of the conversation below, edited for length and clarity.
Aidan McLaughlin: Let’s talk about The Washington Post. You have a major new piece in The Atlantic that peels back the curtain on the current crisis at the paper. Could you lay out what the current problems are?
Brian Stelter: There are many, unfortunately. And this is a tragedy. This is a tragic story because The Washington Post is, was, but is and will be a great newspaper. It’s an essential publication. It’s one of the most important news organizations in the country. And yet it has suffered through this decade of missed opportunities and big missteps and bad hires. And that’s what I detailed in this piece with The Atlantic. And you’ve known me for a long time, I’m used to writing blog posts and thousand-word stories. I’ve never written a big magazine article like this. It’s 9000 words. So I’ll give you the summarized version that came out of months of reporting. The summarized version is that Jeff Bezos came in a decade ago and he truly was a savior. Everybody agrees on that. The Amazon billionaire comes in and he saves The Post from oblivion. This thing was going down. There was no future for the post that Don Graham could imagine that involved profits. So Jeff Bezos comes in, he saves The Post, but then he gets distracted. He lets his attention go off elsewhere. He doesn’t really focus on the property that he owns. He instead focuses, maybe understandably, on Amazon, on Blue Origin, on his personal life, on his $500 million super yacht. And the point is, as many Post staffers told me, they feel like there’s been a lack of leadership at The Post. So that’s the big picture. That’s what the story is about.
This piece is sweeping, it’s a fantastic, decisive story about how we got here. You spend a good time talking about the history of The Post. One of the things that really struck me is the role that Fred Ryan plays in all of this. When you look at the resume he had when he got appointed to be publisher by Jeff Bezos, it was really the ideal resume that you’d want from someone to turn around the fortunes of The Washington Post. But he failed to do that. What’s the role that Fred Ryan played and how did that all go wrong?
Maybe he succeeded and failed. You’re right about his background. He brings this experience from Politico. Playbook, for example, which is still a must-read today, is the kind of product that The Washington Post should have invented 15 years ago. And then once Playbook took over, The Washington Post should have found a way to one-up Playbook. The idea that different companies have owned the DC newsletter game, but not The Post, it’s a great example of the problem The Post has faced. It has had this monopoly position in print. I grew up in Maryland. The Post was my hometown paper. I would wait up every Sunday night to read Howard Kurtz’s media column. I’d be refreshing The Washington Post website to read it. The post has had all these advantages, all this dominance. But in the move to digital, it has had its lunch eaten by Playbook, by Axios, by Punch Bowl. And part of that does fall on Fred Ryan. Fred Ryan, he was the publisher for about a decade at The Post. He was the most important person Jeff Bezos hired. Because when you’re the owner of a paper, the publisher is your most important person. But for long stretches, Bezos disappeared. And so Ryan was left alone to run it. And there’s a lot of criticism inside The Post about how Ryan handled it. There are a couple things everybody says he did really well. He cared a lot about PR and prestige and promoting The Post’s brand. He played a critical role when journalists were in harm’s way, in making sure Jason Rezaian got out of Iran, getting The Post staffers out of Afghanistan in 2021. He gets a lot of credit for that. But what he doesn’t get credit for, what he gets blamed for, is not seeing around the corner and seeing that the Trump bump wouldn’t last forever, and not building for the future. I’m sure he has defenses for that, but he’s never talked on the record about his time at The Post since leaving last year. So I try to offer those defenses in the piece, but there is really nearly unanimous criticism of him for not building The Post as a machine to rival The New York Times. Because you remember during the Trump years, The Post and The Times were neck and neck. They were both growing. They were both winning. They were both getting scoops. And the difference since then is that The Times has taken off like a rocket and The Post has fallen behind.
The thing that Politico figured out, is they nailed all of those little arbitrage opportunities for digital news. They realized that Politico Playbook would be a great place to monetize subscriptions. And they also figured out that you could post a micro news story that was breaking and beat all of the newspapers to the punch. And it seems like that’s something The Washington Post should have figured out.
And there were times when Bezos was pushing The Post to do that. Early on when he acquired the paper, he was involved quite deeply. He cared about the colors of the buttons on the website. He cared about the language of the subscription promotions. He was invested. He cared a lot about page load times. That makes sense, right? He’s coming from Amazon. He knows the most important thing is if you’re buying a product, the page has got to load quickly. So he brought a lot of that energy, he cared a lot about the technological back end as well. But I think a couple of things happened. One, the initial experiments didn’t work out as well as maybe he had hoped. And number two, Blue Origin was happening. His relationship with Lauren Sanchez was happening. He had a lot of reasons to be off in different directions, and he trusted Fred Ryan to mind the store. And that’s where the criticism of Ryan comes in, that he didn’t know exactly what to do. That while The New York Times was out acquiring Wirecutter and Wordle and The Athletic, The Post was not making acquisitions. Now, there’s good reasons why. Fred Ryan knew that it’s hard to integrate products. There’s lots of good reasons why M&A isn’t always the right path. But the point is that The Times was building for the future, and The Post feels like it wasn’t. And there was a great quote in the piece that I think sums this all up. You know when you’re in the middle of a big reporting project and you hear a quote and you realize, oh, that quote explains the entire story? Here was that quote for me. It was Patty Stonesifer, who’s a Bezos friend, who came in to figure out what went wrong last year. She says to a Post reporter, “We didn’t lose this race in two years. We lost this race in five years.” What she meant by that was when the Trump bump happened, when the whole world was relying on The Post for news about Donald Trump, that was the time five years ago that you had to start building for the future. You had to start hiring more engineers and more subscription experts and more technicians. You had to build the back end so that you could sustain the growth five years from now. And that’s where The Post failed. And by the way, that’s where The Times succeeded, because The New York Times in 2018 was hiring all the people it would need to have a profitable business today. So to me, that quote is the whole story, that five years ago you had to be building for the future.
You had Patty Stonesifer on the record for this piece. What did she say about what The Post is going through?
You know how this works, you get to the end of a story, you’ve been working on it for months. You’re trying to get people on the record. They’re not willing to do it. And then finally yesterday, as I was closing this piece, she decided to go on the record, which I was grateful for. And there were two things she wanted to say: she wanted to reassure everyone that Bezos is involved, that he does care about The Post, that he reads it every day, that he’s invested in its future, that he’s involved in meetings. And she wanted to say that she is back and present, working to reassure the newsroom. So basically, Fred Ryan leaves in 2023. Stonesifer comes in as Bezos’ proxy and friend to try to figure out what to change, what to do differently. They ended up hiring William Lewis, who we can talk about. William Lewis is now scandal-plagued, now embattled. He’s the new publisher, the new Fred Ryan at the Washington Post. So Lewis is this tarnished figure. A lot of Post staffers don’t want to deal with him, but everybody likes Stonesifer. She’s the woman in the middle of all this trying to repair it. She’s the one in touch with Bezos. She’s the one in touch with Lewis. I think she’s trying to steady the ship. She’s trying to restore some peace. Her main message was that Bezos is still invested in The Post, even though he’s not at the office, even though he’s not in the building. He does care about its future. And I think that is an important thing for Post staffers to hear. I don’t know about you, but I think a lot of journalists are a little insecure. I think we’ve got egos. I think we’ve got anxieties. I think you want to know what your owner thinks of your place. You also want autonomy, by the way. You want independence. And Post reporters do have that. Bezos does not meddle. He doesn’t assign stories. He doesn’t kill stories. He’s not involved in the newsroom at all, which is a good thing. But where Post staffers say he should be more involved is on the business side. And that’s really the crux of the story.
Tell us about Will Lewis, because he came in to replace Fred Ryan. He has a fantastic resume. He was a journalist in the UK, and he ended up moving to the executive side of the news business and had a lot of success there. But now his past is coming back to haunt him. There’s been a series of brutal reports from The New York Times, from The Washington Post even, about his past and his involvement in the phone hacking scandal that rocked Murdoch world about a decade ago. Tell us about Will Lewis and how his hiring has now created a huge problem for The Washington Post.
That’s right. Bezos has been really high on this guy. He has a lot of confidence in Will Lewis. He believes Will Lewis is the kind of big thinker businessman that can really redefine and reinvent The Post’s business model. Those are the stakes. That’s how big this is for Bezos. He doesn’t want small changes. He doesn’t want The Post to go from 2.5 million subscribers to 2.8. That’s not success for him. Success for him is tens of millions of subscribers, a new business model that the entire industry can learn from. And he has bet big on Will Lewis to do that. And my sense is, even this month, as all these scandals have erupted, he still wants Will Lewis to do that, to reinvent The Post’s business model. But you’re right, that these stories in Lewis’s past about what he knew, what he might have done revolving phone hacking, that is what’s come to haunt him. He has always denied wrongdoing. He has said that he was part of the solution. He was basically sent in to clean up Rupert Murdoch’s mess when Murdoch’s UK newspapers were found to be hacking into people’s phones, basically stealing information in order to to win scoops. It’s the kind of thing that would never fly in the US. And it didn’t fly in the UK either. Some people went to jail. This was a huge embarrassment for Rupert Murdoch in the UK. And it is true, Will Lewis was brought in to clean it up. But in the middle of cleaning up, there’s a question about whether records were deleted, whether things were destroyed. And that is really where the controversy lies. Lewis has said he didn’t do anything wrong, but then he’s refused to talk about it. And incredibly, he’s even refused to talk to The Post’s own reporters. So we’re in this really incredible, strange situation where The Washington Post is reporting on its CEO. One of the reporters on the team joked to me that it feels like a suicide mission because you’re literally writing tough stories about your boss. But that team has independence, complete independence. They were able to put a story on the front page of The Post that was very damaging for its CEO, and that’s actually exactly what we should want out of news outlets. That’s a sign of integrity. As Stonesifer said to Puck, that’s a sign of independence. So maybe that’s the way forward. Will Lewis is going to run the business side. He’s going to be aggressively reported on by his own reporters. And maybe that’s going to be the fragile peace that winds up here. But I think the answer is we don’t know what’s going to happen with him, because there are staffers at The Post, there are reporters who said to me things like this: “He hates us”. “We will never trust him.” One reporter said to me, “Either Will goes or a lot of us are going,” meaning they’re going to leave. So there’s a real fear about people leaving as a result of all this controversy. And we don’t know what’s going to happen.
I wanted to ask you about that quote because it was really striking. You described the reporter as a well-regarded one within The Post. And the quote was, “Either Will goes or a hell of a lot of us go,” which is not good for the publisher of a paper, especially a paper that has suffered an exodus of high-quality reporters over the last couple of years. From your sense of talking to your sources, it sounds like we still don’t know whether or not Jeff Bezos is going to stand by Will Lewis, but it certainly seems like he’s lost the newsroom.
He’s lost the newsroom for now. Whether he can regain the newsroom is a question. He does seem to have Bezos’ support for now, but we’re having to read tea leaves to know that. We’re having to look at Stonesifer being there, meeting with staffers, trying to reassure them. We’re having to look at Bezos writing a one-paragraph memo mentioning Will as a sign of support. As someone said to me for this piece, Jeff works in mysterious ways. It’s hard to sometimes decipher what he’s thinking or doing, and he likes it that way. So I don’t think we know. But months ago when I started this, I thought Will Lewis was the happy ending to the story. And he might still be the happy ending. That’s the weird thing about the situation at The Post. He has some good ideas for the business, and he’s hired some deputies who are really good at this subscription business model. I think they know what they’re doing. I interviewed Carl Wells who is the guy in charge of subscriptions on the business side. Like Lewis, he came over from Dow Jones, from Rupert World. He has a great plan. He has a pyramid where he talks about micropayments on the bottom, people being able to pay for a single article, or what you do now for The Post, you buy the bundle, or he wants to build up the pyramid so that you can buy premium subscriptions, business subscriptions for companies. He’s right to do all of that, like Axios and Politico already have. A lot of these are ideas are not new, but they need to be tried at The Post. So there are good people in place there and they’re executing on this plan. But whether this controversy around Lewis can subside enough for him to be effective is an open question. So I went into this thinking that was going to be the end of the story. And then I realized, as these controversies erupted and Lewis lost the trust of the newsroom, that the story had changed. So in the past week, I reached out to a bunch of new sources because I just wanted to make sure I was hearing from different corners of the newsroom, and that’s really when I picked up on just how intense the criticism of Lewis is. That’s where that quote came from, saying either he goes or a lot of us go. That’s a very real sentiment. Now, of course, are people blowing off steam? Will they actually follow through? I don’t know, but this has really paralyzed The Post. It’s all people there are talking about. It’s another distraction for The Post at a time when it doesn’t need any more distractions.
What do you make of his line that he decided early on that the phone hacking scandal is something he’s never going to talk about? The phone hacking scandal is not a story that’s going anywhere, because there’s the case that’s moving forward in the UK courts brought by Prince Harry and a bunch of other celebrities who were victims of the hacking. This is going to be a huge story. This is going to be on the front page of The Post for a while.
It is a big story. Lewis is not being sued personally, but his name does keep coming up and it will keep coming up in relation to this case. And I think what has so many Post journalists unnerved is the fact that The New York Times reported, that NPR’s David Folkenflik has reported, and that I’ve now reported in The Atlantic, is that Lewis repeatedly pressured the editor of The Post not to cover the story, not to cover the lawsuit. So this brings in Sally Buzbee, who was the editor of The Post, another Bezos hire. She was hired by Ryan and Bezos back in 2021 to replace the acclaimed editor, Marty Baron. And Sally Buzbee had a rough time. She had a very difficult few years as editor. She fought with Ryan. She believed he was incompetent. She tried to work well with Will in the beginning. But Will Lewis wanted to bring in his own man, his own friend from London, Robert Winnett of The Telegraph, so he tried to move Buzbee off into a smaller job. He tried to demote her to run a different part of the operation. She resisted. She left. But what we learned after she left, after Will Lewis announced her departure without even a friendly goodbye, without a party or anything, what we learned is that Buzbee was under pressure from Lewis not to have The Post report on the lawsuit about phone hacking victims. Thankfully, Buzbee, as journalists tend to do, she said, we’re not gonna take orders from you about this. We’re going to go ahead and publish this story. And so The Post did report on the lawsuit and did report on Lewis and did report on the controversy. But the fact that Lewis pressured her is very notable. Of course, there was a denial from The Post that they rejected the word pressure. But I’m confident here to say that Buzbee was freaked out by what she heard from Lewis on this. So of course, that just begs the question about what he’s hiding, if anything. And, as you know, any time a journalist is waved off something, it only makes them more curious about what’s going on. Come on.
Some analysis has suggested that the clash between Will Lewis and The Washington Post is the result of differing approaches to journalism between the UK and the US. You’ve written extensively, books even, about Rupert Murdoch’s media empire. Do you see it more as a clash between the UK and the US, or between the way Rupert Murdoch runs his newsrooms and the way other places in the US run their newsrooms?
I would say it’s more of the latter. I thought Jon Allsop nailed this for Vanity Fair the other day, I’m going to quote him. He said, “Reporters going undercover for pay or paying for information are more commonly accepted in UK journalism than they would be in American circles. But even these differences are complicated,” he said. “Such practices are not consensus norms in the UK, and when they are employed these days, it’s on public interest grounds.” So in other words, there’s a lot of British journalists who are just as offended by the techniques that are allegedly used here as American journalists are offended. So I think there’s a dividing line about types of journalism within the UK. Is it ever okay to be using deceptive techniques to get information or not? And I think that’s for dispute within the UK. We’re also talking about techniques that were used more than a decade ago. And I think one of the defenses of Lewis is that we’re talking about a very different time in his career. And also that there’s relatively little that’s been directly implicating him, instead questions about whether he assigned stories that were based on hacked or stolen information, for example. It is very complicated. I think the way that Post reporters view this in a way that’s simpler is to say the following. They say, why won’t he answer questions about it? Why is he saying he refuses to talk? Why does he seem like he has something to hide? I think there’s almost more concern about that element than there are some of the fundamental details. Here’s another thing that’s been concerning. When David Folkenflik of NPR went to report on this last winter, Lewis tried to talk him out of it by offering him an exclusive interview. A deal. If you don’t report on this hacking controversy, I’ll give you my first interview with The Post. Folkenflik declined it. And then he wrote about that offer recently. In response, Will Lewis called Folkenflik an activist, not a reporter. And this is interesting, probably for Press Club listeners. There are journalists who perform advocacy roles. There are lots of partisan and opinionated journalists out there. But Folkenflik is not one of them. He is a straight shooter. He is as straight as they get. And so for Will Lewis to call an old-fashioned, by-the-book, straightforward journalist an activist, that offended a lot of people at The Post. And here’s how Will Lewis responded and handled that. He had a bunch of small group meetings, like 25 reporters at a time. And in those meetings, he said he had made a mistake. He said he regretted calling Folkenflik an activist. He said he won’t do it again. But he didn’t tell that to the entire staff. His communication strategy has been very muddled. And frankly, the average Post staffer has heard very little from him this month. So I think he has a PR crisis on top of a leadership crisis at the moment.
Not to get too granular into the media coverage of media coverage here, but Dylan Byers had a report, I’m sure you saw it in Puck last week, where he reported that the foreign desk at The Washington Post ‘hatched a scheme to dig up dirt’ on Will Lewis. He got a lot of criticism for that reporting because people argued that obviously Post reporters are supposed to be reporting on their publisher. I think his argument would be that it wasn’t necessarily an earnest effort to report on Will Lewis, it was an effort to take shots at the publisher of the paper. But did you come across any of that in your reporting? And what did you make of that Dylan Byers story?
Of course the conventional wisdom view inside The Post is that Will Lewis is leaking to Puck in order to tell his side of the story. But let’s just be honest. Let’s just put our cards on the table. And I say that as a fan of Puck and someone who reads every column Dylan Byers ever writes. I was proud to work with him at CNN when we overlapped years ago. But the conventional wisdom view inside The Post is we read Puck to find out what Will Lewis thinks of us. And that is a wild situation. But that’s where we are. And by the way, that’s true elsewhere, too. When Matthew Belloni writes about the movie industry, people in Hollywood read Puck to find out what’s going on in their movie studio. So it is a testament to Puck. But yes, there’s very much a situation going on here where it feels like Will Lewis’s supporters are trying to get a narrative out, and Post reporters are trying to get a different narrative out. And I guess what I would say about that is this is no way to run a news organization. This is not sustainable. It’s not tenable. It’s not going to last like this.
A proxy war between the publisher and the newsroom is not good.
We’re at the end of June. It’s been probably one of the worst months in the history of The Post. This has rattled and consumed the place. Can July be any better? And we will find out.
We know that the paper lost $77 million last year. You report in your piece in The Atlantic that they’re on track to lose another $50 million this year. How existential does this feel for The Post? Is this something that you think they’ll be able to turn around and survive? Or with the the exodus of talent, the clashes between the newsroom and the publisher, and the the mass loss of cash, does this feel like something that could be seriously damaging to The Post going forward?
I think the credibility crisis is real. But I think in some ways, The Post still has enormous advantages and opportunities in front of it. So I don’t think this is existential for The Post as an institution. I do think there are individuals for whom they can’t come back from this, or they’ll decide they don’t want to be a part of this. But Jeff Bezos, for all of his faults, and I’ve spent thousands of words outlining some faults of his when it comes to The Post, he’s been willing to take on these losses. He bought The Post for $250 million. He’s probably about half a billion in so far to date because of the losses over the years. He’s probably put in about $500 million into this thing. He’s willing to sustain more losses. I’ve had people call me in the last few weeks saying, do you think Bezos is going to be willing to sell? Will he sell? Because I’m ready to write a check. The Post is valuable even though it’s been losing money. People want to own The Post. The Post is a treasure. It’s an icon. If not Bezos, there would be people lining up to buy it even though it’s losing money. So with that in mind, I think there’s a world in which a year or two from now, The Post is rebounding, gaining subscribers again, shaking this off. And here’s what Bezos would like. He would like The Post to think big again. He would like big new ideas. Now one critique of Bezos is, what are your ideas, man? Tell us what to do. People want leadership from the owner, and that hasn’t always been forthcoming. But he does seem willing to get behind other people’s big ideas. I’ll bounce one off you and see what you think of this. Ten years ago, Bezos came in and said The Post should do more aggregation. We should be aggregating. And the newsroom didn’t necessarily love that. But imagine a world where The Washington Post had invented Apple News. That’s the kind of big thinking that I think the owner wants. Now here’s a path to get there, and I think this is one of the most important details I put in this piece that I hope people notice: some people around Bezos and inside The Post have said you should have a board of directors. You should appoint an advisory board or a board of directors, so that there’s a lot of smart people around the table overseeing The Post. That way, it doesn’t all fall on the publisher. Now, Bezos has not done that to date. Maybe he doesn’t like the idea, but I think it’s something worth considering. A.G. Sulzberger at The Times, he benefits from having a board of directors, people that he can work with, and checks and balances for The Times. And I think that might be a path forward for The Post. Have a bunch of smart people around the table from time to time, keeping an eye on the institution, and giving Bezos more information about The Post.
I want to talk about the 2024 election with you. Back in May, you published a piece for The New Republic asking readers to imagine a world in which Trump is elected for a second term. And you painted this very vivid image of how Trump could silence his critics, including in the press. And this is something that’s been a recurring topic on this show. Almost everyone I’ve spoken to is raising alarms about what a second term would mean for journalists.
I’ve been hearing.
I’m naturally disposed to being a bit more sanguine than others. And so I’m always a little bit skeptical when I hear anything close to alarmism. So, Brian, how alarmed should I really be about the potential of a second Trump term when it comes to his treatment of the press?
Well, Aidan, you look so privileged in your library. You have a beautiful glow behind you. All of your books, it looks very rich. You look very comfortable. Maybe you don’t have to worry. I kid, I kid, I do think you should worry. Actually, worry is the wrong word. I think what we should all do is a thought experiment, a thought exercise. What could happen? And it doesn’t mean necessarily all negative things, but I think it’s smart to be going into this election season with eyes wide open about the possibilities. And I say that because I know that’s what some editors and publishers and owners are doing. I’ve talked with a couple of media CEOs who are doing this exercise, and they’re sitting down and thinking through, okay, what are the levers that Trump could use? What buttons could he push to punish my organization? How could he use the government against my news outlet? And it doesn’t mean he’s going to do it, doesn’t mean we want to give him any ideas about how. But let’s go into 2025 with a vivid idea. For example, some obvious ones would be IRS audits and government regulations, use of the FCC in new ways to control license holders. But then there are, of course, the more subtle ways that I think are more corrosive and more dangerous. Think about how Trump tried to take out Amazon, tried to target Amazon because Bezos owned The Washington Post and because Trump didn’t like what The Post was reporting about him. If you’ll recall, five years ago, Trump would call it the Bezos Washington Post, or the Amazon Washington Post. He was trying to punish the Amazon business by denying government contracts, and affecting the post office, and all that sort of stuff in order to punish The Washington Post. Now, he was not very effective at doing so in his first term, but we know that there was also meddling. There’s strong reporting that indicates there was meddling with CNN, with the owner of CNN when AT&T was trying to buy Time Warner. That’s another episode that we can look to from the past as a blueprint for the future. So not to worry, but to be aware of the possibilities is smart. And in my piece at The New Republic, I took it a few steps further and imagined a very destructive scenario where an act of violence or an act of protest could be used to punish the press. Well, here’s what I imagined, and you tell me if it seems impossible. Let’s say some protesters disrupt Inauguration Day. And let’s say that Trump forces come out and say the protesters were getting help from the press. The press is aiding and abetting the protesters. They’re anti-American. They’re anti-Trump. They’re trying to kill Trump. That rhetoric is not far off from what we hear today. There is already in MAGA world this narrative that Trump is going to be assassinated by the deep state because they just can’t stand the thought of a second Trump term.
Marjorie Taylor Greene said yesterday that Biden and the debate moderators want to assassinate Trump.
I haven’t even seen that because I live in reality.
Tucker Carlson repeatedly floats that Trump is going to be assassinated by Election Day.
That is really dangerous. I think it’s really dangerous to push that before Election Day because then after an inauguration, it makes it easy for the security state to take drastic action in the name of protecting the president. Imagine a world where Trump doesn’t travel with the press. Imagine a world where he flies out of Andrews Air Force Base, and journalists are arrested for trying to see where his plane’s going. This is not farfetched to imagine a world where a couple journalists get beat up at a rally and then editors say, don’t go to those rallies. Imagine a world where one journalist gets shot by a border officer and we don’t know what happened and we don’t know why and it’s all very murky. But just that kind of spasm of violence could be enough to cause newsrooms to pull back for their own protection. That’s not to say every journalist would pull back. It’s not to say everybody would fall in line. But I do think there’s a world where perceived threats or security risks could be weaponized in order to retaliate against the press. And what I fear most and what I was trying to refer to in this piece for The New Republic is the self censorship. People will pull back on their own accord to protect themselves. And that is very much what we see in more autocratic states. When we talk about democratic backsliding, it doesn’t happen all at once, doesn’t happen on one day, it doesn’t happen all in the same direction. But it happens bit by bit, as people decide to pull back, lay low. I was about to say between us, but we’re on a podcast, so I sound like an idiot. Between us, I have had fellow journalists say to me, in 2025 if Trump is reelected, I might just lay low for a while. I might just not be writing as much. I might not be reporting on politics. I might try to find a new beat, or a new job, or go into a new industry. I have had people whose names you know, make these comments to me. So I do think this is a real fear. It’s something really worth grappling with.
Guardrails are what keep something like a Trump presidency from going off the rails. And one of the major guardrails is the media. So I was heartened when the Dominion defamation case hit Fox News hard and hit Newsmax hard, and made it clear that there are consequences for embracing lies about the 2020 election. My fear now is, and we’ve seen the coverage on Fox News in particular over the last couple of years, they’ve become very good at just making sure that they don’t defame private companies or defame people, but they still are more than happy to indulge in election denialism or election fraud conspiracy theories. And I fear that’s going to be something that’s going to get turbocharged by the time we get to the 2024 election. Let’s say either Trump loses and you have Fox News giving fuel to election lies that he’s going to undoubtedly spread, or Trump wins and you have a second Trump presidency where some of his behavior is also excused by Fox. Is that something that concerns you, or do you think that the network has possibly learned its lesson from the 2020 fiasco?
Fox learning a lesson. Those are interesting words to put in the same sentence. I think the lesson is very narrow. As you just said, the very narrow lesson is not to defame certain companies that have a high propensity to sue, but more broadly, they are already laying the groundwork for another insurrection. They’re already laying the groundwork for any Biden victory to be considered delegitimate, and for any Trump loss to be considered a rigged plot. It’s already happening. It’s happening in plain sight. And in that way, they’re doing a disservice to their audience. Democrats tend to be the stressed-out, anxious ones who assume they’re always going to lose. I understand that a lot of Democrats lose a lot of sleep for that reason. That’s actually a healthier way to be than the Fox News Republican narrative, which is we’re winning, we’re ahead, we’re going to crush the evil liberals, we’re going to make them cry again. Because we’ve seen time and time again when Republicans come up short, as in 2022, when the red wave doesn’t materialize, Fox viewers are confused. They’re hurting. What actually happened is they’ve been misled by their favorite shows. But instead of blaming their favorite shows, they blame other people or other forces. They come up with conspiracy theories. They say it was rigged, they blame blah, blah, blah. They blame big cities with Democrat voters. We’ve seen this over and over again. And I do think we’re going to see it again this fall. But let me flip around, be the counterargument to myself. There’s also a world where Trump loses and most people just let out a giant, not a sigh of relief, but just an exhale. This country desperately wants to exhale and have a break from all of this hate and division. And I don’t put that all on Trump. I just think in general, this is a country that’s fatigued, that doesn’t want to deal with this noise as much. And I do wonder if there’s a world in which, rather than the damaging and frightening vision that I portrayed, even in the event of a Trump win, maybe things are much more moderated. Maybe the press is empowered and not threatened by a second Trump term. Maybe we’re right back to 2017 all over again.
There is a lot of pessimism about the cable news industry right now. I feel like you’re someone who is an optimist about it.
Yes, I am.
What do you think about the future of the cable news industry, and why are you optimistic about it?
Optimistic doesn’t mean naive or in this case, doesn’t mean cable news is going to be as profitable as it was ten years ago. I’m not saying that. I’m not saying that cable news will reach as many people necessarily as it did twenty years ago or ten years ago. But I’m optimistic because there are some fundamentals that I think favor cable news and video news. We probably won’t call it cable news in ten years, but, 24-hour-a-day video news. People want to watch people. People want companionship. People want background music for their lives. People want to tune into people they view as friends on television or on the screen of whatever size and know what’s going on in the world. People want to check in and feel a little smarter after watching all of these basics that apply to cable news. Some of them also apply to Instagram, they apply to local TV. Those forces are not going away, even though we’re moving into much more of a short-form video world, even though audiences are fragmenting, even though people are cutting the cable cord, the fundamentals that bolster television news are there. People are becoming actually more visual creatures. They want to read less and watch more. People want to be a part of what is going on at any given day in society, beyond politics, by the way. I think the political fatigue and burnout and hangover sometimes mask a broader truth, which is that when the eclipse happens, when that amazing aurora lit up the northern part of the U.S a couple of months ago, people want to tune in. They want to watch. They want to be a part of it. They want to feel like they’re part of it. And that’s what cable news television news does. We’re taping this on Thursday. The debate is later today. People are going to be listening to this after the debate, but I think about the debate and how it looks on CNN. Look at CNN with this beautiful set, these outdoor studios. It feels like 2016 again when I’m watching CNN this week. They have gone all in with this excellent debate coverage, and it’s been the best of the best version of CNN that I’ve seen in years. And I say that as somebody who was booted from there two years ago. When I look at CNN this week, I think this is why there’s a strong, vibrant future for television news. It is bringing people together. It is showing them the full debate in this country with Republican strategists next to Democratic strategists, and they are having the fight. It’s actually happening. I guess I sound like a TV news nerd, but I am. That’s what I was 20 years ago. I launched TVNewser 20 years ago, and I still care about it to this day. I still think that at the end of the day, there are people like my mother-in-law, people like my brothers who live in Maryland, people like you and me, we want to tune in and see other people. We want to tune in and see a trusted face, or some people that we want to see argue, or some people we can’t stand. Hate watching is a thing too. But all of it comes down to that same reality. People want to tune in and feel like they’re part of something bigger and share experiences. I don’t know, maybe I should launch my own TV network. I guess I’m so bullish.
