Ben Smith, former media columnist at the New York Times and now the editor-in-chief of Semafor, joins Dan to talk about today's ultra-challenging news media landscape. The industry is significantly weaker than it was in 2016, and Trump's aggressive lawsuits have the executives in charge of CBS and ABC scrambling to appease him. Will the death blow for America's free press come from within? Smith runs through what we should have learned from the first Trump presidency, how cults of personality rule in journalism just like they rule in politics, and why the dominance of the Times is terrible for fascism-proofing the country. For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email [email protected] and include the name of the podcast.
Chapter 1: What challenges does the media face today?
And it's not that you necessarily believe the things that are being said on Fox News. But it is important if you're a listener of POTS to probably know what they're talking about some of the time. Like literally what Republican legislators are walking into the House with no idea what the Democratic colleagues like read that morning. And the Democrats have no idea what the Republicans were reading.
And so we have this very popular feature called Blindspot. It's literally like we're not trying to arbitrate the reality of this. Often these are true stories just with different emphasis, totally different emphasis. but the Republicans are talking about some crime committed by an illegal immigrant in Colorado. And the Democrats are talking about some just totally different story. Right.
And I think some level of just trying to say like, this is giving a glimpse of the reality that the other side is living in is pretty useful. I mean, just act sort of actionably useful. And, um,
and sometimes i do think social media is a machine for taking the stupidest thing that your opponent said and elevate the stupidest version of the stupidest thing they think and constantly barraging you with it and there might there might be someone in there who's actually making a reasonable case you could argue with but it will be totally swept away in social media and i think we do try to sort of you know to elevate the stronger arguments and to try to like
creates some space for reasonable disagreement. So I think there's a fair amount of that too. Although there is also, as you say, like eroding shared factual basis around this for sure.
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Chapter 2: How did Trump's administration impact media dynamics?
One, you needed the media to get your message out. That was a fundamental thing. If I was preparing Barack Obama for a press conference, the Faustian bargain in my head is I'm going to take a bunch of questions that are going to be annoying. They're going to be about the things that I know voters don't care about. But the price of that is the airwaves.
It's the way I can get my message in front of people. And you would react to – the media could, if they picked a thing that was going to become the narrative, could change government policy, right? It would create such a firestorm that you would have to stop doing it or change course or whatever else.
I do sort of question after watching this election, the first couple weeks of Trump, whether – like it seems like that role is so diminished as to be – is that the media becomes – maybe this is for better, not for worse from your perspective, but more – almost entirely an observer and chronicler of the process as opposed to a participant when it was a huge participant in politics for basically since the invention of the newspaper.
Yeah.
Yeah. And I think, I mean, I don't think it's a binary thing, but yeah, but I think the media's role in being able to sort of set the agenda essentially is obviously diminished, you know, to some degree given over to whatever, like a non on Twitter caught Elon's eye this morning. Like right now, that's what's driving.
That's what you'll see on Fox tomorrow morning and in the white house the next day. Like that's, you know, is literally random people tweeting it in Elon's replies, but, And I guess, yeah, and I think that the media can overplay it. Yeah, I do have some ambivalence about that role.
And we definitely, I think, we are able, like Semaphore has been able to build a lot of trust with Republicans and Democrats, partly because we see our lane as narrower, right? Like we're trying to tell you what's going on and provide really good information, but not ultimately resolve the argument. Yeah.
That said, I do think that there's a long tradition of people in American politics who think they can shape reality. There was a famous... Who was it in the Bush administration?
It was Karl Rove in the New York Times magazine.
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Chapter 3: What is Steve Bannon's media strategy?
You talked to a lot of Republicans, talked to a lot of Democrats. Um, do you think Republicans better understand this media environment than Democrats?
I think that in this moment after the election, everybody thinks that the winning side figured it out and that the losers are morons and everybody is gearing up to refight the last war and every CEO, every politician is going to be booking themselves onto a bunch of podcasts nobody listens to for the next four years. But that in fact, and that always the world changes faster than they expect.
I think we're headed back into a moment of consolidation basically and that there's going to be a recentralization of audiences and of content and that like some poor hapless congressional candidate is going to spend 300 hours talking to podcasts nobody listens to, to no discernible effect.
But also the Trump years have, I mean, the consolidation of power in Washington is also really new in media, right? Like the extent to which media executives are obsessed with what the administration can do to hurt them. And it's true across business. We're hosting this huge World Economic Summit here in April.
And just the appetite of CEOs in America to get to Washington to figure out what is going on is really new.
Say a little bit more about moving back to a more centralized media. I assume you don't mean ideologically. What do you mean by that?
Oh, just, you know, I mean, it was technological. If you needed, for the late 20th century, you needed a broadcast tower or a printing press if you wanted to reach a lot of people. And not that many people had them. Spectrum was regulated. And so, like, you really had this very, I mean, for technological reasons, fundamentally. There were, as you said, about distribution.
The system was meant, and then the business incentives of those were to sell mattresses to Republicans and to Democrats. And Often that led to something that we romanticize, actually, a kind of so centrist media, but it also did produce this kind of false consensus around Iraq, which, as you say, is part of why everybody lost trust in that kind of media.
But the fundamental change was technological, the splint in the fact that you didn't need these broadcast towers anymore. And so I just think it's hard to imagine going back to that. And, you know, there are, like, we definitely see for readers, part of the value is, and I think you do this too, like, we can read everything so you don't have to and go out into the,
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