0:01

Before we get to this week's

0:03

episode, we also want to remind

0:06

you that on Tuesday, January 30th,

0:08

at 8.30pm Eastern, we will be

0:10

hosting our next Citations

0:12

Needed Beggathon. We do these every

0:14

so often to entice our amazing

0:16

listeners, that's you, to become supporters

0:18

of our show through Patreon if

0:20

you aren't already, and if you

0:22

are, for you to stick with

0:25

us. We do this every so

0:27

often by bringing on some amazing

0:29

guests, talking about some more lighthearted

0:31

topics, and we give out fun

0:33

prizes. Yes, we're going to be discussing

0:35

social media grindset influencers. The likes of

0:37

David Goggins, Andy Elliott, Ed Millett, who

0:39

tell you to wake up at 3.30

0:41

in the morning, work out 15 times

0:43

a day, and just be

0:45

an all-around shredded, awesome alpha male to

0:47

bag escrow and close a tradwife. And

0:49

so we're going to talk about their

0:51

influence, and we're going to discuss their

0:53

ubiquity on social media. So we're doing

0:56

a little bit different. Usually we do corporate media or

0:58

big media. Now we're kind of doing social media trends,

1:00

all of which have developed their own sort of

1:02

quasi-corporate position in our society. So we're excited

1:04

to get into that. We will be

1:07

joined on the Beggathon by writer Hossein

1:09

Kesvani. And if you've joined

1:11

any of our previous Beggathons, like the

1:13

ones on pseudo-archaeology or Star Trek or

1:15

pro wrestling, you'll know that they are

1:18

a good time. So we

1:20

hope to see you there again. That

1:22

is on our YouTube channel streaming live

1:24

on Tuesday, January 30th, 8 30 p.m.

1:26

Eastern. Look

1:29

out for the link that day. This

1:38

is Citations Needed with Nima Shirazi

1:40

and Adam Johnson. Welcome

1:43

to Citations Needed, a podcast on

1:45

the media, power, PR and the

1:47

history of bullshit. I am Nima

1:49

Shirazi. I'm Adam Johnson. You can

1:51

follow the show on Twitter at

1:54

Citations Pod Facebook, Citations Needed, and

1:56

become a supporter of the show

1:58

through patreon.com/Citations Needed podcast. all your

2:00

support through Patreon is so incredibly appreciated as

2:02

we are 100% listener funded. We

2:05

have no corporate sponsors, we don't

2:08

run commercials, we are here because

2:10

of listeners like you. Please

2:12

do subscribe to us on Patreon, it helps

2:14

keep the episodes themselves free and

2:17

the show sustainable. This

2:19

is also our first episode of the New Year,

2:21

2024, so happy New Year

2:23

everyone. We are thrilled to be back and

2:25

we are excited about the shows that are

2:27

coming up. So away we go. Make

2:34

sense of the day's news and ideas, urges

2:36

the morning, a daily New York Times

2:39

newsletter. Get smarter,

2:41

faster on news and information that

2:43

matters to you. Axios

2:46

assures its readership. This

2:49

is how the news should sound. The

2:51

New York Times again declares via

2:54

its podcast, The Daily. For

2:56

the past 10 years, roughly speaking, we've

2:59

seen the proliferation of daily digest

3:01

style newsletters and podcasts at legacy

3:04

and new media organizations. Inspired

3:06

at least loosely by the so-called

3:09

explanatory journalism of Vox and similar

3:11

outlets that arose in the mid-2010s,

3:14

publications now commonly offer bite-sized breakdowns

3:16

of the news that allegedly matter

3:18

most, delivering to the inboxes of

3:21

upwardly mobile dinner party hosting perennially

3:23

on-the-go professionals, or at least those who

3:25

want to think of themselves as such. Now,

3:28

there's certainly nothing wrong with

3:30

accessibility in news media. Quite

3:32

the opposite, in fact. But

3:34

for corporate explanatory news models,

3:36

it's worth asking who makes

3:38

the decisions about which news

3:40

is the most important and

3:43

about how that news is framed.

3:46

How do seemingly benign, even

3:48

folksy promises to, quote,

3:51

make sense of the news and,

3:53

quote, mask the ideology of corporate

3:55

media institutions? And what are

3:57

the dangers of shepherding audiences into a

4:00

center-right political consensus that

4:02

issues complaints like campus

4:04

speeches vexing and the

4:06

left is less welcoming than the right. On

4:09

today's show we'll examine the rise and

4:11

hegemony of centrist micro-news platforms. From

4:14

Axios' trademark smart brevity to The

4:16

New York Times' David Leonards newsletter

4:19

The Morning and The Daily Podcast,

4:21

looking at how they package left-punching,

4:23

pathologically incurious glib news nuggets served

4:26

up to busy, upwardly mobile, well-meaning

4:28

liberals. Later on the

4:30

show we'll be joined by Jacob Bacharach, a

4:32

novelist and essayist whose writing has appeared all

4:34

over, from The New Republic to The Outline,

4:37

The New York Times itself to New York

4:39

Magazine, The Baffler to Jacobin. He is the

4:41

author of three books, the most recent of

4:43

which is A Cool Customer, Joan

4:46

Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking. If

4:49

there's a fundamental underlying ideological

4:51

tendency within The Morning and

4:53

this genre generally but certainly

4:56

within Leonards and his newsletter

4:58

for The Times, it's a tendency that

5:00

I would call the move along nothing

5:02

to see here tendency, which

5:04

is to say a sort of acknowledgement

5:07

that there are imperfections

5:09

in the way that

5:11

society is organized, that

5:13

there are inadequacies in

5:16

the ability of our political

5:18

structures and the actors within

5:21

those structures to respond to

5:23

certain events and contingencies. But

5:25

nonetheless, that broadly speaking, things

5:27

are okay, at

5:29

least within the United States. Relatively

5:32

responsible people are in charge,

5:35

systems broadly work and outcomes

5:37

while not perfected are

5:39

broadly speaking relatively just

5:42

and relatively justly distributed.

5:45

Of course we cannot begin The New Year without letting you

5:48

know that this is a spiritual successor team of

5:50

a previous episode, episode 87, Nate

5:53

Silver and the Crisis of Pundit

5:55

Brain where we discussed the

5:57

descriptive normative shuffle that media

5:59

does. this is a outgrowth

6:01

of this, specifically the sort of

6:04

amoral, quote unquote, data driven, pundit

6:06

brain, and its position

6:08

within the micro news inbox nuggets

6:10

for upwardly mobile professionals,

6:12

and specifically how this idea of curating

6:15

and aggregating the news, because you're so

6:17

goddamn important and busy that you need

6:19

to have a few talking points at

6:21

the water cooler, or at an

6:23

office party, really kind of masks some pretty

6:25

gnarly ideology and I sort of, I

6:28

would say institutionalized moral and intellectual

6:30

lack of curiosity. It really is

6:33

a kind of outgrowth of the

6:35

kind of voxification of news we saw in

6:37

the early to mid 2000s, which

6:40

did embrace this kind of end of history

6:42

ideology. Weirdly, Vox doesn't actually have that ethos

6:44

as much anymore. I think they sort of

6:46

changed editors. But when Ezra Klein

6:48

and Matt Iglesias began Vox, this

6:50

was definitely their MO and that kind

6:52

of aggregating or explaining the

6:54

news conservative ethos lives on in these kind

6:57

of newsletters and podcasts, specifically those at the

6:59

New York Times. So we're going to get

7:01

into that today. Yeah, and Adam, as we were talking

7:04

about this episode, kind of preparing for it,

7:06

one of the things we remarked on is,

7:08

while we over the past six

7:11

and a half years, we're now into

7:13

our seventh season of citations needed, we've

7:15

talked about a lot of sinister shit,

7:17

right? This idea

7:19

of the curated, aggregated,

7:22

explained news nugget model. This

7:24

is how you start your

7:26

day so you can be

7:28

informed. You can know what's

7:30

going on in the world. It

7:33

can be spoon fed to you

7:35

by the smartest people you can

7:37

think of authorized, approved, made official

7:39

by the New York Times and

7:42

other similar organizations. But Adam,

7:44

I think through preparing this episode,

7:47

we've kind of discovered that this

7:49

is among the most sinister things

7:51

that we have talked about so

7:53

far. This idea that the

7:56

people whose inboxes are

7:58

Being aggregated here. I.

8:00

Do think you're typically if you look

8:02

at sort of the New York Times,

8:04

his own internal in or shareholder Pdf

8:06

son and what they claim. This is

8:08

also true for a magazine like The

8:10

Atlantic is they do tend to be

8:12

far wealthier than the average person. They

8:14

tend to be upwardly mobile. They didn't

8:16

have professional jobs, doctor like, sort of

8:18

high status lawyer, bureaucrats, executive, And

8:21

that those people genuinely do have influence

8:23

over every day working class people's lives.

8:25

And so what they believe in what

8:27

ideology they have does matter. Course, it

8:29

shouldn't matter, but it very much does

8:31

answer when you reinforce that conservative ideology.

8:34

On. Literally a daily basis and you aggregate

8:36

news to kind of reaffirm their world

8:38

views. I do think this does have

8:40

pernicious downstream affects which will get into

8:42

and this episode. So. Let's start

8:44

adam with Fox A kind of

8:47

pioneered this model which was instrumental

8:49

in popularizing the so called explanatory

8:51

journalism in the mid twenty tense.

8:54

Here's some background. Thoughts launched

8:56

in Twenty Four team with the

8:58

stated mission of filling a gap

9:00

between reporting. And getting

9:02

an audience to quote truly

9:05

understand why something happened. And

9:07

quote. On it's launch day,

9:09

April six, Two thousand and fourteen,

9:11

Fox published a piece by sounder

9:14

Ezra Klein entitled quote. How

9:16

politics makes a stupid. And

9:18

co. Two Piece was a

9:21

start introduction declines brand of

9:23

anti politics defined by his

9:25

repeated insistence that politics are

9:27

mostly a matter of psychology

9:29

and idiosyncrasies. Three

9:31

days later on April ninth

9:33

Box cutters a gentle dismissal

9:35

of single payer health care

9:38

as a well intended but

9:40

ultimately impractical idea that affirming

9:42

this kind of worldview. The.

9:44

Following years would see the debut of

9:47

several more outlets attempting to recapitulate current

9:49

events and political issues is deemed worthy.

9:51

Axial for example sounded and Twenty Sixteen

9:54

and launched and Twenty Seventeen a Twenty

9:56

sixteen Vanity Fair. Piece. On Axxeo

9:58

says founder political ally. Jim Vandehei

10:00

and my gallon stated that and I

10:03

quote has jokes with potential investors that

10:05

Axxeo suspects described as what you get

10:07

if the Economist mated with Twitter and

10:09

smartly narrated all the good stuff. It's

10:11

own Reporters mists on Club which is

10:14

interesting to see economists is already kind

10:16

of in tidbits, But actually, I wanted

10:18

to break this tidbits down even further

10:20

at this point: Access Insecure Two million

10:22

dollars and financing from multiple of venture

10:25

capital firms and B C News Laurene

10:27

Powell Jobs, Emerson Collective, and David and

10:29

Catherine Bradley owners of The Planet Media

10:31

and early twenties seventeen. Just prior to

10:33

the site's launch, Vandehei was interviewed by

10:36

Harvard's Neiman Labs. He called actually Was

10:38

Quote a very mobile focus platform Unquote

10:40

and added Quote every item. Whether it's

10:42

something that were smartly narrating, A whether

10:44

it's an exclusive scoop that we have

10:47

every item is summarized in a screen

10:49

something size of your I phone screen.

10:51

It's written in a way so that

10:53

if it's all you read, that's enough

10:55

and you'll walk away satisfied. Unquote: A

10:58

typical Access article included multiple points. Below

11:00

bowl the headlines like why it matters

11:02

The big picture between the lines: Access

11:04

As now over a dozen major corporate

11:06

partners including over General Motors, Bank of

11:08

America, Boeing, Comcast, and Amazon. It does

11:11

not disclose funding from these companies and

11:13

is reporting on them despite the clear

11:15

influence an appetizer like say, General Motors

11:17

would have on breakdowns of a potential

11:19

U A W strike. Now. This

11:21

trend wasn't limited to just new media

11:24

legacy corporate media needed to get in

11:26

on the game as well. The New

11:28

York Times, for example, has embraced this

11:31

brand of data journalism since Twenty Ten.

11:33

When. It began to host Nate Silver's blog

11:35

Five Thirty Eight. Now

11:37

after Silver less the times to

11:39

take his blog to his piano

11:41

and twenty thirteen times developed and

11:44

launched the upshot of vertical the

11:46

New York Times claimed would synthesize

11:48

explanatory journalism and data journalism. Now

11:50

we discussed Nate Silver as out

11:52

of mentioned at length and episode.

11:54

Eighty Seven: Nate Silver Antichrist a pundit brain if

11:56

you have not yet check that went out. Please.

11:59

Do. But let's get back to

12:01

the New York Times' upshot and

12:03

its editor, David Leonhardt. David

12:06

Leonhardt announced at the time that

12:08

the vertical sought to quote, help

12:10

people to better understand big, complex

12:12

stories like Obamacare, inequality, and the

12:14

real estate and stock markets. End

12:17

quote. That quote is taken

12:19

directly from a guardian article on the

12:21

launch of the upshot. Now, Leonhardt

12:23

wrote in a Facebook post that

12:26

the vertical, the upshot would be written in, quote,

12:28

a direct, plain spoken way. The same voice

12:30

we might use when writing an email to

12:32

a friend will be conversational

12:35

without being dumbed down. End

12:37

quote. Now, after Nate Silver's departure,

12:39

Leonhardt would become the chief architect

12:42

of the New York Times' conventional

12:44

wisdom breakdowns. And I want

12:46

to note before we get into platforms like The Morning

12:48

and The Daily at the New York Times, we should

12:50

note that getting news

12:52

in the morning is not bad,

12:55

that getting accessible news, as we

12:57

said at the top of this

12:59

episode, is not bad, but when

13:02

it is curated with the explicit

13:04

purpose of reinforcing systems of power

13:06

and wealth, and those curated news

13:09

nuggets are directly sent to the

13:11

inboxes or earbuds of some of

13:13

the most influential people

13:16

in our society, thus creating

13:19

one kind of pundit brain, one

13:21

kind of Leonhardt or Mike Babaro

13:23

influenced brain about how to think

13:26

about the world, how to think

13:28

about policies and priorities that actually

13:30

affect so many millions of people's

13:32

lives, whether it has to do

13:34

with labor, whether it has to

13:36

do with the occupation in Palestine.

13:39

All of these things set up a

13:42

system where there is not

13:44

enough diversity of thought and the power

13:46

structures are being reinforced again and again

13:48

and again every morning, every

13:50

day. newsletter

14:00

in which he authored such pieces as,

14:02

quote, the case for Amy Klobuchar. This

14:04

already reflected the time zone, semi quasi

14:07

weird endorsement of both her and Elizabeth

14:09

Warren in 2020 and quote,

14:11

Biden is smart to talk about a Republican VP

14:13

unquote, where he made the case why Biden should

14:16

appoint a Republican vice president. Leonhard

14:18

has effectively become the voice of the times

14:20

determining what news its readers should be paying

14:22

the most attention to and broadcasting

14:24

this to an audience of a reported five million

14:26

people as of late 2021. The

14:29

Times in its press release announcing Leonhard's leadership

14:31

of the morning newsletter described Leonhard

14:33

as quote, the guide through the day's news.

14:36

It's also confusing and jumbly. I'm going to walk

14:38

you through this and do better to a point

14:40

as the official Times summerist and Leonhard, the author

14:42

of newsletters like the following. So we're going to

14:45

look through some of his, it's

14:47

hard to sort of show everything because it's a

14:49

daily, right? It's sort of a daily newsletter, but

14:51

we're going to highlight some examples we think are

14:53

sort of especially egregious. Just

14:55

days after the murder of George Floyd, Leonhard

14:57

argued that defunding the police

14:59

was an impractical goal, but that

15:01

reforms like training officers to deescalate

15:03

situations were working. Leonhard

15:06

claimed in his June 5th, 2020 article

15:08

where police reforms have worked that

15:10

quote, new policies unquote had resulted in

15:12

the decline in fatal LAPD shootings in

15:14

each of the previous four years, but

15:16

shootings themselves had increased by then 26 and

15:19

2019, 27 and 2020 and continue to

15:22

rise in 2021. During

15:24

that year, 2021, the LAPD shot at at least

15:27

37 people and killed 17. So

15:30

the police reforms didn't work. The

15:32

sort of cherry picked one particular precinct and said,

15:34

look, they're working, but it ended up sort of

15:36

not being true. And it wasn't even really true

15:38

at the time. This is kind of typical of

15:40

how Leonhard works, which is again,

15:43

any radical reforms, anything perceived as

15:45

not conservative is unserious.

15:48

And here I'm going to come in with the data

15:50

to prove to you why these more modest reform, quote,

15:52

unquote reforms work reforms, by the way, which we

15:54

have had for at that point for all of going on

15:56

seven or eight years, right after Ferguson,

15:59

that's the whole reason. why the George Floyd

16:01

demand became a radical because we had this sort

16:03

of banning chokeholds for the 800th times and

16:06

the sort of police training and all

16:08

that is funnel more money into police

16:10

departments. And the body cameras and that...

16:12

Right and nothing fundamentally changed which incidentally

16:14

remains the case today. Right but for data

16:16

journalism you just kind of cherry-pick one

16:19

data point that follows your ideology, right?

16:21

Like that's so often how this works

16:23

it doesn't really work the other way.

16:25

Now in subsequent editions of the morning

16:28

newsletter, Leonhardt would continue to manipulate and

16:30

defy available evidence in order to advance

16:32

certain politically expedient narratives such as on

16:34

February 11th 2021 the newsletter

16:37

had this headline, Pandemic in

16:40

Retreat, in which Leonhardt argued

16:42

quote, the pandemic is in

16:44

retreat. What happens next will depend

16:46

mostly on three factors. One,

16:49

how many Americans wear masks and remain

16:51

socially distant. Two, how contagious

16:53

the new variants are. And

16:56

three, how quickly the vaccines

16:58

which have virtually eliminated the

17:00

worst COVID symptoms get into

17:02

people's arms. End quote. Now

17:04

this became a regular assertion from Leonhardt.

17:06

Our guest on today's episode Jacob Bacharach

17:08

wrote in the New Republic in 2022

17:10

in his article Why

17:13

is David Leonhardt so Happy? Quote,

17:16

by April of the same year, again that's 2020, Leonhardt

17:19

was castigating the, as Leonhardt put it,

17:21

quote, many vaccinated people

17:23

who continue to obsess over the

17:26

risks from COVID. End quote.

17:28

Offering what we now know to be

17:30

a highly inaccurate picture of the vaccine's

17:32

effectiveness at reducing transmission of the SARS-CoV-2

17:35

virus and experimenting with an argument that

17:37

would become a reoccurring favorite. Now we

17:39

easily accept tens of thousands of road

17:42

deaths every year. So why should COVID

17:44

be any different? He soon

17:46

announced that again, this is Leonhardt's words

17:48

quote, the pandemic may now

17:50

be in permanent retreat in the

17:53

US. End quote. Now this

17:55

is important because Leonhardt's obsessed with comparing everything

17:57

to road deaths and of course

18:01

He does this kind of binary, well, there's gonna

18:03

be risk, risk aren't inherent, and that's true, right?

18:05

But there's some number of deaths from any

18:07

disease where you say, well, that's too

18:09

much. And you sort of draw the line and you say, how

18:12

can we reduce that or mitigate that? And

18:14

for some reason, that line was

18:16

road deaths for Dan. Like tens of thousands of people

18:19

die every year, therefore COVID can do that too. Now,

18:21

of course, what most people would say and follow up

18:23

to that who deal in public health would say, yes,

18:25

the road deaths are also not natural and

18:28

also that it's also not good

18:30

that we've completely designed, again, through

18:32

human contrivance, not through some natural

18:34

process, our entire organization around a

18:36

bunch of distracted, drunk, texting people

18:38

driving 210 machines at 75 miles

18:41

an hour, that perhaps that, there are better ways

18:43

of doing that as well. But Leonhard,

18:45

of course, he doesn't ask any kind

18:47

of deep or even remotely deep, right?

18:50

Not even the sort of kiddie pool deep questions about

18:52

the world, that sort of, that's just the way it

18:54

is and we all need to move on. And

18:56

the only people who wanna ask these deeper questions about

18:58

society are a bunch of freaks and weirdos and fringe

19:00

types. And I'm gonna go around and slap them in

19:02

this newsletter. Now, the conventional

19:05

wisdom put forth in Leonhard's

19:07

daily newsletter, again, entitled The

19:09

Morning, has really dug into

19:12

coverage of the ongoing

19:14

Israeli genocide and assault

19:16

on Gaza. And in so doing

19:18

has become really a mouthpiece, not

19:20

only for the Biden White House,

19:23

but the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin

19:25

Netanyahu, and everything that the Israeli

19:27

information offices and military is putting

19:29

out in the world. So his

19:31

news aggregation of Gaza has been

19:34

extremely thin and very

19:36

basically just repackaging White House and State

19:38

Department press releases. So let's begin,

19:40

I'm just gonna say one example. Overall, it's been

19:42

horrible or kind of non-existent, but his

19:44

coverage and the buildup to the

19:47

al-Shifa hospital, raid, siege, bombing, sniping

19:49

at, where Israel killed dozens, if

19:51

not hundreds of people in

19:53

a hospital because they were carrying out an evacuation

19:56

order from October 13th in Northern Gaza, which was

19:58

framed as a hunt for how much? Hamas,

20:00

a raid. Now we've debunked that on

20:02

the show both before, during, and after

20:04

the supposed Hamas command and control center.

20:07

But what's important to know is that in the build

20:09

up to that, you didn't really need to have

20:12

any kind of unique access to intelligence.

20:14

You just needed to know that governments

20:16

lie, and they especially lie when they

20:19

have self very obvious self serving reasons

20:21

to do so. So a

20:23

little bit of context here and the media

20:25

lies around Al-Shifa hospital and the media stenography

20:27

around Al-Shifa hospital leading up to

20:29

the raid on November 15th, 16th. That's

20:32

going to merit its own episode. I'm working on a long

20:34

form article about that. We're going to do probably either a

20:36

news brief or a full episode on that to show

20:38

you what a sort of power serving little weasel David Leonhardt

20:40

is. I sort of want to use

20:42

this as an example. So just to start off

20:44

with a Washington Post report on December 21st confirmed

20:47

again, what I think any sensible person who was

20:49

not doing spin for the Biden White House

20:51

or Israel would know, which is that

20:54

of course, Al-Shifa hospital was not a

20:56

Hamas command and control center as Israel

20:58

alleged. Washington Post found quote, but

21:00

the evidence presented by the Israeli government fall

21:02

short of showing that Hamas had been using

21:05

the hospital as a command and control center

21:07

according to a Washington Post analysis of open

21:09

source visual satellite imagery and all of the

21:11

publicly released IDF materials unquote. It

21:13

was not a command and control center. There was one tunnel. The tunnel

21:15

was actually connected to the hospital. They showed some

21:17

rooms which were almost certainly built by Israel in the

21:19

80s. No evidence at all of the command and control

21:22

center, no Hamas militants in the hospital when they raided.

21:24

So again, this is going to have its own separate

21:26

episode. We won't litigate that too much. But this was

21:28

also the site just to make clear. This was the

21:30

site that prior to the raid,

21:33

Israel was saying, you know, this was

21:36

like the Bond villain headquarters, right? They

21:38

had like 3d models, like computer models.

21:40

This is the beating heart of

21:42

the Hamas infrastructure showing like underground

21:45

layers and meeting rooms and weapons

21:47

caches, all these things, obviously

21:49

bullshit at the time confirmed later by even

21:52

the Washington Post, which, you know, they say

21:54

they had looked at all the open source

21:56

stuff, but super normie,

21:58

super centrist, super government. connected,

22:00

meaning even though they cite and

22:02

credit all the open source material,

22:04

chances are they're also getting this

22:07

from other back channels, right? Like

22:09

approving this kind of reporting, saying

22:11

that the Israeli intelligence, quote unquote,

22:13

really didn't pan out. So we

22:16

hear this in late December. We

22:18

have known this now for a month

22:21

and a half. So let's now go

22:23

back to what David Leonhardt was telling

22:25

his millions and millions of subscribers in

22:27

advance of the al-Shifa raid. Right. So this

22:30

is again, someone who's deeply incurious, who is

22:32

deeply deferential to power, who just assumes that

22:34

everyone in power is telling the truth. And

22:36

let's look at the raw ideology of how

22:38

I wrote about the al-Shifa. Again, this is

22:40

days before the quote unquote raid. This is

22:42

directly targeted to influential liberals while there's global

22:44

calls for a ceasefire, right? So the stakes

22:47

here, I think are actually pretty high. Quote,

22:49

the battle over al-Shifa hospital in Gaza highlights

22:52

a tension that often goes unmentioned in the

22:54

debate over the war between Israel and Hamas.

22:57

There may be no way for Israel

22:59

both to minimize civilian casualties and to

23:01

eliminate Hamas, unquote. So let's start

23:03

here with the raw ideology here. Two assumptions are

23:05

baked into this opening, right? Number one,

23:07

that Israel wants to minimize civilian casualties. We

23:09

now know that's not true. A CNN analysis

23:12

and a subsequent New York Times analysis found

23:14

that 50% of the bombs that have been

23:16

dropped have been quote unquote, dumb bombs, which

23:19

is saying they're not smart. They're literally just dropping bombs

23:21

on a whole building. By way of comparison, the US

23:23

has not used those bombs in over 20 years. Israel

23:25

used 50% of the bombs of their 30,000

23:28

bombs, as of the time of

23:30

the CNN report, were dumb bombs. 972

23:32

in Israeli magazine found that they were

23:34

deliberately targeting civilian and civilian infrastructure because

23:36

they wanted to ruin morale among

23:38

supporters of Hamas within Gaza. We

23:41

now see entire cities that have

23:43

been raised. They've raised greenhouses, graveyards,

23:45

farms, schools, government buildings. We now

23:48

know they're targeting civilians and civilian

23:50

infrastructure deliberately. This is not some

23:53

incidental thing that happens in the quote unquote hunt

23:55

for Hamas, which again, is the second premise baked

23:57

into this, but they're in fact, seeking to eliminate

23:59

Hamas, whatever. that means when we now know

24:01

that's not true, they're seeking to eliminate large

24:04

parts of Gaza, at the very least northern

24:06

Gaza, if not all of Gaza while doing

24:08

forcible population transfers, a policy aimed at

24:10

Netanyahu administration now openly says they're doing. But

24:13

David Leonhardt is not interested in any of those questions.

24:15

He just takes everything, all the nominal sort of reasons

24:17

for the White House and the Israeli government, he takes

24:19

them at face value. Oh, they're trying to limit Hamas.

24:21

They're trying to reduce civilian casualties. But

24:23

they're not. And we know they're not because we have mountains of evidence

24:26

they're not. But again, they're in power,

24:28

right? And they represent the people he's close

24:30

with and the people he sort of defends.

24:32

So therefore, they're taken at their word. Now,

24:34

if he said, you know, Hamas did their

24:36

best to reduce civilian casualties on October 7,

24:38

but unfortunately, x, y and z happened, nobody

24:40

would take that seriously. So even though Israel

24:42

deliberately targets civilians, and we know they deliberately

24:44

target civilians and civilian infrastructure, this is not

24:46

a question that David Leonhardt is

24:48

interested in answering. And so he goes on and

24:50

somehow gets even worse, quote, the reality of this

24:53

trade off still doesn't answer the question of what

24:55

should happen in Gaza. Some people will conclude

24:57

that the human cost in lives of innocent

24:59

Palestinians does not justify removing Hamas from

25:01

power, or that Israel may be undermining its

25:04

own interest by trying to dismantle Hamas. Others

25:06

will conclude that Hamas's recent killings of

25:08

innocent Israelis, and its repeated

25:10

vows to destroy Israel represent a threat that no

25:12

country would accept on its border. Nonetheless,

25:14

Al-Shifa, a major hospital that includes a

25:17

neonatal department, highlights the lack of simple

25:19

answers in Gaza. And I want to

25:21

use today's newsletter to explain. So there's

25:23

no simple answers about whether or not

25:25

fucking Israel should shell and fucking

25:27

bomb a hospital. Right? This

25:30

is the framing we're set up here that is

25:32

difficult, it's muddy, it's fog of war, while lying

25:34

about it being a command and control center, building

25:36

a 3D model with zero evidence, zero proof, they

25:38

never presented any evidence this was a Hamas control

25:41

center. It does matter. It matters if there's not

25:43

a fucking bond layer villain in a silo full

25:45

of missiles underneath it, right? Because it does matter,

25:47

obviously, because it means they're lying. And if they're

25:50

lying, it means their entire motive is suspect. And

25:52

so he said, quote, there is substantial evidence that

25:54

Hamas has used hospitals from military operations and has

25:56

built a command center underneath it as part of

25:59

Gaza's tunnel network. This is not true.

26:01

This is simply not true. There is not substantial

26:03

evidence. He goes on, he would write, quote, a

26:05

New York Times journalist in 2008 watched

26:08

armed Hamas militants walking around Al-Shifa hospital in

26:10

civilian clothes and witnessed Hamas executed Palestinian men

26:12

accused of collaborating with Israel. So they're around

26:14

Al-Shifa hospital, right? They're in the proxy of

26:16

any time the military person gets around a

26:18

hospital, that hospital is a command and control

26:20

center. Amnesty International concluded in 2014,

26:23

Hamas used parts of Al-Shifa hospital to

26:26

detain, interrogate, torture and otherwise ill-treat suspects.

26:28

So again, a part of

26:31

a broader hospital compound that was abandoned

26:33

was supposedly used by Hamas militants, therefore

26:35

it's a command and control center. More

26:37

recently, Israel has released audio recordings that

26:39

purport to contain conversations in which Hamas

26:41

fighters discuss tunnels under Al-Shifa as well

26:43

as video interrogations in which captured militants

26:46

discuss the tunnels. Now, these

26:48

are forced confessions and the audio recordings were

26:50

fake. At the time, Channel 4 News in

26:52

the UK clearly said they were fake. Everyone

26:54

who looked at new those audio recordings were

26:56

fake and Israel had released fake recordings before.

26:59

You would go on to say, Israel officials allowed

27:01

Times reporters to view photographs that appear

27:03

to show secret entrances inside the hospital

27:05

that lead to military compounds underneath, unquote.

27:08

Not true, no tunnels connect to anything.

27:10

The New York Times reporters either deliberately spread

27:12

misinformation or they got played by Israeli and

27:15

American intelligence. He would go on to say,

27:17

US officials say their own intelligence also indicates

27:19

Hamas has built a tunnel network under Al-Shifa.

27:22

Oh, okay, that includes a quote, command and control

27:24

center as well as weapons storage. Oh, well, the

27:26

US intelligence official said it, therefore it must be

27:28

true. Again, not true. They did not respond to

27:30

the Washington Post when they asked for them to

27:33

shoot to see that intelligence. They never provided any

27:35

of this evidence at the time or afterwards. And

27:37

then there's a final kicker that closes the

27:39

circle here. Final kicker, quote, Hamas has

27:41

a long history of placing its operations

27:43

in hospitals, mosque and other civilian areas

27:45

so that Israel must risk killing innocent

27:47

bystanders and thereby damages reputation to attack

27:49

Hamas fighters. Quote, I've seen these things

27:51

myself. Stephen Erlanger, a long Times Times

27:53

correspondent has said on the daily podcast.

27:55

Oh, so he's seen maybe a few

27:57

weapons in a mosque and that's the

27:59

same. is using a fucking hospital as

28:01

a command and control center. Again, no

28:04

evidence, no evidence, even after Israel raided

28:06

the hospital, killed hundreds of people, had

28:08

several NICU babies die. So

28:10

what was Israel doing? Were they destroying

28:12

the Hamas command and control center? Or were

28:14

they carrying out an evacuation order that

28:17

they announced on October 13th, which

28:19

they said they were gonna do, which is

28:21

evacuate the whole of Northern Gaza. They called

28:23

Al-Shifa hospital dozens of times and said, you

28:25

need to evacuate everybody. Doctors said, we can't,

28:28

because if we leave, they're gonna die. The

28:30

doctors can't do that. So what did they

28:32

do? They were carrying out an evacuation order.

28:34

Subsequently, Israel has bombed, attacked, sniped or shelled

28:36

a dozen hospitals in Northern Gaza. They cleared

28:38

out a dozen hospitals in Northern Gaza. They've

28:41

left babies to deteriorate and rot, despite

28:43

saying they were gonna send an ambulance. They've

28:45

shot at medical professionals. They are destroying the

28:47

civil structure of Gaza because that's what they

28:49

said they were going to do. And

28:52

the biggest fucking power serving

28:54

dipshit in the world, David Leonhardt, doesn't consider any

28:56

of those possibilities, even though Israel said they call

28:59

the hospital and said, we're going to raid you

29:01

and force you to evacuate per our evacuation order

29:03

of October 13th. But David Leonhardt

29:05

is not interested in any of those

29:07

questions. So he does this fog of

29:09

war. Here's this intelligence justifying, uncritically

29:12

passing along the rationalization to attack medical

29:14

facilities and to kill medical professionals and

29:16

to condemn hundreds to die. These are

29:18

people, these are babies, these are children.

29:21

These are infirmed old people. And

29:23

he just goes, eh, you know, intelligence says, and

29:25

there was this guy in 2008 who saw a

29:28

mosque guy with a gun, maybe perhaps, who was

29:30

wearing normal plain clothes, just militarizing an entire population,

29:32

which we now know, again, according to the Washington

29:34

fucking Post, was total bullshit.

29:37

And this is the kind of stunted

29:39

morality we're dealing with with these Commission

29:41

wisdom aggregators. Right, so you have this

29:43

newsletter set up to explain. You then

29:46

have your requisite bullet points. And

29:48

over the course of those six bullet points that

29:50

Adam just walked through, you

29:52

have the manufacturing of

29:54

consensus toward saying,

29:56

oh man, this is such a tough decision

29:59

by poor Israel. but I guess

30:01

when looking at all this evidence that's

30:03

now been explained to me by

30:05

a voice that I trust that I look

30:08

to every morning to kind of frame things

30:10

up to see how

30:12

I should think about the world, to

30:14

make the news which is so complex

30:16

and convoluted, but to parse it out,

30:19

to explain it to me, to make it bite-sized,

30:21

to bullet point it for me. I

30:24

now have six bullet points at least to

30:27

say over the water cooler why I

30:29

also now think that it's okay for

30:32

Israel to bomb children. And

30:34

then after that they just kept attacking hospitals

30:36

and didn't even bother calling it a command

30:38

center. They had one that was looked very

30:40

bad because they killed a bunch of babies.

30:42

So then they planted loose bullets inside of

30:44

an incubator, a baby incubator machine, which like

30:46

no one believes, like no one believes this.

30:48

This is Bush-Lee Trump election

30:50

denying like my pillow type

30:52

propaganda just completely fake and

30:56

it's just fog of war Israel says this but

30:58

you can't trust Hamas and so Ty goes to

31:00

the runner we're just going to kind of defer

31:02

to the IDF and time and time and time

31:05

and time and time again again leading up to

31:07

this Al-Shifa hospital bond villain lair lie that

31:09

again nobody I think credibly

31:11

believed even at the time. They

31:14

had manufactured other

31:16

evidence fake audio recordings. They had claimed there

31:18

was a video of a nurse and an

31:21

official Netanyahu advisor tweeted out saying that they

31:23

were at Al-Shifa and there were Hamas militants

31:25

everywhere and the woman had an Israeli accent.

31:27

I mean, we're talking really shitty obviously

31:30

Borat like propaganda that

31:32

they're just kind of rolling with it. And the

31:34

whole thing was just vibes. It was like oh,

31:36

it's a you know, and the Washington Post says

31:38

and they're hunting for Hamas or you know, there's

31:40

hospitals caught in the crossfire. There was no crossfire.

31:42

There was no one shooting from the hospital because

31:44

there was no fucking Hamas militants in the hospital.

31:46

It was completely made up. And

31:49

this is the kind of thing that David

31:51

Leonhard is pathologically not

31:53

interested in dissecting or it's just

31:55

about defending power because the people,

31:57

the smart savvy, educated.

32:00

Harvard, Yale, Brown, Columbia

32:03

educated people, they're in charge and they know

32:05

what's going on. And I'm gonna

32:07

tell you what they're thinking because that thinking is

32:09

always in good faith. It's never bullshit. And

32:12

we can't trust anyone who doesn't operate

32:14

in those social and economic circles. Right,

32:16

so that kind of structure gets filtered

32:18

down and filtered through newsletters and these

32:20

daily podcasts. Leonhardt does this, of course,

32:23

when he's not talking about Gaza too.

32:25

This deeply incurious consensus making

32:28

kind of format. For instance,

32:30

when he writes about labor. So on October

32:32

20th, 2021, his newsletter that day had

32:35

the title, Where Are

32:37

The Workers? With the sub

32:40

headline, how can so many

32:42

Americans afford not to work? And will

32:44

it last? In this

32:46

newsletter, which came out still during

32:48

the COVID-19 pandemic, right? Like 2021,

32:50

this thing is still ongoing as

32:52

it continues to this day, but

32:54

we were deep in it then.

32:57

Leonhardt fear markers in his newsletter about

32:59

what else, as we've discussed on the

33:01

show before, Adam, the labor shortage, right?

33:03

There are no bus drivers, no servers.

33:06

He then claims that Americans are choosing

33:08

not to work because stimulus checks, of

33:10

course, had rendered them

33:13

as he writes, quote, flush with cash,

33:15

end quote. Now we discussed this exact

33:17

thing, as I've been saying, the labor

33:19

shortage canard in episode 135 back

33:22

in April of 2021, six

33:25

months before Leonhardt put out this

33:27

particular newsletter. Using

33:29

the same bullshit talking points, Leonhardt also

33:32

claims in a separate newsletter that

33:34

quote, the cash glut, end quote, not

33:37

corporate profiteering or just

33:39

in time supply chain strategies, quote,

33:42

is also causing rising inflation

33:46

and supply chain problems like backed

33:48

up ports, end

33:50

quote. Leonhardt, of course, didn't

33:52

find it necessary in these

33:54

newsletters to point out the dire straits were

33:57

in financially before the onset of COVID.

34:00

of it, namely that as of the

34:02

summer of 2019, before the pandemic, 40% of Americans were

34:07

reporting that it would be a struggle to come

34:09

up with just $400 to pay for an unexpected

34:15

bill. These financial straitjacket

34:17

were only tightened during the pandemic when

34:19

so many people couldn't work or they

34:21

didn't want to continue at their jobs

34:23

because things were very difficult either staying

34:25

home or actually trying to go out

34:27

in the midst of the pandemic. But

34:30

what Leonhardt does time and time again

34:32

is condemn any semblance

34:34

of government assistance, any kind

34:37

of state welfare to

34:39

allow people to live and

34:42

survive, maybe not

34:44

just get by in the most

34:46

precarious of scarcity kind of scenarios,

34:48

right? This is not good enough.

34:50

We all need to just buck

34:52

up, get a shot and go

34:54

outside and get back to quote

34:57

unquote normal. In September of 2023,

34:59

after the New York Times wrote a 12,000 word piece on

35:01

widespread child

35:03

labor abuses and the corporations that

35:05

enable them, David Leonhardt's newsletter came

35:07

out a couple of days later and sort

35:11

of spun this again in favor of

35:13

corporate America and the Biden White House

35:15

by redirecting blame in a pretty sinister

35:17

place, which is two lacks of immigration

35:19

laws. So in his mind, the problem

35:21

was that Biden was too weak on

35:23

immigration and the solution was to clamp

35:25

down immigration. So here we have Fortune

35:27

500 corporations using child labor and

35:30

a White House that looked the other way for

35:32

years or pretty much endorsed it, right? Because then

35:34

they wanted to get more labor back

35:36

into the pool, did nothing but

35:38

token fines, a Congress that has

35:40

no interest on finding anyone or

35:42

stopping child labor. But

35:45

the solution is to actually clamp down more

35:47

on immigration. Leonhardt would write

35:49

in his article from September 19th, child

35:51

labor and the broken border unquote, he

35:54

wrote quote, over the past 15 years entering

35:57

the US without legal permission has become easier,

35:59

especially for children. A 2008 law

36:01

intended to protect children from harm on the

36:04

Mexico side of the border has meant that

36:06

children can usually enter the country without documentation."

36:09

So, see, the underlying problem is not actually

36:12

unaccountable with corporations. It's because

36:14

we were too nice to children to come

36:16

into this country. Therefore, we need to clamp

36:18

down on children coming in and let them

36:20

starve and famish and die at the border,

36:23

therefore preventing child exploitation labor. The solution isn't

36:25

locking up corporate executives. It's

36:27

not jailing the subcontractors to use

36:29

child labor, jailing the corporations that

36:31

knowingly use child labor. The

36:33

quote-unquote underlying problem is actually we're too nice

36:36

to immigrants. And this is, again,

36:38

the Leonart way. You take this horrible thing

36:40

that shocks the liberal mind and your solution

36:42

is to do something in response that

36:44

is pro-corporation and liberal, which is

36:46

not pen responsibility on the

36:48

CEOs and executives and the decision makers

36:50

and the politicians in the White House

36:53

and the Department of Labor who looked

36:55

the other way while this was happening, it's actually

36:57

we need to clamp down further on immigration. We

36:59

need to take a more conservative approach. And

37:02

you frame it in liberal ease when you do so, because that's

37:04

really the key. That's really who you're sort of appealing to here.

37:07

We could talk for many, many

37:09

more hours, Adam, about David Leonhard's newsletter

37:11

the morning. But let us now shift

37:13

focus to The New

37:15

York Times' other marquee platform

37:18

for daily aggregated news. It's

37:20

podcast The Daily, which debuted on February

37:23

1st, 2017. It

37:25

was and still is hosted by

37:27

longtime New York Times correspondent Michael

37:29

Baubarro, co-hosted by New

37:31

York Times reporter Sabrina Tavernisi. Now

37:34

Baubarro cut his teeth at the

37:36

Times reporting on retail and shopping

37:39

trends, then moved on to praising

37:41

figures like Michael Bloomberg for his,

37:43

quote-unquote, generosity and Jeb Bush for

37:45

his, quote-unquote, depth of knowledge. That's

37:48

the level at which Baubarro has been writing analysis.

38:00

created like five articles on, where

38:02

he took a picture of this guy sleeping and

38:04

then tagged the MTA and

38:06

said, station at 123 Underpass at 41st and 7th

38:08

Avenue has

38:11

become dangerous and unacceptable. And anyway, he was

38:13

made fun of that. But that's sort of

38:15

the ethos of your kind of average New

38:17

York Times nerd. That's right. That's

38:20

your daily podcast, Pearl Clutcher, which maybe,

38:22

you know, goes to show just the

38:24

kind of perspective that we're actually getting.

38:26

But let's get back to the daily

38:29

podcast. The show is effectively the audio

38:31

equivalent of Leon Hart's daily newsletter. It

38:33

traffics in much of the same centrist

38:35

conventional wisdom aggregation, routinely spurning left

38:37

politics while being significantly softer on the

38:39

right. Now, just one example, for instance,

38:42

was from a 2019 episode of the

38:44

daily, quote,

38:47

explaining, but not justifying, end

38:49

quote, why Venezuela should be

38:52

skeptical of Trump's so-called, quote,

38:54

unquote, humanitarian convoy. The

38:57

way Bobaro promoted the podcast on his

38:59

Twitter feed was by writing

39:01

this, quote, on today's daily, a history

39:03

of US intervention in Latin America, which

39:06

may explain, but by

39:08

no means justify, why Venezuela's

39:10

Maduro is blocking badly needed

39:12

shipments of US food to feed

39:14

his starving people. Now,

39:16

this doesn't make any sense. So how

39:18

can decades of US intervention coups and

39:20

assassinations, they say nothing of the actual,

39:22

literal, ongoing coup at the time from

39:25

Trump, Rubio, and John Bolton, who were

39:27

openly calling generals and telling them to

39:29

openly overthrow the government, how

39:31

can that explain, but not justify, Maduro's skepticism

39:33

for letting a US, quote, unquote, aid convoy

39:35

in it? An aid convoy we now know

39:38

was a pretext for regime

39:40

change because two years later, USAID did

39:42

an internal audit. Again, this isn't even

39:45

like a credible liberal intervention. This is

39:47

Trump, John Bolton, and Elliot Abrams. Now,

39:49

what Bobaro doesn't mention and what Nick

39:52

Casey has does not mention in this

39:54

particular episode is that

39:56

Elliot Abrams literally did the same

39:58

thing. In the

40:01

1980s, he used the pretext of aid to ship

40:03

weapons to the Contras. Here's an article from the

40:05

AP from August 17th of 1987. This

40:09

is the Associated Press quote, Assistant Secretary

40:11

of State, Elliot Abrams, has defended his

40:13

role in authorizing the shipment of weapons

40:16

on a humanitarian aid flight to Nicaragua

40:18

rebels, saying the operation was strictly by

40:20

the book. Mr. Abrams spoke at a

40:22

news conference Saturday in response to statements

40:25

by Robert Dumling, a former head of

40:27

the State Department's Nicaragua Humanitarian Assistance Office,

40:29

who said that he had twice ordered

40:31

planes to shuttle weapons for the Contras

40:33

in aid planes at Mr. Abrams' directions

40:36

in early 1986. Huh,

40:39

so why would Maduro think Elliot

40:41

Abrams would use a humanitarian aid

40:43

convoy as a way of sneaking

40:45

in weapons? Huh, because he literally

40:48

did the exact same thing 30

40:50

years prior. So this is completely omitted

40:52

from the daily podcast. This is a

40:55

very sort of liberal position where you

40:57

sort of vaguely gesture towards, like, the

40:59

reasons why Latin American leaders would

41:01

be skeptical of the motives of psycho Cold

41:03

War veterans and then say, but

41:05

this time is different. This time he should

41:07

have done it. Which is why you explain

41:09

and not justify, because you're supposed to walk

41:12

away from this, still thinking Maduro is a

41:14

bad guy. We support exactly what the U.S.

41:16

government is doing, but we're going

41:18

to now know, we're going to

41:20

have some talking points about why

41:22

Maduro and other leaders in Latin

41:24

America may be paranoid about U.S.

41:26

humanitarian aid. But that doesn't mean

41:29

anything should change. It just explains,

41:31

but not justifies. Now for

41:33

a glimpse into this kind

41:35

of consistent right-wing leaning of

41:38

the daily podcast, let's consider

41:40

the daily's inaugural episode, which

41:42

focused on Trump's first Supreme

41:44

Court nominee at the time,

41:46

Neil Gorsuch. Mike

41:48

Bobaro, the host of the daily

41:50

podcast, interviewed several of

41:52

his own colleagues at the Times,

41:55

including Maggie Haberman, In

41:57

order to, quote, understand more

41:59

about. Judge Coursage and Quotes

42:01

Barbaro also spoke very politely

42:04

to David Greene. The

42:06

Ceo of Hobby Lobby. Which

42:09

was the company at the center

42:11

of the court case that allow

42:13

corporations not to provide insurance coverage

42:15

for contraception on religious grounds. Our

42:17

forces had ruled in favor of

42:19

Hobby Lobby and Twenty Twelve when

42:21

it sought a religious exemption for

42:24

providing insurance coverage for contraception, which

42:26

is why this was so relevant.

42:28

To. Him being a Supreme court

42:30

nominee, Barbaro conspicuously despite all

42:32

the New York Times his

42:35

own resources didn't know. Interview

42:37

a hobby Lobby employed. Or.

42:39

Any employee working anywhere, for that

42:42

matter who may have been adversely

42:44

affected by Gorse has his own.

42:47

Court. Ruling. So. They

42:49

give you a sense of the deeply

42:51

in curious approach that the daily from

42:53

it's very first episode. Takes.

42:56

To explaining the news. This.

42:59

Is what we mean. That a separate

43:01

two episodes and may have. Twenty Twenty

43:03

Two was released after the leak of

43:06

the Supreme Court draft opinion on overturning

43:08

Roe V Wade A before the ruling

43:10

was made official by the court at

43:13

the end of June. Twenty Twenty Two

43:15

know Part One of the episode was

43:17

devoted to Cook, What Comes Next and

43:20

quote for the anti abortion crowd and

43:22

port to cover that same kind of

43:24

what comes Next approach. but this time

43:27

for abortion providers, here's a clip from

43:29

Part One in. Which Daily cohost

43:31

Sabrina Tavern Easy to conduct

43:34

absurdly friendly, humanizing interviews with

43:36

extreme right wingers, including for

43:38

instance, Samuel Leave, an anti

43:41

abortion lobbyist in Missouri. Take

43:43

a listen to the way that these

43:46

questions are. friend. So.

43:49

Where. Were. You when you've

43:51

heard the news of the

43:53

leaked decision. I was leaving

43:56

St. Louis to drive to

43:58

Jefferson City about. hours away,

44:00

we've had a confirmation of kids

44:02

at our path of church, Rahmatykin,

44:05

and had just finished up with that and

44:08

was checking my phone for

44:10

messages and some of

44:12

my colleagues who are state legislators,

44:15

they were tweeting out the political

44:17

story and it's like, whoa, what's

44:20

this? What's

44:24

the first thing that went

44:26

through your head when you saw that news? What's the first

44:28

thing that came to mind? I'm

44:33

still not convinced that

44:35

the Supreme Court will use this case to

44:37

overturn Roe v. Slade. I hope I'm wrong

44:39

in my analysis, but I'm not convinced it's

44:41

going to happen. So skeptical,

44:45

but also happy. Maybe

44:48

this is, I'm not going

44:50

to say the end or the beginning

44:52

of the end, but maybe this is

44:54

the transition point that the

44:57

pro-life movement and this country needs to

45:00

get away from court supervised

45:02

abortion law and return

45:04

it to the states to

45:06

decide. But we'll see. Yeah,

45:09

that's the level of deep

45:11

interview that the

45:13

dailiest is invested in, Adam. This

45:16

is someone who has committed his

45:18

professional life to destroying rights in

45:20

this country, to making health care

45:22

difficult for people to access. And

45:25

we're asking, like, you know, oh,

45:27

what did you do? Who did you call? Are

45:30

you celebrating yet? This is the

45:32

deep inquiry. This is what daily

45:34

broadcast listeners, Adam, need on their

45:36

commute to work. Yeah, there's always

45:38

this, like, I mean,

45:40

again, it's the ethos of the New York Times,

45:42

which Jim Norikos described as the far left wing

45:44

of Wall Street, where it's like, there's always this

45:46

kind of wonder and sort of feigned credulity about

45:48

the world. Like the right is always taking a

45:51

good faith. People in power never

45:53

have ulterior, cynical motives. Everything is kind of

45:55

on its face, true, unless it's about an

45:57

enemy state. And then there's always a sinister.

46:00

conspiracy or sinister plot. It's

46:02

instantly not true. And there's

46:04

nothing really sort of behind the veil, right? There's

46:07

nothing sort of behind the scenes going on. Everything

46:09

is earnest. Everyone in power who has

46:11

the same sort of ideological

46:14

and racial complexion as I do is more

46:16

or less in good faith. And

46:18

here's the news and we're gonna aggregate it. Now,

46:20

we mentioned earlier that there's something inherently conservative about

46:23

daily news aggregation. Noam

46:25

Chomsky somewhat famously made the argument that

46:27

concision was inherently conservative because if you

46:30

have to subvert conventional wisdom, you necessarily

46:32

have to explain yourself. Whereas if you

46:34

just assert a truism, like

46:37

the US promotes human rights and

46:39

democracy, no further explanation is necessary.

46:42

So while I don't think news nuggets,

46:44

little McNuggets and people's news block is

46:46

inherently conservative, I do think it lends

46:48

itself to conservatism. And I think

46:51

that the rise in these kind of news explainer

46:53

sort of daily news curation, I

46:55

do think one of the reasons it is so popular, it is

46:57

a feedback loop is that you get wealthier subscribers as well and

47:00

you sort of wanna reaffirm their ideology, but

47:03

it's just so pathologically incurious

47:06

about bigger and deeper issues. Now, they'll

47:08

bring on reporters sometimes who have done deep

47:10

reporting. I mean, that's kind of what both

47:12

Leonhard and Barbaro sort of claim to do.

47:15

They'll either have them as an interview or

47:17

they'll cover their report, the reportage. As

47:19

Hannah Dreier wrote for the New York

47:21

Times about child labor, even when you have that kind

47:23

of story, it becomes very

47:25

superficialized and then gets steered into

47:27

a kind of dopey conservative policy

47:30

solution of making sure we

47:32

clamp down on immigrant children. And

47:34

that's what they do. They're sort

47:37

of dumbing down conservatizing machines that

47:39

need to make complex or difficult

47:42

questions seem easily digestible to people

47:45

who seek out news that reaffirms their

47:47

worldview, that doesn't really subvert or have

47:49

them question too much, but still makes

47:51

them seem smart. And this is,

47:53

we're pathologizing a little bit here, but I think

47:55

that's a fair summation of that market And

47:58

the reason why they target that market. To

48:01

discuss this more, we're now going to

48:03

be joined by Jake of Bacharach, a

48:05

novelist se as who's writing has appeared

48:07

all over, from the New Republic to

48:09

the outlines The New York Times to

48:11

New York Magazine, The Bachelor to Jacobin.

48:13

He's the author of Three Bucks, the

48:15

most recent of which is a cool

48:17

customer Joan Didion the Year of Magical

48:19

Thinking. Jacob will join us in

48:21

just a moment. stay with us. We're

48:30

joined now by Jacob Bacharach Jacob thank you

48:32

so much for joining us today And citizens

48:35

mean thanks for outings! Really happy to be

48:37

here! So let's begin by discussing

48:39

the subject of your article in the primary target

48:41

of our criticism of the top of the show

48:43

the with Leonardo who's the most I would say

48:45

most important commission will miss him to reader at

48:47

the New York Times if not kind of all

48:49

the media. I think by being most important person

48:52

as New York Times economies in most important person

48:54

per se and certain ways in terms of influencing

48:56

those who have influence are influencing those who are

48:58

in power. We discuss a stick of the Top

49:00

of the show as someone who kind of starts

49:02

from a position of power needs and so he

49:04

works his way backwards. To. Sort

49:06

a suit those needs especially the kind of

49:09

current administration for whom he's been very solution

49:11

to as the administration has right wing Tennessee's

49:13

he supports them and sticks and to wish

49:15

they had the occasional non right we tendency

49:18

scolded them. but whether it's kind of downplaying

49:20

child labor and blaming it on lax immigration

49:22

or on covert denialism more has kind of.

49:25

General. Optimism about the kind of posts

49:27

covert austerity regime to is constantly downplaying

49:29

are ignoring the situation in Gaza. His

49:31

tone is always kind of one of

49:33

like ignore the crazy radicals. Everything's kind

49:35

of fine. It's the tone that has

49:37

many many antecedents but will get into

49:39

those later. I went to sort of

49:41

begin by kind of talking about. How.

49:44

His position fit into a broader ideological

49:46

genre of spot we've been discussing today,

49:49

which is this kind of repackaging conventional

49:51

wisdom. It's a little nuggets for right,

49:53

super important, busy people. Yeah. I

49:55

think that's a good way to put it out. I

49:57

might. Maybe. quibble with the important

49:59

people portion a little bit only

50:01

capital I capital P important yeah

50:03

well I guess I guess insofar

50:06

as I have a quibble there

50:08

what what I would say is

50:10

in some ways it's about repackaging

50:12

the capital I capital P important

50:14

people for the lowercase i lowercase

50:16

p important people if that makes

50:18

a lot of sense if there's

50:20

a fundamental underlying ideological tendency within

50:22

the morning and this genre generally

50:24

but certainly within Leonart and his

50:27

newsletter for the times it's a tendency

50:29

that I would call the move along nothing

50:31

to see here tendency which is

50:34

to say a sort of acknowledgement

50:36

that there are imperfections

50:38

in the way that society

50:41

is organized that there are

50:43

inadequacies in the ability

50:45

of our political structures

50:48

and the actors within those

50:50

structures to respond to certain

50:52

events contingencies but nonetheless that

50:55

broadly speaking things are okay

50:58

at least within the United States relatively

51:00

responsible people are in charge

51:03

systems broadly work and outcomes

51:05

while not affected

51:08

are broadly speaking relatively

51:10

just and relatively justly

51:13

distributed I think that

51:15

that's kind of a fundamental underlying

51:17

premise and then I think you used

51:19

the word curation and I think that

51:21

generally speaking when you look at the

51:24

way that he and

51:26

his co-writers and editors

51:28

select and present stories and

51:30

then the way that they interpret them

51:32

within that selection and presentation

51:34

they are doing so in a

51:36

way to basically show that things

51:38

are okay that marginal and

51:40

incremental improvements can be made within the

51:42

structures that we have and that exists

51:44

but that anything that deviates from that

51:47

anything that seeks to look beyond

51:49

that or anything that says well

51:52

if you lift up the hood you'll find that

51:55

this smoothly purring engine is in

51:57

fact full of sawdust is

52:00

more dangerous, where faith is more

52:02

problematic than the problems that that

52:04

sort of deeper dive supposedly uncovers,

52:06

that the questions are more dangerous

52:08

even than the proposed answers in

52:10

some ways. Yeah, to that

52:12

point, I mean, I guess something you were

52:15

talking about really made me think of, if

52:17

I can kind of reinterpret Kurt Angle's three

52:19

eyes to be like, as you said, intention,

52:22

interpretation, and then ideology, and kind

52:24

of how those work together, this

52:26

idea that to be power flattering

52:28

or power serving, you kind of

52:30

assume that there are good intentions at

52:33

the top and kind of in policy

52:35

in politics. And so how

52:38

do you think that kind of framework

52:41

and the interpretation that comes from it,

52:44

and then the ideology that kind of

52:46

is that kind of undergirding infrastructure, like,

52:48

how do you think that flows

52:51

throughout this entire genre

52:53

of explanatory journalism that

52:55

kind of sets people up to, you know,

52:57

as you said, have this sort of nothing

52:59

to see here move right along, we're doing

53:02

okay, but at least you can say one

53:04

interesting thing over dinner. Yeah,

53:06

a lot of it is clearly designed for

53:08

exactly those conversations, right? Where, Oh, I read

53:10

an article, Oh, I heard a story on

53:12

NDR, and that's the conversation starter. And

53:14

look, we're all guilty of it. I'm guilty of

53:16

it, of speaking in that mode. Myself,

53:18

we're recording around holiday time about to go spend some

53:21

time with my mom and dad and a bunch of

53:23

aunts and uncles. And I'm sure I'm going to say,

53:25

Oh, I read an interesting article about 150 times in

53:27

order to

53:30

come up with something to talk about. I think

53:32

that the way that it flatters in two directions,

53:34

as you said, you know, it flatters the reader

53:36

by saying, we're going to draw back the curtain,

53:38

and we're going to let you see the

53:41

data and the mechanics that are

53:43

being used by the experts who

53:45

are really running things to make

53:47

decisions in society. And then it

53:49

flatters the people who are really

53:51

running things, you know, not the mid-level lawyer who

53:53

makes a lot of money, but just works for

53:56

some firm in some city in the Midwest somewhere,

53:58

but the people who are really running things. things,

54:00

it flatters them by

54:02

taking as given that

54:04

they are in fact experts

54:07

who are applying domain

54:09

expertise to parse through

54:11

this data and make

54:14

scientific decisions about the

54:17

direction of society, about the creation

54:19

of policy, and so forth. And

54:21

the fact that those capital I,

54:23

capital P, important people who are

54:25

being flattered in that direction are

54:27

in many cases I think as

54:29

we see right now like in

54:31

the Biden administration, these sort of

54:34

almost like powerless reactive caretakers of

54:36

this machinery that operates almost independently

54:39

in so many cases, it's something that

54:41

gets really obfuscated here. And so it

54:43

flatters them by pretending that they know

54:46

what they're doing, it flatters the

54:48

people who are their sort of

54:50

notional political constituency, the sort of

54:52

sensible center as having a

54:55

window into this kind

54:57

of program of scientific government,

55:00

and it makes everyone feel like

55:02

there is a steady and measured

55:05

hand on the wheel,

55:07

which again is very flattering

55:09

for people who have achieved a certain

55:11

level of professional and social and material

55:14

success and status in life because

55:16

if you believe that our

55:18

society is basically being governed using

55:21

scientific principles, principles who are almost

55:23

drawn from a sort of natural

55:25

law in a way, being appropriately

55:27

applied to social problems, then that

55:29

allows you to very easily believe

55:32

that whatever it is that you

55:34

have in life is all wholly

55:36

merited and was earned on

55:39

the basis of your own application of

55:41

some sort of intellectual and scientific principles

55:43

to the material struggles

55:45

of life in the 21st century. Totally.

55:48

It's like so right, the order

55:50

of the universe is just so

55:52

you're okay. So then like, feel

55:54

good about yourself listening to this podcast. Well, right.

55:56

And then all that's left is kind of sciences

55:58

or this kind of in parisism, which when

56:01

we've talked about the show before, we talked about Nate

56:03

Silver, we talked about the economist and as part of

56:05

that continuation. So I want to talk about this idea

56:07

of post ideology. We are infinitely fascinated

56:09

by that on the show because it's like once you

56:11

sort of assume that the ideology is settled, then

56:14

you move on to this idea of how to

56:16

kind of manage the end of history. And then

56:18

politics is not a terrain of competing moral frameworks

56:21

or competing moral interests, or

56:23

even a zero sum game really between the

56:25

haves and have nots, but as in fact,

56:27

something that requires minor iterations over time, like

56:29

the new iPhone, you sort of introduce a

56:31

new camera or maybe even a sort of

56:33

sharper lens, but ultimately, nothing fundamentally changes or

56:35

more importantly needs to change. And

56:38

the explanatory journalism, there are kind of

56:40

early days of Vox, they don't do this

56:42

as much anymore. The economists, semaphore does this,

56:44

Politico, of course, being where the most dead

56:46

eyed, immoral people somehow end up where

56:49

every everything's a game. Oh, Axios might take

56:51

offense to that. Yeah, people dying

56:53

at the border or dying in Gaza is sort

56:55

of seen as a barrier to reelection versus a

56:57

sort of moral consideration. I want

56:59

to talk about this kind of post ideology framework

57:01

that is inherent in the explanatory journalism. We

57:04

talked about that one particular instance of David

57:06

Leonhardt was giving this breakdown of the bombshell

57:09

New York Times report about child labor. And

57:11

there's this paragraph, which I won't read again, because we

57:13

read at the top of the show, but I'll summarize

57:15

here basically says that the surge in

57:18

immigration that led to the child labor was

57:20

caused by Biden effectively being too laxed or

57:22

too informally laxed about immigration. He basically blamed

57:24

being too nice to immigrants for the surge

57:26

in immigration and thus the rise in child

57:28

labor. There was really no

57:30

sense of any moral properties

57:32

whatsoever to what they were discussing, to what

57:34

he was writing about. There was no sense

57:36

that we should punish the corporations that incentivize

57:39

and use and knowingly use child labor. It

57:41

was just like, this is the way it

57:43

is. It's a process tweak. And to the

57:45

extent to which we can tweak something, it's

57:47

making life more miserable for immigrants. And you're

57:49

just sitting there with your jaw up and

57:51

going, does this man believe in fucking anything

57:54

at all? Or

57:56

is it all just, again, a sort of game on a

57:58

chessboard? Well, I think that's a good question. that first of

58:00

all is indicative of something that you pointed

58:02

out before, which is that in so far

58:05

as lean art in particular, this genre

58:07

in general is going to be

58:09

critical of the current

58:11

Biden administration. It's generally

58:13

to criticize it for

58:15

being insufficiently open to

58:17

ideas that are purple

58:19

up out of the far right wing, like being

58:22

much, much meaner to immigrants. And it's worth

58:24

noting that one of the main areas of

58:26

continuity between Biden and the

58:29

prior administration is in areas of

58:31

immigration and border enforcement. So

58:34

I think that's worth noting, you know, and

58:36

to the sort of ideological question at root

58:38

here or the analytical question is maybe even

58:40

the better way to put it. I

58:43

do actually think that it's almost, if

58:45

not post ideological, then sort of post

58:47

moral in terms of politics. What

58:50

post moral sounds bad? Well,

58:52

for example, looking at this specific

58:55

story, it treats a

58:57

series of very deliberate

58:59

choices on the part of industry,

59:02

for example, as being

59:04

again, a sort of like a

59:06

mental process, that corporations

59:09

utilizing children as roofers, one of

59:11

the most dangerous professions in the

59:14

world is just water flowing downhill.

59:16

Water finds the fastest path to

59:18

the sea. So if there is

59:22

an untapped labor resource,

59:25

then corporations, not directors, not

59:27

managers, not executives, no individual,

59:29

they're just going to flow

59:32

into that gap and

59:34

utilize that labor resource neither because they're

59:36

good or because they're bad, but just

59:38

because it's just because it's there. So

59:40

it exempts all of the actors in

59:43

that process from any type of moral

59:45

culpability of ethical judgment. Then at the

59:48

same time, you know, it treats something

59:50

like the increase in the number of

59:52

migrants arriving at the US border as

59:54

being, and this to me is like

59:57

completely hysterical, as being the result of

59:59

the crisis. of rhetorical

1:00:01

choices being made by

1:00:03

an American president, as

1:00:05

if people like Salvadorians

1:00:07

or Fandurians who are about

1:00:10

to risk the crossing of

1:00:12

the Darien Gap are sitting

1:00:14

around at night parsing the

1:00:16

specific way that Joe Biden

1:00:19

is talking about US immigration

1:00:22

enforcement rather than making decisions

1:00:24

on the basis of a whole complex

1:00:27

of environmental, social,

1:00:30

and economic factors, not to

1:00:32

mention social and economic connections

1:00:34

to existing communities in,

1:00:37

for example, the United States.

1:00:39

So it's just like weirdly

1:00:41

depersonalized way of looking

1:00:43

at something while at the same time

1:00:46

being completely non-material in the

1:00:48

way that it analyzes these

1:00:50

phenomena. That's like the paradox

1:00:52

to me at the heart of

1:00:55

this. It refuses any sort

1:00:57

of individual personal

1:00:59

culpability, blame,

1:01:01

or analysis, while at the same time also

1:01:04

basically rejecting material analysis. And that's why I

1:01:06

keep kind of reverting to this idea that

1:01:08

it sort of just treats all phenomena as

1:01:10

if they're just like natural

1:01:12

occurrences that happen because

1:01:14

of some sort of law of nature. And our

1:01:17

job is just to go

1:01:19

to work and to sort of know that they

1:01:21

happen, but not to think any further than that.

1:01:24

And to maybe not to feel like you have a role

1:01:26

in that. So you kind of set your framework for what's

1:01:28

going on in the world without feeling

1:01:30

like you necessarily have much at stake

1:01:33

in there. And I want to

1:01:35

be clear, like we all need to get

1:01:37

our information from somewhere. And there's a lot

1:01:39

happening in the world all the time. So

1:01:41

the idea that there is all

1:01:43

the daily facts in your inbox, I don't want to

1:01:45

like shit on that idea kind

1:01:47

of in total or the ideas you brought

1:01:49

up earlier, Jacob, you know, as

1:01:52

you said, it's okay to start a conversation like, oh,

1:01:54

I read this thing. We're talking on a

1:01:56

podcast right now. I Kind of hope someone would be like,

1:01:58

oh, I Heard on this podcast. One point like

1:02:00

that's fine. but I think the issue

1:02:02

here, which I'd love free to speak

1:02:05

to his what are the steaks here

1:02:07

right? What happens over time? If

1:02:09

like, The. Big centrist decision

1:02:11

makers within the A you

1:02:13

know, nominal democracy right or

1:02:15

doctors, lawyers, Ceos, cetera, et

1:02:17

cetera. All.

1:02:20

Are. Being said the same three

1:02:22

or four daily conventional wisdom. To.

1:02:25

Ration platforms But or

1:02:27

curators doing that. People

1:02:29

like Leonhard. people like.

1:02:32

Michael Borrow people like Ben Smith

1:02:34

like what ideology as them being

1:02:36

reinforced and upheld and what might

1:02:38

be lost if everything is curated

1:02:40

that way. I think let's just

1:02:42

talk about the states here. so

1:02:44

we're not just like sitting on

1:02:46

daily morning newsletters. Yeah,

1:02:48

one of the. Effects it's

1:02:51

to. Transform. The

1:02:53

news. From. Being

1:02:55

a precursor to political action

1:02:58

into being merely social commodity.

1:03:00

Which has to say that

1:03:02

which freaks me about these

1:03:04

newsletters. For. The majority of

1:03:06

their consumers is that what I

1:03:09

think the really defines to do

1:03:11

is to turn current events into

1:03:13

a kind of social currency. That.

1:03:16

Can be used for

1:03:18

conversation. Can be used

1:03:20

to. Position oneself as

1:03:22

sort, being at the no understanding

1:03:24

what's going on, being relatively savvy

1:03:27

about you know what's happening with

1:03:29

in politics, but my reinforcing sense

1:03:31

that politics is a distinct and

1:03:34

professional domain of. Politicians.

1:03:36

And maybe some media people

1:03:38

voted for the books he.

1:03:41

Was. Work management personally economy

1:03:43

have settled and so one of

1:03:45

the things that it does the

1:03:48

take that sort of self flattering

1:03:50

centrist self image of a lot

1:03:52

of the people who consume these

1:03:55

products. And it's Us. Politics is

1:03:57

a profession. is this a thing

1:03:59

that exists siloed from

1:04:02

the rest of society

1:04:04

and those who attempt

1:04:07

to act politically

1:04:10

outside of the professionalized realm of politics

1:04:12

and outside of occasionally you know voting

1:04:14

I guess are

1:04:17

disrupting a sort of natural order of

1:04:19

things like why can't they just take

1:04:21

their ration of news that they

1:04:23

get each morning and do what normal people

1:04:26

do with it which is exchange it with

1:04:28

other people over dinner at a restaurant. Yeah

1:04:30

it's news as commodity versus news as something

1:04:32

that's a like you said a sort of

1:04:34

precursor to political action and that's kind of

1:04:36

the the take-home point here I think

1:04:38

for us is again this is part of a

1:04:40

informal trilogy with I think the

1:04:42

economist and the kind of neoliberal pundit

1:04:44

brain where it's like it's

1:04:47

about sort of being informed

1:04:49

about the inevitable water

1:04:51

on cement going to its lowest point rather

1:04:53

than this idea that you can sort of

1:04:55

change the trajectory of that water or that

1:04:57

there's moral content to that discussion at all

1:04:59

and even sort of Leonards recent very

1:05:02

sparse coverage of Gaza you

1:05:04

would think it was a earthquake the way it's

1:05:07

talked about it is not something that Biden can

1:05:09

do much about he's kind of bumbling around and

1:05:11

many are seeking answers and it's very complicated everything

1:05:13

is so again by design I think I think

1:05:15

he sort of knows what he's doing everything is

1:05:17

so politically impotent

1:05:20

and disempowering it's a very disempowering way

1:05:22

of viewing the news and

1:05:24

I do think it comes along with again as we discussed at

1:05:26

the top of the show I think there's a market

1:05:29

I think advertisers want wealthier listeners I remember sort

1:05:31

of one example like the famous example is that

1:05:33

for seven or eight years the West Wing was

1:05:35

like not even a top 30 rated show but

1:05:37

it was always number one with people who made

1:05:39

over a hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year

1:05:41

so advertisers loved it like it made a ton

1:05:43

of money I think this is

1:05:45

sort of a version of that it's like wealthy people

1:05:47

are more likely to want to have these kinds

1:05:50

of savvy insider news nuggets versus something

1:05:52

that's going to challenge them for obvious

1:05:54

reasons right not only that but people

1:05:56

like you said who want to be that or kind of aspirational I

1:05:58

want to do a guy used to care the economist in his

1:06:00

back pocket on a subway in New York because he thought

1:06:02

it made him look like he was sort of in the

1:06:04

know. Did he know that everybody who writes for that magazine

1:06:06

is 19 years old? I

1:06:09

know. It'll destroy your worldview

1:06:11

pretty quickly. And I think

1:06:13

a lot about that. It is almost like a bit of an

1:06:15

image thing. It's like, oh, I saw in the in Leonarts newsletter,

1:06:17

I read in the, I heard in the Daily. I

1:06:19

heard on the Daily, yeah. I actually think

1:06:21

that you're very much identifying in one of

1:06:23

the reasons, not the only one,

1:06:25

but one of the reasons why I think there's been

1:06:28

so much institutional investment in these types of products by,

1:06:30

for example, the New York times,

1:06:32

which is not much of advertising, but actually

1:06:34

it is that as advertising

1:06:36

has increasingly become a

1:06:39

loser as a

1:06:41

non factor in the financing

1:06:43

of these major media outlets,

1:06:45

especially print media outlets. And

1:06:48

as they have moved into

1:06:50

a model where their most

1:06:52

important revenue source is subscriber

1:06:54

revenue, they need to find

1:06:57

markets of people who are willing to

1:07:00

pay, who are willing to

1:07:02

subscribe. So finding

1:07:04

the doctor, the lawyer, the

1:07:06

middle level professional, the executive, the

1:07:08

computer engineer, you know, whatever the

1:07:11

low six figure salary and above who is

1:07:14

able to sustain multiple subscriptions

1:07:16

to a variety of, you

1:07:19

know, a couple of newspapers, their

1:07:21

local NPR station, you know, whatever else,

1:07:23

I think it's very, very important because

1:07:25

those are the people who are driving

1:07:27

these like major consolidated national media products,

1:07:30

like the times, like the post, et

1:07:32

cetera. So I, I think that there's

1:07:34

a real underlying business rationale within these

1:07:37

enterprises. I think of

1:07:39

the kind of Noam Chomsky adage about

1:07:41

how brevity is inherently conservative, because if

1:07:43

you're saying something subversive, it necessarily requires

1:07:45

further explanation. Whereas if you're saying the

1:07:47

conventional wisdom, it just sort of accepted

1:07:49

like, again, like gravity or the tides,

1:07:52

it's sort of always been clearly, you

1:07:54

know, again, clearly, the US

1:07:56

is a force of good, clearly Iran's a terrorist state, no one's

1:07:58

going to question that. But if you say Israel

1:08:00

is a terrorist state, and I have to

1:08:02

explain it. Then things get really complex. Right,

1:08:05

so can you, because again, the question then is can

1:08:07

you have something that is a sort of daily

1:08:11

newsletter in your inbox, explain

1:08:13

the world that isn't inherently conservative, or

1:08:16

is the genre itself inherently going

1:08:18

to be just conventional wisdom repackaging?

1:08:21

Yeah, well, my answer to that is no. The

1:08:25

genre, I think, is inherently conservative in the

1:08:28

way a publication like The

1:08:30

Times is inherently conservative. And I think what

1:08:32

I mean by that, and I'm not completely

1:08:34

certain of words in either of your mouths,

1:08:36

but I think what you mean by that

1:08:38

is not conservative in the kind of modern,

1:08:40

slavering, weirdo, Republican, Trumpist sense, but conservative in

1:08:43

the sort of older

1:08:45

sense of the word, of

1:08:47

being institutionally oriented, resistant to

1:08:49

change, invested in conventional wisdom,

1:08:51

invested in incrementalism at maximum when

1:08:54

it comes to any type of

1:08:56

social or political change. Sort of

1:08:58

like, working in the horror at

1:09:01

the possibility of the masses rising

1:09:03

up and storming the palace. And

1:09:05

I think that these types of

1:09:07

products are by their nature, by

1:09:10

their structure, by their length,

1:09:12

by the way that they're curated,

1:09:15

are designed fundamentally to

1:09:17

uphold the existing order. The

1:09:19

Aussie regime, to say that

1:09:21

it's okay, and that

1:09:24

we should be satisfied within it, and that

1:09:26

our demands should be moderated

1:09:28

if we make demands at all, and

1:09:30

that anyone who's not moderate in their

1:09:32

demands is a greater threat to the

1:09:35

order than anything that the order itself

1:09:38

is actually doing or is capable of doing.

1:09:41

Yeah, I mean, I think you're so right about how

1:09:43

it markets the system, but also how these

1:09:45

are marketed to a specific

1:09:47

kind of listener. People who

1:09:49

self-identify as being busy. And

1:09:52

so you need this curation. You need

1:09:55

just a few points, because

1:09:59

you're assuming your day is going

1:10:01

to be so busy constantly because that

1:10:03

is now the identity that you hold,

1:10:06

and that is the way that you maintain

1:10:08

your job or your status or how you

1:10:10

interact with your family. You are a busy

1:10:12

person, and I totally feel that as well.

1:10:14

And so I kind of, it's

1:10:16

being marketed to someone who just, oh,

1:10:18

just a fax ma'am kind of stuff.

1:10:21

But because of the curation, it just

1:10:23

leans into the idea that, well, that

1:10:25

kind of middle management busy person is going

1:10:28

to endlessly be busy because their lot

1:10:30

is never going to change. If they

1:10:32

want to be who they are, who

1:10:35

they are invested in being, they

1:10:37

will not have more free time in their lives.

1:10:39

That is not something that they are going to

1:10:41

fight for or that they are going to win.

1:10:43

And therefore, who

1:10:46

they are needs to just be

1:10:48

marketed to without changing the circumstances

1:10:50

in which maybe you could get

1:10:52

more nuanced. You could read more,

1:10:55

you could hear more, and therefore

1:10:57

have a different take. You need that

1:10:59

curated sound bite because that is all

1:11:01

that your identity allows for.

1:11:04

Yeah, if you ever want to do

1:11:06

an entire episode on the American concept

1:11:08

of leisure as being a form of

1:11:10

moral turpitude, you can have to come

1:11:12

back. But yes, I agree with that

1:11:14

characterization. I think that even a lot

1:11:16

of these people who aren't nearly as

1:11:18

busy as they don't present and who

1:11:21

spend as much time just sitting and

1:11:23

fucking around on the internet in their

1:11:25

middle management offices as they do actually

1:11:27

working are deeply, deeply personally invested in

1:11:29

this sort of idea that they are

1:11:31

on the grind from the moment that

1:11:33

they wake up through their commute all through

1:11:35

the office day and at the end of

1:11:37

it. And feeling like, yes, they are kind

1:11:39

of getting, this is their walk and talk

1:11:41

moment. I mean, you mentioned the West Wing.

1:11:43

This is like, imagine myself as like an

1:11:46

executive walking down the hall with my lackeys

1:11:48

trailing behind me and giving me my sort

1:11:50

of freezing book for the day is very

1:11:52

self flattering portrait. And a lot of people

1:11:54

I think quite like that, even if their

1:11:56

version of it is sitting on a commuter

1:11:58

train or being in my mending trash. of

1:12:00

just digesting these little bits and pieces

1:12:03

of news that have been chopped and

1:12:05

screwed for them by one

1:12:07

former business reporter in New York. I think

1:12:09

the business aesthetic is definitely a thing. I

1:12:12

think of Luke Savage's criticism of the Obama,

1:12:14

behind the scenes Obama administration documentary the first

1:12:16

year where they kept cutting to like garbage

1:12:19

cans with a bunch of Red Bull and coffee cups

1:12:21

in them. And it was sort of like this, but

1:12:23

like the moral content of what they're actually discussing was

1:12:26

pretty fatuous and like not that interesting. But they were

1:12:28

busy. They were super busy and they were working hard.

1:12:30

And again, that kind of Ivy League sort of

1:12:32

sensibility. And again, I think one can be

1:12:34

sensitive to that as maybe a pathology

1:12:36

of what it's like to have to work all the time. But

1:12:38

I think the take home point is that everyone

1:12:41

on this call is overly educated and downwardly mobile

1:12:43

and we're jealous of people with money. I think

1:12:45

that's the take home

1:12:47

point. We want our news creators. Normies

1:12:49

who live happy lives and don't

1:12:52

live in existential dread over

1:12:54

genocide and truly we want

1:12:56

to be them, but we're just so morally superior. We

1:12:58

can't help it. That must be what it is. Jacob,

1:13:00

this has been so great. Before we let you go,

1:13:03

let us know what you are up to these days.

1:13:05

What can our listeners look out for you? Are

1:13:07

you working on anything? I have actually

1:13:09

been doing a lot of book

1:13:11

reviewing lately, largely for New Republic,

1:13:13

but for a few other outlets.

1:13:15

I have a few things in

1:13:17

the hopper. I always host and

1:13:19

promote about them both on my

1:13:21

legacy Twitter account at Jake backpack

1:13:23

as well as my blue sky

1:13:25

account, Jacob backpack and he's

1:13:28

a person on blue sky.

1:13:31

And so I keep an eye on those

1:13:33

spaces and you can certainly find any

1:13:35

of my books wherever flying books are sold. You

1:13:38

do that for the love of the game. I

1:13:40

feel like, you know, that's true. But I, it

1:13:42

was actually a moment of moral exhaustion where I

1:13:44

had been, I had been doing a ton of

1:13:46

more sort of like quick

1:13:49

hit hot take political issue of the

1:13:51

day types of op-ed pieces. And I

1:13:53

got so tired of it and realized

1:13:55

that I wasn't moving the needle at

1:13:58

all. And I just thought place,

1:14:01

just book in the airport, then that's probably more impact

1:14:03

than all. Really really, you're a hero. You're doing God's

1:14:05

work. Well, I think that's a great place to leave

1:14:07

it. We've been speaking with Jacob Bacharach, a novelist and

1:14:09

essayist whose writing has appeared all over from the New

1:14:11

Republic to the outline, the New York Times to New

1:14:13

York magazine, the Bachelor to Jackman. He is the author

1:14:15

of three books, the most recent of which is A

1:14:17

Cool Customer, Joan Didion's is

1:14:21

a book that is a book that is a book that is a book that is a book that

1:14:23

is a book that is a book that is a book that is a book that is more a

1:14:25

book that is a book that is a book that is a book that is a book that is

1:14:28

a book that is not written in any book from any book Jacob,

1:14:30

thank you so much again for joining us today

1:14:32

on Citations Needed. It's such a pleasure. Thanks

1:14:35

for having me. Yeah,

1:14:45

I think he has to nail on the head when we talk

1:14:48

about like politics and the news

1:14:50

of politics or this passive thing. There's

1:14:53

something that smart, savvy people do, but

1:14:56

the idea that you can be motivated to

1:14:58

affect that or to change that through protests

1:15:01

or through boycott or through

1:15:03

political action is sort of

1:15:05

unheard of. It's just this, these are the smart people. They're

1:15:07

kind of tweaking the levers

1:15:10

of policy. They're

1:15:12

sort of trying to perfect the craft. They sort

1:15:14

of iterate policy as one iterates an iPhone. They're

1:15:17

sort of doing their best to perfect the machinery of

1:15:19

policy. But there's no real ideological

1:15:21

battles. And I'm here to sort of

1:15:24

explain to you that the thinking of the elites and

1:15:26

how they're, again, totally in good faith, trying

1:15:28

to maximize the utility of everybody. And

1:15:31

it's all very childish. It's sort of a childish

1:15:33

way of viewing politics. It's a very

1:15:35

comforting way of viewing politics for people who, who again,

1:15:37

have a station in life for which they're not going

1:15:39

to be meaningfully subversive. They're sort of older. They're

1:15:42

settled. Again, they have well-paying jobs. They're not

1:15:44

going to really go out and protest in

1:15:47

any meaningful way. And again, part of that

1:15:49

identity, Adam, is being busy, right? So they

1:15:51

need to rely on the elite filters that

1:15:54

allow them to trust what they are

1:15:56

hearing, that decide

1:15:58

on what framing, decide. decide on what

1:16:00

is curated. And then they

1:16:03

receive that easily in their inboxes or

1:16:05

in their podcast feeds so that they

1:16:07

can stay informed. Now this, again, as

1:16:09

we keep saying, there's nothing inherently terrible

1:16:11

in the kind of wanting to be

1:16:13

informed without, you know, being able to

1:16:15

read things cover to cover every single

1:16:17

day. People have things to do, sure.

1:16:19

But who gets to

1:16:22

make the decisions about what information is

1:16:24

shared, what information is being shared, who

1:16:26

the experts are, who the voices are

1:16:29

that we are supposed to trust, these

1:16:31

all matter. It's genuinely

1:16:33

sinister that David Leonhard just

1:16:35

casually in this kind of

1:16:37

wonkspeak throws out these incredibly

1:16:39

flimsy arguments for why

1:16:41

it's okay to siege, snipe at, shell

1:16:44

a hospital with patients

1:16:46

inside of it because, you

1:16:48

know, he cites supposed hearsay from 2008

1:16:51

about a Hamas fighter in civilian clothes near a

1:16:53

hospital. In 2008, if I saw an IDF soldier

1:16:58

in plain clothes outside of a hospital

1:17:00

in Tel Aviv in 2008, would that

1:17:02

justify Hamas shelling and blowing up

1:17:04

a hospital? No, it's

1:17:07

just vibes. He's literally just

1:17:09

working backwards to provide a justification

1:17:11

for what his ideological confederates in

1:17:13

the Biden White House have signed on

1:17:16

to. It is pure sophistry. It

1:17:18

is pure propaganda. It is taking an already

1:17:20

settled position, which is Israel is going to

1:17:22

invade, bomb shell this hospital and condemn dozens,

1:17:24

if not hundreds, to death. And the White

1:17:26

House has signed off on it. So we're

1:17:28

just going to kind of float six, five

1:17:30

base talking points that you can tell

1:17:32

your friends and family over dinner or at the

1:17:34

water cooler at work to kind

1:17:36

of make yourself feel good about yourself. Because

1:17:39

again, you cannot live in a world where Biden is

1:17:41

not fundamentally good because what do you give over Trump?

1:17:44

And so that's pretty much your only option. And

1:17:46

he starts from that position and he works backwards

1:17:48

because again, he is that's what he's paid to

1:17:50

do. He's a well paid sophist for power. And

1:17:53

so that's why the idea of aggregation

1:17:56

of explanatory journalism, especially delivered

1:17:58

in this new. nugget

1:18:00

format winds up just

1:18:02

reinforcing the vast inequality

1:18:05

of power, of wealth,

1:18:08

on all of these levels of

1:18:10

how the media operates, which

1:18:12

is why we thought that would be a good thing

1:18:15

to start off 2024 with. We

1:18:17

are now, unfortunately, Adam, in

1:18:19

a presidential election year once

1:18:21

again, so we are

1:18:23

definitely going to see this continue throughout

1:18:25

the coming year and of course Citations

1:18:28

Needed will be here the whole way.

1:18:30

So happy new year again to all

1:18:32

of our listeners. Thank you so much

1:18:34

for continuing to listen to the show,

1:18:36

share the show, rate the show on

1:18:38

Apple Podcasts or wherever else you happen

1:18:41

to listen to Citations Needed. Thank you

1:18:43

so much. We cannot thank you enough,

1:18:45

so we'll keep doing it for your

1:18:47

ongoing support. Of course, you can follow

1:18:49

the show on Twitter at CitationsPod, Facebook

1:18:52

Citations Needed. Not only can you listen

1:18:54

and share and support the show, but

1:18:56

you can also help the show continue

1:18:58

by becoming a patron of the show

1:19:00

through patreon.com/Citations Needed podcast. All your financial

1:19:03

support through Patreon is so incredibly appreciated

1:19:05

as we are 100% listener

1:19:07

funded. And as always, a very

1:19:10

special shout out goes to our

1:19:12

critic level supporters on Patreon. They

1:19:14

include Brad Hayward, Zach Kaskart, Lorenzo

1:19:16

Mitchell, Ben Lazar, Morgan Green Hopkins,

1:19:19

Ed Zitron, Corporate Zombie, Eric Joyner,

1:19:21

Buzzamongus, Stinky Pete, DL Sinkfield, Jam

1:19:23

Jaral, Chris Vincent, Nigel Kirby, Scott

1:19:25

Roth, Quarter Shots, Zachary Henson, Josh

1:19:28

Jerlum, Joe Wengert, Steely Dan, Halen

1:19:30

Douglas, Danger Manley, Green New Neil,

1:19:32

Trazdat, Brickshop Audio, Supple Old Man,

1:19:35

David McMurray, MST, William Rush,

1:19:37

Garrett Geisler, Political Zombie, Extra

1:19:39

Domum, Jason Eason, Chris Sarah,

1:19:41

Dash X, James McKayla, Greg

1:19:43

Westmeat, Drew Johnson, Max Belanger,

1:19:45

David Bettner, Brendan O'Connor, Ultra

1:19:47

Miraculous, Zappos, Sturm Wyvern, Darren

1:19:49

Brady, Bart DeCourcy, Ra, Max

1:19:51

Willsie, Blake Bunel, Zenia Zydvornik,

1:19:53

Brendan Hines, Duck Reitzel, Philip

1:19:55

Moss, Rulos Bar, Jamison Saltzman,

1:19:58

a very throwable brick. coin

1:20:00

wallet inspector, shock fist weed

1:20:02

lord, AI scare, backups care,

1:20:04

and of course, computer scare.

1:20:07

I am Nima Shirazi. I'm Adam

1:20:09

Johnson. Our senior producer is Florence

1:20:12

Burra. Adam's producer is Julianne Tweaton.

1:20:14

Production assistant is turned on Lightburn.

1:20:16

Newsletter by Marco Cardolano. Transcriptions are

1:20:18

by Mahnoor Imran. The music is

1:20:20

by Granddaddy. Happy New Year. We'll

1:20:22

catch you next time.