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At a town hall event hosted by Fox, Donald Trump shared a number of falsehoods, and appeared to confuse who he was running against. On this week’s On the Media, how mainstream outlets fail to hold the Republican candidate accountable. Plus, meet the right-wing American pundits who’ve received payouts from the Kremlin.

[01:00] Host Brooke Gladstone speaks with Daniel Drezner, professor of International Politics at Tufts University. Drezner discusses how the political press continues to struggle to cover Trump, and his campaign against Vice President Kamala Harris.

[12:34] Host Brooke Gladstone interviews Dan Froomkin, editor of presswatchers.org. Froomkin explains why fact checkers at legacy outlets are too often adding to political confusion.

[20:49] Host Micah Loewinger speaks with Will Sommer, reporter for the Washington Post who writes about conservative media. They discuss a federal investigation into how the Russian-funded media network RT funded and influenced content of a conservative media company in the U.S., which appears to be the Tennessee-based Tenet Media.

[35:01 ] Host Micah Loewinger speaks with Dan Taberski, the host and creator of the podcast series “Hysterical,” about the ties between a medical mystery in Le Roy, New York in 2011, and the unending Havana Syndrome saga.

Further reading:

“The Very Weird Media Coverage of the 2024 Presidential Race,” by Daniel Drezner

“'Fact-checking' does a (hopefully fatal) face plant,” by Dan Froomkin

“Inside Tenet Media, the pro-Trump ‘supergroup’ allegedly funded by Russia” by Will Sommer

On the Media is supported by listeners like you. Support OTM by donating today (https://pledge.wnyc.org/support/otm). Follow our show on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @onthemedia, and share your thoughts with us by emailing onthemedia@wnyc.org.

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WNYC’s weekly investigation into how the media shapes our worldview.

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At a town hall event hosted by Fox, Donald Trump shared a number of falsehoods, and appeared to confuse who he was running against. On this week’s On the Media, how mainstream outlets...

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The Media Are Going Easy On Trump and Russia is Going All In On Right-Wing Media

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The Media Are Going Easy On Trump and Russia is Going All In On Right-Wing Media

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Brooke and Micah update the listeners about a new funding model for the show.

On the Media is supported by listeners like you. Support OTM by donating today (https://pledge.wnyc.org/support/otm). Follow our show on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @onthemedia, and share your thoughts with us by emailing onthemedia@wnyc.org.

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Brooke and Micah Have Something To Tell You

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Brooke Gladstone: Welcome to the midweek On the Media podcast. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger. Hey, Brooke.

Brooke: Hi, Micah.

Micah: For this week's podcast, we're going to do something a little bit different. We're going to have a conversation, you and me, about something that we're doing at the show that's kind of big.

Brooke: Yes, it is big. That decision is for us hosts to start reading some of the ads that listeners will hear on the podcast, not on terrestrial radio, of course. That's got different rules now. Now, we haven't read the ads on the podcast until now, and there's a really good, if obvious, reason why we're about to.

Micah: Because we, as the hosts, have not read the ads, this has limited the amount of ads that we can feature on the show. It's limited the number of ads that the WNYC team can secure for us. That's one reason why we're rethinking this model. The other reason that's a bit harder for us is that, as many listeners probably know, public media in general is going through a tough time. There have been challenges after challenges, particularly in the past year. Recently, some outlets, like Current and CNN, have reported that this month, in mid September, our producing station, WNYC, plans to cut at least 8% of our workforce.

Brooke: Again.

Micah: Again, yes. This is after a substantial round of cuts this time last year.

Brooke: Last year, we lost a producer, so did some of our other shows. We lost friends around the station, too. They're gone now. Mostly, for your purposes, listeners, this is about what you get to keep hearing. Now, Micah, you've reported on the nervous condition of public media and podcasting for us, and also about the particular role of declining ad money in the podcast industries contraction. Relate that, too, on the media.

Micah: I'm not going to pretend to be some ad expert, but the economy is funky, and for all kinds of reasons, companies are spending less money on advertising, and that has really hurt WNYC. I know it's hurt all kinds of media, but it's really had an outsized effect on the podcast industry. Like we mentioned, there were layoffs over here last year. At the time, our president, LaFontaine Oliver, cited a decline in advertising, what we call sponsorship.

We saw that at other companies like Pushkin Industries, which is Malcolm Gladwell's podcast company, they cut a third of their staff. LAist, which was formerly known as KPCC, got rid of some of their podcast-only shows. NPR cut over 100 jobs. Everyone's feeling it, but we're all feeling it, I think, especially rough.

Brooke: Right. As a public radio show, we're not just relying on ad money. It's just an area where we have some potential for growth. We still have the membership model. That's when listeners like you guys support us, and that still is our most reliable source of funding. There's also foundation and corporate money, but that's been in decline, along with your classic podcast ads. Where does that leave us now? We've got to leverage more of that ad money, right?

Micah: I think so, yes. Our issue is that a show like On the Media, a show about the news that's deeply edited, that features original reporting, that isn't just a couple people sitting around a table shooting the breeze, this is an expensive show to make. I think that's why it's really good, is that we have really smart people and we compensate them fairly for putting a great program together.

Whereas there's this other big style of show, which is just like the personality-driven chat shows. Those, I think, are having a bit of an easier time securing ad money, perhaps because they're not always talking about the news and because--

Brooke: I'll just say it, Micah. It's because they're more commercial.

Micah: Yes. I mean, I don't want to speak too generally here.

Brooke: It's not a bad thing. It's just not what we are.

Micah: Fair enough. I think what advertisers like about host-read ads, what they like less about the kind of sponsorship ad where you have the voice actor whose name we don't know, who reads the ad, is that advertisers, they want to piggyback on the trust that audiences feel with their favorite personalities, what's often called the parasocial relationship. The fact that we have not read those ads has limited the number of ads we can get. We're drawing from a smaller and smaller pool of companies and organizations that want to pay us to have ads featured on our show.

Brooke: Micah, you raised this idea of us reading the ads. It was very popular with the people who look at the money. What gave you the idea, and how do you imagine that they'll sound?

Micah: It's not like I'm some advertising nerd who just loves to read ads and hear them. It's not like that. It's that I see the changes that are happening more broadly in the media. I'm seeing that some older financial models are becoming much less sustainable, much less predictable, and I believe just this is a business decision. I think that this is a necessary, and honestly, increasingly basic part of having a podcast that will exist for years to come.

I mean, Brooke, I think this might be a bigger change for us than it will be for some of our listeners. If you listen to Pod Save America, or popular news shows on Slate, like what next with Mary Harris? Or even Death, Sex & Money, hosted by our former colleague, Anna Sale. Gimlet shows when they were around, all the big chat shows do this. They all have these host-read ads. That is the norm. Again, it's because advertisers are willing to pay more for these ads. I take this decision very seriously, but this, I think, will help us shore up some of the finances with our show and ensure that it's going to be on the air for years to come.

Brooke: I honestly think that it may be hard for people to believe that whenever we come on asking them to contribute, that it isn't just a pro forma ask. In the last couple of years, it's actually become existential.

Micah: Which is not to say that this has been some super straightforward decision. We are thinking through the ethics of this, and we're trying to internally figure out what our boundaries are, which I'd like to ask you about. I mean, what do you think should be the basic rules for how we choose ads and how we read them?

Brooke: Well, I think we need to steer away from our coverage areas so that we don't raise eyebrows or questions about conflicts of interest. That's pretty obvious. No political ads, obviously, or ads from entities we're likely to cover. For instance, big media companies or the oil and tobacco industries because we've covered their misinformation campaigns, and we may still.

Obviously, if you start reading ads, it could raise eyebrows and questions about conflicts of interest. I just want to be clear. The ads, whether or not we read them, aren't going to change the stories we take on or how we report them.

Micah: Look, we've always had a firewall between the editorial side of what we do and the business, and this ad thing is not going to change that whatsoever.

Brooke: If you listen to the show a lot, you feel like you know us, and to a large extent, you do because we essentially play ourselves on the air when we refer to a product, a company that may be more persuasive. That doesn't mean we're going to endorse just anything. We'll think very carefully about our choices. If it's a product that we really can't stand, I don't see us ever reading an ad about it.

Micah: What's an ad that you would really like to read that you think we're well suited for?

Brooke: I'll answer this question if you do.

Micah: Okay.

Brooke: For every wedding that a staff member has had while I've been on the show for the entire third millennium, I've always gifted the happy couple with a Tivoli radio. I have many in my home. I love them. Tivoli, come to us. Let us read your ad. Because I can do that full-throatedly. How about you?

Micah: This sucks because I think you've stolen my answer, but I was going to say, I use a Sennheiser microphone for all my interviews, and I really like their products. It seems like we're both drawn to the radio and audio stuff.

Brooke: Listeners, how do you feel about us reading ads? You think it's gonna bug you? If you're inclined, you can send us an email to onthemedia@wnyc.org and let us know. Meanwhile, thanks for listening to this week's midweek podcast.

Micah: Remember to tune into the big show on Friday. Among other things, we're going to be answering the question, why is the election coverage felt so freaking weird recently?

Brooke: Why indeed? Well, thanks, Micah.

Micah: Thanks, Brooke. Bye.

Brooke: Bye.

Copyright © 2024 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.

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Brooke and Micah Have Something To Tell You

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During election season, voters hope to glimpse the true selves of presidential candidates. And sometimes, revealing details hide in plain sight. On this week’s On the Media, one reporter sifts through political memoirs for truths about politicians and the people they lead. Plus, in vivid detail, a novelist imagines the private lives of former presidents.

[01:00] Host Brooke Gladstone speaks with Carlos Lozada, New York Times Opinion columnist and a co-host of the weekly “Matter of Opinion” podcast. Lozada explains how he mines political memoirs for deeper understanding of our political figures by examining what they include and what they omit.

[16:43] Brooke speaks with Vinson Cunningham, author of the novel Great Expectations. Cunningham, who is now a theater critic at The New Yorker, worked on the 2008 Obama campaign and later in the White House. Great Expectations is inspired by that time in his life and the difficult-to-read candidate for the presidency.

[35:05] Brooke interviews novelist Curtis Sittenfeld about her exploration of the minds of political figures through fiction, first in American Wife (inspired by Laura Bush) and next in Rodham, which considers what Hilary Clinton’s life would have looked like if she had never married Bill. They discuss the questions that led Sittenfeld to write those novels and why fiction based on real people makes readers so uncomfortable — especially the sex scenes.

This show originally aired on our May 3, 2024 program, How to Read a President, with Carlos Lozada, Vinson Cunningham, and Curtis Sittenfeld.

Further reading:

The Washington Book by Carlos Lozada

Great Expectations by Vinson Cunningham

American Wife and Rodham by Curtis Sittenfeld

Curtis Sittenfeld: ‘People misunderstood the sex scenes in Rodham’

On the Media is supported by listeners like you. Support OTM by donating today (https://pledge.wnyc.org/support/otm). Follow our show on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @onthemedia, and share your thoughts with us by emailing onthemedia@wnyc.org.

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With his various books, and publications featuring him, on display, President Barack Obama speaks in the library of Miami Central Senior High School in Miami, Friday, March, 4, 2011.

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WNYC’s weekly investigation into how the media shapes our worldview.

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Getting to know presidents through memoirs, journalism, and fiction.

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[music]

Brooke Gladstone: South Dakota governor Christy Noem is responding to backlash over a story in her upcoming memoir. In the book, Noem says she shot and killed her 14-month-old puppy for bad behavior. From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media, I'm Brooke Gladstone. Every election season, political memoirs abound, often divulging more than intended.

Carlos Lozada: No matter how diligently they present themselves in the most electable light, they always reveal themselves, their insecurities, their fears, their ambitions.

Brooke Gladstone: Plus, a novelist imagines the private life of political figures in search of unknowable answers.

Curtis Sittenfeld: What does Laura Bush think of the Iraq war? Does she approve of it and if she doesn't, does she feel complicit?

Brooke Gladstone: How to read a politico on this week's On the Media from WNYC. [music]

Brooke Gladstone: From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. Micah Lowinger is out this week. I'm Brooke Gladstone. As we near Election Day, voters seek to glimpse the true selves of presidential candidates. To that end, an old clip of Kamala Harris describing her Thanksgiving recipe has gotten a lot of mileage. "You could even do a little rosemary if you want, under the skin with some butter before you're going to cook it so that butter will just melt in there." Well, how about that? She cooks. At the Republican National Convention, the party tried to show Donald Trump's softer side, inviting his granddaughter to share this story.

Kai Trump: To me, he's just a normal grandpa. He gives us candy and soda when our parents aren't looking.

Brooke Gladstone: Then there are the tidbits reporters dig up against the candidate's will.

Speaker 4: Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is now admitting that he abandoned a young dead bear in Central Park.

Brooke Gladstone: Can we ever really know a public figure? That is the question that is animating this hour, which first ran this past May. To answer that question, we ranged across genres, even into fiction, for whatever may offer a true look. Of course, you can always mine for shiny nuggets hiding in carefully curated sound bites or you could go even deeper and read a memoir.

Carlos Lozada: Everybody now should read The Truths We Hold, the memoir of Kamala Harris.

Speaker 2: Former first lady Melania Trump announced she will be releasing her first memoir.

Speaker 5: House Speaker Emerita has a new book out, The Art of Power, an art at which Nancy Pelosi is something of a master.

Brooke Gladstone: One connoisseur of politician lit finds them quite useful, even revelatory. Carlos Lozada is a columnist for the New York Times and author of The Washington Book: How to Read Politics and Politicians. Others may pass on these books because they are dull or doorstops. Lozada, however, is a very close reader.

Carlos Lozada: No matter how carefully they sanitize their life stories and their records, no matter how diligently they present themselves in the most favorable and electable light, they always reveal themselves, their insecurities, their fears, their ambitions, whether they really mean to or not. It's not always the big, sexy, newsy material.

Brooke Gladstone: That's the stuff that comes out in the headlines, right?

Carlos Lozada: Yes. That gets covered right away, right. When Barack Obama's memoir comes out, immediately, political reporters pour over it for the news value. The way I try to read them is a little bit different. You know, it may be something very subtle, they say in the acknowledgement section. It may be some small thing they said to a low-level aide, but that's where they really show themselves.

Brooke Gladstone: Give me a couple of examples.

Carlos Lozada: Sure. One of my favorite Obama stories is in another Washington book, not by him, but by one of his former aides. Reggie Love wrote a book called Power Forward. Reggie Love was Obama's personal aide, his bodyman, as they call it. The guy who kind of helps him get from place to place, carries his stuff around. Love recalls a moment when he forgot to bring Obama's briefcase on the plane. This is in his first campaign for the presidency. They were flying to some Democratic primary debate. He thought he was going to get fired, right? Obama forgave him, but he was annoyed about it.

Reggie Love explains why Obama was annoyed. He liked to be seen carrying something off the plane. He said to Regie Love, "JFK carried his own bags."

Brooke Gladstone: That is revealing.

Carlos Lozada: It says so much about how carefully Obama shaped and thought about his image and how he drew on perhaps our most mythologized former president.

Brooke Gladstone: You've also said that omissions can be as revealing as what's actually in the book. One example you gave was Mike Pence's memoir, published in 2022, called So Help Me God. A lot of it was about his actions on January 6, but there's one moment when he describes the video message that Donald Trump put out on January 6.

Carlos Lozada: He quotes extensively from Trump's message when he finally tells the rioters to stand down, and here's how he quotes it in the book. "I know your pain. I know your hurt...but you have to go home now. We have to have peace now." Trump did say those words, but that's not all he said, right? When I looked at that, I thought, "What did Pence cut out with that ellipsis in the middle of the quote?" so I dug up the video. Here's what Trump said, "We had an election that was stolen from us. It was a landslide election, and everyone knows it, especially the other side." Only then does he go on to say, "But you have to go home now. We have to have peace."

Mike Pence, he's still covering for the boss. It's impossible for me to think about Mike Pence's vice presidency without thinking about those three little dots in that quote.

Brooke Gladstone: Which brings us to 2015, when you binge-read eight books by then-candidate Donald Trump, I didn't even know he'd written eight books.

Carlos Lozada: He's written more than eight books. Just those were the ones that I was able to get hold of and read.

Brooke Gladstone: This year, you wrote an op-ed saying that if someone had read those books, they wouldn't have been surprised by the presidency that followed. Shocked, perhaps, but not surprised. What did you know back in 2015 that we might not have realized until 2016 or years after?

Carlos Lozada: Back in 2015, this is just when Donald Trump was suddenly doing very well in the polls in his effort to secure the Republican nomination. I asked my editor, "What if I just read a bunch of his books and see what they say about him?" He said, "That's a great idea, but do it quickly because who knows how long interest in this guy is going to last," right?

Brooke Gladstone: [laughs] We talked to somebody at the New York Times. It was David Leonhardt. He said then, "In all honesty, we're going to serve our readers by not spending time on candidates that aren't going to get anywhere," and Donald Trump was among them.

Carlos Lozada: Lo and behold. Often when I read these books, years later, there's basically one or two key things that still stick in my head. He wrote a book in 2004 called How to Get Rich. He drops this really weird passage about his hair. He says, "The reason my hair looks so neat all the time is because I don't have to deal with the elements. I live in the building where I work. I take an elevator from my bedroom to my office. The rest of the time, I'm either in my stretch limousine, my private jet, my helicopter, or my private club in Palm Beach." What does that tell you right, aside from his vanity about his hair?

Brooke Gladstone: He has his finger on the pulse of the American people.

Carlos Lozada: [laughs] Political reporters say that the White House traps presidents in a bubble, but if you read that passage, what you realize is that he has lived in a bubble of his own making for a long, long time.

Brooke Gladstone: As you've noted, a lot of people see what you do as a kind of masochistic enterprise. Are any of these books genuinely like good?

Carlos Lozada: Absolutely. Out of the Obama trilogy, Dreams From My Father, Audacity of Hope, and A Promised Land, it's going to be hard to top the first one, Dreams From My Father. In general, I think when it comes to books by presidents or former presidents, the more distant they are from that person's time in the White House, the better they tend to be. Books by presidents that are straight-up White House memoirs are often both very defensive and very in the weeds. Of the Obama canon, I would say that Dreams From My Father is the strongest. I'll mention two others by presidents. Ulysses Grant's memoirs are fantastic.

Brooke Gladstone: Right. They're famous. I've never read them.

Carlos Lozada: Well worth reading. One of the things I love about it is that really, it's not about the presidency at all. It's about his experience in the Civil War, the Mexican-American war, and just his life. You'd almost be surprised to know the guy in that book went on to be president. He doesn't really have a lot of interest or respect for politics, but it's a very honest account. It's funny, you can tell how much he, like, just couldn't stand Lee and all the great press that Lee got. It may have helped that Mark Twain was his publisher, but he was writing it as he was dying and broke. It's a remarkable story.

Brooke Gladstone: We talked about Obama and about Grant. What's the lesser-known one that is among your favorites?

Carlos Lozada: Jimmy Carter has written four memoirs. His White House memoir is perhaps the least interesting of the four, the best one is called An Hour Before Daylight. I only read it recently when we all learned that Jimmy Carter had gone into hospice care, and it is his story of growing up on his father's farm in Georgia during the Depression. It is beautiful. It was a Pulitzer finalist in biography in the early 2000s. To my mind, it's still my favorite book by a president, as distinct from a presidential memoir.

Brooke Gladstone: You say that when reading a Washington book, always read the acknowledgments?

Carlos Lozada: Absolutely.

Brooke Gladstone: Why?

Carlos Lozada: The acknowledgments are a goldmine of back-scratching, of snubs, of insecurities. I'll give you two examples, one just kind of funny. Another, I think, almost poignant. Marco Rubio wrote a book in 2015 called American Dreams. In the acknowledgments, he starts off thanking two people by name. The first person he thanks by name is "My Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, whose willingness to die for my sins will allow me to have eternal life." Wonderful. That's great. The second person he thanks by name is his lawyer.

Brooke Gladstone: [laughs] Who's that?

Carlos Lozada: His lawyer is a very well-known, powerful Washington lawyer named Bob Barnett.

Brooke Gladstone: Oh.

Carlos Lozada: I thought that was wonderful. I thought it did such a great job of capturing the inside-outside game that politicians play. The second example I will give you, I'm sure that you and your listeners, you all saw the coverage of the special counsel report on Joe Biden's treatment of classified documents, right where he was exonerated of any misdeeds. No charges. But in the sort of soundbite that went around the world, the special counsel said he came across as "A well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory." Biden gave a press conference where he tried to address that, didn't go so well. In the course of all that controversy, I was reading Promise Me, Dad, which is the memoir that Biden published in 2017 about his final period as vice president, which coincided with the time of Beau Biden's illness and death.

Brooke Gladstone: His son.

Carlos Lozada: Yes, who died in 2015. One of the issues that was raised in the special counsel report was some question as to whether Joe Biden remembered the precise year of Beau Biden's death. I was reading the acknowledgments of that book, and here is the very first paragraph of the acknowledgments. He says, "This is the story of Beau's death. This story was not an easy one for me to tell. I found it difficult to go back and revisit this time period, and my memories of events were sometimes foggy. There were a number of people I counted on to help me with recall, with the reconstruction chronologies, and with encouragement." I found that so utterly relatable.

Any one of us who has experienced the prolonged illness and death of a loved one knows that sometimes the mind obscures the details of family trauma. I wish he had reread that moment in his own book because I understood it.

Brooke Gladstone: I think a lot of people, with some blockbuster exceptions, mostly find these books as doorstops on the 20% off table in Barnes & Noble. As someone who's consumed the gamut that most of us simply pass by, how would you advise us to sort through them, or can we let you do it for us?

Carlos Lozada: [laughs] If people want to merely rely on my columns and my books as substitutes for reading the Washington books, who am I to tell them not to? I do think theres a lot to be learned from them. If there's a president who you instinctively dislike, maybe check out what he had to say. There's plenty to learn in Washington books that we're just leaving on the discount shelf at Barnes & Noble.

Brooke Gladstone: You wrote, "I realize this kind of journalism may seem a bit passive. After all, I'm just reading, but by digging through the books that politicians write, I can help explain, reveal, and understand them. I may not have found that next great American novel, but I hope that reading these texts can help me fill in a little bit more of the great American story."

Carlos Lozada: When I was trying to think about the various scandals surrounding the Trump presidency, I looked back on books about Watergate, books about Iran Contra, books about the Clinton impeachment scandal. There were many similarities with the issues that we were going through in the Trump era, but one thing that struck me was how in those past scandals, the presumption of honesty that people had for the presidency was very important. When it was revealed that Nixon had been lying, that Reagan had skirted the truth around Iran Contra, that Clinton hadn't been honest about his relationship to Monica Lewinsky, that was a big deal, right?

There's a great quote, and I think it's The Final Days by Woodward and Bernstein, which is their second book on Watergate, where Patrick Buchanan is telling some of Nixon's relatives, like, "Look, the tapes reveal that he had been lying to the public, and the president can't lead a nation that he's deceived." The one big difference that I found in the scandals of the Trump era is that that presumption of honesty has been squandered. It's gone. Instead, there's this cynical acceptance of deceit, so reading these books doesn't just tell me about Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, and Donald Trump tells me something about the nation that they lead.

Brooke Gladstone: Thank you very much.

Carlos Lozada: Brooke, thank you so much for having me.

[music]

Brooke Gladstone: Carlos Lozada is an opinion columnist for the New York Times and author of The Washington Book: How to Read Politics and Politicians. Coming up, a very rare take on a politician, a novel drawn equally from firsthand experience and the imagination. This is On the Media.

[music]

Brooke Gladstone: This is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone. Vincent Cunningham is a New Yorker staff writer and theater critic, but before he was a journalist, he worked in politics. First on Barack Obama's 2008 presidential campaign and then in his White House. He could have written a political memoir about those days. Instead, he wrote a novel. It's called Great Expectations, about a young man named David Hammond on the campaign staff of a man both charismatic and remote, mostly referred to as the candidate. Earlier this year, Cunningham explained how much that character mirrored the real Obama.

Vincent Cunningham: Well, he is most remarkable for his illegibility. In my book, he is this screen upon which many different kinds of people from many different kinds of places, with different motivations, different life stories, and different destinations in the end, all of them could project. The keyword back then was hopes, but also their neuroses, secret ambitions, and, yes, their attempts to build an identity, in the case of the main character, David Hammond. All of that could be projected onto this canvas that is the candidate.

Brooke Gladstone: How do they differ, your Obama and the real one?

Vincent Cunningham: Well, they don't differ very much. I've always thought of the way that fiction can take someone that we think we know and present a different version is really a matter of angles, almost like camera angles. The Obama of the true 2008 campaign was a protagonist who had his say. The candidate in my novel is someone who is looked at and projected upon. That's really the difference, but there are many similarities, right? He has a pastor that sounds a lot like Jeremiah Wright, if people remember that episode.

Vincent Cunningham: Right, Jeremiah Wright, who scared a lot of white people.

Vincent Cunningham: Well, yes, famously, goddamn America was his friend, so there's a lot that these figures hold in common. Oddly, even though he is the one who is driving the world historical action by running for president, the candidate of my text is a kind of passive figure. The object of wishes, but not their author.

Brooke Gladstone: You've said, "here are seeds of truth you seek to make more meaningful through fiction." Apply that to what you did.

Vincent Cunningham: For example, my biography is a lot like David Hammon's. He grew up where I grew up, has known people like I've known. He read the books that I've read. [laughs]

Brooke Gladstone: He had the same religious upbringing you did because a struggle with belief plays an important role in your book.

Vincent Cunningham: A struggle with belief, and also an attempt to make one system of belief parallel with another. How the process of politics entails a similar structure of belief.

Brooke Gladstone: Enlarge on that.

Vincent Cunningham: Well, sure. My parents were both very devoted Pentecostal.

Brooke Gladstone: The way that David's background was?

Vincent Cunningham: It was even more complicated than David's. My parents met in the Baptist church, in a choir that my mom sang, and my dad was the musical director of. Then when I was three years old, my father, being a musician, got a job at a Catholic church. We moved to Chicago, and I was Catholic from the ages of three to nine. Then just before my father died, we moved back to New York. Then, my mother and I joined the Pentecostal church. To answer your prior question, this has given me and David Hammond, the protagonist of my novel, a fairly fine-grained understanding about how people believe.

How they are, as we say, converted, how they persist in their beliefs, what the process of disillusionment looks like, and how disillusionment is not like a cessation of belief, but a dramatic passage in the action of someone's life in belief. All of that drama that comes purely inside ourselves about what we hold to be true, or as the founders say, self-evident. That is thrilling to me. Fiction can be about the movement not of a body through space, but of a psyche through its life.

Brooke Gladstone: You said that, "Novels that draw from life are a better way to track truth."

Vincent Cunningham: Well, because you can mold action using some things that are true, some things that are not, into a shape that makes sense to you. Once fact is not an obstacle, what you're left with is meaning. The meaning in our lives is often so different from what actually happens. All of us know that when we show up at work in the morning, we've been through a whole drama that has nothing to do with anybody we've seen or anything we've done. It has happened in our subconscious minds, in our dreaming, in our reorientation as we wake.

Our minds often create patterns, and the process of making untrue things true in the life of a book is a way of adding deeper, more resonant stakes to the true action of our lives. I think that's why it's a more harrowing kind of truth because it involves not just what we did and what we said, but also what we thought and what we hoped.

Brooke Gladstone: There's so much self-disclosure in this book. Were there moments of hesitation when writing your protagonist because he mirrored so much of your experience?

Vincent Cunningham: I can't think with that mind while I'm writing. I've thought about that more over the past couple of weeks. All of a sudden, people are calling me and being like, "Hey, did that really happen?" I'm like, "Actually, no, it didn't," or I'm like, "Okay, yes, that kind of did." While I wrote it, I was trying to make a story using the materials of my life as the paint and the canvas and all that." I didn't have time to think about it back then. Now I'm like, "Oh, wow. What have I done?" [laughs]

Brooke Gladstone: There's vivid imagery in Great Expectations, down to the condensation on the walls.

[laughter]

Brooke Gladstone: Your doppelganger is a keen observer, trying to figure out who he is or wants to be. He does that by studying others and the choices they make.

Vincent Cunningham: Yes. One of the joys of my life of reading novels is the opportunity that it creates for paying attention. That profusion of noticing, those were the parts of this book that I've had the most fun doing.

Brooke Gladstone: The oratory of Obama is what drew so many Americans to him. Your narrator is captured by the candidate's ease with talking about faith in a way that reminded him of his pastor.

Vincent Cunningham: Obama, his graspings after meaning his search for an identity, one step along the way was the Black church. Trinity in Chicago, social justice-oriented liberationist congregation pastored by Jeremiah Wright, was part of his creation of an African American identity that he didn't necessarily get from his upbringing. Whose sounds and rhythms often are made manifest through the Black church and the many musics that it has brought into being, is something that he learned and was therefore very attuned to. The expertise of the outsider is different than the lived-in expertise of the insider, right? You could feel all of the efforts of his study.

He was the possessor of those rhythms. He earned them. Having been native to them myself, I could hear that. Not only the rhythms, but the effort in their acquisition. It was something that interested me about him.

Brooke Gladstone: David Hammond says that he was never able to really "to arrive at a stable opinion of nature or, at the bottom, the sincerity of his oft-mentioned Christian faith," that is the candidate. "He seemed, even in his own well-honed telling, to have joined this church, to root himself socially within a recognizably Black community, not necessarily in response to some deep and irrepressible metaphysical urge. No shame there," he writes. What is religion especially in those first beautiful days of belief, but the acknowledgement of an agreement among people?

Vincent Cunningham: Catholics, in their vast vocabulary for God, one of the phrases that I love is that God is the ground of being, the stable surface that makes it all possible, right? That has always appealed to me deeply because I think about friendship, for example, or just you and I got on this recording and were able to talk and joke and laugh even before we turned on the recordings. That has to do with some deep agreement, whether it be biographical or something in our temperament, especially with humor, right? You have to have so much in common with someone to make a joke because the joke rests on so much sediment beneath it.

I love that feeling of deep agreement, and this is why I like to meet people. You surprise yourself with how much goes wordless, but because of the implicitness of our samenesses, so much can grow on top of that. I mean, if that's a definition for God, then sign me up. I think that the skillful politician is a manager of those samenesses. Someone who can say, "This is how we are alike." That is a kind of politics, and it's also a kind of religion. I've always loved being part of a congregation. When people start to sing together, oh, we all know that song. It makes me want to cry every time.

Brooke Gladstone: What did you learn from writing this novel, from working on this campaign, from being an erstwhile speech writer yourself, about the power of rhetoric and its limits?

Vincent Cunningham: Well, yes, rhetoric asks the question, how are we in the same boat? How are our destinies linked? That is the amazing thing and also the terrifying thing about rhetoric. Rhetoric creates groups, and groups become mobs sometimes, but sometimes they become movements. All of a sudden, you're in a group with somebody that you don't know, and you got to figure out why that speech spoke to you. It might not be the same reason that I think, but a good speech can make you understand why you're more like a different person that you kind of thought was off to the side.

Brooke Gladstone: It was so funny when you just said, "Sometimes that speech talks to you." You sounded just like Obama.

[laughter]

Vincent Cunningham: I grew up with him. There you go.

Brooke Gladstone: You've said you're addicted to oratory. It was the first thing you tried to learn to read.

Vincent Cunningham: If you grow up in church, imagine for a listener who hasn't been to church but has listened to politics. Imagine attending a speech every week. Not only was it the first kind of thing that I thought of as a literary event worthy of my own effort, but it was also the first thing that I ever tried to edit. If you are subject to as many sermons as I have been, at a certain point, you'll be like, "He should have said that. He missed this part of the text." I mean, this is part of why I'm a critic. I would sit back and say, "This word would have made that rhythm go better and develop my own theory of the sermon." When I teach any of my writing classes, I always, early in the semester, include a speech because it is the most obvious way to learn to craft an argument.

Brooke Gladstone: Not everyone in your novel is convinced of rhetoric's power. Take Beverly, a campaign fundraiser, a hard charger, often a critic of the candidate's long speeches.

Vincent Cunningham: [laughs] Well, in creating Beverly, who is, on some level, she might be my favorite character in this book. One thing that I wanted to capture was us young, 20 something staffers and there were people just ten years older than us who said, "Well, slow down. Not everybody's going to be as besotted by this as you are." Also, if you think back to that time, especially during the primary, Hillary Clinton, she would make fun of the hope thing. She's like, "Oh, all of a sudden, the waters are going to part and the oceans will cool."

I remember this one speech where she was laying it on pretty thick, that wasn't just Clinton, and it wasn't just her supporters. Many people had this reservation about Obama, and I wanted to make that manifest in one of my characters, and so Beverly, who's all about power, she wants to track the movements of power.

Brooke Gladstone: She said, "Everybody talks about how he'll change race in America, erase it or whatever. When the real thing is, how about you get some power and then use it?"

Vincent Cunningham: It makes a lot of sense. It doesn't make for a good political speech, but at the end of the day, that is the ground of politics, the acquisition of power. One function of high flown rhetoric is to cloak that under layers of feeling, often reasonable and warranted feeling. It is good to sometimes pull that blanket away and look at politics for what it is.

Brooke Gladstone: Would you say that David was naive?

Vincent Cunningham: Well, he's expressing this desire to understand the campaign, not through, like, will they win? Won't they win? But what is, as he calls it, its coded, total meaning, and read it like one reads a novel. I can admit that this is one of the problems of my life, right, that I can't just experience something. I'm always trying to break it down as an abstraction and get it all into my head. That is a kind of naivete because life is this onrushing flood. Its one true quality is that it is ungraspable in all of its details. The moment that you try to do that, you're doing something like art. Trying to rove through it and pull from it a certain kind of meaning, but to do that is, of course, to leave parts out.

That is sad to me.

Brooke Gladstone: Sad?

Vincent Cunningham: That, in fact, there are more moments that I don't remember than I do remember. That, to me, is terrifying. A kind of death before I die, and this is maybe why I'll never be quite the hard-edged Beverly. Even if maybe I agree with her, I more than I agree with David Hammond. My desire to make art is precisely an attempt to retrieve as much of life as I can.

Brooke Gladstone: The other big theme in the book is David's striving to become something, an effort that was hamstrung in part by his upbringing. Could you turn to page 196?

Vincent Cunningham: Absolutely.

Brooke Gladstone: We will read call and response.

Vincent Cunningham: John 3, this is very Bible, the textual reference. I love it.

Brooke Gladstone: "When looking for clues," says David, "Into the sources of my own passivity."

Vincent Cunningham: When looking for clues into the sources of my own passivity, my odd relationship to effort, I think of scenes like this one. I was raised in an atmosphere of magic, christened into unrealism, made to feel most at home amid excruciating cognitive dissonance, the kind that never resolved. I believed and didn't believe and felt the strain. The people I knew were and weren't real did what they shouldn't do without jettisoning the orthodoxies that should have made them ashamed. God knows how, but I guess that's all of us."

Brooke Gladstone: Which brings us back to Obama. It's his rhetoric that helped get him elected. Two very different presidents later, is he still a symbol?

Vincent Cunningham: It's so strange. Usually for me, at least, when someone who was the president is no longer president, they become more legible, right? We know who Jimmy Carter is, the good guy. Usually presidents come from a sort of archetypal background, right? The man from a place called Hope, Bill Clinton, or the C student of a preppy family, George W. Bush. We understand them as archetypes in the beginning, and they retreat almost into those archetypes, becoming more and more legible as they age. I don't know if that's true about Obama. I understand him less than I thought I did. A Netflix guy? I have been consistently surprised by his choices.

I think he's just as well intended as I thought he was before, but the meaning that he was so skillful at managing, it's kind of slipped away. He'll certainly always be the first Black president, which means something. He'll certainly always be cool, right, which means something. Maybe he represents a last gasp of, as you mentioned, naivete and innocence before the country reached a kind of apocalypse. I don't know. Lots of people who've read this book come back to me to saying, "Wow, I just got so sad thinking about how hopeful we were." Being transported back to that time represents a final gasp of something. I can't say if he's a symbol, what he's a symbol of.

Brooke Gladstone: In the end, David is less impressed with the candidate the more he understands the symbols he offered. He calls him a moving statue. He mattered and he didn't. Just as David said his own history mattered and didn't. He wanted to be more legible than symbol, more real. The book ends with him pulling out his phone and taking a picture.

Vincent Cunningham: It's another one of those cognitive dissonances, moments of strain that I feel all the time in my attempts to capture and to understand more of my life. In the end, I think this book's attention to art and to politics and to other dimensions of life is about that struggle. Digging through surfaces, trying to access the real. So many things in our lives offer us a the shovel to do that right. Religion offers us access to the real. Politics says "No, power. This is access to the real." Social movements, this is it. Even science, but it's really this impossible thing that takes a whole lifetime. Maybe life is the most spectacular failure at this attempt, but the only people that I'm interested in are the people that keep trying to do that.

[music]

Brooke Gladstone: Thanks for this book, Vincent.

Vincent Cunningham: Brooke, thank you for this conversation.

Brooke Gladstone: Vincent Cunningham is a staff writer at the New Yorker, where he also co-hosts a podcast called Critics at Large. His novel is Great Expectations.

[music]

Brooke Gladstone: Finally, the deepest of dives into the consciousness of a public figure that the novelist never even met. This is On the Media.

Vincent Cunningham: Yes, we can.

Brooke Gladstone: This is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone. When puzzling over public figures, we can turn to biographies, memoirs, and even novels penned by people who were, as the song goes, "In the room where it happened," but where do we go when the public record is too sparse to examine? Curtis Sittenfeld has written several novels exploring the minds of public figures that were fueled from the media ether or her own imagination, and they are startlingly convincing. In 2020, she published Rodham, an alternate history of what Hillary Clinton's life might have been if she hadn't married Bill. In 2008, Sittenfeld authored American Wife, inspired by former First Lady Laura Bush.

In that earlier book, the character based on the First Lady is called Alice and follows her life from early childhood to her ambivalent entry into the storied Blackwell family, based on the Bushes. We spoke in May about the mysteries that inspired her to write American Wife.

Curtis Sittenfeld: The essential unanswered question was, what does Laura Bush think of George W. Bush? What does she think of the Iraq war? Does she approve of it? And if she doesn't, does she feel complicit?

Brooke Gladstone: Why did you care what she thought?

Curtis Sittenfeld: Something that made a big impression on me is that she would hold these literary salons at the White House early on in her husband's first term and that she would invite writers who were on the record as politically disagreeing with him. They might think, "Oh, she's not familiar with my work, but she's trying to seem literary." Then they would go and they would find out that she had read everything they'd ever written and was very conversant in it. That's super interesting. There was just, like, little facts about her, including many that I read in Anne Gerhardt's biography. Like, she liked to fly Southwest and go to informal Tex-Mex restaurants. She was supposed to be very unpretentious and low-key and there was this knee-jerk view of her as like a Stepford wife.

Brooke Gladstone: Well, it was known that she was in favor of abortion rights.

Curtis Sittenfeld: There can be public facts out there that do not penetrate people's consciousness. Yes, I think that a public figure who seems to embody certain contradictions is just a more dramatic version of the rest of us because we all have inner conflict.

Brooke Gladstone: Right? You created such a plausible character. At least half the book, if not more, doesn't have anything to do with Bush or his political career. That seemed to be part of the point. We learned about what shaped Alice, her trials and her traumas, and most notably, the tragic event drawn from the life of real-life Laura when she was a teenager and she killed a high school friend in a car accident. This high school friend was incredibly important to the fictional character. Of course, I want to know how close was this character to the real-life Laura.

Curtis Sittenfeld: She ran a stop sign. Who among us hasn't run a stop sign? If something terrible had happened, how could a person not be haunted by that? So I thought, "Of course, she's haunted by it," but as I'll say many times, I do not know Laura Bush.

Brooke Gladstone: It sure seems like I know her now from your book. Given what we know of Alice, her first and evolving impressions of Charlie Blackwell, drawn from George W. Bush, they're so plausible, given what we've experienced through her eyes as a child. Later, she's captivated by his easygoing, self-assured charm, and she's also rather indifferent to his rich, high-profile political family. What did you learn about George in writing this book? I mean, you did research into him, too. You imagine that he's afraid of the dark, literally.

Curtis Sittenfeld: That's definitely made up.

[laughter]

Curtis Sittenfeld: I am afraid of the dark. I often think that being a fiction writer is like being a desperate but resourceful little bird building your nest, and it's like partly twigs and partly garbage. I really am in dialogue with real events and in imaginary dialogue with real people, but it is a novel. It is made up. It's supposed to make a reader think about what is it to be a person? How do we end up living the lives we live, but it's also supposed to be entertaining.

Brooke Gladstone: It's only very much later when your character Alice realizes that Charlie's clan saw him as a lightweight, as a bit of a loser. The extremely intimidating Priscilla, your stand-in for the matriarch Barbara Bush, suggests that their engagement came as a surprise because in choosing the smart and serious Laura, George was clearly and unexpectedly marrying up. Suddenly Laura's asking, Did the Blackwells think Charlie was incompetent and foolish? Did everyone?"

Curtis Sittenfeld: That is something that, again, you can read articles about the Bush family that it seems like George W. Bush was not the son who is expected to be president.

Brooke Gladstone: Fiction, you've said, is speculation based on two years of research, and it's very careful gossip.

Curtis Sittenfeld: Ha, yes.

Brooke Gladstone: Now, I want you to turn to page 518.

Curtis Sittenfeld: That alone, someone might be like, "Oh, wait, but 518? Never mind."

Brooke Gladstone: [laughs] Okay, so at this point, Alice is grappling with the role she's expected to play in her husband's political life, and she's wavering between denial and guilt about her own part in his career. She says, "I can change people's lives, and many times, although it is cowardly, I have wished I didn't have that ability." Can you pick it up from there?

Curtis Sittenfeld: Yes. "And the hardest part is not that what I do is insufficient in others' eyes, but that it's insufficient in my own. I stay busy, I travel, I try with my visits, with my actions. That is more than my words to support other people's good work, but I don't doubt that I'd have felt better about my contributions to the world if my power were more modest later on."

Brooke Gladstone: She says, "I could have lived a different life, but I lived this one. Perhaps it's not a coincidence that I married a man who would neither fault me nor even be aware of my failings. I married a man to whom I would compare favorably because if I have done little, he's done less or perhaps more. If I had caused harm accidentally and indirectly, he's done so with qualmless intent and total confidence." There's an important confrontation between Alice and Charlie. She calls him from the back of a car to tell him that she's met with a veteran whose son has died in the Iraq war and that she told him she herself wanted the troops to come home, which created a big rift. What led you to write that? How much of this book is a wish fulfillment?

Curtis Sittenfeld: Probably a very significant amount. She was believed to be a Democrat until she married into the Bush family at the age of 32. Did she always vote for him? Probably, but I don't know.

Brooke Gladstone: Alice didn't.

Curtis Sittenfeld: Right. Spoiler alert. Did Laura Bush always vote for George W. Bush? I would say it's highly likely, but if I've wondered, it's much more interesting and dramatic to let it play out in fiction that this stand-in for her didn't.

Brooke Gladstone: She tells us, "All I did was marry him. You're the ones who gave him the power."

Curtis Sittenfeld: Well, it's true, right?

Brooke Gladstone: I'm wondering why you changed the name of Laura Bush's character in American Wife, whereas, in Rodham, you used Hillary and Bill's real names.

Curtis Sittenfeld: American Wife is supposed to say, "Here are some major events from the life of Laura Bush, and I'm taking these as a point of departure and then trying to imagine how the world looks to someone like her in these very intimate ways that we probably will never know." It's very speculative, but it is grounded in real events. Whereas Rodham is an alternate history, so, as in real life, Hillary and Bill meet and fall in love at Yale Law School. She follows him back to Arkansas, where he's making his first congressional run. He asks her to marry him twice, and she says no.

In real life, he asked her a third time, and she says yes. In Rodham, he asks her a third time, and she says no, and so there's a split in the timeline. I felt you understood that everything from this point forward is fiction, so I don't need to change the names. If I change the timeline and change the names, you might wonder, "Is this really a novel about Hillary, or is this just a novel about a woman in politics?" I did it for clarity, but I made discoveries by doing it that I hadn't anticipated. Like, it turns out that, without question, readers prefer changed names.

Brooke Gladstone: [laughs] Why?

Curtis Sittenfeld: Okay, I'll tell you why, sex scenes. People like the sex scenes in American Wife, and they don't like the sex scenes in Rodham. I think it's because "And then Bill, you know, caressed my shoulder," except the word isn't shoulder.

Brooke Gladstone: You've noticed that novels based on public figures can make people feel more uncomfortable than fictionalized accounts on TV or film. I wonder, is it because the novel is more intimate, it takes up more resonance in the people's brains than a director's sound and pictures?

Curtis Sittenfeld: Maybe it's that it's written in the first person. Also, there is something very undeniable or concrete about words on the page.

Brooke Gladstone: I just think it requires more audience participation.

Curtis Sittenfeld: Yes, it's almost like if you're showing a sex scene, it can just be two characters embracing or lying in a bed together. If you're writing it, are you going to say penis? Are you going to say erection? Actually, I think a lot of different people have a ick reaction to any word for genitals that is not the word they use.

Brooke Gladstone: You got mocked for the sex scenes of between Bill and Hillary in Rodham, right? You told the Guardian that it felt radical to write about sex from Hillary's point of view because we all knew about Bill and sex. You heard criticisms that maybe it wasn't your right to reclaim that as a novel. Don't you have the right to do anything?

Curtis Sittenfeld: Amen. Yes, you do. I know there is something hilarious. Over my career, people will say, "Did you have to get permission to write this?" I'll think, "Do you know how writing novels work? Would I have applied to the Bureau of Novel Writing?" I'm glad to live in a country where, for the time being, it's still permissible for me to choose the topic.

Brooke Gladstone: We're trying to sort out the different kinds of political novels and what their purposes are. Have you got any thoughts?

Curtis Sittenfeld: There can be a difference between an insider's novel and an outsider's novel. Just in terms of the books that I personally want to write, I think it's to my advantage that I'm an outsider. I don't feel afraid that I won't be invited to some party in Washington, DC. I live in Minnesota. I would never be invited to anyone's party in Washington, DC, and the same with writing my recent Saturday Night Live novel, where I don't feel afraid that Lorne Michaels is not going to greenlight my idea for a sitcom because I don't have an idea for a sitcom and I don't know Lorne Michaels.

I think that's liberating. Although, I also will say people who are insiders certainly have access to many more juicy details or firsthand experiences than I do.

Brooke Gladstone: Why do you think you've been so drawn to exploring the minds and the lives of political figures in fiction?

Curtis Sittenfeld: When I was in graduate school, I had a professor who would say, "Fiction is this conversation between the reader and the writer." I feel like if the reader already has familiarity with the subject of the fiction, that conversation is richer and more complex. If you and I are talking and I'm telling you about my friend, we can have some interesting conversation, but if you know that friend, it's a much more complicated, in a good way, conversation and you can contribute. If I write a novel about Hillary Clinton, I know you know who Hillary Clinton is, and I know you probably have an opinion, and I, as the writer can maybe challenge that or that's something that we can explore together.

Brooke Gladstone: Maybe that's why Moby Dick didn't get off the ground. There's too much about the whale.

Curtis Sittenfeld: [laughs]

Brooke Gladstone: It didn't initially. [laughs] Curtis, thank you very much.

Curtis Sittenfeld: Thank you.

Brooke Gladstone: Curtis Sittenfeld's latest novel is Romantic Comedy. She's also the author of American Wife and Rodham.

[MUSIC-- Let's Impeach the President- Neil Young]

Neil Young: Let's impeach the President then for lyin'

And misleading our country into war.

Brooke Gladstone: That's the show. On the Media is produced by Molly Rosen, Rebecca Clark Callender, and Candice Wong. Our technical director is Jennifer Munson. Our engineer is Brendan Dalton. Heloise Blondio is our senior producer, and Katya Rogers is our executive producer. On the Media is a production of WNYC Studios. Michael Lowinger will be back next week. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

[00:50:45] [END OF AUDIO]

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New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.

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A recent update to the Apple podcast app also included a tweak to how podcast downloads work. As a podcast user you’re free to shrug and move on. But for podcast creators this could be a big deal. According to data from Podtrac, overall downloads across the industry were down 15 percent as of February.  This American Life lost 20 percent of their downloads. Some shows at NPR saw a 30 percent dip. In this week's midweek podcast, OTM producer Molly Rosen looks at how Apple has shaped the podcast industry.

On the Media is supported by listeners like you. Support OTM by donating today (https://pledge.wnyc.org/support/otm). Follow our show on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @onthemedia, and share your thoughts with us by emailing onthemedia@wnyc.org.

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Apple Computer Inc. CEO Steve Jobs holds up the new iPod with an episode of hit television show 'Desperate Housewives' showing, during an unveiling in San Jose, Calif., Wednesday, Oct. 12, 2005.

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Oct. 2005: Apple Computer Inc. CEO Steve Jobs holds up the new iPod with an episode of hit television show "Desperate Housewives" showing, during an unveiling in San Jose, Calif.

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WNYC’s weekly investigation into how the media shapes our worldview.

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And how a recent update caused ripple effects across the industry.

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Title: How Apple Shaped Podcasting

Micah Loewinger: This is On the Media's midweek podcast. I'm Micah Loewinger. Back in November, I reported a piece about the layoffs, show cancellations, and shrinking revenue streams that have plagued the world of podcasting over the past year and a half. The cliff notes version, ad revenue dried up, shows became too expensive to make, and one outlet after another closed podcast departments or cut their long-form narrative shows. Over the past nine months, things have stabilized a little, I think, but there was a small technical change, an iPhone update rolled out last September, that compounded the problems. The update to the Apple Podcast app also included a tweak to how podcast downloads work. It's a small change that might mean fewer automatic downloads of a podcast's back catalog. As a podcast user, you're free to shrug and move on, but for podcast creators, this has been a big deal. According to data from Podtrac, overall downloads across the industry were down 15% as of February. This American Life lost 20% of their downloads. Some shows at NPR saw a 30% dip. Lower numbers, while a more accurate reflection of listenership has meant less ad money, podcast companies Acast and Audioboom lost $7.2 million and $9 million, respectively.

To understand how a small change in Apple software sent ripple effects across an entire industry, we're going to revisit a story from last November about how the podcasting medium became a thing in the first place, and the company at the center of it all. Producer Molly Rosen has the story.

Molly Rosen: It's impossible to tell the story of how podcasting came to be without Apple. About a month ago, the company rolled out a new operating system.

Male Speaker: IOS 17 for iPhone is now out for everyone.

Molly: Some of the updates might have an impact on how you're listening to this show right now.

Male Speaker: There's actually huge changes to the Apple Podcast app. You can now create custom episode artwork that's prominently featured on the Listen Now and your show page. There's updates to how [crosstalk]

Molly: The update to the Apple Podcast app also includes a tweak to how podcast downloads work. It's a small change that might mean fewer automatic downloads of a podcast's back catalog. As a podcast user, you're free to shrug and move on, but for podcast creators, this could be a big deal. Lower numbers, while a more accurate reflection of listenership could translate into less ad money, less ad money means fewer podcasts. We'll get to that later in the show, but I wanted to know how a small change in Apple software is capable of sending ripple effects across an entire industry. The story starts in the early 2000s.

Kevin Marks: The same year the iPod had launched in 2003, while I was still working on Apple, there was this group doing audio blogging.

Molly: Kevin Marks is a software engineer. He worked at Apple from 1998 to 2003. He was trying to solve the problem of streaming audio and video on the internet. The problem being it didn't work. The files were too big, they needed too much bandwidth, more than early 2000s internet could handle. He became very interested in what those audio bloggers were doing.

Male Speaker 2: The power of your intellect.

Kevin: They'd record a radio show, put that on their blog as an mp3 file, and link to it from the blog.

Adam Curry: dominating world leaders, welcome to the Daily Source Code. I'm Adam Curry coming to you from Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

Molly: The Daily Source Code, hosted by the DJ, Adam Curry, was one of the first podcasts ever made. The term itself was coined by a Guardian journalist mashing up iPod and broadcast, podcast. Adam Curry with Dave Winer, a software engineer, came up with the idea of sending sound files, like a blog post, down an RSS feed. In the early days, you'd listen to these podcasts on the computer, like reading a blog. Then in October 2003, the programmer and blogger, Kevin Marks, wrote a script that would download podcasts, copy them to iTunes, and sync them to his iPod so he could listen on the go like people do today. He demoed the script at a blogger conference at Harvard.

Kevin: There was a dozen people in the room. They were like, "Oh, that's a good idea. Yes, interesting." Then in 2005, Apple launched integration of podcasting to iTunes.

Steve Jobs: Podcasting started off as Wayne's World for radio.

Molly: This is Steve Jobs on a stage at the All Things Digital conference in May 2005. He's in his trademark look, jeans and a black long-sleeve shirt brimming with founder energy. He pulls up iTunes.

Steve: Yes, there's a little thing called podcasts right here. You click that, and we've got a page full of podcasts. All these things sync up with your iPod every time you sync your iPod. Remember, this has been really hard to do so far. You've got to download this third-party app, and already, millions of people are subscribing to these podcasts. I think this is just going to send it into orbit.

Molly: Can you tell me about your experience before Apple really got in the game, and then how Apple changed things?

Rob Walch: There was no guarantee that podcasting was going to succeed before Apple got into it.

Molly: Rob Walch is the VP of podcast relations at Libsyn, one of the first hosting platforms.

Rob: I always say there's three inflection points in podcasting. The first inflection point was September 2005, and that was iTunes. The second big inflection point was 2007, which would have been when the iPhone was released. Then the third inflection point is not serial. It's iOS 8 going native on the iPhone.

Molly: When you say native, what do you mean?

Rob: You buy a phone. What's on that phone? Native. What apps are on there? iOS 8 went native about a month before serial came out. You can look at the numbers of where podcasting grew. It grew on the iOS side. It didn't grow on the Android side. If it was serial, it would have grown on both sides, but it grew on the iOS side. Android has never had a native podcast app. They still don't have a native podcast app. Apple Podcast app this past week, 56%, 57% of downloads directly across all Libsyn's platforms went directly to Apple. Podcast app. Spotify was 15%, number two.

Molly: Then there's YouTube. More and more podcasters are posting their interviews to YouTube as videos, and more and more listeners or viewers are finding them there. Whether YouTube videos actually count as podcasts depends on who you ask.

Rob: People don't like it, but my definition of a podcast is you have an RSS 2.0 compliant feed, and it is in Apple Podcasts because if you're not in Apple Podcasts, then you're not in all those different apps.

Molly: He's referring to Apple's directory, which they made public back in 2005. It's like a centralized podcast library. As long as you meet Apple's specifications, you can submit your podcast to it, and then the podcast is there for any potential listener to find in any app. Without Apple, none of that would be possible.

Rob: Now, I'll say this. Steve Jobs and Apple had an ulterior motive, and people don't realize why Apple did support us. That was because they would want to sell iPods. If you're going to sell an iPod in all these countries around the world, you have to have something to put on it. In a lot of the countries, they didn't have rights yet, and here is this medium called podcasting, which has universal global rights. They could have iPods for sale in Albania and have an Albanian iTunes store that has nothing but podcasts because they don't have the rights yet for music.

Molly: I hear what you're saying, that overall, with Apple's role, it's generally been a very open ecosystem, and they've been good custodians of the medium you would say.

Rob: Yes.

Molly: Does it ever concern you that things could go a different way in the future and that one company has this kind of power over the standards of the medium?

Rob: I'm not concerned it's Apple. What I'm concerned is other companies haven't been able to move up. I felt that Google Podcast was going to be the next inflection point. Once Google made that native, I felt we would see a bump like we saw with iOS, and I was obviously dead wrong. Apple is going to continue to be that dominant player in the space. People have to remember, podcasting ecosystem is such a tiny percentage of Apple's revenue. The amount of revenue that Apple makes from podcasting, even with the subscriptions, is less than the interest they earned while we've been talking for this hour.

Molly: That is part of what's interesting to me, though, because I don't necessarily see it as a bad thing, but I do see this imbalance. How much podcasting matters to Apple in terms of making money, it's just not that important, I think, but how much Apple matters to podcasting is a lot.

Rob: I would be more concerned if Apple cared about making money from podcasting. That would be my concern. As long as Apple goes with podcasting is a great thing for our consumers, and we like podcasting because people that own iPhones like podcasts, I think we're fine. Apple has been a really good steward in this space, and I believe they're going to continue to be a very good steward in the space as long as they don't want it to become a profit center.

Molly: Now, in 2023, podcast technology works pretty much the same as when Kevin Marks wrote the first code to feed podcasts onto iTunes 20 years ago.

Kevin: You have a feed, and the feed links to a file on a server. You download the file.

Molly: Do you feel like its development was a little bit random and then it just stuck, or do you think there was a logic to why the RSS MP3 combination is still what we use today?

Kevin: It's a little bit random, yes. I think the point was it fitted neatly with the episodic nature of blogs anyway, and there was a huge, ridiculous standards war between different kinds of feeds. You could make a serial-length drama about that. Standards do tend to persist, and a big chunk of that is that they become harder to change when you've got lots of people both writing and reading them.

Molly: We've interviewed Cory Doctorow on the show, somewhat recently, about his theory of the [unintelligible 00:10:12] of the internet, which we always have to bleep because it's public radio. He said that there's one part of the internet that it's [unintelligible 00:10:22] resistant.

Cory Doctorow: I've got some good news for you, Brooke, which is that podcasting has thus far been very [unintelligible 00:10:29] resistant.

Brooke: Really?

Cory: Yes, it's pretty cool, which isn't to say that people aren't trying.

Molly: Do you agree with that? Why do you think it's remained such an open ecosystem?

Kevin: Yes, it was this fairly simple standard that anyone could adopt, so there was the large ecosystem of people doing different bits of it. Every now and then somebody does try and privatize it. There's been lots of attempts to replace feed formats with new feed formats, but they're still there and they still work.

Molly: The same thing that's made podcast technology a little wonky and a little random has also kept it on this different path than other digital media. It was coded by techies to solve a delivery problem and then given a home by Apple to sell hardware. For listeners, we can subscribe to a gazillion podcasts for free from the app of our choice. What could possibly go wrong? For On the Media, I'm Molly Rosen.

Micah: For more on what went wrong, go back and listen to our show from November 10th, 2023. It's a good one. By the way, if you're using the Apple Podcast app, search On the Media and click Plus Follow in the top right-hand corner. If you see a checkmark, that means your phone will download new episodes automatically, which you know is convenient for you and really helps us. Thanks for listening to this week's midweek podcast. Be sure to check out the big show dropping on Friday. I'm Micah Loewinger.

Copyright © 2024 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.

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When President Biden campaigned for re-election, he highlighted threats to democracy and his long track record. But since Kamala Harris took over the ticket, the party has landed on new messaging. On this week’s On the Media, a democratic strategist explains why we heard words like joy and freedom over and over at the Democratic National Convention. Plus, hear how Christian nationalism is shaping American politics.

[01:00]  Host Brooke Gladstone interviews Anat Shenker-Osorio, a democratic messaging strategist who has advised PACs and committees in battleground states, about the party’s new messaging strategy. They discuss how mockery shrinks strongmen to size; why voters seem to like the word “freedom” more than “democracy”; and more.

[16:39] Brooke speaks with Matthew D. Taylor, scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Christian, & Jewish Studies in Baltimore and author of the forthcoming book, The Violent Take It by Force: The Christian Movement That Is Threatening Our Democracy. They discuss different strains of Christian nationalism — from the sentimental view of America as a Christian nation, to the desire to uphold Christian supremacy. Plus, how the phenomenon has shaped American politics for centuries.

[32:23] Brooke continues her conversation with Matthew D. Taylor. Taylor introduces Brooke to the world of independent charismatic Christianity and its media, where an extreme form of Christian nationalism has taken root. Plus, the Christian leaders who stoked violence on January 6th.

A portion of this episode originally aired on our April 19, 2024 program, Meet the Media Prophets Who Preach Christian Supremacy. Plus, Journalism in ‘Civil War’

Further reading / listening:

The rise of the "Brat Pack" — and a new Democratic political style by Anand Giridharadas

Why Kamala Harris’ New Politics of Joy Is the Best Way to Fight Fascism, by Anat Shenker-Osorio

How the Alabama IVF Ruling Was Influenced by Christian Nationalism by Matthew D. Taylor

Christian Nationalism (Un)Defined by Matthew D. Taylor

On the Media is supported by listeners like you. Support OTM by donating today (https://pledge.wnyc.org/support/otm). Follow our show on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @onthemedia, and share your thoughts with us by emailing onthemedia@wnyc.org.

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Vice President Kamala Harris smiles and waves with a backdrop of a sea of delegates holding up 'Kamala' signs on the floor of the DNC

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Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris during the Democratic National Convention Thursday, Aug. 22, 2024, in Chicago. 

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WNYC’s weekly investigation into how the media shapes our worldview.

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The party debuts a new messaging strategy.

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Freedom! Joy! Forward! The DNC’s Fave Buzzwords, Explained

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Michelle Obama: Who's going to tell him that the job he's currently seeking might just be one of those Black jobs?

Brooke Gladstone: Democrats depart from the high road at the DNC with some creative and purposeful jabs at the Republican candidate.

Anat Shenker-Osorio: That's what mockery does. It shows you that that great and powerful Oz is merely a little man behind a curtain.

Brooke Gladstone: Also, on this week's On the Media, while Donald Trump is selling Bibles on the campaign trail--

Donald Trump: I'm proud to endorse and encourage you to get this Bible. We must make America pray again.

Brooke Gladstone: We revisit a conversation about an increasingly extreme form of Christian nationalism.

Matthew D. Taylor: Christian supremacy is the idea that Christians are better than other people. Therefore, Christians should exercise maybe even a coercive influence on people who are not Christian.

Brooke Gladstone: It's all coming up after this. From WNYC in New York this is On the Media. Micah Loewinger is out this week. I'm Brooke Gladstone. I've seen almost all the conventions since 1972, but I've never seen anything like this week's DNC already parsed endlessly for its breadth, its unity, and its joyful noise.

Michelle Obama: That's what we've seen from Kamala Harris, the steel of her spine, the steadiness of her upbringing, the honesty of her example, and yes, the joy of her laughter and her light.

Brooke Gladstone: The one fly in that otherwise healing ointment was that like all conventions, it offered no place for dissenters. The uncommitted delegates were referenced only during the roll call, and though in her speech, Kamala Harris depicted both sides of the conflict in Gaza is agonizing and urgent. The DNC declined requests to feature any Palestinian voices as Jon Stewart observed.

Jon Stewart: They had black Americans, Hispanic Americans, Asian Americans, gay Americans, Jewish Americans. Palestinian Am-- oh. Well, oh, to be fair, it was only four nights, eight hours a night. [laughter] Really it's best not to think about the consequences of our actions over there, especially given the theme of the week.

Female 1: I can feel the excitement in this arena. It's filled with energy and with joy.

Female 2: The air of joy.

Hakeem Jeffries: Joy.

Brooke Gladstone: Go ahead and laugh, but joy felt good this week, especially is applied to the joyful warriors leading the ticket. Joy infused nearly every moment to accept the ones devoted to the fear and anguish created by the overturning of Roe, the lack of effective gun regulation, the captivity of the hostages in Gaza. Those mood shifts weren't jarring because joy is entirely compatible with urgency. In fact, joy is the antidote to cynicism and paralysis, and thus a driver of action. Here's Pete Buttigieg on the GOP's political strategy.

Pete Buttigieg: They are doubling down on negativity and grievance. Committing to a concept of campaigning best summed up in one word, darkness.

Brooke Gladstone: The dems chose a light, but even more, this democratic convention engaged in an audacious display of redefinition, wrenching keywords and associations away from the GOP.

Adam Kinzinger: Donald Trump is a weak man pretending to be strong.

Brooke Gladstone: Adam Kinzinger, a lieutenant colonel in the Air National Guard is a Republican and former Illinois congressman.

Adam Kinzinger: He puts on quite a show, but there is no real strength there. As a conservative and a veteran, I believe true strength lies in defending the vulnerable.

Brooke Gladstone: Equating empathy, caring with strength. One crucial redefinition this week involved the meaning of manliness and femininity in the political context. For decades, the GOP has been the daddy party, focused if only rhetorically on fiscal responsibility, national security, global leadership, and strength in all things.

Arnold Schwarzenegger: Of course, we don't have to talk about the democratic candidates, right? No. They all look like a bunch of girly men, huh?

Brooke Gladstone: That's Arnold Schwarzenegger pumping up votes for George W. Bush in 1992, and here again at the 2004 Republican National Convention.

Arnold Schwarzenegger: To those critics who are so pessimistic about our economy, I say, don't be economic girly man.

Brooke Gladstone: The Democrats are the mommy party, a bleeding heart fixated on family issues and healthcare generous to a fault and ignorant of the ways of the world. Not this week, Kamala Harris.

Kamala Harris: As Commander in Chief, I will ensure America always has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world. I will fulfill our sacred obligation to care for our troops and their families. I will always honor and never disparage their service and their sacrifice.

Leon Panetta: Trump tells tyrants like Putin, they can do whatever the hell they want.

Brooke Gladstone: Leon Panetta has been Secretary of Defense, CIA director, White House Chief Of Staff, Head of the Office of Management and Budget, and the California Congressman.

Leon Panetta: Kamala Harris tells tyrants the hell you can, not on my watch.

Brooke Gladstone: In his newsletter, The.Ink, Anand Giridharadas sees the rise of a new democratic political style, which involves, yes, a joyful urge to punch back hard and fast. He calls the Democratic messaging strategist, Anat Shenker-Osorio, the philosopher queen of this style, recently advising candidates in France and Brazil. She's not working on Harris's campaign directly, but she does advise PACS and committees in some battleground states. Since 2020, she's conducted at least two focus groups a week to explore what disaffected voters want to hear from democratic candidates. In a recent piece in Rolling Stone, she noted that Representative Jasmine Crockett has made an art form of the clever jab.

Anat Shenker-Osorio: She became a career prosecutor, while he became a career criminal with 34 felonies, two impeachments, and one porn star to prove it.

Brooke Gladstone: Even Michelle Obama departed from her 2016 declaration that when they go low, we go high.

Michelle Obama: Who's going to tell him that the job he's currently seeking might just be one of those Black jobs?

Barack Obama: It has been a constant stream of gripes and grievances. That's actually been getting worse now that he is afraid of losing to Kamala.

Brooke Gladstone: Barack Obama.

Barack Obama: There's the childish nicknames. The crazy conspiracy theories, this weird obsession with crowd sizes.

Brooke Gladstone: Capped with a downward glass and the suggestive hand gesture. Anat Shenker-Osorio says, "You need laughter to bring down a strong man."

Anat Shenker-Osorio: Not only I say that, but experts, historians, and people who study present-day efforts to bring down an authoritarian, or in our case a would be authoritarian, pretty conclusively demonstrated that you got to get the people to feel like this person is vincible. If they seem like a force more potent than any on earth, people aren't going to have the tenacity to stand up and resist the fight. There is a lot of despondency, but if you want people to come to your party, probably pretty good idea to throw a better party.

Brooke Gladstone: All this makes sense. Trump was made fun of through most of 2016s campaign. He was called a carnival barker, a big orange baby, and so forth. He still won. How is the Harris campaign threading that needle?

Anat Shenker-Osorio: This is actually a really important and subtle point. It is serious. You have to make clear to your voters just what MAGA Republicans, not just Trump, but the whole ilk have in store for us. This is why we've put a lot of time and attention to making voters aware of Project 2025. At the same time, you have to make it seem that it is not a fate accompli. I think in the 2016 Trump case, yes, there was absolutely derision and mockery, but the dominant message about Trump was, he's dangerous, he's dangerous, he's dangerous, he's dangerous.

He had never served before, and so he was an unknown quantity. We see this dynamic with Bolsonaro when he was first elected in Brazil. It happened just now in Argentina with Milei. When people are still in the flirtation phase with the right-wing authoritarian, they're not quite sure what's coming. It's a different story when you're trying to beat him another time.

Brooke Gladstone: That is very interesting. Another thing that really seems to be working for the Democrats is the co-opting of traditional Republican talking points. It's often been noted, this focus on the heartland and patriotism, and especially freedom.

Josh Shapiro: It's not freedom to tell our children what books they're allowed to read. It's not freedom to tell women what they can do with their bodies.

Joe Biden: Kamala and Tim will protect your freedom. They'll protect your right to vote.

Brooke Gladstone: Which includes caring about and helping your neighbors. Also in Walz's. words.

Tim Walz: There's a golden rule, mind your own damn business.

Brooke Gladstone: In 2022, you directed research on democratic messaging called Protect Our Freedoms. You say you've been on the freedom train 10 years longer than that.

Anat Shenker-Osorio: Yes. Back in the ancient times, we tested a whole bunch of messaging to look at what would actually make US voters aware of interested in mobilized by unions. Both to join them themselves, but also just understanding their fundamental purpose. What we found is that the most potent message was one about freedom. CEOs are free to negotiate their wages and bonuses as they see fit. Working people just want the same freedom, the freedom to join together in union. Many people were surprised by this.

They felt as in the framing of your question, that this was some right-wing concept. I would actually push back on that and say free at last, free at last, thank God almighty as famously, Martin Luther King Jr. ended his I Have a Dream speech. I would point to the Freedom Riders, Freedom Summer to FDRs for freedoms to more recently the very intentional switch away from the right to marry to the freedom to marry. Freedom has been a contested concept. It's neither a right nor a left.

Brooke Gladstone: What took the Democrats so long to try it out against Trump?

Anat Shenker-Osorio: Great question. Ask the suitcases under my eyes that passed for bags, what took them so long.

Brooke Gladstone: At 100 campaign events since launching his reelection in April 2023. Biden referenced democracy 386 times, and freedom about 175 times. As you found, democracy is an abstraction, whereas freedom is where the rubber meets the road. You did focus groups on this.

Anat Shenker-Osorio: Not just focus groups, but in quantitative testing as well. When we would do split samples within our surveys and we would ask folks about anything from gun violence to democracy reforms. When we would frame those democracy reforms with the obvious word of democracy, it is best for our democracy if we X people would be less in agreement, but more importantly, they would be less mobilized. They would be less willing to support a candidate who favored that position than if we framed precisely the same reform as in order to protect our freedoms, we need to X.

Brooke Gladstone: Democracy is less salient because it's an abstraction. The same is true of the word economy, right?

Anat Shenker-Osorio: It's not going to buy you dinner or give you a nice present on your birthday. It's merely a convention by which we measure human activity. People obviously care more about how they're doing than how it's doing. It's a shift away from saying, for example, we grew the economy by this much to here's what we delivered to your family. Placing yourself on the side of working people rather than placing yourself on the side of maintaining or growing or keeping healthy this abstraction.

Brooke Gladstone: You have found as a democratic messaging strategist, don't ask potential voters to complete the sentence Trump is or Kamala Harris is. Ask them to complete the sentence, Trump will do and Kamala Harris will do. What's the difference between Trump is and Trump will do, or Harris is and Harris will do?

Anat Shenker-Osorio: When we were looking at a Trump-Biden ticket, that is where we first happened upon this finding that anytime that we would start a sentence with Trump is they would instantly knee-jerk rejoin. Yes, well, Biden is. Because we were talking to the so-called double haters because that's who we focus on in our research because that's who we need to move.

Brooke Gladstone: The people who hate both candidates.

Anat Shenker-Osorio: Yes. People would end that sentence in not very nice ways. When we would flip away from Trump is to Trump will do, they would reluctantly say, "Yes, maybe I'm not thrilled with the continuation of a status quo I don't love under Biden, which is how it felt to them. What Trump will do sounds way, way, way more nefarious and terrible to me, so fine. We saw this in the elections in Poland last year. We saw this in the Bolsonaro-Lula race in 2022. Flip people away from, this is an election about two different candidates, to this is an election about two different countries, and we're going to decide which future we will have. They are much more likely to want to head in the progressive direction.

Brooke Gladstone: Hence the emphasis on Project 2025, which really is a bunch of policies, but collectively is an idea of a very changed America. It's interesting Harris's new campaign slogan is a "New Way Forward." I'm old enough to remember "A Bridge to the 21st Century."

Bill Clinton: Tonight let us resolve to build that bridge to the 21st century, to meet our challenges and protect our values.

Brooke Gladstone: It's really working with Harris.

Anat Shenker-Osorio: Harris embodies much, much more of a fighting spirit, and a sense of actually doing something about these threats that she's bringing up. That's really important to people.

Brooke Gladstone: Can we end with the observation that the Harris campaign seems to be whether deliberately or not engaged in redefining masculinity? I mean, you've referred to the work of Ruth Ben-Ghiat, who's studied the playbook of a strong man who she observes promises law and order then legitimizes financial, sexual in all manner of predatory behavior. Take what you want and getting away with it becomes a symbol of masculinity, proof of male authority, right?

Anat Shenker-Osorio: Yes. Unfortunately, you do have it right. I think that this is why Governor Tim Walz is such a head-scratcher for them, because he very much represents a masculinity, in addition to being a standard Midwestern white man, he's a hunter. He was in the military, he's a football coach. Need I say more? This is like the trifecta of manness. [laughter] What they're showing is that you can both quote unquote be a man and actually admire women and be excited about their leadership.

Brooke Gladstone: Thank you, Anat.

Anat Shenker-Osorio: Thank you.

Brooke Gladstone: Anat Shenker-Osorio is a democratic strategist and the host of the podcast, Words to Win By. This is On the Media, I'm Brooke Gladstone. At the DNC Georgia's Senator and Reverend Raphael Warnock denounced Donald Trump's sales pitch to Christians.

Raphael Warnock: I saw him holding the Bible and endorsing a Bible as if it needed his endorsement. He should try reading it. It says, "Do justice, love, kindness, and walk humbly with your God." He should try reading it. It says, "Love your neighbor as yourself." It says, "In as much as you've done it unto the least of these, you have done it also unto me."

Brooke Gladstone: Apparently Trump has made $300,000 this year selling Bibles.

Donald Trump: We must make America pray again

Brooke Gladstone: For only 59.99.

Donald Trump: I'm proud to endorse and encourage you to get this Bible.

Brooke Gladstone: Wait, there's more. His Bible includes a copy of the Constitution and the Pledge of Allegiance. The merch is all of a peace with his religion-infused election pitch. In late July, Trump addressed a crowd in Florida and he stated his goals, pretty frankly--

Donald Trump: You won't have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians, I love you Christians. I'm not Christian. I love you. Get out. You got to get out and vote. In four years you don't have to vote again. We'll have it fixed. Good, you're not going to have to vote.

Raphael Warnock: We've got to be full-throated in resisting this idea of Christian nationalism.

Brooke Gladstone: Raphael Warnock.

Raphael Warnock: Democracy is the political enactment of a spiritual idea. This notion that each of us has within us a spark of the divine.

Brooke Gladstone: Christian nationalism is a term embraced by far-eyed crusaders like Marjorie Taylor Greene.

Marjorie Taylor Greene: I say it probably we should be Christian nationalists.

Brooke Gladstone: Lauren Boebert.

Lauren Boebert: The church is supposed to direct the government. The government is not supposed to direct the church, and I'm tired of this separation of church and state junk.

Brooke Gladstone: Matthew D. Taylor is the author of the forthcoming book, The Violent Take It by Force: The Christian Movement That Is Threatening Our Democracy. He's written extensively about Christian nationalism and what to watch out for in the run-up to the election. Earlier this year, I asked him to grade the mainstream media on their coverage thus far.

Matthew D. Taylor: I would give the American mainstream media a solid B minus on its coverage of Christian nationalism. I'm not trying to be overly critical there. This is a very difficult topic to cover well.

Brooke Gladstone: What's the main thing we get wrong?

Matthew D. Taylor: When it gets framed as though it was a single coherent movement with everyone marching in lockstep together? Because the reality is there are a lot of different forms of American Christian nationalism. There are a lot of contributing theologies and strands of thought. It can be very easy to slap a phrase on a phenomenon and say, "Okay, now we understand it."

Brooke Gladstone: Christian nationalism is by definition in opposition to a secular state, right?

Matthew D. Taylor: Pew Research Center did a very important study on Christian nationalism in the fall of 2022, I believe. They asked the gateway question, do you think the US should be a Christian nation? Something like 45% of the American population said yes. As a scholar I would say, well, that is all Christian nationals. Then Pew asked a bunch of follow-up questions, and the picture that emerged was much more complicated. Things like, do you think that the Supreme Court should use the Bible and Christian morality in making decisions? Only about 10 to 15% of the US population said yes to that.

Do you think that the federal government should declare the United States a Christian nation? Again, something like 10 to 15% said yes to that. This is what I mean when I say there's a spectrum there. I think we need to differentiate between the vague hazy, God bless America, sentimental style of Christian nationalism that is more popular and this hardened form of Christian nationalism. It tends to be more ideological and more ready to overturn even parts of the Constitution in order to enact this reality of a Christian nation.

Brooke Gladstone: You take issue with the conflation of easygoing Christian nationalists and Christian supremacists. You've also suggested that kind of conflation only widens America's yawning political rifts.

Matthew D. Taylor: I think the question is, who is persuadable in that spectrum? Who is open to pluralism? If somebody wants to have some notion that the US is in some vague way Christian, but they still think that everyone should have the same rights and there should be a separation of religion and state. Then I would say that is an acceptable position within the landscape of American religious pluralism.

We need to view the spectrum to understand why some people who might have more sympathies towards pluralism, more willingness to embrace the separation of church and state feel insulted and threatened when we paint with a super broad brush about Christian nationalism. What I would define as Christian supremacy is a Christian theological worldview that wants to say that Christians are entitled by God to have leadership over a society.

White supremacy is this idea that white people are better than other people. Christian supremacy is more the idea that Christians are better than other people, therefore Christians or Christianity should exercise maybe even a coercive influence on people who are not Christian.

Brooke Gladstone: The term Christian nationalism has been all over the news. When did the phrase first come into use?

Matthew D. Taylor: I believe you can find the phrase even being used as early as the 19th century. Those sentiments, those ideas of Christian nationalism really go back to the US founding and before. It's always been a part of American politics. It's always been an ongoing debate about this relationship between church and state, about the role of the Christian majority in America and who gets counted within that majority.

Brooke Gladstone: You talked about Mark Noll, who wrote about Christian nationalism as a root cause of the Civil War.

Matthew D. Taylor: Yes. Mark Noll has a great book, the Theological Crisis of The Civil War, I think we have to remember, right, the Civil War happens in the aftermath of the Second Great Awakening, which is the historical term that we apply to the surge in growth that we see among Methodists and Baptists in the roughly 1810s to the 1840s. That reconfigured the religious makeup of the United States. The founding era of the United States was not a particularly pious era. Church participation was very, very low in the late 18th century. Then in the early 19th century, we have the surge in piety, and that segues into the antebellum and the Civil War eras.

Brooke Gladstone: How you've got many Christians who are very opposed to slavery. Did you have another constituency of Christians who were in favor of it?

Matthew D. Taylor: Oh yes, absolutely. In the North, the Second Great Awakening, puts new energy into Christian abolitionism. The Protestantism of the 19th century that we would today probably call evangelical, although that wasn't the universal term at the time, was very activist, very energized. In the North that led to a lot of pious Christians being anti-slavery. In the South, it led to a lot of pious Christians being very pro-slavery.

You started to have a ramping up of theological arguments about slavery in the 1830s, 1840s. It's in that moment that many of the Protestant denominations in the United States fracture. You get a southern form of that denomination and a northern form. We still see that in our terminology today. We still talk about the Southern Baptist Convention because it broke away from the Baptist Convention because it wanted its clergy and missionaries to still be allowed to own slaves.

All that theological energy and ferment of the second-grade awakening created these different forms of Christian nationalism. If you go and read the lyrics to the Battle Hymn of the Republic, which is a Christian nationalist hymn written by an abolitionist in the middle of the Civil War. It's envisioning the kingdom of God is marching on with the union troops. That the cause of God is synonymous with the cause of the union.

[MUSIC - Julia Ward Howe and William Steffe: Battle Hymn of the Republic]

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord

He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored

He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword

Matthew D. Taylor: The same time as that the South, you see more energized forms of Southern Christian nationalism. In fact, in the Confederacy, they very intentionally named God in the preamble to the Confederate constitution. They use this as a propaganda point to say, "Look at those godless northerners with their secular constitution that doesn't mention God." The motto of the Confederacy was "Deo vindice," God is our vindicator. There very much were these Christian nationalist sentiments on both sides that made the Civil War a type of holy war.

Brooke Gladstone: What about the Cold War? There was a resurgence then, wasn't there?

Matthew D. Taylor: Absolutely. The Cold War was the last surge before the one that we're experiencing right now. If you think back in the end of the 19th century, you had new waves of Catholic and Jewish immigrants coming into the United States. It's in the 1920s, 1930s, you begin to hear that the United States is a Judeo-Christian country.

Then as you move into the Cold War, people start speaking of the United States as a Judeo-Christian nation in contrast to these godless communists. That is where you see the integration of Jews and of Catholics into this previous Anglo-Protestant establishment. Many of the manifestations you find Christian nationalists today citing as evidence for the US being a Christian nation actually were put in place in the 1950s under Eisenhower.

Brooke Gladstone: Like what?

Matthew D. Taylor: Up until the 1950s, the motto of the United States was E pluribus unum. That was what was on all of our money.

Brooke Gladstone: Out of many, one.

Matthew D. Taylor: Yes. In the 1950s "In God We Trust" is added to all the money. It had happened during the Civil War, but it was not widely used up until the 1950s. Similarly, the phrase "Under God" gets added into the Pledge of allegiance under Eisenhower. All of this is part of this shoring up of American identity in opposition to communism.

Brooke Gladstone: How widespread or intense is Christian supremacy right now?

Matthew D. Taylor: I think that those numbers that you find in PRRI and Pew at around 10 to 15% are a good estimate. Up until about 1990, consistently you could find about 90% of Americans saying they were Christian. Now depending again on how you ask the question and what survey you're looking at, we're down at around 62, 63% of the US identifying as Christian. At the same time that has happened, you've also had more Muslims and more forms of Islam, more Buddhists, and more forms of Buddhism coming to the United States.

More Hindus coming to the United States. Today, somewhere around 25, maybe even more than that percent of the US populations, when they're asked what their religious identity is, they choose unaffiliated or none of the above. They don't want to be labeled with religion, and that coalition largely aligns with the Democrat party today. The religious landscape has become more diverse, less Christian, and many Christians, they perceive that as a real threat. Donald Trump has proven very good at getting them activated for political mobilization.

Brooke Gladstone: If there's been this decline, you're saying it's left us with a more hardened or desperate form of Christian nationalism. Christian supremacy. You say that poses a real threat to democracy.

Matthew D. Taylor: Majorities are never more dangerous in a democracy than when they feel their majority is slipping away. As Christianity is declining in its cultural reach, the Christians who are dedicated to this vision of a Christian nation become more aggressive. This is what we see in part on January 6. The rhetoric that fueled the Christian nationalism we saw on January 6 was desperation. The sense that our country's being taken away from us by nefarious forces.

Brooke Gladstone: You feel that we need more in-depth scholarship and reporting on the different constituent movements of American Christian nationalism. Why?

Matthew D. Taylor: Well, if we just assume that all Christian nationalists are the same, that they have the exact same motivations, the exact same worldview, we're going to miss all kinds of variation. To just give a concrete example, Catholic Christian nationalists are going to approach Christian nationalism through the Catholic tradition, potentially through the Catholic hierarchy. They're going to be persuadable with different arguments about the importance of pluralism, of separation of religion and state than Protestants. There's all kinds of different forms of Protestantism that have different approaches to Christian nationalism.

Brooke Gladstone: Are they less persuadable?

Matthew D. Taylor: No. It's just going to require different arguments. For the Christian nationalists and Christian supremacists for whom theology is driving that, we need to have an intra-Christian dialogue about the theological ideas that are giving rise to some of these sentiments. Because for many Christians in America, it is a part of their piety. It's not something simply that you can make a political argument and persuade them to think differently.

It requires theological conversation. We need, I think, to come to a greater level of awareness of what the subspecies of American Christian nationalism are, and what are arguments that might be more persuasive, to some of these folks, to bring them into the coalition of American pluralism of an America that is protective of everyone's religious rights.

Brooke Gladstone: We need to pay attention to the media worlds of the most extreme and influential Christian supremacists.

Matthew D. Taylor: Absolutely. Sometimes connected to the right-wing media ecosystems that we're aware of places like Fox News. Some of these Christian media ecosystems and niche cultures are not being paid close attention to by the mainstream media. You wouldn't even think to. Yet there are millions of people following them, some of the most radicalizing media spaces, especially charismatic Christian media spaces where Trump support is assumed.

I think we also need to be paying attention to the Christian leaders who helped instigate January 6th. We have paid close attention to the politicians who did that to the activists, and white nationalists, and conspiracy theorists who've done that. We have not paid close attention to the Christian leaders who were as instrumental in what occurred on January 6 as some of the politicians and activists that we know by name.

Brooke Gladstone: Coming up, more from Matthew D. Taylor on the self-proclaimed prophets preaching Christian supremacy. This is On the Media. This Is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone continuing my conversation with scholar Matthew D. Taylor from earlier this year. Next, we turn to a community where the most extreme form of Christian supremacy has taken root.

Matthew D. Taylor: There's a new form of deeply politicized, independent, charismatic spirituality that has just taken hold in the Trump era and has become in many ways the pulsating heart of Christian Trumpism.

Brooke Gladstone: "If follow the money is a good journalistic dictum," Taylor says, "Follow the theology is a better guide here. Charismatic Christians believe in revival, a miraculous, unpredictable outpouring of God that ignites people's faith." It's a community of faith Taylor has studied and lived.

Matthew D. Taylor: I grew up evangel. I have many charismatic experiences myself belong to charismatic churches. There's really a beauty to people finding ways of expressing Christianity that is exciting and dynamic.

Brooke Gladstone: Most forms of Protestantism in the US regulate themselves by branching off into denominations with their own rules and hierarchies. An independent branch of charismatic Christians have opted out of that model. Among them, for example, is a movement that calls itself the New Apostolic Reformation.

Matthew D. Taylor: Because it's non-denominational, there aren't overarching institutions. What holds it together is media. Part of what happens in 1960s is you had a series of these Pentecostal healing revivals that really activated that Pentecostal charismatic world, and really alienated them in some ways from mainstream media that they felt was not covering these miraculous occurrences. You started to see the emergence of charismatic media.

One of the movements that comes out of that is called the Word of Faith Movement in the 1950s. Word of Faith is what often gets talked about as the prosperity gospel. This idea of health and wealth being a marker of piety or of God's blessing and favor on a person.

Brooke Gladstone: This is Trump's favorite. It means you wouldn't be rich if you weren't good.

Matthew D. Taylor: If you think back, respectable evangelicalism didn't want anything to do with Donald Trump because he was vulgar. He's this real estate playboy. The evangelical grassroots loved Trump. You can find surveys from even July of 2015 where he is the leading candidate for American Evangelicals. You have to remember that within about a week of Donald Trump declaring his candidacy for presidency, the Obergefell Supreme Court decision came down allowing gay marriage across the country.

For conservative evangelicals in America that felt catastrophic. Donald Trump comes on the scene and he starts saying, "I'm going to fight. I'm going to disrupt the system." Many evangelicals were attracted to that. Trump turns to his religious advisor, Paula White, and says, "I want to start meeting with evangelical leaders." She doesn't know James Dobson. She doesn't know the mainstream evangelicals. Paula White came up in the independent charismatic media world.

She's a megachurch pastor and a televangelist. She starts bringing in to meet with Trump, the people that she knows. She's bringing in prophets, messianic, rabbis, apostles and televangelists. They have a series of meetings in the fall of 2015 at Trump Tower. This is where you start seeing this genre of photos emerge of leaders gathered around Donald Trump praying over him, laying hands on him, prophesying over him. Those folks get into the ground floor of the Trump campaign.

Brooke Gladstone: They have their own media.

Matthew D. Taylor: Well, the major outlet or the major empire of the independent charismatic world is called Charisma News. They have Charisma magazine. They have a podcasting empire. It is run by a man named Steven Strang, who is in many ways the Rupert Murdoch of the independent charismatic world. This is a niche media, not something that most Americans would ever touch. For the millions of Christians who are listening to this media, it has become a really dominant influence for them.

Brooke Gladstone: Charisma News, the news in that title is about new prophecies, right?

Matthew D. Taylor: You'll find articles talking about scandals that Christian leaders have gotten into those sorts of things. Then Charisma News will often write about a new prophecy and not in a skeptical way, but presented as well, "Isn't this amazing?"

Jack Hibbs: When praying about 2024, here's a couple things the Lord showed me. Number one, that there's going to be war in 24. Number two, there will be turmoil in 24. Number three, those who were prepared for those two things will flourish. Those who are unprepared will flounder.

Matthew D. Taylor: The charismatic prophets are always kind of jockeying for position to share their prophecies. One of the most interesting of these prophecies emerged in 2015. One of these charismatic prophets named Jeremiah Johnson goes on Charisma News, publishes a prophecy, and he says that Donald Trump is like the Persian emperor in the Bible.

Jeremiah Johnson: I saw Donald Trump and the spirit of God began to speak to me about Cyrus, how just as the Lord raised up Cyrus to fulfill his purposes, that he would raise up Trump to fulfill his purposes prior to the 2016 election.

Matthew D. Taylor: This becomes one of the central ways that charismatics attach themselves to Trump. Many other prophets echo this or amplify this. Part of what happens in this world is prophecies move around like memes. They introduce new images, they introduce new ideas, and then other prophets pick those up and play with them.

Brooke Gladstone: Let's jump to the 2020 election or just before it. There's a formidable new branch of charismatic media emerging. Kenneth Copeland is a televangelist and a Trump advisor, and he created a YouTube show called FlashPoint.

Matthew D. Taylor: Kenneth Copeland is one of the old lions of the televangelism world.

Kenneth Copeland: --who you are in Christ. You tell me you're a believer, you tell me you're strong, you tell me you've been made the righteousness of God in Christ. You tell me you are anointed, you tell me. I said, "Okay, here we go."

Brooke Gladstone: A celebrity?

Matthew D. Taylor: Absolutely. I mean, he is an A-list celebrity.

Presenter 1: Televangelist Kenneth Copeland recently bought a $36 million Gulfstream V Jet.

Kenneth Copeland: The world is in such a shape, we can't get there without this.

Brooke Gladstone: FlashPoint launched right before the election, and Copeland apparently really wanted to affect the 2020 election. The concept of the show is it's a panel of commentators, similar to what you would see on CNN or on Fox News. Except they're all either pros or they are propagators of prophecy.

Matthew D. Taylor: It went from 56,000 views when FlashPoint launched in September 2020 to 152,000 views in October. Then in November, 1.4 million views. In December 6.1 million views. By January 2021, the month of the insurrection, 32.4 million views on YouTube.

Brooke Gladstone: As somebody who has dug deeply into the social media profiles of the Christians who were there on January 6 to protest and sometimes to riot, and some of whom went into the Capitol itself. FlashPoint was everywhere. It was telling Christians, "You need to believe these prophecies. Donald Trump is the rightly elected president, and it's only because of witchcraft and demonic conspiracies that he is not being put back in office. We need to be there on January 6th."

Male 1: When the majority of true Americans want honesty and integrity, and we did not get that in this election. We are going to fight for this nation like those warriors did, because we don't want the light to go out in this nation. We don't have time. Not one day in office with Biden would be good.

Kenneth Copeland: Amen.

Brooke Gladstone: You say that Charismatic media was one of the most powerful incubators for mobilization for January 6th, and no one was watching it. If you had, you said, we would've known it was coming.

Matthew D. Taylor: Yes.

Brooke Gladstone: In 2013, Dutch Sheets, who is a very important celebrity in the charismatic media world, he calls himself a spiritual warrior. He was given a white flag with a green pine tree on it. The phrase across the top of the flag is "An Appeal To Heaven." This was a Revolutionary war flag. The quote "An Appeal To Heaven" is a citation from the philosopher John Locke. A very popular phrase amongst the American founding fathers.

The idea that you make these appeals to unjust governments and you keep appealing and appealing and appealing, and at some point, you make an "Appeal to Heaven". In other words, you go to war and let God sort it out. Sheets believes that he receives a prophecy about the "Appeal to Heaven" flag, that it is a sign of a new American revolution, a new revolution in American spirituality. A new revival that is going to break forth when America becomes what God intends it to be.

He starts pushing this flag everywhere. It's become very, very popular in right-wing circles. At the same time as he's doing that, he also launches an app called Give Him 15. He launches it in the fall of 2015. As soon as the election in 2020 was called for Joe Biden, Dutch Sheets made a very important pivot with Give Him 15. He turned it into a YouTube show where he would record seven days a week telling these charismatic Christians, you need to be praying for Donald Trump.

You need to be doing spiritual warfare for Donald Trump. You need to believe these prophecies, and we cannot give up this fight. Some of these prophecies, these dreams, the one that he described on January 1st of 2021, so just five days before January 6th, was an image of Sheets and his fellow prophets and apostles riding on horses.

Dutch Sheets: We found ourselves in a field and could see out in front of us, the US Capitol building. As we sat looking at the building, we heard air sirens going off. These were like the air raid sirens you would hear in Old World War II movies. As the sirens were sounding, we saw a huge hand come down from the sky and take hold of the dome of the Capitol building.

Matthew D. Taylor: They see a demonic entity rise up out of the Capitol and be dispersed by the Holy Spirit. Sheets concludes that some in our Congress need to go. This is the propaganda that is driving Christians to show up on January 6 because they believe that they are following General Dutch Sheets.

Brooke Gladstone: You know that this had an impact how?

Matthew D. Taylor: If you look at the social media feeds of the people who showed up on January 6, many of them are referencing-- Give Him 15 are posting videos from Give Him 15. Then many of the people who show up on January 6 are also carrying these "Appeal to Heaven" flags that Dutch Sheets is the one who coined as a kind of right-wing Christian meme. They're referencing the prophecies that Sheets is referencing.

Tammy: Good morning. It is January 6th. We are Tammy and Kevin Martin, but today we are in Washington DC and we're praying and decree Dutch Sheets, Give Him 15.

Matthew D. Taylor: During the Capitol riot, Dutch Sheets himself was on a prayer conference call with 4,000 people praying for the success of these protests and riots and that it would bring about a transformation in American culture.

Dutch Sheets: Perhaps up to a million have gathered in Washington DC today to intercede on site outside the US Capitol building. Whether you are physically there or not pray today as if the life of our republic depends on it.

Matthew D. Taylor: Dutch sheets has really pushed this narrative that the "Appeal to Heaven" flag and this idea of a new prophetic American revolution and spiritual warfare to bring that about is going to transform the United States. You see Christian lawmakers appropriating this "Appeal to Heaven" flag, putting it on their desks in the state legislator, putting it on state Capitol buildings. In fact, the speaker of the house, Mike Johnson, flies an "Appeal to Heaven" flag outside of his congressional office, even to this day that he was given by some pastors who are associated with Dutch sheets.

Brooke Gladstone: In summing up the impact of outfits like Charisma, and FlashPoint, and the likes of Dutch sheets. You've suggested the term stochastic terrorism. What does that mean?

Matthew D. Taylor: Stochastic is a synonym for episodic and chaotic. It's the idea of something being likely, but unpredictable. This is an idea that has emerged in counter-terrorism circles to try to understand the phenomenon of what is popularly called in media, lone wolf attacks. The theory of stochastic terrorism is that those lone wolves are not actually lone wolves. They're often tied into networks and into ideological circles. They also are feeding off of polarization and hostility that exists in broader society.

Brooke Gladstone: Like what? Give me an example.

Matthew D. Taylor: Sure. For decades, republicans have demonized Nancy Pelosi and made her into an object of hatred. In fact, in the 2022 election cycle, Trump's former national security advisor, Michael Flynn, literally said, "Nancy Pelosi is a demon," at a political rally and got a standing ovation. Just a few months after that, this man breaks into Nancy Pelosi's home in California. She wasn't there, but her husband was, and he beat Paul Pelosi with a hammer.

When he was interviewed afterwards, he said that evil had infected our government through Nancy Pelosi. Now, can you draw a one-to-one correlation and say, "Well, he was inspired by Michael Flynn or by this other rhetoric? Well, no, but you can see the connective tissue between the way that he's thinking about the violence he's perpetrating and this ramped-up rhetoric of hostility.

Brooke Gladstone: You're saying it brings the paradigms of "holy war" into contact with American politics.

Matthew D. Taylor: Now, Paul Djupe is a sociologist at Denison University, and he's done a number of different surveys trying to track these beliefs in modern prophecy and how they correlate with people's political beliefs. Across these surveys, and there's other surveys including through the Public Religion Research Institute that have shown this as well. You see there's a radicalization premium that comes with belief in charismatic prophecy.

If you believe that prophets are speaking today, entering into politics, and are saying, "Well, God wants this candidate," or, "God is opposed to this party," that is a fuel for Christian radicalization. I know it sounds wild, but millions of people believe these prophecies. The prophets themselves, I've interviewed a number of them, they really believe that these are words from God. It's not just a form of propaganda or hucksterism for them.

Brooke Gladstone: If you believe that you can't compromise good and evil is a sharp dichotomy with no shades of gray

Matthew D. Taylor: Not just good and evil, but angelic and demonic. Abortion factors very centrally into this. They would say the other side is demonic and we are the side of righteousness crusading to bring about the kingdom of God. That is the rhetoric of holy war.

Brooke Gladstone: What then can possibly be the antidote to prophecy?

Matthew D. Taylor: I don't know that there's an antidote to prophecy. I think we need to spread the word about these circles of Christian supremacy, about their increasing influence, about the media that is perpetuating these narratives. I think we also need to be careful in our media portrayals, not to castigate all Christians, not to say that all Christians are the problem. In many ways, we need Christians to have the conversations that will maybe diffuse or defang some of this radicalization.

The independent charismatics are very good at getting people in the streets, at getting people to show up for protests. I don't see a scenario in which the 2024 election is not contested. In which these prophecies and these leaders are not involved again in a campaign to see Donald Trump put in office, and to in some ways dismantle the separation of church and state and the very foundations of our democracy. We all need to figure out what are our bright lines.

What would lead us to show up in the streets to protest and stand up for and defend democracy? I say this as a scholar, as an egghead, as somebody who would much prefer to sit in a library and read books. We're entering into a time in our politics where we need to be prepared to defend our democracy. Democratically do that peacefully, do that nonviolently, but do it with devotion.

Brooke Gladstone: Matt, thank you very much.

Matthew D. Taylor: Thank you.

Brooke Gladstone: Matthew D. Taylor is a scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Christian and Jewish Studies in Baltimore. He's the author of the book, The Violent Take It by Force: The Christian Movement That Is Threatening Our Democracy. On the Media is produced by Molly Rosen, Rebecca Clark-Callender, Candice Wang, and Katerina Barton. Our technical director is Jennifer Munson. Our engineer is Brendan Dalton. Our Eloise Blondiau is our senior producer. Our executive producer is Katya Rogers. On the Media is a production of WNYC Studios. Micah Loewinger will be back next week. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Copyright © 2024 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

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Freedom! Joy! Forward! The DNC’s Fave Buzzwords, Explained

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This is an episode from the Vox daily news podcast, Today, Explained. Host Noel King spoke with OTM regular, Rick Perlstein. As a historian of US politics he is often called upon to draw comparisons between today’s events and those of the past. This year in particular, the echoes with 1968 are unavoidable: the DNC is again in Chicago, there are protests outside (this time its about Gaza, then it was civil rights).

On the Media is supported by listeners like you. Support OTM by donating today (https://pledge.wnyc.org/support/otm). Follow our show on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @onthemedia, and share your thoughts with us by emailing onthemedia@wnyc.org.

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The Chicago DNC everyone wants to forget (not this one).

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Title: Echoes of 1968 at the DNC in Chicago

Katya Rogers: Hi, everyone. It's Katya Rogers, executive producer of On The Media. We're busy watching the DNC and working on the show for this weekend, so in lieu of a brand new OTM midweek podcast, we offer an episode of Today, Explained. The host, Noel King, spoke with OTM regular guest Rick Perlstein. As a historian of us politics, Perlstein is often called upon to draw comparisons between today's events and those of the past.

This year in particular, the echoes with 1968 are unavoidable. The DNC is once again in Chicago, and there are protests outside. This time it's about Gaza. Then it was about the Vietnam War. I hope you enjoyed this episode as much as I did. Tune in this weekend for the big show, and we'll see you then.

Noel King: It's Today, Explained. I'm Noel King with historian and journalist Rick Perlstein, who has spent much of his adult life chronicling American conservatives and examining the role that the '60s played in bringing them to power.

Rick Perlstein: Growing up in the 1980s, Reaganland was boring for me, and the melodrama of the '60s was absolutely galvanizing. I couldn't believe how every day seemed to bring a new revolution. Certainly, I was fascinated by this idea of these kids sitting down in the streets and getting beaten within an inch of their lives by the cops and the whole pageant.

Noel: All right. Let's go back to the summer of '68. What was the backdrop to the convention in August of that year?

Rick: The backdrop nationally was that the Democratic Party was divided down the middle on the issue of the Vietnam war.

Speaker 4: The whole question is, I mean, what happens if you do win in North Vietnam? What happens if you do win in South Vietnam, what then? You're faced with the same problem. How are you going to find a popular government that's going to run the place?

Speaker 5: And have it turn into eventually a communist government? Is that your idea?

Speaker 4: Well, that doesn't terrify me quite as much as it seems to terrify some other people.

Rick: Of course, it had been escalated by a democratic president, Lyndon Johnson, who believed he was continuing the wishes of the martyred president, John F. Kennedy.

Lyndon Johnson: I have today ordered to Vietnam the air mobile division and certain other forces which will raise our fighting strength from 75,000 to 125,000 men almost immediately.

Rick: A lot of people who were democrats saw it as part of this great anti-communist crusade, and a lot of people saw it as imperialism, that basically, we were interfering in another country's civil war.

Speaker 7: My own personal position is that the war in Vietnam is unjust, unnecessary, and immoral, and I feel immoral participating in it.

Rick: The idea that we had to get out was very, very prevalent on the left wing of the Democratic Party. Lyndon Johnson decided he wasn't going to run for president.

Lyndon Johnson: I do not believe that I should devote an hour or a day of my time to any personal partisan causes or to any duties other than the awesome duties of this office.

Rick: By the time delegates arrived at the convention, Lyndon Johnson's loyal vice president, Hubert Humphrey, was the nominee apparent, and he had been coerced almost into loyally supporting the war, even though he had grave reservations about it.

Hubert Humphrey: I think that for the Democratic Party and convention to try to draw up military strategy and tactics is just a little bit beyond what the American people would expect of a political party and beyond its capacity or ability to do. These are matters that must be left up to our commander in chief, to the officer.

Rick: The question of whether he would be nominated or Eugene McCarthy was nominated was live in the air, and it looked like Humphrey had it wired, but there was a proxy fight in the form of a platform proposal that the Democratic Party go on the record to end the Vietnam War.

Speaker 9: My feeling is that should he accept it, it would go a long way towards assuring both his nomination and his election. If he should decide to oppose the inclusion of a specific peace plank in the democratic platform, I think it would conceivably turn it into a real battle royal.

Rick: Of course, at the same time, protesters from all over the country flooded in.

Speaker 10: Members of the Youth International Party, yippies they called themselves, converged on Chicago. They said they were there to protest the war, poverty, racism, and other social ills. Some of them were also determined to provoke a confrontation, to draw attention from the convention to the streets.

Rick: There's a separate Chicago context. Several months earlier that spring, there had been terrible riots after the assassination of Martin Luther King.

Speaker 11: Good evening. Doctor Martin Luther King, the apostle of non-violence in the civil rights movement, has been shot to death in Memphis, Tennessee.

Rick: There was dread and anticipation not only within the convention hall, so it seemed for the democratic party, and then outside the convention hall, what would happen when the city hosted, very reluctantly, thousands of protesters who were much more radical than the kind of protesters we see now. They would talk about, we want to overthrow society, we want to overthrow capitalism.

Protester: We are a people. We are all together. We are all under attack. America has decided to devour its youth. We will resist. We will not participate in America's children for breakfast program. Fuck 'em.

Rick: Here, everyone arrives, the city, which is run by this almost oligarch, Mayor Richard J. Daley, who intended no disorder in his city, that he was putting on display for the entire world.

Mayor Richard J. Daley: They have no right to come in the city and tell us what they're going to do. We don't permit our own people to sleep in the park, so why would anybody would come out of the city to sleep in the park? We don't permit our own people to march at night, so why would permit a lot of people doing snake dances at night?

Noel: Disorder came anyway. Tell me two things. What did Daley do to try to prevent disorder, and how did it go so very wrong?

Rick: One of the things he did to try to prevent disorder was to string along these two groups of protesters who wanted to come to the city by not granting them official permission to, A, sleep in the park, which was Lincoln Park. That was the intention of a group who identified themselves as hippies. They were led by a guy named Abbie Hoffman, the guy who had, a year before, promised to levitate the Pentagon during a protest.

Abbie Hoffman: When it gets about 300 feet in the air, it's going to start to vibrate, slowly at first, and then a little quicker, and all the evil spirits are going to pour out.

Rick: These were the people who wanted to-- they would talk about fornicating in the park. They wanted to have a rock festival. The idea was they represented this new youth identity that was revolutionary and was going to completely overthrow bourgeois propriety. Another group of people wanted to parade to the convention hall, and they were much more conventionally political, but a lot of them were radical revolutionaries and the kind of people who would hoist flags of the enemy in Vietnam, the Viet Cong.

Protester: We say that if the government of the United States does not stop the war, we intend to stop the government of the United States.

Rick: Daley put his foot down and said, these long-haired miscreants are going to get the time of day in our city, which only ratcheted up the tensions and made them even more determined. "We'll sleep in the park even if you don't want us to. We'll march the convention hall even if you don't want us to. We'll put our bodies on the line in both cases."

Protester: It'll be like a football game, cops versus the yippies or the National Guard or whoever. People will be watching that on TV, and they'll say, "We don't want to watch that boring speech stuff. We want to watch the Rose Bowl out there."

Noel: When did the violence begin?

Rick: Immediately.

Reporter: Now, moving off down Balboa Street. The crowd is running, and the police are chasing them into Jackson, into Grant Park. There is an odor of tear gas still left in the air here from tear gas shells that have been going off periodically for the last hours.

Rick: You basically had this enveloping dread leading up to the last day of convention. Even as the debates over the platform are leading to actual violence inside the convention hall.

Reporter: What is your name, sir?

Reporter: Take your hands off of me unless you intend to arrest me. Don't push me, please. Walter, as you can see, we got bodily pushed out of the way. This is the kind of thing that's been going on outside the hall. This is the first time we've had it happen inside the hall. I'm sorry to be out of breath that somebody belted me in his stomach doing that. What happened--

Rick: You had these miniature civil wars breaking out inside among the actual credential delegates, and outside among protesters and police.

Noel: What was going on inside the convention, and how rowdy did it actually get?

Rick: The most dramatic thing that happened inside the convention hall to increase the tension is that that Thursday night when students who were denied the right to march to the convention hall, sat down right in front of that famous hotel, and police just started wading into the crowd and just bashing people on the head.

Protester: Go ahead. Come on. Do it, Officer.

Rick: Word got into the convention hall that that was what was happening. They were doing the final vote for who would get nominated as president. There was a third candidate who was running almost as like a symbolic run. It was a guy named George McGovern, who later won the nomination in 1972. He was really the most anti-war of all the candidates.

George McGovern: We ought to try to work out a coalition government now. If the South Vietnamese continue to veto it, we ought to put them on notice that we're going to limit our commitment, that we're going to reduce it.

Rick: He was nominated by a liberal senator from Connecticut named Abraham Ribicoff. Ribicoff said, "If George McGovern was the president of the United States--"

Abraham Ribicoff: We wouldn't have to have Gestapo's tactics in the streets of Chicago.

Rick: When he said that, this corpulent cigar-chomping political boss, Mayor Daley, shouted something that you could not hear. Later, lip readers famously said that he had said something about how Senator Ribicoff was a no-good jew bastard. That was it, the battle was on.

Abraham Ribicoff: I choose not simply to run for president. I seek--

Rick: Today, Explained.

Noel: Rick Perlstein, author of Nixonland and Reaganland. When we left off, you said, on Thursday night at the 68th convention, there was fighting inside the hall. Some slurs were thrown about. What was going on outside the convention center?

Rick: Michigan Avenue is the most famous street in Chicago, the magnificent mile. On the east side of the street is Grant Park, which is this gorgeous 19th century Paris-style park. The marchers mass for their march several miles down in the convention hall. The police are standing in the street in their way, so what they do is the protesters do a military flanking maneuver. They walk into the park and try and walk around the policemen, and the policemen chase them back across the street.

Reporter: Vice President Humphrey, at his 29th floor room, got some of the gas which came up there. He choked and sneezed a bit, said it itched and took a shower and made a statement saying that he was dismayed by the outbreak.

Rick: What happens next is the students sat down, did a sit in strike, basically, blocking the street right in front of the TV cameras. Hundreds of white helmeted Chicago police just methodically started taking their nightsticks and beating these seated protesters.

Reporter: The interesting thing about this is that, almost universally, the bystanders have been horror-stricken apparently by this action of the police.

Rick: Police wagons lined up and they would grab young people by the scruff of their neck, throw them into police wagons.

Reporter: These are scenes similar to those we saw earlier on videotape of the demonstrators being hustled, which is the kindest word for it, into the police wagons.

Rick: Then when there were enough of them to be full, they would throw a tear gas canister inside, and then they would smack the door closed. This was all on TV. It was on all three channels. There was this terrible backlash. The majority of the country very much believed that the Chicago police were on the right, the protesters were in the wrong, and that was the very backlash against the forces of civil rights and anti-war activism and cultural shifts and all that stuff, that Richard Nixon was running for president on as the Republican candidate.

Richard Nixon: It is time for an honest look at the problem of order in the United States. Dissent is a necessary ingredient of change, but in a system of government that provides for peaceful change, there is no cause that justifies resort to violence. I pledge to you, we shall have order in the United States.

Noel: Could a person say that Richard Nixon, who ended up winning, ended up winning that year because of the way the events of the 1968 DNC played out in Chicago?

Rick: I don't think so. I think the main reason Richard Nixon won was because Hubert Humphrey, who had been manipulated into supporting the Vietnam War that he had grave reservations about from Lyndon Johnson, who just demanded the most intense obeisance and loyalty on the part of his underlings, that he refused to denounce the Vietnam War.

Hubert Humphrey: The American people are not going to stand for any kind of a peace arrangement or any kind of a tactical arrangement relating to the peace discussion that leaves our men in South Vietnam at the mercy of the enemy.

Rick: I think that was the biggest cause for the Democrat's loss, that the protesters-- It was like not listening to the protesters. The big message that he took to the country in his TV commercials was that the first "civil right of all Americans" was to be safe in their own homes. He was campaigning against skyrocketing violent crime rates. He was campaigning with commercials that showed these violent protests, and, of course, were blaming the protesters for them. Generally speaking, that if he was elected president, he would bring law and order to the White House, as opposed to the Democrats, who couldn't even control their convention.

Noel: We decided to do this episode about the 68th convention months ago, even before this year's convention seemed exciting because people kept saying, you keep reading op-eds, oh, the DNC is in Chicago. 2024 is like 1968. How much do you believe that to be true, and what is causing people to make that comparison?

Rick: It's so interesting. I know a ton about the 1968 convention. In my book, I documented hour by hour and sometimes minute by minute. I'm, of course, fascinated by what will happen in politics in 2024. Until I started getting these calls from folks like you, it never occurred to me to understand that the 2024 convention in my city, Chicago, by going back to what I studied and wrote in 1968, to me, everything from how presidents get chosen now compared to then, how protests in the street work now compared to then, how politicians respond to protests, how the entire apparatus of law enforcement and security work compared to then, how Chicago works compared to then are just so different.

Reporter: Right now, the biggest priority on the agenda is the build-out of the DNC security perimeter. Once the perimeter is in place, no cars or foot traffic will be allowed inside without proper clearance.

Rick: You've been to conventions. You know that a quarter mile away from the arena, there's going to be iron fences, and you can't get anywhere past those iron fences without going through metal detectors. Protests themselves, one of the things that made 1968 so shocking and so galvanizing to the public was this was a new thing. People hadn't seen it before. The idea that you could go into a convention and you didn't know whether the presidential candidate was going to be Hubert Humphrey or Eugene McCarthy, maybe there was a glimmer of possibility that might have happened before the Democratic Party lined up behind Kamala Harris.

Part of what the protesters were trying to do was influence how the convention would come out. After 1968, they completely changed how presidential candidates were chosen. They went to a primary system where they used to have these backroom caucus systems. Finally, no one really cares about these conventions. I mean, there's just this they show up for a night on TV, and people watch the speeches.

The idea that this could be this cataclysmic, galvanizing event that-- don't forget the slogan of the protesters is, they were getting beat up. Their chant was, the whole world is watching. Well, the whole world won't be watching. I'm always saying, history is a process, it's not parallels. We can't have 1968 again because we already had 1968. It completely shaped the politics we have now and the way the Republican Party does business.

Because we're that farther down the road, a lot of the things that happened in 1968 are inconceivable in 2024. It doesn't mean that interesting and even melodramatic and even possibly violent things might not happen in 2024, but those will happen for 2024 reasons. Those won't happen for 1968 reasons.

Noel: Historian Rick Perlstein. All right. The comparison between today and '68 isn't exactly one-to-one, but the echoes of that year are certainly alive here in Chicago. In fact, two young activists I talked to even mirrored the language of '68. They told me the whole world is watching.

Husam Marajda: The United States is usually on the news everywhere in the world, but this is a big deal. It's a Democratic national convention, going to nominate their presidential candidate. There's a lot of momentum, of course, with the Kamala Harris announcement to challenge Trump and to defeat Trump so that the world is all affected by the policies of the United States. The world looks to the United States to put a stop to the genocide. People want a stop to this.

The United States have derailed it. They've slowed it down. "Oh, we're gonna achieve a ceasefire. We're gonna achieve a ceasefire." Ten months of saying the same thing. We don't want no more talks. We want action. How many more need to die for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris to put an end to this? They can put an end to this in one phone call.

Noel: What these activists are not expecting is a repeat of the violence.

Nazek Sankari: Our marshals have been preparing for this. Our communities keep us safe. We keep each other safe. We're going to continue to be out here all day rallying in sight and sound of the DNC to make the demands heard, that we need to end US aid to Israel immediately, and that humanitarian aid needs to go into Gaza. We are going to continue fighting for the liberation of Palestine until all of historic Palestine is liberated.

Noel: That was Husam Marajda and Nazek Sankari of the US Palestinian Community Network, the Chicago Chapter. Today's show was produced by Hady Mawajdeh and edited by Miranda Kennedy. It was fact-checked by Laura Bullard and engineered by Patrick Boyd and Andrea, Kristen's daughter. Thanks to Amina Al-Sadi in Washington. I'm Noel King in Chicago. Today, Explained will be reporting from the DNC all this week.

Copyright © 2024 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.

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New York City’s alternative weekly newspaper, The Village Voice, birthed a generation of legendary writers. On this week’s On the Media, how the Voice transformed journalism and what’s being lost as alt-weeklies across the country die off. Plus, a look at how AI sludge is flooding old news websites.

[01:00] Host Micah Loewinger speaks with Tricia Romano, author of The Freaks Came Out to Write, about the early days of The Village Voice, including one reporter’s mission to stop Robert Moses and its revolutionary music section.

[16:02] Micah continues his conversation with Tricia Romano, getting into the Voice’s sale to Rupert Murdoch, the tensions within the paper, and how Craigslist led to its ultimate demise.

[34:41] Micah speaks with Wired tech reporter Kate Knibbs about how the site of publication The Hairpin mysteriously relaunched with a slate of bizarre, AI-generated articles. Knibbs managed to track down the new owner of the site, a Serbian entrepreneur known as DJ Vujo.

Portions of this episode originally aired on our April 12, 2024 program, The Rise and Fall of Alt-Weeklies, and Backpage.com vs The Feds, and our February 9, 2024 program, If You Can’t Beat ’Em… Join ’Em? Journalism in an AI World.

Further reading:

The Freaks Came Out to Write: The Definitive History of the Village Voice, the Radical Paper That Changed American Culture

“Zombie Alt-Weeklies Are Stuffed With AI Slop About OnlyFans,” by Kate Knibbs

“Confessions of an AI Clickbait Kingpin,”

by Kate Knibbs

On the Media is supported by listeners like you. Support OTM by donating today (https://pledge.wnyc.org/support/otm). Follow our show on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @onthemedia, and share your thoughts with us by emailing onthemedia@wnyc.org.

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Plastic newspaper boxes for The Village Voice stand along a Manhattan sidewalk in New York in 2013.

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Plastic newspaper boxes for The Village Voice stand along a Manhattan sidewalk in New York in 2013.

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WNYC’s weekly investigation into how the media shapes our worldview.

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The story of how The Village Voice changed journalism, and a peek inside the AI clickbait industry taking over old news websites. 

# included[].attributes.title
The Rise and Fall of Alt-Weeklies, and Journalism in an AI World

# included[].attributes.transcript
Title: The Rise and Fall of Alt Weeklies, and Journalism in an AI World

[00:00:00] Tricia Romano: The Village Voice is no more. After more than four decades in print, the city paper is shutting down.

[00:00:07] Michael Lowenger: A weekly connection to Twin Cities culture, now just a 41-year chapter in its journalistic history. Whatever happened to the off beat, irreverent Alt weeklies that used to populate newsstands across the country? From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media, I'm Michael Lowenger. On this week's show, an ode to the Village Voice.

[00:00:28] Tricia Romano: The Voice was to guide delight from people who cared about what they were covering with such intensity that there were fistbites and drawls inside the paper. That's gone.

[00:00:40] Michael Lowenger: Plus, how to earn big bucks by reanimating defunct news sites and filling them with AI sludge.

[00:00:48] Kate Nibs: There's a lot of posts that are about dream interpretation. It's just clearly written by an AI. Kind of the worst thing you've ever read in your life.

[00:00:55] Michael Lowenger: It's all coming up after this. From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. Brooke Gladstone is out this week, I'm Michael Lowenger. At the beginning of the summer, a small but revered paper in St. Louis, Missouri closed up shop.

[00:01:13] Speaker A: The end of an era. That is how some are describing the not-so-secret sale of the Riverfront Times to a secret buyer. People close to the paper now fear it is gone for good.

[00:01:24] Speaker B: The staff got word yesterday morning that they were all losing their jobs.

[00:01:28] Michael Lowenger: The Riverfront Times was once a staple in the thriving genre of news known as alternative weeklies. Alt weeklies, the type of offbeat, fearless publication that, once upon a time, you could pick up on a street corner, in a bar, or a cafe in cities across the country. Over the course of roughly 60 years, they transformed journalism. Today, they're nearly extinct.

[00:01:54] Speaker A: This week is your last chance to grab this current issue of the Baltimore City paper.

[00:02:00] Tricia Romano: The Village Voice is no more. The Pulitzer Prize-winning paper was known for its coverage of politics, music, theater and the gay community. [00:02:08] Michael Lowenger: A weekly connection to Twin Cities culture, now just a 41-year chapter in its journalistic history.

[00:02:16] Tricia Romano: Tomorrow's edition of the San Francisco Bay Guardian is going to be the last.

[00:02:20] Michael Lowenger: The Boston Phoenix, Urban Tulsa, Philadelphia City Paper, San Francisco Bay Guardian and Knoxville Mercury have also closed shop. They aren't totally gone. The Association of Alternative News Media lists 107 members, but those that survive must contend with constant mergers, buyouts, and financial precarity. The legacy of Alt weeklies, however, lives on in a generation of outstanding writers. Including, but in no way limited to, Wayne Barrett, Joe Klein, Katherine Boo, Ta-Nehisi Coates, David Carr, Susan Orlean, Jonathan Gold, Coulson Whitehead, Ann Powers, Anil Dash, and on and on.

They went after local politicians, championed weirdo artists, and challenged the status quo, including the conventions of journalism and writing. For much of this hour, we'll celebrate and examine the guts and glory of a bygone media era, beginning with a look back at where it all began in Greenwich Village. In 1955, Norman Mailer took money he'd earned from his bestseller, The Naked and the Dead, and together with Dan Wolf, a psychologist, and publisher, Ed Fancher, founded the Village Voice.

[00:03:39] Tricia Romano: They wanted to create a paper that reflected the Greenwich village that they knew and loved, beatnik culture, and jazz, and writers like James Baldwin.

[00:03:50] Michael Lowenger: Tricia Romano worked at the Voice in the '90S and the 2000's. She's the author of an oral history that came out earlier this year titled the Freaks Came Out to Write. The definitive history of the Village Voice, the radical paper that changed American culture. When I spoke to Romano earlier this year, she explained that at the outset, editor Dan Wolf had a preference for hiring amateurs. As he put it, "It was a philosophical position. We wanted to jam the gears of creeping automatism."

[00:04:23] Tricia Romano: Journalism at that time was very much who, what, where, why, when, than it is writing lyrically in any way. So he and Norman Mailer also leaned towards writers writing. They knew that if you loved something and you were passionate about a subject, you were going to bring that passion to The voice in a way that an objective newspaper reporter really wasn't even allowed to.

[00:04:51] Michael Lowenger: Give me a couple examples of people who fit in at the Village Voice helped define its style, but probably wouldn't have gotten hired at one of its competitors.

[00:05:01] Tricia Romano: You've got Jules Feiffer, who was the Pulitzer-winning cartoonist who wrote these satirical, very adult comics about relationships between men and women, called Sick, Sick, Sick. He got paid nothing for many years. Then Jonas Mekas, a Lithuanian refugee who was an avant-garde filmmaker and director and hosted loft parties and showed y Warhol films.

He walked in one day, he says, how come you don't have any columns on cinema? They said, I don't know, why don't you do it? So he started doing that. Then you had Richard Goldstein that comes along later. He is the first rock critic by many people's calculations and he is actually one of the few people who actually did go to journalism school, which he tried to hide.

[00:05:57] Michael Lowenger: Because it seemed like a square.

[00:05:59] Tricia Romano: Yeah. Well he was the weirdo at his journalism school. He had long hair, and he tells a joke how to mess with the instructors he would put a sugar cube on his desk.

[00:06:09] Michael Lowenger: Because they would think it was acid.

[00:06:12] Tricia Romano: Yes. [chuckles] He was embedded in the early rock scene and [unintelligible 00:06:20] in the velvet underground and all those people. He quickly became very well known for this because that music was just starting to explode.

[00:06:30] Michael Lowenger: From December 1962 to March 1963, seven major daily newspapers in New York went on strike.

[00:06:42] Presenter: No news is bad news to 8 million New Yorkers when strikes closed down their daily papers.

[00:06:44] Michael Lowenger: The Voice didn't. Since it was available on newsstands, it stood out to New Yorkers outside of Greenwich Village for the first time, leading to a spike in its circulation from about 28,000 to 35,000.

[00:06:59] Tricia Romano: That audience discovers, "Oh, they're covering stuff that I go to or I'd like to go to, and I don't read about it anywhere else." So we suddenly got more advertising and a greater audience from that. It just grew from there.

[00:07:15] Michael Lowenger: The paper was, roughly speaking, divided into the front of the book, which was the news coverage, and the back of the book, which was more arts and culture. One of the early news reporters is this amazing woman, Mary Perot Nichols, who started at the paper in 1958. Her origin story at the paper, it turns out, is not that unusual. She kind of just like, walked in through the front door, right?

[00:07:39] Tricia Romano: Yeah, that's what a lot of people did, they just would walk into the office. They would just come in and be like, "Hey, do you know about this thing?" Or, "Why aren't you covering this or that?" She was a mother who lived nearby and her and a group of other mothers would hang out in Washington Square park, one of them being Jane Jacobs.

This is the time when Robert Moses had this vision for the city that was much more car-centric and would have bulldozed the lower part of Manhattan as we know it now. She began going into the voice and saying, why aren't you covering this? After a few tries they said, why don't you do it? She had literally no reporting skills and had never done that before but she apparently loved the research and she loved the hunt.

[00:08:28] Michael Lowenger: Robert Moses, of course, was an incredibly powerful urban planner in New York City for decades. What happened to his attempt to turn the beloved Washington Square park into just another thoroughfare?

[00:08:38] Tricia Romano: Well, a lot of what Mary did was advocate against it every week in the Village Voice. Getting the neighbors involved, getting especially a lot of the women who were using that park every day with their kids to block it. Eventually, politically, she was able to convince a lot of the mafia store owners also. She would put it to them like, "Look, all those people that pay tribute to you," meaning all the people they got money from, "They're not going to be there anymore." Like none of those stores will be there, that restaurant won't be there so you're going to lose money.

[00:09:14] Michael Lowenger: The offices of the Village Voice were right next to the Stone Wall Inn. Voice reporters were there in 1969 and covered when the bar was raided in an event that sparked the modern-day gay rights movement. How did the voice cover the Stonewall uprising? Why were they targeted by the gay rights movement in the so-called zaps?

[00:09:36] Tricia Romano: So back in the day, gay bars were not allowed. Also, I should say most of the gay bars, if not all of them, were owned by the mafia. It was sort of this game that the police and the mafia would play, which was they'd go raid the gay bar and the mafia would pay off the police and then the bar would reopen. In this case, they were raided and the patrons were fed up, and they started getting kind of roughly handled by the police outside.

Howard Smith went inside. He was kind of like a nightlife reporter on the scene in the '60s and '70s. He was inside with the police, and Lucian Truscott, who wrote from the outside. They were both straight white men. The way they covered it was both with more seriousness and length than you would see in any other publication. There were two probably 1,200-word-something articles inside the paper, whereas any other paper, I think, maybe ran a little squib and no one was there. Tthey used words that we would find offensive today.

[00:10:46] Michael Lowenger: The headline was forces of, and then the F slur. It's offensive today, but it was offensive then too. Gay readers of the news coverage were not happy with it.

[00:10:57] Tricia Romano: They were not happy with that and they were also not happy with the fact that The voice wouldn't take ads that said the word gay. They were zapped. Zapped meaning protested. The voice's offices were pretty transparent, the windows, I think, were showing to the street. They just sort of disrupted the meetings and such long enough that Dan Wolf, the editor in chief was like, "Okay, I guess we got to deal with this." That was a learning lesson for the Voice and it happened much sooner than it did for other media.

[00:11:31] Michael Lowenger: One of the internal agitators at the Voice who was quite critical of the homophobic language that was used in its coverage of Stonewall was Richard Goldstein, who you've already mentioned. He was arguably the paper and America's first real rock critic. He was a gay man who helped shape the music writing of the paper. In addition to Goldstein, there was Robert Kriskow, who joined in the late 1960s as a rock critic and columnist and he went on to be the paper's longtime music editor.

He jokingly referred to himself as the "Dean of American rock critics," which would be this kind of nickname that would follow him around for the rest of his career. These guys hung out around the village, including the iconic bar and venue CBGB, where they hung out with Lou Reed and Patti Smith and saw early shows of Blondie and the Ramones.

[music]

[00:12:33] Tricia Romano: When Richard comes along, he's around the same time or just before Rolling Stone and Crawdaddy, rock and roll was considered kids music or teens music. It wasn't taken seriously. Richard and then Robert Christelle and later James Wolcott, they believed that it should be treated with the same seriousness as the opera or literature. They applied those type of critiques to a genre that was just growing, rock music.

Chris Gal, especially when he took over the music section, he really had a vision for what the section could be. By that time, Rolling Stone is much bigger and it's flourishing so now there starts to be a lot more people writing about music in a serious way. So he starts recruiting people and he creates this bold section, and James Wolcott, who's now a very well known writer who worked at Vanity Fair and is also writing for Airmetal, he was like 20 or something, just working on the circulation desk or the front desk, but he was going out every night. That's what you do in New York when you're in your early 20s.

CBGB was not very far away from the Voice's office. it was where you went to see local bands, great new music. Those bands just happened to be legendary, or they would become legendary in part because the voice was shining a light on them. They weren't the only one, but they were certainly the local outlet to do that. it was like Television, Talking Heads, Blondie, Ramones, all that stuff happening every night. James Walcott just started writing about CBGB and that was in part because Robert Kriskow gave him a chance to.

[00:14:31] Michael Lowenger: Robert Chris Gao would later become known for his consumer guides, where he gave new albums a letter grade, like A, B, or C or whatever. As one of the men you quote in the book describes it, Chris Gao was hated by bands because he was so honest and he was so brutal. His album grades were so influential that artists over the years have responded to his criticism. There's a famous live performance of Walk on the Wild side by Lou Reed from 1978, he's kind of vamping while playing the song and he says this about Robert Crisco.

[00:15:07] Lou Reed: Imagine working for a fucking year and you got a B plus on the ass with Village Voice [inaudible 00:15:12]--

[00:15:14] Tricia Romano: I've never heard of the whole thing. That's amazing. The thing about Bob, which is different than a lot of music writers, is that he did not want to be friends or friendly with the bands because his gruff exterior belies a very soft interior. If he liked somebody as a person and then hated the record or had to be critical of it, he felt bad. He found it easier to be just completely apart from the band.

[music]

[00:15:47] Michael Lowenger: Coming up, multiple ownership changes herald the beginning of the end for the Village Voice. This is On the Media. This is On the Media, I'm Michael Loringer. We left off our story about the history of the Village Voice at the end of its early heyday of the '50s and '60s. In 1977, after passing through several different owners, the Voice was acquired, to the great chagrin of its writers, by media mogul Rupert Murdoch. The staff ended up unionizing and scoring some surprisingly progressive wins. Here's Trisha Romano.

[00:16:29] Tricia Romano: The voice was part of a package, it was New York magazine and the Village Voice. Rupert Murdoch didn't really want the Village Voice, he wanted New York magazine. Come to find out, New York magazine is actually not the moneymaker, the Voice is. When he took over, the New York magazine staff was fired and the Voice staff freaked out.

When they formed this union, it was a major step up into that point. Dan Wolfe, the original owners, they did not believe in unions. They were like, "Well, we're all family here. You could just come in and then talk to me if you have problems." The thing is, when Dan and Ed Bancher, the publisher, sold it the first time to Carter burden, they made money. They made a couple million, I think like 3 million. The staff was furious because they were being paid peanuts.

In some cases, Feiffer, he was paid nothing for years and years and years. They felt like they should have some of the spoils and that created an animosity, I think, towards owners. When Rupert Murdoch comes in, they're ready. After a few years, Jeff Weinstein's at a meeting, union meeting, and they're talking about healthcare. We had a thing where if you had a live-in partner, they could be on your healthcare.

[00:18:02] Michael Lowenger: Somebody that you're dating but who you're not married to.

[00:18:04] Tricia Romano: Yes, they could get on your health care program. Jeff Weinstein was like, "Well, why wouldn't it count gay people?" That was a big thing in their negotiations, to get spousal benefits for unmarried couples and extend that to gay couples, and they got it. Murdoch was like, "Can we not trumpet this?" The lawyer was like, "Oh, no, but they are going to trumpet this. They're going to trumpet it specifically."

[00:18:32] Michael Lowenger: This was really fascinating to me because even before the union negotiations, Rupert Murdoch at the same time that he's kind of squawking at the editors for covering gay life as a normal part of New York life, he ultimately approves this really progressive, influential provision in the union contract that allows gay couples at the paper to share health insurance. You suggest in the book that this might have actually played an important role in the ultimate same sex marriage movement.

[00:19:07] Tricia Romano: Yea. As far as they know, they're definitely the first newspaper that did it and possibly the first organization at all that did it. There were certain guidelines, and it had to be notarized that you were a couple living together. It wasn't just like you could get your friend on it. That's the foundation, to some degree, of the ultimate gay marriage law that was passed and upheld by the Supreme Court.

[00:19:37] Michael Lowenger: You mentioned that Rupert Murdoch saw that the Village Voice was more of a moneymaker than New York magazine. How did the paper make real money?

[00:19:47] Tricia Romano: Well, for many, many years, apartment ads, the classified ads in the back of the paper were basically a form of printing money. That was a source of income for decades for the Voice. For a long time, people lined up at Astor Place on Tuesday night waiting in line to get the first edition of the paper so they could get a jump on apartment ads.

[00:20:11] Michael Lowenger: Yes. There was this quote from Jackie Rudin in your book who worked in advertising who said--

[00:20:17] Jackie Rudin: "People found their lives through the Village Voice, whether it was a partner or a job or an apartment."

[00:20:26] Michael Lowenger: Blondie and Bruce Springsteen in the E Street band found their drummers through classified ads in the Village Voice.

[00:20:30] Tricia Romano: The Max Weinberg story is really great because he was a very well trained, jazzy drummer.

[00:20:39] Michael Lowenger: Who was auditioning to be Bruce Springsteen's drummer.

[00:20:41] Tricia Romano: Yes. Everybody got a half hour in the audition. He got there and he ended up doing like 3 hours. He didn't know that it was unusual, he thought everybody was getting that kind of audition. At some point Bruce says, "Where are you from," and Max Weinberg is like, "Jersey." He's like, "That's good." [chuckles]

[00:21:03] Michael Lowenger: He didn't know that that was the best thing he could have said.

[00:21:06] Tricia Romano: The best thing he could have said. Max Weinberg was like, the Village Voice changed my life. Also, I think Kiss found one of their bandmates in the Voice. There's more than that, I barely scratched the surface. That's where you would post. There's no Craigslist, there's no Facebook marketplace, no Twitter. There's nothing like that. That's where you would post your help wanted ads, and musicians did the same thing as some office looking for a secretary.

[00:21:37] Michael Lowenger: Your book outlines this kind of rift at the paper between the mostly white male reporters who covered the news for the front of the book, the so-called white boys, as they were known, and the feminist and gay writers who mostly covered arts and culture in the back of the book. You write about this really interesting episode in 1986 when Robert Friedman, the editor of the paper, made the call to put performance artist Karen Finley on the cover of the paper. What was so provocative about this cover story, and what conflict did it spurt?

[00:22:13] Tricia Romano: The article was written by Cynthia Carr, who went by C. Carr, and she had had a column about performance art for several years. She came to Richard Goldstein and her editor, Karen Durbin and said, there's this performance artist I really want to cover, she's pretty controversial, I think you should come see her. The thing that she was known for was using food as a reference point.

She would often be naked or partially naked or wear like little prom dresses and she would crush the food on her body while she sort of had this incantation, kind of possessing the male voice. It's one of those things you really have to see to understand. Cynthia Carr writes this story and they decide to put it on the cover. She was just posing with her dog, it's a pretty cover shot, but you have to realize back then papers are finite and space is finite so what gets on the cover is a big thing. It's a big deal.

At the time, Pete Hamill, who's one of the famous columnists in New York journalism, worked at Daily News, and he was like a star. He sort of led this charge against this piece because he saw it as unworthy of being on the cover because it wasn't real journalism in his eyes. It diminished the hard news that all the guys in the front of the book did. He never even saw the work, but he wrote like a full page denouncing the story and the work and the idea of the art that she was doing.

[00:24:00] Michael Lowenger: It was really, obscenity seemed like kind of deliberate in this performance. Do you want to describe what she was doing with the yams?

[00:24:07] Tricia Romano: She was using canned yams, and she would kind of push them on her body while she was talking. It was sexually explicit and meant to be provocative. It was a commentary on the male gaze and objectification of women, et cetera. It's just the kind of thing that those guys, it just is going to go over their heads. They led this charge. It was him, Nat Henthoff, Barrett Neufield.

[00:24:37] Michael Lowenger: These are like some of the heavy-hitter investigative reporters.

[00:24:40] Tricia Romano: Wayne Barrett, who wrote about Trump. Jack Neufield's, who did the worst judges and worst landlords series. Nat Henthoff, the infamous First Amendment writer who later came out against abortion. All these guys were like titans at the paper by this time, and they go marching in and saying, how can you put this filth on the front? Not really understanding that their city was very different from a city that Cynthia Carr was in, but they were both in the same city.

The voice was a reflection of that, of Manhattan, of Brooklyn, of the moment that New York was in. So the front of the book left graffiti in the office, in the bathroom. They left cans of VMS everywhere on Jackson, around the cubicles. They had a softball team, and there was a softball tournament, and when the Voice won, the trophy had a can of yams on it. It was a whole thing.

[00:25:43] Michael Lowenger: What was the point? To mock the paper for running the cover story?

[00:25:46] Tricia Romano: Yes. It was childish. The more upset the back of the book got, the more the front of the book would push it, and vice versa. It's interesting to note that the front of the book wasn't as big. Literally, space wise, as the back of the book. The back of the book was all the listings and the film reviews and the music and the theater and art and dance, all of it. It just didn't make the cover as often. Cynthia Carr was like, "If it hadn't made the cover, I don't even know if they would have realized it was in the paper." Because it was on the cover they were furious.

[00:26:21] Michael Lowenger: You're describing this tension at the paper. Reading the book it felt to me like there was this sort of constant hum of struggle, where on one hand you have the Village Voice as this very radical, very progressive paper, and yet we keep seeing moments where it's kind of failing to live up to its own values. On one hand, the paper is celebrating great Black music, and on the other hand, there were very few people of color writing for the paper in its first couple decades.

The paper was among the first to write about abortion. It had this great stable of feminist writers like Ellen Willis, Laurie Stone, Karen Durbin, and Mark. Yet internally, they face derision from their own colleagues. The paper had these pioneering gay writers, even as the Village Voice is publishing homophobic slurs in its coverage of the Stonewall uprising.

[00:27:15] Tricia Romano: It was a constant learning process for the people on the paper and the people reading it. The fact that they didn't really have any Black writers until Stanley Crouch shows up is crazy. I think it was 1976 or something.

[00:27:35] Michael Lowenger: Basically 20 years in.

[00:27:37] Tricia Romano: Yeah. They wrote about black causes. Wayne Barrett, the reporter that covered Trump and Giuliani, and Jack Neufields, who wrote about worst landlords and the worst judges, and Nat Handoff, who got his start writing about jazz. They were all very much about civil rights and were a big part of that movement, but they were blind to the fact that there were really no Black people at the paper. No one seemed to figure that out.

Schneiderman, David Schneiderman who was an Op Ed editor at the New York Times in the '70s comes on board, and he's the editor in chief, and he says, what, this is the progressive Village Voice and there are no Black people on staff. Then they also got investigated by a government agency for this so they had to take action. The thing is, right around that time is when hip hop is sort of born. Robert Krisgal is given a name by one of the first Black editors at the paper, Telani Davis, in the name of Greg Tate. Greg Tate is this unbelievable cultural critic. Hip hop helped usher in a whole bunch of Black writers into the paper.

Carol Cooper, Barry Michael Cooper. Not related. They're covering hip hop. Later, Barry Michael Cooper becomes more of an investigative reporter and covers the crack epidemic and does the story that is New Jack City that becomes the movie. They also have writers like Nelson George and Lisa Jones, who writes a cultural column about race. Lisa Kennedy, who is the film editor, she joins the paper in the '80S.

By the mid '80s, it becomes a focal point for Black writing. Hilton Als joins the paper, he's a Pulitzer Prize winning critic now at the New Yorker. It just opens the doors to these voices. Once a group of people come in, they have friends and they know people who are writers, and they get introduced and it just grows. For decades, there was nothing, and it still was a very "white paper" even towards its end.

[00:30:02] Michael Lowenger: I'm going to jump way ahead to the 2000s when we're starting to see cracks in the Village Voice, its business model. Anil Dash, now a famous technologist and writer, joined the Village Voice in 2001. This is when Craigslist, the classified ads website was first becoming a thing, and then 9/11 happens. How did the Internet and 9/11 converge to ruin the Village Voice's whole business model?

[00:30:32] Tricia Romano: Anil gets to the Voice in the summer of 2001, and it happens to be the summer that Craigslist is about to hard launch in New York. He came from San Francisco and he knew what was coming. he's telling them, you guys, we're about to get disrupted in a major way. People ignored this.

[00:30:52] Speaker A: Like the second work day, my third day there, Craigslist launched in New York. I'm just talking to somebody and I'm like, "Hey, what are we doing about Craigslist?" It was like, "Who's Craig? What are you talking about?" I couldn't articulate why it mattered so much. I couldn't tell people the whole world was about to change. I felt like Chicken Little. I kept running around being like, "The Internet is coming." It was just that, because it sounds crazy, right? You sound like a crazy person.

[00:31:19] Tricia Romano: Then 9/11 happens, and Google News wasn't a thing yet, but people wanted immediate information at that point. That's when people started pushing out news a lot faster online. The combination of those two things starts to render print not necessarily useless, but slow. When 9/11 happens, there's a little bit of a recession, and so apartment ads stop being placed with the same level and the same numbers that they were before. Then you have Craigslist saying, hey, you don't need to mail in or call anyone or fax your listing to some number, you can just post it directly online and it's free. A lot of people just shifted to that and the apartment ads never recovered after that.

[00:32:19] Michael Lowenger: In 2005, Village Voice Media, which at this point was owned by a Financial Management Group, along with six other Alt weeklies, merged with the New Times, a newspaper chain. They became the biggest company of Alt weeklies, with 17 papers. The New Times had long coveted the Village Voice, but once it bought Village Voice Media, it started picking it apart limb by limb.

[00:32:45] Tricia Romano: It was sort of like they just wanted the logo and the name, but that logo and name only has value because of what was there when you bought it. This collection of voices that made it the Village Voice. Those voices changed, some people came and went, but there's a core sensibility that they just didn't get.

[00:33:09] Michael Lowenger: In 2017, the print paper for the Voice was shut down, and a year later it seemed like the digital version was dead too. Until 2020, when it was revived by a new crop of ownership. I think we can confidently say that the Village Voice of old is gone. What's the latest iteration like?

[00:33:32] Tricia Romano: It's a zombie. The voice, to my knowledge, only has one employee, and that's RC Baker, who is essentially the editor and they run some freelance pieces. It's just sort of there, but it's not present in the city the way it should be.

[music]

[00:34:01] Tricia Romano: The voice was a guide to a specific kind of life in New York City at specific times. That collection of knowledge from people who cared about what they were covering with such intensity that there were fistfights and brawls inside the paper, that's gone.

[00:34:13] Michael Lowenger: Trisha Romano is the author of the Freaks Came Out to Write. Trisha, thank you very much.

[00:34:19] Tricia Romano: Thank you for having me.

[00:34:22] Michael Lowenger: This interview first aired in March. Coming up, if you can't beat em, should you join them? This is On the Media. This is On the Media, I'm Michael Owinger. The journey of the Village Voice, from iconic publication to a website with a single employee is sadly not unique in the Alt weekly world. Writing in Wired last month, tech journalist Kate Nibbs described a new low for some of the erstwhile greats. The Voice, LA Weekly, and Detroit's Riverfront Times, she wrote, were all hosting listicles promoting OnlyFans. That's the subscription based app that allows people to sell their pornographic content.

When the OTM fact checkers went to verify some of the links in her story, they discovered that the sites appeared to have scrubbed references to Onlyfans from their homepages, perhaps as a reaction to nibs reporting. The links are still there, you just need to know where to find them. Her story also highlighted another worrying trend on these zombie sites, the presence of AI generated text.

According to an AI detection startup called Reality Defender, a bunch of these OnlyFans articles have a high probability of AI text, like a Riverfront Times story titled 19 best free asian Only fans featuring Only fans asian free in 2024. Kate Nibs has been on the AI sludge beat for a while. We spoke to her back in February about another investigation she had a conducted into this new industry. Our conversation begins with an anecdote the story of a late great blog called the Hairpin, a site with writing by and for women that underwent an unsettling transformation.

[00:36:25] Kate Nibs: When you went to the Hairpin, you were getting something you couldn't get anywhere else.

[00:36:28] Michael Lowenger: Kate Nibs.

[00:36:29] Kate Nibs: It was part of the Alt network, the collection of blogs that had a very writer friendly sensibility. Gia Tolentino was an editor, Jasmine Hughes was an editor, and Helen Peterson. It just had a murderer's row of really talented, distinctive voices. It never had a mass audience, but the people who read it loved it. I've heard it compared to like the Velvet Underground.

[00:36:52] Michael Lowenger: Not that many people bought their album, but every one of them started their own band kind of thing.

[00:36:57] Kate Nibs: Yes, yes. Not that many people might have read it, but everyone who did became a blogger.

[00:37:02] Michael Lowenger: I love that.

[00:37:02] Kate Nibs: This website was so special to me and so many other people.

[00:37:07] Michael Lowenger: What happened to it?

[00:37:08] Kate Nibs: It just didn't succeed as a business, and they decided to fold it.

[00:37:12] Michael Lowenger: The story of digital media.

[00:37:13] Kate Nibs: Yeah, the sad story.

[00:37:15] Michael Lowenger: A couple weeks ago, Kate heard through the grapevine that the site was mysteriously back online.

[00:37:22] Kate Nibs: Someone from the Hairpin world alerted me to the fact that it had been revived in this wholly bizarre way. It was just like generic content mill nonsense. There's a lot of posts that are about dream interpretation. It's just clearly written by an AI. Kind of the worst thing you've ever read in your life.

[00:37:41] Michael Lowenger: Typically, I feel like these people who run these content mills aren't that eager to talk to the press or just want to go about their business without too much scrutiny. How did you figure out who now owns the Hairpin?

[00:37:54] Kate Nibs: I could tell you a lie about doing some sort of sophisticated forensic digging and make myself sound really good, but I'll just tell you the truth. Which is I emailed the email on the website, and the owner wrote me back and just was very eager to talk about his projects.

[00:38:09] Vuyo: You asked me about Hairpin. What?

[00:38:13] Michael Lowenger: This is the man who responded to her email, a Serbian entrepreneur named Nibosha Vunovich.

[00:38:19] Vuyo: But you can call me Vuyo because I'm Vuyinovich, my second name. So Vuyo is okay.

[00:38:24] Michael Lowenger: Kate nibs connected me with Vuyo after she profiled him for Wired this past week. An article titled Confessions of an AI Clickbait Kingpin.

[00:38:33] Kate Nibs: He actually told me that he was very surprised that I was asking about the Hairpin because it wasn't one of his top websites.

[00:38:40] Vuyo: The Hairpin is not topm 20, maybe in my top 100 websites.

[00:38:46] Kate Nibs: He said he had over 2000, although he did not provide me with a master list, so take that with a grain of salt. I checked that he owned at least a few dozen.

[00:38:56] Vuyo: I have much bigger websites than this one, so it's not too special for me.

[00:39:00] Michael Lowenger: What are some other websites that you own that you're proud of?

[00:39:04] Vuyo: I'm not proud, especially proud of anything, I must tell you, because--

[00:39:10] Michael Lowenger: Why not? This is your life's work. Why are you not proud?

[00:39:13] Vuyo: No, it's not. I can be proud of my kid, I can be proud of my songs that I write.

[00:39:21] Kate Nibs: He's also a pretty actually popular DJ in Serbia.

[Music:Vuyo's song]

[00:39:34] Vuyo: I'm singing that part of the song. That song was the most popular song in Serbia more than two years. Also, it was a hit in Bosnia and Herzegovina. It was hit in Croatia.

[00:39:49] Michael Lowenger: You're a celebrity in Serbia?

[00:39:51] Vuyo: Small celebrity.

[00:39:54] Michael Lowenger: This is actually how Vuyo got into the content mill game. In 2005, when he was still trying to make a name for himself as a DJ, he noticed that his personal site where he posted his music was getting more and more traffic.

[00:40:09] Vuyo: I get idea, "Okay, I will write about, I don't know, house music." I am purchasing housemusic.com, for example.

[00:40:17] Michael Lowenger: He quickly learned that starting a new site from scratch, churning out blog posts that advertisers like, is a ton of work. Getting people to stumble upon your site is hard too. If you Google House music, you'll probably see bigger older music sites first.

[00:40:34] Vuyo: One day I starting to buying already established websites. Just imagine you're buying website of, I don't know, closed restaurant and that restaurant have backlinks from New York, from BBC, from, I don't know, Yellow Pages, from Forbes.

[00:40:53] Michael Lowenger: I if the restaurant was written about and linked to on sites that Google considers to be high quality, then it's more likely to show up on the first page of Google results.

[00:41:03] Vuyo: Of course, it's not so simple, but there is a bigger chance for websites like that to rank easier than another domain without backlinks.

[00:41:12] Michael Lowenger: So this became a big part of his business and it appears to be legal. Every day he says he hangs out on auction sites like GoDaddy looking for dead sites that he can scoop up.

[00:41:23] Vuyo: So I'm buying established website 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 10 per days, every day.

[00:41:28] Michael Lowenger: Which is how he ended up with an eclectic assortment of sites, including photolog.com, an early Spanish language competitor of Facebook, and Pope2U.net, a former official site of Pope Benedict XVI, and of course, the Hairpin.

[00:41:44] Kate Nibs: The most popular site in his stable is another women's media site, actually it's called the Frisky. It was launched in the 2010s as well. At one point it was like one of the most popular women's interest websites in the US. It was kind of like a Cosmo style, there was a lot of sex content and dating advice. It went out of business in 2016 and the domain was up for grabs at some point and he grabbed it.

[00:42:14] Vuyo: It was so popular. I think more than 10 people work every day on that website. Real humans, we write about everything, especially about celebrities. Meghan Markle, she was pregnant, and that was the huge story. Today, maybe the Frisky earning $100,000 per year. I don't know.

[00:42:37] Michael Lowenger: We were not able to verify his earnings from the Frisky.

[00:42:41] Kate Nibs: So he's making a lot of money off sex toy companies that still want to do sponsored posts or advertisements. I was looking at the Frisky search traffic and all of the top keywords are breast related. When people are searching for things on the Internet related to bra sizes, it tends to send you to the Frisky. I think that helps keep the engine running.

[00:43:07] Michael Lowenger: in the past year or so, Vuyo's engine got a big new upgrade. Generative AI.

[00:43:13] Kate Nibs: Yeah, it just supercharged this weird spammy corner of the SEO industry. Instead of taking 4 hours to write 12 blog posts, all of a sudden you can do that in 40 seconds. They primarily use ChatGPT. They just put in prompts and spit out articles. He does say that they fact check them. I don't know how thorough the fact check is, but there's some sort of quality control going on to avoid putting something super offensive on the internet that would end up alienating potential advertisers.

[00:43:47] Vuyo: We don't publish anything about politics. We write about health, we write about fitness.

[00:43:54] Kate Nibs: It's not something that's super sustainable. He's already losing traffic on a lot of the big properties, including the Frisky, because people figure out that it's AI generated.

[00:44:03] Michael Lowenger: The Frisky, the Pope website, it's a little silly, but there is a slightly darker side to this, which is that he is using the same business model on dead news websites.

[00:44:15] Kate Nibs: Yes. Honestly, the most shocking thing that he owned to me was the English language website for Apple Daily. Which is a very culturally significant pro democracy newspaper that was based out of Hong Kong that was shut down in quite a dramatic fashion a few years ago.

[00:44:36] Michael Lowenger: The newspaper has had financial trouble since its assets were frozen after the arrests of of course, its founder, Jimmy Leibniz, the billionaire media tycoon.

[00:44:45] Kate Nibs: He was a very, very outspoken critic of the Chinese government. He's a frequent visitor to Washington and has been labeled by Beijing as a traitor. Jimmy Lai is currently under arrest, as are several of his top editors.

[00:45:01] Reporter: Charged with, "conspiracy to collude with foreign forces." His crime was running a media outlet that wouldn't tow the party line.

[00:45:10] Kate Nibs: Apple Daily was very important to the pro democracy movement.

[00:45:14] Michael Lowenger: I'm looking at it now. It's just appledaily.com, right?

[00:45:17] Kate Nibs: Yeah, appledaily.com.

[00:45:18] Michael Lowenger: Funny, cool username ideas, a guide to creating memorable online handles. Then we got unlocking LeBron's recovery secrets under the heading world, I guess this is like world news. Eight tips to take your healing seriously. Then under actors, the actors heading, we see 45 plus happy birthday wishes for teacher.

[00:45:42] Kate Nibs: [chuckles] Just totally, they're not even trying to hide the fact that it's AI generated. This is an important media outlet. It's really unsettling to see a news outlet emptied out and replaced by like the complete opposite of what it stood for.

[00:45:59] Michael Lowenger: Can I ask you about Apple Daily?

[00:46:01] Vuyo: Mm-hmm.

[00:46:02] Michael Lowenger: Because I do think some of our listeners would be really disappointed to learn that this important website was shut down and is now posting AI content.

[00:46:15] Vuyo: I understand, but there is a lot. I live in Serbia. I live in ex-Yugoslavia. There is a lot of things here--

[00:46:27] Michael Lowenger: Vuyo's English isn't super clear here but he went on to talk about growing up in Bosnia during the war, which he says destroyed his childhood. He referenced a hospital near his home that NATO bombed in the '90s. Injustices that feel bigger to him than putting AI clickbait on a dead news website that the Chinese government shut down in Hong Kong.

[00:46:50] Vuyo: I'm not part of that story. There is a lot of bad things in this world, a lot of things is not right. If I buy some domain, legal, and create anything what I want, is it bad thing? Does it change anything if I put on that website best in the world? Is it change anything in the world? No, it's not. So I think you understand what I want to tell you.

[00:47:16] Michael Lowenger: I do understand, and I don't think that you're responsible for the website going away. AI is helping accelerate the death of journalism, do you think about that at all?

[00:47:24] Vuyo: I'm afraid AI can be used for bad things. I'm not a fan. What is opposite of fan? Hate? Hater. [chuckles]

[00:47:33] Michael Lowenger: You hate AI.

[00:47:34] Vuyo: Maybe I hate AI. Especially if I can see people losing jobs because of AI. You are journalists, you're afraid about your business. Because this striking journalism, for sure, striking all writers, or content creators. I writing songs today so yes I also I'm afraid it will make better music and play better music than me as a DJ. I understand but--

[00:48:02] Michael Lowenger: But, of course, he talked about how useful and popular ChatGPT is. He cited a projection that I've seen quoted widely in the press that by 2025, 90% of online content could be generated by AI. Vuyo, you are helping create an internet where there is less and less human on the internet. Is that an internet that you want to be on?

[00:48:27] Vuyo: No. Yes, I agree with you, but I hate also using cars with oil or petrol and destroying our planet.

[00:48:37] Kate Nibs: He said, I like horses. I drive a car because we live in a society where you have to drive a car.

[00:48:43] Vuyo: Probably you don't also like destroying our planet and you are still using car too.

[00:48:48] Kate Nibs: That's how he feels about AI. This is the way things are going so I'm going to go in the direction that the world is already moving.

[00:48:56] Michael Lowenger: Can't beat them, join them. That's what I'm hearing you say.

[00:48:58] Vuyo: Something like that. That is good one. That's it.

[00:49:01] Kate Nibs: He's not sitting there being like, "I'm going to destroy a beloved independent women's media blog. I'm going to create this perverse desecration of this important pro democracy Hong Kong news outlet." He is simply taking advantage of an opportunity that has been presented on the internet that has a very low barrier of entry, and that's it. He just wants to make money and I think that's how a lot of the people who are making the internet worse operate.

[00:49:35] Michael Lowenger: Kate, thank you very much.

[00:49:36] Kate Nibs: Thank you so much for having me.

[00:49:38] Michael Lowenger: Kate Nibs is a senior writer for Wired. We first aired this story in February.

[music]

[00:49:50] Michael Lowenger: That's it for this week's show. On the Media is produced by Molly Rosen, Rebecca Clark Callender, Candice Wong, and Katerina Barton. Our technical director is Jennifer Munson. Our engineer is Brendan Dalton. Katya Rogers is our executive producer, and Eloise Blondio is our senior producer. On the Media is a production of WNYC Studios. Brooke Gladstone will be back next week. I'm Michael Lowenger.

[00:50:32] [END OF AUDIO]

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The Rise and Fall of Alt-Weeklies, and Journalism in an AI World

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In 2011, a group of high school girls in the small town of Le Roy, New York started coming down with mysterious medical symptoms. When their parents took to the story to the press, it became a national news sensation, attracting the attention of everyone from the environmental activist Erin Brokovich to a former Bachelor contestant with a medical diagnosis tv show. Host Micah Loewinger speaks with Dan Taberski, the host and creator of a new podcast series called Hysterical, about what happened in Le Roy, New York and what this and other similar events can tell us about the relationship between the media and hysteria.

On the Media is supported by listeners like you. Support OTM by donating today (https://pledge.wnyc.org/support/otm). Follow our show on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @onthemedia, and share your thoughts with us by emailing onthemedia@wnyc.org.

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WNYC’s weekly investigation into how the media shapes our worldview.

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Dan Taberski, host of the new podcast series "Hysterical," investigates a medical mystery in a small town and how it was shaped by a media frenzy.

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Dan Taberski on His New Series "Hysterical"

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Micah Loewinger: Hey, it's Micah Loewinger, and you're listening to the On the Media podcast extra. Last April, I took a look at an affliction affecting American diplomats in Havana, Cuba and beyond.

Speaker 1: A new assessment by US intelligence officials says the debilitating ailment known as Havana syndrome cannot be linked to any foreign adversary or weapon.

Speaker 2: To make the assessment from that, it's likely not a foreign adversary. I think is very bad intelligence tradecraft. There's nothing in this latest report that disproves the possibility that this is from a foreign adversary, which is what we should worry about. So my suggestion here--

Micah Loewinger: Today, there's still a heated debate about the cause of Havana syndrome. Some patients, journalists, intelligence workers, and medical experts say that it was an attack from an unidentified weapon, maybe from Russia. Others argue that the culprit is more likely the human mind, what's known as mass psychogenic illness or mass hysteria. That's where I landed when I looked into it last April. You can find a link, by the way, to that piece in the description for this episode.

I had so many more questions about mass psychogenic illness that we didn't have a chance to answer in that piece, which is why I was so excited to listen to a new docu series called Hysterical, hosted by Dan Taberski. I called up Dan to talk about the podcast, which focuses on a curious story in Le Roy, New York, in 2011, when a group of high school students started exhibiting the same Tourette's-like symptoms.

Speaker 3: This is my eighth or ninth day straight ticking and doesn't stop.

Speaker 4: I would go to art class. I used to go to two art classes every day. [unintelligible 00:01:50] Now I'm not in school.

Speaker 5: She could not talk. Was stuttering so bad that she could not even get out a word. She's twitching. She's crying at that point, just trying to get out her words.

Speaker 6: We heard a lot of like a yipping sound from some of the students or a screeching sound.

Speaker 7: She went into a full on epileptic fit on the stage. It was on the ground screaming. It was scary.

Micah Loewinger: Here's Dan Taberski.

Dan Taberski: It all started, by most accounts, when a junior from Le Roy High School woke up from a nap with a stutter. She woke up and couldn't quite get her words out. She couldn't quite speak, which was not normal for her. The symptoms got worse. It became tics and verbal outbursts and twitching, things that you would normally associate with something like Tourette's syndrome. A couple weeks later, a friend on the cheerleading squad came down with the same symptoms, tics, jerks, vocal outbursts, twitching. Two became three, three became five, and it just took off from there. Almost all the girls experiencing the symptoms were students at Le Roy High School.

Micah Loewinger: By January 2012, 12 students at the school were showing symptoms. The high school started working with the state and an outside health contractor. They ran a bunch of tests on the students who were showing symptoms. They also did some environmental tests at the school. Then they held a town hall with parents and students. Do you want to talk about what went down?

Dan Taberski: The state basically held a town hall and said, "We know it's not environmental. We know it's not a virus or a bacteria. That's all you need to know." Basically they said, "We know what it isn't, but we're not going to tell you what it is." The reason behind that was because of HIPAA laws. They were concerned that by revealing the diagnosis for the group, they would also be revealing diagnosis for the individual girls, which violates the law. It's good to keep with the law, but a terrible way to scare the hell out of a town of really nervous parents who are watching this thing literally tear through that high school.

Micah Loewinger: Putting the HIPAA thing aside, you allude to this in the show, but it's kind of a damned if you do, damned if you don't. If you just say, trust us, we're working on it, that doesn't exactly inspire confidence, especially among people who don't trust local authorities or the government. If you do roll it out in public, you make it a group detective project.

Dan Taberski: Yes. The parents were really scared. Over a dozen girls at this point are having these incredibly violent symptoms. If you're a parent, the only thing to do is investigate. The only thing to do is to try to rule out every possibility. If it was mass hysteria or not, it is interesting to watch something like this unfold in a sort of can't stop it sort of way.

Micah Loewinger: You just use that word, hysteria. The name of the podcast is Hysterical. Hysteria is kind of a loaded term, especially when it's used to describe women, right?

Dan Taberski: Yes.

Micah Loewinger: You talk about that history on your show, and yet you embrace the word.

Dan Taberski: Yes. The history of the word hysteria is really, really loaded. For hundreds of years, it's basically been used as a bucket term to describe anything that men don't understand about women's bodies. Mysterious symptoms, that's hysterical. Things that don't seem to start from a physical place in the body or have an organic cause or that we don't understand what it is, you must be hysterical. That's a term that has been used historically as a way to dismiss their medical issues. It's a really loaded term.

Over the years, it got taken out of this medical discourse. In 1980, it got taken out of the DSM, and they began using other phrases like conversion disorder or functional neurological disorder or sociogenic illness or psychogenic illness. I went back to hysteria because all those new words, unfortunately, seem to make it more confusing than less. For me, the word hysteria is the word that doesn't just describe the medical or psychological phenomenon that's happening. It also includes the cultural, the social.

Mass hysteria, if it's happening, is something that's happening on all those different levels and by taking the word out, it makes you not be able to identify it anymore. I wanted to get back to that thing, that word that really describes that group social phenomenon, just really kind of look at it for what it is.

Micah Loewinger: An interesting thing about the outbreak in Le Roy is that it primarily impacted girls. As we just discussed, there's this very gendered history to the idea of hysteria. Doctors used to blame it on a wandering womb that became misplaced and was wandering around the body but after observing women exhibiting symptoms of hysteria in Paris in the late 1880s, the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud made a breakthrough around the nature of hysteria. Can you talk about his research a little?

Dan Taberski: During the 1880s, there was an outbreak of hysteria in major cities in Europe, especially Paris, especially at this hospital called Salpetriere. The head neurologist there, Charcot, he would put the women on stage every Friday who were exhibiting these really bizarre symptoms. Doctors would come and observe to try to figure out what it all meant. Now, Charcot thought that there was something physical there. He's like, "For sure there's going to be brain lesions or there's some sort of physical source for these bizarre symptoms. We just haven't found it yet."

Freud thought something different. Freud began looking to the mind. Instead of just watching the women who were exhibiting these symptoms, in Freud's studies on hysteria, he would talk to them and they would talk back, and it would become a back and forth about what was going on, not just in the body of these women, but in their minds, in the culture, in the society that they were living in. He began to make the connection that it appeared that these symptoms were very often a manifestation of what was happening in their minds. Basically, that sort of stress and trauma converted from the mind into the body, into physical symptoms.

Micah Loewinger: Freud coined the term conversion disorder to describe hysteria. Returning to that town hall in Le Roy in 2012, one parent who we hear from on your show got very sick of all this HIPAA deflection. He walks up to the microphone and he says that the diagnosis that's been given to his child is conversion disorder. Do you mind just defining conversion disorder?

Dan Taberski: In general, conversion disorder is stress or trauma in the mind that exhibits itself as physical symptoms in the body. Generally, you know it's conversion disorder because there is no explanation for what's going on. You have a limp, but the x rays are normal, or you're having seizures multiple times a day, but the MRI show nothing. Basically, Freud figured it out. Doctors and psychologists have pursued since then that it was a conversion of this mental stress into physical symptoms, completely unconscious, which is just a huge important thing to remind people. It's not faking it. The patients aren't faking it. They are real symptoms that they can't control, but they're coming from a place and they're unconscious that they can't access.

Micah Loewinger: As you talk about on the show, conversion disorder is just the first part of it. Dr. Jennifer McVige, the neurologist working with the students, says.

Dr. Jennifer McVige: Each case, uniquely is a conversion disorder independently but when you mush them all together and they all have the same symptoms and they all know each other, then it's a mass psychogenic illness.

Micah Loewinger: We've spoken a little bit about mass psychogenic illness on the show before when we were looking at Havana syndrome. It's when physical symptoms that don't have a clear physical cause spread from person to person. This is what the state concluded was happening to the girls in Le Roy. Although they didn't come out and say it at this town hall. Some of the students and parents were not convinced at all. We hear from a student named Jessica who said.

Jessica: I don't believe that because after seeing, I was like, "There's just no way. I don't believe that." Seeing all these girls, they're not making it up. I just don't believe that that's the thing. I just couldn't. My mom and me were just so outraged to hear everybody just say that's what it was. After all of this, that's all it is. I just don't know how to believe that.

Dan Taberski: I just don't know how to believe that is such a great way of putting it. It appears that the families in that town, they weren't just having this willful, I don't believe the doctor. They truly didn't know how to believe it. It wasn't something that they could understand. They heard that, and they heard it's all in your head. They hear that thing that girls have been hearing since forever when they go to the doctor. I completely understand the impulse not to believe it, or at least not to believe it yet.

At least to believe, fine, I understand what you're saying. Maybe it does have a psychological component to it, but there's no way that if I were a parent, I would stop investigating. I just wouldn't believe it until I had personally turned over every stone. In particular, I think the thing that people found most offensive about the diagnosis was the suggestion, or the implied suggestion that they were faking it. That's how a lot of people took it, that these weren't real. That's not the case with mass psychogenic illness. They are real symptoms. They are uncontrollable but it's just a real hard thing to make people believe.

Micah Loewinger: As you alluded to, the parents did not want to stop investigating it, and so they started to bring in a string of outside investigators. They brought the story to the press, and it became a national news story, an international news story. Camera crews from Sweden and Japan started showing up. The New York Times was on the scene.

Speaker 8: We have new information tonight on a medical mystery that's centered in western New York.

Speaker 9: The number of victims displaying involuntary Tourette's-like syndromes has grown.

Speaker 10: What could be the cause of all this?

Speaker 11: Is it a disorder or a kind of mass hysteria or is the cause and effect in their backyard?

Micah Loewinger: Dr. Drew, the tv and radio personality, picked it up.

Dr. Drew: The girls, I'm sure these symptoms, no matter what has caused them, gets worse when you're anxious and obviously, you're in front of a tv camera. Now, I want you to breathe deep and let's everybody calm down and let's have. Let's try to figure this thing out. You guys feel comfortable?

Speaker 12: Ah.

Dr. Drew: Okay.

Micah Loewinger: One of the students went on a show called The Doctors, which was hosted by a former bachelor contestant.

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Speaker 13: 16 year old Alicia and her dad, Randy, are here with us now. So glad you picked up.

Micah Loewinger: Dan. How would you describe this portfolio of coverage?

Dan Taberski: Bizarre, expected, overly fascinated. The doctor's thing was crazy and oddly mirrored what was happening in Paris in the 1880s when Charcot would put these women having symptoms on stage, and the people in the audience would look. Here we are, 130 years later, and we're putting girls with mysterious symptoms on stage again, except this time, it's in front of a live studio audience, and it's on a show hosted by a former contestant from The Bachelor.

Micah Loewinger: Correct me if I'm wrong, but Alicia, the student who went on The Doctors, wanted to go on the show. She and her parents, their calculus was, "We're going to get really high quality doctors if we go on the show. The kind of care that we can't or wouldn't want to shell out for otherwise."

Dan Taberski: They didn't come from big urban areas. They came from places that they didn't have access to a lot of doctors. Certainly not the best in the business doctors that you would want for your own kid when something this strange is happening that you can't understand, that you're looking desperately for an answer for. People weren't talking to the press because they thought it'd be fun. People were talking to the press and going on these really strange shows and almost exploiting themselves because they were looking for an answer. This is the way that they could get attention, and this is the way that they could get doctors. Most of their insurance didn't cover this stuff, so not only just doctors, doctors they didn't have to pay for. It's not a small thing.

Micah Loewinger: When Alicia got the answer from the doctors, it was that she was suffering from conversion disorder.

Dan Taberski: They're basically telling her this news. They did all these MRIs. They got brain scans scattered all over the screens behind her. She's onstage, like she's on Jerry Springer with her father in front of this audience. They're giving her this diagnosis, basically saying that all her tests are normal, which sounds like a good thing, but the implication is that therefore, if your tests are normal, but you're still having these symptoms, that's conversion disorder. That's psychogenic illness.

It feels insulting. It's funny because when it was happening, she was a young girl of maybe 15, 16, and so she's very polite on the show. She says, thank you, and she says, I'm very happy but then you hear her talk as an adult when she can express herself more clearly. Her real disgust was really palpable.

Alicia: "It's all in your head," they're saying and I'm saying, it's not. I have physical symptoms. My mom would go to my appointments with me and a male doctor would dismiss everything we were both saying. It wasn't until my dad went into the meetings and then until we were heard.

Dan Taberski: The hard thing to really understand about conversion disorder is that you're having physical symptoms. They are coming from your mind, but you don't know it. It's coming from your unconscious mind. Even somebody who's having conversion disorder will never be able to bridge that gap. The mind, the brain, and how it interacts with the body and society is really complicated. It's a hard thing to accept, especially from a doctor who used to be a former contestant on The Bachelor. [laughs]

Micah Loewinger: It got more complicated. The coverage got kicked up another notch after an anonymous note was slipped under the door of one of the parents in the community.

Dan Taberski: Slipped under the door? Some people say it was slipped under a doormat. Some people say it was slipped into their mailbox. We know that there was an anonymous note and some documents, and they were anonymously given to one of the affected families. The documents basically reminded people that if you're looking for the cause of this outbreak, if you're looking for the toxic cause of this outbreak, you need to go back further.

It reminded people that in 1973, there was a train derailment 3 miles from the school that dumped 35,000 gallons of trichloroethylene solvent into the ground and that it was still there. 50 miles away in Niagara Falls, New York, was where Love Canal happened, which was one of the greatest environmental disasters in American history. Very similar circumstances with mysterious symptoms that were unexplainable and turned out to be caused by the chemicals that had been dumped into the ground decades before and that was now poisoning their children. The fear that this trained derailment and Le Roy might have something to do with it wasn't just some made up media thing. It was a real possibility and it was something that the people in this area had seen before.

Micah Loewinger: This theory became even more plausible when Erin Brockovich got involved. The Erin Brockovich, the environmental activist played by Julia Roberts in the movie from 2000.

Erin Brockovich: We have more than 400 plaintiffs. They may not be the most sophisticated people, but they do know how to divide and $20 million isn't shit when you split it between them.

Micah Loewinger: Did she and her team solve the case?

Dan Taberski: They investigated six fracking wells that were situated on the high school. They investigated other environmental problems that were happening in the community. They went to that train derailment to see, you know, how the cleanup efforts were and realized that there were still over 150 gallon drums of toxic waste from the site that had been cleaned up back in the '70s that had never been removed. Apparently those steel drums had decayed and the toxins in those drums had seeped back into the ground. They were right in that there were serious environmental problems in the area. They were not able to show through any tests that that was the source of the cause of the symptoms for the girls.

Micah Loewinger: Something interesting happened following the environmental investigation, following Erin Brockovich's involvement, when the press coverage was at a fever pitch. Many of the girl's symptoms actually got worse. Here's Dr. McVige.

Dr. Jennifer McVige: It got crazy because first everyone starts with tics, and so we're managing these tics and we were worried about motor issues. Then it turns into which I think is so interesting, syncopal events. Syncope is when we pass out. Near syncope is when I feel like I'm going down and I feel dizzy but syncope is actually the act of passing out.

Speaker 14: People start passing out.

Dr. Jennifer McVige: People start passing out right and left. Now we're passing out.

Micah Loewinger: Then what does this culmination tell us about the relationship between mass psychogenic illness and the media?

Dan Taberski: I will say this, that very often what happens with a mass psychogenic illness is that the symptoms get worse over time. As a mass psychogenic illness is growing and spreading, the symptoms tend to evolve.

Micah Loewinger: We don't know that the media coverage exacerbated it in this way.

Dan Taberski: Dr. McVige has done the research and really difficult research. It doesn't prove causation, it proves correlation, but it's still pretty impressive. Dr. McVige was the neurologist that treated the majority of the girls who had the symptoms, and she charted when there would be what she called exacerbations. Anytime that symptoms would get worse in a patient, an ER visit, if they would start passing out, if their symptoms evolved, she would keep track of that.

Then she basically put that up against a calendar of when the big events in the mass hysteria happened, to see if she could pinpoint what was causing these symptoms to worsen. She basically found out that the week that the press attention got the absolute most cacophonous.

Speaker 15: Tonight, activist Erin Brockovich has launched her own investigation. ABC's Lindsey Davis is in upstate New York.

Lindsey Davis: Now, enter the famous environmental activist Erin Brockovich. Brockovich speculates that when this school was built in 2003, that some of that contaminated soil may have been used during construction.

Dan Taberski: The Brockovich team was there, and they were talking about the possibility of cancer cells and media from around the world was there. It was just the super intense focus on this town that the symptoms got markedly worse that following week. There were 11 exacerbations in the week after the Erin Brockovich team came, which was by far the worst week of the mass hysteria, if you do believe it was a mass hysteria. She was able to show that there was at least some sort of connection between the attention we give a situation like this and the potential for it to get worse.

Micah Loewinger: There was that fascinating moment where Bob from Erin Brockovich's team, he seems conflicted.

Bob: Did something good come out of it from an environmental investigator's perspective? Yes, I got the TCE site cleaned up that had been neglected for probably the better part of 20 years. Did the fact that I came to town and found environmental things of concern exacerbate or contribute further to the psychological impacts to these kids, did it validate their feelings? Could have. Could we have made it worse? We tried not to.

Dan Taberski: For him, it's like, "Did we make it worse? I hope not." But in his mind, and I'm inclined to agree, I'm not sure what the other alternatives are. The best way to deal with a mass psychogenic illness, once you realize it's a mass psychogenic illness, is to stop giving it attention, to try to stop talking about it, potentially separate the people who are experiencing symptoms. On the whole, it will probably fade away. It's the pattern of mass psychogenic illnesses.

That's an impossible thing to do because who's going to prove that there is no other explanation for these symptoms unless you do a real investigation? The only way a mass psychogenic illness is a mass psychogenic illness is if there's no other plausible explanation. As far as the people in that town were concerned, and Erin Brockovich was concerned, they had not ruled out the environmental yet, not by a long shot. I'm inclined to agree, the only thing to do is to investigate. The only thing to do is to stir things up a little bit to make sure that you're turning over every stone. It's sort of a catch 22 that I think is fascinating and we could watch, actually play out in real time in this case.

Micah Loewinger: One way to treat mass psychogenic illness is to stop giving it attention. That's exactly what some doctors did when they reached out to some local tv stations in Le Roy and the journalists listened.

Dan Taberski: Basically, the neurologists asked the television stations not to stop covering the story, but to stop showing the tics on television. Mass psychogenic illness is a line of sight illness, and it spreads, usually in tight social groups like a convent or a small town or a high school, where people usually know each other. The way it spreads is line of sight. You see it happening. What the doctors feared was going on was that by covering this story so incessantly, and by showing the girls ticking and having symptoms on television so incessantly, that was a vector for spread so they asked the television stations to stop showing it, and a couple of the local stations did. They didn't stop covering the story, they just stopped showing the tics, which I think is commendable.

Micah Loewinger: It's responsible journalism.

Dan Taberski: If we're being honest with ourselves, the thing that people want to see are the symptoms. That's a salacious thing. That's the thing that makes it watchable and they stopped doing that. I thought that was super interesting and super responsible on their part.

Micah Loewinger: You compare what happened in Le Roy to another case, a similar case in Danvers, Massachusetts, shortly after. How did that episode differ from Le Roy?

Dan Taberski: Shortly after what happened in Le Roy, there was an outbreak in another town, in a town called Danvers, Massachusetts. The difference here is that there were no town hall meetings, nobody talked to the press, there was no secret sources. They didn't give it any attention, they didn't fuel the fire, there was no media attention because of that and eventually it went away without the Erin Brockovich showing up and crazy town halls with people screaming and constant people passing out on Dr. Drew. None of that happened.

Of course, the ultimate irony of that is that Danvers, Massachusetts was not always called Danvers, Massachusetts. In 1752, they changed their name to Danvers from what it was before, Salem, Massachusetts, which is where the original Salem witch trials happened, which a lot of people think was a mass psychogenic illness, that those girls obviously weren't witches, and that maybe what was happening was a psychogenic illness like what was happening in Le Roy.

Micah Loewinger: You go through some other examples of suspected mass psychogenic illness on the show. You look into, for instance, the fear that cops were overdosing on fentanyl by merely making physical contact with it, or in some cases, just being near fentanyl. You and your team counted over 300 cases of alleged police fentanyl overdoses reported in the press. How did that all start?

Dan Taberski: It seems that it all started in 2015, when there was a report released by the DEA and a video that went along with it that showed the personal testimony of two police officers who say they had incidental contact with fentanyl in the context of an arrest and began to basically experience overdose symptoms because allegedly of how dangerous and how incredibly reactive fentanyl was. This video was used as a warning to send to every police station, telling police officers to not get anywhere near fentanyl, that you could overdose just by being near it, just by potentially inhaling at the wrong moment, if there's a bag of it somewhere nearby. Just by potentially touching a little bit of the powder.

Micah Loewinger: We know that fentanyl is 50 times stronger than heroin or 100 times stronger than morphine. No one's disputing that.

Dan Taberski: It's just a matter of how can you overdose from it? The Society of Medical Toxicologists and other experts like that have told us over and over since 2015 that is not possible to overdose on fentanyl in that way, that you're not going to overdose on fentanyl just by being near it or potentially breathing in while there's some in the room. It's not possible. It's theoretically possible. There hasn't been a case, as far as they can tell. What happened is that after this video came out, police officers began overdosing by being near fentanyl. They began reacting to the point where they were getting Narcan administered to prevent the overdose.

Micah Loewinger: You speak with Ryan Marino, an ER doctor in Ohio, who has been trying to publicly debunk this claim. He backs his stuff up with science and he says you can't overdose on fentanyl by touching it or accidentally breathing it in.

Ryan Marino: Fentanyl that's in street drugs is a solid. Solid doesn't just turn into gas. We do know, too, that through another law of physics, we have this concept of vapor pressure, which is the ability of something to transition into a gaseous state or aerosolize spontaneously. Fentanyl has a very low vapor pressure. Under any normal conditions on the planet earth, fentanyl in a powder form sitting somewhere is not going to aerosolize.

Dan Taberski: It's a hard stance to take because people are really fucking scared of fentanyl, and they should be. It's really scary. It's destroying lives. 100,000 people last year, something like that, overdosed on fentanyl. It's incredibly destructive so I get the fear. There's this fear on the one hand, but the facts are another. It makes you question what is happening to these police officers as they're "Overdosing." By the way, what's so interesting about this case in particular is that because of police body cams, all these overdoses, we're seeing them all, and we're not only seeing them all, it's that they make great news footage.

Speaker 15: Shocking body cam video released tonight by the San Diego Sheriff's department shows a deputy on the brink of death after being exposed to fentanyl.

Speaker 16: The power of even the smallest touch of fentanyl, shown in this video. Watch as a Bartlesville police officer wearing protective gloves is packing up drug evidence believed to be laced with fentanyl when he slowly starts to collapse.

Speaker 15: A video tonight of a New York state trooper on Long Island helping revive a woman, the victim of a possible fentanyl overdose.

Speaker 17: We believe that it is that fentanyl and heroin that ultimately, he was somehow exposed to it.

Speaker 16: Police say it's yet another risk of the evolving opioid epidemic, a risk to law enforcement.

Speaker 18: Earlier this week, we reported on an Ohio police officer who accidentally overdosed after coming into contact with fentanyl.

Speaker 19: He absorbed the drug through his skin. Fellow officers had to use Narcan to revive him, and he woke up in the hospital.

Dan Taberski: There are police officers who think they're having overdoses. They're getting Narcan administered to them by their partners and by EMTs on camera. We're seeing the symptoms. We're seeing them freak out. We're seeing them panic. We're seeing them fall to the ground. Then it gets put on the news very often, without question, unfortunately, and that is just an incredible way for a mass psychogenic illness to spread. It's what a lot of people think is going on here.

Micah Loewinger: What do you think is at stake when journalists are credulously covering these stories of police overdoses from simply being near or making contact with fentanyl, beyond, let's just say, some misinformation about the drug? Is it doing any harm?

Dan Taberski: Yes. The problem is, is that because fentanyl is such a dangerous drug and people are overdosing from it at such a high rate, people believing that you can overdose from incidental fentanyl contact creates big problems in terms of caring for people who really are overdosing on fentanyl because that fear means that they put safety protocols into hospitals so that doctors and others don't overdose by getting near the people who are actually overdosing but that slows down medical attention for these people, and there's no time. These people are overdosing.

Even worse is that many municipalities are now charging people found with fentanyl. They're charging them with attempted assault on a police officer, alleging that having that fentanyl with them is an attempted assault, and putting those police officers at risk to the point where people are serving time in jail for attempted assault, for having just fentanyl on their body.

Micah Loewinger: We should add that fentanyl is used very often in hospital settings. Doctors and nurses and medical staff are handling this drug and they're not overdosing, right?

Dan Taberski: Yes. It's one of those things where when you stop to question, how do we know that those police officers aren't overdosing? You ask yourself, how are doctors and nurses dealing with fentanyl all the time? Fentanyl is one of the most useful drugs in medicine. It's used to help people with fear, used to help people with pain. It's used constantly and doctors and nurses aren't overdosing on fentanyl in that way. Even further, think about people who are actually using fentanyl as a drug illegally.

They're not overdosing accidentally on fentanyl just by being in the same room with it either. They have to snort it, they have to take it, they have to do what they have to do to actually get it into their system. It's not an accidental thing. The fact that it's restricted to the criminal justice system and criminal justice workers, is another indication that it could be a mass psychogenic illness because mass psychogenic illnesses tend to spread within pre existing social groups. Police officers and criminal justice workers definitely count as that.

Micah Loewinger: Let's return to Le Roy. Some of the cases were ultimately resolved. Some of these young women got over their symptoms.

Dan Taberski: Most of them did.

Micah Loewinger: How?

Dan Taberski: If you believe it was a mass psychogenic illness, the traditional trajectory of mass psychogenic illness is to flare up, is to cause havoc and it's to fade away. Eventually, as the news value of these dies down, as the media tiptoes away, as the headlines get smaller, it's almost like you're starving hysteria from the attention that it needs. Eventually the symptoms faded away.

Micah Loewinger: For the patients who never believed that it was mass psychogenic illness, how do they say they were healed?

Dan Taberski: Basically what happens is that another doctor, and I will say mysterious doctor because he never talked to us about it. Another doctor shows up in town and gives an alternate diagnosis. He says that he believes it's more likely something associated with an illness called PANDAS, which is basically, pediatric autoimmune neuropsychiatric disorder associated with strep. It's basically people who have a lingering strep infection can sometimes begin exhibiting symptoms that are similar to the symptoms that the girls in Le Roy are experiencing.

Unfortunately, if you ask me, and if you ask the neurologists in Le Roy who were treating the other girls, this did not line up with PANDAS. PANDAS is a pediatric disorder, first of all, and this was happening to kids who were past that point. They were in their teens. PANDAS is something that tends to happen mostly to boys, and this was happening mostly to girls. There are a host of reasons that PANDAS does not work as a diagnosis for this, but a lot of the families in the town believed it, and they took the treatments that he recommended.

Micah Loewinger: They say that the treatments work. As you say in the show, belief gets you out of the psychogenic illness, just like belief is what got you there in the first place.

Dan Taberski: Yes, I guess it's important to say, I don't mean this as a knock on the parents who believe this. It's just one possible theory, is that this alternative diagnosis and the pretty simple therapies that he prescribed because of it, that it was a placebo effect, that because the parents believed the diagnosis, and because the parents believed the therapies that he was suggesting, that that is what made it work, that's what made the symptoms go away. It's fascinating.

Micah Loewinger: I want to ask you, zooming out a little bit, what you learned over the course of reporting these stories. What did you set out to investigate, and do you feel like you found the answers you were looking for?

Dan Taberski: Yes. On the one hand, you're asking, what was this mystery illness? Am I able to say, beyond a shadow of it out that I know what it was? No, but I don't think that's necessarily appropriate when you're talking about individual medical diagnoses.

Micah Loewinger: You think it was mass psychogenic illness, what happened in Le Roy?

Dan Taberski: I believe it was a mass psychogenic illness on the group level. I think the minute you get down to individual people, it's impossible to say but I think looking at it as a group, I think it was 100% a mass psychogenic illness.

Micah Loewinger: Of course, the podcast is more than just this mystery. It's a show about attention. It's a show about groupthink. It's a show about belief and how we conceive of ourselves. You've described mass hysteria as "The defining disorder of our time." Why do you think that outside of these medical examples, this is a useful metaphor for thinking about our culture?

Dan Taberski: In the process of doing this. One neurologist we talked to that treated many of the girls, he was talking about something that they had pinned to the wall in his medical school. It's a quote that I think is pretty common among doctors. It's if the human brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we couldn't. I love the logic of that. Just the idea that we think we know what's going on in our brains, that we know it all is hubris. There's something at the podcast where I feel like I never quite go as far as to make the connections to how we're all feeling, even though I feel like this is how we're all feeling.

Micah Loewinger: You just use the term how we're all feeling. What do you mean by that?

Dan Taberski: I feel like we're all feeling at the mercy of our feelings and our thoughts and our brains and what we hear around us and all the information saying, could it be this or could it be that? I feel like we all feel like we're at the mercy of not understanding what's going on because it's just so incredibly complicated. For me, a certain sense of giving yourself over to that creates a little more sanity.

Micah Loewinger: Dan, thank you very much.

Dan Taberski: Thank you so much, man. I love doing it.

Micah Loewinger: Dan Taberski is a documentary podcast creator. His latest series is called Hysterical.

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Thanks for listening to this week's midweek podcast. By the way, I'd love to hear from you. Hit me up if you have a tip, if there's something you want us to dig into or if there's something you think we should know about. It can be a personal story or a question about the media that you want answered. My contact information is on our website onthemedia.org. All right, that's it. Be sure to catch the big show on Friday. I'm Micah Loewinger.

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Copyright © 2024 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.

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Dan Taberski on His New Series "Hysterical"

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This week, Kamala Harris’ VP pick Tim Walz went viral for being a typical Midwestern dad. On this week’s On the Media, the narratives surrounding Walz, and the political appeal of the car-tinkering, grill-manning father figure. Plus, the news influencers covering the election, and what their work reveals about the future of legacy journalism.

[02:22] Host Brooke Gladstone examines the narratives swirling around Gov. Tim Walz, and chats with Charlie Warzel, staff writer at The Atlantic, about the many memes, videos, and tweets claiming the VP nominee is “dad-coded.”

[14:50] Host Micah Loewinger speaks with Nathan Grayson, reporter and co-founder of the gaming publication Aftermath. They discuss Donald Trump’s recent interview with live streamer Adin Ross and Trump’s courtship of edgelord influencers like Logan Paul. Plus, is there a place for politicians on platforms like Twitch and Kick?

[33:18] Host Micah Loewinger talks with Makena Kelly, who writes about politics and the internet for Wired, about how the Republican and Democratic national conventions are inviting influencers to watch. Then, Micah checks in with Taylor Lorenz, columnist at the Washington Post and host of the podcast Power User, about how the rise of short-form video is impacting the news industry.

Further reading / listening:

“Dad Is on the Ballot” by Charlie Warzel

Stream Big: The Triumphs and Turmoils of Twitch and the Stars Behind the Screen (forthcoming in 2025) by Nathan Grayson

The Influencers with as Much Presidential Access as the Press, by Makena Kelly

Democratic convention will host hundreds of online influencers, by Taylor Lorenz

On the Media is supported by listeners like you. Support OTM by donating today (https://pledge.wnyc.org/support/otm). Follow our show on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @onthemedia, and share your thoughts with us by emailing onthemedia@wnyc.org.

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Walz side hugs another person while a phone in the foreground takes their picture

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Democratic vice presidential nominee Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz meets union members during a campaign rally at UAW Local 900, Thursday, August 8, 2024, in Wayne, Mich.

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WNYC’s weekly investigation into how the media shapes our worldview.

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A flurry of internet activity around Gov. Tim Walz, and the ever-growing role of influencers in politics.

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A Dad-Coded VP Pick. Plus, Trump Courts Gen Z Influencers

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Micah Loewinger: Hey, it's Micah here. Before we get to the show, big news.

CNN Dana Bash: It's new merch. All the campaigns get merched up really quickly, but this in particular is in orange, blaze orange. It's a color used by hunters for safety purposes.

Micah Loewinger: That was CNN this week describing the Harris-Walz camo hat, which reportedly sold out in 30 minutes. But that's not the hat drop I'm talking about, because OTM also has a new hat. It also has orange lettering, that's the OTM logo, and the hat itself is a cool, light blue cotton with a perfectly sized peak. For just $12 a month, this hat could be on your head. By the way, we already have them in the office. So when you donate to help support the show, your hat will be on its way to you ASAP, so you'll have plenty of summer to be out there sporting your new OTM merch.

But there's only 200 of them, so don't wait to order. And as ever, we so appreciate any contribution of any size to help us keep our radio station and this show going strong. So, head on over to onthemedia.org and click on donate to get your OTM hat today. Thanks so much. Enjoy the show.

Tim Walz: Then we're going to go get some food. Corn dog?

Hope: I'm vegetarian.

Tim Walz: Turkey, then.

Hope: Turkey's meat.

Tim Walz: Not in Minnesota, turkey special.

Brooke Gladstone: Tim Walz is the dad the Internet has been waiting for. From WNYC in New York, this is O n the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: And I'm Micah Loewinger.

Donald Trump: You're going to have big ratings today, I can see it.

Adin Ross: Yes, I want to break a million. I think we could do it.

Micah Loewinger: Candidate Donald Trump appeared on a popular influencer show this week, but was it good for his clout?

Nathan Grayson: Yes. [unintelligible 00:01:52] was like LeBron James kid. He's got to be cool, right? And so by association, somebody like Donald Trump must also be cool.

Brooke Gladstone: Also, the DNC has credentialed a whole lot of news influencers. Is that good or bad for journalism?

Taylor Lorenz: I don't think anyone's really cracked the business model for news, but I have to say, having had my own stories read by many TikTokers, it boosts the story.

Micah Loewinger: It's all coming up after this. From WNYC in New York, this is O n the Media. I'm Micah Loewinger.

Brooke Gladstone: And I'm Brooke Gladstone. The presidential campaign has certainly entered a fascinating phase, as writer Philip Gourevitch noted Thursday in this tweet, "Sometimes you see an elderly couple declining together, but they keep each other going, they become each other's context and lend each other coherence. Then you see them alone and you realize that one of them is totally lost and gaga without the other: witness Trump without Biden. MAGA, at least temporarily, has lost the plot.

Donald Trump: They’re the weird ones, and if you’ve ever seen her with the laugh and everything else, that’s a weird deal going on there. They're the weird ones. Nobody's ever call me weird.

Brooke Gladstone: Trump's even losing his beloved name-calling game. Laughing Kamala, lame. Lying Kamala, boring. And on his Truth social platform this week, Kamabla. Meanwhile, the epithet Fox News slapped on running mate Tim Walz is a loser due to the ick factor alone. Jesse Watters.

Jesse Watters: Coach Walz, where are the tampons? I don't think football coaches stock tampons in the boys' locker rooms. Tampon Tim spent his honeymoon in China, which Chinese intelligence paid for. More on that later in the show.

Brooke Gladstone: But now Trump's running mate, JD Vance, enabled by Fox and its many friends, have deployed a time-tested tactic that could do real damage if the legacy media let them get away with it, like they did in 2004. Thats when a group called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth smeared Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry's military service in Vietnam in the awarding of his Purple Heart, his silver star and his bronze star.

Announcer: Eventually, Jane Fonda apologized for her activities, but John Kerry refuses to. In a time of war, can America trust a man who betrayed his country? Swift Boat Veterans for Truth is responsible for the content.

Brooke Gladstone: Ever since, Swift boating has referred to a dishonest campaign tactic, attacking candidates by smearing their decency and patriotism. Like what's happening now, choreographed by the very guy who deployed it against John Kerry, political operative and Trump campaign co-manager Chris LaCivita. First, here's Army National Guard veteran Tim Walz.

Tim Walz: I spent 25 years in the Army, and I hunt. I’ve been voting for commonsense legislation that protects the Second Amendment, but we can do background checks. We can CDC research, and we can make sure those weapons of war, that I carried in war, is the only place where those weapons are at.

Brooke Gladstone: And here's JD Vance on Wednesday in Michigan.

JD Vance: What was this weapon that you carried into war, given that you abandoned your unit right before they went to Iraq, and he has not spent a day in a combat zone? What bothers me about Tim Walz is the stolen valor garbage.

Brooke Gladstone: Walz misspoke. He never carried a weapon in war, though after 20 years in the Army National Guard, he did sign up for another four after 9/11 and trained many others on those weapons when he was stationed at an army base in Italy. In a 2009 interview, Walz said that he and the members of his battalion first thought they were being deployed to shoot artillery in Afghanistan, as they had trained to do. But that didn't happen. After much thought, he filed paperwork for a congressional run in February 2005.

According to a fellow soldier, rumors about a future combat deployment were swirling, but the first unit wasnt mobilized until that fall. Walz faced similar criticisms about how he portrayed his overseas service when he ran first for Congress in 2006 and during his runs for governor in 2018 and in 2022. He answered them with facts and won. But many in the national press still seem to feel theres a story in this thrice litigated, steaming pile of poo. So, hey, maybe fourth time's the charm. Meanwhile, the pushback from vets has been faster and furiouser. Adam Kinzinger is a former republican congressman, lieutenant colonel in the Air National Guard, and now a senior political commentator for CNN.

Adam Kinzinger: I am furious about this attack. He could have retired at 20 with a pension. He stayed for 24. Eventually, he makes the decision to retiree. They said that he is claiming to have worn a rank that he didn't wear is complete bull. How military retirement works is after 20 years, you're eligible to retire. You retire at the rank you last held for three years. That's what Walz did. He reverted to senior master sergeant.

Tim Miller: So wait, which rank did he reach?

Adam Kinzinger: Chief master sergeant, which is like the highest enlisted rank in the army. And then since he didn't finish his education requirements for that, which happens all the time, and since he wasn't in that rank for three years, he reverted to senior master sergeant. There is still nothing cowardice or unethical about that. So it is an unhinged, wrong, and sick attack against a man that did 24 years of service.

Brooke Gladstone: JD Vance enlisted in the US Marine Corps out of high school in 2003 and served for four years, including six months in Iraq. But he never saw combat. He was charged with writing articles behind the lines. No one dare claim that's not real service because it is. Trump evaded military service when a podiatrist who worked in his dad's building said that young Donald had bone spurs. The doc's daughter later said that her dad gave that diagnosis as a favor to Donald's dad. Meanwhile, speaking of dads, everyone's speaking of this dad.

Reporter: Harris and Walz once again filled a stadium with their rally, the line stretching for blocks. Many there to see the man nicknamed America's dad on social media.

Alex Edelman: We finally have a vice president who's just giving us Midwestern dad.

Brooke Gladstone: Comedian Alex Edelman.

Alex Edelman: A vice president who after he tried, reese’s pieces for the first time, just went, aw, these are dangerous. A vice president who, when he's trying to pass someone on a sniper sidewalk, just goes, "Just gonna sneak right by you. I'm kidding." Just a vice president who calls little kids slugger. A vice president who, when he gets on the elevator and there are a bunch of people there, he's like, "Oh, it looks like it's a party."

Josh Johnson: Walz appeals to the older white guy who always tells the same joke to the server at Denny's.

Brooke Gladstone: The Daily Show's Josh Johnson.

Josh Johnson: The one where he points to his empty plate and says, I guess I hated it. Meanwhile, JD Vance appeals to the older white guys who say things like, I'm not racist, but. And then say the most racist you've ever heard. Tim Walz appeals to white guys who hang an American flag. JD Vance appeals to white guys who hang a bunch of American flags.

Tim Walz: Hi, Minnesota. Governor Walz here, along with--

Hope: Hope.

Tim Walz: We're making sure we remind all of you, hands-free driving starts on the 1st of August. We want to make sure our teen drivers are not texting and--

Hope: No, no, no, I think it's actually mostly bald men.

Tim Walz: Cut. All right, once again, Minnesotans, we're here making sure millennials are putting down the phone and--

Hope: I think it's actually adults, Dad, like older people like you.

Tim Walz: Cut.

Charlie Warzel: The idea of the dad stereotype is a person who's really grounded. Right?

Brooke Gladstone: Charlie Warzel is a staff writer at the Atlantic and the author of its newsletter Galaxy Brain.

Charlie Warzel: And I think that the idea of the dad stereotype is also somebody who is supportive when you need them but also stays out of your business. Right?

Tim Walz: In Minnesota, just like in Wisconsin, we respect our neighbors and the personal choices they make, even if we wouldn't make the same choices for ourselves, because we know there's a golden rule. Mind your own damn business.

Male Speaker: If you go up to Tim Walz and say, "I'm hungry," he'll say, "Hi, hungry, I'm Tim." And then he'll make sure that your school-age children have free breakfast and lunch.

Female speaker: He represents the dad that a lot of liberal women lost. A lot of us had moderate to conservative, educated, sensible fathers, that we lost to Rush Limbaugh, that we lost to Fox News, that we lost to Donald Trump.

Charlie Warzel: I think that there is a feeling of hope and optimism, excitement and enthusiasm around these people.

Brooke Gladstone: Charlie Warzel.

Charlie Warzel: It might not even be completely around the policies, but it's around the idea that Democratic apparatus felt very stuck, very party-governed, very institutional. And when Biden stepped down due to a chorus of people saying, we need something to change here. It gave people this feeling that their advocacy, their concerns were being listened to, whether they were or not, there was a feeling of something changed.

Reporter: That you could make a difference or that you could win?

Charlie Warzel: It's both. There was a crack in the earth and then all this energy or all this lava just bubbled up, right? It's this enthusiasm, this feeling that changed, it's possible.

Brooke Gladstone: But not inevitable.

Lawrence O'Donnell: It was 2016 all over again today.

Brooke Gladstone: MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell on Trump's hour-plus press conference Thursday in Mar-a-Lago.

Lawrence O'Donnell: And all of the cable news networks, including this one, carried it live, just like they all did repeatedly in 2016. It would be hard to find a sentence in what Donald Trump said today that did not include at least one lie. Some of the networks tried to play catch up with fact-checking after Donald Trump finished speaking, but that, of course, is way too late and utterly useless. And to make a bad news coverage situation worse, none of the networks, none of them carried Kamala Harris's speech live after the Trump appearance. None of them.

Which all of the networks knew was coming. They knew what time it was coming, they knew how to cover it live and they didn't, after giving Donald Trump more than an hour of live coverage on all of their networks. The same mistakes are being made. I have never seen an industry slower at learning from its own stupid mistakes than the American news business. And you cannot expect them in the next 89 days to figure out what they haven't been able to figure out in nine years, how to cover a Trump for president campaign.

One of the Harris-Walz campaign slogans now is, we're not going back. But we just went back today. Donald Trump answered no questions today. None. He stood up there in a room where he made sure the reporters' questions could not be heard by the TV audience. And so when he spoke, the TV audience had no idea what the question was. Most of the questions were terrible. What a waste of a moment with a convicted felon, and former president to ask questions like that.

Here's one question, "Mr. President, can you tell us a bit more about your upcoming interview with Elon Musk?" That was an actual question to Donald Trump today. And so Donald Trump could just ramble about anything that came to mind, including lying, of course, about the size of his crowds. He has been telling crowd-sized lies for nine years, and he wants to wear the news media down to the point where they just accept it. And he has won because no one in that room fought him on that in any way today. Or on anything else.

Brooke Gladstone: No other candidate or president has ever been so deferred to in my long-living memory, and I can't imagine ever will, once Donald casts off this mortal coil. But, hey, the good part may be that an old-school media steeped in old-school traditions that no longer apply can no longer entirely determine the news agenda. Everyone can get into the pool. Coming up, a look at the people for good and ill who are getting into the pool.

Micah Loewinger: This is O n the Media.

Brooke Gladstone: This is O n the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: And I'm Micah Loewinger. When did this race get so manly? As we just heard, the liberal Internet has cocooned itself in Tim Walz's soft bear hug. Meanwhile, the Trump-Vance camp is projecting a far more muscular energy.

Dana White: The president is now on TikTok.

Donald Trump: It's my honor.

Micah Loewinger: That's Dana White, president of Ultimate Fighting Championship or UFC, in Trump's very first TikTok video, posted in June. Keep scrolling and you'll see him holding his fists up with Jake and Logan Paul, the bad boy brothers who have over 20 million YouTube subscribers a piece, and now do boxing and mixed martial arts.

Jake Paul: You heard it right, motherfucker. I'm fighting Mike Tyson. We plan on this being the biggest fight of the 21st century, dummy.

Micah Loewinger: The only TikTok on JD Vance's page features the Nelk boys, the fratty edge lords known for their college party videos and their viral pranks.

Stephen Deleonardis: As I said before, we're the only people to book a five-day cruise with the intention of getting kicked off. We were there for one day.

Micah Loewinger: And that time they surprised Tucker Carlson with an enormous Zyn container, the nicotine pouch product, which they flew in by helicopter.

Tucker Carlson: Gentlemen, you've lost control. I stand in awe before this. This is the largest Zyn tin in the world. The volume of nicotine in here could save the world.

Micah Loewinger: Perhaps that stunt helped inspire writer Max Read to coin the term Zinternet, his shorthand for a giant nexus of Internet subcultures where crypto bros, habitual sports bettors, and southern sorority girls converge, a group that the MAGA campaign is apparently courting. On Monday, Trump plunged even deeper into an even stranger, younger male subculture.

Adin Ross: So do you know what live streaming is on these platforms?

Donal Trump: More or less, yes.

Adin Ross: Yes.

Donal Trump: More or less. It's the new wave.

Adin Ross: It's the new wave. It's the new wave. I'm going to explain it to you, all right?

Micah Loewinger: This is Adin Ross, a 23 year old livestreamer, in a 90-minute interview with the former president at Mar-a-Lago on Monday. Ross is a big name on a small streaming platform called Kick, a clone of Twitch. Turns out Barron Trump is a fan and helped convince his dad that Adin Ross might be key to attaining the ever-elusive youth vote.

Donald Trump: All of you young people, and he's got a lot of them. All I know is, my kids say, Dad, you have no idea how big this interview is. I said, don't tell me that.

Charlamagne: I love this press hit for Donald Trump.

Micah Loewinger: Radio host Charlamagne tha God.

Charlamagne: There is a new potential voter turning 18 every day. You got some elitist, bougie liberals who will say things like, that audience doesn't vote. How'd you know?

Micah Loewinger: It's a good question. One of many that I put to Nathan Grayson, a reporter and co-founder of the gaming publication Aftermath. I asked him who exactly watches Adin Ross and how he became famous enough to interview the former president.

Nathan Grayson: He was a variety streamer. So basically he did whatever would get him viewership, whether that involved playing specific video games like Grand Theft Auto, or whether it involved a lot of just chatting and kind of like what's known as react content. So watching videos online, watching things happen to other content creators, and voicing his opinion as it occurs, interacting with his chat.

Micah Loewinger: Live, streaming for hours and hours a day and filling the time.

Nathan Grayson: Yes.

Micah Loewinger: For a while, he was playing the basketball game 2K, and he was streaming with LeBron James's son, which I believe led to one of his first breakthroughs when he won a big game on stream, and as a reward, LeBron James's son called up LeBron himself.

LeBron James: What's good, Bro?

Adin Ross: Is this LeBron?

LeBron James: He said, is this LeBron?

Adin Ross: Yo, first of all, I got to say, gigantic fan, I love you.

LeBron James: Nah, it's all respect, man. I appreciate it, man. It's all love and respect to me and my son.

Adin Ross: That's right.

Nathan Grayson: Yes. It's interesting because somebody like Adin Ross, at first glance, is not the first choice that you would think of for a political figure like Donald Trump, because most of his content has not been politically oriented. It's been stuff like this where as a result of his increasing fame, he's rubbed shoulders with more and more famous people, but they're not like politically oriented famous people. But at the same time, if that's the kind of clout you have, then there are a lot of people who would not normally be predisposed to an interest in politics who then look at you, and when you get involved in this, they're like, that suggests it means something, that suggests it matters more. Also then you have that memory of, yes, [unintelligible 00:19:33] is like LeBron James's kid, he's got to be cool, right? And so by association, somebody like Donald Trump must also be cool.

Micah Loewinger: On Twitch, Ross had something like 7 million followers at his peak. 2021, he was in the top five streamers on Twitch, and he was making a lot of money from live streaming gambling. He had an arrangement with a sketchy crypto company. What was going on there?

Nathan Grayson: Like a lot of streamers during that time period, he was working with Stake. Stake is basically an online casino company, and there are a lot of places that outlawed it. And so what they started doing is making all of these deals with various content creators to just gamble on stream, and they were paying a lot of money for this. To some of the biggest streamers, these deals were more than a million dollars per month, which is just astronomical, right?

Micah Loewinger: Dumb money. I saw a YouTube video essay documentary about Adin Ross by a YouTuber called Patrick Cc, and he says--

Patrick Cc: Online crypto casino was paying him at least $1 million per month, according to a private conversation that Adin leaked himself.

Adin Ross: So the sponsor, they pay me to play on their website, right? And then they pay me an amount to gamble with. However, if I lose the amount, I have to withdraw my own money.

Micah Loewinger: Break that down.

Nathan Grayson: Stake would give you house money to play with, so you weren't spending your own money. And so that would enable these streamers to place ridiculous bets that most of the time wouldn't pay off, right? But if you're sitting there gambling all day long, eventually after one of your massive bets is going to pay off, and that will result in this huge viral moment. And that makes for great content.

Speaker: Yes.

Adin Ross: Come on. That's it, that's it, that's it, that's it. How much do we have?

Speaker: 84.

Adin Ross: That's it, that's it, 84. Let's go.

Nathan Grayson: Both live content, because people want to hang out in your chat and be there for that moment, and then also for like a YouTube video or a TikTok clip or whatever, of you reacting to this huge win. And so it's amazing advertising for a site like Stake, which is why they were willing to spend so much money to make sure that these streamers kept gambling. And then, of course, you had the broader issue of the fact that some of these content creators have audiences that skew younger, probably late teens into early twenties and thirties. We're not talking a ton of twelve-year-olds or whatever, but still, it's not great to advertise gambling to kids.

Micah Loewinger: In 2022, Twitch effectively banned gambling on the platform, and soon after Adin Ross moved to a lookalike live streaming platform called Kick, the same live streaming site that ultimately hosted his conversation with Donald Trump. How does Kick compare to Twitch? And why did Adin Ross ultimately move over there?

Nathan Grayson: It's really similar with the crucial distinction that it allows gambling. It was started by the founders of Stake, the online casino I mentioned earlier, just a few months after Twitch banned gambling and basically lured over a lot of popular streamers with non-exclusive deals. So they said, okay, come and stream on our platform, but also you can still go stream on Twitch too. Your contract would say that you're going to get paid a certain amount. But the fine print said you've got to spend a certain amount of time per month on Kick for this payment to actually happen.

It was a really smart strategy in that what it would encourage people to do is go stream on Twitch for a little bit and then say, "Hey, guys, I'm ending my stream on Twitch right now. Now I'm going to go over to Kick. Follow me over there." And so it was a funnel. It really is just kind of a reskin of Twitch in that they are literally using Amazon technology that Amazon in turn got from Twitch. So Amazon is actually making money off of both Twitch and Kick, which is either really funny or really dystopian, depending on how you want to look at it.

Micah Loewinger: Yes, pretty dystopian. And Kick has a lighter terms of service than Twitch. There's much less content moderation. And when Ross moved over to Kick, we started to see a kind of ratcheting up of the offensive factor in his content. He went from being edgy guy who makes homophobic jokes and stupid fart jokes to kind of an explicitly right-wing influencer.

Nathan Grayson: I think it's a pretty standard right-wing grift move where you kind of do enough to get cast out of "like Liberal society." And so you just cultivate this new audience of people who want to see that and who believe that in saying all these things and doing all these things and supporting these figures, you're finally saying what you really meant the entire time, what you really believed. So, yes, he streamed with people like Nick Fuentes, who is a very far-right figure. I think a lot of people just would call him straight-up a Nazi.

Adin Ross: You said something that like, Jews are the spawn of Satan.

Nick Fuentes: I don't think I said that, but I do believe that Jews are doing the work of Satan. Absolutely.

Adin Ross: All right, all right, all right, all right. Slow it down. Take it back a notch.

Nathan Grayson: Yes, and then the most obvious thing that Adin Ross did is he became friends with Andrew Tate.

Micah Loewinger: The self-proclaimed misogynist influencer who has been prosecuted for sex trafficking and sexual assault.

Nathan Grayson: Yes.

Micah Loewinger: Adin Ross's courting of Andrew Tate culminated perhaps when Adin Ross accidentally tipped off Romanian police to the fact that Andrew Tate was trying to leave Romania before he was scheduled to stand trial for rape and human trafficking charges.

Adin Ross: Andrew had hit me up. He said, hey, I'm gonna be leaving Romania soon and probably never coming back. If you want to come over and do a week of long streams and content before I leave, I think it'll be big. And it's never-- I'm sorry. He said, it's basically now or never.

Nathan Grayson: That again speaks to Adin Ross's weird combination of opportunism and a kind of startling lack of savvy. I think a thing that you see recurring with Adin Ross is that he, despite his many deficiencies in terms of understanding even basic concepts like fascism, there's a clip out there of him discovering what it means and mispronouncing the word repeatedly.

Adin Ross: I don't know what the fascism is. I don't know what the fuck that is. Benito Mussoli, and Giviontier Gentile, and Jason Stanley. Who the fuck are these people, bro?

Nathan Grayson: I don't want to make fun of people for not being well educated because that's much more of a systemic issue than it is necessarily an individual one. But it's telling of, I think, what his kind of attention has been on prior to this, in both his life and his career. I think that that's kind of revealing of what Adin Ross is good at, which is that he is very opportunistic.

Micah Loewinger: You've described him as a sycophant. How did we see that in his relationship with Andrew Tate?

Nathan Grayson: With Andrew Tate, yes, he was just like, I'm all about this guy. At one point, he even shaved his head and wore the same glasses as Andrew Tate to be like a little miniature lookalike of him. It was tongue-in-cheek as with any of these things. That's sort of what a lot of these streamers who flirt with far-right ideology do, is they make it all kind of a joke. It could be that they're just being ironic or not. Because, again, that's part of opportunism, is you're always trying to play for the winning team, so you give yourself some plausible deniability so that if it becomes apparent that this is not working out anymore, you can take a step back from it. But by the same token, if it's going great, then you can go all in. You can put all your chips on the table.

Micah Loewinger: Let's dive into Adin Ross's interview with Donald Trump this week. What moments stood out to you?

Nathan Grayson: One of the big talking points that's come out of the whole interview was that in addition to sort of talking to Trump and having a stream with them, Adin Ross also presented Trump with a couple of gifts, one of them being a really expensive Rolex watch and the other one being a cybertruck.

Adin Ross: You could already see the gift.

Donald Trump: Yes, I can.

Adin Ross: You can't miss it.

Donald Trump: That's an Elon.

Adin Ross: It is an Elon.

Nathan Grayson: Emblazoned with basically the moment right after somebody tried to assassinate Trump.

Adin Ross: Check out this rapper. Let me know your honest thoughts.

Donald Trump: I think it's incredible.

Nathan Grayson: It's kind of the perfect thing to do if you're trying to suck up to somebody who presents himself as authoritarian and you approach him and say, look at these things I got you. And they have your face on them. They're about you. Adin Ross is kind of modeling what a lot of these far-right figures kind of want out of their own audiences, which is somebody who just says, like, yes, man, you're the best. I'll do anything for you. I got you. And so then Adin Ross, in turn, is making behaving that way seem cool to these audiences of people who are still trying to figure out what their identity is.

Micah Loewinger: We heard Donald Trump start his pitch to Adin Ross viewers by saying, the American dream is no longer working for you, but I'll make it work for you.

Donald Trump: I love having a young audience. This is young. I think you have some oldsters, too, because I also know some oldsters that are listening and watching. It's about the American dream. Right now, you don't have the American dream.

Micah Loewinger: And some pundits and personalities like Charlamagne tha God, the radio host, has talked about how this was a brilliant play on Trump's part coming on Adin Ross's Kick livestream. How influential do you think this interview actually was?

Nathan Grayson: That's a hard question because we don't have that many points of reference against which to measure it, but we do have some. The kind of big example is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez went on Hasan Piker's Twitch stream a handful of years ago, and actually streamed with a bunch of different streamers. They played Among Us, which is a multiplayer game.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: Oh, my God, oh, my God. I knew it.

Hasan Piker: All right, so AOC has found a body.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: I didn't even know I recorded myself.

[crosstalk]

Nathan Grayson: It was not like a super overtly political stream. Nonetheless, it drew 400,000 concurrent viewers, maybe more. So comparable numbers to Trump's viewership on Kick. And then the next time Ocasio-Cortez went on Twitch, it was deliberately a get-out-the-vote, but there was not really a disproportionately higher youth vote turnout in that case. It didn't lead to anything measurable. And so in the aftermath of that, you just didn't see that many politicians show up on Twitch. When they did, they didn't do very well. Matt Gaetz tried to go on Twitch. Admittedly, this was, like, after a bunch of his scandals. So, you know, public opinion about him wasn't great, and the live stream barely attracted notice, peaking at a mere six viewers.

Micah Loewinger: Wow.

Nathan Grayson: Yes. You know, these things don't really translate to votes. What they do translate to is people who are younger being aware of politicians and liking them more. The thing about Twitch is, and just streaming in general, is you've got to stick with it. You got to be consistent because it is this ever-evolving world where there's always something new happening, there's always something new people are commenting on. And so if you don't have the time to do that and politicians don't, then it's just not really worth it to stream sporadically because you just get lost. You become noise.

Micah Loewinger: You don't think that this one-time live stream with Adin Ross on Kick is necessarily gonna help Donald Trump score big with a whole bunch of first-time voters?

Nathan Grayson: No, I definitely don't.

Micah Loewinger: On Twitch this week, the live streamer Kai Cenat claimed that the Secret Service and the Harris campaign had reached out to him to maybe explore an interview. He might have just said that as like a ploy for views or something since some outlets are reporting the campaign has done no such thing. But it's an interesting idea at the very least. Cenat is a hugely famous Black streamer on Twitch, who some listeners might remember from having incited a riot in 2023 in New York when he told his followers that he'd be giving away free PS5s in Union Square, but he didn't have a permit.

I kind of think of him as a modern day late night talk show host. He's an extraordinary showman. He helped invent the term riz, a popular slang term for a person's ability to seduce or charm somebody else, like their charisma. Kai is edgy in his own way. He's kind of a loose cannon. Do you think it would be a good idea for Kamala Harris to go on his stream?

Nathan Grayson: It could be, but I think the people who have done best on his streams are the people who can rise to the occasion of being almost as unhinged as he is. I recently watched his stream with Kevin Hart, and that was ideal. They matched each other's energy really well.

Kevin Hart: Why you got a bucket of Vaseline?

Kai Cenat: Cause I always lose my blipsticks.

Kevin Hart: No, man, that's-- Where you taking it?

Kai Cenat: Like, is it hard?

Kevin Hart: It don't fit in your pocket. God damn, you don't--

Kai Cenat: Is this crazy?

Kevin Hart: That's absolutely insane. Don't let people see you operating from a bucket of Nivea. You see how big that Vaseline is.

Nathan Grayson: I'm not sure if it's Kamala's vibe. So that said, again, Kai's audience is absolutely massive, and Kamala is definitely trying to court Black voters. That's definitely a way to reach them. But Kamala's kind of like a consummate politician. I just find it hard to imagine her fitting in in that environment or being able to sort of embody the energy that Kai gives off. I would like to see it happen, though. I think that would be fantastic content no matter what. I just don't know if it'd be good for her.

Micah Loewinger: Nathan, thank you very much.

Nathan Grayson: Yes, of course. Thank you.

Micah Loewinger: Nathan Grayson is a reporter and co-founder of the gaming publication Aftermath and author of a forthcoming book about Twitch called Stream Big.

Brooke Gladstone: Coming up, the DNC credentialed a whole bunch of news influencers. So who are they?

Micah Loewinger: This is O n the Media.

Brooke Gladstone: This is O n the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: And I'm Micah Loewinger. As the battle for online attention rages on, the Democratic National Convention, beginning next week, is trying something a bit new. In addition to Legacy Press, the party has credentialed a record-breaking 200 content creators.

Makena Kelly: A lot of these influencers position themselves as the everyman, as a normal person who is looking at the news and sees it how it is.

Micah Loewinger: Makena Kelly is a senior writer at WIRED covering politics and the Internet. She's been reaching out to some of the big news influencers who will be in attendance, like V Spehar of UnderTheDeskNews with over three million followers on TikTok.

Makena Kelly: They have, in the post-pandemic world, plotted the path for what a news influencer looks like.

V Spehar: Hi, it's V Spehar of UnderTheDeskNews, one of the most trusted voices on the Internet, and I am here to try and give big content creators--

Makena Kelly: During the pandemic, V was underneath their desk talking about the news because everything was very scary back then. And now they're always at the White House and they're always reporting on all different policy issues, election-related issues.

Micah Loewinger: Also at the DNC, we can expect videos from Brian Tyler Cohen, a 35-year-old liberal commentator on YouTube, where he also has three million followers.

Brian Tyler Cohen: At a time when the media has largely failed us, I discussed not only the extent to which our current both sides media is utterly incapable of meeting the moment, but also how the Republicans have come to rely on gaming the refs.

Micah Loewinger: But Makena Kelly says the convention will also host influencers who aren't necessarily known for explicitly political content, like food reviewers.

Makena Kelly: I talked to this guy named Jeremy Jacobowitz, and he is a part of this group called the Brunch Boys. For most of his content, it's him going to a restaurant, trying the food, and reviewing it on TikTok.

Jeremy Jacobowitz: This might be the most underrated pizza spot in New York City, let me tell you why.

Makena Kelly: But he also received an invitation to the DNC. There's a lot of nurses who I've spoken to have been invited to White House events who are also really big on TikTok and Instagram, and they dedicate a lot of their work online to reproductive rights. I think it shows a real understanding of the Internet moment that we're in right now, where Micah, my For You Page is probably a lot different from yours. Like, we're not seeing the same stuff for sure.

There are a wide array of creators who focus on a whole host of different things that are going to show up at the DNC, interact with a directly political environment, and then deliver that to hundreds of thousands, millions of people online who maybe wouldn't have been trying to seek out political content in the first place.

Taylor Lorenz: I think the Democratic Party rightly recognizes that the way people get news and information, and especially information about this election, has radically changed, especially from just four years ago.

Micah Loewinger: Taylor Lorenz is a columnist at the Washington Post. She says this election should be a wake-up call for the Legacy Press, which is quickly losing ground to independent news influencers. A lot's changed since the first time she covered the Democratic convention in 2016.

Taylor Lorenz: I was actually there as a Snapchatter because I had my Snapchat show at the time and it was really difficult. I was trying to shoot for my Snapchat show, but I was in the photographer pit. They were like, "Who's this girl with her phone? Get out of here. We're trying to get the official AP shots and stuff." Now we're seeing both parties really embrace the new media landscape.

Micah Loewinger: How do you define that term, news influencer?

Taylor Lorenz: I personally consider these people independent journalists, and I know that makes a lot of journalists unhappy to hear, but what these people are doing is a form of journalism. They educate their audiences on the news. A lot of them do their own original reporting when they can. Of course, many of them don't have the resources to do tons of original reporting, and they do aggregate a lot of news stories, but nevertheless, they're communicating news and current events to their audiences.

Micah Loewinger: Somebody like V Spehar, for instance, who does UnderTheDeskNews does, I would say, really sophisticated original commentary and analysis about the news and I've seen them do some original reporting as well. And just to add a little bit of self-awareness into the mix, at O n the Media, sometimes we do some deep dive, original investigative reporting, but a lot of what we're doing is maybe not so different. It's analysis and commentary.

But then you have somebody like, say, Kelsey Russell, who has 95,000 followers on TikTok, and what she's doing and what some other news influencers do is reading an article every day. Many of her videos are her taking reporting from a legacy outlet, throwing it up on a green screen, summarizing it, and building a following off of that.

Taylor Lorenz: Yes, exactly. She's communicating the news to millions. What's the difference between her and a newsletter writer? You know, that aggregates things. My first job in media was at the Daily Mail. We would just get links from other outlets and have to aggregate those stories for their audience. I would say with Kelsey, at least she cites where this news is coming from. Having had my own stories read by many TikTokers, it boosts the story and the culture. You have people suddenly knowing more about the story, and that should be our goal. Our goal should be to inform the public. I think that's what a lot of these news influencers are doing.

Micah Loewinger: If you had to estimate the proportion of news influencers doing original journalism, original analysis versus explaining articles, explaining TV news segments created by other journalists, what would you estimate as the breakdown?

Taylor Lorenz: This is a total speculation, but I would say it's about maybe 80% just aggregating other stuff, and then maybe 20% original content. Sometimes it's maybe even higher than that, like 90/10. But I would say that's about the same for a lot of popular news websites. I came up in the era of digital media, Micah, when most of what newspapers do is cover stories that other people are covering.

Look at any major news website today, you see a lot of announcements, you see a lot of breaking news that's covered by everybody else. And these influencers are increasingly getting the opportunity to cover things on the ground, right? They're getting directly briefed on the war in Ukraine or invited to the White House State of the Union, or things like the DNC. These give them the opportunities to do that original reporting.

But it reminds me, again, a lot of bloggers, I started as a blogger. When I first started out, of course, I didn't have access either. Most bloggers didn't. So you just blogged about things that were happening that you saw, right? As things progress and as the sort of lines between these worlds blur, you see bloggers getting more traditional access. Suddenly bloggers are sitting front row at Fashion Week, et cetera, and then suddenly writing for mainstream outlets. I think we're seeing that with these content creators. I think a few years ago, you're right, they didn't have much access. Most of what they were doing is reading headlines. Now, a lot of them, this is their on-ramp to the journalism world.

Micah Loewinger: In your own work, you've referred to the Reuter Institute's digital news report, which shows that as there's this plummeting trust in the news, young people are increasingly getting their news from social media, especially TikTokers, Instagram, YouTubers. Many of these news creators are using that falling trust as marketing. And they're saying, I'm not like the mainstream media. Even, as in many cases, they're relying on the reporting and work of legacy outlets, the same outlets that are struggling. This dynamic feels pretty unsustainable, no?

Taylor Lorenz: Well, it's unsustainable for the traditional media, which is losing ground every single day because they refuse to adapt to the current media climate for decades now, decades. The media has becoming more digital and more distributed. Trust in traditional media is falling for so many reasons. There's political attacks on it aimed at dismantling trust, I think. There's a broader shift away from trusted institutions. I think rather than acknowledge that and allow reporters to build these more direct relationships with audiences, traditional media has really retracted and pulled back and gotten scared.

Micah Loewinger: How so?

Taylor Lorenz: One example I'll give. I think a lot of people in traditional media think of objectivity as like this view from nowhere, right? I think in the actual world that we live in, the majority of people realize that that is a farce, right? That there is no such thing as a "objective person" we all come with specific worldviews and backgrounds, and that's actually really valuable. People online want commentary. They don't want to get news from somebody whose view they don't know. It makes you seem untrustworthy, because the truth is, is that none of us are objective. None of us are truly sort of like these neutral beings that operate in the world without any sort of life experiences or opinions.

And so when traditional media comes and tries to purport that and give that to people, people are like, well, who is this person? I don't want to trust this person. I want to trust this other guy on Instagram. I don't agree with him all the time, but at least I know where he's coming from. I think that's caused a lot of sort of rifts and trusts. A lot of people don't understand how journalism works either, which is a problem because they are only familiar with commentary.

Micah Loewinger: That said, I have seen research from Pew that suggests that a majority of journalists when polled in 2022, 55% of journalists said that they didn't believe in a both-sides approach to news reporting, whereas 76% of US adults said that they believe journalists should give equal time to each side when they cover a story.

Taylor Lorenz: That's not what their consumption says. People love to say that, but then they watch the commentators that, frankly, validate a lot of what they want to hear.

Micah Loewinger: Fair point, and this brings us back to TikTok. Is there not some risk to journalists who don't come up in newsrooms, who are not instilled with some sense of traditional journalistic ethics, and who end up commanding a large audience online with very partisan inflected coverage of current events, some of whom are extremely savvy on these platforms, but lack that traditional training?

Taylor Lorenz: As a journalist and as somebody that believes deeply in the need to have traditional media, there is something about the traditional media which is worth saving, I would argue, which is the resources that they give to journalists to produce original content, and the rigor. I can't just get on the Washington Post and start posting my thoughts and opinions, right?

Micah Loewinger: There's an editorial structure that deems what's newsworthy, what's factual.

Taylor Lorenz: Exactly. Exactly. And that structure doesn't exist among these influencers. But I very much caution people against this idea that somehow these influencers are all biased, but the traditional media has some sort of completely neutral point of view. Every outlet has their own sort of editorial point of view, and that is reflected through the stories that they choose, through the framing on headlines, through how stories are reported, through what stories get told, through who gets quoted in those stories. All of these micro-decisions shape coverage, and I think we need to recognize that.

Micah Loewinger: That said, you do think that there are some clear downsides to the direction that all of this is headed. I want to play you something that you said in a video that you made this past January.

Taylor Lorenz: I don't want to live in a world where all of the news is delivered through 62nd TikTok videos with retention editing. And I think there's a ton of really talented journalists that are also just not great, like social media people. I think of some of my friends who are journalists who do really deep investigations or local reporting or sit through hour long city council meetings to hold some local politician to account. That's really important work, and it's work that somebody should pay for, and it's work that's not rewarded by these social media algorithms.

Micah Loewinger: So break that down for me.

Taylor Lorenz: The problem is, is that although people's attention is shifting to these online platforms, these online platforms are very hostile to news and it's almost impossible to build a sustainable business model around news gathering and reporting on these apps. There's so many of my colleagues, like I mentioned in that video, that are phenomenal reporters but aren't great marketers. That's fine because the Washington Post will market their stories for them. In the Internet world, you've got to be everything. You've got to do everything. You've got to be your own video producer and fact checker and do all the marketing and promotion, and figure out monetization and--

Micah Loewinger: And do the reporting. Where's the time for the reporting?

Taylor Lorenz: That's the thing. And by the way, you're up again against Meta banning everything you say because of community guidelines, because they've decided they don't want news anymore. And of course, you're dealing with onslaught of harassment and abuse probably because that's what being a person with an audience on the Internet comes with. So it's really hard, and you have no support. By the way, you also have no legal support.

Micah Loewinger: Do you think TikTok or Instagram or YouTube or all of them together can replace legacy media?

Taylor Lorenz: I don't think it's the best replacement. No, I don't think it's the best replacement. I think it is a extremely flawed replacement. That said, I think there are enormous upsides of the fact that more people are getting informed, more people are learning about the news, more people know about current events, especially young people today, than in the past.

Micah Loewinger: How do we know that? How do we know that more people are getting informed, thanks to social news versus the old model?

Taylor Lorenz: Because it was so difficult to get news in the old days. You had to go out and buy a magazine. I guess you could turn on the TV, but you didn't have very many options. You certainly weren't getting a lot of alternative points of view. You certainly weren't getting anybody that was actually challenging structural power. You'd have to subscribe to Alt Weeklies and stuff, but there just wasn't very much content compared to now.

There's just so much more content now. There's so much more information. There's so much more free information out there. So I do think that there's just more opportunities to be informed and that's a great thing in a lot of ways, right? We just need better media literacy. I think we have a crisis of media literacy in this country for many reasons. I think we need traditional media to adopt and sort of recognize that the news landscape is not becoming less digital or less distributed or less personality-driven, frankly. People want to get news from people and figures that they trust.

Micah Loewinger: So you think taking the personality-driven approach is a potential antidote to this plummeting that we're seeing in trust in journalists?

Taylor Lorenz: I think it's a start. I think you don't want to build the cults of personality, but people need to know who you are, what your background is, where you're coming from, and I think the best journalists have always done this.

Micah Loewinger: I agree that basically all journalists should become stronger advocates for their own reporting, better messengers for the stories that they're writing and the reporting that they're doing on all these platforms. That said, I look at the outlets that are doing it well, like the Washington Post with Dave Jorgenson, like NPR with the Planet Money TikTok guy. These outlets haven't shored up their financial issues. They're still laying people off. I'm concerned that we're in pivot to video, v2, v3, whatever, where we're chasing an answer out of something much bigger.

Taylor Lorenz: I would argue, you're thinking about it the wrong way. So many people, when you say the word influencer or content creator, they think of somebody with a ring light and a cell phone. That's not how it works. There's so many forms of distributed media podcasts, which, by the way, have been a huge business for the New York Times. Newsletters, which also are huge businesses, and the Post has a ton of amazing newsletters. That's what Axios was built around a lot as well, monetizing these newsletters, Politico as well.

They've all leaned further into developing these digital products.

What's different about newsletters and podcasts is that you have this direct relationship with the audience. You're not going through social media. I think anyone in the news business knows that social media is incredibly fickle. TikTok might be banned. Meta is banning politics. YouTube is completely subject to an algorithm, so it's hard. I'm not saying that any of this would fix traditional media.

If being social media first was the only answer, we would still have BuzzFeed News thriving today. We know that this was not the answer. We know that leaning fully into social is not necessarily going to make anybody millions of dollars. However, we also recognize that consumption patterns are changing and we need to be up with the times. This is the media landscape that we're living in 2024, and I think it doesn't do anyone any favors to deny it.

Micah Loewinger: Zooming out what's at stake do you think if legacy media fail to adapt to this explosion in short-form video and this huge transition in consumption habits?

Taylor Lorenz: I think they'll lose control of the narrative. They won't be able to shape the narratives around their own stories. They won't be able to continue to grow their audience. They won't be able to continue to keep their brands relevant. And I think that that will ultimately hasten their decline. That's not to say that if some of these local newspapers had just gotten on TikTok a little more, that would have saved them. No, there are bigger problems with the business model of news.

But I will say, as somebody that has covered the content creator industry and just wrote a book on it, these shifts have been happening for decades. We've seen it happen before. Short-form video is just the latest format that's in vogue. It won't be here forever. We need to just recognize how these consumption patterns evolve and meet people where they are and try to get our stories out and try to tell stories in ways that consumers want to engage with.

Micah Loewinger: Taylor, thank you very much.

Taylor Lorenz: Thanks for having me.

Micah Loewinger: Taylor Lorenz is a columnist at the Washington Post and host of the podcast Power User. Her book is titled Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet. That's it for this week's show. O n the Media is produced by Molly Rosen, Rebecca Clark-Callender, Candice Wang, and Katerina Barton, with help from Pamela Appiah, our intern, who leaves us this week. Pamela, thanks for everything.

Brooke Gladstone: Our technical director is Jennifer Munson. Our engineer is Brendan Dalton. Eloise Blondiau is our senior producer. Our executive producer is Katya Rogers. O n the Media is a production of WNYC Studios. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: And I'm Micah Loewinger.

Copyright © 2024 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.

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A Dad-Coded VP Pick. Plus, Trump Courts Gen Z Influencers

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Brooke Gladstone interviews Kathryn Hughes, author of Catland, about the storied history of the cat lady trope, how cats became beloved by so many in our culture, and the many meanings ascribed to the animals.

On the Media is supported by listeners like you. Support OTM by donating today (https://pledge.wnyc.org/support/otm). Follow our show on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @onthemedia, and share your thoughts with us by emailing onthemedia@wnyc.org.

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A cat looks out in the street form a window during a nationwide confinement to counter the Covid-19, in Paris, Sunday, April 5, 2020.

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WNYC’s weekly investigation into how the media shapes our worldview.

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Brooke Gladstone interviews Kathryn Hughes, author of Catland, about the storied history of the cat lady trope, how cats became beloved by so many in our culture, and the many meaning...

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Brooke Gladstone: This is On the Media's midweek podcast. I'm Brooke Gladstone. In last week's show, we aired an interview with Kathryn Hughes, the author of the new book, Catland: Louis Wain and the Great Cat Mania. We heard lots of appreciation from so many listeners and their familiars that we're releasing an extended cut for you this week. In Hughes's book, she traces the many meanings ascribed to cats and their guardians, because cruelty to cats, whether drowning, stoning, stomping or exploding, has a long tradition. Early on, Hughes describes the notorious case in 1730 of the great cat massacre in Paris.

Kathryn Hughes: It's an extraordinary event. Two apprentices in Paris became really, really outraged because they discovered that their master's wife, in effect their mistress, was feeding her pet cat much nicer food than she was giving them. This just seemed absolutely outrageous to these teenage boys so they rounded up all the cats in the area and staged a mock trial in the courtyard. The charge against these cats was that they were living at a rate of extravagance that was far, far too good for them. Very unsurprisingly, these poor cats were found guilty and the apprentices then slaughtered all the cats.

Brooke Gladstone: They hung them, didn't they?

Kathryn Hughes: Some of them were hung. La Grise, the mistress's cat, was smashed with an iron bar so that her spine broke. Slaughtered the lowest of the low, they are restored to their most abject kind of state.

Brooke Gladstone: In the late 1800s, once seen as mangy mouse hunters, relegated to back alleys and kitchens, suddenly cats become very popular. Could you describe the reasons for and the scale of that cultural shift?

Kathryn Hughes: For millennia, cats had been tolerated, useful in kitchens for catching mice, useful in the barnyard for catching rats. They have a freelance association with mankind, but they're not in the service of anybody. The dog can be trained to go down rabbit holes or fetch prey or pull people out of the snow. The cat can never be trained to do those things. Then what happens? As Britain becomes more and more urbanized and people are still pouring into the cities, there's also space for the cat, as it were, to start moving up from the kitchen into the sitting room.

Brooke Gladstone: You do describe the period from 1870 to the eve of the Second World War, a period of 70 years as cat land, when cats were transformed from anonymous background furniture into individual actors with names, personalities, even biographies. You build your story around one of the progenitors of Catland, a peculiar character named Louis Wain.

Kathryn Hughes: Catland is created by many social trends coming together but I think one of the most important elements is the fact that this illustrator called Louis Wain, who starts off as a lowly freelance commercial illustrator, starts to draw cats as if they are people. They start to walk upright, they start to wear clothes. Onto those creatures, he maps a kind of topography of middle class life in the 1890s and beyond, playing tennis, going to the opera, sitting down to breakfast, taking tea.

His first really important picture is called the cats Christmas dance, and it's a huge panoply of cats in evening dress under the Christmas tree having a dance. Some of the younger ones are getting a little bit amorous with each other under the mistletoe.

Brooke Gladstone: His heyday is the '90s, what you call a fin de siecle world of artifice, disguise and impersonation. What was it about the 1890s?

Kathryn Hughes: The world is speeding up. The pretty, modest middle classes have a little bit more money to spend. We now have a weekend, annual holidays so people are carving out a life for themselves, which is not just about putting enough food on the table, but creating a sense of yourself as a person with tastes and pleasures and hobbies. That is, I think, particularly ripe for Wain, as it were, to map onto his cats. Cats enjoying a dip in the sea, taking to the road on bicycles.

Brooke Gladstone: Weirdly, cats were changing to look more like the ones Wain drew. Not so weaselly and rat like as London cats were typically seen, but adorable, sleek, big eyed like Wain's. Or did it just seem that way?

Kathryn Hughes: That's exactly what happens. The London cat was well known for being stringy and looking more like a weasel than a cat. What women particularly start to do is kind of carve out of this genetic sameness, distinct breed so you start to get Persians are imported from France, Siamese from the Far east. You might put two beautifully marked tabbies together and hope that out of their offspring, you would get a particularly charming kind of effect.

Brooke Gladstone: The British cats were manly and hardworking, whereas the foreign ones were effeminate and deceptive.

Kathryn Hughes: That's absolutely right. It's very interesting to watch as the rhetoric takes on all the qualities that you might expect. The long haired cats that come in from France are effeminate. They spend too much time grooming themselves. They're pretty, but they're shallow. All those kind of nationalistic stereotypes. British cats are short haired, stocky, sensible, because they know that they need to get on with life. This has no bearing in truth.

Brooke Gladstone: Despite this embrace of cats, their improved public image, there obviously remain negative associations with the animals and their owners that they never managed to shake off. Like the cat lady trope we've been hearing so much about lately, brandished mostly as a term of ridicule.

Kathryn Hughes: It's always about the fact that the cat lady is lavishing on the cat the kinds of attention and material resources that should have gone into a husband and children. For instance, having your cat buried in a particularly fine coffin, trying to get the local minister to conduct a Christian burial service, or leaving your cat a lot of money so that it can live in the manner to which it's been accustomed. Everything is about subverting normal family patriarchal rules. That is what is so offensive and why so much print is expended on these strange women.

Brooke Gladstone: You say that cats are markers of dissident sexuality. They're not quite tamable.

Kathryn Hughes: Now, it's a trope that draws very obviously on old anxieties around witches and their cats from the Middle Ages, as well as the fact that the cat lady may well not have children herself. There's a sense in which the cat, as a creature of the street, comes and goes, makes its own way in life, will never be told what to do, and is also very, very fertile, very promiscuous, and is up on the roof calling two or three times a year to be mated.

Kathryn Hughes: Again, we get the slippage between the actual female cat and the female cat owner. I think there's always this sense of women and women who like cats in particular, of just not playing the game, of always being on the point of leaving, always on the point of putting their own interests first. There's a sense in which cats and women cannot be tamed, cannot be brought to heel like a well trained dog, cannot and will not ever be completely trustworthy. I think that's where the anxiety comes from, that sense of always being up on the roof.

Kathryn Hughes: Louis Wain often draws cats up on the roof, and they're often playing musical instruments. That really is a stand in for a very free and easy, autonomous sexuality and sociality. That sense that the cat will always do what it wants and it will find new spaces to do what it wants. It will never do what it's supposed to do. It may lie in front of the family hearth for half an hour, snoozing, but look again and you'll find that it's gone and there will just be a whisk of a tail.

Brooke Gladstone: [chuckles] How were men who owned cats perceived in society? Did cat mania change those perceptions? Even Louis Wain said that when he first started drawing cats, it was difficult because it was tied up with being effeminate.

Kathryn Hughes: I think that's right. There's always this anxiety, and Wain puts it very well about no public man being able to suggest that he likes cats because it will make him seem effeminate. It makes sense. If cats are so tied up with the notion of being a woman, a man who likes a cat is suggesting that there's something of the female about him. There is a phrase that's used, and it's not really used as a slur, the phrase pussy bachelor.

Kathryn Hughes: It was often applied to a man, he might well not actually be gay in the way that we understand that now. In other words, he may not have organized his life around romantic relationships with men, but it was clear that he was never going to get married. He wasn't drawn towards women. That expression pussy bachelor, does suggest that the man who likes cats, there's something strange about him, and I don't think that ever goes away.

Kathryn Hughes: What we see throughout the late 19th into the 20th century is men who have cats knowing that it's a signal they, too are living a life that is slightly off center and apart, and they're not fully invested, as it were, in the act of reproductive heterosexuality. The most famous example is Edward Lear, the nonsense writer, the man that wrote The Owl and the Pussy-Cat, very famous poem. He was gay, and he was absolutely devoted to his cat, Foss.

Kathryn Hughes: He lived with him on such intimate terms that when he moved house, at one point he lived on the Italian Riviera, he was so worried about his elderly cat not being able to find his way around the new house that he had the house built on exactly the same pattern as the old one, so that Foss would know exactly where to go and wouldn't be nonplussed in any way at all, because he knew how much cats really do dislike change.

Brooke Gladstone: You said it's a signifier of all kinds of non conforming sexuality, the cat. In France with Baudelaire, association is with men who sleep with sex workers and don't get married. They're the ones with the cats.

Kathryn Hughes: Yes.

Brooke Gladstone: Proper men have dogs.

Kathryn Hughes: Proper men have dogs. Some of the original anxiety around the cat, actually in the middle ages, its association with witches, was that the cat was a shape shifter. Now, there is something extraordinarily malleable about a cat's form. They are amazingly good at elongating themselves, getting into spaces, or if they meet another cat they don't like, they will fluff themselves up and their spine will become a sort of horseshoe shape.

Kathryn Hughes: I think that also works imaginatively as well, and rhetorically, so that the cat is both associated with Baudelaire, the bohemians of the 1850s and 1860s in Paris, who are living a very heterosexual life. They're not wishing to get married, but they have-- There's a constant flow of women through the studio so they're a kind of ultra hyper male kind of sexuality. It is, at the same time, and certainly in Britain, associated with a kind of male bonding that doesn't really involve women.

Kathryn Hughes: It's an emotional that is organized around other men and that is a pussy bachelor. I think that is quite-- There's something so extraordinary about the cat that it can actually be the two things at once. I think that is something to do with its uncanniness and it's shape shifting.

Brooke Gladstone: You write at length about the Lloyd sisters. They're at one end of the spectrum of cat ladies. Who were they? How did they end up in the press?

Kathryn Hughes: The Lloyd sisters are three sisters who live in Birmingham in the 1860s. They live in a house that's called [unintelligible 00:12:45] Villa, a brand new house that has aspirations to some sort of gentility. They're very poor and they take in cats and try and nurse them back to health. The problem is they don't have the money or the means to do this in any kind of healthy or salubrious ways.

Brooke Gladstone: A little grey gardens, as you'd say here.

Kathryn Hughes: Very grey gardens, yes. Charles Austin, a very unpleasant man who lives next door, makes a series of formal complaints. Then, in the end, these women are taken to court for really running an unruly household. Now, they're not running a brothel, they're running a cat hospital, but in a sense, the two things hover over each other. I came across the story in the press, the magistrates who put the elder sister, Ann Lloyd, on trial for running a disorderly house.

Brooke Gladstone: She was described by journalists as somewhat eccentric in appearance and manner. A mad cat lady suspected of sharing immoderate intimacy with cats by having them sleep in her and her sister's beds.

Kathryn Hughes: I think the Lloyd sisters are sort of lightning rods. They attracted all the kinds of anxieties and tensions, fears, and it comes to court. What was so shocking is the misogyny on display. The magistrates laugh at Miss Lloyd every time she opens her mouth to say something about the cats, about the way they're being tortured by the local boys. Worst of all is when the policeman is called as a witness and he's asked about, "How much did the house really smell?" The policeman says, "There's a strong smell of fish. I didn't know whether it was the ladies bodies or it was the fish that they were feeding to the cats."

Kathryn Hughes: The court absolutely erupts. Of course, we know, of course, I'm sure it was intended then, a very unpleasant reference to aging female bodies and curdled female juices. It's just extreme. This is Victorian England. I had no idea that this kind of thing went on.

Brooke Gladstone: That's a classic. Becoming a cat lady in the 19th century was, for some, quite a lucrative business. Miss Frances Simpson, the stylish daughter of a vicar, pioneered the modern breeding of cats. You wrote, "Her greatest achievement was to take a subject that society treated as a bit of a joke, single women and their cats, and turn it into the means to an independent and dignified life."

Kathryn Hughes: Frances Simpson is an extraordinarily interesting case of a woman who decides that she's not going to go into the usual careers open to single, middle class women, teaching, possibly nursing. She's going to do something quite different. She loves cats and she decides to build a business around cats. First of all, she's a journalist, so she has a lot of columns in newspapers on cat care and cat history. Miss Simpson, a vicar's daughter, can write with a completely straight face, a column called Practical Pussyology, in which she advises people on everything from what to feed your cat, how to dress it in the winter, if it's going on a railway journey.

Kathryn Hughes: She also gets very interested in cat breeding. She invents the Blue Persian, out of which she makes a very tidy sum of money selling her cats for up to £100 a go. She is also the main channel between America and Britain so she works, as it were, as an agent in Britain, sending out pedigree cats, kittens, to American cat ladies.

Brooke Gladstone: She was an entrepreneur.

Kathryn Hughes: Yes. She even sets up in Selfridges, which is our biggest department store. She is the first person to suggest that there'll be a cat lounge in Selfridges where you could come and buy kittens. Whereas something that before you'd have just scooped up a cat from the gutter and taken it home and hoped for the best, now, you picked out a particularly charming cat and then you were briefed on how to look after it by Miss Simpson so it becoming very, very tony, as a kind of occupation. I think she's an extraordinary woman.

Brooke Gladstone: One of the most powerful women during the cat mania was the Duchess of Bedford, known as Lady Russell. She was president of the National Cat Club. She was known for training her cats to hold poses and play croquet. It seems to me that the richer the cat lady, the more acceptable she was.

Kathryn Hughes: Money solves everything. The Duchess of Bedford was herself an extremely ambivalent mother. She had one child 10 months into her marriage and then stopped sleeping with her husband, the duke. Never had any more babies, couldn't stand her son, in fact. They were estranged most of the time and was not very interested in family life at all. She was much more interested in animals and in also becoming one of the first female aviators in Britain.

Kathryn Hughes: Nobody thought to be scornful about her because she is the Duchess of Bedford and she's immensely wealthy. I think it's always about, isn't it? It's always about there's a finite amount of resources, and if they're going in the wrong direction, so with the Lloyd women, they can't actually keep their cats properly. That tends to provoke the most outrage and disgust. Somebody like Miss Simpson who, she's not married, but she's a very attractive woman. She's very fashionable.

Kathryn Hughes: In some ways, she conforms to all the kinds of things that one might want a woman to be. She's just seen as charmingly ambitious and entrepreneurial. I understand that J.D. Vance, the whole point about his anxiety about cat ladies is simply that they don't have sufficient stake in future generations. It's always about where the resources go, where one's interest goes, whether there's enough to go around. I think that is perfectly borne out here.

Brooke Gladstone: You had a fascinating chapter about the use of cat imagery in the suffragist movement, and you said that one particular picture actually won some men over to the suffragist side.

Kathryn Hughes: A lot of women who were active in the movements to get votes for women were also very, very preoccupied with societies against cruelty to animals and cats in particular. You would expect to find suffragist artists using the cat as a kind of idea of a independent female denoting agency. That doesn't happen, in fact. The image of the cat gets taken up by the anti-suffragists. There's a rash of drawings of cats dressed as suffragists or suffragettes looking quite ridiculous.

Kathryn Hughes: Pictures of cats dressed up in silly hats holding notices saying, "We demand the vote." A sense, again, in which all that misogyny comes tumbling out because there's something ridiculous about a cat demanding the vote. What next? Will mice demand the vote? Then comes one particular image towards the end of the struggle. When suffragists were imprisoned in Holloway, they often went on hunger strike and were then force started to go, what's called force feeding, where a tube is stuck down their throat, a nasty, thin gruel tips down.

Brooke Gladstone: Which is in itself dangerous.

Kathryn Hughes: Yes, it's waterboarding. It's a kind of torture. It was so unpopular that a state of affairs was reached whereby the women, when they got so thin, they would be allowed to go home until they were well enough to be brought back to prison, and then they would be tortured again. It was called the Cat and Mouse Act, and it was such a disgusting idea. It was called Cat and Mouse Act because the cat played with the mouse.

Kathryn Hughes: It doesn't finish it off. It enjoys torturing the mouse, letting it go, and then jumping on it again. A particular potent poster was produced showing the home secretary as a bloodthirsty cat with a suffragist clamped between his teeth. That piece of rhetorical propaganda was so powerful that it actually got the liberals out of power.

Brooke Gladstone: Now, you thank your own cats, Maud and Ted, in your book for accompanying you as you wrote it. What led you to write this?

Kathryn Hughes: Ted and Maud are here actually recording the interview as we speak because they like to have their own copy of everything so they're sitting here on my lap. My grandmother, who was born in 1907, was a breeder of Blue Persians, a hopeless breeder, because she could never bear to sell them. My mother, who was an only child, grew up with 17 cat siblings. My grandmother was a cat lady, and I think much preferred the cats to my mother.

Kathryn Hughes: As I was growing up, I remember my grandmother had the Louis Wain book. She had a lot of Louis Wain books. At that point, so I'm talking about the '70s and '80s. They weren't really very well known at all. I was fascinated by these books, particularly fascinated by Louis Wain's schoolroom scenes because they would have cats behaving really, really badly, and the naughty cats were pulling each other's whiskers and chucking mice at each other.

Kathryn Hughes: I was completely fascinated by this and actually really, really frightened because I was a very, very good child and I hated that kind of disorder which I experienced at my own school, as one does. As I grew up, I was very aware that there was always a kind of anxiety in these drawings that other people seemed to find so charming. Often the male cats were a bit lascivious. They often had two girlfriends on the go at once. There was just something that was very uncomfortable about them. I always thought that at some point I would write a book about Louis Wain.

Brooke Gladstone: You were also writing about cultural dissonance, right?

Kathryn Hughes: Yes. My interest has always been in figures that undercut or undermine or just make more complicated what we thought we knew hiding in plain sight. I thought that there was something about the cat that performed that same kind of work, in the sense that when I told people I was writing about the cat in the 19th century, people would say, "I don't quite understand. Are you talking about famous people and their cats? What is there to say? There is no cultural history of cats."

Kathryn Hughes: I thought that was very interesting because there is actually a huge cultural history of cats, but it's a history made up of small feelings, hints of unhappiness, dissatisfaction, slurs, discomforts, all kinds of things that don't quite fit. As a historian of the 19th century domestic life in particular, I'm always interested in those moments when things don't quite fit. Years ago, I wrote my PhD on the Victorian governess because I was very interested in the way that she was both a servant and a lady, a woman who looked after children but wasn't a mother herself.

Kathryn Hughes: She was supposed to be both very pure, but she was also associated with notions of an unbridled female sexuality. You have to look at a book like Jane Eyre. It struck me that the cat did much of the same kind of cultural work, that a cat also was hiding in plain sight, always there. Somehow, once you started following the leads, you found that you got to two entirely opposing places at once. For instance, a cat is a devoted mother. Cats are very good mothers to their kittens, but they also are extraordinarily promiscuous.

Kathryn Hughes: That seems to capture the sense in which the cat is many, many things at once, can never quite be constrained, will always exceed your expectations. That's what really interested me.

Brooke Gladstone: You also noted that history comes around in new, interesting forms. You wanted to explain to people the roots of cute cat videos on the internet and that we're disposed to think they're cute because of the cat mania that Wain and the cat lady breeders helped to bring about.

Kathryn Hughes: Particularly, I think it happened during COVID where people were building businesses out of their cats on Instagram. The public discourse was, this is entirely new. This is shocking. Is this not decadent? All the things that have been talked about back in the 1880s and 1890s, when there'd been a lot of commentary in the press about the ludicrousness of cat ladies spending a fortune on making their cats look attractive, buying ribbons to put around their necks.

Kathryn Hughes: I wanted to show people that things that seem entirely new nearly always have a history. They don't come back in exactly the same form, but they do come back. We only have to look at what happened at the same time as J.D. Vance made that strange remark about cat ladies. We also have Taylor Swift posing with her cats. I think it was on the cover of TIME magazine. We have those juxtapositions. Still nothing ever quite fits about the cat, and it never has. We really need to realize that all our feelings, all our anxieties have a history.

Brooke Gladstone: No amount of love for cats will ever do away with the cat lady trope. That'll stick with us for the long haul, right?

Kathryn Hughes: Absolutely. Just look at the way in which cat ladies have come out fighting as a result of the Vance comment in the last few days. There's just an army of outraged cat ladies, many of whom actually have children, many of whom also have dogs. There's nothing to say to a cat lady. You can't also be a dog lady. It's just so interesting the way that that remark has produced this brouhaha around the world. We're just agog about it here in Britain.

Brooke Gladstone: By the way, whatever happened to Louis Wain? He spent some time in America working for a newspaper magnate, also the model for Citizen Kane, William Randolph Hearst. His ending, though, was pretty sad.

Kathryn Hughes: It's a very sad story. Wain, in his peak, was 1902. He's a household name. He is so famous. He is the man who draws cats but gradually, the demand for his work starts to fade. By the time of the first world War, there's a paper shortage, and then after the war, there's less demand for his work. In the cinema, Felix the Cat is actually an American creation, has taken over, is occupying that space of the anthropomorphic cat.

[music]

Brooke Gladstone: A different sort of cat.

Kathryn Hughes: Actually, I've been looking at a lot of the old Felix cartoons. Felix, it seems to me, embodies a lot of the spirit of a Wain cat. There's a kind of perky can do attitude. There's a pugnacity. There's a kind of, I was going to say underdog, but there's a sense of always not starting from a position of great authority, but actually carving out something that works. Felix is always very, very worried about getting tied down by girl cats, which is something you see in Louis Wain as well.

Kathryn Hughes: Felix is a man about town, and he's not going to get hoodwinked into any kind of heterosexual, patriarchal kind of authority. He's always on his own. His song, which was very, very famous in Britain as well as America, was Felix kept on walking. Felix doesn't he keep on walking. There's always somewhere new to explore.

Brooke Gladstone: And Wain?

Kathryn Hughes: Wain, he's always suffered from a slightly precarious mental health. He becomes more and more distraught as his work fails to sell. Throughout most of his life, he's been having to look after five of his sisters who are unmarried, although one of them does die quite young, and the strain is simply too much. By 1924, when he's 65, his sisters actually have to sign the papers, which mean that he's taken into what in the vocabulary of the day is called the lunatic asylum.

Kathryn Hughes: What's even worse, it's the pauper lunatic asylum. It's where you go where you've lost your mind, but you've also lost all your money, really the lowest of the low. Unfortunately, that is where he's sent. The most extraordinary fall from grace. Luckily, there is a happy ending because the novelist HG Wells, who's always been a big fan of Wain, discovers that Wain is languishing in the pauper asylum and starts a GoFundMe money raising campaign and raises enough money to get Wain out of the pauper lunatic asylum and into Bethlem, which is the most famous mental hospital in Britain. Wain actually has a comparatively comfortable life towards the end.

Brooke Gladstone: Later known as bedlam.

Kathryn Hughes: Yes, known as bedlam for short. I have to say, by the time Wain is there, it's actually perfectly nice. Think of it as a rather nice rehab. There Wain, in a sense, comes to have a very happy ending because he no longer has to satisfy the magazines and newspapers with endless pictures of cats doing crazy things. He starts to concentrate on his own art. Draws cats, which are just extraordinarily contemporary. They look like Picassos. They are very, very abstract. They're very strange. They're cats but you have to look really hard to know that they're cats.

Kathryn Hughes: They're multicolored, jagged. They're quite extraordinary. Those are the artworks that go for an awful lot of money these days. Nick Cave, very famous Australian musician, is a great collector of Louis Wain's cats. They are very valuable now. What's so unusual about Wain? He goes from being a commercial artist to being a household name to being a pauper lunatic, to being actually a man whose work is now really quite highly regarded. I don't think there are many artists of whom you can say that.

Brooke Gladstone: Kathryn, thank you very much.

Kathryn Hughes: Thank you so much. I've really enjoyed talking to you.

Brooke Gladstone: Kathryn Hughes is an emerita professor of life writing at the University of East Anglia and a literary critic for The Guardian. She's the author of the book Catland: Louis Wain and the Great Cat Mania. Thanks for listening to the midweek podcast. Tune into the big show on Friday to hear how the Democrats and Republicans are waging very different social media campaigns this election season.[music]

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