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There have been hints dropped that the incoming administration intends to shake up the White House briefing room to potentially allow in more podcasters and outlets friendly to Trump. Whether or not it happens, the threats set the tone for another period of bad relations with the press corps. Time Magazine’s Olivia Waxman told Brooke back in 2017 that it was ever thus.

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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There have been hints dropped that the incoming administration intends to shake up the White House briefing room to potentially allow in more podcasters and outlets friendly to Trump....

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NPR and PBS stations are bracing for war with the incoming Trump administration. On this week’s On the Media, the long history of efforts to save—and snuff out—public broadcasting. Plus, the role of public radio across the country, from keeping local governments in check to providing life-saving information during times of crisis.

[01:00]  Hosts Brooke Gladstone and Micah Loewinger explore the history of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and break down the funding with Karen Everhart, managing editor of Current.

[06:59]  Host Micah Loewinger speaks with Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts, a member of the Subcommittee on Communications, Media, and Broadband, which oversees the Corporation For Public Broadcasting, on his decades-long fight with Republican lawmakers to keep NPR and PBS alive.

[13:44]  Host Brooke Gladstone sits down with Mike Gonzalez, a senior fellow at The Heritage Foundation, who authored a part of the foundation’s Project 2025 chapter on ending CPB funding.

[34:26] Hosts Brooke Gladstone and Micah Loewinger on how public radio stations across the country work to hold local governments accountable, ft: Scott Franz of KUNC in Colorado, Matt Katz formerly of WNYC, and Lindsey Smith of Michigan Public.

[00:00] Host Micah Loewinger takes a deep dive into the role of public radio during crises, ft: Tom Michael, founder of Marfa Public Radio and Laura Lee, news director for Blue Ridge Public Radio.

[00:00] Host Brooke Gladstone sits down with Sage Smiley, news director at KYUK in Bethel, Alaska, to talk about the station’s life-saving coverage of the Kuskokwim Ice Road in southwestern Alaska, and what the region would lose without public radio.

Further reading:

“End of CPB funding would affect stations of all sizes,” by Adam Ragusea

“Is there any justification for continuing to ask taxpayers to fund NPR and PBS?” by Mike Gonzalez

“Should New Jersey Democratic Officials Keep Jailing Immigrants for ICE?” by Matt Katz

“A secret ballot system at Colorado’s statehouse is quietly killing bills and raising transparency concerns,” by Scott Franz

“Not Safe to Drink," a special radio series by Michigan Public

“The Rock House Fire: 5 Years Later,” by Tom Michael

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 history of public broadcasting and its adversaries; and the modern place of public radio in covering community and crises. 

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Public Broadcasting Is In Danger (Again)

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Title: Public Broadcasting Is In Danger (Again).

Ed Markey: Donald Trump and his allies are coming for it and we have to be prepared for an incredible political battle.

Brooke Gladstone: Federal funding for public media is once again on the chopping block. From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Michael Ohnger. On this week's show, we track the essential role local public radio stations play in keeping our local governments in check and how they sometimes save lives from Hurricane Helene in North Carolina.

Laura Lee: We have heard stories and seen images of people gathered around one little hand crank radio at the cul-de-sac to listen to our updates.

Micah Loewinger: To remote southwestern Alaska.

Sage Smiley: During freeze-up, people do fall into holes in the river, people do go missing, being able to communicate with the public through KYUK about search efforts, about travel advisories. There's no other place to get that information.

Brooke Gladstone: It's all coming up after this.

Micah Loewinger: From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I'm Micah Loewinger.

Brooke Gladstone: I'm Brooke Gladstone. Donald Trump, who says journalists are scum and thinks fact-checking is really unfair, won the election. Now, all those accused of scummily fact-checking are scrambling to adjust. After all, Mr. Trump has already vowed to seek retribution for media offenses by, say, suing CBS for $1 billion doll because of "biased editing of a Kamala Harris 60 minutes interview," suspending ABC's broadcast license because of fact-checked him during a debate and suing The Des Moines Register for printing a poll suggesting Harris would win. A poll that turned out to be, wait for it, wrong. There's more.

Donald Trump: We're involved in one which has been going on for a while and very successfully against Bob Woodward where he didn't quote me properly from the tapes. Then on top of everything else, he sold the tapes.

Brooke Gladstone: This week, the Washington Post's budget was cut by its stupefyingly rich owner, Jeff Bezos, two months after he killed its endorsement of Kamala Harris, and just as Amazon signed a big deal to bring out a Melania Trump endorsed Melania Trump documentary. He's also given $1 million bucks to Trump's inauguration, as has Meta's Mark Zuckerberg, who just announced that Facebook is ending its fact-checking program, leading the president-elect to say that Zuck's company had "come a long way."

Micah Loewinger: The point is fact-based journalism is in trouble. This hour, we're going to look at the plight of public radio, which we are, because who else is going to do it? First, a quick history. Back in 1967 when President Lyndon Johnson mired in Vietnam was trying to build the Great Society at home by passing the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Act, creating Medicare, and crucially, for the purpose of this story, creating the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which has been marked for death repeatedly. What is it?

President Lyndon Johnson: The Corporation of Public Broadcasting will assist stations and producers who aim for the best in broadcasting on the whole fascinating range of human activity. It will try to prove that what educates can also be exciting. It will get part of its support from our government, but it will be carefully guarded from government or from party control. It will be free and it will be independent and it will belong to all of our people.

Micah Loewinger: It was a hard sell. Conservatives worried the CPB would promote liberal ideas. After all, Johnson's agenda was indisputably liberal. Some suspected its funds would flow more to some regions than others. Commercial broadcasters feared the competition. Even after the dust settled, well, actually the dust never really settled, it's been kicked up by every Republican administration since. Yet through the decades, somehow every effort to slash or burn the CPB has failed, thanks to such battle-scarred warriors as Big Bird and this guy.

Fred Rogers: I end the program by saying, you've made this day a special day by just your being you. There's no person in the whole world like you, and I like you just the way you are. I feel that if we in public television can only make it clear that feelings are mentionable and manageable, we will have done a great service for mental health.

Brooke Gladstone: Despite Fred Rogers' appeal to empathy, Richard Nixon, not known for manageable feelings, viewed public broadcasting as an enemy to slay. In 1975, it was left to Gerald Ford to set up a funding scheme to shield it, theoretically at least, from the immediate political winds. Congress was directed to appropriate CPB's funding two years in advance. Of course, Congress could kill future funding or even rescind what had already been allocated, but some insulation was better than none. Fast forward to 2017. Donald Trump tries to cut CPB's funding several times in his first term.

Karen Everhart: This morning, President Trump made public his proposed budget blueprint for the coming fiscal year. Among the items included, the elimination of all funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Brooke Gladstone: He didn't get it done.

Karen Everhart: No, he did not. Those proposals did not fly in Congress.

Brooke Gladstone: Karen Everhart is the managing editor of Current, a nonprofit newsroom covering public media.

Karen Everhart: Members of Congress, particularly in rural states, recognize that public broadcasting is one of the only local originating sources of news and information and programming, and they value that. Their constituents value that. What typically happens is the House goes along with a recommendation, especially when it's dominated by Republicans. The House will eliminate CPB's funding from its appropriations budget and then the Senate will propose an alternative number, and that number or something around that amount will end up in the final budget.

Brooke Gladstone: More than 70% of CPB's annual appropriation goes directly to public media stations in the form of community service grants, CSGs, of which about 45% are rural. They can be used as they need to be to keep the station running and for programming, both local and national. They're not obligated to buy programs from PBS, nor do they have to buy from NPR.

Karen Everhart: Although most of them do because they're very popular with their audiences. They can choose to buy programs from American Public Media or PRX or the BBC.

Brooke Gladstone: Last year, CPB received $525 million plus another $10 million in interest, about half of which went to local public TV stations and direct grants, about 15% to local radio stations. A big chunk went out in programming grants, mostly to TV. More went out to support the distribution system, et cetera. That said, the bigger stations are less vulnerable to attacks on CPB because it's not a significant part of their budgets.

Karen Everhart: They don't rely on CPB funding for essential services. That doesn't go towards their programming budget. It's the small stations where it really makes the biggest difference in what they do on a day-to-day basis. Those are the stations that are most at risk.

Ed Markey: Every single time, the House, the Senate, and the Presidency, they think, "Ah, now we have a chance." Every time, they find how much support there is for this program.

Micah Loewinger: Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey is a member of the Subcommittee on Communications, Media, and Broadband, which oversees the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. He's been fighting off Republican efforts to defund NPR and PBS for decades.

Ed Markey: Whether it be the children's programming that's on all day long all across the country for free or the news, the entertainment made available on NPR in the remotest parts of America, in Alaska, in Aroostook County, Maine, wherever people in the United States live, there is access. Each time, there has to be a re-education of the Republican members of Congress because they learn how central it is. Every time, we've been able to hit the pause button and just stop them from making those dramatic cuts. That's what we're going to have to do again.

Micah Loewinger: One line of rhetoric I'm sure you're familiar with is okay, we can see why so many different kinds of Americans support this, but why don't the viewers and the listeners pay for it themselves? Why does the government need to be paying or contributing for the production of this work? What do you say to that?

Ed Markey: Because we do need one source of news which is free. If public broadcasting did not exist, we would be trying right now to invent it because we need public broadcasting more than ever.

Micah Loewinger: As the effort to defund and demonize NPR's coverage ramps up, Republicans will almost certainly point to an essay in the Free Press substack by a former NPR editor named Uri Berliner who claimed that NPR doesn't employ enough conservatives, that the news organization caters too heavily to a left-wing audience, that conservative listenership has declined.

Ed Markey: Follow-up reporting revealed that the accusations were cherry-picked and mischaracterized NPR's reporting. The truth is NPR receives a relatively small amount of its funding directly from the government, and there is zero evidence that NPR manipulated its coverage to protect its funding because it simply didn't happen. The conservative backlash against NPR is a threat against NPR's actual independence, a partisan effort to force NPR to alter its objective coverage. That is the true threat to free speech, that objective journalists are told that they've got to conduct journalism more like the Fox network, which is biased in order to keep funding.

Micah Loewinger: Back in 2005, during an interview on C-SPAN, you said.

Ed Markey: There has been a radical right-wing agenda to undermine the Public Broadcasting System forever, really. At the end of the day, there always is a moderate center in Congress, Democrat and Republican, that sticks together, that ensures that proper funding for the Public Broadcasting System stays intact.

Micah Loewinger: Senator, do you think that remains true today, or is this political moment fundamentally more split than in congresses of years past?

Ed Markey: Well, the newer members of the House and Senate who are more extreme may bring an ideological perspective to the issue, but for the members who have served for years, they've been through this debate. I don't think it's going to be easy for the ideologues to convince the pragmatists that the pragmatists should just give up. They understand how their communities rely upon public television and public radio. We'll see how it all plays out. Ultimately, as the old saying goes, all politics is local, and there's nothing more local than your local NPR station.

Micah Loewinger: Part of what we're trying to understand in this episode of our show is whether an emboldened Donald Trump, a Republican-controlled House and Senate, all in a very anti-media political moment, presents a new and unique threat to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, given all the technological disruption, the fact that many Americans can get news for free, it's not always good, but they can get lots of news for free online. Are these threats unique?

Ed Markey: There is going to be an intensity to this campaign against the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, especially NPR, that is unprecedented. Donald Trump and his allies are coming for it, and we have to be prepared for an incredible political battle. We're going to have to build a powerful coalition. My own belief is that they're going to quickly see how much Americans value these media sources because public broadcasting is a public good.

Micah Loewinger: Ed Markey is a Democratic senator for Massachusetts. Senator, thank you very much.

Ed Markey: Great to be with you. Thank you so much.

Micah Loewinger: Coming up, why local news is critical across the country.

Brooke Gladstone: This is On the Media.

[music]

Micah Loewinger: This is On the Media. I'm Micah Lowinger.

Brooke Gladstone: I'm Brooke Gladstone. Now, we're going to a staunch CPB critic to hear that argument directly. We reached out to Senator John Kennedy, the Louisiana Republican who last month introduced a bill to defund CPB, calling it the No Propaganda Act. He didn't respond, nor did the like-minded Pennsylvania Congressman Scott Perry, so we asked Mike Gonzalez, a senior fellow at The Heritage Foundation who's called for defunding CPB for over a decade. When the foundation released Project 2025 last April, he wrote the chapter on why CPB should end. His chief reason was that it was unfair on two counts. First, to the competition, which did not have the benefit of federal funding, and second, to the taxpayers, especially conservative ones, forced to support programming that not only doesn't reflect their values but actually undermines them.

Because we both had dogs in this fight, we debated with a lot of conviction, but ultimately to little agreement. Sometimes, though, such conversations are useful, if only to see how differently two well-intended people can see the world.

Mike Gonzalez: Thank you very much for having me. I'm very happy to be on your show.

Brooke Gladstone: You say that every Republican president since Nixon has tried to defund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, that's a fact, and that it's time for it to finally happen. Those efforts have always failed because there seems to be broad support for the service. A 2017 PBS survey conducted by both Republican and Democratic polling teams found that 70% of Trump voters opposed eliminating federal funding for public TV.

Mike Gonzalez: Well, weak members of Congress have come in and saved your bacon.

Brooke Gladstone: Why would they?

Mike Gonzalez: Because you give them awards. They love the awards that you give them. They put them on their website. I don't want to name any names. Why do you have to do this perennially?

Brooke Gladstone: To defend the funding against the quadrennial attacks.

Mike Gonzalez: Why not just be less biased? Why not just be objective in reporting the news?

Brooke Gladstone: All right. I'm not going to argue that NPR does or doesn't have a liberal bias. We once spent several episodes addressing the issue with a lot of conservatives who, like you, listen to public radio every day. They don't like the attitude, but they like the information.

Mike Gonzalez: I disagree. I think the information is tainted. Let's look at the fact-checking that NPR did on President Trump's press conference in August. Do you want me to tell you what the headline was? "162 lies and distortions in a news conference. NPR fact-checks former President Trump." Trump said we are very close to a world war. NPR's fact-check said, "No serious person thinks that the US, Russia, and China are about to start a world war." It just so happens that the next week, I was at the Vatican and I attended a set of remarks by the Pope and he talked about a looming world war. I think that we can qualify the Pope as a serious person. The FPR fact-check "was wrong." Another one was when he called Kamala Harris a very liberal senator.

Brooke Gladstone: He didn't say that she was liberal. He said that she's a radical left person at a level nobody has seen.

Mike Gonzalez: Okay.

Brooke Gladstone: All right. When he goes hyperbolic, you are of the camp that says, don't take him literally.

Mike Gonzalez: Here's another one, Brooke. NPR chose not to report on the Hunter Biden laptop. NPR put out a statement. Here's what the statement said. "We don't want to waste the listeners' and readers' times on stories that are just pure distractions.'

Brooke Gladstone: Even Fox News passed on the story amid credibility concerns at that very point.

Mike Gonzalez: The way that NPR reported on the news that Meta, that is Facebook and Instagram, are renouncing censorship.

Brooke Gladstone: Are renouncing fact-checking.

Mike Gonzalez: I know. Censorship, they actually said it was biased.

Brooke Gladstone: To fact-check.

Mike Gonzalez: That's right.

Brooke Gladstone: I don't agree with that. I think it's fundamental to good journalism.

Mike Gonzalez: People with conservative views saw that as a stride towards freedom of expression. NPR's reporting did not reflect that at all. Here's a quote from NPR repeating talking points long used by President-elect Donald Trump and his allies. "Zuckerberg said the company's content moderation approach resulted too often in censorship." NPR reported it as Zuckerberg just repeating President Trump's talking points. A person who gets the lion's share of her news from NPR would have no way of finding out that what Mark Zuckerberg announced yesterday was seen by many of us as a victory for freedom of expression. NPR has a vision that is the Univision, the vision of the bicoastal elite.

Brooke Gladstone: You're saying if NPR would just be more, I don't know, centrist, by whose standards?

Mike Gonzalez: By the standards of conservatives because conservatives pay for you as well. If conservatives complain perennially about you, you don't think that's a problem?

Brooke Gladstone: I'm just saying this is not all conservatives. That was what this research I quoted earlier suggested, that if you actually talk to conservative consumers of NPR, they may dislike what they perceive as a liberal perspective, but they value the journalism.

Mike Gonzalez: Uri Berliner, 25-year veteran of NPR, wrote a very eye-opening whistleblowing piece about NPR, how it handles the news. He said only 11% of listeners are now conservatives, while 67% are liberal and 20% describe themselves as middle-of-the-road. Public readers driving away even moderates and traditional liberals.

Brooke Gladstone: You don't think the facts are more reliable on National Public Radio?

Mike Gonzalez: No, I don't at all. I think, again, that you become an educated news consumer, you consume a wide variety of news and then you make up your own mind.

Brooke Gladstone: You need the information to do that accurately reported. There are very few sources of that.

Mike Gonzalez: NPR is not one of them.

Brooke Gladstone: Then we come down to facts again, just plain naked information.

Mike Gonzalez: You think that the left has a monopoly on them and I don't.

Brooke Gladstone: I think that journalists who have been working the field for a long time and public broadcasting among them, they don't lie. Now, your main gripe is with PBS and especially NPR, but public media, as you note, is so much more than that. Most of CPB's funding, some 70%, goes to local stations, not directly to NPR. Those stations play crucial roles, especially in rural areas in news deserts.

Mike Gonzalez: They turn around then and they use that money to buy NPR and PBS broadcasting. As to the news deserts, let's take Alaska for example. I know that you talk to people in Alaska. The figures that I got were from four or five years ago, has an Internet penetration of 80%, 20%, which is not insignificant, but a lot of those people just don't want Internet. I think that this argument that there are news deserts out in the Dakotas and in Alaska continue to get news through social media. They do not need the taxpayer to pony up.

Brooke Gladstone: They aren't getting news from the Internet about their local area. In 2024, there were 208 counties that were considered news deserts. More than 1,500 had only one local news source. That means that more than half of the nation's counties have little to no local news. News deserts have been associated with lower household incomes, lower rates of educational attainment, higher poverty. A recent study from Medill's School of Journalism, Northwestern University's journalism school, says that there was a net increase of 81 standalone local digital news sites in the last year, but nearly 90% of those are in metro areas, not in rural counties.

Mike Gonzalez: Well, I think it's a question of demand. If there really is a demand, a supply will be there. I have never seen any area where demand surges and it's not met by a supply.

Brooke Gladstone: Not all listeners can afford to support their public stations and they rely on them for local news, emergency updates. In fact, rural stations are the ones that are reliant on CPB funding and they don't spend all that money on simply sending it to National Public Radio.

Mike Gonzalez: They buy NPR programming.

Brooke Gladstone: They do, but that's not where all their money goes. The rest of it is for their physical plant and for local news and for partnering with emergency services in their area.

Mike Gonzalez: As I said, I think that if there's a demand, the market will supply a response to it. If some local communities have disaster response in weather-related needs that the market does not supply a solution to, I am sure the state and local governments can devise and set up systems that can take care of the problem on a much cheaper basis than the entire public broadcasting apparatus and without the attendant ills that accompany the prison system.

As for local news, which as you mentioned local news, I just don't buy the state funding is the only business model for local news. We've had private funding before, so I don't know why all of a sudden state funding is the only business model for local news. Now if you're asking me, Brooke, is it a good thing that Alaskans will no longer be captured by NPR's liberal vision, do I think that's a good thing? Yes, I think that's a good thing.

Brooke Gladstone: We did speak to Alaska and not just Alaska. In some of these areas, there is no Internet. There are constant disruptions. This is how they get the information about the emergency services that they absolutely need.

Mike Gonzalez: I'm not sure that's the case. It used to say it's for the children. You're trying to kill Big Bird. Well, Big Bird has flown the coop.

Brooke Gladstone: Big Bird has been fired by HBO in the last few months.

Mike Gonzalez: Now that you can no longer say it's for the children, you're saying, "Oh, it's for rural Alaskans." If there's a need for them, people will step in. There will be charity money. Soros will pay for it, the Tides Foundation, the Ford Foundation, membership model. We're talking about paying $500 million dollars a year to NPR and PBS. To continue to make the argument that this is for these rural communities, I don't think it passes the laugh test.

Brooke Gladstone: Many people on the local level that you say have been harried into supporting public radio, actually do it because they recognize that their communities need this local service.

Mike Gonzalez: I can see now clearly how NPR is going to build its lobbying efforts. This year, they're going to say, "Oh, it's the local rural communities. We have to save their news coverage." In fact, we live in the age of the Internet.

Brooke Gladstone: You think that will take care of it?

Mike Gonzalez: You think that will take care of it? Yes. When there's a demand, there's a supply, and it's unfair. As Jefferson said, it's a tyranny to ask a man to pay for views with which he disagrees. That's pure tyranny.

Brooke Gladstone: Thank you very much.

Mike Gonzalez: Thank you, Brooke. Anytime.

Brooke Gladstone: Mike Gonzalez is the Angeles T. Arredondo Fellow at the Heritage Foundation.

Micah Loewinger: We all know that local news is in retreat. As you just heard, the Medill Local News Initiative found as of 2023 that more than half of US counties have no or very limited access to anything other than national outlets.

Brooke Gladstone: One well-observed impact of losing local news. Local officials were more inclined to misbehave. Researchers at George Mason University in Tulane tallied corruption charges in federal districts that had lost a major daily newspaper from 1996 to 2019. After those papers closed, the districts collectively saw a 6.9% increase in charges of bribery, embezzlement, fraud. The authors noted that only counts the people who got caught. The study also checked if the some 350 websites that sprang up as substitutes for those papers could make a dent in that number. They didn't.

Micah Loewinger: Wouldn't it be great if a solid piece of accountability reporting always resulted in a change for the better? It's rarely so simple. Its power is in the act of showing up with a microphone to every statehouse hearing or school board meeting, reading through police files, or putting in that umpteenth FOIA request. Even after all that and more, it can take years to see results, if at all, but sometimes all that tedious incremental reporting does start to add up. Government malfeasance is exposed and good things happen. Take this example from Colorado in 2022 when the state was still recovering from the Marshall Fire, which destroyed over 1,000 homes. Scott Franz, a government watchdog reporter for KUNC Public Radio serving northern Colorado*, noticed that a popular bipartisan bill to fund investigations into the origins of wildfires mysteriously died.

Scott Franz: Why did this bill die? How did it die?

Micah Loewinger: Scott Franz.

Scott Franz: When I started talking to lawmakers, I discovered that there was a secret ballot system that lawmakers were using to anonymously rank the bills that they thought should get funding and ultimately get passed at the state house. The sponsor of this bill blamed its death on this secret ballot system.

Micah Loewinger: He wasn't the only one reporting on the new system, but he was the first to ask.

Scott Franz: Hey, wait a second, is this legal?

Micah Loewinger: Franz spent two years reporting dozens of stories on this secret ballot system used by state Democrats, probing how the system worked and its impact on legislation.

Scott Franz: The public has a right to see how bills go through the process because, at the end of the day, if bills can just die quietly without explanation or accountability, it shut the public out of an important part of the decision-making process.

Micah Loewinger: In early 2024, a judge ordered lawmakers to stop using the system because it violated state law. In the state's most recent legislative session.

Scott Franz: For the first time, lawmakers made this process public. They published the results down to how each individual lawmaker voted in this process.

Micah Loewinger: Here's another example of the grind of accountability journalism paying off. In 2018, Matt Katz, former WNYC reporter and current executive producer of City Cast Philly, started reporting on immigrants detained by ICE in three New Jersey county jails. He spent the next few years covering how these counties, run by Democratic politicians who publicly protested Trump immigration policies, were at the same time raking in millions of dollars from ICE under Trump.

Matt Katz: There was immediate concern about this because people didn't know that in fact, their county budgets were being subsidized by ICE and therefore their taxes were lower.

Micah Loewinger: The public was also unaware of the horrific conditions in these jails.

Matt Katz: I reported on allegations of sexual assault by officers, inhumane medical care like Bengay prescribed for a broken rib, or long delays in access to treatment for chronic illnesses.

Micah Loewinger: Other local outlets picked up on Katz's reporting, and people showed up outside the jails to protest. In 2021, New Jersey banned ICE detention facilities from opening in the state, but that ban was contested by a federal judge in 2023, and now New Jersey is appealing that federal decision.

Matt Katz: It's always hard as a reporter to know if something you reported is directly what caused some change. We were told on background that our reporting is what led to this. Certainly, the addition of reporting from other news outlets, editorials from local newspapers also put pressure on policymakers to do something about this.

Brooke Gladstone: Sometimes the grunt work of investigative reporting kicks in long after the spotlight on a story fades. In early 2015, ACLU reporter, Curt Guyette, broke the story of the Flint water crisis in Michigan to a national audience, painting a picture of millions of Flint residents exposed to tap water contaminated with staggering amounts of lead. Soon after Flint switched to a cleaner, safer reservoir in late 2015 and Barack Obama's emergency declaration in January 2016, much of the national media moved on. That's when local reporters like Michigan Public Radio's Lindsey Smith doubled down.

Lindsey Smith: We really held onto it and did not let go. It was really wild, the number of times that we had to keep saying, "No, State, this is your responsibility. No, EPA, pretty sure that is your responsibility." That continued just for months and months.

Brooke Gladstone: Smith and her environmental reporting team spent years covering the state's response to the crisis. They also turned their eyes to other districts in Michigan.

Lindsey Smith: After the dust settled with Flint, it was very intuitive to turn our attention to places like Grand Rapids, Saginaw, Midland, Battle Creek. They had tons of lead lines. They had not been testing at any homes with lead lines for decades. We really were able to keep the pressure on to see, "Okay, let's resolve this in other places."

Brooke Gladstone: As the government started admitting its wrongs and implementing new water safety rules, Michigan Public Radio was still pushing.

Lindsey Smith: Michigan now has adopted the toughest rules in the country because of the water crisis and because, frankly, we kept reporting on it as they went through this rulemaking process. Now the EPA has gone in and finally adapted some changes to their federal lead and capital rules, too.

Brooke Gladstone: They didn't do it alone.

Lindsey Smith: Flint Journal has some great reporters who did excellent, excellent job reporting on the Flint water crisis throughout, the Detroit Free Press, the Flint Journal, Curt Guyette at the ACLU, and us. I would really package those together. It was almost what needed to happen to make the state not ignore us.

Brooke Gladstone: This kind of painstaking reporting takes time and money and the trust of bosses who might not have anything to air for years. It's certainly not profitable. It's merely a public trust, what Jefferson called the agitation produced by a free press. He said that, "It must be submitted to. It is necessary to keep the waters pure."

Micah Loewinger: Coming up, public radio's most crucial mission doesn't emanate from Washington or even Brooklyn.

Brooke Gladstone: This is On the Media.

*Scott Franz was originally misidentified as a Colorado Public Radio reporter. He is currently employed at KUNC.

[music]

Brooke Gladstone: This is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger. We'll finish this hour by looking at a few public radio stations that met their communities in a time of need.

Tom Michael: I came to Marfa around 2000, and I had a front-row seat of watching Marfa become what it is now.

Micah Loewinger: Journalist Tom Michael founded Marfa Public Radio, a station that serves far west Texas.

Tom Michael: It's in Presidio County, one of the poorest counties in the United States. Marfa is known as an art town, the home for The Chinati Foundation, which was where a minimalist New York artist, Donald Judd, did a large-scale installation.

Micah Loewinger: Maybe you've seen pictures of a lonely Prada store on a barren highway. That's Marfa. The radio station is one of a few local media shops, but its airwaves reach listeners far afield in what's otherwise basically a news desert and a literal desert.

Tom Michael: The Chihuahuan Desert, which is mostly in Mexico. It's a dry climate.

Micah Loewinger: Which helps explain what happened on April 9th, 2011, a hot day in the middle of a drought.

Tom Michael: It was a Saturday, I believe. We had a meeting at the station because we were preparing for our next on-air fundraiser. I think we had three employees at the time. Myself, Anne Adkins, and office manager Rachel Osier Lindley. I remember Rachel had to go to her second job at the grocery store, so was headed home. Then she called and noticed that what she thought was originally her neighbor's house was on fire.

Rachel Osier Lindley: It's my neighbor's house. I can't get to my house. My neighbor's entire house burst into flames. There's grass fire. Oh my God, there's fire. Oh my God.

Micah Loewinger: Tom didn't know this at the time, but his team was the first to report on what would become one of Texas's largest grassland wildfires.

Tom Michael: We were kind of a relay point for a lot of critical information about what was happening to the fire. You had Steve Odell up on Blue Mountain, looking where the smoke was going.

Steve Odell: I've got the smoke moving to the northwest towards Monopareto. The heaviest part of the smoke cloud is over Monopareto.

Tom Michael: Pretty soon we're in regular contact with the fire chief at that time.

Jim Fowler: In all my years of firefighting, this is the worst fire I've had.

Micah Loewinger: Jim Fowler is the spokesperson for the Fort Davis Volunteer Fire Department.

Jim Fowler: The first time I've had to evacuate my residence for a fire.

Ty Mitchell My first concern was my horses.

Tom Michael: You had Ty Mitchell, cowboy there kind of moving his horses.

Ty Mitchell: One of the deputies jumped in my pickup, got my pickup out so I wouldn't lose it and I just bareback headed the horses out of the flames and onto the highway.

Micah Loewinger: The Rockhouse Fire, as it was later named, scorched over 300,000 acres, consuming countless cattle and dozens of homes, but no humans died, thanks in part to Marfa's award-winning diligent coverage.

Tom Michael: We knew it was our duty to do that and that was our moment. We've seen great service from public radio stations since most recently Blue Ridge Public Radio in North Carolina.

Brooke Gladstone: Neighborhoods, communities, businesses along the Swannanoa River just absolutely devastated. It has been a mess and it's going to be a long time before things get back to normal.

Micah Loewinger: This is coverage from BPR, Blue Ridge Public Radio, in Asheville. Shortly after Hurricane Helene brought historic flooding to western North Carolina.

Laura Lee: We had a lot of flooding. We also had a lot of landslides that unfortunately caused a lot of the fatalities.

Micah Loewinger: Laura Lee, Blue Ridge Public Radio news director.

Laura Lee: Then the aftermath of that, we had no power and we had no water. We didn't have water that was non-drinkable for quite some time.

Micah Loewinger: The radio station in downtown Asheville was one of the fortunate businesses that could operate on a backup generator. Lee remembers her conversations around the newsroom as their small team of reporters and hosts sprung into action.

Laura Lee: Hey, what we do typically is narrative and storytelling and driveway moments that people love public radio for. Right now, what we're doing is serving as a conduit of information that is critically important to this community.

Micah Loewinger: BPR quickly transitioned into 12 hours a day of live coverage, bringing life-saving information in Spanish and English to listeners without power and Internet access.

Laura Lee: Telling people where they could access water, telling people where they could get their oxygen tanks refilled, telling people what we knew about road closures. Hi, it's Laura Lee at Blue Ridge Public Radio. Wanted to ask about the quantity of supplies at these distribution centers. Can you give us a sense of the scale?

Buncombe County Resident: We have tractor-trailers of water. We did receive that shipment of water that we've been waiting on for several days now.

Micah Loewinger: This is an exchange from one of the official Buncombe County briefings which the station aired twice a day.

Laura Lee: We have heard stories and seen images of people gathered around their neighbor's car, people gathered around one little hand crank radio at the cul-de-sac to listen to the briefings and to listen to our updates.

Micah Loewinger: As Asheville has begun to recover from the storm, BPR listeners have been leaving voicemails at the station.

Listener 1: I clung to every word and waited for the daily updates at 10:00 and 4:00.

Listener 2: You guys were wonderful and you sustained me. I was isolated on and out inside.

Listener 3: My wife and I are so thankful for your constant presence during this crisis. Keep it up. We love you.

Listener 4: Thank you guys so much for being there. It's just going to make me cry because you're the only source of information that we've had. Thank you. Bye-bye.

Micah Loewinger: Laura Lee told me that cuts to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting would hurt BPR, which receives about 6% of its budget from the government. She seemed even more concerned about how it would affect smaller stations with less cushion, like, say, Marfa Public Radio, which gets about 27% of its funding from the government today. Marfa's founder, Tom Michael, runs a station in Boise, Idaho, and worries a lot about the cuts.

Tom Michael: A commercial broadcaster might not find a return on investment in a small community. It just doesn't make sense for them to be there. For us, it's a mission of service. Today in Idaho, as part of Boise State Public Radio, we spend a lot of funds on infrastructure in rural areas. Cambridge, Idaho, population 250, we have two stations. Challis, Idaho, population 920, we have three stations. Stanley, Idaho, population 120, we have three stations. We're committed to that. I feel like with a loss of federal funding and we'd have to kind of tighten our belts and such things, I'd be afraid that we wouldn't be able to serve these rural areas because we'd have to make some sort of cuts.

[music]

Brooke Gladstone: One of the remotest areas served by public radio is southwestern Alaska, just 40 miles from the Bering Sea. Bethel, perched on the edge of the icy Kuskokwim River, population 6,500, is the largest city in the region and also home to public radio KYUK, the only media source for hundreds of miles.

Sage Smiley: KYUK serves over 50 different villages, most of which are predominantly Alaska Native.

Brooke Gladstone: Sage Smiley is the news director at KYUK.

Sage Smiley: That's Yup'ik, Cup'ik, and Athabaskan. Our call letters, Y-U-K, in the Yup'ik language in Yugtun means person. KYUK means people's station.

Brooke Gladstone: Many of them are connected by the Kuskokwim River, right, the longest river in Alaska.

Sage Smiley: Yes, along with the Yukon River, which stretches all the way into Canada. It's a lot of river systems and tributaries that connect these people. In the summers, people travel from village to village by boat. In the winters, people travel on the ice road to get to other places in the region.

Brooke Gladstone: The rivers are your highway?

Sage Smiley: Absolutely. It's either an ice highway or a water highway.

Brooke Gladstone: KYUK is the only radio station for how many miles?

Sage Smiley: I believe the closest public media news station to us is 300 or 400 miles away, as the crow flies. Public radio is just absolutely vital in this region as both a source of emergency information and a source of connection. People call into our talk line shows, they call into the river watch shows that help people be aware of river conditions. Our Internet is very limited out here. People are starting to have Starlink, but low earth orbit satellites are only so reliable and we still don't have fiber optic Internet.

Brooke Gladstone: You mentioned incessant coverage of the ice road. One of your station's notable programs is called River Watch. Let's take a listen.

Presenter: How much snow do you guys have left?

Listener 5: We don't have very much snow.

KYUK's Presenter: How about your temperature this morning?

Listener 5: This morning was about six below.

KYUK's Presenter: Wow, quite a bit colder then. I was holding my breath this past weekend when it started raining. Oh, man, I hope this isn't it. We've seen the river break up upriver several times during November. If we can make it to December without a big warmup, then it'll probably hold together.

Sage Smiley: When the ice road is plowed, it is a real road. You absolutely see trucks and cars and even hovercraft out on the river, delivering goods and transporting people from place to place. The tundra can be very treacherous. Sometimes snow will blow over an open hole.

KYUK's Presenter: We've started out the winter on a tragic note. We lost one person right off the bat, and we'll all be striving to let that be the only person we lose this winter.

Sage Smiley: There's a concept in the Yup'ik language called Pulazarak, which is the good trail to follow. Traditionally, trails are marked by willows. There are individuals who are going out to the area surrounding their village that they know better than anybody else, putting down willows, marking this pulazarak the way to follow.

Listener 6: We try and stay away from using long skinny trees that hardly have any branches because those are hard to see in the blizzard.

Brooke Gladstone: You think KYUK has ever saved a life?

Sage Smiley: Absolutely. During freeze up, there are unfortunate tragedies. People do fall into holes in the river. People do go missing during a whiteout on a snow machine. Being able to both communicate with the public through KYUK about search efforts, about travel advisories, what trails have been set by the experts, the people who know this tundra better than anyone.

Brooke Gladstone: There is no alternative?

Sage Smiley: Oh, no, no, no. There's no other place to get that information other than Facebook. Again, sometimes the Internet doesn't work.

Brooke Gladstone: I noticed that some of your coverage on the ice road is bilingual. Do emergency alerts always go out in both languages?

Sage Smiley: Always. Every day, we have six newscasts, three in English and three in Yugtun. We live in a region that has deep roots in Yup'ik, Cup'ik, and Athabaskan culture. To be able to broadcast, especially for elders, many of whom lived through the era of boarding schools and were compelled forcibly to not speak their language, to be able to broadcast news and information and allow people to call in and share their opinions in this language that has been so thoroughly rebuilt by the people of the YK Delta is just incredible to me.

Brooke Gladstone: This part of Western Alaska is the state's poorest, the biggest outlet in the state. The Anchorage-based newspaper often reports articles about the region's crime. You think that angle is unfair?

Sage Smiley: People in this region don't always live by a Western economic system. People here subsist. They hunt for moose, they trap beaver, they fish. That doesn't show up on a tax statement. This is a region that is touched very intimately by climate change, that has a very recent and very raw history with colonialism, that is dealing with the impacts and the fallout of that still on a daily basis, but there is also so much beauty and joy. To be able to reflect that, in addition to the developments and the struggles that happen in the YK Delta, it's just so important for a station to be based in this region and to be focused on serving this region instead of serving a narrative that has developed over a long time, and that does not reflect the nuance and reality of the world out here.

Brooke Gladstone: Could you give me a rundown of how much of KYUK's funding comes from CPB? How much from other sources? You've already explained that money doesn't have a big presence in a lot of the communities you serve.

Sage Smiley: Living in this subsistence-heavy region, we don't rely on monetary donations from people who otherwise support and share KYUK's articles and engage with our news coverage or community affairs programming.

Brooke Gladstone: Do they bake you pies?

Sage Smiley: Yes. We also get moose dropped off or salmon or salmon roe. We have caviar sometimes in the break room fridge. We rely incredibly heavily on CPB funding and on grant funding. Around 50%, on a given year, does come from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, both through television and through radio funding. We are the smallest CPB-funded public television station in the United States, which puts us in an incredibly tenuous position. We already exist 40 miles from the Bering Sea, way on the edge of the United States, living what can be an incredibly harsh life. You go from 90 degrees in the summer sometimes and the air full of dust and there can be tundra fires to negative 35, colder with the wind chill. To exist on what feels like a razor edge with funding when this is such a vital community resource in so many ways, it's tough and a bit scary.

Brooke Gladstone: Sage Smiley is the news director at KYUK, which serves the Yukon Kuskokwim Delta in southwestern Alaska. Sage, thank you very much.

Sage Smiley: Quyanaqvaa. Thank you for your time.

[music]

Micah Loewinger: That's it for this week's show. On the Media is produced by Molly Rosen, Rebecca Clark-Callender, Candice Wang, and Katerina Barton.

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. On the Media is a production of WNYC Studios. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Michael Olinger.

Copyright © 2025 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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Public Broadcasting Is In Danger (Again)

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In the aftermath of the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol in January 2021, politicians, pundits, and the American public condemned the violence—while many considered Donald Trump responsible for what had happened. In a few weeks, Trump will be sworn in for a second term at the very same place rioters overran four years ago. For this midweek podcast extra, host Micah Loewinger sat down with Dan Barry, senior writer at The New York Times and co-author of the recent article, “‘A Day of Love’: How Trump Inverted the Violent History of Jan. 6,” to talk about how Trump and his allies diligently worked to rewrite the American memory of that day, and why they were so successful.

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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Hundreds of people are seen gathered over the front of the U.S. Capitol

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Supporters of President Donald Trump rally at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, in Washington. 

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

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Four years later, the new meaning of January 6.

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How Trump Re-Wrote the History of January 6

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Title: How Trump Re-Wrote the History of January 6.

Micah Loewinger: Hey, it's Micah Loewinger, and you're listening to the On the Media Podcast Extra. This Monday marked four years since a violent mob of Trump supporters attempted to stop certification of the 2020 election. Shortly after January 6, 2021, 51% of respondents told CBS and YouGov that they strongly disapproved of those who forced their way into the Capitol. As of last month, that number has dropped down to 30%, nearly 20 points down. The same poll found that 72% of Republicans now support pardons for the rioters.

The softening and even celebration of that day comes after a sustained effort from Donald Trump and his allies, countless truth social posts, interviews and campaign rallies aimed at distorting and rewriting the past. Dan Barry is a senior writer at the New York Times and coauthor of the recent article A Day of Love: How Trump Inverted the Violent History of January 6th. Barry said while reflecting on a second Trump inauguration, how he pictured not just a return to the White House, but a reemergence of the 45th President at the Capitol itself, where so much violence happened in his name four years ago.

Dan Barry: When he comes down the steps, he'll be walking down a blue carpet that struck me as carpet that will now be covering over a crime scene. I think the ghosts of January 6th will be all around him. I find that quite evocative and a reminder of how perilously close we came to this orderly transfer being disrupted.

Micah Loewinger: Let's walk through how we got here. Four years ago, we saw Trump give a speech near the White House. After repeating the lie that the election had been stolen, he told the crowd to, "peacefully and patriotically march to the Capitol," but added, "we fight like hell," and we all remember what happened next.

Speaker 3: We have a breach of the Capitol. Breach of the Capitol.

[crowd chanting]

Micah Loewinger: Trump was at the White House as the chaos unfolded, and save for a couple tweets calling for peaceful protest, did little to stop the riot that was unfolding on TV. Some hours later, he posted a minute-long video on Twitter that had, let's say, mixed signals.

Donald Trump: I know your pain. I know you're hurt. We had an election that was stolen from us. It was a landslide election and everyone knows it, especially the other side, but you have to go home now.

Micah Loewinger: Tell me about the initial reaction to the rioting on January 6th and Trump's behavior that day.

Dan Barry: Sure, I think that the outrage was immediate, and it was happening both publicly and privately. Trump's aides and even his family members were begging him to tell the rioters to go home and it took a long time for him to finally say something. Then the condemnation was taking place as well. Republican leaders, both public and private, were denouncing him. All the social media platforms were cutting him off. There were Cabinet resignations. His own Cabinet members were resigning.

Micah Loewinger: Here's what Conservative commentator, Ben Shapiro, said on January 7, 2021, the day after.

Ben Shapiro: Frankly, I think that in many ways it's the worst thing to happen to the United States of America since 9/11. It was cataclysmically awful.

Micah Loewinger: Here's Fox News host, Sean Hannity.

Sean Hannity: We do not support those that commit acts of violence. All of today's perpetrators must be arrested and prosecuted to the full extent of the law.

Micah Loewinger: Among those hedging early on was Fox News host, Jesse Watters.

Jesse Watters: In context, what happened yesterday doesn't really hold a candle to what we saw over the summer with Black Lives Matter and Antifa.

Dan Barry: While the riot was winding down or was being controlled by the heroic law enforcement on scene, it was already being plan by Paul Gosar, among others, that-- no, this was Antifa, the idea that it was some kind of a plot or that it was somebody else. That night, Laura Ingraham on Fox News was propagating the same falsehood.

Micah Loewinger: She was basically arguing some of these rioters don't look like MAGA supporters because they're wearing dark helmets or something. Therefore, they must be somebody else.

Dan Barry: I guess that's what she was implying, and that would suggest that all Trump supporters always wear MAGA gear.

Micah Loewinger: [laughs] They always wear the exact same uniform.

Dan Barry: So you know exactly what team you're on. I don't want to downplay the jaw dropping outrage that many Republicans were feeling at that time. They absolutely were. It's what happened in the aftermath, in the months to follow where that outrage somehow evaporated.

Micah Loewinger: You mentioned some of the Republican lawmakers and commentators who were attempting to soften the day. Among those quickly trying to change the narrative was Donald Trump himself, who in March of 2021, when doing an interview with the Washington Post's Carol Lennig and Philip Rucker, said that, "The rioters were ushered in by the police and that those who had rallied with him beforehand were "a loving crowd."

Dan Barry: Right. What he's describing makes it sound like the people who descended upon the Capitol were there for some kind of theater production, and the Capitol officers just had like flashlights and were directing them to their seats.

Micah Loewinger: Of course, this would be a kind of foreshadowing for one of the conspiracy theories about January 6th that would take hold. You found that one of Trump's most repeated stories was that the Democratic House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, had rejected his recommendation to have some 10,000 soldiers present on January 6th.

Dan Barry: I think what Trump was implying there, and it's all part of the larger conspiracy that sometimes is overt and sometimes is winked at, that this was all purposeful by other people, and that Nancy Pelosi had control over the National Guard, somehow. I think Trump's argument is that he recommended that maybe we should have 10,000 troops there. It was in fact his own Defense Department, his own Pentagon, who pushed back against that and said, "No. First of all, that would be a horrible optic to have protesters at the Capitol and then have them surrounded by soldiers. That's not a good look."

Secondly, that Defense Department official said, who knows, maybe he was going to employ the Insurrection act, which would put those troops under his direct command, and that also would not be a good look.

Micah Loewinger: Ultimately, it was his own administration that was responsible for not bringing in the soldiers. It wasn't evidence of really anything.

Dan Barry: That's exactly right.

Micah Loewinger: In late 2021, Tucker Carlson, who was still then a host at Fox News, put out a three-part series called Patriot Purge, exploring his claim that the insurrection was a government plot to discredit Donald Trump and to entrap well-meaning patriots.

Tucker Carlson: The domestic war on terrorists here is coming after half of the country.

Speaker 4: The helicopters have left Afghanistan.

Speaker 5: Now they've landed here at home.

Speaker 6: The Left is hunting the Right.

Dan Barry: It was a celebration of outlandish conspiracies, audacious in its tiptoeing past fact. Okay? It was so roundly denounced by the media, including colleagues at Fox News, that two of those Fox colleagues resigned in protest. They were commentators who said this is just half-baked nonsense and it's feeding into the notion of a shadow government, a deep state government that simply isn't true.

Micah Loewinger: The two commentators, Stephen Hayes and Jonah Goldberg, who resigned in protest, said that it ran counter to much of the news reporting that Fox News itself had done on January 6th.

Dan Barry: That's right. I think Bret Baier and others at Fox News were doing their own kind of counter reporting to downplay or to challenge what Tucker Carlson had put out with Patriot Purge.

Micah Loewinger: In the months following the release of Patriot Purge, many Americans tuned into what was probably the most comprehensive public detailing of evidence and testimony about January 6th, the US House Select Committee hearings, which were televised in late 2021 and 2022. Tell me a little bit about how Donald Trump and his allies attempted to counterprogram what was a pretty compelling case that January 6th was really as bad as it seemed it was.

Dan Barry: Trump's Republican allies in Congress tried to impeach the mission of that committee by refusing to participate. If you remember, Kevin McCarthy pretty much banned all Republican members from joining that committee. Chu wound up sitting on that committee, making it a bipartisan committee. That was Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger. Of course, they are perceived as traitors.

Even from the get go, there's a fog surrounding it. Then, as its information is coming out in witness testimony and documents, and video, Trump and his allies are doing all they can to knock down or ridicule, or denounce every detail. Trump has now turned it into something. At one point, he tweeted something to the effect of this so-called rush on the Capitol was not caused by me. It was caused by a rigged and stolen election. In other words, that all of this is corrupted by the fact that it stems from an election that was rigged and stolen, to begin with.

Micah Loewinger: This is the part which I always have trouble keeping straight, because if he's saying that the event was justified but not his responsibility, that complicates the narrative that it was instigated by the government or something. Right?

Dan Barry: Once you're engaging in conspiracy theories, it's pretty hard to keep track of all the dots you've thrown up in the air.

Micah Loewinger: You mentioned Ashli Babbitt, the woman who was shot as she was attempting to enter into the House chamber.

Dan Barry: She was climbing through a window that was leading into the Speaker's lobby, that was leading into the House chambers, where some congressional members and staff members were basically hiding.

Micah Loewinger: Babbitt was subsequently turned into a martyr by the Right-wing media, and eventually by Donald Trump himself. As you write about in your piece, some conservative activists and members of the media didn't feel that he was doing enough to advocate on behalf of the thousands of people who were arrested in the wake of January 6th.

You point to this really fascinating meeting in the summer of 2022 between Donald Trump and two Conservative women, a writer named Julie Kelly and Cynthia Hughes, a founder of the Patriot Freedom Project, an organization that supports January 6th defendants and inmates. The three of them spoke at Trump's Bedminster Golf Club. Tell me about that meeting and how you think it changed some of Donald Trump's rhetoric.

Dan Barry: It's an important moment because he is beginning to fully commit to the notion that the rioters and those who are now imprisoned as a result of that attack on the Capitol are martyrs, and they're being persecuted. Well, they're martyrs for what cause? They're being persecuted for what cause? The cause is their belief in the falsehood that he has propagated, that the election was stolen. He has to commit to them in some way. They're suffering because of him. I'm sure he's thinking about the optics of that, like, are you going to allow people who are in prison because of you to stay there, or you're not going to champion their cause?

In the summer of 2022, these two women visit him at Bedminster, and they tell him, "You're not doing enough. The judges that you appointed to the bench, the federal judges who are sitting, say, in Washington, are being unduly harsh in how they're handling these cases, and you're not speaking up enough." After that meeting, Donald Trump donated $10,000 to Ms. Hughes' cause. Then a few days later, Ms. Hughes was given a spot at one of Trump's rallies in Pennsylvania where she laid out her cause.

Now Donald Trump is not just talking about it, he's putting up some money, and he is also giving them a platform to further their cause, which is that the rioters who are imprisoned are being mistreated and are unjustly being punished.

Micah Loewinger: Which is interesting, because I've seen many reports that suggest some share of sentences given to defendants from the insurrection were often lighter than what prosecutors had recommended or below federal sentencing guidelines. It was essentially the largest criminal investigation in American history, but it's not like every one of these defendants had the book thrown at them, right?

Dan Barry: No, no. Oftentimes, the judge would hear the prosecution's case for harsh punishment, hear the defense's case for leniency, and find some kind of middle ground. That is usually what had happened. What's interesting, too, is it was only a year and a half earlier that Donald Trump and other Republicans were saying that people who broke the law need to pay the price. Now they are backing away from that.

Micah Loewinger: You note in your piece that in 2022, an NBC poll found that fewer than half of Americans still considered Donald Trump "solely or mainly responsible for January 6th."

Dan Barry: The polling immediately after January 6th is basically holding Donald Trump responsible or certainly accountable for what had occurred. Then as the months go by and these falsehoods are being propagated, and anything that it's coming out that is basically proving, or let's say, underscoring what you saw with your own eyes when the melee was occurring, it's now being cast in this cloud of smoke, and that smoke is having an effect. As the months go by, the numbers of people who hold Trump responsible is declining.

Micah Loewinger: Then in early 2023, Donald Trump, now a presidential candidate, again, fully embraced his alternate telling of the day with a song. With a very strange song.

Dan Barry: Yes. In early March of 2023, Donald Trump releases a single that appears on all the platforms. It's a duet in a way. It's Donald Trump reciting the Pledge of Allegiance.

Donald Trump: One Nation Under God.

Dan Barry: While a group called the J6 Prison Choir sings the national anthem. He's recorded his part in this single at Mar-a-Lago. The prisoners have used a cell phone to record it because they are in prison. It's called Justice for All.

[MUSIC - Donald Trump & J6 Prison Choir: Justice for All]

Dan Barry: What's so striking about it is that you have a man who is seeking the Republican presidential nomination, and he is collaborating with about 20 men who are in prison for allegedly attacking the nerve center of the republic and assaulting police officers. Now, I've covered politics for a long time. I've never seen that on someone's political playbook, but Donald Trump does it, and it goes right to the top of the charts.

When he speaks about it at his various rallies, and it's often played at his rallies, and it's often played at Mar-a-Lago, he always makes a point of saying how high it was on the charts, that it was higher than something by Taylor Swift and Miley Cyrus. The song comes out in March of 2023, and by August, Donald Trump is indicted both in state and federal courts for effectively interfering with the 2020 election results. Right?

That recording, Justice for All, strikes, Jack Smith, the special counsel who is working for the Department of Justice, as particularly egregious. He files a document with the court pointing it out, saying, "Are you kidding me? What he's doing is financially supporting and celebrating these people who assaulted law enforcement on January 6th. Not only that, he's playing their recordings of the national anthem at political rallies and calling them hostages, hostages, martyrs, and ultimately, patriots."

Micah Loewinger: He wasn't using it to raise money, though, right?

Dan Barry: No, I think what he's doing is he's subverting what the notion of patriotism is. Okay? The people who attacked the Capitol are now being likened to Lexington and to the American Revolution of 1776. If that's true, then Donald Trump is the number one patriot.

Micah Loewinger: It's not so surprising to hear Trump's distortions and lies recounted in this way. I mean, we've just encountered so many of them now over the years. What's still harder for me to wrap my mind around is why so many people are willing to believe these false narratives about a day that we all witnessed. I mean, we just saw it.

Dan Barry: That's a great question. I think that many of his supporters do, in fact, believe his lie that the 2020 election was stolen. All right? If you believe that the election was stolen, notwithstanding that there's absolutely no evidence of this, notwithstanding the fact that it's been knocked down dozens of times in court. If you believe that the election is stolen and rigged, that's worth revolting against. That is something that justifies going to the Capitol and making your feelings known. If it gets violent, so be it. You're trying to prevent what you believe is a corruption of the American ideal.

If you believe all that, and maybe you didn't in the beginning, but when your leader tells you over and over, and over, and over again that it was a rigged election, that these are all political enemies, that everything is a lie, that you can't trust the court system, you can't trust your federal government, that I think this begins to find purchase. Also, you have aligned yourself with this guy for so long that what would that mean? What would that say about you if you suddenly change your mind? Now, you, too, are treasonous. You're a traitor. You're going against the cause.

I often think that Donald Trump is a symptom of something larger, and I think that's what your question is getting at. He's a symptom of something larger. The acceptance of January 6th by a lot of people speaks to something larger as well.

Micah Loewinger: What you just said reminded me of something I read today in the Atlantic in a piece by Charlie Warzel and Mike Caulfield, who wrote this, "Misinformation is powerful, not because it changes minds, but because it allows people to maintain their beliefs in light of growing evidence to the contrary." What I take from that is that these types of conspiracy theories give people the psychological comfort of not having to change their worldview as it becomes less and less aligned with what they feel to be true around them.

Dan Barry: Right. It provides the justification.

Micah Loewinger: Yes.

Dan Barry: No matter that there's no evidence.

Micah Loewinger: Exactly. Of course, we're speaking less than a few weeks before the new administration is set to take office. Tell me where we are now. Obviously, Trump has floated the idea of pardoning the people charged and convicted for crimes on January 6th, but you don't think it will be quite as simple as he's made it out to be?

Dan Barry: No, I don't. He has said that there will be pardons in the first hour of his administration, but he hasn't really been clear about how many people he will pardon or who. I think if he were to pardon people who were convicted of mostly nonviolent misdemeanor crimes, they wandered onto the restricted area, or they were in the Capitol and they took a selfie and then left, that's a fairly easy lift. You may not agree with it, but that would be an easy lift.

It gets dicier for Donald Trump when it comes to the people who were filmed beating police officers with American flags or clubs, or spraying them with bear spray, or dragging police officers literally by their feet down the very steps near the lectern where he will be taking the oath of office in a few days. If he does not pardon those people, then there's going to be a segment of the MAGA universe that is going to feel that he has betrayed them, he has let them down, because these were the people who suffered the most in his name.

Micah Loewinger: I'm trying to think of a good place to end this.

Dan Barry: Well, I would. Micah, you might at some point, I don't know. I'm not going to tell you what to do, but.

Micah Loewinger: No, tell me what to do.

Dan Barry: No, no, no. A month or so ago, a relatively minor figure in the attack on the Capitol is supposed to be sentenced. He was convicted of a few misdemeanors, and he had petitioned the judge to delay the sentencing because, "Look, Trump is going to be pardoning a lot of people, and maybe this will just be busy work if you sentence me." The judge, who is in his 80s and he was appointed by Ronald Reagan in 1987, his name is Royce Lamberth, took the unusual step of filing a note on sentencing. It's a 13-page document that he filed in this relatively minor case.

What he does is he says, "Okay, I want to clear the air. Okay? There was no evidence of a stolen or rigged election. None. Let's remember, angry people who believed that the election had been stolen invaded the Capitol, and their purpose was to halt the peaceful transfer of power," which is what he said was the center of our Constitution and the cornerstone of our Republican legacy.

He goes on to lay out exactly what happened. He said, "You know how I know this stuff, and you know how my colleagues on the bench know this stuff? Because we sat through hundreds and hundreds of hours of testimony. We went through thousands of documents, and we saw thousands and thousands of hours of videotape. That is what happened." Then he sentenced that guy to a year in jail, and he sentenced him to be committed immediately because I think he wanted the guy to spend at least some time in prison before he was possibly pardoned.

Then as the guy is being cuffed and being led away by the marshals, he tells the judge, "It doesn't matter anyway. Trump's going to pardon me."

Micah Loewinger: Why did you choose to end your piece with this anecdote?

Dan Barry: Because I thought it was beautiful what Judge Lamberth had written. I thought what he had done was Alan Foyer, who wrote the story with me. I agreed that this was a clarifying moment, that we're not nuts. Do you know what I mean?

Micah Loewinger: Yes.

Dan Barry: That we saw what we saw. It's been four years, but those images are burned in my mind, and they're burned in the collective mind of America. This octogenarian judge, who was appointed by a Republican 35 years ago says, "Time out. Wait. This is what happened. All this stuff that's going on now, it's nonsense. This is what happened."

Micah Loewinger: Dan, thank you very much.

Dan Barry: Thanks for having me.

Micah Loewinger: Dan Barry is a senior writer at the New York Times and co-author of the recent article A Day of Love; How Trump Inverted the Violent History of January 6th.

[Music]

Thanks for listening to the OTM Podcast Extra. Tune into the big show this weekend. We're looking at the latest threats to defund public radio. It's going to be a good episode, but in the meantime, please consider following the show on Instagram, Bluesky, and TikTok. Just search On The Media. I'm Michael Loewinger.

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How Trump Re-Wrote the History of January 6

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The complete story of American imperialism is missing from our history books. On this week’s On the Media, how the United States worked to capture territory and expand power, while preaching democracy and freedom.

[01:00] Host Brooke Gladstone sits down with historian Daniel Immerwahr, on the hidden history of the United States empire. For Americans, empire often means economic and military power abroad, or CIA coups in Central America–not British-style imperialism. But the American empire was — and in some ways continues to be — a lot closer than most people realize. Immerwahr explains the role of guano — bird poop — in launching America's overseas empire, and the legal, political and social clashes that ensued.

[17:57] Host Brooke Gladstone continues her conversation with historian Daniel Immerwahr, exploring why, at the dawn of the last century, the arguments over imperialism didn’t end with poets like Rudyard Kipling and writers like Mark Twain. How should the adolescent U.S., big-headed about its democratic values, grapple with capturing territory? Immerwahr explains how this vital debate blazed across America’s consciousness like a comet, then vanished just as quickly.

[34:47] Host Brooke Gladstone and historian Daniel Immerwahr conclude their conversation, discussing how, after World War II, global anti-colonial sentiment (combined with less dependence on natural resources) led to a shrinking of America's physical empire. But the American empire didn't disappear — it merely changed form.

This originally aired in our April 5, 2019 program, “Empire State of Mind.”

Further reading/listening/watching:

How To Hide An Empire: A History of the Greater United States, by Daniel Immerwahr

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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[music]

Brooke Gladstone: On this week's On The Media, how the map of the US we grew up with has never shown us our true selves.

Daniel Immerwahr: If you looked up at the end of 1945 and you saw a US flag flying overhead, it was more likely that you were living in a colony or occupied zone than you were actually living on the US mainland.

Brooke Gladstone: The origins of the American empire lie in the so-called guano islands in the Caribbean.

Daniel Immerwahr: I asked some historian friends, "What do you think is the worst job in the 19th century to have?" I think I can now say with confidence, guano mining is the worst.

Brooke Gladstone: America's holdings then expanded to include Samoa, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and elsewhere despite the claims of many a US president.

Truman: We do not seek for ourselves one inch of territory in any place in the world.

Brooke Gladstone: An Exploration of Empire after this. From WNYC in New York. This is On The Media. Micah Loewinger is out this week. I'm Brooke Gladstone. Donald Trump said last month on Meet the Press that given how much the US is "subsidizing Canada and Mexico" both nations should just become states. That was probably a joke, right? He seems dead serious about buying Greenland, ostensibly because of its location and resources.

Despite it definitely being not for sale, he also wants the Panama Canal, which belongs to Panama. We have this notion that the United States, being a republic and former colony, never was and never aspired to be a colonial power, but that is wrong. As you'll hear in this rebroadcast of one of our favorite shows, a conversation from 2019 with Northwestern University history professor, Daniel Immerwahr, author of How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States.

This masterwork was inspired by a trip he took some years earlier to the Philippines. He was stunned by what he found. Streets with American names, people speaking American English. Of course, he knew the Philippines had once been annexed by the United States, but until he saw it, he never understood what that really meant.

Daniel Immerwahr: I realized that the United States that I was teaching a history of was a truncated version. It was the contiguous United States, but that's not the whole country, and it's never been the whole country.

Brooke Gladstone: That whole country is almost always depicted by what he calls the logo map. The lower 48 spanning from coast to coast, jutting out in the southeast with a protrusion for Florida and a smaller one for Texas.

Daniel Immerwahr: That map, the contiguous blob with oceans on either side and Canada in the north and Mexico in the south, that's only been the borders of the United States for three years of its history.

Brooke Gladstone: Some of us never got past that truncated version of history we learned in primary school. To see the implications of that, we need only look back to October, when a comedian told this joke at a Trump rally in Madison Square Garden.

Tony Hinchcliffe: There's literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now. I think it's called Puerto Rico.

Reporter 1: Comedian and podcast host Tony Hinchcliffe made a so-called joke about Puerto Rico.

Reporter 2: This Puerto Rican has something to say about the island that I love. Where my family is from. Puerto Rico is trash. We are Americans, Donald Trump.

Donald Trump: I have no idea who he is. Somebody said there was a comedian that joked about Puerto Rico or something, and I have no idea who he was. Never saw him, never heard of them.

Brooke Gladstone: In 2018, Donald J. Trump drew criticism from many Puerto Ricans when he disputed the death toll of Hurricanes Maria and Irma and then--

Reporter 3: The White House spokesperson calls Puerto Rico that country while defending the President's treatment of the US Territory.

Brooke Gladstone: Puerto Rico's status as belonging to the United States seems to be thoroughly misunderstood by vast swaths of their fellow Americans. The path of how we arrived at this point starts in the 19th century when the population boomed and our soil was dangerously depleted. Turns out the best remedy for pasture that's pooped is nitrogen, and the best source of that is literal poop of the avian variety.

Daniel Immerwahr: In the 19th century, that bird poop, guano, was called white gold because it was seen as so valuable as fertilizer for farms that, once they'd converted to industrial farming, were losing a lot of their fertility. An acre of farmland that might formerly have grown 20 bushels of wheat was, by the mid and later 19th century, growing down to 10 bushels an acre. This was a serious crisis.

Brooke Gladstone: You need lots of usable nitrogen. There are whole islands basically made of this white gold.

Daniel Immerwahr: Islands in the Pacific and the Caribbean that don't get a lot of rain, but that do get a lot of visits from birds. Then they poop on the islands year after year after year and it piles higher and higher, bakes in the sun so that over centuries, you're looking at an island that is basically made out of fecal matter.

I asked some historian friends, "What do you think is the worst job in the 19th century to have?" I think I can now say with confidence, guano mining's the worst because it's like coal mining with all the pulmonary damage that you might suffer, except you essentially have to be marooned on a rainless island where there's only the food the ships can bring with them, very little water supply, where people are suffering from all kinds of intestinal illnesses as a result.

Guano entrepreneurs sell African American men in Baltimore a story about the tropical lives that they'll be able to live consorting with beautiful women, picking fruit, occasionally shoveling a little guano. Once the men step on that ship, their reality changes. Where else are you going to go? That ship takes you to the Guano Islands, deposits you there. You're under the supervision of a white overseer. You just have to work and they have to pay for their passage. The second they arrive, they are in debt to their employers and they have to shovel enough guano or blast it free from the island in order to pay for their return passage.

Brooke Gladstone: These workers were abused horribly, left tied up in the sun if they violated an order, and then something happens.

Daniel Immerwahr: To understand it, you have to understand the harsh regime of labor discipline on Navassa Island,

Brooke Gladstone: Off the coast of Haiti.

Daniel Immerwahr: Yes. This is an island that is full of Black men who've been deceived. They're not very enthusiastic about backbreaking work in the scorching sun on a jagged island. It's not a shock to me that these men mutiny, gather some rocks, weapons, and some dynamite, and they stage a full-out riot and they end up killing five of their white overseers. The papers all report it. Black men have butchered white men and they're hauled back to Baltimore for a trial.

Brooke Gladstone: Which becomes a milestone in America's legal history of imperialism. Ultimately, they win, but how?

Daniel Immerwahr: It's kind of incredible. The African American community in Baltimore rallies around them and their legal team make this extraordinary argument, which is to say Navassa Island isn't part of the United States. Because it's not part of the United States, federal law doesn't apply and if federal law doesn't apply, how can you try these men in US Courts? They're outside of the jurisdiction of the United States.

What this legal team does is it challenges the constitutionality of the idea that the United States can expand overseas. It goes all the way up to the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court has to decide, is the United States the kind of place that can expand overseas?

The court decides that, yes, it is constitutional right and proper that the United States should expand overseas. This minor incident on a place that had seemed very remote from the perspective of the mainland, suddenly lays the legal foundation for the United States territorial empire.

Brooke Gladstone: Also doesn't this decision thereby declare that what happens there is subject to American law? These companies that were mining the guano were also massively breaking the law.

Daniel Immerwahr: That's right. It cuts two ways. If these places are part of the United States, where do they go to appeal for justice? What are they supposed to do when they're being, as they are, clearly abused? Benjamin Harris concludes that, okay, yes, these places are indeed part of the United States, but that means that people working on them should have some appeal to all the institutions and courts of the United States.

He, as a result, takes this issue up and decides to commute the sentences so they're not sentenced to death. Then they have to spend the rest of their lives at hard labor.

Brooke Gladstone: It was the pursuit of guano that forced us as a nation to publicly acknowledge that we were going to expand beyond our manifestly destined borders into realms unknown. By 1898, most of America seems all in on this imperialism idea. Maps were redrawn and hung in classrooms across the country. Maps that we certainly didn't grow up with that showed us America in the world as it truly was.

Daniel Immerwahr: It's an extraordinary moment. In 1898 and 1899, the United States basically goes on a sort of imperial shopping spree. It fights a war with Spain, and as a result of that war, it takes the Philippines, Guam, and Puerto Rico, and it briefly occupies Cuba. At the same time, almost in a fit of enthusiasm, the United States also annexes Hawaii and American Samoa. Cartographers see their opportunity and start publishing these extraordinary new maps. New maps that show the US Mainland surrounded by boxes, so Alaska, Hawaii, Guam, Puerto Rico, American Samoa. Why these are so extraordinary, at least for me, is when I saw them, I thought, "I've never seen a map like that." I had never seen a map of the United States that had Puerto Rico on it. I'd never seen a map of the United States that had that box for Guam. This is a moment when, and a lot of people in the US Mainland are so proud of this new facet of the United States that they are eager to see it differently.

I found books that have titles like The Greater United States, The Imperial Republic, the old way of referring to the country as the United States, the Republic, or the union in the 19th century, those don't really work anymore because it's now transparently not a republic and not a union. This new polity, quite transparently, has not been created by the voluntary entry of all parts. The Philippines fights a bloody war of independence that we think racks up more bodies than the US Civil War.

Brooke Gladstone: I remember there was a time when the US Was referred to as Columbia. In songs like Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean.

[MUSIC - Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean]

O Columbia the gem of the ocean,

The home of the brave and the free,

The shrine of each patriot's devotion,

A world offers homage to thee,

Daniel Immerwahr: Yes, because Columbia was in the way that we have the District of Columbia, Columbia was a literary name for the country. What's striking about this is the literary name that we all have in our heads that really wasn't that often used in the 19th century, America. A lot of people in the 19th century understood that if you were speaking of America, you were speaking of the Americas, the whole region. That changes in 1898, partly out of this desire to find a new way to describe the country, a new shorthand for it. America.

It's a vaguer, more expansive term. The President who takes office after the war with Spain. Teddy Roosevelt uses the word America in his inaugural address. There's a two-week period where he uses it in different speeches more times than every past president has used it collectively in the entire history of the country. Ever since then, it's off to the races.

Brooke Gladstone: Why was 1898 an Imperial shopping spree? What was going on?

Daniel Immerwahr: The United States bonked into the Pacific. The census in 1890 had issued a report suggesting that the frontier was no more. It inspired a few, such as Teddy Roosevelt, to try to make new frontiers, to find new places where the United States could restore its vigor.

Brooke Gladstone: Explain the Philippines.

Daniel Immerwahr: It partly has to do with Teddy Roosevelt. He's the assistant secretary of the Navy. His boss leaves the office for an afternoon to visit an osteopath and Roosevelt springs into action and orders the US Asiatic Fleet to prepare to invade Manila if the United States has a war with Spain and his boss doesn't countermand the order, possibly fearing looking weak. When the United States does go to war with Spain, it engages the Spanish fleet, defeats it, and suddenly the United States has the Philippines on its hands.

Brooke Gladstone: Not suddenly. Takes a while.

Daniel Immerwahr: Right. The actual conquest of the Philippines takes an enormous amount of time. Part of the reason the United States is in a good position vis a vis the Philippines is that the United States has allied itself with Filipino insurgents who've been fighting against Spanish colonialism for quite a long time. They think that they're doing so in the name of liberating their colony.

With the aid of the United States, they're able to conquer the archipelago. The United States ends the war by purchasing the Philippines from Spain but then it has to deal with these Philippine insurgents and ends up fighting a long and excruciatingly bloody war. The Philippine archipelago isn't restored to civilian rule until 1913 and was only recently surpassed by the Afghanistan War as the longest war in US history.

Brooke Gladstone: On what grounds did the US go to war for the Philippines? Because the US was still hesitant to say, "We do this for the sake of empire. "The US was never quite as frank about this as, say, the British were.

Daniel Immerwahr: Well, this is a really interesting and rare moment in US history where the leaders of the country will start talking like the British. The reason that the United States needs to fight the Philippines and fight to retain the Philippines is in order to civilize and uplift Filipinos. The most famous poem justifying empire, Rudyard Kipling's White Man's Burden, is written as advice to the United States about what to do in the Philippines.

Rudyard Kipling: Take up the white man's burden, send forth the best ye breed. Go bind your sons to exile, to serve your captives need to wait in heavy harness on fluttered folk and wild your new court sullen peoples half devil and half child.

Daniel Immerwahr: Teddy Roosevelt receives an advance copy, but a lot of politicians are deeply enthusiastic about this notion that the United States could achieve its adulthood by becoming like Britain, like France, a transparent and forthright empire that's taken on the white man's burden to uplift and to educate its colonial subjects. That's the rhetoric of the time.

Brooke Gladstone: You quote Mark Twain, who had been as ardently imperialistic as Rudyard Kipling, but then reversed himself, "There must be two Americas. One that sets the captive free and one that takes a once captive's new freedom away from him, picks a quarrel with him with nothing to found it on, and then kills him to get his land." For that second America, he proposed adding a few words to the Declaration of Independence. Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed white men.

Daniel Immerwahr: That's right. Mark Twain and Kipling were friends. Initially, Mark Twain had been, as he described it, a red-hot imperialist. As he saw the war in the Philippines start to unfold, he came to be one of the most withering critics of the war, just as vociferously anti-imperialist as Kipling was pro-imperialist. For the rest of his life, he would chronicle with sarcasm, with outrage everything that the United States was doing in the Philippines. The massacres, the tortures, the hypocrisy.

Brooke Gladstone: Coming up, how the world's professed leading democracy learned to reconcile itself to imperial brutality. This is On The Media. This is On The Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone. At the dawn of the last century, it wasn't just poets like Kipling and writers like Twain who are arguing about imperialism. In a world of shifting borders, the adolescent United States, big-headed about its democratic values, would grapple over how or even whether to grab other people's territory.

Back in 2019, historian Daniel Immerwahr told me that this debate blazed like a comet across America's consciousness and then vanished just as quickly, out of sight and out of mind. Here's presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan speaking out against imperialism during his campaign in 1900.

William Jennings Bryan: We do not want the Filipinos for our citizens. They cannot, without danger to us, share in the government of our nation. Moreover, we cannot afford to add another race question to the race questions which we already have. Neither can we hold the Filipinos as subjects, even if we could benefit them by so doing, for such an inconsistency would paralyze our influence as the world's teacher in the science of government.

Daniel Immerwahr: The racial logic here is totally transparent. Interestingly, a lot of the anti-imperialism was a racist anti-imperialism. The objection to empire was that it would extend the borders of the United States in such a way that it would include more non-white people in the country.

Brooke Gladstone: Even during our transcontinental land grab, Americans shied away from taking land that was populated by people who were not white.

Daniel Immerwahr: Yes, it's really extraordinary. The United States expands a lot as the borders go west, but was always operating a logic of the United States should seek to take land, land that would then be used for white settlers, but it should not seek to incorporate large non-white populations. After the United States fights a war with Mexico in the 1840s, militarily it could seize a lot of Mexico, but politicians debate how much of Mexico does the United States really seek to annex.

The southern border of the United States was carefully drawn in order to give the United States as much of Mexico as it could get with as few Mexicans.

Brooke Gladstone: People of color cannot be trusted with the vote. That seems to be the governing principle here.

Daniel Immerwahr: That's the operative logic, yes.

Brooke Gladstone: Yet didn't we in the Navassa decision that recognized that our off-the-mainland holdings were still subject to American law, mean that the people who lived there had constitutional rights?

Daniel Immerwahr: You might think so. The Supreme Court has to figure out what to do with this newly shaped United States. There are a series of contentious Supreme Court cases starting in 1901 called the Insular cases. Ultimately, what the court decides is that constitutional rights apply in the mainland United States, but they don't apply in Puerto Rico. Shockingly, this is still law today. You can have rights in Puerto Rico, but they're not guaranteed by the Constitution because Puerto Rico exists in an extra-constitutional zone.

That's one reason also why if you're born in American Samoa, you're not a US citizen. You're born in the United States, but you're not born in the United States that's covered by the Constitution. The 14th Amendment doesn't apply to you and therefore you're a US national.

Brooke Gladstone: You're not a citizen?

Daniel Immerwahr: That's right. The history of the United States colonial empire is the history of a lot of people who are US Nationals and either are not US Citizens have to push to become US Citizens. Even when they receive that citizenship, for example, Puerto Ricans have been citizens since 1917, the citizenship that they receive is statutory i.e. it's provided by law, not by the Constitution, which also suggests that it can be taken away.

Brooke Gladstone: One of the most clarifying things that you do in your book is to describe the trilemma that placed the central ideas of what the United States is in conflict with each other when confronted with its imperialist role.

Daniel Immerwahr: That's right. In the late 1890s, when many people in the United States are contemplating the future of the country, they realize that they can have an empire. They can have a country that's ruled by white people and they can have a country that has representative government but they can't get all three of them.

Brooke Gladstone: Why not?

Daniel Immerwahr: Well, think about it, because now the United States includes large non-white populations. If the United States is going to continue to be Republican, Filipinos should have some kind of representative government and should have some kind of voice in the federal government of the United States. Those are the principles of republicanism. They're taxed, they should be represented. That seemed like it was a founding and core principle of the country.

There are a lot of anti-imperialists, including William Jennings Bryan, who worry about what happens to the United States if suddenly non-white people have political power. Some people try to solve this one way by allowing the expansion of the United States, but by rejecting its republican principles. That's how Teddy Roosevelt thinks the United States should grow. It should have republicanism for the mainland, but not for the entire country.

Others, like William Jennings Bryan, seek to resolve this by not having empire, by limiting the growth of the country so that it doesn't have the problem of large non-white populations who otherwise might need political representation.

Brooke Gladstone: There's a really loud debate about this.

Daniel Immerwahr: It's in some ways a tragic debate because those are usually the two positions you hear. The United States should abandon republicanism, or the United States should limit itself to its contiguous borders. What you don't hear in the mainland debate is the third option. The United States should jettison white supremacy.

Brooke Gladstone: They never considered taking white supremacy off the table, and yet they manage to reconcile these three incompatible ideas.

Daniel Immerwahr: Largely this happens by not talking a lot about the territories. If you can brush it under the rug, the United States can still present itself to itself and to others as a republic, the distinctive and exceptional world power without being an empire.

Brooke Gladstone: The maps of greater America start to go away.

Daniel Immerwahr: Literally, you can see the boxes erased. If you look at textbooks that are published by 1920, it is really hard to find a map that shows any part of the United States beyond the mainland.

Brooke Gladstone: In terms of press coverage, let's talk about the invisibility of the people that the US had come to rule first, statistically.

Daniel Immerwahr: The census is the statistical self-portrait of the nation. If you look at the census from 1910, from 1920, from 1930, the first page in the population report will say, this is the population of the United States, and here's the population of its possession. Everything after that in the census, how rural or urban is the population? How long do people live? What kind of jobs do they have? All these ways in which the United States seeks to understand itself, those calculations are implicitly just about the mainland.

The argument is that people who live in the territories are just too different to be included in the calculation. Essentially, they are relegated to the shadows.

Brooke Gladstone: They're invisible in our numbers, more or less. They're also invisible in American popular culture. I was struck by your discussion of the films about the Long March in Bataan.

Daniel Immerwahr: That's right. One of the more dramatic events In World War II is the Japanese conquest of the Philippines. This becomes the single bloodiest thing ever to happen on US soil. World War II in the Philippines ultimately kills 1.5 million people, about 1 million of whom are Filipinos or US nationals. That's two civil wars. There is very little registering of that on the mainland during the war. Frankly, there's very little registering of that now. It's not the kind of thing you find in textbooks.

During the war, the thing that you see most about on the mainland is these wars about a fight in the Bataan Peninsula where Filipino soldiers and soldiers from the mainland were making a last-ditch defense of the Philippines against Japan right before the archipelago got occupied and conquered. What's so interesting about these films is that they focus with laser-like intensity on the white soldiers.

Speaker 11: Our club on Bataan took another rap on the chin last night.

Daniel Immerwahr: The tragedy of the loss of the United States largest colony. A tragedy that will lead to the single bloodiest thing that ever happens in US history, this is entirely understood as something that happens to characters who were played like people like John Wayne.

Speaker 11: By then, the Air Force will have won the war, I suppose. Only, where is the Air Force?

Daniel Immerwahr: The Filipino presence is almost completely erased from the reception of World War II even when it's taking place in the Philippines.

Brooke Gladstone: Obviously if people are viewed as lesser and if they are invisible, they're more vulnerable. Tell me the story of Cornelius Rhoads, who was sent by the Rockefeller Institute to Puerto Rico to study anemia.

Daniel Immerwahr: Cornelius Rhoads, Harvard-trained doctor, arrives in Puerto Rico in the '30s. He regards Puerto Rico as a sort of island-sized laboratory. Here's what we know. First of all, he intentionally refuses to treat some of his patients just to see what will happen. He also seeks to induce diseases in others by restricting their diets. He describes some of them to his colleagues as experimental animals. He sits down and he writes to a colleague in Boston, one of the most extraordinary letters that I've read in US history. He says, "I am here in Puerto Rico. It's beautiful except for the Puerto Ricans."

Speaker 12: They are beyond doubt the dirtiest, laziest, most degenerate, and thievish race of men ever inhabiting this sphere. It makes you sick to inhabit the same island with them. They're even lower than Italians.

Daniel Immerwahr: "This island would be great. But if something could be done to exterminate the population."

Speaker 12: I have done my best to further the process of extermination by killing off 8 and transplanting cancer into several more. The latter has not resulted in any fatalities so far. The matter of consideration for the patient's welfare plays no role here.

Daniel Immerwahr: He leaves the letter out. It's discovered by the Puerto Rican staff. It seems to conflict all of the fears that Puerto Ricans have about mainlanders and it becomes a scandal on the island.

Brooke Gladstone: This letter helps to fuel the nationalist movement of Pedro Albizu Campos.

Daniel Immerwahr: That's right. There's already a small nationalist movement in the 1920s. Pedro Albizu Campos is at the head of it but in the 1930s, economic depression and then the issue of this letter turn it into a major force in Puerto Rican politics. Albizu passes this letter around to anyone who will listen. He sends it to the Vatican. The appointed colonial governor, who's a mainlander, describes it as a confession of murder. There's an investigation, and how that investigation plays out is really telling. First of all, Rhoads just leaves and there's an investigation without him. Rhoads' defenders say a few contradictory things. He was drunk, he was joking, he was angry, but the point is that he didn't actually kill eight people.

The government, which is staffed by appointed mainlanders, runs an investigation, finds another letter that is, as the governor sees it, worse than the first, which is hard to imagine. We don't know what that letter says because the government suppresses it, destroys it, and decides that Cornelius Rhoads was crazy and intemperate, but that he didn't actually kill people.

Brooke Gladstone: Maybe he was intemperate, maybe he was a little out of his mind. He paid the consequences by being appointed the vice president of the New York Academy of Medicine and in the army During World War II, Chief Medical Officer in the Chemical Warfare Service.

Daniel Immerwahr: Yes, and he goes on to have this illustrious career in medicine and basically suffers no consequences. Then in the army, in the Chemical Warfare Service, he gets another go.

Brooke Gladstone: Meaning he gets to use people as experimental animals again.

Daniel Immerwahr: Exactly right. The United States government is seeking to develop chemical weapons in case World War II becomes a gas war, which it never really does. Overall, some 60,000 people are tested on. Sometimes that looks like having a mustard agent applied to your skin to see what kinds of blistering happen. Sometimes it's men are put in gas chambers with gas masks and are gassed to see how well their gas masks hold up. The largest scale tests are these tests on this island that the United States seizes off of Panama.

Speaker 13: After a survey of the Southwest Pacific theater and the Caribbean area, San Jose island in the Pearls Group was selected as the test ground. Since the climate and flora are similar to that which has been found in the Southwest Pacific--

Daniel Immerwahr: It uses those to stage field tests. Large groups of men are asked to stage mock battles. While they're doing this, planes fly over and gas them from the air and then the question is, how well do the men hold up?

Brooke Gladstone: Where did these soldiers come from? Who are they?

Daniel Immerwahr: The government is unwilling to send continental troops to be used as test subjects in San Jose island in this way, so Puerto Rican troops come. Many of them don't speak good English. They don't really understand what's happening. The men who are gassed, 60,000 men who are gassed, they experience long-standing effects, many of them emphysema, scarring, lung damage. These men were also supposed to be doing this secretly, and it only really came out in the '90s just how many of its own people, and a good number of them Puerto Ricans, the United States had tested chemical weapons on.

Brooke Gladstone: Cornelius Rhoads becomes the head of the Sloan Kettering Institute and one of the forefathers of chemotherapy. This is a supremely surreal twist.

Daniel Immerwahr: Some of the mustard agents that work as poison gases also work selectively in fighting certain kinds of cancers. A number of doctors figure that out during the war. They put a pin in it, and they say, "After the war, let's check this out." The government makes available its stock of surplus chemical weapons.

Cornelius Rhoads is in charge of deciding which hospitals get it. He gives it to three hospitals, and a good bunch of it goes to his own hospital. Then he has a Sloan Kettering Institute, of which he's the head. Then he has for the rest of his career this incredible chance, a hospital that is full of dying cancer patients who will submit to experimental treatments. He just goes for it and just test chemical after chemical after chemical, and in doing so, becomes one of the forefathers of chemotherapy.

Presenter 1: Dr. Cornelius P. Rhoads of the Memorial Hospital in New York.

[applause]

Daniel Immerwahr: He's on the cover of Time Magazine, able to cultivate this image of himself as a cancer fighter without anyone really acknowledging that he's had this back history in Puerto Rico.

Brooke Gladstone: Most people didn't know the informational segregation is so complete.

Daniel Immerwahr: After Rhoads dies, there's an award that's given out by the American Association of Cancer Research in his honor for promising young cancer researchers. This award is given for over 20 years before anyone who's involved, who's in the medical community and has a voice in that way, can say, "You might want to rethink the name of this award," because powerful people in the United States, not just politicians, doctors too, have basically been able to think of their country as a contiguous blob and haven't really had to grapple with the parts of US History that have taken place in the territories.

[music]

Brooke Gladstone: Coming up, why understanding America's history of empire is vital for making sense of everything from bin Laden to the Beatles. This is On The Media.

[music]

Brooke Gladstone: This is On The Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone. We end this rebroadcast of our hour with his historian, Daniel Immerwahr by probing the hidden ways the pursuit of empire has changed our history and especially for our purposes, our view of our history, because that blinkered view has allowed us to see past human rights violations committed on our own soil, here or elsewhere.

Jim Moran: The reason we have Guantanamo is that this was set up to be above the law. It's extrajudicial.

Brooke Gladstone: Former Virginia Congressman Jim Moran.

Jim Moran: The rules don't apply. The rest of the world looks at this, and it undermines our credibility and our security as a nation.

Brooke Gladstone: We have people born on American territory who aren't legally citizens.

Speaker 16: The people of American Samoa are considered US nationals.

Speaker 17: You're born owing allegiance to the United States, but you're not a citizen. America doesn't owe its allegiance back.

Brooke Gladstone: Of course, this.

Speaker 18: President Trump tweeting, "The people of Puerto Rico are great, but the politicians are incompetent or corrupt. Their government can't do anything right."

Brooke Gladstone: Even during the height of American empire, even During World War II, even among soldiers fighting in US territories, there was confusion about what exactly the status of those territories was.

Presenter 2: From the United States of America, Uncle Sam presents--

Brooke Gladstone: In your book, you recount the story of a young Filipino boy, Oscar, who encounters a GI coming down the street handing out cigarettes and Hershey bars. Speaking slowly, the GI asks the boy's name, and when he replies easily in English, the soldier was startled and he said, "How'd you learn American?"

Daniel Immerwahr: That story slays me because you have to think of it from the perspective of the soldier. first. He's crossed the Pacific. He's been given maps. He's been told where to go, whom to shoot. He's arrived in the Philippines. He's seen some of the bloodiest fighting of the war, and he meets this kid, and when the kid speaks in English, he's totally confused why this kid should speak in English.

When Oscar explains, "Oh, the reason I speak English is that after the Philippines became a US colony, you guys sent a bunch of teachers and we all learned to speak English." The soldier just looks at him and says, "Oh, I didn't realize that the Philippines was a US colony." He doesn't actually realize that he's fighting on US soil. We usually think of the war as catapulting the United States into the position of global leadership with a larger military, a more bustling economy than anywhere else.

Actually, the war did something else, too. It gave the United States a lot of territory so much territory that there were more people living in its colonies and occupied zones like Japan, than were actually living in the States. If you looked up at the end of 1945 and you saw a US flag flying overhead, it was more likely that you were living in a colony or occupied zone than you were actually living on the US Mainland.

Brooke Gladstone: Truman saying--

Truman: We do not seek for ourselves 1 inch of territory in any place in the world.

Brooke Gladstone: FDR said it, Everyone said it, but people are like, "We're going to keep Micronesia, right?" Suddenly our borders are malleable.

Daniel Immerwahr: It's a moment when the United States has the ability to decide what its territorial destiny will be. It could take a lot of that territory. It could convert its occupations into annexations if it wanted to. When Truman says the thing that so many past presidents had said, "We covet no territory," there's a scandal about that. The State Department complains, the military complains, the public complaints. "Are you really saying that we're going to give up all the land that we fought so hard to get, the places where we've planted our flag?"

They're particularly concerned about Micronesia, which is a sort of buffer zone between Japan and the western parts of the United States, including Hawaii. That's where a lot of the bloody fighting had happened in World War II. The idea of the United States surrendering this strategically valuable space, that's hard for a lot of people to countenance. In fact, Truman amends his statement.

Truman: Outside the right to establish necessary basis for our own protection, we look for nothing.

Daniel Immerwahr: We're going to keep what we need to preserve our security. In that moment, right after World War II, when the United States has so many options territorially, the end of World War II brings a worldwide revolt centered in Asia, against empire. Formerly colonized people have often seen their empires dislodged, often by Japan. They have access to arms. They've heard the idealistic speeches of FDR that this war is not a war for empire.

This is a war for liberation, which produces a sense of shame, which makes it a lot harder for powerful countries to insist that empire is right and proper. That's just how civilization goes without fearing the kind of real on the ground and possibly violent resistance that they'll face in the colonies. The cost of colonialism has gone up.

Brooke Gladstone: That's one of the trends. The other one is that there are new ways to project power worldwide without controlling vast swathes of territory. A lot of these are technological. We can now produce a kind of nitrogen-based fertilizer that replaces guano. We needed rubber and we developed fake rubber. We got plastic. Then basically all we really needed were military bases.

Daniel Immerwahr: That's exactly right. On the one hand, the United States figures out how to generate synthetic substitutes for a lot of things that had formerly depended on colonies for. Rubber is a really good example. At the start of the war, the United States has a rubber crisis.

Speaker 21: Well, Charlie, this is one of the last rubber tracks we'll get. That's right. If we don't get rubber, we'll have to stop making good tanks.

Daniel Immerwahr: The reason it has a rubber crisis is that Japan has seized a number of European and US colonies in Southeast Asia in rich rubber-growing lands. It looks to a lot of people like the US economy is just going to fall flat on its face because you can't fight a war, it turns out, without rubber. What happens, and this is a surprise to a number of people who live through this and are watching it, is that the United States figures out how to make rubber not from rubber plantations, but from petroleum, from oil, of which it has a great deal.

Suddenly it's done a sort of colonies for chemistry swap that it allows it to no longer depend for strategic reasons on tropical colonies. Rubber is one example. Plastic, which is also honed during the war, replaces any number of tropical products and allows the United States to be immune to the desire to colonize large places so that it can control, for strategic reasons, their economies.

Brooke Gladstone: We got radio to facilitate communications.

Daniel Immerwahr: It used to be the case that if you wanted to send a secure message from one part of the planet to another, you had to send it through a wire. If you wanted that to be secure from sabotage, interruption, or espionage, you had to control all of the territory along that wire. The British Empire was obsessed with getting a large telegraphic network that went only through British-controlled territories, so its adversaries couldn't snip its cables or listen in. The world of radio brings something different.

With radio, you can just control one transceiver in one spot, another in another spot, and beam the message from one to another. Now, people can still listen in, but if you get really good at encrypting your messages, you can solve that problem as well.

Speaker 22: Roger six able. They're between hills two niner zero and three two six, south of the--

Daniel Immerwahr: A similar another thing happens in transportation as you see a world that goes from surface-hugging transportation, such as steamships, cars, trucks, and railroads, to a world where ultimately, if you need to get something from point A to point B and you don't control the territory in between, you can transport it by plane. The United States gets really good at using plane and radio and it figures out that ultimately when push comes to shove, what it really needs is just a series of well-situated points all across the planet.

Brooke Gladstone: That's what you call a pointillist empire, which still endures today.

Daniel Immerwahr: Yes, it's important to recognize that although the United States has distanced itself from colonialism, it no longer has the Philippines. Hawaii and Alaska have become states. Puerto Rico underwent a constitutional change, although it's still very much a US territory. From a strategic perspective, that's not the core of the US Empire today. What the United States has is hundreds of overseas bases. Places where it can land, places where it can detain people, places where it can repair, and places where it can store weapons. That is really the face of power today for the United States.

If you took all US overseas territory today and mashed it all together, you would have a land area that's less than the size of Connecticut. They may be small, but oh boy, are they important.

Brooke Gladstone: A lot of history turns on those places and a lot of culture. A lot of Americans may not know this country's colonial history, but people in Puerto Rico do, people in the Philippines do, and so do people who live near those bases all over the world.

Daniel Immerwahr: One really good example is the city of Liverpool. Before World War II, it hadn't been a particularly culturally inventive city. Then after the war, suddenly it lights up like a Christmas tree and there's just band after band after band and you know, hundreds of them and they're playing rock music.

[MUSIC - Chuck Berry: Roll Over Beethoven]

Daniel Immerwahr: Suddenly it's a sort of world center. It's not all of Britain that's doing it. It's particularly Liverpool.

[MUSIC - Chuck Berry: Roll Over Beethoven]

Gonna write a little letter

Gonna mail it to my local DJ

Daniel Immerwahr: Liverpool has right outside of it the largest US base in all of Europe. As a result, Liverpool is this sort of borderlands between this outpost of the United States and a still very much impoverished and war-torn Europe. Young people from Liverpool and from the area recognize that the men on the base are a great source of cash. At the same time they're receiving records from them, they're getting musical instruments from them.

It's not an accident that the Beatles come from Liverpool. Liverpool is the contact zone between the United States and Western Europe.

Brooke Gladstone: It isn't all sunny in Japan. There's a deep sense of resentment. Riots every 10 years or so. Two Japanese ministers forced to resign because they deferred to the US in matters related to the base. Then the Saudi Arabian bases, one could say that they had a role to play in 9/11.

Daniel Immerwahr: That's right. Often in areas where bases are stationed people are drawn into them because they're sources of income but they often find themselves resenting the bases, understandably and you can see that so well in Saudi Arabia. After the war, the United States establishes a military base in a place that had already been a company town for a set of oil companies, Dharan. It has to build up this base. It draws on a lot of local laborers to do so. One guy who's been working on this base for a while is a Yemeni bricklayer named Muhammad and he's really good.

The people he's working for are very encouraging of him. He starts his own firm and starts to get a lot of contracts. The firm is called Muhammad and Abdullah Sons of Awad bin Laden. The guy who builds that Base and who builds some other US Bases is Osama bin Laden's father. Osama bin Laden grows up around US bases in the Middle East, US-sponsored construction projects in the Middle East. On the one hand, he's part of this. That's where his money comes from. He gets really into construction. He's a construction guy. On the other hand, he gets deeply resentful and regards it as a form of imperialism.

It's this basing issue, particularly as the United States puts more troops in a formally closed base in the 1990s, that sets Osama bin Laden on his jihad against the United States. It's the issue of US Troops being stationed in Saudi Arabia, the land of Mecca and Medina, turning, as Osama bin Laden regards it, turning Saudi Arabia into a US colony. That's his main source of complaint about the United States.

Brooke Gladstone: How do we know that?

Daniel Immerwahr: The first thing that we know Osama bin Laden did is a bombing at that base.

Speaker 23: An explosion occurred this afternoon at the United States military housing complex near Dharan, Saudi Arabia.

Daniel Immerwahr: Precisely the base that his father helped to build. That bombing is timed so it is the eighth anniversary of the stationing of US troops there. He's communicating through the date exactly the thing that he is protesting.

Speaker 23: The explosion appears to be the work of terrorists. If that is the case, like all Americans, I am outraged by it. The cowards who committed this murderous act must not go unpunished.

Daniel Immerwahr: I think that the United States has to get right on empire. For too long it's been so easy from the mainland to not think about the overseas parts of the United States, despite the fact that mainlanders have been consistently affected by them. The overseas parts of the United States have too often been sacrifice zones, places where the full cost is paid for decisions made in Washington, World War II in the Philippines. That's where most US nationals die in World War II, and many of them die from the US military itself, which bombs and shells its own cities as it's trying to dislodge the Japanese.

My point is not that military strategy was wrong, but my point is that it was made in a kind of bubble without any real reckoning of who it is that lives in the United States. I think that can't keep going on.

Brooke Gladstone: Daniel, thank you so much.

Daniel Immerwahr: Brooke, it's been a pleasure.

Brooke Gladstone: Daniel Immerwahr is a historian at Northwestern University and author of How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States.

[MUSIC - The Odd Man Who Sings About Poop, Puke, and Pee: A Nice Song About Bird Poop]

Bird poop, Bird poop

Birdie, birdie, birdie,

Poop, poop, poop,

Bird turd, turd from a bird

Turd it, turd it, turd it,

Birdie, birdie, birdie

Tweet, tweet, tweet, tweet goes birdie

Brooke Gladstone: That's the show 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. Eloise Blondiau is our senior producer, and 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.

[MUSIC - The Odd Man Who Sings About Poop, Puke, and Pee: A Nice Song About Bird Poop]

Birdie turd, birdie turd,

Poop, poop, poop,

Bird turd.

Copyright © 2025 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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With Trump’s imminent return to the White House, we’ve decided to take stock of how political and journalistic norms have evolved over the years. For this week’s midweek podcast, we’re sharing an episode from Radiolab that aired in October, on the whirlwind history of Gary Hart, a young charismatic Democrat who in 1987 was poised to win his party’s nomination and possibly the presidency – until a bombshell sex scandal derailed it all. Brooke Gladstone and Radiolab co-host Latif Nasser discuss that history, and why sex scandals don’t really matter anymore.

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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Gary Hart stands with a two pronged mic in his right hand, left hand raised while speaking infront of signs bearing his name

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Sen. Gary Hart gestures while speaking at the Hillcrest Senior Citizen Center in Queens, New York, Friday, March 30, 1984. 

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

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Taking stock of how political and journalistic norms have evolved over the years. 

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Do Sex Scandals Matter Anymore in Politics?

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Brooke Gladstone: This is the On the Media Midweek podcast. I'm Brooke Gladstone. With Donald Trump moving back into the White House, we thought it made sense to take stock of how political and journalistic norms have morphed over the years. We're sharing an episode from Radiolab that aired in October on just that topic. Latif Nasser, Radiolab's cohost, invited me to talk about it.

Latif Nasser: How you doing, Brooke?

Brooke Gladstone: Good. Really good. Great to talk to you, really.

Latif Nasser: Really I-- this is Brooke Gladstone, longtime host of the show On the Media. I called her up in her home because we had done this story back in 2016, just nine months before Trump was elected president. It was about how the media covers presidential campaigns, how we the public think about our candidates. When I relistened to the episode, I felt like it was perfectly speaking to the political moment that we're in right now, but then also somehow simultaneously totally outdated.

Brooke Gladstone: Yes.

Latif Nasser: Do you agree with that? Do you think that's true in some way?

Brooke Gladstone: Absolutely.

Latif Nasser: Okay.

Brooke Gladstone: I have thoughts, though maybe not the ones pertaining to what is the profound nature of our humanity that you may want to get to.

Latif Nasser: Well, that was the number one question. Brooke did show me how the last eight years have evolved out of, but also completely rewritten that story. I'm going to play you the original show. Like I said, we did it back in 2016, so you will hear Jad and Robert, our original hosts. Then I'll come back on the flipside to talk to Brooke. here we go.

Robert: We're going to take you back to an evening in 1987. Tom Fiedler, ace political reporter for the Miami Herald. It's late at night and he's in his office.

Tom Fiedler: I was at my desk. I'm just, in fact, packing up to go home. My phone rang, and I'm thinking, "Oh, that's probably my wife, and she's wondering why I haven't left yet." Said, "All right, I'll pick it up."

Robert: When he picked up the phone--

Tom Fiedler: Turned out this--

Robert: It turned out it was not a voice he recognized. It was a woman's voice, maybe in her late 20s. She said to him, "I have something you need to know." It was a tip about one of the most powerful and charismatic men in American politics, former Senator Gary Hart, who at the time was not only the most likely candidate to become the Democratic nominee, he was very possibly going to be the next President of the United States.

Tom Fiedler: Her words to me were, "Gary Hart is having an affair with one of my best friends."

Robert: She told him, basically, "I can prove it."

Tom Fiedler: I was rather, I guess, dumbstruck by that.

Robert: He thought--

Tom Fiedler: Well, now what do we do?

Jad: Now, if you're of a certain age, you probably remember this story, you probably know what happens next, but even if you've never heard of Gary Hart, you still probably know the outline of this story, the accusations, then the denial.

Bill Clinton: I did not have sexual relations with that woman.

Jad: T hen after that, the whole wall-to-wall media thing, which just goes on and on and on until you want to take your head off your shoulders, put it on the sidewalk and beat it with a baseball bat. The thing that's easy to forget is that it wasn't always like this.

Matt Bai: No. Hart was the first to walk into this vortex of social forces. After that, the rules of political journalism and politics change almost immediately.

Robert: That, by the way, is Matt Bai.

Matt Bai: National political columnist for Yahoo News.

Robert: He wrote a book about this incident which he called All the Truth Is Out.

Jad: In that book, he makes the argument that this is the moment, Gary Hart, 1987, when political journalism slid off the rails. Or, you might argue, when it finally got serious.

Matt Bai: Well, just flash back a minute because I think the context is important.

Robert: 1984.

Matt Bai: Hart kind of comes from nowhere.

News Presenter 1: It's a whole new ballgame in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Matt Bai: Runs for president. Storms New Hampshire.

News Presenter 2: Senator Gary Hart is on his way to a clear-cut victory over Walter Mondale.

Matt Bai: Beats Mondale there and becomes a political celebrity.

Gary Hart: This country cannot stand four more years of Reaganomics for the rich. [cheers]

News Presenter 3: Gary Hart.

News Presenter 4: Gary Hart, the senator from Colorado.

News Presenter 5: Gary Hart.

Gary Hart: I'm a Democrat and proud of it.

Jad: Hart was this tall, good-looking Democrat.

Matt Bai: He's got great, wavy hair.

Lesley Stahl: I mean, dashing, handsome, charismatic and young.

Robert: This is Lesley Stahl.

Lesley Stahl: CBS.

Robert: She's covered politics for 40 years. Now works for 60 Minutes.

Lesley Stahl: He was cool and smart. Women liked him, too.

Matt Bai: He's an anti-orthodox Democrat, very liberal, anti-nukes. He is sort of the Bill Clinton before Bill Clinton.

Robert: He doesn't get the Democratic nomination in 1984. Walter Mondale does by a nose. When Mondale gets crushed by Ronald Reagan--

Matt Bai: Hart is immediately presumed to be the next nominee of the party at a time when these things were more obvious.

Jad: Fast forward to 1987.

News Presenter 6: Like it or not, Campaign '88 is underway.

Matt Bai: And-

News Presenter 7: The leading contender, frontrunner Gary Hart, in New Hampshire.

Matt Bai: -he's winning.

Gary Hart: On to the White House.

Matt Bai: He's running double digits higher than any Democrat.

Robert: He's projected to beat George Bush, the Republican front runner.

News Presenter 8: The next President of the United States, Gary Hart.

Kevin Sweeney: It felt like, look, this is a guy who is changing politics, who is unafraid to speak the truth. Who is willing to be really clear about what he wants to do.

Jad: That's Kevin Sweeney. He was Hart's press secretary in 1987. He joined the campaign just a few years out of college.

Kevin Sweeney: 23, I'm idealistic. The first time we really met, I was wearing a necktie with pictures of Lincoln and Washington on it, and Hart said, "That's the ugliest necktie I've ever seen in my life." [laughter] I said, "My mother made it," and he said, "I apologize."

Robert: [laughs] Well, that's a good beginning.

Kevin Sweeney: Yes. I knew pretty early I wanted to work for Hart.

Robert: Do you remember why?

Kevin Sweeney: He was really liberal on social issues at the time. Unafraid to be specific or take a stand.

Jad: He said Hart placed an extraordinary amount of emphasis on not just winning the campaign, but what would they do when they got in office.

Kevin Sweeney: He commanded that attitude.

Jad: They wrote out all these position papers on foreign policy, energy, international trade, the budget. Even what would his relationship with Gorbachev be?

Kevin Sweeney: There was something about Hart, and something about what happened on the campaign where it did feel like the kind of campaign that I haven't seen since.

Robert: When does the subject of what goes on below the belt come up, if at all?

Kevin Sweeney: Well, there were rumors, definitely rumors.

Matt Bai: By this time, there are a lot of whispers about his personal life and a lot of speculation. He's been married to his college sweetheart, Lee, for a very long time. They've been separated twice, long separations. During those separations, he's dated openly in Washington. It's a well-known fact of life in Washington where he is a central figure and has a lot of friends in the press corps that he's dated. That he's dated people for extended periods of time, that he and his wife have a troubled marriage. Together and not together he stayed on Bob Woodward's couch for a little while when she kicked him out at one point. Nobody wrote about that.

Jad: The reason they didn't write about it was because of a very old, very well-established convention.

Matt Bai: I mean look, go back through the 20th century. Franklin Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, Dwight Eisenhower heroes, towering figures. Their personal lives simply were not in play.

Jad: Take, for example, JFK. Lesley Stahl says that when the press was covering him--

Lesley Stahl: Vast numbers of reporters knew that John Kennedy was cheating on his wife. That was no secret, but we wouldn't have dreamed of printing that. Even if the whispers were loud enough to spread around the country, it just wasn't done.

Robert: Is the thought, "Hey, nobody does that, so I-- you know, forget about it?" Or, "Hey, that has nothing to do with statecraft?"

Matt Bai: I think the feeling was that, so what? You know, we all get to have a zone of privacy.

Jad: The assumption was that what happened in your private zone behind closed doors--

Lesley Stahl: Had nothing to do with whether you were going to be a good president or not. There are certain ethics and certain standards, I guess.

Matt Bai: This is the world that Hart still thinks he's living in, that as long as it doesn't burst into public view, it won't be a story.

Jad: Matt Bai says that world was actually changing because of a political earthquake that had happened just over a decade before.

News Presenter 9: Talking about the Watergate break in.

News Presenter 10: Burglarizing and bugging Democratic headquarters in Washington.

Matt Bai: That is the big first knocked-out brick in that wall.

News Presenter 11: Five people have been arrested and charged with breaking into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee.

Jad: Arguably the biggest scandal in White House history. You had Nixon tapping phone lines, compiling enemy lists. For the reporters covering Nixon--

Matt Bai: It really is an embarrassment. You had an entire White House press corps, political press corps, campaign press corps who had followed this man, Richard Nixon, for decades. Somehow either missed the fact or failed to report the fact that he had some significant psychological issues and was paranoid and could be corrupted.

Lesley Stahl: I think there was a sense that we let the public down.

Robert: Lesley Stahl remembers it this way.

Lesley Stahl: The regular White House press reporters, they should have been digging, chipping away, chipping away, chipping away. They should have been looking behind the curtain. Right after Watergate, reporters became tougher, saying, "Okay, we have to be skeptical about everything."

Robert: In particular--

Lesley Stahl: The character issue.

Matt Bai: Meaning suddenly your makeup, your personal behavior, who you are in your private moments, matters a whole hell of a lot for the kind of president you can be, and whether or not we can trust you as a public leader.

News Presenter 12: Hart's character is the subject tonight of our Weekend Journal. When Americans choose presidents, personal character traits are important. In this day and age, candidates' personal lives are getting a great deal of scrutiny.

Kevin Sweeney: I remember there was a bit of a shift in the kinds of reporters who were covering national politics. They had a different orientation, and they were really interested in the character question.

Robert: That's Kevin Sweeney again. He says he was initially frustrated by the reporters' strange obsession with things that were not really issues, important issues in the campaign.

Kevin Sweeney: Like age. There was some confusion about Hart's age. The fact that he changed the family name. His signature changed at a certain point in his life.

Robert: He says when those stories initially popped up--

Kevin Sweeney: I thought it was a false set of issues. I didn't really take it seriously.

Jad: Then when it came to the rumors of "womanizing" or marital infidelity, he felt like he needed to talk to Gary Hart.

Kevin Sweeney: Yes. I did say, "If anything is happening, it needs to stop. This can't-- whatever it is. I mean-- " and he said, "You know, nothing is happening." He shot back and said, "They have no right to cover that. That's ridiculous. It's not an issue that-- why is that an issue? That's not their job." I kept pushing back saying, "I don't actually care what their job is. I don't care what you think their job is. This is the new context that exists now. I don't know why or how, but the rules have changed. The rules have changed."

Tom Fiedler: It was--

Robert: This brings us back to Tom Fiedler of the Miami Herald. He was covering Gary Hart, going with him to all the stops in Iowa, New Hampshire--

Tom Fiedler: --and so forth. It seemed like at every stop along the way, someone, some reporter would raise her or his hand and would say what about the rumors of his womanizing?

Jad: Tom says that he would see reporters asking all these questions, and he was a little bit troubled.

Robert: On April 27th, 1987, he wrote a column asking the question--

Tom Fiedler: Is it ethical for journalists to be even raising this kind of a question? I really came down to the conclusion that unless the media, unless the reporters involved had actual proof that this was a problem, that he was a womanizer, we just shouldn't be printing that.

Robert: Column runs on a Monday morning.

Jad: That night--

Matt Bai: He gets the call.

Tom Fiedler: The voice on the other side says, "Gary Hart is having an affair with one of my best friends."

Jad: He was dumbstruck, as we know.

Tom Fiedler: I told her that my position had to be that I couldn't believe what she had to say unless there was proof. Finally, she said, "My friend is going to fly up to Washington next weekend, and she's going to spend the weekend with Senator Hart." She said, "So all you have to do is buy a ticket on that plane." I thought, "Well--

Robert: Would that be ethically okay?

Tom Fiedler: --what is inbounds and what is out of bounds?"

Jad: I mean, character was this new obsession of political journalism, but according to Matt Bai, no one had taken that character question into a candidate's bedroom. That was new.

Robert: Fiedler thought, "Well, no, no, no, this is inbounds.

Matt Bai: Because Gary Hart was publicly denying that he had been carrying on affairs with anyone.

Jad: Now to be clear, oftentimes when Gary Hart was asked about these rumors of an affair, he was never asked directly, just about the rumors, he'd say something like this--

Gary Hart: It's no one else's business.

Interviewer: Now why is it not anyone else's business?

Gary Hart: Because it isn't.

Interviewer: No, but--

Gary Hart: It hasn't been the business of the American public for 200 years, and it isn't today.

Jad: He'd say something like that. Fiedler says a couple times when he was asked, he did say something that amounted to a 'No.'

Tom Fiedler: Such as, "If there was any truth to these allegations, it would have come out long before." The kinds of answers that were non-denials denials-- another phrase that came out of Watergate. My view at that point was if in fact there was proof that he was carrying on an affair privately while publicly insisting that there really was no basis to this, then that was a relevant issue.

Robert: Relevant to his performance as a future president?

Tom Fiedler: Yes. It was a question of integrity. We thought the only way that we are going to find out if what the caller told us is true is we've got to catch him.

Jad: That's coming up next.

[music]

Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.

Robert: I'm Robert Krulwich.

Jad: This is Radiolab. getting back to the story. Reporter Tom Fiedler gets a tip saying that candidate Gary Hart is having an affair, and he thinks to himself, "This is inbounds if it's true. Therefore--

Tom Fiedler: We've got to catch him.

Robert: His editor tells a colleague of his, Jim McGee, to go to the airport, telling him--

Tom Fiedler: "This is what you're going to do. You're going to look for a woman who looks like a model."

Jad: That's how the woman on the phone described her friend.

Tom Fiedler: She's described as a model, blonde, in her mid-20s. "And call me back if you see it."

Jad: This guy Jim races to the airport--

Matt Bai: Spots this attractive young woman, fits the description.

Tom Fiedler: Of course, we later knew was Donna Rice.

Robert: He boards the plane, they land in DC. He follows her out of the airport to a cab.

Tom Fiedler: He runs to another cab, jumps in it, and he says, "Follow that cab."

Jad: Just like in the movies.

Tom Fiedler: Which they do.

Robert: He loses her for a while, but then eventually he gets to the house where he thinks Hart and this lady should be.

Tom Fiedler: He's not there more than a few minutes when the front door opens, and out comes the young woman on the arm of a very handsome man. One small problem. Jim had never met Gary Hart.

Jad: He had no idea what Gary Hart looked like.

Robert: No. [laughs]

Tom Fiedler: He said later-- he said, "I really couldn't pick Gary Hart out of a lineup." That's when I really thought we have got to go to Washington.

Matt Bai: That's what they do. The Herald-

Robert: Matt Bai again.

Matt Bai: -they send a team of reporters, investigative reporters, and Fiedler, and a photographer to Washington.

Tom Fiedler: We arrive Saturday morning.

Matt Bai: They stake out his townhouse.

Tom Fiedler: You know, I'm thinking, "My gosh, somebody will surely notice that there are four or five of us-- lurking is probably the right word.

Matt Bai: It's May, and one guy's in a parka to disguise himself. Fiedler, who the candidate knows, is in a jogging suit, and he's pretending to jog around the street all day long. [laughter]

Tom Fiedler: I would change clothes a little bit. Occasionally I would run without the jacket. Other times, I would just be wearing a T-shirt and shorts.

Robert: He'd run around and around and around.

Matt Bai: It's not how the CIA would do it, but it's about what you'd expect from a newspaper.

Tom Fiedler: Our "stakeout" went on all day into Saturday night, and it got dark. Then front door opens. Out comes this man and out comes the blonde woman.

Matt Bai: Hart walks out with Donna Rice, sort of arm in arm.

Tom Fiedler: He quickly realizes something is wrong.

Matt Bai: He kind of makes the surveillance. They see him. He sees them. He turns her back around. They go inside.

Tom Fiedler: Go back inside the townhouse.

Matt Bai: He sends her away through the back door.

Tom Fiedler: Then he comes back out of the townhouse-

Robert: Hops in his car--

Tom Fiedler: -and starts to drive off. Our photographer starts to chase Senator Hart's car.

Matt Bai: He drives a couple blocks--

Tom Fiedler: Up streets, down streets, back and forth.

Robert: He gets out of the car.

Tom Fiedler: Walks through a park.

Robert: Chase continues on foot.

Matt Bai: He knows they're following him, and they know he knows they're following him.

Robert: Hart ducks around the corner. They lose him for a second, then they're running to catch up.

Matt Bai: Then--

Tom Fiedler: They turn a corner in an alley. There's Hart. There is the presumed nominee of the Democratic Party, the most important Democratic politician in the country. They're confronting each other.

Jad: For a moment, standing in the alleyway behind Hart's townhouse, they just stare at each other because there is no script for this moment.

Tom Fiedler: Ultimately, he asked, "Well, who are you?" "Well, we're from the Miami Herald." He didn't really say anything. I told him that we wanted to know why he was meeting with this woman in his townhouse, a woman who at that point we knew had spent the night with him.

Matt Bai: He says, in myriad ways, myriad times--

Tom Fiedler: "I'm not going to tell you who that woman was. This is private. This isn't public."

Matt Bai: He says there's no affair, which he would maintain forever after. Ultimately--

Tom Fiedler: He said, "I've said enough." He turned and walked inside and slammed the door. We did tell him, though. We said, "We're going to write this story unless you give us a reason that explains as to why what we are seeing and what we're concluding is wrong." He never did that. We kind of look at ourselves and say, "Well, now what do we do?" Ultimately, the call was we have the proof we feel we needed. We know that publicly he was saying these things, and we now know that privately he was engaged in this.

Robert: They ran back to the hotel room. Fiedler frantically typed out the story.

Tom Fiedler: "Gary Hart, whose presidential campaign has been dogged by rumors of womanizing, spent Friday night and much of Saturday with a woman who came from Miami to meet him." I finally went back and I probably slept for three or four hours.

Robert: Okay, so you're going to do the story. The only thing that gives me pause is under this standard, you'd lose Jack Kennedy, certainly.

Tom Fiedler: Yes.

Robert: You'd lose Woodrow Wilson, I think. you'd lose a lot of people you might not want to lose.

Tom Fiedler: But you've leaped to the conclusion that the public would banish a person for that. I don't go there.

Robert: Yes.

Jamie York: Are you worried about how it's going to land?

Jad: That's our producer, Jamie York.

Tom Fiedler: Terrified. I was terrified.

Robert: The next morning--

News Presenter 12: An ABC New s brief.

Tom Fiedler: The political world explodes.

News Presenter 13: Democratic presidential hopeful Gary Hart.

News Presenter 14: Gary Hart.

News Presenter 15: Gary Hart.

Tom Fiedler: It truly became a firestorm.

News Presenter 16: The Miami Herald reports today that Hart, "Spent Friday night and most of Saturday-

News Presenter 17: The Miami Herald reports that Hart and a Miami woman spent Friday night alone together.

News Presenter 16: -in his Washington townhouse with a young woman."

Matt Bai: That story begins ricocheting around the country.

News Presenter 18: On CNN.

Matt Bai: By Sunday--

News Presenter 19: Confronted by Herald reporters last night-

News Presenter 20: Hart denied any impropriety.

News Presenter 19: -Hart denied any impropriety.

Matt Bai: It's very apparent that not only is Hart in trouble, but the entire culture of media around politics has changed in some very dramatic way.

Robert: When you think about the mindset of the television people, the radio people, the newspaper people, is there any self-doubt there? Is there people saying, "Is this really a question of his ability to conduct matters of state?" Is that question being asked?

Matt Bai: There's a tremendous amount of self-doubt.

News Presenter 21: Not everyone agrees that such intense public scrutiny is necessary.

Matt Bai: There was widespread feeling-

News Presenter 22: The Miami Herald was put on the defensive.

Matt Bai: -that what Fiedler and his colleagues had done was wrong.

Lesley Stahl: You know, that's out of bounds.

News Presenter 23: What business is it of the press?

Matt Bai: You staked out a guy in his home?

Lesley Stahl: What are they up to, sneaking around in the bushes and all that?

News Presenter 24: A lot of reporters don't think it's relevant. One reason is this, nobody knows where this is going to lead.

News Presenter 25: Does this set a precedent?

News Presenter 26: Should reporters be staking out George Bush's house? Bruce Babbitt's house? Joe Biden's house?

Matt Bai: Then in the same breath, there's generally this sense of, but you know-

News Presenter 27: All he had to do, basically, was stay clean.

Matt Bai: -what was he thinking?

News Presenter 28: Hart is to blame.

News Presenter 29: It's Gary Hart's fault.

Matt Bai: Didn't he understand that things had changed? Doesn't the public maybe have a right to know?

News Presenter 30: The newspaper that began the controversy is not backing down.

Male 1: This was not character assassination. This was character suicide. He did it, we didn't.

News Presenter 31: Even as the debate heats up over the ethics of its coverage of Gary Hart.

Matt Bai: There was a real conflict. All the various echelon of media respond to this differently.

Tom Fiedler: The New York Times refuses to touch it. Originally, the Washington Post is deeply conflicted.

Robert: As for the public--

News Presenter 32: In an unscientific Herald telephone poll, 63 percent of the callers said they thought the paper was making too much of a fuss over Gary Hart.

Matt Bai: I mean, the polling shows that people think the media overstepped. He's still polling very strongly. He's winning in the public mind.

Robert: According to Lesley Stahl, most people seemed to be willing to compartmentalize.

Lesley Stahl: Most people can split off how's he going to be as President and is he cheating on his wife?

Matt Bai: It was not clear that the tide was going to take Hart out at all.

Robert: Hart and his team try to get ahead of this story. They schedule a press conference in New Hampshire. On the flight over, Kevin Sweeney, his press secretary, preps him.

Kevin Sweeney: I remember asking Hart a question, something like, "Have you ever been unfaithful to your wife?" He shot back at me with anger. He said, "I don't have to answer that question. That's a question that I can answer to God, to my wife, but it's not a question that I need to answer in politics. That's a dangerous question to be asking. We don't want to go there." I just said, "That's a great answer. Just hold that anger. That's an appropriate response.

News Presenter 33: Senator Hart. Senator Hart.

Kevin Sweeney: We get to the press conference.

Jad: Hart and Sweeney walk into this colonial-style room at Dartmouth College.

News Presenter 33: Senator Hart, Senator Hart, there is a new poll.

Kevin Sweeney: There are lights everywhere. The room is filled.

Matt Bai: Sweaty. It's hot. There's more media than anyone's ever seen packed in.

Kevin Sweeney: It's a really intense environment.

Matt Bai: Hart has very little buffer, and he's handling the questions-

News Presenter 34: How are you going to convince them that you're not going to make this kind of mistake in judgment about personal behavior again?]

Matt Bai: -really pretty brilliantly.

Gary Hart: I won't tell them. I'll demonstrate it. As time goes on, people are going to want to know about your judgment, your character on the issues that affect their lives and their families and their nation. That's what this campaign is going to be about.

Matt Bai: He's kind of firing on all cylinders.

Kevin Sweeney: Hart goes through 30 minutes, 40 minutes of questions. Then--

News Presenter 35: In your remarks yesterday, you raised the issue of morality and you raised the issue of truthfulness.

Matt Bai: At some point, he calls on a young reporter named Paul Taylor.

Paul Taylor: Be very specific. I have a series of questions about it.

Matt Bai: Paul Taylor walks him through a series of questions.

Paul Taylor: You said you did nothing immoral. Did you mean that you had no sexual relationship with Donna Rice last weekend or any other time you were with her?

Gary Hart: That is correct. That is correct.

Paul Taylor: Do you believe that adultery is immoral?

Gary Hart: Yes.

Paul Taylor: Have you ever committed adultery?]

Matt Bai: He says, "Senator, have you ever committed adultery?"

Gary Hart: Um--

Jad: Senator Hart looked out at the sea of reporters.

Matt Bai: No politician had ever publicly been asked that broad, direct a question about his personal behavior. It really just shocked the room.

Jad: We don't know what Gary Hart was thinking in that moment. He did not want to be interviewed on tape. It's clear that if he said yes or no to that broad of a question, then his entire married life-- because have you ever committed adultery? That word 'ever.' His entire married life would suddenly be in play. As far as we know, no other person in his situation in history had ever been asked to drag that much of himself into the limelight. On his face you can see--

Matt Bai: That he knows that this is never going to end. I mean, he knew how many women he'd seen over the years. He could envision them all being paraded through the papers. He could tell already that there was all this new sort of tabloid press, and that the political press was following along, that he was never going to be able to talk about his agenda.

Gary Hart: Um--

Matt Bai: Hart stumbled around for a minute. Ultimately he says--

Gary Hart: I do not have to answer this question.

Kevin Sweeney: "I don't have to answer that question."

Paul Taylor: It was introduced by you, Mr. Hart.

Gary Hart: That's right.

Paul Taylor: I think--

Kevin Sweeney: When I heard that response, I felt it. I felt it. The tone was such that it felt like defeat. It felt like he is exhausted, and he can't take this. I was offended. I really in that moment thought this is just wrong. This has nothing to do with what is necessary to run this country. I just thought, this is not-- we're not going to survive.

Matt Bai: That moment effectively does him in.

Gary Hart: I have told you the facts. If you don't believe me, there's nothing I can do about it.

News Presenters: Senator Hart--]

News Presenter 36: Gary Hart is finished as a presidential candidate.

News Presenter 37: Gary Hart's formal campaign is only three weeks old.

News Presenter 36: There was simply no putting the genie back in the bottle.

News Presenter 38: His appearances yesterday were mobs in.

News Presenter 39: The Hart campaign has been hammered to its knees.

News Presenter 40: Asking the same questions again and again.

News Presenter 41: Today, after what may be remembered as the most disastrous week any presidential candidate's endured in years. Hart told an aide, "Let's go home."

Jad: A couple weeks later, that famous image of Gary Hart and Donna Rice comes out in the National Enquirer. That was that.

Robert: For people my age, that image of Donna Rice sitting in his lap and he's got this shirt on that says "Monkey Business," that's the thing you remember.

Jad: Yes. Now according to Matt Bai, you can look at this whole story, and particularly Tom Fiedler taking that call and Paul Taylor asking that question. As this moment when all of these forces way outside of Gary Hart's control come together not just to sink his campaign but to change political journalism profoundly. As with all cultural shifts, there's more than one way to look at this. Just for a gut check, we put the whole story-

Cokie Roberts: We're talking about Tom Fiedler?

Robert: Yes, Tom.

Cokie Roberts: Yes.

Jad: -in front of this lady.

Jamie: Can we have you introduce yourself?

Cokie Roberts: I'm Cokie Roberts.

Robert: No, who you are, like, part two. [laughter]

Cokie Roberts: I have six grandchildren.

Robert: No, no, no, no, no. Something NPR-y.

Cokie Roberts: I'm a political commentator and author.

Robert: Okay. Cokie Roberts believes that yes, reporters were interested in character more after Watergate, but it wasn't just that.

Cokie Roberts: The thing that's important to keep in mind here is that there were many more women covering candidates at that point than there had been before. There were women on the bus. In the case of Gary Hart, several of those women had had personal encounters with him. There were times when you'd be in a room where he had hit on every woman in the room. This was not somebody that women who were covering campaigns were ignorant of.

The other thing to keep in mind, Robert, is that the whole women's movement did talk quite a bit about the personal is political. Because the way women were treated was something that we thought-- and I continue to think-- is a good gauge of character. There was something of a sense that he treated women like Kleenex. We were expanding the universe of what was a major character flaw.

Jamie: Then are you kind of rooting Fiedler on?

Cokie Roberts: Oh, absolutely. Finally, somebody's written about it, and thank God it's a guy.

Jamie: As much as you were cheering them on, was there any concern that that was changing the rules of journalism?

Cokie Roberts: No.

Jamie: Why?

Cokie Roberts: Because the rules of journalism were constantly changing, as they should.

Jad: According to Cokie Roberts, this was less about journalism changing than about journalism catching up with the ethics of the time.

Cokie Roberts: Look, we elect our presidents based on who they are, not on what policies they stand for. It's different from any other office. The voters need to know as much as they can humanly know about that person.

Jamie: Is there a line for you? Is there a place you won't go in taking the full measure of a candidate?

Cokie Roberts: Not for president that I can think of.

Jamie: There's nothing you wouldn't touch?

Cokie Roberts: No. I mean, I'd have to know that it was true.

Jamie: Sure.

Cokie Roberts: No. No.

Lesley Stahl: [laughs] I love that. Oh.

Jad: Lesley Stahl had a slightly different take.

Lesley Stahl: She's fabulous, Cokie Roberts. I didn't go there. That's interesting. I just didn't want to ask about it. I didn't want to go there. I'm telling you this even though I covered Watergate, and would've asked any number of questions about character. You know, it's open season, fellas. The public needs to know this. Sex is really a hard place for me to pry, so I agree with it but I also have my own opinion that's there's propriety. I'm old-fashioned, I guess. Am I? I don't know.

Gary Hart: I had intended, quite frankly, to come down here this morning and read a short, carefully worded political statement.

Robert: This is Gary Hart's statement a few days after that press conference.

Gary Hart: Saying that I was withdrawing from the race, and then quietly disappear from the stage. Then after frankly tossing and turning all night, I said to myself, "Hell, no. [cheers] I'm not going to do that because it's not my style and because I'm a proud man and I'm proud of what I've accomplished. In public life, some things may be interesting, but that doesn't necessarily mean they're important.

We're all going to have to seriously question a system for selecting our national leaders that reduces the press of this nation to hunters and presidential candidates to being hunted. Politics in this country-- take it from me-- is on the verge of becoming another form of athletic competition or sporting match. We all better do something to make this system work or we're all going to be soon rephrasing Jefferson to say, "I tremble for my country when I think we may, in fact, get the kind of leaders we deserve."

Robert: Now we did reach out to Mr. Hart for comment, explaining to him the story we were doing. He wrote back this response. "Thank you for your letter and the invitation to participate in your current story. Though I did not become President, my life continues to be extraordinarily rich. Perhaps someday someone will tell that story. For now, I have no interest in revisiting what many consider a turning point for the nation and a few an injustice. I do believe that the full and accurate story of that event remains to be told. Signed, Gary Hart."

Brooke Gladstone: Mm.

Latif Nasser: It does feel, like I said at the top, like, it sort of feels like the episode is about this moment, but it also doesn't at all.

Brooke Gladstone: Right. I think you're absolutely right. It does-- there are certain similarities, but there's also a tremendous difference.

Latif Nasser: Once again, Brooke Gladstone, host of the WNYC show On the Media.

Brooke Gladstone: You have Trump being accused dozens of times of sexual assault or sexual harassment, even convicted at least in a civil trial, but it doesn't seem to matter.

Latif Nasser: That is staggering.

Brooke Gladstone: Yes.

Latif Nasser: Why did that not matter way more?

Brooke Gladstone: Well, you see, this is what makes this time different. This is a time where a simple lie will be embraced if it serves a voter's purposes.

Latif Nasser: Brooke says, of course, part of what's going on here is that the electorate has become much more rigidly partisan-- even tribal. It also has to do with our relationship with the media, where we get our news, who we trust, who we don't trust.

Brooke Gladstone: This is a profoundly cynical time. I don't think I have ever lived through a political era that has been as cynical as this.

Latif Nasser: Brooke says she thinks this has to do, at least in part, with an evolution since the time of Gary Hart in the way reporters and media outlets think about what's worth covering or not.

Brooke Gladstone: Yes, precisely. Precisely. I have an anecdote you might find interesting.

Latif Nasser: Okay, let's hear it.

Brooke Gladstone: It was in the late '80's. I was the editor of All Things Considered at the time. George H.W. Bush was in some sort of a car thing. There was a threat, a loud bang. There was a woman with him in the car who got hustled away. Her name was Jennifer Fitzgerald, and she had had-- it was a 17-year affair with George H.W. Bush.

Latif Nasser: No. I never even heard of that.

Brooke Gladstone: This was an open secret.

Latif Nasser: Really?

Brooke Gladstone: It's believed they began their relationship in '74. She was his secretary when he was chief of the US liaison office to China. She was his executive assistant when he was the CIA director.

Latif Nasser: Wow, how have I never heard of her? Wow. Yes.

Brooke Gladstone: Vice president. President. She denied the affair.

Latif Nasser: Okay.

Brooke Gladstone: We talked about whether this was the time to sort of bring this story out into the open.

Latif Nasser: At the time, he was-- what was his--

Brooke Gladstone: He was president.

Latif Nasser: He was president.

Brooke Gladstone: He was president.

Latif Nasser: Yes.

Brooke Gladstone: We ended up not doing it. We ended up not doing George H.W. Bush's affair. It never was done.

Latif Nasser: Why did you decide not to?

Brooke Gladstone: Well, in the late '80s in that editorial office, we decided that it really wouldn't inform the public of anything related to George H.W. Bush's governance of the country.

Latif Nasser: Brooke says this is the important thing to pay attention to, not so much whether you're intruding on someone's privacy or not, but rather--

Brooke Gladstone: What better informs the people, and what is a distraction?

Latif Nasser: Because in the years that followed, from Bill Clinton's sex scandals to George W. Bush, whether he used cocaine in the past, to Barack Obama's tan suit, the press constantly erred on the side of coverage. More information, but also with it maybe more distraction. The aperture on what was worth talking about kept opening wider and wider until Trump came on the scene, and the press pretty much started covering everything and anything about him.

Brooke Gladstone: I mean, during Trump's first campaign against Hillary Clinton, CNN would focus on an empty podium-- because Trump would arrive late all the time-- rather than simply shift to the speech that at that very moment Hillary Clinton was giving elsewhere.

Latif Nasser: Of course, after he was elected President, he continued to offer the press a deluge of outrageous statements, exaggeration, and lies.

Brooke Gladstone: Right before the first inauguration he said, "Oh my God, all the fancy dresses in Washington, DC, have all been sold out because of the upcoming inauguration. It's going to be such a big thing." The Washington Post sent people out to go to the stores to find out so did they sell out? Of course, no, they did not. Was it worth it?

Latif Nasser: There was just so much coverage of all these little things that even when something big and important was happening, it just sort of got lost in the noise.

Brooke Gladstone: Obviously, Donald J. Trump is a master of distraction, and he doesn't really care how people think about it.

Latif Nasser: The media just keeps falling for these distractions. This is actually something that Brooke, on her show On the Media, has reported about repeatedly, including just this past spring in an episode called, "How Not to Cover the Trump Trials."

News Presenter 42: You're looking at live pictures in New York City of Donald Trump's motorcade. It's about a 20-minute drive between Trump Tower and--

Brooke Gladstone: The coverage around Trump's indictment found the media stumbling back into some of its own worst habits.

News Presenter 43: Heading down the FDR.

News Presenter 44: To the Manhattan courthouse on Chambers Street.

News Presenter 45: Arriving at this intersection of American history--

Brooke Gladstone: What the media that vowed to never again waste precious airtime on Trump-related minutiae forgot.

News Presenter 46: Trump leaving Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue.

News Presenter 47: They're now making their way across town.

Brooke Gladstone: As we've heard now since 2016 at least, the ability to flood the zone with outrages causes a kind of emotional, intellectual, and maybe even ethical paralysis.

Latif Nasser: Do you feel like-- is it just going to get more and more like this, more sensational, more distraction? Can it go back or is it just sort of a one-way ratchet?

Brooke Gladstone: Well, I'm not the best prognosticator.

Latif Nasser: [laughs] That's fair.

Brooke Gladstone: I would say there's a symbiotic relationship between Americans and their leaders and Americans and their media. In a sense, we're seen as consumers, not as citizens. We are served what we will buy and what we find tasty.

Latif Nasser: Tabloid coverage will give you tabloid presidents, I guess. is the vision there.

Brooke Gladstone: If our media and our leadership offer us something else, we can be better. The reporters may take the cue and decide that this isn't worth it, or they'll decide that this is going to be very clique-y and people on the side that you're on are going to love it. It's going to make them feel good, and it will just be in the process of tossing out red meat.

Latif Nasser: Mm.

Brooke Gladstone: Hard to say.

Latif Nasser: Thank you so much to Brooke Gladstone. Honestly, when I am trying to avoid getting stuck in this swirl of media distraction, the circus of it all, On the Media is the place I go. They put things in perspective, they curate the news in a way that is clarifying and not muddying. Yes, go check them out wherever you get your podcasts, On the Media. The original story we did on Gary Hart drew so much from Matt Bai's book.

It's called All the Truth is Out. You can, of course, find a link to the book on our website, radiolab.org. That story, the original story, was produced by Simon Adler with help from Jamie York. The update you just heard with Brooke was produced by Rebecca Laks. I'm Latif Nasser. This has been Radiolab. We will catch you next week.

[music]

David: Hi, I'm David and I'm from Baltimore, Maryland. Radiolab was created by Jad Abumrad, and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser are our co-hosts. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes: Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bressler, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gebel, Maria Paz Gutiérrez, Sindhu Gnanasambandan, Matt Kielty, Annie McEwen, Rebecca Laks, Alex Neason, Sarah Qari, Sarah Sandbach, Arianne Wack, Pat Walters and Molly Webster. Our fact-checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, and Natalie Middleton.

Ellie: Hi, this is Ellie from Cleveland, Ohio. Leadership support for Radiolab's science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

Brooke Gladstone: Thanks for listening to the On the Media Midweek podcast. Tune into the big show. It usually posts on Friday around dinner time to hear about the escalating threats to public radio and what that means.

[END OF AUDIO]

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Do Sex Scandals Matter Anymore in Politics?

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It’s been almost a year since the historic music outlet Pitchfork shrank considerably. On this week’s On the Media, why the distinctive voices in music journalism are worth saving. Plus, how AI music generators could upend the industry.

[01:00]  Host Micah Loewinger, speaks with Ann Powers, critic and correspondent for NPR Music, on Condé Nast's acquisition of the influential music publication Pitchfork, and what this means for the future of music journalism.

[12:45] Host Micah Loewinger speaks to Kyle Chayka, staff writer at The New Yorker, about how algorithms are changing how people discover and listen to music – and all too often, not for the better.

[28:39] Former OTM producer, and current composer and sound designer, Mark Henry Phillips, on how AI music generators could fundamentally upend the industry for good.

Further reading:

“With Pitchfork in peril, a word on the purpose of music journalism,” by Ann Powers

"Why I Finally Quit Spotify," by Kyle Chayka

A segment from this show originally aired on our January 19, 2024 program, Trouble at The Baltimore Sun, and the End of an Era for Pitchfork.

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 pair of headphones hang on a peg above rows of CDs, while a customer stands in the background

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Customers shop for music at Decatur CD on Record Store Day, Saturday, April 19, 2014, in Decatur, Ga.

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

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The state of music criticism; and the AI generator that could put composers out of a job.

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How AI and Algorithms Are Transforming Music

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Kyle Chayka: The algorithm as your best friend, as the intimate knower of your innermost secrets, is definitely what Spotify would love for it to be.

Mark Henry Phillips: Guys, is this how it ends? Is this the sign of the death of music reviews?

Brooke Gladstone: As the year comes to a close, amid a barrage of best music lists, we reflect on the state of music criticism.

Anne Powers: The critic is in a parallel relationship with the musician, who also is revered and scorned in our society. [chuckles] All of this says something about how we treat culture.

Brooke Gladstone: From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media, I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger. Also on this week's show, an AI music generator gives a composer a run for his money.

Mark Henry Phillips: I don't want to admit it, but it's good. Like really good. It doesn't feel like it was created by AI and a data center. It feels real.

Brooke Gladstone: It's all coming up after this. From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger. It's December, and that means it's listicle season, when critics like to rank their favorite things from the past 12 months. The best movies, best TV shows, best books, and super popular in the genre with an assist from Spotify is the favorite track list.

Speaker 6: What time is it? December. Which means we're ending the year with Spotify Wrapped.

Speaker 7: Your 2024. Wrapped is here.

Speaker 8: Oh my God, I'm so excited.

Speaker 9: What were the best albums of 2024? Let's get into it, shall we?

Speaker 10: 2024 has been the best year for music this decade, hands down.

Micah Loewinger: One of the most vaunted roundups of music making once belonged to the iconic online music publication Pitchfork, which was founded in 1996. They still make waves with their rankings and year end roundups, but back in January, Pitchfork shrank considerably when it was folded into GQ by Condé Nast and most of its staff were cut. Earlier this year, I spoke to NPR music critic Anne Powers about the role Pitchfork has played in shaping tastes and music criticism today.

Anne Powers: The very opinionated reviews, the scoring system that became notorious where they give a number score to new releases, and that blog-like constant stream of content is what made Pitchfork so important.

Micah Loewinger: Tell me a little bit about some of the bands and genres that were elevated because of Pitchfork. Or at least were the favorites of the cast of writers in its heyday.

Anne Powers: Well, Micah, I'm curious, what bands do you associate with Pitchfork? I bet you're a Pitchfork reader.

Micah Loewinger: I was a big Pitchfork reader when I was in high school and in college, the bands I associated with it were Spoon or Phoenix or Radiohead, Animal Collective.

Anne Powers: Broken Social Scene?

Micah Loewinger: Yes, Broken Social Scene.

Anne Powers: Arcade Fire would be another one. These are really the leading "indie" rock bands of the late 2000s and early 2010s, coming out of the indie rock tradition that in previous generations had given us bands ranging from R.E.M. to Nirvana. So really, Pitchfork was the 21st century flag bearer for the kind of music that Rolling Stone would have covered in the '60s and '70s and Spin magazine would have covered in the '80s and '90s. Pitchfork's strong association with that kind of music in the early 2000s is what made it such a potent brand and gave it that foothold that allowed it to truly show its influence.

Micah Loewinger: Yes, and to put even just a finer point on it, there was a 2006 piece in Wired titled the Pitchfork Effect.

Anne Powers: Right.

Micah Loewinger: That described the make or break power it had over that era of bands.

Anne Powers: Yes. Let's put this in the historical context of music magazines going back even before the rock era. In the jazz world, for example, you had downbeat its annual polls, its reviews, its articles had the similar effect on the jazz world.

Micah Loewinger: I want to ask you, though, about the style of writing the voice, because it wasn't just their curation, it was something else about how they wrote. Can you describe it?

Anne Powers: The basic unit of Pitchfork is the album review. And what is an album review? This is a philosophical question, Micah. [chuckles]

Micah Loewinger: What is an album review, Ann?

Anne Powers: It can be something as small and simple as a little blurb that says, "Hey, you're going to like this." Or it can be as long as a cover and really become an essay that considers music in many different contexts. Or possibly it could be a vehicle for personal expression, for memoir, for expressing ideas from a very opinionated place. I think one of the things that makes Pitchfork so important is that Schreiber and then the other editors there have allowed writers to really develop a voice.

Micah Loewinger: Sometimes that voice was mean.

Anne Powers: [laughs] Yes, negative reviews, they're kind of like the Thor's Hammer of Pitchfork, writers there and the editors there would wield those negative reviews as a way of proving their influence and a way of generating discussion.

Micah Loewinger: Some of those 0 out of 10 reviews haven't aged so well. Matt LeMay had given Liz Phair's 2003 self titled album a zero at the time he, I think, was maybe 18 or 19, and he didn't like that Liz Phair, who was an indie musician, had come out with a more pop radio friendly album.

Anne Powers: Right.

Micah Loewinger: But then in 2019, LeMay returned to his review and described it as condescending and cringy. He tweeted, "The idea that indie rock and radio pop are both cultural constructs, language to play with, masks for an artist to try on, yes, I certainly didn't get that. Liz Phair did get that way before many of us did."

Anne Powers: Kudos to Matt LeMay for engaging in some very constructive self criticism and kudos to Pitchfork, because I think one of the best things that Pitchfork has done in recent years and under the guidance of Puja Patel, the editor in chief, who was let go as part of these layoffs, is they have revisited old reviews, they have created a whole feature that allowed for them to review records they'd ignored from genres they weren't as interested in. This self examination and confrontation with the limits and problems of the Pitchfork approach, to me, that is one of the most inspiring aspects of what's been happening in music writing in the past decade or so.

We have a much more diverse field of music writers now. Many more women, many more people of color, many more LGBTQIA people writing about music. That diversity has totally changed what we do. I think it's great, and Pitchfork has been a huge part of that.

Micah Loewinger: Yes, and you've mentioned that as the publication's aperture has expanded, they now cover a much more varied range of musicians. How has that affected the editorial experience, you think?

Anne Powers: Yes, Pitchfork covers pop, but they mostly cover pop and varying mainstream artists in their news section. Yes, they will review a Taylor Swift record, for example, and certainly a Beyonce record, as any of us would. They are also covering, you know, very obscure electronic music, Avant Garde jazz or Avant Garde or classical music or Americana music. I think it's that diversity that makes the review section particularly so valuable because it is like going into a great huge record store where you could happen upon something you didn't expect.

Let's be real, there's so much more to music than the cool new bunch of dudes in tight pants or whatever.

Micah Loewinger: Playing some growling guitars typically.

Anne Powers: Yes. I love that stuff, but I think it's great that Pitchfork grew up. So many of my favorite writers who've come through Pitchfork in recent years, they're diversifying the field. That, to me is so crucial.

Micah Loewinger: Not everyone has been on board with the changes at the site. Writing in the Guardian this week, Laura Snapes responded to critics of Pitchfork who have, "lamented Pitchfork's poptimist shift over the past decade". Poptimist. What is she referring to there?

Anne Powers: I'm glad you brought up that term, Micah, because it's one that drives me crazy. The word poptimism originated in response to an essay that Kelefa Sanneh wrote in the New York Times called the Rap Against Rockism. Kelefa's criticism of the world of music writing was that it was dominated by straight white men who like guitar based rock music made by straight white men, and that this had created a hierarchy within the music industry. Quickly, this critique created a space for some of us to say, "Hey, let's also take mainstream pop music seriously.

Let's take dance music seriously. Let's take these fields that happen to be dominated by African American artists, by women. Let's make a space for that." Carl Wilson also wrote a really important book. It was about Celine Dion, but it was really about how our tastes form.

Micah Loewinger: Oh, yes. This is A Journey to the End of Taste. Is that what it is?

Anne Powers: Yes.

Micah Loewinger: It's a fascinating premise. He basically says, "Celine Dion, one of the best selling artists of our time, I hate her music. Why?"

[laughter]

Anne Powers: He was saying, "Okay, from my standpoint as a fan of indie rock, as a white guy, et cetera, what am I bringing to the table when I listen to a Celine Dion record? Why do I think this is "bad music"? Why do so many other people think it's great music? That's the essence of what the poptimist project really was. It was not to promote mainstream music. It was to take seriously music that is very popular music that rock critics scorned historically. I think Pitchfork's evolution from a site that sort of embodied that scorn to one that was fighting against it was one of the most beautiful things that's happened in media in the past few decades.

Micah Loewinger: It's been interesting to see the evolution of Pitchfork land between all of these competing interests. I'm thinking of the 2020 review of Taylor Swift's surprise indie folk album Folklore, written by Jillian Mapes, who wrote a pretty positive review of the album, but ultimately the site only gave the album an eight.

Anne Powers: Right.

Micah Loewinger: She was sent death threats, constant harassment online. It's just fascinating to me that on one hand you have people who bristle at the very fact that Pitchfork is reviewing Taylor Swift, and on the other, [laughs] fans of Taylor Swift aren't happy with a critical review about her.

Anne Powers: The critic has always been an embattled figure in our society, both revered and utterly disrespected, both considered a nothing who only lives through the works of others, and someone that supposedly makes people tremble when they walk in the room. Right? In a strange way, the critic is in a parallel relationship with the musician, who also is revered and scorned in our society. All of this says something about how we treat culture. On the one hand, there are these attempts to sportsify it, to quantify it, to make hierarchies, which always, inevitably fail because encounters with art are personal.

On the other hand, there is such a thing as aesthetic judgment. I think that that combination of stepping back and being close at the same time, it's a complicated way to talk about culture, and it can be upsetting to some.

Micah Loewinger: Ann, thanks so much.

Anne Powers: It was great talking to you.

Micah Loewinger: Ann Powers is a critic and correspondent for NPR Music. She's the author of several books, including the biography Traveling: On the Path of Joni Mitchell. This is On the Media.

Brooke Gladstone: This is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger. Before I landed a job at this show, I worked for a few years on and off at a couple record stores around New York City. Some of my favorite albums to this day were recommended to me by my co workers, men and women who I consider to be archivists not just of old formats like vinyl records, cassettes and CDs, but of underappreciated artists and niche genres, a knowledge of music history that can only come from a lifetime of obsessive listening, research and curation. Nowadays, I pay for Spotify.

I try to learn about music off the app and then save it for later listening on Spotify. Sometimes I find myself just letting its recommendation algorithm queue up the next track and the next, and it definitely works. Spotify has helped me discover great music, but it's never been as revelatory as a personal recommendation from a friend or an expert at a record store or an independent radio station. This feeling that I've traded convenience for something deeper is what made me want to read Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture by Kyle Chayka, a staff writer at the New Yorker.

Chayka says apps like Spotify and TikTok are great at studying user behavior, but that we should be suspicious of the idea that they can really know your taste.

Kyle Chayka: You are not aware of every time you click into a Spotify track. You're not aware of when you favorite an album on TikTok. You're absolutely not aware of every microsecond that you flip up a video or what you pay attention to a tiny bit longer than Something else. It does know exactly what you're doing and it doesn't forget, like that one time that you lingered too long on a shower tiling video. [laughter] It's like, "You remember those shower tiling videos. Let me give you some more."

Micah Loewinger: It would be good to define our terms a little bit. I know Spotify's algorithm is a trade secret. We don't know exactly how it works, but as you write in your book, there are clues based on literature about the development of recommendation algorithms that might tell us how it likely works.

Kyle Chayka: Most recommendation algorithms are black boxes because the company itself does not want you to know how it works because you might game it and that would ruin their product. A lot of them work along the same lines, essentially measuring a bunch of variables about the content that's on their platform, how many times people have clicked it, what the faves are, what the retweets are, what the time watched is, and then using that to figure out what to promote more and what to kind of push off to one side or another.

Micah Loewinger: Spotify doesn't know what's good or bad.

Kyle Chayka: Right? That's a fundamental thing. Algorithmic recommendation is not about quality. There is no essential metric of quality. There is only attention. It can do thumbs up, thumbs down. But it can't be like, "Oh, Bach is better than Mozart."

Micah Loewinger: Spotify's recommendation algorithm is just one part of what you call filter world. It's the name of your book, but it's also a concept. Can you describe it?

Kyle Chayka: Yes. Filter World, for me was this single term to describe the entire ecosystem of algorithmic feeds that we exist in. When we're on the Internet today, we are moving across all of these different platforms, whether Facebook or TikTok or Instagram, that are all driven by algorithmic recommendations that are constantly trying to guess what we might like and put the next piece of content in front of us based on what we've consumed before. I personally felt totally enclosed by this kind of sphere almost of algorithms, and I couldn't find something or listen to something without facing that surveillance and recommendation of what I was doing.

Micah Loewinger: I want to dig into some examples of this feeling of being boxed in by algorithms at the same time as feeling that they provide us with the things that will fill our time and our hearts, TV shows, movies, albums. Let's talk about Netflix, for instance. When I open up the app on my TV or laptop, it feels like I'm being given a wide range of shows and movies tailored to me, but what's really happening there.

Kyle Chayka: The homepage is supposed to be a thing that reflects your taste and filters through things that you're going to like. More often these categories are so broad and the kind of labels are so vague that they don't actually promise personalization. There's like a top 10 or there's a popular right now, and those shows are just what's convenient for Netflix to promote at a given time, what's popular with a certain segment of the users, and what they can most conveniently convince you to watch in a way. Like Netflix has this algorithmic system to change the thumbnail of a show.

Micah Loewinger: Yes, this is so creepy.

Kyle Chayka: [laughs] When you go on Netflix, the images of every TV show and movie are tailored to your preferences.

Micah Loewinger: For instance, in 2018, there was like a controversy where a bunch of people were being promoted the film Love actually, a pretty safe film to promote to a lot of people. Very popular. It turns out some people were being recommended with the prominent imagery of the Black actor Chiwetel Ejiofor, who plays only a minor part in the film.

Kyle Chayka: It's so manipulative. If I, the Netflix algorithm, know that you watch a lot of movies with Black actors, then I am going to present every movie as if it focuses on Black actors. In the case of Love Actually, which absolutely does not focus on Black actors, I will highlight one of the few scenes that has this man in it in an effort to get you to watch it. Not because you definitely like Love Actually. Not because you're gonna love Hugh Grant dancing through the halls of the government or whatever, but because it would be convenient for Netflix if you watched this movie.

Micah Loewinger: That's an egregious example of the bait and switch. I want to talk about another theme in your book. You're talking about something slightly more pernicious, which is a recommendation algorithm like Spotify's, that in maybe the largest library of legal music ever created, I am subtly encouraged to listen to the same stuff that I like over and over. How is that happening?

Kyle Chayka: There are a lot of knobs and variables that can change in these formulas. For Spotify, if you put on an album and then let it go, usually within a few songs, I think it serves you up. Something that you listen to constantly that it knows you are not going to turn off in order to lull you into that hypnotic state of just listening to the infinite playlist and not thinking about it.

Micah Loewinger: This gets into what you want out of a listening experience or what you want out of a library of culture. My own sort of leaps forward in music curiosity has come from listening to the radio. Big shock. I work for a public radio show and I really like radio, but I think of WFMU, the independent radio station in New Jersey, or WKCR, Columbia's radio station. I remember for the first time hearing the Indian music show and hearing a 30-minute raga, and then somebody explained why it was interesting at the end.

I had never encountered that kind of music before. There is something that you argue in your book that is lost when we take curation away from humans.

Kyle Chayka: Yes, human curation. And that idea of a DJ, a human person who has selected this raga, and even though it's 30 minutes, that person is like, "You are going to like this. It's important." That's such a different encounter with a piece of culture than what you get on Spotify or what you get in a YouTube recommendation. The job of human curators, like a DJ, like a museum curator or a librarian, is to build meaning through juxtaposition and then guide the consumer into it in a way that helps them kind of broaden their own horizons, as you said, or brings them to a new place of taste or thought.

We just don't get that from a machine.

Micah Loewinger: That said, I'm sure listeners right now are like, "But Discover Weekly has delivered some great stuff to me or I keep a close eye on some of the high profile Spotify playlists that are curated by humans." This is not a pure either or. Right?

Kyle Chayka: The Internet is not the same thing as algorithms. There are many digital platforms that are not algorithmic. There are also ways of using Spotify that are not guided by algorithms. We can't blame algorithms so much, like they fulfill a really important function in sorting information but I think we can take back some of our agency in comparing past.

Micah Loewinger: Ways of consuming music, say like through the radio, to what you call filter world, we do run the risk of being overly nostalgic. The tastemakers of old, the radio DJs, the record store clerks, the critics, they had their own blind spots and biases. DJs of top 40 radio stations were swayed by money, pressure from labels, whatever the public at large they thought would respond to, that's not exactly for the pure love of music. Right?

Kyle Chayka: The old algorithms were human gatekeepers who made decisions about what culture should be promoted and what shouldn't. Magazine editors, record label executives, the DJs who might be influenced by payola. I don't think that's inherently good. I do think in the best examples like an indie radio DJ who's not overseen by corporate overlords, that can create really beautiful moments of curation and the transmission of culture but so can a YouTube recommendation. I've gotten really interesting stuff from a YouTube recommendation that I wouldn't have known a person who could give me and I wouldn't have known to seek it out.

Micah Loewinger: Give me an example of the algorithm serving up something that got around the calcified biases of the old gatekeepers.

Kyle Chayka: An example of something that I personally like is the Japanese genre of city pop, which was this kind of music that was made in the '70s and '80s mostly. It's this very ebullient R&B, big orchestra, propulsive beats, big bold, crazy music, and it's really fantastic. It was hidden away for a long time. Japanese people were not listening to it much after the '80s, and then in the 2000s some record DJs brought it up and then it hit YouTube where it just blew up because for some reason it worked for the recommendation engine.

A lot of people were listening to this music, they were liking it, they were engaging with it, they were seeking out more of it. YouTube registered that this music was getting popular with an American audience long before a record label executive could do anything or even a radio DJ. It was a kind of democratic revival of the genre of music online, which I think is really cool.

Micah Loewinger: With the so-called democratization promised by social media, is amplification and all of the problems that it introduces. Algorithms picking things up to go viral that otherwise might not have, and that any regulation of algorithms which you explore in your book should mandate greater transparency around what gets pushed into people's feeds. Tell me a little bit about why we should regulate algorithms and what you see as the potential avenues for that.

Kyle Chayka: Right now there are essentially no rules about what an algorithmic feed can recommend to you or how it can interact with you. You can regulate what kinds of content gets algorithmically recommended. You could say that problematic content that promotes violence or self harm cannot be subject to an algorithmic recommendation. And if that was blanket illegal, as it may soon be in the European Union, then social networks would be much less likely to even touch that kind of material in its feed. All of a sudden you could only find that stuff if you opted into it, it would not get pushed out to more people.

There's regulation about what kinds of content can be recommended or promoted. There's regulation around transparency for algorithmic feeds, which means that we could see how something works and know what variables are being taken into account when something is promoted to us and there's regulation that mandates you be able to opt out of recommendation.

Micah Loewinger: Are they likely to pass and be implemented?

Kyle Chayka: In the European Union, they have passed the General Data Protection Regulation, which has caused that wave of pop ups that say, "Please let me give you cookies." The Digital Services act more recently, which does mandate things like algorithmic transparency and opting out of feeds. In the US we're way, way, way behind that. Some of these companies like Facebook are changing how their feeds work based on the European regulations but in the US we don't actually have any of those rules. And the few efforts that have been made in government have just not gotten very far at all.

Micah Loewinger: In your conclusion, you acknowledged that the intersection between art and culture and technology has always been fraught. Cameras and radios sparked fear, so did the telephone. In fact, you quoted one Japanese novelist who was lamenting what was lost when street lights were introduced in Tokyo at the late 1800s and early 1900s. Are algorithms fundamentally upending how our world works? Or is this part of a larger fear we have about change?

Kyle Chayka: We do always fear what technology does to culture. Culture is threatened by a thing like the camera, like recorded music, like the radio. Then artists find a way to carry on and make great things, and then we adapt and reframe our idea. No one's going to say that recorded music is a sin or that we should go back to only live music because that would be more authentic. There's no pure culture but I do think pendulums swing. We've gone so far into this algorithmic ecosystem that I think we desire to retreat from it a little bit.

The same way that we had to make up regulations for seat belts and car safety rather than people flooring it down the road and having no safety checks in place. The financial exchange is so different to how art is sustained. Before, a musician would sell you their album and they would make money. Now it's mediated by this huge algorithmic platform of Spotify and they only make money based on certain metrics, based on streams. I think one way to retreat from that and to go back a little ways is just finding ways to directly support the voices that you like.

A designer, even a curator or a DJ who makes cool playlists. The best way we can ensure the survival of those kinds of relationships is just to pay them money. It's more expensive than a Spotify subscription. You're not going to get an infinity of music, but getting that infinity of music for $10 a month means that musicians have a really hard time making a living. Even though it's nice to be on the TikTok feed and see who you like to see, that's ultimately a hard way for your favorite creators of whatever to make a living.

Micah Loewinger: Kyle, thank you very much.

Kyle Chayka: Thank you for having me.

Micah Loewinger: Kyle Chayka is a staff writer for the New Yorker. His latest book is Filter World: How Algorithms Flattened Culture.

Brooke Gladstone: Coming up, the AI robots are coming for your music.

Micah Loewinger: This is On the Media. This is On the Media. I'm Micah Loewinger.

Brooke Gladstone: I'm Brooke Gladstone. We're sticking with the music theme for the rest of the show, but we're turning the focus away from listeners to makers. This comes to us from a former OTM producer, Mark Henry Phillips. You may not remember his name, but you'll probably be familiar with his work.

[MUSIC]

Brooke Gladstone: Yep, that infamous jingle was a Mark creation. When he left the show 14 years ago, it was to pursue a career in music, and it kind of worked out. He started scoring films and making commercials for clients like Google, PayPal, and Ford. He's also made music for podcasts like Serial Startup, This American Life, and Homecoming. As he says, he's not a rock star, but he's made a decent living making music, until now. Over the past few months, Mark has become terrified of and fascinated by AI music generators, particularly one that launched in April of this year.

When he first encountered it, Mark realized his work would never be the same.

Mark Henry Phillips: I know this sounds dramatic, but the first time I played around with this AI music generator, it caused an existential crisis. I literally lost sleep staring at my ceiling in the middle of the night wondering, "Will this be my last year making money as a musician?" Okay, what happened? I stumbled across a track by a user named Man or Monster. He was trying to recreate a Toots and the Maytals track and had typed in some lyrics along with Soulful Reggae, Ska, 1969 Hammond organ male vocalist and out popped this.

[MUSIC]

Mark Henry Phillips: I don't want to admit it, but it's good. Like, really good. It doesn't feel like it was created by AI in a data center somewhere. It feels like it was made in a makeshift studio in Jamaica on a hot summer night in 1969. It feels real. Of course, this brings up all sorts of copyright issues because this sounds a lot like Toots, also known as Frederick Hibbert, also known as a real live human being. I would wager to bet that sounds that good because Toot's entire catalog was used in this AI music generator's training data.

Let's ignore that for now. Instead, let's just focus on how good this sounds.

[MUSIC]

Mark Henry Phillips: Girl is not a good one for you. I know that you must feel it too. AI generated images often have glitches like pictures of people often have extra fingers. In AI text, it also has its subtle tells that make it feel not quite human, but this track, it might not be perfect, but it feels like real music. If it feels real, that has big implications. Like what, you ask? Let me give you a hypothetical. You're an ad exec making a beer commercial. You want a track that sounds like it was recorded in Jamaica in 1969, but you don't want to deal with all the money and legal back and forth that comes with light licensing a vintage track.

So you turn to a composer like me, you pay me. Not as much as you'd pay Toots or Desmond Dekker, but still enough that it'd be worth my while. Boom. You get a commercial and I have a job. Years ago, that's exactly what happened to me. I was hired to make a song that sounds like an early rock steady tune from 1969 Jamaica. Essentially, I was given the same prompt as that AI track, and here's what I came up with.

[MUSIC]

Mark Henry Phillips: It took me a couple days, and it's pretty good, fine, mediocre. It's a little embarrassing to play it now, and I was actually going to take the vocals out because that part is super embarrassing, but if we're going to do a comparison, it's kind of relevant. So here they are.

[MUSIC]

Whatever you think of my track, the vocals on the AI version just sound so much better, in that legally and morally dubious type of way. Don't get me wrong, there are many musicians out there who could have produced something way better than me or the AI but the vocals, here's that AI generated track again.

[MUSIC]

Mark Henry Phillips: To get something like this, you'd kind of have to hire or be an amazing Jamaican legend with a group of amazing backup singers. Even if you were, you know, Toots himself, you couldn't write, produce, record, and mix a track in under a minute. That's the crazy thing. Our hypothetical ad exec can now make this track. Hell, 10 tracks like this in under five minutes, and it's free. See why I was having that existential crisis? A lot has changed over the past decade, and the money has been on a steady trajectory downward, but now, post AI, I think a lot of composers are going to be without a job, including me.

If you've messed around with these services, you might be thinking, "They're interesting, but they're not that good without, what's this dude talking about?" but you're probably not using it to make the same stuff I make. AI isn't going to replace Billie Eilish or Radiohead, at least not for a while, but my bread and butter theme songs, commercial music score, yes, it could replace me, like today. I don't think that's necessarily true yet with other AI products like ChatGPT or Dall-E. They're definitely cool or scary, depending on your orientation, but they're not really replacing professional humans quite yet.

ChatGPT isn't writing big ad campaigns, Midjourney isn't replacing photo spreads in magazines, but music, it's different from those other mediums. I think it's interesting to think about why. I was always taught that the golden rule of music is if it sounds good, it's good. Sounds pretty basic, but it kind of has big implications. For the listener, that means you don't have to understand how a song was made to enjoy it. It's a black box process. Most people have absolutely no idea how their favorite songs were made, and it doesn't matter.

If it turns out good and it's good, but here's the weirdest part. For the musician, the process of writing music is also a little bit of a black box. A musician is never that conscious of what they're doing. You have a vague idea or a goal or a feeling, but you just mess around and discover the song. At a certain point, even if you're super cognizant of what scale and mode you're in and what the chords are doing and what is common in this style of music, at a certain point, you really just have to take a guess at what the next note is.

When I have a job, sometimes I'm really explicit with what I need to do. I'll say to myself, "Okay, this is a scene where a couple is getting to know each other. This needs to be something like a Jon Brion Score from 1997. Something a little goofy and a little romantic." Jon Brion, if you don't know, is an amazing composer and producer who scored films like Magnolia, Eternal Sunshine,and I Heart Huckabees. Anyway, I don't actually go back and listen to one of Jon Brion's pieces and dissect the chord progression or the instrumentation, and I don't find just one piece to rip off.

I just get a vague notion in my head and I start playing around and then something like this comes out.

[MUSIC]

Mark Henry Phillips: It might not be amazing, but it hit the mark for the show I was working on, and importantly, I don't think it's a ripoff of Jon Brion. I had a good target in my head and I didn't get a perfect bullseye but that's a good thing because it means I came up with something new and that's really how music works. I think this is a really key point. Take the Beatles, they were trying to sound just like Buddy Holly and Elvis and their failed attempts became the Beatles. That's just how music evolves. The point is, I can't tell you exactly how I wrote this song.

Even though this was a pretty conscious for hire process. Even this writing and recording a song for a show, it's a black box process for me. That's why these AI music services are so good. It approaches music creation in the exact same way. It doesn't consciously say, "Write a four chord progression in a melody in a mixolydian mode." No. Instead it creates a Jon Brion-esque track just how I would. It's listened to all of his music and then using neural networks, whatever those are, it has a fuzzy image of a Jon Brion vibe. I don't know exactly how it works, but I think it's just always guessing what the next sound's going to be.

On one level that means guessing the next note in the melody, but on another level that means guessing what instrument should come in next or guessing what the next cool production trick should be to keep the track interesting. In other words, it's approaching it just how I would. Here's the AI music service doing it for a Jon Brion track.

[MUSIC]

Its process is remarkably similar to a human musician. And that's why the results are too. When ChatGPT is "writing", it's also just guessing what should come next, but that's very different from actual writing. A writer knows what they're writing, but musicians, we don't fully know what we're creating, so the process is much easier for AI to replicate. This is why I think the next version of one of these AI music generators will replace me very soon. Let's take a project I'm working on right now. I'm scoring a show that's Hitchcock ass. Hitchcockian.

The show involves trains and even though Strangers on a Train was scored by Dimitri Tiomkin, I obviously thought of Bernard Herrmann, who scored a bunch of other Hitchcock movies like Psycho and Vertigo, and who was friggin awesome. Before I sat down at the piano and tried to figure something out, I thought I'd do a little experiment. I logged on to the AI music generator, typed in Bernard Herman theme, Alfred Hitchcock film Train Mysterious, and this is what I got.

[MUSIC]

To my ear, that's really good. Scary good. I keep waiting for it to break down and do something uncanny and weird, but it never does. Of course I guided it as it made the track, but I really didn't have to do much. It was kind of a choose your own adventure between really good options. This is the track that really scared the crap out of me. I could never in a million years write and record something this good. Even if I could, I would need to spend three times the entire budget of the project to hire a musical arranger, a real orchestra and a recording studio.

All which would be necessary to create something that sounds this close to a Bernard Herrmann score but AI it did it in five minutes for free. And this is where we flesh puppet musicians just can't compete. None of us are experts in every style. I might be able to beat it at an indie pop tune, but I can't do a better debut piece and a better medieval choral hymn, and certainly can't do a better Bernard Herrmann track. Plus it's a virtuoso at every instrument. Violin, piano, vocals, guitar. Yes, in the vibes department, I might have an edge, but also maybe not.

Those examples were really good. That's what's so unmooring about this AI thing for me. It's not just the loss of work. It's part of my identity. It was my thing. You could give me a commercial or a film or a podcast and I could make a song for it. It's the thing that made me a little bit special. When I tell someone I'm a musician, a lot of times their eyes light up. They think it's cool. Some even ask me, "How do you just write a song?" But now with AI, anyone can write a song. My special skill just isn't that special anymore. From a musical and economic point of view, AI just has me beat.

This is where I was this summer, freaking out. I picked up mountain biking to distract myself. I thought about starting a granola business but then something happened. For me, it changed everything. The AI music generator I'd been using added a new feature allowing you to upload your own music. The idea was that it could listen to what you were doing and just extend it. To test it out, I uploaded a 12 second jingle I made a decade ago for a commercial I pitched and didn't land. This is what I made back then.

[MUSIC]

Nothing special, but I always thought that could have been the start of something.

[MUSIC]

I uploaded it and with a little prompting, it turned into this. It starts exactly the same, but then completely, seamlessly, it keeps going. This is way more mind blowing than the tracks I heard it make from scratch, because it doesn't feel like some other musician, it feels like me. This track isn't mine in the traditional sense, but because it grew out of a seed I planted, it really does feel like something I would have done if I wanted to turn this track into a full length song. Like the percussion that just came in, I totally was imagining a vintage CR78 drum machine loop.

That's exactly what the AI put in. I know, I know. This is like someone saying they could have invented Instagram or could have invested in Nvidia before the stock skyrocketed. Yes, dude, you could have, but you didn't. So maybe this is just me tricking myself into thinking this is my music, even though it isn't. The more I played with it, the more exciting it was. Take this track.

[MUSIC]

This was a little demo I made to test out a new guitar amp. I don't even remember making it, but I stumbled across it and thought, "It sounds pretty cool." What you're hearing right now is still just me, what I originally recorded, but I uploaded it to the AI music generator and then prompted it to do a horn arrangement. Of course it obliged and it's switching to the AI version right now.

[MUSIC]

But why stop there? I messed around with the prompting and had it come up with another version, and it popped that out in just a few seconds. That version starts now. Also amazing. Again, it really sounds like where I was imagining taking the song next, and yet I would never feel comfortable using the audio it's generating as my own work. That feels like a bridge too far, but I could take bits and pieces of what it's done as jumping off points. This is where it gets so exciting. If I'm stuck on a song, let's say I can't figure out a new section.

I could have the AI music generator come up with 10 new choruses for me. I could take elements from different versions. A tempo change from one, a chord change from another, a bass line part from yet another version. Of course, I would play it all my myself. Since I'm just taking bits and pieces from different versions and putting my own spin on it while I play it, it wouldn't sound like any one version that the AI created. When it comes to ownership, this way of doing things would make it much, much murkier. It's not an AI creation, but it's not entirely mine either.

As murky as it is, it's the really appealing way to bring AI into my workflow. It'd be like having the best music writing partner ever. They're always awake. They're fast, enthusiastic and good. I have tons of unfinished songs. Some are produced tracks I couldn't quite finish. Some are like these 15 second samples I did for commercials and didn't get made. Others are voice memos. With all of them, I didn't finish the track because I got stuck. I think every musician, maybe every creative person, can relate to this.

It's easy to come up with the germ of something cool, but it's so hard to get it from 70% done to 100% finished, but now I have no excuse for leaving a song unfinished. I've never been more unsure of my future as a professional musician but as much as it pains me to say this, I haven't been so excited to make music in a long, long time. I have so many songs, so many projects that I feel like I can finish now, and that's really exciting. As weird as it feels to me using AI as a co-writer, I think young musicians coming up now could lean on these tools.

Just like I grew up with spell checks baked into Microsoft Word. Yes, there will definitely be holdouts, but as a society, it'll become the norm, both for musicians and the listeners. I can't help but see this as a weird fork in the evolution of music. Like music was pure up until 2023, but from here on out, it won't be because AI music is already in the water. All future models will will be trained on music that was made with AI this could cause feedback loops in the algorithms, a proverbial AI snake eating its own tail. It could get really weird.

This might be the last year I make money as a musician. If that's the case, it'll free up time for me to finish the half dozen unfinished albums I have. I'm excited to actually do them, using AI as a writing partner. Yes, that brings up all sorts of moral and legal issues, so I probably won't release them. I'll just make them because it's fun. Isn't that what making music is all about? For On the Media, I'm Mark Henry Phillips.

Micah Loewinger: That's it for this week's show. On the Media is produced by Molly Rosen, Rebecca Clark-Callender, Candice Wang, and Katerina Barton.

Brooke Gladstone: Our technical director is Jennifer Munson. Our engineer is Brendan Dalton. Eloise Blondiau is our senior producer, and our executive producer is Katya Rogers. On the Media is a production of WNYC Studios. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: 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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How AI and Algorithms Are Transforming Music

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For the new documentary, The Bibi Files, director Alexis Bloom uses hundreds of hours of leaked, previously unseen interrogation footage of  Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, his wife Sara, his son Yair, his staff and inner circle – to trace how the corruption charges against Netanyahu and Israel’s war on Gaza have converged. On this week’s midweek podcast, we re-air a conversation between Brooke Gladstone and Israeli journalist Raviv Drucker, one of the main guides through The Bibi Files, to discuss his role in the documentary and how Netanyahu’s corruption cases act as the “engine” that drives the wider conflict in the region.

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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Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu walks head down past another person in the background with a television camera pointed at him on his right.

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Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu attends his trial on corruption charges at the district court in Tel Aviv, Israel, Monday, Dec. 16, 2024.

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

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For the new documentary, The Bibi Files, director Alexis Bloom uses hundreds of hours of leaked, previously unseen interrogation footage of  Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu,...

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A New Film Unearths the Depths of Netanyahu's Corruption

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[music]

Brooke Gladstone: This is the On the Media midweek podcast. I'm Brooke Gladstone. For the new documentary, The Bibi Files, director Alexis Bloom used hundreds of hours of leaked, previously unseen interrogation footage of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, his wife Sara, his son Yair, his staff and inner circle, in order to trace how two different stories converged, one being the corruption charges against Netanyahu, and the other, Israel's war on Gaza that has since spilled into Lebanon and elsewhere in the region.

Raviv Drucker: The engine is the corruption cases. It all started with the fact that the prime minister does not respect the law. Anyone that dares to touch Mr. Netanyahu is doomed.

Brooke Gladstone: That's Israeli journalist Raviv Drucker, one of the main guides through the Bibi files. Since we're speaking with him, we couldn't air any interrogation tapes because On the Media can be accessed in Israel, where airing those leaked tapes without prior approval is prohibited. Since Drucker is already under investigation by the Israeli government, playing that tape in our conversation would put him in further legal jeopardy.

Alexis Bloom: Do the Netanyahus know who you are?

Brooke Gladstone: Director Alexis Bloom in the film's opening minutes.

Raviv Drucker: Netanyahu, yes, they know.

Brooke Gladstone: Drucker, now a political analyst at Israel's Channel 13, has spent decades reporting on Israeli prime ministers from Ariel Sharon to Ehud Barak to Netanyahu. Since The Bibi Files is now finally playing in select theaters in the US, this week we're re-airing our conversation from a few months back, because now you may actually have the chance to see the film. Here's Raviv Drucker.

Raviv Drucker: Netanyahu personally sued me three times in the past for libel. In all of those cases, none of them reached real testimonies in court. He never got a penny from me. Not an apology. Nothing.

Brooke Gladstone: Aha. Let's zero in a little on Netanyahu's early life. His erstwhile childhood friend, Uzi Beller, described how Bibi worshiped his older brother Yoni, the family's golden child. As the lead commando of that legendary 1976 raid to free Israeli hostages in Entebbe, Uganda, Yoni was also the sole member of the team to die. Here's Uzi.

Uzi Beller: Yoni's death was definitely the making of Bibi. There's no question about it. It opened the door for something new to start. The first time that we hear about Benjamin Netanyahu is because of his brother. It was the kicking off of his career this tragedy. Since then, he has a lot of credit by being a very talented and gifted ambassador to the UN.

Brooke Gladstone: As Israeli's ambassador to the UN in the '80s, he enthralled listeners with his vow to protect Israel against all enemies.

Benjamin Netanyahu: In the question of terrorism, there's no neutrality. You have to choose. You're either with the terrorists or you're against them.

Raviv Drucker: He's working tirelessly on how to perform in front of the TV, what to do with your hands, where to look, sound bites. He became masterful in the art of TV.

Brooke Gladstone: You think it was partly those rhetorical skills that propelled his career from ambassador to chair of the right-wing Likud party to prime minister at the unprecedented age of 47 back in 1996?

Raviv Drucker: Yes, he's brilliant. He has this iron will. It doesn't matter how much he is getting hurt politically from this story or this action. It's no coincidence that he is the long-serving prime minister of Israel, ever.

Brooke Gladstone: Yes. You reported on several Israeli prime ministers, but at some point, you started to realize that the corruption of Netanyahu was different.

Raviv Drucker: Because his obsession with the media, it's something that we never experienced.

Brooke Gladstone: The extent of the corruption, the value of the gifts he received was pretty notable. One of the big cases covered in the documentary explores his involvement with an Israeli Hollywood mogul named Arnon Milchan, who became a billionaire producing massive Hollywood hits like Fight Club and Pretty Woman, 12 Years a Slave, he has two Oscars, but throughout Milchan's years in America, he kept strong ties to Israel. As you say in the film, everybody knows that if you want to speak with the prime minister, go to Arnon. So, what is important for us to know about that relationship?

Raviv Drucker: For Arnon Milchan, it's so important to be close to the prime minister, any prime minister. He was close to Ehud Barak, to Ehud Olmert, to Shimon Peres. It's very important for him to be someone who is whispering in their ears. He's a Hollywood mogul, but he wants to be also involved in the Iranian-Israeli conflict or the government affairs in Israel. This is like entertainment to him. When it was Netanyahu, the price for him to pay was to become like his sugar daddy.

Brooke Gladstone: A prime witness in the interrogations is Hadas Klein, who was Milchan's former assistant. She exposed the gifts to Bibi and his wife Sara. Cigars and champagne worth thousands of dollars a case, a bracelet encrusted with scores of diamonds worth $42,000. She also testified that these gifts were solicited by the Netanyahus and more or less mandatory. The prime minister, he has a famous memory, but it seems to fail him again and again in response to the police interrogation. He can't recall the cases of champagne in the car, in the house, and those beloved cigars or even that blindingly blingy bracelet. He's stonewalling, right?

Raviv Drucker: Yes, absolutely. The number of questions that he really answers through this very, very long interrogation are very few. Most of the time, he's saying, anything that I received is from a friend. It has nothing to do with the fact that I'm the prime minister. He usually said, I don't remember. I can't recall. You know that I'm busy with Iran and Hamas and Hezbollah in the United States.

Brooke Gladstone: You mentioned Sara Netanyahu. She's Bibi's third and current wife, recipient of a lot of Milchan's gifts, especially the champagne and the bling. The clips of her police interrogation are kind of terrifying. They're even more thunderingly outraged than her husband's. You observed that they're almost like a couple that runs the country. I mean, are we talking about like Juan and Eva Peron in Argentina? What's her role in the government?

Raviv Drucker: She has a lot of influence over Mr. Netanyahu's decision. People in Israel already know that. Only now, when Netanyahu joined a new minister to his coalition, all the headlines in Israel were, the new minister will join only if Sara Netanyahu will not object. Those were the headlines.

Brooke Gladstone: Now to 2015, when Netanyahu wins his bid for reelection by a landslide, despite polls that predicted a dead heat. In the film, Nir Hefetz, Netanyahu's former media advisor said that--

Nir Hefetz: This night was not only his biggest win, it was also the day that he started to deteriorate.

Raviv Drucker: 2015 is a landmark because until then, he always wanted to save some eye contact with the other camp, to be against them, against the elites, against the left wing, but not too much against them. In 2015, he said, "Even though I was soft on them, they were all against me. And even though they were all against me, I won." It makes him very vain, very right-wing. Then the interrogation came up in 2016. Since then, we have a different Benjamin Netanyahu.

Brooke Gladstone: The next big investigation after Milchan, centers around Netanyahu and an Israeli media tycoon, Shaul Elovitch, who made a fortune importing Nokia cell phones but found himself suffocating under a mountain of debt after taking out millions in bank loans, and in 2016, he panicked, reached out to Netanyahu. You referred to this earlier, Bibi's obsession with the media. He seized the opportunity to take over a news outlet called Walla. This was not exactly an important news outlet for the tycoon, but it mattered a lot to Netanyahu.

Raviv Drucker: When you look at this period, he did a couple of things to at least four or five media outlets, trying to control them or soften the coverage or to get his people to be inside those media outlets. From all of those activities, two media outlets became a criminal case. One is called Yedioth Ahronoth, the largest newspaper in Israel. The second one is this website.

Brooke Gladstone: Walla.

Raviv Drucker: The thesis of this indictment is saying, look, this is a quid pro quo deal. Netanyahu is giving this tycoon all kinds of regulation that the government can give that will help him to finance his debt. In return, this website will actually surrender its control. They will not appoint an editor or political reporter without consulting with Netanyahus and getting their approval. They will put the stories in or take stories out because of Netanyahu's demands.

Brooke Gladstone: In November 2019, Netanyahu was officially indicted for breach of trust, accepting brides, and fraud. We know that since 2016, he didn't have any friends on the left or the center, but in 2019, he was regarded as more or less illegitimate in the view of the center and the left parties in Israel. At that point, it seems he either had to resign or he had to turn to the far right to create a coalition, which is where Itamar Ben Gvir, now minister of national security, and Bezalel Smotrich, the finance minister now enter the story. These are two people so marginalized, you said, he wouldn't dare to appear in a photo op with them a few years ago, but now they're part of his cabinet. Give us a brief overview of these two men.

Raviv Drucker: Well, they are ultra, ultra right wing.

Brooke Gladstone: And what does that mean?

Raviv Drucker: It means, for example, that both of them now want to resettle in Gaza Strip, which means to bring Jews to the Gaza Strip, inhabited by 2.5 million Palestinians. They want to have settlements in South Lebanon, or at least military presence. They want to have all the West Bank, the Judea, and Samaria as part of Israel. Both of them regards Arabs as somewhat inferior to Jews. Those politicians never had enough votes to reach the Parliament, and now he is such an important minister because of those corruption cases that led Netanyahu to join him.

Now, when you speak about the cabinet meeting, thinking about how to retaliate to the Iran attack that might inflame a regional war in all the Middle East, maybe in all the world, Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich sitting in such a crucial cabinet meeting, I cannot overdramatize the influence that those corruption cases and the trial had on Israel.

Brooke Gladstone: There's a lot of argument in the American left over whether the Israeli government is actually attempting genocide. If you go to the rhetoric of Ben Gvir and Smotrich, you see genocidal statements in there all the time.

Raviv Drucker: When you hear this public statement saying things like wiping out Gaza or transfer all these people to some other countries, of course, I can understand the listeners that says, oh, well, this is a genocide intention by those two.

Brooke Gladstone: Okay, so zoom out for a moment. You conclude, and you are by no means alone here, that Netanyahu is so desperate to stay out of prison that he's willing to escalate violence in Gaza, in the West Bank, in Lebanon, in Iran, all to appease the extremist wing of his governing coalition. Is that how we should understand the wider war around Israel?

Raviv Drucker: I don't want to put it all on his desire to stay out of prison. I want to put it on his desire to stay in power. Some of his crucial decision in this war is being influenced only by political reasons. Otherwise, he would have done a deal to free the hostages a few months ago, and part of this deal is a ceasefire, at least in Gaza. He is doing everything in his power just to stay in office, even though it has such an enormous cost.

Brooke Gladstone: You've talked about Bibi's interference in journalism or his effort to shake it to his liking. What do you think about the overall health of the Israeli media at this moment?

Raviv Drucker: I would say that most of the mainstream media, 90% of it, it's very, very critical on the prime ministers. At the same time, he was able with relentless efforts to have some islands in the Israeli media functioning as his soldiers. The most important one is TV Channel 14, which is Netanyahu's channel. They reach a lot of viewers. He has one radio station, and in other news outlet, he has this guy and this guy and this guy. If you watch only those channels, you will experience a totally different world that I'm experiencing. It's a little bit like MSNBC and Fox.

Brooke Gladstone: There are so many polls. Do you know what the public feels about Netanyahu these days?

Raviv Drucker: I'm sure 100% that he's not popular at all, and he knows it as well. This is why he's doing everything in his power to stay in office right now because he knows that if there will be an election, he will be out.

Brooke Gladstone: Are you worried about your future as a reporter in Israel?

Raviv Drucker: It's 13 years that I'm worried, and after a while, it becomes part of your life so you're less worried. Not because the threat is smaller, because you're getting used to anything.

Brooke Gladstone: Why did you want to be part of the The Bibi Files even while knowing it was going to bring you under greater scrutiny by the Israeli government?

Raviv Drucker: The scrutiny by the Israeli government doesn't worry me at all. I think it's very important movie, so the international audience also will know more about Mr. Netanyahu, about Israel, and about the 7th of October war.

Brooke Gladstone: Thank you very much.

Raviv Drucker: Thank you so much for having me.

[music]

Brooke Gladstone: Thanks for listening to the On the Media midweek podcast. I'm Brooke Gladstone. Tune in to the big show this weekend to hear about how AI is changing music-making and music criticism in the era of Spotify Wrapped.

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 New Film Unearths the Depths of Netanyahu's Corruption

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Donald Trump has a big plan to remake American universities. On this week’s On the Media, hear how the distinctly American idea of “diversity” has fallen out of favor—from higher education to the Supreme Court.

Reporter Ilya Marritz explains how the deep history of Harvard and the concept of “diversity” is the hidden subtext for much of the recent strife. In the past half-century, the academy (and the business world) embraced the idea of diversity as a social good–an idea developed at Harvard and endorsed by the Supreme Court, until the latter ended race-based affirmative action in 2023. This episode also looks at what’s in store for universities as the incoming Trump-Vance administration promises to pressure them to change curricula.

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 Harvard Plan, hosted by award-winning reporter Ilya Marritz, is a three-part podcast series from The Boston Globe in partnership with WNYC’s On The Media that takes listeners inside the chaos at Harvard University last year, exploring the rise and fall of Claudine Gay’s presidency and the explosive fight for the soul of America’s most prestigious university.

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Liam Eisenberg for The Boston Globe and On the Media

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Donald Trump has a big plan to remake American universities. 

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Title: The Harvard Plan: The Finale.

Brooke Gladstone: On this week's On the Media, the leadership crisis at Harvard and the backlash to decades of diversity efforts didn't begin or end with the resignation of its first Black president last year.

Randall Kennedy: Diversity wasn't much of an important political term in the 1970s. Integration was a much bigger term. Nobody was buying stock in diversity.

Archibald Cox: There is no racially blind method of selection, which will enroll today more than a trickle of minority students in the nation's colleges.

Lewis Powell: I refer, in my opinion, to the Harvard admissions program as one example of how race properly, in my opinion, may be taken into account.

Chris Rufo: True free speech has been curtailed on many campuses and conservative voices have been shouted down.

JD Vance: We have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country.

Brooke Gladstone: Stay tuned for the gripping finale of our series, The Harvard Plan.

Micah Loewinger: From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I'm Micah Loewinger.

Brooke Gladstone: I'm Brooke Gladstone. For the past two weeks, we've brought you The Harvard Plan, our series, produced with the Boston Globe, about the crisis in American higher education. We focused on our country's oldest and richest college and as you've heard, a place where the very idea of diversity has come under a lot of screen scrutiny of late. Actually, though, diversity has always been associated with Harvard. How do you think Elle Woods got into Harvard Law in Legally Blonde?

Speaker 8: She does have a 4.0 from CULA, and she got a 179 on her LSATs.

Speaker 9: A fashion major?

Speaker 10: Well, sir, we've never had one before. Aren't we always looking for diversity?

Brooke Gladstone: In The Social Network, it's how the Mark Zuckerberg character rationalizes getting snubbed by an exclusive social club after his friend Eduardo gets an invitation.

Jesse Eisenberg: It probably was a diversity thing, but so what?

Brooke Gladstone: There is no movie yet that describes the particular pickle that Harvard and other universities now are in. College is becoming an increasingly politically coded place. President-elect Trump says they have to change or else. The Boston Globe's Ilya Maritz was a visiting fellow at Harvard last year during the brief, troubled tenure of the university's first Black leader. He picks up this hour with Claudine Gay, the woman whose critics called a diversity hire.

Micah Loewinger: The brutal takedown of Harvard's first and only Black president seemed to register very little on the Harvard campus. This surprised me. It happened during winter break. Sure, people were away. When they came back, I expected to see posters for assemblies and talks about what it all meant. I waited and nothing happened. I started to feel like a house guest in one of those families where they don't discuss uncomfortable things. I wondered what it must feel like to be Claudine Gay.

On taking office, she had moved herself and her family into the grand mansion where Harvard presidents live. As a political scientist, she must have been delighted by the fact that it was once the home of Elbridge Gerry, the Founding Father who gave us the term gerrymandering. Within months, Gay was moving again, back out of the mansion. One day last April, I noticed Gay's name on the signboard outside Memorial Church. She would be speaking there, so I went.

Preacher: Welcome to the Appleton Chapel of our Memorial Church for our daily service of morning prayers.

Micah Loewinger: People arrived in ones and twos until there were about 70 of us seated in two banks of pews facing each other. Sunlight streamed in through the east windows. Preacher: Our speaker this morning is Claudine Gay, the Wilbert A. Collett Professor of Government and of African and African American Studies and former president of Harvard University.

Micah Loewinger: Then a diminutive woman in those recognizable chunky glasses rose to the lectern.

Claudine Gay: Good morning.

Congregation: Good morning.

Micah Loewinger: She told a story.

Claudine Gay: When my mother emigrated from Haiti to the United States, she came as a live-in nanny for a family here in the Boston area. The agreement with her and with the agency that had placed her was that the family would help her enroll in English language courses as the first step in her journey to college and eventually to a nursing career.

Micah Loewinger: Claudette Gay, Claudine's mother, was quickly disappointed. Her household responsibilities grew and grew until the job came to feel like indentured servitude. There were no English classes. She felt trapped, but she wasn't stuck.

Claudine Gay: She quietly began making weekly trips to the post office, each time sending off a small package, small enough to fit in her purse, to an address in Brooklyn where an older sister lived.

Micah Loewinger: One day Claudette walked out of the house and got on a Greyhound bus to New York. Years later, she would tell this story to her daughter, Claudine.

Claudine Gay: What I heard was an epic adventure story, and it elicited in me a mix of pride in my mother's ingenuity and envy that my own life was devoid of drama.

[laughter]

Micah Loewinger: Gay said she realizes now that her mother told this story less as entertainment than as evidence. What a person will do when circumstances become intolerable.

Claudine Gay: Though mind and body may feel unsettled by change, the soul delights in the act of starting over, even when the destination is not clear.

Micah Loewinger: One day, I imagine, Claudine Gay's portrait will hang on a wall someplace at Harvard. People will walk by, maybe stop, and wonder who she was and why she was in the job for not even one full year. I've been puzzling over this since I watched her flame out. What did it all mean? I have come up with two answers to that question, and I'm going to give you both of these answers in this episode. The second answer, which we'll get to a little later this hour, is all about the present political moment, polarization, social media, and the Trump-Vance administration's plans to attack universities. Their words, not mine.

The first answer has to do with the long and surprising history of a very potent, very American concept, one that was developed at Harvard and spread to the world, diversity. Let's start there. When Claudine Gay was announced as Harvard's next president, there was grumbling because she hadn't published many articles or a book. This observation goes hand in hand with a belief I also heard as I reported this story, that Gay was a diversity hire. People who know Claudine Gay professionally, as a colleague, describe her with words like thoughtful, intelligent, and good listener. She was lowkey, low drama, and you could argue that those qualities made her not the best pick for this moment in time. Still.

Randall Kennedy: A Black woman was made president of Harvard University.

Micah Loewinger: Randall Kennedy is a professor at Harvard Law School. He's written many books on race and the law.

Randall Kennedy: Now, I'm sorry that her tenure was so short and that it was cut off in such a terrible way, but I don't think it should be forgotten that a Black woman was president of the most famous university in the United States. Part of making that happen was diversity consciousness.

Micah Loewinger: Kennedy heard the whispers and insinuations that she was chosen for her race. He thinks this is true to a point, but also, so what?

Randall Kennedy: There are going to be some people who are going to look at that and snicker and make that part of a deficiency story. "Well, she must be deficient." I think that's ridiculous. I look at the social forces that made her presidency possible as, on balance, a good thing.

Micah Loewinger: We're going to go deep now on Harvard and diversity because the conversation didn't begin with Claudine Gay. It stretches back decades, actually, a whole century. In fact, you could say the whole idea of diversity in education was developed at Harvard and spread from there to all corners of the country. To walk us through this history, our guides are Randall Kennedy, who you just met, and his colleague, another Harvard law professor, Noah Feldman.

Noah Feldman: I'm a Felix Frankfurter professor of law at the law school.

Micah Loewinger: Feldman pointed me to the very beginning of the diversity conversation. It goes back to a time before there were many Black or brown people at Harvard. The discussion then was about Jews, and it wasn't pretty. At the start of the 20th century, Jews were arriving in America in large numbers from Eastern Europe. By the 1920s, their sons were taking the Harvard entrance exam and getting in, and people at Harvard did not like it.

Noah Feldman: There's no very exact count, but people's estimates at the time put the number of Jews up at 20% of the population. This led to concern and backlash from, among other people, A. Lawrence Lowell, who was the president of Harvard at the time.

Micah Loewinger: President Lowell fretted that the character of Harvard was changing and wrote that there was an urgent need to prevent a dangerous increase in their proportion of Jews. What to do about it became a high priority, but Lowell's initial proposals to simply cap the number of Jews admitted didn't fly with the faculty. It was too much of a blunt instrument.

Noah Feldman: He, with the assistance of advisors, came up with an alternative strategy. This was a strategy they called the diversity strategy. What it set out to do was to make Harvard a national university, drawing on people from all over the country.

Micah Loewinger: Diversity, not to bring people in, but to keep them out. This is the moment when Harvard moved to an admissions system that looks more like what we know today, with interviews for applicants, an emphasis on character, and an effort to recruit from all over the nation. Tools that enabled the school to have more of a say in its own student body.

Noah Feldman: The point of this plan, the diversity plan, was to say, by making it a national school, we'll draw in people from Nebraska and Iowa. Still men, of course, at the time. The idea was that the university would then be more diverse nationally, and by magic, it would also have very many fewer Jews because it wouldn't have urban ethnic Jews.

Micah Loewinger: It worked. Jews continued to get into Harvard, but in smaller numbers. Hang on to Harvard's concept of diversity as a key principle in admissions because a few decades later, it comes into play again in a big Supreme Court case.

Lewis Powell: First case on today's calendar is number 76811. Regents of the University of California against Bakke.

Micah Loewinger: In the late 1970s, a white plaintiff named Allan Bakke claimed he'd been denied admission to the University of California Davis Medical School because of his race. Many colleges and universities had begun considering an applicant's background in response to the civil rights movement. They felt it was time to give opportunity to more minority students.

Lewis Powell: Mr. Cox, you may proceed whenever you're ready.

Micah Loewinger: This was sometimes called affirmative action, but it wasn't clear whether it was constitutional.

Mr. Cox: Mr. Chief Justice, may it please the court.

Micah Loewinger: The Bakke case involved a challenge to affirmative action in which the challengers claimed that affirmative action violated the equal rights of white students who had the same scores as Black students who were being admitted on the basis of there being an addition to diversity. Among the nine justices, there was a clear divide. Four justices said essentially affirmative action should be unconstitutional as a violation of equal protection. Four justices said affirmative action should be perfectly constitutional because we have a history of racial exclusion and discrimination in the United States and admitting students to remediate that history of discrimination is totally legitimate and doesn't violate equal protection.

That left one swing justice, Lewis Powell, a white Virginian and Harvard law grad class of '32. Powell was not ready to go with the four justices who supported affirmative action on the grounds of history, but he was also unwilling to close the door on the notion that the applicant's personal background could play some kind of role. He found a middle way in arguments made by Harvard, specifically by a slow-talking patrician Harvard law professor who was a bit of a legend.

Lewis Powell: Certainly the objective of improving education through greater diversity.

Micah Loewinger: His name was Archibald Cox. Here he is arguing for Harvard at the Supreme Court.

Archibald Cox: There is no racially blind method of selection, which will enroll today more than a trickle of minority students in the nation's colleges and professions.

Micah Loewinger: Randall Kennedy got to know Cox when Kennedy joined Harvard Law School in 1984 fresh from clerking for Justice Thurgood Marshall. There hadn't been many Black people on the faculty and Cox took an interest in his young colleague.

Randall Kennedy: You can tell just from the tenor of my voice, I remember him with tremendous fondness and respect and admiration. If he was being portrayed in a movie, the directions would say, you want a person who looks like a Boston Brahmin.

Micah Loewinger: Cox was partial to bow ties and semi-rimless readers, but what he was famous for was being fired by President Nixon. Just a few years earlier, Cox was a special prosecutor investigating Watergate. He had refused to drop a subpoena for recordings Nixon secretly made of his own conversations in the White House, and he was canned. That gave Cox a particular kind of gravitas as he went before the Supreme Court and sketched Harvard's idealistic vision for higher education as a vehicle for social advancement open to all.

Archibald Cox: So that the other younger boys and girls may see, yes, it is possible for a Black to go to University of Minnesota or to go to Harvard or Yale. I know Johnny down the street and I know Sammy's father. He became a liar and John's father became a doctor. This is essential if we are ever going to give true equality in a factual sense to people.

Randall Kennedy: What Archibald Cox says was the community that we want to facilitate is a community in which individuals come here, they're selected to come here, and a lot of the learning comes from people learning from one another. Well, for people to learn from one another, won't that happen best if there is some degree of curated difference?

Micah Loewinger: It's not about repairing past wrongs, but about who's in the classroom. At that time, there was something novel about this idea.

Randall Kennedy: Diversity wasn't much of an important political, cultural term. In the 1970s, there were other terms. Integration was a much bigger term. Nobody was buying stock in diversity. Then in the '70s, the '80s, the '90s, into the 2000s, diversity becomes more and more and more influential as an idea.

Micah Loewinger: Thanks in large part to the US Supreme Court.

Lewis Powell: Mr. Justice Powell will announce the judgment of the court. There is no opinion of the court supported by a majority.

Micah Loewinger: Justice Powell's one-man opinion carried the day.

Noah Feldman: In that opinion, Powell said diversity is the rationale that justifies affirmative action. Not remediating past discrimination, but having a diverse class.

Micah Loewinger: Again, Noah Feldman.

Noah Feldman: One justice, Justice Lewis Powell wrote a narrow opinion only for himself that became the law because it was the narrowest opinion upholding affirmative action, a majority of one.

Micah Loewinger: Although the University of California was the school whose policies were being challenged, it was Harvard and law professor Archibald Cox who supplied the blueprint for race-conscious admissions to Justice Powell. Here's Powell at the Supreme Court.

Lewis Powell: I refer, in my opinion, to the Harvard admissions program as one example of how race properly, in my opinion, may be taken into account.

Micah Loewinger: Sometimes also called The Harvard Plan.

Lewis Powell: I will quote briefly from the description of the Harvard program, a copy of which is in the appendix to my opinion. Here I quote in substance, "The admissions committee has not set target quotas for the number of Blacks or musicians, football players, physicists--"

Noah Feldman: In that moment in 1978, Harvard's diversity admission policy became the law of the land.

Micah Loewinger: The difference it made is still much debated. Either way, universities adopted this approach. Student bodies did become more diverse. In 1991, Barack Obama graduated from Harvard Law. In time, corporate America embraced diversity. You can see diversity on TV and in movies and panel discussions. It's so everywhere you notice when it's missing. Again, Randall Kennedy.

Randall Kennedy: The diversity rationale says, actually, the people that we are selecting are bringing something very special and very good to the table. I think this may be the very first time in the history of the United States in which a policy, a racial policy actually valorized people of color.

Micah Loewinger: Diversity doesn't dwell on history. It's inclusive.

Randall Kennedy: Everyone, the whole community is going to be uplifted through diversity. At least in theory, everybody gets a role in the show.

Micah Loewinger: In higher education specifically, affirmative action has always had its critics. In 2022, the Supreme Court heard a major challenge to considering race in college admissions. The plaintiff said that like Jews decades earlier, Asian Americans had become too successful for some people's comfort. Race-based affirmative action was used to keep their numbers down. The defendants were the University of North Carolina, a public institution, and Harvard. Noah Feldman says that was no accident.

Noah Feldman: You didn't need Harvard, which is a private university. They added Harvard to that same case because they wanted the oomph of being able to say diversity came from Harvard, diversity was bad from the start.

Micah Loewinger: The decision came down June 29th, 2023.

Noah Feldman: The question in these cases is whether Harvard and UNC's programs are permissible under the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment. We conclude that they are not.

Micah Loewinger: Two days after that, Claudine Gay formally assumed the job of Harvard president. Incredible timing.

Noah Feldman: To my mind, not at all a coincidence that the Supreme Court strikes down the diversity rationale. Then almost immediately, the attacks on Claudine Gay start to depict her as "a diversity candidate" with the intent of undermining her. For critics of diversity, depicting a president who was already in a lot of trouble as a diversity candidate was a way of weakening diversity as a cultural category that can be used positively for anybody else in the future.

Micah Loewinger: Diversity is on the ropes, and race-based affirmative action is legally dead, so what now?

Randall Kennedy: For me, racial affirmative action, I wrote a book defending it. I've been defending it.

Micah Loewinger: Then Kennedy said something that I did not expect.

Randall Kennedy: Is it the last word? No, I don't think it's the last word. It may very well be that there are superior alternatives. It's even possible. It's even possible that the Supreme Court of the United States decision, which I don't like, it's possible that that decision will lead to better policies in the future. Life is just complicated like that.

Micah Loewinger: Coming up, Black alumni of Harvard get together to process everything that just happened.

Brooke Gladstone: This is On the Media.

[music]

Micah Loewinger: This is On the Media. I'm Micah Loewinger.

Brooke Gladstone: I'm Brooke Gladstone. We're back with The Harvard Plan, our collaboration with the Boston Globe. The series started with a deep dive into the short and troubled leadership of Claudine Gay, but it soon became clear that there were much bigger forces at play in the crisis over America's institutions of higher learning. Here's reporter Ilya Maritz.

Danielle Holley: How's everything going?

Ilya Marritz: How are you?

Daniel Holley: Great to see you.

Ilya Marritz: Not long ago, I got a glimpse of all that 45 years of race-conscious admissions has accomplished.

Danielle Holley: This is called the Harvard Black Alumni Weekend.

Ilya Marritz: Mount Holyoke College President Danielle Holley.

Danielle Holley: It started, I think we had the first one maybe 20 years ago or so.

Ilya Marritz: Remember Holley from our first episode? She became a college president on the same day Claudine Gay did. We're sitting on a bench outside the Harvard Science Center. It's college weather, sweaters, autumn leaves, and all around us, Black Harvard grads in their 40s, 50s, and upwards are hanging out in little clusters as undergrads come and go on foot and on scooter.

Danielle Holley: There are over 1,000 alums this weekend, Black alums who are here to celebrate together.

Ilya Marritz: We spotted Alvin Bragg, the District Attorney of Manhattan and an actress from Riverdale.

Danielle Holley: Oh, there's Soledad O'Brien right there.

Ilya Marritz: I hadn't really prepared for all the famouses, but yes, of course.

Danielle Holley: Whether it's Justice Jackson or President Obama or Eric Holder or Loretta Lynch, every major leader who's Black American in this country, the road to that leadership runs through the Ivy League schools and Howard. If you cut off access to Harvard, you're cutting off access to leadership in this country.

Ilya Marritz: In the days just before the Black Alumni Weekend, colleges started releasing the numbers on their first post-affirmative action classes. At some schools, Black admissions are down a lot. Other places, there's no big change. At Harvard College, the percentage of Black freshmen is down 4 percentage points. At Harvard Law School, just recently, we learned Black admissions are down by more than half. No one I talked to at this gathering seemed to have an answer for what the post-affirmative action world should look like. Again, this was September when it seemed possible that a Black woman lawyer might become the president of the United States. Holley told me it was former Attorney General Loretta Lynch who brought the most fire in her talk.

Danielle Holley: We will not back down from the notion that we belong here. There's a sense that many of us have sacrificed quite a bit personally to contribute, build this place up.

Ilya Marritz: Then we see one more famous person.

Danielle Holley: Oh, but here's President Gay right here, behind us.

Ilya Marritz: Claudine Gay is making her way across the plaza. People keep stopping her, wanting to talk. She's wearing Crimson flats and a very colorful dress. Holley and I hover nearby, waiting for an opening. Holley wants a selfie. I just want to introduce myself. In person, Gay is warm and relaxed. Here this weekend, she's been celebrated. While I stand just a little to the side, the women kibitz. I notice they're now holding hands, swinging their arms.

Danielle Holley: We would love to have you come to Mount Holyoke.

Claudine Gay: Next year. I'm on sabbatical next year.

Danielle Holley: I know you're on sabbatical. I'm like, but whenever. It doesn't even have to be it, but whenever. We started on the same day.

Claudine Gay: I know.

Danielle Holley: We were the new presidents together.

Claudine Gay: Yes, I remember.

Ilya Marritz: After Gay moved on, Danielle Holley told me she had expected this weekend to be something like a reckoning or a family conversation.

Danielle Holley: It hasn't been that at all. I think it's really been more about, wow, look what this community has been able to do and look what the institution for years believed was important for it to do. I think the question is, does the institution still believe that?

Ilya Marritz: There is a movement in the opposite direction to take the Supreme Court's decision and the DEI backlash and decisively lock racial diversity out of the university's goals. It's gaining ground. I want to reintroduce someone we met in the first episode of this series. Sam Lessin, Harvard College Class of '05. California venture capitalist, friend of Mark Zuckerberg's.

Sam Lessin: I'm a stereotypical Silicon Valley guy.

Ilya Marritz: Lessin is the one who used to defend Harvard when his friends complained about trigger warnings and political correctness. He had an awakening after Hamas attacked Israel.

Sam Lessin: I'm the one who's wrong here, and that sucks.

Ilya Marritz: If you think of Bill Ackman or Chris Ruffo as the clean-cut Harvard grads who fanned the flames of outrage.

Bill Ackman: Does Harvard value veritas or truth, or does Harvard value DEI?

Chris Rufo: True free speech has been curtailed on many campuses, and conservative voices have been shouted down.

Ilya Marritz: Lessin shares some of their views, but his approach is different.

Sam Lessin: There's a lot I respect about Bill Ackman, a lot of the good I think he's done. I also think from a purely political how do you fix things perspective, there's a difference between the aggressive yell at things versus give people paths forward. I think that's the interesting balance to play in terms of saying no, I want substantive change and revival. I don't want to just be mad.

Ilya Marritz: Lessin takes meetings from a standing desk at home. He has the kind of just rolled-out-of-bed hair some people would pay a lot of money for. He's running a marathon, not a sprint. We checked in a bunch of times while I was working on this series. He has a plan. He's been circulating a 97-page slide deck about how Harvard should change. There's a weekly newsletter with 20,000 subscribers and counting. Lessin is talking with donors about how they can leverage their dollars for accountability.

Sam Lessin: We believe the school needs to refocus on academic excellence, improving governance, real free speech, and free inquiry. There's a bunch of themes we have.

Ilya Marritz: Notice diversity is not one of the core values. Lessin thinks it's a mistake to try to solve bigger social problems through university admissions policies. He's okay with what the Supreme Court did. More than okay.

Sam Lessin: I actually believe this was the right decision, which is how can we as a society say that it should matter what the color of your skin is in terms of who gets into college. That's crazy.

Ilya Marritz: By the way, Lessin's father and sister went to Harvard too. I asked him about that. He told me doing away with legacy admissions is "a valid conversation." He worries that the kind of classroom environment where students learn from each other is more difficult to achieve today with people growing up online.

Sam Lessin: They created a sense of identity and purpose and meaning by being extreme. You say, "Oh, now we want you to go to college and we want you to be in a diverse community and work with all these people that you're not going to agree with completely." They all come in like atoms just bouncing off of each other. You're supposed to learn to learn from people you don't agree with. It's oil and water is what's going on.

Ilya Marritz: You're a Facebook guy. Do you blame social media?

Sam Lessin: The answer is, I think it's like such a simplistic read. People love scapegoats because it's fun.

Ilya Marritz: I put him on the defensive a little. He said it's not social media per se, but the underlying technology and what it enables. Lessin told me in his ideal world, universities would be monasteries of truth. Less online, more focused on IRL debate and discussion.

Sam Lessin: They defend the truth. They search out the truth. They look for the best of the best. To do that, they train the best, et cetera. In that world, I think it'd be great for them to be set up in such a way that they have incredible independence from any politics.

Ilya Marritz: Well, sure, but especially after what happened to Claudine Gay, that is increasingly hard to do.

Representative Elise Stefanik: Good evening, Milwaukee.

Ilya Marritz: Representative Elise Stefanik, the tormentor of college presidents, took a victory lap in primetime at the Republican National Convention last summer.

Representative Elise Stefanik: Who saw that congressional hearing with the college presidents of so-called elite universities?

Ilya Marritz: As if to declare, yes, college is political now, suck it up.

Representative Elise Stefanik: Oh, wait, they are former presidents.

Ilya Marritz: This year, Republicans campaigned against universities. It is a big change. They used to talk about making college more accessible. Now they're saying college itself is bad.

Donald Trump: The time has come to reclaim our once-great educational institutions from the radical left.

Ilya Marritz: This little nugget from then-candidate Donald Trump made Hilary Burns, the Globe's higher education reporter, sit up straight.

Donald Trump: Our secret weapon will be the college accreditation system.

Ilya Marritz: Accreditation, a secret weapon.

Hilary Burns: No one knows what accreditors do or what they are, and they certainly have never been the topic of a political campaign. I think it has everyone on edge.

Ilya Marritz: Accreditor is this totally obscure job.

Hilary Burns: You really only pay attention to the accreditor when a college closes. That's where you get the alert from, the accreditor.

Ilya Marritz: Accreditors come under the oversight of the Department of Education.

Hilary Burns: They are like the quality assurance. You can think of it as they work for the consumer and they do visits to colleges. They call out when colleges are doing something not good. Like we've seen colleges that have closed sometimes at the end when they're financially crunched, they start doing things that lessen the quality, and that's where the accreditor steps in and says, "This isn't okay."

Donald Trump: When I return to the White House, I will fire the radical left accreditors that have allowed our colleges to become dominated by Marxists, maniacs, and lunatics. We will then accept applications for new accreditors who will impose real standards on colleges once again and once and for all.

Ilya Marritz: Trump, who is the founder of the now defunct, never-accredited Trump University, says he'll pressure schools to refocus curricula on Western civilization, American tradition, and of course, to get rid of DEI. There are other levers at his disposal. Investigations, taxes on endowments, cuts to research funding. It's all on the table. Do universities have a plan to deal with this? Are they ready for this?

Hilary Burns: Universities have been very quiet since the election. That's something I've been speaking with people about. Universities have so many fires they need to be watching right now. Not only it's their finances and academic freedom, but also their students and their professors, and their employees are being threatened with many of Trump's immigration policies.

Ilya Marritz: Trump has said he'd deport foreign students who join pro-Palestine protests, and many universities have responded.

Hilary Burns: They want all international staff, faculty, and students getting back to campus before Trump takes office in January, just in case they can't get them back here. What I'm hearing from higher education watchers and lawyers who are working on this is the universities are doing the work behind the scenes, quietly, because they don't want a target on their back.

Ilya Marritz: The tools, the pressure points were always there, but it's new that there are politicians willing and empowered to use them.

[music]

Micah Loewinger: Coming up, JD Vance's plan to attack the universities looks to Viktor Orbán's Hungary for inspiration.

Brooke Gladstone: This is On the Media.

[silence]

Brooke Gladstone: This is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger. We're back with the final part of The Harvard plan, our collaboration with the Boston Globe, looking at the growing battles over American universities. Earlier in this hour, we delved into the history of diversity in American college admissions, part one of Ilya's answer as to what exactly happened last year at Harvard. Now, we get to part two, the politics of our current moment.

JD Vance: So much of what we want to accomplish.

Ilya Marritz: Vice President-elect JD Vance.

JD Vance: So much of what we want to do in this movement in this country, I think, are fundamentally dependent on going through a set of very hostile institutions, specifically the universities.

Ilya Marritz: Vance gave this speech in 2021 when he was running for Senate from Ohio. Everything about it is blunt, starting with the title, The Universities Are the Enemy.

JD Vance: I think if any of us want to do the things that we want to do for our country and for the people who live in it, we have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country.

Ilya Marritz: Next, Vance explains the concept of red pilling. If you don't know it.

JD Vance: It comes from the movie, The Matrix, which, as I understand it, is made by a couple of people who do not share the politics of the people in this room.

Ilya Marritz: The writer-directors of the film are siblings and trans women and critics of Donald Trump. Still, there is an idea in their movie that people on the right love.

JD Vance: The basic idea is that once you see the way that knowledge is transmitted, once you see the way that public policy works in this country, it's very hard to unsee it.

Ilya Marritz: He runs the audience through some examples of campus Liberals taking things too far. This, of course, is the key ingredient in all conversion narratives about universities.

JD Vance: A pogrom started on social media. The guy was turning to--

Ilya Marritz: It's effective because enough of it is true or feels right.

JD Vance: People came out suggesting that gender transition surgeries and hormonal therapies for adolescents was, in fact--

Ilya Marritz: When I was at Harvard, I had a class where the students routinely reached for words like colonialism or oppression. I found that annoying.

JD Vance: A young student who invited a bunch of students over to his house in a joking way has been threatened by the diversity bureaucracy at Yale Law School.

Ilya Marritz: Vance speaks with the fluency of an insider. He graduated Yale Law School in 2013.

JD Vance: I really want to end this on an inspirational note.

Ilya Marritz: I'm including the end of his speech because it contains this weird historical coda. Vance says he looked for a quote from Scripture or from history.

JD Vance: The person whose quote I ultimately had to land on was the great prophet and statesman, Richard Milhous Nixon.

Ilya Marritz: Vance releases a little smile and his eyes sweep the room as if to say, "Are you ready for the mic drop? "

JD Vance: There was a wisdom in what Richard Nixon said approximately 40, 50 years ago. He said, and I quote, "The professors are the enemy."

[applause]

Ilya Marritz: The end. "The professors are the enemy." I want to underline what a choice this is. President Nixon said those words not in public, not in his speech, but in a secret recording made in the Oval Office in 1972, right after he won a landslide re-election. The tape was only released to the public in 2008. You'd have to be a Nixon scholar or a fanboy to really know about it.

Richard Nixon: The press is the enemy. The academy is the enemy. The professors are the enemy. The professors are the enemy. Write that on the blackboard 100 times and never forget it.

Ilya Marritz: Not long after Nixon said those words, the special counsel investigating Watergate requested some of his Oval Office tapes. Nixon resisted. When the special counsel refused to drop his subpoena, he was fired. I tell you this because the special counsel was, of course, Archibald Cox. The same Archibald Cox, who wore bow ties and taught at Harvard Law School. The same Archibald Cox, who convinced the Supreme Court to uphold race-based affirmative action on the grounds of diversity.

[music]

Margaret Brennan: I want to ask you about some of the things you've said about American universities. I know you've been very critical of them.

Ilya Marritz: CBS's Margaret Brennan had JD Vance on Face the Nation in August, shortly after he became the Republican candidate for vice president. By now, Vance had a specific model in mind for the change he wants to see.

Margaret Brennan: You gave an interview in February. You said the closest conservatives have ever gotten to successfully dealing with the left-wing domination of universities is Viktor Orbán's approach in Hungary.

Ilya Marritz: Hungary's strongman President, Viktor Orbán grabbed control of state universities, putting friends from his political party in charge of the foundations that run them. Gender studies have been banned. Hungary is now ranked lower for academic freedom than Sudan and just ahead of Uzbekistan, far below where it was when Orbán intervened.

Margaret Brennan: Is that what you're advocating be done in the United States?

JD Vance: Well, Margaret, what you're seeing in the United States actually is that universities are controlled by left-wing foundations, they're not controlled by the American taxpayer, and yet the American taxpayer is sending hundreds of billions of dollars to these universities every single year.

Margaret Brennan: I don't want taxpayers controlling education necessarily. Is that what you're advocating for, federal government control?

JD Vance: Margaret, what I'm advocating for is for taxpayers to have a say in how their money is spent.

Ilya Marritz: Does JD Vance admire Hungary because it's producing better graduates and finer research and more medical breakthroughs? I went back to Hilary Burns, the Globe's higher education reporter.

Hilary Burns: I have not heard anything about that. I think we've only heard that he admires the government policing what's taught and how the university is run.

Ilya Marritz: There's no shortage of authoritarian governments around the world at this moment, and there have been many in the past. What do we know about universities in authoritarian systems?

Hilary Burns: I asked a professor I spoke with over the summer, a CUNY professor, Benjamin Hett, about why is it that universities are among the first targets for authoritarian leaders. His answer was quite simple. He said because professors tend to tell them they're wrong. Who likes that?

Ilya Marritz: [laughs]

Hilary Burns: I think that it's safe to say authoritarian governments target the people who are establishing truths and who are studying and researching controversial and difficult topics. That's a playbook that we've seen throughout history. I think that's really concerning for anyone who cares about the truce or is in the truce business.

Ilya Marritz: In the new administration, uncooperative colleges could lose access to federally-backed student loan programs, to research grants. Endowment taxes could grow.

Danielle Holley: We absolutely are thinking about that.

Ilya Marritz: I went back to Mount Holyoke President Danielle Holley one more time.

Danielle Holley: How would we self-fund, for example, our entire financial aid system?

Ilya Marritz: We're in a conference room because it's a women's college. Almost all the oil portraits on the walls are of women, which makes a nice change.

Danielle Holley: If there's no funding for Pell Grants, if there is complete privatization of the loan system that we have, how will we be able to help parents and students? We're lucky we're a small liberal arts college. We believe that we actually probably have the resources to self-fund for four years or however the defunding last, but many colleges and universities don't have that choice.

Ilya Marritz: Holley had read some of Vance's words before, but she hadn't seen this speech, so I played some of it for her.

Danielle Holley: It's breathtaking. It's truly breathtaking. When we ask the question of why universities, I think you heard a lot of it in that answer, which is they get to control what the truth is.

JD Vance: The universities, which control the knowledge in our society, which control what we call truth and what we call falsity, that provides research, that gives credibility to some of the most ridiculous ideas that exist in our country.

Danielle Holley: If the truth is malleable, if the truth is just something that we play out on social media, but there is no actual truth, I think when you put universities in the bullseye, you're essentially putting concepts like knowledge and truth, even values, what is right and what is wrong, all of those things are being called into question.

Ilya Marritz: It lines up with something Holley recently noticed. When people find out what she does for work, they're sometimes skeptical or even hostile.

Danielle Holley: I've had people in airports and on airplanes ask me like, "What do you teach? What are you doing in terms of indoctrination of students?" Because again, we've become like the tobacco industry almost for some people. They see us as a harm to the republic, as a harm to their values and to their communities.

Ilya Marritz: She says it started in 2020 or 2021.

Danielle Holley: That's when you began to hear a lot of this. Remember Ron DeSantis, of course, in Florida.

Ilya Marritz: When Florida did its own strong arm reboot of education at one public college, the gender studies program was axed and more than a third of the faculty left the school. It's early days. We don't know how much of a focus it's going to be in the end. We don't know what the new administration is going to maybe look at first. Please get as concrete as you can. With this institution, what are you going to do if somebody comes to you and says you have to change the way that you're teaching? Are there compromises that you can make?

Danielle Holley: No, there are no compromises to be made. For me, my job is to promote the mission of my institution and to make sure that the students here get the best education possible.

Ilya Marritz: Do you think most college presidents are going to take the same position as you?

Danielle Holley: Absolutely not. I think what we will see is that we will see many institutions, we see that already, who are scraping their websites. They're being very neutral. They're trying to stay under the radar. All of this, again, is understandable, as a college leader. If I were leading a large Research 1 institution, I would absolutely be positioning, I think, my university to probably keep as much federal funding as possible.

Sam Lessin: In the end of the day, who's going to defend the universities from the federal government, like from these entities? Normally, it'd be people like me.

Ilya Marritz: Again, Sam Lessin, Silicon Valley guy and alumni activist. I followed up with him after the election.

Sam Lessin: Who would say, let's pursue truth at all costs, stay out of these schools, et cetera? I'm at the point where I'm like, "Look, I still believe that intellectually, but practically speaking, you don't really have a leg to stand on." It's hard to defend the activities that have been happening on campus.

Ilya Marritz: A few years ago, in a speech, JD Vance said we need to attack the universities. He said professors are the enemy. Do you have any concern about that kind of rhetoric?

Sam Lessin: Here's my thing on rhetoric, is I think we live in this very split world at this point, where everyone's scared of everyone else.

Ilya Marritz: Lessin contrasted Kamala Harris's careful, more scripted media strategy with that of her opponents.

Sam Lessin: People make fun of Trump for spitballing live for hours. It's actually a very reasonable strategy.

Ilya Marritz: Before landing on what he thinks of Vance's words.

Sam Lessin: Yes, that's a little intense. Is it completely wrong? Are there some crazy liberal professors who are using their brands they're associated with as a political platform and are not pursuing truth? Yes, that is definitely true. Again, does it scare me as a one-off? Sure. If you plucked it out and said this is one point of platform, it's not great, but I don't think it's completely unreasonable in a spitballing sense. I think people need to give some grace to this different communication strategy.

Ilya Marritz: In Sam Lessin's world, JD Vance gets grace, but universities don't. They are under obligation to police their students, their professors, and administrators, to police themselves or risk being on the wrong side of the government. Harvard's new president, Alan Garber has told faculty he's worried. The Republican talk about significant increases in endowment taxes "keeps me up at night," the Harvard Crimson reported him as saying. Harvard has recently made some changes that may help it with the incoming administration. It did away with diversity statements for applicants to join the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. It adopted a policy on institutional voice similar to Danielle Holley's statement on statements. The new guidance says Harvard will only talk about stuff pertaining to Harvard and higher ed. Will it even do that? Again, Danielle Holley.

Danielle Holley: We need to watch carefully for the next four years, who will get in line, who will be ready to participate and cooperate with the notion that we must readjust our academic programs and academic freedom, what we teach in our classrooms to conform to what the current federal government wants us to do.

Ilya Marritz: At the beginning of this series, I told you that Harvard is all about power, studying it, forming the people who will hold it. I was skeptical, but also intrigued. I signed up for one of those power classes, a one-week course during winter break. 80 people in a classroom, UN-style horseshoe with name placards. We watched film clips, discussed readings, heard from speakers. It was great. That class started six days after Claudine Gay resigned. We never talked once about the grand power play that had just taken place at our own institution, at least not in class. I sat there the whole time wondering what lessons can be learned from what happened to Claudine Gay. Here are three that I landed on.

One, we know social media fuels instant judgment. That is kryptonite for institutions that like to go slow. Two, attacking things is a way to build your own power. That's not a left or right thing. It's just how things work. Three, anyone making a historic change should prepare for a backlash. If colleges and universities are going to survive and thrive, they need to look at the storm that blew through Harvard and start learning lessons fast.

[music]

Ilya Marritz: A lot of people helped me to make this series. This list is incomplete, but it includes Ann Marie Lipinski and everyone at the Nieman Foundation, my 2024 Nieman Fellows and affiliates, including Denise and Mike Chetta and Andrea Patiño Contreras and Will Moose. Also, Ian Coss and Kelsey Tyssowski, Jed Willard, Rebecca Lavoie, many professors, administrators, alumni, and others at Harvard, who are patient with their time and generous with their knowledge, the Harvard Crimson for its excellent reporting and at the Boston Globe, special thanks to Mike Damiano, Shirley Leung, Deirdre Fernandez, Adrian Walker, Aidan Ryan, Hilary Burns, Andrew Ryan, Jen Peter, and Nancy Barnes. The Harvard Plan is a collaboration with the Boston Globe. The production team includes me, Jasmine Aguilera, Emily Botin, Regina de Heer, Jared Paul, and the Globe's head of audio, Kristen Nelson.

[music]

Micah Loewinger: On the Media is produced by Eloise Blondiau, Molly Rosen, Rebecca Clark-Callender, and Candice Wang.

Brooke Gladstone: Our technical director is Jennifer Munson. Our engineer is Brendan Dalton. Eloise Blondiau is our senior producer, and our executive producer is Katya Rogers. On the Media is a production of WNYC Studios. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: 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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This year was earth’s hottest on record, and the Atlantic storm season brought with it five major hurricanes. And yet in December, the Pew Research Center found that only some 20 percent of Americans expect to make major sacrifices in their lifetime due to the climate crisis. According to writer Nathaniel Rich, when it comes to planning for a fraught future, New Orleans sets an example the rest of the country would be wise to follow.

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 protestor held a sign as Extinction Rebellion activists and sympathisers blocked a busy road in The Hague, Netherlands, Saturday, Jan. 28, 2023.

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

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This year was earth’s hottest on record, and the Atlantic storm season brought with it five major hurricanes. And yet in December, the Pew Research Center found that only some 20 perc...

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Title: How to Plan for Inevitable Disaster

Brooke Gladstone: This is the On the Media midweek podcast. I'm Brooke Gladstone. This year was Earth's hottest on record, and the Atlantic storm season brought with it five major hurricanes. Yet in December, the Pew Research Center found that only some 20% of Americans expect to make major sacrifices in their lifetime due to the climate crisis. When it comes to planning for a fraught future, writer and essayist Nathaniel Rich recently argued in a piece in the New York Times that his city of New Orleans can set an example that the rest of the country would be wise to follow. Welcome to the show, Nathaniel.

Nathaniel Rich: Thanks for having me. It's great to be back.

Brooke Gladstone: How does New Orleans' perspective differ from other places where inevitable natural disaster is foreseen sometime in the future? I emphasize sometime in the future. What do you think?

Nathaniel Rich: I think the perspective down here is franker and more honest than you tend to see anywhere else in this country. Certainly, I was struck by this kind of metronomic drumbeat of the reporting this hurricane season from places like Asheville or even to the Florida coast, of people saying things like, "I never would've expected this," or, "Who could've imagined?" Nobody says that kind of thing here. People here live with their eyes wide open to existential risk because we know every hurricane season might be the last.

Brooke Gladstone: How does that perspective play out in how New Orleanians plan?

Nathaniel Rich: We're ready. I think everybody here has a fully filled pantry. They have gallons of water. Those who can afford it have whole house generators. There are evacuation plans, as you said, depending on the trajectory of a storm and the duration of the devastation. They say, "Pack a go bag or something," whenever-- FEMA says that whenever a hurricane is coming. We have go bags. We have go suitcases, and we don't need to be reminded.

Brooke Gladstone: You don't wait for a tropical storm to form. You track every depression and cyclone advisory with, you say, grim scrutiny. Local news tracks it, too.

Nathaniel Rich: Yes. I have to say that the local news is excellent at this, you say, then there's random people and amateurs on Twitter who follow this kind of thing more obsessively than even the state agencies. At times, you become a kind of expert at reading advanced meteorological bulletins from the National Hurricane Center and various different spaghetti models.

Brooke Gladstone: What models? [laughs]

Nathaniel Rich: Spaghetti models. Yes. There's a whole-- There are all these terms of art that I suppose I need to define-

Brooke Gladstone: Yes, you do. [laughs]

Nathaniel Rich: -as I go along that I've just become completely accustomed to. There are a bunch of different modeling agencies around the world, and each of them have their own little calculation of what their algorithms to predict where a storm will go. When you project all of those predictions on a map on top of one another, basically, it looks like strands of spaghetti representing the possible paths of a storm.

I mean, the other thing I wasn't able to get into in the piece is that not only do we monitor whatever's available publicly, I think everybody in the city has their own kind of inside source within Army Corps of Engineers or-

Brooke Gladstone: [chuckles] Really?

Nathaniel Rich: -city government. That's a bit obsessive, but of course, it's pretty high stakes. Hurricane season ends in November 30th, technically, but in New Orleans, it never ends.

Brooke Gladstone: You've said, "We are as prepared as anyone can be with the certain knowledge that one day a storm will come for which no preparations will suffice."

Nathaniel Rich: Yes. On some psychological level, many of us have made peace with that. Maybe because there's no evading the reality of what we're up against.

Brooke Gladstone: You outlined something called the Coastal Master Plan, which has been endorsed by the city leadership. You describe it as the world's most expensive and most ambitious climate change adaptation plan. What makes it so incredible?

Nathaniel Rich: The master plan is enormous. It's essentially an omnibus plan on the order of 200 projects to build land, to preserve land, to restore land, and then there's also a whole host of mitigation efforts built into it. It's a $50 billion plan, although that's seen as a gross understatement, that renews every five years. It's in perpetuity a 50-year plan.

Brooke Gladstone: It's currently underway that would mitigate Louisiana's severe loss of coastal land, which was the number one problem, by essentially creating new land.

Nathaniel Rich: Yes, the core of the plan is called river diversion. They basically cut a gap into the levee in the riverbank and open up a new tributary of the river, and so strong is the flow of the Mississippi that even cutting these little diversions are enormously forceful. They've pinpointed two such places on the river, one on the east bank, one on the west bank, south of New Orleans.

Brooke Gladstone: They would create new rivers that would be among the five most powerful in the US. The first one is scheduled to start next year?

Nathaniel Rich: It's scheduled to start next year after an extraordinarily long political, scientific process. What's important to understand is effectively what the engineers are trying to do is to mimic the natural behavior of the Mississippi River, which, before human settlement and before the construction of levees, would change course every year and flood its banks. Every time it flooded, it would deposit this silty water, and over generations, that all that silt would cohere and build up into land. They've already begun the basic construction, but in the last couple weeks, it's now come under some threat from the governor.

Brooke Gladstone: Yet the planners concede it's not going to really solve the big issue, which is saving the coast. It's just buying time. It's soberly facing the reality of climate change.

Nathaniel Rich: The genius of the plan, I think, or really the shrewdness of it, is that it's an enormously ambitious plan that doesn't ultimately intend to solve the major problem it addresses, but what it does do is it buys time. It might buy decades or even generations of time to prepare for that eventuality.

Brooke Gladstone: Even in one of the nation's reddest states, it won wide bipartisan support, but there is one constituency strongly opposed. That's the oystermen, the shrimpers, the fishermen in the Gulf, 10 miles downriver of New Orleans. Why are they so against the plan?

Nathaniel Rich: The people living south of New Orleans who are the most threatened by sea level rise, by hurricanes, who live on this very narrow spit of land between the Mississippi and the swamps behind them, which lead to the Gulf and that are being eroded at this rapid rate, they are against the master plan because this pumping in of the Mississippi River water into the marshes behind their houses will alter drastically the fisheries that they use to make their livelihoods.

Brooke Gladstone: They have to choose between saving their homes or saving their livelihoods, and they've picked their livelihoods.

Nathaniel Rich: Well, it's really a question of timescale. They're not climate deniers down there. It's a very conservative parish, but they don't need to be convinced that the water is rising. They've seen the swamp disappear. They've seen places that used to be land turn into open water. However, they're not really concerned about what's going to happen to them 10 or 15 or 30 years from now. They're concerned about whether they'll be able to make a living in the next year. I think that's valid. They're not making anything up, but a decision has been made.

I don't think the decision makers would put it in so crudely, but a decision has been made essentially to sacrifice the livelihood of a lot of these people down there in order to benefit the whole and save the much broader economies that are just upriver from the parish. It's created a political problem that's now threatening to be a real nightmare for the engineers and the other populations that are depending on the master plan being built.

Brooke Gladstone: In fact, in the last couple of weeks, Governor Jeff Landry, who was just elected this year, has been speaking out because he says it would, "break parts of Louisiana's culture because of the harm to these Gulf fishing communities."

Nathaniel Rich: Yes, he's giving them now priority over the voices of everyone else, which not only includes greater metropolitan New Orleans and the millions of people who live in fear of hurricanes coming over these depleted marshes, but frankly, his leading constituency, which is the oil and gas industry, enormously powerful in Louisiana. You could even say runs the state basically in a petro-imperium down here.

Brooke Gladstone: They support the plan.

Nathaniel Rich: They support the plan because even though they've helped bring about many of the conditions that have forced this plan upon us, including putting pipelines and shipping canals through the marsh, not to mention greenhouse gas emissions, those industries have enormous infrastructures.

Brooke Gladstone: Just wondering, has there been any discussion of the potential ecological harm of diverting the Mississippi River, the second most toxic river in the country, on plants and wildlife and fishing ecosystems?

Nathaniel Rich: Yes, it's been enormously well studied and extensively. The one that's gained the most press and so the most political value, I think, for the critics is that it will lead to the death of something like 200 bottlenose dolphins that--

Brooke Gladstone: Don't kill the dolphins.

Nathaniel Rich: Well, I mean, the counterargument would be-- Not to defend dolphin murder, but they're swimming in places in the marsh that historically they never would have been. In fact, historically, it would've been dry land. They're only that close because the marshes are disappearing. Absolutely, I mean, flooding the swamps will have some negative impacts.

There was this moment in which the fishermen had been failing for years to get anyone to care about them and their plight. They realized that if they started talking about dolphins, all of a sudden the press coverage become much more favorable, and so overnight, all of these fishermen became these kind of Free Willy advocates and started giving dolphin tours and so on.

Brooke Gladstone: That is an important media point.

Nathaniel Rich: Well, they realized that people care more about dolphins than working class fishermen.

Brooke Gladstone: In your piece, you quote Ben Strauss, who's head of Climate Central, that's a nonprofit composed of scientists and science journalists that report and also conduct research on climate change. Strauss said, "People find it very hard to accept that a city like New Orleans at some point will not exist anymore. Why don't we think of the life of a city the way that we think about the life of a human being? Just because our lives are finite doesn't mean that they're worthless." I think that's the point in your piece that actually hit me the hardest, and I thought it could really be applied to a whole host of situations in the world today.

Nathaniel Rich: Yes, it hit me hard, too, when I first heard that. It was told to me by Tor Törnqvist, who's a professor of Tulane. It did put things into perspective for me because I realized that we have this fantasy, at least in this country, that cities are forever, that the culture is forever, and that's just not true. Civilizations are not forever. That's not, however, a reason to just give in to nihilism or despair.

A problem we have facing climate change as a species, psychologically, is that we can't look at it too directly. It's a bit like looking at one's own death because we're talking about civilizational death. That's what's on the table. Once you can get there, once you can accept the idea of mortality, it focuses your thinking, and it forces you to really question what you value. It forces you to prioritize. In New Orleans, people live with full knowledge that the city will not live forever, and yet that does not make people give up for the most part. It makes people commit more fully to the life of the place.

Brooke Gladstone: You suggest that in other places, there's a big gap in what people know about climate change, for instance, and where they put their taxpayer money and investments. You said people in New York, they probably don't know about the water table. [chuckles]

Nathaniel Rich: Yes. I don't know that people living downtown Manhattan look at the flood risk maps too closely before they've spent $5 million on an apartment. In New Orleans, you do. [chuckles] You know exactly how many inches you're above sea level, and you know the differences between one block and the next. I think it's bracing. It can be chilling in some ways, but I think it's actually healthy.

Brooke Gladstone: I know a lot of people in their 30s who really feel hopeless about the future, everything from thinking there isn't going to be a place to live, to not going to be able to get Social Security when they're old or any number of things, and it is easy to throw up their hands. I just wonder, is there a way that this message of cherishing the moment in which we actually spend our lives can be an impetus to change?

Nathaniel Rich: Yes, but I also think there's a kind of in between place, which is to say that I don't think the message of New Orleans is laissez les bons temps rouler and just get drunk and hope for the best. Although, of course, that's the way some people respond. I think it's a message that forces one to try to improve the place and to withstand some of these pressures that are coming at us, this binary of hope and despair, which has so dominated the conversation in activist circles in this country for the last couple decades.

Whenever I speak with people in Europe about climate change issues, that whole binary doesn't enter into the conversation. If anything, people in Europe, especially northern Europe, are far more pessimistic than would be allowed in any kind of activist circle in the US, and yet the policies tend to be much more progressive. I do wonder also to what extent is that a symptom of American culture, that everything that needs to be placed into this kind of Marvel Universe of are we going to save the world or are we going to fall into this apocalypse? It's a kind of mental shortcut that prevents us from thinking of real measures that we can take to improve our lot in the meantime.

Brooke Gladstone: In the meantime, meaning in the moment. Does thinking about the future enable us not just to plan for the future, but to better appreciate the moment? Is that what New Orleans teaches us?

Nathaniel Rich: Absolutely. I think people who decide to live here, who have the ability to live other places, you see a much stronger commitment to the place, to the life of the place, I think, here than in other cities I've lived in. If you're here, you're here for a reason. Now, a lot of people are here who would leave if the rate of poverty wasn't as high as it is, and yet there's still this sense, I think, in the city, the culture of the city, that the people who are here are dedicated to it. There's a level of civic engagement that feels to me much more robust than I've encountered in other places. Part of it has to do with this shared sense of peril, frankly, precarity.

Brooke Gladstone: [chuckles] Thank you so much.

Nathaniel Rich: Thank you.

Brooke Gladstone: Nathaniel Rich is the author of Second Nature, Scenes from a World Remade and a contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine. Thanks for listening to the On the Media podcast. Tune in to the big show on Friday evening to hear the final installment of the Harvard Plan, all about the fallout of Claudine Gay's short and troubled tenure as president of the university and what it all means for the rest of higher education.

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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The suspected killer of the UnitedHealthcare CEO has been crowned a hero by many on social media. On this week’s On the Media, what the fandom reveals, and what the coverage of it has missed. Plus, tune in to part two of "The Harvard Plan." Hear how plagiarism allegations at the university exploded into a toxic discourse about DEI and “diversity hires.”

[01:00]  Hosts Brooke Gladstone and Micah Loewinger examine how the suspected killer of the UnitedHealthcare CEO became an internet sensation, what the spectacle itself reveals, and the gulf between the reactions on TikTok and in mainstream media.

[15:29] Reporter Ilya Marritz, in part two of this collaboration with WNYC’s On The Media, Harvard’s first Black president Claudine Gay is accused of academic plagiarism, just days after giving testimony to Congress. The drip-drip of new allegations keeps the story in the headlines. It also reinforces critics’ allegation that Gay is a “diversity hire,” unworthy of the job. We hear from two of the writers who broke that news, and from a defender of Harvard’s diversity efforts.

Check out our collaboration with the Boston Globe here.

Further reading/listening/watching:

“Luigi Mangione’s Full Story Isn’t Online,” by John Herrman

"Beware, fellow plutocrats, the pitchforks are coming," Ted Talk by Nick Hanauer

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 poster depicting Luigi Mangione hangs outside the New York Hilton Midtown hotel, in New York, Dec. 12, 2024.

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

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The suspected killer of the UnitedHealthcare CEO goes viral, and the culture war that ousted Harvard’s first Black president.

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A Cold-Blooded Killing Ignites a National Conversation. Plus, Part Two of 'The Harvard Plan.'

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Male Speaker 1: Yo, go do a deep dive on this guy right now. He seems like someone I would probably be friends with.

Male Speaker 2: Mama, I'm in love with a criminal. Because Luigi, that's a spicy meatball.

Micah Loewinger: The alleged killer of the United Healthcare CEO is getting the TikTok treatment, much to the disgust of some in the traditional media. From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I'm Micah Loewinger. Also on this week's show, Harvard president Claudine Gay found herself in the hot seat at a congressional hearing last year after protests on campus were deemed antisemitic. That was just the beginning of her troubles.

Male Speaker 3: The elite college is facing pressure again to oust its leader as House lawmakers investigate academic plagiarism allegations.

Female Speaker 1: You might as well murder somebody in academia if you're going to plagiarize your dissertation.

Micah Loewinger: Tune in for the second episode of our miniseries about the leadership crisis at Harvard and what it spells for universities writ large. It's all coming up after this. From WNYC in New York. This is On the Media. I'm Micah Loewinger.

Brooke Gladstone: I'm Brooke Gladstone. You know the story. On Wednesday, December 4th, a hooded assassin gunned down a corporate exec on a midtown Manhattan street in the hushed twilight just before sunrise.

Micah Loewinger: From there, the narrative took off in many directions. With so little context to be found at that early stage, police and journalists went online to comb for clues. TikTokers were at it, too, doing what they do so often, turning a breaking news event into a group scavenger hunt.

Male Speaker 1: Yo, go do a deep dive on this guy right now. He's got a Twitter and honestly, seems like someone I would probably be friends with.

Micah Loewinger: That video got 1.8 million likes.

Female Speaker 2: The astrology girlies got hold of his birth chart. Are you ready for this? There's no surprises. Taurus Sun, Virgo Moon, Aries Rising, and y'all want to argue that astrology is not real?

Female Speaker 3: When I googled him, his Goodreads showed up, and as a bookish content creator, I am at liberty to review his Goodreads presence, so let's get into it.

Micah Loewinger: Those who pored over his digital footprint found his positive review of The Unabomber Manifesto and his review of a book about back pain. They found what appeared to be the X-ray of his back surgery, a LinkedIn profile that pointed to a stint in the video game industry, and an X account count following Andrew Huberman, AOC, Joe Rogan, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Ezra Klein, and Sam Altman. A fairly unremarkable mishmash media diet for a tech bro interested in politics and fitness. Speaking of which, it was his Instagram account and all those shirtless photos that likely drew the most attention this week.

Male Speaker 4: People had already decided he was a sex symbol based on like the two inches of eyeball that we'd seen from him, but now we've got full body tea. Like he is ripped. It feels like it's Christmas day on the Internet.

Male Speaker 2: Mama, I'm in love with a criminal. This type of love isn't rational, it's physical. That was Britney Spears, and I believe we're all feeling that right now. Because Luigi, that's a spicy meatball.

Micah Loewinger: There were videos about whether Mangione could be saved with jury nullification and offers to pay his legal bills, and unfounded theories about how he'd been framed. For much of social media, this was a clear cut story of a hero and villain.

Female Speaker 4: Today we mourn Brian Thompson, a man who revolutionized healthcare by denying it.

Female Speaker 5: Empathy is unfortunately not covered under our current plan. You know what I mean?

Female Speaker 6: Deny, defend, depose on the bullet casings. I was like, oh, wow. Yes, clear. Message and receipt. We got it.

Male Speaker 5: After this healthcare CEO thing, we're so close to class consciousness, like millimeters away. Like roughly 9 millimeters away.

Micah Loewinger: The dark humor, the glee, and the overnight canonization of a murder suspect sparked disgust and confusion. An op-ed from the Wall Street Journal's editorial board argued that Mangione devolved into madness as he "trafficked in the theories of exploitation and blame that dominate corners of the Internet." Adrienne LaFrance, executive editor of the Atlantic, described the killing and the specter of political violence as a sign of impending decivilization. But her piece made no reference to America's broken healthcare system, which is also quite bad for civilization. Here's Chris Cuomo on NewsNation.

Chris Cuomo: You are worse than what you oppose when you celebrate murder as a justifiable end for disagreement over policy. What the hell is going wrong here?

Laura Ingraham: The Instagram posts from nutbag people--

Micah Loewinger: Laura Ingraham on her Fox News show this week.

Laura Ingraham: Crazy. Like he's cute, and people celebrating this. This is a sickness. Honestly, it's so disappointing, but I guess we shouldn't be surprised. Up next, the other big news out of New York, Daniel Penny. A lot of people think he's a hero and tonight he's not guilty. My take next.

Ben Shapiro: This is simply Marxist, leftist, radical evil.

Micah Loewinger: Ben Shapiro on his YouTube channel last week.

Ben Shapiro: When you say it's okay to murder CEOs on the street, that is a call for revolution. Second, violence against members of private industry, that isn't even a protest to public policy. Let's be fair about this. That isn't even shooting politicians, which would be evil enough. It's even a different level of evil because it's a protest against the very system of free markets themselves.

Micah Loewinger: Shapiro's audience appeared to disagree. The video was heavily downvoted by a ratio of 8 to 1.

Brooke Gladstone: If you go down to the comments section, you'll find messages with thousands of likes. "Remember guys, Ben has more in common with that CEO than he has with any of us."

Micah Loewinger: "This isn't a left versus right issue. It's the working class versus the wealthy. That's probably why you're trying to pretend it's something it's not."

Brooke Gladstone: "Saw my lifelong hardworking father become bankrupt as a result of claims being denied after getting cancer. You are out of touch, man."

Micah Loewinger: "Wow, maybe I've been wrong this entire time. Ben, I don't think you actually care about us. I think you just want our money. I think you just want us to hate each other."

Brooke Gladstone: Many have evinced shock at the mixed reaction to cold-blooded murder. Others, not so much. In recent days and years, we've often marveled at the reactions of our fellow American. As we grope for some clarity, at least this time we don't have to grapple with slippery intangibles like zeitgeist. This context is quantifiable, so get ready for some numbers. According to data derived from CMS, the federal agency overseeing the coverage of more than 160 million people on Medicare, Medicaid, the CHIPs program, and the health insurance marketplace, UnitedHealthcare dismissed about a third of all claims in 2023. That's twice the industry average. Its parent company, UnitedHealth Group, raked in close to $400 billion this past year, revenues that have grown by between 9% and 14% each year going back to 2021. It's ranked by Fortune magazine the eighth largest company in the entire world.

Senator Elizabeth Warren: Now, Mr. Witty, UnitedHealth Group owns the country's largest insurer, the country's largest claims processor, the country's third largest pharmacy benefit manager, a huge pharmacy chain.

Brooke Gladstone: At a Senate Finance Committee hearing last May, Senator Elizabeth Warren grilled UnitedHealth Group CEO Andrew Witty, noting that the company employs, or she said, controls 10% of the nation's doctors.

Senator Elizabeth Warren: Because UnitedHealth has bought up every link in the healthcare chain, you are now in a position to jack up prices, squeeze competitors, hide revenues and pressure doctors to put profits ahead of patients. UnitedHealth is a monopoly on steroids.

Brooke Gladstone: In January, the health news outlet STAT published a detailed investigation into how a UnitedHealthcare subsidiary, NaviHealth, used algorithms to deny care for seniors enrolled in the company's Medicare Advantage plan. That prompted a class action lawsuit against UnitedHealthcare and its parent company. Also this year, a Senate committee concluded that UnitedHealthcare, Humana, and CVS, which owns Aetna, had purposefully denied claims for costly nursing care to patients recovering from falls and strokes. Then there's the class action lawsuit brought by the City of Hollywood Firefighters' Pension Fund against the late Brian Thompson and two other UnitedHealth Group execs for allegedly dumping stock just before a Justice Department antitrust investigation into the company. There's so much more.

Male Speaker 6: The prior authorization process where a physician might have said you need this procedure and UnitedHealthcare found ways to slow walk that, delay the procedure, deny the procedure and ask for more paperwork.

Brooke Gladstone: Our pretzel shaped, employer based/government funded/public-private hybrid of a healthcare system was a compromise crafted in part to protect the deep pocketed insurance companies' bottom lines. Even leaving the corruption aside compared to peer nations, American healthcare, in a word, sucks.

Female Speaker 7: Let me just start off this video by saying I do not condone violence by any means, but as a mom who was nine months pregnant sitting in the emergency room with my one-year-old baby, being told she had a giant brain tumor that was causing her brain to essentially swell out of her head, she needed to be transferred to New York City so she could have emergency brain surgery and instead we sat in the hospital for three days because UnitedHealthcare refused to approve the transfer via ambulance from the hospital where we live to another state. Again, this isn't to condone violence whatsoever. All I'm saying is that I do not doubt for a second what the motive of that suspect was.

Brooke Gladstone: In the latest Commonwealth Fund report comparing global health across the globe, 10 nations, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States were assessed on five criteria, access to care, care process, administrative efficiency, equity, and health outcomes. Australia scored first and Germany second to last, but frankly, they were clustered pretty closely together. All of them met their residents' basic health care needs, including universal coverage. Until you got to the US, which was so far below the others on the graph, it looked like it had been dropped there by accident.

Meanwhile, medical debt is the number one cause of bankruptcy in America. More than 100 million people, 41% of adults, are struggling with medical bills they can't pay. According to an investigation by KFF Health News with NPR and CBS News. KFF, formerly the Kaiser Family Foundation, said that the project "exposed that medical debt, rather than fighting disease, is now a defining feature of the nation's healthcare system." About that so-called manifesto. A few pages penned by Luigi Mangione reported in snippets, but at this writing still isn't available to read in context. Well, here's what NYPD Chief of Detectives Joseph Kenny had to say.

Joseph Kenny: That document is currently in the possession of the Altoona Police Department as part of their investigation. Just from briefly speaking with them, we don't think that there's any specific threats to other people mentioned in that document. It does seem that he has some ill will toward corporate America.

Brooke Gladstone: If that seems noteworthy to Chief Kenny, then he's part of a dwindling minority. According to a 2022 Pew study, some 71% of Americans feel some ill will toward corporate America, a sharp rise in just the last few years.

Nick Hanauer: You probably don't know me, but I am one of those 0.01 percenters that you hear about and read about. I am, by any reasonable definition, a plutocrat.

Micah Loewinger: This is Nick Hanauer, a venture capitalist and entrepreneur, delivering a TED Talk in 2014, 10 years ago.

Nick Hanauer: Tonight, what I would like to do is speak directly to other plutocrats, to my people, because it feels like it's time for us all to have a chat.

Micah Loewinger: He described his incredibly lavish life achieved through what he calls luck, hard work and a couple key talents.

Nick Hanauer: I have a good sense, a good intuition about what will happen in the future. What do I see in our future today, you ask? I see pitchforks, as in angry mobs with pitchforks, because while people like us plutocrats are living beyond the dreams of avarice, the other 99% of our fellow citizens are falling farther and farther behind.

Micah Loewinger: He laid out the accelerating rate of income inequality in America.

Nick Hanauer: If wealth, power and income continue to concentrate at the very tippy top, our society will change from a capitalist democracy to a neo feudalist, rentier society like 18th century France. That was France before the revolution and the mobs with the pitchforks. I have a message for my fellow plutocrats and zillionaires and for anyone who lives in a gated bubble world. Wake up, wake up. It cannot last.

Brooke Gladstone: Revolutions happen. Can we still assume in today's America that it can't happen here? The murder, as horrific as it was, was not the most important news in this sobering saga. It was our reaction to it. Was it a sign of what Adrienne LaFrance called decivilization? Or was it Nick Hanauer's wake up call?

Micah Loewinger: As we try to understand what this moment means, one thing is clear: the massive disconnect between this week's conversations on social media and in the once hallowed op-ed pages. It felt like two different planets orbiting two different suns. We can only hope the fact-based media finds a way to close the distance. Coming up, the untold media story behind last year's dramatic ouster of Harvard President Claudine Gay.

Brooke Gladstone: This is On the Media. This is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger. For the rest of the hour, we're airing part two of our series we made in collaboration with the Boston Globe, looking at how American colleges and universities have become a political punching bag with a focus on the oldest and richest of them all, Harvard. To recap, the latest salvo against elite universities began in earnest a year ago. After the Hamas attack on October 7 sparked Israel's ongoing war in Gaza, college campuses became a locus for protest and the media couldn't look away.

Female Speaker 8: America's elite colleges are a world apart from the war in Gaza, but protests about the war are putting them at the center of a growing controversy.

[protesters chanting]

Micah Loewinger: At Harvard, a letter written by the Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee and originally co-signed by 33 other Harvard student organizations blamed Israel entirely for the attack. The university leadership response wasn't deemed strong enough by either the protesters or by the community of donors and alumni who began to complain online about the tolerance for what they saw as antisemitism at their alma mater. As the newly inaugurated president of Harvard and the first Black woman and only second woman to occupy that role, Claudine Gay was in the hot seat. Then the Republican controlled House Committee on Education in the Workforce got interested and hauled in the presidents of Harvard, MIT, and the University of Pennsylvania for a grilling.

Female Speaker 9: Based upon your testimony, you understand that this call for Intifada is to commit genocide against the Jewish people in Israel and globally, correct?

Micah Loewinger: The drubbing in the press of the three leaders was instant and devastating. For Claudine Gay, it was just the beginning of her unraveling. In this week's episode of a series we're calling the Harvard Plan, reporter Ilya Marritz documents the role of journalists and activists in Gay's plagiarism scandal. Here's Ilya.

Ilya Marritz: The Yale Halloween costume controversy of 2015 is not much remembered today, but for Aaron Sibarium, it was decisive.

Aaron Sibarium: Let me just preface this by saying I'm always speaking in a personal capacity.

Ilya Marritz: Sibarium is now a reporter with the Washington Free Beacon.

Aaron Sibarium: Views do not reflect those of my employer or anyone else in my immediate professional orbit, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Ilya Marritz: Back then, Sibarium was a Yale sophomore and opinion editor of the Yale Daily News. Shortly before Halloween, the university's committee on Intercultural affairs sent out an email on blast about how not to dress for the holiday. Avoid cultural appropriation--

Aaron Sibarium: Be respectful of everyone, don't wear offensive costumes. Pretty boilerplate bureaucratic stuff.

Ilya Marritz: Then a lecturer named Erika Christakis, Harvard College class of 1986, sent a follow up email to students in the residential college where she worked with her own take.

Aaron Sibarium: More or less saying, you shouldn't expect the university to police Halloween costumes. Talk to each other if you're offended. That was really it.

Ilya Marritz: Christakis, who is an early childhood specialist, opined, "Is there no room anymore for a child or young person to be a little bit obnoxious, a little bit inappropriate or provocative or, yes, offensive?"

Aaron Sibarium: Campus goes crazy. Oh my God, she's defending blackface. She's X, Y and Z.

Ilya Marritz: Then her husband, a Yale professor, also got swept into it.

Aaron Sibarium: Next thing you know, her husband, who's the head of the hall residential college, is encircled by screaming students in the courtyard.

Female Speaker 10: Sending out that email that goes against your position as master. Do you understand that?

Male Speaker 7: No, I don't agree with that.

Female Speaker 11: Then why the fuck did you accept the position? Who the fuck hired you?

Male Speaker 8: I have a different vision to rule.

Ilya Marritz: It became a whole thing with the Atlantic, the New York Times and other news outlets getting in on the story. The editors of the Yale Daily News, of which Sibarium was one, met to decide what kind of editorial they wanted to write on this.

Aaron Sibarium: It became very clear two minutes into the meeting that anyone who pushed back was going to get called racist.

Ilya Marritz: Sibarium was in the minority, but as the opinion editor, it fell to him to write a piece that reflected the majority view, not his own.

Aaron Sibarium: I ended up having to write this sobbing, saccharine editorial about how horrible people of color at Yale are treated and how the administration hasn't done enough to elevate their voices, blah, blah, blah, blah. Obviously, I didn't believe in any of this. I thought the whole controversy was nuts.

Ilya Marritz: He saw how it resonated, though, and he wanted to cover colleges in the aggressive, skeptical way he thought they deserved. After Yale, he found his way to the Washington Free Beacon, a pugnacious right wing outlet whose motto, flanked by two cartoon missiles, is covering the enemies of freedom the way the mainstream media won't. There, he made college controversies his beat. Years later, when things blew up at Harvard, Sibarium got out the popcorn.

Aaron Sibarium: It was fun to watch them squirm because they couldn't issue a full throated condemnation of Hamas without really pissing off a certain small slice of activists. They couldn't not issue such a statement because then Jewish students and donors, as they did, were going to say, what the hell, guys? Yes, I thought that was delicious.

Ilya Marritz: Sibarium has a scruffy beard and describes himself as a secular Jew and a big believer in free speech. He wasn't writing much about the Harvard crisis until one day, just after the congressional hearing where Claudine Gay testified, he received a tip from an anonymous source.

Aaron Sibarium: It was about Claudine Gay's plagiarism. I thought, wow, this could be big, but I don't want to get my hopes up.

Ilya Marritz: He did his due diligence, and the tip checked out. On December 11th, 2023, his story ran in the Free Beacon asserting that Gay had taken from others' work on four papers published between 1993 and 2017. Harvard's rolling crisis had entered a new phase.

Male Speaker 9: University says Claudine Gay has now asked that corrections be made to her 1997 dissertation because of what it called inadequate citations.

Female Speaker 12: In a statement to multiple news outlets, Harvard says the university reviewed more of Gay's academic work and that the president plans to update her dissertation to correct instances of "inadequate citation." Stopping short of calling it plagiarism.

Ilya Marritz: I found reviewing Claudine Gay's alleged plagiarism to be tedious. It's about matching four words here, six words there, about a paragraph that looks to be around 70% the same as someone else's work, and so much academic jargon. Some of the alleged lapses are in the description of methods or the review of others' writing. Language here can be jargony and formulaic and repetitive, and that's expected. It seems clear, though, that she was at best sloppy.

Even professors who are sympathetic to Gay say they are troubled by this stuff. But I'm calling it alleged plagiarism because Harvard's own review did not conclude Gay's errors met its standards for plagiarism. Instead, it said she had left out citations and quotation marks in several articles. The reviewer said Gay's work still stands as original and that she did not intentionally claim other people's work as her own. After that review, yet more examples of Gay's alleged lapses were reported. We now come to the scuzzy side of this whole affair. The plagiarism allegations fueled attacks on Gay that were ugly and personal.

Female Speaker 13: Claudine Gay has revealed she faced death threats and was repeatedly called the N word in recent weeks as a right wing effort to out--

Ilya Marritz: Gay and her family began receiving 24/7 police protection.

Female Speaker 5: You might as well murder somebody in academia if you're going to plagiarize your dissertation.

Male Speaker 10: Harvard is committed to DEI and Claudia Gay's race protected her from losing her job. It's outrageous.

Male Speaker 11: That's right. The president of what is supposed to be America's most prestigious university is accused of plagiarism on top of everything else.

Ilya Marritz: That was the public side of the plagiarism conversation. I want to show you what I've learned about what was going on behind the scenes. These plagiarism allegations didn't come out of nowhere. They emerged from a complex web of tips and axes to grind. The whole picture may never be clear, but it's useful to examine what we do know because a close reading of one academic's footnotes and quotation marks became a referendum on diversity, equity, and inclusion. Eight years after the Halloween costume flap that crystallized things for Aaron Sibarium, he landed a story that helped to oust a college president. Sibarium didn't get to break that news because hours before the Free Beacon published his story, he was scooped by another critic of campus life.

Aaron Sibarium: I was just like, "I'm not the first one," damn it.

Ilya Marritz: Behind that scoop, there's a tale involving one of America's most active culture warriors. In 2019, a man named Christopher Rufo appeared on Tucker Carlson's show on Fox for the very first time. He was talking about the homelessness problem in Seattle, where he then lived. Rufo's look is clean cut, young dad. He speaks in complete, forceful sentences. He must have made good TV because he was invited back. By 2020, Rufo had pivoted from quality of life issues in cities to a different problem.

Christopher Rufo: Critical race theory, in simple terms, is an academic discipline that holds that the United States was founded on racism, white supremacy, and patriarchy, and that those forces are still at the root of our society today. Tucker, this is something I've been investigating for the last six months, and it's absolutely astonishing how critical race theory has pervaded every institution in the federal government. What I have discovered-- It's not a benign philosophy about teaching racism. It's a radical philosophy that's rooted in Marxism.

Ilya Marritz: Right after one of these appearances, then President Trump ordered government agencies to cut back sensitivity training programs. There seemed to be a direct line from Rufo on the TV to an executive order. As the New York Times noted. Now so many of Harvard's critics are alumni. Elise Stefanik, Bill Ackman, and so on. Not so many people know that around this time, Christopher Rufo enrolled at Harvard. Specifically, he entered a master's program, getting his degree in 2022. It was at the Harvard Extension School, a way easier to get into institution than other Harvard schools. It's designed for working adults, and much of the instruction happens online.

When Rufo published his book America's Cultural Revolution, his dust jacket bio touted his master's from Harvard. Rufo's book has become a bible to the critics of wokeness at universities. It traces the intellectual roots of current efforts at diversity and racial reconciliation back to the radicals of the 1960s and '70s. He promoted the book on podcasts.

Christopher Rufo: The critical race theorists were very focused on building a pedagogy.

Ilya Marritz: When their revolutions failed, he says, they retreated to the universities, incubating many of the concepts that have become huge today.

Christopher Rufo: Systemic racism, whiteness, white privilege, intersectionality, et cetera. These kind of core set of ideas that are now ubiquitous at one time were really marginal academic ideas, limited to just very few of these scholars and intellectuals.

Ilya Marritz: For some influential Harvard alums, Rufo's ideas were transformative. Bill Ackman, hedge fund billionaire, Twitter influencer, Harvard College, class of '88, called Rufo's book America's Cultural Revolution, "One of the more important books I've read." Another hedge fund billionaire and Harvard College grad, class of '89, Ken Griffin, has referred to "This cultural revolution in American education." Just a few months earlier, Griffin seemed to be happy with Harvard. In the spring of 2023, the university announced a $300 million gift from Griffin to the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, then led by Claudine Gay, totally unrestricted. Within a year, he changed his tune completely, calling American college students--

Ken Griffin: Frankly, just like whiny snowflakes. Where are we going with education in elite schools in America?

Ilya Marritz: Christopher Rufo wasn't done shining a bright, blinding light on universities because on December 10th, 2023, one day ahead of Aaron Sibarium, he published an article breaking the news of Claudine Gay's alleged plagiarism. Then he went on TV again.

Christopher Rufo: The facts are clear. Now the decision that has to be made is a very simple one. Does Harvard value veritas or truth? Or does Harvard value DEI and having the right race and gender symbolism at the top of its university hierarchy?

Ilya Marritz: We asked Rufo for an interview more than once. He declined comment, but Rufo had a co-author who did speak.

Aidan Ryan: How'd you get the story? What led you to want to pursue that?

Ilya Marritz: The Boston Globe's media reporter, Aidan Ryan, Harvard College class of 2021, talked with the co-author last January.

Chris Brunette: I'm not sure how familiar you are with my whole involvement in this.

Ilya Marritz: Meet Chris Brunette. Yes, another Chris. He's a substacker from Canada.

Chris Brunette: I was working as an investigative journalist at the Daily Caller News Foundation.

Ilya Marritz: The Daily Caller News foundation is a nonprofit connected with an outrage fueled media company that was founded by none other than the man who nurtured Chris Rufo's career, Tucker Carlson. Brunette told Aidan that he was the one who brought the story to Rufo. Here's how he says it happened. Brunette had suspected a different Harvard government scholar of falsifying data. By the way, that was never proven. In the course of his digging, Brunette got interested in Claudine Gay.

Chris Brunette: Then I wrote several articles about her.

Ilya Marritz: The Daily Caller didn't want Brunette's reporting, so he published on his Substack.

Chris Brunette: I thought my articles were like super damning, but once again they didn't have any impact, partly because I discredited myself by just not being professional enough. I was like writing angry screeds pretty much, and so my articles kind of fell flat.

Ilya Marritz: A year passed. Claudine Gay was elevated to president, and a tip came in.

Chris Brunette: Which actually contained the firm plagiarism accusation, finally.

Ilya Marritz: Much like the tip Aaron Sibarium saw at the Free Beacon, this one said Gay's articles lifted from other scholars' work. Brunette then approached Chris Rufo.

Chris Brunette: I didn't really know him before, like we were mutuals on Twitter, but I needed firepower so I brought it to him.

Ilya Marritz: Rufo was interested. They spent a few days reporting it out.

Chris Brunette: And we published it. His initial tweet, at first, it got 100 million impressions. It's probably like 200 million now.

Ilya Marritz: After years of digging in the wilderness, Brunette finally had a reporting coup that would get him noticed. He told Aidan he had actually logged his own time in academia. He wasn't just reporting on it. Brunette previously had been a research assistant to an economist at UChicago who came under attack from other economists for comparing BLM activists calling to defund the police to flat earthers. The professor still has his job. Brunette defended the professor on Fox News.

Chris Brunette: That more or less got me rejected from every PhD program I applied to. I was canceled, pretty much. That was pretty nakedly my motivations. I was angry, bitter, and hurt.

Ilya Marritz: So you could say resentment of academia was one motive behind the very first story about Claudine Gay and plagiarism. Who was Chris Brunette's source? What was their motive? Brunette isn't saying. Still, if you talk with people inside the government department at Harvard, the place Chris Brunette was writing about and not getting a lot of pickup, people who were there at the time remember one particular grad student who seemed to be struggling with their coursework. This student hurled a lot of accusations at a lot of people in the department about scholarly misconduct.

We really don't know whether this person was the source. When I reached them by email, they didn't confirm or deny any role, but they did include in the message the ugliest things I have ever seen written about Claudine Gay. Just a note, the Chris and Chris reporting team is no more. After their initial success, Rufo steered a fellowship to Brunette to support his work. Then, according to Rufo, Brunette started a lot of fights with their colleagues. He also spread antisemitic content online and called Rufo an Israeli asset. According to Brunette, Rufo has blocked him on Twitter.

Micah Loewinger: Coming up, a visit to the upside down world.

Brooke Gladstone: This is On the Media. This is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger. We're listening to the second episode of our series about the leadership crisis at Harvard. When we left off, just before the break, two conservative writers, both named Chris, had collaborated on a bombshell story accusing the president of Harvard of plagiarism. We pick up with reporter Ilya Maritz, who spoke with another journalist whose plagiarism reporting came hot on their heels.

Ilya Marritz: I have so many questions. I asked the Free Beacon's Aaron Sibarium to help me untangle how he and the Chrises, Rufo and Brunette, came to report close to the same story at nearly the same moment. Rufo has called it a team effort. Were you aware of each other reporting? Did you know somebody else was on this story? Were you guys communicating at all?

Aaron Sibarium: No, I did not. There was absolutely no coordination of any kind. I genuinely did not know that they were on this.

Ilya Marritz: Sibarium says it was pure happenstance. In fact, he was a little upset when the Chrises published first, but then he saw the effect of one story landing right after the other and he was pleased.

Aaron Sibarium: There was this really effective, almost one-two punch.

Ilya Marritz: What's more, it created a permission structure, Sibarium's words, for mainstream outlets to pick up a story they might not have assigned on their own.

Aaron Sibarium: From that moment on, the narrative just totally was out of the control of Harvard.

Ilya Marritz: The New York Times was particularly activated, pulling in reporters from other beats to cover the story. I counted close to 50 pieces in the Times focused on this crisis just in the three weeks between the plagiarism allegations surfacing and Gay's resignation as president. The Boston Globe went big too, of course, hometown paper. One editorial blamed Harvard for muddying what should be a clear cut line about plagiarism in its effort to defend Gay. Still, I was curious about the origin of Sibarium's reporting, which, like the Chrises, began with a tip. He wrote that his source was a professor at another university.

You wrote that you verified their identity, but I don't believe you told us who they are. I don't know who they are. What can you say about the source of the allegations?

Aaron Sibarium: I can't say much more than what was reported, which was that anonymous individual who's a professor at another university.

Ilya Marritz: It's stunning how many tips were circulating about Gay's scholarship in the fall of 2023. Aaron Sibarium got one, so did Chris Brunette. I've seen a tip from an anonymous email account sent out the day before the Big House hearing, apparently to five different news outlets. On top of that, the New York Post had been working on its own plagiarism story. When the Post approached Harvard for comment, Harvard's lawyers responded that publishing the piece could be defamation.

Aaron Sibarium: That did, I think, create a rational fear in the complainant's mind and reinforce the complainant's desire to be anonymous. In terms of my own and I think other people's motivations for the story. I just think it is newsworthy that the president of the most famous university in the world plagiarized.

Ilya Marritz: All that said, for a guy who enjoys the cut and thrust of debate, Sibarium also concedes a lot of points. It's like he thinks on some level that the whole storm around Claudine Gay was an overreaction. The alleged plagiarism, not that bad.

Aaron Sibarium: It was not on the same level as a lot of other people who have since been caught up in plagiarism scandals.

Ilya Marritz: Was she really the apostle of DEI she'd been made out to be?

Aaron Sibarium: I honestly don't. Even though I was emphasizing the DEI stuff, I get the sense that she embraced that in large part because she thought that's what everyone wanted to hear.

Ilya Marritz: What about his own work? Pointing a big finger at real people, academics and administrators. He told me he feels badly when one of these people becomes a target for hate, but to write about an issue, you need a protagonist.

Aaron Sibarium: It's frankly impossible to scrutinize them without there being some kind of main characters who get caught in the crossfire.

Ilya Marritz: He told me about some deans at Columbia whose text messages he obtained and reported on. They contained some troubling stereotypes about Jews.

Aaron Sibarium: It wasn't like virulent antisemitism, but they maybe touched on some tropes that were troubling. They ended up resigning. I think that all of those deans are like evil monsters who hate Jews. No, of course not.

Ilya Marritz: You know that's how your stories are going to occur to people when they see them.

Aaron Sibarium: I know. I just don't know any other way to surface this stuff.

Ilya Marritz: In 2015, Aaron Sibarium was appalled by what he saw as politically correct posturing at Yale that targeted two administrators over Halloween costumes. He might say it's not a fair comparison, but it's worth pointing out that in 2023, he and the Chrises did the reporting that fueled the social media pylon that helped to take down Claudine Gay. While Aaron Sibarium and Christopher Rufo were not cooperating on their plagiarism reporting, there is a link. Their paychecks, both men's earnings, depend in part on the generosity of a billionaire hedge funder you haven't met yet.

Paul Singer: Professors, they are mostly hopeless beyond repair.

Ilya Marritz: Paul Singer, Harvard law, class of 1969, doesn't do a lot of public speaking, but when he does, he does not hold back.

Paul Singer: The miniscule number of ones who are not radical left wing dolts clutching Mao's little red book are huddled together in basements whispering the truth, while the thugs and deranged are upstairs on the quad screaming at Jews.

Ilya Marritz: At a Manhattan Institute dinner last summer, Singer ripped universities as havens for Marxists and Jew haters. Singer is the major funder of the Free Beacon, where Aaron Sibarium published his scoop. He's also a funder and chairman of the Manhattan Institute, where Christopher Rufo is a scholar. That means both men's work is supported by a very rich man who is clearly very, very angry about the direction universities have taken. Singer declined to comment.

Claudine Gay resigned as president of Harvard on January 2nd, 2024, exactly four weeks after the house hearing. She wrote in a message to the community. "When my brief presidency is remembered, I hope it will be seen as a moment of reawakening to the importance of striving to find our common humanity and of not allowing rancor and vituperation to undermine the vital process of education."

It does appear that Gaye was steered towards the job. I learned in the course of reporting this story that she was asked by the Harvard Corporation more than once to put her name forward for president. She was one of three Black women to be made deans by the previous president, Larry Bacow. Bacow was known as someone with a knack for nurturing talent. One could argue the Harvard Corporation should have done more to vet her and, once she was hired, that they should have prepared for a possible backlash.

Christopher Rufo: Claudine Gay is now gone. We've exposed the DEI regime, and there's much more to come.

Ilya Marritz: The day after Claudine Gay resigned, Christopher Rufo claimed credit for her downfall with a piece in the Wall Street Journal. Throughout the campaign, he wrote, "I adopted the unorthodox approach of narrating the strategy in real time, explaining how conservatives could shape the media narrative and apply pressure to Harvard." He linked the offensive against Harvard to ones against Disney, Target and Bud Light, and noted approvingly that Florida, Texas and other states have banned diversity, equity and inclusion programs at public universities. Khalil Gibran Muhammad is a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School.

Khalil Gibran Muhammad: In public universities, there have been somewhere around 100 bills proposed in states across the country, of which a number of them have passed, that have rendered illegal DEI offices at universities.

Ilya Marritz: Muhammad is probably the university's most vocal defender of DEI programs. Although he's about to leave Harvard for Princeton, Muhammad was already tracking the backlash to DEI when it came for him.

Ilya Marritz: I don't remember.

Khalil Gibran Muhammad: I can show you right now on my computer. It doesn't take much.

Ilya Marritz: On his office computer, he pulled up a clip from the same House Education Committee hearing where Claudine Gay gave testimony.

Khalil Gibran Muhammad: You could literally--

Ilya Marritz: Show me, show me. Let's do that. Before any of the college presidents had the chance to speak--

Virginia Foxx: It's clear that rabid antisemitism in the university are two ideas that cannot be cleaved from one another.

Ilya Marritz: In her opening remarks, Virginia Foxx, the committee chair, called out a class that Muhammad was teaching that semester. He calls it a mouth drop moment.

Virginia Foxx: A prime example of this ideology at work in Harvard where classes are taught, such as DP 385 Race and Racism in the Making of the United States as a Global Power

Khalil Gibran Muhammad: Yes, boom, there it is. It's like, whoa, really? The first class mentioned in the world is my class, and then she goes on to cite two more.

Virginia Foxx: History and recent perspectives. Even the Harvard Divinity School has a page devoted to "social and racial justice."

Ilya Marritz: Muhammad's course is called Race and Racism in the Making of the United States as a Global Power. It includes readings on antisemitism in the United States and the race laws Nazi Germany adopted on the road to murdering millions of Jews. I asked Virginia Foxx how she became aware of the course. She didn't answer that, but a spokesperson said it's emblematic of the oppressor-oppressed framework she says fuels antisemitism on college campuses. Foxx seemed to be saying that a course which includes teachings about antisemitism was now evidence of how universities encourage antisemitism. For Muhammad, this is when we entered upside down world.

Khalil Gibran Muhammad: How did a concern about what the university leadership was doing to protect Jews come to blaming me and others who teach about race and racism on this campus as the root cause of the problem?

Ilya Marritz: Muhammad freely concedes that some DEI workshops can alienate people. As for where Jews and antisemitism fit in, he says the DEI framework was originally conceived around racial, not religious identity. It missed a lot.

Khalil Gibran Muhammad: Is it a fair criticism that many DEI offices weren't built to address religious based discrimination? Yes, I would agree.

Ilya Marritz: That's changing now, he says. What I see is that DEI has become one of those terms that's prisoner to our increasingly stupid social media fueled discourse.

Dana Bash: Governor, some Republicans are trying to blame the bridge collapse on policies that encourage workplace diversity.

Ilya Marritz: For example, this absolutely incredible exchange between CNN's Dana Bash and Wes Moore, the governor of Maryland, after the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapsed. Moore is Black.

Dana Bash: A Utah state representative who was running for governor tweeted, "This is what happens when you have governors who prioritize diversity over the wellbeing and security of citizens."

Ilya Marritz: The Key Bridge was completed in 1977. It was rammed by a container ship.

Dana Bash: Another Republican running for Congress in Florida posted, "DEI did this." What's your response?

Ilya Marritz: Actually, let's not hear Governor Moore's response. Let's look at the effects of the DEI panic.

Khalil Gibran Muhammad: Slavery, for example, cannot be taught in the state of Texas currently-

Ilya Marritz: To kids in school.

Khalil Gibran Muhammad: -except as an aberration with America's founding principles of liberty. But it's more of a contradiction because we have a very difficult time explaining why we had slavery longer than we've had freedom in this country, so it doesn't make sense. It doesn't pass academic muster. It is a lie. Texas is legislating a lie.

Ilya Marritz: The DEI panic had the most success initially in red states and in public institutions. Now Muhammad says it's making inroads in elite private schools. Just four years ago, Claudine Gay's predecessor as president, Larry Bacow, started using terms like structural racism and white supremacy. The university accelerated a diversity plan. You could say the rapid adoption of inclusion programs at places like Harvard and Disney was its own kind of social media fueled contagion. In any case, it's over now. Harvard's new president does still talk about diversity as a core value, but Muhammad sees quiet retrenchment.

Khalil Gibran Muhammad: They haven't yet dismantled the offices that were built, but there is almost no public defense of the work coming from Harvard University. You can find mostly silence across higher education amongst the most powerful universities, many of which were taking a leadership role in this work.

Ilya Marritz: Was it possibly a mistake? Given the ferocity of the counterreaction and, as you say, the fact that in many parts of the country now, a lot of this history can't even be taught or not taught with the fullness that you feel it deserves. Was it a mistake to pursue DEI in this way in the first place? Is there any other way to get to the conversation that you think that America needs to have?

Khalil Gibran Muhammad: No.

Ilya Marritz: You'll do it all again?

Khalil Gibran Muhammad: I do it all again? Yes, because you cannot solve for people who are committed to structural racism and forms of neocolonialism by appeasing them. You cannot solve that problem. There is no pathway to justice but through truth and education, period.

Ilya Marritz: There is an insane circularity to these fights. The critics say that college campuses have become ideologically rigid and intolerant of dissenting viewpoints, especially conservative ones. This is what Aaron Sibarium saw in the Halloween costume controversy. Their solution, as espoused by Virginia Foxx and Chris Rufo, is to drop DEI to tell teachers what they can and cannot teach, and to silence liberal voices. Who here really believes in free speech and academic freedom?

Khalil Gibran Muhammad: In the December 5th testimony, if you go back and listen to it, the solution to antisemitism was education, was training. Every faculty member and every student at your university should be taught about the history of antisemitism. How many classes do you have on antisemitism? How many Jews are teaching the history of their people. They're right, actually. Which only shows you the moral duplicity and their critique of race and racism as something that is destroying higher education. That promotes censorship, doesn't promote free thinking.

Ilya Marritz: In the months after Claudine Gay resigned, Chris Rufo lobbed accusations at more Black women at Harvard, saying their scholarly work was inferior. Those women kept their jobs. Pro Palestinian encampments sprouted up on campuses across the country, keeping colleges in the headlines.

President Trump: The time has come to reclaim our once great educational institutions from the radical left, and we will do--

Ilya Marritz: The founder of Trump University, a now defunct, unaccredited, for profit, sham institution of learning, promised to use the power of the government to squeeze real universities.

President Trump: Our secret weapon will be the college accreditation system.

Ilya Marritz: That's next week in the third and final episode of the Harvard Plan.

Micah Loewinger: That's it for this week's show. The Harvard Plan is a collaboration with the Boston Globe. The production team includes Ilya Marritz, Emily Bottine, Kristin Nelson, Jasmine Aguilera, Regina De Heer, and Jared Paul. On the Media is produced by Molly Rosen, Rebecca Clark-Callender, Candice Wong, and Katarina Barton.

Brooke Gladstone: Our technical director is Jennifer Munson. Our engineer is Brendan Dalton. Eloise Blondiau is our senior producer, and our executive producer is Katya Rogers. On the Media is a production of WNYC Studios. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger.

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A Cold-Blooded Killing Ignites a National Conversation. Plus, Part Two of 'The Harvard Plan.'