Following the shocking attempted assassination of former president Donald Trump, social media platforms were flooded not only with truthful accounts of what happened at the rally, but also with lies, conspiracies and “fake news” concerning the shooting.
Alan and Lionel are joined by Jay Rosen, associate professor of journalism at New York University, to explore how to cover a presidential campaign in a time of misinformation, and when a culture war is pitching social media platforms and new forms of media against the so-called “mainstream” or legacy media.
Jay shares his views that producing quality journalism may not even matter right now, because those for whom most news analysis is intended aren’t paying attention and don’t want to read it.
Alan and Lionel also reflect on the near-success of the England men’s football team. They’re joined by sportswriter Paul Hayward to discuss how the media relationship with football has evolved during Gareth Southgate’s time with the national squad.
This transcript is unedited and may contain errors.
Alan: Footage of the attempted assassination of President Trump was beamed around the world just seconds after it happened, along with a defiant Trump pumping his fist in the air, shouting, fight, fight, fight before being bundled away by his secret service team. At the weekend, the presidential election campaign took another unexpected, shocking turn.
Lionel: Today on Media Confidential, we move beyond the conspiracy theories and inflamed rhetoric. We consider the impact of Donald Trump's brush with death on the presidential election. With three months to go, is there still a risk of the media creating a self-fulfilling narrative about the inevitability of a Trump win? Jay Rosen, Associate Professor of Journalism at New York University, joins us to discuss what can be done by the mainstream media to better get to the truth, to lower the temperature and heal political division in America.
Alan: First, we're both here in London today. We're both going to take a summer break, aren't we? This is the last episode of Media Confidential until September. Have you got holiday trips planned to the beach?
Lionel: Well, I'm planning to go briefly to the beach, in Greece, and then perhaps to Scotland. Where are you?
Alan: I'm supposed to be moving flat. I've got the horror of moving flat, but a little trip to the mountains to hike at some point. Anyway, we'll be back on Thursday, the 5th of September, and we'll be bigger and better than ever, we promise. What's been on your radar during this incredible week? You were in Idaho at the time that this happened, I think.
Lionel: Yes. I was all week in Idaho at the Sun Valley Media Conference, The Allen and Company meeting where everybody was there, all the tech titans and media titans and I made a call to Washington just to check in with somebody. Then they said, "Have you heard the Trump news?" Well, I flipped the television on, and there it was.
Alan: That astonishing picture, which is now going to become one of the iconic pictures in political history, I think, I read it was an AP photographer, wasn't it? He was saying before he had even had a chance to look at it, because he had an automatic hotspot on his camera. It was beamed around the world within a minute of it happening before he'd even had a chance to look at the image himself.
Lionel: What was extraordinary was how Donald Trump, who just has a perfect eye for the camera. He wanted to make sure that he pumped that fist as he was resisting actually being bundled into a car by his Secret Service guards. He wanted also to pick up his shoes that had been knocked off. I think the other point, Alan, there's some of the images that have come out. That TikTok picture of Trump's head moving and two bullets just all grazing his ear, that's a scene that just wasn't possible a few years ago, right?
Alan: The standout interview for me was Gary O'Donoghue, the BBC reporter, who managed to find an eyewitness who had been trying to alert the police to the fact that they could see this marksman on the roof. The other thing, I know we're going to be discussing this with Jay, but Elon Musk behavior in the wake of this, for a man who heads up a social media platform that supposedly has some care about the truth. Within minutes, he was suggesting that this was a deliberate thing that had happened. That the security services allowed this to happen.
Then, repeatedly over the next few days, he was talking about how the legacy media misled the public. He said the legacy media is a pure propaganda machine, versus the voice of the people. As evidence of that, he had some screenshots from the first reactions when actually media organizations were being very careful and just saying they could hear popping sounds. He was spinning this into the media was conspiring to hold back the truth from the public.
Lionel: Well, he's certainly fueling those conspiracy theories and directly attacking American institutions.
Alan: Within it a minute to be suggesting that, that this was deliberate. It demeans Twitter as a platform where accurate news should exist, I think.
Lionel: Well, certainly on my feed, there was an awful lot of that, that suggestions that there was an inside job that Trump had been denied full Secret Service protection. All this was coming out. Plus, I must say, the fairly unpleasant images of the assassin without any censorship. The dead man in images, I think as well, more conspiracy theories, more torrent of right wing hate messaging than I was used to a couple of years ago. I have no idea how the algorithm is working on that.
The other image, of course, which has been played over and over again, is of that hapless woman Secret Service agent who couldn't holster a gun, obviously frightened by what had happened. There's a picture of enduring incompetence and then the celebration later on, and it's the will. Obviously, the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, that Trump is now surrounded by male Secret Service guards.
Alan: Well, by the time we come back in September, who knows where America will be. Have you seen anything to share yourself up this week?
Lionel: Not much Alan, but, well, I did see in the Wall Street Journal today, Wednesday, a homepage story about our mutual acquaintance friend, Sir William Lewis, the publisher of the Washington Post embattled, and the journal has finally written its own account of a man haunted by his past with a phone hacking scandal when he worked for Rupert Murdoch in London 15 years ago. It's not a particularly insightful story, no real revelations other than the fact that he spent rather a lot of money on overseas travel and also high fived politicians, including David Cameron.
That's hardly a hanging offense. I must say, Alan, from what I picked up in Idaho, Jeff Bezos was there, Don Graham, the former owner of the Washington Post was there, and publisher, and a lot of other media people. My sense is that, Will Lewis has got a certain amount of slack. They're not going to jump throw him overboard.
Alan: My cheerful moment, Lionel, was, I wrote a column at the weekend about Lisa Nandy, who I don't know. I didn't know whether we should rejoice or not at her becoming cultural secretary. I think from reading up on her and listening to her on arrival podcasts, on the rest is politics leading edition, I think she's a good egg. She comes from a very interesting heritage. Her mother was head of news at Granada TV, when it was a proper news organization. Her father, Deepak Nandy, a great human rights specialist. Her stepfather, Ray Fitzwalter, the great investigative journalist from Granada.
She's got investigative journalism in her heritage and upbringing. She understands about local news. She's a big supporter of the BBC. She was outspokenly critical of Johnston Press, which many MPs might have been thinking that they're there when they went past. She came out and said it. I think she could surprise us all by being rather good Secretary of State for culture and media.
Lionel: I met her a couple of times on television sets, and I agree with you. I think she's got a feel for television, a feel for journalism, those genes sound pretty impressive to me. Perhaps a postscript, Alan, we now know that the bid for the Daily Telegraph Group is in its final, final stages. Redbird want the US Private Equity Group want around 600 million plus to recoup their money. The important thing now we've got a labor government, is that they may look at certain bids, like Paul Marshall, the evangelist, investor in GB news, with a slightly different view than the
previous conservative government. Interesting that Lord Rothermere of The Daily Mail group has bowed out of the race. I think you might see some new combinations, Marshall with some other money. If you like, it's not only Paul Marshall coming up as owner.
Alan: Interesting. Again, who knows where that story will be by September the 5th. Were you back in time to watch the football, by the way?
Lionel: Sadly, I was en route from Idaho on a plane. I could get Wi-Fi, so I was watching it on, wait for it, Alan, The Guardian Live.
Alan: Guardian Live? [laughs]
Lionel: Yes. That invention, that innovation that you did all those years ago.
Alan: We did. We started live blogging on The Guardian, the very first live blog ever. Well, it didn't end happily. Gareth Southgate has since quit his job as England manager. The question now is, who's going to take over the role? More importantly for this podcast, what's the key to a successful relationship with the media?
Lionel: Yes, a quick bit of background here. Of course, Southgate was in charge for 102 games in just under eight years so he's going to hand on a very strong group of players. The key point is he didn't actually win a trophy.
Alan: Yes, fascinating relationship with the media. Probably the only sportsman in recent history just had a play about on the stage at the National Theatre.
Lionel: Yes, wonderful play that by James Graham, Dear England. Now we're joined by Paul Heywood, the veteran sports writer and author of England Football: The Biography, that's a history of English football going back to 1872.
Alan: Welcome, Paul. That's a very long memory you've got, but we just want to discuss the last, as it were, five minutes of that. Paul, just give us a sense of what's involved in writing. In the Slovenia game, I guess by 89 minutes into the game, all the football writers had their obituaries of Gareth Southgate more or less written because that's how it works. Then in the last minute, they have to metaphorically rip it all up again and start again. That's fantastically stressful and odd. [laughs] It's an odd way to earn a living.
Paul Heywood: Very odd. Very odd. I'm off the circuit a bit now, Alan, but I did that job for over 30 years and I spent some furnished nights in press boxes where the story would flip on its head at 5:00 to 10:00. You both know better than me that first-edition deadlines are not conducive to covering late turnarounds in football matches. Everybody will remember the Nou Camp in 1999 when Manchester United turned a Champions League final on its head. At that point, you look at everything on your screen and you say, "That is now irrelevant.
I have to start again, and I have five minutes to rewrite 1,000 words." You learn over the years to hedge your bets a bit, to not commit too soon in that writing process. It was always the print-first-edition deadline that exerted the maximum stress. Where 30 million people perhaps, or 25 million people are watching the game at home on television, there's an extra stress with that because you can't help thinking of how important it is to your newspaper to get it right and to be able to tell the story well the following morning. Those are the big adrenaline nights and I miss them, but not always.
Lionel: Paul, you had two stories, though, as Alan's suggesting. One was the result of the match and how England had played, but the other was the future of Gareth Southgate. At the end of the tournament, England came very close, but yet again, no cigar. What were your views about Southgate's prospects at the time and whether he should go or not?
Paul: It's been a really big conundrum for quite some time because Gareth Southgate, on the one hand, has been transformational. He's completely revolutionized the professionalism, the ethics, the standards of the England setup. At the same time, over those four tournaments that he was in charge for, he's come to be seen by the fans, I think, as a bit of a nearly-man, a reformer who couldn't quite close the deal by winning a trophy. As we all know, England have been waiting 58 years now to win another trophy. The only trophy they've won was the 1966 World Cup.
Southgate sequence was semi-final, final, quarter-finals, final. Now, by the standards of England managers, that is an exemplary record. It's unrecognizable, really, from the terrible toilings and howlings of the previous five decades. In that sense, the England setup is completely transformed. It's been brought into the mainstream, the European mainstream. England are no longer an outlier, living off myth and delusion and entitlement. They look like a serious European team. They look like Italy, Spain, France, all the rest of them, Germany.
That's immensely refreshing. There is still this core of frustration about the team's inability to actually win a tournament because that's what everybody wants. Southgate is being seen, I think, as the manager who achieved so much on a cultural level and an organizational level, but hasn't given the public what they want. What the public wants is to see a trophy flown back to London. The pain and the wait go on.
Lionel: Winning, as we know, is so critical, especially in these tournaments.
Paul: I think Alan Shearer and Gary Lineker and that generation of players became increasingly frustrated with what they saw as Gareth Southgate's excessive caution, so did half the public. They weren't comfortable with it. He wasn't able to carry a very gifted generation of players over the line to the point of success. I think, unfortunately, his extremely good record is clouded by this anguish about the fact that these players still haven't won anything. We all know they're very good players. What we also know is that whoever gets the job now is being handed a very good legacy and a very good group of players. When managers take jobs, they say, "Do I have the equipment here? Can I win with these players? Is this a good job to take?" After Gareth Southgate's eight years, any manager would look at the job offer and say, "Yes."
Alan: You can expect a brutal press if you don't deliver the results. How much did that filter through into the English dressing room? It seems to me that Southgate almost saw it as his responsibility to try and shield the players from the criticism that would be coming their way.
Lionel: Yes, it was more therapist than manager, some people think.
Paul: We were old enough to remember the tabloid circulation wars of the '70s and '80s, when the mass market papers were handing down judgments on tablets of stone and there was no diversity of opinion. They were excessively and sometimes vituperatively powerful about the England team. It was a much nastier and coarser environment for the England manager to work in. This was all coming from above. This was coming from that very narrow, traditional form of media that we all remember.
Now, I would argue it's coming more from social media, it's coming from the fans, and it's coming on social media platforms where the abuse is more direct and more personal. Actually, the traditional media are less significant, I think, in terms of putting pressure on an England manager. A lot of young football writers are more progressive. They're less caught up in the mythology of the whole England story. To them, 1966 might as well be 1066. I think football writing now is much more benign.
Alan: Naming no names, Paul, but how knowledgeable are football writers? If you're a manager and you pick up the papers the next day, do you think you expect to learn things that are useful, or do you think they don't have much respect for the football writers because they don't really know what they're talking about?
Paul: There's been a huge shift from my time when you were able to speak to players and managers. There was access. The word is access, isn't it? Gradually, over time, the big Premier League clubs decided they were media companies as much as football clubs. They began to exclude football writers, football journalism, because they saw them as rivals. They didn't want to give them free "content". Football writers and writing has been pushed further away, I think, from the heart of the story, from the people that you really want to talk to.
For example, very few journalists would know or be close to Pep Guardiola or Jurgen Klopp. In my day, you knew all the managers and you could pretty much ring them up. There's a lot less of that intimate access, the inside track that you might have seen 10 or 20 years ago. There's a very bright school of young football journalists now, but they're writing very differently. They're writing impressionistically and with data as their main tool.
Alan: I think there's a very interesting parallel, Paul. If you think about match reports being commodity news, even with the great stylists, what's happening on the Monday, you can actually really read a breakdown of the game. There's a lot of value-added interpretation. I suppose the other point is there's a certain lyrical quality, I think, to a number of the football writers that I read.
Anyway, I'm going to put you on the spot, Paul. Who's your money on for the next England manager?
Paul: Should the next manager be English? Now, that's not as parochial a question as it sounds because as Gareth Southgate actually himself pointed out many years ago, the point of international football is to pit the players, coaches, and fans of country A against the players, coaches, and fans of country B. That's what international football is. It's country against country. There is nothing wrong in wanting to appoint a coach, head coach, manager from your own country, particularly when the whole coaching system has to have a pyramid. It has to have an ultimate reward, and the ultimate reward is clearly managing the England team.
I would nominate Eddie Howe, the Newcastle United manager, not just because he's English. I think he is the brightest and best of the emerging young English coaches. I just hope we don't get caught up in the whole big-name glamor chase, the celebrity circus of managerial appointments, which club football goes in for and indeed, which the England setup have indulged in over the years with Fabio Capello for example, and….and Erickson because the FA's mistake in the bad old days was to look for somebody who was the opposite of the manager they had just sacked.
England veered from identity to identity, style of play to style of play, personality to personality, and there was no consistency or continuity at all. They have an opportunity with Gareth Southgate to retain the bits that Southgate has added while trying to add the bits that aren't quite there. Personally, I just think Eddie Howe is the best qualified of the emerging candidates.
Alan: This is Media Confidential from Prospect Magazine, and after the break we'll have more on the US presidential election. We'll be right back.
Alan: In the Prospect Podcast this week, deputy editor Ellen Halliday talks to Mark Wilding from Liberty Investigates, who's written a piece of Prospect Magazine about the way the home office of housing contracts for asylum seekers dwellings have turned a firm called Clear Springs and its founder Graham King into one of the UK's richest men.
Mark Wilding: It was particularly illuminating to pay a visit to Wethersfield Asylum Center. This opened recently. It's a former military barracks that's been repurposed as asylum accommodation, a really good example of the strategy that the most recent Conservative government was embarked upon. When you go to the site and it looks like a prison camp, there are tall fences all around it topped with barbed wire, there are signs telling you that CCTV is in operation.
Organizations like Medicins san Frontier and Doctors of the World have described an unfounding mental health crisis at the camp. Essentially, they are temporary blocks that have been dropped in. They have six beds, six lockers, everything gray and white. It looked like a prison to me and that was how he described it. He said it's like prison.
Alan: Follow Prospect podcasts wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoy listening to Media Confidential, perhaps you'd consider sponsoring Media Confidential. As we're about to hear from Steve Brill, there has never been a more important time for Trusted Media in an age of machines and of domination by the four big tech companies. Prospect is a comparative minnow, but what we do is rigorously check our journalism to fact-check it and to try and maintain an independent path in a world that's increasingly polarized.
If you think that's valuable, we treasure you as listeners, but perhaps, you'd like to sponsor an episode because that would enable us to continue our work of explaining, of lucidly analyzing and contextualizing information and also our work of investigation. If that appeals get in touch with Wendy Miller, who is our fabulous constitute person, and you can contact her on mediaconfidential, that's all one word, @prospectmagazine, also all one word, .co.uk. Do it quickly before others beat you to it.
Lionel: Welcome back to Media Confidential. The presidential election campaign has had many twists and turns. Now after his brush with death, Donald Trump is the dominant politician in the country. How has he used the media to maximize the power of his candidacy against Joe Biden? A bandaged Trump appeared at the Republican Convention and named his running mate, JD Vance, the bestselling author of Hillbilly Elegy. Now, his campaign has become one of showing strength in the face of adversity, but also, it's worth taking a look at that campaign ad featuring the voiceover of Sylvester Stallone from Rocky.
Sylvester Stallone: Let me tell you something you already know. The world ain't all sunshine and rainbows. It's a very mean and nasty place, and I don't care how tough you are, it will beat you to your knees and keep you there permanently if you let it. You, me, or nobody is going to hit as hard as life, but it ain't about how hard you hit. It's about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward, how much you can take and keep moving forward. That's how winning is done.
Lionel: Every American icon on the book, Alan.
Alan: Yes. Ticking all the boxes.
Lionel: Dinesh D'Souza mentioned the new ad on X, describing it as the most powerful ad since Reagan's Morning in America in 1984.
Alan: By contrast of faltering, Joe Biden is conducting a series of network TV interviews, including an 18-minute segment with NBC anchor Lester Holt. He appears to be utterly on the defensive, being forced to admit he's old, but arguing that he's still in command of his mental faculties. The Democrats have had the worst of both worlds of defiant, resurgent Trump and an enfeeble president. What else could possibly happen between now and the first Tuesday in November?
Lionel: While conspiracy theories have circulated on social media about the circumstances surrounding the failed assassination attempt, the incompetence of the Secret Service, the background of the lone gunman, Thomas Matthew Cook, a socially isolated 20-year-old. How can readers, viewers, and listeners know which sources to trust amid the flood of misinformation on web pages and TV screens?
Alan: Jay Rosen is at NYU New York University and for my money, he's one of the most perceptive commentators on the media and politics. I just want to quote something that he tweeted the other day. It was a paragraph from Charlie Warzel from The Atlantic responding to the shooting. This is what it said. "Some may wish to see the conspiracy peddling, cynical politicking, and information warfare as a kind of gross aberration or the unintended consequences and outputs of a system that's gone awry. This is wrong. What we're witnessing is an information system working as designed. It's a machine that rewards speed, bravado, and provocation.
It's a machine that goads people into participating as the worst version of themselves. It's a machine that is hyper-efficient, ravenous, even insatiable a machine that can devour any news cycle no matter how large, and pick it apart until it's an old, tired carcass." Jay Rosen. Welcome, Jay. It's been quite a few days in American politics and media. I think at one point I saw you on Twitter. You were so overwhelmed by what was happening. You said for a moment you didn't know what to think, but what are you making of it now?
Jay Rosen: Well, some very troubling things are already happening. For example, a show that was at times critical of Trump was simply taken off the air this week without real explanation to the hosts by MSNBC. Recently, maybe this is related, maybe it's not, but CNN announced that it was just eliminating opinion journalism completely from this menu of items. The assassination provides, of course, all sorts of reasons why you should calm down, not be so critical, don't create conflict, don't say anything that might be offensive.
All of that has come with the first couple of days. Meanwhile, we don't actually know anything about this assassination attempt, hardly anything except that it happened and the individual's name. There's very little to go on there, and that creates an environment where all kinds of things can be said by anyone.
Alan: Just to be clear, Jay, do you believe that Mark Thompson, the ex-BBC director general and ex-CEO of the New York Times, who's now in control of CNN, do you believe that his decision to scrap opinion was directly related?
Jay: No, I'm not saying that. I'm just saying that it's probably something like it's more trouble than it's worse. That was also the reasoning for taking a very popular and powerful show, powerful in the sense that powerful people watch it, including the president and MSNBC's catalog, Morning Joe, they just took that off the schedule on Monday in order to address the fear that somebody might say something offensive. This was news to the hosts of Morning Joe. There's just a collision there between agendas. I'm just saying that that's a note that we should make. As Timothy Snyder says, "Don't obey in advance." I think those are interesting examples of don't obey it in advance.
Lionel: Jay, you've long been a critic of reporting these campaigns in terms of horse race, but this one above all is now a horse race. In a sense, there's a baked in narrative which is happening now that Biden is too old, he's too frail, and what's happened in the last week has really cemented Trump. Is that your perception of what's happening at the moment, and if so, how would you advise that we get out of that?
Jay: I'm not a political pundit. I really try to stay out of that. My point has never been that we shouldn't pay attention to the horse race or to the pollists. My point as a critic has always been that the horse race is not a strong enough method to ground election reporting in it. It should not provide the model or the template for election coverage. Even though it's important to know who's ahead, you can do that in a way without allowing the horse race to become the story of the election.
Alan: There is the other danger, of course, that journalists, almost as a pack, anoint one or other their candidates as, if you like, the inevitable winner. It's premature.
Jay: That's true. It's extremely premature, and they know that, too.
Alan: We know that Donald Trump appears to be the man of destiny this week. It's his convention. We know that big money is now beginning to flow into Trump from Silicon Valley, et cetera, but how do you avoid, if you were the editor, say, of the New York Times, how do you avoid the journalists all packing together and saying, "It's done?"
Jay: My mantra for these things is not the odds, but the stakes. I think that is a good way of directing campaign journalism to the thing that it should really be concerned with. The horse race is there. Nobody's taking it away. It's in the background. It's a constant. It's shifting, but it's constantly there, but it cannot provide itself tools for story making. That has to come from the consequences and what couldn't be the fate of American democracy. That's the thing to keep your eye on, because settling the who's going to win question is really the job of the voters, it's not the job of the reporters.
Alan: Do you think that the media bears any responsibility for lowering the temperature?
Jay: Insofar as it should always be facts first and fair to all sides and to all good arguments and should not be feeding hysteria in any form, yes, those are all virtues of campaign journalism. It does make sense to say, "Be careful." I don't have any problem with that, but we have to also be careful that we don't make ordinary criticism, which is fair game during the campaign some kind of sin or violation. We have to prevent against them.
Alan: It's interesting. I was in America when these shocking events happened. I spent the last week in the States. It struck me how many of the news organizations, including the New York Times, were very, quite slow in using the word assassination or assassination attempt.
Jay: That was probably a notice that went out to newsrooms internally. That's the kind of saying that they would be extra careful with. It is fair, I think, to remind everyone that internalization of media bias is definitely something that has happened to the American press. In a moment like this, they are extra careful and they want to make sure that they don't have to correct something because that could further feed the ongoing story of an unfair, biased press, which has long ago been internalized as just part of the background of politics by journalists. I'm sure that is operating as we talk.
Lionel: Jay, you tweeted a paragraph which I read before you joined us from Charlie Warzel in The Atlantic. What he said was, "What we were witnessing is an information system working as designed, a machine that rewards speed, bravado and provocation." The fact that you retweeted that, you have some sympathy with that view, that we're now living in a system where this is not an aberration, this is the system.
Jay: The new system we have was not designed for public understanding. That isn't the way that it is structured. It is designed to create fresh content every day and push it into the various veins of the culture. Added to that is, we now have almost the completion of a system in which freedom from fact is an established part of it. Freedom from fact. That is a good description of what's sometimes called the conservative media system. Freedom from fact is something that Trump's political style is meant to produce. It's also something that has happened to every kind of educated voice or expert or anybody in the system who is supposed to be able to actually answer what happened or what is true, or did that really happen?
Verification, which is the centerpiece of good journalism, as well as important and all kinds of other fact based practices, like the intelligence community, like diplomats. All of those people have been pushed to the side in a lot of ways by this conquest of the public square, by the Internet, and by a political style, as I said in Donald Trump, where fact simply doesn't matter. Let me give you an example of what I'm talking about. Anybody who reported on American politics and presidential White House politics and campaigns over the years knew at one point that if the president or the candidate said something untrue, the staff would get on them right away to correct it somehow, because if the president was wrong about something, that was a big problem.
It affected their credibility, it was thought-- Right up to Trump's 2016 victory, the notion that the president not only couldn't lie, but couldn't let a factual error stand, was just part of politics. As I'm sure you guys know, when Trump left office, the Washington Post had counted 30,000 lies or false statements he had made in his tenure. That is the kind of shift in communication environments that people don't get used to very easily. We are living in and trying to have a political campaign under those conditions. I don't think we've come close to understanding what is happening, but that Charlie Warzel quote got at it. That's why I used it.
Lionel: It's such an interesting phrase of yours, saying that the system, as it currently is, is not designed for public understanding. Is it too romantic to say that 25 years ago, the system, pre the internet, although it was in the service of profit, mostly, was designed for public understanding. Is that the big change?
Jay: I'm not so sure of that. I don't know if we've ever been able to say that. It's just we
had such a furious alternative to it on view now. I'm not making a golden age argument about, it used to be fine back in the '60s when we had just a few channels and it's become chaos since then. I wouldn't necessarily say that but because it hasn't been designed for human understanding, even in its most responsible forms, we are constantly shocked by how little voters know about the stories that are in the newspaper every day.
Alan: Final question from me, Jay, given what you've said, and it's easy to feel just overwhelmed by this, that we're on the losing side of a battle, as you say, against its freedom from facts. If you were working in the mainstream media there today, given the scale and the speed and the motivation of the people involved, is it possible for us to reassert the primacy of facts and to get control of the narratives again or do you think it's a losing battle?
Jay: I think it's possible to do and in the output of responsible newsrooms, that is, we could get the people working on election coverage and overseeing that work to do better, to be more responsible. That's within our grasp for sure but when we pull the camera back a little bit and we ask, "Well, who is waiting to receive that improved journalism?" The simple fact is that the entire Republican half of the electorate is just not there. If we took the New York Times and Washington Post, well over 90% of the regular readers of both of those franchises are Biden voters.
I'm not saying they're wild about Biden nor that they're camping out for him, just that they intend to vote for Biden. The people that you might want to reach and inform are not there on the other end of the communication dial, is what I'm saying. You could improve the journalism and it still wouldn't reach the public because we don't really have a news public the way we once did. This is changing under our feet as we try to react to each hit of the election system.
Alan: Jay, you have a very discerning eye when it comes to examining the performance of media. I'm going to put you on the spot and say for our listeners, just give us three or four sources of information or even named writers or commentators who you think are doing a great job covering this election.
Jay: I think ProPublica is always a place to start, that their work is really strongly fact-based, and also informed by a very strong ethic they have of holding power to account. For those who are progressives and are liberal-minded and want a steady stream of quality argument as well as journalism, The New Republic I think is strong there. For something that might be a little bit in between those two, The Guardian US I think is doing a good job in not falling prey to off of American journalists' bad habits but providing a strong day-by-day weekly report.
Of course, the icons of journalism often have the stories that you want to read, Washington Post, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, these are still very serious news organizations. They're sometimes ripped by bad ideas of which I would say, for example, both sides is a bad idea. That's why I try to criticize it but those are serious organizations and they care if they get it right. There's just something that I wanted to stress with you guys in talking to you today. Verification is, as I said earlier, this core competence of professional journalists. You need to establish first what happened.
By verification, I mean did that really happen? What do the documents say? What do the participants say? What is the evidence? Where is the proof? These kinds of questions are central to what serious journalism is but Trump has managed to create something different, which is verification in reverse. When you take something that's already been nailed down as a fact and you introduce doubt about him, and the doubt creates commotion and energy and reaction and controversy, and then you can take that energy and power your political movement with it.
I'm mentioning this because this is what we are confronting, not just bad information but the practice of taking bad information and converting it into political support. That is another reason why just doing good journalism and releasing it to the public square is not changing our sense of things because at the other end of that good journalism, you have many other things going on that kind of undo the work of journalism, which is why I call it verification in reverse. Verification is did this really happen? Verification in reverse is taking what happened and doubting it.
That is how Trump burst onto the scene in the first place in 2015 when he became a birther or a carrier of the charge that Obama was not actually a US citizen. That fact was as established as any fact can be. There was a document at the government office that said it, and he undid that fact. That's a lot of what's happening in the broader sphere overtaken by the internet, is verification in reverse.
This transcript is unedited and may contain errors.
Alan: Footage of the attempted assassination of President Trump was beamed around the world just seconds after it happened, along with a defiant Trump pumping his fist in the air, shouting, fight, fight, fight before being bundled away by his secret service team. At the weekend, the presidential election campaign took another unexpected, shocking turn.
Lionel: Today on Media Confidential, we move beyond the conspiracy theories and inflamed rhetoric. We consider the impact of Donald Trump's brush with death on the presidential election. With three months to go, is there still a risk of the media creating a self-fulfilling narrative about the inevitability of a Trump win? Jay Rosen, Associate Professor of Journalism at New York University, joins us to discuss what can be done by the mainstream media to better get to the truth, to lower the temperature and heal political division in America.
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Alan: First, we're both here in London today. We're both going to take a summer break, aren't we? This is the last episode of Media Confidential until September. Have you got holiday trips planned to the beach?
Lionel: Well, I'm planning to go briefly to the beach, in Greece, and then perhaps to Scotland. Where are you?
Alan: I'm supposed to be moving flat. I've got the horror of moving flat, but a little trip to the mountains to hike at some point. Anyway, we'll be back on Thursday, the 5th of September, and we'll be bigger and better than ever, we promise. What's been on your radar during this incredible week? You were in Idaho at the time that this happened, I think.
Lionel: Yes. I was all week in Idaho at the Sun Valley Media Conference, The Allen and Company meeting where everybody was there, all the tech titans and media titans and I made a call to Washington just to check in with somebody. Then they said, "Have you heard the Trump news?" Well, I flipped the television on, and there it was.
Alan: That astonishing picture, which is now going to become one of the iconic pictures in political history, I think, I read it was an AP photographer, wasn't it? He was saying before he had even had a chance to look at it, because he had an automatic hotspot on his camera. It was beamed around the world within a minute of it happening before he'd even had a chance to look at the image himself.
Lionel: What was extraordinary was how Donald Trump, who just has a perfect eye for the camera. He wanted to make sure that he pumped that fist as he was resisting actually being bundled into a car by his Secret Service guards. He wanted also to pick up his shoes that had been knocked off. I think the other point, Alan, there's some of the images that have come out. That TikTok picture of Trump's head moving and two bullets just all grazing his ear, that's a scene that just wasn't possible a few years ago, right?
Alan: The standout interview for me was Gary O'Donoghue, the BBC reporter, who managed to find an eyewitness who had been trying to alert the police to the fact that they could see this marksman on the roof. The other thing, I know we're going to be discussing this with Jay, but Elon Musk behavior in the wake of this, for a man who heads up a social media platform that supposedly has some care about the truth. Within minutes, he was suggesting that this was a deliberate thing that had happened. That the security services allowed this to happen.
Then, repeatedly over the next few days, he was talking about how the legacy media misled the public. He said the legacy media is a pure propaganda machine, versus the voice of the people. As evidence of that, he had some screenshots from the first reactions when actually media organizations were being very careful and just saying they could hear popping sounds. He was spinning this into the media was conspiring to hold back the truth from the public.
Lionel: Well, he's certainly fueling those conspiracy theories and directly attacking American institutions.
Alan: Within it a minute to be suggesting that, that this was deliberate. It demeans Twitter as a platform where accurate news should exist, I think.
Lionel: Well, certainly on my feed, there was an awful lot of that, that suggestions that there was an inside job that Trump had been denied full Secret Service protection. All this was coming out. Plus, I must say, the fairly unpleasant images of the assassin without any censorship. The dead man in images, I think as well, more conspiracy theories, more torrent of right wing hate messaging than I was used to a couple of years ago. I have no idea how the algorithm is working on that.
The other image, of course, which has been played over and over again, is of that hapless woman Secret Service agent who couldn't holster a gun, obviously frightened by what had happened. There's a picture of enduring incompetence and then the celebration later on, and it's the will. Obviously, the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, that Trump is now surrounded by male Secret Service guards.
Alan: Well, by the time we come back in September, who knows where America will be. Have you seen anything to share yourself up this week?
Lionel: Not much Alan, but, well, I did see in the Wall Street Journal today, Wednesday, a homepage story about our mutual acquaintance friend, Sir William Lewis, the publisher of the Washington Post embattled, and the journal has finally written its own account of a man haunted by his past with a phone hacking scandal when he worked for Rupert Murdoch in London 15 years ago. It's not a particularly insightful story, no real revelations other than the fact that he spent rather a lot of money on overseas travel and also high fived politicians, including David Cameron.
That's hardly a hanging offense. I must say, Alan, from what I picked up in Idaho, Jeff Bezos was there, Don Graham, the former owner of the Washington Post was there, and publisher, and a lot of other media people. My sense is that, Will Lewis has got a certain amount of slack. They're not going to jump throw him overboard.
Alan: My cheerful moment, Lionel, was, I wrote a column at the weekend about Lisa Nandy, who I don't know. I didn't know whether we should rejoice or not at her becoming cultural secretary. I think from reading up on her and listening to her on arrival podcasts, on the rest is politics leading edition, I think she's a good egg. She comes from a very interesting heritage. Her mother was head of news at Granada TV, when it was a proper news organization. Her father, Deepak Nandy, a great human rights specialist. Her stepfather, Ray Fitzwalter, the great investigative journalist from Granada.
She's got investigative journalism in her heritage and upbringing. She understands about local news. She's a big supporter of the BBC. She was outspokenly critical of Johnston Press, which many MPs might have been thinking that they're there when they went past. She came out and said it. I think she could surprise us all by being rather good Secretary of State for culture and media.
Lionel: I met her a couple of times on television sets, and I agree with you. I think she's got a feel for television, a feel for journalism, those genes sound pretty impressive to me. Perhaps a postscript, Alan, we now know that the bid for the Daily Telegraph Group is in its final, final stages. Redbird want the US Private Equity Group want around 600 million plus to recoup their money. The important thing now we've got a labor government, is that they may look at certain bids, like Paul Marshall, the evangelist, investor in GB news, with a slightly different view than the
previous conservative government. Interesting that Lord Rothermere of The Daily Mail group has bowed out of the race. I think you might see some new combinations, Marshall with some other money. If you like, it's not only Paul Marshall coming up as owner.
Alan: Interesting. Again, who knows where that story will be by September the 5th. Were you back in time to watch the football, by the way?
Lionel: Sadly, I was en route from Idaho on a plane. I could get Wi-Fi, so I was watching it on, wait for it, Alan, The Guardian Live.
Alan: Guardian Live? [laughs]
Lionel: Yes. That invention, that innovation that you did all those years ago.
Alan: We did. We started live blogging on The Guardian, the very first live blog ever. Well, it didn't end happily. Gareth Southgate has since quit his job as England manager. The question now is, who's going to take over the role? More importantly for this podcast, what's the key to a successful relationship with the media?
Lionel: Yes, a quick bit of background here. Of course, Southgate was in charge for 102 games in just under eight years so he's going to hand on a very strong group of players. The key point is he didn't actually win a trophy.
Alan: Yes, fascinating relationship with the media. Probably the only sportsman in recent history just had a play about on the stage at the National Theatre.
Lionel: Yes, wonderful play that by James Graham, Dear England. Now we're joined by Paul Heywood, the veteran sports writer and author of England Football: The Biography, that's a history of English football going back to 1872.
Alan: Welcome, Paul. That's a very long memory you've got, but we just want to discuss the last, as it were, five minutes of that. Paul, just give us a sense of what's involved in writing. In the Slovenia game, I guess by 89 minutes into the game, all the football writers had their obituaries of Gareth Southgate more or less written because that's how it works. Then in the last minute, they have to metaphorically rip it all up again and start again. That's fantastically stressful and odd. [laughs] It's an odd way to earn a living.
Paul Heywood: Very odd. Very odd. I'm off the circuit a bit now, Alan, but I did that job for over 30 years and I spent some furnished nights in press boxes where the story would flip on its head at 5:00 to 10:00. You both know better than me that first-edition deadlines are not conducive to covering late turnarounds in football matches. Everybody will remember the Nou Camp in 1999 when Manchester United turned a Champions League final on its head. At that point, you look at everything on your screen and you say, "That is now irrelevant.
I have to start again, and I have five minutes to rewrite 1,000 words." You learn over the years to hedge your bets a bit, to not commit too soon in that writing process. It was always the print-first-edition deadline that exerted the maximum stress. Where 30 million people perhaps, or 25 million people are watching the game at home on television, there's an extra stress with that because you can't help thinking of how important it is to your newspaper to get it right and to be able to tell the story well the following morning. Those are the big adrenaline nights and I miss them, but not always.
Lionel: Paul, you had two stories, though, as Alan's suggesting. One was the result of the match and how England had played, but the other was the future of Gareth Southgate. At the end of the tournament, England came very close, but yet again, no cigar. What were your views about Southgate's prospects at the time and whether he should go or not?
Paul: It's been a really big conundrum for quite some time because Gareth Southgate, on the one hand, has been transformational. He's completely revolutionized the professionalism, the ethics, the standards of the England setup. At the same time, over those four tournaments that he was in charge for, he's come to be seen by the fans, I think, as a bit of a nearly-man, a reformer who couldn't quite close the deal by winning a trophy. As we all know, England have been waiting 58 years now to win another trophy. The only trophy they've won was the 1966 World Cup.
Southgate sequence was semi-final, final, quarter-finals, final. Now, by the standards of England managers, that is an exemplary record. It's unrecognizable, really, from the terrible toilings and howlings of the previous five decades. In that sense, the England setup is completely transformed. It's been brought into the mainstream, the European mainstream. England are no longer an outlier, living off myth and delusion and entitlement. They look like a serious European team. They look like Italy, Spain, France, all the rest of them, Germany.
That's immensely refreshing. There is still this core of frustration about the team's inability to actually win a tournament because that's what everybody wants. Southgate is being seen, I think, as the manager who achieved so much on a cultural level and an organizational level, but hasn't given the public what they want. What the public wants is to see a trophy flown back to London. The pain and the wait go on.
Lionel: Winning, as we know, is so critical, especially in these tournaments.
Paul: I think Alan Shearer and Gary Lineker and that generation of players became increasingly frustrated with what they saw as Gareth Southgate's excessive caution, so did half the public. They weren't comfortable with it. He wasn't able to carry a very gifted generation of players over the line to the point of success. I think, unfortunately, his extremely good record is clouded by this anguish about the fact that these players still haven't won anything. We all know they're very good players. What we also know is that whoever gets the job now is being handed a very good legacy and a very good group of players. When managers take jobs, they say, "Do I have the equipment here? Can I win with these players? Is this a good job to take?" After Gareth Southgate's eight years, any manager would look at the job offer and say, "Yes."
Alan: You can expect a brutal press if you don't deliver the results. How much did that filter through into the English dressing room? It seems to me that Southgate almost saw it as his responsibility to try and shield the players from the criticism that would be coming their way.
Lionel: Yes, it was more therapist than manager, some people think.
Paul: We were old enough to remember the tabloid circulation wars of the '70s and '80s, when the mass market papers were handing down judgments on tablets of stone and there was no diversity of opinion. They were excessively and sometimes vituperatively powerful about the England team. It was a much nastier and coarser environment for the England manager to work in. This was all coming from above. This was coming from that very narrow, traditional form of media that we all remember.
Now, I would argue it's coming more from social media, it's coming from the fans, and it's coming on social media platforms where the abuse is more direct and more personal. Actually, the traditional media are less significant, I think, in terms of putting pressure on an England manager. A lot of young football writers are more progressive. They're less caught up in the mythology of the whole England story. To them, 1966 might as well be 1066. I think football writing now is much more benign.
Alan: Naming no names, Paul, but how knowledgeable are football writers? If you're a manager and you pick up the papers the next day, do you think you expect to learn things that are useful, or do you think they don't have much respect for the football writers because they don't really know what they're talking about?
Paul: There's been a huge shift from my time when you were able to speak to players and managers. There was access. The word is access, isn't it? Gradually, over time, the big Premier League clubs decided they were media companies as much as football clubs. They began to exclude football writers, football journalism, because they saw them as rivals. They didn't want to give them free "content". Football writers and writing has been pushed further away, I think, from the heart of the story, from the people that you really want to talk to.
For example, very few journalists would know or be close to Pep Guardiola or Jurgen Klopp. In my day, you knew all the managers and you could pretty much ring them up. There's a lot less of that intimate access, the inside track that you might have seen 10 or 20 years ago. There's a very bright school of young football journalists now, but they're writing very differently. They're writing impressionistically and with data as their main tool.
Alan: I think there's a very interesting parallel, Paul. If you think about match reports being commodity news, even with the great stylists, what's happening on the Monday, you can actually really read a breakdown of the game. There's a lot of value-added interpretation. I suppose the other point is there's a certain lyrical quality, I think, to a number of the football writers that I read.
Anyway, I'm going to put you on the spot, Paul. Who's your money on for the next England manager?
Paul: Should the next manager be English? Now, that's not as parochial a question as it sounds because as Gareth Southgate actually himself pointed out many years ago, the point of international football is to pit the players, coaches, and fans of country A against the players, coaches, and fans of country B. That's what international football is. It's country against country. There is nothing wrong in wanting to appoint a coach, head coach, manager from your own country, particularly when the whole coaching system has to have a pyramid. It has to have an ultimate reward, and the ultimate reward is clearly managing the England team.
I would nominate Eddie Howe, the Newcastle United manager, not just because he's English. I think he is the brightest and best of the emerging young English coaches. I just hope we don't get caught up in the whole big-name glamor chase, the celebrity circus of managerial appointments, which club football goes in for and indeed, which the England setup have indulged in over the years with Fabio Capello for example, and….and Erickson because the FA's mistake in the bad old days was to look for somebody who was the opposite of the manager they had just sacked.
England veered from identity to identity, style of play to style of play, personality to personality, and there was no consistency or continuity at all. They have an opportunity with Gareth Southgate to retain the bits that Southgate has added while trying to add the bits that aren't quite there. Personally, I just think Eddie Howe is the best qualified of the emerging candidates.
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Alan: This is Media Confidential from Prospect Magazine, and after the break we'll have more on the US presidential election. We'll be right back.
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Speaker 3: It's that time of the year. Your vacation is coming up. You can already hear the beach waves, feel the warm breeze, relax, and think about work. You really, really want it all to work out while you're away. Monday.com gives you and the team that peace of mind. When all work is on one platform and everyone's in sync, things just flow. Wherever you are, tap the banner to go to monday.com.
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Alan: In the Prospect Podcast this week, deputy editor Ellen Halliday talks to Mark Wilding from Liberty Investigates, who's written a piece of Prospect Magazine about the way the home office of housing contracts for asylum seekers dwellings have turned a firm called Clear Springs and its founder Graham King into one of the UK's richest men.
Mark Wilding: It was particularly illuminating to pay a visit to Wethersfield Asylum Center. This opened recently. It's a former military barracks that's been repurposed as asylum accommodation, a really good example of the strategy that the most recent Conservative government was embarked upon. When you go to the site and it looks like a prison camp, there are tall fences all around it topped with barbed wire, there are signs telling you that CCTV is in operation.
Organizations like Medicins san Frontier and Doctors of the World have described an unfounding mental health crisis at the camp. Essentially, they are temporary blocks that have been dropped in. They have six beds, six lockers, everything gray and white. It looked like a prison to me and that was how he described it. He said it's like prison.
Alan: Follow Prospect podcasts wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoy listening to Media Confidential, perhaps you'd consider sponsoring Media Confidential. As we're about to hear from Steve Brill, there has never been a more important time for Trusted Media in an age of machines and of domination by the four big tech companies. Prospect is a comparative minnow, but what we do is rigorously check our journalism to fact-check it and to try and maintain an independent path in a world that's increasingly polarized.
If you think that's valuable, we treasure you as listeners, but perhaps, you'd like to sponsor an episode because that would enable us to continue our work of explaining, of lucidly analyzing and contextualizing information and also our work of investigation. If that appeals get in touch with Wendy Miller, who is our fabulous constitute person, and you can contact her on mediaconfidential, that's all one word, @prospectmagazine, also all one word, .co.uk. Do it quickly before others beat you to it.
Lionel: Welcome back to Media Confidential. The presidential election campaign has had many twists and turns. Now after his brush with death, Donald Trump is the dominant politician in the country. How has he used the media to maximize the power of his candidacy against Joe Biden? A bandaged Trump appeared at the Republican Convention and named his running mate, JD Vance, the bestselling author of Hillbilly Elegy. Now, his campaign has become one of showing strength in the face of adversity, but also, it's worth taking a look at that campaign ad featuring the voiceover of Sylvester Stallone from Rocky.
Sylvester Stallone: Let me tell you something you already know. The world ain't all sunshine and rainbows. It's a very mean and nasty place, and I don't care how tough you are, it will beat you to your knees and keep you there permanently if you let it. You, me, or nobody is going to hit as hard as life, but it ain't about how hard you hit. It's about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward, how much you can take and keep moving forward. That's how winning is done.
Lionel: Every American icon on the book, Alan.
Alan: Yes. Ticking all the boxes.
Lionel: Dinesh D'Souza mentioned the new ad on X, describing it as the most powerful ad since Reagan's Morning in America in 1984.
Alan: By contrast of faltering, Joe Biden is conducting a series of network TV interviews, including an 18-minute segment with NBC anchor Lester Holt. He appears to be utterly on the defensive, being forced to admit he's old, but arguing that he's still in command of his mental faculties. The Democrats have had the worst of both worlds of defiant, resurgent Trump and an enfeeble president. What else could possibly happen between now and the first Tuesday in November?
Lionel: While conspiracy theories have circulated on social media about the circumstances surrounding the failed assassination attempt, the incompetence of the Secret Service, the background of the lone gunman, Thomas Matthew Cook, a socially isolated 20-year-old. How can readers, viewers, and listeners know which sources to trust amid the flood of misinformation on web pages and TV screens?
Alan: Jay Rosen is at NYU New York University and for my money, he's one of the most perceptive commentators on the media and politics. I just want to quote something that he tweeted the other day. It was a paragraph from Charlie Warzel from The Atlantic responding to the shooting. This is what it said. "Some may wish to see the conspiracy peddling, cynical politicking, and information warfare as a kind of gross aberration or the unintended consequences and outputs of a system that's gone awry. This is wrong. What we're witnessing is an information system working as designed. It's a machine that rewards speed, bravado, and provocation.
It's a machine that goads people into participating as the worst version of themselves. It's a machine that is hyper-efficient, ravenous, even insatiable a machine that can devour any news cycle no matter how large, and pick it apart until it's an old, tired carcass." Jay Rosen. Welcome, Jay. It's been quite a few days in American politics and media. I think at one point I saw you on Twitter. You were so overwhelmed by what was happening. You said for a moment you didn't know what to think, but what are you making of it now?
Jay Rosen: Well, some very troubling things are already happening. For example, a show that was at times critical of Trump was simply taken off the air this week without real explanation to the hosts by MSNBC. Recently, maybe this is related, maybe it's not, but CNN announced that it was just eliminating opinion journalism completely from this menu of items. The assassination provides, of course, all sorts of reasons why you should calm down, not be so critical, don't create conflict, don't say anything that might be offensive.
All of that has come with the first couple of days. Meanwhile, we don't actually know anything about this assassination attempt, hardly anything except that it happened and the individual's name. There's very little to go on there, and that creates an environment where all kinds of things can be said by anyone.
Alan: Just to be clear, Jay, do you believe that Mark Thompson, the ex-BBC director general and ex-CEO of the New York Times, who's now in control of CNN, do you believe that his decision to scrap opinion was directly related?
Jay: No, I'm not saying that. I'm just saying that it's probably something like it's more trouble than it's worse. That was also the reasoning for taking a very popular and powerful show, powerful in the sense that powerful people watch it, including the president and MSNBC's catalog, Morning Joe, they just took that off the schedule on Monday in order to address the fear that somebody might say something offensive. This was news to the hosts of Morning Joe. There's just a collision there between agendas. I'm just saying that that's a note that we should make. As Timothy Snyder says, "Don't obey in advance." I think those are interesting examples of don't obey it in advance.
Lionel: Jay, you've long been a critic of reporting these campaigns in terms of horse race, but this one above all is now a horse race. In a sense, there's a baked in narrative which is happening now that Biden is too old, he's too frail, and what's happened in the last week has really cemented Trump. Is that your perception of what's happening at the moment, and if so, how would you advise that we get out of that?
Jay: I'm not a political pundit. I really try to stay out of that. My point has never been that we shouldn't pay attention to the horse race or to the pollists. My point as a critic has always been that the horse race is not a strong enough method to ground election reporting in it. It should not provide the model or the template for election coverage. Even though it's important to know who's ahead, you can do that in a way without allowing the horse race to become the story of the election.
Alan: There is the other danger, of course, that journalists, almost as a pack, anoint one or other their candidates as, if you like, the inevitable winner. It's premature.
Jay: That's true. It's extremely premature, and they know that, too.
Alan: We know that Donald Trump appears to be the man of destiny this week. It's his convention. We know that big money is now beginning to flow into Trump from Silicon Valley, et cetera, but how do you avoid, if you were the editor, say, of the New York Times, how do you avoid the journalists all packing together and saying, "It's done?"
Jay: My mantra for these things is not the odds, but the stakes. I think that is a good way of directing campaign journalism to the thing that it should really be concerned with. The horse race is there. Nobody's taking it away. It's in the background. It's a constant. It's shifting, but it's constantly there, but it cannot provide itself tools for story making. That has to come from the consequences and what couldn't be the fate of American democracy. That's the thing to keep your eye on, because settling the who's going to win question is really the job of the voters, it's not the job of the reporters.
Alan: Do you think that the media bears any responsibility for lowering the temperature?
Jay: Insofar as it should always be facts first and fair to all sides and to all good arguments and should not be feeding hysteria in any form, yes, those are all virtues of campaign journalism. It does make sense to say, "Be careful." I don't have any problem with that, but we have to also be careful that we don't make ordinary criticism, which is fair game during the campaign some kind of sin or violation. We have to prevent against them.
Alan: It's interesting. I was in America when these shocking events happened. I spent the last week in the States. It struck me how many of the news organizations, including the New York Times, were very, quite slow in using the word assassination or assassination attempt.
Jay: That was probably a notice that went out to newsrooms internally. That's the kind of saying that they would be extra careful with. It is fair, I think, to remind everyone that internalization of media bias is definitely something that has happened to the American press. In a moment like this, they are extra careful and they want to make sure that they don't have to correct something because that could further feed the ongoing story of an unfair, biased press, which has long ago been internalized as just part of the background of politics by journalists. I'm sure that is operating as we talk.
Lionel: Jay, you tweeted a paragraph which I read before you joined us from Charlie Warzel in The Atlantic. What he said was, "What we were witnessing is an information system working as designed, a machine that rewards speed, bravado and provocation." The fact that you retweeted that, you have some sympathy with that view, that we're now living in a system where this is not an aberration, this is the system.
Jay: The new system we have was not designed for public understanding. That isn't the way that it is structured. It is designed to create fresh content every day and push it into the various veins of the culture. Added to that is, we now have almost the completion of a system in which freedom from fact is an established part of it. Freedom from fact. That is a good description of what's sometimes called the conservative media system. Freedom from fact is something that Trump's political style is meant to produce. It's also something that has happened to every kind of educated voice or expert or anybody in the system who is supposed to be able to actually answer what happened or what is true, or did that really happen?
Verification, which is the centerpiece of good journalism, as well as important and all kinds of other fact based practices, like the intelligence community, like diplomats. All of those people have been pushed to the side in a lot of ways by this conquest of the public square, by the Internet, and by a political style, as I said in Donald Trump, where fact simply doesn't matter. Let me give you an example of what I'm talking about. Anybody who reported on American politics and presidential White House politics and campaigns over the years knew at one point that if the president or the candidate said something untrue, the staff would get on them right away to correct it somehow, because if the president was wrong about something, that was a big problem.
It affected their credibility, it was thought-- Right up to Trump's 2016 victory, the notion that the president not only couldn't lie, but couldn't let a factual error stand, was just part of politics. As I'm sure you guys know, when Trump left office, the Washington Post had counted 30,000 lies or false statements he had made in his tenure. That is the kind of shift in communication environments that people don't get used to very easily. We are living in and trying to have a political campaign under those conditions. I don't think we've come close to understanding what is happening, but that Charlie Warzel quote got at it. That's why I used it.
Lionel: It's such an interesting phrase of yours, saying that the system, as it currently is, is not designed for public understanding. Is it too romantic to say that 25 years ago, the system, pre the internet, although it was in the service of profit, mostly, was designed for public understanding. Is that the big change?
Jay: I'm not so sure of that. I don't know if we've ever been able to say that. It's just we
had such a furious alternative to it on view now. I'm not making a golden age argument about, it used to be fine back in the '60s when we had just a few channels and it's become chaos since then. I wouldn't necessarily say that but because it hasn't been designed for human understanding, even in its most responsible forms, we are constantly shocked by how little voters know about the stories that are in the newspaper every day.
Alan: Final question from me, Jay, given what you've said, and it's easy to feel just overwhelmed by this, that we're on the losing side of a battle, as you say, against its freedom from facts. If you were working in the mainstream media there today, given the scale and the speed and the motivation of the people involved, is it possible for us to reassert the primacy of facts and to get control of the narratives again or do you think it's a losing battle?
Jay: I think it's possible to do and in the output of responsible newsrooms, that is, we could get the people working on election coverage and overseeing that work to do better, to be more responsible. That's within our grasp for sure but when we pull the camera back a little bit and we ask, "Well, who is waiting to receive that improved journalism?" The simple fact is that the entire Republican half of the electorate is just not there. If we took the New York Times and Washington Post, well over 90% of the regular readers of both of those franchises are Biden voters.
I'm not saying they're wild about Biden nor that they're camping out for him, just that they intend to vote for Biden. The people that you might want to reach and inform are not there on the other end of the communication dial, is what I'm saying. You could improve the journalism and it still wouldn't reach the public because we don't really have a news public the way we once did. This is changing under our feet as we try to react to each hit of the election system.
Alan: Jay, you have a very discerning eye when it comes to examining the performance of media. I'm going to put you on the spot and say for our listeners, just give us three or four sources of information or even named writers or commentators who you think are doing a great job covering this election.
Jay: I think ProPublica is always a place to start, that their work is really strongly fact-based, and also informed by a very strong ethic they have of holding power to account. For those who are progressives and are liberal-minded and want a steady stream of quality argument as well as journalism, The New Republic I think is strong there. For something that might be a little bit in between those two, The Guardian US I think is doing a good job in not falling prey to off of American journalists' bad habits but providing a strong day-by-day weekly report.
Of course, the icons of journalism often have the stories that you want to read, Washington Post, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, these are still very serious news organizations. They're sometimes ripped by bad ideas of which I would say, for example, both sides is a bad idea. That's why I try to criticize it but those are serious organizations and they care if they get it right. There's just something that I wanted to stress with you guys in talking to you today. Verification is, as I said earlier, this core competence of professional journalists. You need to establish first what happened.
By verification, I mean did that really happen? What do the documents say? What do the participants say? What is the evidence? Where is the proof? These kinds of questions are central to what serious journalism is but Trump has managed to create something different, which is verification in reverse. When you take something that's already been nailed down as a fact and you introduce doubt about him, and the doubt creates commotion and energy and reaction and controversy, and then you can take that energy and power your political movement with it.
I'm mentioning this because this is what we are confronting, not just bad information but the practice of taking bad information and converting it into political support. That is another reason why just doing good journalism and releasing it to the public square is not changing our sense of things because at the other end of that good journalism, you have many other things going on that kind of undo the work of journalism, which is why I call it verification in reverse. Verification is did this really happen? Verification in reverse is taking what happened and doubting it.
That is how Trump burst onto the scene in the first place in 2015 when he became a birther or a carrier of the charge that Obama was not actually a US citizen. That fact was as established as any fact can be. There was a document at the government office that said it, and he undid that fact. That's a lot of what's happening in the broader sphere overtaken by the internet, is verification in reverse.
Lionel: Jay Rosen, thank you very much.
Alan: Well, I wish we could have a more optimistic ending.
Jay: Well, you got the wrong guest.
Lionel: That's all from Media Confidential today. Thank you to Jay Rosen for joining us. Remember, we're taking a summer break but we'll be back on the 5th of September with more news from behind the headlines and beyond the clickbait.
Alan: Thank you also to Paul Hayward and remember to follow Media Confidential wherever you get your podcasts. You can send any questions or comments to mediaconfidential@prospectmagazine.co.uk or get in touch on X formerly Twitter, where we are @MediaConfPod. Thank you for listening to Media Confidential all this time. We'll see you in September. It's brought to you by Prospect Magazine and Fresh Air. Our producer is Martin Poyntz-Roberts.
