Glenn Greenwald
Politics • Culture • Writing
Interview: How the Media Got Cozy With Power, Abandoned Its Principles, & Lost the People, w/ Steve Krakauer
Video Transcript: System Update #48
March 03, 2023

Note From Glenn Greenwald: The following is the full show transcript, for subscribers only, of a recent episode of our System Update program, broadcast live on Monday, Febraury 27, 2023. Watch the full episode on Rumble or listen to the podcast on Spotify

We devote our program to one of the most scathing and insightful indictments of the modern-day corporate media, particularly their subservience to power centers and how they eagerly spread disinformation campaigns in service to that power. One of the most insightful critiques that has been published on this topic in years, our guest, Steve Krakauer, who is the author, has been around media for decades, and the book shows how much up close insight he has developed. He has worked inside a very diverse range of media outlets from CNN and The Blaze to Mediaite and NBC News, and he now works to produce one of the best shows in the most thriving sector of our media ecosystem, independent media, specifically, on “The Megyn Kelly Show.” 

Before we show you that interview, I want to share some of my own reflections on this book and the reasons why I believe that what is often dismissively and snidely minimized as “mere media” criticism is in fact one of the most consequential and necessary forms of real reporting and journalism. 

For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update starting right now. 

 


 

Many corporate journalists are very fond of trying to draw a distinction between what they call real reporting, which is noble and elevated and honorable – even though for them it usually consists of little more than calling the CIA and the FBI and writing down what they tell you to say – as opposed to media criticism, which they regard as tawdry and trivial.

 It is, of course, unsurprising that employees of corporate media outlets would seek to denigrate and minimize anything designed to put them and the many flaws of their work under a microscope. So, their antipathy to what they call media criticism or media critics – always said with a condescending sneer – can be reasonably dismissed as nothing more than self-interested whining. I actually regard the attempt to insist upon this distinction as quite revealing, one that provides insight into how these corporate outlets have come to see their role in the world. 

There's no universal definition for what journalism is, or even what constitutes reporting – it can mean a lot of different things and a lot of different contexts but I think we can identify foundational values, and defining goals, that distinguish journalism from other activities. These are the goals and functions that render journalism, when it is done, well as genuinely necessary to a healthy and functioning democracy, the reason the American founders decreed it as a guaranteed right in the First Amendment, one that could not be infringed upon for any reason. They did that precisely, or presumably, because they believed that a free press was essential for maintaining the equilibrium with which they were obsessed with preserving, the system of checks and balances that will ensure that no one institution or individual can ever acquire the kind of unchecked power that allowed the British monarch to act with such arbitrary force and under such personal whim that they were willing to fight an extremely risky war against the then most powerful empire on Earth in order to liberate themselves from those abuses. 

If journalism does nothing else, it must exist to impose checks and accountability on society's most powerful institutional actors. The unique attributes of journalism can impose on such institutions –transparency, investigative scrutiny, questioning, dissent – they are vital to ensuring that those actors remain limited, humble, and in check. I think very few people, even those who consider themselves journalists in the corporate world, would find those basic principles I just outlined objectionably. But what many of them overlook, or more accurately, what they choose to deny, is that near the top of the list of powerful institutional actors in need of journalistic scrutiny are the very gigantic media corporations that are their employers; highlighting the corruption and deceit of, say, Goldman Sachs and the CIA, is no more or less urgent than doing the same for NBC News and the New York Times. 

All powerful institutional entities need investigative scrutiny, unflinching critiques, and pushback against their propaganda and deceit. And that most definitely includes, perhaps especially includes, the media conglomerates that control the nation's airways and printing presses and which report and disseminate the news and analysis of our politics to tens of millions of people. As a result, what they try to mock and minimize as mere media criticism – something in their eyes barely different than idle gossip – is to me not only real reporting but some of the most important and valuable real reporting that one can do. If one affirms that journalism exists to place the actions of powerful institutions under an investigative microscope, but then excludes gigantic media corporations from the list of institutions that receive that kind of attention, then what is permitting those corporations to become exactly the kind of unchecked, unlimited power centers that the founders most feared? Worse, it will ensure that these corporate giants have the power to propagandize the population without any real systemic pushback or investigation because those who perform those services have been successfully marginalized as lowly media critics rather than people who do real reporting. 

And that is why I have always categorically rejected not just as artificial but dangerous, this self-serving attempt to differentiate critiques of media outlets from real journalism. Indeed, I have come to believe that debunking the propaganda and disinformation of the nation's most powerful media corporations is arguably the most valuable and necessary form of real reporting. It's what enables us to liberate ourselves from the kind of propagandistic prism. In which we would be permanently detained absent the ability to critique these institutions. 

That's a lesson that I actually learned very early on in my decision to begin writing about politics in 2005. When I started doing that, I had not been trained as a journalist. I had no intention of paying much attention to media corporations, let alone spending much of my time critiquing what it was that they were doing. My range of interests and why I began to write about politics was far more limited. I was setting out to critique the civil liberties assaults being waged under the banner of the War on Terror, and I was approaching it mostly as a constitutional lawyer. I was offended by the kinds of programs that deny the due process by imprisoning people without trial or that spied and surveilled American citizens without the warrants required both by the Constitution and by law. Those were the values and the interest I was seeking to vindicate and to report on and shed light on and I was doing it from a very limited perspective, largely as a journalist turned writer, trying to convey complex constitutional principles to people who had not gone to law school. 

But what I realized very early on was that it would be impossible for me to make any progress, to make any impact whatsoever if I was unwilling to confront the actual barrier to getting my fellow citizens to see things in the way I thought they should see them, which was the mountain, the avalanche of propaganda that was descending upon them on a daily basis from all directions, emanating from the country's most influential, wealthiest and most powerful media corporations. And I knew, for example, when, say, reporting on illegal domestic warrantless spying or on many of the pieces of the War on Terror, that if I were unwilling to debunk and dismantle and dissect the propagandistic framework being fed to people to induce them to accept these abuses as something noble or necessary to guarantee their security, I would have no way of making any headway of having my voice be heard beyond a very small and limited group of people already trained in constitutional law. 

So, very early on in my journalism career, I began adopting as a primary focus, even though that was never my intention, the lies that were being issued on the topics I knew most by the most powerful newspapers, by the most influential media outlets, because that was a way of getting people to clear their mind of what was being purposely put into it – the clutter that was being inserted into it – to prevent them from thinking critically. And as I did that, I began to view that work, namely the work of dismantling propaganda issued by media corporations on behalf of power centers, not just as a form of media criticism, but as a form of reporting. After all, if the goal of reporting – which is what I believe – is to show one's fellow citizens who don't have the time to engage in politics full time, who have families to take care of and other work to do – to show them the information in the public interest they need to see. If that's the goal of reporting, then debunking media propaganda showing them that what the media is telling them and inducing them to believe, showing them that it's actually untrue and baseless, is a vital way of reporting on the world. It's crucial for showing them the truth of what is happening, of what our institutions are actually doing. And from that very first year of writing, I learned that this attempt to isolate media criticism from real reporting was nothing more than an effort on the part of those media corporations to malign and discredit people who decided that all-powerful actors and all-powerful institutions, including media corporations, deserved to be subjected to that level of scrutiny. 

One of the things that Steve talks about in his book – and we talk about in this interview – is the cultural change that journalism has seen over the last several decades. If you go back to the 1920s, the 1930s, even into 19th-century journalism, what you will find is that journalism, which really wasn't much of a profession or a priesthood the way it is now, it was really an activity in which all citizens could engage – was really most commonly heralded in its muckraking form. These are people who really enjoyed more than anything, almost sadistically, taking down the elite institutions that like to drape themselves in all sorts of prestigious private praise and all kinds of awards. And then, when reporting became an actual way to earn a living, in the 1930s and forties and fifties, it was really a working-class kind of a job – It was people who formed guilds in order to provide themselves a livable wage and what it attracted, more than anything, was a personality type that I would describe as people who most enjoy throwing rocks from the outside of elite events rather than being invited into those elite events. What really changed – more than anything – the nature of journalism, in my view, was the corporatization of media. Media began to be more expensive, as you needed to own networks and studios and major printing presses, the kinds of things only large corporations could afford. The iconography of the outsider journalist with smudging ink on their fingers, working late hours for little pay, and the kind of slovenly dress got replaced by the mentality that corporations value most. The people who began to thrive within corporate journalism had the same kind of characteristics that cause people to thrive within any type of corporation – people who don't make waves, who are good at managerial tasks and doing what they're told – and it really began to incentivize the exact opposite kind of personality as what journalism used to encourage. As a result, the idea began that the way you thrive in journalism is not to strip our most powerful institutions of their mythology or expose their secrets but help elevate them and elevate respect for them and serve their interest rather than undermine them. And that, more than anything, became one of the most important cultural changes in how corporate journalism works. And that's why, for that reason, the people who continue to choose to remain on the outside, who still have that personality type, that would rather be the people throwing rocks at those powerful institutions rather than being bestowed with all sorts of awards within them, to me are the people who are often doing the most important work, and they may easily be dismissed by condescending employees of corporate media outlets who never break stories, whose only basis of self-esteem is the titles they get within these corporations. But nonetheless, you can call them the media critics if you want, who are performing the core function of journalism and showing that the emperor has no clothes. And most importantly of all, dissecting and shedding light on the lies that these institutions are disseminating and the reasons for it. 

And for all of those reasons, we decided to devote our show tonight to this discussion we're about to show you with Steve Krakauer. He has just published one of the most incisive critiques of the modern-day corporate media entitled “Un/cover/ed” – How the Media Got Cozy with Power, Abandoned its Principles and Lost the People. As I said, he's very well positioned to express this critique, given how many functions he has served within the media. He now authored the Fourth Watch Media newsletter. He hosts the Fourth Watch podcast, and he's the executive producer of “The Megyn Kelly Show”, one of the most successful ones in my views, one of the best forms of independent journalism. So, I really enjoyed talking to Steve. I enjoyed this book in ways that I didn't expect. It provided me with a lot of insights that I kind of had lurking in my brain, but never really quite articulated in the way the book enabled me to do – something that a book, a really good book, does best. And I am confident that you will enjoy listening to this interview as much as I enjoyed conducting it. 

 


The Interview: Steve Krakauer



G. Greenwald: So, Steve, first of all, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me. Congratulations on the release of the book. I know that's always a happy time in life when you finally get a book out to the public. So, I'm glad you're able to talk with us about it. 

 

S. Krakauer: Glenn, thanks so much. Really, I've been such a fan of you and your work and it's great to be on. 


G. Greenwald: Absolutely. So, let's talk first about the title of the book. Even though my mother taught me not to judge a book by its cover – I'm also going to judge the book by what's inside of it as well, I promise - but the title of the book is “Uncovered - How the Media Got Cozy with Power, Abandoned Its Principles and Lost the People”. And this phrase, “how the media got cozy with power,” I remember back when I first started writing about politics in 2005, 2006, that was a time when, at least as I perceived it, the media was very cozy with, say, the intelligence community that was supporting the War on Terror. I think some people have forgotten the critical role The New York Times played in helping the Bush administration sell the war in Iraq, based on a lot of the falsehoods emanating from the government. My critique back then was that the press was far too cozy with power, especially the Security State. Do you think that that has gotten a lot worse in the past few years? And if so, how and why?

 

S. Krakauer: I do. I think that there were absolutely valid critiques of the media back then for decades. I mean, I describe the SLA media that's based in New York and D.C. and, by extension of just the pure geographic nature of the media, so much of that we see is this coziness between the people and elite positions on the government side, on business and the people in the media. The people that are supposed to cover them and be a check on power in support of the people, instead, they become part of the powerful, even the ones that are, you know – it's not clear exactly the connection. They might just be on the sidelines of their kid's soccer game and then they connected in some way. 

So, I absolutely think it's been a problem for decades. But I do think it's also gotten worse, partially because of the incentive structure that we've seen change and shift over time. On one end, there are the business models – completely broken now. And so, at once it was really good for business, to go after people in power in some ways. And so, yes, it was a mix, but you certainly get some good journalism out of it because those are the things that actually performed well. And then you have social media, Twitter, which really has a chilling effect in a lot of ways on younger journalists who won't go after stories that they think they might get backlash for on social media and might actually hurt them, stories that might make them less popular with people. That's the role of journalists. Journalists should be unpopular with people in power. Instead, we see people just sort of craving that attention, craving that popularity and influencer status, building their brand. It's all been detrimental and it only adds to the coziness that we see. 

 

G. Greenwald: I've been dealing a lot over the past couple of weeks with Sy Hersh, in part because of the story he published on Substack, claiming it was the United States that blew up Nord Stream 2. Regardless of what one thinks of that story or some of his other stories, it reminded me, as I was dealing with him in terms of how just generally cantankerous he is, how he's not particularly, you know, oozing charm, and doesn't really care to. That kind of old-school journalist – of which he is very much a vintage expression – was the kind of person who generally liked to find themselves on the outside of authority and society. They preferred to throw rocks out at elite events rather than be allowed into them. They really didn't care at all whether they were being applauded by elites. It was kind of a working-class profession. Clearly, all of those things have changed in so many ways. What do you think are the primary reasons why it has? 

 

S. Krakauer: Yeah, I think that journalists, you know, a positive phrase is they should be curious. I look at the total lack of interest in that Sy Hersh piece from the larger corporate press – total disinterest in pursuing that story, which is a fascinating story. I mean, maybe let's dig into it, let's look into it. No. Total lack of interest. But I think, you know, journalists should be nosy. They should be disliked. They should be annoying to people in power. And that's also something that has gone away. And there are a few reasons for it. I mean, I think that some of it is just general laziness and incompetence. I mean, how interesting is it that the most complicated stories, the stories that take a lot of work, are the ones that rarely get attention from the corporate press, the press that has resources and various people to dig into stories? No, we don't really get much coverage of those. But the stories that are easy, the ones that are quick turn, those are the things that get constant attention nonstop and across the board. I mean, some of this is political. Some of this happened and really became worse during the Trump years because all of a sudden it's good for business when you spend your time, spending every waking moment, 24 X 7, talking about Donald Trump, as if it's this big, giant existential threat, ignoring any other story. And then, in some ways also, we saw it, I think in many instances with COVID, where it's just a total like anti-speech activism I describe in the press, where it went from not only a disinterest in stories to this idea of working in tandem with the censors to make it so that the public won't even have access to information or to other points of view because there's a general distrust in the public. By being so disconnected from the public, the press has made themselves no longer connected, no longer even trusting that the public can get the information that it needs. 

 

G. Greenwald: You know, I think one of the strengths of your book is that you're not just this kind of harsh media critic, which you are, but a lot of times harsh media critics are people who have never actually worked inside of journalistic institutions and, I think, therefore, lack a certain perspective that might be helpful to inform their critiques and make them a little more nuanced. You actually have spent a great deal of time working within some of these more established media outlets and, as a result, you have sources, people who are willing to speak with you for this book, both on and off the record, and you share some interviews and some anecdotes that parallel mine as well, where you talk to journalists inside these major news outlets who often said to you, ‘look, there's a lot of things that I think are said that are critical of the prevailing narratives that our media outlets that I agree with.And yet I don't really have much of a willingness to be among the people speaking out and saying those things.” And there are a lot of different reasons why. And whenever it comes to kind of younger or even middle-aged but less established journalists, I've tried to give them the benefit of the doubt by saying, it's a shrinking industry, there are constant layoffs, and if one day you stick your head up on Twitter and say something off key and you become the person of the day who editors and journalists call, you know, all the names that you get called if you do that, your resumé is the easiest one to most quickly be thrown away the next time there's an opening. And that's part of the reasons why younger journalists are petrified of speaking out. Do you think that those economic reasons are the primary ones why it's become so conformist?

 

S. Krakauer: I think that is a huge reason for sure. I think that the business is truly in flux and in a lot of ways that's positive for both the public and the individuals who are willing to put themselves out there, to just trust the public enough to put information out there. Independent sources like your show are on the rise for a good reason, because the corporate press has so much disdain for the general public that there is this real opening. At the same time, as you say, I was in these newsrooms. An impetus for this book was that in 2018, after seeing just how totally just off the reservation the larger establishment press went after Trump won one election – shocked them in November 2016 and then what we saw in 2017 with the coverage. I kind of laid out an idea of sort of a three-page pitch to them about, you know, here's how you can kind of reconnect, maybe fix some of the blind spots. And I called it all my favors. I talked to executives at CNN and CBS, ABC, across the board, tried to sell them on this idea and, generally, there was a lack of real introspection or interest in this. And it's too bad.

 But I think this ultimately became what the book was, which is here are all the ways that this went off the rails over the last few years. And at least if we could just lay all the cards on the table, face up. Anyone who's reading it, anyone in the public can be on the same page. And then we don't need the gatekeepers anymore. We don't need the corporate press and we don't need the people who I think really are showing a bit of cowardice, whether it's the younger generation, whether it's their editors who just give in to the mob, that we don't need them to necessarily change their ways to get the information that we need. 

 

G. Greenwald: Yeah, absolutely. I think the big cause for optimism is the success of independent media of what you're now a part of as well, working with “The Megyn Kelly Show,” and doing other projects. And I want to talk about a lot of those Trump era examples that you raised, because I also think that another major factor is for sure the arrival of Donald Trump and the way in which that transformed a lot of things, but probably, above everything else, media behavior and what they thought of their actual mission. But before I get to that, you know, I think part of the change we just touched on, is the economic motive. There's also clearly a cultural change, I think, where journalists often used to take pride in the fact that stories they filed or analyses that they offered provoked a kind of anger and disturbed people. It resulted in controversy. I told this story before, but I had dinner, I think maybe three or four years ago in New York with two very well-known and established journalists who are very secure in their careers because of their reputations, because of how well-known they are, because of their past accomplishments. They're not the kind of young journalists I was just referring to who are petrified that their resumés are going to be thrown away. And I remember having this to our conversation with them that contained really interesting and nuanced discussions about a wide range of controversial issues. They are both parents of teenagers, they were talking a lot about concerns about how gender ideology is infiltrating schools and clearly converting some kids who aren't really suffering from gender dysphoria but who feel a certain kind of pressure. It was a very interesting kind of conversation, an adult nuanced conversation that I really enjoyed, and yet the minute I left, and I was riding back to my hotel room in the taxi, I realized that under no circumstances would either of them even think about breathing a word of any of what they had just said to me, notwithstanding that they don't have that excuse – I might be fired and I won't get another job given, as I just said, all of this security they enjoy. 

What happened in the cultural milieu of journalism that has turned them all into such cowards and conformists? Not all of them, but the vast majority in the corporate media. 

.

S. Krakauer: Yeah, it does seem like across the board but there are some exceptions. You know, as you mentioned, I talk on the record with over 25 people in the book, all throughout the industry, some at Fox News, but some at The New York Times and The Washington Post, and trying to get at this question. 

And, you know, I look at The New York Times as a good standard of how this decline has really materialized because I spent a great deal of time about The New York Times’s Tom Cotton op-ed fiasco that we saw in 2020, which I think was just such an important moment. And yes, people who may know a little bit about it privately and then it spilled out publicly. But to really dig in and look at the circumstances and look at the implications of what we saw there, we saw the publication of an op-ed by a senator during the height of the protests and riots after George Floyd by Tom Cotton. And it was such a backlash. 

 

G. Greenwald: Just to remind people what he was advocating – it was something with which I disagreed – but he was advocating essentially for the deployment of military reserves and the military to keep order in the streets. Not exactly an unprecedented proposal or something that George Bush 41 had done during the Rodney King riots and many other times. And it wasn't that these reporters were saying they disagreed with the story. They were saying they were so offended that the newspaper wouldn't even air the opinion that they demanded and then ultimately won the resignation of a very senior editor at The New York Times. 

 

S. Krakauer: Exactly. And the way that they went about that, after having all this internal drama and crying on Zoom meetings, which I described in the book on the record, that if spelled out publicly in a very specific way, they said that publishing this column put the lives of our colleagues in danger. And that implies that it was actually dangerous to publish this op-ed is what was able to get the bosses to give in to this mob that was created, not just from the external activists, but from internally. So that was point one that was really alarming. But the second element here is that it was journalists. It was not even activists – it was not opinion columnists. It was the actual staff of the news side of the newspaper that put this out there and you start to learn that journalists these days, for whatever reason, whether they believed it or whether they just went along with it, they were able to use this scare tactic in order to get this changing dynamic culturally. And I do think what's interesting is more recently with what we've seen with the kind of trans coverage of The New York Times and the pushback that they got. The New York Times actually went a different route and has stood firm so far, pushing back against their own internal staff and the activists who are coming after them for daring to publish stories objectively looking at this issue from a variety of perspectives. 

 

G. Greenwald: You know, I pay a lot of attention to the times when journalists do things that aren't just wrong, but that seems to me to be such a fundamental violation of what the journalistic mission is supposed to be, what the defining values of journalism have always been. When I see, for example, journalists being the leading agitators for censorship, when journalists have long been expected to defend free inquiry to be, it's like seeing a cardiologist encouraging everybody to smoke six packs of cigarettes a day. They just do not combine. There's an anecdote in your book I want to ask you about, in part because I admit to finding it entertaining – but also revealing – which is that Charlie Wetzel, who was this sort of star columnist of The New York Times, was the test case. He left The New York Times for Substack and that was going to prove that there was this young generation of journalists that the world really did crave their work and loved them. And he was going to be a shooting star at Substack. It turns out nobody cared about him once he left the paper, and I think after nine months, ran back to the arms of the Atlantic. But you talk about the reaction that he had when, during this whole Tom Cotton episode, which I found really interesting and revealing. Why don't you tell that anecdote and tell us why you thought it was worth including? 

 

S. Krakauer: Yeah, absolutely. And this was a story that was relayed by Shawn McCreesh, who at the time was an opinion writer staffer and is now at the New York Magazine. And he went on the record with this, which, again, I mean, I give him credit for revealing this. But he describes a meeting with hundreds of people – and, again, if you remember this, at the height of the pandemic, everyone's at home, everyone's spending too much time on Twitter and getting emotional over watching cable news or whatever they're doing when it comes to these protests – and he describes Charlie as saying that, essentially crying during this meeting, saying that his friends wouldn't talk to him because he worked for The New York Times. And that was one of the impetus for why he was fighting against the publication of this column by the United States senator. You know, it's sort of silly and it's kind of funny, but it's also just really disturbing. And again, it's those kinds of anecdotes, I believe, that were able to move The Times in this very real way, which, as you say, you would think I get why maybe activists in a height of this were where you know would push back against The New York Times ... 

 

G. Greenwald: That's their job, right? That’s their job to influence papers to produce new journalism more favorable to their agenda. 

 

S. Krakauer: But the one occupation that should be the most for free expression and the free exchange of ideas is journalists. And potentially the paper of record should be the one that employs the ones that do it the strongest and most ardently. And that is completely the opposite. That was a real eye-opener for me. And I do think it was a very clear case of the perilous times to come when it comes to the support of censorship that we've seen in the intervening years, particularly after Trump left. 

 

G. Greenwald: Yeah, you know, again, I think it's very cultural. I was sort of steeped in the journalistic iconography of the 1970s, which in some ways was the peak for journalistic accomplishments. That was the era of Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers, the Watergate investigations, and the uncovering of a lot of the dirty deeds of the CIA as part of the Church Committee. So, journalism inspired me as a kid because it was, you know, a profession where people were expected to go risk their lives covering wars or you would expect to go to prison and instead of revealing your source a court told you to or do your reporting, that angered power centers to the point where they wanted to prosecute you. And now we have journalists crying in staff meetings because their Brooklyn liberal friends are angry about that with them and won't talk to them, not because of anything they wrote, but because of an opinion piece that their newspaper wrote. And I think we see this kind of degeneracy in terms of just the character of the people who are supposed to be journalists and what they're willing or not willing to endure. 

 

S. Krakauer: Yeah. And I do think –and I know you've written about this quite a bit – and in chapter one, I start to say, well, how did we get to this particular point? And I do think it was in how the press really was just subservient to the Obama administration, despite the fact that in many real ways, the Obama administration was an enemy to the press. […] talked about the Trump administration, enemy of the people, all that while, you know, we criminalized the act of journalism through using the Espionage Act, more times than every other administration combined, to prosecute and to criminalize journalists and journalism sources. James Risen, who was a victim of this, wrote in the New York Times, as soon as Donald Trump was elected, that if Donald Trump targets journalists, blame Obama. And I would also blame the journalists themselves who didn't push back against the Obama administration's overreach on journalism, instead continuing to deify him in every possible way. That's what you get. And then all of a sudden, this is what happens when the pushback on what was supposed to be the kind of criminalization of journalism that journalists should be outraged about, doesn't happen. 

 

G. Greenwald: Yeah. From personal experience, I mean, that was when I was doing the Snowden reporting and the government forced me to stay in Brazil for a year against my will. My journalistic colleague, Laura Poitras, was forced to stay in Germany. It was not Donald Trump threatening us with arrests because of the reporting that we were doing, it was the Obama administration. I remember at the time there were plenty of journalists not only not defending us but justifying that on the grounds that the reporting we were doing was criminal. I was notoriously asked by David Gregory on “Meet the Press”, whether I should be in prison because of the reporting. So I think you're right, you could really see the change then, as they undertook this very subservient posture with the Obama administration. 

 

S. Krakauer: But if you happened to do the Snowden reporting a few years later when Donald Trump was in office – I wonder how they would have treated you. And I wonder how that story would have played out if it was just simply under a different administration. 

 

G. Greenwald: Yeah, You know, one of the problems for sure is that whether the reporting you're doing is considered favorable by the government often determines your rights. I was doing it in Brazil, and the Brazilian government’s daily reporting is very favorable. Why? Because we were informing Brazilian authorities about the ways in which the NSA was spying on all their key civic institutions and the populations. So, it's very popular in Brazil. It was not in the United States. And so, I was protected by the Brazilian government and threatened with prison by the Obama administration. 

Well, let's move on to the Trump era and some of the specific examples you focus on most. I was thrilled that you basically began the book with a focus on the Hunter Biden story because I think sometimes even long-term readers of mine, people who are part of my work, think: “Is he ever going to stop talking about the Hunter Biden story? And he loves to talk about the Hunter Biden story. I can barely do a show without talking about it. I personally think it's for a good reason. I think it illustrates a lot. You obviously seem to agree, given the play that you gave to it in your book, why do you think it merits so much attention? 

 

S. Krakauer: Yeah. In fact, I did an interview last week with Brian Stelter and he asked me, what's the thing we got the most wrong during my time at CNN? And I said it was the Hunter Biden laptop story 100%. 

It was a really disturbing story because of the – I think [some of the stories I write] about in the book are laziness, incompetence from the press, you know, stupid mistakes. This one was not. This was a real determined effort – and we've seen through the Twitter Files that have come out since – but we really knew it at the time. I think any discerning consumer of the news would understand what was going on, even in the moment that the tech platforms were in collusion with agencies, at least in talking to you for four months before that with the FBI and the media, instead of being a check on that powerful collusion that was happening, we're instead a part of it. We're part of the entire elite censorship collusion because they not only were not outraged by it, but they also only gave attention to all the earmarks of Russian disinformation letter coffers of the world. And they were not at all anywhere close to the way that they should have been outraged by their colleagues at the New York Post, getting completely censored in a truly unprecedented way. The link to the New York Post was not available to be spread. And I laid this out point by point. You know, I mean, it's almost amazing to go back and look. Maggie Haberman shares a link to The New York Post and is trending as MAGA Haberman because her colleagues were mad that she happened to link to it, just noting that that story existed. Jake Sherman, now of Punchbowl, then at Politico, was suspended from using his account on Twitter. He linked to the story. He quickly deleted it and apologized for daring to link to this horrible text. It was so embarrassing that the media, instead of fighting for their colleagues, joined in on the censorship. We know what happened in October 2020, but it continued for years and years and obviously has since been banned. Oh, no, now The New York Times and CNN are confirming that this laptop is real. Yeah, we knew it all along. The public should have lost the distrust that they may have had in the press to give it to you straight. They can't even be curious about it and they can't even be honest about why they're not being curious about it. 

 

G. Greenwald: But this is the thing that I have to admit does somewhat mystify me, which is as people like Brian Stelter tell it, and I heard those parts of the interview, you know, then they were like, oh, look, we were in the dark. It was hard to know what was going on. You know, they have all these excuses for why they were unclear. They pretend they really didn't spread this lie, that it was Russian disinformation – even though you can spend all day showing people one video clip after the next, where they brought on people, including their own employees like James Clapper, to say exactly that. But even if you want to give credit to that version of events, ‘there's no way we could have known’ – even though a lot of us did know to the point where we were willing to stake our careers on it by putting our names on those stories because the authenticity was so obvious – at least now, as you say, even the institutions that they say are the ones you should trust most – The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN – have all come out and said these documents were never Russian disinformation. We've authenticated the documents independently. A political reporter did the same as well. And the story of how that laptop got into the hands of the FBI and Rudy Giuliani was also accurate: that Hunter Biden left it at that repair shop and it was abandoned. This means that whatever their intentions were before the election, the story they all spread day after day after day was wrong. And it's been the most basic rule of journalism forever, that when you get a story wrong – like The New York Times did after the Iraq war, and they went back and signed a long editor's note trying to account for how they got it wrong and why and what they need to do better – there's not been one single journalist or one single outlet, not one that has spread that story that is in any way even purported to grapple with the lies and falsehoods they spread before the election. And there seems to be very little demand on them for you to do so. That seems like a major change to me in how journalism functions. What do you think explains that? 

 

S. Krakauer: Yeah, so I think there are two things about that. First of all, I will say one of the people I spoke to for the book was Olivia Nuzzi, of New York Magazine, and she was a co-author of the cover story about Hunter Biden’s laptop, for New York Magazine a few months ago, which I thought was very good and actually called into account some of the real problems with the way that it was covered originally. Of course, her story barely got attention. I wrote about it for my newsletter, but very, very few in the press gave it much attention because I really think it's the second reason, which is that they didn't just get the story. They essentially got the story wrong on purpose They treated it as this toxic, contaminated piece of information that we can't even acknowledge exists. I mean, all this so often with Colbert. It's why I think just like the Hunter Biden laptop story, we're not getting the introspection with COVID either, because they realize that correcting the record now proves why you got it wrong in the first place, which is that either consciously or subconsciously, you intentionally didn't even cover the story. You weren't even curious enough. You wouldn't even give the oxygen of at least hearing other perspectives and allowing other information out there. We just shut it all down because of a fundamental distrust of the public. And that's too embarrassing to really start to go and put into account. 

 

G. Greenwald: So, we talked about it right at the start because of the book title that describes pathologies in the media that we both agree actually predated Trump but seems to have gotten much worse once he ascended to the presidency. And I think that's true across-the-board. Whatever media pathologies were already in existence went to an entirely different universe because of this overriding, not just even contempt they had for Donald Trump, but this belief that he was such a singularly threatening figure that they could, almost like abiding by journalistic ethics, became a luxury they couldn't afford. Here's somebody who has kind of had one foot in the kind of more corporate mainstream media, but also a foot in conservative media working with Fox and Megan and other people like her. Why is it that the media came to see Trump in those terms as so radically different than, say, more conventional politicians like John McCain and Mitt Romney and even George Bush and Dick Cheney? 

 

S. Krakauer: Yeah, for sure. It was very clearly different. I lay out in the book three specific reasons why. First of all, there's the business side of it. He was so good for business, and we saw that very early on in the way CNN and even MSNBC covered him in a very nice way, essentially. I mean, they just played all his rallies without any movement. So that was the way it started. It was a good business decision. But it was also personal. I mean, I write about all of the media executives and media personalities who were at Donald Trump's wedding only in 2005. Jeff Zucker, Katie Couric, Gayle King. You go right down the line. And so, they were kind of part of that and he became this turncoat to the elite power structure that he started in the media space in New York. So that was two. And then the third one, as you mentioned, I do think that there were elements of the media that truly believed they were doing Watergate every single day in this existential fight, and they were saving democracy. But I would argue that instead of what they should have done, which is even if they believe that, which I completely think is ridiculous, but if you believe that, that's when you double down on your standard, that's when you have your journalistic principles. And you have to even do that more stronger because you have to convince the public to trust you on it. Instead, they went in the opposite direction. The guardrails were completely off and just the trust of the public completely declined as well. 

 

G. Greenwald: But I want to probe a little bit of that more because I can understand why the media kind of like people like John McCain and Mitt Romney, who are these kinds of moderates. You know, John McCain carefully cultivated this maverick image his whole life reaching out across the aisle. Mitt Romney was this sort of a standard old-school Republican, just kind of a business guy. George Bush and Dick Cheney at the time they were elected were considered radicals by the media, especially after 9/11. And I think for good reason. It was part of what was my impetus for getting involved in journalism. They were doing things like instituting a worldwide torture regime and then invading Iraq based on false pretenses and creating CIA black sites and the Patriot Act and warrantless spying on American citizens. I would argue that, from a liberal perspective, Donald Trump, the first president in decades not to involve the U.S. in a new war, was nowhere near that same universe of moral evil from a liberal perspective as George Bush and Dick Cheney. And yet they look at Bush and Cheney as these very kind and decent human beings. Maybe a little bit of that is just the passage of time. People seem less horrible as time goes by. But I think there's a lot more going on there. What do you think accounts for that? 

 

S. Krakauer: I agree. I think that there is a general sameness in thought when it comes from the left or the right of the people that spend their time in cable news, green rooms and in the newsrooms of all these organizations. And so, yeah, you know, Dick Cheney, George Bush, and, you know, it's all sort of the same in a lot of ways. I mean, there was not a lot of outrage over the Patriot Act for a very long time – even from places like on the left, but most of the people on the left. And I write about this in chapter eight, in terms of Bernie Sanders, because I do think that in 2016, it's been widely reported Bernie Sanders was sort of screwed by the DNC and in cooperation with Hillary Clinton’s political job there. In 2020, when really it seemed that Bernie Sanders was going to coast to the nomination after Nevada, I remember just a political galvanization of all the candidates going behind Joe Biden in an effort to stop it, to stop Bernie Sanders before Super Tuesday. It was the media themselves. It was people like Joy Reid on MSNBC, even CNN to a lesser extent, that really just started to push against Bernie Sanders and his supporters in a very overt way. Why were they doing that? The same reason that they didn't like Trump. It was a disruption to the establishment and a disruption to the general sameness that they were used to for so long and they weren't going to have it. And on the Bernie Sanders side, whether it was from MSNBC or from the DNC, they were successful in doing that two times in a row. Trump was able to do it outside of the norms, even though he was not a fan or even not the candidate from the right either. 

 

G. Greenwald: So, I just have a couple of questions left, and one of them is actually one that you just kind of answered in a way but I think, for me at least, it's such an important question that I want to kind of ask it from a different direction and probe a little bit more. You know, for years I remember well before I was a journalist, it was kind of just gospel on the right that the United States media is liberal. The liberal media, Rush Limbaugh would rail against them every day, right? They were Democrats. They were on the side of the left. And it was never something that I believed. You know, I think on cultural issues, you can probably make a much better case. These are people who go to the same schools where left-liberal cultural ideology comes from. They live in blue cities. It makes a little more sense there from an economic perspective, a military perspective. They were never on board with antiwar protesters or the economic policy of Bernie Sanders. As you just said. They were very hostile to Bernie Sanders, who was clearly to the left of Hillary Clinton. And as I said when I was writing about politics, my argument was they were very subservient to the Bush-Cheney administration, serving their agenda in so many ways, and that the ideology isn't so much that they're left-wing. It's that they're just kind of pro-establishment. They're interested in protecting whoever is a status quo candidate, which is why they're comfortable with, say, a Mitt Romney and a John McCain in a way they're not comfortable with a Donald Trump. 

How do you see or how would you define the core bias of the corporate media now in the post-Trump era? 

 

S. Krakauer: I completely agree. I think that you can make the argument that for decades the bridge to someone who leans left, probably when they vote, they probably vote for Democrats much more often than Republicans. We see that in poll after poll. That changed. But something also fundamental has changed. Now it's even more overt. I see this in the way that objectivity has become this dirty word – I write about it a little bit in the book. 

There is no longer a sense that journalists should be even striving for fairness, you know, fairness to all sides or both sides. No, it's much more overt. I actually think it's a nonideological disdain for the average American. I think from the American media perspective, there is a real distrust in the people that you don't know. And I think it goes both ways. I think the average American has a real disdain for the elites on both sides of the aisle. We saw it with Donald Trump and we saw it with Bernie Sanders. And so I think, if anything, the sort of policy perspective of our current elites, the people who are in government, the people who are running our corporate media, is one of general distrust and disdain of the people that they're supposed to be the conduit for. Instead, they kind of dislike and feel like one thing might happen and they're all going to mess up what we have going on here. I think COVID has made this entirely worse, and that's a real problem because the public can feel that they get that sense. Every poll shows the lowest trust in the public of the media every year at the lower and lower. 

 

G. Greenwald: Yeah. This is a great place to end because this is the thing I worry about a lot, in general, is, you know, if you look at history, when the breach gets way too large between the elite sectors of the country and kind of the ordinary citizens, lots of instability or even worse can happen. That's clear here in the United States now, they don't just hate the media, they hate the media more than other elite inside institutions. They hate most establishment institutions, which is why they were driven into the arms of whatever politicians Obama or Trump promised to burn the system down. 

But I want to talk a little bit about why there's been this breach with the media, why they're so insular. I remember the interview at The Intercept. There was all this talk constantly about diversifying the newsroom. And, you know, you would look around over the years and it would seem like, on the surface, in the most superficial ways possible, that this diversification process was actually underway. And yet, I'm not exaggerating, Steve, some of the wealthiest people I've ever met in my life, meeting people who come from the wealthiest enclaves in the United States and were raised by the world's richest families, were people I met at The Intercept, reporters, editors, you know, just so whatever diversification of the newsroom meant, it definitely didn't mean class or education. They all went to the same schools and the like. 

How much of that in the culture of journalism – which really used to be a working-class profession, people unionized, they made very little money – what is the role of all of that and how much do you think is responsible for these changes? 

 

S. Krakauer: Yeah, it's gone in the opposite direction, right? And I do think that's one of the reasons that I wrote the book. I would love it if the corporate press got better and started to learn some of these lessons and had some ability. But I don't believe that's going to happen. Instead, lay it all on the table and actually band together because we don't need them. We need the independent press. But no, I think that one of the things I would argue is to actually get the press in a better position is to find people who don't want to be journalists, to almost drag them kicking and screaming into the profession. Because if you're looking for people who actually want to be the journalists of today, there are people that see themselves building a brand, accruing followings on social media, using it as a stepping stone to accrue more power and to have a voice in a larger way. In the olden days, I mean, a couple of decades ago, the best journalists were respected by the people, but not really known. You know, that was the way that journalism works. Yeah. 

 

G. Greenwald: David Halberstam, who won a Pulitzer for covering the Vietnam War for The New York Times, used to say, “if you're famous, it's likely that you're not a very good journalist”..

 

S. Krakauer: Right. Right. But that's clearly not the case. You can be a lower-level staffer at a big publication like The Washington Post or The New York Times and have 200,000 followers and think that you're famous – and in some ways you are – but being a famous low level journalist is really just a recipe for disaster if the media wants to get in a better place. Yes, I think ideologically there could be more diversity, cultural diversity, but also try to find some people who are not swayed by the current trappings of what journalists can be, find people who actually want to talk to people, tell people a story, and not worry about what's happening on Twitter every time, every day. 

 

G. Greenwald: But for your next book, I give you permission to call that the Taylor Lorenz syndrome. I think you could use that as good shorthand. 

Actually, I do have one last quick question for you. Yeah, it's about a part of your book I wanted to ask you about and it relates to a story that came out obviously after the publication of your book. So, you didn't talk about it. There's this controversy about the lawsuit brought by Dominion voting machines against Fox News, claiming that they were intentionally defamed through accusations that they were involved in voting fraud. And one of the arguments you make in your book that actually I thought was pretty novel, and I hadn't really thought about it this way before, though I think it makes a ton of sense, is that one of the things that our polarized environment has done is that it makes it so that if one side wildly exaggerates a certain story, the other side refuses to acknowledge any validity to it whatsoever. I think the Hunter Biden story is a good example of the role the FBI and the CIA play in influencing Big Tech, that's another. It has to be either or all. I think the coverage of this Dominion lawsuit has been terrible. They were eager to try and pretend that Tucker, who always is their number one target, was on the air constantly promoting theories of electoral fraud while in secret he was saying he knew it was untrue and in reality, he never did. In fact, he kind of bravely went on air and attacked Sidney Powell for refusing to show her evidence. 

Nonetheless, I'm curious what you make of this particular story and what we do know about it and whether it reflects any of these kinds of pathologies that are going on, not in the primetime shows of Fox, but in other sectors of Fox. 

 

S. Krakauer: Yeah, I think it's a fascinating story. I think any time you start to read the text messages of really famous people, it becomes a juicy media story. I'm all for transparency, I think that there's validity to that. I think what's interesting is you look at the original Dominion filing - I think it was 400 or so pages, 200 pages or so -  it was all tweets and Instagram posts and Facebook posts. And notably, he's the only person from Fox who essentially filed exactly this lawsuit with others. He was the star of the original filing, but he's not the star of the media coverage of these text messages that are coming out now. Instead, as you say, Tucker was someone who did not put this stuff on the air, and instead called out Sidney Powell on November 19, early on. 

So, at the same time, we also learned what was happening inside the heads of people like Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham, and some of these others. And it is interesting, you know, I think it's valid to say that perhaps there was a bias of omission, which is something I write about in the book, of not going full on and explaining ‘well, this is what we actually believe about what's happening here.’ At the same time, you also see the business decisions that get me here because Donald Trump had his grip on his supporters at that moment. And you have to tread carefully. These are your voters. In fact, in the text messages, they really, Tucker and others show care for their own viewers saying they're being spun this. We need to find a way of getting through to them, but not do so in a way that's going to alienate them. I think that's a very real thing. 

And the other thing I would just say, is I think I would be very curious to see the 2016 text messages of people like Rachel Maddow and others at MSNBC because I don't think they didn't believe what was being spun about Russiagate. I think that they actually bought fully into the 2016 election story. And I don't know what's worse, but I do think it's interesting to look at the stories totally. 

 

G. Greenwald: I think one of the hardest things to do in journalism is having to challenge your own audience when your journalistic revelations are your own sense of what's right and wrong compels you to do so. And I think there's a lot of fear in doing that. But ultimately, that's what builds trust, in my view, more than anything, is the more you're willing to show your audience that you're not pandering to them, you're not condescending to them, you're willing to tell them things you know they don't agree with or want to hear, but demand kind of a fair hearing for them to give it to you. That's what I think develops trust, the rapport between journalists and their audience. It can really rebuild trust. 

 

S. Krakauer: They'll respect that. Yeah, yeah. 

 

G. Greenwald: Yeah. Well, Steve, congratulations on the book. We will give everybody not just the information on where to get it, but also encourage them to do so. I think the issues you're writing about in this book are among the most important we face. We cannot have a healthy democracy when we have a rotted and corrupt press corps, which we absolutely do. And I think your book does one of the best jobs yet in laying out why that is and also how it's come to happen. So, I hope everyone will read your book. 

 

S. Krakauer: Hey, Glenn, thanks so much for having me. I really appreciate it. 

 

For those of you who have continued to watch and have made our show a much bigger success than we anticipated so early on, we're really grateful. We hope to see you back tomorrow night and every night at 7 p.m. EST, exclusively here on Rumble. 

 

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Week in Review: Trump's Tariffs, Ukraine Negotiations, Possibility of War with Iran, and More with Glenn Greenwald, Lee Fang, & Michael Tracey
System Update #438

The following is an abridged transcript from System Update’s most recent episode. You can watch the full episode on Rumble or listen to it in podcast form on Apple, Spotify, or any other major podcast provider.  

System Update is an independent show free to all viewers and listeners, but that wouldn’t be possible without our loyal supporters. To keep the show free for everyone, please consider joining our Locals, where we host our members-only aftershow, publish exclusive articles, release these transcripts, and so much more!

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As a program that covers only two or at the most three issues per night – because we prefer in-depth coverage to sort of cable-style quick five-minute hits of each different news event possible – sometimes, especially these days, it is difficult to keep up with all the news, given how fast and furious things are always happening with this new administration. 

As a result, we're going to try to devote one show per week or so to a sort of “Week in Review,” where we're able to cover more topics than we normally would cover on a typical program by inviting friends of the show on to talk with us about those. 

To help us do that tonight, we are joined by the independent Journalist Lee Fang and the always delightful and agreeable Michael Tracey. 

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Lee Fang is an independent journalist based in San Francisco. He covers political and corporate wrongdoing on Substack at leefang.com. He previously wrote and reported for The Intercept where he was my colleague for many years; he has also written at The Nation and reported for Vice. He is an intrepid investigative journalist, always breaking lots of stories, working by himself or with an independent team. We are always happy to welcome him to the show. 

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System Update #437

The following is an abridged transcript from System Update’s most recent episode. You can watch the full episode on Rumble or listen to it in podcast form on Apple, Spotify, or any other major podcast provider.  

System Update is an independent show free to all viewers and listeners, but that wouldn’t be possible without our loyal supporters. To keep the show free for everyone, please consider joining our Locals, where we host our members-only aftershow, publish exclusive articles, release these transcripts, and so much more!

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Before I get to the questions though, I want to give you some breaking news that happened a few minutes before we came live on the air. I just spent the last 10 to 15 minutes reading about it so I don't have a very in-depth knowledge of it. You may have heard the U.S. government sent to El Salvador a person who was living in the United States, who's married to an American citizen, has a daughter they're raising together, has lived here for years in the U.S., has no charges against him, no problems whatsoever. As a result, there was a hold put on any attempt to remove him or deport him by a deportation court. Yet, he was picked up within the last month and sent to that mega horrific prison in El Salvador, even though there was a court order barring his removal, pending hearings. Even the U.S. government admitted that they sent him there accidentally. That's what they said. “Oops, it was an accident.” 

Now, what do you do if the government admits and mistakenly consigns somebody to one of the worst prisons on the planet, in El Salvador, indefinitely, with no way out, incommunicado: their families can't speak to them, their lawyers can't speak to, they're in El Salvador. 

A federal district court judge about a week ago ordered the U.S. government to do everything possible to get him back, to tell their – let's face it – puppet state in El Salvador, President Bukele, that they want him back. 

Remember, the U.S. government pays for each one of these prisoners to be there. So, it's not like we have no influence there. The whole strategy of Bukele is to do what the United States tells him to do. The Trump White House and Trump supporters were indignant about this order: who are you to tell the president to go get him from El Salvador? The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt said, “Well, tell the court to call Salvador.” That was her attitude. 

The injunction then went up on appeal to an appellate court composed of one Reagan appointee and two appointees of Democratic presidents, one Obama and one Clinton, if I'm not mistaken, who, more or less unanimously – they had some differences about the rationale – upheld that injunction and said it's unconscionable to send somebody who you haven't demonstrated any guilt for and when there's a court order barring his removal, to send him to El Salvador for life in prison and then just wash your hands of it. 

The problem is the government doesn't want to go get him because that would be an admission that they sent someone there mistakenly, which they've already admitted in their briefs. That would raise the question, well, how can you send people to a prison in El Salvador without giving them a chance to prove that they're not guilty of the crimes you're accusing them of being gang members and those sorts of things? 

Last night, we reported in detail on the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in a separate case where five Venezuelans obtained an injunction before they were sent to El Salvador, a country they've never been to, to be put in prison, arguing that they should have the right of habeas corpus, the right to go into court before they're removed and argue that they were wrongfully detained and are wrongfully accused and all nine justices of the Supreme Court – all nine – said that you cannot remove people under the Alien Enemies Act until you first give them a habeas corpus here and they had a disagreement by a 5-4 vote about that proceeding had to be brought where the person is detained.” 

They're detained mostly in Texas or Arizona and already those Venezuelan detainees who had this injunction against them immediately went to court in Texas. Yesterday, a Trump-appointed judge issued an injunction saying the government has to prove that they have evidence that they're guilty of the things they're accusing them, which is gang membership. 

You can still deport people and send them back to their country of origin just by proving they're illegal but if you want to send them to a prison in El Salvador, and if you want to remove them under the Alien Enemies Act, which requires proving that they're an alien enemy: every time it's been invoked – the War of 1812, World War I, World War II – even those accused of being Nazi sympathizers got hearings first. And that's what the U.S. Supreme Court said. Right after that, a Trump-appointed judge in the original court, the district court, issued a ruling saying, “You cannot remove these people as well.” 

We keep hearing about all these left-wing judges. We talked about this before. These are not left-wing judges. A lot of times they're Reagan or Bush judges but in a couple of cases now they've been Trump-appointed judges. 

In fact, yesterday, a different Trump-appointed judge ruled in favor of the Associated Press. As you might recall, the White House issued marching orders to the American media, saying, “You cannot call this the Gulf of Mexico anymore, you have to call it the Gulf of America.” 

I’m not sure when the government thought it obtained the power to dictate to media outlets and journalists what they can say and how they can describe things. When the Associated Press continued to call out the Gulf of Mexico, the Trump White House cut off all access to press pools, briefing rooms, and the like. 

A Trump-appointed federal judge ruled in favor of AP, saying, obviously not everybody's entitled to access to the White House but once you have it, you cannot be punished with removal because of the things you say, because the things that you're saying don't align with the government's orders of what you should say. 

Just before we came on air, the Supreme Court issued another ruling – it was an unsigned ruling, which typically means that it was the opinion of the court unanimously – which involved the case of this one individual who was sent to El Salvador in the way that the administration admitted was sent mistakenly. The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to dissolve that injunction saying, “Courts can't rule on how to conduct ourselves diplomatically” and the court said, “No, we are maintaining this injunction” by a 9-0 vote – apparently, there was no dissent.

So, you can't mandate or force the Trump administration to get the prisoner back but they said the government does have to prove they did everything reasonable to facilitate his return and that's the Supreme Court, the last word that has said that the Trump administration has to try and get him back because he should never have been sent there by the Trump administration's admission. 

Congress is completely impotent. They're afraid of Trump, especially the Republicans. As long as he stays very popular within the Republican Party, very few Republicans are willing to defy him. 

Congress in general, well before Trump, has neutered itself. We talked about that last night with David Sirota. They've given up the role that they're supposed to have constitutionally in setting tariff policy. They've especially abdicated their responsibility to authorize wars. The president goes to war all the time like we are now in Yemen without any hint of congressional approval. Obama did the same thing. Biden did the same thing. 

We don't really have an operating congressional branch in any real sense. |As I said, no branch is supposed to be unlimited in its power, it's supposed to have a balance of power that's supposed to be co-equal branches. 

If the president starts violating the law, implementing due process-free procedures of punishment and punishing the press, it's the role of the courts to say, “This violates the Constitution.” This Supreme Court has now twice done that with Trump, and Trump-appointed judges are doing it as well. 

Whatever your views are on all these different assertions of power, you want there to be some check on presidential power, and you don't want any one branch of government getting too powerful. There are all sorts of checks on the judiciary. The only people who can be on the judiciary are ones that the president nominates, even ones the president nominates said they have to go through a confirmation hearing in the Senate – every single judge – and then for wrongdoing, they can be impeached. 

So, they have many different checks and balances on everyone in the branches and you don't want the power to get too concentrated in any one branch, especially the president. As David Sirota said last night, the founders feared most an elected king; they just fought a revolutionary war to free themselves of a monarch. The last thing they wanted to do was to recreate one, but that's what you would have if the president said, “Oh, once I win an election, I'm totally free to do whatever I want. Ignore the Constitution. It doesn't matter. No one can do anything to stop me.” That is not something any American citizen should want. 

 So that's just an update. I'll read the case more carefully but, from what I can gather, that is the essence of the ruling. It's not a complete defeat for Trump because it does recognize the president has the right to conduct diplomacy and they don't want to interfere in that but the order is the government has to do everything reasonable to facilitate their return and then demonstrate to the court the efforts they made so the court can then determine whether they actually tried to do that.

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All right, so let's get to our Mailbag. These are questions that have been submitted throughout the week by members of our Locals community. The first one is from @John_Mann. 

AD_4nXcdRzr6sZ9KQq3FHxTXYeAVEqeMpChh786AVQXcqgjXiqJtr6YhmTYfhOScFrEEFWtOe4YyJHpW3_rQgE-hF98iqyAj_D3vt545whwTcGWMk7q8L17MXlubkN60Ij37-Lu7eRd3T4eRNVJ1dvmGskg?key=raEjNIDONd4zGJ8N9tomIcvGI do think it's important when critiquing any institution, including the corporate media, not to romanticize the past. 

It has always been the case, especially throughout the Cold War, that the corporate media would basically serve as a mouthpiece for the CIA, for the Security State. Every time the CIA overthrew a government The New York Times and Time Magazine would herald it as a revolution by the people. 

Conversely, whenever a new pro-United States leader was installed, no matter how tyrannical, they would call it an advancement of democracy. And you can just go back and look at that. I recently did that with the CIA-engineered coup in Brazil to see how The New York Times covered that and it was essentially, “Oh, this was a revolution against a corrupt communist regime.” 

In fact, it was an elected center-left government, and the tyrannical regime was the installment of the right-wing military junta. The worst offender was probably Time Magazine. Henry Luce was the publisher and owner of Time Magazine, he was extremely close to the U.S. government, and a hardcore Cold Warrior. 

Several countries actually enacted laws banning foreign-owned media from being freely circulating in the country as a result of the influence of Time Magazine and how they were just propagandizing the entire world. 

So, there was always this kind of union between the government on the one hand and the corporate media on the other. They worked hand-in-hand. But you did have occasions when that didn't happen, very well-known occasions: when Edward R. Murrow angered his bosses at CBS by vigorously and repeatedly denouncing McCarthyism in the 1950s; Walter Cronkite, in the 1960s, turned against the Vietnam War and editorialized on air – he was the most trusted news person there was saying, “The government's not winning, the U.S. is not winning, the U.S. isn't going to win.” 

Shortly thereafter, we had Watergate, you have the Pentagon Papers that enraged the U.S. government that was done by The New York Times and the Washington Post. So, you definitely had a kind of adversarial relationship at some points. 

But well before Donald Trump, when I first started writing about politics, and I'll talk about this in a second, I didn't intend to start writing about the media. I wasn't trying to be a media critic; I wasn't looking at the world that way. Only over time did I realize that with the War on Terror, the war in Iraq, the problem with the media was they were completely subservient to the National Security State, not to Democrats, not to Republicans, to the National Security State. 

Nonetheless, despite all of that, despite those fundamental problems I used to rail against the corporate media, I would debate them, I'd criticize them, I'd dissect their propaganda when I was writing, every day, in the 2000s and 2010s. I think it has gotten much worse for one reason and one reason only, and that was the emergence of Donald Trump. 

Once Donald Trump emerged, even though I don't think he was more radical than, say, George Bush and Dick Cheney, even from a kind of coastal, liberal perspective. Comportmentally, he was just so offensive to establishment elites, to liberal elites, that the media absolutely despised him, especially once he won and they went completely insane. They really did start including that their journalistic mission no longer mattered, that far more important was the higher mission of defeating Donald Trump, and they just started lying openly. 

We've been through all those lies, the Russiagate, that people forget now, really did drown the country politically for almost three years, only for it to be debunked. They spread the Hunter Biden laptop lie right before the election, which came from the CIA that it was “Russian disinformation.” All the COVID lies, everything Anthony Fauci said was not to be questioned and anyone who questioned it was a conspiracy theorist and on and on, and on. 

And that was really when you see this massive collapse in trust and faith in the media if you look at the graphs. I mean, it has been going down over time and you can even see prior to the advent of the internet, people turning to alternative sources. Talk Radio became very big among conservatives. Millions and millions and millions of people listen to Rush Limbaugh and he fed them every day with arguments about why you can't trust the corporate media. 

But in 2016, it fell off a cliff. That's because most of the media ended up just openly cheering for one of the two parties and that's something they really hadn't done before. 

The media was always liberal in the sense that these people lived in New York or Washington, they were probably more liberal on social issues, but when it came to war, remember, The New York Times and The New Yorker, with Jeffrey Goldberg, did more to sell the war in Iraq than any conservative outlet ever did. Conservatives were already behind the war on Iraq, behind the War on Terror, because it was a Republican administration. They're the ones who made it palatable for liberals to support it, telling liberals, “No, these things are real. Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction. He's in an alliance with al-Qaeda.” 

That central bias was never right v. left or Democrat v. Republican; it really became Democrat v. Republican in 2016 and until the 2024 election. They were just openly and almost explicitly of the view that their journalistic views no longer matter, their journalistic principles no longer matter because of the much higher mission they were serving now – very kind of self-glorifying view of themselves like “No, we're on the front lines of this world-historic battle, this preserve American democracy and keep fascism out of the country.” 

That's what they told themselves. It feels much better than saying, “Oh, yeah, our job is just to report facts, without fear or favor to anybody.” It's kind of boring. They became heroes in liberal America. I mean, all these journalists, they wrote bestselling books, because they were anti-Trump, kind of the Jim Acosta effect. Just like the most mediocre people. Rachel Maddow became like a superstar in liberal America and in mainstream entertainment and all of that. All those people who abandoned their journalistic mission for the much more overtly partisan one. 

And when they did that, the problem was it wasn't like they were just reporting in a way that would help the Democratic Party. That was their mission, that was their goal. And that was what their mindset became. Remember, heading in the 2020 election, I worked for The Intercept, which was created explicitly to avoid attachment to a particular party or an ideology. We were supposed to just be adversarial to the government and that was the first time editors ever tried to stop me from publishing something. It was right before the election. I wanted to write about the revelations of the Hunter Biden laptop, what it showed about Joe Biden's and the Biden family's pursuit of profits in Ukraine and China, and they just said, “No, you cannot do that.”

 I don't think corporate media ever recovered and don't think they ever will recover. I think that trust and faith are gone. The fact that there are so many alternatives now means that people aren't captive of them any longer and you can see their audience disappearing. I mean, the only people who watch cable news are people over 60 or 65. It's true, especially on MSNBC and CNN. If they have like 700,000 viewers in total for a prime-time show, maybe 10%, 70,000 people under the age of 54, 70,000. Do you know how small that is for a massive media corporation in everybody's home because they're on the cable networks? You just see that medium dying and I think they did it to themselves. 

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All right, next question. @Bowds asks:

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I just did a show with two other leftists. One is the European editor of Jacobin, who's based in Europe, and the other is Yanis Varoufakis, who was the former finance minister of Greece and a very smart, I think, figure on the left. And it was about how so many right-wing populists are being banned the minute they start getting too popular, focused on Marine Le Pen’s banning. 

 I was really relieved to hear both of them, both on principle and on pragmatism, warn how dangerous and wrong that was to steal the core right in a democracy, which is to vote and choose your own leaders by banning people who are opposed to the establishment the minute they start doing too well. 

I've learned more about the Le Pen case, both of them have much nuts-and-bolts knowledge of it. I mean, the Marine Le Pen case is such a joke. I mean, it was called “Embezzlement” in the United States. That's what she was charged with and convicted of, which makes it sound like she stole money for herself. That's usually what embezzlement means. That's not what it was at all, it wasn't even close to that. 

Basically, everyone who's a member of the EU Parliament gets a lot of money a month for staff, something like 30,000 euros a month for staff and you can hire people even though they don't really do anything. One of the things Marine Le Pen’s party did was they took a lot of that budget for the parliamentarians they had in the EU, and they used it essentially to hire people, not so much to help with the work of the EU, but more to supplement or bolster salaries of the people who work for her party. 

And what both of them said, and this is the impression I got too, is that it is possible that that happened. Although it's a very gray area and the question becomes like, “Did they do more work on the EU or were they really working more internally on the party?” But there's no self-enrichment. Marine Le Pen didn't steal any money. The idea was she had the people who were getting these salaries work more on the party in France than on the EU work. 

How do you determine who does more of what? But what they all said was that essentially every party does this. Something like 25% of members of the EU Parliament have been found doing things very much like this, and they're not prosecuted criminally. They're required to pay a fine or pay the money back. So, at best, it was a very selective prosecution. They found Marine Le Pen doing something that is commonly done. 

And I think in general, any time you have a candidate who's leading the polls, either probably will win or highly likely to win as in the case of Marine Le Pen, she was certainly a real threat, especially without Macron being able to run and they suddenly get prosecuted on a very iffy crime. 

I'm not talking about murder, rape, kidnapping, racketeering. It's like misuse of funds where nobody gets enriched, kind of like Donald Trump's prosecution in Manhattan for these supposed mischaracterizations of the payments to Stormy Daniels through Michael Cohen, a bookkeeping kind of transgression that would be at best treated like a misdemeanor and rarely prosecuted. 

Whenever you start having that, you immediately, instinctively should wonder, is this person being prosecuted because they're afraid they're going to win an election and don't want to let the people of the country whom polls show close to a majority or even a majority want to elect, to keep them from actually running. And if this were a nice lady case where Marine Le Pen was the only example, maybe you could sit there all night and debate the intricacies of French law and how much other people do it and whatever, but it's so clearly part of the pattern. 

Here in Brazil, Lula's popularity is declining significantly and a lot of polls show Bolsonaro would win if he was able to run in 2026 against Lula, some polls show a tie within the margin of error. But, again, clearly, Bolsonaro would have a chance to win. Clearly, tens of millions of people in Brazil want him to be the president. But they're denied the choice because, in 2023, an electoral court said Bolsonaro is ineligible to run for the next eight years because he cast out on the integrity of the voting process. And they said, “Oh, it's an abuse of power to have done that. You can't run again.” 

And then, obviously, in Romania, we have Calin Georgescu who won the Romanian election and he's the more anti-EU, anti-NATO, pro-Russia, anti-Ukraine war, at least, candidate. The EU hates him, the U.S. hates him and they just invalidated the election. They said, this election doesn't count because Russia used ads on TikTok to help this candidacy, as if the U.S. and the EU weren't massively interfering in all these elections to get the candidate they want elected. 

But it's like, yeah, this election doesn't count. The candidate we don't like won, so it doesn't count. Then as polls showed, for the new election, he was again leading in the polls by an even higher amount because there was a perception in Romania that they were banning him to prevent him from winning, they went back, and said, “You can't run, Russia helped you, you're now ineligible.” There was another populist right figure in his party or an ally who was then also banned. 

This is becoming a trend. The Democrats' principal strategy in the 2024 election was to try to charge Trump with as many crimes as possible, not only convict him of those crimes but even try to put him in prison before 2024. 

It's so obviously a tactic that's being used by people who are claiming that they and they alone are the guardians of democracy. I mean, they're doing the same exact thing with censorship. And I believe that the story is that in 2016, the British people shocked Western liberals by having the U.K. leave the EU, do you know how significant that is? To have the U.K. leave the EU as a result of a referendum of the British people? Just because of perceptions that Brussels hates them, is not caring about their lives, how they don't want to be ruled by these distant bureaucrats and eurocrats in Brussels, and then, three months later, four months later, Donald Trump beats the symbol of establishment, power and dogma, Hillary Clinton. 

And that was when Western liberals decided that they could no longer trust people to be free. They can't trust them to have free speech because if they talk to each other freely and circulate ideas, they can't control what people think and therefore how they vote. That was when this whole disinformation industry arose. 

The whole purpose of the Enlightenment was “No, we were endowed with the capacity for reason.” We can all do that ourselves using free speech, as long as we can debate each other and exchange ideas, we can then make our own choice about what's true and false. That was the whole point of the Enlightenment, on which the American founding, among other things, was based. 

So, they're waging war at the Enlightenment on core Western values, core democratic values, not just of censorship, but now banning people they are fearful to win and they're doing it in the name of saving democracy, kind of like we have to burn down this village to save it. We have to eliminate democracy to save democracy. 

And I think all this is going to happen, kind of, as I was saying last night when we were looking at those polls showing a significant decline in support for Israel in the United States and how the reaction is more censorship to prevent people from spreading anti-Israel arguments that I think it's just going to create a backlash, just like the liberal censorship regime did on issues like race and gender ideology, created resentment and a backlash. I think that's going to happen with Israel, I think it's going to happen here as well. I think people are going to start looking around and figure it out and realize, hey, wait a minute, all these candidates that are leading in the polls that the establishment hates, they're all getting banned. 

It's not that difficult to realize how improbable it is that all of these right-wing populist anti-establishment candidates, right as they're on the verge of winning, just happen to commit crimes in the nick of time to justify banning them from the ballot, whereas all the establishment's favorite candidates are all super clean and law-abiding and driven by nobility and integrity, and they're just abiding by the law. I mean, who believes that? It's always like this. The people who stand up and say, “We are the guardians of democracy” are the ones who censor and ban people from the ballot. 

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All right, next question from @TuckertheDog. I don't know what that means but I'm always happy to take questions from canines. 

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It is not unheard of for journalists to have off-the-record meetings with American political leaders and even foreign leaders. Obviously, why would a foreign leader want to meet in secret with a journalist? Or why would a foreign leader want to be secret with influencers? Because they want to impart to them propaganda about why they should be more aligned with that country's agenda or that leader's way of thinking. 

The people they met with are already very pro-Israel, certainly Dave Rubin. I mean there's a picture that Dave Rubin posted of himself and Netanyahu and it almost looks like he's in the middle of some sort of sexual ecstasy that's like a sustained one, I mean he's standing next to Benjamin Netanyahu who basically is his leader. 

So, I don't know what possible impact that could have. Dave Rubin was already somebody who put Israel at the center of his world. I don't know how he could do that even more. Tim Poole, I don't want to make sweeping statements about his views on Israel. I know he's very pro-Israel, but I just don't know enough to make definitive statements. But it's not that it's that unheard of and my understanding is like Dave Rubin posted a picture of it. I think Tim Pool talked about it. I think that happened after it was disclosed, but they met under a set of rules that journalists use where you can't report on anyone who is at the meeting, you can't report on anything that was discussed, but you can disclose the fact of the meeting and just maybe general impressions. 

So, it was rules of secrecy. They weren't allowed to quote Netanyahu; they weren't allowed to talk about what he said. And I do think this points to a problem in independent media. I think one of the problems that we were just talking about with corporate media is that they became too partisan, too ideological, too willing to act subserviently to a particular faction. The U.S. Security State, the Democratic Party, whatever. 

And I think there's definitely that same problem in independent media. I've talked before about how the easiest way to have financial success and rating success in this new independent media environment is to plant your flag in one faction and say, “This is who I am, this is where I am, this is who I defend, this is the ideology I believe in; I'm never going to deviate from it.” 

You attract all the people who believe in that ideology or who are loyal to that party or to that faction, and they want to hear their views validated all the time. And you can build a very big audience of people who just want to keep informational closure and always have their views validated, never challenged, let alone rejected: a lot of people are making a lot of money in independent media doing that. 

I absolutely believe that the emergence of independent media is a net good just for the reason that it increases the number of alternatives people have. Some people have tried independent media but have not succumbed to that kind of group thing or audience capture, Joe Rogan probably being the best example. 

Joe Rogan does not sit there and just praise the Democratic, the Republican Parties. He's always that kind of a mixture of views. He obviously became the most popular program in the country. 

It's a little different because Joe Rogan's program is not primarily political. Sometimes it's political. But it is cultural. He considers himself a comedian, he has a lot of comedians on, actors, celebrities, and a lot of political content – just kind of along the way there's political content, so, but I'm not playing that political show; it's difficult to be successful as a political show unless you do that. And once you do, in a lot of ways, you become no different than the corporate media. 

They have a lot of proximity to power. If you're suddenly now – because you cheered on MAGA, you cheered on Trump every day – now you're getting invited to the White House, you're being let in on secret meetings, the Trump White House is calling you, giving you little tidbits, to what extent is that really independent media? 

I've always believed it's important to keep people in power at a distance, at an arm's length. The minute you start befriending them, the minute you start talking to them too much, the minute you start succumbing to the temptations of being led into their world – you have people with power, they can open doors, like, oh, I get to go to the White House, I get to have a meeting with a foreign leader, not just a foreign leader but like the Prime Minister of Israel – of course, that's going to compromise your independence. Or maybe not. Of course, maybe you can resist that and fight against that, but it's certainly going to have a big effect. 

That's why I've always hated anything that reeks of journalists and political power merging socially or in any other way, like that White House Correspondence Dinner. I absolutely despise it. It makes me sick to my stomach. They all dress up as if they're at the Oscars and they get to meet like B-list celebrities and chatter at the White House with all these and with the president. It's just so corrupting. It creates just like this culture of Versailles like you're either in the royal court or you're not. 

On some level, the issue of audience capture can actually be more problematic in independent media. It didn't use to be such a problem in corporate media years ago, in the decades I was describing earlier, because when there was only ABC, NBC, and CBS, they were the only games in town – The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, your local newspaper. But it was a place everybody felt more or less trusting of in terms of getting the news from because they were not overtly partisan. As I said, they had other biases, but it wasn't so overtly partisan. 

Now, there is absolute audience capture among corporate media. The vast majority of The New York Times subscribers – the vast, vast majority – are liberals. They hate Trump. Same with The Washington Post: they had mass cancelations of subscriptions when Jeff Bezos barred them from endorsing Kamala Harris. Obviously, the cable outlets all have their audiences, and you actually saw that with Fox, which I personally do believe is the most independent of the three cable networks for reasons I can explain, but not really relevant now, but when Trump was telling everybody the 2020 election was the byproduct of fraud, that Biden's victory was fraudulent, byproduct of voter fraud, many, maybe even most people on Fox were not on board with that. Some of them actually were opposed to it. Tucker Carlson went on the air and ranted and raved about the dishonesty of Sidney Powell, how she keeps making these grandiose claims and she has all this proof, but then every time he invites her on to show, she won't come on, she never shows this proof. And you saw this migration of a good number of people, a good number of conservatives, away from Fox to Newsmax, and, as a result, Fox started getting more receptive to the fraud narrative. 

That is a kind of audience capture that I think is new for corporate media because they are now all in silos. You know who the audience is of each one of these outlets. But I think with independent media – because shows and independent journalists rely on their viewers not just for ratings, not just to show up, but also for financial support – most independent media shows, most independent journalists can't make a living unless they have their readers and viewers supporting them financially, monthly subscriptions or donations or whatever. That's what independent media rely on mostly. 

Then many of them become afraid to say anything that might alienate them. I mean, I've been through this many times in my career where you take a position that you know is going to alienate a lot of your audience and you can watch them go away, the subscriptions drop and fall. But I would way rather have fewer viewers and make less money and know that I'm not in prison to say things I don't really believe to keep my audience happy. 

I've never had a viewership or a readership that expected me to do that or wanted me to do that and I think it's really commendable for people who consume news to stay with somebody even when they're saying things that are so against your views as long as you think they're doing their best to be honest, you can be challenged by it. I think it's boring to listen to somebody who agrees with me all the time. I really do. I don't like it. I don't find it compelling or engaging. There's too much agreement. It's like we're already on the same wavelength. 

So, I do think independent media is an absolute positive. I've been a big defender of it. I still am. I think free speech on the internet is the most important thing. But I also think there are some important vulnerabilities independent media has, some of which are shared by corporate media and some of them are more inherent to independent media that I think are worth being aware of. 

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The next question is from @aobraun1: 

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I think the most interesting thing about Trump and tariffs, and a lot of people have said this before, is that – and I'm sure you've all seen this – you can go back to the 1980s, Trump was famous when he was young because he was entering the Manhattan real estate market, building big buildings, he was good looking, he always attracted attention, always had a certain charisma, his dating habits attracted all kinds of tabloid attention. He had his first wife, Ivanka. I remember one of us when I lived in New York with whom he had his first four children. And he ended up having a marital affair with Marla Maples. And the media went insane. Like The New York Post, those tabloids every day. 

He was extremely famous for those kinds of things, for his real estate success. He ended up leaving Ivanka Trump and then marrying Marla Maples, whatever, and then he had a third marriage and lots of other things in between and the tabloids loved this. They ate it up. 

You can see an interview with him in the 1980s where he was interviewed by Oprah Winfrey, kind of at the height of her popularity on her extremely popular show and she asked him, like, “Would you ever run for president?” and he said, “Ah, probably not.” But he was passionate about one topic in particular and that was the idea that Japan back then, it was not China but Japan, in the ‘80s, that people feared was taking over technologically and economically – they were buying a bunch of land in the United States – that Japan and other countries were taking advantage of the United States in ways that were disgusting, he said, for American leaders to permit, meaning trade deficits, unfair trade practices – it has been a view of Trump's forever. He’s been talking about tariffs and protectionism for a long time. 

So, in terms of the brain trust, it's not like other issues where I think Trump gets influenced to do things. I think this is something that Trump really was devoted to doing, especially this time around. You can see this time he wants to leave his mark. He doesn't care as much about public opinion, about media anger – and this is what I heard too from Trump's circle throughout 2024: they got outflanked in the first turn, they had all kinds of people there to sabotage them, weaseled and embedded into a circle. They didn't really know how Washington worked. Trump was an outsider. He was constantly undercut and sabotaged by generals and by the whole deep state. 

And they are determined to make sure that does not happen again. That was, they worked on that for a long time, at least a full year, and they got in and they were very serious about it. They had a real plan for it. So, this time, most of what's happening is because Trump wants it to happen. Tariffs are probably the leading example. But of course, he's not an economist, he's not a specialist in tariffs, but Trump has a lot of confidence in his own decision-making ability. 

My guess is that the main architect of these tariffs is Peter Navarro, just because he's a fanatical supporter of tariffs. Maybe he talked to his treasury secretary. Maybe he talked to some billionaires whom he trusts. What I know for sure is that when these terrorists were instituted the way they were, people were kind of shocked, including people close to him, and they were harming these billionaires quite a bit. I mean, you could watch Tesla stock imploding. 

When Tim Waltz made fun of Tesla when it was at a very low level, like six weeks ago, two months ago, it was 225, it then went up to 280, 290, and it was back to 210, 215, like losing 20% of its value. Elon Musk is the primary shareholder of Tesla, so that eats in greatly to his net worth, but everyone in the market, people on Wall Street and Silicon Valley, who love Trump, who thought he was going to do everything that they wanted him to do, that he would serve their interests without any kind of hesitation. 

So, I know for a fact, that there was a lot of reporting on this, I've heard this as well, Elon was going to Trump all the time, trying to talk him out of these tariffs, other people were as well, and Trump wouldn't move because he believed in it. And the only thing that got Trump to move, as he himself said, was that people freaked out, they panicked, and they were panic selling. What really alarmed them was not so much the stock market, because the stock market has had many times when it's gone down that way, and it bounced back, they knew the stock market was going to go down, they were willing to endure that. 

What really alarmed them was what happened in the bond market because that reverberated the entire economy very quickly. Imagine that if things didn't get better and Trump kept those tariffs in place through 2025 heading into 2026, by the best estimates, whatever benefit you get from protectionism is going to take some time to show up. Just think about layoffs, the economy slowing down, prices going up, people's 401k being eaten up. 

As I said last night, I have people in my life who don't care much about politics, but they have 401ks and they care quite a lot about the 401k because that's the retirement security and when it starts going like this, it's not just billionaires, it's ordinary people really feeling fear and anger about what's happening. 

Then that reverberates in Republicans and Congress as well, because they serve and are funded by banking interests in Wall Street, but also because a lot of them are true believers in free trade. That's the classic Republican position. But then also they have to run for re-election every two years and 2026 is already looking to be a scary year for Republicans. General midterm elections after an election are terrible for the party in control. The opposition is much more motivated. 

You've already seen in some of these elections for state Senate and House, these kinds of off-year elections, these special elections, and the couple for Congress where Democrats cut into the margins that Trump created very significantly. They were even afraid of Elise Stefanik's seat; if she went to the U.N. and there was an open seat, they were so afraid that they might lose it, even in a Trump 20-plus district, that they withdrew her nomination for U.N. ambassador because that's how much energy there is among Democrats and a lack of interest and energy among Republicans. When Trump's on the ballot, a lot of moderate people don't come out and I'm sure they're petrified about that. So, he was getting it from all directions. 

We'll see what happens. It's very uncharacteristic of Trump to back out, and that is what he did. I don't care what anyone says. They said from the start, these tariffs are staying in place, we don't take care; if the stock market gets angry, you're going to have to grit and bear it, have some short-term pain. We need to radically overhaul our economy. It's not working, which I agree with. 

Free trade globalism has been great for billionaires. It's created massive income inequality and sent the middle class and the working class on this sharp, steep decline of downward mobility. But suspending the tariffs kind of contradicts that message, like, we're going to radically overhaul the system and put in protectionism. Even if they get deals with these countries, if the tariffs don't return, then you haven't really overhauled anything. You've gotten some better deals. But you haven't overhauled the global economy or the American economy. 

But imagine putting those tariffs back in place, what it would do to the stock market, what it would do to the bond market, what it would do to people's perceptions. I don't know if they can put it back. I mean, presidents, no matter how powerful they are, definitely are limited by a lot of other powerful factions. 

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Last point, just not really a question, but speaking of independent media like on Joe Rogan's show, today, I don't know if it was recorded today, but it was released today, they had kind of a debate between Dave Smith on the one hand, who's a libertarian, anti-interventionist, anti-war Israel critic, and Douglas Murray, the British, whatever he is, who's fanatically in favor of Israel and wars, he loves wars, he thinks they're all great. 

There's this phrase I once heard or I once read. It might be something that a lot of people have said. I'm certainly not the first one to say it, but it's really true. I realized as soon as I read it, how true it was. I realized that when I was younger, I kind of absorbed this, that Americans automatically add 20 IQ points to any British person who speaks with a posh British accent, they all think, “Oh, they're so brilliant, so eloquent.” and that they subtract 20 IQ points for anybody who speaks with an American Southern accent. It is so true. 

The relevance of Douglas Murray seems obvious to me, but he went on Joe Rogan's Show today with Dave Smith, Joe Rogan doesn't usually have these kinds of debates. It got very heated. Rogan was clearly more on Dave Smith's side than Douglas Murray's side.

 Usually, Joe Rogan's audience is pretty favorable to the show. Basically, the entire Joe Rogan audience, which, again, is not left-wing, to put it mildly, was completely contemptuous of Douglas Murray. They could not spew enough disgust and contempt for him intellectually, politically and personally. 

I don't think I've ever seen Joe Rogan’s comment section be that universally disgusted and contemptuous of anybody since Matt Yglesias – I mean, I like mean internet comments as much as anybody else, but like, I almost felt uncomfortable reading the comment section when Matt Yglesias went on just because it was so mean, so incessantly mean, so personal. I mean they hated Matt Yglesias. It was when he had that book out about how America should have a billion people in it and they hated the book, they hated the argument, they hated him, they hated how he looked. I mean everything about him. But it came close with Douglas Murray. And I think it's so interesting because Douglas Murray usually won't go anywhere where he's challenged in any meaningful way. 

In fact, after October 7, we asked Douglas Murray to come on our shows several times. At first, he was responding, pretending he would, talking about scheduling, and then he just ghosted us and disappeared and won't come on. He doesn't want to be challenged; he wants to sit back in some chair like he's in a British salon. He loves to hear himself speak, he thinks he's so eloquent and he knows Americans are like, “Oh my god, this is so brilliant,” but he will never be challenged and he was challenged today a lot by David Smith and Joe Rogan. And he just fell apart. Fell apart.

It's really worth watching. It's entertaining. I encourage you to read the comment section as well. But it's not just that it was a good internet fight. They talked about a lot of foreign policy issues. Douglas Murray came on and just became a full-on Karen for the first 15 minutes, like whining and complaining to Joe Rogan about how he's talking to people he shouldn't be talking to, people who aren't worthy of being heard, including Dave Smith. That didn't go well. 

So, I recommend that. It's good when somebody like Douglas Murray, a hardcore Israel fanatic, a complete warmonger, someone who wants to send people to war all the time, but never goes, is actually challenged, not in like an eight-minute cable hit where you really can't get at the person, but it was two and a half hours and it's unrelenting.

I loved it when I was on, but by the third hour I was like, is this ending? It's tiring to focus that much, and when you're getting battered by Dave Smith and more importantly for Douglas Murray by Joe Rogan that way, you can definitely see him falling apart very quickly. So, I really recommend that! 

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As Tariffs Dominate News, Trump and Netanyahu Make Increasingly Militaristic Threats; Plus: Mixed Supreme Court Ruling on Deportation Powers
System Update #435

The following is an abridged transcript from System Update’s most recent episode. You can watch the full episode on Rumble or listen to it in podcast form on Apple, Spotify, or any other major podcast provider.  

System Update is an independent show free to all viewers and listeners, but that wouldn’t be possible without our loyal supporters. To keep the show free for everyone, please consider joining our Locals, where we host our members-only aftershow, publish exclusive articles, release these transcripts, and so much more!

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Trump once again hosted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House – the second time in two months.  Hopefully, this will be a monthly occurrence when Netanyahu comes to Washington and visits his workers every month or so. 

The visit was billed as an attempt by Israel to convince Trump to lift the 17% tariff imposed on that country but, as the visit unfolded, it was clear they were talking at least as much about war in the Middle East, specifically, the prospect of bombing Iran – an American war against Iran, the ultimate dream of Israel and its many supporters in the United States. Many statements were made of great significance – to put it mildly – and we will break those all down for you. 

Then, the U.S. Supreme Court handed the Trump administration a partial victory – and, despite the headlines, it was only a partial victory – as they lifted by a 5-4 vote, the nationwide injunction on these deportations imposed by federal district court Judge Boesberg and the court then required any judicial challenges to the deportation to be brought not as a class action. 

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There are many important world leaders of major countries with whom Donald Trump has not yet met, which is to be expected. He's only been in office not even 90 days. But there's a world leader with whom he has now met twice, hosting that leader at the White House two times in two months. You'll be shocked to learn that the leader who has now visited the White House most is none other than Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. 

Netanyahu went to the White House on April 8 and had a tour, including the part of the White House where Trump has a whole wall of just photos of himself with the Israeli leader. They were both admiring and looking at that. Trump seemed very proud of how many times he met Netanyahu: he talked fondly of Netanyahu in front of the media, including how often he has met with him, how well he knows him – praised him essentially for everything. 

One of the things that was so odd about this meeting, especially the love fest that manifested again between the two leaders, was that the day before, Israel shot and killed a 14-year-old American boy in the West Bank, a foreign government shot and killed that American citizen, 14 years old, in the West Bank, shot dead by Israeli soldiers and rather than the U.S. government saying, "Hey, why did you kill our citizen?” or “We were kind of upset that you shot an American boy,” it was not mentioned in any part of their public communications. 

Here from CNN yesterday:

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We have seen so many times when the IDF or the Israeli government makes a claim to justify their killing of innocent people about what these people were doing to warrant their murder and so often when there's a video that emerges, it turns out the IDF is lying. It happened in 2023, with an American journalist who worked for Al Jazeera shot in the West Bank. Israel originally said that they didn't kill her, it was Palestinians who shot and accidentally killed her, and then there was an investigation, there were videos and there was an autopsy that proved that the bullets came right from an IDF weapon. They ultimately admitted it. 

They eventually even ended up apologizing but that was only because a video was released proving it, as happened last week as well with the killing of medics as we'll show you so. It so often happens, of course, if the Israelis kill even a 14-year-old American boy they'll say, “Oh those are terrorists.” 

I just want to remind you of one thing so often this gets lost: the West Bank is not part of Israel; it has internationally recognized borders when Israel was created and then, even when Israel took more territory in 1967, there are internationally recognized borders. Israel does not own the West Bank. The West Bank does not belong to Israel. 

The Israeli military is brutally, violently occupying the West Bank and has been for decades ruling the lives of the Palestinians who live there in horrific ways that a lot of South African leaders say are even worse than in South African apartheid. There are roads in the West Bank available only for Jews but not for Arabs or Palestinians, they constantly have to wait in line for hours and go through humiliating checkpoints where they're constantly beaten and forced to just engage in humiliating rituals. 

There's also a huge number of settlements, just buildings that Israeli citizens have built, “settlers,” because they want to take that land. They expel Palestinians from their homes and say this is now our home, they have built so much there that it makes a two-state solution impossible because there are so many settlers in the West Bank, even though it doesn't belong to Israel. Some of the Israeli settlers have fanatical religious views; they believe God promised them that land. Others just don't care; they want Israel to expand and are now backed by the IDF, so, they go and pillage villages, they kill Palestinians in the West Bank, and the IDF often stands there, if not aiding them now, given how the government has changed. 

The entire world considers Israeli settlements and the Israeli occupation of the West Bank illegal. So, when you're hearing, “Oh, these boys were throwing rocks,” they're throwing rocks at their military occupiers, who are in tanks: tanks paid for by the United States – some of the most fortified tanks on the planet. 

I just want to ask you, if you’re an American and a foreign military invaded and occupied the United States, would you throw rocks at the military occupier? Would that be terrorism if you did? There's actually a 1984 film about what would happen if the Russian army, then the Soviet army, called Red Don, invaded the United States. Essentially, it glorifies all the American civilians who bravely stood up to their occupiers and killed them, used violence against them and threw rocks at them. But of course, if a foreign military is occupying your land for decades and the whole world considers it illegal, it's not theirs. If you're going to a map, the West Bank is not part of Israel. And yet their military is ruling the lives of those people – who would not think that's justified throwing rocks at the Israeli tanks? What people being occupied wouldn't do that? But in any event, even if they were throwing rocks at tanks, does that justify murdering a 14-year-old American, Palestinian American boy who was in the West Bank? The Israeli defense, the IDF thinks so. They released a video of them killing this American and shooting two other Americans, that they think justifies it. 

Video. Israel Defense Forces, X. April 7, 2025.

It's about a five-second video where you can see a couple of rocks being thrown. And then they came and just kind of shot them all, all three, two wounded, one dead. We talk about 14-and 15-year-old kids here. 

If any other country shot American teenagers, the U.S. government would be very angry but when Israel kills an American citizen, we're on the side of Israel. That's America First. 

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