America This Week, May 10, 2024: Canada Über Alles! On Justin Trudeau's Terrifying New Speech Law

more often. They think that it sort of takes the fuddy-duddy. Wow. Yeah. And so the other day, I went and bought one.

And now I'm wearing it, and I feel free, open. I'm laughing for absolutely no reason. I should have done it a long time ago. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Is there anything that you've ever been asked to wear by the romantic partners in your life that you've resisted?

But I am a very poor dresser. I need to be dressed.

Remember that?

And I tried to do that, and it was kind of a disaster. So I haven't taken any fashion tips since then, but I'm ready. I don't know. It's really improved my mood.

And I'm curious to hear what your take on this is. It's a little bit of an inside baseball media story. But once you get the basics of the plot, the ending is incredibly satisfying. So, Walter, you obviously heard about executive editor Joe Kahn's outburst. This is the executive editor of the New York Times, who gave an interview to Ben Smith, a famous media reporter at Semaphore.

And he just sort of let everybody have it all at once. And, whether he means it or not, it was beautiful. Walter, how did you feel when you heard this thing?

that, I don't know, the news had a protective promotional function for the good people of the world.

You know? Oh, my God.

Of course, you know, wildly overstating what this is, what it really is, is, you know, the Biden administration has been, has been making unreasonable demands of The New York Times for five years now. And The Times, really, to its discredit, has done a lot of bending over backwards or bending over forwards, depending on which image you want to use. And there was recently a story that was leaked in Politico that was designed to kind of twist The Times one more time, and Khan just. I think he just had it. He had enough.

And this interview that he gave to Smith, the thing that aroused the most anger among the press community, was this incredibly simple statement. And maybe it might be even worth looking at this on the page just because it's just so amazing that this is what they would get angry about. He had been criticized by Dan Pfeiffer, who is a podcaster like us, used to be the White House communications director under Barack Obama, I believe. Now he's on Pod Save America. And he was complaining in actually in a substack that he has, that that The New York Times didn't see their job as saving democracy or stopping an authoritarian for taking power.

Now, I don't know what he was looking at at the time. But so Ben Smith is forced to ask the question, why don't you see your job as we've got to stop Trump? What about your job? doesn't let you think that way? And Khan answers, good media is the fourth estate.

It's another pillar of democracy. One of the absolute necessities of democracy is having a free and fair, open election where people can compete for votes. And the role of the news media is not to skew your coverage towards one candidate or another, but just to provide very good, hard hitting, well-rounded coverage of both candidates and informing voters. If you believe in democracy, I don't see how we get past the essential role of quality media in informing people about their choice in a presidential election. And then he goes on to say, it's also true that Trump could win this election in a popular vote.

And there's a very good chance, based on our polling, that he will win the election.

And so there are people out there in the world who may decide, based on their democratic rights, to elect Donald Trump as president. It is not the job of the news media to prevent that from happening. It is the job of Biden and the people around Biden to prevent that from happening. Water is wet, right? I mean, the media reports, and politicians compete for votes, and somebody wins, and we've got to live with that.

These are obvious things. The fact that the editor of The New York Times, who is not exactly a hot-blooded, shoot-from-the-hip type of personality, if you've ever seen Joe Conn speak, the fact that he had to come out and say this and then be denounced by all these journalism professors and media critics, it was kind of amazing to watch.

They just do not believe that. it's true, that it's not The New York Times' job to get Joe Biden elected.

And it shows that the confidence of these people like Pfeiffer, that they had everybody in the bag, that they'd created an entire new world and a new mission, was ultimate confidence. I mean, he was flabbergasted, I think, by the response, and other people have been too.

It's amazing that it went this far.

He gets key facts about the Hunter Biden story, doesn't get them from Rudy Giuliani, gets them from the Ukrainian prosecutor's office.

And so this $3.

4 million that's paid to Rosamond Seneca becomes part of the discussion. And yes, The New York Times contributed to that. But The New York Times also sat out the laptop story entirely and basically squashed that. They squashed every other Biden-related controversy during the election season and after. And yet, the Biden administration was still peeved.

And so they went to extraordinary lengths to humiliate the newspaper, in this little tiny story in Semaphore, leaking this tale about how they'd invited everybody in media to the first of a series of retreats in Wilmington, where they would be informed about what they were doing wrong. They were shown, let me see what the exact language is. They were shown charts about things that they had not covered about Donald Trump. I'm sorry, they were shown a coverage spreadsheet laying out the areas where the team, that's the Biden team, believes that their reporting has fallen short. And so all of these reporters showed up, gave off-the-record privileges to the White House while they laid out a plan for, here's the stuff we think you should be covering about Donald Trump.

And then they turned around and leaked to Semaphore that of all the people there, the only paper that didn't get a gold star for obedience was The Times. They were the only ones whose meetings were unproductive.

So that's just such a petty thing to do. And what are you supposed to do? At that point, you're just rubbing the puppy's nose in it, don't you think?

I can't believe that those were leaked. I mean, it's so shameful that people even went and that they agreed that they should be secret, only to be rewarded with being leaked on by the people who called the shameful meeting. I mean, I'd be pissed, too. Maybe they've just finally had enough of this behind the scenes stuff. I mean, maybe this is an outbreak of just complete frustration and postponed anger over this lapdog treatment.

This was a story that came out a couple of weeks ago. Very well reported. I mean, this guy, Eli Stockels, got it looks like a couple of dozen sources to tell the history of this feud that had erupted between the Times and the White House. And yes, it's a good story, but they presented it as something that was petty on both sides. Really, you know, it's kind of a forum for the Biden administration and people surrounding the administration to just take more shots at the Times.

Sometimes they complain about some person, who wasn't even a White House reporter, who did some run of the mill story and got an attribution wrong. I don't even think he got it wrong. I think what happened was they had a standing agreement with the White House that a White House spokesperson would not be named. And this other reporter didn't know that and just wrote the guy's name. Because that's what happens if you don't say off the record, or this is on background, look at everything's fair game, right?

But anyway, they go in here and it's just full of these quotes like here's Kate Berner, who worked on Biden's 2020 campaign, saying the frustration with the Times is sometimes so intense because the Times is failing at its important responsibility.

Then there's lines like this, which are kind of amazing. The president's communications team's bristled at coverage from dozens of outlets. But the frustration and obsession with the Times is unique, reflecting the resentment of a president with a working class sense of himself and his team toward a news organization catering to an elite audience. So that's and saying that they have a deep desire for affirmation of their work. So that's them saying, oh, those New York Times elite snobs, which of course they are.

But this is them saying, we want to be affirmed, we want our good work to be affirmed. And we want you to present our president as more of a working class figure or something. I mean, it's such an incoherent criticism. But I could see how the Times, you know, after all this stuff, they would just blow a gasket eventually.

that's what these stories look like to me in terms of real political power calculations. As bracing and encouraging as they are in terms of, you know,

the press's intellectual sense of itself and recovering somewhat, it does look like people are frustrated because they feel they're maybe on a losing side. And that's what I hear. The resentment of being working class versus these snobs at the Times, that just feels like, you know, gathering resentment of people who are worried.

And now it's the New York Times that's not properly perceiving and representing things. You know, it, it feels a little, you know, mutiny on the bounty or something. A group of people have holed up in the cabin, and, you know, see mutiny everywhere.

You want us to be, you know, a Sinhwa or Pravda, or, you know, which is effectively what they already are.

But then, you know, there was a really interesting question where he's asked, you know, does all this make you likely more likely to hire kids from state schools outside that elite group? And he answers, I'd be open to it.

I'm open to graduates from whatever school who understand what they need to commit to to being in an independent news environment. But I don't think we can assume they've been trained for that if they've been trained for safe spaces. The newsroom is not a safe space. It's the space where you're. you're being exposed to lots of journalism, some of which you're not going to like.

And. You know, he goes on and at the end, he says, I think there was a period where we basically told them that that was the way it was going to be. And I think that in the early days of Trump in particular, they were like, join us for the mission.

But so this is a remarkable kind of repudiation of things that The Times said openly in its own editorials, which was, you know, the days of just, you know, the view from nowhere. This is a fact. We'll print it, whatever. It's up to you. Those are over.

The stakes are too high now. But for him to call out this whole culture, safe space culture and say, look, the news is messy. It's ugly. Sometimes we've got to print stuff that we don't like or that we don't think is going to favor our side, because it's true. And.

You know, I wonder whether this is going to impact him, his ability to continue being at The Times, right, because this is. this is basically the same critique that Uri Berliner had, and, you know, that NPR and, you know, how is it going to go over? I'm very curious.

I don't know.

I hate to call it pussification, but something like that, I couldn't find in other words. So I'll just, you know, default to hate speech.

And I think they're wondering.

Safe spaces, such that it's making the job harder. So it could be that it's not just the Biden administration is pushing them too far. It might be that they're starting to get signals from their own staff that they have better toughen up and manage things, rather than be pushed around by their, you know.

Triggered youth, which is something that's happened at a lot of magazines and places I've worked for in the last few years.

It's usually age correlated, but not always. You know, after cons, little outbursts. I got texts from all kinds of people.

You know, I have a friend who who works in England and sent the text saying, you know, fuck, yeah. Right. But it was sort of an older reporter. Right.

But, you know, it's an open question whether this is going to change anything or whether it's going to mean anything. It's just interesting, because no one has been able to say that these kinds of things out loud. These have been sort of career killing statements for everybody, you know, below the level of editor in chief lately. So we'll see how that all plays out. I think it's just an interesting thing for us to bring up.

And I was curious to hear.

And we're going to stand up for ourselves for five seconds. And there's not much you can do about it. And there really isn't much they could do about it. I mean, now that some of their complaints have, their private complaints have leaked out. It shows how weak it is to complain about a newspaper that 95 percent of the time is organically on your side.

I mean, even Elizabeth B. Miller, who's the Washington bureau chief, when she was apprised of the fact that there were complaints from the Biden camp about Times coverage, she's like, have they read our paper? Like, you know, basically she was responding to the idea that they didn't cover Trump enough.

So, yeah, so that happened. It's interesting. And we'll see. We'll see if that, if there's a ripple effect from it. But certainly in the press world, that was.

that was a cool thing to watch now, on a darker front.

Earlier this year, I don't know when the first time you heard about this, Walter, was, but earlier this year, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau introduced a bill, and I think it might be a good place to start with a little video of him introducing the.

that's really shocking. And, you know, for journalists, this is why you always make more phone calls, because you never know what's going to happen to a story. This story about the online harms. bill, Walter, you you reached out to me earlier this week about it. And some people here in the States have heard about it.

When was the first time you heard about it, Walter?