Speaker 1: Understand the thinking atheist. It's not a person, it's a symbol,
an idea.
Speaker 2: The population of atheists this country is going through the.
Speaker 1: Rule, rejecting faith, pursuing knowledge, challenging the sacred. If I
tell the truth, it's because I tell the truth, not
because I put my hand on a book and made
a wish and working together for a more rational world.
Speaker 3: Take the risk of thinking. Feel so much more happiness.
Truth Usian wisdom will come to you that way.
Speaker 1: Assume nothing, question everything, and start thinking. This is the
Thinking Atheist Podcast hosted by Seth Andrews.
Speaker 3: Today I want to dial in on a specific example
of how the free press journalism is under attack in
the United States, and it has to do with the
new editor in chief of CBS News, Barry Weiss, and
I got to give you just a little bit of
backstory for context. So sixty minutes a flag ship show
doing real journalism, a news magazine broadcast that started the
year I was born, nineteen sixty eight. This is not
a tabloid, it is not sensationalism. It is real journalism
done by veterans in the field. It's a very responsibly
produced program. So back in twenty twenty four, when Kamala
Harris was a presidential candidate running against Donald Trump, sixty
minutes sat down with her on camera. I think she
must have been there for an interview that lasted had
to be over an hour, maybe two hours. But as
these shows do, they whittled it down. They grabbed sound
bites and answers to questions and sort of packaged it
for short form broadcasts. The segments run about fifteen minutes
a pop. Well, Donald Trump says, oh oh, when you
ask her about the Israel Hamas conflict in separate broadcasts,
you deceptively edited her to make her look good, and
a lawsuit was filed under the Deceptive Trade Practices Act.
CBS said, hey, wait a minute, this is how we
always do what we do. We stand by the segment,
We stand by our editing of the interview. Your lawsuit
is completely without merit, and there was a rallying cry
across the journalistic community and the general public. Two sixty
minutes in CBS, do not cave, do not settle, don't
let them win. This is about more than a single
segment with Kamala Harris. This is about journalistic integrity and
autonomy and your ability to properly do your jobs without
government interference. But low and behold, there was a pending
merger involving Paramount, the parent company for CBS. Paramount didn't
want any bad press and certainly didn't want the government
stepping in to prevent this profitable merger. So Paramount settled.
Paramount Global settled with the Donald Trump administration for sixteen
million dollars. And this I think may have been the
beginning of the end for American journalism because now the
president has been set if you threaten journalists, if you
threaten their network's major corporations, who essentially own the media
in this country, well they're going to fold. They're going
to cave, because it's all about money and power and
kissing the right ass to get what you want. Whether
or not you are a Bernie Sanders fan, I will
say he has been on the right side of this,
blowing the whistle about the billionaires, the power players who
are behind our media, which I think six companies own
ninety percent of the media outlets in the United States,
a freaking monopoly. Really well, he posted this on the
thirteenth of March. He said, it's not just that oligarchs
control our economy. It's not just that they control our
political system. Increasingly, they control what we see here and read.
Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, owns x,
Larry Page and Sergey Brinn, the second and third richest men,
control YouTube. Jeff Bezos owns Twitch, Mark Zuckerberg owns Facebook
and Instagram, and Larry Ellison will soon control TikTok. Almost
all of them sat right behind Donald Trump at his inauguration,
all of them bank rolled him. All of them are
getting richer by the day. But it's not just social media.
Ellison and his son David, with the help of Trump,
will soon control CNN, not to mention CBS, HBO, MTV, MIRAMAX, Beet,
Warner Brothers, and many more. In fact, just this morning,
and again this was a few weeks ago. Just this morning,
after CNN published reporting on the president's mishandling of the
war in Iran, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said, quote, the
sooner David Ellison takes over that network, the better. This
is a startling example of the kind of state control
U see in authoritarian states, not a democracy. I believe
most journalists are factual in report what they see the
real question is what are they told to emphasize by
their corporate bosses? What are they told to ignore? Whose
stories are being told? Larry Ellison has made billions of
dollars from AI. Will you hear much serious discussion about
the economic, social, and existential threats of AA on TikTok,
CBS or CNN. Allison is a personal confidante of Benjamin Netanyahoo,
a notorious war criminal and a supporter of Netta Yahoo's
genocidal war in Gaza. Will we see criticism of Israel
on his media platforms? There was another Bernie Sanders post
from January. He said, thanks to Trump, right wing billionaire
Larry Allison will now control the TikTok algorithm along with CBS, MTV,
the Free Press, b E, t CMT, Simon and Schuster, Nickelodeon,
Paramount Plus, Pluto TV, and more. This is what oligarchy
looks like. Let me play a clip from about a
year ago Bernie Sanders, Senator from Vermont's talking about oligarchy
on the Senate floor.
Speaker 2: And what should upset every American, no matter whether you're conservative, moderate, progressive,
is that in direct violation the Constitution in federal law.
Trump is intimidating the medium with lawsuits against ABC, CBS, META,
and the Wine Register. His FCC is now threatening to
investigate PBS and NPR. What Trump is essentially saying to
every media outlet in America, if you say or do
anything that is critical of me that displeases me, you
may be subject to a lawsuit or a federal investigation.
If that is not a direct attack on the First Amendment,
on the US Constitution and free speech in our country,
I don't know what is.
Speaker 3: So I've set the stage. Let me come back to
the subject of my ire. Before she became the power
player at CBS News, Barry Weiss was an op ed
and book review editor for the wallstre Rejournal eight nine
years ago something like that. Used to write for The
New York Times. Got disenfranchised. There was some big blow
up about what she called harassment on Twitter. She didn't
feel like The New York Times did enough to protect
her or defend her, and she said, fine, if you're
gonna let Twitter be the de facto editor for the
New York Times, I'm out of here. And it was
a very public and nasty separation, and she goes off
to found her own media company called The Free Press.
She had positioned herself kind of in the middle, at
least verbally. She said, well, I'm not Fox News to
the right, I'm not MSNBC to the left. I'm going
to be right here in the middle. I think she
called herself a liberal centrist or centrist liberal, you get
it right. I'm in the middle. I'm going to be
more objective. And this was dubious. She used to gripe
a lot about the woke Libs, and she was a
big proponent of the intellectual dark Web, which I don't
even know who chose people that were supposedly part of
this new elite that had been cast off or had
left the university system and the legacy media system and
we're out here doing great thinking on their own terms.
The intellectual dark Web. The term is actually concocted as
a gag, but it was Barry Weiss who popularized it.
And I don't mean to digress too much, but the
people who were the supposed elite thinkers who had cast
off the system and they were now doing their own
thing included I know somebody put Sam Harris on the list.
In Steven Pinker, I don't know how they feel about that.
But also as part of the intellectual dark web, Jordan Peterson,
Ben Shapiro was on the list, Joe Rogan, Dave Rubin,
You're gotta be shitting me, you know, so we can
already see where Barry Weiss's leanings had been. Well, there
was a big buy out that was being propos ed
six months ago. The Ellisons, David Ellison and his billionaire
father Larry Ellison. They are extremely wealthy, powerful people who
are adjacent to Donald Trump. Essentially, they're kind of on
his staff as far as I'm concerned. I mean, they
are pro Trump. And David Ellison was in the process
of acquiring Paramount. This was a massive acquisition, eight billion
dollars to buy Paramount, but David Ellison required the approval
of the government. Donald Trump sees that a couple of
his buddies are going to buy CBS. Of course, Trump
pissed at CBS, especially sixty minutes for any reporting that
didn't kiss his ass, so he was like, oh great.
In fact, he said this quote, I see good things
happening in the news, so I think one of the
best things to happen is this show and New ownership
CBS and new ownership. I think it's the greatest thing
that's happened in a long time to a free and
open and good press. Now, if the Ellisons they're going
to buy Paramount and Paramount owns CBS, what a wonderful
time to hire a Trump friendly editor in chief for
CBS News Q Barry Weiss. By the way, the Ellisons
bought Barry Weiss's platform, The Free Press, and they only
paid her one hundred and fifty million dollars, So I'm
sure she has no motivation to keep those people happy.
And what do you do? First? She installed at the
evening anchor desk Tony de Koppel. He was a morning
show guy. She moved him into the evening CBS News
slot to do more Trump friendly I'll just say it,
more Trump friendly story certainly less critical stories. He goes
forward and he says, you know what, we have been
relying too much on the experts, on the elites. We
will now be listening more to the public. Let me
play you a sound bite. This is actually from the
CBS Evening News broadcast the night Tony de Koppel took over.
Speaker 4: People do not trust us like they used to and
It's not just us, it's all of legacy media.
Speaker 3: And I get it.
Speaker 4: I get it because I've been hearing about it from
just about everybody for more than twenty years, as I've
traveled America on this assignment, or that my mom's neighbors
in West Virginia, my own neighbors in New York City,
thousands and thousands of conversations in between. Sometimes people want
to talk to me about our coverage of NAFTA or
the Iraq War. Other times it's all about Hillary Clinton's
emails or Russia Gate, or more recently, COVID lockdowns, Hunter
Biden's laptop, or the President's fitness for office. The point is,
on too many stories, the press has missed the story
because we've taken into account the perspective of advocates and
not the average American. Or we put too much weight
in the analysis of academics or elites and not enough
on you.
Speaker 3: Now, let's take a second and consider the implication CBS
News has admitted now that rather than rely on expertise, experience,
degreed professionals who are peer reviewed holding each other accountable.
Rather than do that exclusively or mostly, let's go out
to the general public. I am reminded of that line
from Men in Black, or Tommy Lee Jones's character said,
a person is smart, people are dumb. And I'm telling
you Americans, we have been running hard for the gold
Medal of stupid for decades, if not longer, in this country.
So now Tony Dakoppel admits outright, you know, we're going
to give pretty much equal weight to a culture that
thinks COVID was a hoax and vaccines cause autism. The
earth may be flats. Airplanes are dropping keemtrails, mind controlled
drugs on the public, and we need legislation to stop
this crime. Global warming doesn't exist. Aliens built the pyramids.
The Biblical God endorses net and Yahoo's genocide in Gaza.
I can't start my day without reading my star chart.
The astrologists await me. Nine to eleven was an inside job.
You can defeat cancer by eating more kale. This is
the culture that Tony de Koppal says he's going to
rely more on while reporting hashtag news. I am sure
you remember right after Barry Weis took over at CBS
sixty minutes had investigated the Sea Coot Center. This prison
a concentration camp, torture chamber really in Al Salvador, where
people who were being deported as gang members out of
this country were since and essentially forgotten as their lives
became a living hell. And the Seacott situation is a nightmare.
It is a nightmare. So sixty Minutes does legitimate investigative
reporting on what the hell is going on? And right
before it goes out, and I mean right at the
last second, Barry Weiss jumps in and says, I'm not
convinced the White House has been given an ample opportunity
to comment on this story. She pulled the plug, and
the producers and investigative reporters at sixty minutes had a
what the hell moment. We have properly vetted and investigated
and given everybody a chance to comment, and now you're
telling us that we haven't done proper journalism. But that's
what she did. However, the package, the news package, including
sixty Minutes, went out to other outlets, including outlets in
Canada where it aired as it was supposed to. And
there was a story in the States that the segment
was leaked online. That's not accurate. It wasn't leaked by anybody.
It simply aired in Canada, and then it became available
on the internet. People grabbed it and copied it and
saved it and re shared it, and Signal boosted it,
and ironically, more Americans saw that sixty minute segment on
the internet than would have ever tuned in to the
actual show on CBS, so it went super viral. Barry
Weiss is criticized left and right for being a non
journalist who pulled the plug because she is a little
too Maga friendly. Finally, after a couple of months, sixty
minutes has given permission to air the segment as intended.
But you can see the challenge, and you can understand
why journalists at sixty minutes and elsewhere are looking around
going how in the hewl are we supposed to do
our jobs under someone who is not qualified to do
what we do, yet wields great power and is attached
to the Ellisons who are attached to Donald Trump? Is
this the beginning of the Fox newsifacation of CBS? And
of course the fallout began in short order and continues today.
Producer Alisha Hasty, she left CNN's Anderson Cooper, did a
lot of reporting for sixty minutes. He left CBS News
Radio after one hundred years of broadcasting, has been shut
down due to quote challenging economic realities. We're talking about
seven hundred affiliated stations nationwide affected by the end of
CBS News Radio, which is going to officially kick in
May the twenty second, with all jobs eliminated. There has
been a gutting of the news division at CBS, and
those who remain have to do their work under a shadow,
actually several shadows. Barry Weiss, the Ellison's Paramount Plus and
this administration. Did you see that segment Don John Oliverer,
It's got a great HBO broadcast. This was a clip
from five months ago.
Speaker 5: When these takeovers get announced, it's easy to think, well,
thank goodness, there are other outlets that aren't under some
billionaires influence. And that is true because there is always
another one until there suddenly isn't. And I admit I
don't know what is going to happen next. Maybe Barry
Weiss will completely reshape CBS News, maybe she'll flame out
and write another resignation letter heard around the world, but
it is it is worth keeping an eye out for
subtle changes there because while I'm sure many of CBS's
good journalists will continue to do great work. If you
start seeing people resigning or getting fired, or you start
seeing stories that seem off in some way, especially if
it involves the left going too far on a topic
Barry weiscaz about, it's worth asking yourself why that might be, because, unfortunately,
the much bigger answer might be that the billionaire has
chosen to inject contrarian, right leaning opinion journalism into an
American icon.
Speaker 3: Longtime CBS Late Night host David Latterman, he came forward
and he was talking to Sky News Australia about the
debacle at CBS.
Speaker 6: What about those idiots at CBS. The CBS News is
a rare bill, just gone CBS News for decades, joining
back your brand world War Two. Before World War Two,
they would be Ed Murrow would be broadcasting the blimpse
of London from the rooftop of buildings in London for
CBS Radio. And it was that mentality that drove the
integrity of CBS News that has been trampled on, pissed on,
and eviscerated by these idiots that have taken it over.
And I'm at a point now where It really is
hurting my feelings because I'm sick and tired of people saying, oh,
into those midterms, kids. We're far downstream of the midterms
having any effect on this.
Speaker 3: And unsurprisingly, the already lackluster ratings at CBS News pre
Barry Weiss have now become abysmal. TV Insider just reported
that the CBS Evening News, which had a what four
and a half million viewership for the first night, which
was really rocky. D Koppel has been just pathetic. He
struggled on the air. He brought on all kinds of
Trump friendly people. He had Pete hag Seth, and he
had Christy Nome and they were pitching ice propaganda, etc.
He did a feature where he was talking about the
ultimate Florida man, Marco Rubio. Of course, Marco Rubio appointed
by Trump to be our Secretary of State. This is
a guy who's been totally neutered by Donald Trump and
by Magga. He's totally flipped. Do you remember years ago
when he issued this warning.
Speaker 7: Donald Trump has portrayed himself now consistently is fighting for
the working people, and he has a record of sticking
it to working people for thirty five years If any
other candidate in this race had his record, there would
be non stop reporting on it. But unfortunately, he's being
pumped up because many in the media with a bias
know that he'll be easy to beat in a general election.
Speaker 3: So we're going to put a stop to it now.
Speaker 7: There is no way we are going to allow a
con artist to take over the conservative movement. And Donald
Trump is a con artist.
Speaker 3: Okay, that was ten years ago. Marco Rubio. Here is
a SoundBite from three months ago as he is sitting
shouldered his shoulder with Donald Trump at a cabinet meeting.
Speaker 8: Everything this president does is driven by the American people.
Whether you you don't have to agree with the actual
move but understand the motivation. The motivation is always you,
the American people, and what's good for you, for your family,
for the country, and.
Speaker 3: For our economy. So how does CBS News with Tony
Decoppel cover Marco Rubio? Check this out.
Speaker 4: Only in America. The many lives and many jobs of
Marco Rubio, the son of Cuban immigrants and a former
Florida senator. He's now the face of US foreign policy
and President Trump's point man on Venezuela all in addition
to his roles as Secretary of State, Interim National Security Advisor,
and Acting National Archivist, and USAID Chief. Whatever you think
of his politics, you got to admit it's an impressive resume.
And now AI memes have added to that portfolio, casting
Secretary of Rubio as the new Governor of Minnesota, the
new Shaw of Iran, the Prime Minister of Greenland, the
new Manager of Manchester United, the head of Hilton Hotels,
and highest of high honors of all, the new Michelin Man.
Now back in real life. Of course, these memes may
not add up to much, but for Rubio's hometown fans,
which are many around here in Miami, it is a
sign of how Florida, once an American punchline, has become
a leader on the world stage. Marco Rubio, we salute you.
You're the ultimate in Florida man.
Speaker 3: This is supposedly objective journalism, and the people are not happy.
They have been defecting. Viewership is dropping. The network is
now seeing three and a half million viewers, which is
a terrible number. And now many people are saying Barry
Weiss herself might see her career on the chopping block.
So it's a bloodbath over there. You get the idea. Well,
let me read for you an article that was posted
in the Verge. The author is a senior writer at
The Verge. Her name is Elizabeth Lopato, and the title
does not pull any punches. It is memo to Barry
Weiss regarding CBS News, You're doomed. Let me take my
short break and I will come back so I can
read the whole thing uninterrupted right after this. Okay, let
me read this article. I will link it in the
description box, written by Elizabeth Lopoto, Memo to Barry Wise
regarding CBS News, You're doomed. Subject Good luck, babe. I
honestly cannot believe you've willingly decided to go into the
worst kind of job that exists, management at a dying company.
Managing sucks. It sucks even when you like the people
you're managing. And it's a low stress position. And I'm
sure I don't have to tell you running CBS News
is not a low stress position. You're gonna get blamed
by everyone above you for decisions that are made by
people below you, and you're gonna get blamed by people
below you for the decisions that are made by people
above you. You're also going to get blamed for your
own decisions, just for kicks. You have elected to take
a job where the primary purpose is for you to
eat shit and own. The death of broadcast TV news
a thing that's going to die no matter what you do.
Nice work. This is the glass cliff to end all
glass cliffs. You're Marissa Mayer at Yahoo without the Googler
street cred, your Nancy Dubuque advice, without the string of
hit TV shows. You're Linda Yaccarino at Twitter without the
advertiser relationships. You have been hired as a soop to
a Trump administration that is actively hostile to the actual
free press, and you will be made to oversee wave
after wave of layoffs until you quit or get fired,
and the entire news division is shut down in a
final spasm of cost cutting after the next next inescapable
media merger. No one can save CBS News because it
was made for a media ecosystem that is now dead.
Broadcast television is slowly circling the drain its aging audience,
drifting toward the great inevitable. Younger people are getting their
news from TikTok and Instagram in ever greater numbers, and
they trust institutional media less than ever CBS in particular.
That's your new company now has the oldest audience in
primetime TV. These folks aren't the free presses assiduously courted
classical liberals either. It's normy grandparents, a bunch of whom
are planning to appear at the next No Kings rally.
I might invoke Edward R. Murrow, but they remember him.
They don't have any goodwill toward you. They don't know
who you are at all, and they're not going to
defend you when you screw up. You are now stuck.
I mean, your goal is to win back younger audiences,
which you cannot do while your real job is to
manage decline. There is no way to win here, only
slightly better ways to lose. Now, it's possible that your
delusional enough to think that Larry Ellison's takeover of TikTok
will give you a tailwind. I mean, your owner is
Ellison's son, after all, and why wouldn't the Ellison family
support each other. You should have known the moment you
saw Rupert Murdoch on the investor list that wasn't going
to happen. After all, did MySpace help Fox News or
did NewsCorp catastrophically fumble an asset that didn't understand On
a business level, Your problem with TikTok is this platforms
exist to erode institutions like CBS News. You cannot solve
your problems with improved distribution on TikTok. The things that
work on televis for sixty year olds do not work
on TikTok for fourteen year orols. First of all, but
more importantly, TikTokers monetize their channels by directly integrating advertising
and brands into their content, a strategy in immediate conflict
with the values and ethics of a storied news organization
like CBS News. Even if you somehow manage to crack
TikTok's algorithm, you still won't make enough revenue to survive
without trashing the very soul of the institution you're purporting
to save. It's actually even worse than that. You also
have to manage talent, famous TV talent, the people your
audience actually knows and likes, and who will eat you
alive if they think you've screwed them over. In order
for that to work, you actually need to completely disappear
and let the talent be the face of the network.
And quite frankly, nothing about your history suggest you're capable
of that. And one of the main problems with talent,
especially famous TV talent, is that they are ego maniacal
monsters who love getting paid and throwing his e fits
and hate being told what to do. You think you
had a bad time at The New York Times, baby,
you have no idea what a bad time is. You'll
find out when you try to tell Nora O'Donnell anything
at all about her reporting. If you're lucky, she'll just
shake her emmys at you when she tells you to
fuck off. You think Gail King or David Martin they're
gonna sit through a lecture from you, like for real?
Come on, Jane, Polly has already caused one media firestorm
by changing jobs. Are you ready for this? Managing requires
certain kinds of soft skills ones I'm not confident you possess.
They weren't necessary in your cushy Wall Street Journal op
ed job or your cushier New York Times bad job.
They were barely required at the publication you invented the
free press. So now you're the head honcho at CBS News.
Let's say you decide to skip levels to directly edit
a sixty minute story. It doesn't even have to be
a controversial story to make all hell break loose, because
you have neither the credibility nor the relationships required to
take this kind of work on. And what's more, you've
got a news division composed exclusively of ambitious piranhas below you,
not your handpicked cronies like Tyler I wish to see Hollywood,
Virgin's Cohen. These people have decades on television. And you
have a newsletter and a history of throwing your colleagues
under the bus. The media reporters are already circling you
like a pack of wolves. Like take your opening memo
to the news division, the one about quote the same
core journalistic values that define this profession from the beginning,
which for some reason includes using all of the tools
of the digital era. Not only could it have been
better edited and based on actual journalistic history, but you
might have held off on insinuating you intend to incorporate
aislop into the work process until sometime after your first day.
Consider all the people you now lead to have actual
reporting experience. Do you think they're going to do something
other than call their favorite media reporter the moment you
interject yourself into a story or impose some nonsensical AI
bias meter review to make matters worse. You have never reported,
and they all know it. You don't know anything about
the challenges or judgment calls required for complicated stories. You're
an op ed writer who rode Bret Stevens's coat tails
into the New New York Times newsroom, then quit in
a huff because they wouldn't fire you for whatever it
was you wanted to pretend to be a free speech martyr.
For the closest you came to doing anything like reporting
was the flop Twitter Files work, which exposed people having
banal conversations in the context of the Twitter files. This
was a win since you didn't actually dox anyone. By
the way, the Twitter Files was a big Elon Musk
collaboration that blew up, and that's a whole other story
back to the article. Honestly, I thought your experience with
Elon Musk might have prepared you for what a bad
idea this was, since you know he got mad at
you when you asked the wrong questions about China. Sure,
you've made a career out of kissing the right asses
to move ahead, but you must have learned by now
this means you will be disposed of whenever it's convenient.
You had such a good gig going to Your entire
pitch at the Free Press, Lol, was that you were
standing boldly against the big, bad corporate media that simply
wouldn't tell the truth. This was an easy pitch, albeit
one made by every substacker from Taylor Lorenz to Ken
Klippenstein to Naomi Wolf, and, judging by your audience, a
fairly lucrative one. You didn't even have to get stories right.
Remember when your columnist Coleman Hughes published a column about
George Floyd that was so wrong it got dog walked
not once but three times by Radley Balco, and you
personally got dog walked a fourth time, and your response
was that Balco should do your podcast. No one but
the terminally online remembers that little kerfluffle because the steaks
were small potatoes. But you're on TV now, babe. Do
you remember when CBS News is Dan Rather didn't adequately
verify some documents purporting to be about George W. Bush's
military service, and it turned into a national controversy that
lasted for weeks. That's what you have to look forward to,
especially if you personally sign off on compromised reporting, and
that controversy is coming for you at warp speed. More
than half of America thinks Israel has gone too far
in Gaza, and any insufficiently aggressive reporting on the situation
in Gaza is ultimately going to be blamed on you,
miss zionist fanatic. Plus, CBS News isn't going to move
the needle on young people's attitudes toward Israel because they
don't watch it. This specifically, is an area of news
where there are no winning moves for you because of
your proudly worn biases. You don't even have to be
involved in a bomb story to get blamed for it,
because getting blamed for reporters alas is the most important
part of your job. Though reporters are near and dear
to my heart, they are not your worst problem. Your
worst problem is somehow Brandon Carr. Now let me jump
out here for just a second. Brendan Carr was appointed
by Donald Trump to head the Federal Communications Commission the FCC,
and the FCC oversees broadcast media in this country, and
Brendan Carr has come forward and threatened to revoke the
broadcast licenses of outlets that are being too critical to
unfair to Donald Trump. So he is essentially part of
a wing of the Trump administration who wants free speaking,
free writing, free expression journalism to become dear leader state
television with its head up the ass of Donald Trump.
This guy is a nightmare who wields great power. Back
to the article, your worst problem is somehow, Brendan car
I don't mean that he's gonna personally come for you, Barry.
I mean that you've obviously been put in charge of
CBS News as a way of appeasing the Trump administration
something to allow the merger to go through. Car blessed
the sky Dance acquisition after CBS paid sixteen million dollars
to President Donald Trump in what was definitely not a
bribe and didn't renew late show host Stephen Colbert's contract.
Sky Dance promised car An anti DEEI pro diversity of
viewpoints Nanny in the News division, that Nanny is a
Republican donor who somehow has even less journalistic experience than
you do, So that kind of puts you in a
precarious position. Babe. The moment that deal is closed, you're
disposable and there are just so many ways to dispose
of you. Every day will be a thrilling new adventure.
Will a truth social post and your career? Will you
accidentally publish aislop? Is there going to be a mass
quit leaving you with a gaping hole in your programming?
Or will a maga pilled influencer inevitably goed musk into
an advertiser harassment campaign that ends your career. Perhaps there
will be a newsroom scandal I have not adequately foreseen.
This is a deck that's stacked against you, and you
haven't got the skills to finesse your way through the deal.
Congrats on that one hundred and fifty million dollar payout
for the Free Press. Someone else owns it now, and
Elizabeth Lopato at The Verge is absolutely correct. Everybody disposable
in the Trump administration. Anybody who rubs him the wrong way,
anybody who's a convenient scapegoat or fall guy, anybody who
fails in his adult mind. Everybody's expendable. Barry Wise is
expendable as well. But watching in real time not just
the demise of legacy news media, but we're really watching
the demise of what was once a great and credible
and reputable and wonderful journalistic enterprise. And I'll start with
sixty minutes, but I mean CBS News at least they
were reporting some news. You'll never eliminate bias from reporting,
but I mean they were relatively credible until they weren't.
Now they are bleeding credible journalists. And Barry Weiss is
sitting there wondering what she's going to do when the
ratings actually hit the basements. I just thought that was
an interesting piece in the Verge. I mentioned earlier about
six major corporations and or billionaires who own ninety percent
of the media in this country. And I want to
come back to that short break. We'll do it next.
Broadcaster in the nineteen nineties, you know my story. I
was on FM radio, and I'm pretty familiar with broadcasting
of that time, the late twentieth century, So it was
true that in the middle of the twentieth century there
were major players. There were rich families and corporations who
did own a bunch of our media. The Grams owned
the Washington Post, the Chandlers owned the Los Angeles Times,
the Tailors owned the Boston Globe. We saw the Cox
family controlling Cox Networks, the Sinclair's they own hundreds of stations.
Of course, the Murdos, et cetera. But it was during
the nineteen eighties that things really began to shift in
favor of the oligarchs and the billionaires and the major
corporate players. So Reagan is in office, and this is
a time of excess, and this is a time of
free market latitude. Let us get the governments out of business,
stop interfering. This is America that if we pull off
the restraints and the regulations and all of the red tape,
and we allow the market to do what it does,
it'll be a great democratizing thing, and everybody everywhere will
be able to play fairly. This is either a monumentally
naive notion or these people were just corrupt. Because as
soon as we saw the elimination of the fairness doctrine
and the deregulation of broadcasting and media in the nineteen eighties,
what happened what always happens, Monster corporations swooped in and
vacuumed up everything in sight. Do you think the mom
and pop shops, you know, the radio stations and TV stations,
do you think they were going to be able to
compete with billionaire power players. They would either be suffocated
out by overwhelming amounts of competing programming, or they'd be
offered a deal they felt they couldn't refuse. You know what,
I know your family, but let us come in and
we'll make your ridge. Just give us all your assets,
the frequency, etc. That's exactly what happened. There were fifty
major owners of commercial media in nineteen eighty three. There
were twenty three major owners of American media in nineteen ninety.
That number reduced to ten major entities who owned most
of our media in nineteen ninety seven, and today, of course,
it is six six entities own ninety percent of our media.
And again, it used to be that broadcasters couldn't own
more than one station in one market, and there was
no ownership of a newspaper and television station or radio
station by the same company in the same market. Right,
you cannot come in and monopolize. That was nineteen seventy
five and then the eighties kicked in the Telecom Act
nineteen ninety six, the Internet comes into play, and it
was officially in twenty seventeen that the FCC struck the
rule that said that a TV or radio station could
not also own a newspaper publication in the same market. Now,
I want to expand just a little bit past the
oligarchs and those Trump adjacent corporations and power players in
the billionaires, etc. To talk a little bit about how
the algorithms are shaping how we think and what we do.
We've talked in the past about how we are being controlled,
and of course this is not news to you, but
I want to get more specific. There was a TED
talk from a few years ago by a technology ethicist
who used to work for Google. His name is Tristan Harris.
He has co founded an organization called the Center for
Humane Technology. He has been featured in a Netflix documentary
called This Social Dilemma. This guy's been out there pounding
the drum advocating for the understanding and minimizing the negative
impact of digital technologies on our lives. He's been featured
on sixty Minutes and Anderson Cooper and Elsewhere, and a
few years ago, he did a presentation for Ted talking
about how Google, YouTube, etc. Are directing our attentions often
away from those we are genuinely interested in or positively
impact our lives. They are doing it for ratings, clicks,
and profit. This clip is along when it runs about
ten minutes, but I've got the clip and we've got
the time.
Speaker 9: I want you to imagine walking into a room control
room with a bunch of people, one hundred people hunched
over at desks with little dials, and that that control
room will shape the thoughts and feelings of a billion people.
This might sound like science fiction, but this actually exists
right now today. I know because I used to be
in one of those control rooms. I was a design
epicist at Google, where I studied how do you ethically
steer people's thoughts? Because what we don't talk about is
a handful of people working at a handful of technology
companies through their choices, we'll steer what a billion people
are thinking today. Because when you pull out your phone
and they design how this works or what's on the feed,
it's scheduling little blocks of time in our minds. If
you see a notification, it schedules you to have thoughts
that maybe you didn't intend to have. If you swipe
over that notification, it schedules you into spending a little
bit of time getting sucked into something that maybe you
didn't intend to get sucked into. When we talk about technology,
we tend to talk about it as this blue sky
opportunity could go any direction, and I want to get
serious for a moment and tell you why it's going
in a very specific direction, because it's not evolving randomly.
There's a hidden goal driving the direction of all of
the technology we make, and that goal is the race
for our attention. Because every news site, ted elections, politicians, games,
even meditation apps have to compete for one thing, which
is our attention. And there's only so much of it.
And the best way to get people's attention is to
know how someone's mind works. And there's a whole bunch
of persuasive techniques that I learned in college at a
lab called the Persuasive Technology Lab to get people's attention.
A simple example is YouTube. YouTube wants to maximize how
much time you spend, and so what do they do?
They auto play the next video and let's say that
works really well, They're getting a little bit more of
people's time. Well, if you're Netflix, you look at that
and say, well, that's shrinking my market share, so I'm
going to auto play the next episode. But then if
your Facebook, you say, well, no, that's shrinking all of
my market share. So now I have to auto play
all the videos in the news feed before waiting for
you to click play. So the Internet is not evolving
at random. The reason it feels like it's sucking us
in the way it is is because of this race
for attention. We know where this is going. Technology is
not neutral, and it becomes this race to the bottom
of the brain stem of who can go lower to
get it. Let me give you an example of Snapchat.
If you didn't know, Snapchat is the number one way
that teenagers in the United States communicate. So if you're
like me and you use text messages to communicate, Snapchat
is that for teenagers. And there's like one hundred million
of them that use it. And they invented a feature
called snapstreaks, which shows the number of days in a
row that two people communicating with each other. In other words,
what they just did is they gave two people something
they don't want to lose because if you're a teenager
and you have one hundred and fifty days in a row,
you don't want that to go away. And so think
of the little blocks of time that that schedules in
kids' minds. This isn't theoretical. When kids go on vacation,
it's been shown they give their passwords up up to
five other friends to keep their snapstreaks going even when
they can't do it, and they have like thirty of
these things, and so they have to get through photo
taking photos of just pictures or walls or ceilings just
to get through their day. So it's not even like
they're having real conversations. We have a temptation to think
about this as, oh, they're just using you know, snapchat
the way we used to gossip on the telephone. It's
probably okay, Well, what this misses is that in the
nineteen seventies, when you were just gossiping on the telephone,
there wasn't one hundred engineers on the other side of
the screen who knew exactly how your psychology worked and
orchestrated you into a double bind with each other. Now,
if this is making you feel a little bit of outrage,
notice that that thought just comes over you. Outrage is
a really good way also of getting your attention, because
we don't choose outrage, it happens to us. And if
you're the Facebook news feed, whether you'd want to or not,
you actually benefit when there's outrage because outrage doesn't just
schedule a reaction an emotional time space for you. We
want to share that outrage with other people, so we
want to hit share and say can you believe the
thing that they said? And so outrage works really well
at getting attention, such that if Facebook had a choice
between showing you the outrage feed and a calm newsfeed,
they would want to show you the outrage feed, not
because someone consciously shows that, but because that worked better
at getting your attention. And the news feed control room
is run by is not accountable to us. It's only
accountable to maximizing attention. It's also accountable because of the
business model of advertising for anybody who can pay the
most to actually walk into the control room and say
that group over there, I want to schedule these thoughts
into their minds so you can target. You can precisely
target a lie directly to the people who are most susceptible,
and because this is profitable, it's only going to get worse.
So I'm here today because the costs are so obnous.
I don't know a more urgent problem than this, because
this problem is underneath all other problems. It's not just
taking away our agency to spend our attention and live
the lives that we want. It's changing the notion the
way we have our conversations. It's changing our democracy, and
it's changing our ability to have the conversations and relationships
we want with each other and we in It affects
everyone because a billion people have one of these in
their pocket. So how do we fix this? We need
to make three radical changes to technology and to our society.
Speaker 3: The first is.
Speaker 9: We need to acknowledge that we are persuadable. Once you
start understanding that your mind can be scheduled into having
little thoughts or little blocks of time that you didn't choose,
wouldn't we want to use that understanding and protect against
the way that that happens. I think we need to
see ourselves fundamentally in a new way. It's almost like
a new period of human history, like the Enlightenment, but
almost to kind of self aware enlightenment that we can
be persuaded and there might be something we want to protect.
The second is we need new models and accountability systems
so that as the world gets better and more and
more persuasive over time, because it's only going to get
more persuasive, that the people in those control rooms are
accountable and transparent to what we want. The only form
of ethical persuasion that exists is when the goals of
the persuader are aligned with the goals of the persuade,
and that involves questioning big things like the business model
of advertising. Lastly, we need a design renaissance because once
you have this view of human nature that you can
fear the timelines of a billion people. Just imagine there's
people who have some desire about what they want to
do and what they want to be thinking, and what
they want to be feeling and how they want to
be informed, and we're all just tugged into these other directions,
and you have a billion people just tugged into all
these different directions. We'll imagine an entire design renaissance that
try to orchestrate the exact and most empowering time well
spent way to those timelines to happen, and that would
involve two things. One would be protecting against the timelines
that we don't want to be experiencing, the thoughts that
we wouldn't want to be happening, so when that ding happens,
not having the ding that sends us away. And the
second would be empowering us to live out the timeline
that we want. So let me give you a concrete
example today. Let's say your friend cancels dinner on you,
and you are feeling a little bit lonely, and so
what do you do in that moment? You open up Facebook?
And in that moment, the designers in the control room
want to schedule exactly one thing, which is to maximize
how much time you spend on the screen. Now, instead,
imagine if those designers created a different timeline that was
the easiest way in using all of their data to
actually help you get out with the people that you
care about. I think, just imagine how just alleviating all
loneliness in society if that was the timeline that Facebook
wanted to make possible for people. Or imagine a different
conversation where let's say you wanted to post something super
controversial on Facebook, which is a really important thing to
be able to do, to talk about controversial topics. Now,
when there's that big comment box, it's almost asking you
do you want what key do you want to type?
Now there is, it's scheduling a little timeline of things
that you're going to continue to do on the screen.
And imagine instead there was another button there saying, well,
what would be most time will spent for you? And
you clip host to dinner and right there underneath the
item it said who wants to RSVP for the dinner?
And so you'd still have a conversation about something controversial,
but you'd be having it in the most empowering place
on your timeline, which would be at home that night
with a bunch of friends over to talk about it.
So imagine we're running like a find and replace on
all of the timelines that are currently steering us towards
more and more screen time persuasively and replacing all of
those timelines with what do we want in our lives?
It doesn't have to be this way. Instead of handicapping
our attention, imagine if we used all of this data
and all of this power in this new view of
human nature to give us a superhuman ability to focus
and a superhuman ability to put our attention what we
cared about. It is superhuman ability to have the conversations
that we need to have for democracy.
Speaker 3: I don't know. I found that an interesting clip about
how you and I are being manipulated in a world
of disinformation, outrage, or just temptation to go and lose
ourselves and the soup out there, and I thought it
might be an interesting way to finish the conversation today.
Thank you for listening, Thanks for being here, Thanks for
being a part of the community. I'll see you back
here next week. Take care.
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