How Legacy Media Lied and Misinformed Us for Decades with Ashley Rindsberg | Real Talk

[Music] did you know that the New York Times avoided reporting about the Holocaust during the war this entity known as the paper of record lied to the world about Stalin's brutality the effects of the bomb on Japan and more recently kovid's origin has the New York Times ever been objective or honest Ashley rinsberg illustrates in this conversation that the answer is no so why do so many Americans still trust this gray lady I want to start by saluting you for your courage and the listeners are about to realize why you took on the gray lady the New York Times thank you what led you to do that I think it was just a really deep feeling that something is wrong something is wrong with the newspaper and something's wrong with the notion that we all put our faith in this institution blindly we we assume that if it comes from the New York Times therefore it's credible but what I started to see in the world and partly from being in Israel in the late part of the intifada in 2002 or three was that just wasn't true the reality and the reporting didn't match um and that sort of got inside me and I wanted to understand it you know what's so interesting about your book is I think people especially around me keep saying oh Once Upon a Time you could trust the news right once upon a time you could pick up the New York Times or turn on CNN and get unbiased news and that's actually not true it turns out when you study actually history and you actually dive into your book you realize that even my parents should not have actually trusted the New York Times and we're going to get into all of those examples but just fast forward to what is happening today as we speak we have Tucker Carlson being fired from Fox we have Don Lemon being fired from CNN like what is going on yeah yeah it's uh the media is in in the state of Crisis I think there's an economic crisis that they're dealing with and they are dealing also with something that they call the trust crisis but the trust crisis when they use that terminology puts the burden on us we don't trust them enough the reality is it's a reliability crisis they are no longer reliable and the public understands that and that's on both sides of the aisle we sort of understand now that there are agendas at work there are narratives that are being constructed to suit the needs of those agendas and they are scrambling they don't know what to do because for basically the last 8 100 years they've enjoyed the privilege of our trust and they no longer have it one of the things as I think about what has just happened recently with you know the firing from Legacy Media and I read your book at the same time I think about this idea that if they were actually capitalist if these news organizations were less of these ideologues and actually were more focused on building a business then they would satisfy a larger customer base right like if I ran CNN I would call Tucker Carlson right now and I would say hey come over and let me get your audience and then my audience would grow even further and if CNN actually did that not only would they probably make more money because they would have a larger audience but they would actually do a favor to Americans because they would provide two perspectives so that Americans can actually go ahead and make their own decisions but they're not capitalist they are ideologues and they've always been ideologues in the New York Times has always been about ideology not necessarily about managing a good business do you see that connection too for sure I mean today with the media especially with the economic headwinds that they're facing and since Google has basically eaten all their ad Revenue this would be the moment to rethink how they approach their market and how they serve their customer and who the customer is that's the other thing I think for for a lot of media today the customer is the political establishment and the actual customer the audience is just kind of a byproduct it's just a means of serving that Upstream customer that they're really ideologically aligned to and it's of course about being part of this set of people who think alike and they want to prove their bonafides to each other but the times the times did have somewhat of a capitalist approach to things and it led to some of their very disastrous decision making but what we've seen in the last 10 15 years and certainly that's accelerated in the last five years is that they've thrown out that out the window and they've taken a political approach which is about serving the base three percent of their readership that is willing to be uh to become subscribers and that three percent is increasingly extreme in their views they're younger and they're more woke and more Millennial and the times is scampering after them to try to serve them and what that means is that they're giving up the rest of the 97 of the audience who are thinking what is going on here why do you think they're doing that I mean if if they know that they're actually catering towards a more extreme base is it because they only believe that the base would actually pay a recurring fee and that's what they need to capitalize on partly yeah the entire uh let's say newspaper-based news media has been has flipped the model from Advertising based which is kind of democratic because every set of eyeballs is worth the same amount as every other set of eyeballs but when they move to subscription-based model that meant that the people who are willing to pay not just a few months or a few years but for 20 to 30 years you've got to get those real true believers the fundamentalists um and that's exactly what happened in the 1619 project was quite expressly a response a tactic for them to attract this new kind of subscriber that would really fire them up and say I need this I need this so much I'm going to pay you every single month indefinitely your book The Gray Lady winked talks about how a family started the New York Times you talk a little bit about their background and the kind of impact they have on the way America thinks about virtually everything right it's the paper of record and there's this one family that has such a strong influence on even on our policies our decision making let's go back to the first story that you talk about here which is how the New York Times got the reporting on the Holocaust wrong is an understatement yeah who owned the New York Times what's their background and and how did they cover the Holocaust yeah they're called the solsberger family today they still control the paper they're um it's a public company but they have a two-tier stock structure and they have special stocks that um gives them control of the paper that cannot be taken from them they trace back to the founder of this dynasty and it is a dynasty this is one of the Great American Business dynasties that it still exists today we kind of think about the Rothschilds and the Vanderbilts who are basically all gone this one Still Remains and by the way it is a literal patriarchy they passed that baton of the chairman of the paper and the publisher of the newspaper chairman of the New York Times company from mail air to mail air to mail air for 120 years there's not been someone who is not a white male to speak in New York Times terminology for over a century so these are they're started by was a German Jewish immigrant to the United States and after him it was handed back with a brief stopover through his son-in-law to another son-in-law named soulsberger and soulsberger was the guy who kind of really took the paper and this real drastic Direction including with the the World War II stuff where they were reporting on Nazi Germany in a way that was so favorable to the Nazis that they would just read New York Times reporting on German broadcasts without changing the reports or censoring them these are German Jews that owned the New York Times and you're saying that they didn't report about the Holocaust why would they not report about the Holocaust they were Jewish what what yeah what interest would they have to support the Nazis there's two separate issues there one was their the support of the Nazis was because they had a Nazi sympathizer running their Berlin Bureau during World War II and of the lead up to World War II that guy was is name is Guido indaris he was loved by Nazi brass because of the way he reported on Germany and so he got really great access he got access to the top people he got great stories got great Scoops and the times knew this they knew about his sympathies for the Nazis but this is back to their capitalist spent they didn't want to give up that access they wanted to be number one they wanted the pulitzers which they won for their pro-german reporting during World War II they won two cultures the Holocaust stuff was about them not wanting to be seen as a Jewish newspaper as Jewish owned because this was America in the 1940s there was a lot of anti-Semitism they were afraid that it would jeopardize their position in the market and for them that was just not something they would sacrifice even for the truth so they actually forbade the word Jew from appearing in reports news reports during that period and in one instance which was the liberation of Ash they did a big story and the word Jew didn't appear in that story and that was the extent to which they were willing to go to keep the paper and sort of free of Jewish influence or the appearance of any kind of Jewish slot it was so important for them to feel like they can belong and fit in that they were actually willing to sell their own Jewish Brethren who are out there in Germany being slaughtered that was the ideological part for them which is that they kind of subscribe to this this approach to the Jewish faith which for them meant that there was no such thing as Jewish people as an ethnicity or a nation there's just Jewish worship like you would go to a church and I would go to a synagogue and we're just all the same and for them what was happening in Europe was just happening to Europeans not to Jews per se so that was an ideological commitment that they made and that's something that they all believed in and it was about not wanting to be seen as being different and it was also about not wanting to lose their their leading position in the market how did they write articles about the Holocaust without mentioning the Jews what did they write about they just didn't write about the Holocaust that was uh the easy solution that they took or if they did it would be in incredibly small articles that were buried in the back pages so in one case that I talked about in the book they did a story about the murder of seven hundred thousand Jews in Europe and they gave that something like three four inches of calm space and they buried it on page five and the same days Edition with the front page had a story about one man in Iceland being killed that was the way they did it say sure we're covering it but without really covering it six years they did six front page stories about the Holocaust that's unbelievable and you're saying they won two Pulitzer prizes did they ever apologize or you know come out with a statement saying we were wrong they they did some sort of like in the in the 70s they did a like retrospective look at their Holocaust coverage by 30 years later yes and and it was just one article but they never they never corrected the record for the Nazi the pro-nazi reporting they've never actually spoken about that the other example you bring up in your book uh is what happened between Russia and the Ukraine hello to more yeah I would imagine that a lot of the people listening don't know that much about halodemore I didn't either so can you tell me a little bit what happened there and when was it hodomor is the Ukraine famine that is a feminist kind of it's not really the right way to describe it it was a campaign of genocide created by Stalin to consolidate power and to sort of do what Stalin did which is to express his wrath politically on vulnerable people in this case peasants in the Ukraine he starved five to seven million people to death in a period of two years it was 1931 1932. and for Ukrainian people today that is for them what Jews think of as the Holocaust is that magnitude it affects them it affects their family lives today they still think about it and feel it but the New York Times decided not to cover it not just to not cover it but to deny it so other reporters were saying this is happening at the time and the New York Times Reporter Walter durande said there is no famine there is no such thing and that's how they reported on it and they won a Pulitzer for that reporting they have been called upon to return the Pulitzer to amend the record into sort of repent journalistically but they've refused to do that why I guess both why why did they refuse to do it but then why did they report a lie it was really incumbent upon them to help this group of business people in New York City push for the United States to officially recognize the Soviet government it had been 16 years by that point since the Soviet Revolution the United States had not recognized the Soviets as the legitimate government of Russia and what that meant is that this sort of Syndicate of businesses based in New York was not able to access that market for import or for export that was a huge mark it was 150 million plus people rapidly industrializing it was an incredible opportunity but you couldn't trade with that market anymore because there were no diplomatic relations so the New York Times was actually pushing FDR when he was still Governor just months before he became president to do that to recognize the Soviets and this was not something FDR could do if that same government had just murdered five million of its own people for no reason so you just kind of easily glibly whitewash the record in real time and when it came time to do that recognition he did it and there was a Gala event at the Waldorf Astoria in New York where the who's who of American politics and business were in attendance all the banks the railroads Etc only one man got a standing ovation that night and that was Walter Durante it was the guy who covered up the guy who lied about the fact that ukrainians were literally starving to death yes because they all knew everyone in that room knew that it would never have happened without durante's sacrifices his lies and when it came out as a lie and they were expected to return the prize why didn't they return the prize given that they know it's a lie I think that's a great question um the Ukraine ukrainian-american community in America started to push really hard around the early 2000s to address this and the times went on hired a consultant they called him as a historian to assess the situation big surprise the guy came back said you should return the prize and then they said no they said that to do that would be kind of like airbrushing history which is a bizarre explanation is it the opposite of airbrushing yeah so they had already airbrushed history and this would be to correct the record um why did they really do that I think because they understand that to give back one prize would open up the can of worms to say okay well what about the World War II stuff and what about this stuff you the the reporting for weapons of mass destruction that got a pulse or what about this or that or that or that there's a lot to correct I did a story about I think it was at least seven pulitzers that I count that the New York Times won incorrectly or illegitimately that really should be given back I mean these are clear-cut cases so they don't want to go down that road well I think there was a difference between news entities that have reported a mistake by accident yeah versus news entities that actually know that they're lying about things and I think that's really what we're talking about here is that they knew that the Holocaust was happening but because they didn't want to be associated with the Jews they didn't report on it they knew that holotimore was happening between Russia and Ukraine but because they wanted to make Russia happy they lied about it and on to the next one is what happened in Japan so it's another example where they knew that they were reporting a lie but they still went ahead and did that it was actually quite remarkable because it was this isn't like uh maybe they did maybe they did they did actually work with the war department they sent their star science reporter William Lawrence and they sort of loaned him out to the war department in exchange that he got access to the bombing run that dropped the bomb on uh Nagasaki so this was quid pro quo he was expected to carry water for the war department and he actually was working with them to develop pamphlets propaganda pamphlets about this new weapon to make it seem less horrendous than it was and he was also expected to deny that there was radiation poisoning as a result of it so you could sell it to the American people as just a really big bomb and not something that makes people sick for years on end after the fact it was an arrangement that worked for both parties the party that lost was the American people who didn't know the truth about what this bomb really did until months later where again you have a very narrow period where you can set public opinion with what comes out first and people just say okay this is the story there's no radiation poisoning as a result of the bomb and uh in fact of course there was and other people were reporting it including some of their own reporters who they subsequently shut down in order to keep the propaganda line is this an example where the government actually told the papers what to write they told them what to write and they willingly said sure let's make the deal and the deal was you get your reporter to be with the Armada that's dropping this bomb you get to have the first story you get to report from looking out the window as you're seeing the mushroom cloud rising to the air and we get the New York Times to help us write the propaganda and to publish it in their paper it's unbelievable because as I say we keep thinking that before we were born these news entities were reliable but you know these are obviously examples of things that have happened many many years ago it's just the public was unaware that we're being manipulated I guess yeah we we place a lot of store in these brands that have been built up for decades if not centuries and you know the times I think is actually it is different in a way I mean I did a lot of comparison with the book looking at what the Washington Post did for example when the New York Times was calling the Berlin Olympics in 1936 the Nazi Olympics the greatest sporting event of all time the Washington Post was actually saying this is a disaster this is a propaganda win for the Nazis so the times is different in that way but it's also symbolic of the rest of the media which is why it's it's such a fascinating way to look at the media through this lens it that is an interesting question I guess that you asked yourself and I should have asked you too which is how did the other media Outlets report on all these issues but you're saying that really the New York Times had its own agenda yeah in most of these cases that was the case I mean the post was pretty good on the uh the Nazi stuff they were not reporting like the times was um on the atomic bomb uh the radiation new poisoning there were plenty of other reporters who were on the ground saying there's absolutely radiation poisoning going on here the same would be with the Holocaust of course lots of reporting by other papers people ask me how does it get this reputation from being number one if all this is going on my answer is that it's reputation for being number one is because of all this stuff because they were working with the Nazis to get the best Scoops because they were working with the war department to get their reporter on the plane looking out the window at the mushroom cloud they were willing to sacrifice everything first of all the truth in order to stay number one hmm what about Iraq that's another example that you bring up I guess somewhat more recent something that some of us can still remember yeah Iraq I think it fits that pattern they they really came out looking for prizes they had a new editor at the time named Howell Reigns who really wanted to make the New York Times which was you know a very well known but still mostly focused on New York paper into this National phenomenon in news more like CBS or ABC than just a newspaper tied to a city so he said we're going to increase what he called the competitive metabolism of the New York Times we are going to be number one we're going to beat the Washington Post for pulitzers and we are going to do that by getting rid of all our kind of uh blue Dem Hang-Ups and we're going to go after that the red meat for the story and the red meat for this story was Saddam Hussein has wmds weapons of mass destruction that wasn't true of course but they were so invested in that narrative and they were so invested in securing the Pulitzer which they won that they they blinded themselves and uh Judith Miller of course played a role in that where she was reporting stuff that it didn't it didn't make the cut it didn't meet their own standards for you know when you've got the story of the decade and your source is the guy standing 100 feet away from you wearing a baseball cap saying this is where the weapons were pointing at the ground and you can't interview him and you don't know his name and you don't know who he is but you run that story anyway you know there's a problem and it's not just about Judy Miller it's about the paper that was allowing that kind of reporting to hit its front pages I mean a lot of it comes from leadership but certainly they ended up throwing Judith Miller under the bus yeah but they made this huge like human cry about protecting their reporters and protecting the sources this was after she reported on the identity of uh of a CIA agent that was leaked by someone in the administration she went to jail for that she stood behind her principles and her convictions and she actually sat in jail and the New York Times uh the salzburger at that Salzburg at the time there's a different Sellersburg now there's always a Salzburg there's always sales speaker in his name is always Arthur and so that Arthur solzberger he came out and went on uh Charlie Rose saying we stand behind Judy and what she's doing and it's terrible conditions meanwhile she's saying the conditions are actually okay but she gets out of jail and then two three days later or maybe a week later they fire her and that was that because it was no longer good for the brand you know what I I remember hearing about the stories from Iraq where all these veterans that were suffering from PTSD and just coming back to America and beating their wives and killing people I I just the way veterans were treated I to me this was the first time that we started seeing Americans really bash veterans in a way that was really disruptive uh to our psyche yeah the next chapter after wmd in my book is that the times came out with this homicidal veterans narrative and it was really being Advanced by a young reporter named Jason Blair who was a rising star at the paper very young he'd had a few red flags associated with him for for a lot of errors that kind of didn't make a lot of sense but he was bringing home the goods and the goods in this case were that these veterans were coming home broken and crazed and whatever whatever that violence yeah turns out he was making up most of those stories he was fabricating them out of thin air and if you kind of looked at how do you know that how do you know he was making it up was is it already oh that was exposed it's exposed yeah he was fired he was if you if you just looked at the timeline of his reporting it was physically impossible physically for him to have been in the places he said to have been interviewing these sources and when the times actually went and re-interviewed them they said I never talked to this guy I don't know who he is um but what he was saying using these people who had some of them lost loved ones in the war was that this the son or the daughter whoever it was was broken was regretful remorseful or angry about it and there they would go and interview these people and the actual person if the person was still alive would say no I'm proud of my service it was hard I don't regret it I maybe it was an amputee or maybe they were injured but they say I feel okay about what happened but the the homicidal veterans thing was just a lie they just made it up there was no statistics to support it in fact if you looked at the actual numbers veterans coming back from Iraq were less likely to commit act of violence than the general population wow so why why did they push this narrative that these veterans came back violent because they had just supported the Bush Administration with the wmd stuff and when the readership looked at them be like what happened you just supported the most evil guy on Earth which is how the media made bush look at the time right they had to atone for that and they did it by now saying this was the most evil War shift The Narrative shift The Narrative where they would look like back to the base yeah yeah it sounded from some of your interviews and your writings that you got into this business of exposing the gray lady or the New York Times through something that is very similar to my personal experience which is the reporting on Israel yeah um and so tell me a little bit about that how did you get to um realize that even the New York Times owned by Jews is lying about Israel I go to Israel you know it was like the very tail end of the antifada there were still bombings here and there but it wasn't like it was in 2000 2001 and you just read what the times says about the country and not even the the war that the intifada was but just what daily life is like between Jews and Arabs but that's what really struck me and it still strikes me today after I lived there for 20 years now it is more or less a place where coexistence is real it's part of our daily lives and it is not this ongoing enmity between Jews and Arabs and there's not this ongoing persecution of Arabs by Jews that's just not what life is like there and you can feel that and when you read the reporting you and then your times is putting dead children dead Palestinian children on the front page photos of them in a montage and they've not done that for any other war in the history of the New York Times newspaper you think that something is going on here and then you look at their reporting on the Holocaust on World War II on any other number of things and you think okay well I think I understand what's going on here um that was part of it so do you think the same reason that they did not produce any articles about the Holocaust or any significant articles about the murders of Jews in the Holocaust is a similar reason why they were so focused on bashing Israel and lying about Israel yeah it's the same kind of ideology of just distancing themselves and not looking like they're part of you know the Jewish group or something like that yeah it's almost like reverse anti-Semitism or it's actually anti-Semitism done by Jews yeah because if again for them they don't see Jews as a people or as a nation or even as an ethnicity so why should they have a state right you've got America it's fun but so they've been anti-israel in that way politically into Israel for you know since Israel's birth and this was just a way for that for them to drive home that message and it it sort of optimizes over time it gets more and more intense as the ideology kind of compounds within the newspaper because again this is a dynasty it's the the hand down not just control and ownership but ideological commitments and you get to the point where it's both ideological and from a business perspective benefits them to Pander to that base that feels the same way you know I I mentioned that a similar story happened to me where I'm an American I was born here in the United States and I lived in Israel for several years and when I came back from Israel and I saw the lies about Israel there were two things that really got me into the business of trying to share truths with with the public and one of them was education the teachers unions and the lies that are being taught to American Kids the lowering of standards and all of that really ties into the great big American lie and that is that the teachers unions actually care about kids or teachers they don't care about anybody except for their own power and money and the other great lie that woke me up was the lie about Israel right where you know places like New York Times would report that Israel is in a parthened state and I I came back from Israel as an American like wait a second I lived there there's no apartheid state I mean in in high school we would have friends that spoke Arabic it's why I can kind of get a get away with a few Arabic words and so this great big lie that Israel is oppressing you know that a minority Arab population and the fact that the New York Times is propagating that is is just mind-boggling for me the if that's their point of view that's okay if Everyone's entitled to it the problem is that when you actually start to change facts change the ground truth in order to support the narrative and that's the 1619 project is another great example of that if that's your point of view in America I don't agree with it it's not how I think that's all right but when you're distorting and perverting the historical record to achieve it that's actually a very different story that's where things become really dangerous and that's what happens with Israel you know the Muhammad Aldora was the young boy who was killed um under unknown circumstances in the beginning of the intifada and the New York Times came out within days of that happening saying Israel murdered a child that was in uh the intifada was it 2001. it was this was in 2000 things broke out yeah and I think his death was in 2000. the New York Times wasn't there they didn't know what was the exact story remind me I should remember the story was that he the interview breaks out and under a very kind of weird set of circumstances his this is like Mass violence in in the territories his father wants to go out and buy a used car or something so that day decides they get stuck at a checkpoint where there's a gun battle between Palestinian tariff actions and um and IDF post and their this video emerges of this little boy with his father Sheltering behind a concrete barrier and the boy seems to be hit by a bullet and dies or a set of diet I mean people's people question that I don't know but the narrative that came out of that was that the IDF killed the boy and the New York Times reported that and not just reported it they hit that they hammered it home and up EDS and mentions and other articles it became gospel years later there was a court in France that had to do with libel because a French Jew in in France accused a French news channel of sort of manufacturing this as a hoax the French company sued him and the French Court ruled in the favor of the Jew who who said this was not true the forensic expert in France said there was no possible way given the positions of the IDF and the child that the IDF could have killed the boy was not physically possible and the New York Times of course didn't respond to that didn't report that after they had manufactured this myth about essentially a blood level that In Cold Blood they had shot this boy who shot the boy then did we ever find out it was never it was killed no why was there a boy running around none of it really makes sense it's not been resolved but um what is clear is that it was not Israeli soldiers and what is clear on the media side is that Israel was blamed for that for that occurrence did the New York Times ever publish a correction or an apology never no and that that was the myth that in part was used to justify the murder of Daniel Pearl The Wall Street Journal reporter who was killed by Al-Qaeda they said look what you are doing to our children your own media is documenting this and we are taking our revenge do you happen to know how the New York Times reported on Daniel Pearl uh no not not really I would imagine you know um lukewarm I imagine I I never really looked into that yeah so on to a more recent issue and that is critical race theory in the 1619 project which I would hope is considered a massive failure but what is scary about it is that they've been successful at not just being a news media company but now an educational company right the 1619 project had the goal of actually being in schools and essentially brainwashing the American student public right and now it is and now it is so what are the origins of uh the 1619 project the 1619 project came from a reporter New York Times Reporter named Nicole Hannah Jones who had reported quite a lot on Race a lot about what she describes as segregation in the education system that black kids go to school with mostly blackheads and white kids go to school with mostly white kids if that's true or not I don't know but that was her approach so she came up with this idea which was really born out of the critical race Theory movement um that had its roots in the 1970s in Academia at Harvard and other places and that was taking the argument to its absolute extreme which is to say that America was not born in Liberty but born in slavery born out of slavery and that was the 1619 number which is the year that slaves arrived in the colonies so it wasn't 1776 where America achieved or declared independence but 1619 that is the true birth of the nation and they made this into the biggest possible editorial initiative that they could make which is a full issue of the New York Times magazine dedicated to that concept and then sort of as you're kind of referencing growing it out into this brand extension thing that includes educational curricula and colleges and podcasts and the show with Oprah and movies and children's books you name it they did it and uh in that regard it's been very successful and sort of as I'd mentioned earlier is it was really a centerpiece of their marketing mix there's really a way for them to appeal to a younger more woke generation that they were really eager to to get hold of as new subscribers so you think it was part of this whole woke industrial complex where they realized that if they push this Narrative of critical race Theory it's critical race theory part of the 1619 project for sure absolutely yeah and can you explain critical race Theory and how it's connected to what they're trying to teach through this project yeah sure it's it's really about um taking the the fundamentals of critical theory which was a philosophical movement from uh the early 20th century which said that truth is not an objective thing truth is whatever the the victims of power say it is so who decides who are the victims of power well we do the people who are talking and that really was a huge reorientation from this like classical Enlightenment notion of Truth which is something that we all kind of do our best to approximate together and saying No this is about what I declare to be the truth the truth is about power it's not about knowledge and they took this and sort of applied it to race and said if you look at this this racial hierarchy hierarchy of racial victimhood that the people with the most truth are the most victimized and they sort of use that to manufacture the world we see today which is that you've got the you know what people describe as the the race the victimhood Olympics oh yeah that's what 1619 is about it's about saying no it's not about objective historical truth because when the project came out you had historians dozens of historians from prestigious universities not right-wing people coming out and saying actually this is not true what you're saying is not true their own fact checker told them that you cannot say the Revolutionary War was fought to preserve slavery that's not true that was a professor of African-American studies an African-American woman at Northwest University said this is not true but for them with critical race theory behind them it wasn't about what was objectively true or false there was no such thing it's about what serves the the needs of power and who deserves to have that power and for them it was about this group of sort of radical people thinking about how how to restructure power in America and the New York Times what did they do they just ignored the historians that said it was wrong it's just like okay never mind we don't like what you have to say keep going with 1619 yes yeah they just ignored them they just ignored their fact Checker um a woman named Leslie Harris professor who she she came on Politico and wrote an article about this saying they published the claim anyway and that was the key the key word anyway because it wasn't about historical truth and it wasn't about objectivity and this was something that flipped in the Trump era and they came out and started saying this in um around 2018 2019 where they said objectivity is no longer the goal of Journalism the goal of Journalism was what they called moral Clarity it was about taking a position taking a a activist approach to journalism and really pursuing that that angle I mean the hypocrisy is so unbelievable because they were so obsessed with Donald Trump and claiming that he was lying and that they were all focused on the truth meanwhile they've been lying to us for years but not only have they been lying to us for years they actually have an entire 1619 program that admittedly is not about the truth how do they get away with that how are they the paper of record it's just Bonkers you know and I think that's what comes back to the the whole through line of the book is that they they are willing to stay number one at all costs including the cost of truth and the 1619 project is just a great example of that because you fire up all these people you say something so extreme and so out there that it's going to be challenged across the board it does make things a little bit more binary we like it or we love it or we hate it but that's okay for them division is okay for them division works great in media because you you want that kind of energy you want that kind of tension and they achieved it with the 1619 project it's just so crazy you know the other hypocrisy is that they keep putting America through the purity test you know oh America was not founded by completely perfect individuals and therefore America is this horrible place right that's the narrative that the 1619 project pushes but they don't apply that to their own background right in their own history yeah that's right I mean why has there never been a not non-white male publisher of the New York Times ever I mean they didn't even consider a a different option it's not even in the running and I think that's what it is for them it's like they can do what they need to do to support the dynasty one thing that they've been really Hardline about in the business of the New York Times company is being anti-union they really try to crush the union movement within the paper and that's been something that's come up recently where there's this Tech Guild that some of the tech staff and reporters are trying to form and the New York Times is brutal when it comes to their own employees trying to unionize when it comes to other companies and unions they are gung-ho so this is just another another facet of that are they starting to suffer from their own poison it's not something I ever really thought would happen but I think there's so much awareness today and I think there's so much focus on the New York Times from every angle about what's going wrong and what's happening there the pressure of it and the cost of it all the lawsuits um that they're defending it it has to actually take a toll in the business and they recently had another shift in their their editorial leadership from Dean bucket to Joseph Khan um who I think is probably you know they had this recent Uprising about trans issues at the paper where trans Advocates and activists came out saying the New York Times is not covering this correctly and rather than cave they pushed back really hard rather than do the sort of town hall thing that they love to do they said absolutely not and if you get up and walk out and protest you're going to get fired and that's a big shift for the times what are the chances that one of the soulsburgers will actually step down and give the winner of a victim Bingo their position zero like one has to ask that right that's so wonderful never gonna happen are there you know I guess nefarious or outside influencers on these media companies whether it's New York Times or CNN or you know all these folks that are pushing things that are so bad they're so obviously bad for America that one has to wonder where is this funding coming from people ask me all the time you know is George Soros behind this or you know George Shores is known as like the one big villain behind a lot of this kind of push for America to become more socialist but is it China I mean we know that you know there is a huge impact of China and the way America thinks now have you done any research on that since publishing your book yeah sorry I don't know what the the relationship with the times but China for sure I mean China the times actually has a Chinese edition of the newspaper it's it's one of the few uh language editions dedicated to a single country I think is the only one actually and for them it's the future I mean you've got 1.4 billion people 1.6 or whatever billion people in that market and accessing that market is for them massive yeah it's massive it's where the growth is they they know that growth in the US is going to be limited to what it what it currently is so for them it's all about getting access to that market but they also know that they're bumping up against the great firewall which means that if they say the wrong thing which they did when they when they first launched their Chinese HTTP yeah they did some reporting on very senior CCP figures and Corruption and they just got banned from China from that day on and now they're trying to fight to get back in and that means you can't go too far in what you report on China you can't stray from the party line otherwise you're not going to ever access that market and your competitors will and you can see that today in it's an echo of the Holocaust coverage that they didn't do which is the uyghur coverage there is a genocide taking place in China against an ethnic religious minority and ask yourself when was the last time you saw front page coverage about the uyghurs in the New York Times or any other newspaper they just don't do it they don't talk about it we don't know anything about it and of course the New York Times like many other American News organizations has until fairly recently taken money from Chinese propaganda from China Daily it was paying out huge sums of money to advertise and these advertisements were actually advertorials they look like editorial you'd open the New York Times print edition you would see great coverage about China and CCP and if you didn't happen to see the little equatorial label at the top right of the paper you wouldn't know that it was paid for by the Chinese Communist party so you think that the New York Times just like they played friendly with the Nazis during the Holocaust they're playing friendly with the CCP now for sure just like any huge tech company would do and does it's the same calculus covid yeah do you think that's related do you think the way the New York Times did not report about the Wuhan league in fact pressured people and and mocked people who spoke about the truth about the uh the leak of the lab is that connected is that part of them wanting to play friendly with China probably uh you know I think when they came out on February 17 2020 it was a month before pandemic was declared saying that if you think this came from a lab in China that your conspiracy theorist there was no scientific publication at that point saying anything like that there was only one thing that said that and that was an article an editorial in China Daily saying the very same thing using the same exact language one week prior one week later the New York Times comes out saying the same stuff about the lab leak being a racist conspiracy theory and that was a line that they held for quite a long time and it had nothing to do with Donald Trump Donald Trump was praising China in February and March of 2020 he was saying she is doing a great job and it was only in April that he came out talking about lab League the New York Times had been on this anti-lably Crusade for by that point two months so they set the tone absolutely why do you think the New York Times was on this anti-lably Crusade I think it was in part because they were paying attention to the China Chinese messaging and I think the overwhelming influence with that was Anthony fauci Donna McNeil was their top coveted reporter at the time he was actually writing to factory saying you're doing such a great job that press conference you did was amazing I got a bobble head of you I actually bought two these are New York Times contributors that are you know celebrating fouchy and giving him Kudos absolutely and it went both ways in fact you would write back saying thanks Donald you're great too and I love what you did in that article it was amazing and that was the relationship and uh that that was because fauci holds enormous amount of power and if you're a science reporter you're dependent on access to fauci to do a really good job in that vertical and they all knew it and they all loved him and they all looked at him as this God and when he handed down the messaging about lab leak they just ran with it that's there's no other reliable explanation for why they would call lablic or conspiracy theory in mid-February 2020. so it was because they wanted to make him happy so that he continues to give them access to information or it's just this whole like they've just believed what he said and he says this came from an animal this was animal spillover and we're seeing a lot of conspiracy theory about people talking about the lab in Wuhan and that's all it is and that's the that's the story that they run and your opinion did fauci know more about it and he wanted to just not share that with the public I mean would it be what do you think that Dr fauci was lying to the New York Times and then the New York Times was sharing his lies because they believed what he said he may not have known exactly what happened at that point I'm sure he knows now but he did know what kind of stuff they were doing in that lab he funded it and what what really set him off in this sort of panic in late January was discovering a Science magazine article saying that one way that that covet could have emerged is in this kind of study and it referenced a 2015 study done in the Wuhan lab in fact she says to his Deputy go find out if we funded this study they did fund that study and the deputy came back and told him that the next day Foundry said we need to do this emergency conference call with some of the top scientists in the field to kind of start coordinating the messaging and that's exactly what happened why do you think he lied because this is the worst pandemic in a generation many generations and he might be culpable for for starting it the kind of research you can call it research I would say in air quotes that they're doing is to take exactly like what what kind of virus this is bring it into a lab and give it what they call pandemic potential that's the research can you take a non-harmful virus put it in a lab and make it a pathogen of pandemic potential PPP that's exactly what they've been doing for for 10 plus years and he is the primary funder of that research have you heard of newsguard yeah I have so newsguard has had uh an impact on us in a really bad way Dennis would speak about things related to the lockdowns and covid we would receive these threatening emails from this organization called newsguard saying you know you are propagating misinformation and we're going to let the public know that you know basically your fake news first of all I was like what fake news I mean every person we bring on has you know credibility in its legitimate sources and unlike the New York Times you know we're not looking to play friendly with you know certain interest groups but we would receive all this pressure from newsguard to not report on things and at first we were like well who cares what you even have to say News Guard if you slap us with a bad label you know supposedly you think that what we're saying is not true you know we shouldn't have to worry about that but because they have all of these connections with other entities they essentially apply pressure on other organizations and companies not to work with prageru and so actually newsguard became an issue not when they sent us these threatening emails but when they actually informed other companies not to work with Prager Youth and so we received an email from JW player our video Servicing Company telling us that we have a month or so to take off all our videos and find a new entity that's going to serve our videos and you know when we ask them why their answer was well you know newsguard gave you a bad rating and God forbid they would work with a company that gets a bad rating from newsguard and I do foresee that this is what's going to happen with other entities and other you know businesses that won't work with companies that are simply afraid of the News Guard rating right they don't want to deal with it or they actually believe it and that will ultimately lead to what I call economic Suffocation right they're trying to suffocate us from working with any other groups eventually they're going to go also into Financial institutions that shouldn't work with entities that propagate misinformation according to newsguard and I'm just curious what kind of experience you have with these you know entities that guard the news uh clearly there is some stuff that is happening behind the scenes where they put pressure on companies media companies to not share information that whether it's the government or big interest groups don't want to have shared yeah newsguard from from what I know which is not that much but what it seems to me is that they are they are sort of this seal of approval of what is correct information right think and what is wrong think and if it comes out of this you know let's say 20 to 30 News organizations that are approved by them then it's automatically good and uh okay for some consumption but I think the actual danger is on the other side where they're just rubber stamping they're giving a seal of approval to information that may not be reliable at all so you're the New York Times The Washington Post the notion that you're now just you've got this glaze of credibility of trustworthiness but we all know that that's actually not true and the American public knows that's not true when you look at the Trust in Media numbers it is a steep Decline and I think what this is is a way to push back on that that's a way to sort of create this ring of enforcement that just said we're going to ram this through we're going to make sure our guys get the right kind of treatment and service and the other guys don't get it it's not even about red and blue anymore it's about are you aligned or are you not aligned right I completely agree you talk about the Newark times as a dynasty I think of News Guard as the Guardians of this dynasty right they're guarding Victorian Garden right and that's exactly what they are of course New York Times gets a hundred percent rating and you have a book full of information about how not only do they keep getting it wrong but they never apologize or print a correction you know yet the New York Times with 100 rating and Pa and and prageru receiving this you know Red Label warning everybody that we're the ones who are telling lies and I completely agree it's not a left versus right it really is about who they can control and which narrative they they can control and whose narrative they cannot control yeah 100 and I think that's sort of also what we're seeing um with the current banking crisis you know if you don't get in line and say oh the the financial system is okay and the banks are completely solvent then you are cast out as some sort of lunatic or outlier even though it's clearly the case that something is very wrong with America's Financial system but you can't say that out loud because if you say it out loud you threaten to rock the boat we can all see with our eyes what's happening but you can't say that out loud it's like 1984. yeah exactly can I ask you the hardest question sure where can someone get honest news what would you do I mean where can we actually go for trustworthy news I think it's a it's really about rethinking the way we interact with the news and just like we we rethought the way we interact with music where it was no longer about the album we used to go out and buy an album and you would say oh this is going to be a great album and we used to do the same thing in the newspaper I'm going to go and buy the newspaper and be like everything in here is going to be more or less good enough uh we we can no longer do that and now we have Spotify and say I'll I want this song and that song to make a playlist and it's the same thing with news say all right this report at the New York Times is really good and this one at Fox News or Washington Post or wherever you might find it is good it's no longer enough to just trust the brand which is what we used to do we used to use that as a kind of heuristic to say this is good you can't do that anymore you have to say I trust myself I trust people around me who I know and I'm going to do my own research to understand what I can rely upon and cherry pick it's so interesting because I actually think this is happening from both directions directions right a lot of newsmakers are realizing that they don't want to be part of a larger entity where they can you know Barry Weiss left the New York Times who knows what's going to happen with Tucker but you have like 10 pool and all these other folks that are actually coming out of these media establishments and very likely are going to build their own audience base that's going to follow them directly and and you were self-published right yeah and so I guess you're another example of how being part of these established entities is actually coming across now less trustworthy yeah and also the economics are better I get to retain all my rights I when you sell a book to a publisher you give away your rights in perpetuity Universal rights around the world forever if you don't want to do that you can now do something different it's the same with news where Barry or Andrew Sullivan or Glenn Greenwald they are the masters of their own fate editorially and to your point about Tucker I saw a clip I think Dave Rubin posted of him and Dave talking Dave's said are you jealous of Dave being independent and Tucker said of course I am because that's the most important thing so I think the move towards independence wherever you are politically it doesn't matter it's about being independent it's not about being in chained to some huge organization today 90 of the media is in the hands of six companies and those companies are gigantic companies Comcast that's a t Verizon NBC Universal these are giant companies that have a fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders not to their news owners not to the truth not at least of all to the truth so they're doing what's good for the stock price or what's doing what's good for their ideological commitments and I think the truth comes last yeah it's no surprise that they hire folks like News Guard and other fact Checkers uh to try to take any sort of incoming competition down it's a very clever model the news card model yeah it's when I deeply disagree with I think this is this is not what we need right now what we need to understand is how reliable is the reporting that is the question we're all seeking to understand News Guard doesn't answer that News Guard deflects that right and that's why it serves such a great purpose a great need for the media because that's what they're looking to do is deflect well I really really enjoyed reading your book it took me the whole weekend but it was totally worth it and I I actually really highly recommend it because you know there are a lot of claims we made here in this conversation in the book actually backs it up with a lot of evidence and so it was a fascinating read I hope they will go ahead and uh and buy it and get more informed and thanks for all you're doing and thanks for being so courageous to speak out and um I look forward to speaking with you again yeah me too thank you it's been great [Music]