Ben Smith: The Rise and Fall of the Social Media News Age

Welcome to the Bulwark podcast on triple a site. It is May third two thousand twenty three. Breaking news, the alpha man running away from both debates and testimony in the Yijing Carol case, CNN is still struggling to explain why it is giving the twice impeached, indicted accused of rapist audition inspiring ex president, primetime town hall meeting, the Texas legislature moving toward allowing Republican officials overturned elections. And my Morning Shot’s newsletter focuses on the twenty six women who have fused Donald Trump of sexual misconduct. There’s so much going on.

So we are joined by Ben Smith, cofounder of Sema four Previously, the media columnist at The New York Times founding editor in chief at Buzzfeed News, and he has a brand new book which just came out this week traffic, genius rivalry and delusion in the billion dollar race to go viral. So first of all, good morning, Ben. Thanks so much for having me, Charlie Sykes, I wanna talk about this book, which I I told you I read on a plane to Phoenix last week. The origin stories of this incredible shit show that we now find ourselves in the middle of is yeah. That’s honestly what the subtitle should have been.

That should have been the subtitle. But some editors said no. Before we get into all that, I’m really conflicted, and I’m having a hard time parsing through this latest story about Tucker Carlson and the New York Times report that that they have this bombshell text that apparently alarmed the Fox board and might have contributed to his firing. This is the New York Times reporting a text message sent by Tucker Carlson. This set off a panic at the highest level of Fox in the eve of its billion dollar defamation trial showed its most popular host sharing his private inflammatory views about violence and race.

And he talks about how he was watching a video, of some Trump guys beating up an antifa kid, and he said, I found myself rooting for the mob against the man, hoping they’d hit him harder, kill him. I really wanted them to hurt the kid. I could taste it. Says, you know, this is not the way the white man fight, but he was still into it. And then he goes on a little bit later to say, yeah.

But then I had to ask myself, you know, do I really wanna be this? So Ben, I wanted to get your your take on all of this. Because there’s a lot going on in all of that. And I and I wonder whether or not it’s as bad. All of my instincts do not cut this guy any slack.

But is it as bad as it sounds? And the reason I’m asking that is because there is a certain introspection in the text where he says, okay, this is what I was feeling and I don’t wanna feel this way. You know, I wanna remember that somebody probably loves this kid and would be crushed something bad happens. If I don’t care about those things, if I reduce people to their politics, how am I better than he is? So, shockingly, It’s evidence that Tucker Carlson had a bit of conscience embedded in all that racism.

Yeah.

I mean, I guess, I think there are sort of three different things happening here. And the first one, which, you know, if this isn’t brand new news, the Fox News has fired a series of people working for Taco Carlson who turned out to be, again, just like stone cold racists talking the way people talked in the nineteen twenty Right? About race. This isn’t the way white men fight. I mean, like, what?

Mhmm. I mean, if you were shocked and surprised that that is how Tucker is talking behind the scenes you just obviously, like, haven’t been watching the show, haven’t been reading any of the coverage for less than years. So but I find that genuinely shocking. I guest the board who also presumably don’t watch television, found it shocking. It’s pretty shocking.

I agree with you that then there is a second and really kind of unrelated thing. The racist rumor basically an aside — Mhmm. — that he’s kind of staring into the abyss and seeing his own kind of you know, attraction to my violence and pulling back. And I tend to, I guess, in check out people Slack in private messages that weren’t intended for publication when they reflect It’s a very dark strange exchange. He just makes the casualty racist remark sort of in the course of this other reflection.

But the third thing is I mean, I believe the great New York Times reporting that this was the thing that sent the board into a panic. I mean, ultimately, this wasn’t that new. I mean, none of this is that new and the sort of notion that they just discovered and were shot to discover. The Tucker’s peddling racial division that he says disgusting things about women. They were just the last people on Earth to find this out.

And so very strange Ultimately, too, this is a company run by Rupert Murdoch, not by anybody else. The board is famously supine. Who knows? And I think Fox is always after these little crises, tries to piece together a story in which it operates like a normal company, the board exercises governance, for instance, like a normal company. That’s not really how that place works.

Rupert Murdoch makes decisions on the fly and always has. For seventy years. Seems unlikely he would stop now. So I think you’d really have to ask

him exactly what happened, and I’m not sure there’s another way of explaining it. Will you make a great point that if you look at this and are shocked by this

text message, then clearly you have not been paying any attention what Tucker Carlson has been saying on the air over and over and over again. You know, I I still have that image sort of, you know, burned into my my retina. Tucker Carlson holding up the front page of the New York Times with this big shittied in green, you know, the this big expose of how he had been running the most racist show in the history of cable television. I mean, this is not a secret. If you read about it, if you followed it, if you watched it, you knew who Tucker Carlson was?

Yeah. It was literally on the front end. It was literally on the front

end of the year. But, you know, maybe these folks are Wall Street Journal readers. I don’t know. But just a notion that, like, the fox board is acting super responsibly is, I mean, come on.

Well, it’s it’s an interesting story. So your book ex examines the rise and fall of the social media news age through the lens of BuzzFeed News and Gawker. And yet, it comes out at this moment that BuzzFeed News is shutting down. This, you know, one of the first digital media pioneers is coming to an end. Now you were the founding editor in chief of the News division at BuzzFeed.

What happened? Yeah. I mean, that makes me really sad. And I think a lot of

things happen, including just mistakes in running the business that I have some responsibility for. But, you know, the big story and the reason, you know, vice is heading into bankruptcy. A whole generation of media is really struggling. Has to do with this big bet. We all made it on social media.

You know, I think there was an idea again, it’s part of it as a business story. There was an idea that just like, you know, a cable came up in the eighties. They laid these cables and they needed content. And these great media companies, MTV, CNN, what would become Viacom, ESPN, were born into that new world, providing content that was suited for that new world. And became these huge sustainable businesses.

And the cable operators needed great profitable businesses to make content for them. It was a symbiotic relationship. Our strategy at BuzzFeed was rested on the idea that the social media platforms similarly would realize that they needed quality, trusted content premium awesome entertainment that was purpose built for their platforms, but also professionally created and competitive. And they never came around to that point of view. And maybe we were insane to think they ever would.

Consumers first, different set of reasons got pretty freaked out by social media, I think, and are moving away from it. But I think it would be the business story. That’s ultimately it. That ultimately these platforms loved getting everything for free and didn’t

like paying for anything. I mean, fair. Well, I think the extraordinary thing about your narrative though is is the way it describes the unintended consequences of all of this. You know, you go back to the early digital media scene and the early thoughts and the early, you know, twenty ten’s. He’s mostly young, mostly progressive people who thought that they were growing this new progressive media.

And they thought that the election of Barack Obama was This was the culmination of many of their efforts, and, of course, it didn’t turn

out that way, did it. There was a meeting in Hollywood after the two thousand and four election we can’t let this happen again. The judge report is this big thing. We need, like, a left wing answer to the judge report that will channel all this new energy into electing a Democrat in two thousand and eight. Huffington Post was very focused on that.

Barack Obama visited Facebook and it just went without saying that Facebook was a Democratic place because it was where college kids got on the Internet, who were college kids gonna vote for Barack Obama. And so there was this sense in that world that in a way Obama’s election was like the combination of this new digital media and this new digital moment. I’ve certainly felt that way at BuzzFeed, and we had, you know, we did this incredible stunt with Obama where he sort of riffed on the thanks of Obama meme and a video that went everywhere and put on sunglasses and used a selfie stick. And it was just a sense of like Not necessarily that every outlet had the same politics, but these were youthful, progressive places, just because that’s who was on the Internet then. When I went back and reported, hon, reported on this kind of, like, slightly kind of insane coke adult scene of the early odds in downtown Manhattan, with all these great characters.

One of the things that I hadn’t realized, and I think a lot of the people in that scene hadn’t noticed was that a lot of the people who would kind of build this new right wing populism. We’re kind of there. The guy who built Fortune was working out of BuzzFeed’s offices for a while. Yeah. I was amazed by that.

Andrew Breif Bart was a cofounder of Hoffman’s business. Put your head, like, way back into a different place to think, like, Oh, sure. I’m starting a left wing thing, so I’ll go hire the guy from the right wing thing. Totally makes sense. Because they were on the Internet.

The Internet was a small place. Steve Bannon went by half post and learned a lot from it. Mhmm. To me like it really crystallized when I was watching the you know, January sixth, and there was a guy live streaming from the capital, you know, cheerfully marauding around. Who had been my colleague a buzzer.

Would this be a baked Alaska? Yes. Baked Alaska. Yes. He was known.

I

probably should have known this, but the fact that, you know, Gavin McGinnis was a co founder of vice. I mean, all of these people were there. And so — Yeah. — it took a weird turn. So let me just tell you, you know, one of my and I’m not trying to, you know, be personal about all of this.

But as I’m reading the book and all of the characters that, you know, were involved in all of this and how it took the dark turn that I keep thinking to myself, man, please, please do not tell me that a bunch of overcastimated, over medicated, narcissist, you know, coke heads and ass with hammers destroyed western civilization because this is what happened. Because you you have so many of these sort of colorful characters and I have to tell you that I had a hard time maybe I had a hard time rooting for them because I I know what the endgame story is. So maybe that’s unfair. I think that’s unfair, Charlie. We weren’t all coke heads.

But all the rest of the stuff.

No. I mean, I mean, I don’t think these are simple stories or that you can just point to causes of Donald Trump or whatever. And I do think to sort of understand that you have to kind of look at where the media was in two thousand and four. I think there was a sense that the media was totally out of touch. I mean, the sort of mainstream media with this new digital world that a lot of us were starting to live in.

You know, television stations, newspapers just had no way of communicating on the Internet. And then we were coming out of the Iraq War in particular, where I think there was a pretty broad sense that the main stream media had totally screwed up and had contributed to this incredible debacle. Mhmm. And and that there was a lot of appetite for new voices and new perspectives. It’s not like they came out of nowhere.

So let’s talk about the some of the the main characters of your book. You have the Jonah ready, cofounder of the Huffington Post and BuzzFeed who who really had the insight that media could be, you know, distributed by what your friends were were sharing. I mean, he saw that. And and then you also have sort of the doppelganger, Nick Denton, the founder of Gawker, who thought that share gossip, let share poor knocker say, let’s share brands. Let’s, you know, let’s let’s go there.

Then the fact is as you point out, I mean, the content in each site would be distributed, you know, so became what became known as viral. And as you explain, they didn’t see and we didn’t see the extent to which this really toxic politics would be the thing. That people wanted to share and talk about. Right? I mean, you know, what the idea was, hey, let’s share with people what they’re interested in and nobody knew that it was going to be the toxic politics that was going to supercharge the whole thing.

Yeah. Or at least I don’t know if nobody knew it. We sure didn’t. And in fact, at BuzzFeed, where I worked. I mean, the the slogan early on was no haters.

Mhmm. That wasn’t just a topping point. There was a real theory that, you know, if you’re in at the privacy of the search bar, you might type in something really obnoxious because that’s, you know, less Tucker Carlson in a way. I was talking about earlier, like, people’s private selves are not always their best selves. But the theory was, if you’re posting things in public, you’re gonna be sort of showing what a good person you are, and you’re gonna be posting thoughtful articles and fundraisers for earthquake victims and funny memes and jokes and baby pictures.

But like, what kind of person would go post confrontational, divisive politics in us on social media. Like, what a insane thing to do? Everybody would hate you. Who would do that? And that really was the theory under which we operated.

One of the questions that I’ve gone back and forth on, I’m I’m sure you’ve

given it a lot of thought as well, which is does the new social media? Does it actually change the way that people think and behave? Or does it just reveal and expose what was already there? How do you parse that out? I guess, I really think both.

You

know, certainly all these elements of human nature are there. And it’s not like social media invented, you know, all of our worst qualities, but also specific features of these different platforms you know, can dial them up and dial them down and Facebook in particular made a series of very specific choices that I think at times we’re aimed just for totally commercial reasons to produce more engagement on their platform, which is to say you were spending four point eight minutes a day on the platform and they would like you to spend five point two minutes Yeah. And really the way most of the folks at that business are thinking, that’s all they’re thinking about. And if you think of them as a political institution, you’re kinda looking through the telescope Bulwark. They’re basically a commercial entity trying to get you to use their product more and buy more stuff.

Right. They’re really the course of this on Facebook is really worth looking at. And they see and are criticized that people are, like, sharing made up stories that Hillary Clinton has been replaced by a body double. And so they think, oh, we’ve gotta Let’s find a new metric that keeps people more engaged, but in a more meaningful way. And they have this idea of meaningful social interactions.

Which is meant to be, well, you’re not just, like, blindly sharing some stupid thing. You’re engaging with it. You’re commenting on it. Kinda makes sense in theory. What in practice, what it is is I share some insane Donald Trump meeting.

You comment, kill yourself seventeen times in a row. And then the system is like, wow, look at this great engagement. Shows it to everyone

both of us now. So when did it become clear that the most engaging posts were the ones that created the most engraachment. At what point did people go, okay, so the fake news actually actually gets more traffic than the real news, the stuff that makes people angry, in fact, is what’s supercharging this engagement. It was before the twenty sixteen election. Right?

You know, I would say something like twenty fifteen. You know, I think it’s hard to say what’s cause and what’s effect. I think Yeah. People were really angry. I think the message that Donald Trump was sort of selling that, like, the establishment had forgotten you that you were getting screwed and that globalization had sort of left you behind where all things people really felt and we’re really angry about.

And so it’s not like Facebook or Donald Trump necessarily just created that out of sort of some technical trick. And the fact that these social platforms all over the world, not just in the US, became sort of overrun by this surging, right, when populism wasn’t just about the social platforms. Like, that was happening in the world. And I think yeah. No.

No. I just think it’s too simple to say one cause the other.

Well, I mean, that that’s what’s interesting is, you know, it was this festering rage out there that now had an outlet as opposed to have recreated something that is just pumping the rage dopamine into people. It’s just injecting it into people. So as people are scrolling through, they’re getting angrier and angrier and more willing to express their rage and their hatred. Because, I mean, it doesn’t seem that long though that as you as you pointed out, that you wouldn’t expect that somebody would wanna advertise, you know, their derangement, you know, their hatred. They wouldn’t do that in public.

They wanted to present their best selves. So what happened between two thousand and four and say two thousand twenty where people said, yeah, I’m I’m I’m gonna spend a good portion of my day being a complete and total asshole in front of the whole world. You know, I think, you know, the

unsatisfying answer, I think, two big things happened. Right? A huge technological change and the great financial crisis. Which was not a technological thing. Mhmm.

And I think people were genuinely really angry. And also, there were these new tools for expressing it and those things fed each other, but I don’t think that you’d pull out social media, you pull out Facebook, and you and nationalism goes away. Right? I mean, I think it’s more complicated. So you had an interview with Walter Isaacson the other night, and you suggested that

you thought that maybe the election of Joe Biden signify that people are getting tired of all the drama and the conflict and the last few weeks, it kind of felt like everything was drawing to a close. Why would you think that because as I look at social media, I still see the crazy and the anger continuing to ramp up. So what is coming to a close?

Well, I think I mean, in a way, I mean, there’s a bunch of things that have happened in the last few weeks. I don’t think, again, this is sort of a neat line you can draw under it. But — Mhmm. — you know, the end of BuzzFeed News and Vice reflected the end of, I think, an idea of a media business that you could build on social media. And then, you know, the firings of Tucker Carlson, which I think we probably agree, like, it wasn’t just one text message.

It was — No. — whatever however Murdoch makes decisions, it was time for a change. And CNN firing, Don Lemmon, is a totally different kind of a figure, but was very associated with a period at CNN when they were defining themselves as this anti Trump voice. And where is that pressure coming from from the audience some degree, from advertisers, from, you know, corporate media executives. It’s not all great reasons.

But I think It’s not that social media is getting the Twitter in particular is getting less crazy. It’s just getting less relevant and Facebook similarly. I mean, they’ll argue with you about whether it’s shrinking or growing, but certainly discussion of matters of public interest on Facebook is sort of fading. And it’s and these are no longer the places that politics gets shaped the way they used to it. Well,

one of the fun things in your book is the way that you sort of capture this media startup craze in New York in the early audits that kind of untold story in Europe, you know, it was a real moment of dynamism and interesting stuff that was happening. You had, you know, parity out there, the idealistic data with kids, denton. Founder of Gawker with his acid pen. The story of Gawker is really something, including the speaking of relevant, including the Is it too strong to use the actual, you know, well funded conspiracy led by Peter Teal to destroy it using

it? And that’s a real thing that happens.

It’s a real thing that happens and amazing that you had a billionaire who basically said, I’m really mad at you. I’m going to kill you. I’m going to destroy any debt. Yeah.

And they gave him ammunition. I mean, they were right. And Galker was this. It was almost sort of the flip side of Leslie. The reason I focused on those characters was that they were they’re great characters who were also real personal rivals and who also saw the world very different.

I think Nick looked at the same tools that general looked at these tools and so, wow, this is gonna be this utopia and paradise. Denton looked at these tools and said, okay, this is gonna rip the mask off of all this hypocrisy. Journalists can just say what they think. Readers who if they want pornography, they can just look at pornography. They don’t need to pretend they will look at anything else.

And that this will sort of be a more honest new medium and At times, I think that led to real, you know, real progress and real good things. I think if you look at the rise of this website called Jezebel in two thousand and seven, that was this sort of frontal attack on all the worst things about the women’s magazines, the way they distorted women’s sort of body images, how there were only white models, things like that. And they just like I mean, this is so fun. They, like, launched with a ten thousand dollar bounty for an unretouched photo. And somebody, like, stole one from Red Book and gave it to them, I guess.

And of Faith Hill where, like, before they had removed her freckles and smile lines. Right? And, like, that was a really positive movement in some ways, but also — Mhmm. — in a way that would really message the future generated this incredibly intense and sort of toxic relationship with their own audience actually in a very Twitter like way that in this sort of birth of this kind of online outreach culture. And then the other side of it was just this ideology that everything should be exposed led in a fairly large collaborate than publishing a series of like sex tapes and intimate photographs that I think it’s hard to think back to the mid odds when know, when most people didn’t have digital cameras on their phones, and so this was sort of a slightly exotic thing that you didn’t know what to make of.

Because now, I think enough people have embarrassing images on their phones that it’s appalling, that, like, some

journalists would go around exposing this stuff. It’s just so far outside the panel. It was the whole Hogan tape that brought them down. The invasion of privacy case that really

led to the demise of of Gawker.

Red. And as you said, it was a well funded conspiracy by a billionaire that brought that case to court. But the reason Gawker lost it in court was because Becom twenty fifteen and twenty six seeing a jury in Florida is just totally appalled that they’re putting this stuff on the Internet and they can’t explain it.

Have judgments like that change of the culture? Of this new media. And I’m thinking about, you know, the rule of litigation, what just happened with Fox? Will that have any, you know, sobering effect? Did the demise of gawker for publishing sex tapes?

Did that have an effect with them? And did that have ripple effects throughout the culture? The social media culture. I

mean, in the most narrow sense, I think it made really clear that people’s intimate pictures are off limits. And I think you’ve since seen a term called revenge born — Mhmm. — to have come into the lexicon, and I think that was a saletary change in the culture. And then on the very dark side, I think it made everybody a little that much more scared of challenging powerful rich people who have a new tool to a way to war on their enemies. And powerful rich people have always abused the courts, to attack their enemies.

That’s not totally new, but this is another reason for publishers to be scared about printing printing true things. About powerful rich people. And that’s a real concern. But I think most broadly, like, in the United States, the legal guardrails in journalism are pretty pretty far out. They’re pretty loose you know, I mean, Fox managed to find, like, the single most damaging tort it could violate, which is just attacking a company that could show commercial damage from very specific lies about that company.

In the context of the highest stakes story in the world, the election. But Fox hosts can lie all day as long as they’re not committing defamation that causes damages to people within pretty narrowly defined strictures. And if there’s a limit to what the law is gonna is a great line from one of my favorite writers that you you get justice in the next world. In this world, you have the law.

Well, I mean, they can lie all day as long as they don’t write emails in text messages to each other, you know, admitting that they’re lying and why and why they’re lying. And if they’re not lying about a well heeled company, I mean,

I think that’s one of the lessons. Right? Yeah. Specifically, it’s that they were lying about a company that could claim damages and a lawsuit in a very specific way. This

point, I don’t think can be overstressed. It is a extremely difficult to win a defamation suit like this. So, you know, Fox’s behavior had to be really extraordinary to put them in where everybody thought that they were at real legal risk. Do you think they would have lost that case? They obviously think they would have lost.

The facts were

just so catastrophically bad. I mean, you just But as you say, it’s like if you were trying to make up the worst possible case of definition, it would be

this. So let’s go back to the Gocker BuzzFeed story. Your book was reviewed by in the Washington Post by Max Reid, who was an editor at Gocker, you know, who wrote that The race to go viral seems kind of pathetic in retrospect. You know, at best a brief wacky interregnum between periods of sustained dominance by big national news publishers At worst, a pointless waste of journalist creativity and resources spent pursuing a doomed business strategy of the many delusions in the book. The grandest is the idea that digital publishers could build sustainable businesses by chasing immense audiences with free content.

So I I mean, I guess I have a couple of things on that. One is that it’s very easy to say things are doomed after they’ve failed. Right. But the reality is you don’t know in advance, and I think that notion, this this analogy of cable. You know, maybe it was totally insane all along, but maybe the social media companies themselves could have chosen different paths and created healthier ecosystem that would have been better for them.

That’s actually what I think. But who knows, honestly? And obviously, in retrospect, we were wrong. So, you know, hard to argue with that. But I think there’s a kind of easy cynicism of looking at things that failed and say they were doomed to failure and everybody involved with Zimura.

You know, maybe that’s me being a little defensive. But I think, actually, there was an enormous amount of journalistic creativity Bulwark that wasn’t wasted. Just a lot of good work that existed in the moment, which is all the journalism ever does. And the other thing is for better and for worse. I think you can see the DNA of BuzzFeed and Gocker and all these places and the people very deeply absorbed

into the mainstream journalistic culture. And then, of course, that’s one of the stories. You know, how many of the people who got started there went on to what do we wanna call it? Legacy media, established media. But also, you have the proliferation of of outlets that are doing good journalism.

You know, vice news had some very powerful reporting. Very, very powerful. You know, movies and videos, BuzzFeed News, broke a lot of things. And now, I think that we just take it for granted that there are other news outlets and news sources other than, say, The Washington Post Wall Street Journal of The New York Times, that are doing this kind of groundbreaking credible journalism. And we’re not going back.

And I wanna talk to you about some of four in a moment. Since we’re talking I mean, I have to ask you the question that everybody asks you. Your decision to have BuzzFeed published the Steel dossier in January two thousand seventeen. You took a lot of flack for that. In retrospect.

What do you think about that?

In retrospect, I have complicated feelings about it and, you know, wrote wrote about it in the book. I mean, I think in some big picture sense, the context of that digital media world where and I’d come up kind of reading and copy and gawker actually and with that sharing that kind of belief and transparency. And so in a big sense, I probably had a kind of impulse to say, hey, like, if Charlie and I have seen this document and so is every, you know, member of the Senate Intelligence official political consultant journalist in Washington, like, why shouldn’t you? Like that like that, I do have that impulse. Mhmm.

That said, there were pretty good reasons weighing the other way too, which was that it was full of lurid allegations that weren’t proven. And it’s a pretty heavy thing to sort of throw those out there. I mean, the thing that tipped the scale for me, at least there were two. One was that it had clearly, like, become part of politics. It was this dark matter in politics.

Harry Reid was write had written a letter referring to it. McCain was acting in a certain way toward Trump. You couldn’t really explain without knowing about it. It was affecting the course of things without and we weren’t allowed to tell our audience what was happening. But the thing that tipped it for me was CNN reports that, you know, it’s been briefed to the sitting president Barack Obama and the president-elect Donald Trump by the director of the FBI.

And which obviously turns it into a doc. I mean, if you had any data, but it’s public import, that’s sort of a very formal way of verifying it. And CNN also says this document says Donald Trump’s been compromised by the Russians. And this is certainly something you could argue with, but I think if you say there is a secret super serious document that says Donald Trump’s been compromised by the Russians, it is healthier for democracy for people to see it than not see it. Mhmm.

Actually, I think a lot of people saw it and said, this is total nonsense. And that was healthier than having people wave around a list of suspected communists to not show it to anyone?

Right. I mean, you know, there was there was a decision, of course, you know, do you publish the Pentagon papers? Do you put out other information that that actually is having an effect right now. And and I do think that there is that moment. I was thinking about this a couple of weeks ago.

I was watching a reporter on one of the one of the cable channels, and he was talking about some piece of information that clearly he knew, but he wasn’t going to share it. And yet, you couldn’t really understand what everybody was talking about without it. It was like, Okay. So, you know, I’m telling the public everything they need to know except exactly what they need to know about all of this. And down

the road with

the screen. Just show

us. Tell us what it is. I know. And the but the real problem was we did not you know, like other publications, we sent reporters to Prague and the Moscow and tried to ultimately, what you wanna do is, like, is this true? Is it not true?

And we could not have been able to stand it up or knock it down. And that’s a very frustrating place to be. And I think it’s it would be reasonable to say, we’re not talking about this at all. I think it is not reasonable to say, we’ve got this secret document. Here’s basically the most inflammatory claim it makes.

And we’re not gonna give you any way to weigh that. Howard Bauchner:

So we’ve talked about, you know, these and and this is a really extraordinary moment that we’re having this conversation that your book has come out, you know, buzzfeed news shutting down vice news currently going bankrupt. Obviously, we’re in another period of transition after all of this term. Who’s getting it right? And again, this is part of the bet about where we’re going here. So cable is Sarah Longwell, CNN is Sarah Longwell, There are a few outlets that are prospering, but, you know, this has been a real sifting and winnowing for media at every single level.

Who’s getting it right? I mean, obviously, Sema four. But that was a high log. I apologize. Right?

Yeah. Exactly. Obviously, Sema four. Obviously,

the the Charlie Sykes Bulwark podcast. Though, I mean, I say that in Jess, but also I mean, one thing is that I think that, like, the media that gets it right is the one that’s listening to people where they are now, like, not just sort of having some abstract theory about what people auto want. But I think, like, you know, if the problem when we were starting at twenty years ago was we’re all just, like, desperate for alternative voices and for more voices and for more perspectives for ordinary people’s opinions getting injected into the news. Now, we are totally overwhelmed by those things and swimming in content from all over the world and unsure what to trust. And so I think the people who are connecting are trying to deliver the news in a very human direct way that you know, that in in our case it’s done before, we’re in a very stylized way to try to say, here is the news in the story, and here’s the reporter’s opinion, and here’s somebody else’s opinion.

And we’re gonna separate those things, not try to kind of, like, inject it all into you. And we’re also gonna try to read all over the world and bring you all the relevant stories on a topic, not force you to go Google them all. I think we’re trying to sort of like answer what we see as the challenge people have now. I think part of the reason audio Bulwark well now is because it has the same sense that you’re, like, just genuinely talking to somebody you can trust. There’s a real human being.

So you mentioned this sort of very stylized approach. So give me your elevator pitch for the personality of Sema four and why it is different from other media. How do you think about this?

Yeah. I mean, I think that we are trying to blend sort of news from a great journalist who knows the difference between facts and their opinion. And is distilling the best journalism from all over, giving it to you all in context with their own original reporting with their own expertise, but leaving space for you to disagree with them and for other people to disagree with them. And actually, that’s really core to trust right now, is leaving that room for disagreement. What is the future of

the media in relationship to AI? Is that going to play a role at all? You know, I’m sure, well, god, it’s an incredibly powerful technology. And these large language models

are basically, like, technology that what it does is it does stuff with words, which is, you know, what you and I do. Yeah. You know, I haven’t found myself consuming a lot of AI written stuff, and I don’t really see the use case for in immediately replacing what you and I do. I mean, it’s not that far out from you being able to say,

you know,

I wanna interview Ben, but he’s on a plan. So I’m gonna rip his voice off YouTube and have a the the AI read the corpus of everything he’s ever read and do a passable interview without me being there. But I’m not sure that’s what your audience wants. I think if you said I’m talking to an AI version of this person, people would be less interested if you told them. If you told them, I think they’re actually I think I mean, the most powerful immediate use for media.

And this is both kind of like boring and positive, which I realize is not what anybody everybody wants the apocalypse. But if there’s this explosion in video tools, And if you wanna sort of, like, produce a gorgeous animated documentary, if you wanna produce everything everywhere all at once that want all those Oscars, They did that with, like, seven animators. Whereas if you watch a Disney movie — Mhmm. — you’ll see there, like, seven screen and screen and screen of animators. And and some of these tools that have been you know, very limited to Hollywood studios who spend a hundred million dollars are gonna get democratized in a way that’s interesting and

positive, I think. Okay. So wait. So do you think right now given current technology that I could have done an AI interview with Ben Smith? You’ve spoken.

You have written. All of your thoughts are out there. Right? All of this stuff has been published. You’ve given all these interviews.

So how easy would that be? To do something like that. I’m not saying I’m gonna do it.

Right now, you would have to, like, hack together a bunch of different tools to do it. Right? Like, it would be hard, but not impossible. I think in, like, a year, it’ll be easy. And so what does that mean?

See, I don’t know. I think that’s a thing who really wants. Yeah. So I’m not sure that means anything. It does mean for instance that we could it’s a week we started to play it some before with, like, you know, you you it’s sort of nice sometimes to have article read out loud by the author.

Right. But honestly, like, it’s sort of annoying for the author to do it, and the author is not always in a place they can record. I can sample my voice, give it to a tool, and it will read the article in my voice, and that could be present with every article. I don’t know. There’s a French site called brute.

It’s pretty interesting. There’s this reporter they have who, big star reporter in the French media, who’s interviewed Macron a number of times. And he has sort of given them permission or he’s participating in a project where every morning his AI avatar reads the news.

Oh my. Yeah.

So I don’t know. I mean, I I don’t know. Well,

I just wonder at some point that ten years from now, we’ll look back on this and go, why do you even think that that was controversial because that’s become completely normalized. A club you know, of course, this is just a a new tool. It’s like doing all the cable interviews people on on Zoom at home and we figured out that we could actually do this. We don’t have to have people in studios. We don’t have to actually have live human beings do it.

Here.

This seems like this could happen very easily. Sure. I mean, I guess it just depends, like, what does the audience want? Like, I think that right. You can think of all this devious stuff you could do, but I’m not sure who’s really, like, there for it.

I mean, I think you could create personal certain kinds of, like, personalized disinformation that’s scary. You could kind of you know, trick people in criminal ways that seems very scary. I’m actually maybe this is wrong. I think in National Politics where there’s a huge amount of attention, and scrutiny on everything that is said and done. It’s gonna be pretty hard to, like, insert a deep fake.

I think in a city council race, in a school board race, in places where there’s way less attention, no kind of professional journalism, apparatus, back decking, that that’s where some of the in people’s personal lives, Like, that stuff is pretty scary, I think. Well,

I mean, I was just looking yesterday at a at sort of a a a shallow fake video of of Kamala Harris, which apparently has been seen by five million people, and you you can see how how that’s gonna affect our politics in a while. And I’m not sure how many of those five million people would actually care if you told them it was a complete fake. Okay. I have one more question. So I was reading an article about the bankruptcy of vice news.

And again, I admire a lot of the things that they do. And one detail jumped out at me, that they had three thousand employees Is that right? Yeah.

I think I mean, I think that is right. I think they have three thousand employees. They value themselves at five billion dollars, I think.

How do you have that many employees? And I guess part of the question is, is one of the reasons why you’re having these biz just from a business point of view, the business failures, is they have been grotesquely bloated. And, of course, we’re

seeing, you

know, Facebook and Amazon and

other companies, you know, Google who really loaded up with staff, we’re now letting them go. But those are high margin small businesses

that use some of their profits to hire too many people. We’re talking about money losing businesses that we’re raising venture capital and hiring too many people, which certainly we did a bus How did that happen? You

know,

advice is an unusual case. They were the best brand. I mean, just such a pure brand, you really know what they stand for. They never had much traffic on the Internet, but they kind of parleyed that brand into other businesses. They had an ad agency.

They sold a television show to HBO, which is a real business. But it’s great, but a challenging business because you’re a production company for HBO. And one day, they canceled the show and you fill everybody off, and that is what happened to them. So,

Midea, is part of it just the temptation. Is is it a culture of growing all the time, losing focus, on what exactly your core mission is? I mean, how how do you get a company like that with three I think we got coming back to this. I mean, how many employees does the New York Times

They have seventeen

hundred journalists, I would think. So how does vice news have three thousand employees, not obviously all journalists? Yeah. I

mean, you know, I don’t I don’t really know. And I remember when when there was a transition in in management, the new management came in and kept finding out, like, what? We have a team in Montana. Like, you know, like months in, like, what? I mean, so I think there was just impressive.

Yeah. We all thought we had kind of the wind at our backs and we’re growing into these

huge companies like, you know, Disney and NBCUniversal. And that did not turn out to be true. Ben Smith’s new book, which came out Tuesday, is traffic Genius rivalry and delusion

in the billion dollar race to go viral. Ben is cofounder of Sema four and was previously the media columnist of The New York Times and The founding editor in chief at BuzzFeed News, Ben, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast today. And

thanks so much for having me, Charlie. And thank you all for listening to today’s

Bulwark podcast on Charlie Sykes. We will be back tomorrow and we’ll do this all over again. Bullwerk podcast is produced by Katie Cooper and engineered and edited by Jason Brown. Dissecting politics with exclusive interviews, commentary and humor, useful idiots, with Katie Halper and Aaron Mate.

I really don’t like sharks. And I think we live in a very Sharky Gandisfib world. Quote, one thing to keep in mind is sharks are not out there trying to eat surfers and swimmers. They’d much rather eat fish, but in many cases, they mistake us for their actual prey. When they do bite, they usually move on.

That’s supposed to make us feel better?

Youthful idiots. Wherever you listen.