Katya Rogers: Hi, everyone. This is Katya, executive producer of On the Media. I said to Michael and Brooke last week, let's gather Wednesday morning and talk about our immediate reflections and thoughts following the election, Tuesday night. We did the same in 2016. It was an experiment for us. I wanted to recreate that. We wondered what we were going to talk about. Probably something about the Trump campaign accusing states of stealing votes or rigging the election. Maybe something about how Fox News and others were spreading conspiracy theories. We did not expect this outcome.

The following conversation happened with no preps. It's just us discussing the role of the media now and in the last eight years and what we should do on the show this week. Take a listen.

Micah Loewinger: All right, I'm setting up my pro tools. Just wait for Eloise and Kat to join.

Brooke Gladstone: What time did you go to sleep?

Micah Loewinger: I went to sleep at a reasonable hour. I saw the writing on the wall and I was tired and I figured there was nothing, nothing that couldn't wait until the morning. What about you?

Brooke Gladstone: We stayed up till 2:00, but I just couldn't hang around for Trump. I knew I would hear it the next day or hear about it, but we shouldn't say anything, really. This is supposed to be fresh and raw.

Katya Rogers: Well, wow.

Brooke Gladstone: Let's not talk unless we're ready to record.

Katya Rogers: Oh, right.

Micah Loewinger: We're recording. We're recording. Don't you worry.

Brooke Gladstone: We are. Okay. Kat, you threw up all night?

Katya Rogers: I did. I slept on the bathroom floor for a couple of hours. It was a bug, but maybe it wasn't.

Brooke Gladstone: We need to think about this week. I imagine that everybody is pretty darn tired, even on the Trump side. Then there are things that people are going to try to explain, and I want to make sure that we stay away from that.

Micah Loewinger: Like what?

Brooke Gladstone: Like, what did the campaign do wrong? This is what we all said the last time. There's something going on that those of us on the coasts don't understand. I can't help but feel it all boils down in the end to the bubbles we're all in, and the fact that a great many Americans aren't familiar with the facts.

Micah Loewinger: You said that. There are obviously some. There are many Americans who don't know the facts that have been reported repeatedly by the media, the fact checks, the questions about Trump's policies, reporting on his last administration. All of that seems to either have been memory hold or not reached people. I guess, Brooke, does that just mean that the media is fundamentally broken?

Brooke Gladstone: I think the media delivery system has a great deal wrong with it. I think probably the mainstream or legacy media or wherever you want to fit us in still has a comprehension problem. We keep trying to understand. I remember when Bush was elected and there were a lot of evangelicals in that case, the first time, we were going, wow, this was happening beneath the surface. We didn't even know, but we should have known this time, and we still don't know. I don't know.

Micah Loewinger: What did we not know? I guess I'm confused because a lot of the debates that we had on the show were about whether journalists took the threat of Donald Trump seriously and conveyed it clearly. We weren't talking so much about reaching people who had tuned out the media. I mean that's almost a separate topic altogether.

Brooke Gladstone: I don't know that it is, Micah. I mean, I think it's the same topic. Who are you conveying this stuff clearly to? The entire nation, hopefully, but of course, we know we don't speak to the entire nation. No one does anymore. We do a damn fine job of talking to ourselves.

Micah Loewinger: Brooke, I know we've disagreed on this, but I do think that Trump has been really effective at tapping into an anger that Democrats have shied away from. I think they have allowed themselves to be perceived as the party of the rich, despite their policies being much more effective for working-class people. I think we've seen that in exit polls. We've seen a bigger push of higher-income people voting for Kamala Harris as compared to the last election, and a bigger push of working-class people voting for Donald Trump. It is about perception. It is about somebody saying, "The American dream is dead."

Brooke Gladstone: I don't think I disagree with you at all.

Micah Loewinger: I think we may have disagreed on whether there was a role for a Democrat to say these things.

Brooke Gladstone: Did we?

Micah Loewinger: I don't know. Perhaps I'm misremembering our conversation. It reminds me of that interview I did with the Harvard economist about tariffs. His point was, Donald Trump said, these trade policies screwed you. They took your jobs, and effectively the elites are screwing you over. They're outsourcing your jobs and we're going to bring them back. He didn't bring the jobs back. He said, "We're going to tariff the crap out of China."

The effect, as we may very well see, is that American companies will pay the price and they'll pass it along to consumers, and once again, it will hurt people in the United States. I just think his ability to say, "I'm fighting for you and they're the Enemy and I will vanquish them for you," just continues to be a unifying message.

Brooke Gladstone: Are you suggesting that the problem for the Democrats is that they didn't fight anger with anger?

Micah Loewinger: My opinion is that-- I don't know if this is relevant to our conversation, but my opinion is that Kamala Harris was in a situation where she had to basically defend the Biden administration because she was part of it and tell a story about how actually it's been really good. Over and over, we're just seeing that people are not responding to the metrics about how good the economy is when reported by politicians and by the media.

Alot of critics I'm seeing online are blaming the media, saying, "You misled people, you didn't tell them how good the economy is." I don't know. If people feel mired in student debt and they don't think they can ever buy a house and their wages are stagnating, it doesn't do much to hear that, well, actually, the stock market's doing really well. There is that fundamental disconnect. I think that the anger on the right captured that disenfranchisement.

Brooke Gladstone: There was a lot of discussion that the anger on the right was directed at programs that seemed to help college debt. We didn't go to college, we don't get our debts forgiven, and so on. There was quite a bit of discussion about that, too.

Micah Loewinger: I just want to add, I don't think that this materialist analysis explains at all. Clearly, the Trump campaign said, we will crush basically any minority or hated group that you want. That seemed to be a pretty damn loud, clear message, like, "We're going to crush the media. We are going to put women back in their place. The minorities who stole your jobs are going to be ripped away from their communities and from their families. Don't worry, we're going to rough them up."

I don't want to make it sound like I don't think that rampant racism wasn't a huge part of this rampant xenophobia. I don't think there's any one explanation that does this service. I just want to caveat a lot. Yes, the question is, what does this say about the media today? What does it say about the future of our show? There's going to be a lot of discussion about, did American readers of the New York Times and the Washington Post and the AP and the Wall Street Journal and listeners of NPR, did they fully understand what a threat Trump was? Did journalists rise to the occasion, and did that play a role? I guess I'm curious to know what you think about that framing.

Brooke Gladstone: I think that especially in the last couple months of this campaign, everybody heard that stuff in full. We heard all about his former staff and generals fearing for the future of democracy. We heard much about the possibility of incipient fascism. We've heard about his policies. That his way of making everything good is to pull out of the Paris Accords and eliminate the environmental provisions in the Inflation Reduction Act. We've learned about what tariffs mean with regard to prices.

We've heard about his so-called proposals for peace and his general expressions about how he was going to fix everything and it was going to be so fixed you'd never need to vote again. That whole business, I don't think anybody lacked for that stuff among our readers, listeners, and so on. The problem is again that the information about just generally policies don't excite the imagination as much as an idea that things are spiraling out of control, that there's chaos. The great murder sprees in the cities, the immigrants taking over communities and so on, and eating your pets. All of this stuff just fed into a feeling and that this is about feelings.

Micah Loewinger: I guess what I'm getting at then is if you think that enough of the stakes were conveyed by the end of the election and still this was the outcome, does that mean that mainstream media is irrelevant, that it is incapable of conveying a basic message?

Brooke Gladstone: I think they are not. I think that they didn't do a great job. We critiqued on this show the double standards, the false equivalencies, but in terms of the stakes, I think by the end they were doing a really good job. The fact is that it was in an echo chamber. It's not those people necessarily who voted for Trump.

Katya Rogers: I wonder if some of this is. Remember we did the show a few weeks ago about what was going to happen with the vote in all these different counties, and we did three interviews in a row and the last question was, what can we do? The final answer was like local media, local media, local media. Go local, go local, go local. Maybe there's something to be said for this is the end game of the loss of local media that people don't want to be talked to from on high from New York.

Micah Loewinger: Yes.

Brooke Gladstone: I love this idea and I think it really rings true. I think people do want to hear from the people who live in their community. The local news business has been devastated.

Micah Loewinger: People's habits have changed. I mean, a lot of younger people are not watching their local TV stations or not paying for their local newspaper. There are still communities with access to local news, but people are on YouTube, they're on TikTok, they're listening to podcasts. They have just chosen other personalities. They've chosen other people, journalists or those who larp as journalists to choose their information. There's no news monoculture left. That is dead.

Brooke Gladstone: Interestingly, public radio does have local stations. It is a network of local stations. A lot of local radio stations are actually networks. We've covered that on the show. Right wing networks, in many cases, all speaking from the same playbook. Even local media has been not only financially bankrupted but-

Katya Rogers: Colonized.

Brooke Gladstone: -colonized, yes.

Micah Loewinger: I mean, the public radio system is a great local news system. It's not perfect, but it's pretty good at fielding reporters and stories from across the country and elevating, but listenership is down. We know from Project 2025 that they're coming for it. They want to kill it. I fear for the future of this medium. I really do.

Katya Rogers: Yes. every successive Republican administration has said they're going to cut funding. In those days--

Brooke Gladstone: [unintelligible 00:13:47]

Katya Rogers: Yes, and in those days when we've covered it in the past, we've said, but we have this solid conservative listenership and they don't want it to be gone either. It would not be a popular decision on the part of any local Republican. I don't know if that's true anymore.

Brooke Gladstone: I don't know if that's true either. I think it's certainly less true.

Micah Loewinger: It's more vulnerable than ever.

Brooke Gladstone: Let's not make it about us.

Micah Loewinger: We haven't talked about the war in Gaza yet. I think it was a disaster for Democrats in the media, personally. I think it has accelerated an exodus. It has accelerated a decline in trust among lots of different kinds of Americans. I know you said you didn't want to do a postmortem about the election, but I think it was shameful how little attention Kamala Harris paid. We had on a media studies professor named William Youmans who talked about how on the Sunday shows the guests were overwhelmingly pro-Israel and how the guests, many of those guests, were American officials.

I do think that media consumers took note of that. They said that a lot of this coverage can be seen as basically American officials explaining why this war needs to happen and why we're giving arms. I'm still disturbed by how quickly very flimsy reporting about UNRWA was elevated by the Wall Street Journal and some other mainstream outlets, leading a couple months later to banning the largest humanitarian aid group in Gaza while people are starving.

I am sympathetic to those who feel that mainstream media was complicit in allowing the war to get as bad as it did. I'm sad to think that Donald Trump was able to use the war as a wedge issue. We saw them ramp up the messaging around the war because they knew how much discontent there was among Democratic voters. I think it will prove to have been effective.

Brooke Gladstone: Obviously, I don't think that we're going to need to talk about the coming legal challenges to the vote, which is something--

Micah Loewinger: Disinformation around voter fraud.

Brooke Gladstone: [unintelligible 00:16:34]

Micah Loewinger: It wasn't a problem, I guess. It was a great election. Free and secure. Move on, everybody.

Brooke Gladstone: Those plans that we had on the boil are probably defunct at this point. I was thinking at first something that we used to do was just go around the world and see what the world says. I don't know what, if anything, Putin has said so far. I didn't come across it, but I do know that other representatives of the Russian position on social media have been absolutely thrilled and delighted. We know Viktor Orban is absolutely delighted. We know that all of those people that Trump has glommed onto in his years in exile have come out to celebrate and support him.

These are people who work from a totalitarian playbook. Do we want to keep going on about fascism? Are we sick of it? Do we just do a thing of what to look out for while we wait for perhaps some more divided government after the next two years? If it seems likely that the Democrats will get the Senate back, there'll be many more Republican seats at issue rather than Democrats like it was this time. We won't know for at least a week if the Democrats have the House. It's a possibility that this could be the trifecta, in which case people have to work within civil society or at the local level. There's a great deal happening at the local level.

Katya Rogers: My feeling is thinking about 2016 compared to now. Remember we spoke to Masha Gessen and they gave us this roadmap, like how to survive what we were going to go through. The courts will not save us, all these things. The lying is the point. It was like, "Okay, we'll just hold on to these instructions. We can make it through four years, and then we're back to normal." Now I feel like the Biden four years was a post-pandemic blip. This country is on a trajectory and it's a serious realignment and we can't think we're the normal ones. They're the people who are taking us off track and we'll just get back on track. This is the track.

Brooke Gladstone: Certainly, there's a possibility that we are on an anti-democratic trajectory and our institutions are so profoundly weakened that that system is in decline, but we don't know. We really don't know.

Micah Loewinger: I'm quite frightened that it is.

Katya Rogers: Just how do we cover, how do we filter stories? What's our frame? I remember I said exactly that. What's our-- I'm certain we'll find our correct. I didn't even listen back to the 2016 pod we did the day after. I remember saying, I feel confident that we'll find the right frame and we'll be able to tell this story well. Honestly, if this is a realignment, if this is as dramatic as it feels, I'm not even sure what the frame is now.

Brooke Gladstone: I think we can't know. I think we have to take it day by day.

Katya Rogers: I love when you say that. I love when you say that.

Brooke Gladstone: We're living in history. We don't have a roadmap, but we never have. The show has changed so much when Bush v. Gore happened, we've just seen lots and lots of changes. I think in the end, we keep talking about the messages that are out there, how they get out there and hope that we can make a contribution.

Micah Loewinger: Again, we can't predict the future, but I don't know that we're going to see a Trump bump again. I think it could be isolated to maybe the New York Times. I'm sure some substacks will go gangbuster. I'm sure some TikTok accounts and podcasts will get a whole bunch of new subscribers, but I don't know.

Katya Rogers: Yes, I fear the mass switching off.

Brooke Gladstone: I don't know. I mean, half the country didn't want Kamala and they wanted Trump, half the country doesn't want Trump and they want a majoritarian democracy, which involves really tweaking the system, electoral college, blah, blah, blah. There's still a lot of people out there who hopefully aren't just looking for confirmation, although we provided plenty of that from our position in Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn.

Micah Loewinger: This is going to sound so trivial, but as I was watching the results come in last night, I saw that Mark Robinson lost his race, and I thought to myself, maybe journalism still matters a little bit. Maybe a really good investigative story can really take down a politician. Not Donald Trump. He's impervious, but maybe it's a sign that good information finds its intended audience some of the time. I know, sorry, that's absolutely pathetic.

Brooke Gladstone: No, what you've been saying is that we don't serve a purpose anymore. I don't--

Micah Loewinger: I'm not saying we don't serve a purpose. I really want to stress that I think that the need for information, good information, is as high as ever. I think we're all in complete agreement. The need for great reporting on the upcoming Trump administration is absolutely-

Brooke Gladstone: Paramount.

Micah Loewinger: -paramount. I just fear that the business model that supports it and the trust that powers it are falling apart. It's so upsetting for me to scroll on TikTok or listen to a podcast, and what I'm hearing is mainstream journalism filtered through people who present themselves as a foil to mainstream media. The source of good information is required to fuel everything, but we're just somehow people have just completely lost faith in it, and it really scares me.

Brooke Gladstone: You spend a lot of time on social media. Thank God someone has to. People are getting their information from everywhere. A lot of generational difference, but everybody is existing in the world. I don't know what else we can do. It's not like we have the answers. We know how to do this thing, tell the truth, try to contextualize it, and send it out into the world like a message in a bottle that you throw off the side of a rowboat. That is our role. We can do it differently. We can see what message resonates, but we don't run a campaign. We don't. We're just trying to be honest brokers.

Micah Loewinger: Yes. I think the best we can do is just affirm the truth and reality to the best of our ability to the people that we reach.

Brooke Gladstone: What do we do this week?

Micah Loewinger: I think we should talk about Joe Rogan.

Brooke Gladstone: Okay. That's certainly something we can do this week. Didn't Trump call him a hero or the greatest of the great or something like that?

Micah Loewinger: Yes, I think that his endorsement meant something. It's impossible to know if it won him the election, but I think Joe Rogan is emblematic of a new media environment that is so potent, that is so easily swayed by Trump's lies.

Brooke Gladstone: I was thinking. I was hesitating because I know you're sick to death of the guy, Micah.

Katya Rogers: I know what you're going to say.

Micah Loewinger: Stephen Miller. Right?

Brooke Gladstone: No. There was an amazing story about what Elon Musk stood to lose if Kamala Harris won. That probably Twitter would go or X would go just down the drain, ultimately. There were a bunch of other sorts of possibilities for him in a Trump administration, not just as the Commissioner of Efficiency or whatever position you're inventing for him, but a lot of business stuff.

Micah Loewinger: Yes, all those government contracts.

Brooke Gladstone: Yes. I think it's a useful context for people to understand why he was willing to throw so much money into this campaign, massive quantities. The men of Trump or something. Maybe we do it that way. J.D. Vance, who knows.

Katya Rogers: J.D. Vance is a creation of the media. We talked about that on the show.

Brooke Gladstone: Absolutely.

Micah Loewinger: Absolutely. Yes.

Katya Rogers: It's funny. It's like Kamala-- it's like even looking at it now, it's like just hours have passed, and that seems like a world that was like a million years ago. Tim Walz, like a traditional-- like a guy. Just a guy.

Brooke Gladstone: We hardly knew ye.

Katya Rogers: We hardly knew ye.

Micah Loewinger: One thought I was having. I don't know if this will work for the show is what Elon Musk and Joe Rogan, I think, have in common is they're both champions of the marketplace of ideas. They both presented an image of free speech, which is, "We'll just hear from all sides, and the good things will rise to the top." That's what Joe Rogan does on his show.

Katya Rogers: It's quote-unquote that marketplace of ideas thing. They don't really.

Brooke Gladstone: Another thing they have in common is that they traffic in an enormous number of lies and misrepresentations.

Micah Loewinger: Absolutely. They both tilted their marketplaces for Donald Trump. At the end of the day, this radical neutrality thing was a farce, whether or not they knew it. Ripe for exploitation, whether they knew it, and not honest.

Brooke Gladstone: They always knew it.

Micah Loewinger: What have we hit on or not hit on in this conversation that we think we need to touch?

Katya Rogers: I'll just say, like one motivational thought. I'm really glad that we have the show, as ever.

Brooke Gladstone: I know.

Katya Rogers: So lucky. It's such a privilege.

Micah Loewinger: Not to be a cornball about it, but I would-- it's hard not to wake up this morning, see the popular vote the way it was, and not feel like the world's just completely turned upside down, and not feel like the truth doesn't matter anymore or whatever hysterical thought you want--

Katya Rogers: It mattered to half the country.

Micah Loewinger: It mattered to half the country, but a little less than half the country, potentially. I don't know. I was posting on social media, like, "How are you feeling?" On our socials? We were getting a lot of responses. A lot of them were negative, but maybe this is an opportunity to lean into our show being a community for people, a celebration of good journalism, a belief in the truth to our best ability to understand it and report it. Could we say let us know what you want us to cover, email us, tell us how you're feeling. I don't know. I'd love to do a show where we collect how our listeners are hearing and make this a little bit more of a dialogue.

Katya Rogers: We could just say if anyone listening to this now does have something they want us to consider or talk about or just want to emote, record it on your phone, send it to onthemedia@wnyc.org.

Brooke Gladstone: Go ahead, record your voice memo and send it to onthemedia@wnyc.org.

Micah Loewinger: Onthemedia@wnyc.org.

Brooke Gladstone: You guys out there need to do it fast because we only have two days to put together this show.

Katya Rogers: Let's wrap it up. We're going to make a show.

Micah Loewinger: Sounds good. All right.

Brooke Gladstone: Okay.

Katya Rogers: Okay.

Brooke Gladstone: Bye.

Katya Rogers: Bye.

 

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