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David Gilbert: More and more people doing this thing where they're just asking questions. By just talking about it, they are boosting signals.

Micah Loewinger: After the Baltimore Bridge collapse and the failures at Boeing, what are the real issues being drowned out by the just asking questions crowd? From WNYC in New York, this is On The Media, I'm Micah Loewinger. Also on this week's show, NBC's hiring and firing of Ronna McDaniel is just the latest swing of the revolving door between politics and media.

Michael Socolow: There's Donna Brazile, George Stephanopoulos, Jen Psaki. It's a very common practice. The real issue is the role of independent journalism in a democracy. It's not Ronna McDaniel.

Micah Loewinger: Plus, Calvin Trillin reflects on changing tides in journalism.

Calvin Trillin: I don't think very many people in my cohort work up and said, " I want to be a reporter." Watergate might have changed that a bit.

Micah Loewinger: It's all coming up after this.

Brooke Gladstone: From WNYC in New York, this is On The Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: Micah Loewinger. At 1:29 AM on Tuesday, disaster struck.

Reporter 1: In the US city of Baltimore, examining the data recorder from the ship that brought down a bridge killing six people. Inspectors are also looking at the twisted remains of the Francis Scott Key Bridge as they try to determine how and why the incident occurred.

Micah Loewinger: Within hours of the collapse, as rescue crews were still searching for survivors and answers, conspiracy theories were already spreading on X, Telegram, and the conservative media.

Reporter 2: The ship involved in the collapse of the bridge is a Singaporean-flagged container but of course, you've been talking a lot about the potential for wrongdoing or potential for foul play, given the wide open border.

Speaker 8: I'm no expert on what's going on on the seas but all I would say is, is that if you talk to employers in America, they'll tell you that filling slots with employees who aren't drug ailed is a very huge problem.

Speaker 9: I don't mean to say that because Maersk has this new DEI push, people likely died in Baltimore this morning but I do mean to say there's a pattern here.

Speaker 10: Once you allow that woke thing, and I'm not saying this has anything to do with that specifically, but once you will decide, we won't hire the best of the best to to build our planes or build our bridges or build our buildings or our roads or whatever else, then bad things are going to happen.

David Gilbert: Before news organizations have a chance to publish anything that has been fact-checked, these guys are posting post after post after post on X and getting millions and millions of views.

Micah Loewinger: David Gilbert, a Wired reporter covering disinformation, has been tracking the conservative media and online chatter.

David Gilbert: They will try and seek out an angle to push the narrative that diversity is a bad thing and is hurting American society. It's a knee-jerk Pavlovian response at this point to whatever happens in the news.

Micah Loewinger: Similar to the bridge-related misinfo, partisan actors have glommed onto an alarming string of Boeing airplane malfunctions.

David Gilbert: It kind of all kicked off earlier this year when part of a Boeing-built plane, Alaska Airlines flight just flew off the plane.

Reporter 3: You see the video there of that massive hole. It appears that an entire panel on the side of the plane was ripped off in midair.

David Gilbert: Planes having to turn around in midair.

Reporter 4: Just 10 seconds after flight 8:30 from Sydney to San Francisco took to the air, video by plane spotter New York Aviation got clear images of fluid spewing from the plane.

David Gilbert: We've seen a wheel falling off a plane as it took off.

Reporter 5: A new word for Boeing after a Delta flight lost a wheel just as it was about to take off this weekend.

David Gilbert: Pilots losing control of the plane mid-journey.

Reporter 6: Chaos inside the cabin after a technical problem on board this Boeing 787 Dreamliner caused it to suddenly drop.

Micah Loewinger: Once again, without clear answers, Fox News capitalized on the fear and confusion.

Reporter 7: Boeing seemed to be particularly interested in sustainability and DEI. Does that come at the cost of something? I don't know but these are the kinds of questions that have to be answered in this investigation.

Micah Loewinger: America's most popular podcast interviewer posed a similar question.

Joe Rogan: How is all this DEI stuff getting into airplanes?

Micah Loewinger: Joe Rogan in conversation with right-wing activist James Lindsay in mid-March.

James Lindsay: Yes, isn't that scary as hell? We see all this DEI stuff at Boeing. We see all these problems. It's cutting corners. It's locked in by this ESG DEI stuff. That's it.

David Gilbert: We are seeing more and more people doing this thing where we're just asking questions or I'm just raising this possibility. They're not endorsing a conspiracy, but by just talking about it, they are boosting signals to suggest that there could be something else here. That conspiratorial mindset is becoming more and more pervasive, it seems.

Micah Loewinger: We've seen a similar rhetorical feint from Elon Musk, who shared anti-DEI posts on X that suggested a female pilot was to blame for the Alaska Airlines door debacle, despite the fact that she landed the plane without anyone getting hurt and that Boeing took responsibility for the faulty aircraft.

Elon Musk: Look, I'm saying we should not lower standards. That's it.

Micah Loewinger: Musk in conversation with journalist Don Lemon earlier this month.

Don Lemon: Do you believe that women and minority pilots are inherently less intelligent and less skilled than white male pilots?

Elon Musk: No, I'm just saying that we should not lower the standards for them.

Don Lemon: Okay, but there's no evidence that standards are being lowered when it comes to the airline industry.

Elon Musk: You've repeatedly said that there's no evidence that standards are being lowered and watched the replies showing all the evidence that it is.

Don Lemon: Replies though, on social media or on Twitter are not necessarily fact and evidence. That's people's opinion.

David Gilbert: The other argument is that in Boeing's factories, their embrace of DEI has meant that the quality of the work that they're producing has gone down. Again, there's no evidence to suggest the link between hiring more diverse employees and a drop in production values.

Micah Loewinger: On the far-right web, actual problems are explained away with cheap, racist memes. Production values at Boeing are obviously lower than they should be but thanks to some actual journalism, we know that the real causes include a pattern of lobbying, deregulation, and ignored warnings. This week there were consequences.

Reporter 8: We've got a major management shakeup at Boeing. Dave Calhoun will be resigning from the position of CEO at the end of the year.

Reporter 9: Today, the CEO of Boeing stepped down. Either that or they never installed the bolts that keep him in the boardroom.

Micah Loewinger: Katya Schwenk is a reporter at The Lever, an online investigative outlet. She says that Dave Calhoun was brought in as CEO in 2020 after the devastating crashes of two Boeing planes killed nearly 350 people. His mandate was to reform the company, but that was called into question after the door flew off that Alaska Airlines flight.

Katya Schwenk: Federal regulators' audit of Boeing in the weeks since that time have found pretty serious quality control problems at Boeing as well as its suppliers. Now we're seeing this leadership shakeup.

Micah Loewinger: One supplier is a major Boeing contractor, Spirit Aerosystems, which helped manufacture that Alaska Airlines plane. A couple of months ago, Schwenk broke a story about serious safety concerns at Spirit that were brought up by employees.

Katya Schwenk: In January, we began looking not just at Boeing, but also at Spirit, because at that time Spirit had confirmed that they had made the body of that plane.

Micah Loewinger: The National Transportation Safety Board's investigation into exactly what went wrong is still ongoing but we do know that when the plane first arrived at Boeing's factory from Spirit Aerosystems, there were some issues with the rivets. When Boeing employees removed the door to fix the issue, they replaced it without all the necessary bolts.

Katya Schwenk: We found in federal court records in a lawsuit that had been ongoing that employees at Spirit had raised serious issues, serious concerns about quality control at the company. They had alleged a culture of retaliation. Workers in these records said that they had been told to misrepresent quality control issues at the company in the manufacturing process. The FAA documented similar quality control issues in its audit, and I think more details of what those look like will eventually become public.

Micah Loewinger: There's an interesting story behind Spirit because it used to be part of Boeing. Why was it split off?

Katya Schwenk: Spirit was once a key division of Boeing. It was Boeing's Wichita division. In 2005, Spirit was spun off, these factories in Wichita were spun off into their own company, Spirit Aerosystems. They were sold to a private equity firm. Boeing made some money off of the sale, and the private equity firm that invested in Spirit made millions, and Spirit over the next decade expanded significantly.

At the same time, Boeing lost key oversight ability of Spirit. Boeing has had a pattern over the last couple of decades of similar kinds of outsourcing, taking key parts of production, manufacturing, and maintenance and moving them to other companies. Now, over the last few weeks, Boeing has said it's in talks to reacquire Spirit. I think the history there is really just emblematic of what has happened to Boeing over the last couple of decades.

Micah Loewinger: You broke the story about the Spirit court records before other more well-resourced outlets. How did you get there first?

Katya Schwenk: We just thought, "Oh, interesting, there's this other supplier that might be involved." Then we just dove right into the court documents and the public records, then went from there. As soon as I saw the kinds of testimony that had been shared by workers in that case, I knew that it was going to be an important story. I think that has remained so even as we've learned more about who bears exact responsibility for what happened in January.

Micah Loewinger: The documents that you uncovered, were a part of a case, a federal securities lawsuit filed by shareholders of Spirit, what exactly were they alleging?

Katya Schwenk: Spirit's shareholders last May, I believe, filed a lawsuit against the company. Spirit has had a history of somewhat public quality control and production issues. For example, in August of last year, Spirit announced that it found some issues with a part of the plane's pressure seal that caused delays in the rollout of a particular Boeing plane. When something like that happens, the stock price goes down.

Spirits shareholders in this lawsuit sued the company in which they have shares saying, "Spirit has known more about these defects and the quality control issues in this company than has been made public to shareholders." Essentially saying Spirit executives were defrauding us when they did make it clear that there were these issues at the company. Within that lawsuit, there is testimony by workers supporting this saying, "Yes, these defects were known about before they became public to shareholders, and we faced retaliation when we were speaking up about them."

Micah Loewinger: Social media has been just completely flooded with conspiracy theories about Boeing, but some of the safety concerns we've seen with their planes, likely stem from garden variety, not-so-sensational causes, lobbying, lack of regulation. Tell me about how Boeing has tried to influence lawmakers.

Katya Schwenk: I think lobbying is an important piece of this question of why are we seeing these quality control issues at Boeing. For instance, back in 2018, Boeing lobbied on a piece of legislation that would reduce the FAA's oversight in airplane certification. That legislation was eventually passed. The FAA outsources quite a lot of its certification oversight work to people who work for the company it is overseeing, what is called a designee program.

Intuitively, there seems to raise concerns about conflict of interests. The FAA does say that this is common practice in other aviation authorities. It would need potentially thousands of additional employees and quite a lot of money in order to do all of this work itself.

Micah Loewinger: Well, let me ask you about that. Doesn't Boeing want its planes to be safe? Why are they trying to skirt basic protections, the exact kind of protections that would have stopped them from getting into this hot water in the first place?

Katya Schwenk: What some argue and what has been documented over the years is Boeing's focus on short-term profits, making sure they're able to compete with rivals like Airbus. The company is often focused on getting off the planes quickly, making sure that they're not delayed by burdensome certification processes. That was why they're lobbying on that legislation to reduce the FAA's authority in that area. The argument is that they're getting caught up in this focus on short-term profits, short-term goals to the detriment of everything else.

Micah Loewinger: There's been a lot of reporting about Boeing's manufacturing, which moved from Washington State to South Carolina, and the culture change that happened as a result of this move. This came up in testimony from John Barnett, a former Boeing employee who worked at the company for 30 years and began filing whistleblower complaints to the FAA. He died a couple of weeks ago just after a deposition. What do we know about what happened?

Katya Schwenk: Yes. The story of John Barnett is really such a tragic one. This was a former Boeing quality manager. He resigned from the company several years ago, I believe in 2017. Ever since, he has been in a legal battle with Boeing, essentially saying, "You retaliated against me for raising some concerns about quality control and safety issues at the company." Things like issues with the oxygen tanks, he alleged that management was telling him to cut corners. He has been in this legal battle with Boeing for years.

The weekend that he died, he was giving depositions in this ongoing case and was found dead in his pickup truck by his legal team. It seems at this point that he died by suicide, although, there's still an ongoing investigation. His family has said that he was under quite a lot of stress and pressure with the ongoing case, with having to relive all of this for years.

Micah Loewinger: This really alarming sad death has stirred up even more conspiracy theories around Boeing, particularly after this report from Charleston's ABC affiliate in mid-March.

WCIV Reporter: A close family friend of Barnett says he predicted he might wind up dead, that a story could surface, that he killed himself, but he told her, "Don't believe it."

Micah Loewinger: This story has been catnip for much of the internet. Obviously, there's a lot about the case we don't know yet, but zooming out, what does all of this tell us about protections for aviation whistleblowers? How do these channels for raising alarm affect some of the safety and quality control concerns that we keep seeing in the news?

Katya Schwenk: People have pointed in the wake of Barnett's death to protections specifically for aviation whistleblowers, which is governed under a particular statute. They say that it really does not give whistleblowers the proper protection. That, because these sorts of cases are not well-resourced, they can drag on for years, like they did with Barnett's case. A judge in the case had accused Boeing of pushing it longer and longer, putting him under this kind of stress.

In the past too, the FAA has identified, there's often not a good way for aviation whistleblowers to communicate to federal authorities. It's something that federal regulators have said they're working to change.

Micah Loewinger: The people time and time again, who seemed to know the most about the issues with these manufacturing facilities are workers. I wonder if the kind of slow decline of the labor beat might help explain the lack of crucial coverage.

Katya Schwenk: Yes. The people who know this best are the workers, are the people doing this work day in and day out. If your sources are largely Boeing executives, they're not going to tell you what's going on. They might not even know what's going on on the factory floor. Building those kinds of connections is really important, and yes, absolutely. The decline of the labor beat has led to a real loss.

Micah Loewinger: Based on your reporting, what do you think news consumers should be looking out for as they follow the next beats of this story?

Katya Schwenk: I think it's important not to lose interest in the story because the next few months are going to be pretty critical. We're going to see if federal prosecutors take up the case. We're going to see if they reconsider Boeing's earlier deal to avoid criminal prosecution back from 2021. We're probably going to see some more revelations from the FAA. I really don't think the story is going anywhere.

Micah Loewinger: Katya, thank you very much.

Katya Schwenk: Thank you so much.

Micah Loewinger: Katya Schwenk is a journalist at The Lever. Coming up, the porous membrane separating politicos and pundits.

Brooke Gladstone: This is On the Media.

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Brooke Gladstone: This is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger. We just heard from a reporter at The Lever, a small investigative outlet founded and edited by veteran journalist David Sirota, who took a break from reporting to write speeches for the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign. Many like him have passed through the revolving door between politics and the political press, some more sensitively and ethically than others. This past week, former RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel was hired and swiftly fired from NBC News. Before she got the boot, McDaniel made the case for her new role at NBC on Meet the Press, in an interview with the network's own Kristen Welker.

Kristen Welker: Do you disagree with Trump saying he's going to free those who've been charged or convicted?

Ronna McDaniel: I do not think people who committed violent acts on January 6th should be freed.

Kristen Welker: He's been saying that for months. Ronna, why not speak out earlier? Why just speak out about that now?

Ronna McDaniel: When you're the RNC Chair, you take one for the whole team. Now I get to be a little bit more myself.

Micah Loewinger: Chuck Todd, former host of Meet The Press, spoke with Welker on air about that spot with McDaniel.

Chuck Todd: She is now a paid contributor by NBC News. I have no idea whether any answer she gave to you was because she didn't want to mess up her contract. She wants us to believe that she was speaking for the RNC when the RNC was paying for it.

Micah Loewinger: Then, MSNBC's Rachel Maddow entered the fray.

Rachel Maddow: You wouldn't hire a made man like a mobster to work at a DA's office. [laughs] You wouldn't hire a pickpocket to work as a TSA screener, and so I find the decision to put her on the payroll inexplicable.

Micah Loewinger: Just a day after the staff revolt, McDaniel's $300,000 contract was no more. Why exactly did NBC execs think hiring McDaniel was a good idea in the first place?

Michael Socolow: I believe that she had a personal relationship with the senior executive level at NBC News and that personal relationship played a major role in the hiring.

Micah Loewinger: Michael Socolow is a professor of communication and journalism at the University of Maine.

Michael Socolow: Specifically, what Max Tani reported in Semafor is that Ronna McDaniel and an NBC News Vice President worked together closely on the Republican debates. It sounds like they got to be good colleagues and trusted, and that's what led to the offer.

Micah Loewinger: Executives presumably also hoped that McDaniel could get them better insight into top Republicans, but that's a fraught enterprise when falsehoods are commonly held party positions.

Michael Socolow: The line that she crossed essentially was election denialism. It's not simple election denialism saying that Joe Biden was illegally or illegitimately elected through fraud, she actually participated by communicating with people in Michigan in the process of subverting the democracy, the democratic deliberation of the election of 2020.

It's the difference between if somebody were to hire just a political communicator from the Nixon administration, or if they hired somebody from the Nixon administration who had actually crossed the line into illegality and was headed to jail. It's kind of that line, if you will.

Micah Loewinger: In fact, MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell, who by the way, started his career in politics in the '80s as an aide to US Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan condemned the hiring of McDaniel this week saying it was in violation of the so-called Nixon rule. He explained it on his show.

Lawrence O'Donnell: There is an easy way to avoid the controversy NBC News has stumbled into. Don't hire anyone close to the crimes. That's what happened to the Nixon gang, the only comparable predecessors to the Trump gang. Only the Nixon speech writers who literally worked at a different building from the White House far away from the crimes were welcomed across the line.

Michael Socolow: Yes, I think that's a fair standard. If somebody did something that is legally actionable or even constitutionally questionable, I think that is a standard that should be evaluated and thought about.

Micah Loewinger: Media critic Jack Shafer this week made a nauseating short list of some of the most notable hires from politics to media. He notes that Fox News has hired among others, Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum, Mike Huckabee, Karl Rove, but there's also a long list of former political operatives working on other, let's say more reputable news outlets. To name a few, we've got Sarah Isgur, former Trump spokesperson was hired by ABC News in 2019, Obama advisor Van Jones rose to a huge profile at CNN.

Michael Socolow: Yes. There's Donna Brazile, George Stephanopoulos, James Carville, Symone Sanders, Jen Psaki. The list is essentially endless. It's a very common practice.

Micah Loewinger: These are all people that a news show could book for an interview or a panel. Why does CNN, or ABC, or MSNBC need to pay a former Trump spokesperson?

Michael Socolow: These people can get information from people that couldn't be gotten otherwise, and that's what you're actually paying for. Corey Lewandowski, the Donald Trump advisor was a talented and skilled political operative as much as a political communicator, and he latched onto Trump early. He had terrific access within the Trump sphere. He had got a job as a pundit for CNN after he had been charged with battery in an altercation with a reporter.

Micah Loewinger: It's one thing if you're paying David Axelrod, a chief strategist for Barack Obama, who's worked at CNN since 2015 to be a commentator, or you're paying Rick Santorum as CNN did to be a commentator. It's another, if you are paying somebody like Jen Psaki, Former White House Press Secretary to host a show. She's not just slinging takes, she's doing interviews, she's breaking down current events. Are we to believe that a former partisan whose job it was to spin the news can be really trusted to call out the spin?

Michael Socolow: Yes, we are to believe that because George Stephanopoulos is paid to do that on ABC News.

George Stephanopoulos: Former New Jersey governor, Chris Christie sat down with me for an exclusive interview, his first since dropping out of the presidential race.

Michael Socolow: I think an entire generation of TV news viewers has no idea that he worked for Bill Clinton 30 years ago and they actually see him as a journalist. I think this is one of the problems of where we are today versus where we were 30, 40 years ago. The accrued respect of somebody like an Edward R. Murrow, Walter Cronkite, a Chet Huntley, a David Brinkley, somebody who came up through the concept of news and news reporting, they wouldn't be tainted by these political operative questions or political communication, whether it's Bill Moyers or Diane Sawyer. I think you can go through a list of people who eventually did become respected journalists but came into the business through political communication.

Micah Loewinger: You mentioned Bill Moyers, who nowadays is this righteous truth teller, but before he joined CBS in the 1970s, he was doing the bidding of the Johnson administration.

Michael Socolow: That's correct. Moyers has talked about his role as a political communication specialist under Lyndon Johnson on everything from the advertisements that were ethically questionable. The very famous Daisy Ad, the Johnson campaign, basically accused Goldwater of being a nuclear madman, right up through Moyers arguing with the press about what was actually happening in Vietnam

Micah Loewinger: When he was a press secretary.

Michael Socolow: Correct. For instance, when Morley Safer in CBS News showed the American soldiers burning down a Vietnamese village, Moyers very famously tried to leak that Safer was some kind of communist.

Micah Loewinger: He said, "The irresponsible and prejudiced coverage of men like Peter Arnett and Morley Safer, men who are not American and who do not have the basic American interest at heart." Referring to journalists Arnett who was from New Zealand and Safer who's from Canada.

Michael Socolow: That's what he said in public. [laughs] In private, Moyers said a lot worse than that. Moyers has admitted his role in lying to the American public about the Vietnam War during the 1960s, and I think that's a very important standard to think about if you're hiring somebody for political communication. You could even look at Moyer's career since as penance for what he did. In other words, he took what he knowingly did as a White House press office aide, and he decided to attack it critically from the outside to make up for what he did.

Micah Loewinger: You also point to former Nixon speech writer, William Safire's hiring by The New York Times as an opinion columnist in 1973. It was treated as pretty controversial back then, right?

Michael Socolow: That's correct. Safire was a terrific speechwriter, and he was known for working with the Nixon administration and Agnew on the speeches that attacked the press

Agnew: In the United States today, we have more than our share of the nattering nabobs of negativism.

Michael Socolow: The hiring sparked a rebellion within The New York Times. People were very upset about it, especially reporters, and some of them went on the record against the hiring, but within a few years, Safire had won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary.

Micah Loewinger: Some of these big hires paved the way for the likes of Diane Sawyer, who worked on the Nixon campaign before becoming a juggernaut of ABC.

Michael Socolow: Interestingly, she stayed with Nixon after Nixon resigned, and was a real true loyalist, which made a lot of people very antsy when she was hired by CBS. People thought she was going to bring in that Nicksonian Republican perspective, but she worked with a lot of very respected journalists who had been at CBS a long time to shape the work that she was doing. She did make a conscious effort to remove her political perspective, and she did very well in establishing her journalistic reputation.

Micah Loewinger: Doesn't that prove that these people are capable of an evolution and that the original sin of working for an administration shouldn't mar you for the rest of your career?

Michael Socolow: These are very bright people. Let's be clear. They don't get these contracts unless they know how to work within organizations and know how to operate politically, whether it's Bill Moyers, whether it's Jen Psaki, and even Ronna McDaniel. You don't get to be the head of the RNC unless you can bring a lot of coalitions together, and you develop some confidence within your leadership. There's a larger question here, which is just because they can do it and they know how to do it, doesn't mean they necessarily do do it. Jen Psaki gets her MSNBC show and she just gives her opinion of the news.

Jen Psaki: Well, It's Monday everyone, the start of a new week. If you're looking at your own personal calendar, you might see some meetings, some appointments, maybe you're going to see some friends, maybe a grocery run if you have time. Let's just say the leading candidate for the Republican nominations calendar looks a little bit different.

Michael Socolow: That's very cheap and it'll draw ratings, but it's not reporting and it's not journalism.

Micah Loewinger: Clearly, there are some people who came from politics and had by and large, great careers in media. Where do you think the line should be?

Michael Socolow: I think the line should be established by professionalism. In other words, yes, you can come into journalism with a shadow over you from your political work, but if you demonstrate your independence, you'll be respected and get where you need to go. I'm thinking now somebody like Pete Williams, who was the Pentagon spokesman who translated into NBC News's military reporter, and did a wonderful job at that because he was clearly being a reporter. He was clearly breaking news, getting scoops, and acting independently for NBC News so quickly that people forgot he was a defense department spokesman. I think that's the standard.

Micah Loewinger: While ratings for all of these networks are going down, there seems to be a parallel trend in alternative media. I look at, for instance, Pod Save America.

Michael Socolow: Absolutely.

Micah Loewinger: One of the biggest left-wing podcasts and its company, Crooked Media, which is now host to many liberal progressive podcasts, it was created by former Obama aides. I look at Steve Bannon's War Room Podcast, one of the biggest right-wing podcasts.

Steve Bannon: This is the fight, all this nonsense, all this spin. They can't handle the truth.

Presenter: War room battleground.

Micah Loewinger: Here's a guy who's basically just bounced back and forth between political consulting running right bart, running campaigns, working in Trump's White House. Senator Ted Cruz and Matt Gaetz, they're still in office and they're already hosting their own podcasts. They're already pundits, so they have to be tapping into some kind of hunger out there.

Michael Socolow: The question that you're getting into now is the splintering and fracturing of the audience, in that we are empowered in a way we weren't to choose the news that confirms our bias already. We can choose a podcast like Joe Rogan or we can choose cable TV News channel like MSNBC or Fox News, and whoever actually appears there and gives us the information is secondary to the idea that we've already selected the information to come in through a filter that we want to see it.

The audience plays a major, major role in that sense, but even today, the number one most-watched broadcast journalist in the United States of America is somebody I almost never see anywhere. I'm not even sure if your show On The Media has ever profiled him.

Presenter: From ABC News, this is ABC World News Tonight with David Muir reporting tonight-

Michael Socolow: Why are about 9 million Americans a night tuning into David Muir on ABC News? His audience is three times larger than Fox News.

Micah Loewinger: You're saying people trust him because he's not a former political operative or because he is seen as a straight shooter.

Michael Socolow: I think he's seen as somebody who delivers information from the ABC News organization. It's not from the Democratic Party, it's not from the Republican Party. Whatever he's doing, it's enough to attract the largest broadcast journalism audience nightly in the United States of America.

Micah Loewinger: Ronna McDaniel is out because of a revolt within the newsrooms of MSNBC and NBC, et cetera. Is that how we start to correct this problem?

Michael Socolow: I think the Ronna McDaniel case is a tempest in a teapot. If you look at the NBC News President, Cesar Conde's memo, he says they're still going to go out and look for a Republican opinion maker who they can pay. It's not like the McDaniel case changes much. There's going to be this constant repetition and predictable cycles of outrage.

I think the animating impulse behind the hiring of McDaniel and behind the hiring of all these political commentators into journalism roles is that we audiences today the concept of journalism means tell me the information I already believe. The real issue we're discussing is the role of independent investigative journalism in a democracy. That's the real problem. It's not Ronna McDaniel.

Micah Loewinger: Michael, thank you very much.

Michael Socolow: Thank you.

Micah Loewinger: Michael Socolow is a professor of communication and journalism at the University of Maine.

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Micah Loewinger: Coming up, Calvin Trillin recounts his games of tic-tac-toe with a Chinatown chicken.

Brooke Gladstone: This is On the Media.

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Brooke Gladstone: This Is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger. The trend of politico turned TV pundit has been around since at least the middle of the last century, but it's accelerated in the last few years. To better understand how norms in American journalism have morphed over the past 60 years, we called up a writer whose career spans that shift. Calvin Trillin rose up in the ranks from a position at Time Magazine to a staff gig at The New Yorker in 1963 where he continues to contribute today.

Brooke Gladstone: He's published upwards of 20 books and he even made a name for himself on the late-night TV circuit.

Isaac: Calvin Trillin has been writing for The New Yorker magazine for many years. He also writes a syndicated column of humor and satire for newspapers across the country, and recently did a one-man show on Broadway. Would you welcome Calvin Trillin? Calvin. You went to Broadway.

Calvin Trillin: That was close. I was about half a block off, Isaac.

Brooke Gladstone: Trillin's trademark humility and dry humor shows up in all of his writings, whether it's a story about the invention of the Buffalo Chicken Wing or the Civil Rights Movement, or an old ditty about our political woes. Here's one he recited to Jon Stewart in 2008,

Calvin Trillin: I have a song called The Rhyme of the Ancient Candidate. One of the stanzas is houses, houses everywhere, abodes in the amount, no short-term memories involved in failing to keep counts.

Brooke Gladstone: I recently sat down with Trillin to discuss his career and his latest book, The Lede: Dispatches From A Life in the Press. Welcome to the show, bud.

Calvin Trillin: Thank you, bro.

Brooke Gladstone: You call yourself a collector of ledes. What do you like about them?

Calvin Trillin: Well, I think that a lede sets the tone for what's going to be written. There was a New Yorker editor named Robert Bingham, lovely man. He edited my stuff and also John McPhee's, and he always said that McPhee and Trillin start stories in the middle. It's sort of true. I think what he means is that we jumped on when the narrative was going. It's like a carousel turning and you run a couple of steps and then you jump on it.

Brooke Gladstone: I always thought that was the style of The New Yorker. People always said the best way to write for The New Yorker is to put the last paragraph on the top and the top paragraph at the end.

Calvin Trillin: I never knew that. I've typed out when I was thinking about it, a couple of ledes and there's one, it came to light because of a bad left turn. The funniest lede I ever come across is from I think Baton Rouge Advocate.

Brooke Gladstone: September 23rd, 2019.

Calvin Trillin: Here it is, "A veterinarian prescribed antibiotics Monday for a camel that lives behind an Iberville Parish truck stop after a Florida woman told law officers she bit the 600-pound animal's genitalia after it sat on her while she and her husband entered his enclosure to retrieve their deaf dog." For a while, I couldn't read that without bursting into laughter, particularly the deaf dog. I don't know why that always got me.

Brooke Gladstone: The telling detail. You've observed a number of things about this lede, how the reader is drawn in with a single unpunctuated sentence that starts slowly and gradually becomes an express train that whistles right by the local stops.

Calvin Trillin: Something like that was so funny in itself that I think the task was just to erect a little scaffolding to hold it. It's the deaf dog still that gets me.

Brooke Gladstone: I think you can never go wrong with Florida woman

Calvin Trillin: Florida woman is good too.

Brooke Gladstone: [laughs] In your career, you moved around a lot from beat to beat. Religion was your least favorite.

Calvin Trillin: This was when I was at Time. Time in those days practiced something called group journalism where people in the field would file long stories and then somebody in New York writing one of the sections like religion, education, politics, something like that, would compress that along with what he could steal from The New York Times and what he heard from the Washington Bureau, I think into 70 lines.

I was for a while, a floater, which meant when somebody was on vacation, I moved literally into his office. I always said when you sit down on his chair, instant omniscience comes with that. I did religion for a few weeks and then I was trying to get out and so I put alleged in front of any historical religious event that I mentioned.

Brooke Gladstone: The Alleged Birth of Jesus.

Calvin Trillin: I had that in there. The senior editor just crossed out the alleged. They were really used to smart Alex.

Brooke Gladstone: [laughs] Back in those days. I remember the novel of the same name as the role you had at Time Magazine then Floater that I thought your novel was hilarious. I remember that there was one editor who when you went into his office, he had his feet on his desk and all you could see were the soles of his shoes.

Calvin Trillin: That's right. He was known mainly for his ability to lean back at an angle. A voice appeared as if from some cave.

Brooke Gladstone: About group journalism, it had its pluses, I guess, but mostly minuses.

Calvin Trillin: The problem with it was that power over the story increased with distance from the story.

Brooke Gladstone: The reporter on the ground was the least powerful with regard to what appeared in its pages.

Calvin Trillin: Exactly. People used to say Time is a great place to work for a reporter as long as he doesn't read the magazine.

Brooke Gladstone: [laughs] Because if he does, he's going to have a heart attack or faint.

Calvin Trillin: Yes. Well, I remember the Freedom Rides, I was gone for a couple of weeks. It was exciting and sometimes scary.

Brooke Gladstone: People trying to desegregate public transportation.

Calvin Trillin: Buses mainly, and I filed a lot on it. The next week I was talking to one of the fact-checkers and she said, "What'd you think of our cover story on the Freedom Rides?" I said, "I thought it was very interesting. Did you get my file?"

[laughter]

Brooke Gladstone: You didn't even see any of your work in there. [laughs]

Calvin Trillin: It was hard to see it.

Brooke Gladstone: You dedicate part of your book to obituaries in The New York Times critic, Dwight Garner wrote, "I've known people to attend the funerals of people they've never met because word had spread that Trillin would be speaking in the manner that an NBA non-fan might attend a Knicks game solely because he'd heard that Chaka Khan would be singing the national anthem." Pretty good.

Calvin Trillin: I think he may be exaggerating a little bit.

Brooke Gladstone: I don't know. What's your approach to eulogizing?

Calvin Trillin: Well, I have a general approach to memorial services, which is that they last an hour or as close to it as they can get. That if someone asks to speak, don't let him speak. Keep it short. Don't talk about yourself.

Brooke Gladstone: Well sure, but in order to keep it short, you have to boil down what makes that person noteworthy or you need to find that hook.

Calvin Trillin: Yes. That is true. I think Murray Kempton's obituary, which I think I did for the Sunday Times Magazine, the first line--

Brooke Gladstone: I have it here. You wrote, "It would be surprising if the last gentleman turned out to be a newspaper reporter, but Murray Kempton, who may in fact have been the last gentleman definitely identified as a newspaper reporter on his tax forms."

Calvin Trillin: Yes, but I think that was the central issue for me with Murray Kempton.

Brooke Gladstone: It's funny, I'm going to admit here that I and my husband, Fred Kaplan, know you a little and love you a lot. Fred said the other day that the only two people he ever met who talked exactly as they wrote were you and Kempton. Now your style is deadpan and sort of sneakily hilarious. Kempton's was ornate.

Calvin Trillin: It was ornate, but also it's interesting that Fred said that because Kempton also had the habit, if you were on a story with him together, a trial or something in one of the breaks, it would sometimes audition for a line or observation. He was a wonderful gentleman. I think it was his great-grandfather who was something like the Arch Episcopal Bishop of Baltimore, and Murray would leave saying, "God bless." You could see that was in him somewhere.

Brooke Gladstone: He always said that he came from shabby gentility. Do you remember what happened in that defamation case against him?

Calvin Trillin: No.

Brooke Gladstone: A plaintiff accused him of defaming him. His name was Laskey, and the judge responded with a decision in Murray Kempton style that basically said that the offending article was so cryptic, contradictory, and hyperbolic that you couldn't tell whether it was defaming the guy or not. Therefore, case dismissed.

[laughter]

Calvin Trillin: I always said that Murray Kempton's columns required group parsing. You had to have more than one person to figure it out, but they were often eloquent. Also, he had another quality that I really admired. He was the opposite of someone who kicked somebody when he's down. That was true, even of mobsters and things like that.

Brooke Gladstone: I know. [laughs]

Calvin Trillin: I think Carmine "The Snake" Persico-- I think his view was that people were in the line they were, whether they were senators or mobsters for a variety of reasons, but the question was how they played the cards that they were dealt. He was willing to give everybody a break.

Brooke Gladstone: I'm wondering, in the course of compiling your book, whether you came to any sort of realizations about the development of journalism over the course of your career. In one essay you remarked about how rereading your work, you were surprised by what turned out to be true?

Calvin Trillin: [chuckles] Well, I do two things I guess. I try to write moderately serious journalism and I also write what The New Yorker used to call casuals. Short pieces that are meant to be funny. I was just talking about my theory that when there was a lot of angst on Wall Street and a falling stock market, and it was right around the time when these very exotic things like credit default swaps were being introduced, my theory was that the problem with Wall Street was that too many smart people were going to Wall Street.

The people in my era who went to Wall Street were the pleasant probably lacrosse player or something, not stupid, but not really that smart. Those people couldn't have gotten involved with credit default swaps because they couldn't do the math.

Brooke Gladstone: [laughs] Neither could a lot of people who did get involved with them.

Calvin Trillin: That's right. Then I got a couple of letters in the Times got letters saying, "That's a good theory." Sometimes when you're only joking, it's accidentally true.

Brooke Gladstone: What was your most notorious piece? Was it about a chicken?

Calvin Trillin: [laughs] It might have been about a chicken. By notorious, you mean?

Brooke Gladstone: I just remember the chicken that did arithmetic.

Calvin Trillin: Tic-tac-toe. I did enjoy taking people to Chinatown to play tic-tac-toe with the chicken because they would look at the arrangements and they would say, "But the chicken gets to go first."

Brooke Gladstone: [laughs]

Calvin Trillin: I'd say, "But he's a chicken"

[laughter]

Calvin Trillin: You're a human being. Surely there's some advantage in that. Then some of them would say, "I haven't played in years, the chicken plays every day."

Brooke Gladstone: [laughs] Do you have a favorite piece?

Calvin Trillin: I like the piece that I did around the time that Jimmy Carter selected as Attorney General Griffin Bill. I think it was called something like Remembrance of Moderates Past. It was about how people made the adjustment between the segregated days and politician.

Brooke Gladstone: Here's a quote, "I keep hearing about white people who say they've been working behind the scenes, A Black lawyer in New Orleans told me during the desegregation of public schools there in 1960, a time when the business and professional leadership in New Orleans stood silent while the city seemed to be taken over by a bunch of women in hair curlers screaming obscenities at six-year-olds. "Yes, sir." He said. "Must be getting mighty crowded back there behind the scenes."

Calvin Trillin: Yes. It turns out when the turn came that everybody was immoderate.

Brooke Gladstone: It's like all those people in the resistance during the Nazi invasion of France.

Calvin Trillin: That's right.

Brooke Gladstone: Was it your idea to write this compilation or did someone come to you?

Calvin Trillin: Well, I'm a veteran collector, recycler, I think some would say, and it was my idea. Random House said at first, why do I need to do it on the press that I could just do my favorite pieces or something like that. Turned out that a lot of my favorite pieces were about the press. Even though I still wasn't exactly sure why we were doing it, I said in the introduction that I thought my father had something to do with it.

I always assumed that my father's aspirations for me was that I become the president of the United States, and his fallback position was that I not become a ward of the county.

Brooke Gladstone: [laughs]

Calvin Trillin: Once, when the Kansas City School system stopped in spring, ran out of money, he sent my sister and me to [unintelligible 00:48:49] Secretarial School to learn how to type. That really wasn't done for boys. That was a girl's thing to learn how to type. Neither the president of the United States or ward of the county actually needs typing.

Brooke Gladstone: [laughs]

Calvin Trillin: I thought maybe he was pushing in direction of journalism. I think a lot of people in my era backed into journalism. The novel didn't work out or they were just being pressured to make a decision while they were working for a magazine. I don't think very many people in my cohort woke up and said, "I want to be a reporter." I think maybe Watergate might have changed that a bit.

Brooke Gladstone: Such a pleasure talking to you.

Calvin Trillin: Well, thank you.

Brooke Gladstone: Thank you so much. Calvin Trillin is longtime writer for The New Yorker and author of the new book, The Lede: Dispatches From a Life in the Press.

Micah Loewinger: That's it for this week's show. On the Media is produced by Eloise Blondiau, Molly Rosen, Rebecca Clark-Callender, and Candice Wang with help from Shaan Merchant.

Brooke Gladstone: Our technical directors, Jennifer Munson. Our engineers this week were Andrew Nerviano and Brendan Dalton. Katya Rogers is our executive producer. On the Media is a production of WNYC Studios. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger.

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