Micah Loewinger: Hey. It's Micah. Before we get into the show, I want to talk to you about something really important. December is the month of giving and receiving and I want to tell you a bit about what I've worked on this year, thanks to your support. I reported on my fraught experience as a federal witness in the Oath Keepers' January 6 trial. I did an episode all about the science of sound featuring Robert Krulwich. There was my piece about the experiments in worker-owned media and more recently, my piece about the first boom and bust cycle of the podcast economy.

The deep dive into Leonard Leo, the midweek podcasts, Brooke's big essays, everything you hear each week on the show takes time and money. Not to mention a whole lot of teamwork from producers, Eloise, Molly, Becca, and Candice along with our audio wiz Jen and our fearless EP, Kat. Look, it's no secret that it's a bit rough out there for high-quality journalism but the stakes right now couldn't be any higher with the presidential election just around the corner. For better or worse, media coverage is probably going to play a big role in who ends up getting elected, and next year, we plan to be even more ambitious.

Please, head to onthemedia.org/donate to keep our essential unique brand of journalism alive and thriving. When you donate, you'll be able to choose from some amazing gifts. Brooke has a new batch of her famous hand-crocheted hats to keep you warm. We're also offering OTM's first ever t-shirt which is yours for $12 a month but it goes away on January 1st. Don't wait to support our show. Head to onthemedia.org/donate. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Enjoy the show.

Brooke Gladstone: From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone. With 2023 swiftly coming to a close, many have turned their political sites on the coming new year with the November calendar boasting a presidential election. Grab those tarot cards, Yarrow stocks, look it up, or magic eight balls because America's quadrennial guessing game is underway.

Female Speaker 1: A turn now to a new polling of a hypothetical 2024 election matchup that shows Donald Trump beating President Joe Biden in seven swing states. Trump holds a four-point lead over Biden in Arizona, a six-point lead in Georgia, four points in Michigan, three points in Nevada, two points in Pennsylvania, four points in Wisconsin.

Male Speaker 1: According to the Decision Desk HQ on the general election fraud, Trump is topping Biden by 2.3 percentage points overall.

Brooke Gladstone: Polls and polls and polls, the prime ingredient in horse race coverage even as we media critics clamor for the nourishment of policy reporting, but it cannot be denied. Biden does face a challenge known to many and incumbent a public pretty ticked about the present and worried about the future of the next four years at least.

Male Speaker 2: A new CBS News poll is showing most Americans disapprove of President Biden's handling of the Israel-Hamas war, with few thinking his administration's actions are bringing things closer to a peaceful resolution.

Male Speaker 3: It's not just the war. 7 in 10 Americans say they disapprove of the president's handling of inflation and immigration at the border.

Female Speaker 2: CNBC out with a new all-America economic survey, this one looking at the Biden administration losing some support heading into election year.

Male Speaker 4: President Biden, terrible approval numbers no matter how you look at it.

Brooke Gladstone: Of course, Biden's campaign woes are very different from his projected opponents. In fact, it's not clear his projected opponent would concede any woes because look at the numbers.

Female Speaker 3: Donald Trump is defending his recent declaration to be dictator as he still holds a commanding lead in the polls.

Male Speaker 5: A new Siena College/New York Times polling that shows Republican voters favoring him by 54 to 17% over his nearest rival, Ron DeSantis.

Male Speaker 6: There were 26 different demographic groups that got broken down. You know how many of those groups Donald Trump didn't lead amongst?

Male Speaker 5: No.

Male Speaker 6: Zero.

Ruth Igielnik: What we've seen in our data so far is that there's an increased share of people who say that Trump has committed serious federal crimes and in fact, an increased part of that group says that they're likely to continue to vote for Trump.

Brooke Gladstone: Ruth Igielnik is the staff editor for News Surveys at the New York Times. She was part of the team that crafted a New York Times/Siena College poll that came out this week.

Ruth Igielnik: Other polling organizations have compared the four different possible trials and there's no question that the two trials around election interference, the January 6th trial, and the Georgia trial are seen as more impactful, more meaningful for voters overall and for Trump voters. We definitely saw in our data and in conversations with voters that, for example, the case in Florida around the documents at Mar-a-Lago is far less concerning for a lot of Trump voters in particular.

Brooke Gladstone: The polls show Trump beating Biden by two points and Biden's approval on Israel is especially low, especially with the young people.

Ruth Igielnik: There's no question that in our data across age groups, we saw low approval for Biden on how he's handling Israel, from young voters all the way to the top. We did ask who voters trust more on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and there we saw voters saying that they trust Trump by a pretty decent margin to handle the situation in Israel over Biden, and particularly young voters by nearly 20 points were more likely to say they trusted Trump than Biden. Older voters by about seven points said that they trusted Biden over Trump, but the public overall said that they trust Donald Trump more to handle a conflict in Israel.

Brooke Gladstone: Let's talk about the way a question is framed because it can mean anything and it can mean everything. Were there debates about the wording of any questions in these particular polls?

Ruth Igielnik: In any poll, but in particular, this poll, we wanted to be very careful and conscientious in how we worded the questions because we know that the conflict between Israel and Gaza right now is very complicated, and even that choice of words I had now is really complicated. We had to really think carefully about when we're saying Gaza, when we're saying Palestinians, when we're saying Israel, when we're saying the Israeli government.

Each of those decisions was very, very careful and with any poll, we spend a lot of time thinking about question wording with two main goals. The first is that a question feels fair to anybody who's being asked it. We want to represent every single voter in America, no matter their opinion, no matter where they sit on the political spectrum. That means that every voter in America should be able to look at these questions and say, I see myself in those answer choices, there's an answer choice there that represents how I feel. That requires a lot of debate.

The second thing that we spend a lot of time doing is trying to ensure that the questions are interpreted the same by everybody who's answering them. Oftentimes with polls, we can get something what's called measurement error where we think we're measuring something but different respondents interpret it different ways. We again, spend a lot of time being very careful and very precise.

Brooke Gladstone: Can you give me an example?

Ruth Igielnik: Yes. We wanted to understand this idea of a ceasefire. If we just asked, are you in favor of a ceasefire? We might get a lot of measurement error there. Some people think a ceasefire is all the fighting stopping now. Some people might think a ceasefire is the fighting stopping as soon as let's say the hostages are released, or any number of conditions.

Brooke Gladstone: Or stopping forever with no condition.

Ruth Igielnik: Or stopping forever, right, with no conditions. Just asking ceasefire is too broad a word that lots of people have different interpretations. For me, as an analyst of polls, I would know how to interpret that data because everybody's bringing their own perspective to it. Instead, we had a forced choice option, either Israel should stop its campaign in order to protect against civilian casualties, even if not all the hostages are released, or Israel should continue its military campaign until all the hostages are released, even if it means civilian casualties in Gaza might continue.

Now, a lot of people might disagree with those answer choices and I think it's very reasonable to disagree with those as the only two answer choices but in doing that, we actually saw that the public is fairly split on that question, which I think is interesting. I think a good survey question does split the public more evenly.

Brooke Gladstone: Did you consider having more than two choices?

Ruth Igielnik: We did. We debated that pretty heavily and there were times where we got close to having that as options. In the end, it makes it a lot more difficult to analyze the data, the more options that you provide. Our goal here was this as a first volley into these things and we find something interesting, we can ask additional questions and try to tease apart those groups as we go.

Brooke Gladstone: How many people did you poll overall?

Ruth Igielnik: We polled a little over 1,000.

Brooke Gladstone: A typical number, but on the smaller side, right?

Ruth Igielnik: This is actually a current fallacy I think of polling in an issue for debate. Some polling is traditionally around 1,000 adults or voters nationwide. There's a statistical principle called the central limit theorem and that says, when you get to a certain sample size, you have less variation over time, and 1,000 is around that sample size for US adults. While there are a lot of online surveys these days that have much larger sample sizes, I always stress to reporters, a larger sample size isn't necessarily better. In fact, you can get a pretty good result out of 1,000 voters and it's not that much better to have a lot more.

Brooke Gladstone: Do you regard the recent poll you helped to craft as an election poll or an issue poll?

Ruth Igielnik: We had questions that were with the goal of trying to understand where the electorate stands right now on the upcoming election but we also took an opportunity in this poll to really dive deeply on two issues. On the situation in the Middle East and then on Trump's trial so this one kind of straddles both worlds.

Brooke Gladstone: Which one presents more problems in trying to get an accurate result?

Ruth Igielnik: I think they're both very challenging to get an accurate result, let me say that to start. Election polling is really difficult because we are trying to predict a population that doesn't exist yet, we're trying to predict who is likely to vote, and that's a group of people that don't know if they're going to vote, they can change their minds, there are a lot of things that happen between now and then and so that is a very challenging feat. Issue polling is also really challenging for a different set of reasons. Issue polling the challenge is more of that question development challenge.

Brooke Gladstone: Since we're going into an election year, Ruth, I think we could all use a refresher on polling literacy so let's run through a few things that listeners might want to look out for. First of all, how accurate are polls? I'm guessing it's harder to get people on the phone these days and many who do answer the phone aren't necessarily interested in responding to a pollster.

Ruth Igielnik: Yes. I think it's reasonable to be concerned about poll accuracy. One of the things that we in the polling community track is the average error of polls over time so how far election polls are off from the final results, and that's actually getting smaller, over time the polling results are getting closer to the actual election result with certainly some outliers, some elections polling fares worse. For example, we've historically seen that polling is less accurate when Donald Trump is on the ballot than when he's not. For example, in 2022, The New York Times/Siena College poll, we in all of the races we polled we were within a couple of points of the final result. We were very accurate.

Brooke Gladstone: Then again, a couple of points in a country so divided can make all the difference.

Ruth Igielnik: Yes, you're absolutely right. One thing I really struggle with is that polling is really a blunt instrument and it's not always a great instrument for measuring elections. To be able to get within two points feels pretty good but it's obviously not good enough to truly show us the outcome. You asked specifically about getting people on the phone and it's a really good question because it is something that we as an industry struggle with. I remember when I started in the polling world response rates meaning the rate of people who respond and answer a poll were around 10%. That number is now around 1% or 2% of people actually responding so it's very low.

Brooke Gladstone: Yet you say polls are more accurate now than they used to be.

Ruth Igielnik: One of the things that we and others in the industry do are what we call non-response studies. We try to understand if people who don't respond to polls are fundamentally different than people who do respond to polls. That's really where the difference happens. If the people who respond to polls are different in their attitudes and opinions, then there's cause for concern. What we're seeing so far is the people who do respond to polls even if it's a small sliver of the population, they're not different in their attitudes and opinions than people who don't respond to polls. We're also exploring other methods beyond just phone polling. People have moved more towards online polling or some kind of hybrid between phone and online polling.

Brooke Gladstone: Those aren't randomized, right?

Ruth Igielnik: Correct, exactly. Then there is a third category that a lot of pollsters have explored and this is this idea of an online poll that is recruited over the phone. They contact people over the phone and then they bring them into an online panel so it is random, and these are what some people call probability-based panels. There's a lot of smart people in the polling industry who are trying to answer these questions because it's a concern for all of us. Making sure that we are still accurate and representative is the most important thing to us.

Brooke Gladstone: We had sociologist Zeynep Tufekci on the show back in 2020 and she compared election forecasts to weather forecasts. When it comes to election forecasts. She said--

Zeynep Tufekci: There's a lot of evidence and reporting that shows that the forecast itself affects the outcome. That's where they differ from weather forecasts. If I don't take an umbrella, the rain is not going to happen just to spite me, whereas if I think something's more likely to happen and act in a particular way, I may actually be changing the odds it's going to happen.

Ruth Igielnik: There's a particularly interesting overlap between people who are interested in election forecasting and interested in weather forecasting in the polling community and I find it hilarious. I think it's a good question to ask. I would draw a distinction between polls and averages of polls and then what some people layer on top of it which are these probabilistic models that suggest how likely someone is to win.

I'll give an example. Biden is down by two and then they say, and that means that Biden has a 20% chance of winning. It's that chance of winning that I think is really challenging for people to interpret. You can imagine in 2016 when models said, for example, Hillary had a 70% chance of winning a lot of people mentally rounded that up to 100% and then felt that she was guaranteed to win. I think a lot of the behavioral changes that came out of this weren't just because of polling but were because of these probabilistic models that were layered on top of polling.

Brooke Gladstone: Behavioral changes meaning?

Ruth Igielnik: If people decided to not vote or there was some reporting that people were choosing to switch their votes, any of those kinds of decisions they were often because of this idea that they thought somebody had a 70% chance of winning and so their behavior didn't make a difference in that outcome.

Brooke Gladstone: Whereas the 30% chance of losing is still a big chance?

Ruth Igielnik: Huge.

Brooke Gladstone: [chuckles] If there were a 30% chance of rain you would ponder over bringing an umbrella?

Ruth Igielnik: Yes.

Brooke Gladstone: What are the top three things you'd like news consumers to keep in mind when interpreting poll responses?

Ruth Igielnik: One, don't focus on any single poll. Any single poll could be an outlier so looking at multiple polls over time is hugely valuable. The second thing is be smart about what polls you're consuming. The metric I like to use to actually assess whether we think a poll is good quality or not really doesn't require any methodological understanding, it's just whether or not a poll is being transparent about their methods.

If you look at some of these higher quality pollsters they will go deep and explain their methods and everything that they're doing. That's what we're looking for. A lot of these lower quality pollsters they're putting out a short couple-sentence statement that explains what they found without a lot of information about how they did it. That should be a red flag that that might not be a poll that you should give a lot of credence to.

Number three is to not ignore poll results that you don't like. That actually means you should probably pay more attention to it. For example, with our Battleground Polls last month, we had a lot of people push back on the idea that Biden was losing and he was particularly losing among young voters and Black and Hispanic voters. That was a poll result that a lot of people didn't like, it wasn't necessarily representative of the people around them. At the same time. That's a real change that's happening in this country and many polls are showing that not just us and so I think it's good to pay attention to those results, not ignore them, especially if they are happening across multiple polls.

Brooke Gladstone: Ruth, thank you very much.

Ruth Igielnik: Thank you so much for having me, this has been great.

Brooke Gladstone: Ruth Igielnik is the staff editor for new surveys of The New York Times. Coming up, that feeling when you really want to avoid the news. Given that, hey, thanks for listening. This is On the Media. This is On the Media I'm Brooke Gladstone. Interpreting polls is tough even for the most media literate. There can be contradictory and wrong. Their ubiquity may be one of the reasons so many of us when faced with the news choose to turn away but certainly not the only reason and certainly not these days.

Benjamin Toff is an assistant professor at the Hubbard School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Minnesota and co-author of the book, Avoiding the News: Reluctant Audiences for Journalism. Welcome to the show, Benjamin.

Benjamin Toff: Thank you so much, great to be here.

Brooke Gladstone: You and your co-authors interviewed about 100 people across three countries, and then supplemented those interviews with surveys. There are people who consume news less than once a month, right?

Benjamin Toff: Right. In some countries, it's a relatively small group like 1% or 2% in, say, Denmark or Finland but in the United States and the UK it was more like 7% or 8% which is millions of people. The project began with wanting to understand, who are these people? What are their lives like? What do they think about news and journalism they're encountering? There's a mix of people who are in this category and some were very well educated, very politically engaged to some degree, they had made a very deliberate choice.

For example, there's an engineer I spoke with in Iowa who had done a cost-benefit analysis of his own time and felt like paying attention to news just wasn't worth the time investment that he was putting into it. For many others, the pattern is pretty consistent that the people who are most likely in this category who are paying little to no attention to news tend to be among the most marginalized people in the society. They tend to be less educated, to lower socioeconomic status, they tend to be already on the margins of society when it comes to engaging, participating in political life.

Brooke Gladstone: You mean principally voting?

Benjamin Toff: Principally voting, but not always politically, and a lot of these one-on-one conversations, people would talk about how they found it just so hard to make sense of important political issues going on in their own communities because they felt so disconnected.

Brooke Gladstone: For these people who feel disconnected from the news, you found that that behavior was bound up in other forms of disengagement.

Benjamin Toff: Yes.

Brooke Gladstone: A lot of these people, for instance, just don't have the time, they may be working two jobs and taking care of family members. They you found, may regard news as an irrelevant luxury.

Benjamin Toff: Right. Part of it was about existing store of knowledge to make sense of the information that they were encountering, people feel they have to look up the details of what terms mean.

Brooke Gladstone: You referred to a kind of arcane news language where you had to come to a story with some prior knowledge of it.

Benjamin Toff: Exactly. A lot of the people who were paying so little attention to news, they didn't know how to place themselves politically on the left to right, they often didn't really identify with any political party, and so, the stakes of a lot of political stories just didn't really register for them. It was also about being invested in stories about politics, which for many people, that's what they equated news with.

Brooke Gladstone: Do you have any guesses why younger people of lower socioeconomic status are more likely to avoid the news than older people?

Benjamin Toff: One piece of it is, people will say, it's not that they don't see any potential value in news, some will say, I expect when I get older, maybe when I have a mortgage, maybe when I have these other commitments or more rooted in the community, maybe then I'll pay more attention to it. I think that for this population in general, there was a common frustration of like, "Well, what difference does it make ultimately? If I know more about what's happening, what can I actually do about anything?" If you don't feel there's much you can actually do to solve the myriad problems that the news is presenting, it doesn't feel it's a good investment of your time.

Brooke Gladstone: I think a lot of us think of it as a solo activity. Maybe you read the paper, you do that by yourself, or you're listening to the radio, but you drew a very clear conclusion that news consumption is principally social.

Benjamin Toff: People who really enjoy news who are immersed in these news communities, it's a very social activity. It's a point of connection between people. We talked about how to make sense of what you're hearing and to process the information. I think it's a really important piece of how we don't allow it to just make us feel as depressed as it might because we rely on each other to help us feel either maybe something we can do about what we're hearing, but also a source of strength from those around us as they're having a similar experience.

Brooke Gladstone: Some people told you that they never developed a routine of consuming news, and they didn't know people who did.

Benjamin Toff: For myself and I think for my co-authors as well, I think it made us that much more aware of, if we're really honest with ourselves, why do we consume the amount of news that we do? We'd like to tell ourselves this because we feel more empowered as citizens. It's not that that stuff isn't true, it's just that, there's a bigger part of the explanation here that I think does trace back to the communities we're a part of, the social expectations around consuming news, and the benefits we derive from talking about news with the people in our lives.

For people who generally are not paying attention to news, they often don't have that in their lives. It not only makes it harder to feel there's much enjoyable part of the experience of paying attention to news but also reinforcing the notion that it's a useful habit to develop.

Brooke Gladstone: Folk theories are a way that people weave together a notion of how the world works, and there are folk theories about media and media platforms that you encountered. One of them was the idea that the news will find me.

Benjamin Toff: Yes, people have the sense that when they go online, they don't have to seek out the news on their own or even develop their own habits on following news that it'll just find you all by itself. To some degree, I think those of us who are immersed in very strong communities of other news consumers, we do see a lot of posts by other people we know, other journalists we know, but the algorithms themselves, the platforms themselves, not everybody's experience is going to be the same. There's a belief that this is the case that may not be necessarily matched with the reality of one's experience when they do go on these platforms.

One of the other folk theories that we heard in the course of these interviews was what we call "the information is out there folk theory," which is the sense that if you wanted to know what was going on, you would just go out and Google it and then you'd find it all, but actually, that information only exists because there's a journalist who spent time and resources, gathering that news, and that piece of the puzzle is often gone unstated or unacknowledged among a lot of the news avoiders.

Brooke Gladstone: Those are two of the folk theories, the news will find me or I can easily find the news because of the technology, but there's a third theory that seems to belie the other two, which is even if I encounter news, I won't know how to make sense of it.

Benjamin Toff: Yes, we call that the "I don't know what to believe folk theory." Not all news avoiders felt it, there were some who felt fairly confident in their own ability to make sense of what information they might encounter. Part of it was because they also didn't feel like most news was all that relevant to them, so they didn't have a whole lot of desire to make sense of a lot of that information that was out there. There were others who were pretty frustrated and felt like they just didn't have the tools at their disposal to make sense of the differences between different news organizations, or why they should trust one versus the other. This very strong protective sense of like they needed to be distrusting of everything that was out there because they didn't want to be manipulated.

Brooke Gladstone: The safest course of action wasn't to trust anything that you saw, and just avoid it all.

Benjamin Toff: Exactly. There is definitely a strong correlation between trust and the likelihood that somebody was avoiding the news. On the other hand, it's not purely about distrust, there's a fair amount of people who would say, "It's not news, it's me." They would talk about being very anxious people or would feel like, "Oh, maybe there's useful information out there, but it's just too difficult to figure out which of those sources is reliable." They would take the position that is easier or smarter to just be distrusting everything.

Brooke Gladstone: A few years back, I spoke with Eitan Hersh, the author of Politics Is for Power: How to Move Beyond Political Hobbyism, Take Action, and Make Real Change. He took a survey of about 1,000 people, and he found that of the people who say they spend two or more hours each day on politics and civic engagement, the vast majority of them are just reading the news and talking about politics.

Benjamin Toff: They read the newspaper, they listen to NPR, and then they could listen to a bunch of podcasts or watch MSNBC or Fox News for hours. Even if the stuff they're learning about is gossip and minutiae, they'll say, "Oh, it's my civic duty to be informed," but if you ask them, "Okay, well, who should I vote for in a local election?" They would say, "I have no idea. I don't know anything about the local elections. I don't know anything about the state. I really could just tell you a lot about Sharpiegate, the Mueller investigation, but I can't tell you a thing that would actually inform your vote.

Brooke Gladstone: All this news consumption didn't translate into actual political work, or going out and helping people in the community, or giving money to charity. Maybe the news avoiders have a point.

Benjamin Toff: I do think they have a point. I do think that there are levels of news consumption that I think can border on spectatorship, particularly around politics where part of the interest in it is people are really invested in their side winning. There's a segment of news avoiders in the United States that was unique around people who are expressing discontent about mainstream media and see it as liberal bias as the reason why they're avoiding the news.

Brooke Gladstone: When you ask news avoiders, is it a civic duty to consume the news? You said there was some ambivalence, some of them though, felt strongly that it doesn't make a better citizen to hear and parrot sound bites.

Benjamin Toff: Yes, one of the other news avoiders, we did a follow-up interview with in the intervening months in between, he changed his habits, and he started to subscribe to satellite radio in his car, he spent a lot of his workday driving around the state. one of the things he noticed right away was, he thought that one of his colleagues who talked about news a lot and he found a source of annoyance, the degree to which he talks about the news. What he said was he felt he was not actually as smart as he seemed, he was just repeating things he had heard on CNN. Those of us who pay a lot of attention to news, it does give us ways of making sense of the world around us that I think can be a value but also can be a crutch, especially when it comes to politics.

Brooke Gladstone: The news environment we're currently swimming in is especially heavy and difficult, and there's two major wars dominating the headlines. Sometimes I don't think it's helpful to be always embroiled in the suffering of others. I think it can be paralyzing. I guess the question is, how do you know when the amount you're consuming is not healthy?

Benjamin Toff: I think it's partly about giving yourself permission that it's perfectly natural to feel that way and it can be healthier to cut back and to find strategies that are more about ensuring that the time and attention you're spending with news are valuable and be more about the quality of that experience rather than it being about the quantity. I think that there are really important functions that news plays in a way that few other institutions in society can substitute for.

I'm thinking of one of the news lovers that I interviewed who, he had a pretty challenging life. He was a recovering alcoholic who was unemployed. He was homebound because his driver's license had been revoked. For him, news was rather than this horribly depressing thing that I think many of us feel like it often is, he recognized that, but for him, he said it was a window into the outside world and he so appreciated having access to all these things happening elsewhere in a way that he really drew strength from. I think some people have that reaction. I think that's a very positive thing. I think news isn't always just a negative experience. If it was, no one would be paying attention to it.

Brooke Gladstone: Benjamin Toff is the co-author of the new book, Avoiding the News: Reluctant Audiences for Journalism. Thanks.

Benjamin Toff: You're welcome.

Brooke Gladstone: Coming up, when a comic stretches an autobiographical truth to make a bad thing seem worse, is that still comedy? This is On The Media. This is On The Media, I'm Brooke Gladstone. Last weekend, Hasan Minhaj turned to the crowd at the Beacon Theater in Manhattan, after finishing a bit about his ex cheating on him in the 11th grade and said, "Don't fact-check me." The audience went wild. The comedian was referring to an article published in The New Yorker in September, Hasan Minhaj's Emotional Truths, in which journalist Clare Malone fact-checked moments from his standup specials. For example, Minhaj had an extended bit about being rejected on prom night on his date's doorstep.

Hasan Minhaj: Mrs. Reed opens the door. She has this look of concern on her face, and she's like, "Oh my God, honey, did Bethany not tell you? Ah, sweetie, we love you. We think you're great, and we love that you come over and study, but tonight is one of those nights where we have a lot of family back home in Nebraska and we're going to be taking a lot of photos tonight, so we don't think it'd be a good fit."

Brooke Gladstone: The New Yorker found that the doorstep moment never happened as such. Minhaj owned up to this in a 21-minute response video posted on YouTube in late October.

Hasan Minhaj: Bethany's mom did really say that. It was just a few days before prom and I created the doorstep scene to drop the audience into the feeling of that moment.

Brooke Gladstone: In another routine, Minhaj describes receiving an envelope filled with white powder in the mail after a critical Patriot Act segment on the killing of Jamal Khashoggi and Narendra Modi Hindu nationalism. He said the powder fell into his daughter's stroller.

Hasan Minhaj: It falls on my daughter's shoulder, her neck, her cheeks, and she's staring at me. We rushed down to NYU and the moment they see the baby, they just rip the clothes off her and they take her away.

Brooke Gladstone: The New Yorker found no record of this emergency room visit. Minhaj admits it didn't happen though he says he did open an envelope full of white powder with his daughter, and the threats to his family's safety were genuine.

Hasan Minhaj: This is all terrifying, so why embellish? Why even say you took your daughter to the hospital? The night of the athletics Bina and I, we got into a huge argument and she kept asking Hasan, "What if this powder fell on our daughter?" I created the hospital scene to put the audience in that same shock and fear that me and Bina felt playing out that night.

Brooke Gladstone: The New Yorker has stood behind its story, which he calls misleading. During his performance at the Beacon, Minhaj said, "I had to go head-to-head with one of the most dangerous organizations in the world." He didn't mean perhaps the most storied magazine in the country, nor journalism unbridled. He meant a brutish power, never, ever threatened in the real world or challenged in the digital one. He said, "I'm talking about a White woman with a keyboard." The crowd went even wilder. The controversy covered by almost every major news outlet and woven into several jokes in Minhaj's latest comedy special demonstrates how a minor scandal in deaf hands can be successfully leveraged. It also brings into question what audiences expect from comedians, especially ones who do John Stewart-style political commentary.

Hasan Minhaj: I thought I had two different expectations built into my work, my work as a storytelling comedian, and my work as a political comedian where facts always come first. That is why the fact-checking on Patriot Act was extremely rigorous, but in my work as a storytelling comedian, I assumed that the lines between truth and fiction were allowed to be a bit more blurry.

Brooke Gladstone: Jesse David Fox is a senior editor at Vulture, host of Good One, a podcast about jokes, and the author of Comedy Book: How Comedy Conquered Culture–and the Magic That Makes It Work. Welcome to the show, Jesse.

Jesse David Fox: Oh, thank you so much for having me.

Brooke Gladstone: It's pretty commonplace for comedians to exaggerate or twist the truth for the sake of a more entertaining story in their standup performances. What do you think The New Yorker article and the reactions to it tell us about the perceptions of truth in comedy in 2023?

Jesse David Fox: The tension of the story is that a comedian would exaggerate, and that might be a newsworthy bit of information, and that implies that there is a large segment of the general audience who consumes comedy, who does not think of a comedian as a person with the artistic license to make things up. I think there's a tendency to think of comedians as just talking up there. Even while comedy has gotten more and more ambitious in its structure, there still is a tendency to not really investigate the nature of how they're talking.

Brooke Gladstone: As you yourself wrote, "No one is going to question whether what Mike Birbiglia says about his life is true. When you are centering yourself in a story about racial discrimination, pain that you experienced and then you exaggerate it, you embroider it to make the prejudice seem even more egregious." Isn't that precisely the occasion when the contract with the comedy audience shifts and genuine naked honesty is called for?

Jesse David Fox: Hasan in his defense is arguing that what he's conveying to the audience is correct, but in so much as an artist is trying to communicate their truth to people, if them knowing the factual truth would completely delegitimize the story, then I do think there's something to think about. I think it's also impacted by the fact that Hasan is a comedian whose other job is being in the political space. This show is not an apolitical work. It is a political work with a point it is making.

Brooke Gladstone: We are hearing a story that's horrible made more horrible so that we can feel more horrible about it. I don't know.

Jesse David Fox: It feels weird at minimum.

Brooke Gladstone: It feels weird.

Jesse David Fox: We never really, as a society determine the ethics of art, but our stomach can feel like, "Oh, this is not what we agreed to." I think broken contract is correct.

Brooke Gladstone: In your book, you track audiences evolving expectations of truth and authenticity in comedy, you mark the sick comedians of the mid-20th century as turning points in the role of truth in comedy. Mort Sahl used to take newspapers up onto the stage and obviously, there were plenty of moments in Lenny Bruce's monologues that weren't funny. Talk to me about the sick comedians and how they engendered the goodwill and regard of their audiences.

Jesse David Fox: They're reacting to the comedy of the 1940s and early 1950s that was still rooted in very traditional joke writing structure and club comedians performing sometimes stock material and not coming from a personal perspective. In the late 1950s with the rise of what would become-- called the sick comedians, Andy Bruce, Mort Sahl, Shelley Berman, all had certain versions of, this is a personal expression and that is a tremendous evolution, probably the largest evolution in the history of comedy. From personal expression, you assume they're a truthful expression.

Brooke Gladstone: Let's talk just, say, 10, 20 years after the sick comedians about Richard Pryor say, and George Carlin who became experts at performing their authentic personas while highlighting social inequities.

Jesse David Fox: Richard Pryor is to me, the avatar in a lot of different definitions of when we think of in terms of truth and comedy because he's both being really frank about race relations in America in a way that comedians weren't doing in the same way.

Richard Pryor: Police got a chokehold they use out here though, man, they choke niggas to death. That mean you be dead when they through. Did you know that? Wait a minute. Niggas going, "Yes, we knew." White folks, "No, I had no idea."

Jesse David Fox: Then there is the truth of how he investigated himself in a way that really had never been seen. That level of vulnerability really pushed the art form forward. By being so vulnerable, by being so truthful seemingly in his discussion of his personal life. That then gives you a certain credibility when you're talking about politics or race.

Brooke Gladstone: Talk about vulnerability, you wrote about Tig Notaro going on stage just after the death of her mother and her own cancer diagnosis.

Tig Notaro: I have cancer. How are you? Hi, how are you? Is everybody having a good time? I have cancer. How are you?

Brooke Gladstone: Then you talked about Margaret Cho's struggles on her TV show to try to conform to how TV execs expected her to look, or Maria Bamford doing material about mental health in the 2000s.

Maria Bamford: I went into a psychiatric facility, which if you haven't been don't feel bad if you go and they're uniformly awful. You're not at the wrong one. They're all bad.

Brooke Gladstone: These women you wrote confront the popular idea of what it means to be fearless on stage. Fearless is often used to describe comics unafraid of hurting people when it should apply to comedians afraid of being hurt by people and persisting anyway.

Jesse David Fox: What all those comedians did is genuinely risk ramifications. If you just come down from a high and go, here's my truth, it's unquestioned. This is the truth. It's not actually vulnerable. You're not actually going to get to something universal. If you leave yourself open to the audience, you're going to be able to find something deeper. Actually, being a pervert and maybe having a string of sexual misconduct has a long history of not actually affecting one's career, where physical illness, a history of mental illness, does have a long history of affecting people's careers. Especially in a place like Hollywood that is looking for reasons not to work with people. That is the difference, which is not just saying this is the truth, it's unquestioned. It's basically like truth is a sometimes abstract idea that we're going to find together.

Brooke Gladstone: Let's talk about Louis C.K. You wrote that he had a breakthrough after his first kid was born that transformed his up to that point not very impressive career. You write that in the story of comedy's march to be taken more seriously. CK was for nearly a decade, its avatar. At the center of the celebration was truth that the Los Angeles Review of Books called him television's most honest man.

Louis C.K: You know what's really sad about men? That we can't have a beautiful thought about a woman that isn't followed by a disgusting thought about that same woman. We're not capable of it. We can't do one and not the other.

Jesse David Fox: Louis CK was taken extremely seriously in a way comedians really hadn't been before. There's a lot of reasons for it. A lot of it was this idea of how honest he was on stage.

Brooke Gladstone: That sometimes he thought his daughter was a real a-hole.

Jesse David Fox: Yes. Stuff like that, or describing what it's like to clean the diaper of his newborn daughter and confronting that expectation. I do think talking about parenting on stage, that was new. He then used the goodwill of that to then apply it to a lot of work that was not as emotionally vulnerable, which was much more using the feeling of truth to hide in the stakes of jokes. He prefers to say the N-word. Actually say the word, not say the phrase, the N-word.

He has a joke about the C-word and how that word is okay. He has a joke about the F slur and about how that word is okay. In those jokes, he fashions them as progressive. All of those were attempts to use the goodwill he had earned from earlier specials to get away with stuff that I think really is not as truthful as he is fashioning himself to be.

Brooke Gladstone: Then in 2017, The New York Times published a story revealing five accusations of sexual misconduct against him. What does his story reveal about the expectations of truth in comedy?

Jesse David Fox: For a lot of younger people, I think it poisoned the way of projecting yourself as authentic when you have full control of how you're being presented. I think more than anything about being truthful, it's much more about control and controlling the narrative and controlling the perception. You can say, yes, he was being honest, but more so he was trying to manipulate the perception of that honesty in a way where he was still in power and he's still in control. He was not being vulnerable to people calling into question his ethics or his behavior.

Brooke Gladstone: You've marked the appearance of a new era of comedian. Folks like John Early and Kate Berlant respond to this performed authenticity, reacting you say, "against the phoniness of going on stage and acting like what you're saying is authentic."

Kate Berlant: The thing about us is-

John Early: I'm just going to stop you right there because-

Kate Berlant: What's up?

John Early: Oh my God. Kate, this is huge. This is huge.

Kate Berlant: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I've chills. I've chills.

John Early: Oh my God

Kate Berlant: Few people experience this.

John Early: Thank you. If I could go back in time to when we first met. If I could tell those two people, Kate, look how far you're going to come.

Kate Berlant: Don't go there because I'll go here.

Brooke Gladstone: They satirize the idea that it's even possible to be truthful on stage. Is this the way to avoid being called inauthentic to lean into the absurdity of the performance?

Jesse David Fox: It's saying that if you're going on stage and you're performing no matter what, it is more authentic to acknowledge you're performing than it is to pretend you are just telling people about your life. Kate's background, I believe she has a master's in performance studies. It's rooted in people like Judith Butler. Judith Butler is a queer and feminist academic. A lot of what we think of is the idea of the performance of gender comes from their work. They have a book called Gender Trouble. The quote I quote from Gender Trouble is, "Laughter emerges in the realization that all along the original was derived." Meaning that you laugh when you realize we think we're being an authentic person when really, we are performing what we think an authentic person looks like. That then gets heightened on stage where you actually are performing.

Brooke Gladstone: Minhaj is often vulnerable on stage sharing stories about race in America and the discrimination he experienced. The narrative around his success is about what he reveals about the American immigrant experience and racism in the country. He has admitted that he's not great at physical comedy or writing jokes. What he's great at is sincerity.

Jesse David Fox: Yes, and I've talked to him about it. What he can do that may be better than any other comedian ever is look directly into a camera and say something earnest, I think is maybe a better word, and without irony. Truly just directly being like, this is something that happened. This is important. That can be quite impactful and can cause people to have a very strong relationship to him because he's talking directly to you. A lot of comedians aren't doing that, especially not on tape because it's embarrassing almost to be seen as that sincere.

Brooke Gladstone: Do you think that's his vulnerability?

Jesse David Fox: I think it's artistically vulnerable. I do think it is something that he knows comedians would make fun of. I think there is less vulnerability in the nature of how he tells his story.

Brooke Gladstone: It's because he really isn't like the women that we talked about earlier, laying things on the line that could hurt them. This kind of earnest, righteous discussion is, in fact, his brand.

Jesse David Fox: Yes, I think that's fair. I think that criticism of his work existed before The New Yorker story. That's why when The New Yorker story came out, for a lot of people they felt very vindicated because they're like, "Well, I always thought there was something wrong with his work."

Brooke Gladstone: It's been reported that The New Yorker piece may have cost Minhaj The Daily Show host job. Outside of that, do you think it might mark a new turn in the notion of truth in comedy?

Jesse David Fox: It will force the comedians who are in the political sphere whose personal work might not be the same thing, to really have to scrutinize their standup and see if it adheres to the same standards as their shows that at higher fact-checkers and stuff like that. What I hope is somewhere it allows audiences to be where I am, where I don't go into a comedy show worried one way or the other about the factual accuracy of the story and just allow myself to experience it emotionally.

Brooke Gladstone: Conan O'Brien retired, shows like Patriot Act and Full Frontal with Samantha Bee, Desus & Mero, and Ziwe have been canceled by their networks. It feels like a moment of change for the Stewart brand of political comedy. What do you think is next? What's it feel like? What platform is it on?

Jesse David Fox: The legacy of The Daily Show of people turning to comedic individuals that they trust to provide them information and/or process information in the news and politics is alive and well. Like if you look at podcasts, TikTok, and Instagram, there are just people doing this. It's essentially as our life gets increasingly complicated and we get further removed from each other. Comedians are adept at affirming humanity, at relieving tensions, at making the world seem like it makes sense. Not necessarily fixing problems, but just making it seem like it's manageable.

If you find someone funny, you trust them. Studies show this. It's part of the nature of what we laugh at. It's so rooted in our trusting of other people. It's why we laugh most with our loved ones. That's the thing about the Hasan story that I think is so interesting is after he released the video, you then basically saw a split where who people trusted is who they decided was correct in that story. They both seemingly released examples of manipulation. The New Yorker story was about how Hasan manipulated the truth. Then Hasan released a video about how New Yorker manipulated the truth. Then people just picked a side and that is the media story of this. Where everyone landed is not based on any actual information. It's just based on who they trust.

Brooke Gladstone: Thank you very much, Jesse.

Jesse David Fox: Thank you.

Brooke Gladstone: Jesse David Fox is the author of Comedy Book: How Comedy Conquered Culture and the Magic That Makes It Work. 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. Our technical director is 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. Micah will be back next week. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

 

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