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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.