Hi everybody -

We have a new episode this week, that came about when we put in an interview request for Donald Trump, pre-election, and we thought maybe, just maybe, it might come through. It seemed *possible* enough that we had to prepare, and because my main question for him was, “In a second term, how do you plan to treat journalists?”, I wanted a compilation of every statement we could find that Trump has made about the media since he started running for office. 

Here is that compilation: Master List of Trump Statements About the Press

As you’ll see, the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker gave us an invaluable head start by having amassed every Tweet the once and future president had made about the media from the time he started running in 2015 to his being banned from Twitter after January 6th, 2021. They put them into helpful categories such as “insult”; “media bias”; “denigrate media”; “accusation of false reporting”; and “call for firing, boycotting, or other action against”. 

A producer we hired named Sam Eagan then scrubbed Trump’s speeches, press conferences, Truth Social posts, &c, &c, to find other comments about the press. 

Trump’s campaign denied our interview request. And we were left with this document — kind of an odd memento of the last nine years of our politics. We were trying to figure out what, if anything, to do with it; we had a serious editorial discussion on our team over several days, including with our sound designer, about reading every single statement, including all the tweets, aloud into a microphone — or, honestly, we probably would’ve had AI do it. By my estimation, it would’ve made for a roughly six-hour recording, which we were then going to release as an episode in our feed. We knew no one would listen for more than a couple minutes but we still wondered if there was value to doing it; we talked about it as a performance art project, like Andy Kaufman reading The Great Gatsby aloud word for word. 

Ultimately we nixed that idea. But in the meantime, the freelancer we’d hired to make the document, Sam, had actually done something with it. He’d wielded it in a debate he got into on Instagram with his old wrestling buddy, Chaz, over whether to take Trump’s threats against the press seriously. Sam is the only journalist Chaz has ever met. Generally, he doesn’t trust journalists, but he does trust Sam. So I ended up getting the two of them together to talk about this list. And we all went through the useful exercise of seeing things from each other’s points of view.

Here’s what Chaz said to Sam after listening:

I never take it lightly when someone who distrusts reporters takes a leap to go on the record with you. When they call your representation of them fair and honest — I’ll take that as a win.

Anyway, that’s this week’s episode. I hope you’ll check it out here.

Let us know what questions are on your mind about journalism, the news, information, truth, in these weeks after the election. We want to know. (You can just reply here or find us on social at the handles below.)

Brian

P.S. By the way: curious if any of you have heard of the book Chaz mentions in the episode, The Gray Lady Winked? If so, where’d you hear about it? Have you read it?