Steve Krakauer’s Uncovered exposes how mainstream media abandoned truth for power, with CNN’s shift post-2014—driven by financial panic and Twitter mobs—replacing fairness with viral outrage, like its Trump fixation. Editors scrapped source requirements, while journalists’ unfiltered social media (e.g., NYT’s Astid Herndon) erased objectivity, mirroring institutional coziness with agencies seen in the Twitter Files. Corporate outlets now enforce anti-speech activism, yet independent rivals like The Daily Wire exploit their decline. Reform hinges on financial pressure, not ethics, leaving media’s credibility permanently fractured. [Automatically generated summary]
So we're talking about keeping your eyes open, keeping your eyes closed, lies of context that make it hard for us to see.
Steve Krakauer has written a new book called Uncovered How the Media Got Cozy with Power, Abandoned Its Principles, and Lost the People, a story about how we lost the news media and how they've been using that, the news media, to create a context in which their lies make more sense than they should.
Steve has been a journalist and media executive for 15 years.
He's been at CNN, The Blaze, Mediaite, and he's the author of this book.
Steve, thank you so much for coming on.
Thank you so much for having me.
Appreciate it.
So you're a guy who's watched this firsthand and you've seen this transition because I was in the news media back in the 1980s and it really was not like this.
What happened?
Yeah, I look, I was a CNN executive back as late as 2013, the end of 2013.
So not that long ago, I mean, less than 10 years ago.
And when I was there, there were, I think, valid criticisms of CNN at the time.
I think that, you know, it was populated by people that leaned left for sure.
It mostly voted for Democrats when they voted at all.
So that was true.
But there was still a mission when I was there.
And I was, especially during the 2012 campaign, in all the top executive meetings going on, there was a mission to try to get it fair, to try to be fair to both sides.
When you get it wrong, you want to try to correct it.
That was the ethos there.
Never was it always the case that it was going to be perfect, but that was what we were striving for.
That significantly changed, not just at CNN, but throughout the media in 2014, 2015, certainly with Donald Trump coming in.
I think that completely upended it entirely.
And it's not just Trump.
I think there are a lot of external factors as well.
The business model changing, the rise of social media.
So it's a whole confluence of things, but something significantly changed about seven, eight years ago, and it has not gotten better.
So let's go back to this because I agree with you about this Trump thing.
It's not the Trump thing.
And I also agree with you.
I remember working as a reporter with some guys who went on to be some of the most liberal left-wing reporters in the world.
I remember them yelling at me if I got too far left, if I was not fair to the right-wing candidates.
But it's not just Trump, is it?
I mean, when you say the business model, can you unpack that a little bit?
What changed about that?
Yeah, one of the chapters that I lay out, I kind of lay out five major problems here that caused us to get to this massive place where no one seems to trust the media anymore, is this broken financial incentive structure.
I look at companies like a CNN, but also ESPN, which I write about in the book, the New York Times, which I spent a lot of time on in the book with the Tom Cotton op-ed and others.
These were businesses that they may have had a little bit down years and some really good years, but for the most part, the business model was solid.
It was clear where their audience was coming from.
And then it's something significant started changing.
It happened slowly at first with people going to streaming or to just the viewing habits changing, not really understanding the digital landscape to the extent that they have.
And so suddenly there's this panic, if you will, when it comes to the business.
Well, how are we going to keep these people?
How do we hold on to the lowest hanging fruit and make sure they don't go away for fear of losing everybody?
And so suddenly these giant businesses didn't try to appeal to everyone.
That was one thing.
But also in the void that was created by this just panic over the business model, mistakes start getting made or different incentives get changed.
Instead of what's good for the bottom line, that's no longer what matters most.
Now it's the Twitter mob.
Now it's your youngest staffers can really influence the most powerful people in these organizations.
With a little bit of a galvanization on Twitter, suddenly you can affect big change because the business model is no longer strong.
And that is something that has some relation to Trump, but ultimately that was going to happen either way.
What is it about these young people?
I mean, young people, youth and ignorance are kind of synonyms, right?
Why should the editor of the New York Times quail when a 25-year-old comes in and tells him that Tom Cotton should be running an op-ed in his paper?
Why is that happening?
Yeah, and they shouldn't be.
I mean, that's the thing.
The media these days, I think, is full of partially because the business model is so broken.
They're fearful of their own jobs.
They no longer feel that they can just stand firm on the principles that maybe they once had, and maybe they still do.
But they just give in to these younger staffers, to the mobs that they can get together easily on social media.
And I think it really is a fear.
There is a real fear these days in what feels like this very amplified world that we live in with Twitter in particular, but social media more broadly, where it used to be 15, 20 years ago, maybe you send an email if you have a complaint, or even before that, you send a letter to the editor or like a literal letter, a letter to the station.
It was all behind the scenes.
No one could see it.
But now there's such a performative nature to the way people complain about their media these days.
It all happens out in the open.
And suddenly an editor who maybe is not too familiar with the demographics of Twitter, let's say, can see what 50 people yelling at them looks like.
Well, that can feel really scary.
That can actually start to change things.
And they no longer can understand the context of which they're actually living in their own business.
And they start to just give into these mobs.
We experienced that at the Daily Wire as we were coming up.
And people would just like swamp us on Twitter.
And it was upsetting.
Especially the names they call you.
It was upsetting to be called a racist.
I think Ben like broke the record for anti-Semitic tweets and all that.
And it gets under your skin.
There's no question.
Journalists vs. Mob Mentality00:09:22
So now I don't want you to tell tales out of school, but you were at CNN.
Were you there during the time when it shifted over to what it then became?
I really wasn't.
I did share a single year with Jeff Zucker.
Jeff started in 2013, January of 2013.
And I worked really closely with Jeff during the nine months that I was there still before I left to go to the Blaze.
And, you know, Jeff came from NBC.
He has an entertainment background, also news in the Today Show.
And when I worked with Jeff, there were some traits I would say that I recognized that would be exacerbated during the Trump years, let's say.
He was really about this single story.
He thought of the CNN world as what used to be was, let's cover all the big stories going on.
Jeff was saying, there's one big story.
And in some cases, like the Boston Marathon bombing, I remember, I worked really closely with him in that, poured all these resources into it.
And it was good because that was a real big story.
And then other stories, there was the missing plane or the poop cruise that he poured all the resources into.
That was our one big story.
Well, then Trump came along.
And I think those instincts that Jeff had about this one big story started during the primary where he made Trump into, if you will, a star.
I mean, they would just show the empty podium and they would just give him these interviews.
And some of them were a little tougher than others.
But for the most part, he got a pretty easygoing time during the primary from CNN.
And then, of course, what happened next was there was the business decision, but it was also personal.
Trump turned on CNN, turned on Jeff.
He knew Jeff from the NBC days, The Apprentice and others.
And then suddenly it became, we need to be the antagonist to this.
And I do think that there are certain people in that newsroom.
I mean, I know for a fact that believed that democracy was under threat.
There was this existential threat and they were doing Watergate every day with what they were doing with Trump.
I mean, it was so ridiculous.
But if you really believe that, and this is what I told them during the Trump years, if you really believe that that's the case, then you need to double down on your standards and principles.
That's when you need to actually adhere to these principles to try to convince more people.
They went the opposite direction.
The guardrails were off.
Oh, we don't need two sources.
Maybe one source.
Oh, the New York Times has a source.
Let's run with that.
It was completely off the rails because of just how spun and addicted they were to the Trump phenomenon.
You know, you mentioned the business model, which I think is such an important point.
In CNN's case, at least, it seems like that business model has failed utterly.
That they've, you know, without Trump, they're nothing.
They can't really get back in the game with him.
Is there going to be a reaction to that, or are they too blind now to see what's going on?
I think it's really, it's kind of a nuanced situation, I think, with what's going on at CNN.
Chris Licht has come in and the mandate is to make CNN a news network again, which is like, oh, that would be nice.
That's kind of what we, I think, need in a perfect scenario.
But the ratings are failing.
I mean, they're seeing some of their lowest ratings in, certainly since before Trump.
So it's been a very long time since they're this low.
But the problem I would say, and what they're trying to address, even more than the daily Nielsen ratings, which are kind of a bit antiquated in how we look at what the business is, is they need people, the average person who's not super political, to think of when news happens, I need to turn on CNN because it's news.
It's just boring old news.
And they need to show cable providers, satellite operators, that they are worthwhile because they are trusted and they are news.
And they lost that during the Trump years.
And then their brand was tarnished.
They were no longer as valuable to those.
They could no longer get as much money when it comes to that.
So they need to reestablish that they are just boring old news.
Then they can try to make it look good.
But that's much more important than the daily ratings to them.
Interesting.
What is the transparency paradox?
I have not gotten to this part yet, and I found that an interesting thought.
What does that mean?
Yeah, I think a lot about this because I spend a ton of time on Twitter, even though I hate that I do that because I'm part of the media myself.
And it's just, it's where the media is happening.
And I look at it, and in some ways, there's a real transparency to it.
For the first time, you can actually see what news reporters who in their, look, New York Times has some really bad journalism, but it also has some good journalism.
And that good journalism, which is just normal journalism, then those same reporters then go on Twitter and put their opinions out there, not just on the stories they're covering, but on all sorts of things.
And you think, why are these people doing this?
Why are they treating it like it's their diary?
And everyone can see that now.
It's going to undermine their credibility.
And it absolutely has.
I give an example in the book of Astid Herndon.
This was after Governor Yunkin won in Virginia.
He tweeted immediately after Governor Yunkin won that it was white grievance politics, which is the reason that Yunkin was able to win.
Not school closures or anything like we could look at the exit polls.
There was actual, no, no, this is what he believed happened.
And this is a news reporter.
Three days later in the New York Times, there's a story by him and another reporter talking to eight people on some border town between Virginia and West Virginia about white grievance politics.
That's why they did it.
And you can see the sausage getting made in that way.
So on one level, it's great, transparency.
I'm glad that these reporters do that, but it's to their own detriment.
It's destroying their own credibility by putting it all out there in that way.
Interesting.
We're talking to Steve Krakauer about his book, Uncovered How the Media Got Cozy with Power, Abandoned Its Principles, and Lost the People.
Let's talk about this cozy with power thing, because one of the things that I do remember fondly about being a reporter is that we hated everybody.
We hated anybody who had even a little bit of power.
We just wanted to catch him with his pants down.
It did not matter what side he was on.
If he had the power to make laws or control other people, we wanted to nail him.
And so how did it happen that the Twitter files could happen?
I mean, that to me, to me, that's one of the most important stories, at least of the decade, to see the media cozy up to intelligence agencies to help silence individual people.
That's insane to me.
It's almost like living in kind of a mirror world.
How did we get there?
I completely agree.
Look, the Twitter files came out after the book was published.
And at the same time, the Hunter Biden laptop is how I start the book because I think it is the single most important story in the media for a very long time.
And I think it's important because the Hunter Biden laptop story, it's kind of a Trump story, but it's really what happened next.
It was the beginning of the next phase, the censorship phase of what happened when it comes to COVID and lots of other examples since then.
That is where things went.
And it relates very clearly to coziness with power because what it really boils down to it, journalists used to be antagonists to power, like you talk about.
I mean, that's the game.
They're going to speak truth to power and they are going to be essentially cozy and they're going to be close to the people, to the people of the country that they serve the people.
It has completely switched now.
They are cozy to power and they are almost disdainful of the audience and even potentially their own audience, but certainly certain people, they are so distrustful, so disdainful.
These people should not even be able to look at information.
We need to remove that from them.
They become these, what I call anti-speech activists.
When they should be about free speech, they are now about anti-speech.
The less speech, the better.
That is really alarming.
And that it's the complete antithesis of what journalism should be and what it used to be not that long ago.
And I think it really is relating back to the rise of social media and the way that they can see that their own power, their own institutional power has evaporated.
There's no longer a need for gatekeepers.
And that makes them really afraid because now the information can get directly to the people rather than through them.
I've only got a minute left.
Can you tell me, do you see any resolution to this, any way to reform the media or will it just happen naturally or will it not happen at all?
I've got, I'm actually a kind of glass half full.
And I'll tell you why.
I think that we've seen places like the Daily Wire, places like the Megan Kelly Show, where I'm the executive producer of, lots of independent outlets propping up and performing extremely well to the detriment of institutional corporate media.
And it's hurting the bottom line.
And I think when that happens, they have to pay attention to it.
Now, are they going to adjust and start to fix what they need to do and get back?
I talk about geographic bias.
Can they get back to maybe getting people from the middle of the country rather than the coasts?
No, I don't know if it's going to happen overnight, but I do think that they are seeing that something is broken here and there are real winners out there that they would never have thought would infringe on their property and infringe on their actual real power.
And so I'm hopeful that by seeing that, they will be forced into action.
They will be forced to adjust at least in some ways to, if for no other reason than from a business decision, they need to get this in the right place because they're losing.
And this could be catastrophic for them long term.
Once again, the book is uncovered, How the Media Got Cozy with Power, Abandoned Its Principles and Lost the People by Steve Krakauer.
It's just one of the most important stories of our time.