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Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman discuss 2 letters sent to the Times regarding their problematic coverage of trans issues. Next, they talk about Donald Trump fantasizing about guillotines and firing squads and then move to the eponymous Seymour Hersh who is still breaking news - this time about the US involvement in the Nordstream pipeline explosions.
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Hey everybody, welcome to the Weekender Edition of the Muckrake Podcast.
Available to patrons, go over to patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast to get the whole show.
You're going to want to hear this show.
Nick, we gotta talk about sex, we gotta talk about firing squads and guillotines, we gotta talk about sabotage in the deep seas.
This show is loaded and weird.
Yes, we have to talk about sex?
We have to.
We've been told we have to.
All right.
Well, listen, if that's what you tell me, then let's do it.
All right, everybody.
Before we get to business, we are going to do a live show for our patrons.
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That is next Thursday.
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Eastern.
Those who have attended before, you know the drill.
We'll do the episode.
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I don't want to speak for you, Nick, but this is one of my favorite things that we do.
Oh, absolutely, and I don't ever usually get in there and tell people that they should go over to Patreon, but I am going to do it because maybe my voice will be compelling for them.
So, definitely, it's a really great time.
Definitely the 10-poll event of our Patreon experience.
I agree.
And listen, I want to pull back the curtain on this thing.
I'm sitting here.
Most of the time I'm going to have a beer.
I'm going to have something like that on a weekend.
I'm drinking coffee, Nick.
We're doing this in the morning.
I got to go to St.
Louis.
I'm doing this event with Sarah Kinzier.
I noticed you're not a coffee guy.
Is this right?
Yep.
Never.
I don't think I've ever really had coffee.
I'm sorry.
I know.
It's stunning.
Yeah.
I've never.
I don't like it.
I don't even know what to do right now.
Do you like coffee flavored things like an ice cream or something?
No.
How about this?
I like tiramisu and some people have insisted that there's a coffee-ish something there but I don't I don't know if that's coffee then maybe I don't know but no.
Our friendship and our partnership has now lasted years and I am just absolutely flummoxed constantly.
I gotta tell you.
That's incredible.
All right, well, on that note, Nick, we're going to go ahead and start with a development that's taking place at the New York Times.
Over the past couple of days, GLAAD and also hundreds of New York Times contributors have sent letters asking the paper to stop running stories criticizing trans people.
The letters sent on the 15th, again, we write to you as a collective of New York Times contributors with serious concerns about editorial bias in the newspapers reporting on transgender, non-binary, and gender non-conforming people.
We'll get into the response, the actual official response, but as of this morning, Nick, and we're recording this on Thursday, February 16th, grabbed my coffee, sat down, opened up my laptop to do a little pre-show, just reading the tea leaves, if you will, and friend of the pod, Pamela Paul, who, by the way, is one of the worst opinion columnists that is out there, And not just because of her opinions, which suck.
Her columns are boring and predictable and awful.
I gotta say, this response is something.
This column that comes out the day after this public open letter came out, Pamela Paul's opinion column in defense of J.K.
Rowling.
I don't know if you can make it much clearer than that where things stand right now with the gray lady.
Um, you know, it's keep piling on the failing New York Times.
There's lots of issues there.
And I gotta tell you, I pulled apart the article that you shared with me about the letter.
And then they actually referenced a particular article that was troublesome about trans people in New York Times.
So I called up the article.
And I tried to read it, or I read it, and I was having a little bit of trouble understanding exactly what the outrage was about, like what they were complaining, if that's like a good example of that.
And I guess I would have preferred more very specific stuff in there where they're talking about, you know, where I can wrap my head around it better, because honestly, I'm having a little trouble, so help me.
Well, you know, a large part of what's happening in this, and real fast, I want to read the response.
This came from the Director of External Communications, Charlie Statlander.
This is the response, and we'll get into what exactly is happening here.
We received the open letter delivered by GLAAD and welcome their feedback.
We understand how GLAAD and the co-signers of the letter see our coverage, but at the same time we recognize that GLAAD's advocacy mission and The Times' journalistic mission are different.
As a news organization, we pursue independent reporting on transgender issues that include profiling groundbreakers in the movement, challenges and prejudice faced by the community, and how society is grappling with debates about care.
Now, one of the things that's happening here is that the New York Times is the New York Times.
You know, over the past few years, there's been this weird shift in American politics.
And you see it, especially with social media, you see a lot of liberals or Democratic voters who are starting to look up and they're trying to understand what space the New York Times has in communal dialogue.
Right?
Like, because one of the reasons is because the New York Times and the Washington Post in the era of Trump, they sold themselves as, you know, resistance newspapers or resistance media.
And, you know, democracy dies in darkness and all of this.
And so meanwhile, we're seeing these articles where, you know, major issues such as the opening up of like trans people and like where they should be in society and how society should function.
There's a surprise that someone or a media Avenue, like the New York Times or the Washington Post, seems to sit squarely in the middle or center right.
Right.
They're questioning these things.
They're constantly sort of cautioning against moving too fast, almost as if they are conservative in nature.
Right.
Almost like they are.
And this, for people, and you've been paying attention in this same way, we're going to talk about Seymour Hersh later.
You know, we know that the New York Times oftentimes is centrist and oftentimes is center-right and conservative.
I mean, they push the The Iraq War, right?
On false pretenses.
They've constantly been on the conservative side of social issues.
And we're watching sort of a shifting, like, sort of consideration of what the New York Times is.
And the problem here is it's sort of like asking a leopard to change itself, you know?
Like, it is what it is, and the pushback against it is from a perspective that they are not who they are.
I believe Michael Jordan said it best.
He said, I think I'm paraphrasing, Republicans buy newspapers, too.
Sure.
And so, of course, they need to appeal.
And we've seen a shift.
There has been this notion of trying to appeal more to the right in The New York Times in the last several years.
You know, part of this is, The thing I find hilarious is that the big argument tends to be, well, these kids are seeing more and more trans people like in the movies.
And so because they're seeing that, that's giving them these weird ideas that they want to suddenly become trans.
That's not part of their fabric.
They just sort of are emulating something like it's cool, which is not how this works.
And so but but so the so the argument could very well be like with The New York Times writing about it as much as they are, we're maybe perhaps we're getting somewhere.
And that's what the letter is also wanting us to get to.
Like we're getting somewhere where there is a bit of a more of a normalization.
So more and more people could come to accept what this is.
And I and that and by the way, if that's the idea, then when you screw up misgendering people in these articles, that definitely is a problem which furthers or makes it harder for us to progress to where it becomes a little bit more of a normal situation.
And people who are in a trans community won't be ostracized or treated as poorly as they are now.
Yeah, and let's go ahead and reset this thing, because there's so much that's happening here that has, like, a larger context than what's going on, right?
Like, on one hand, let's go ahead and be very upfront about this.
Transgenderism is not something that has just happened in the past couple of years.
I mean, we have societies going back centuries that have this on the record, that have dealt with this.
In fact, by the way, have not only dealt with it, but have dealt with it with more grace and aplomb than America is dealing with it in 2023.
Right?
On top of that, there was this moment during the Trump era, and this is one of the problems, because Trump both highlighted what was happening in our culture and in our politics to make us understand that something was wrong, but the ability to understand what was wrong was colored by where people were in the political and social stratum, right?
So, let's take this issue of transgenderism.
The people who wrote this letter are completely right.
There's no debate about how trans people should be treated, right?
They should be, you know, given rights.
They should be protected.
They shouldn't have to live in fear.
And meanwhile, there's two reactions to it that are sort of taking place.
One is the right wing.
And the right wing says, like you just said, these children are being indoctrinated.
They're being brainwashed.
And yeah, let's look at Josh Halley real fast.
Well listen, some people may need to go to jail, Laura.
You don't get to take kids in and tell them that they need to have their gender reassigned, lie to them about what the effects will be, which is sterilization in many instances, lie to their parents about it, and maybe take taxpayer dollars as part of the whole thing and then just get away with it.
Yeah, and by the way, that's Howley and the National Conservatives on the far right.
That's what they believe, that there is, and this is one of the defining characteristics of this conservative movement, and it always has been, that not only is society changing, but it's changing because of a plan.
You know, Nick, again, no offense to you, but you and your friends are getting together in secret midnight meetings and having discussions about how to inject poison into society and how to destroy masculinity, and particularly white masculinity.
And they see this as a plot.
Meanwhile, the New York Times and other sort of centrist status quo institutions, they have to be in the middle of this thing because they don't particularly want society to change.
This is one of the reasons why they often, in the past, have sort of sided with people like, I don't know, Adolf Hitler or Benito Mussolini, because those were people who said, oh, society is changing too quickly, we need to slow things down.
That's their natural instinct because they are wealthy and privileged and influential people.
They're not interested in things changing.
Things feel pretty good to them for the most part, except for, you know, when we're talking about chatbots taking their jobs.
And it's always this sort of straddling this middle rail that people now on the left or people within this transgender movement, they're saying, this coverage isn't, you know, it's not doing it.
You know, it's lending credence to what the far right is saying.
But I have to tell you, That tree isn't necessarily worth barking up, because it's not going to change.
You cannot change the New York Times by criticizing it, and literally you have to understand its place in the political spectrum.
You can criticize it, you can talk about what it can do better, but you can't expect it to necessarily change, because it can't change.
There's nothing that these media institutions can possibly do to change themselves.
Well, that's an interesting conversation we can have about the method with which they attempted this, which was two different letters, one from GLAAD and one from the LGBTQ community.
And so there could be an argument that you shouldn't have done.
It should have been one at a time or have a singular voice or or there's a lot of other things where now one gets drowned out because, you know, is the response from New York Times kind of says only calls out the glad letter.
Right.
And it sort of allows them to sort of ignore the hundreds of other people who wrote a separate letter that might actually have some more of a journalistic background that might have more weight to what they were saying.
And so as a result, it's like they get to write their letter.
It's written well.
You know what I mean?
In terms of flourish and they get to move on with their lives.
Pretty much.
That's all they responded like they wanted to.
And yeah, they didn't have any notion of contrition or a desire to alter the method with which they're reporting these things.
They have a really natural faint that they always fall back to, which is right.
We are completely objective.
We're journals.
Nothing's objective!
If in 2023 AD, the year of the Lord, like my god, can we finally get to the point where nothing is actually objective.
Well, are there adjectives in the New York Times?
Sometimes.
Yeah, so I think there's, like, how can you be objective with adjectives?
Journalism has never been objective, but what happens is it's sort of this constant shield of, we're just basically common sense, we're just reporting it as it is.
Things are written, things are edited, things are presented, and the way that this has worked, particularly during the Trump era, has shown us that there is this Constant gravity or constant push to go ahead and, quote unquote, ask questions.
Well, if we're asking questions, why aren't we asking questions about economic institutions?
Why aren't we asking questions about where power lies?
And it's very clear because this is the bastion.
And again, I say the word liberal and it always ruffles feathers a little bit, right?
Like, liberalism is not necessarily what we've been told it is.
It is also the emphasis on property, the emphasis on the protection of personal property and personal bastions of wealth and power.
And when you look at this, you have to understand that these institutions work the way they do for a reason.
That doesn't mean that things can't change, but like, look at how they covered the civil rights movement.
Look at how they covered, you know, constant revolutionary moments.
Like, they're not going to do this for you.
That's the biggest thing.
We can't just tweet at public officials.
We can't just tweet at newspapers and such.
And listen, I think this letter should have been written.
I do.
But that doesn't mean that we have to expect that the well-written letter will suddenly make them come to their senses.
We have to understand that there are class issues here.
There are material conditions here.
And quite frankly, Nick, there are conversations that we should be having.
Things are changing.
And we should have conversations about things like where one person meets another person in the public place.
Like, what should a school do?
How should a school react to these issues?
What is the best way to protect children and also protect these public institutions?
Those are conversations we should be having and we should be meeting out, but the way it's being handled right now, it is not being done with that in mind.
I mean, don't you think a letter or outrage should have been pointed at someone like Josh Hawley?
That probably is the more nefarious issue we have.
We have leaders of a Republican Party that are spreading all sorts of lies about trans people every day.
And that's probably more dangerous than the reporting that we've seen the New York Times do.
I know they're easier because they want, they say, send us a letter if you have a problem with what we do.
It's okay, let's do that.
We'll have a day worth of news.
But we have these guys every other day coming out there talking about this stuff and really polluting the issue.
That's the progression that is going to be, won't progress because of that.
And it will just foment even more and more hate.
I mean, you know, how, Insecure are you as a person and who you are that you would think that if I were to go to a film when I'm 12 and I see something on the screen that somehow completely and utterly changes my identity of who I am and how I want to be seen.
Like that doesn't make sense.
That's not how that works.
I want to point something out in all of this.
They are literally, in the far right, Josh Hawley and all these assholes, they're literally making this argument that people are choosing to express themselves in a way that will make them way, way, way more statistically vulnerable to violence.
You know what I mean?
And being pushed out and being harassed and being mistreated.
That's the argument that's being made.
They're doing it because it's cool.
They do not understand modern culture in that way.
And by the way, Nick, I don't want to put you on the spot.
What grade would you give the New York Times and the Washington Post for their coverage of the Trump phenomenon, his lies, right-wing authoritarianism?
What grade would you give them?
Well, I mean, if I was on the side of Josh Hawley, I'd give him an A+, I suppose.
But you gotta give him a D, I would say.
A D is generous.
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