Hello and welcome to On the Nose, the Jewish Currents podcast. I'm Alex Kane, the senior reporter at Jewish Currents, and I'll be your host today. In the aftermath of the assassination of Charlie Kirk, a number of media figures have been fired for their comments about the right-wing activist. MSNBC fired Matthew Dowd, who, by the way, is a former chief strategist for the Bush-Cheney campaign in 2004, for saying that hateful thoughts lead to hateful words. A reporter who covers the Phoenix Suns, an NBA team, was fired after tweeting: “Truly don't care if you think it's insensitive or poor timing to decline to respect an evil man who died.” Of course, Jimmy Kimmel’s show was temporarily taken off the air for saying that the quote “MAGA gang” were desperately trying to paint the accused shooter, Tyler Robinson, as anything other than one of them. And Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah was fired after she posted a thread on BlueSky, in which she said that she: “Refuses to tear my clothes and smear ashes on my face in performative mourning for a white man that espoused violence,” and that “part of what keeps America so violent is the insistence that people perform care, empty goodness, and absolution for white men who espouse hatred and violence.”
AK:This post-Kirk purge of commenters critical of the right is part of what appears to be a broader attempt during Trump's second term to cow and reshape mainstream media in the right’s image. Of course, Fox News, founded in the ’90s, has always been the right wing's megaphone in mainstream media. But with CBS News, for instance, under a new ownership structure, and other outlets making explicit moves to the right, we seem to be living in a new moment of right-wing influence in, if not full control of, the media. To unpack these developments, we're bringing on two guests who have deep experience in both mainstream and independent media. Karen Attiah is an award-winning journalist whose work explores the intersections of race, culture, gender, and international affairs. She spent 11 years with the Washington Post before being fired. Mehdi Hasan is a former MSNBC host and the founder of the new independent media outlet, Zeteo. Mehdi and Karen, thank you for joining the show.
Mehdi Hasan:Thank you for having us.
Karen Attiah:Yeah, thanks for having me.
AK:I wanted to begin with the wave of firings that I mentioned, and obviously, I want to begin with you, Karen. If you could just talk about what happened, and your reaction to it, and why you think it happened. And also, what does it signify about the broader media moment that we're in?
KA:Yeah. So a little bit of background about me. I actually spent a good chunk of my 11 years at the Washington Post being an editor, actually. And part of the reason I was hired was because of my skill with social media. I actually helped craft the social media guidelines for the opinion section, and I think it'll be important for listeners to understand that I was in the opinion section of the Washington Post for 11 years. Meaning we, particularly as columnists and writers, have a wide berth to not only have a responsibility to facts and the who, what, when, where, and whys of everything, but also to be able to advocate for what we believe in, to even be partisan. We have a wide berth, wider than normal reporters. So I just wanted to put that out there because I think there's a little bit of misconception. Part of my guiding principle has always been I get the freedom and the privilege, really, to write about the world as it should be—or as I think it should be—not just as it is.
KA:So, I was named a columnist in 2021, and I focused a lot on race and gender and culture, and international affairs, and really, just broadly, commentary on society, on where America has been and where it's going, where it is. And often, that commentary—particularly talking about violence and talking about white supremacy—isn't always comfortable. But I always had the berth, and the permission, and the support to be able to do that, even when those views proved uncomfortable.
KA:Fast forward to two weeks ago, and the Charlie Kirk shooting happens. And again, reminding people that there are actually two major shooting news events that day: There was Charlie Kirk's shooting at the Utah University, and then, there was also the shooting of children in Colorado. So for me, I'm seeing the reports coming in on social media about both, literally almost simultaneously, and my training as a journalist tells me that in breaking news events, often there's a lot of misinformation. There's often a lot of speculation. There's a lot of reason to have restraint, just in general. So my posts are very broadly about patterns in America, about patterns in how we respond to violence. So I was actually commenting a lot on my tiredness—being tired of the empty rhetoric, the thoughts and prayers, that “this is not who we are,” “political violence has no place here.” You're seeing a lot of these empty cliches and platitudes, and my commentary was just like: Yeah, violence is wrong. Murder is wrong. I expressed shock at the Charlie Kirk murder, and then I also said: Yes, and: the empty rhetoric, the coddling, very specifically of the proven demographic—it's backed up by FBI data, backed up by DOJ until recently, until they scrubbed the data, that fundamentally, the demographic that is most statistically likely to carry out mass shootings and right-wing extremist violence has been young white men. So all of that taken together. I also was reacting to the fact that after the Minnesota lawmakers, Melissa Hortman, her husband, her dog, were shot in Minnesota, that America, for all the talk about “political violence has no place here,” that political violence happened, and we sort of shrugged and sort of moved on.
KA:And so, that was the context. It was this broader climate of our rhetoric, of our gun violence problem, of our inability to get out of this really bloody status quo. And I said—again, in this service of being objective, knowing that Charlie Kirk was for some, yes, this Jesus-like martyr at the time, for others, and particularly as a Black woman, as a member of a group that he routinely attacked, was someone who was odious, who spread hate, who put some of even my own acquaintances on watchlists and put their lives in danger. So, journalistic objectivity required me to basically say out loud that I am refusing to overly perform. Again: tearing my clothes, smearing ashes on my face. To me, that was about the performativity, the over-the-topness of mourning for someone who routinely attacked people like me. To me, that's balance. And again, refusing to mourn is not the same as condoning violence. That's actually the full quote of mine. So it wasn't just about refusing to mourn; I was specifically saying: Refusing to do the over-the-top mourning is not the same as saying this person should be killed or that political violence as a place here.
KA:So that's just a fact, right? So I went on about my day. There was no backlash, there was no viral anger. And then maybe 12 hours later, I see a missed call from the Washington Post. A couple of minutes after that, subject line: Notice of Termination, from the HR head. That was it. No conversation. It didn't even come from my immediate bosses. That was it. And their reasons in the termination letter: accusing me of gross misconduct, saying that my references to white men were disparaging and against the social media policy, and that I posed a risk to the physical safety of my colleagues, even. They went so far to say that I posed a threat to them. And again, like I said, I was just doing my job that I'd been paid to do for the last 11 years. Everything was factual. I mean, it was an honest reaction. I was not going to participate in either the extremes of celebrating this man's death, because that's just not who I am, and that's not responsible, and I wasn't going to do the over-the-top mourning for someone who is an extremely hateful, in their eyes, figure.
KA:So, yeah, to be fired for doing my job correctly (and according to how the Washington Post trained me) is still something that I can't get my head around. And again, I was very specific in my words. I didn't say some white men; I didn't say all white men; I didn't say most white men; I said, very specifically, violent white men. But yeah, obviously, I reject it, and we're challenging it. I think the bigger question is for those who cover America, for those who cover violence, for those who cover race, for those who are opinion journalists, for those who just care about freedom of speech and expressing yourself. this sets a really scary precedent.
AK:I mean, your firing, when it crossed my Twitter and BlueSky feed, was the first indication to me that this post-Kirk moment was going to result in extreme censorship. I think that hit for most liberal Americans, or even centrist Americans, when they saw Jimmy Kimmel get taken off the air. I want to go to Mehdi. I think to a lot of people this felt like crossing the Rubicon into full-blown authoritarianism or authoritarian control of the media. Do you think that's a fair reading? Is that too hyperbolic? Like, what did taking Kimmel off the air temporarily mean to you?
MH:Yeah, there was this argument that: Oh, it's not that big a deal compared to other things. Put it in perspective. He's a billionaire. It's just a comedian. No, I think symbolically, it was huge. We have not seen a government official threaten private media companies into taking entertainers off the air because the president didn't like something they said. We've not seen that before in our lifetimes. I know the right-wingers tried so hard to make this into a both-sides thing. Oh, what about Roseanne? Roseanne was fired under Donald Trump. What about all these other entertainers? What about social media companies and Covid guidelines? None of that involved a government insisting someone be fired or taken off the air. Not Joe Biden, not Barack Obama, not George W. Bush. None of them had a direct involvement.
MH:Brendan Carr was on the Benny Johnson podcast. He said it out loud, as is so often the case with this administration. They say this stuff out loud. They don't say it behind closed doors. They say the quiet part out loud. In fact, one of the most amusing things when it comes to Trump defenders is they will spend days often defending Donald Trump, and then Trump will come out and just say something to throw them all under the bus. So they spent days saying: Well, no, this had nothing to do with Donald Trump. J. D. Vance loyally went on air and said: Jimmy Kimmel was a business decision; it had nothing to do with Donald Trump. And then Donald Trump posts: Why is Kimmel back on air? I was told he would be off air. I'm going to sue ABC. Oh, so it is you. None of us want to live in a country where people who make fun of the president are taken off air. That is the country we are in now. Now, did ABC bring him back? Yes. I was just reading earlier that over a million people cancelled their Disney+ and Hulu and ESPN accounts. Guess what? Boycotts work. Public pressure works. Public shaming can work with some institutions. Not all. But no, I think it was a big deal.
MH:Now, was it the biggest deal of all? I know some people went around saying: This is the number one free speech issue under Trump. I think there are many free speech issues under Trump. Mahmoud Khalil is being threatened with deportation right now because of his speech. Rumeysa Öztürk, a Turkish student, grabbed off the street by masked thugs and put in detention for months because she wrote a student newspaper op ed. Massive attack on free speech. First Amendment covers immigrants, folks. So we've had a lot of attacks on free speech, and I would just point out that for every single one of those attacks, all the same folks who spent years boring the shit out of us with complaints about “free speech, free speech, snowflakes cancel culture”—they're all silent now when the government is doing actual assaults on free speech. I mean, we just saw over the weekend a delivery bike rider in Chicago being chased by masked thugs because he said, “F you, Trump.” No crime was committed. He said, “F Trump,” and a bunch of masked government goons chased him down the street of Chicago. I mean, that's the country we now live in.
AK:A question for both of you. Most of the media commentators and analysts that I follow, to understand what's going on in mainstream and independent media, immediately placed ABC taking Kimmel off the air in the context of a broader right-wing or even MAGA takeover. For instance, CBS News. There was recently a deal in which CBS News came under the control of an ownership structure, in which Larry Ellison provided significant financing for this deal, and his son is now the CEO of the corporation that owns CBS. Larry Ellison, of course, is a big Trump donor—by the way, also a big donor to the Friends of the Israel Defense Forces, which funds the Israeli military—and CBS News also installed this right-wing ombudsman from the Hudson Institute, which is this conservative think tank. And you have CBS News, which I've long thought of as like, the paragon of shooting it straight, straight-down-the-middle kind of objective, and now we have them under the control of a right-wing billionaire.
MH:Under the control, let's be clear, under the control of David Ellison, Kenneth Weinstein, and Bari Weiss. All three of them hardcore pro-Israel, and two out of three of them hardcore pro-Trump.
AK:Yeah, I mean, exactly. How do you guys assess this hard right turn in the media? Is it something brand new, a product of wanting to appease Trump? Is it something that there's a long history of? Like have we been building to this, or is it a hard right pivot out of the blue? And also, what do you think the consequences of this will be?
KA:I think Mehdi was spot on. When we saw the free speech of campus protesters, who were protesting against genocide in Gaza and Palestine, and we saw bipartisan crackdown—I was at Columbia teaching a course on race and media while this crackdown was happening, the NYPD being called on peaceful students. So I think, to an extent, these forces will use various weapons in which to purge and get their aims right. I would actually also trace this back to the anti-CRT panic, critical race theory panic. I was a reporter in Texas when I saw how this was operating at the local school boards in North Texas: removing Black principals, Black-written books. And so, I saw like this right-wing playbook at a very local level, in terms of creating a bogeyman. So CRT, some scary three-letter monster—so from CRT to DEI, to then claiming that anyone who wants to protest Israel is pro-Hamas, to now Charlie Kirk. However, when it's happening to Black people, we both sides-ed it: Well, maybe CRT is a little scary. Maybe we DEI’d too hard. Maybe Black Lives Matter went too far. All of that, and now, it's come for Jimmy Kimmel. So, for me, this has been something I've been watching for the last seven to eight years, and it's just that it's caught up with me personally now.
AK:And you can't eliminate the anti-trans panic as well, and shutting down discourse around these groups. But also, the right will put their money where their mouth is, literally—where their media mouth is, literally. So the fact that with Charlie Kirk, Turning Point USA was something in the range of an $80 million operation—the fact that these are well-funded information campaigns from them, well-funded doxxing campaigns from them. What I'm struggling with, in a lot of ways, is: Where's the answer for that from the quote-unquote left? The liberal side? I don't think we have one.
MH:I mean, let's not get started on the asymmetry of our media landscape. What we're seeing now is the full MAGA-fication of the US media, in the sense that even a little bit of questioning is seen as dissent and is crushed down. It's very scary when you look at the landscape now and see what kind of information control will Trump and MAGA have. Let's not forget that Trump is super unpopular. His second term, first year, is one of the most unpopular first years for a president ever. People are turning on Trump; they're turning on Israel. So what better course of action than to control the information that they receive? If you have David Ellison and Larry Ellison controlling—not just CBS News, but they want to buy Warner Brothers and therefore take over CNN, they are about to get TikTok, in concert with Rupert Murdoch, another pro-Trump, pro-Israel billionaire, then, yes: You have TikTok, you have CBS, you have CNN with Ellison, you have Twitter with Musk, you have Meta with Zuckerberg. You have all these people either ideologically committed to Trump or, just in Zuckerberg's case, they'll go wherever the power and money is, and I think, to answer your question about: Is this new? Yes, I do think it's new. We've seen presidents come and go, and we haven't seen this kind of shift in our media landscape. Just today, the day we're taping, YouTube just paid $24 million to Trump to settle his case about them excluding him after the insurrection. So add that to the list. Meta has settled, Twitter has settled, YouTube has settled. Every major big tech firm has paid him. ABC has paid him; CBS has paid him. The CBS lawsuit was the most ridiculous lawsuit in the history of lawsuits. They paid Donald Trump millions of dollars because he didn't like the way they edited an interview with Kamala Harris. I've never heard of anything more insane in my life. There was no scenario in which that case could have been lost by CBS in court. But they settled. They paid him the protection money. So we have a full-on mafioso system with a mob boss at the top, shaking down not just universities and law firms but also major media organizations—shaking them down for protection money.
AK:You mentioned that this comes as Trump is increasingly unpopular. Israel is increasingly unpopular because it's carrying out a genocide. And yet, the media, and of course, not to mention universities and law firms, are capitulating.
MH:He's more unpopular than he's ever been, and yet, he's more powerful than he's ever been. It is fundamentally bewildering and frustrating. And you know, Adam Serwer wrote a great piece in the Atlantic the other day about how—this is how they operate. This is how mob bosses and bullies operate. One by one, they take you down because they know that together, you're strong. And the more that one person goes, then the next person goes, and that has been the strategy with media organizations in particular. There is huge strength among the media, and big law, and big tech, and big universities. But for some reason—and we can speculate. I'm not sure I know exactly the reason, but there's a mixture of factors. Since January 20th, you saw that on Inauguration Day when all those billionaires lined up behind him. Many of whom had criticized him in the past: Sam Altman, Tim Cook, all of these guys who had heavily criticized Trump. Tim Cook said so much about Donald Trump in 2021, and then he turns up at the Oval Office with a fricking gold award for Donald Trump, which he assembles on the table. I mean, it's something out of North Korea. It's embarrassing to watch.
MH:I think it's a mixture of: They're going to get paid well; Republican tax cuts will help them. Deregulation, which is what Zuckerberg and co want. And, of course, fear. Let's not underestimate the fear. I mean, Donald Trump threatened to put Mark Zuckerberg in prison last year. Literally, a year ago, he was threatening to imprison the guy, and the following year, he's sitting next to him saying: $600 million. Is that the right number? Did I get it right, Mr. President? If you saw this in another country, you would say: Oh, the billionaire media owner got threatened with prison by Vladimir Putin, and the following year, he's sucking up to Vladimir Putin. We all know what's going on. So I do think it's a mixture of greed and fear, and also just a refusal to acknowledge what they are laying the groundwork for. Because let's be honest, if we do go full autocracy, some of these people won't be spared either. So they're kind of making their own beds.
AK:I wanted to specifically get to social media and the TikTok deal, for instance, just, just to start out. As you mentioned, Mehdi, TikTok is about to come under the sway of a group of pro-Trump billionaires: Larry Ellison, Rupert Murdoch, Jeff Yass, perhaps a lesser-known billionaire who is already an investor in the parent company that owns TikTok. And of course, the promise of social media in the mainstream, booster-ish narrative was that this was gonna create revolutions. In the Arab Spring—obviously, not to downplay the fact that social media played a force in the Arab Spring, but I think it was probably exaggerated. Social media was supposed to be this freewheeling place where everybody can congregate in the so-called global town square, and yet now, we have Elon Musk obviously on X. Now we have this TikTok deal. What is going on with social media? Should we be worried? Or is social media too big to actually control?
MH:It’s not too big to control at all. These people are controlling it as a fricking algorithm. The White House has talked openly—I don't know if you saw a statement from Levitt the other day that we are going to retrain the algorithm. They're not hiding what they're doing. Netanyahu met with American influencers on his trip to the UN last week. Why is a foreign leader meeting with American influencers? I don't know, that’s a story for another day. But they all sat around the table, and he said very clearly to them that this is the number one purchase, the number one deal in the world right now. He said it will be very, very consequential. He said: These are the new weapons we use in war. These are Netanyahu's words. He said: TikTok is a weapon to use in the war, and this is a very consequential move. So again, they don't hide this stuff. They could have done it secretly, but they're saying it openly. We were told that this was about China; it was never about China. It was always about Israel. That famous Mitt Romney, Anthony Blinken conversation on stage, where Romney complains about how biased it is toward Palestine. That was what was always driving the decision to take over TikTok, to exclude the Chinese, to have Americans run it, and it would be pro-Israeli billionaires. I think you're going to see a lot of young people who have used TikTok as a way to get around corporate media gatekeepers; they are going to see their feeds change radically. Well, they're not going to see what they have been seeing, which is atrocities out of Gaza, and influencers who can explain some history beyond October 7th, 2023. I think that's going to make a lot of young people get their news, whether we like it or not, from TikTok and Instagram. And if you have the algorithms pushing stuff that Netanyahu wants pushed or Ellison wants pushed, that will have an impact. It's naive to think otherwise.
KA:If I can chime in, I mean, just from a global cultural level, I mean, look at the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter. Look at #MeToo. Look at some of most profound conversations about racism, about sexism. I mean, the Black Lives Matter global protests were some of the largest global protests in history. So it's not really lost on me that those platforms that were used for agitating against the systems—agitating against sexist patriarchy, people being able to speak openly about their experiences and organizing—it's not lost to me that that absolutely would be captured. There’s a book called The Net Delusion by Evgeny Morozov, who argued a long time ago that this utopian ideal that we have about social media, he warned way back in 2010 or 2011 or so, saying like: All right, you guys think you can use these tools, use Twitter for good and overthrow dictators? The dictators are going to learn how to use these tools too and going to learn how to use them at scale.
KA:It feels like that is, is coming to fruition. Ever since Musk took over Twitter, which is now X—I mean, Musk himself said: We are not going to talk about decolonization. Certain words, certain people were banned. I personally have almost a quarter of a million followers on X. My reach has been throttled on X, which is why I'm on BlueSky in the first place, because this is an active suppression of certain voices. And so, I definitely see it as an active way to disrupt Black organizing, to disrupt, quote, unquote, “progressives” who are using those platforms to have these discourses. And so, it's a full capture, and I also want to say, I feel like this is a cultural capture, right? It's not just social media. Just today, the news coming down that a $55 billion deal for Electronic Arts, the game developer that has been responsible for everything from NFL games, to Madden, the Sims—Jared Kushner, along with the Saudi private investment funds, is looking to buy that too. Which, as a gamer, this is something that I'm like: Oh, my God. This is a tool that the military actively uses to recruit a lot of children. Actually, this is their first social media platform, gaming with other people. Now that is going to be in the hands, possibly, of Jared Kushner, the Saudis, and, as Mehdi said, it's the MAGA-fication not just of our media but our online reality.
AK:When I first started gaming out this podcast episode, in my head, I was thinking about the New York Times. Now, we can critique the Times a lot, but it seems like the Times has taken on a much more combative posture toward the Trump administration than many of these other institutions. And so, I guess my question is: Is there any exception to this? Or is really the exception independent media and independent media outlets? I mean, both of you—Mehdi, you do Zeteo; Karen, you do your Substack. Is that really the place that people are turning to right now if they're anti-Trump and want real news that challenges this authoritarian turn?
KA:I mean, the New York Times wrote about my case. The Washington Post has not mentioned me—not in any coverage of censorship, as if I never existed there. It's been really stark for me that the first exclusive sit-down interview that I had about my firing was with Don Lemon, who also had his show canceled by CNN. I've been able to get on CNN just once, but it's been really striking to me that the first, and the bravest, and the best interviews I've had so far have been with independent media—have been with Substackers, have been with podcasters. I've been able, at least to an extent, to get my side of the story out, but largely without the major broadcast networks. I was paraded around the network seven, eight years ago when Jamal Khashoggi was killed. Had no problems being on mainstream media. This time? I don't know what it is, and it really does feel like independent media is the new frontier. And many of these shows, many of these podcasters, are reaching literally millions.
MH:I would say—and obviously, I'm biased—that I think people are flocking to independent media because they're fed up of what they're getting from mainstream media. This stuff is all happening out in the open, right? So when the Washington Post did not endorse last year, people canceled their subscriptions in huge numbers. Karen was there at the time. I'm sure she knows internally that was a huge issue. The LA Times—same thing happened there. Kimmel, as I mentioned earlier. People are canceling their subscriptions. So people aren't afraid to vote with their feet and cancel subscriptions and go elsewhere. It’s not the 1950s or 1960s, where you're just blindly loyal to your news outlet that you watch every night. People are willing to jump around, and I think independent media is taking advantage of that. We have 1.3 million subscribers on YouTube in less than 18 months. That's what Zeteo has. To put that in context, MSNBC has 9 million subscribers on YouTube. Six times, seven times what we have, which isn't that much when you think about their resources, experience, history, size, brand name versus us. News Nation, a cable channel, right now has 2.4 million YouTube followers. So we're catching on them.
MH:So the idea that in the past: Oh, independent media is fringe; by not being mainstream, you don't have a big platform. Even those of us on the left who are new are picking up big audiences. Karen mentioned Don Lemon, Joy-Ann Reid, Jim Acosta. These are mainstream anchors who have now come over to Substack and YouTube and are doing their own thing. Obviously, if you look at some of these comedians and podcasters—the Theo Vons and Joe Rogans and Andrew Johnsons—they have huge audiences and they gain huge guests. They're getting the president, the Democratic presidential candidate, the members of the cabinet, etc. So I think that is changing things. My worry, of course, is that all of this independent media still depends on the big tech companies. At the end of the day, Elon Musk can throttle Karen on Twitter, can throttle me on Twitter. Meta can take down our videos anytime they want. Shadow ban us on Instagram and Facebook. So that is the fundamental problem, right? It doesn't matter how successful we are, as long as the technology is still controlled by these big companies that are willing to roll over for Donald Trump, willing to be complicit in his fascist agenda.
MH:That is a problem for all of us in independent media. I'm not going to gloss over that. It's a huge challenge. It's the kind of stuff that keeps me up at night. Substack is a good platform to be on, and I will defend Substack in the sense that they are a free speech platform, and they are less censorious than some of our mainstream media outlets. And that cuts both ways, right and left. But that is what worries me in the long term. What do you do if these platforms are pulled from beneath us? Then it becomes hugely problematic, no matter how big our followings are. But at the moment, we're doing what we can to give people choice, to get rid of some of those filters and gatekeepers and try and provide people with unfiltered news about what is going on in the Middle East and here in the United States. And I think the numbers speak for themselves.
AK:I'm glad that you tempered your positivity, which I share, about independent media, with some reality about the fact that it is still controlled by all of these big social media corporations, many of whom are in thrall to Trump.
MH:Which is why Democrats, by the way, need to have a plan for big tech if they ever return to office, whether it's the House, whether it's the White House. I mean, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and others were talking about breaking up big tech a long time ago, and Joe Biden did not do it.
KA:Yeah. And also, just to add to the rest of that, speaking to folks who've been independent—I mean, the advantage of being at a big institution is that should someone say: Hey, I'm going to sue you for what you said, there are those sort of resources to be able to defend you.
MH:That's the new form of censorship, right? Reaching for frivolous lawsuits and defamation suits from the president downwards, from the richest man in the world.
KA:To Hulk Hogan and what happened to Gawker. And Peter Thiel.
MH:It's become a fashion on the right now. From the free speech warriors!
KA:Right. And also, it's so expensive to do proper reporting. I do worry about what this means for those who are reporters, investigative journalists. It is so expensive and time-consuming to do that, and it's going to really be up to the American people, subscribers and things like that. Will they be willing to pay for what it takes to do a fully reported, fully investigative effort and stories? I mean, it's not cost-effective for most independent journalists, so there's still some hitches to watch out for. But at this point, what are the choices that we have?
AK:Thank you so much to Karen and Mehdi for coming on. You've been listening to On the Nose, the Jewish Currents podcast. If you like us, please rate and subscribe to the podcast on your platforms. Of course, subscribe to the magazine. Visit our work at JewishCurrents.org. We'll see you next time. Thank you very much.