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This is Stay Tuned In Brief. I'm Preet Bharara. Being online has gotten worse. It seems like any given day's news feed is a whirlwind of tragedy, envy, conspiracy theories, misinformation, and now... Utter chaos. And buried in it all is the valuable information about what is really happening. Joining me to discuss is the Atlantic staff writer Charlie Warzel. He writes the popular newsletter Galaxy Brain about technology, media.
and big ideas. Charlie, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. So there's lots to talk about, obviously, in the world. Policy, politics, the media. And you write a lot about that. I guess my first question is, what is the legacy media? How do you define it? Who's included in it? And is it or is it not an insult these days? Oh, man. There's a lot there. You know, I think the way that I would define it...
I mean, there's the way that I think a lot of people use it as shorthand for like the big remaining papers or the things that they remember, you know, reading in their youth. Is the Atlantic? Is the Atlantic? Oh, the Atlantic. Definitely. Definitely. I think. Legacy media, you know, I believe 1865 is when it's founded. Like, you don't get more legacy than that. But I think a lot of people define it as...
you know, the media that's sort of been around for a long time that's popular. But I would say like, you know, major newspapers, major magazines, major, you know, news stations and cable channels and things like that. But I think I would say a better way to think about that is as media entities that have to really follow a set.
of standards, right? A kind of a traditional set of standards in terms of not only how they report, but how they publish. And I would say that, you know, legacy media and the phrase institutions or the term institutions. are very, you know, like tightly wound up in each other. Like a legacy media organization is one that has institutional authority, but also institutional bureaucracy and institutional.
you know, structures. At The Atlantic, I have fact checkers. We have, you know, copy editors. We have an editorial apparatus that works not only to make sure that we're publishing the most truthful you know, best written factual content, but there's also just a lot of checks on every individual person in that process to make sure that nobody does anything, you know, reckless in that.
And I think that that sort of bureaucracy, which takes... time to navigate, which is slower than, say, somebody firing up Twitch and just talking or even a lot of podcasts where two people can just get together and kind of speak extemporaneously on issues or TikTok or social media or whatever. Or publishing to a sub stack. I think that is the sort of legacy media has exists in opposition to that, to the newer style of media. And as to whether it's an insult or not, I think.
To a lot of people, it is. And I think it's because of that. being bound up in institutions, right? This is a moment of deep distrust of institutions. And so I think that there's that element there. So on this issue of whether or not it's an insult, and who owns the term, and whether it's pejorative or neutral or something else, when you from The Atlantic or someone from The New York Times hears themselves being called the legacy media, do they feel insulted or not?
I mean, I think it depends, right? Previously, I worked at the New York Times. So I've been in different newsrooms that you would classify as legacy media. I mean, I think to some degree. A lot of people who are in those institutions are there because they're proud of it. They're there because they understand the rigor, right? They understand sort of the mission statement. They connect to the history. I think that's like a really important thing.
something that, you know, I feel, whether I was at The Times or whether I'm at The Atlantic, is this connection to a history of people who have done this work before and, you know, really... helped, you know, document major moments of American struggle, but also just, you know. Like The Atlantic is like an archive of the American idea in this way, and it's great to be a part of that. But not to be like a company homer or anything. I would say there's also a frustration too.
Right. Inside of this anti-institutional push. And I know like my peers across the media industry who are in these these places like we do feel frustration. Right. Because sometimes. these checks that are put into the system, this institutional editorial bureaucracy.
makes it harder to compete with this type of news cycle, right? I've been doing a lot of reporting on Elon Musk and the Doge incursion into the federal government and something that I feel doing that work and, you know, sort of painstakingly... reporting and checking sources and verifying and going through this procedure while Elon Musk, you know, kind of kicks down doors and is sending, you know, 21-year-olds into the Treasury to look at sensitive information.
I feel sometimes like I'm bringing like a spoon to a gunfight, right? You know, everything's moving so fast. And so I do think there's frustration, right? And a wish to want to be able to compete in that way. But at the same time... You know, that editorial apparatus serves something very important. What's interesting about your description of and defense of the legacy media and the fact-checking...
and the standards and all those other things that you just talked about. When I hear people denigrate legacy media, whether it's Elon Musk or someone else, it seems that the thrust of their denigration is legacy media is biased. Legacy media misses facts. Legacy media covers the wrong things. Legacy media gets it wrong. When ABC settles a significant lawsuit or when CBS is on the verge of settling a significant lawsuit, it sort of undermines in the minds of many.
This whole regime that you're talking about, which is supposed to make, on that view, legacy media more trustworthy, more correct, more balanced. And yet when people use the term, I think they're using it to denote.
The opposite of that. Do you have a reaction to that? I would agree. I mean, and I think they are using it often in a derogatory way. And I would say what I have found... really interesting about this moment is that all of those things that I was telling you about this, the editorial bureaucracies, right, the stuff, fact checkers, editors, things like that, all of that.
is in place like i just said to provide a higher quality of journalism but all of that is used by especially by by people like let's say elon musk or you know sort of the mega movement all of that is used actually against mainstream media as a way to denigrate it as a way to um
to show either bias or to, you know, elicit distrust. This idea of editing, I spent a lot of time in the first Trump administration covering the right-wing media ecosystem and all these shock jocks coming sort of up through, you know. Twitter and other places. And they were obsessed with this notion.
that we are going to live stream everything we are going to if we're going to you know talk about something we're going to write it at you know 150 000 words we're going to document document alex jones is on the air for you know 22 hours a week or something like that, just simply talking. And the idea behind that is we're going to give you something, you know, quote unquote unfiltered. We're not hiding anything. We're documenting everything. You deserve to know.
everything and that is very much the ethos of say the internet right information wants to be free you should be able to find anything you want and it's very easy then to take that and turn that towards the mainstream media and say look, they're not showing you everything. They're editing absolutely everything. And that is, I think, reasonable. But to answer your point, I think there are lots of people. out there who do feel like the mainstream media is not doing a good job of
You know, let's just say, like, obviously covering Donald Trump or holding Donald Trump to account. Right. And there is this feeling that they want the media to drop any any supposition that they are objective. And this idea that no one can really be objective when there is a figure like Donald Trump, when there is a right-wing movement like the MAGA movement coming through our country and taking it over.
And I understand that criticism. I think that that's very fair. When you see people responding to insurgent media organizations, like let's say the Bulwark, right? I think what they see in that is someone... who is responding to the crisis in a way that's not objective and that they feel so much more authentic and is actually getting the job done. I think that there's something to that. That's definitely a real thing. Stay tuned. There's more coming up after this.
Hey, this is Peter Kafka. I'm the host of Channels, a podcast about technology and media. And maybe you've noticed that a lot of people are investing a lot of money trying to encourage you to bet on sports right now, right from your phone.
That is a huge change, and it's happened so fast that most of us haven't spent much time thinking about what it means and if it's a good thing. But Michael Lewis, that's the guy who wrote Moneyball and The Big Short and Liar's Poker, has been thinking a lot about it.
And he tells me that he's pretty worried. I mean, there was never a delivery mechanism for cigarettes as efficient as the phone is for delivering the gambling apps. It's like the world has created less and less friction for the behavior when what it needs is more and more. You can hear my chat with Michael Lewis right now on channels wherever you get your podcasts. The Republicans have been saying lots of things.
Just yesterday their leader said he wants to own Gaza? The US will take over the Gaza Strip and we will do a job with it too. We'll own it. On Monday, the Secretary of State said an entire federal agency was insubordinate. USAID in particular, they refused to tell us anything. We won't tell you what the money's going to, where the money's for, who has it. Over the weekend, Vice President Elon Musk We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper. Could gone to some great parties.
did that instead. But what have the Democrats been saying? People are aroused. I haven't seen people so aroused in a very, very long time. That's a weird way to put it, Senator. We're going to ask what exactly is the Democrats' strategy to push back on Republicans on Today Explained?
So explain the following phenomenon to me, and maybe I'm overstating it. But on the one hand, people have become conspiracy theorists. They don't buy what legacy media tells them. They see reporting. They assume it's a lie. some of the people they revere in politics or in business will say this article from New York Times is full of lies. It leaves things out. Fox News will say it about other, and Fox News, by the way, I imagine you would also call a legacy.
media outlet because it's been around a long time so on the one hand there's the belief that we're just being fed lies right on the other hand i see repeatedly completely false statements, misinformation, made up out of whole cloth. I'll give you an example in a second. Completely made up stuff that people are just utterly credulous about, right? So a quick example.
On Twitter, I saw someone post the other day, my old boss, Senator Schumer. He said, Senator Schumer's annual salary is X dollars, whatever it is, 200,000, whatever it is, per year. And he's only been in public service, and yet he has a net worth of $80 million. And there's reply after reply after reply by people who I assume, although maybe I shouldn't assume, but I'm going to assume for the purpose of this question, hate the legacy media, think it's full of nonsense.
who are replying not incredulously or not by going and looking at the financial disclosures, but are saying he should be in jail, he should be investigated, par for the course, response after response after response. And I think these are some of the same people. I think the Atlantic is full of crap. Can you explain that? Because by the way, just for the record, he is now worth $80 million. This is happening all the time, right? That's an example of it. The one that I've seen.
right now that's going through is, you know, elon musk and other people are are throwing out us aid you know numbers uh and stuff from you know from the federal government what the federal government is funding right um and there's a bunch of viral stuff going around that you know the federal government is giving millions and millions of dollars to politico because they are you know they're trying to fund politico and this is an easily debunked
Misconstruing of the facts, right? Those are Politico Pro subscriptions that different people and different agencies are purchasing in order to get information that they can, you know, use to do their jobs. So many people have believed that immediate sort of lie or, you know, misconstruing of the facts.
And it doesn't really matter, right? Because there is such a durable media ecosystem now that exists on the right that it travels from these people who are totally credulous, like you said, about it, right? They believe these people. They believe what they are saying. And it moves its way up through that system. And then you have on Thursday.
Donald Trump posted about it on Truth Social, in all caps, very mad. And it's this way in which this lie just becomes canon, right, in this side of it. Those people, yes, you're totally right, would also say that The Atlantic publishes. propaganda and gets things wrong and makes up their sources and lies and all that stuff, right? And I think what has happened here is that there has been this sorting.
into two completely separate completely durable media ecosystems you know there are terms for this that's like you know like the filter bubbles that people have And I think people have sort of sorted into the information that they feel comfortable with, but also more importantly, the purveyors of the information they feel comfortable with, right? But is that really right? Because sometimes a purveyor is unknown.
to these people. It's a random person posting on Twitter. It's not Elon Musk. It's not Donald Trump. And it would be one thing if the trend was, look, we are skeptical of... and apply critical reasoning to facts and stories brought to us by legacy media which makes us now critical of and skeptical of all media that's not what happens it strikes me and and i wonder if you think this is correct or way off the mark
It's really just about wanting the news that you want to hear, right? So if a legacy media, so every once in a while, a legacy media organization will report something that actually jibes with the viewpoint. of you know a trump supporter and they'll say well i guess even a broken clock is right twice a day and on the other hand people are buying into information and facts and reporting that fits with the truth that they want to hear
as opposed to what we're told is the critique that certain news outlets are biased and misinforming. Is that what it is? Yes, to some degree. This is people, I mean, the sorting is based off of this, right? It is, you know, from a from like a psychological standpoint, it is it is very difficult to to break away from your preconceived notions. Right. From from the.
biases that you have. It's actually psychologically painful to do that. But not only that, our information systems and the politics that we have and the culture that's developed around all of that is so... very tribal and is so... You know, it's not just like the news. It's your interpretation of how the world is and all the people around you who share that. And that's why I use that word, you know, sorting, right?
If you are someone who has deep, let's say, progressive politics or deep mega politics or whatever, right? Culturally, you are forming bonds and relationships with other people around that. It's become harder and harder to reckon with information that's outside of that. You know, when we talk about disinformation, I wrote a story with a...
wonderful media studies professor named Mike Caulfield. Yes, I have the piece in front of me. Can I just read you a line from it? Yeah, please. Because it's so great. You together wrote, quote, lately our independent work has coalesced around a particular shared idea. That misinformation is powerful not because it changes minds, but because it allows people to maintain their beliefs in light of growing evidence to the contrary. The internet may function not so much as a brainwashing engine,
but as a justification machine, end quote. That kind of, that boggles my mind a bit. And I think it's right. Can you elaborate on that as you're about to? Yeah, absolutely. I'm glad you read it. You saved me from having to describe it. Just use my words to make me sound better than... I think that... This idea of the justification machine is also about this idea that information has been made so readily available, right? We have this expectation that we must be able to
access any information and also this expectation throughout the internet that we have the ability to parse it, right? And that we can understand it and everyone should respect our intelligence enough to allow that to happen. But what's really happened is humans are really good at being evidence gatherers to help form their worldviews. And when you live in a world where...
every piece of information is available at your fingertips, that has changed a lot of our behaviors. It has really sort of supercharged that. And I think that what's really important here...
A lot of people read that piece and said, oh, yeah, I knew it, right? Which is part of the point of the piece. Everyone feels this way. When I go and I look at something on... you know twitter or blue sky or wherever i am and i see i see a piece of information i am consciously or subconsciously filtering it through my own worldview right i am trying to either
quickly justify it or not and if you're a smart and savvy media consumer you catch yourself doing that right but but i can see it myself if i see something that really doesn't sound right to me i'm immediately skeptical i'll go research who that person is sort of to try to build a case against it in my own head and make sure. Now, if it turns out it's bulletproof, I'd like to think I would be able to admit that.
But it works the exact opposite way, right? I'm very quick to retweet or reshare something from a source that I already know and I trust that, you know, very much validates the things that I'm thinking and feeling at that current moment. Because I sort of have a built-in lack of skepticism. Anyway, that sort of tendency writ large and powered by the, you know, social media, this, you know.
news, influencer culture, the politicians who have kind of changed the way that they interact and who are influencers themselves. It has created this culture where we are all evidence foraging. all the time. And we're doing so to try to protect this worldview and all these relationships and this understanding of the world. And it's so easy.
You know, that is sort of what the attention economy has wrought, I think, to some degree. It provides people. I mean, if you look at someone like Alex Jones, he's obviously been. sued and maybe forced to sell his company and all that. But prior to doing that, he made an incredible amount of money.
Basically, providing evidence and justification for people to believe the things that they wanted to believe, whether it was through conspiracy theories or just interpretation of every single news event. And that's incredibly lucrative because you're— providing a service to people, you know, to keep them from having to change their mind, to experience that cognitive dissonance, which is just so psychologically painful. Yeah. So it's not that the modern...
environment and technology and social media has changed people. Human nature remains the same. There's now a way at persuasion and taking advantage of what was already human nature in a way that wasn't. in existence before when there were three networks, right? And this is why I say it's important, you know, it's important who these people are following and this, you know, filter bubble idea. What's so important about it
is we are sorting into these camps based off the people who we believe we can trust, right? The influencer news economy, whether it's people. on substack who are writing about progressive things or it's you know charlie kirk or jack posobic or some of these you know mega influencers people like that there are these parasocial relationships that form, right? There's this notion that you know the person, that you can trust them. And a lot of that is done by...
Flattering people by giving people what they want. Another term in this universe is this idea. of audience capture, right? And it happens to lots of people where you start providing, you know, a certain slant on the world, a certain type of content, a certain whatever, and it gets really popular. And you start responding to that incentive by kind of upping the stakes. And there's this ratcheting up in terms of what you're giving them.
And I've seen and heard from different people say there's a point where some folks kind of come to and they say, I've sort of been... radicalized by my audience and my audience has radicalized me. And then there's plenty of people who won't admit that. So what's the solution to all this in the remaining two minutes, Charlie? I don't think that there's an easy solution. The way I...
I think about this is I think that the information revolution that we're all experiencing, right? It has been, let's just say, 28 to 30 years since, you know, the commercial internet as we know it has been. poured it into enough homes, you know, for it to start to change the way that we see the world and get information. That is, it's an amazing... revolution in terms of media technology that is on the order of the printing press or on the order of of um
I think it could be as big as the industrial revolution, right? This is a massive societal change. Think about Facebook and the idea that 2.5 billion people are connected on one platform. There has never been such a connection of human beings on one centralized network in the world. The idea that in, you know, Facebook is now 21 years old. The idea that in 21 years, we could all...
adapt and understand and develop cultural norms around all this is, I think, just unrealistic. I think that we... are going to have to spend generations developing these norms, understanding how to... talk to each other, understanding what these platforms are doing to us. One of the best-selling books in the last year is The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt. And that speaks to a real fear.
A real kind of concern that the phones in our pockets are doing things, you know, doing things to kids, but everyone sort of feels that. And yet the science around that, the social science, is like pretty inconclusive. So we have, we're grappling with this notion that something has really fundamentally changed, not within us, but in the way that, you know.
We react to the information that we're constantly being bombarded with. And I think it's going to take a long time to figure out what it is, what it's doing to us. how to best protect ourselves and our attention against it, how to develop a politics, how to develop a culture, a relationship to each other, a kindness, learn how to speak to each other again. in this way. And I don't know if that's going to happen in a really legible way.
in, you know, even my generation. I think we're just in this period of great upheaval and we need to kind of understand what's happening to ourselves first. Okay, so on that note. Charlie, I guess the solution I'm going to posit is we will get there one podcast episode at a time. That's right. You're doing it. We're trying. You're the solution. We're trying. We all are.
It takes a village. Charlie Warzel, thanks so much for being with us. Yeah, thank you for having me. For more analysis of legal and political issues making the headlines, become a member of the Cafe Insider. Members get access to exclusive content, including the weekly podcast I host with former U.S. attorney Joyce Vance. Head to cafe.com slash insider to sign up for a trial. That's cafe.com slash insider.
if you like what we do rate and review the show on apple podcasts or wherever you listen every positive review helps new listeners find the show Send me your questions about news, politics, and justice. Tweet them to me at Preet Bharara with the hashtag AskPreet. You can also now reach me on threads, or you can call and leave me a message at 669-247-7338.
That's 669-24-PREET. Or you can send an email to letters at cafe.com. Stay Tuned is presented by Cafe and the Vox Media Podcast Network. The executive producer is Tamara Sepper. The technical director is David Tattashore. The deputy editor is Celine Rohr. The editorial producers are Noah Azulay and Jake Kaplan. The associate producer is Claudia Hernandez. And the cafe team is Matthew Billy.
Nat Weiner, and Leanna Greenway. Our music is by Andrew Dost. I'm your host, Preet Bharara. As always, stay tuned.