The Death of the Gatekeeper: Adam Penenberg on Traditional Journalism's Identity Crisis

[00:00:10] Hello and welcome to the latest edition of Blue City Blues, a podcast featuring smart guests talking about the problems facing blue cities and how to fix them. I'm David Hyde with Sandeep Kaushik. And Sandeep, you and I have talked a lot about how blue city media has been changing over the last 10 or 15 years and the nature of blue city media. But I don't think we've done anything about where blue city media could be headed next.

[00:00:36] Yeah. And it's an interesting question, right? I mean, I am a media junkie, right? I still get two daily newspapers, print editions delivered to my door. I am one of the increasingly aging crowd of people. I think the average age is 71, I think, for people who listen to one of the nightly newscasts, right? Most nights I listen to one of the nightly newscasts, right? Oh my God. Disturbing. Disturbing.

[00:01:01] I know, isn't it? Yeah, it's pretty fuddy-duddy of me. On the other hand, you know, I'm also seeing my media consumption habits like evolve pretty rapidly. And I'm getting a lot of info now from all sorts of different sources. Like, you know, every morning my inbox is flooded by emails from all the substacks and podcasts and online outlets that I subscribe to. It's actually kind of overwhelming. It's really hard to keep track of all of that stuff.

[00:01:29] As I recall, I don't think you started listening to podcasts until you started doing one. No, I think I started doing a podcast before I ever listened. I am a late adopter, right? I'm an old man. But, you know, but I will say this. So while my sort of consumption habits have changed a lot, you know, even if I am late to the game, I will say that the other thing that's changed for me is that I am constantly now not just watching the news,

[00:01:56] but I'm watching the newsmakers themselves to kind of judge whether I think they are bringing some bias or at least some agenda or perspective that I should take into account as I consume their coverage. And I don't think I'm alone on that front. Like, it seems to me like this old media center has kind of collapsed. And with it, the idea that there's even any kind of singular shared narrative that explains major news events. And I think we're in kind of a brave new world when it comes to media.

[00:02:25] I'm not sure I have that same experience. I feel like I, you weren't clear on whether or not news media had a bias back in the 1980s. You were like, this is objective reality when you were listening. You know, much more so than now, right?

[00:02:40] All right. Well, I can think of no one better positioned to talk to us about this and the future of Blue City Media than Adam Penenberg, a prominent Blue City journalism professor at NYU, a writer, editor, columnist, and film producer. Adam Penenberg's written for Fast Company, Forbes, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Wired Slate, Playboy, The Economist.

[00:03:02] He's also a senior, former senior editor at Forbes and reporter for Forbes.com, which is where Adam Penenberg broke the story about the notorious, fabulous Stephen Glass, who had been making up stories as a reporter at the New Republic in the late 1990s and is the subject of the film Shattered Glass. And full disclosure, Adam Penenberg and I have been friends since the late 1980s. Adam Penenberg, thanks so much for joining us. Yeah, Sandeep and I also go way back to Sandeep.

[00:03:32] I won't tell any of those stories. I was going to, I have to, I have to just, you and I for a year co-edited The Quest, the student newspaper of Reed College in Portland, Oregon, way back in the mid 1980s, right? And can you believe that you and I brought respectability to it? We were the respectable editors, it's true. And Hyde here with his band of cronies tried to destroy all that. They did, they out. We won't, we won't rehash any of that history. No, no, it's fine. It's fine.

[00:04:02] Yeah. The irony, the irony that we're all here 40 years later. As I like to say, I beat Sandeep in his first election. That's true. We lost my seven votes to David and his young radical. I counted those votes, by the way. I was part of the team. We were very, very honest about it. Yeah. Adam, were you running for reelection? No, no, I was graduating. I was graduating. You'd moved on. We replaced Adam with a third person. But anyway, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It didn't work out.

[00:04:32] But anyway, you know, I have a question for you. Does blue in blue city mean sad? Because that's very accurate. Often. Often it does. Yeah. Yeah. And I can, I am definitely an expert on the sad state of media. Yeah. That's true. This is the blues part of it. What do you want to know? Who's to blame? Well, look. What we could do. What they have done, which never seems to work. You know, what can we talk about?

[00:04:58] We should start with the Stephen Glass story, which you probably get asked about for every single interview you've ever done. But just because our audience may not be so familiar with it. Anybody who's born in, you know, 2001 or whatever may not have heard about this. This was when the New Republic was kind of the magazine, right? I mean, it was everywhere in DC, at least it was, I know my advisor, Jackson Lears at Rutgers

[00:05:27] wrote book reviews for the New Republic back in the 1990s. And I'm sure that it was the most read thing that he ever wrote, even though, and they were good book reviews, but in any case, Stephen Glass, this guy comes along, starts fabricating stories and you caught him. So I don't need to have you sort of rehearse what happened, but I'm wondering, like, this must come up in your classes. What do you tell students about this episode? Do you make them watch the movie?

[00:05:57] You know, I don't make them watch the movie, although for the first time in like years, I assigned it to my class to watch because. I mean, they should watch it. It's a great movie. I teach a class on ethics. So, you know, the reason they had me teach the class was like, he'll teach Stephen Glass. But then for years, I resisted it thinking like, they don't want to hear me talk about like past glories and shit. So you can curse on this show. Yeah, totally. Oh, good. Yeah. Thank God. Let it go. Thank God. Yeah. Whoa. Yeah.

[00:06:24] So, you know, I tell him basically the weird thing was that, you know, Stephen Glass, I caught him fabricating that story. And it turned out he had fabricated like basically everything, right? For years, either parts of stories, but also increasingly whole stories. And in fact, mine was the first time he made up everything in the story. And it just so happened. It happened to be in an area that I knew, which was really arcane anyway.

[00:06:52] So the point is, though, five years later, Jason Blair happened. Now, in 1998, when we busted Glass, people were shocked, right? There was absolute palpable shock at the time. I remember it because I did like interviews for weeks afterward. And there was intense interest. Like this could, how did it happen? And people became, to this day, there are glass junkies who approach me and tell me, I, you know, they know everything about it.

[00:07:20] It's really, it's like a folk tale at this point. But at the time, it was shocking. And then five years later, Jason Blair happens almost five years to the day. And that editor's note, they had like this 12,000 word mea culpa where they go into painstaking detail. What went wrong? And at one point, they sent editors to fact check all of Blair's stories.

[00:07:45] And they go, they end up on this, meeting this guy who was, whose daughter was captured during the Iraq war, yada, yada. But the point was that Jason Blair wrote an article where he made up everything in it. And so they asked the father, when you read the article where you were quoted in the story and you never talked to the reporter, and he was describing the front porch view from your home and everything in the story was wrong, why didn't you say anything? And he said, I just thought that's what journalists do.

[00:08:15] And so in those five years, something had happened. And if you look at Gallup polls judging the trustworthiness of professions during that five year period, trust in journalism plummeted and has continued to plummet. And now we're like equal to members of Congress. That shows you how bad it is. It used to be we were like very respected profession 40 years ago, but there's been a total grind

[00:08:42] toward the bottom now where we're like one of the least trusted professions. If you're enjoying this podcast, can you please do us a favor? Spread the word. Tell your friends, your family, your coworkers, anyone who's interested in the future of blue cities and better governance. Basically anyone who thinks that the conversation in blue cities is kind of stagnated and thinks we need to be hearing from more smart people, even people that we might disagree with about many things.

[00:09:11] And one more favorite ask, if you want this podcast to continue, can you take a minute right now to give us a five star review on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts? Because the way the algorithm works, it's the five star reviews that give other folks a chance to discover the podcast. And finally, we want your feedback, positive, critical, whatever. Please send that to us directly. You can email us bluecitypodcast at gmail.com.

[00:09:40] That's bluecitypodcast at gmail.com. And send along show ideas, guest ideas. Sandeep and I would really appreciate that as well. Okay, back to the show. So Adam, let's get into that because this is something, you know, I've been tracking this and I was just looking up some Pew research from last October on trust in the media.

[00:10:06] And it does seem like it's all but collapsed, right? I mean, Pew found that 56% of US adults say that they have either a lot or some trust in the information they get from the national news media. And that's down 11 percentage points from March of 2025, but down 20 points since they first started asking the question in 2016.

[00:10:32] And it's also worth noting there's a significant partisan divide that comes in with that where Republicans are way less trusting of the media than Democrats are, though I thought it was interesting that Pew found that Republican trust in media accounts had actually rebounded a fair bit from an all-time low back in 2021 when it was down to 35% and it came back up to 44%, whereas Democratic trust at 69% was the lowest they'd ever measured.

[00:10:59] But overall, right, trust has really gone down a lot. And these Pew numbers are a lot higher than Gallup does these surveys, too. There was an October 2025 Gallup that had it down at 28% overall, you know, kind of trust in the media. So, Adam, what's going on there? You know what? They always ask this very broad question, trust in media. Now, do they define media when they run this survey? So I don't want to criticize Pew. They're awesome. But you know what?

[00:11:28] I would like to see the numbers for how do people trust the media that they like and consume? So, you know, I think that Fox News viewers really trust their outlet of a lot. I think New York Times consumers, I think many of them trust the New York Times. And so you're not just looking at this kind of like a name question, trust in media, which is very broad. But you're looking at like this deepening polarization, which we know is true.

[00:11:55] And this deepening polarization is to the point where the way that media is disseminated has changed dramatically since Sandy and you and I were consuming newspapers over morning or afternoon coffee. Right. And, you know, and it was it was at a time in the 90s and before when like like consuming news was part of our daily habits. Nowadays, people don't have that habit.

[00:12:21] They don't have the habitual coffee newspaper news or six o'clock news at night, except if you're over 70. Sorry, Sandy. Yeah, I'm not there yet. You act like somebody. I'm acting older than my age. Yeah, exactly. So so, you know, the point is, though, and that and then that also plays into how media made money back then. Right. So back in the 90s, you know, when you bought a newspaper, it monopolized your attention. You know, you had two choices.

[00:12:48] You could either read the newspaper or or on your commuter train, talk to the guy next to you. And the newspaper usually won out. The New York Times was had you as a captive audience. But now on my phone, I can get the New York Times and read it if I want to or I can do anything else. I can shop for shoes on Amazon. I can play Candy Rush. I can I can, you know, do any number of things, including maybe even be interviewed on a podcast all on my phone. And so nothing monopolizes their attention.

[00:13:17] So, first of all, there is no way to making money changes when you don't monopolize your audience anymore, because the New York Times doesn't make money on on selling news. They make money by by attracting eyeballs that can be sliced and diced and then you can use it to sell stuff to them. And that's how they've always existed. And now they've had to change, too. So if you look at New York Times, which is a great example today, you know, they make more money on games and cooking and entertainment than they do on the news.

[00:13:45] And so news is a loss leader for the New York Times. They're really a games and cooking app company that has news as a subsidized loss leader. And it's a shame because, you know, the New York Times does some great journalism. Although my nephew just got a job for the New York Times working on programming the cooking app. So it's good for him. So I hope he's giving you a cut of that. 2024 in that election, we see this shift, right?

[00:14:12] Joe Rogan with Donald Trump gets like, I don't know, almost like 100 million listens or something like that. And I'm wondering, how does this affect how you're training the next generation of journalists? Are you like, forget doing news, man? Just start a podcast where you get RFK on there to explain the effectiveness of vaccines. Be an influencer, not a journalist, right? God, you've been vetting my curriculum.

[00:14:39] How did you gain access to the secret plans I have to retool my entire – I run an online master's program for your audience. They probably don't know. And I trained – I've graduated about 200-plus journalists now. And we launched in 2019. We were like one of the only – well, I think we're the only major institute school with an online master's in journalism. And so, you know, we get some great people.

[00:15:06] But I've noticed in the last few years the types of students have changed that I get. And so in the past, I got, you know, pretty traditional people. They wanted – you know, they want a job at the New York Times. They want a job writing for Slate. They want a job writing for, you know, Politico. They want a job in traditional media. But more recently, I'm getting people who are like – they enter the program as influencers. And they have an audience already.

[00:15:30] And in fact, they don't need journalism to make money because they're making money just fine. They want what journalism can teach them because they feel like they will get legitimacy in what they're doing by taking the tenets of journalism and applying it to what they do, which is influence. And so I feel like what you're seeing today are like we're seeing a lot of people coming out of different career paths that we didn't see in the past.

[00:15:58] You know, I had a full professor from another major university who signed up for my program because – to get a master's, mind you. She already had a PhD in another area. But to get a master's because she wanted to be able to write books that were more commercially acceptable, right? And her books weren't getting read. And she was hoping that she would learn the tenets of journalism to do that. We get people that end up – like one woman ended up being like the spokesperson for somebody running for Congress in Texas, right? And so, you know, she's the spokesperson.

[00:16:28] She took the Sandeep route from journalism into politics. The dark side. She crossed the road. And it's not just her. I've had others have done that as well. They've moved into politics because the tools that you learn in the program really work. But the thing is we've had to be very adaptable because I don't train people to write work for the New York Times. I train people to be really good ethical journalists and to be able to be fluent in multiple platforms. And by platform, I mean is it video? Is it podcast? Is it infographics?

[00:16:58] Is it gossip? I don't care. Fashion. We get people who want to do all sorts of things. In fact, during COVID, a number of Broadway dancers discovered us because they didn't have anything else they could do. There were no performances. And so actually they are the best students I ever had because who's more driven and focused than Broadway dancers, you know? So we get all sorts of very interesting people that come through the program.

[00:17:24] And, you know, they kind of reflect the way that journalism is changing because they don't all want to come in and be journalists anymore. They want it because it will advance what it is they're already doing or they want to learn the tools, the techniques, tools, and experiences that we give. So we can teach them podcasts. We can teach them multimedia and video. We can teach them long form for the New Yorker and things like that. And so that's kind of like the way that we scope things out and what we offer. And it's difficult because it's a moving target.

[00:17:54] Right now, I layer AI into both classes that I teach. And I have students work in AI, learn how to use it, learn all these disparate tools so that they can basically tell them, use AI or it will use you. Like you can't hide from it. So either you learn how to be fluent and use the tools because they will be the ones that Olsters will ask for help. And they'll be able to make lots of money in the short term. So I can't guarantee their long-term success.

[00:18:23] But in the short term, I can definitely get them into places where they wouldn't be able without a master's from us. Just to put an exclamation point on some of what you're saying, Adam, again, going back to that Pew research I was just citing, Pew found that for younger people, adults under the age of 30 years old, they have as much trust in what they pick up on social media as they do from what they hear from national news organizations.

[00:18:52] You know, they also found that trust is higher in local news organizations. People have, you know, kind of less trust in national news than they do in their own local things, which is what you're talking about. That's something they have a kind of media they have maybe more of a direct relationship with in some personal way. But yes, but when you look at younger people, their habits, as you're saying, are really, really different from an old dude like me, right? Yes, they are. Sure, yeah.

[00:19:22] I think you're touching on something kind of interesting, which is the change in what we're seeing at the university level of what students come in with. And so, you know, the kids coming into universities right now, you know, at 20 years old, you know, they have never known life without a screen ever. Now, my kids, you know, were born, you know, a couple of years before the iPhone. And so they're very fluent in technology.

[00:19:50] But these kids not only were born with a screen, were born with it. And those early experiences are very, they shape and they shape a child. They shape everybody. Those early experiences are very important. And so they are much more fluent and immersed in screen life to the point where most of them live more of their life on screen than they do in real life. And by real life, I mean just off a screen.

[00:20:19] Like, I'm guilty of that as well. I'm not being critical. I work on screen and therefore I work a lot, you know, and so I'm on screen most of my life. But I'm aware of the difference. And I feel like a lot of kids today are born in environments where they have a different relationship to what being on screen means than I do. I see it as distinctly different. I don't think they do. And so it changes their media consumption habits as well.

[00:20:49] Like, you know, Gen Z are much more likely to like basically cancel their streaming memberships for Netflix and Hulu and whatnot based on one show. If the show they like goes, they're gone. And then they'll sign up again when their show comes back. Whereas people like me are like, yeah, let it ride. I don't care. It's just $9.99 a month or whatever it is. And I don't care. But they do. And so they are very particular because they're very interested in money because they have to be.

[00:21:18] Because their fear is that there is nothing left for them as they're entering this really tumultuous job climate for them. And so I think you're getting all of that. And so one study that really shocked me recently, but then again it shouldn't, is that many people trust an influencer on health and wellness more than their own doctor. Right. And I think a lot of that comes out of the anti-vax movement from the 2000s that has completely disrupted the whole belief in science.

[00:21:47] You also have an epidemic and fraudulent scientific papers. You know, Mills in China just churning out fabricated scientific papers because there's a whole market for it. And so there's not a belief in science. The numbers of retractions are at an all-time high, by the way, right now. Like, and they're going to get worse because of AI. So you can just see that there shouldn't be a belief in institutions anymore.

[00:22:15] It makes very perfect sense that people don't believe in them. And so younger people, I think, even more so because, you know, they're basically been raised to really doubt what they're being fed. They're much more likely than an older person to spot misinformation. You know, and they view it as part and parcel of their online experience where I think for people like us, we're still surprised when we come across something that's just a bull-faced lie. And it's always like, well, how can they say that?

[00:22:45] There's an outrage. I don't think there's an outrage to the younger generation. They've seen it from the day they were born. I mean, the collapse in faith and expertise probably dates back a little bit earlier maybe to the counterculture of the 1970s. I'm a little skeptical about blaming it only on the right, especially the anti-vax movement, right? It kind of comes out of the counterculture of the 60s and 70s.

[00:23:07] And places like Portland, Oregon and Wharton schools in Brooklyn and New York City are probably hotbeds of anti-vax perspectives back in the – up until recently. And now that's flipped. Now it's right-coded, but it was kind of left-coded or left counterculture-coded, at least for a long time. I think you're making an assumption, though. I didn't say that the anti-vax movement was right or left. I said it was the anti-vax movement, which is all of those guys. I see it in my own neighborhood, too, man.

[00:23:37] Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. And taking it back to the Stephen Glass thing a little bit for a minute, you know, here's a guy who's fabricating and kind of violating these journalistic ethics principles. Seek truth and report it. But another issue that's kind of come up maybe starting in the 90s or more recently is what the heck does truth mean?

[00:24:00] Do your students still think, seek truth, and report it means the same thing that it meant to us back in the 1980s? You know, I go back even farther, right? I think, you know, I got to do it. I got a historian on here like David, you know. Two. Oh, that's right. That's right. I got two smart historians here. So you'll correct me if I'm wrong. But I think we're basically returning to the days of the 18th century pamphlets and early newspapers.

[00:24:29] I feel like where we are right now, like Substack, is like Thomas Paine, man. All of this is a return to opinion. And back in the 18th century, there was no news as we think of it, right? The actual idea of objective news is a very modern construct. And you can track it back to, well, okay, depending on who you talk to.

[00:24:50] You can talk to, but basically I would track it back to Adolf Ockx, the unfortunately named Adolf Ockx, of the New York Times, who bought the New York Times in 1890 or something like that. And then the first thing he did was that he instituted the objective model, right? And so part of it was that he was going to vet advertisers. He would be the first one to do that because there were so many snake oil salesmen at the time and so many lies and people getting ripped off and nobody else was checking.

[00:25:19] And so one way that he gained trust and credibility during the yellow journalism time of the 1890s with Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst doing it out in tabloids, you know, he charged more. He promised objective journalism and he promised that the ads were vetted and that you could trust ads in the New York Times. And then he did something that was the total contradiction of that in that, you know, he came up with the motto, all the news that's fit to print.

[00:25:48] But that's an editorial judgment, right? So it kind of undermines like, you know, do you have to decide what the news is? Then that's not objective anymore. But he's okay with that little dialectic. That's fine. So you have this idea that really coming into the 1890s and it's been a very effective model, like the attempt at being objective is a good idea. But, you know, we don't have a history of that in this country. It started off with like newspapers were political organs.

[00:26:14] They were somebody funded it to go after their enemies. It was virtually all of them at the beginning. And those pamphlets were all political, basically. And that's how printers made money, by the way. You know, they didn't, you know, create the content. They would publish whatever they could and make money at it. And so we've all returned to that today, right?

[00:26:35] We're getting away from this objective model and going back to the day of like, you know, massive amounts of newsletters, massive amounts of pamphlets, massive amounts of newspapers. But they're more personal and they're really vitriolic. And so were they at the beginning, by the way. The founding fathers may have lionized a free press, but they hated newspapers. And you can look at the quotes, the difference. They lionized a free press and talk about how it's a bulwark against fascism and the importance of a free press.

[00:27:05] At the same time, you know, they called newspapers polluted vehicles that were destroying the country. And so it's very interesting juxtaposition. Just really quick historical aside, since we're talking the history of this, the first what we might call kind of proto newspapers began in the 1630s in England as sort of one page broadsheets where, you know, people would, as you say, kind of write news.

[00:27:33] But in this kind of polemical form, and then they would get distributed, often taken out to towns in the, you know, in the hinterlands. And, you know, someone would read the one page news sheet right in the town square. And that's how people actually started. That's how it's the beginning of public opinion. Right.

[00:27:53] Because suddenly people who weren't had didn't have anything to do with the royal court or London or whatever were actually kind of consuming information about what was happening there and forming opinions about it. And anyway, so there you go. We're going back to the maybe the 17th century, not the 18th century. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:28:14] OK, so I wonder how you talk about this, Adam, with younger aspiring journalists, the pursuit of objectivity, because, you know, it's come to mean being a dinosaur and being a pain in the ass and being a curmudgeon to to hold on, to cling to that idea. Even for people at the New York Times or NPR or sort of mainstream media outlets like that, that used to operate that way inside public media where I was sort of locally.

[00:28:44] When as this kind of criticism of both sides ism and objectivity takes hold, what I saw happening was a lot of younger producers and reporters started to kind of say, well, once we get rid of that based on, I don't know, kind of an undercooked criticism of the pursuit of objectivity. What we should pursue instead is kind of whatever I think ought to be the news.

[00:29:11] It wasn't sort of this top down Pravda like type of propaganda, but rather whatever any individual reporter or editor saw as their mission. And people in local news outlets, NPR stations kind of came to see their audience differently than, say, our professors did when we were at Reed College. You know, we're going to teach the multiple sides of these arguments and let our smart young students kind of make up their own minds politically at best and not try to tell them what to think.

[00:29:40] Rather, it's a bunch of old boomers out there and they need to be enlightened by me, the young reporter, the young editor. I need to get in there and tell them what to think. And I'm not sure that's the best direction for things to have gone. If it was like you and Sandeep are describing, like a partisan outlet where we know where they're coming from, well, that's fine.

[00:30:01] But I think a lot of what we ended up with was this kind of confusing, individually sort of partisan approach without any kind of larger, coherent mission on the part of news outlets. And so I feel like what's replaced it is something where it comes down to us having to check individual bylines at The New York Times or The Seattle Times or elsewhere. Do we trust this individual reporter to be delivering the news? It's without any clear, coherent management.

[00:30:29] So that's the part that really worries me about these current trends. And I wonder what you think about that or what you say to your students. I think it's a really good point you make. I think you're absolutely right. But there's an equally important other force at work, right? And so it's totally true. I feel like we've had a time in the last, certainly the last 15, 20 years where there's more and more belief that subjectivity is what we should embrace as journalists over objectivity. Right.

[00:30:58] Or moral clarity, right? Isn't that the phrase? Yeah. And you see that across universities, right, with a very much of a Maoist atmosphere at times where I almost felt like I was working within a re-education camp. You know, I had some conversations over the many years of like a student once complaining that a professor had assigned Andrea Dworkin. No, I kid you not, Andrea Dworkin.

[00:31:24] And it was on a class on feminism in the body, right? And as a reporting class for women. And it was always a class that had done extremely well, taught by a really credentialed, wonderful, radical feminist, historian, journalist. And a student complained because in the text, I think she had used the word transsexual. Right. Or had used the term. Oh, I see. An antiquated term. An antiquated term for it. I'm not sure exactly what it was. I don't remember.

[00:31:54] But anyway, she was up in arms. So like it was from 1985. Literally, I said, I can't tell a professor academic freedom. I can't tell a professor what to assign. And nor would I, by the way. And but there was that kind of behavior at a large cultural time. And so, yes, you're absolutely right. And journalism is definitely in that realm. I would also point out, though, that have we really had truly objective journalism in this country? And I would say, no, we have not.

[00:32:23] We've had everything is done from the prism of a certain class and a certain race. And it's been that way from the beginning. Let's take the Japanese internment camp issue. In the 1940s, when Japanese were being interned, look at the newspaper coverage in this country. And it was very much like he said, she said. They're arresting Japanese and there could be spies. You should look at the tenor of that.

[00:32:47] I actually did and compared it to German coverage, Nazi German coverage of Kristallnacht in Germany. And the coverage is very similar. All right. Now, in one, you have a controlled media that was propagandistic. And then we have Germany. No, I kid. We had one media that was propagandistic, which was German. I was just kidding before. And the other, which is supposedly free. But, of course, everyone went in line with the government line because that's what they do during times of emergency.

[00:33:16] So my point is that they don't really have objective journalism. They never have. They have objective journalism in a way that suits their interests when they want to say it that way. But when it comes down to it, they are never truly objective. And they can't be. And they shouldn't pretend they are. My senior thesis at Reed was on the Zoot Suit Riots of 1943. So I did spend a fair amount of time looking at really insanely biased coverage from 1943.

[00:33:44] Although I would just also point out teaching students about the pursuit of objectivity is very different than saying there is such a thing as objectivity that can actually ever be attained. It seems like those are two different things. But anyway, Sandeep. Yeah, I mean, there's two sides to this coin, Adam, because I think you're getting at something super interesting, right?

[00:34:03] And on the one hand, when you look back in this prior era, before this kind of modern era we're talking about, the media really did play a gatekeeper function, right? They set a kind of often a pretty singular narrative about how we were supposed to understand or interpret, you know, news events that happened and that were to a large extent kind of accepted uncritically.

[00:34:31] And as you say, that allowed for certain kind of groupthink and unconscious biases to come into play and sort of perspectives, you know, that were lost and completely unrecognized. And that's all true. But on the other hand, we've now reached this point where that gatekeeper function has collapsed, right?

[00:34:50] We've got this fragmented world where anything goes and everybody gets to put it out and you're on social media and radical democratization of information flow that's been created by technology and all of that kind of stuff. But now we're in a freaking epistemic crisis, right? And there is no, there's just a million narratives and there's no truth, right? And some things that look to me to be completely false get traction and credibility.

[00:35:19] And in some sense, perception becomes reality. And, you know, there are all these people that believe the 2020 election was stolen, right? You know, that is a truth for a lot of people now. And there's all sorts of media that tells them they're right about that, right? So that's kind of the, you know, I get what was wrong with the old world, but it doesn't seem like this is necessarily an improvement, does it? And also, if you look at how do you cover Trump objectively?

[00:35:49] So, for example, we can stipulate on this show that he will lie on occasion. Yeah. And so if that being the case, you report on the lie. First of all, if it comes out of the mouth of a president, it's news by definition. President said it, it's news because the president can move markets with just one utterance, right? So president, what he says is news. In this case, Trump says something that's not true. First of all, you've got to run it down and find out whether it's true or not.

[00:36:17] And then when you start to criticize it, you're accused of not being objective because you're criticizing the president. And then when you try to point out that what he said is completely made up, you're viewed as being critical of the president and not being a trusted source for information because you're obviously biased because you've criticized the president. And so there doesn't seem to be right now. Now, this began in 2015 when he started running and started spewing lies.

[00:36:46] It almost short-circuited the media coverage at the time. You remember? Oh, yeah. They didn't know how to cover it. And so it's been not just everything that we've been talking about, but from the very top, everything has been shaped by that as well. And it makes it even more insidious. So what we have right now is not just a fragmented media world. We have a shrinking mainstream media world of also having a lot less impact on people.

[00:37:16] And one thing that – one of my big criticisms, and again, I know I sound like I'm trying to destroy journalism, but I'm not, but the paywall is a problem. The paywall is a problem because how many of these freaking publications can you subscribe to? Like the average is something like three for Americans or less. It's getting up there. It's getting up there with Substack. With Substack, it's – Right? And so – Although everyone should subscribe to this podcast. I mean taking that off the – yeah. Exactly.

[00:37:44] So this should be your only source of news. But so the problem then – you know, the problem though is that, you know, you can't possibly do that. And so I looked up the stats. It's really alarming. But for every website that has a paywall, they turn away 99 users for the one that will subscribe. So name me one business where turning away 99 out of 100 people is in your best business interest. Like how does that work?

[00:38:13] And so what you do is your New York Times. New York Times can thank this paywall for having a lot less influence because when people can't access your news from Google News, let's say, or from their social media feeds, then they start to like discount what the New York Times has to say because it's not in the public conversation as much as it used to be. People can't get it.

[00:38:32] And so you're getting filtered versions of the New York Times story, which will be through probably a more subjective, if you will, viewpoint that may or may not paint the New York Times in such a great light. And you have like a way of withering of their brand and their identity. And this is true for all the publications that chose paywalls. Now, I get why they had to do it. Like you need to make money somehow and pay your staff. But paywalls have been very destructive. And that's not something they want to discuss.

[00:38:59] I also don't get why more people haven't figured out how easy it is to defeat those paywalls. But that's another another question. Yeah. Yeah. See, I'm an old man. I can't figure that out. So it's very easy. You get just one website, but I'm not disclosing it for legal purposes. We'll put it in the show notes. You can find it on your own, I'm sure. Every university student knows it, by the way. I'm sure they do. Yeah. So, I mean, coming back to, you know, because obviously, yeah, 2015, 2016, Trump versus the media. Right.

[00:39:28] And there was this huge debate. And I think they did. For a while, media kind of went into this sort of resistance mode and let's call out all his lies. And I think pretty quickly turned the dial up to 11. And yet, I kind of think on balance, Trump won that fight. Right. Like they really didn't like the public didn't care or at least large swaths of it didn't accept that this was disqualifying what Trump was doing.

[00:39:54] His lying is, you know, his sort of out of bounds comments and all of that, you know, some of his actions and all of that kind of stuff. And let me give you a more recent example from the other side. Graham Plattner. You're running for the United States Senate in Maine. 41-year-old oyster man running very much on the left.

[00:40:13] A few months ago, it comes out that he, while he was in the military in Bosnia or somewhere, he gets an SS style, you know, skull tattoo. Traditional media is all over this. Right. You know, they're playing their gatekeeper role. This is really, oh, my God, this guy is running for U.S. Senate. He got an SS tattoo. Like, is he a Nazi? What's going on? And then they dig up all these kind of social media comments he made 10 years ago.

[00:40:43] Some of them are pretty offensive, you know, talking about, you know, women and how they should dress and related to rape and stuff like that. Right. And you know what? His numbers went up as all of this was happening. Like he opened a 30 point lead over his more traditional Democrat. I think there was a sympathy reaction. I felt it. I felt like there was a forum and I'm not even from Maine. And yeah, I felt like there was a pylon going on. And OK, this guy got a Sunday. Brandon got one of the tattoos. I was like, this guy got a transgressive tattoo, whatever.

[00:41:13] He's not really a Nazi. Shut the fuck up. Like like you guys are like acting like, you know, you have the vapors about about him and whatever. Right. Like I'm not even politically aligned with him. And I felt sympathy for it, you know, and and that's clearly what happened. Right. He's he's now the Democratic, essentially the de facto Democratic nominee. We'll see how he does in a general election with some of this stuff. But he clearly got a bounce. He also got a bounce. Trump got a bounce from being banned from Twitter. Yeah.

[00:41:41] You know, and so banning it from Twitter ended up being a colossal mistake. If you were trying to curtail his ability to disseminate hate speech, you want to call it hate speech. That's debatable. Right. But I mean, if you if you're trying to throttle Trump getting, you know, kicking him off Twitter was not going to do it. Right.

[00:42:00] And what it ended up doing was it led to a whole blog, the whole ecosphere of right wing sort of like loosely aligned publications and zines and online sites and podcasts and influencers all kind of connecting up and helping each other. And now they dwarf the size of the mainstream legacy media, which is a term I hate. But what else can we call them? Right.

[00:42:28] So it's kind of interesting how that's happened. So broadcast news was really, you know, it's shrunk. The the reach of the New York Times. Well, it's it's you know, they they would claim to have a great reach. But I really believe in this fragmented media thing. They don't have the influence they used to. Like when Judy Miller was leading everyone to war in the in Iraq, you know, they had a lot of they had a lot of ability to shape public opinion. And now I think they have almost none at this point.

[00:42:56] There's all this introspection on the part of news organizations. And I'm sure in journalism departments about this and kind of what did we do wrong or what can we do differently and how do we restore credibility in the media? But, you know, I remember being at Trump's rally here in Washington state in 2016 when he and Rudy Giuliani are up there, you know, railing against the media.

[00:43:21] And we're all in this like pen, you know, this metal pen inside this giant concrete building. And we're there for our protection. They have to, like, take us to the bathroom. We have to be escorted if you want to go to the bathroom because they're worried that the crowd is just going to maybe start strangling some of us. And, you know, so now it's like, I mean, before 2016, even during that election, if I showed up at the national conventions or a state convention and started interviewing rank and file Republicans, even, you know, hardcore activist type Republicans.

[00:43:50] And I said I worked for an NPR station. They were fine with it in many cases more open than Democratic equivalents, Democratic Party equivalents, who would be many times more paranoid of the press than than these Republicans were. Or subsequent to that, I mean, calling up and trying to cold call Republicans or meet them. You know, you work for the media, which outlet? I mean, the level of skepticism and cynicism just really escalates after that point. So it's like all the introspection kind of on the left and the hand wringing.

[00:44:19] It's like how much can you do given kind of like what journalism is up against from the other side? Because it's not like the Democrats have been doing anything similar, really. I mean, to try to undermine confidence in media. And so that's what I kind of wonder. It's like how given the political climate like and you're saying, well, yeah, we need to pretty much give up on the idea of the pursuit of objectivity anymore. What do you tell students about how they can help restore credibility in journalism?

[00:44:49] Or is this just like we're talking about something that happened a long time ago and it's going to be, you know, grandpa's tales about back when there was trust in media? Well, you know, it all begins with each person, you know. So what we try to do is inculcate this this feeling of ethical journalism and, you know, facts and being fair. And we go through things like, you know, what's the difference between truth and, you know, and facts? You know, what's the difference? Like what is what is the pursuit of truth?

[00:45:19] How is that different than objectivity? Why is objectivity the gauge they use? Why not pursuit of truth? Or why not some other term? They chose objectivity. That's a different term, you know. And so I think what I try to tell them basically and what we try to teach is like do great journalism. Like that journalism is a place we talk about what journalism has done really well in the past. And we also talk about where it really fails and has failed people, you know.

[00:45:46] So I try to really weave into the program, you know, all aspects of this. It's not like a cheerleader. Hey, journalism is great. Go join this calling. It's not that certainly not anymore. It's a very, you know, jaundiced eyed view of the world, which is, you know, we can draw attention to the things that need changing and you can do it through fact-based journalism. And whether you're, you know, you write with a subjective view or an objective view, the point is that the information has to be true.

[00:46:15] It has to be fact-checked and it has to be good. You know, so that's kind of like where we stand on it. But, you know, you know, things are changing. I mean, again, media itself is different. So you don't see students coming in wanting to work for the New York Times as much as they used to. Now it's, you know, any number of reasons why they want to get this education. And I feel like that's a good way to approach it because we offer a really great education.

[00:46:44] I can't guarantee a job, although most of them do get jobs. But I can guarantee that you get a great education. Yeah, I mean, I do think particularly this makes a lot of sense, Adam, what you're saying at the individual level. I mean, I do think even in this era of, you know, epistemic crisis or whatever 50 cent words we want to use about it, like we still have a yardstick, right? We still have an ability to make judgments.

[00:47:07] And, like, I still kind of make judgments about the truth value of, you know, one piece I read, you know, this seems really much more like a partisan screed or this seems more, you know, kind of fact-based. Or, you know, this seems like more of a kind of good faith effort to try to put a lasso around the full picture of something.

[00:47:26] However, you know, imperfect it's going to be at least there's an effort going on here to try to provide a sort of full portrait as opposed to a one-sided perspective or what have you, right? We all make those judgments all the time. We still have some kind of yardstick by which we do that. But what I worry about is – and, David, you kind of made a comment like, oh, you know, this is all Republicans who, like, you know, hate the media and stuff like that. I didn't say that. Or something.

[00:47:57] But I will say on the – once Trump gets elected in 2016, what happens? There's this whole kind of misinformation and disinformation discourse that arises, right, including in the media world about how are we going to address with this plethora of not just Trump's line but it's being repeated everywhere. They're saying all this crazy stuff. How do we stop that, right? And I have some sympathy for folks on the right who said that shit went off the rails really fast.

[00:48:24] Like, and suddenly you've got these, like, places like these institutes at Stanford and University of Washington working with the FBI in back-channel meetings with, like, you know, Meta and Google and whatever and shadow banning certain transparency about what they're doing, right? And that looks kind of problematic to me as a response to this stuff, right?

[00:48:50] And that's all stuff that came out of the left and there's been no – look, they took down the fourth largest daily circulation newspaper in the United States of America is the New York Post. Two weeks before an election, they took down all of their social media feeds because they printed a true story about, you know, Hunter Biden's laptop, right? Like, and nobody on the left seemed to have any problem with that, right? You know, so what's going on there? Are you pointing out hypocrisy, Sandy?

[00:49:20] Yeah, I don't know what I'm pointing out. I'm pointing out, yes. He's saying if they hadn't done that, all Republicans would 100% trust the media now. Right. And it wasn't like the Hunter Biden story didn't get out. Of course it did. That was all we talked about for the last two weeks of the election. It didn't have any political impact, I think. But it did have a big impact, I think, as a precedent for press freedom. Like if you can just take down, you know, the access of outlets you don't like, what's – you know, that's kind of chilling, right?

[00:49:50] Is that a true question? Is that chilling? Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, how to answer this. I'm not even sure what the question is. I'm not sure what the question is. Whatever your thoughts are, Adam. I'm rant over, sorry. No, no. I mean, I feel like – look, there's – on the left, there's been – there's always this initial response to try to spare people from bad news. And so let's take COVID as a bad example, but it's a good one.

[00:50:20] All right, COVID. And then, you know, the question arose very – I'm going to get in so much trouble. The question arose whether the virus came out of a lab in Wuhan or it was a naturally occurring virus and came from some sort of animal from the wet market. Now, it was a – given the facts, it was a rational question to ask.

[00:50:49] But you weren't allowed to ask that question because of the fear that it could lead people to be targeted because they're Chinese in this country, right? It was a fear of stoking the flames of racism. But the point was it was definitely a reasonable question to ask at the time. And so when you stop people from being able to ask the question in the first place, it causes rage, doesn't it?

[00:51:14] I mean, it would cause rage in all of us if we're like – we're not even asked – we can't even raise the question. It's pretty obvious there's a question here, right? There's a lab in Wuhan, isn't there? I'm not saying I know where the – you know, this thing came from. Nobody does. But the point is, though, it was a reasonable question to ask at the time. And out of the left came this view, you can't ask it.

[00:51:35] And I feel like that led to a lot of damage because it led to stoking the right wing on that issue at the very beginning and led to like all sorts of chaos. So I think that's kind of like one of the issues is like they may do it because they believe it's for a better good. But by squelching public debate, they're often doing the opposite.

[00:51:56] In my newsroom, we encouraged people to go out and eat in Chinese restaurants in Chinatown immediately in sort of solidarity and dot, dot, dot, get COVID. You know, we didn't know. We didn't know. And it was – I hear your larger point here. I have another horse-left-the-barn type question picking up on something that you mentioned earlier, which is AI and how you're talking about it in your classroom. So I'm curious about how.

[00:52:25] When I started working in radio, I had to learn how to write for radio, which meant getting rid of the type of writing that you and Sandeep really, really like, like 10 different subjunctive clauses per sentence and that sort of thing. I do like that. And, yeah. But at this point, like, look, AI could do better newscasts than most cub radio reporters. It's already there and it's just getting better and better.

[00:52:52] And I feel like for most people, maybe 99% of people, AI is already better than them when it comes to writing. I mean, maybe not if you write for The New Yorker or you're a great novelist, et cetera, et cetera. But people that don't have really great style, I mean, there's all the structure, et cetera, et cetera. And so I'm just wondering, like, is teaching writing going to become kind of an outmoded thing at some point? I mean, I guess we still teach math.

[00:53:18] But, you know, how many of us have, like, calculated percentages on our own recently? That's my question. We haven't taught writing in this country to students for 20 years. Okay. So I'm going to tell you something that will probably surprise you. Wait, what do you mean by that? What do you mean by that? I'm so ready for this conversation. This is going to annoy a lot of people. Oh, good. Okay. Yeah. I've seen it firsthand. Okay. I teach on the master's level almost exclusively.

[00:53:46] So I have been there for 20, this is my 23rd year. All right. So I have a fairly long track record and students have changed. And about 15 years ago, 10 years ago, when they instituted the Common Core curriculum, you can see a change in the students we've been getting to the point where most of the people coming out of major schools, I'm not going to say read, and I'm not going to say NYU, but I will say I get them from everywhere.

[00:54:16] They can't write an essay. They can't write an essay that's structured like an essay where you have a thesis statement and then you back it up with facts. They can't do it. I now have to teach remedial essay writing as people start the program, whereas I wouldn't have had to do that 10 years ago. And certainly 20 years ago, it never even occurred to me. And the problem is the Common Core curriculum. Like, it's very STEM-based. I get that. Wonderful.

[00:54:46] I'm so glad they're learning math and science, although they really aren't. They aren't. Yeah, that's the problem. They're not learning that either. But they're not reading. Literally, they do not read a single book as part of the curriculum anymore. They read parts of books. And they don't even spend a lot of time on writing. And so I started, I tried to find out, how is it possible? How is it possible that I'm getting so many students that can't write an essay that I have to teach it to them?

[00:55:13] And it's because they have never gotten feedback on their writing at any level. The first time they get detailed feedback on a piece of their writing is in my program. They didn't get it in high school. They didn't get it in college. And so suddenly I'm having to do something that should have been done in high school. And so that is a huge problem because if you can't write an essay, you can't engage in critical thinking. You can't construct a logical argument in your mind and then debate somebody. They can't do it.

[00:55:43] I see it in classroom participation, too, because, you know, you start pushing at an argument. They're not really armed with the ability to think on their feet and construct logical sequences of steps to back up their point of view. They have a feeling. It's about a feeling. It's not really it's about what they believe. It's about their truth. It's not about having an opinion based on the facts that you have.

[00:56:09] So if you're talking about a crisis in journalism, it's a crisis in the public as well as it is in journalism, the business. I never thought of that one sidedness coming from a lack of critical thinking the way that you're describing it before. That's so interesting. Sorry, Sandeep. Yeah, yeah. Just really quickly. The National Council of Teachers of English, right?

[00:56:31] The central body that sort of tries to determine how we should be teaching our kids proposed in 2022 to, quote, de-center, unquote, book reading and essay writing as the primary focus of English language instruction. Right. And instead, they encouraged a shift towards digital media, including podcasts, memes and video. This is about how we're going to teach kids like English language arts.

[00:57:00] No more books, no more essays, no more learning to write. We're going to do this other stuff. So, Adam, to your point, I mean, that just to me seems like a fundamental breakdown. And learning to write is, as you say, it's about learning to think. It's about how to make an argument, right? You learn that's what writing is, is the structuring, right, of an argument and presentation of an argument. And so that goes beyond journalism, right?

[00:57:28] That is a collapse in our pedagogy. And yeah, it's the same is true on the math side. We just had six months ago a report came out from UC San Diego that, you know, it's a selective college where the number of remedial math classes that they had to provide to their incoming freshmen had skyrocketed. And these kids all had straight A's and calculus and stuff in high school. And yet they were coming in, some of them not being able to add fractions.

[00:57:58] And somehow they got an A in calculus, right? Like, so there's obviously a kind of breakdown somewhere in the educational process before we're getting here. Oh, yeah. Yeah, I see it. I tell you. Teaching writing is really hard. What does that mean for you and ChatGPT? And what are all the other ones? Oh, what does that mean for my buddy ChatGPT? You know, here's what's funny. I think everybody is using. It's raising standards. ChatGPT is raising standards. No, I'll tell you something.

[00:58:26] I don't think that I have gotten a typo from anybody in six months. I think everybody is using AI for all their correspondence. And if they're not, it's noticeable. Like, oh, typo. That's bad. Right? There are ways that, you know, I don't want to get all Marshall McLuhan on you, but it's like there are ways that technology, technology shapes our experiences in the world. We don't shape technology. Technology shapes us, right?

[00:58:54] That's Marshall McLuhan at its basis, I guess. You know, not that I understand him completely. But, you know, it shapes us. And so how we interact with the world is through technology. How we see it. Like, it's basically Apple owns the interface to our realm. That's an awesome responsibility for Apple. But they own that. And it shapes who we are and how we perceive the world. And so my, you know, when I teach writing, you know, we're trying to teach thought. We're trying to teach structure.

[00:59:24] We're trying to teach great writing. And so I use AI in my classes, but in the writing classes, we don't. What we tell students is like, listen, you know, we're not using AI in this class. Or if we do, we're going to use it as part of pedagogy. And so, you know, you know, so for example, I've come up with ways to teach how to write drafts through AI. And so, you know, I've created a prompt so that the student can take their rough draft

[00:59:52] and get the type of feedback that I would give on the draft. Because they based it on the rubric that I use when I grade. And then it gives them detailed feedback on how to fix things without giving them the answer. And then they've got to do another draft. And then the AI will analyze that draft for them and will tell them where it falls short and ways to consider how to fix it. And they'll work on another draft. And then they'll do it a third time. And then they'll have a publisher will piece by the end of it.

[01:00:18] And they've gone through all the structures of what we used to do, where they'd send it to me. I'd have to get around to giving them feedback. Giving them detailed feedback when you weren't using AI takes a long time. Using AI, using it based on my own feedback, my own writing, my own work, it gives much deeper feedback than I ever could if I were to use that. And so, there's a lot you can do with AI without it ruining the process.

[01:00:46] My argument is that instead of running away from it and trying to stop people from using it because you can't, or trying to detect if they use it, which is stupid because Grammarly is AI. You use Grammarly, are you breaking the rules? You spell check, right? You Siri or Alexa, are you breaking the rules? It's kind of crazy. So, I feel like we've got to embrace it and figure out how it works and use it to teach.

[01:01:11] Part of the problem with teaching, I've learned, is that teaching is designed as a business. It's not designed on, we don't ask ourselves, or I ask myself this all the time, but in general, in my field, it doesn't seem to be that we ask ourselves, how do students learn best? And how can we design a system for them that would teach them in the most efficient, best way possible so that they would get the most out of it? Instead, it's about, hey, 15 in a class, that's great.

[01:01:40] 12 in a class, even better, smaller class. We think in terms of that because it's a great model. 12, one instructor, low overhead, 12 students paying full tuition. Boom, you've got a business, man. But it's not great for teaching. It's not great for their learning, I should say. It's great for teaching because that's a business. But it's not great for their learning. So, let's try to kind of sum up the state of our conversation here and the state of the media and the state of where things are going with the media.

[01:02:10] So, Adam, where do you think we stand? Big picture. Is the future of media here? It's all good. It's terrifying and terrible. Somewhere in between. Where are we headed here? Well, I think you should take into account that basically virtually every single prediction from today will be wrong.

[01:02:38] Not just me, everybody's predictions. If you go back and look at the history of predictions, very few are correct. Like, did anyone call Trump? Really? Like, there have been a few thinkers that, like Aldous Huxley was considering, you know, a celebrity, a juiced world, you know, in Brave New World. But, you know, it doesn't mean that he really called Trump coming, right? So, these kinds of predictions are bad. So, you know, who knows?

[01:03:05] But I would say that I think that AI actually can play a major role in this because I've been actually developing some AI technology myself, you know, where if you paste a link into it, it will tell you how accurate the story is. It will tell you, basically, it will look at every claim in the story and then it will find whether you can verify that claim or not. And so, I've been running scientific and healthcare stories through it to start.

[01:03:33] And it's been unerringly pointing out every single, and it's been able to rate them. And now I've been running technology stories through it and you can do that too. So, if I can create that on my own, you know, without much coding experience at all, then I can, I think it's possible that we're all going to have our own AI agents working for us to basically interpret the world. Because we're already using AI to write everything. I think we're going to also use AI to venture forth into this digital realm and to make sense

[01:04:03] of it. So, you come across a tweet and it's claiming that, oh, like a new scientific paper comes out and makes all these vast claims and it's going to mean the end of this and the end of that. And of course, you think it's hype, but you don't know. Well, you paste it in, your AI will tell you immediately, nope, this is overhyped. Here's why. And I feel like we're all going to have our own, well, almost like spam filters, only it's going to be for AI slot filters. And these AI slot filters will do a very good job of determining what's real and what's not for us.

[01:04:31] And we're all going to have to depend on AI to do that because we're not going to be able to tell what's real or not on our own. On that note, Adam Pennenberg, thank you for joining us today on Blue City Blues. Thanks for having me. Yeah, Adam, thanks for bringing us a little note of optimism at the end there, even though the conspiracy theorists won't trust the AI agents anyway. So we're screwed. It's still the blues here. I'm David Hyde. He's Sandeep Kaushik. Our editor is Quinn Waller.

[01:04:58] Our supporters are on Patreon.com slash Blue City Blues, where we now have bonus episodes starting just last month. And thanks everybody so much for listening.