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Episode: A Message from Bari on Election Day
Author: The Free Press
Duration: 00:12:18
Episode Shownotes
Our newsroom reflects our readers: We aren’t voting in unison. Today, Bari Weiss explains how The Free Press is handling Election Day inside the office. Read Bari’s full essay. If you liked what you heard from Honestly, the best way to support us is to go to TheFP.com and become
a Free Press subscriber today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Summary
In this episode of 'Honestly with Bari Weiss,' the host explores the diverse political landscape within The Free Press newsroom on Election Day. Bari reflects on the team's lack of a unified voting bloc, contrasting it with the evolving nature of editorial endorsements in mainstream media. She emphasizes The Free Press's commitment to a mission of informing rather than endorsing candidates, highlighting the significance of diverse perspectives and open debate in journalism. The episode underscores the responsibilities of journalists in fostering trust and encouraging civic engagement amidst polarized political sentiments.
Go to PodExtra AI's episode page (A Message from Bari on Election Day) to play and view complete AI-processed content: summary, mindmap, topics, takeaways, transcript, keywords and highlights.
Full Transcript
00:00:00 Speaker_01
Hi, Honestly listeners. I'm not sure if you've heard, but there's an election.
00:00:03 Speaker_01
It's happening on November 5th, and I want you to join us for a marathon free press live hosted by me, Michael Moynihan, Bhatia Angus Sargon, and an absolutely incredible, epic lineup of guests, including—I'm taking a deep breath—
00:00:20 Speaker_01
Abigail Schreier, Anna Kasparian, Andrew Yang, Anna Kochian, Ben Domenech, Brianna Wu, Katherine Harridge, Coleman Hughes, Dasha Nekrascova, Eli Lake, Eliana Johnson, Frank Luntz, Frannie Block, Jonah Sarah, John McWhorter, Kat Rosenfield, Camille Foster, Konstantin Kissin, Marianne Williamson, Mark Halperin, Matt Continenti, Matt Welsh, Michael Schellenberger, Nancy Rommelman, Nellie Bowles, Olivia Rheingold, Ollie Weissman, Peter Savonik, Ricky Schlott,
00:00:45 Speaker_01
Richie Torres, Roy Teixeira, Selena Zito, Shane Smith, Saurabh Amari, Vivek Ramaswamy, and actually more. Our coverage will begin on November 5th, of course, starting at 7 p.m. EST.
00:00:56 Speaker_01
We'll livestream on X and on YouTube, so click the link in the show notes and select Notify Me to receive a reminder once we're live. I'm told there will be drinking games, and I'm looking forward to it. We'll see you then.
00:01:10 Speaker_01
Today's episode was made possible by Ground News. America's trust in the media has been on a long and steady decline, especially over the last few years. If you listen to this show, you know that's something that we care about and talk about a lot.
00:01:25 Speaker_01
Mainstream media often have their own agenda, which leads, and we've seen this many times, to bias coverage, public polarization, and ideological bubbles that reinforce readers' opinions rather than challenging them.
00:01:39 Speaker_01
That's why ground news is so important. Their app and website allow us to access the world's news in one place to compare coverage with context behind each source.
00:01:50 Speaker_01
Take the story of major news outlets like the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times opting out of endorsing a presidential candidate. Ground News found more than 300 headlines covering it, and there was backlash from both sides.
00:02:04 Speaker_01
They analyzed stories from Business Insider, Slate, the Center for the National Interest, and many others for their biases and blind spots.
00:02:12 Speaker_01
Reading the news this way helps you see discrepancies on how certain topics are covered or not covered at all, so you can think critically about what you read and make up your own mind.
00:02:22 Speaker_01
Check it out at groundnews.com slash honestly to get 50% off the Ground News Vantage plan for unlimited access. Ground News is female founded and subscriber funded. By subscribing, you're supporting transparency in media and our work in the meantime.
00:02:41 Speaker_01
Today's episode was made possible by Ground News. America's trust in the media has been on a long and steady decline, especially over the last few years. If you listen to this show, you know that's something that we care about and talk about a lot.
00:02:56 Speaker_01
Mainstream media often have their own agenda, which leads, and we've seen this many times, to bias coverage, public polarization, and ideological bubbles that reinforce readers' opinions rather than challenging them.
00:03:09 Speaker_01
That's why Ground News is so important. Their app and website allow us to access the world's news in one place to compare coverage with context behind each source.
00:03:20 Speaker_01
Reading the news this way helps you see discrepancies on how certain topics are covered or ignored so you can think critically about what you read and make up your own mind. Check it out at groundnews.com slash honestly
00:03:34 Speaker_01
to get 50% off the Ground News Vantage Plan for unlimited access. Ground News is subscriber-funded. By subscribing, you're supporting transparency in media and our work in the meantime. From the Free Press, this is Honestly, and I'm Barry Weiss.
00:03:52 Speaker_01
Once upon a time when newspapers covered both sides of an issue, editorial endorsements may have moved a voter in Michigan or persuaded some undecided soul, like my mom in Pennsylvania.
00:04:04 Speaker_01
But those days are long gone, which may explain the astonished outrage this election season when a couple of corporate media papers, like the Los Angeles Times and then the Washington Post, decided not to endorse a candidate.
00:04:17 Speaker_01
The responses to that were apoplectic. Karen Atiyah of the Washington Post wrote that she and her colleagues were betrayed by the lack of endorsement of Harris. Newsroom staffers at the Post publicly posted their disagreement.
00:04:32 Speaker_01
One wrote that her own parents unsubscribed from the paper.
00:04:36 Speaker_01
Others, trying to stave off the wave of cancellations, suggested that those angry about the lack of endorsement should cancel their Amazon Prime accounts instead as a way of sending a message to their owner, Jeff Bezos.
00:04:50 Speaker_01
The Post has reportedly lost 250,000 digital subscribers, or 10%, over this decision. But the most delicious publication endorsement fight of this cycle happened at The Nation magazine.
00:05:04 Speaker_01
The left-wing magazine endorsed Kamala Harris, which apparently outraged the interns, who then wrote an op-ed of their own, arguing that the endorsement was a, quote, unearned and disappointing step given the Biden-Harris administration's support for Israel.
00:05:21 Speaker_01
Why do I say all of this? Because we've received a lot of questions about whether and who we'd be endorsing in this election.
00:05:30 Speaker_01
Given the free press's mission of not telling readers and listeners what to think, but in rather giving the audience the information necessary to make their own decisions, we're not going to be endorsing a candidate this year.
00:05:43 Speaker_01
We did, however, poll our staff at a recent retreat. We didn't do it with the expectation, of course, of sharing the results.
00:05:50 Speaker_01
We did it on account of a relentlessly curious podcast producer, the executive producer of Honestly, who took advantage of the fact that we were all trapped together on a boat on the Hudson River.
00:06:01 Speaker_01
But those results seem worth sharing now, partly because they are not results you will find in any other American newsroom, but mostly because we're continually told that America is divided into Reds and Blues, into MAGA and the Resistance, into protesters and counter-protesters.
00:06:21 Speaker_01
And, well, that's just not been our experience.
00:06:26 Speaker_01
The staff of the free press is split almost exactly three ways in this election—between Kamala Harris, Donald Trump, and, well, neither—people who are abstaining, writing in their preferred candidate, or who remain undecided.
00:06:41 Speaker_01
Yes, there are still undecideds. In other words, our editorial staff is split, just like the country that we write about.
00:06:50 Speaker_01
We also have widely ranging views, not just about the candidates themselves, but also about the stakes and the meaning of this election. Some think democracy is on the ballot and are profoundly fearful of Trump without the guardrails of men like H.R.
00:07:06 Speaker_01
McMaster and Jim Mattis. Others are far more sanguine, making the case that we endured four years of Trump and four years of Biden-Harris, and the Republic survived.
00:07:16 Speaker_01
My point is that at the free press, it's okay to be liberal, conservative, or politically non-binary. And though it shouldn't be, having a newsroom that reflects the politics of America has become extraordinarily unusual.
00:07:32 Speaker_01
At the New York Times, my friend Adam Rubinstein used to joke that the only people at the paper who voted for Trump were the delivery guys from Staten Island. Like all jokes, it was an oversimplification.
00:07:43 Speaker_01
There were also the plumbers, the electricians, and the porters at 628th Avenue, New York Times headquarters. And it's not just the Times, of course. It's the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, CNN, ABC. It could go on. At NPR's D.C.
00:07:58 Speaker_01
headquarters, as Ori Berliner reported earlier this year in our pages, he found 87 registered Democrats working in editorial positions and zero Republicans. None.
00:08:11 Speaker_01
Indeed, you'd be hard-pressed to find a mainstream media outlet outside of Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal that doesn't have a newsroom and often an opinion staff that thinks as one.
00:08:23 Speaker_01
Which is to say, the people whose job it is is to tell you about the world in all its complications and contradictions have the same view about almost every important issue in American life.
00:08:39 Speaker_01
At the New York Times, every last columnist, even those who were supposed to be the conservatives, opposed Trump's election.
00:08:48 Speaker_01
At the Washington Post, journalists' furor over Bezos' squashing of the Harris endorsement isn't because their independent journalism is being harmed.
00:08:58 Speaker_01
It's because, like most of their brethren in the mainstream media, they think it's imperative for Kamala Harris to win.
00:09:04 Speaker_01
According to the Free Beacon, during a heated meeting between Washington Post staff and editorial page editor David Shipley, one editor blurted out, But the thing is, half of the country wants Donald Trump for another four years.
00:09:23 Speaker_01
Whether he wins or he loses, half of America is voting for him. So isn't it just a little bit strange that the institutions that talk the most about diversity and inclusion can't stomach anyone whose views align with half of Americans?
00:09:43 Speaker_01
At The Free Press, we flip this dynamic on its head.
00:09:46 Speaker_01
The fundamental value we share here, with each other, and with our readers and listeners, is a commitment to seeking and telling the truth, which allows us to disagree without disrespecting one another.
00:10:00 Speaker_01
We share an understanding that the truth isn't something you bring back like a moon rock and put under glass, but rather the best answers you can get under changing circumstances in an ever-shifting world, and that those answers are always subject to revision in the face of new information.
00:10:19 Speaker_01
We share the view that politics need not be a team sport.
00:10:22 Speaker_01
We share the view that our vocation as journalists is not about ushering readers to a political conclusion, but to tell stories that reflect the complicated nature of issues that are so often presented as simple and settled.
00:10:37 Speaker_01
If we knew in advance who or what was deplorable, we wouldn't need journalism at all.
00:10:44 Speaker_01
Most importantly, all of us share a view that there is not an enemy within among our fellow Americans, nor do we believe in referring to any of our fellow citizens as garbage.
00:10:57 Speaker_01
We're also grateful, grateful for our privilege, our privilege to live in a free country. My colleague, Tanya Lukyanova, was born in Russia.
00:11:07 Speaker_01
She became an American citizen just a few months ago and will vote this year in her first free and fair election. Here's what she recently wrote.
00:11:16 Speaker_01
When I step into the voting booth, I'll think about how lucky I am to be here, where my vote is not just an act of resistance, but a genuine opportunity to make a choice.
00:11:27 Speaker_01
We know that our readers and our listeners and our viewers don't come to the free press to be told what to think. You're here because, like us, you're of independent mind and spirit.
00:11:39 Speaker_01
We're proud of that fact, and we owe it to you as much as to ourselves to try with all of our might to restore a culture where arguing, debating, persuading, and disagreeing, as opposed to damning and silencing, are the norm.
00:11:54 Speaker_01
If we can't sit next to colleagues who are voting differently, how can we sit next to them at our dining room tables, or on the subway, or on a jury?
00:12:03 Speaker_01
I can think of nothing more meaningful and important than building a publication and a community that aspires to that.
00:12:11 Speaker_01
There is nothing more exhilarating than discovering, not only in our newsroom, but also in the world of the free press, that this is still a country of free people.
00:12:38 Speaker_00
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00:12:49 Speaker_00
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00:13:01 Speaker_00
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