Does Hunter's conviction hurt Joe Biden's campaign? – plus, why the American media is f*cked 01:04:58

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Hello and welcome to American Friction, the new weekly US politics podcast from the makers of Oh God What Now, The Bunker and Papercuts. I'm Jacob Jarvis. And I'm Chris Jones. Every week in the run-up to November's US presidential election, we'll be unpacking everything you need to know about the big vote in November. And on hand to help us with all of that is going to be our favourite Rolling Stone politics reporter, Nikki McCann-Ramirez, who after a brief visit to London and Europe and Australia,

traveling the continent on some sort of gap year she was on is now back in DC. Hi, Nikki. Hello. Jolly old England. It was lovely. No, it was beautiful. I don't love being back in my apartment. Fair enough. Well, let's crack on, shall we? Today we're going to talk about more of the age-old debate of who'd win in a fight, Trump, shock, or electricity. Ooh. Ooh.

I wonder. Who's to say? Who is to say? And we'll also be talking about Hunter Biden's latest escapades. He's been found guilty in all three counts in the Delaware gun trial. What does that mean for his dad's reputation and re-election chances? And we'll also discuss Biden's latest major issues with his call for a ceasefire in Gaza stalling and a new immigration executive order announced last week.

Plus, guest Jeff Jarvis, no relation, author of the Gutenberg Parenthesis and the voice behind the Buzz Machine blog, joins Nikki and I to discuss how the media landscape will shape the way Americans think, feel, and finally vote come November. Welcome back. You're listening to American Friction.

Firstly, then, President Biden's son, Hunter Biden, was found guilty on all three charges in the Delaware federal gun case on Tuesday. This was related to him buying a gun whilst he was high on crack cocaine, wasn't it, Chris? Can you give us the details of this? It's a massive deal because I think it's one of the first times or the first time a president's child has been found guilty of a felony. But he could also face 25 years in jail, couldn't he?

Yeah. So as you said, three charges, two revolved around lying on a federal form about his drug use and another for possessing a firearm whilst using or being addicted to drugs. It's worth saying as well that he pleaded not guilty to all of these charges and claimed that he was in recovery when he acquired this firearm and therefore said he wasn't lying.

The jury didn't believe him, as we've seen. And as you've said, he could be facing up to 25 years in prison. But it is, again, like we were saying with Trump's case, it's unlikely he's going to face 25 years. He's a first time offender and nonviolent. So it's likely if he does face a prison sentence, it'll be a shorter prison sentence. It's

Also, quite likely that he might face probation as well. And it's also worth saying that President Biden has said that he's going to respect the judicial system, which is something that Republicans are, I guess, losing their minds over. Well, he said he wouldn't pardon his son, which is interesting considering the way that President Trump handed out pardons, like literally like fucking Monopoly get out of jail free cards to his mates. Yeah, I like it.

It's also, we should add, Delaware, where this trial has been held, is a democratic state, which is another reason that the GOP's argument has been shot down, well, some of the GOP

Marjorie Taylor Greene, for instance, who's been calling Biden and his family a crime family, and also a crime empire, as if Biden is some kind of Darth Sidious kind of character. So their argument around this, in terms of there's a massive conspiracy around it, just doesn't hold up anymore, really. Joe Biden wishes he looked as young as Darth Sidious, I reckon. Yeah.

Anyway, since I'm done throwing shade at the US president, who I'm sure really cares about my opinion. Nikki, what will this do to Joe Biden's re-election campaign? This is going to add fuel to the fire of the GOP Republican campaign.

conspiracy theory. Well, it's not a conspiracy theory, but you know what I mean. It's going to add to this whole the son's dodgy, so the dad's dodgy, so there we go. There is a conspiracy theory. And first of all, I feel like Simon should just start adding a bell sound every time we mention Marjorie Taylor Greene. Please, producer Simon, get on it. Days since we mentioned Marjorie Taylor Greene. Zing!

Zero. No. So here's the thing. There's a lot of things that can be said about Joe Biden. I think the one thing that cannot be said about Joe Biden is that like he doesn't love his family or care about his family. Some of our listeners may know. Some of our listeners may not. Biden was married before his first wife, Naomi.

died in a car accident along with his infant daughter when Hunter Biden and his other son, Beau Biden, were very young. Later remarried, he had more children with Jill Biden. And then a couple years ago, his son, Beau Biden, died of brain cancer. And if you've heard any of Joe Biden's statements publicly about his family, like the tragedy he has suffered throughout his life has really influenced his policy and who he is as sort of like a politician, as a statesman. So,

Ever since the sort of Hunter Biden laptop situation came to light, Biden has been very clear that, you know, he acknowledges that his son was a drug addict, that that was an extremely painful period in his life, and that, like, any person who has had a family member who's suffered from addiction, suffered from mental health issues like what Hunter Biden was going through, he is just very happy that his son is alive and in recovery.

Biden, I think here is drawing a very clear distinction, not only in the way he treats his family, but in the way he's responding to the judicial process here. We've seen Trump be like the Supreme Court should intervene. He's been meeting with members of Capitol Hill being like, you need to have this overturned. Biden is acknowledging that.

My son was a drug addict. He did bad things while he was addicted to drugs. And if a jury has found him guilty, then I'm going to respect that because I respect the judicial process. The reality is that the charges under Biden was tried under are very rare. People don't really get charged for lying on a federal form that often, especially if a violent crime was not committed with the weapon that is in question. So that's why I think

He'll probably not end up in prison. He'll probably be sentenced to probation. There'll be like restitutionary fines, all that. He still has a separate tax case that we have talked about before. Think this is necessarily going to damage Biden too much in terms of the election? Like Republicans have been harping on Hunter Biden for years. The reason they have been harping on Hunter Biden for years is because they are

are on a fishing expedition to prove that Joe Biden has done crimes. And then you get into the whole everything that's happening on the Judiciary and Oversight Committee where they're trying to impeach Biden for some theoretical crime that they cannot find proof of. A couple months ago, one of the big witnesses that Republicans were like, see, this guy is proof that Joe Biden and Hunter Biden were selling influence in Ukraine.

was indicted because it turns out he lied about the whole thing. That entire effort to have Joe Biden convicted of high crimes and misdemeanors and impeached has fallen apart. So Republicans are going to keep pushing the Hunter Biden issue. But at the end of the day,

The biggest thing in Biden's campaign is drawing a distinction between Trump and himself in terms of this guy, Trump, has no respect for norms, no respect for our legal institutions, no respect for the processes that make the United States a stable country founded on like democratic principles.

and himself, whereas he is holding himself as this man who is extremely pro-democracy and extremely pro-criminal justice system. So I think that's going to be the priority here. I don't think he's going to go out of his way to like bail Hunter Biden out of a probation sentence. It does feel to me somewhat like the attack line is falling down because

by remaining consistent can make this look like, as you say, that he seems like a pretty good dad through some difficult circumstances and he'll hold his children accountable regardless of how he might feel about that and that being painful for him. On a crass level, I think it could be good for him on a campaign rather than bad for him. Yeah, no, I agree with that. But also I think what we're seeing is that the attack line hasn't gone away. It's just changed from the GOP and from Marjorie Taylor Greene. Ding!

I'm going to say her again, who is probably the person who's been leading this against Hunter Biden. And she's referred to him in this case as the deep state's sacrificial lamb. So they're trying to redirect this to say that, hey, Hunter Biden has been found guilty, but they're trying to misdirect it away.

from Joe Biden, who they believe is the real mastermind behind all of this. So there's like a satanic altar upon which Hunter Biden is the sacrificial lamb for Joe Biden. It's like Joe Biden's Darth Sidious and Hunter Biden's kind of like a Darth Vader kind of vibe. Yeah. These people are fucking stupid. I'm just going to say it. These people are just like, what? And it's incredibly ironic given that people like Marjorie Taylor Greene, ding!

Which I will say, she, I don't think, is the head person in the Hunter Biden stuff. She's definitely the most bizarre. She's the one who was whipping out the naked photos in congressional hearings. But I think the big leaders have always been your Jim Jordans, your, like, James Comers, all those. But it is incredibly ironic because Republicans were the people who were like, no, he should go to prison. Why hasn't the DOJ investigated him? Why hasn't he been put under federal indictment? And then when they get the charges and now ultimately get a conviction, they're like, ugh.

This is just deflection from Joe Biden. It's like, no, you went on a fishing expedition. You wanted to find crimes. You couldn't find a crime for Joe Biden. And what you could find were like minor gun charges and some tax violations for Hunter Biden. Okay, you get that. You mentioned fishing expedition. So let's go on one of our own. That is awful. Let's go on one of our own, but for sharks. So for sharks on shark news, we're going to move over to Trump.

No, he's not the new presenter of Shark Tank, although maybe that would be better than him becoming president. But anyway, he has answered the question we all want to know, which was, would he rather take his chances versus a shark in the water or versus electricity in water? And this was at a campaign event in Nevada. He described speaking to a boat manufacturer. And I've just kind of got to quote him because it's just so, so Trump. I can't particularly paraphrase it.

So I said, so there's a shark 10 yards away from the boat, 10 yards or here. Do I get electrocuted if the boat is sinking? Water goes over the battery. The boat is sinking. Do I stay on top of the boat and get electrocuted? Or do I jump over by the shark and not get electrocuted? Because I will tell you, he didn't know the answer. He said, you know, nobody's ever asked me that question. I said, I think it's a good question. I think there's a lot of electric current coming through that water. But you know what?

I do. If there was a shark or you get electrocuted, I'll take electrocution every single time. I'm not getting near the shark. So we're going to end that. Now he's wrong. Because you can fight a shark. You can't fight electricity. If electricity is going to get you, you've lost it. That's not why he's wrong. That is not why he's wrong. I will tell you why he's wrong. Because I fucking Googled it. I was like, okay.

Can I get a look? Because look, I'm a scaredy cat. I watched A Thousand Ways to Die as a child, and I haven't been able to go on a slip and slide since. But anyway, so here's the thing. Here's the thing. This question is highly dependent on whether or not you are in freshwater or saltwater. If you are in saltwater...

The chances of you getting electrocuted are actually, like, way lower because salt is extremely conductive. And electricity generally chooses, like, the path of least resistance. So your body, which is much less conductive than the saltwater, is basically like an electric resistor. Okay. So, like, if a boat sinks in saltwater, if you swim out there, you're probably not going to get electrocuted. If you're in freshwater, however...

You're fucked. So guys, you can fight electricity with salt. It's similar to slugs. So if there's things which I don't like, that's how you can fight them. But also, what kind of shark? What kind of shark are we talking about? Because if it's like a little nurse shark who's just like chilling and vibing, like I take my chances with a shark, you know, he's not going to do anything to me. I could probably kick it. But if it's a little nurse shark,

But if it's like a 15-foot great way, I don't want anything to do with that. I reckon we get back to politics. Dragging this back to politics now, the media does focus a lot on Biden's cognition and aptitude for high office. And I made a very mean joke about how old Biden is by comparing him to Darth Sidious. And I was obviously joking. And anyone who wants to comment that that was mean for me, you're right, it was mean. And I'm saying sorry now. But surely...

We need to have so much more scrutiny on Trump because I was watching this Las Vegas shit and I was like...

What is he saying and why and how is he saying it and how is he delivering it? And there have been kind of worrying videos of Biden lately where he does look like he's got some problems going on. But why can't they start focusing on Trump? It doesn't make any sense to me. Why is Trump getting away with this? Here's the thing. I hate that this is the answer, but fundamentally in my gut, I believe that this is the answer. It's because Trump is really unintentionally funny sometimes.

Yeah. And it's it's that's really it, because they are both like really old dudes. And that is a legitimate issue in this country that we just have aggressively old people running for office. I think fundamentally it is an electoral question. What comes after this? And we've discussed it with past guests. It's what comes after Trump? What comes after Biden?

I think the Republicans are in a much stronger position in terms of having like young talent that would be able to step into a national role. But I think the reason Biden gets so much more criticism for this kind of thing is because Trump is fundamentally in a lot of ways and sometimes too often and to the detriment of accurate coverage of him seen as a joke. Yeah. Like.

Like, we're laughing about the sharks. We laughed about Covfefe. He's kind of a silly guy, like evil as fuck, but also kind of silly in a very unintentional way. And I think part of it is also the way, the treatment each of these two politicians receive.

give their public appearances plays a role in this. Like Trump, I watch a lot of his rallies. I watch a lot of his speeches. The shark thing, not an anomaly, like not necessarily the topic of sharks and electricity, but he will go on insane tangents all the time. The difference is that unlike Biden, Trump really is getting in front of crowds and ranting for an hour and a half multiple times a week,

The rants are insane. A lot of times they don't make sense. He makes mistakes. He gets the names of people wrong. He like fucks up details in the same way Biden does. But Biden, by contrast, has been a lot more isolated. His appearances are far more calculated, far more infrequent. They're very scripted. And I think that does lend itself to a bit of a public perception that Biden needs a lot more work and a lot more sort of balance.

build up toward a public appearance. Whereas Trump is just like getting in front of cameras and saying whatever the fuck he wants. And he doesn't give a shit if it's wrong. He's saying so many things that are wrong on a weekly basis that who the hell's going to keep count? Whereas with Biden, it's a lot easier and prominent when he said something wrong because his appearances are much less frequent and there's so much more scrutiny on it that

You know, it'll very quickly become a thing. This weird speech then from Trump was in Nevada. Why was he there particularly looking at the geography of the election? Why is Nevada so important to him? Okay, so we have talked a lot about swing states and the like,

critical issue of undecided independent voters. Nevada, despite having, I think, only six electoral votes in the American election, is considered to be a swing or a toss-up state this election cycle. Biden won that state by only about three percentage points in 2020, and there was a very competitive race for the governorship and other down-ballot races in 2022.

We talked, I think, last week about the Electoral College and the reality that Americans don't elect their presidents by, like, straight Democratic vote. It goes to the Electoral College. And this time around, every swing state's going to matter. At the end of the day, the decisive states in this election are going to be the swing states. So, like, your Nevadas, your Arizonas, your Michigans, your Pennsylvanias, Wisconsin's, all those states.

Those are the places that Biden and Trump are going to invest their energy into. They're going to go to the places where they, one or the other, maybe won by, you know, a handful of percentage points in 2022. They're going to look at the trends from like 2016 and they are going to start targeting communities that they think they can win over to their side because these elections can come down to like a couple thousand votes, a couple, like maybe 10,000 votes if you're really, if you're really on the split. And,

Well, Trump might want a repeat of the shit show that was 2020, but Biden most definitely does not. So he is going to be spending a lot of his time, energy, financial resources, campaign strategizing on these states. Each candidate wants to create a split big enough that it's undeniable that they won't go to a recount, that there won't be a bunch of legal challenges about who actually won. So Nevada's in there. Three percentage points. That's like a very feasible goal if you're trying to flip a state.

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so listeners know that they're backing a fellow fan's business. Why not give it a go? Drop us a line at advertising at podmasters.co.uk. That's advertising at podmasters.co.uk and see what podcast advertising can do for you. Media constantly shapes the way we think, whether it be the news we watch, listen to, or read, or the devices we use to engage with the world. From the hardware such as our phones to the search engines, platforms, and the algorithms that make them work.

The news media in particular hasn't covered itself in glory in recent years, particularly when it comes to how it reports upon and engages with politics.

Here to discuss how this dynamic has changed and what it could mean for this election is Jeff Jarvis, author of the Gutenberg Parenthesis, What Would Google Do? magazine and more, as well as the writer behind the Buzz Machine blog. Jeff, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for having me. So I want to talk about some really broad ideas first, then we'll drag it to the specifics of things linked to the election. So you've written about the Gutenberg Parenthesis, which, correct me if I'm wrong, but

but is loosely the theory that the 500 plus years from the invention of Johannes Gutenberg's print press in the mid 15th century until loosely the early noughties would be considered as a anomaly in human history because digital tech will come to transform our lives and media and essentially replace the old model entirely.

With the mass media we have, there's obviously more content and therefore more political content than we've ever had before. Would American life and perhaps American politics be better if the era of the printing press wasn't a blip and that was still how we consumed news in hard form, real stuff? It depends on who you are. If you're an old white man, yes. If you're anyone else, no.

because mainstream, so-called mainstream mass media were controlled by people who look like me. And if you can't see me, I'm an old white man. And that limited who was heard. In America, we have the famous, legendary old TV news anchor, Walter Cronkite, who ended every broadcast saying, and that's the way it is. But for many, many Americans, it wasn't the way it was. If you were a woman, if you were black, if you were Latino, if you were an immigrant, if you were LGBTQ, that didn't represent your America.

So we have a cacophony right now. We have a bunch of jerks using media who couldn't speak before, but we also have voices who were not heard, who were always there. And I celebrate that.

We're relearning, I think, how to hold a conversation with ourselves in public. We're out of practice, clearly. We're doing a crappy job of it. But I think we'll eventually figure this out. So when it comes to news media, as you say, it obviously feels a lot more democratic than it's been in the past. But there are people who are using this completely for bad or to at least spread false, dangerous, damaging messages.

This question again maybe sounds quite elitist in a way, but do you worry about the loss of gatekeepers when it comes to news media? So from what you've said, obviously there was a need for reform in who was involved in news media. Should the news media maybe have simply reformed itself as opposed to there being this complete reset which has just opened it up as a free-for-all?

The news media definitely should have reformed themselves and should still. It's a disaster right now in America. The New York Times, I find to be disappointing by the day. The Washington Post, thanks to the British invasion, is going to hell. Most of the big newspaper chains in America are now owned by hedge funds. It's a shit show all around. So yes, news media should reform themselves. But that's not all it is. I think it's about institutional reform at a larger scale. One of the favorite stories I have in the Gutenberg Parenthesis is

is that the first alleged call for censorship in print came in 1470, about 15 years after Gutenberg's Bible. And it was a Latin grammarian named Niccolo Perotti, who was much offended by a translation of Pliny. And he wrote to the Pope and he said, something must be done. Sound familiar? And he said, you must appoint a censor to approve everything that comes off the press, as unaware of the scale that would follow as that could be. It's

As I thought about it, I realized that he wasn't at all seeking censorship. What he was doing was anticipating the need for and the establishment of the institutions of editing and publishing, which would more or less assure quality and authority and artistry eventually in print over half a millennium.

Those institutions all in all are inadequate to the scale of speech today. Yeah. So I think we need reformed or replaced institutions to indeed. I don't like the idea of gatekeeper, but not on a one size fits all basis.

But on a pluralistic basis, help us find quality and authority and artistry and truth. So in the book you write, I see a rug being pulled out from under our understanding of the world, a crisis of cognition. So we blame the news media and journalists for a lot, and rightfully so. You know, I think if you become a journalist, you expect to get a bit of flack.

And that makes sense. But can the media be blamed for the way that humans maybe have simply been pushed into a world that we can't quite comprehend? And perhaps the world is unnatural and too much for our brains to quite get our heads around at this moment. And you can't necessarily say that that is the fault of journalists or institutions or even society. It's just everything's just too weird.

The myth of journalism, the myth of storytelling is that we can tell the story and that we know where that story is. We know who should be in it. We know how it begins. We know how it ends. That's what we promised as journalists. And it was, it was, it was false. And so I think that we've got to reset that.

our expectations of what we learn from each other and how we learn. After our mutual disastrous elections of 2016, I helped raise money to deal with disinformation and I funded projects and thought about that. I come to think that that was wrong, that the enemy was not disinformation at all, that we in journalism think if the problem is disinformation and we sell information, ergo, we are the solution. You're welcome. But I don't think the problem is information, nor do I think it's even belief.

I reread Hannah Arendt. I think the problem in our societies today across Europe and in the U.S. and elsewhere is about a lack of belonging. And I don't blame that on the Internet. But I do think that there are people who, as Arendt wrote about Germany and Russia, our Soviet Union, who didn't belong to anything and thus were vulnerable to the siren call of the authoritarian regime.

And I don't know how to rebuild a journalism built around belonging. I don't know what that looks like. But I think that's the essence of the problem that we have today. Well, I think that's particularly interesting. A couple of weeks ago, we discussed some polling that showed that, you know, among developing countries, Americans rank themselves as one of the loneliest. I think that does speak to a reality that just the way American society is structured, we don't have...

the close sort of interconnected communities that we had, you know, 50, 60, 70 years ago when our grandparents were growing up, where there was a very robust culture of local interaction, of, you know, churches, community centers. But I do think that fundamentally, the internet has changed the way in which people interact with each other. It has changed the dynamics of information systems, and it has changed the

the sort of food chain of knowledge as it exists within our day-to-day lives. And we see that very clearly in our election. And that'll be my sloppy segue into our question. But of course...

This is an election podcast, and I think we saw the disastrous outcomes in 2016 where there was a lot of confidence from the media that Hillary Clinton would win. She didn't. And then in 2020, we saw a massive breakdown amongst the trust that a lot of Americans had within the electoral system that for decades and probably centuries has now been considered sort of the gold standard of confidence in election systems.

So how do you feel things are going so far in 2024? Part of the thing that I think about a lot is have we even learned anything from 2016 and 2020? Or are we repeating sort of the same mistakes in the way we cover Trump, in the way we discuss politics, in sort of the horse race of day-to-day D.C. life?

Nikki, I think you're right and you asked the right question. Have we learned anything? No, it's worse. Oh, great. All in all, the New York Times tries to act as if they want to be independent of their readers by pissing their readers off regularly. Yeah. The Washington Post doesn't know really where to go. CNN doesn't know where to go.

Local newspapers, again, are controlled by hedge funds. Local television is controlled too many places by Sinclair, which is the local version of Fox, which is an awful, awful company. Awful. Yeah. And I believe that Rupert Murdoch is the single most blind influence of democracy in the English speaking world. So it's quite an insult to say that.

But I don't think that this is about people losing faith in the institutions. I think it is about them being driven away from those institutions. The biggest mistake I think we have is this framing of division that presumes symmetry. It presumes that there's people on this side and people on that side. They don't get along. No, what we have is an institutional insurrection.

And I'm going to attack my own kind once again. The old white men, mainly, and women, especially of the right and of the evangelical and Catholic worlds that now control Congress and the Supreme Court, have a worldview of

That, you know, let's go back to Charlottesville and the tiki torch marches there. We will not be replaced, they chanted. There is this myth out there that they are going to be replaced by immigrants. That then is, I think, an acknowledgement that they will be in the sense that they won't be the majority anymore. And rather than sharing the fields and the crops with those who will follow, they'd rather burn it down.

And they are out to destroy the institutions. And major media in the U.S. is willfully credulous about that. So today, the New York Times headline was, Trump goes to Washington to seek unity in the party. Get off of it. That's

It's willful credulity. So, no, we have no sense of how to cover this. My friend Jay Rosen at New York University talks about how we have to cover the stakes, not the race. And I think that's very right. And I see a few glimmers of that, but far, far too late. And so I don't think that they're covering the right story. The story is an institutional insurrection against the institutions of the United States. That's not getting covered.

So Biden and the war in Gaza, one of the hallmarks of this conflict, as we view it from the United States, is the way sort of quote unquote American legacy media has translated a culture of access journalism that is really common in domestic politics to their coverage of the war and even crack down on public criticism of Israel's military actions in Gaza. I feel like we're going to look back on this and look back at the U.S. media's role in this conflict the same way we look back on

on the treatment given to the invasion of Iraq under Bush. This idea that like, you know, there was some report from CNN a couple months ago that CNN had to run all the stories about the war in Gaza through its Israel bureau. The idea that outlets like the New York Times and the Washington Post just like uncritically repeat the IDF's justifications for the massacres we're seeing. And again, I think it goes back to this idea

idea of sort of ideological institutional capture. The idea that

journalists and the people working in this industry a lot of times aren't necessarily individual reporters who are reporting out a story and really weighing all the facts and making the argument, but rather mouthpieces for the overarching ideology of the people who control that outlet. So I know you've been writing and tweeting a lot about Gaza and Israel, and I just kind of wanted to get your read on the landscape surrounding that, because I think it is probably...

going to be one of the defining stories of this. Well, it is one of the defining stories of this year, but I think we're going to look back on it and be like, what the fuck were we doing? I think you're right. And I have to confess that I look back on what I said in the invasion of Iraq and said, what the fuck was I doing? I was a survivor of 9-11. I never thought that Iraq was tied to 9-11 at the World Trade Center, but it set a tone in this country that excused a lot of willful cognitive dissonance.

to reuse the word willful, and the New York Times and weapons of mass destruction and so on. And in this case, yeah, I approached it because of that with tremendous caution. And I've heard a lot of smart people say that it's not hard to keep multiple ideas in the head at the same time.

That you can support the Palestinians and not Hamas. You can support Israel and not Netanyahu. You can give empathy for the losses of the attack by Hamas, but you must give empathy as well for the huge losses in Palestine. That can all be said in the same paragraph.

And in the U.S., we have a morning show called Morning Joe on the liberal network MSNBC. And Joe Scarborough, a former Republican, still a Republican at heart, is often actually these days kind of OK defending Biden and defending the policies. But when it comes to Israel, it is company line. And it goes to exactly what you said, Nikki, is I think that journalism's sense of authority and officialdom and access are corrupting.

and we don't stand back. We think that the way we do that is by doing both sides-ism, but no, it's instead by standing back and doing what journalists should do, which is to be sceptical. When it comes to politics in the media then as well, obviously we have really crystal-cut examples of different political leanings within the US media landscape, but when it comes to the politicians themselves,

What do you make to how they're engaging with the media? And how do you find that seems to be going for them? Because it seems quite strange that some of them want to really use the media completely to promote themselves. You know, you've got, we hate mentioning this name, but Marjorie Taylor Greene. Ding!

who's just used media to build up a profile and give herself unweighted power, she's actually successfully used the media to do that. What do you make more widely to how politicians are engaging with the news, particularly since it feels like the fake news line has just become accepted as one thing on the right, but more widely, what do you make to it?

Um, it's a really good question with with a few different answers. If you look at Joe Biden in The New York Times, A.G. Salzberger has been whining petulantly that Joe Biden won't give The Times an interview. If I were Joe Biden, I wouldn't give them one either. The way they treated him. We know what's going to happen there. That's the kind of the highest level.

And one thing I try to get across to politicians these days, not that I talk to them often, but is that they no longer should fear the people who bought ink by the barrel because they're only buying ink by the pint now. And the big newspapers do not set the agenda anymore. The once mighty Los Angeles Times has a digital market penetration of lower than 5% in Los Angeles County.

They're meaningless. The papers from the big chains, a media news group and Gannett and McClatchy are so thin you could shave with them. Their coverage is awful. They're cut to the marrow by the hedge funds. So politicians still think they have to play to media, but they're playing to the wrong media.

They're ignoring Black media and Latino media and startup media. And they don't know how to deal with something like Politico that comes from the side doing excellent investigative reporting. Or Rolling Stone the last few days with the tapes of Alito and Mrs. Alito. I was on vacation, but they really killed it with that one. I could hear you whooping from here. They did kill it, yeah. And so that's where the reporting is going to come from. And so it comes from unexpected places, I guess is what I'm saying.

And I don't think politicians know how to handle that anymore. So they still think they're playing to big media, but nobody's watching big media. And we saw a few glimmers, you know, Obama on Twitter or on YouTube. That's fine. But they don't know how to use the Internet to communicate directly. AOC is brilliant at it.

But there's few who are as good as she is at it. So looking at the mainstream media in the US, to me, it particularly feels like it's either really lowbrow, tabloidy, shouty, or it's quite often navel-gazy and highfalutin. And you've got the New York Post and you've got the New York Times and there's that split. When we're looking at the old school big beasts...

it does feel to me you either get trash or you get things that are so heavily trying to be like, we're actually so smart. This is why you're a little bit wrong about the thing that you believe. And it's like a school teacher talking to you about why you're stupid. With respect, I think you described the British market more than the U.S. market. The New York Post is Rupert Murdoch's bully pulpit.

But it's not really seen anywhere. Fox fits in that description, certainly. It is a network of lies. But here's the other interesting thing about this. I think that the rest of media, what you put at a higher plane, is instead attempts to be as anodyne and boring as possible.

And when they want to provoke opinions, they do it on the op-ed page and they do it to an extreme of saying, we're going to get somebody who's going to really piss off people today. So today, for instance, the New York Times had an op-ed from a professor at a Catholic university defending what Alito said about the takeover of the American institutions by white evangelical nationalism, for God's sakes. So, you know, I think that the goal isn't to be anodyne. And that came from

I have a book behind me, which is the list of all newspapers in America in 1900. And the list in New York alone was phenomenal. It was dozens of newspapers. Yeah. And everything for every view. And today we would call that fragmentation and polarization. No, it was communities feeling they had their voices and they had the ways to listen and speak. And that's more valuable. I was struck, one more point, I was struck by...

This in Marty Barron's autobiography or memoirs from his time as editor of The Washington Post, where he seemed to lament when he reported that a survey said that more than 80 percent of Washington Post readers classified themselves as liberal.

And you can see the reflex there. I have to serve more conservatives. I've got to be friendly to them. I have to listen to them. I have to get them in. No, you had the blessing, Marty, and I respect Marty, of knowing who your audience was. You had the opportunity to decide how to serve them.

Yeah. But the New York Times, the Washington Post, every newspaper runs away from that because of the myth of mass media. Because when television killed newspapers, you still have a vibrant national—well, vibrant, I don't know, the Telegraph's crap, the Times is Murdoch's. But—

You have a national media landscape in the UK. Well, we never did because we were too damn big. And so when television came in, we got monopoly newspaper towns and they believed they could be, and for business reasons, wanted to be all things to all people. And that led to that anodyne, both side is view from nowhere kind of journalism, that of the Associated Press that I think has served America very badly.

With local papers, they've been gutted over here. And it would appear to me that that is probably becoming the case in the US. But I find it more strange in the US because national...

papers in the UK can serve a wider audience in different territories because we are just much smaller. Whereas in the US, it just strikes me that it doesn't make sense that you can't have a thriving local media. Looking at the election and on a state level and then lower ballot races, does that though make the remaining local media much more influential in certain ways? So perhaps places that do maintain to have somewhere with lots of clout,

If, as you say, that can be taken over by Fox News adjacent networks, that can actually allow the media to play a much more distinct and direct role, which is perhaps under-noticed by going local like that.

Yes and no. I think local television that happens. And that's why Sinclair, which is the noxious company I mentioned earlier, has taken over many stations. And when the Wall Street Journal had a just truly terrible story last week about how Joe Biden's old and not really with it, quoting only Republicans, Sinclair, as we just saw, repeated that on every single outlet in exactly the same way. It's a propaganda network.

So in that sense, local matters. But again, the local newspapers are, I think, meaningless now. And so what we really have is a void that hasn't yet been filled. It is in some markets. In California, because I've been working on researching this legislation, 18 of the top 25 newspapers in the state are now owned by hedge funds. And that's after Media News Group, owned by the worst of them, Alden, consolidated 12 titles in Northern California into two.

So they're far less local than they ever were. And they're filled with wire copy and junk and don't do their job well. So that's the void that we have. Now, there are some efforts. There's a guy named Ken Doctor who's a media analyst who decided to put his money where his mouth is. And he started something in the county of Santa Cruz in California called Lookout Santa Cruz. He raised a lot of money to do it, $3.5 million, which is a lot.

And they just want a Pulitzer. And his avowed purpose is to kill the media news group paper in the town. There's no hope for them. Get rid of them. We will replace them. And I think, unfortunately, that's the way we have to go now. On a final question then, and I'm going to drag this back to two things you've mentioned. So, you know, looking not at the stakes, looking at the race now and looking at two old white men.

Very old white men. Yes, that's true. Particularly old white men. Who do you think the media landscape, as it stands, favors the most when we're coming up to November, either Trump or Biden?

It's a great question because when I whine about this on Twitter, I'll never call it X and Blue Sky and Mastodon and Threads and company because I just never shut up, as you can tell right now. And we see something stupid being done, damaging being done by the New York Times or the Washington Post or CNN or whoever.

somebody will come in and say, they want Trump to win because it's good for business. I don't think it's that simple by any means. I'm not a conspiracy theorist, though I sounded like one five minutes ago. And I think it's more about the perversions of journalism as a discipline that come out of mass media, that come out of the attention economy, that come out of this sense of false balance,

This inability to understand asymmetry and to force symmetry on an asymmetric world. That's what's at work here. And so it's journalists trying to stand up and thinking, well, the rules used to be this. So I'm OK if I can force the present reality into those old rules. But it can't because the bad guys figured out the rules and how to manipulate them.

And so they've done a very, very effective job of it. Our greatest weakness is our greatest strength that we do depend upon open information. We do depend upon discourse. That's a strength as an enlightened democratic society, but it's obviously also a weakness that can be exploited. And our media don't help us navigate that. And that's more than a shame. I think it's more than a tragedy. I think it's a crime.

And so I think we've got to reimagine what journalism is. With that in mind, though, then the bad guys can exploit it. So would you say you think Trump is slightly more helped by the media than Biden is? Oh, yes. Yes. He's more helped by the media. I think that's a good way to put it. Yes. I'm not saying that it's purposeful. I'm not saying that it's going to be successful for him. God knows.

But yes, I think that's an excellent analysis to say that he is definitely far more helped. And, you know, we have this magnificent Twitter account, New York Times Pitch Bot. Yes. Which is just brilliant. Love the Pitch Bot. And if you look at it, it's Doug J. Balloon. But if you search for it, you'll find it. And it mocks the New York Times.

for these moments when they say, "Economy is great. Why that's bad for Biden?" It's true. And half the time he makes it up, but half the time all he has to do is do a screenshot of a New York Times headline when they're mocking themselves and don't know it. Jeff, thank you so much for joining us today. Really appreciate your time. Thank you all so much. Right then, let's get to some more stories from US politics over the last week that you may have missed.

Going back to Biden, he's continuing to push for a ceasefire in Gaza, but this is stalling at the moment. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said it's basically...

in the hands of Hamas was how he phrased whether this deal will come to fruition and whether it will work. Chris, what's going on? Well, there's a three-phase plan that has been put forward by Biden and his administration. Phase one is a full and complete ceasefire lasting six weeks. And within that, hopefully would happen the follows. Allow for the release of hostages. Also allow for Palestinian civilians to return to their neighbourhoods

which many, as we've seen from the pictures, have just been completely obliterated. It's awful. Humanitarian aid would be allowed in. And importantly, during this phase, Hamas and Israel would need to negotiate a complete end to the fighting. And if they don't, within that six weeks, it will just...

they'll push it on further. The ceasefire will continue. That's the plan. Phase two, all Israeli hostages still held by Hamas will be released and IDF forces would make a complete withdrawal from Gaza. And then phase three would be a complete rebuilding of, or the beginning of a complete rebuilding of Gaza. I think it's about between 50 and 61% of buildings

within Gaza have been completely destroyed by the ongoing conflict. So that would happen there and also hopefully the end of fighting and festilities. That would be the plan. And Antony Blinken, as you mentioned, he's been in talks with both sides and says that Hamas is wanting to make changes

and said that there is a readiness to deal positively at play here. So there are some positive signs, but Hamas do want to make changes. For Biden, Nicky, this has been very much a live issue. Obviously, just when it comes to foreign policy, it's horrific to see what is going on and how you handle that is obviously going to massively affect

matter to the president, but from the political angle, it's been posing a difficulty for him in how he navigates it. Is this continuing to impact support for him though? Or we've spoke about this in our first episode.

Were people's minds made up? And at this point, realistically, if you have an opinion on it, is your mind already made up? Is there actually any in terms of losing support or gaining support with this, which it feels crass to put it in those ways. But you know what I mean? Are people's minds set on how they feel? I would say largely, yes, a qualified yes. I think Biden had every opportunity here.

to come out really strong. There was multiple opportunities for Biden to come out and really make himself the face of this ceasefire proposal, really like publicly push the Israeli government, because we do know that the Israeli government has repeatedly rejected ceasefire proposals.

really push them to put an end to this conflict. Biden has nothing to lose here. Netanyahu has a much more favorable relationship with Trump. He does not fundamentally like Biden as much as he likes Trump. It is damaging Biden electorally if we're really just making it a numbers game. We just talked about how swing states are going to be critical in this election.

There are multiple swing states, particularly in the American Midwest, that have large Middle Eastern populations, immigrant populations, who feel that Biden and the Democrats, through their sort of waffling on Gaza and Israel, have basically stomped on the support they've given them electorally in the past. And I think one of the things that

is really frustrating for a lot of people is this notion that the United States is sort of just like a backseat bystander to this conflict. The notion that like the United States cannot...

swing the hammer down and be like, this ends now. The reality is that the United States has the ability to end this whatever they want. They can force the parties to come to the negotiation table. They can cut off military aid. They can put Netanyahu in a position where he can lose the support of his government, which is already really tenuous if they don't figure out a solution here.

It is a known reality in international foreign policy that Israel is largely a client state of the United States and the United States can bring down the hammer whenever and say, this stops now. At the end of the day, Netanyahu is already in a precarious position with his own government. The end of the war can only help Biden. At this point,

He should be doing everything he can to end this and make himself the face of that ceasefire. He should be like, we, the United States, help negotiate this. And the fact that they're just leaving it on the table, again, as we've talked about before, speaks to me of a lack of political instinct that is incredibly frustrating. Finally, with Biden then this week, there was something actually that happened last week, but we couldn't not mention it. Biden signed an executive order about the border, didn't he, Chris? What does this say...

Why has he done it and why in this this moment is it important? Yeah

I had to read this a few times because it was a bit confusing and quite easy to get wrong. But essentially, what it will do is it will stop people who enter the country illegally from the southern border from seeking asylum when the number of encounters exceeds the daily manageable amount, which is around 2,500. And then that asylum process won't reopen until that seven-day average drops to 1.5,000 people.

I'm not quite sure how they manage that, but essentially this is a really, really fucking big deal. I should say, actually, before that, there are some exemptions. Victims of trafficking and unaccompanied children as well are exempt from this. And this is a big issue because the GOP and Biden's

Competitors are using the immigration system to really have a go at him in his campaigning. And this is something that Biden wants to get a hold of. And this order has brought about a whole load of criticism from a whole load of different people. But essentially what Trump has said is that it's insufficient. He also called it bullshit.

and said that Biden has completely lost control of the border. He also said that if he gets in, he wants to deport 15 to 20 million undocumented people. But I looked at some research from Pew Research Center that says that actually the number of undocumented migrants in the US is only around 10 million. So I'm not sure who the other five to 10 million people he wants to deport are. But essentially this is a big deal. It shows Biden wanting to tackle the immigration system

But has he got it right? Not so sure. No, is it largely as well that on the left, if you are on the left or the centre-left as a politician, it's incredibly hard to talk about immigration in a lot of ways, isn't it, Nicky? Because realistically, you get criticised both ways. The right wing will lie and pretend that their numbers are way higher or the situation is way worse than theirs and whatever. But then the left get more and go, OK, any variety of...

dealing with this, which obviously some members of the public want it to be dealt with and whatever that might mean, is seen as a step too far for people who are more of a liberal persuasion. One of the central issues that I don't think gets talked about enough is that this isn't necessarily a problem of like the quantity of people that are coming to the border. There are a lot of people coming. That is a given.

It is largely a downstream symptom of the fact that the American immigration system, particularly the American asylum system, is so fundamentally broken that it is completely unmanageable. And...

I think Democrats let the solution to the problem be guided by their reaction to Republicans rather than diagnosing what the immigration system in this country actually needs. It takes years to establish permanent residency here. It costs thousands and thousands of dollars. As you guys know from my first episode, I am a dual citizen. I was born in Mexico to a Mexican-American father and a Mexican mother. I was born with American and Mexican citizenship.

My mother did not get American citizenship until like a year or two ago. She just got it. And that was after almost 30 years of marriage to an American. And the entire system is not conducive to actually letting people who are, you know, good, upstanding citizens who are just trying to come to this country to build a better life for themselves actually be here in a legal manner. I think...

The immigration system has broken down over decades and decades of decades of not only like intentional attacks,

by the right, but also neglect from institutions who have not adjusted for modern trends within immigration. There's a reason why immigration and asylum is such a massive issue. Statistics show that 41% of Americans want immigration to be cut down. And there's a reason why we're seeing Biden and Trump be so explicit in what they want to do. And it's because

This is such a complicated issue and it affects so many different people. This is one of the most important issues leading up to this election. So I'll be really interested to see in the coming weeks and months how this progresses and whether the messaging changes.

Well, we've reached the end of another week of American Friction, and that means Chris Numbers Boy Jones is going to talk us through the polling. Nice. He's going to talk us through the polling and what's going on there. And you're very excited, aren't you? Because 5.38, you're going to be able to see

your favorite website has actually launched a new thing, thingamajig about polling, hasn't it? Their presidential forecast for 2024. I prefer thingamajig. Yeah, well, you know, 538, if you're listening, you can buy that off me. So anyway, Chris. Yeah. Headlines from it. What's it saying about the state of play?

So right, this model puts the chances of winning for both Trump and Biden against each other in 1000 different simulations. That's loads, 1000 different simulations. And he uses different polls and something called fundamentals of just basically like economic conditions. That's what it says in its kind of press release.

So if we look at the simulations that were put together, Biden is predicted to win 516 times and Trump 480 and no winner in four of those simulations. So right now, as it stands, Biden is the likeliest to win despite the polls being ridiculous.

very much against him in swing states. The entire data shows essentially, though, that it's all just too close to call at the moment. And I was listening to the FiveThirtyEight podcast with Galen Drew and the creator of this forecast model, G. Elliot Morris. And what they were saying is that basically in the time from now until the election, we can expect the percentage of the polls to swing around about 9%, which is quite a lot.

And at the moment, we don't know which way it's going to swing in either way. It is essentially too close to call. And that's exactly what this new presidential forecast shows. I wonder if we did a thousand simulations of this podcast, if you wouldn't be a nerd in one of them, man. Who knows? Anyway, now we are at the end of American Friction. So, Chris, I'm sorry. I'm being mean today. You know we love you. Thanks very much, mate. I'm not even going to thank you, actually. Thank you very much, Nicky.

Thank you very much, Chris. And I will say something, actually, fuck you to job. Listeners, we will thank you, though. Thanks very much. If you want more from us, we're out with a new episode every Friday, early afternoon if you're in the UK and in the morning if you're stateside. You can also follow us on Twitter, Instagram and TikTok. Our name on each platform is at American Frick. And if you've got something you'd like to ask,

the podcast team that we've got here and we will try our best to answer the questions you can send them to americanfriction at podmasters.co.uk you've been listening to American Friction we'll see you next time American Friction was written and presented by Chris Jones, Jacob Jarvis and Nicky McCann-Ramirez

Audio production was by me, Simon Williams. The group editor was Andrew Harrison and the executive producer was Martin Boitosch. Artwork was by James Parrott and music was by Orange Factory Music. American Friction is a Podmasters production.

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