Trump Found Guilty; The Right-Wing Media Were Prepared For It
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Count one guilty. Count two guilty. Donald Trump is the first former president in U.S. history to be convicted of felony crimes. From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I'm Michael Loewinger. This week, a jury found Donald Trump guilty of all 34 counts in the historic hush money trial.

It's an outcome Trump and his boosters have been messaging about for months. What they're doing when you lay out the number of indictments is the definition of election interference. The weaponization of the justice system is in full throttle right now. This is witch hunt political theater. People were told how to think about those indictments.

They were told that Trump was a victim of a weaponized Department of Justice, and they were told that the federal government was being used to punish political enemies. Trump, conspiracy theories, and truth social. It's all coming up after this.

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Listener supported. WNYC Studios. From WNYC New York, this is On The Media. Brooke Gladstone is out this week. I'm Michael Loewinger.

Thursday at 4.20 p.m., a crowd of reporters sat twiddling their thumbs in the Manhattan Criminal Courthouse press overflow room. Justice Merchan came back and told us we would not be getting a verdict and he would be excusing the jury at 4.30. Tyler McBrien, managing editor for Lawfare, speaking on the Lawfare podcast this week. And it was like 4.30, 4.31, 4.32, 4.30.

And then all of a sudden he comes back with a different jury note. This one saying that the jury has decided to return a verdict, which was shocking.

From CNN to Fox, you heard the same thing. Reporters learned it would take about 30 minutes for members of the jury to fill out their juror cards.

And then at 5:06 on MSNBC... We've got a verdict, Ari Malber. We are looking at count one, guilty. Count two, guilty. Count three, guilty. Count four, guilty. Count five... At 5:09, just four minutes after the court announced the decision, over on Trump's social media site Truth Social, the former president's account posted a fundraising link.

at 519 on Fox. I think lawfare is far too soft. It's far too benign. This is warfare. At 528, I called my boss and we scrapped our plan for the top of this week's show. This is a horrific day. 535, Carl Higby on Newsmax. We're going to find out who these jurors are in the next 24 hours. Some are going to speak, some are not going to speak. But...

You've ruined their lives, Alvin Bragg. At 538, journalists reported that WinRed, the GOP donation site, appeared to have crashed from a spike in traffic. By Friday morning, Trump's campaign said it had raked in over $34 million. I thought I'd be angry. 545, Jesse Waters on Fox. But I feel this cool resoluteness.

that we're gonna regain our strength and then we're gonna vanquish the evil forces that are destroying this republic. Some members of the press may have been caught off guard by the timing of the verdict,

But Donald Trump's boosters in the conservative press had prepared for this outcome by undermining credibility in the trial for months. The judge in this case says that he will treat Donald Trump fairly. Oh, OK. Sean Hannity in mid-April. This judge donated $1,000.

to joe biden from some opponent and another anti-trump calls in twenty twenty six this is the most hot high-profile politically charged case in the country the judge in donated to trump's political rival it's true that judge mershon donated to biden's campaign

$15 in 2020, and $20 split among two progressive groups. Though this is hardly uncommon. NBC found that judges made over 30,000 political donations in 2021 and 2022. We did a study looking at how Fox News has been talking about Judge Merchant. Matt Gertz, a senior fellow at Media Matters, a left-wing group that tracks right-wing media. We

We found at least 220 attacks on his impartiality over the course of the trial. Suggestions that he has an anti-Trump bias, that the fix is in, that he has somehow compromised the case. And this is all part of a broader effort to paint the trial itself as an example of the persecution of Donald Trump.

Of course, the verdict didn't come from the judge or Manhattan D.A. Alvin Bragg, who Trump surrogates say has built his career on gunning for the former president. It was a jury of Trump's peers that unanimously voted guilty on 34 counts.

including one juror who told the court he or she gets his or her news exclusively from Truth Social and X. The jury has two lawyers on it who work in Manhattan corporate law firms with DEI all over their websites. Jesse Waters a day before the verdict. They know the charges are Frankenstein. They went to law school. They know better. 89 claims we found undermining the jury as a whole or attacking individual jurors over just the week of jury selection.

You had Jesse Waters target one particular juror. Number two is the nurse. This nurse scares me if I'm Trump. She's from the Upper East Side, master's degree, not married, no kids. Gets her news from the New York Times and CNN.

Goodbye. Who later asked to be dismissed from the jury because so many people had been able to identify her based on the information that was going around. Gertz calls the press strategy around the trial, heads we win, tails you lose. There is a time-tested strategy that the writing media has rolled out through innumerable previous scandals involving Donald Trump.

They run interference. They denounce all of his foes. They say that he both did nothing wrong and that the people who are accusing him of wrongdoing are the true villains. And in doing so, they shape the way the Republican base perceives events and thus keep the Republican Party politicians squarely behind him.

According to a new poll from NPR, PBS, and Marist, roughly one in six voters say Donald Trump's felony conviction would make them less likely to vote for him. But who knows how many of those people live in swing states or how they'll feel on November 5th.

One of the first things that popped into my head after learning about the verdict this week was a classic joke from 2016 Twitter. The joke is saying, I'd like to see old Donnie Trump wriggle his way out of this jam. Quinta Jurecic, a writer for Lawfare, speaking on MSNBC in 2022. And when Trump wriggles his way out of the jam, inevitably the commentator says, ah, well, nevertheless. And I'm leery of putting myself in that position here.

If there's anything we've learned over the past eight years, it's that the man who said he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue without losing voters manages to find a way. While he was on trial, Trump was under a gag order, which prevented him from saying some of the things he really wanted to say. He also faced a gag order of sorts when he was temporarily kicked off Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube back in 2021.

after his violent rhetoric led to the Capitol riot. Three years later, he is the presumptive nominee for the Republican Party. He is polling equal or ahead of Joe Biden. His messages are very much getting out there. Sarah Ellison is a national enterprise reporter at The Washington Post. She

She wanted to understand how Trump's messages were being disseminated when he only posted on Truth Social, a relatively tiny social media site.

For the study, the Post followed 194 of the most prolific conservative influencers who helped spread Trump's ideas far and wide. Trump's biggest amplifiers are well-known political figures like Elise Stefanik. There's Mark Levin, who appears on Fox but is also a big, big right-wing radio host. There's Sebastian Gorka, who was a former Trump advisor. There's

Michael Flynn, who's Trump's former national security advisor. And then some other people who are far less well-known. Those people go by the Twitter handles of things like Cat Turd, which is a name that we will probably discuss later in the hour. Yes. Cat Turd.

You spoke with Steve Bannon for this piece, and he told you that there's, quote, an entire industry predicated upon the Trumps of the world creating compelling content daily. People are making businesses and careers out of his content. You actually reached out to some of these influencers who are profiting off of spreading Trump's messages far and wide. Who did you talk to? What did they tell you?

I talked to Laura Loomer, who told me that she and other people in the MAGA movement needed to be Trump's bullhorn because he was being silenced with these gag orders. Mike Davis, who is a former Senate aide that helped Supreme Court Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh get through their confirmations. And he said that even though Trump has been kicked off Twitter, people like me can get out Trump's message on Twitter.

When I went to Sebastian Gorka to ask for comment, he told us to go to hell. You are scum and a hack. Go to hell. Yes. But then he spent the next day devoting at least a portion of his radio show to my requests for comment.

I want to walk through some examples of how Trump's messaging starts on Truth Social and then proliferates off the platform. On July 27th, there were new charges in Trump's classified documents case led by Department of Justice Special Counsel Jack Smith.

The next day, Trump posted three times on Truth Social talking about the, quote, weaponization of the Department of Justice or the FBI. These posts got some traction on the site. One of them was reposted 8,400 times and liked 29,000 times. You point out that the language Trump was using on Truth Social quickly found its way off Truth Social. What did that amplification look like? So that night...

One of his lawyers, Joe Takapina, went on Sean Hannity's show, which reaches over 2 million people on average. And Joe Takapina said, People of this country are not stupid. And I think as a whole, they're starting to understand that the weaponization of the justice system is in full throttle right now. Then you have people like Elise Stefanik. And I'm just going to quote something that she posted onto her Facebook page.

She said, This morning, I joined Fox and friends to discuss the illegal weaponization of the DOJ against Joe Biden's top political opponent. This line of messaging has been building on itself into a potential policy position. Just this past week on his War Room podcast, we heard host Steve Bannon say that...

The DOJ is completely corrupt from top to bottom. It's going to have to be purged. It's going to have to be restructured. They're going to have to get rid of tons of billets over there and lots of personnel on the afternoon of January 20th, 2025. It's not just Steve Bannon. The Heritage Foundation produced...

thousand-page policy document, Project 2025, that is essentially a series of policy proposals for a second Trump administration.

So this kind of language isn't just something that exists on social media. It goes into the wider world and it becomes a policy position. Let's discuss another example. Last summer in mid-August, Trump was indicted in Georgia for his alleged scheme to overturn the 2020 election results.

Trump posted on Truth Social in his characteristic all caps, quote, those who rigged and stole the election were the ones doing the tampering and they are the slime that should be prosecuted.

This was one of three posts that day about how his trials are election interference. This is clearly Democrat lawfare against President Trump. This is election interference. It's a ploy. It's election interference and it's political lawfare. Is that as President Trump has been arguing election interference? Of course it is. What they're doing when you lay out the number of indictments is the definition of election interference.

This was one of the most interesting points that we came across in our research, which is that obviously for years, Donald Trump and his allies have been talking about how the 2020 election was stolen and all the different ways in which that election was manipulated. And what we found is that at a certain point,

Around the time when these indictments started to become public and announced to the world that election denial in 2020 switched into election interference in 2024. But what was fascinating to us is how that message caught on immediately and was not just coming from Trump, but was coming from

In your piece, you kind of have these charts that show side by side the moment when Trump began using this election interference language and the moment that right wing political influencers started using it as well. It's kind of a one to one.

There are two different graphs, and one of them is looking at what Trump was mentioning. In August 2023, he started to make these big claims of 2024 election interference, and he did that in 42 posts, which was a high for him that month.

If you go to that same time period and you're looking just at right-wing political influencers, you see the exact same spike, 1,281 mentions of election interference among the right-wing influencers that we were tracking.

I want to talk about another example of how Trump's posts on Truth Social kind of set the agenda for much of the conservative media outside of Truth Social. On October 3rd, 2023, the second day of Trump's tax fraud trial in New York, Trump posted a photo on Truth Social. It was a photo of Alison Greenfield, a principal law clerk in the case, who just happened to be standing next to Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer.

In this post above the photo, Trump called Greenfield Schumer's girlfriend, which was not true then, still isn't. Trump was subsequently ordered by New York Supreme Court Justice Arthur Ngoran to remove the post, which he did on that same day, but it was too late, right? Exactly. Exactly.

Once Donald Trump put that out into the world, then you saw right away other people pick up that message and run with it. So Laura Loomer put on True Social and also on X, Greenfield appears to be a Democrat political operative who's collaborating with Senator Schumer, who has openly proclaimed his desire to quote, get Trump and see him jailed. Witch hunt. Michael Knowles, who has his own podcast, said that...

Trump took a swipe at one of the judge's staff members and pointed out that she's a huge lib. Alison Greenfield is a big lib. She's a big Democrat. You know, over the next two months, there were dozens of articles that were written in right-wing media focused on her role. And a lot of these attacks were really sexist and anti-Semitic. She got 20 to 30 calls a day, 30 to 50 additional messages across emails and LinkedIn accounts.

She handed those over to the court and when the court transcribed those messages, they went on for 250 pages single spaced. So that just gives you a kind of sense of the magnitude of attacks that she was on the receiving end on just from these few messages from Donald Trump. I'm curious to know how you think Donald Trump's usage of Truth Social is different from Twitter.

We saw a very similar phenomenon when he was president, for instance, and even before he was president, when his tweets became the focal point of all kinds of media coverage, especially in the conservative press. Is there something fundamentally different about this platform and how he's using it?

Well, my colleagues did a piece that ran just before mine, which looked at how Trump's messages on true social have gotten darker, more extreme, more violent compared to when he was on Twitter four years ago and campaigning. I also have observed that there's more of a shorthand

I mean, if you just walked into his True Social account, you would sort of have to figure out what is this case that he's talking about? What are the things that he's referring to? And so I think that that shows the smaller world that he's occupying now than what he was doing when he was on Twitter and speaking directly to people. And interestingly, Steve Bannon told me that it's the perfect place to workshop a message because you put something out on True Social and

And you have other people sort of pick it up and figure out which parts of it work. And then they can kind of help translate it for a broader audience. When you go back to post-January 6th, when Donald Trump was taken off all of the major social media platforms, the idea was to protect the public from his efforts to urge people to violence, his efforts to try to steal the election, and that that was going to protect people.

and make democracy run better. Now you have people saying that no one's paying enough attention to the crazy stuff that Donald Trump is saying on true social. Yes, it's funny. I actually spoke with Chris Hayes, MSNBC host, about this kind of same pendulum swing that you're describing, where...

In the old days of four years ago, many mainstream political journalists, I would argue, were not all that self-aware about the potential harms of just repeating literally everything he said on Twitter, on the nightly news, when many times these were provable falsehoods.

To now, when the man's not on Twitter, most Americans are not seeing the Truth Social posts themselves. And they're not really hearing about the posts from a lot of political journalists. And so they're kind of out of sight, out of mind. How present should Trump's posts be in media coverage? It's a question that journalists are still grappling with. There are real arguments that if somebody is going to speak publicly

with fascistic language, that Americans should hear that and understand what that kind of language is like.

The danger of fascistic language is that it is effective for a reason. And so it puts a big, heavy burden on people who are reporting on Donald Trump. And it's an unanswered question and people are still screwing up. But when I talk to people who study democracies and autocracies,

What they say is that you can't just have one person who can control all of these kinds of messages on his or her own. You need to have people who, for their own political survival, their own loyalty, whatever reason motivates them, you need to have people who show up and repeat the message, people who are willing to sing from the same psalm book and not challenge the leader and

That's really a key element to having the level of control that Donald Trump has over the culture right now. And it's been reminded to me again and again in my reporting that this is not the kind of thing that Donald Trump could do himself. He needs crowds of supporters and he needs elected officials who are going to communicate to their constituents that his message is the right one and it's the only way to run the country. ♪

Sarah, thank you very much. Thank you for having me. Sarah Ellison is a national enterprise reporter at The Washington Post. She co-authored a piece titled How Trump's Allies Amplify His Truth Social Messages to the Wider World. Coming up, the behind-the-scenes story of how Trump media came to be such a successful failure. This is On the Media. This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance.

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Evan Osnos on the rise of Kamala Harris, next time on the New Yorker Radio Hour.

This is On The Media. I'm Michael Loewinger. It's been about two months now since Trump Media, which owns a single product, Truth Social, started trading publicly on the stock market under the ticker symbol DJT. Fasten your seatbelts because this stock is not obeying the laws of gravity. It's all trading on momentum. Let me tell you that shares in Donald Trump's social media company have soared. Trading was actually halted at one point because of volatility.

Overall, it really defined the logic. The company's value has been drifting between $7 and $9 billion, which rivals that of established companies like American Airlines and Hasbro. Trump Media and Technology Group reported a little more than $770,000 in revenue and a net loss of $327 million just in the first quarter of 2024. I can't emphasize enough how unusual it is for a company with this little revenue to have this high of valuation.

Did I see all this coming? I mean, the company is sort of had an odd beginning. Matthew Goldstein is a business reporter at The New York Times reporting on white collar crime, housing and finance. He co-wrote the recent piece, How Donald Trump's Financial Future Became Tied to Trump Media.

Tell me about the two founders of Truth Social. Who are they and how did they come up with the idea to originally approach Trump? So the two founders are Andy Latinsky and Wes Moss, and they were both contestants on the second season of The Apprentice, Trump's old reality TV show. Andy, you're fired. You're fired.

And they actually went to him after the January 6th attack on the Capitol and Trump was thrown off of what was then Twitter and all the other platforms. They came to Trump. He just left the White House. And they had said to him that we think you can build your own social media company. This way, you won't have to worry about being censored. All your fans will rush to it. You'll never have to worry about what you can say and you can control it. The basic pitch was this.

They would go out and put the company together. They would go out and hopefully find a way to take the company public so everyone can monetize it and get rich off of it. And all Trump really had to do was to lend his name to it and his support, essentially give it his blessing, which he did. And then the two apprentice guys went out there and tried to take the company public. Before Truth Social, the app was even built online.

Latinsky and Moss had plans to merge it with a SPAC, which the first time I read that word, I thought it was Super PAC, but it's something totally different. Can you explain what a SPAC is and how this financial vehicle ended up causing some problems for the company? It stands for Special Purpose Acquisition Company. And SPACs have been around on Wall Street for several decades.

And essentially what a SPAC is, is a shell company. There's no operations to it. It's put together. They file an IPO. And the plan is we're going to go out in the market, raise money from investors and go find some upstart private company to merge with.

The attraction for the private company is it's usually a company with almost no operating record. They just have an idea, which is essentially what Trump Media was at the time. And they're looking for a way to go public. And they normally would never be able to do an IPO on their own.

Andy, by his own words, has said he basically just started calling everyone who had a SPAC in the market. The problem they had is that if you remember, let's go back in that point in time. I mean, Trump is really toxic on Wall Street. So no one really wants to do business with them as soon as they hear it's Trump media.

I don't want to say it was the bottom of the barrel because that's a little rude, but it's sort of close to where they were. Second from the bottom. Second from the bottom. They find this guy, Patrick Orlando. He used to be a Deutsche Bank trader, but no great shakes on Wall Street. He's intrigued when they call. They sort of bond. And basically, the bonding is that they want to do a deal and they all sort of want to get rich. They

they have an initial meeting at Mar-a-Lago with Trump. And ultimately, they decide to merge with a SPAC called Digital World. That's the SPAC they ultimately end up doing the deal with. This is where things get sort of funky. The way the law of SPACs are with the Securities Exchange Commission, a SPAC can only start talking about doing a deal once it has already gone public.

The problem is the deal that Trump Media does with Digital World when they agree to have their merger in October 21, those talks began well before Digital World ever went public. And that will end up coming back to haunt all the parties because that will set off a long-running SEC investigation, which will basically—

put a lot of this deal on hold for at least two years. So the SEC investigation, that is just one of the legal issues that came to haunt Trump media today.

There was also accusations of insider trading. This had to do with two guys, Gerald and Michael Schwartzman. Are they brothers? Who are they? They are brothers. They're actually Canadian citizens. And they put money into the deal, which is totally perfectly legit and fine. They stand to make millions of dollars if they did nothing. Just on the cheap stock they got, they would have been multimillionaires. But, you know, greed got the best of them. And they decided they wanted to make even more money.

So they start buying securities on the open market. They buy lots of securities on the open market. And then after the deal's announced, they sell those securities, making tens of millions of dollars. So that starts then this major insider trading investigation. You should know the Schwartzen Brothers pled guilty about a month and a half ago. But then finally in February 2022, Truth Social finally launched.

What was the app like in the beginning? Because I know you were an early user. I'm actually surprised I got in so early. I made no bones that I was a New York Times reporter. They actually verified me. I didn't ask to be verified. It was like the early days of the Internet. Very slow, very clunky. They didn't have direct message for months.

It was also very quiet. Trump himself wasn't really posting. His very first post was written by an employee who,

It didn't really get covered as a business. It was more truth social, this sort of stupid and it's dumb and Trump's putting posts out there. No one was really focusing on what was going on behind the scenes. And the fact that this had the potential to become one of Trump's most lucrative companies on paper, at least, by the time we get to last summer, it's pretty clear

Trump is fully engaged, fully embedded with Truth Social and Trump media. And any doubts that he had, you know, he had serious doubts early on about sticking with it, were gone by that point. Still, Truth Social was mocked as just a failure waiting to happen. Almost as soon as it debuted, the glitches started. Users who downloaded the app reported issues registering for the service. Some users simply cannot access the app as of today. Yeah.

Yep, Truth Social isn't very popular. At this point, even Rudy Giuliani's OnlyFans account has more traffic.

But shortly after its IPO in March, Truth Social's value, as we discussed, skyrocketed to $9 billion. What do you think the media got wrong here? Because to me, learning that was just a complete shock. I wouldn't have known from the coverage that this could end up being a crucial financial lifeline for the former president. Right. Yeah. Is Truth Social in some ways sort of a joke? You could clearly still say that today in the sense that

I mean, it only has several million users. Trump himself only has 7 million followers, which is a fraction of what he had on Twitter. The ad revenues are slim. The first quarter, they just reported $770,000 in ad revenues, which is nothing for any kind of business. If you go purely on that basis, yeah, it looks like there's nothing there. But what people, I think, failed to appreciate, and I sort of had this from my ongoing coverage of it,

Outside of Trump, who obviously owns almost more than 60% of the shares of the company, but most of the stock that's out there in the market right now that's able to be bought and sold on Wall Street is owned by the original investors in digital world, in the SPAC.

All those investors were individual investors. There's like more than 400,000 of them. And these are just like Trump supporters? Yeah, they are largely Trump supporters. Yeah. And they're not necessarily like rich Trump supporters. They're just average people who really love Trump. They also have come to really believe in true socialism.

they're really deeply committed. They're not going anywhere. A tagline that I've seen in the press coverage is that it's the mother of all meme stocks. Is this a meme stock? Oh, it's definitely a meme stock because it's not trading based on any financials. I mean, in fairness to them, no new company that goes public makes money. But what they do expect to see is some growth possibilities like revenues rising.

The problem with Truth Social is the revenues have actually gone down. The $770,000 in revenue that it took in in the first quarter is 30% less than it took in the first quarter of last year. Anyone who, if you're buying a stock based on you think, hey, this is going to be a growing company, you would not be buying Trump Media. But that's what a meme stock is. It doesn't matter. It's all based on euphoria.

It's love of Trump. That has nothing to do with the finances of a company. So, yeah, that's what a meme stock is. If you're looking for a rational explanation, you won't find a rational explanation. The drama surrounding Truth Social and Trump media is far from over.

A few months after Truth Social launched, we learned that the two original founders, the Apprentice guys, Andy Latinsky and Wes Moss, had left the company. And now they and Trump are suing each other. It's a classic kind of thing that happens with people who do business with Trump. They end up in litigation. Yeah.

It's not uncommon, again, especially in startups for disputes to happen between early founders. I mean, look at Facebook, right? You know, with Zuckerberg and the Winklevoss twins, right? These things happen all the time.

What's unusual about this litigation is that basically, according to the lawsuit filed by Latinsky and Moss, they're claiming that Trump and Trump Media are basically trying to wipe out their entire equity stake. They have, at today's price, roughly about $800 million worth of stock. Trump Media, on the other hand, has turned around and basically saying they're not entitled to any shares because they messed up and they ran the company poorly and

They've each filed counter lawsuits. And it's quite messy. This business is like wacky and volatile and just mired in so much conflict. But you say it could ultimately maybe save Trump financially? Yeah, it could. I mean, it's just as tricky as everything else. Like at this moment on paper, his personal stake is worth $6 billion. We

We've always historically had this debate. Is Trump really a billionaire? Is he not a billionaire? He legitimately, at the moment, can say he's a multi-billionaire because of his stake in Trump media. The problem is that's very difficult to get access to that $6 billion. Let's say we're now in mid to late September and he can now sell his shares. He has 115 million shares. That's a tremendous amount of stock. There's

There's no way he would want to sell all of it. That's insane. But let's say even he wants to sell 20 million shares. He wants to get hundreds of millions of dollars.

There's no doubt he can be able to do that. But when you sell so many shares on the market at one time, it almost inevitably depresses the price. It's just the way supply and demand work. So if he was to go out and sell tens of millions of shares, he'd get a bunch of money, but he'd probably also kill the value of his remaining stock. So it's not the smartest way to do it.

What he could do is go out and try to get a loan against some stock. And this is where we get into this sort of thing. Could it be a political contributor, supporter trying to help him out? That is what we're going to have to pay attention to as we get closer to the election, because that is probably the more rational way to try to monetize his stake, is to get someone to loan him money against the stock or to buy his stock against

in a private sale. There's no way he's getting billions of dollars in September. That's just not going to happen. Matt, thank you very much. Thanks for having me. Matthew Goldstein is a business reporter at The New York Times focusing on white-collar crime and the financialization of the housing market. Coming up, a veteran war photographer on risk tolerance and close escapes. This is On The Media. On The Media.

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Only 116 people in all of history can say what it's like to be a Supreme Court justice. On the next Notes from America, we will meet one.

I'm Kai Wright. Join me for a conversation with Associate Justice Katonji Brown-Jackson, the first ever Black woman to serve on the court. We'll talk about the generation of civil rights fighters who raised her, what SCOTUS means in this moment, and her passions, not only for the law, but for Broadway. That's next time. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. This is On The Media. I'm Michael Loewinger.

As we heard at the beginning of the show, there are some among the conservative Trump-supporting media who say that the guilty verdict in New York this week is tantamount to a declaration of war. It isn't. But for an almost too real depiction of what that would actually look like, there's Alex Garland's film Civil War, which, as of last week, is available to watch at home on streaming services.

It's a horrific depiction of America at war with itself. For reasons we never really learn, society's norms have crumbled, drenching the nation in blood and lawlessness. 19 states have seceded. The United States Army ramps up activity. The White House issued warnings to the Western forces as well as the Florida Alliance. The three-term president assures the uprising will be dealt with swiftly.

We follow the path of four journalists on their circuitous and perilous journey from New York to Washington, D.C., to interview the shaky and shifty president.

The journalists include a elderly New York Times guy portrayed by the trustee Stephen McKinley Henderson, the novice photographer played by Kaylee Spaney, Wagner Mura as the eager Reuters reporter, and Kirsten Dunst as the veteran photojournalist, the film's beating heart named Lee.

Brooke spoke with Lindsay Adario about the film. Adario is an award-winning photojournalist who's covered humanitarian crises and wars around the world for over two decades. Brooke asked her what she made of the film.

There was a lot that resonated with me as true, how we approach things as war photographers, going between humor and these very serious moments, using levity to try to bring us out of these very dark moments. But I think the main

issue that I had was that it never answers the question of why war photographers do the work we do and why we risk our lives. Because you never actually see them filing or the images appearing in public and people responding. Of course, I'm looking at it as a photographer. So it is like, hang on, there's a reason why I do this. It's not just for the road trip through war. It's

And because I'm an adrenaline junkie, because that's always the question that I get is like, do you do it for the adrenaline rush? And I think that this film kind of promotes that. Early in the film, Lee, played by Kirsten Dunst, the veteran photojournalist, says, Every time I survived a war zone and got the photo, I thought I was sending a message home. Don't do this, but here we are.

Isn't that addressing, at least in brief, why you do it?

Yeah, but it's like one line. True. You see Lee as very solemn, clearly very jaded, but almost catatonic. The irony is the older I get and the more I've seen, the more emotional I get and the more invested I get, not the more jaded. When I was younger, I was trying to figure out why I was so drawn to the work.

I would run into the middle of a gun battle and I would shoot all those pictures and I was learning from mentors. So there was a lot that resonated with me as true. But the older character, I guess I just wanted to see a little more emotion. You don't witness a mass grave and just get back in the car and keep driving. I mean, it's like there are moments that I feel like I need a little more.

I am so fascinated by your observation that you've become more emotional as the years have gone by. Because as an outsider, I would think there would have to have been a numbing effect.

How do you not get jaded? How do you go in the other direction? Well, I've seen almost everything. And so I can internalize, I can witness things without losing it. But at the same time, it doesn't mean I'm less emotional. It means the stakes are higher because the longer I do this job, the more sacrifices I make personally and physically.

You're speaking to someone who's been kidnapped twice. I've been held up at gunpoint twice. I've been thrown out of a car on a highway in Pakistan, in numerous ambushes in Iraq and Afghanistan, covered wars all over Africa and the Middle East. I don't do this without a toll. The more people I witness dying and the more people I witness suffering from malnutrition and being displaced from their homes...

the more heartbreaking it is to me because it continues to go on despite the risks that we all take as journalists to document these atrocities. I'm interested in where you found the movie did track with your experience. Did you find more of that tracked in the depiction of the rookie saying that she's never been more terrified in her life and never felt more alive, the adrenaline junkie line?

Definitely, I saw a lot of my younger self in her. I had incredible mentors when I was starting out, whether it was Ruth Frumson or Paula Bronstein, and also Elizabeth Rubin, the writer, who sort of taught me everything about covering war. I think it is still a profession where you learn on the job. You learn from people around you. It's not something you can learn in a classroom.

I was much more fearless when I was younger. I felt sort of invincible, of course, before I experienced so many close calls. I think there were certain things I definitely identified with. The bond between the four journalists sharing the car down to D.C., where apparently the standard order now is to shoot reporters on sight, is

is kind of the emotional backbone of the film. It reminds me of how soldiers in war are often depicted. Did that feel familiar? Yeah. War correspondents, war photographers have a bond that is unparalleled in other aspects of life because we experience such things

incredible highs and lows and we witnessed the most horrific scenes and beautiful scenes and so i think we do form a bond and it is that sort of you can die at any moment scenario and you spend extraordinary amounts of time with the people i've covered the war in ukraine for the last two years with andrei dubchak who's a ukrainian videographer and journalist

together 18 hours a day, every day for four to six weeks. And I don't spend that much time with my husband. You know, you just, you spend a whole lot of time and a lot of really boring time, driving time, and then very exciting adrenaline pump time with people.

I wonder about conflict also among comrades. You were one of four in Libya in 2011 when Muammar Gaddafi's forces kidnapped you. How does the film portray what it's like to balance, say, your risk tolerance with that of your colleagues?

I don't think you really can make a generalization about war correspondence. We all really are very different. My colleague Tyler Hicks, for example, who I was kidnapped with in Libya, I mean, he was

likes to be at the very front line, basically in a trench with the troops the whole time he's in Ukraine. That's the last thing I want to do. You know, I'm much more interested in telling the story of how war affects civilians and particularly women and children. Can you give me an example when you were talked out of something or you talked somebody else out of something? Is there a time when, because they're life and death decisions, they're

There's disagreement that has to be hashed out in that moment. Oh, 100%. Libya, for example, two people in the car wanted to stay and two wanted to leave. And I, because I was the only woman in the car, decided to keep my mouth shut because I didn't want to be the one who was scared. But my premonition was that we were staying too long and that it was too dangerous. And our driver had said, Qaddafi's troops are in the city. There are snipers. We have to get out. And we didn't.

There was tension in the car that day. And by the time we left, we drove directly into one of Qaddafi's checkpoints. And our driver died and we ended up kidnapped for a week and beaten up and tied up and threatened with execution. And for me, groped every day by every Libyan soldier that came across us. There are very tense moments in cars where some people feel like it's safe enough to go forward and some people don't.

That is why having a trusted team, a good fixer or a good colleague, all of those things contribute to whether we stay alive or not. If I'm correct, you've said that the morning before your kidnapping in Libya, you couldn't bring a camera to your face. You couldn't take a picture. I can't help but think of Lee quietly beginning to fall apart and taking no photos towards the end.

What happened then? My concern was getting out of there. And I was kind of paralyzed, not interested in taking photos in that moment and just wanted to leave. But I think that Lee having to break down in the middle of that scene at the White House is...

It was a bit tough for me because it seemed unrealistic that someone of her caliber at that moment would fall apart. Because what happens in those moments is like your adrenaline takes over, your experience takes over. Where the PTSD and the trauma really gets you is when you get home. That's really where, for me, when I don't have a camera in my hand, I have to kind of reckon with everything I've seen.

Alex Garland, the director, said that he wanted to make a film where journalists are the heroes. He thinks they are heroes. But a film industry person apparently told him, don't do that. Everyone hates journalists. Have you noticed a change in how journalists are treated?

both in the U.S. and abroad. It's wonderful that Alex Garland thinks of journalists as heroes, but it would be great if that respect was shared across the greater public the way it was 25 years ago. Things have really changed. I've had a lot of friends killed and killed intentionally, targeted. It continues to happen, and governments continue to get away with it. I mean, look at Gaza. Almost 100 journalists have been killed in Gaza.

This is a crime. And some with visible markings as press. Correct. And so that is intentional targeting of journalists. And I think that that should be a war crime.

The work of journalists and photojournalists is fundamental to understanding what's going on in the world today, and particularly in war zones where people in positions of power cannot access. You need the work of journalists on the ground to understand the nuances of war. And when you start killing journalists, it means that you're doing something you don't want the world to see. I've spoken to war reporters who...

Oh.

Obviously, I have PTSD and I have issues and moments where I become completely overwhelmed with emotion. And they're usually triggered by very random things. Watching the wedding crashers all cry, you know, there's not sort of a textbook reason when I feel overwhelmed.

When I witnessed the family being killed in front of me in the mortar strike in Ukraine in March of 2022, and I and my colleague, Andri, almost died. You know, I think I just have the tools to process this better. I think I talk about things very openly. My husband is a journalist, so we talk about things all the time. It's hard for me to explain. I mean, everyone asks me, how am I even normal?

A lot of it has to do with my foundation. You know, I have an incredible family that provided me with a lot of stability and love and security. And I think I have the tools to get through really tough situations, but I don't really know the answer to that.

And you do believe it can make a difference. I mean, what's the alternative? You can use drones, AI. There is nothing like human contact. For me, so much of the work I'm doing on the front line is engaging with people, empathizing with them, listening to what they think and feel and recording that and trying to capture the mood with my camera. That's not something that a drone or a robot can do. It's all about relationships. It cannot be substituted.

Civil war depicted very well the combat of the front line. What it didn't depict as well are like the relationships. Basically, you saw soldiers and you saw journalists, but it's missing regular people, how they're affected by the conflict. A huge component of why I do this work and why I risk my life are the civilians. That is something that has to be documented and has to be told.

Lindsay, thank you so much. You're welcome. Thank you for having me. Veteran photojournalist Lindsay Adario is the author of the book, It's What I Do, A Photographer's Life of Love and War.

That's it for this week's show. On the Media is produced by Eloise Blondio, Molly Rosen, Rebecca Clark-Calendar, and Candice Wong. Our technical director is Jennifer Munson. Our engineer this week was Brendan Dalton. Katya Rogers is our executive producer. On the Media is a production of WNYC Studios. Brooke Gladstone is going to be back next week. I'm Michael Loewinger.