What Does “Election Interference” Even Mean Anymore?
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Election interference. Election interference. Election interference in America. A term that was barely used a decade ago is now ubiquitous. Clearly, it's election interference if a foreign nation hacks into voting machines and changes the count. But when we talk about election interference nowadays, we're often referring to something much more subtle. Whoever heard you get indicted for interfering with a presidential election where you have every right to do it?

Over time, the term has come to be a catch-all for basically any political action that makes us uncomfortable. I spoke with political journalist John Alsop, who recently wrote a piece for The New Yorker about the fuzzy, subjective meaning of election interference and why it matters. You're listening to The Political Scene. I'm Tyler Foggett, and I'm a senior editor at The New Yorker.

Hey, John. Thanks so much for coming on the show. Thank you so much for having me. So I want to start by going back to the 2016 presidential election, which is when a lot of people first started hearing the term election interference more often.

What did that term mean back then and what kind of behavior was it referring to? Yeah, so I guess that it's always been a term or at least an idea that has existed, right? So it's not something that was kind of born in 2016. In fact, there are some kind of quite 2016-ish echoes if you go all the way back to the first contested presidential election in 1796.

And I found, you know, in old newspaper reports and things like that, that the term itself has recurred in loads of different contexts over the years.

And it's always been a term that's subjective. So when we talk about what it meant in 2016, it's not necessarily the same meaning for everyone. But clearly, the kind of overwhelming narrative around election interference in 2016, I think, was one of foreign interference, specifically on the part of Russia, right? And it sort of was an umbrella term, I think, at least in popular discourse for all the things that Russia was doing or was alleged to have done from

the hack and leak operation of Democratic campaign emails and people in Hillary Clinton's inner circle through to troll farms and fake news and the Internet Research Agency and all those terms that were lingua franca back then have kind of become an artifact of that time, I guess. Obviously, it wasn't just limited to that, but I think that that was kind of how the idea crystallized most commonly when people were talking about election interference.

And how would you say that, you know, eight years later that we are using the term election interference now? Like, what are the ways in which you've seen it being invoked in reference to the, you know, the upcoming presidential election?

So I guess we depends on who you are, because there is like a huge kind of cleavage now between how it's used by Democrats and how it's used by Republicans. And again, I want to stress that kind of subjectivity has always been there. There's never been one unified meaning. And indeed, it's not, you know, a sort of specific term of art as it as it were. Let's split it up then. I mean, how would you say that Democrats have been using it?

Yeah, so I think it probably, again, mostly not entirely has to do this time with things that Trump himself has done, specifically, you know, his efforts around the 2020 election to dispute the result to refuse to accept the vote totals, you know, the phone call to the Secretary of State in Georgia, the false slates of electors put forward by his allies, you know, those sorts of things. It's

become shorthand often for the various criminal cases that he's faced more recently, both at the federal level and in Georgia. And also, it should be said, in Manhattan, the case in which he's already been convicted, that there's a debate about whether it's accurate to call that an election interference case or not. But there are Democrats and liberals who firmly believe that it is about election interference. This is the case where he was convicted of

paying hush money to Stormy Daniels and then covering it up using kind of fraudulent accounting devices. And the argument was that it was election interference because it was keeping the American public away from information that could have influenced the election. So it was interference in the sense that they didn't have access to everything that they could have used to, you know, basically inform their vote. But then Trump is saying that the trial itself is election interference because the Democrats are trying to lock him up as opposed to letting him run against Democrats.

the Democrat in the race? Is that how he's invoking it? That's exactly right. So Trump has been really majoring on this phrase election interference. Again, I'm not entirely sure when it started, but it's very easy to trace it at least to April of last year, around the time that he was first indicted in the New York case and then obviously in the other ones after that.

He calls these cases election interference because, as you say, they're keeping him off the campaign trail, at least to some extent, because obviously they affect his ability to participate in the election. If he were to be sentenced and to go to jail before the election, that would clearly have

an influence on how the election plays out, if not on, obviously, his ability to stand in it, as Eugene Debs can attest. So, you know, this is something that he's kind of used as a repeated talking point about those cases. Actually, what was kind of interesting is he's returned to Twitter...

or X as it's now called quite recently and is now sort of posting there again like it's 2016 all over again. But between Twitter banning him in the aftermath of the insurrection at the Capitol and him sort of returning actively to use it recently, he tweeted, I believe, like only one time. And it was last year after his mugshot was taken in Georgia. And it was to post almost like a Microsoft Word document type image of his mugshot with in like Times New Roman or a similar font, election interference, never surrender in all caps.

So Trump says a lot of things, but this is clearly something that is like an actual talking point for him rather than just, you know, parts of the normal word salad that comes out of his mouth. He also, it's worth noting, has not only used this phrase to refer to the criminal cases against him. He recently described it as election interference when he tweeted,

falsely that Kamala Harris, or I think put on Truth Social actually, that Kamala Harris had been doctoring images of crowds using artificial intelligence. Clearly, this is not something that actually happened, but Trump described that as election interference. He's accused Google of election interference fairly recently. It's sort of becoming an all-purpose catchphrase for him at the moment, I guess.

It's interesting because Trump's catchphrases up until this point have included, you know, fake news and rigged, which to me seem like they're kind of in conversation with the phrase election interference. It's almost like election interference is the more kind of like scientific or formal way of talking about something being rigged. And I guess I'm wondering if you think that that's if you sort of see that as a strategy or if there is really a distinction between the election interference and then fake news and rigged.

there's always a tension in discussing Trump right between like things that appear to be masterful strategy and probably would like you know be considered as such if we were talking about anyone who sort of presented as more considered and sort of tactical whether it's just something that he's saying because he truly believes it or because he likes how it sounds on on online or on tv or whatever but yeah I think you know I think it's certainly a

appears to be, or at least kind of has the aesthetic of being a strategy or at least a talking point. And it does, you know, play into this much broader idea associated with him, right, which is, I am the crusader against the deep state. I am the crusader against the people trying to stand in my way. You know, they're trying to stop me. It really kind of plays into...

into that broader idea. I think there's also, and this was something I read and heard a couple of times while reporting the piece, there's this idea of like, I'm rubber, you're glue. Trump loves to, or at least has a habit of,

I think you see something similar to that going on with him co-opting fake news. And I think initially that was kind of an idea that, you know, disinformation was being propagated to help Trump win election. I think it's now much more associated as a phrase with, you know, something that Trump says to people who are not going to vote for him.

disparage accurate reporting often on him. And with election interference, again, this is a shorthand that's been attached to the charges that he faces in New York and in Georgia and on the federal level. It's not written in, I don't think, to any of these statutes, the specific words election interference, but Alvin Bragg, the DA in Manhattan, for example, has described it explicitly in those terms. So I guess in that sense also, it's not surprising to hear Trump now kind of appropriate

that language and turn it back on on the people who are who are going after him in the courts. And based on your reporting, would you say that there's a party that throws around the term election interference more than the other? Or is it kind of ubiquitous on both sides? I definitely don't think this is something that you can both sides. You know, there's no pattern that I have found of Democrats, at least not, you know, ones who are comparably senior to Trump. Um,

sort of making this into a catchphrase that they repeat ad nauseam. And quite clearly, there's a gaping disparity between the two parties at the moment in terms of their fealty to democratic norms and the truth. And so to the extent this catchphrase has been used in furtherance of a project to deny the legitimate results of elections, to

You know, push back on what are, whether Trump is guilty of them or not, legitimate prosecutions by an independent branch of government. You can't compare how the term is being used in that sense. In terms of just like quantitatively,

I haven't sat down and compiled a database over time. My sense is that Republicans are using the term more than Democrats, but it's definitely not like a thing where Democrats and liberals are only using the term very occasionally. It's fairly common to hear those charges thrown back at Republicans or even sometimes at other liberals. That does happen.

One interesting example where the phrase election interference wasn't used explicitly, but which kind of reflects the same idea, was after the Atlanta Journal-Constitution newspaper editorial board called on Joe Biden to drop out of the presidential race after that disastrous debate on CNN recently.

And Keisha Lance Bottoms, who was a Biden campaign advisor, who was also the former mayor of Atlanta, went on MSNBC and said, "This is undue influence on the part of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution just for writing an editorial," which is clearly the sort of thing that newspaper editorial boards do all the time and always have done. So again, the exact phrase election interference, I don't think was used in that example, but it's the same idea, right? So you can see that it does have some kind of purchase.

you know, among Democrats, including in ways that are kind of silly, if not, you know, overtly chilling to democracy. Absolutely. I want to talk more about, you know, specific case studies of election interference. But first, we're going to take a quick break. You'll hear more of the political scene from The New Yorker in just a moment. ♪

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technical definition that is used by like, you know, the U.S. government. Because there's this amazing part in the piece where you quote like the Wikipedia definition and it's something like, you know, anything that, you know, influences the outcome of an election, which honestly just makes it sound like, you know, campaigning itself is election interference. But I have to assume that government officials are using something a bit more rigid. Yeah.

Right. Yeah, the Wikipedia definition, I guess, was not something I ever thought I would be quoting in a piece for The New Yorker. But it was so sort of uselessly vague and, as you say, kind of encapsulating of everything that could possibly happen in the context of an election that it felt fun to include.

Yeah, so I mean, there's a declassified intelligence report that I think was declassified in the wake of the 2020 election by the Biden administration, which explicitly defines election interference. And this is with regard to sort of foreign actors, but it explicitly defines it as having to do with the technical aspects of an election. So things like

hacking into electoral systems, changing vote totals, that kind of behavior. I think they use the phrase election influence to describe anything that might be more about changing public opinion. So

We were talking earlier, of course, about Russian propaganda operations, Russian kind of fake news in 2016. I guess technically this is not an election interference operation as defined in that report by the intelligence community because it really involves influencing public opinion. It's nefarious. It's a dirty trick. You could even call it a foreign attack, but it's...

not according to that definition, election interference, because it doesn't involve manipulating the actual mechanics of, you know, how an election works in the U.S. What about the recent cyber attack on the Trump campaign by Iran? Because to me, that feels like a more classic example of election interference in the sense that you have a foreign nation getting involved in our election somehow, even though the story didn't really blow up in the way that you would expect, given all the focus on Russia in 2016. Yeah.

Yeah, that was an interesting episode. And I think just as a quick aside, it was a little bit murky at the time as to whether an Iranian hacker had actually obtained these documents about J.D. Vance, this old campaign material where the Trump campaign had been vetting him for VP. There was a suggestion that these Iranian hackers had stolen that and tried to shop it to news organizations that didn't publish it. I think the reason this didn't really blow up more is because

if it was them that got that information, it didn't sound very interesting. You don't need Iranian hackers to tell you that J.D. Vance didn't used to like Trump very much and now does. I guess that kind of plays into the question really of like, does something like this have to actually be significant to be election interference? Does it have to involve... I was going to ask that. Yeah. Do we only care about election interference when it's good? You know, in the sense that it's actually working? Yeah. When it's effective. Right. Yeah. I mean...

My view is that election interference of that variety – and again, I'm using the phrase election interference here in a broader sense than I think the intelligence community might in that specific example. I don't want to speak for them, obviously, not being a spook. I think even though that is a hack rather than just –

pumping out fake news onto Twitter and seeing who bites on it, it doesn't involve the actual mechanics of an election process. It's not quite at that level. So I think it probably would go in the election influence bracket, even though it is obviously, in some ways, more serious behavior, one could argue, than just having three guys in a room in St. Petersburg putting some tweets on the internet. But I see the whole thing kind of as a form of

informational terrorism almost. It doesn't necessarily have to be quote-unquote effective in a measurable, defined way that has huge impact to actually achieve its goals necessarily. If Russia puts out

one tweet and three people like it that's, you know, a tweet that's designed to make Hillary Clinton voters stay at home because they feel disengaged after reading this piece of fake news. Is that effective? I mean, like, you could very much argue that in the real world, no one really engaged with that. It's not a thing. However, if The New York Times then writes a story about that tweet, which is something I think that actually has literally happened in the past,

then that gets to a wider audience. And that wider audience is thinking, well, you know, I see information online. Is that Russian disinformation? Is that real? Is that fake news? Is it true? I think it contributes to an informational environment where people can't necessarily be sure of the veracity of what they're seeing. And it's that sense of doubt, surely, which is what, you know, Russian and Iranian hackers, again, without wanting to speak for them, are invested in. It's about sowing chaos and uncertainty rather than

you know, we're going to go to the Trump campaign and try and steal the most damning documents we can and sort of kickstart a foreign hacking initiated Watergate 2.0. I don't think that's necessarily what they're trying to do. So for me, I think there is election interference. Obviously, again, that's not the most narrow technical definition of it, but that seems to be, you know, a foreign power attempting to influence the course of an election by, you

doing something which might cost them very few resources or which might not look very significant or be a huge investment of time on their end. It still can have an amplified effect in terms of the uncertainty that it creates. So yeah, I guess all these actions kind of exist on a spectrum, but that spectrum itself exists in this kind of murky informational realm where everything becomes a lot more uncertain. And that's, I think, probably what these actors are trying to do.

You spoke to a number of experts when you were writing this piece, and I'm wondering if they had any ideas on sort of how to draw the line between something shady that happened, you know, whether it's something that's being done by a campaign in the U.S. or whether it's being done by a foreign power and something that is genuinely undemocratic.

Yeah, well, it won't surprise any listeners to learn that the experts disagreed on exactly where to draw the line. I spoke to Richard Hasen, who is a really prominent election law expert at UCLA, and

What he said was, you know, there are a range of different things that can impact election results, including in unfair ways, you know, the pressure, public opinion, ranging from the campaign finance system, for example, which he described to me as very unfair, through to, you know, Russian hack and leak operations or sort of broader foreign attempts to distribute propaganda online. But he prefers a definition of election interference that is

not unlike the intelligence community definition, but focused, I think, on domestic actors as well as foreign ones, that that has to do with, you know, once the votes have been counted, this is something that stops them from being, from either taking effect because the winner of the election doesn't come into office, or, you know, we're actually going to change the vote totals or we're going to kind of hack the election machines, that kind of thing. I think he sees those as the most serious threat to elections and therefore, you know,

in his view, you know, it's best to kind of reserve the term election interference for behavior that reaches that threshold. Again, it's not to minimize or to downplay necessarily the conduct that doesn't reach that bar. But I think his view is that we should police that term quite carefully. And then you sort of stop the definitional slippage, which leads to

You know, calling the Atlanta Journal Constitution editorial board, again, not exactly the phrase election interference, but undue influence that stops Trump being able to co-opt it, that stops this kind of definitional race to the bottom, I guess. In terms of this race to the bottom, while researching and writing this piece, what is like the weirdest use of the term that you came across where you were just like, this is we've really kind of lost the plot here. Like this is not election interference. This is but even though it's being called that.

There was one fun one which didn't actually make it into the piece where I think it was somewhere in Arizona, a local conservative activist

was accusing the like a city government of election interference for taking down some posters, which I quite enjoyed. But but the one of the examples that I do cite in the piece that I thought was fun and particularly illustrative of this of this kind of definitional arms race that we've been talking about, came in the gubernatorial race in Washington state this year. So Bob Ferguson, who is the Attorney General of Washington state is currently running for governor as a democrat.

And ahead of the primary, a local conservative activist there recruited two other people, also called Bob Ferguson, to run against him. There was a great quote where this conservative activist says, you know, if I'd had longer, I could have recruited six Bob Fergusons. And he said that they were running to clear their name, which I thought was

whatever you think of his behavior, quite a funny turn of phrase, but pretty much everyone involved in this episode accused everyone else of election interference, right? Bob Ferguson, the attorney general and leading democratic candidate in the race said that it was election interference to enter these same named candidates.

And actually, by the way, something I thought was kind of wild is that it is actually illegal in Washington and other states to run for office when you have the same name as someone else if your intention is to confuse voters. So in terms of legality, this might actually be a kind of like justifiably like the election interference might actually more cleanly apply to this as silly of a situation as it is than some of the other things we've talked about. Yeah, I think it's.

I don't know if it's the best way of describing it necessarily, but like, and I'm not sure how you would actually police that in practice, but that sort of opened up a legal can of worms that I had no idea existed and was sort of amusing to me. So he was saying it was election interference. The conservative activist who recruited the other Bob Ferguson also said it was, you know, that Bob Ferguson, the first one, better not commit any election interference against my guys by voting.

you know, intimidating them out of the race. And then there was a local commentator as well who accused Bob Ferguson of election interference for a conversation with Washington's secretary of state in which he reportedly asked for his name to be placed above those of the other Bob Ferguson's on the ballot and

I believe the Secretary of State said no, because that's a process that's done by randomization, basically. It's kind of like the Spider-Man meme, right, where they're all pointing at each other. It sort of felt a little bit like that, but in election interference terms. You know, again, some serious issues definitely involved in that, but

You know, a story where three people called Bob Ferguson are all running for election against each other is always going to be entertaining to me. So I guess that was kind of the funniest anecdote that I found. John, I want to talk more about how the overwhelming use of election interference as a term might affect future elections. But first, we're going to take another break. We'll hear more of the political scene from The New Yorker in a minute. I'm Nomi Fry. I'm Vincent Cunningham. I'm Alex Schwartz. And we are Critics At Large, a podcast from The New Yorker.

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Join us on Critics at Large from The New Yorker. New episodes drop every Thursday. Follow wherever you get your podcasts. So we've been talking about this mostly in terms of, you know, like semantics. But I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about the kind of real world effect that all of the talk about election interference has had on public perception of elections. It's interesting. I guess.

I guess it probably should be seen more as a symptom than a cause. I don't think that necessarily the phrase, the misuse or abuse of the phrase election interference is the thing that is causing people to have less confidence in legitimate election outcomes. I think it's

people who are doing actual election interference and then muddying the waters by abusing the term to kind of cover their tracks that are doing that and whether they whatever words they use i guess the effect would probably be be something similar but it does show how language that you know at one minute can at least for most people appear to have a kind of clear consensus meaning can just get

totally dragged into this place where you're not really sure what it actually means. And in like, it could apply to a million different things. Again, it's about creating, I think, an atmosphere of pervasive doubt where nothing kind of really means anything. And you're always questioning what you're hearing or what you're reading and what it actually means. And we talked about that earlier in the context of foreign actors, but domestic actors, not least within the Trump orbit, are definitely trying to do that too. I think it's sort of a hallmark of

our information and media climate at the moment. And yeah, I think that the election interference, dispute, whatever you want to call it, this definitional arms race again, is something that is really reflective of that broader state of affairs. There are other terms too. We've talked about fake news. The meaning of that has kind of flipped over time, arguably. There was a great piece in Harper's a few years ago by Joseph Bernstein in which he basically said, it kind of took on

This like academic consensus around the idea that disinformation and misinformation are everywhere and that they're super harmful. And, you know, basically his argument in the piece was to say these terms don't really have fixed meanings. And sometimes they're thrown around as like, well, you know, disinformation is just something that I don't like. It's information I don't like rather than something that has a kind of defined social scientific meaning. I think election interference has kind of become...

a similar battleground, a similar site of confusion, some of which is legitimate, by the way. I think there is a broader conversation to be had here about behavior that happens in American elections, has always happened in American elections, is totally normalized, that might very well fit a reasonable definition of election interference. But I think in this age where the threats to election integrity are heightened, both at home and coming from overseas actors, and where you are seeing a truly unprecedented assault on

completely normal and legitimate election practices by one candidate and one party or most of one party. It sort of has become another rhetorical tool in that arsenal, which is why I think it's important to think about it and to understand what it does and doesn't mean, what it should mean and shouldn't, I guess.

It's interesting because in your piece, there's a line about how, you know, if you view it in a certain way, crying election interference can itself be a form of election interference. And this is something that I've wondered about a lot, just because if you have one party in particular saying that an election is rigged,

Does that not discourage turnout? And I've also wondered just like why that would even be how that can possibly be an effective strategy. I mean, I get that it can be effective in the sense that it can turn, you know, one half of America against the other. But how do you not basically ensure that people just aren't going to come out and vote because they're, you know, sure that their vote isn't going to count? It's kind of similar to in 2020 when Trump was going around saying, you know,

mail-in ballots are fraudulent, don't vote by mail, which turned out to be a really stupid thing to say. And I think now Republicans across the country are desperately trying to walk that back right into a complete 180 and that and say, you know, actually, voting by mail is good. You should vote by mail. So yeah, I think whether it's an effective or clever strategy or not is totally open to question.

But it does seem to me to be part of a project that at least rhetorically is less invested in the idea of actually winning elections fair and square, right? Like it seems to me that it's all part of a big hedge against losing the election. And then you get to turn around afterwards and say, well, you know, we lost, but actually we didn't lose because...

of reasons x y and z but one of them is that the election was interfered with right by these nebulous other forces you know because trump was put on trial or you know foreigners were allowed to vote that's that's another usage by the way that seems fairly common at the moment of the term election interference despite there being no evidence that that's an actual problem so you know it becomes part of that that armory that you can then wheel out after the election if and when you do lose and say you

this wasn't fair, so we're going to pursue it through the courts. And then when that doesn't work, we're going to do things up to and including storming the United States Capitol, right? I mean, I'm not going to pretend to know what will happen after the next election. I'm not going to pretend that 2021 is necessarily some kind of inevitable prologue to what's going to happen next time. But it seems very much like it's part of the same rhetorical project. And that is not a project that is primarily concerned with

you know, turnout and winning elections by fair means. It's a project that is designed to insulate candidates against losing, whether they actually lose or not. And that's concerning. And I think there's definitely a world in which you can see the words election interference cropping up in a very systematic way after the election in November, because the losing candidate doesn't like the outcome. And that's the rhetorical kind of bullet that they're using to fight it with.

Did the experts you spoke with have any thoughts on the best way forward at this point? Or is every election from now until the end of eternity going to have one candidate saying something about interference, whether it's election interference or undue interference or whatever the phrasing that was used against the Atlanta Journal-Constitution was?

Yeah, I don't know if they had any sort of actionable ideas that I heard. I was in moments like this. Think of the Académie Française in France, which like pleases, tries to police language usage. America doesn't have one of those. And I'm not sure it would be very successful if it did. Yeah, once people start using language, once language takes on various meanings, socially, culturally, politically, it's very hard to force it back into a box.

I guess what the most important thing for me is, is for the media to cover and for politicians and other experts and other observers to call out what is actually being done under the banner of this terminology. If you can't stop people warping and abusing language, you can at least point to the underlying behavior that they're trying to justify or that they're trying to hide. This is a moment where lots of things are being done properly.

in that realm. And I think that, you know, as much as it can feel like a fairly impotent answer, doing something about it or trying to do something about it, or at least calling it what it is rather than getting dragged into semantic battles, as fun as they can undoubtedly be and as important as they can undoubtedly be, it's probably...

you know, it's probably just where you kind of have to come down on this, right? One thing that I'm curious to hear your take on is this idea that anything that is kind of weird or unseemly has, you know, is sort of now like up for grabs in terms of being described as election interference. And I wonder if part of the reason why the term has taken off so much is not just that Trump has weaponized it pretty effectively, but also that it's just a weird time. I mean, he...

mentioned that, you know, the way in which Biden dropped out of the race and then, you know, Harris replaces him, that that's election interference. And it's like it's definitionally not election interference. But I think people on both sides can agree that that was unorthodox. And so I wonder if it's become, you know,

We talk about how this is the vibes election. But if the sort of prevalence of this term encapsulates this idea that elections aren't really running the way that they normally do and there are strange things happening and it's not interference, but it's it's not normal per se.

I mean, election interference, I guess, is kind of an appropriate thing to be talking about in vibes summer, right? Like it's a phrase where people essentially just stick whatever vibes they're feeling onto it and then try and make it sound like something that is big and...

you know, definitionally contained and scary, you know, as if by calling it that you kind of become the arbiter of what is legitimate and what is not at this, as you say, very weird vibes-y moment. Yeah, I think again, you know, I don't want to sort of sit here and say that American elections have always been a sort of shining beacon of fairness in a level playing field or anything like that. But this is an absolutely...

I hate the word unprecedented, but I guess it literally is true in this case. Time where, yeah, you have not only all the things we've been talking about whereby one side won't accept totally fair results in a way that has never really happened before in modern American history, but you have just weird kind of unchained things happening all around on both sides. I guess...

In a very dark sense, you could use the words election interference to describe the Trump assassination attempt, which happened earlier this summer. Something we were all told was going to be a totally structuring, radical break with history and which turned out to have, you know, there are some days where you just kind of forget about it, right? Like it's something that didn't seem to have that big political effect after all. Yeah, it's a very unmoored moment.

And I guess it's therefore appropriate that we're having this conversation about a term that feels like it's become very unmoored in the midst of it. I think there's definitely something kind of reflecting both ways there. Well, thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it. Thank you for having me. John Alsop is a freelance journalist who also writes the Columbia Journalism Review's daily newsletter, The Media Today. You can read his latest piece for us, The Election Interference Merry-Go-Round, on newyorker.com.

This has been The Political Scene. I'm Tyler Foggin. This episode was produced by Sam Egan and edited by Gianna Palmer with mixing by Mike Kutchman. Our executive producer is Stephen Valentino. Chris Bannon is Condé Nast's head of global audio. Our theme music is by Alison Leighton-Brown. Enjoy your week, and we'll see you next Wednesday. My name is Madeline Barron. I'm a journalist for The New Yorker. I...

focus on stories where powerful people or institutions are doing something that's harming people or harming someone or something in some way. And so my job is to report that so exhaustively that we can reveal what's actually going on and present it to the public.

You know, for us at In the Dark, we're paying equal attention to the reporting and the storytelling. And we felt a real kinship with The New Yorker, like the combination of the deeply reported stories that The New Yorker is known for, but also the quality of those stories, the attention to narrative. If I could give you only one reason to subscribe to The New Yorker, it would be... Maybe this is not the answer you're looking for, but...

I just don't think that there is any other magazine in America that combines so many different types of things into a single issue as a New Yorker. You know, like you have poetry, you have theater reviews, you have restaurant recommendations, which for some reason I read even though I don't live in New York City. And all of those things are great, but I haven't even mentioned like

the other half of the magazine, which is deeply reported stories that honestly are the first things that I read. You know, I'm a big fan of gymnastics and people will say, oh, we're so lucky to live in the era of Simone Biles, which I agree. We're also so lucky to live in the era of Lawrence Wright, Jane Mayer, Ronan Farrow, Patrick Radden Keefe. And so to me, it's like, I can't imagine not reading these writers. ♪

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