How did we get to the point that it’s good news for Donald Trump, according to The New York Times, when a *majority* of Americans think he has committed serious crimes?
Jamison Foser can tell you. He writes the Finding Gravity newsletter and he's also a strategist who co-created Media Matters. And he now advises Take Back the Court.
America’s right wing is so good at creating and spreading myths that many liberals have bought into two big ones.
The first is that we have a liberal media. And not just MSNBC’s weeknight lineup. There’s a belief that everything from The New York Times to Disney to Taylor Swift to Bud Light’s ad agency has a left-leaning agenda. Not that these entities are following their own intentions or market forces but that there is a left-leaning gravity that cannot be defied. Because woke or something.
The second myth is that running against the Supreme Court only works for Republicans. Democrats have long believed that actively running to overturn Citizens United or the gutting of the Voting Acts Act or Dobbs by making the Supreme Court reflective of American voters could never work out for them. Even though it's pretty much the only thing that works for the Republican party, who've recognized that an activated base is the secret to winning close elections, almost everywhere.
When myths are so strong, you can only call them one thing — frauds. And almost no one is better at calling out frauds than Jamison Foser.
He writes the Finding Gravity newsletter and he's also a strategist who co-created Media Matters. And he now advises Take Back the Court.
If you follow him at all, you probably know there's one media company that particularly upsets Jamison. So we started there.
********
TRANSCRIPT
Jason Sattler: Jamison, to a lot of people, including my smart non-news-junkie wife, The New York Times is sort of like the child's conception of G-d. Sure, it does bad things, but probably for a good reason. And overall, it's gotta be a force for good. Just listen to the way that Ted Cruz used to talk about it.
(Ted Cruz audio clip )
Jason Sattler: You've had a cosmic grudge with this paper for a while. What do people who aren't paying as close attention need to know about The New York Times?
Jamison Foser: Cosmic grudge is maybe my favorite way I've ever heard that described.
I think big picture, their political desk, in particular, is fundamentally unserious. It's frequently dishonest. It favors the right. It doesn't take its role in democracy seriously. It's condescending and dismissive towards readers and it demonstrates just deep contempt for anyone to the left of Joe Manchin.
Jason Sattler: Some people are like, well, yeah, maybe. But why is it worth our time to criticize The Times when we have Donald Trump, literally Joe Manchin still exists. Why not just find them wherever we can and scream at them? Isn't that better use of our time?
Jamison Foser: Let me back up a step here. I loved The New York Times. Absolutely loved it.
Jason Sattler: Is there heartbreak involved? Because that's always better.
Jamison Foser: I grew up in a town of 300 people, in the middle of nowhere. The closest city with a daily newspaper was half an hour away. And that paper probably had a circulation of about 20,000 people. It wasn't very good. And so when I was a teenager in the late eighties and early nineties, I'd save up money to buy a copy of The Sunday Times when I could get it, and that wasn't often. It was hard. I had to go to a newsstand about half an hour away. They got The Sunday Times like midweek and charged about five bucks for it, which as a 15 year old without any money in 1990 was an investment. But every few months I'd make the trip to that newsstand and I'd flip through magazines, Mother Jones, The Nation, The New Republic... And I'd eventually buy something. More often than not, it was the Sunday New York Times.
It gave me access to a world I didn't have access to in a pre-internet, rural, small town. It gave me information about a wide range of topics. I loved what it could be, what it should be and what it was for me at the time. And my frustration with it now and, and for the last quarter century has really been about the disconnect between what I think is the that paper should be and what I think American democracy needs out of its news media and what it actually is. And what it actually is is is, frankly, failing us
Jason Sattler: You've said "It is politically a Republican newspaper." Aren't there lots of Republican newspapers?
Jamison Foser: Yeah, and you know a lot of the criticisms that I have of The New York Times I have for the entire news media broadly and many other specific news organizations.
I focus a lot on The Times because it is the most important news company in the world, the most influential news company in the world. Certainly in America, it drives not only the perceptions of the people who read it directly but of coverage of pretty much every other news outlet and the people who are informed by those news outlets -- the trickle down from things that The New York Times says and the choices they make about what to cover and what not to cover to other news organizations, to the conversations you have on a daily basis with friends, colleagues, neighbors and family who may not themselves even consume The Times but consume something that is influenced by The Times. It's just a massive influence. And it's a useful symbol for the media overall, even aside from from its influence.
So why do I focus on it?
It's because it's more important than anybody else, as a news company and a news organization, and more influential. That said, I would encourage people to get their news elsewhere and their analysis elsewhere ideally several other places.
And I'll just say, I subscribe to The Times for professional reasons. I probably always will. I generally don't actually urge people to unsubscribe. Though, I certainly will defend the action.
One of the things people always say to me is like, "We shouldn't unsubscribe to New York times. It's too important to support journalism!" The New York Times made two and a half billion dollars last year as a company. Okay.
Your subscription means nothing to them. Subscribing to The New York Times to support journalism is like giving Harvard a hundred bucks to support education.
And conversely, for the 300 bucks or so that an annual all access subscription to The New York Times costs you... Mother Jones is 15. The New Republic is, I don't know, 20. Pick your favorite six small, independent magazines or writers or podcasts or whatever form of media you get information and analysis that's valuable to you out of. You could subscribe to six of them, a dozen of them, for the cost of one New York Times subscription.
And those subscriptions would actually mean something to those outlets because they didn't make two and a half billion dollars last year. They're struggling just to stay afloat.
Jason Sattler: Let's say you were someone who shared a lot on social media and you thought, "Oh, hey, maybe I could be the one who gives the gift link that keeps people from subscribing." Should that assuage my guilt or are the numbers so small that it doesn't even affect The New York Times in the long run?
Jamison Foser: In terms of subscriptions, again, there's kind of a collective action problem. In the same way that your subscription actually isn't really doing much to support journalism, unsubscribing isn't going to hurt him either as an individual.
Now I do think the only way this company is going to change and the only way their coverage is going to meaningfully change on a large scale is actually if, is if they lose a lot of subscribers. They've shown over a period of several decades that this is who they are. Like a lot of people come to you know, come to some frustration with the time as a late, maybe it was, you know, their coverage of Trump over the last year or their coverage of the Clinton-Trump campaign in 2016. I've been in this place for about three decades with them.
They've done big things badly for a very long time.
From Whitewater to their just all-out war on Al Gore in the 2000 campaign that was pivotal in putting George Bush in the White House to cheerleading for the Iraq war. They've shown us who they are and, and that starts at the top. It's not about individual journalists, it's not even about individual editors. As long as this company is controlled by the family that has controlled it for more than a hundred years, there's no reason to believe that it's going to change absent a significant loss of subscribers. Frankly, I doubt that's going to happen anytime soon.
That's kind of a long way of answering your question. Like should people feel guilty about sharing links? No. Like if you have a reason to subscribe to it, do. I don't care. You're neither gonna like materially hurt or support them by sharing or not sharing a link. I think that being vocal about their flaws does have value. Because it's about not just the small incremental improvements that maybe we can win in their coverage if we keep pressure on them. Sometimes have some influence on their coverage and that's valuable. But just as importantly the critique of The Times is very valuable for helping other people understand to take with a grain of salt the information that they're getting about their government, about politics, about campaigns. There's that value in helping inoculate people from the latest round of of BS that they hear about Biden's age.
Jason Sattler: One thing you're better at than almost anyone is the perfect example. You can point to something The Times has done that shows exactly how bad they are at this. Is there a specific, recent example that shows how they get the big things, or even the little things, wrong?
Jamison Foser: Yeah, I'll just give you a small example, but illustrative, from just last night after President Biden's State of the Union Address. The Times published this analysis piece of it saying, and I'm quoting now, "Despite a performance that was more spirited than he often delivers, it was unlikely to quell the concerns, especially from Republicans who have made questioning Biden's competency a centerpiece of their 2024 strategy."
And let's sit with that for a second.
The bar that's New York times set for Joe Biden to quell concerns about his age is whether or not he can convince not just Republican voters, which is an absurd bar in any case, but literally the Republicans who are running the campaign against him.
Jason Sattler: Surrender or else it doesn't count.
Jamison Foser: That's not how anything works. And that's a small example. It's one sentence in a piece, but what I think it's illustrative of is just how institutionally bought into this idea of Joe Biden's age being something that they need to just bang away at every day, in every story, that nothing was ever good enough, that nothing can ever overcome this perception.
You can look at the way they treat Trump and it's, it's kind of the opposite. They ran a story last week about their latest poll in which they found that a majority of voters, 53% think that Donald Trump has committed serious crimes, which of course he has. They ran an article about this question, not about the whole poll, about this question specifically. And the headline of the article was "Fewer voters think Trump has committed crimes, polls show." And that article never mentioned, literally never mentioned, that in the poll question the article was about, a majority of Americans said that Trump has committed crimes. Instead the focus was entirely on it having been a smaller number than in the previous poll. But they didn't actually tell you what the numbers were because if they did, it would make clear that it was still a majority. And by the way, the decrease was a five point decrease was a 58 to 53%, which is not a meaningful decrease. And that's the entire premise of the story.
So while the bar for Biden is impossibly high the bar that they set for Trump is so low It's literally good news for Trump in The New York Times when a majority of the American people say he's committed serious crimes.
Jason Sattler: There's also a permission structure. You talk about the trickle-down effect and it gives Jon Stewart a chance to come out and go "Do you ever notice that Joe Biden's old? That occurred to anybody yet? I've been sitting around for seven years and this is what I figured out."
But there's also the way they cover trans people, which is, I think, literally dangerous. And it's JK Rowling-levels of distortion and gives permission to, editors to run more and more stories that buy into this myth that is basically indistinguishable from Fox News, except for bigger words.
Jamison Foser: Could not possibly agree with that more. It creates this permission structure. It creates a sense of the scale and importance of a topic . They might find one example somewhere of one person who has regretted transitioning, and then they cover that as though it's the majority of people who have transitioned. They cover it wall to wall. Often they don't even have an example in the story. People develop a misconception about the scale of a topic or the importance of a topic based on how relentlessly The Times covers it.
Jason Sattler: It really is a remarkable story if you actually look at the care that trans people is so judicious because it has to be, because the dangers of not being judicious are so immense. In my idealized perception in The New York Times, they'd be the one to tell America how great this is.
We have this perception of the liberal media that persists from Edward R. Murrow, but does exist anywhere. Have you ever seen it?
Jamison Foser: No, not at scale. There's all kinds of outlets, including The Times, there are individual journalists, individual opinion writers, who I would say are liberal and who I would say are exceptional. And The Times does a lot of great journalism. But on balance, if we're doing a net effect you know, if The Times or frankly, any other large national media outlet, no.
It's one of the great frauds that have been perpetrated on the American people ever is that notion that the media is liberal. It was an extremely cynical and effective propaganda tool that the right deployed to both to push the media, which was already very pro-corporate and very right leaning, further to the right, while also kind of inoculating themselves from any bad stories that do come out in the media.
I think it's the source of a lot of our problems.
It's frankly a source of a lot of the problems with the media itself is they internalize that critique which has made them even friendlier to Republicans, even more generous to them. Because even while waging a campaign-long war on Al Gore in 2000 or obsessing over Hillary Clinton's emails in 2016 as though they were more important than literally everything else in the campaign combined, even though all The Times it was doing those things, it believed itself to be biased in favor of liberals.
And that has a really damaging effect on how it approaches future stories on how it responds to criticism. The Times fundamentally does not respect or take seriously any critique from the left at all. It bends over backwards to accommodate criticism from conservatives and just dismisses or caricatures criticism from liberals out of hand.
Jason Sattler: With Al Gore, they were part of this kind of snowball of criticizing him for saying that he invented the internet, something he never said. And then they just got mad at Hillary Clinton for using the internet. The, the bar went down considerably.
Let's talk about the other great fraud in American life, maybe the greatest, this would be the Supreme Court.
We're making a quick right turn and the big connection here is fraudulence.
As someone who paid who's paid close attention to this, what the perception that the average person should have of the Supreme Court? How bad is it?
Jamison Foser: It's real bad. When I talk about the Supreme Court, I think of it as the legal arm of the Republican National Committee. And that's the first thing that people need to understand is that this is not a group of impartial academics neutrally applying legal doctrine to the things that come before it. They're, they're politicians and they're Republican politicians for the most part.
Two thirds of the Court was appointed by Republicans. It's been more than 50 years since the majority of the Court had been appointed by Democrats. This is an institution that has been fully captured by the Republican Party and is an active participant in the Republican Party's assault on democracy and assault on our fundamental freedoms.
And that's the first most important thing that I think people need to understand about it. And I think people increasingly are understanding about it. That's why public opinion of the Court is at an all time low. I think there's been a huge shift in public understanding of the Court and attitudes towards the Court over the last decade or so, and an increasing understanding that these are, these are first and foremost political actors and really Republican political actors.
Jason Sattler: The robe seemed to give it a veneer that no other Republican politician had.
Is expanding the Supreme Court a solution to this problem you're describing?
Jamison Foser: I think it's the most important solution. There's all kinds of problems with our Supreme Court and all kinds of reforms that we shouldn't pursue and should enact from meaningful ethics standards --this Court obviously does not believe in any -- to term limits. But the only reform that will immediately fix this gaping disconnect between the composition of the Supreme Court and the will of the American people, as expressed through elections, is expanding and rebalancing the Court.
We have a Supreme Court that is controlled by a super majority, 6-3 right-wing super majority. The Court's been controlled for more than 50 consecutive years by the Republican Party at a time when the Democratic Party has won the popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections.
There is a huge disconnect between what the people have said they want their government to look like and the composition of the most powerful branch of government. And absent a reform that intentionally rebalances the Court, the Court will remain in Republican hands for 40 more years.
Jason Sattler: So longer than our lifetime.
Jamison Foser: It'll be a hundred consecutive years of Republican rule on the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act, actually several times, and with the Republican Party that we've seen, nobody should be particularly confident that come 2050, we're going to have enough of a democracy left for the Court to naturally reshape itself at that time.
Time's running out here.
So, if we want to restore reproductive freedoms, democracy, any of the wide range of other things that the Supreme Court has assaulted in recent years, the only way to do that is to disempower this right-wing Supreme Court that has made it so that Republicans don't even have to win elections to get their way.
They've hobbled Joe Biden's ability to govern when he's in office. They have paved the way for abortion bans even after Republicans lost. elections.
It's really the only way that we can stop this runaway Court. And to circle back to some of those other reforms that I mentioned that we should obviously have, we can't enact any other meaningful reform of the Court until we expand and rebalance it. Because any reform that we enact, the Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito don't like, they're just going to strike it down.
Jason Sattler: There's that backlash argument that if we do it, they'll do it . Why is that silly?
Jamison Foser: Well, because it's preemptive surrender. The Court that we currently have has been controlled by Republicans for the last 50 years. And if we don't expand and rebalance it, they're going to control it for the next 40 years.
So expanding and rebalancing the Court and having a more progressive, more representative Court for a few years, and then perhaps Republicans then doing the same thing in return, that's better. A situation in which control of the Court changes in response to elections is better than our current situation, which is that control of the Court never changes, regardless of elections.
Jason Sattler: Do people understand how bad it will get?
Jamison Foser: I don't think so, on any range of topics. I think people are beginning to understand, better than they used to how bad things are. But but this Court our news media, the Republican Party, they're all on a trajectory and it's not good.
It's going to get worse not better unless we actively change it
Jason Sattler: What would the actual process of expanding the Supreme Court look like?
Jamison Foser: The process is simple. It just takes a simple act of Congress, a majority of both houses have to pass it. It literally can be one sentence. The judiciary act that's that's currently been introduced in both the House and the Senate, I believe it's actually two sentences. It's an extremely simple thing. You just say We're adding four seats to the Court. Congress passes it. President signs it. He then appoints supporting justices. Senate confirms them. Now, you no longer have a right-wing supermajority on the Court. From a process standpoint, it's extremely simple.
In order to do that, you obviously need majorities of both houses of Congress to support this. Senate's tough. Under, under current Senate rules, this would almost certainly be filibustered and you wouldn't have 60 votes. For a ton of other reasons, in addition to this one, we should get rid of the filibuster. That's a fundamentally undemocratic tool that's been used to empower America's right-wing minority for far too long and to quash any kind of progress. And we've seen dozens of examples of that just in the last few years. So that's a necessary step. But that's a necessary step to anything else Democrats are going to want to do in, in the first place.
Jason Sattler: My argument is this never happens unless we run on it. Joe Biden is historically a centrist, he's someone who believes in the tradition of the Supreme Court as it's kind of been described throughout the 20th century. Do you think there's a chance of making that happen? What is the way that people can participate in this if they do believe that this should happen this year?
Jamison Foser: I think there's a ton of value to Democrats running against the Supreme Court, of talking about the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court is an extremely compelling villain. Clarence Thomas. Brett Kavanaugh. These are really compelling villains, villains that pretty much every Republican who's running is going to support. It's a really excellent opportunity for Democrats to connect their opponent to this really flamboyant corruption that we see when we see Clarence Thomas taking luxury RVs and yacht vacations and literally houses from right-wing billionaires.
Jason Sattler: Just one house, I think.
Jamison Foser: Well, just one House. Yes. To be fair, that we know of, so far.
This is kind of transparently corrupt and every Republican in the country supports him, every Republican candidate. And so that's a really powerful thing for Democrats to, to run against, in addition to running against what the Court has done to assault and undermine our freedoms, our right to vote, reproductive freedom.
So the Court is definitely something I think. Democrats should talk about in their campaigns. And that's actually a topic I've been meaning to, to write more about and hope to soon. So thank you for reminding me to do that. In terms of remedies and solutions, court expansion, as we've talked about, I think is the key remedy and solution.
I'm an advisor to an organization called Take Back the Court. People should check out their work. Court expansion is `the most powerful and consequential remedy that we can pursue and I'd encourage people to support it. Contact your member of Congress, urge them to support it.
There's a really good group of leaders in both the House and Senate who are on board with this legislation. Senator Warren and Markey in the Senate. Senator Tina Smith has been a tremendous advocate as well. And a pretty nice range of members of the House, some really strong progressive members. Might surprise people to know that there are some more moderate Democrats in the House who have supported the bill as well. Because there's a growing realization that that this Court keeps driving home every day that we need to do something.
Jason Sattler: Do you think the unwillingness to run against the Supreme Court frees the Court up to act with impunity?
Jamison Foser: I absolutely think that it has. I, I think there's some shift in that that we're starting to see. I think if you compare Democrats willingness to directly criticize the Court now versus five or ten or certainly 20 years ago, there's been a dramatic shift. There's been an awakening that this is not the institution we thought it was, hoped it was, believed it should be. And, and increasingly people are taking that on a direct way. And I think that is very important. It's important that that continue. There isn't enough of it yet, but, but there has been some progress. And I do think, yes, you're right, that like one of the effects that that can have is... You know, I, I don't think that Clarence Thomas is gonna is gonna change his behavior until he's made to change to his behavior.
Jason Sattler: Not even for another house?
Jamison Foser: Not even for another house.
But John Roberts -- who' s a terrible Chief Justice, maybe the worst of all time -- he does have a bit of susceptibility to pressure. He values, the image of the Court, if not the reality of the Court, as an independent institution. And I think if he feels some heat. He feels that people recognize what they're doing and are going to call him out on it. He might moderate himself just a little bit as a result.
And so you do have, in some really close cases and some important cases, you know, some potential that increased focus on the Court increased scrutiny of the Court can have a little bit of a moderating effect on on them to some degree. Now it's still a 6-3 supermajority. I don't think like I said, you know, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, you know, they're going to be persuaded to tone themselves down at all. But if you can peel off one vote in a case that we see this fall having to do with the election that might be determinative.
Jason Sattler: The only time the Court's ever really been moved in any direction is when FDR threatened to, they called it "packing the Court" then, I think balancing is a better term.
Is this something you could see Joe Biden going a little FDR on?
Jamison Foser: I mean, he came into office saying that he wanted to model his presidency after FDR's and that's a a great example of what FDR did, that frankly, a lot of historians for a long time kind of got wrong and viewed his approach to the Court, FDR's approach to the Court, as having been a failure. But it really wasn't, because if you look back at what was happening at the time this Court was blocking FDR's agenda and really kind of stretching the constitution and reason and law to do it. And he said, "Fine, I'm going to disempower you. You can't just be doing this."
And he didn't get that through Congress. But he did send a real signal to the Court and they pulled back, they stopped blocking his agenda. And the result was the greatest sustained period of legislative accomplishment in the 20th century. It shaped America and that wouldn't have happened if he had not stood up to the Court.
Jason Sattler: Well, Jamison, I appreciate what you do so much because not only are your examples so clear that you really can't ignore them, but you have a sense of morality to what you're talking about that always kind of clarifies what's going on at any time for me. So I really appreciate what you do on every platform you're on, and on your newsletter Finding Gravity
Jamison Foser: That is so nice of you to say and I'm glad to finally talk. I feel like we've kind of known each other online forever, but I think this is the first time we ever spoken. So thanks so much for having me.
Jason Sattler: Yeah, I think the last time we really connected was over Mitt Romney's taxes.
In retrospect was worth the fight, wasn't it?
I I think Mitt opened the door for Trump in a certain way
Jamison Foser: It did. And, you know, he, he kind of was the first, first modern president to push the envelope there on not disclosing his taxes, which everybody had done prior to him.
And of course, you know, as with everything, Trump then came along and exponentially was worse. But that was sort of the canary in the coal mine there.
Jason Sattler: Yeah, it's tough to say that Romney paved the way exactly because it's like Romney opened the door and then Trump is kind of Kool Aid man, and didn't need the door open.
"Two of the Greatest Frauds" with Jamison Foser