Ben Terris
speaker
216 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard May 2025
last heard 7 Feb
Ben Terris’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Feb 2026 with 1.
Appearances
There's also political reasons to do it. There's also personal reasons. And so I think that, sure, Adam probably had lots of reasons why he was willing to speak out now when he wasn't willing to speak out before. But for me, I wasn't about to just take Adam at his word.
Whether he's a friend of mine or a source I just met, as a journalist, my job is never to just hear one side of a story and then run with it. And so I talked to so many people for this story, so many people who don't even appear in the story. And so Adam can be the kind of catalyst to send me off on an investigation.
But if I found out that Adam was wrong, if I found out that nobody believed what Adam believed, then that would have all made it into the story. My number one goal when being a journalist is to tell a true story. And to do that, you have to talk to just so many people and you have to go through so much documentation. I'm relying on text messages. I'm relying on firsthand accounts.
I'm relying on emails. I'm relying on you know, stuff I learned from the doctors and from, you know, documentation from the hospital. To call it like a one source story, which is kind of where Fetterman has landed, is just completely ridiculous, honestly. And I encourage people to read the story so they can see how much sourcing is actually there.
Everyone's got their own experience, right? And everybody sees things through their own eyes. And so no, not everybody had the same exact experience. And what I worked really hard to do was try to include as many experiences as I can to paint as complicated and nuanced a story as this one deserves.
You know, one of the things that people talk about working for John Fetterman is that he sees a lot of things in black and white, that that's kind of how he goes about doing the job. You know, there's good and bad, and there's, you know, good and evil, and there's, you know, it's a black and white world. I don't see things in black and white, and I don't see his story in black and white.
This is a story filled with lots of gray area, and the only way to fully capture that is to try to get as many, you know, perspectives as possible.
People with various views on politics, you know, wrote to me to say that they were worried about him as a person. There were people who felt like this was a hit piece because he has become a controversial figure in democratic politics. And they believe that this is just a story to try to take him off the democratic team because he's no longer a team player. Certainly not my intention.
My intention was just, like I said, write a true story about a difficult subject. And there were people who kind of came down in between. And so... I'd say the real response to this is it's gotten a lot of people talking. What would it mean for the Democrats if they lost John Fetterman? He has said that he is committed to finishing out his term.
There doesn't seem to be a lot of movement from Democratic leadership to push him out. Why would they? I mean, he's, you know, he's one of theirs. And Republicans aren't pushing him out because, A, they don't believe in cancel culture. And, you know, there's that. And also Fetterman is sort of a Democratic figure that has become popular on the right side.
He has a regular fixture on Fox, and Republicans have actually come to his defense, you know, in some ways even more vociferously than Democrats. So I'm not so sure they will be losing him. But if they were to, you know, it could leave kind of a vacuum in the Democratic Party for that type of Democrat, the type of kind of heterodox Democrat who's willing to punch left,
who may lose a lot of support from the base, but may find a new audience who could become Democratic, the kind of Democratic senator who can go on Joe Rogan and chop it up with him, or who can appeal to these kind of rundown, Braddock-like towns all across America. I mean, he does have a kind of appeal that a lot of Democrats lack.
Yeah, so this was some great reporting by the Associated Press. And what they found is that the day before my story came out in New York Magazine, Fetterman was having a meeting with Teachers Union, and it very quickly kind of went off the rails. And what they reported is that he slammed his hands down on the desk and would say things like, why is everybody mad at me? Why is everybody mad at me?
Why does everybody hate me? and got kind of repetitive, and the meeting had to be ended quickly, and a member of Fetterman's staff started crying afterwards and was comforted by the teachers' union. You know, it's just another example of kind of a difficult moment in his office.
I would not be surprised if there were more and more stories like this. The Philadelphia Inquirer had a piece about how staff is worried that he's not up for the job. There's been a piece in Politico about how he... doesn't have a lot of allies in the Democratic Party, so he's kind of on an island of his own making.
A lot of politicians have been able to withstand difficult news cycles, knowing that eventually everybody's attention is going to go elsewhere. And in American politics today, people's attention is going all over the map, all over the place, all the time.
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