Jon Ossoff

Turn the dial.

That is a more subtle, but in this world that we're living in, potentially more powerful way for them to control the information that gets to the public.

I think probably yes, in some cases.

But I think that the whataboutism is like pretty limited in its validity because we're talking about things that are vastly different, right?

And I think federal courts rebuked the Biden administration for some of the way that the tech companies were being talked to about information about public health that was coming out during the COVID pandemic, right?

And that was probably overreach.

But it's nothing like the president saying, I'm going to take broadcasters off the air because their coverage is too negative.

So, you know, we should not... Yeah, we obviously need to practice what we preach and acknowledge where there may have been mistakes.

But let's not for a moment indulge the lie that these are equivalent in any way.

Yeah.

Yeah, well, I've been investigating not just Homeland Security facilities, but federal prisons, state and local prisons and jails since I was elected.

I mean, and, you know, that has been sort of the continuity of effort for me having left investigative journalism and entering office.

The oversight muscles in Congress are so atrophied, right?

Like most of the oversight is partisan oversight and very little of it is just pure public interest oversight.

Yeah, so most of the oversight in Congress is like one party investigating the other party's efforts.

And, you know, there's a role for that in ensuring that there's accountability, right?

Like you have to have that kind of hostile exchange in order to ensure that things are brought into the public light and debated no matter who's in power.

But what gets neglected is oversight that's essential for principled moral reasons, human rights reasons, but for which there's no obvious political reward.

You know, like there's not a lot of political upside to investigating the abuse of federal inmates.

And so we have this federal prison system where there's this ongoing multi-decade human rights crisis that gets very little attention from Congress.