Malcolm Gladwell
speaker
169 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 28 Jul
Malcolm Gladwell’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 Jul 2026 with 1.
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People with mildly left-wing views, I mean, words fail me when somebody presented with a critique of his rather idiosyncratic position on Walter Cronkite comes back and says, oh, no, no, no, there's more to my great love of this man.
The other thing that struck me in their comments was there's a weird obsession with the two of them with the notion that the media occasionally gets things wrong.
And I wonder if they have confused the role of journalists with that of stockbrokers.
Stockbrokers have to get their predictions right, but journalists don't.
The job of a journalist is to use that famous phrase, to afflict the comfortable.
Afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted.
And sometimes that means you go down some dead ends and you chase stories that don't turn out as you want them or wish them or hope that they would turn out.
But that is the nature of the business.
And if that business seems uncomfortable to you, then I would suggest you should go into stockbroking.
Wait, I can't sit here and let you make these statements without any kind of... We don't do that as much as we used to for financial reasons.
I mean, I worked at the New Yorker.
The New Yorker, if anything, spends more money on fact checking today than it did in the past.
I would have thought, with my first book, I didn't hire a fact checker, but then I observed the number of errors in it.
I also observed that the nature of the journalism world in which we live, the scrutiny of journalists is such that it's really perilous not to have a fact checker, and so now I have fact checkers.
Many other people, I think, have observed the same thing, that there is now so much
attention paid to the accuracy of things that writers say, that you'd better make sure you don't have errors in your, so I mean, Matt, I understand that you do have this wonderful nostalgia for the way things used to be, but I think that you need to fact check
some of your nostalgic notions about the wonderful world of the 1950s.
Who was watchdogging the New York Times in the 1950s?
Nobody was, it was a tiny little universe of people now watchdog institutions like that and so they have a higher commitment to the truth.
Showing 101–120 of 169 · page 6 of 9
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