Matt Welch
speaker
460 appearances
11 recordings
2 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard May 2025
Matt Welch’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
So Megan, this is my favorite question that you've ever asked me. Jim Rutenberg, the irony of this is astounding. Jim Rutenberg in August of 2016 wrote an extraordinarily influential article called Trump Assessing the Norms of Objectivity in Journalism. And the entire argument of the piece was was that Trump was such an extreme threat that journalists had to change the way they did business.
We no longer had to be just true. We had to be true to quote history's judgment, right? So it was a clarion call for the entire mainstream media To change its they did this, they did that, we don't really care, you sorted out attitude to let's become activists, let's tell you which is the right thing and who is the villain and who isn't, and let's become activists.
narrative-driven, in-your-face politicized media, which has lost all credibility with audiences. Now, when he says that Trump can circumvent journalistic narratives and go directly to the people, he's absolutely right. But that is a market contest, a free market contest of believability where the mainstream media is losing credibility.
because it's screwed up so many stories in pursuit of trying to preserve these politicized narratives. They've made so many horrific factual errors and gone over the deep end so many times that people trust the Joe Rogans and Megyn Kellys of the world far more than they do the Jim Rutenbergs of the world. Jim Rutenberg created this situation that he's lamenting. It's extraordinarily ironic.
Not only the bias, though, Megan, it's also just the wimpiness, the whining that, oh, my God, the president can get around the journalistic narratives and get around the mainstream media. You know how the press gets power? By being good at what it does. When you get a good story, when you break news, when you're a great investigative reporter like Cy Hirsch, people listen to you. It's like E.F.
Hutton, you know? When you have... uh good information people listen when you suck at your job like the people at the new york times mostly have for quite a long time now you lose audience and and presidents like donald trump can get around you and you don't have the same influence that you have you had in elections previously i mean as a campaign reporter i've been doing this for
I guess since 2004, I covered five straight presidential elections. And the press continually lost influence as people discovered that there were more sources out there on the internet that they trusted more because they got tired of hearing the same old canned stuff from reporters who were too friendly with politicians in both parties, but particularly with Democrats, I would say. And
The fact that they get frozen, it's their own fault. It's their own fault for not working and for and for not thinking about the audience first and not their political sponsors.
It's unbelievable. My father, who was a reporter, used to tell me that you don't need to go to journalism school, that you could learn the basics of the job in two hours. But in those two hours, probably the first thing that they tell you when you start working in journalism is that the one thing that you cannot do is accuse somebody in print of a crime that they have not been committed for.
That will get you sued 100 times out of 100. And the ABC News case, I understand the argument that you can construe that verdict, I guess, if you take a creative interpretation of it as rape, but it's not going to hold. He wasn't convicted of rape, and it wasn't a criminal case either. The most you can say is sexual assault in that case.
And he repeatedly said rape and he clearly knew what he was doing. So that that's why they settled in the 60 Minutes case. They settled because they did something embarrassing and they didn't.
Right. Exactly. And to your point about 60 Minutes falling from its great heights, Walter and I talked not that long ago about the 60 Minutes story about speech in Germany, where they did this extraordinary segment, sort of breathlessly showing how wonderful it was to live in a country where six armed cops burst into your door to arrest you for doing memes. And they don't see that.
For insulting somebody.
Remember how these people in New York used to wear those OPP hats everywhere? That whole year, everyone was wearing fur OPP hats. I mean, the skull caps, they were amazing.
Thank you.
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Yeah, it seems like this is a person for whom there is more than one language. And it's apparently not just money. But yeah, I think Walter is exactly right. And your comparison to AOC is apt. It's so strange. Ocasio-Cortez, before she ran for Congress for the first time, there was a Bernie-backed group called Brand New Congress whose mission was to replace the entire Congress. Alexa, stop.
to replace the entire Congress with populist candidates. And they chose to support AOC because when the people from this group met with her, they felt like she was a, quote, normal person and wouldn't come off as an activist who would rub voters the wrong way. And so The irony that she gets into Congress and immediately adopts a completely different personality, I think that does happen at times.
People, once they get a taste of politics, especially when they get a taste of social media attention, you just never know what's going to happen to them. And the incentives, particularly in Democratic Party politics, are all wrong now. They just incentivize people to behave in ways that they never would in real life.
Schultzy, Schultzy, Schultzy, Schultzy. Matthew. Hey, cute baby. I didn't get the Amber Alert.
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