LEMON DROP | Don Lemon & Ryan Lizza on MAGA & the Media
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How did Don and Ryan introduce the purpose of this conversation about media and MAGA?
Ryan Lizza! Good to see you, my friends. It's been a while.
So I didn't realize, just before we were talking, this is your second Substack Live? I just was on for an hour with the great Steve Schmidt. And, you know, that's an experience. The Steve Schmidt experience is intense. Oh, gosh, of course. So I feel like you come at your guests at a slightly different speed. So going from Steve to Don is an interesting transition. Steve's like cocaine. You're like a downer. A downer? No, I'm more of like a, you know. I don't mean that in a bad way. But I don't know. But yeah, we'll see how this goes. Maybe I'll be describing you as like cocaine at the end as well.
No, I'm more of a Molly. Let's just say something like that. It's a love experience. It's very loving. You look good. You sound good. It's been a while. So you're on Substack now. You have your own newsletter, correct? Correct.
Yeah, it's called Telos, T-E-L-O-S. So telos.substack or just telos.news. Tell us what's going on in your life. Yeah, that was, you know, that little the ability to call it tell us and then, you know, use the tell us little pun that, you know, that definitely led helped us pick that that that word. So I, you know, I was at Politico from 2019 to March 31st, 2025. And I just been watching what's going on, uh, on sub stack for months now and talking to a lot of friends who are here. Um, people that, um, have long journalism careers, uh, and especially people that are, um, used to be in the, in the magazine world. Like, like I've, I've been in, uh, Tina, um, I don't want to mention all the names, but people that I respect and that are doing great work on here and started talking to some of the folks at Substack as well and just started... I wrote about this yesterday, Don.
You know, I think all of us have, you know, it's different for different people, but there's a moment watching this Trump administration up close as a reporter where you kind of just have a moment of like, am I at the place that is telling the public very, very clearly with intellectual honesty, what is actually going on for real? And I think the point for me was doing some reporting on Paul Weiss. And I was going back and forth and looking at the websites and how Paul Weiss, the law firm, had changed things. the language of the biographies of their top partners and the history of the firm and changed it all in ways to appease the Trump administration. And I remember this moment just sitting there doing this research and reporting and just having this like
Just the specificity of this poor woman who had to remove from her biography her proudest achievements in life, which were working for the Mueller investigators in the Justice Department. And just memory hold that information. And it made me just, it terrified me.
Well, you know, that's what's happening at the networks and what I call now corporate media is that that's happening in ways that you don't even, you kind of get lulled into it. And I'll just say, I remember, I won't call any names, but I was at a certain place and the first LGBTQ White House press secretary was installed. And I said, congratulations, such and such is the first. And the boss has called me the first time and he said, take it down. And I'm like, what? Take that down because they were just nervous about what – how the right might seize upon it or MAGA. And MAGA was not even – and they were trying to – you know, they wanted more conservatives to be able to come in. And I was like, well, that's not really what journalism is about.
And there's so much of that that goes on in corporate media, whether it's broadcast or print or whatever. where you kind of get lulled into doing it the way, if you work for company A, you do it the way company A does. And if you work for company B, you do it the way company B does it. And now you'll get to do it the way company RL does it, which is Ron and Lizza.
Yeah, it's worse than people think. I think it's worse. It's worse than people think because of the context we're in right now.
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