Brooke Gladstone: Hey there, friends on the precipice of 2024. This is our last chance to invite you, encourage you, or entreat you who find yourself relying on the show to enable us with a tax-deductible end of the year donation. It hasn't been a banner year for joyful celebration, but we can make the next year better politically and psychologically with some positive action by treating ourselves better and our communities too.

We fall in the latter category obviously. Close listeners already know that our producing station, WNYC, was hit with some pretty big deficits this year and some terrifically talented people are now looking for new jobs in a very anemic journalism market. We're still here and we need your help. Just text OTM to 70101 and send whatever you can comfortably manage.

There's only a few days left till 2023 is just a bad memory. Help us make sure this show is going strong into 2024. Text OTM to 70101 or go to onthemedia.org, and thanks so much. 2023 has just about wrapped up, and we decided to look back at what this year has wrought for the press, for the courts, and for democracy.

Speaker 2: This year has been among the most deadly for journalists.

Press Critic Dan Frumkin: On social media, what you heard was somebody who has completely unhinged, but then the articles said things like, "Trump defends himself and attacks judge."

Speaker 4: We have a tradition of one person, one vote. The most grievous assault and undoing of that battle has been the work of Clarence Thomas.

Brooke Gladstone: That a court that by design has neither the power of the purse nor the sword. Power it has is the public's willingness to suspend disbelief and say this is not a partisan political institution?

Speaker 5: I don't think it's a coincidence that it's that moment when conspiracy culture just goes supernova. It's about what we can't bear to look at.

Brooke Gladstone: It's all coming up after this.

Micah Loewinger: From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I'm Micah Loewinger.

Brooke Gladstone: I'm Brooke Gladstone with On the Media's Year in Review. Well, not really. Since it was such a bummer, instead we're going to mine 2023 for a few stories that have the potential to help us gird our loins, if you will, for what's coming around in 2024. First, a quick look on the bright side because it's going to get dark pretty fast.

For instance, did you know that 2023 was chock-a-block with medical breakthroughs? The UN says there's a clear pathway to ending AIDS transmission by 2030. A powerful new malaria vaccine has been approved, there are new treatments for Alzheimer's and some cancers, and, of course, Ozempic, an effective treatment for diabetes, and heart disease, and now most notably obesity, really took off.

On the climate, China's emissions are forecast to fall in 2024 because of the rapid rollout of renewables, and Ecuadorians voted to stop drilling in the Amazon. Deforestation rates there dropped 55.8% from last year. Nuclear fusion, man. The US National Ignition Facility this year produced fusion reactions that released more energy than they consumed many times since they first pulled it off a year ago.

The ability to do that repeatedly marks a huge step towards producing a new source of limitless clean energy. As for fears of runaway technology, this month the EU agreed on a landmark deal to regulate artificial intelligence and we in the US inched closer to controlling our own data when California Governor, Gavin Newsom, signed California's Delete Act, which will make it easier for residents to request their personal information be deleted by all data brokers in the state at the same time.

On the economy, did you know US inflation has cooled sooner and more quickly than in other advanced economies? Just saying. As for the bad news, you know all about the dysfunction in Congress, the war in Ukraine, and Gaza, and Israel, and disorder in the High Court. We'll get to some of those. We start with one of the scariest stories convulsing America's media terrain from below like the sand worms in Dune, the threat to democracy spearheaded by Donald J. Trump.

Here he is on the threat from within.

Sean Hannity: You are promising America tonight you would never abuse power as retribution against anybody?

President Donald J. Trump: Except for day one.

Crowd: Yes.

Sean Hannity: Meaning?

President Donald J. Trump: I want to close the border, and I want to drill, drill, drill--

Sean: That's not--

President Donald J. Trump: We will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.

Brooke Gladstone: The threat from without.

President Donald J. Trump: It is only common sense that when I'm reelected we will begin, and we have no choice, the largest deportation operation in America.

[crowd applauds]

President Donald J. Trump: They're poisoning the blood of our country. That's what they've done. They poison--

Brooke Gladstone: He is not going away.

Laura Ingraham: Trump is leading in every major poll by margins once thought impossible. In the new Monmouth University poll, Biden's approval rating's at a dismal 34%. That's another new low and that's--

Speaker 10: The lead story in today's New York Times, the question asked, "Who do you think would do a better job on the Israel-Palestine conflict?" 46% picking Donald Trump, 38% picking Joe Biden.

Speaker 11: You look at the states that really matter, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia, Arizona, Biden keeps falling every week. Trump keeps gaining every week.

Brooke Gladstone: The rise of Trump has long been a puzzle for political scientists, historians, and Democrats. He has never paid a price, quite the contrary, for the incitements that defy not just American norms, but its founding principles, and given license to his party and supporters to do likewise. He has never paid a price for his bare face lies. He challenges journalistic conventions of polite interrogation with pyrotechnical defiance.

To such an irreconcilable electorate, how should the media cover Trump in 2024? In May, CNN hosted a Trump Town Hall in New Hampshire with an audience of loudly enthusiastic Trump supporters, an election denier as a post-show guest, and lone moderator Kaitlan Collins, trying to quench the great Chicago fire with a water pistol.

Kaitlan Collins: That's the question that investigators have, I think, is why you held onto those documents when you knew the federal government was seeking them and then had given you a subpoena to return them.

President Donald J. Trump: Are you ready? Are you ready? Can I talk?

Kaitlan Collins: Yes, what's the answer?

President Donald J. Trump: Do you mind? Do you mind?

Kaitlan Collins: I would like for you to answer the question.

President Donald J. Trump: Okay. It's very simple to answer.

Kaitlan Collins: That's why I asked it.

President Donald J. Trump: It's very simple. You're a nasty person. I'll tell you that.

[crowd laughs]

Brian Stelter: I think other cable and broadcast networks watched and learned from CNN's handling of Trump in the town hall and are going to do things differently as a result.

Brooke Gladstone: I spoke to former host of CNN's Reliable Sources, Brian Stelter, fired last year by then CEO, Chris Licht, who was responsible for the disastrous Trump Town Hall.

Brian Stelter: All the interviews Trump is doing on Fox, even the friendly chitchats with Sean Hannity, those are being pre-taped. They are not happening live. Fox presumably is doing so because of the fallout from Dominion and Smartmatic, and they are afraid of Trump defaming those companies or others live on the air.

Brooke Gladstone: Now, there's a cautionary tale.

Brian Stelter: 100%.

Brooke Gladstone: The fallout from the Dominion voting machine case cost Fox nearly $800 million. It didn't cost Trump, who made hay by defaming the voting machines, a nickel. We all know about those 91 felony charges Trump is fending off. Falsifying business records in connection with hush money paid to a porn star, committing fraud by lying to lenders and insurers about the value of his family's properties, filching highly classified government documents, trying to steal an election. In May, though, there was a rare moment of accountability.

Speaker 13: A jury today found former President Donald Trump liable for sexual abuse and defaming Writer E. Jean Carroll.

Writer E. Jean Carroll: I'm overwhelmed with joy for the women in this country. I want to tell the people who are about to watch CNN tonight, Donald Trump did it. Donald Trump did it.

Brooke Gladstone: That may be the exception that proves the rule. Meanwhile, Trump's been in and out of court in Florida, in Georgia, and New York. For a view of the coverage of the New York case for fraud, Micah spoke to Press Critic Dan Frumkin about how the coverage was going.

Press Critic Dan Frumkin: If you follow it in the live blogs on social media, what you heard was the astonishing story of somebody who was completely unhinged, who was completely delusional, who was smirking, who was making faces, who was taunting the judge. Then the articles all came out and they said things like, "Trump defends himself and attacks judge." My take right now is that people are less interested in covering his unhinged statements because they're afraid that they'll be helping him spread disinformation and misinformation.

Micah Loewinger: That was one of the lessons from the Trump era, right? Don't just cover everything he says.

Press Critic Dan Frumkin: Amplifying him does reward him and does risk even further radicalizing his supporters, but you can't ignore it when this guy who could be the president is saying things that are just nuts. I have a proposal here, which is that when he's unhinged, yes, you report what he said, that you go talk to the Republican leaders and to his base and the people who support him and say, "Do you agree with what he just said? Is there no limit to what he could say and you'd still support him?" The news value to me of an incremental, unhinged statement by Donald Trump is he said this and the Republican party still supports him.

Micah Loewinger: I agree that we could do it better, but it's also the case that facts don't seem to change minds like they used to. There have been warnings of his dangers to our democracy. You could argue there aren't enough, but perhaps they are just not sticking.

Press Critic Dan Frumkin: The press critics have been saying stuff like this for years now and they've not been heard, but I think that at some point it may sink in. We may have to wait until the next generation of editors, the leaders of our newsrooms have just gotten used to still covering what is basically an asymmetrical political climate, as if there are two equal parties involved in the discussion.

At some point, one of these editors is going to wake up, look in the mirror and say, wait a minute, we're not doing this right. We need to reset because we are not successfully informing the American electorate.

Brooke Gladstone: Author Jeff Sharlet says, journalists should be less squeamish and more precise in their word choices. For instance, to choose the word fascism to describe the movement Trump fueled in road to power. I asked what's wrong with the more often used phrase, crisis of democracy.

Jeff Sharlet: I'm actually against the term, the crisis of democracy. Crisis is narratively a word that supposes this is a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end. That's not the nature of the situation we face. Some things were lost.

Fascism is understood in the press as a kind of F word, as opposed to describing a political movement, the cult of personality, the idea that a strong man leader alone can fix it, that he transcends the normal rule of law, a persecuted ingroup, a mysterious outgroup that can take any form, but most importantly, not just a rhetoric of violence, but of pleasure and violence.

That's a key part of fascism, and I think in as much as we resist it, and I'm sympathetic to that resistance, but what if we don't see it as a crisis, as a final battle, but say, hey, that's the condition. How do we get through this?

Brooke Gladstone: Back in September 2016, Salena Zito offered in the Atlantic perhaps the best description of the press's dilemma when she observed that Trump's supporters took him seriously, but not literally while the press took him literally, but not seriously. That was a crucial mistake. Trump means what he says, so report we must, but how? New York University journalism prof and press critic Jay Rosen.

Jay Rosen: It would help if journalists shifted their energy and their attention from the odds of who's going to win and the whole horse race discourse to the stakes, meaning what are the consequences for daily life? What's going to change in this country depending on the results of the 2024 election?

Brooke Gladstone: That's probably the oldest piece of advice one can give for election coverage. It is less about the horse race, more about the issues, the stakes, the consequences, but now more than ever?

Jay Rosen: This time, the stakes are huge.

Brooke Gladstone: Odds versus stakes in the coming year boils down to horse race coverage versus everything else. CJR recently published a review of the research into the impact of horse race coverage and found nothing good. In one study, domestic policy analysis amounted to just 2% of front-page coverage, diminishing our understanding of the real issues, engendering distrust in the whole system, and normalizing the abnormal candidacy of Donald Trump.

They're all just horses after all. In her book Doppelganger, Naomi Klein said that our political culture isn't just divided. The left and right are distorted mirror images of one another.

Naomi Klein: We became very, whatever they are, we are not. A classic example of this is the lab leak theory. Early on that was seen as a conspiratorial take on the origins of the COVID virus rather than something that was worthy of exploration.

In recent months, we've seen some serious investigations of the lab leak theory, which deserved real journalism. I think we mistakenly sometimes think our job is just to do the opposite of what they're doing, and that's okay, but not if it's at the expense of engaged debate about what else we might do.

Brooke Gladstone: Dwelling on the split identities in our politics, she described how implicated each of us are in all the systems our world runs on, both the ones we like and the ones we don't, and how we participate from within the comfort of our own bespoke bubbles.

Naomi Klein: If we are fortunate enough to be in wealthier parts of wealthier countries, fortunate enough during COVID to be part of the lockdown class, we knew our comforts were only because of other people's risks and, frankly, other people's exploitation. I don't think it's a coincidence that it's that moment when conspiracy culture just goes supernova.

I don't think it is just about the technology. I think it's about what we can't bear to look at, but part of the reason why we look away is because we are so conditioned to see ourselves first as individual consumers, that we forget that we actually have the ability to join with other humans and build collective power, that kind of collective power that would make it bearable to really look at our implication in these systems so that we can make our systems more just.

[music]

Brooke Gladstone: Not a bad theory for why we see so few ways forward. If as staunch American individualists, we presume to be the masters of our own fates, and blindly ignore the systems that decide who among us will be lucky, we won't see the potential in uniting to confront the coming storm. Our reflex will be to assess our separate strengths against an incomprehensible opposition and ultimately decide that we're going to lose.

Micah Loewinger: 2023 was also the year of Twitter, X, whatever.

Speaker 20: A year ago, Elon Musk famously, infamously walked into Twitter holding a sink, "Let that sink in," he quipped, before firing huge sways of its staff.

Micah Loewinger: We spoke to Zoe Schiffer, who had the scoop from workers inside the company, and industry watchers like Avi Asher-Schapiro who helped us understand the significance of Musk's withdrawal of staff from Twitter's offices around the globe. We tried on Mastodon for size, got some Bluesky invite codes, and plotted up on Threads.

Meanwhile, Elon Musk got the hero treatment in a giant biography by Walter Isaacson and the stories about him and his exploits never let up. Maybe we couldn't look away because everyone loves a train wreck, or maybe it's because we journalists were just a little bit sad that our favorite website for finding sources and sharing gossip was gone. In its place, an embarrassing sideshow. By way of a kind of obit, we decided to let the journey of the website from Twitter to X speak for itself. Cue the tape.

Zoe Schiffer: How's this for a first message from your new boss? A staff-wide email that was sent in the middle of the night, Elon Musk suggested the company could go into bankruptcy as executives are resigning, advertisers are fleeing, and trolls are running rampant on the platform since he took over.

Speaker 22: Breaking political news overnight, Elon Musk reinstating former President Trump's Twitter account.

Speaker 23: Elon Musk said people must pay $8 a month for the platform's "Twitter Blue Subscription Service." As a result, journalists, politicians, celebrities, city and government organizations who would not pay have been stripped of their verified status.

Speaker 24: Wall Street is watching pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly today. Its stock plummeted last week after someone impersonated the company on Twitter, said it would make insulin free.

Speaker 25: Maybe all of these verified real fake people on Twitter chaos is actually part of Elon's plan. Sure, no one will know a real account from a fake account and then he'll be like, "Guys, did you see someone impersonated me and spent $44 billion on Twitter? That was crazy. [laughter] Well, I'm just going to take my money and be on my way. Bye-bye now. Bye-bye.

Speaker 26: Musk now also butting heads with NPR, National Public Radio. It comes after the news outlet quit Twitter, upset that it was briefly labeled as "state-affiliated media." In a following tweet, Musk just wrote "defund NPR."

Speaker 27: This morning, the highly anticipated rival platform to Twitter is now live. Facebook and Instagram's parent company Meta launching Threads overnight.

Speaker 28: Mark Zuckerberg looks ready to rumble, showing off some wash cord abs as his feud with Twitter exec, Elon Musk, escalates, including talks of the two Silicon Valley giants wanting to fight one another.

Speaker 29: Tonight, Zuckerberg says it's likely not happening.

Speaker 30: This segment on CNN newsroom is proudly brought to you today by the letter X, as in Xerox, Xbox.

Speaker 31: Industry experts say it's not surprising given Musk's history with the letter X, there is Elon's rocket company commonly known as SpaceX, of course.

Speaker 30: Xfinity Xvideo, Xanax. Just X the new name for Twitter.

Speaker 32: Elon Musk's X sign is now an X sign. In another big setback for Twitter's rebrand, this brightly flashing X has been removed from the company's San Francisco headquarters.

Speaker 33: Elon Musk said on Sunday that the account of right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones has been reinstated.

Speaker 34: Disney chief executive Bob Iger revealed Disney is pulling its advertising from X, which prompted this from Elon.

Andrew Ross Sorkin: You don't want them to advertise?

Elon Musk: No.

Andrew Ross Sorkin: What do you mean?

Elon Musk: If somebody is going to try to blackmail me with advertising, blackmailing for money? Go [beep] yourself.

Speaker 37: What happened to the nerdy guy who wanted to go to space, build rockets and electric cars right? Just the smart, quiet, nerdy genius guy has turned into this free-speech absolutist.

Trevor Noah: I'm going to be honest and I'm going to be blunt here, Elon Musk is running Twitter into the ground and it's the best Twitter's ever been. Are you kidding me?

[laughter]

Brooke Gladstone: Coming up. 2023 was the year that journalists shed light in a supremely shady place and exposed serious disorder in the courts.

Micah Loewinger: This is On the Media.