Tiffany Hanssen: It's the Brain Lehrer show. Welcome back, everybody. I'm Tiffany Hanssen filling in for Brian, who is off for a few days. Well, it has been a hectic couple of weeks since President Donald Trump returned to the White House for a second term. Almost immediately, he flooded the news with a record-breaking number of executive orders, even just his first day in office. There were calls to annex Canada, Greenland and to retake the Panama Canal, and it doesn't end there. Lest we forget the president's call to rename the Gulf of Mexico, to pause federal funding. Some of this we've been talking about this morning, tariffs on Canada, Mexico, China, Elon Musk's takeover of the DOGE, shutdown of USAID, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. With all of this news, even journalists are having difficulty parsing out what actions deserve wall-to-wall coverage, which stories are just a fleeting blip on the timeline. It's even more complicated for news consumers trying to stay informed. Luckily, we have On the Media's Micah Loewinger with us to talk about some tips both for journalists and for you as well on how to keep track of all of this coming out of the Trump administration. Micah, thank you so much for joining us.

Micah Loewinger: Hey, Tiffany, thanks for having me.

Tiffany Hanssen: All right. Micah, let me just get your personal reaction. It has been, I think I can say, a fire hose of information. How are you feeling, dealing, et cetera?

Micah Loewinger: Don't feel too bad for me. It is my job to follow the news, but it's been a ton. That is not just something that I'm feeling. I think it's something that everyone is feeling. A point that we tried to make on the show recently and On the Media is that that's the point, that the overwhelmingness is the strategy. This is not new for the Trump administration. Back in 2019, Steve Bannon, who of course played a greater role in Trump 1.0 than now, but is still a great strategist for the GOP. He told PBS that what he and the Trump administration were trying to do was flood the zone.

He said, and this is almost a verbatim quote, he said the media is dumb and lazy. We give them three things a day, they bite on one and we get the rest done. I'd argue they're doing more than three things a day, but I think the point still stands. The zone is so flooded that journalists can't keep up with every single thing. To report the news quickly and accurately, nuance, stakes might get lost in just trying to keep a handle on everything.

Tiffany Hanssen: To that point, how do you think media outlets are doing this time around? I know we're only a couple of weeks in here, but how are we all doing covering this?

Micah Loewinger: I think that it's very fashionable these days to speak in great generalizations about the media. I'm going to try to be specific and a little bit nuanced if I can. I would say that one lesson that has really not been learned by journalists is the sort of breathless coverage of every single thing that Donald Trump says. The man says a ton. He owns a social media platform. He posts in the middle of the night.

If your job as a journalist is just to write and contextualize about everything he says, you're going to have a more than a full-time job and not necessarily offering to news consumers nourishing information and context about how what Trump is saying would affect their lives. The other thing-- On that front, I'm quite disappointed to see a lack of triage. What's big, what's small, journalists need to do a better job of making those decisions and using precious resources accordingly.

Tiffany Hanssen: Could you make the argument, though, Micah, that in reporting on those middle-of-the-night social media posts and anything else that the President might say at his events on any given day, that you can create a broader picture of the administration's strategy, what their priorities are for these first weeks, in a way that, here's the totality of what's being done, and this is how we interpret that to mean a specific priority for the Trump administration. You see what I mean?

Micah Loewinger: Yes, that's a very, very charitable interpretation of following everything that Donald Trump says and does. Just to give you an example of the kinds of analysis that we at On the Media were trying to do during the last administration roughly this time eight years ago, was an interview that we did with linguist George Lakoff, and he outlined to my co-host, Brooke Gladstone, a taxonomy of Trump tweets. Twitter's not around anymore. The President posts and talks in different ways, but I think that this taxonomy that he outlined is broadly applicable to the way that Donald Trump commands the news cycle.

One style of Trump tweet during that time was the preemptive framing. He gives a name to something, he talks about it a lot, and then when a news story comes along, we have to use his language, his framing, and we do a lot of the work for him. I can give an example of that. For instance, this DEI was responsible for the plane crash in D.C. There was never any evidence of that. It's certainly not at the time that he was making this case.

He was using this term DEI that the partisan, right-wing media and some very dark corners of the Internet have been using for a long time to basically blame large societal problems on people of color and women being present in the workforce. By saying that DEI was responsible for this plane crash, he was basically saying before an investigation had been done, we know that it was the fault of women or people of color. What I saw in the headlines was not a breakdown of a extremely bigoted statement. What I saw was the President blames DEI.

That's how people think about it, unfortunately. This is a successful preemptive framing. Another example of a Trump tweet would be, or a Trump tweet strategy would be diversion. The DEI thing is a good example of that too. Divert attention from real issues. The story of this plane crash so early in his administration seemed to signal there was quite a lot of chaos. It was a story that demonstrated a failing of his administration, a weakness. Instead of having people focus on that in any way, he blames a political enemy. Deflection. This is another style of Trump tweet that we saw.

He attacks the press. He says it's the press's fault. I never do anything wrong. It's them. It was Biden. Then another-- the fourth style of Trump tweet in the taxonomy is the trial balloon. I'm going to say something so outrageous and just test the public's interest in it. Remember how much we talked about nuclear escalation during the first Trump administration? Fortunately, that did not bear fruit, but we spent a whole lot of time testing the bounds of public debate led by Donald Trump and facilitated by the press.

Tiffany Hanssen: I would argue that this makes him incredibly media savvy and quite smart when it comes to his own media strategy because public relations people will tell you the way to do something is to get out in front of the story. Get out in front of it, and you create the narrative, and that's the way the world works when you want to have a media presence and a reputation that you control.

Micah Loewinger: Absolutely. It's very savvy, and he seems to have a singular talent for it. I think that this is not our first rodeo, both as news consumers and journalists, and we need to be a little bit more sophisticated this time around. This man is a great showman. He really understands stagecraft. We were talking about how overwhelming the executive orders have felt. On the day of his inauguration, he sat on stage and signed them. That's a really effective way of making governance and the cryptic processes of Washington feel very tangible.

Look at me and all this stuff I'm getting done. That's how a lot of people have perceived it. Of course, some of these executive orders are largely symbolic. Some of them are being shot down and held up in the courts. Some of them will have tremendous effects on people's lives. The point is, it feels like so much being done so fast, it makes him seem all-powerful, and it makes us feel utterly powerless.

Tiffany Hanssen: Let's talk a little bit about this Trump 1.0 versus 2.0 in this way. In 1.0, did the flood of information which happened during the first Trump administration eventually backfire? Could we, because we are all now have four years under our belt from the first time, is it possible that it could? If it didn't, is it possible that it could backfire this time?

Micah Loewinger: I'm not sure how I could answer about whether it's backfired. I think it has an immobilizing effect. Most recently on our first episode after inauguration, Brooke and I wrote this big essay. You can find the episode. It's called Trump 1.0. I'm sorry, first week of Trump 2.0, and On the Media. I returned to this metaphor that we had used from the last administration called the shepherd tone, which is this technique that's used by film composers and musicians. It's this sound that sounds like it's trending upwards.

Tiffany Hanssen: Micah, we have it. Let's play it.

Micah Loewinger: Oh, let's hear it. Let's hear it.

Tiffany Hanssen: Yes, let's hear it.

[music]

Tiffany Hanssen: Okay. Just hearing that makes me have all sorts of anxiety.

Micah Loewinger: Exactly. That's the point. We used this metaphor to describe what it felt like following the news during the first Trump administration. So many breaking news updates that felt like they were advancing a story that felt like they were going to help us reach a culmination where the tension would break and the tension never broke. I think that this is something that you will experience if you spend a lot of time reading and following the news. You're on the edge of your seat over and over and over again, but the blood pressure just keeps rising.

The point I wanted to make by using this metaphor, because maybe you're listening and you're like, ''I don't need you to tell me that reading the news is stressful.'' The point I was trying to make is that if your sole relationship to politics is consuming news, you will feel terrible and get nowhere. In fact, we've also had on this really amazing political scientist named Eitan Hersh, and he did a study basically about just this, where during the first Trump administration, he polled 1,000 Americans and he said, ''How much time do you spend on politics each week?''

A large percent of the people that he spoke to said they spent about two hours on politics a day. Two hours of politics a day. That's a lot of time to be a civically engaged member of society. When he asked more questions, what he found is that that two hours a day was news consumption and very likely just scrolling. What people were effectively saying is that their civic engagement was like surrendering themselves to the onslaught of information.

Tiffany Hanssen: Isn't there a difference, Micah, between-- we say news consumption, as a term that we use to talk about people who pay attention to the news, follow the news, follow news outlets, but isn't there a difference in the kind of consumption that one does when one is scrolling through Instagram or Facebook, and the kind of consumption one does when one is reading an essay by you and Brooke Gladstone? Doesn't that affect how informed the person actually is?

Micah Loewinger: I could give you the most self-serving answer in the world and --

Tiffany Hanssen: Please do. [laughs]

Micah Loewinger: If you read and listen to me and the people that I respect, you'll be a better person. The point is that the Internet has deeply flattened all content and many of us are not all that aware of the time that we spent consuming news on social media or from a trusted legacy news source. I can't be wagging my finger at people and say you're doing it wrong or whatever. I have no control over their habits.

I do think that we have some discretion about how we curate the kinds of stories we spend reading. I would really encourage people to go after stories that-- and read reporters who do a good job of outlining the stakes of a Trump media event rather than just something that he said.

Tiffany Hanssen: Right.

Micah Loewinger: A lot of news outlets are not doing enough of this curation for us. They present Donald Trump's and Elon Musk's attempted takedown of USAID as some kind of political thing. They use language about government efficiency and this sort of thing. They don't do a good job of saying like, ''Hey, this is an agency that employs 10,000 Americans that is responsible for feeding millions of people around the world, and that buys $2 billion a year of American-grown crops, and so what would happen to you and your state and your region if this went away?'' We need to do a better job of leading with that information and reducing the political angles.

Tiffany Hanssen: I'm talking with Micah Loewinger who is a host at On the Media. We're talking about the flood of information coming out of the Trump administration. Listeners, Micah and I would love you to join us in conversation. What are you thinking about all of this flood of information? How are you processing it? How are you consuming news these days? Call us. Text us. 212-433-969 221-2433-WNYC. Micah, we have Lauren in Manhattan. Hi, Lauren.

Lauren: Hi. Thanks for taking my call. I used to be a reporter in New York and I covered Trump over 20 years ago, 25 years ago, before he had The Apprentice when he was a real estate mogul and making his rounds and getting his names in the gossip columns. He has always been a complete manipulator of the press. From the beginning, he has known how to get himself media and attention. He, as your guest said, he's a complete showman and he has totally bamboozled the entire press corps. I don't understand why the press cannot come out harder on him.

Your guest said that hopefully, we've learned our lesson, but there is no lesson that has shown to be learned. He is completely undermining the press by going directly to the voters through social media. I don't understand what it's going to take to really call him out and hold him accountable because it's like he's being just totally given free reign.

Tiffany Hanssen: Lauren, thanks so much for the call this morning. We do appreciate it. Micah, she calls the president a manipulator. We are journalists. Are we being manipulated?

Micah Loewinger: Yes, we are. [chuckles] The troubling thing is that we have multiple maxims of journalism fighting each other at the same time. One, an old rule is that basically anything the president says is news, and editors and newsroom leaders and reporters know and believe this to be true. Another one, another maxim of journalism should be that we should we should prioritize and rank stories based on the stakes and speak clearly when analyzing a news event.

An example of a form of manipulation this week, and at least this was my interpretation, was Donald Trump's really awful comments about occupying Gaza. This set all of us into a tailspin because he was very casually talking about ethnically cleansing people in Palestine. A huge amount of the press came out in outrage. There were tons of op-eds, there were many politicians from widely across the aisle saying this is a bad idea. This is just not a good idea. Donald Trump doubled down and said, ''I want to do it anyway.''

I think that this was just an extremely overwhelming news event. For me, the timing seemed pretty salient. There was a push from Democratic lawmakers to draw attention to what Elon Musk was doing at DOGE in the Department of the Treasury. There was a growing group of protesters outside of the Treasury. There was more focus on what DOGE and Elon Musk was doing than ever before in the press.

Donald Trump, by saying something that was very, very upsetting for a lot of people, was able to very easily divert attention away from arguably what was the biggest news story of the week, which was Elon Musk and DOGE going in, attempting to gut federal agencies in a completely untransparent, undemocratic, and very likely highly illegal manner.

Tiffany Hanssen: At the same time, would we not have heard from listeners, readers that why aren't you talking about the fact that he's saying all of these things about about whatever? I guess what I'm saying is--

Micah Loewinger: It's a damned if you do, damned if you don't, but I don't control newsrooms, but I do think that some resource management could be employed a greater amount than we're currently seeing. For instance, some of the best reporting on the inner workings of how DOGE is coming into some of these departments, gaining access to highly critical information databases, how a 25-year-old DOGE engineer was given access to a multi-trillion dollar treasury database, who, by the way, got fired for some extremely racist posts. The reason we know about this is from Wired, from the technology outlet. They've just been doing banger after banger after banger of scoops about finding high-quality government sources and having them relay to us information about what DOGE is doing in real-time. That reporting has, or at least the level of it, has not been coming from the New York Times or the Washington Post or the NBC or these highly resourced newsrooms in Washington D.C. with you'd think tons of sources throughout Capitol Hill.

It's coming from a much smaller outlet. I think that this should be a signal to newsroom leaders that whatever they're doing right now is not right. They're not serving their readers and they're not doing the level of reporting that we expect from them in this moment.

Tiffany Hanssen: Micah, you've teed up this text here that someone would like you to respond to this. Can Micah talk about the editorial mandates in many newsrooms, including ''liberal outlets'' like the New York Times to go easier on Trump? Whether this is because of fear of retribution or for some other reason, I fear the consequences of not calling a spade a spade on the future of our democracy. First, Micah, we don't know that there are these mandates in the New York Times newsroom. I cannot imagine news directors making such a mandate, at least publicly. Thoughts?

Micah Loewinger: I'll just say that Oliver Darcy, who is a media reporter and writes a newsletter called Status, came on On the Media and talked about what appears to be a series of mandates at other news outlets. I'll just speak about what I know. For instance, we've seen the owner of the LA Times say that he was unhappy with an op-ed in the LA Times opinion section that had a, let's call it a one chili spice level tone about how Elon Musk is cozying up to Donald Trump or something like that. It was not interesting.

He said that this was too biased and that he wanted to review op-eds from now on to make sure that they weren't too biased. That's pretty alarming. That is a breach of the firewall between the business and the editorial side that is highly unusual in a newspaper. On Inauguration Day, Mark Thompson, who's the head of CNN, reportedly told Jake Tapper and some of the on-air talent to not go too hard on Donald Trump, which again, is not the kind of-- As journalists, we are supposed to cover whoever is in power in an adversarial manner. Right?

Tiffany Hanssen: Precisely. I was just going to say I have never, ever, ever heard that from someone in this organization. I'll tell you that.

Micah Loewinger: Yes, we saw an editorial cartoon from a Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist at the Washington Post be quashed because it mocked, I believe, Jeff Bezos's attempt to suck up to Donald Trump. He's the owner. We are seeing an alarming trend of news organizations seemingly bend the knee because they're concerned about retribution because the owners of the outlets have some vested interest in not upsetting the president. I think this is really short-sighted. I think Donald Trump has made it abundantly clear how he feels about news organizations and the news press in general. He said this week that CBS should be shut down because of a 60-minute segment that he didn't like.

Tiffany Hanssen: Micah, I'm going to stop you there because I do want to get to a couple of these callers. We have callers lining up for you, for us. Judith in Sunnyside. Good morning, Judith.

Judith Sloan: Good morning. Hi, Micah, it's me, Judith Sloan. Micah is a former student of mine. You said something earlier. You said in your phrasing that reporters aren't saying what will happen to your state with the gutting of USAID. My question is about what would you suggest for alternative headlines? Instead of just Trump says DEI caused the plane crash, would you suggest that people rewrite the headline, ''Trump's unfounded claim that DEI is to blame for a plane crash,'' or something else like that?

Because there's always, as you've been saying, we're spinning with each thing and just repeating what he says. How to reframe those stories? One thing that I noticed is that with the Gaza situation and turning it into the Riviera, a lot of journalists were saying that he was just talking off the cuff. When I watch that press conference, he's reading from notes. I think that that's actually important that this is something he's been thinking about. Anyway, I'll take your answer off the air. What would your solution be?

Tiffany Hanssen: Micah? Thank you, Judith.

Micah Loewinger: Hey, Judith. Yes, I know Judith. She was a producer-- a professor of mine, excuse me. You asked a couple things. Where to start? I really don't mean to trivialize Donald Trump's comments about Gaza. We know that his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, had talked about developing seaside property in Gaza. There's clearly a history and context that precedes the statements we heard from Donald Trump. I was just referring to having maybe a slightly greater awareness of how our attention can be forced in one direction when it is deservedly focused on another thing.

In terms of the DEI thing, I've never worked in a newsroom and written news headlines, and so I appreciate that there are conflicting considerations in conveying a story. I just don't think we have to use the President's chosen language and framing at the top of a story, especially when there's no proof. I think a better headline could have been, ''Donald Trump blames Women and Minorities for Plane Crash without proof,'' because that's what he was doing. I think right now we're seeing Donald Trump's preemptive framing on lots of issues being used as a pretense for really alarming action throughout the government.

Another example of this would be, at the Department of Justice currently, he is trying to root out people who acted unethically on January 6th. In the prosecution or enforcement of laws when it pertains to people who participated in the riot and insurrection on January 6th. That means that prosecutors and FBI agents who worked on the largest criminal investigation in American history, the thousands of people who were arrested for their part in the insurrection, those prosecutors and law enforcement are being identified, in some cases fired or in the process of being fired.

What we're hearing is that there was some kind of nefarious activity that these people advanced. The real story, as I see it, is that Donald Trump is trying to rewrite history. He is trying to squeeze out people who-- He's trying to remove career civil servants with know-how who have studied domestic extremism and who have fought cases against public corruption and trying to force them out of the Department of Justice. By giving too much credence to his framing, we, I think, participate in some pretty alarming activity.

Tiffany Hanssen: Micah, that last call was from a professor of yours, as you mentioned, Judith Sloan. She'll be interviewing you if I'm not getting this wrong here, on February 10th. Is that right? About your public radio journey? You want to give a little plug for that convo?

Micah Loewinger: Sure. I'll be speaking at Gallatin, NYU in an event that's open to the public on February 10th. Just talking about some of the investigative reporting that I've done at WNYC and perhaps more of the same of what we're doing now.

Tiffany Hanssen: Got it. All right. Micah Lowinger is a host at On the Media. There is a treasure trove of information at On the Media's website. Micah, we appreciate your perspective today.

Micah Loewinger: Thanks so much. Thanks for having me.

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