The Pentagon is Waging War on Its Own Paper

0:00The Pentagon fired the editor-in-chief, publisher, and a reporter for the military news outlet stars and stripes on Friday. The three employees claimed they were let go for insubordination. The Pentagon is waging war against Iran and the media, including its own in-house newspaper. From WNYC in New York, this is on the media, I'm Brooke Gladstone. And I'm Michael Lohinger. Also on this week's show, a look into the dramatic ascent of the White House assistant quietly shaping the president's worldview. He can turn to her and say, give me the real facts. And she'll go out and find him something that's false, but makes him feel better. Plus, hundreds of influencers have been paid by politicians to spread specific messages without telling their audiences. This sort of scammer con doesn't work. Once they get found out, people turn very quickly when they realize that they've been God. It's all coming up after this. On the media is supported by progressive insurance.

1:03Do you ever think about switching insurance companies to see if you could save some cash? Progressive makes it easy to see if you could save when you bundle your home in auto policies. Try it at progressive.com. Progressive casualty insurance company and affiliates, potential savings will vary, not available in all states. On the media is supported by Viking, committed to exploring the world in comfort, offering destination focused small ship experiences on all seven continents, with a shore excursion included in every port and programs designed for cultural enrichment. And every Viking voyage is all inclusive with no children and no casinos. Learn more at Viking.com. WNYC in New York. This is on the media. I'm Michael Lohinger. And I'm Brooke Gladstone. On Wednesday, President Trump offered, not for the first time, a glowing assessment of his war in Iran. We're winning that one very big, by the way, in case you haven't noticed.

2:04They don't have a navy, they don't have an Air Force, they don't have any aircraft, the leaders have gone. All of their technology has gone. Secretary Hegseth appears to be on a different page. The Wall Street Journal now reports that he is extending troop deployments in the Middle East into next year that's according to people. That report and lately defense secretary Pete Hegseth himself have not been going down so well. Hegseth under fire after army secretary Dan Driscoll's resignation following tensions over key issues in the military. Republican Senator Tom Tillis urging President Trump to fire Hegseth, accusing him of creating a leadership void at the top of our military ranks, adding, I have never witnessed more inemptive management of the brave men and women who serve our country. Meanwhile, the defense department, having done all it could to hamstring serious news coverage, turned its guns on its own award-winning military news outlet, Stars and Stripes.

3:04Its staff is paid by the Pentagon, but its editorial independence from the DOD is congressional mandated. Or was? Federal code has protected the papers right to editorial freedom for more than 30 years. But yesterday the Pentagon announced it is getting rid of that rule. That was back in January. Last month the other shoe dropped when Andrew Bray, deputy assistant to the Secretary of War for Public Affairs, sent the papers longtime publisher Max Lederer an email, attached were notices of termination for the paper's editor-in-chief Eric Slaven and its Middle East reporter Lara Court. They were being fired for insubordination after appearing in a segment on CBS. It was directing me to sign it and send it to them. I chose not to do that. Stars and Stripes publisher Max Lederer. I am forms Andrew Bray and Sean Parnell, the assistant secretary, that I had decided

4:05to retire instead. Just days after announcing his retirement to the entire staff, he says the Defense Department sent a letter firing him, along with the new copies of those firing, Slaven and Court. They took specific quotes in their CBS interview and stated that those quotes were insubordinate. In the case of Eric Slaven, the editor, it was comments regarding what would be a red line for him if Stripes wrote a story that they thought was actually correct and public affairs told him, no, we don't want you to write that story, we don't agree that we want you to print this story. He said that would be a red line. In Laura's case, she stated that she doesn't work for the department, she works for the reader. She said, I'm working for stars and Stripes, not for the Pentagon, not for any administration, not for any policy maker. I'm here to cover the military. Was that insubordinate? Maybe it was. I don't think it is.

5:06I listened to the recordings and they both numerous times said, my opinion, I believe they weren't talking from an official capacity and that's an important element of this case, was an official speech or unofficial. In my mind, insubordination has an element of intent. You intended to disobey something. I don't think they were intending to disobey anything. They made people aware that they were going to do it and they were speaking from their personal opinion. I think it's worth noting that these termination notices came just the day after the paper published a piece about the worsening conditions aboard the aircraft carrier, USS Abraham Lincoln during the war. The carrier had gone over 250 days without a port visit, a historically long deployment, defense secretary Pete Higgseth claimed that the conditions aboard the carrier were quote, completely misrepresented.

6:06Was that a stars and Stripes scoop? We were the first ones to break it. That story came to us because the members of the community trust us that when they have a problem, we're not going to hide it. We're going to reach into the command structure and ask for their comments and give as much balanced information as possible. That's why those family members came to Laura and said, there's a problem here. What did Laura report? We later heard that people were harming themselves on that ship. She reported that one sailor jumped off the ship because he was desperate, emotionally overwhelmed by the conditions. It wasn't that food was not as good as they would like and that there was mold in the showers and things like that, which we reported on. It was just the length of the deployment and no information as to when it would end. They literally had been isolated on their ship during that entire time at war.

7:07That's very stressful. They were sending notes back to their family members saying, I have anxiety. I don't know what's happening, then the family members became very concerned. That's what she reported on. It was somewhat of an embarrassment starting with the president and the secretary, all feeling that, oh my gosh, we have to hide this and we held them accountable. That's our job. And stars and stripes has done that when it comes to bad housing for the military overseas or insufficient health care. You don't see yourself as an adversary to the powers that they, but as a kind of a tool. Exactly. Stars and Stripes content makes the service better. A number of years back in Japan, the US military said, we don't have enough resources to continue to provide health care services for family members or civilian staff. They're going to have to go on the economy. What do you mean on the economy? We're going to have to go to Japanese, Dennis, Japanese oncologies.

8:11That's a significant challenge. You're over there. You don't necessarily speak Japanese and you probably don't, even if you speak a little Japanese, understand Japanese medical terminology. We dove into it and said, why is this happening? The leadership took to heart what the community was saying through stars and stripes and the defense health agency set representatives over to Japan, met with the community, family members, service members, and they modifications so that they could get people into some of the government facilities, but also to assist them in finding providers on the Japanese environment who spoke English or had English translators. We weren't adversarial. We pointed out how policy was impacting people and how it could be improved to make the situation more tolerable. When I spoke to Eric Slaven back in January, that was when Sean Parnell, the chief Pentagon spokesperson, released the memo claiming that the defense department would make dramatic

9:17changes to the paper to quote, modernize its operation, refocus its content away from woke distractions that he says, siphon morale. Then in March, the Pentagon published a quote, modernization plan, reaffirming its independence while also forbidding it from purchasing news from wire services like the Associated Press or even comic strips or syndicated features. Why? The language of the modernization memo states that we're going to find ways to reduce your costs and one of those ways was to eliminate that wire service contact and that required us to eliminate the Associated Press, Washington Post, comics such as Beedle Bailey and Family Circus, but some of it is vital. To eliminate that content, wasn't just eliminating some costs, it was news censorship. Using an example of where it's really harmful to the service members, on occasion there are

10:22strikes at the airport in Frankfurt, Germany, where the airport was shut down and family members who are flying through their service members going on temporary duty would be impacted by that. I don't employ a lot of German staff, so I rely on somebody like the Associated Press to translate that, report it, put it to English, and then I can bring that to my readership. That was just lost. They say that they can find that information on the internet. They don't need stars and stripes. That's very hard to find AP Stories straight on the internet. They're a wire service. It might be in the New York Times, it might be in Wall Street Journal. And so now we're telling our service members something you could get in stripes, all consolidated, all in one place. You're not going to have to go to two, three, four different sources that you might have to pay for. And be on top of things enough to say, oh, I need to go look at this every day so that I don't miss something. That's not the way we should be treating our service members who are sacrificing for

11:23us. There have been a number of attacks by the military. On the paper, in 2020, the defense secretary decided he wouldn't fund the stars and stripes, which would effectively close you. And then congressional reps stood up and customers and defended you. And so that threat went away in the late 80s. There were findings of news mismanagement and censorship coming from the commanders. Congress investigated. The officer was fired. The structure of the paper was revamped to make it more resistant to that kind of interference. What do you think the impact on the paper's editorial independence will have on not just the military community, but the rest of us? The Department of Defense is the largest executive agency. Has its own jargon, its philosophy. There are many things that are rightly controlled as far as information because of operational

12:27security. But I think the public should receive some transparency about how their money is being spent and how the men and women who serve are serving in their name. In Vietnam, the media was really controlled. Its access to the battlefield was limited because of the way communications were set up. If you were with AP to get your story back, you had to rely on the military to transport it in military planes back to the United States. And that resulted in a significant period of time where the people in the United States just didn't really know what was going on. Then slowly leaks began to happen. So all of a sudden we started to see the battlefield on our TVs in pictures. And what resulted is the community in the United States no longer supporting that war. I believe maybe we would not have gotten to that point. If there had been more openness and transparency throughout the war, maybe decisions would

13:31have been done differently. And maybe we would have been in a better position at the end of it. Because then I thought we had learned as a government, as a people that it is better to share bad news when it happens than to wait or to hide it. Because it eventually always comes out. But maybe we are going back to some of those times now and I think it's going to be bad for us if we don't write our ship as a country. Max thank you very much. I haven't heard it. Hopefully it was helpful. Max Letterver is still the publisher as all this plays out of stars and stripes. Coming up, why is everyone talking about Natalie Harp? This is On The Media. Are you hungry for some great investigative journalism that sounds like a music? Then Radio Lab might be the show for you.

14:33Radio Lab began over 20 years ago as an exploration of science, philosophy and ethics. The show is in expanded to become a platform for some of the best long form journalism and storytelling you'll hear today. Join Chad, Lulu Miller and myself, Letth of Nasser, as we investigate stories that provoke, delight, and ask you to completely change the way you view the world. You can find Radio Lab wherever you get podcasts. This is On The Media. I'm Michael O'Incher. And I'm for Gladstone. As you've ever wondered, how Donald Trump has enough energy and time each day to wage war. Appointment Watch Fox News. Play golf. Pursue personal vendetta. Sign executive borders in post 24-7 on Truth Social. The answer lies in part in his assistant, Natalie Harp. She joined the White House in January 2025, which likely triggered the leak of a pile of adoring and reverent letters she'd written to Trump. And Harp first entered Trump's orbit in 2019. When on Fox News, she credited his health care policies for helping her beat cancer.

15:39Natalie Harp, glad you're okay. You look fantastic. Best of luck along the way. Thank you, Natalie. Thank you so much. And happy birthday, President Trump. Yeah. He's hearing you. He's on in an hour and a half. Invited to speak at the RNC in 2020, Harp invoked its wonderful life. Good evening. I'm Natalie Harp. A formerly forgotten American from California. Mr. President, without you, we'd all be living in Potter'sville. Sold out to a crooked Mr. Harp, I should say, a crooked Mrs. Potter, with no hope of escape except death itself. She joined Trump's presidential campaign in 2022, then had a brief stint at the far right network, one American news, where she boosted the big lie. We can't talk about winning back the House and Senate in 2022. And the White House in 2024, if we don't act on the fact that we actually did win the White House and the Senate in 2020, we shouldn't be afraid to say that. In early 2025, she made her stunning ascent to the uppermost echelons of the White House,

16:45serving as the president's omnipresent executive assistant. In a documentary series about the last election, we see her next to him typing as they workshop truth social posts while listening to a Kamala Harris speech. How many people are watching? Can we tell how many Dan? How many people are watching? She's talking about how great the San Francisco was before she destroyed it. The news media's usually list list dog days of August were in live and by Natalie Harp explainers and gossip and speculation. What ignited this explosive interest? Paul Waldman, former Washington Post columnist and writer of the Substack Newsletter, the cross section dates the first spark to July 8th. As the president, preparing to leave the NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey, was informed of a credible threat to the Boeing 747-8 controversially gifted by Qatar. It was concluded that the new Air Force one didn't have the proper security measures.

17:48And there are apparently were some threats that the Secret Service took seriously enough that they wanted to conceal what plane he was going to be on. So they did this sort of Ocean's 11 style switcheroo where they drove a catering truck up to the plane, Trump and a couple of aides got into this catering container. Among them, Natalie Harp and Wald now to the director of Oval Office operations who I think he used to work for him at Mar-a-Lago. But the group did not include Secretary of State Marco Rubio or other officials at the highest level of government. Yes. And then that container was driven over to a second plane. They got off and he flew back home secretly. Now Natalie Harp is not completely unknown. Certainly not among reporters. There were a couple of stories about her, one of the New York Times back in 2024. But the average person has no idea who this person is. And then following on that, Senator John Assoff, who is very clever when it comes to dealing

18:53with the media, he drops this mention of her in one of his speeches. So he doesn't want to do the job. He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the Emir of Qatar. He doesn't use her full name. He just says Natalie. And that too adds to the air of mystery. You see in the next couple of days, multiple front page stories and papers like the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and the New York Times, and some of them share the same title. Who is Natalie Harp? This is actually an old story in the dynamic, so political reporting that reporters know a lot of things, have a lot of stories in their head and character profiles that they just sort of haven't yet found a way to present to the public. It doesn't have a news hook you can hang it on. But then you get the thing in Turkey with the catering cart and then Ossoff bringing it

19:54up. And now you have a news hook. Now you can write the Who Is Natalie Harp story. Then something interesting happened, which is that over the course of the next couple of days, a bunch of other White House aides, start telling reporters even more stories. There's a story about how when Trump was on his way to the courthouse in New York for one of his trials there, Harp didn't get a seat in the SUV and she was so determined to stay by his side that she climbed into the trunk of the SUV. That then propels the story forward even more. You say that even people in the White House who hate Natalie don't think an affair is happening? Yeah, we haven't really gotten anything to make us believe that there's actually an affair going on. You know, because we've seen these letters that she wrote to him is that she has a relationship to him that you might call romantic in some way. There's a kind of almost ecstatic religiosity to it. It's really worshipful. Yeah, she'd say we talk about everything and nothing I want to bring you joy to feel like we can get through a day without ever having to talk work.

20:58Even if there's no romantic relationship, there is something a little odd about it and that certainly seems to be what other people in the White House think. So let's talk about the reaction to Othsoff's remark. There was tremendous high duchin from the far right in defense of women everywhere evidently. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, for instance, posted on X. If a conservative Republican had attacked a liberal Democrat working professional woman, the way that Othsoff smeared Natalie Harp, they would be cries to kick them off the ticket and reject this kind of misogynistic language. Of course, Othsoff wasn't disparaging her. He merely mentioned her first name. He was disparaging Trump. Yes, that was one of the interesting things about this is that immediately the White House and its allies had a huge reaction. And all Othsoff said was that Trump wants to travel with Natalie. Stephen Chone, the White House communications director, immediately tweeted out that John

22:01Jackoff, which is how we refer to John Othsoff, has to be the biggest cook loser in politics. He's a miserable person who hates this country. That's the White House communication director. You had Mark Tiesen, who's a conservative who writes for the Washington Post saying, what a gross misogynistic thing to say. You owe this young woman an apology. You may remember Steve Bannon said that the media strategy was to flood the zone with this. And it is so much more efficient and effective than the old way of having to blast out faxes to a bunch of people to tell them the talking points. Now it is instantaneous, but there's a potential downside too. You can activate that system, flip the switch, and then everyone on your side is drawing attention to a story that if you had spent a few minutes thinking about it, you would have said, you know what? Maybe we don't want people talking about this story, but by then it's too late. So do you think Osof's success at directing the conversation about Trump and getting

23:04under the skin of his political opponents could or should be replicated by other Democrats? Well they can try, but it's kind of like lightning striking to a certain extent. Come on. There are a million potential triggers here. Well, that's part of the problem too. There are so many different things that Democrats are angry about. It's really not easy to get them all to talk about the same thing at the same time. Is it that the public cares more about the young blonde at the president's elbow than it does about suppressing voting rights? Yes, and that's been the case for as long as people have been producing the news every day. Democrats are trying to find things that will capture the news media's attention. And Republicans are too. They, for instance, have had a good deal of success trying to elevate the profile of Hassan Piker, a Twitch streamer. Now Democratic candidates all over are being asked whether they're going to distance themselves from him.

24:05That is its own interesting and complicated story about why this one guy is getting so much attention when there are 20 people on the Republican side who have even bigger audiences than he does and are maybe closer to Republican politicians who haven't gotten that kind of attention. Welcome, we're not talking about Laura Loomer, who is an even more controversial figure on the right and who actually gets to go into the Oval Office, tell Donald Trump who he should fire and he does it. She has way more influence over the Republican power apparatus than Hassan Piker has or is ever going to have over the Democratic apparatus. So why are we talking about her? I just think that corruption can be really sexy. It can be. This is another place where Democrats have really frustrated that there are so many stories of Trump's corruption that have been just overlooked. For instance, there is a person in the Emirati government who's referred to as the spy chic

25:07who made a $500 million investment in Trump's cryptocurrency company days before he took office and then later on, Trump reversed previous policies to remove export controls on the AI chips that the UAE was desperate to acquire. That is the kind of story that is just mind blowing, right? And there are a dozen of those. His main coin. That's another one. The Trump meme coin, according to the analysis in New York Times, he made something like $630 something million off of his meme coin, which has lost 95% of its value. He basically ripped off a bunch of Trump fans who invested in this thinking that they were going to get rich. They have all lost their shirts and he laughed all the way to the bank. That should be a scandal. You think? You get a few stories about it, but then it doesn't really have legs. This happens all the time. For one reason or another, a story becomes compelling. Sometimes it has to do with the biases that reporters bring and what they expect from

26:08the parties. Sometimes it has to do with the fact that something is hidden and needs to be revealed. That, by the way, is one of the brilliant aspects of Trump's approach to corruption. If you look back at the corruption stories of American history, part of the key to all of them was that there was something that the people who were being corrupt wanted to keep secret. Yeah, they were covering up. And Trump has said, hey, people, let me get away with it. So I got away with it. He said that he realized that nobody cares and he can do whatever he wants. For a corruption story to really capture the newsmenious attention, they want to feel like they uncovered something. They found what was hidden. Now they are exposing it to the light. And the fact that those politicians don't want you to know about this, that's part of what makes the story compelling. That means that the things that ought to get more attention only get a little bit of attention. And yet you do think it's important to keep the spotlight on Natalie Harp, right? We all have an interest in where Donald Trump is actually getting his information.

27:12You know, what we want is for the president to have a truth check. Where if you hear something that's not true, there's someone there who can say, actually Mr. President, that's wrong. And here's the correct information. For Trump, it seems to work in the opposite way. He'll still get correct information. As much as the people around him want to tell him what he wants to hear, there are going to be plenty of situations in which someone will have to present to him something that maybe is not quite his liking, like the fact that the ammunition stockpiles are running low. But then he has this kind of safety valve in Natalie Harp that he can turn to her and say, give me the real facts. And she is going to make sure that whatever unfortunate information he may be getting that is actually true, she'll be there to give him things that he really wants to hear. The picture of the world in which everyone loves him is polls could not be higher. The war in Iran is going great. The economy has never been better and he doesn't have to change course or make any decisions that might extricate us from all of these problems.

28:15That's where the real danger comes in. Thank you very much, Paul. My pleasure. Thanks a lot, Brooke. Goldman writes the newsletter, The Cross section, which you can find on the sub-stack. Coming up, your favorite TikToker might have been paid to endorse a political candidate. This is On The Media. This week on the New Yorker Radio Hour, Sarah Longwell has a word of advice for Democrats who want control of Congress. People should be all over corruption and you do it with the contrast of saying, you are getting poorer. Trump is in a war getting rich off of oil. Like, seize that. Be outraged by it. Tell people how it's harming them. Sarah Longwell on our new book, How to Eat an Elephant. That's the New Yorker Radio Hour from WNYC. Listen, wherever you get your podcasts. This is On The Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone. And I'm Michael Lohinger.

29:15If you've been scrolling on TikToker Instagram this election season, you might have seen a video like this. With the Senate race heating up, it's time we pick a candidate that's actually going to help the everyday citizens here in Michigan. Well, that's going to help the hardworking families, help the majority and not just the billionaires or select group of people. Which is why I support Haley Steven. She's wanting to pass the No-Tariff on Grocery's Act and raise the minimum wage so that way the hardworking families are actually getting. Content creators have been opining on races across the country and some of them are being paid by political campaigns for their endorsements. In some cases, a lot of money. Though you often can't tell from the videos themselves, a recent New York Times investigation co-reported by Ken Benzinger dove into the wild west of social media political advertising. So the biggest one that we've been able to find is a TikTok creator called Carlos Eduardo Espina, who has 14 and a half million followers on TikTok, which is big by any measure.

30:16And he's primarily a Spanish language influencer who is a Democrat and supports left-wing candidates. He was paid $400,000. $400,000? Yeah. $400,000 to support Tom Steyer, who was a billionaire who was running for a governor of California in the primary, which happened in early June. Also in California, former representative Katie Porter had a similar operation. We found that she paid 12 different influencers, a total of just under $140,000 to produce videos on these platforms to support her campaign. And this was kind of amazing because most of these people built a huge following online based on lifestyle type things. There was one influencer who does mainly travel and sort of humor type content who did a single post for Katie Porter and was paid $25,000 for that single post, which is a pretty good work if you can get it. You spoke with one such creator, Josh Green. He's 26 years old and he goes by the moniker, Josh, the progressive on social media.

31:19His coverage of candidate for governor Tom Steyer was initially critical. Billionaire Tom Steyer isn't the progressive champion you might think he has, in fact, back in the early 2000s, Steyer made millions of dollars by investing into one of the most exciting new markets here in the US, immigration detention facilities. But a few months later, Josh the progressive was singing a different tune. This election is going to come down to one of the major contenders, which is why I am focused on who I think is currently the most progressive viable candidate in the race, Tom Steyer. In video, in support of Tom Steyer, coincided with a $21,500 check from Tom Steyer's campaign. What did he tell you about his decision to accept this money? Josh seems to think that he learned more about Steyer and that he came to see him as the right guy. Now it's really hard to ignore the money changing hands there and quite a lot of money. And I should add, these are not the only races that he's been involved in and taken money in.

32:20More recently, there was a primary massachusetts that happened on September 1st and just days before we published our article, I learned that the Independent Committee supporting at Markey had paid Josh $3,500 to support him in a series of videos as well. And I found two videos that he produced. Again, in that case, he told me that he supported Markey and that Markey was politically aligned with where he was. It comes to disclosing to his audience that he's accepting this money. He has a mixed track record, right? Yeah, I mean, he has made some disclosures. For example, we found disclosures on three of the videos he made for Tom Steyer in California where he said that he'd been partnered with the campaign or was compensated for his work. But we found many other examples where money changed hands and he didn't disclose anything. And that includes the videos he made for at Markey and Massachusetts and for several candidates for Congress in New York earlier this year. It's important to note that in most cases, those disclosures are not required, right?

33:21So in California, he disclosed, and in part, that's because California has pretty strict laws requiring social media influencers to disclose when they're being paid to post political content. That's not the case at the federal level and it certainly isn't the case in the other ones. And we could find where he didn't disclose. So Josh and others in his situation can fairly claim in those circumstances that they were following the letter of law even when they were not disclosing. Let's talk about the different strategies because I found this really interesting from your piece. One of them is obviously to pay a bunch of money to some of the most visible accounts. Another strategy is to pay much less money to much smaller accounts so they can post at a much higher volume. But I think we call them a piece of carpet bombing approach. That's the strategy where these new specialized firms enlist less famous social media creators. Some of them with very small followings or even using new accounts to blast out messages and they're hitting a wider audience.

34:23You wrote about a company called SideShift which has taken that approach and one content creator, a particular page Dunmeyer, who has, let's say, not been so forthcoming about who she is and where she lives in her process of endorsing a whole slate of candidates. Yeah. So SideShift is a platform where companies, political campaigns, advocacy groups, you name it can go and try to advertise the opportunity to small what you might call micro or even nano-influencers to produce content on mass to distribute it. And what we found is that there sometimes really aren't very good controls about who is responding to these opportunities and whether there's vetting about if they are, who they say they are. So the opportunity might say, well, we need people in Michigan to talk about affordability, for example, but there doesn't seem to be anyone preventing people in Missouri from saying they live in Michigan and producing videos about Michigan even though they don't live there.

35:24And the woman we singled out, she was posting in multiple different jurisdictions saying she was a different person using different accounts with different names even though the images showed the same human being making them. But she was hardly isolated. We found many, many accounts that were doing similar things. So as you say, a lot of these payments are done quietly. It's almost invisible to many viewers. Some creators say that campaigns have asked them to actively conceal the fact that they're being compensated. And unlike other types of political advertisements like mailers or TV ads, there are no federal regulations around social media creators disclosing that they've been paid by a campaign. So how did you track all this down? So it's very true that there are no federal laws requiring this. The Federal Trade Commission does require disclosure and social media for paid commercial type work. So if a beauty company, if a hair care company, if a vitamin supplement company is pagan

36:25influencer to promote their product, they are legally required to disclose that on their social media posts. Whether they always do or not is probably a topic for another day, but at least by law they're supposed to. But the FTC has a car valve saying we don't do politics. That is the domain of the Federal Elections Commission. So you go to the Federal Election Commission and you ask them and what they will tell you is that they don't have a rule when it comes to social media influencers. There have been multiple attempts to get them to institute a regulation requiring disclosure for influencers, but they have never even studied it, let alone taking a vote on it. For a reporter like me, it makes a little tough sometimes to figure out who is getting paid, but we benefited from a couple of things that made it possible, at least in a limited fashion, to peer into this world. One is that California is one of four states that does have a legal requirement for disclosures of paid political social media posts that applies only to state races. In other words, not for Congress, not for Senate, not for President, but for state assembly,

37:26for governor, for jobs like that. Those races require the disclosure in California and a couple other states. The other layer that made it helpful to us is that California is one of a small handful states that requires campaigns to disclose not just what vendors they paid during the campaign, but what also sub-vendors were paid. If campaign A hires a Johnny's advertising agency, then in California is required to disclose all the different things it paid for using the money that was sent to by the campaign. What that translated to in our reporting was we have the chance to see all the way down, multiple layers in some cases, how the payments flowed from the candidates campaign to one contractor, to a sub-vendor, to a third sub-vendor, and finally to specific social media influencers. When you pull the campaign finance reports for candidates like Katy Porter or Tom Steyer, you'll see way down to the bottom the names and handles of specific social media influencers who were being paid and how much each one was paid.

38:27What does this practice look like on the right? Is it as big? This is happening on the right as well, absolutely. It's just very much less frequently reported. I should say less frequently reported than a baseline of Democrats who very infrequently report themselves. We're talking about the difference between slim and none. Ken, just one more question. TikTok has altogether banned political advertisements, right? And Facebook and Instagram supposedly have pretty strict rules around disclosing when an account is creating a political ad. And yet this is a problem. Are the social media platforms doing enough to enforce their own rules? Most of these places have terms of service that either bar paid political content or require disclosure. Instagram doesn't bar it but requires disclosure. TikTok bars that completely, it is prohibited to do paid political content creation on the site. So you have a weird sort of cat and mouse game going on where candidates for office are basically

39:31telling people to break their rules trying to come up with strategies to avoid being caught. I asked some candidates about this and they more or less ignored my question. So I don't think they really have an answer to it, but they know they have to be there. And if they're not on those platforms enough for a two degree that they think is important, then they want to pay for it and I guess try to find ways to avoid being caught doing it. Ken, great piece. Thanks so much for coming on the show. Here's my pleasure. Thanks for reading it and for the great questions. Ken Benzinger is a reporter for The New York Times covering media and politics. I'm pleased to announce that I'll be making my first ever political endorsement in the governor's race here in California. I'm officially endorsing what was her name again? Up until last year, Dave Jorgensen made sharply observed and very funny videos at the Washington Post where he grew the paper's TikTok account to nearly two million followers. Now he has his own media outlet called Local News International and his videos cover pretty

40:34much anything and everything that makes headlines. And no, he is not taking that endorsement money. Okay, I'm not really endorsing someone. They would go against the ethics and transparency rules that my co-founders and I created after leaving the Washington Post and going independent. But a recent New York Times article found that a lot of creators are endorsing politicians and not disclosing that they were paid to do so. When I spoke to Dave this week, he told me the reaction to his video was exactly what he had expected. Which you saw in a lot of the comments, people were like, I was about to be so mad at you. It was a great hook. And I don't always do hooks like that, but I was like, this is a good reason to do it. I do want people to feel that moment of almost betrayal. That's what that story was about in my mind too, is this level of trust that you have with someone that you follow. And to what degree do they owe you to disclose any information and the type of videos that are making? Yeah, same more about that trust because the classic content creator response would be like, I make videos and I build an audience and in return, I get to monetize that audience.

41:37Right. Because that, anyone that grew up in this YouTube world, they understand that economy that in order to be online creator, you have to take ad revenue and money like that. But I think that there's a whole separate thing with politics and how that works and it hasn't really been defined. Have you ever been approached by a political campaign offering you money in return for your endorsement? Yes. So it's happening a lot. Since I posted that video on Monday, I got another email yesterday and it was like, the email is, don't you watch my videos? That's exactly because they say we love your videos and like, did you watch Monday? Yes. If you had, you would know that I'm not even going to finish reading this email. It's in the air and it's thick. And then you bring in the incentives because talking into a camera all day seems really glamorous, but accepting these kinds of deals is one of the ways that a lot of content creators make money. Yeah. And we got really lucky where early on, we got to add deal with Harry's razors.

42:39That was like from day one of leaving the post. And then we have some deals with Beehive who we do the newsletter through. And so we have these set deals for the next few months that are keeping the lights on, so to speak. But other creators don't necessarily have that. It's a very up and down economy. And when you're someone who's already doing political news, for example, or talking about politicians and other brands are afraid of you because you do that. But then a politician who maybe you personally happen to just believe in anyway or they're close enough to your belief system, you go, yeah, I will accept this money because this is my job and how else am I going to make money? I understand where that comes from. I feel like the real marketing edge that news content creators have is they're like, I'm not beholden to the corporate media behemoth. I just speak for myself. Whereas traditional journalists are not accepting any money or gifts or they shouldn't be from a political campaign and yet an independent content creator who claims to be free from

43:39conflicts of interest is. And I have a level of sympathy to the people that again are coming from this background where maybe they weren't going to make news videos, but that became their thing. And I think some of them in good faith are making these mistakes. I think some of them aren't. But either way, it's just this moment of, okay, we actually need to talk about this. I know that you've been thinking about a universal code of ethics for news content creators. What would that look like? Yeah. So to YouTube's credit, they have this independent media summit they do at least once a year. And at the most recent one earlier this year, YouTube themselves was asking me about what's your relationship with AI, what's your audience's response, like, well, they all hate it. And to some degree, I do too. At least as it comes to AI Slop. And another creator in that same meeting was like, there should be a scale. I would actually propose a scale of one to 10. So 10 being this is pure AI Slop. I wrote this into a prompt in January of this AI video and that's a 10. If I'm in Premiere Pro editing my video, I might ask Premiere to transcribe the video

44:43for me so that I can generate captions. And then I go back and I fix the captions. I think technically that process is AI and that would be like a one. So then who comes up with the one through 10 rating? Because how can YouTube know if you're using a chatbot for research or for scripting? How can YouTube know that you used an AI feature on your video editing software? They can't necessarily, though there are increasingly more tools, but that's kind of the early stages of detection. So I do think it's a level of just honesty in the same way that I modest about. Well, President Obama didn't pay for my hotel when I went to Chicago to interview him. To interview him, yes. And that was something I alluded to in the video. When I was invited along with other really great creators to interview President Obama, they offered to pay for my flight and hotel. I declined. That's something where you kind of have to take my word for it to some degree, right? And I think that if you set a scale, like, yes, some people will probably lie, but I mean that that's just on them, really. We can't stop people from lying on the internet. I'm from lying. That's all set for practice.

45:44Yes. Hey, people lie. I think that that would be effective and I would hope that a platform would take that on, but at the very least, and this is a little bit pie in the sky, but like, yeah, if a bunch of creators just agreed to a universal version of this, that would be, I think, really ideal. I want to dig into the tone and the voice that you've cultivated, particularly in your short form content. I see you as a master of a very popular genre on TikTok and Instagram, a sort of explainer skit in which you act out different characters as you unspool an argument about a news event. Recently, you made a video that starts with a Fox News clip of Trump speaking in the Oval Office. We're going to be changing the name of Lake Ontario, effective immediately to Lake America. You are playing the camera guy, the news media, filming him. I love to hear you explain those. I don't even know how you're going to explain it. Go ahead. Lakey Guy in a trench coat, also played by you, tries to get the camera guy's attention.

46:47The trench coat guy flashes open his coat to reveal some news articles. He says, Hey, that's going to take place. Yeah, you want any real news? And the camera guy says, this is news, I think. And the trench coat guy says, despite what Tim Apple and Google Maps would have you think, he can't just change the name of a body of water with an executive order. The trench coat guy goes on to talk about the real news, like the fact that ice has arrested thousands of people who don't have a criminal background. And to me, this was like a really fresh way of talking about something that's become far too normal, which is that the Trump administration tries to distract us, the media, and the public all the time. When did it occur to you that the sketch was a winning formula? With the 24 hour cable news cycle and just generally just the onslaught of news, it's just really exhausting. It feels less like I'm reading the news and more like all of this is happening to me. And that sketch format where I almost just described to the viewer or show them how it feels to me, I think that makes it feel more sincere, adds to that trust we were talking

47:52about where you acknowledge that news isn't just some guy behind a desk getting upright. And there's nothing, I'm not criticizing that, but doing it this way helps people digest it a little better, I think. You have an interesting perch as a journalist, turn content creator, still journalist, where you have to consider what the algorithm and the audiences want, but you also want to feed people their vegetables because you're a reporter. So how do you balance this? A video may be incredibly well researched, but if it doesn't hijack people's attention, then the algorithm won't pick it up. If you oversinstationalize or dumb things down too much, you're just kind of contributing to the noise. Yeah, I think the video that you were just talking about was a really example of that where the vegetables are in the trench coat. I had to build up the premise, catch your attention with the thing that we're all talking about like America, whatever, but really, hey, maybe we should talk about these other things that are not fun to talk about. They probably make you sad or sort of a short hint for that is just climate news because

48:54anytime we do any climate TikTok, people just don't want to engage with the whole thing. It has to be sort of woven in and out around some other narrative, sometimes a pop culture story that just doesn't matter, but people just would rather hear about. So a bait and switch. That's what you're talking about. Basically, but with a very knowing wink, we all know what I'm doing, right? I understand this is hard and you don't want to talk about it, but we have to talk about it. You've said that humor is a great tool for debunking misinformation and sort of diffusing the feelings of you or might have when you're basically telling them you're wrong. You're not saying like you're dumb for believing this, but they might feel attacked if you're correcting part of their worldview. Does it work? Have you found that your videos changed people's minds? Yeah, we see it all the time where someone goes and often reluctantly, they kind of, all right. One example was I did this whole video about people thought Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was dead and that they were generating AI videos of him and that the proof was that in this video where his finger moves fast, it looks like he has a six finger.

49:58The video looked weird though, right? There was a strange filter on it that kind of smushed the detail like it was odd. And that's what I loved about it because it was a learning, it was for me as a video editor, I was like, here's what happened. There's different things that can happen in video editing. There's AI filters that you can add to something that make it look less real, even on YouTube they do this. There was a learning lesson, but there was also a level of humor of me kind of poking fun at the whole thing. And a lot of those comments were people very reluctantly going, okay, fine. Let's at stake if news creators like you, political influencers, some who may identify as journalists or don't, what's at stake if they don't adopt a code of ethics, if they don't act with a sort of shared sense of integrity? I think short term, it's scary for upcoming elections, right? Like it's very scary to be on these apps and not know if the person that's telling you this was paid to do it and what their intentions are. But optimistically long term, this sort of phallacrobat or phrase scam or con doesn't

51:01work. I mean, you see it where once they get found out, people turn very quickly when they realize that they've been God, right? That's why there's rules in place so that you can avoid that whole situation to begin with. So long term, I think it's, in my mind, it'll work itself out to some degree. It's just who leads, right? The creators lead, the platforms lead, the government lead on making these policies. I hope all three in conjunction, but regardless, it's going to happen because it has to and because humans don't like feeling lied to. They don't like when they find out that someone they trusted for five years on TikTok, for example, suddenly is taking money from someone and didn't disclose it. And you're seeing that right now. Dave, thanks for coming on the show. Micah, thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it. Dave Jorgensen is a journalist, video creator and host of Local News International. That's it for this week's show. On The Media is produced by Molly Rosen, Rebecca Clark Calendar, and Candace Wong. Travis Manon is our video producer. Our technical director is Jennifer Munson with engineering from Jared Paul.

52:06Eloise Blondeo is our senior producer and our executive producer is Katya Rogers. On The Media is produced by WNYC, I'm Brooke Gladstone. And I'm Michael Aunger.