Access Is Not Journalism

In Conversation with Joy Reid

[Transcript edited for clarity, flow and length]

Mary Trump: I had a great conversation with the incredible Joy Reid, host of The Joy Reid Show, about the continuing degradation of corporate media. We also discussed the ways in which independent media can step up in advance of the midterms to fill the information vacuum. Enjoy it.

Joy Reid: Now, I mean, there’s a bunch of stuff I want to talk to you about, and I know this is ancient history, but I still think there’s so much going on at all times that we kind of let things just sort of fade away, even though we should continue to remind people how dangerous certain things are. And I’m thinking about the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.

I cannot get the White House Correspondents’ Dinner out of my head. And it’s not simply the fact that they invited a guy who has done more to destroy American journalism and endanger the lives of journalists than anybody in American history. Probably not human history, not yet. But the extent to which so called journalists were enjoying themselves with the fascists, I cannot get it out of my head.

So the reason I bring that up, besides the fact that we need to remember how corrupted and plugged in legacy corporate media continues to be, is because there are alternatives. I mean, you’re leading the charge in the independent media space, and I just think it’s really important to remind people just how unacceptable it is when journalists lose all objectivity for the sake of access.

So if you could talk about that a little bit, I have something specific in mind. I’m thinking about the New York Times article and how they completely misframed the Third Way decision to spend $15 million to go after the enemy, which is progressives.

Joy Reid: Yeah. We’re living in this crazy space because I have to be honest with you, the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, I think, was a tiny bit problematic anyway.

Mary Trump: Oh, yeah.

Joy Reid: And having been to it, I attended it back in the day when President Obama was in office because everyone wanted to be where Obama was, and he was hilarious. I was at the one where he was doing his Obama anger translator. Even that was just a tiny bit problematic because I think that this sort of proximity game isn’t healthy for the press.

I think that the proximity and hanging out with any administration is a little problematic anyway because it’s putting you in a position where you have to cover these people. You have to be objective enough to be critical of them even if they’re Democrats, even if it’s Obama. And I feel like that is lost when you’re also having dinner with them at a fancy dinner party and you’re getting on the red carpet and spending time with them. Even again, if it’s an administration that’s not a regime, that’s not an autocratic fascist regime, then you take that away, which is also an issue.

It’s also a problem, but now it’s the fascist regime and you’re still doing the party. Donald Trump never would go to the White House Correspondents’ Dinner because he can’t take a joke, as you know better than anyone else. He has no sense of humor, as you know better than anyone else. He has no ability to laugh at himself.

The last time that he went to the dinner, President Obama mocked him while he was a guest, and he, according to a lot of folks who said it to me, including one of his former Apprentice castmates, ran for president out of revenge, out of being mocked by President Obama. So this is a dinner that for him was a traumatic experience that he now wanted to attend only if there were no jokes about him and if he could mock the press. And so to even invite him, to me, was problematic.

He called the press the enemy of the people. He said that the press are evil. He mocks press people, calls them names, brutalizes particularly female journalists, and then you invite him to the fancy dress up dinner? Why? And then the first time he was supposed to go, they canceled a comedian because she mocked him on a totally different podcast. And then, of course, she was our first guest on The Joy Reid Show, Amber Ruffin.

And now he attends, there’s an issue, they have to redo it. And when he comes, he just made a mockery of each and every one of them, and they sat there and took it. What insane world are we living in where the media that’s supposed to be holding this person to account sits there and lets him do what he does to journalists in the field while they’re in fancy dress clothes?

It was a humiliating experience. I was embarrassed for everyone. Kaitlan Collins got called, said that she and a trans influencer are the same person, and no one laughed because people were appalled, but she still had to sit there and take it. I’m disgusted by the existence of this dinner. I wish it would go away.

Mary Trump: So your last point speaks to the larger issue, and this is something I’ve had a problem with since 2017. The White House press room was basically turned into a platform for the sycophants. Real journalists were pushed out, real journalists were ignored, real journalists were insulted and mocked. And I always thought, where is the sense of professional collegiality here? Why aren’t these people sticking up for each other?

And by the same token, at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, why didn’t people stand up and leave? Why did they go? Okay, but once they saw the writing on the wall, which they should have anticipated, why did they sit there and take it? Why did they let their colleagues be viciously attacked? Because he’s been threatening people, really threatening them, and he has a lot of power.

So it’s been mystifying to me. And now we’re in a situation in which it feels like corporate media is kind of getting on the Democratic socialists as a bigger threat, not to the Republicans, but to the Democratic Party, than fascism is a threat to the future of American democracy. So can you help me unwind that one?

Joy Reid: Yeah. I mean, we’re in this strange world in which, and by the way, they should have gotten up and walked out. Those aren’t even jokes. That was Donald Trump having a stream of consciousness temper tantrum in front of his victims.

This man and his regime have jailed journalists. They are prosecuting Georgia Fort and Don Lemon for covering a protest. They have raided the home of a journalist for doing her job, a New York Times journalist. They are not just the enemy of freedom of the press, the enemy of the First Amendment, they’re the enemy of democracy. There is no reason to have dinner with them. There is no reason to get dressed up and laugh with Stephen Miller.

You should not be even smiling in the presence of Stephen Miller. He is effectively operating as if this is Nazi Germany and he’s Heinrich Himmler. These people are the enemy of our freedom.

And if you are a journalist, what you’re supposed to be doing if you’re at that dinner is you should be mic’d up and getting inside scoop. Go in there, if you’re going to go in there, and be a journalist and make them answer your questions. If I’m standing next to Stephen Miller, I’ve got questions. I don’t have jokes. I don’t have a kiki.

You’re right. Are people saying Goebbels? I guess Himmler is more accurate. I have questions. If you’re going to be that close, you have access. Good, that’s access. Use that moment to do some journalism because having dinner with them is an affront to the rest of us. And now we don’t believe you when you’re supposedly holding them to account because that’s your dinner buddy. It’s a problem, right? And so the idea of that is a problem.

Joy Reid: But this other thing that you’re talking about, Mary, which I think is equally dangerous, and I think I had to step outside of mainstream media to really realize that in a way, all of us, even though there are some fantastic journalists inside of the mainstream press, absolutely hardworking, brilliant journalists who work in that world, but in a way what the media has become, and I think what it always was, if we’re being honest, is it is a palliative to the public.

It’s a way to make people be informed, but not too informed to be rebellious. It’s a way to make you knowledgeable, but not too knowledgeable to be dangerous to the stability of any government. It’s a way to make sure that there’s never a rebellion. The media is like an alternative to rebellion because if the media just says there’s only this range of protest that’s acceptable, there’s only this range of change that’s doable and that’s feasible in a democracy, and that if you stay in this range, that’s normal, outside the range is not normal, then it makes anyone who wants to get outside the range feel crazy.

So for a long time, Medicare for All was sort of depicted as kind of crazy. The idea that we would do, like, everybody gets government backed healthcare is communism. It’s crazy. And so the job of the media is to sort of represent the crazy people on the left as dangerous to the way things are. We just need to get back to normal.

Normal is you pay a lot of money for your healthcare, you pay big premiums, you maybe go bankrupt when you can’t afford your cancer treatment, but that’s normal. That’s capitalism. We’re there to explain capitalism and make it palatable. But there are people living in this world right now in other countries like Israel or France that have universal healthcare. The thing that we think is crazy is happening in countries we subsidize. We’re paying for universal healthcare in Israel. That’s why a lot of people are so angry about the AIPAC thing.

It’s not just a genocide, it’s that we’re funding a lifestyle in Israel that we don’t have here because we keep being told it’s crazy to have it here and we can’t afford it. So we’re being told that the very thing we’re subsidizing in another country that’s also doing a genocide, we can’t have it here because that’s crazy communism, that it’s not crazy communism when we’re paying for it over there.

And so this is what’s happening, is that people are stepping outside that range of what the media is telling them is normal and saying, wait a minute, maybe it’s abnormal to be a rich country where there are very poor people who live and sleep on the street. Maybe it’s crazy to be a rich country where kids can’t afford to go to college because they have to literally take out loans that are the size of a mortgage.

Maybe it’s actually crazy to live the way we’re living and have terrible infrastructure when countries that we’ve ordered not to have a military, like Japan, have super trains. Why does India have a super train? Why does Japan have super trains? And we have rickety Amtrak where you fall down when you try to go to the bathroom, where we can’t get from New York to DC in 30 minutes, but in Europe, they have a European rail that goes all over the whole semi continent.

So it’s like we are starting to realize that the media isn’t helping. The media is making us feel crazy if we want a lifestyle that’s not just go to work, crank it out, work until you’re 70, and then die because you’re too sick to retire.

Mary Trump: Please take a second to like this video, subscribe to the channel, and leave a comment below. It’s important that we keep using our voices and keep the conversation going.

Yeah, that’s such a fascinating perspective on it, and it makes so much sense because we used to be told that, and I mean, I know it’s true, the clickbait and getting the clicks was important to them, which is why they needed to cover Donald in a particular way. But that wears a little thin when you realize, you know what? I think just as many people would be interested in knowing about his severe cognitive decline as are interested in somehow normalizing him.

So I think this is also of a piece with how the double standard, a really, really bad jobs report came out. The United States lost over 23,000 jobs last month, and the two months previous, those estimates were downsized.

So in other words, the two months previous, the jobs numbers were wrong and were revised downward. So Donald’s track record on the economy in terms of job growth is abysmal. And the opposite used to happen with Biden. The jobs report, oh, we have 100,000 new jobs. And then two months later, oh wait, no, it was half a million. But Biden was always getting attacked for doing a miserable job on jobs. And the New York Times framed this abysmal month we just had as in a reversal.

It’s been terrible. It has been terrible. And meanwhile, on the very same issue, it’s just like, is there no self awareness? Is that whole, oh my God, we can’t show liberal bias thing so ingrained that they cannot tell the straight facts about something without spinning it in the Republicans’ favor?

And I think also, to your point, people are catching on. People are realizing that, you know what? Maybe, maybe this whole communist narrative isn’t really tenable. Maybe states, cities, what have you, when voters choose progressive and social democratic candidates, maybe that actually is a good thing for those places and it’s really not the end of America as well. Maybe it should be the end of America as we know it.

So do you see a shift in how people are responding to being presented with news that’s fact based, even if it’s hard because things are hard and there’s a lot of dark stuff going on? Do you see a shift in the way people are consuming media and maybe realizing that it’s time to start participating a little bit more and being more educated?

Joy Reid: A thousand percent. Look, one of the worst things that ever happened to the media is that it was brought inside the White House. So that was McKinley, Donald Trump’s favorite president. And then, of course, Teddy Roosevelt made it worse. And as time went on, the proximity just got worse and worse and worse, the sort of celebritification of the presidency since Kennedy, since he was so telegenic. It just gets worse. Then Reagan is an actual actor.

And I think what we’re realizing is that, at the end of the day, the issue is capitalism. The media is a capitalist enterprise. It’s not a not for profit. That’s why NPR, if you listen to that in the morning, you’re getting a lot more truth. And sometimes it’s shockingly true, at least before they try to destroy it, because it’s not capitalistic. And capitalism is what the media is really there to defend.

And during World War II, it was just straight propaganda. They just told you, this is what they said:

Here’s the good guys, here’s the bad, you just have to do it.

But we’re fighting Nazis. So it’s like:

Okay, I can accept a little propaganda if we’re fighting the literal Nazis.

But if we come forward to today, look at how the media sanitized the Korean War. Most people don’t even know what happened in the Korean War other than MASH. MASH is the most accurate depiction of the Korean War. Otherwise, people didn’t even know that war happened.

Then you’ve got the Vietnam War where the media was actively lying to people, just actively lying, until you got that moment when Walter Cronkite pierced through the veil of the lies and did something unprecedented. He actually said:

Oh, this war is lost.

And it was like a shock. This was the most objective, most trusted voice in America who said:

You are being lied to about this war. I went. I’m telling you, it’s nonsense.

And that just snapped people out of this kind of veil of thinking the people who were protesting the war are hippies and they’re bad guys and they’re the villain. And all of a sudden it’s like, wait, wait, wait, we are the villain.

And people have been talking about James Baldwin in your chat. Yeah, James Baldwin would go on and just tell the whole truth on talk shows, and people would be shocked and think:

Well, he must be crazy.

But no, he was just telling you the truth. And so you had that moment. We now have a curated media where people are like:

I don’t want to hear the truth. I want to pretend that the Vietnam War was actually lost because of the hippies.

Well, you just watch Fox and they’ll just give you the truth that says:

Brown people bad, brown people bad, immigrants bad, immigrants bad.

And then if you watch MSNBC, you get:

Trump bad, Trump bad, Trump bad, Trump bad.

If you watch CNN, you get this weird mix of:

I’m fake independent because I put a crazy right winger on a panel with Charles Blow and pretend that they’re equals and they’re not, but we just pretend they are and let them fight it out.

And so we’re getting a media that actually isn’t real, isn’t telling us the truth. But the thing you said about the jobs numbers, that’s where the problem comes in. I’m old enough to remember when George W. Bush was in the 40s in his approval rating, but I was being told by the media:

He’s a very popular president, very popular president, very popular president.

When Barack Obama dropped into the 40s, he was the most unpopular president ever. He was being beaten up. He passes Obamacare. The media says the first day the website didn’t work, Obamacare is a failure. They hammered Barack Obama as if he committed a crime because the website didn’t work.

But then if Donald Trump is completely incompetent at being president, everything he does, he’s a normal president. They normalize him. They don’t want to give you the real bad news about him. Joe Biden, you would’ve thought that he was literally wandering around the White House drooling the way that he was covered by the mainstream media.

We have to constantly question his age. We have to constantly question his competency. He’s the same age as Donald Trump. They’re literally a couple of years different. They’re the same age basically, but he was literally hammered anytime he showed a weakness, physical weakness, cognitive weakness. We’ve got to cover this every day because we’ve got to be fair. I think what’s happened to the media is that they are so shaken by the existence of Fox and by the sense that now we’re getting from the people who own CBS.

Did you see that op ed by the baby Ellison nepo kid saying:

Oh my God, it’s just that media is not trusted.

Media’s not trusted by right wingers because they don’t want to hear the truth about capitalism. They don’t want to hear the truth that capitalism is failing people, that people are poor because of capitalism. And since the media are all capitalistic enterprises, it’s much better for them to just say, it’s not capitalism that’s the problem. It’s these communists who want to give you communistic healthcare.

As long as you stick with capitalism, it’s going to be fine. It’s going to be fair. It’s going to be good. And that the real problem is that the media is mean to conservatives. The media is cruel to segregationists. That was the line in the 60s. They’re just biased against white people because they keep talking about Black people needing civil rights.

And so because we’re so in our own bubbles, the right just says, it’s not that I have to reexamine capitalism or reexamine me. I just need to find media that will tell me the truth. And so this jobs report is going to be fed by CNBC as disappointing, but not catastrophic. We’re near a recession, but no one wants to tell you that because you might start questioning capitalism.

So yeah, I’m realizing that I’ve been in the media that’s been the problem because they aren’t objective. There’s no such thing as the liberal media. The media is terrified of the right. They want to be liked by conservatives, and most of them are Republicans. Let’s just be clear. Most of the bosses are Republicans.

We do not have a liberal media. We have liberal individual journalists who all operate in a very conservative media environment. Fox is almost median when it comes to the ideology of the people who run all the media companies, not just Jeff Bezos and the Ellisons.

Mary Trump: Yeah. And I don’t even know if it’s ideological. They just are a bunch of oligarchs and they want to control everything because they think they’re better than everybody else.

Now, I know this is a much broader conversation for another time, and I could talk to you forever, but just quickly, what do you see the role of, because I believe independent media is the future, no doubt about it. Do you think that independent media can really make a difference leading up to this election? Because this should, by all rights, be a wave election.

And the truth of the matter is, as you say, there’s no liberal bias. The facts have a liberal bias, apparently, but there is no liberal bias in the media. I think that media should be neutral as to the facts and pro democracy. Most of our media is not, but the independent media that are growing, independent journalists like you, are really creating the culture in which that kind of reporting can thrive.

So again, do you see independent media as playing a larger role in this upcoming election and beyond? And again, big conversation for another time. I just want to get your sense of how you’re feeling about it right now.

Joy Reid: Oh no, absolutely. We are the pamphleteers in the 18th century. We’re the Ida B. Wellses of the late 19th and early 20th century. The independent media folks are the people that are standing outside the bubble screaming:

It’s a bubble.

And I think that we’re helping. If you look at the elections in DC where a Democratic socialist won, no media coverage there. The mainstream media ignored even the idea that a Democratic socialist, a Black Democratic socialist, could become the mayor of DC. You didn’t get that in mainstream media, but she didn’t need them. She didn’t go through CNN or CBS or NBC. She just went right to the people because she can bypass all of that and get to the people.

If you look at Abdul El Sayed, all of the mainstream kind of dialectic, all the mainstream dialogue, I should say, would’ve told you that he would’ve lost. He’s a Muslim. People love to give his full long name, Dr. Abdul El Sayed, but his middle name is, I guess, even more Muslim sounding and they’re scary.

He was facing $60 million in combined spending from the biggest PACs, including AIPAC. The mainstream media would’ve told you Barack Obama couldn’t win, but they can win. Anyone can win if people vote for them.

And I think what we’re finding with Mamdani, I think what we’re finding with Abdul El Sayed, I think what we’re finding with the young lady who just got the congressional race in Colorado, this is a new world, and I think the mainstream media even doesn’t know how to analyze it. They don’t know how to deal with it, but it’s coming because, as you know, if you read history, fascism almost always breeds a rise in socialism or social democracy. What follows fascist regimes are usually regimes that are more socialist or social democrat.

That’s what happened. And we’re in fascism, so I’m sorry, mainstream media, you’re going to have to get used to it. We’re about to get us some social democracy. It’s coming.

Mary Trump: Joy, you just made me feel good for the first time in a while, so thank you for that. Oh my goodness. Everybody follow Joy everywhere. She is a force, and I am so grateful to know you. Thank you so much for hanging out. Keep doing what you’re doing, and if there’s anything I can do to help, let me know.

Joy Reid: Definitely keep your phone available. Don’t block my phone because I definitely think we’ve got to do this together. The only way through is together. The bigger our team is, the more unbeatable we are.

And I appreciate your voice. I’ve said this to you before. I think you are so brave because I’m just speaking about these things. You have to speak about your own family member, and that’s very brave and very open of you, and I’ve always appreciated it. So thank you, and thank you for having me on your platform.

Mary Trump: You are so kind. Thank you, everybody, for joining us. The phenomenal, phenomenal, awesome, fantastic Joy Reid. Bye, everybody.

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