Don't Stop Asking

The collapse of mainstream media's business model is a tragedy. The wide-open space to keep pushing for answers is not. How do we combine the best of old and new?

I was sitting with a couple of non-news people this week at dinner, and we were discussing what the rest of the White House correspondents should have done once the Associated Press was ejected from the press room for refusing to abide by the Trump administration’s capricious renaming of international bodies of water.

We floated the idea that everyone in that room should have staged a general protest by walking out themselves, but of course it’s clear that replacing the entire press corps with its own gallery of friendly podcasters and cable correspondents is just what the Trump administration is after. One of us suggested that each day thereafter the various news organizations should swap in younger and younger representatives, until the room is a sea of child reporters. Upsides and downsides to that one: I love the optics. I need experienced journalists in the chairs right now. But we all agreed that at the very least, under any administration, when the communications person at the lectern dodges or deflects and then calls on a different reporter to get away from a difficult line of questioning, that next reporter should pick up right where the last one left off.

I pointed out that it’s somehow in the training of British journalists to keep coldly pressing on a line of questioning no matter how much of the interview it winds up occupying, and their ability to both keep their cool and circle back, along with the research they and their producers do in advance, is unmatched in the English-speaking world. They just don’t stop asking.

American pundits are regularly smashed on these rocks. Mehdi Hasan, before he founded Zeteo and before we were colleagues at NBC News, was famous for disassembling his guests on Al Jazeera’s Head to Head, where among many other scoops he caught Blackwater founder Erik Prince in a lie, and got secret information about Iran and Trump out of him, all on camera. Conservative commentator Ben Shapiro’s disastrous interview with the BBC’s Andrew Neil is also a classic of this mortifying genre.

The newest entrant worthy of our praise is Sky News’s Martha Kelner, who, in asking Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene whether Defense Secretary and Signal mis-user Pete Hegseth should resign for discussing secret military plans on a commercial messaging app and inadvertently disclosing them to a journalist (whew!), was suddenly in this conversation:

Martha Kellner, center, interviewing Marjorie Taylor Greene. (Sky News)

Marjorie Taylor Greene: Wait, what country are you from from?

Martha Kelner: The UK.

MTG: Okay we don't give a crap about your opinion and your reporting why don't you go back to your country where you have a major migrant problem.

MK: Do-

MTG: No no no no no you should care about your own borders.

MK: Do you care about American lives being put at risk?

MTG: Let me tell you something do you care about people from your country what about all the women that are raped by migrant-

MK: Do you care about-

MTG: -no do you care.

MK: Okay, do you do you care about American lives being put at risk about service members fighting for your country and your vice president and your defense secretary

MTG: Yeah this is an American journalist.

AMERICAN REPORTER: Thank you, yeah I'm an American, and I'd like to hear your answer to what she's asking

MTG: I'm not answering her question because I don't care about her network if you would like to ask I can answer.

AMERICAN REPORTER: Do you have any concerns whatsoever about the complete disregard of operational security from the top level of this Administration?

MTG: You want to know about complete disregard about oper- operational security you should talk about the Biden Administration and how they ripped our borders open to terrorists cartel child sex trafficking human trafficking and drug trafficking across our borders for four years. The Trump Administration is doing a great job and I stand by their statements. I stand by their statements. My comment to you is I'm thankful to president Trump that he is leading us out of wars that he's ending the war in Ukraine where American lives could have been killed. If Joe Biden was still president today, whether he liked it or not we're talking about NPR and PBS. Today we're talking about fake news that was funded with Federal funding from American taxpayers. That's what this is about today. Not journalists from the UK.

[Marjorie Taylor Greene begins walking away. Martha Kelner follows.]

MK: Does Defense Secretary Hegseth need to resign over this, representative?

MTG: Absolutely not he's doing a great job. He's doing a great job.

MK: But he was putting American Service members lives —

MTG: Your country is going to put your military lives fighting a war in Ukraine. That's not even a member of NATO.

MK: Is this an exercise in deflection?

MTG: This should be an exercise in you worrying about your own country.

If you haven’t listened to my conversation with Jennifer Freyd on The Rip Current Podcast, now would be the time, because the accusation-deflecting tactic Freyd identified and named more than 30 years ago (DARVO, or Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender) is on full display here, as it is each day across the White House and both houses of congress.

Now, hats off to the American who followed up with Kellner’s same question. But more importantly congratulations to Martha Kellner. She kept her cool, and didn’t stop asking, even after Taylor Greene physically departed the interview.

What are the various ingredients that make a strong journalistic moment like this possible? And can they survive the new era of media in which everyone gets to play journalist, but only a very few get paid to actually be one?

First is Taylor Greene’s need to keep appearing on camera. Everyone’s motivation for wanting publicity is different, but hers involves a seemingly unsatisfiable need to score points dueling with reporters and political adversaries over everything and anything. And in Washington, an elaborate accreditation process is necessary to gain access to the halls of power. That makes mainstream media her best chance of getting the publicity she wants.

This is no longer true for people in private life, like CEOs and celebrities. Those folks no longer have to work through accredited journalists to get their messages across. Instead, they and their publicity teams can choose their venue and their interviewers. This is how it is that Mark Zuckerberg’s most public appearance last year was on the very friendly Acquired podcast, smashing softball questions. (Although the easy vibes drew him out in new ways, I’ll admit.) This means we can’t be assured that even the heads of companies that affect if not outright control your daily life will ever face public scrutiny like Taylor Greene did last week.

Another ingredient is the pressure to stay on top of an interview subject, as Kellner stayed on top of Taylor Greene. As discussed, in mainstream American media it’s much rarer than it is in the UK to see an interviewer truly stick with a line of questioning, and interview subjects have learned to fill time in a live interview, dancing and deflecting until the American journalist runs out of airspace and has to let the subject off the hook to get to the commercial break.

This, of course, is solved by the endless time available to podcasters, streamers, and other news influencers. I just spent nearly three hours on This Week in Tech, Leo Laporte’s nearly 20 year-old tech podcast, an amount of time in which anyone can get to the bottom of anything without worrying about crashing through the back of the A block and getting the network in trouble. The difficulty is, no one of influence is going to go onto a hostile three-hour podcast when they can just relax on Rogan. (Although, having been on Rogan, I can tell you he’s not as relaxing as I’d have assumed.)

I’m working on a set of new technology tools for journalists that I hope can create some balance in this new, unbalanced world. I’ll be discussing them further here, and I’m eager for your ideas and feedback. But in the meantime I’m really torn about where we’re at.

I want Martha Kellner’s tenacity. I want her to have endless time to interrogate public figures. But I don’t know how to engineer it such that public figures have no choice but to face Kellner in the format of her choosing. Unfortunately we’re slipping toward a place where the market value of objective journalism has fallen so far that Kellner’s style and strength of questioning isn’t the norm any longer, even though we’re deep in a moment where we need her, and the few remaining journalists like her, to not stop asking.