The New Rules of The Interview
+ How TMTG's cash pile is generating more money than the company's sales
“For my part, as I went away, I reasoned with regard to myself: ‘I am wiser than this human being. For probably neither of us knows anything noble and good but he supposes he knows something when he does not know, while I, just as I do not know, do not even suppose that I do. I am likely to be a little bit wiser than he in this very thing: that whatever I do not know, I do not even suppose I know”.’ – Plato’s The Apology of Socrates.
Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition! Well, at least not online. Here on the internet interviews are two-sided, often long-winded and sometimes sycophantic.
The whole attraction of the long-form podcast is that there’s a discussion where neither party can claim to be a supreme authority on, well, just about everything.
Eventually – one-hour, two-hours, three-hours – everyone runs out of road. And even if you are able to hold your shtick together, try doing that over multiple interviews. Clever riffs turn into boring slogans, original thinking descends into parroting ‘truths’.
Viewers want authenticity. Sometimes that means an interviewee saying ‘I don’t know’ to an answer. Broadcast journalists are finding this situation difficult — the new media interview format means that they must show their own attrition and authenticity to the audience.
They can no longer simply appeal to their own authority as interrogator-in-chief (link). Something big has happened: The Fourth Wall of Journalism has been broken. The consumers know you don’t know everything, they’re sick of soundbites and one-sided interviews.
But why have interview dynamics changed now? Because criticism is baked into the internet and platforms like YouTube, with its feisty comment section, amplify this phenomenon.
But despite the shattering of the Fourth Wall and the end of ‘universal truth’ broadcasting (link), the news media old guard still can’t shake their past habits.
They may have migrated to the video platforms, but Fourth Wallism has followed them. They still want to be the know-it-all authority, and they’re willing to jeopardise their own success by pursuing intellectual dishonesty.
To give you a recent example of this stubborn trait in action, a prominent British journalist, who shall remain nameless, took to her podcast to criticise a politician who had dared to question a colleague’s line of questioning during a long-form interview.
The politician would have to ‘knock that off’ if they were going to get on with the media, the gist of the journalist’s argument went. This bad-form move also apparently looked unacceptable to prospective voters.
The former statement may be true, but the latter is definitely contestable. Consumers are wary of the Fox News-isation of the media, where journalists try to pass biases off as ‘analysis’.
This is partly why trust in the media is so low (Reuters), while trust in social media is growing (PewResearch). Another factor is the rise of clickbait journalism, a phenomenon that Nick Davies’ Flat Earth News warned about 17 years ago.
In short, Davies showed that media outlets were over-reliant on agency copy and would often aggregate narratives and stories amongst themselves. Original journalism – and thinking – was increasingly a rarity.
Today, some of those ‘news media’ outlets are really content creators/farms, while AI-generated media is taking over the internet (link):
A large-scale study of machine-generated articles has found that misinformation farms have increased their production rates by almost 350% between the start of 2022 into the first quarter of 2023.
To add to the issue, there’s also a misalignment between voter and media concerns. News editors and correspondents can easily shoot-down a potential story as ‘not news’ because it doesn’t fit their world view.
The problem is that their ‘news sense’ increasingly comes from an upper-middle-class background (Sutton Trust,
on media nepo babies) that is situated in hyper-urban bubbles (London, New York, Berlin, Paris and so on).“In journalism, about half (51%) of the country’s leading journalists were educated privately, less than one in five (19%) went to comprehensives. Over half (54%) went to Oxbridge.” – The Sutton Trust.
Mix these socio-economic factors with an editorial propensity to over-index ‘horse-race journalism’ (link), and you find the media missing the big three issues of the Western world: the economy, healthcare and immigration (Gallup, Ipsos, Focaldata).
It’s partly why otherwise serious journalists were surprised by the rise of Trump (jobs, jobs, jobs), why the issue of social mobility is often overlooked in ‘DEI’ stories and how migration journalism has been presented through the lens of upper-middle class urbanites.
These deficits run through the whole of the news media industry, and not just broadcast journalism. But the public can increasingly see the misalignment live and in colour because of the digital platforms.
You just can’t get away with blagging and blustering it anymore. A point in case would be the Rest is Politics’ Rory Stewart. An Eton educated former MP turned commentator, Stewart loudly predicted (link) that the Democrats and Kamala Harris would win the White House.
When the results came in, with Trump winning the White House, House and Senate, Stewart incredulously claimed that he was wrong because he held a morally superior view:
“I think I was wrong because I’m an optimist and I hate the idea of being right pessimistically. I think you can be a false prophet and right,” he said.
Though he was mocked and derided over his comments, Stewart was just saying out loud what some bad faith journalists and interviewers actually think.
That behaviour is increasingly going to be called out. The internet is watching, the rules have changed.
AI and Marketing
One of the ‘easy wins’ of LLMs is their content creation abilities. It’s already transforming social media platforms and I’ve even spotted an MP or two using AI image generators.
The professional services and creative industries are also adopting these tools to improve business efficiencies and, ultimately, to deliver better results for consumers and clients.
A good example would be The Brutalist, which used touches of generative AI to create unique yet realistic looking architectural designs.
Meanwhile, a new paper from researchers at Columbia University (link) looks at how marketing slogans are created by LLMs and what unfair biases they produce.
“Women, younger individuals, low-income earners, and those with lower education levels receive more distinct messaging compared to older, higher-income, and highly educated individuals,” the study found.
DODEGY
$16 billion was the big-ticket figure the US’ new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) touted when it laid bare the amount of savings it had initially made for American taxpayers.
The list of cost-costing measures was mostly made up of now scrapped government contracts, the largest being a $8 billion contract for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.
But after further investigation, it actually turns out DOGE was wrong. The axed immigration contract was actually worth $8 million (link). Are DOGE’s AI scrapping tools ‘hallucinating’?
If that’s not embarrassing enough, the revelation comes a week after the DOGE website was hacked. Here’s what Wired had to say on the matter (link):
Two web developers, working independently, found that it is possible to push updates to the DOGE.gov domain, which claims to be an official US government website. The website uses a database that can be edited by anyone online, the experts told 404Media.
To demonstrate the insecurity, they left a couple of messages on the DOGE site: “This is a joke of a .gov site,” one read, while the other says: “THESE ‘EXPERTS’ LEFT THEIR DATABASE OPEN.”
He who dares, DOGES.
Trump Media vs. Brazilian Judge
TMTG has partnered with Rumble, the right-leaning video streaming service and internet infrastructure business, in a law suit against one of Brazil’s Supreme Court Justices (link).
They claim Justice Alexandre de Moraes is forcing Rumble to censor accounts belonging to US-based Brazilian users. The lawsuit is filed at the U.S. federal court in Tampa, Florida.
The news comes less than a week after TMTG announced its Full-Year Results for 2024. The company said its net losses had widened from around $58 million in 2023 to $400 million in 2024 (link), with revenues of $3.6 million for the year.
But given the company now has a massive cash pile, which now sits at more than $776 million, it now receives more money through interest ($11.6 million) than through sales.
The TMTG update page is here (link).
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