This is a lightly edited transcript of the June 9 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.
Perry Bacon: I’m Perry Bacon, the host of Right Now on The New Republic. Great guest today. Kathy Roberts Ford is a professor of journalism at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and she’s been a frequent guest. We’re going to talk about some of the questions about—she writes about journalism and its connection to democracy, and we’re going to talk about that and a few things that happened in the news the last few weeks. Kathy, welcome. Thanks for joining me again.
Kathy Roberts Ford: Oh, so great to be here, Perry. Appreciate it.
Bacon: So I want us to talk first about the 60 Minutes story, which has become personalized in a certain way—it’s Bari Weiss versus Scott Pelley, and those are important people in the journalism world. But what I want to ask you is: what should we think of 60 Minutes, this venerated news program, having its top producers and three correspondents leave in the same week, a new person put in charge who doesn’t seem to know much about television news?
How should we think about that in the democracy context, as opposed to the Bari Weiss versus Scott Pelley framing?
Roberts Ford: Yeah, I really like the way you’re framing that, Perry. I think it’s really easy for those of us observing to fall into the personnel drama—
And not just Scott Pelley, but all of the employees and producers and folks at 60 Minutes. It’s really personal, and it’s incredibly hard, and there is all that drama and deep personal experience. But at the end of the day, what matters most here is that CBS News and 60 Minutes are being recruited into the federal administration’s authoritarian project. And that’s really a huge problem for the news today and the press writ large.
60 Minutes has incredible symbolic value among journalists in this country and among the older generation of news consumers, because it has such a very old lineage and an incredible reputation for doing really hard-hitting, elite public affairs journalism with a focus on politics—and not just politics, but a strong focus on and access to some of the most powerful political operators and players and leaders in the country’s history.
So when you have these mergers and the ownership being used by the federal administration as a way to control CBS News and 60 Minutes—with Bari Weiss installed there, and the new executive producer, I’ve forgotten his name—
Bacon: Nick Gilson.
Roberts Ford: Yeah, that’s it. This is a recruitment and an attempt to capture independent, hard-hitting, truth-telling journalism that holds power to account—for the service of what I view, and maybe many of your audience does too, as an authoritarian project.
Bacon: Let me—you said CBS is being used in service of the authoritarian project. Connect the dots here a little bit. Donald Trump is not calling CBS and saying, Air this and not this. And if you listen to Scott Pelley, what he seemed to be saying was that Bari Weiss interjects to make programming a little bit more pro-Trump than it would otherwise be. So talk about how exactly Trump connects to what CBS does each day.
Roberts Ford: Yeah. I think certainly in the 60 Minutes context, what we’re understanding—or at least what we think we know from the witnesses and those who are in the middle of it, reporting it out—and I think the most recent revelations in the New York Times daily podcast interview with Scott Pelley—by his account, what we have learned or think we know is that Bari Weiss was asking 60 Minutes to change its coverage of the ICE raid in Minneapolis.
And that in fact Bari Weiss asked 60 Minutes to make the protesters look more violent—make the point that Renee Good’s car was driving directly at the ICE officer, which, based on the evidence that many of us have seen, does not seem to be accurate. So there was an attempt to match the narrative coming out of the federal administration—that the Minnesota protesters, and Renee Good and Alex Pretti, were in fact being terrorists, in their words.
Bacon: Yes.
Roberts Ford: That may not have been Bari Weiss’s point—the terrorist thing, exactly—but there did seem to be, according to Scott Pelley, an effort to change the narrative and shape it so it fit the Trump administration’s narrative more closely.
Bacon: You said 60 Minutes has a lot of respect among the older audience particularly. I think that’s correct. So talk about network news in this era, because I think one thing I do want to emphasize is: why is network news important?
My guess is a lot of people, particularly under 40, do not consume 60 Minutes this week, any of the Sunday shows, any of that stuff. Does that stuff—do we in the media think—are we in the media and people who are over 40 thinking about 60 Minutes too much, one? And do these shows still matter at all, two?
Roberts Ford: Number one, they’re incredibly symbolic to the older generation, and they matter in the political sphere.
Because no matter what the reality is about viewership, it does matter to politicos and policy circles—being on these shows and having public discourse happen through the mediation of broadcast news, and in particular 60 Minutes, and cable news, of course. I do think also that our information ecosystem—it may not be that we have viewers tuning in to 60 Minutes, but we do have clips that are circulating broadly all over social media.
And it may be that the outrage algorithms feed them into certain audiences’ feeds more readily, but this is still a really powerful way in which these broadcast news programs get circulated. They still have—I think—and we don’t have a really great way of measuring yet how they circulate—
Bacon: They have impact. They set the agenda. The pure ratings are not a good way to think about these shows.
Roberts Ford: I agree.
Bacon: Let me ask—I wrote last week after this happened that she’s very wisely trying to turn CBS into a polite version of Fox News. And then I read another piece saying what the real goal is to make it anodyne—the political pieces less hard-hitting—turn 60 Minutes into CBS This Morning, which is a very good program but is not as hard-hitting and not as investigative.
So what is your sense of what she’s trying to do with CBS? Do you have any assessment of that? Because I think Fox News, but lighter—there are elements of that, but that’s probably not exactly right.
Roberts Ford: I am really not sure. I think it’s still too early to tell. I think the fact that you’re having this framing disagreement with someone else who’s a really close watcher of the news is indicative that we’re not quite sure exactly what’s playing out and how, and what the outcomes are going to be. But the stakes are high—I think we know that much.
And when you have the independence of news organizations and a program and journalists like 60 Minutes being dismantled in this way, it’s not a good sign and is in fact something that we should be concerned with.
I’m very interested in—I think we in America, as news consumers, do not have a very good understanding of the U.S. experience with authoritarianism in this country. We have long experience with it. It just wasn’t at the federal level—it was at the state level. And this is what happened across the U.S. Southern states after Reconstruction.
You had overthrows of legitimate, elected state governments. You had violent overthrows in many states by the party of white supremacists—Democrats, et cetera. But what you got at the end of the day was racial authoritarianism and these Jim Crow orders, one-party rule. You had authoritarian governance at the state level.
And the press—the white Southern newspapers that were aligned with the Democratic project—they were part of building that. They were active political players.
Bacon: Some of these same states from before, in some ways. Yes.
Roberts Ford: Yeah. And when we think about the authoritarian project today happening at the federal level and some states, we have to understand: the press is not simply a referee. The press is not a neutral bystander. The press is not simply a chronicler. It’s not just calling balls and strikes. It is a political player.
Even those press institutions that don’t want to be connected to a project of any kind—either a MAGA project or a pro-democracy project—they want to somehow stand apart from it. But none do, at the end of the day. The press has First Amendment protections so it can be that fourth estate—it can play its role in public discourse and in public life.
And so it’s a dream—it’s an absolute fantasy to imagine that the press isn’t itself a political player. It’s something we need to account for and think really carefully about: in what ways can certain norms and professional standards of the press be inadvertently not up to the charge of the moment? Which is what I think the press should be doing—a kind of pro-democracy journalism. What that means is incredibly contested. We haven’t quite figured it out yet.
Bacon: We’ll get back to that.
Roberts Ford: You do it well. Other institutions do it well. But a lot don’t.
Bacon: So the Southern analogy—the post-Reconstruction analogy—is interesting: the Southern newspapers participated in the political project of white supremacy. They were not—the owners of those papers were not necessarily picked by the government, right? How were they—how did the owners—what was the line between the governors in the Southern states and the politicians and the newspapers? Were they formally aligned, informally aligned, not at all aligned? Did they have the same goals, or were they working in concert? How did that work?
Roberts Ford: Yeah. In many cases, they might have had a formal alliance with the Democratic Party—
Bacon: The Democratic Party in the South, just to be clear.
Roberts Ford: Yeah, the Democratic Party in the South during this period—
Bacon: The early period, like 19th century—the racist party.
Roberts Ford: Not today’s Democratic Party at all, to be clear to everyone. But it was largely just coalitional. These were collaborative projects in which politicians—governors, state legislatures, representatives and senators to the U.S. Congress—worked with business leaders. And, by the way, newspaper editors and their owners were business leaders.
They worked collaboratively together on a single political project. Not that their interests were always closely aligned, but they were broadly aligned. And they worked really proactively together on all kinds of projects that built authoritarian rule in the South and that excluded a huge portion of the population—Black Americans.
Bacon: You were referring to the media wanting to be neutral, and it made me think of that Jay Rosen phrase, “the view from nowhere.” A lot of news outlets want to say, We don’t have an ideology. We just cover the news. “All the news that’s fit to print” is a version of that—that’s the New York Times slogan. And I guess the point you’re making is: covering the news is inherently a political act.
How you cover it is a political act. And the question is, are you going to be MAGA, pro-democracy, something else? Your point is that news organizations in some ways have to think about their own values and what values they’re espousing—not necessarily partisan values, but democratic values.
Roberts Ford: Yeah, democratic values. I don’t think—there’s room enough in this world of news, the news ecosystem in the United States, to have some partisan news organizations. But when that partisanship leads to disinformation, spreading disinformation; when it leads to ginning up violence, political violence of some kind, or giving a permission structure for political violence; when it leads to any of the things that we understand to be—
Bacon: Democracy-eroding or—
Roberts Ford: Yeah. Trying to undermine democracy. Trying to dominate certain groups within the United States’ political body or the public. When it’s actively doing things that are harmful to the public good and to the creed of the Declaration of Independence, or when they’re against the rule of law—all these things tear us apart, and neutrality doesn’t serve us.
And a both-sidesism kind of journalism—journalism that has a pretense toward being objective and detached and removed and calling balls and strikes—we need a journalism that is covering the power structure and covering what actors are actually doing and what they get out of a conflict.
Bacon: And again, I think people always think that means partisan, but in reality, in most small cities, there are a few business owners who have a lot of control. It doesn’t matter what party they’re in—there’s often a power structure in cities or states, and that’s what we want the journalists to be policing. And you would say they should police the Democratic versions of that, capital D, and the Republican versions of that too. Journalism should be scrutinizing the powerful—all powerful people, right?
Roberts Ford: Yes, all powerful people. And this is also part of the problem with the journalism that we live with today—so much of it is corporatized. Especially broadcast and cable news—it’s owned by major corporations that have other [interests]: tech companies, digital platform companies, entertainment companies. And the news itself is not a big moneymaker.
So what this means is the ownership—these big conglomerates that own these news companies—they have other interests that they’re trying to protect in a federal environment, a regulatory environment, against litigation. And some organizations are beholden to shareholders too.
This allows the powerful to exercise levers of control and recruitment in order to shape what the news actually covers, instead of there being true independence in a journalistic outlet. And this is why having truly independent journalistic outlets really matters—and we don’t have a lot of them.
Bacon: What’s worse is the people who own CBS—one of the Ellison family—one of the people involved in the Ellison family was a big donor to Biden in 2024. So part of what’s going on is it’s not clear that they’re arch-conservatives so much as they are people who know the government in charge has power, and they’re trying to make the news coverage more favorable to the government in power because of the corporate financial interests.
I think what you’re getting at is the financial interests are driving this as much as the ideological. Those are related, but the financial interests are driving a lot of what’s happening here. The media companies that are so big and want to make themselves bigger—skewing the coverage for Trump may help them get mergers, which is where the real money comes from.
Roberts Ford: That’s exactly it. And right now, two of the biggest dust-ups we’ve seen with CBS News have to do with mergers from their parent company. You had the Skydance merger with Paramount back last summer, and Trump was suing CBS at the time for however many millions—I can’t remember how much—over Kamala Harris’s edited interview, which he was calling election interference. And Paramount just wanted that to go away. And so there was a settlement.
Bacon: And the journalists were not happy about that, but as you say, the journalists have a very small financial piece of the company, and they’re not a profit center.
Roberts Ford: That’s right. Not a profit center.
Bacon: They’re often a profit loss, even. Yes.
Roberts Ford: Exactly right. The news oftentimes is getting subsidized by the highly profitable other arms of these conglomerates.
I think the lesson for us all is that we need very different ways to finance news in this country. News is a public good—it’s meant to serve the public good, meant to serve democracy and the people at large, hold power to account, cover governments, and help us do the work of being democratic citizens.
And preferably help us be democratic citizens in a multiracial democracy, where everyone has equal access to protection of the law and equal access to voting and political power and economic opportunity—all of that. And yet that’s not what we’re often getting.
Bacon: I want to switch topics a little bit. There was an interview that NBC News’s Kristen Welker, the host of Meet the Press, did with the president. And it went viral because the president stormed off the interview—which actually lasted a long time if you watched it, about half an hour before he leaves. But anyway, he said two things. One, he said, “Meet the Press is crooked. So is ABC, CBS, and CNN.” So CBS apparently has not sucked up enough, it seems. And then he says at the end, “A country can never be great with a dishonest press.”
What do you think about the president of really any country calling the leading four networks crooked and saying the press is dishonest? How should we think about that—really the president of any country, on some level?
Roberts Ford: Yeah. We’ve seen this in other countries that have been in the ascendancy in terms of authoritarian power—attacking the press, attacking universities, attacking the judiciary, attacking law firms, attacking all the institutions of accountability and truth-telling and knowledge production, institutions that traffic in some form of fact-based reality and reason-making and decision-making and collective work together based on those values. To have the leader of a country attacking those very institutions is a classic authoritarian move. It’s part of a very classic authoritarian playbook, and it’s dangerous territory.
We’ve been here for quite a while. We’ve been here since Trump 1.0, and here we are again, Trump 2.0, with these attacks on the press that have only, it seems to me, accelerated. And this administration has been able, even more recently, to recruit or gain some type of leverage over different news institutions.
Thank goodness there are still plenty it hasn’t. We have a robust, critical, independent press in this country still. But these are long-standing, highly respected news organizations that are being attacked in these ways—and individual journalists, too, especially women and especially Black women, which we all have watched with deep consternation and outrage.
Bacon: Connect the—you said earlier the media reaction to these kind of comments has generally been to say, We are neutral, we are not biased. And to play into the thing you were talking about earlier: the media’s reaction to him calling us biased is to emphasize we have a view from nowhere, we are not biased. What would be an alternative reaction from the press when it’s attacked?
Roberts Ford: Yeah. How do we think about what the press can do better?
Bacon: I don’t know if it’s a matter of coverage as much as the rhetorical argument. He’s saying, You are biased. Their reaction is to say, We have no views, we are objective. And you’re saying that’s not going to be that helpful. What is maybe an alternative response to that?
Roberts Ford: One thing Kristen Welker did was she fact-checked him in real time—and then her network came up behind her and also provided a contextual fact-check after the interview.
Bacon: And that’s not enough, though. The thing is, he said something like, Kristen, you’re a liberal crazy, and she said, No, I’m not. What should she have said? Not I am a Democrat, not I am a Black woman. What would a useful response be—”My role here is not to be partisan, my role is...” what? Because I don’t think she had a good active response to that.
Roberts Ford: What do you think she should have said, Perry? I think that’s a really hard thing.
Bacon: I’m not criticizing her at all. I’m just trying to think about the—
Roberts Ford: No, I know you’re not. I think I don’t know what she could have said other than, I am simply attempting to cover the factual record and the shared reality, and provide the American people with— But all of that takes so much to say. And the ad hominem isn’t going to be really effective here, obviously—No, you.
I guess—forget about the live thing. I think there’s something to say, which is: “You’re saying we are biased toward Democrats, but we are not biased toward parties
Bacon: We are biased toward facts, democracy, holding the powerful accountable. We do have values, and those values often mean we’re going to criticize you. But we also asked Joe Biden hard questions, and we criticized him a lot, too.
Roberts Ford: That would be a great response if you could get all those words into a conversation with Trump. He was just speaking over her, as he always does.
Bacon: But when news executives are asked in forums where it’s not people like Donald Trump, they often still lean into this sort of “We have no views, we are...” And even in slow-motion forums, they reflexively go into this neutrality language that I think is damaging.
Roberts Ford: They do, and it doesn’t work.
Bacon: It doesn’t work. It is not appealing to anybody.
Roberts Ford: It’s not. And it’s not accurate, is it?
Bacon: It’s not accurate. It might be—there are some places that want to just publish the facts. I think that’s probably true. Some AP stories are just recitations of what is happening. And I think that’s what the push is for—you cover a speech, Barack Obama said X, Mitt Romney said Z. But I think that’s not really journalism. That might be news in a sense, but that’s not really journalism.
Roberts Ford: It’s news of a certain kind, and of an older period, it seems to me. “He said, she said”—politician X said this and politician Y said this, and they’re on two different sides, and we need to cover this conflict between the two of them. But oftentimes what’s more important is the stakes of the conflict, not the conflict itself—and weighing the evidentiary basis of the two different arguments in that conflict.
And I do think that this kind of journalism that tends toward the profoundly neutral and detached often misses the importance of the stakes and the importance of naming the structures. What is really going on here in this disagreement? And that requires a kind of interpretation that sometimes takes reporters outside their comfort zone. But I do think that what is necessary in a moment of authoritarian threat is exactly that.
Bacon: In the period you write a lot about—the Reconstruction, post-Reconstruction period, the Jim Crow period—there are Black newspapers and Black editors who are obviously writing in contradiction to what the Southern government was saying. There’s also, at some point, the New York Times and the big institutions start covering the civil rights fight, and probably with certain values—they are saying, in some ways, that the South is being racist and dictatorial. So there have been periods in which the media has expressed some values, right?
Roberts Ford: Yeah, of course.
Bacon: And so we want to get back to that—is that the idea?
Roberts Ford: Yes. And during the late 19th century and across the 20th century, up through the moment of the civil rights movement, you had a very active Black press that was doing pro-democracy work. The Black press was very clear on documenting the facts—everything that happened, events, issues, et cetera. But its framework was also—
Bacon: Jim Crow’s bad, slavery is bad. Lynchings are bad.
Roberts Ford: Yeah. But also: we are working to build American democracy. We are working to ask the country and the states to live up to the promise of the democratic creed, to what self-governance actually is, and to inclusive citizenship.
And that means access to the courts, access to justice, equal treatment under the law. It means inclusion—not segregation, but inclusion. It means not being made to be economically subordinate, having economic opportunity. It means all these things that citizenship means for us. It’s not just about voting. It’s about everything that makes us American and gives us access to—
Bacon: And the news outlets actively said that in their coverage. I have not read a lot of Black newspapers in the ‘40s, but—
Roberts Ford: You probably have, actually. The Black press was—it was so much. Not every single one, but collectively, when you look at the Black press from the late 19th century all the way to the moment of the civil rights movement and throughout the civil rights movement, the Black press was leading the way on doing a kind of journalism that many white Americans and white newspaper leaders believed was biased.
Bacon: Sure. And it was biased for democracy and for the rule of law, right?
Roberts Ford: Yes. And it was very clear on calling out the self-dealing and the corrupt practices of the United States’s exclusionary federal and state-level approaches to citizenship for Black people and people of color and other groups.
Bacon: Where do you see that kind of journalism today?
Roberts Ford: The New Republic. But truly—you do it incredibly well, Perry. You know that. But also, I think ProPublica does an extraordinarily good job. I think a lot of smaller places are doing it best. I think we see it on Substack—there’s just a lot of great work being done there. And you see it in pockets on television news, cable and network, as well. But I think the really best stuff is coming from progressive news outlets. The Guardian, I think, does a really good job.
Bacon: And this is, you think, tied to the corporate ownership of most other outlets?
Roberts Ford: Oh, yeah. Don’t you?
Bacon: I don’t know. I think there are two issues. There’s the corporate ownership, but I think it’s also just the norms in the news. I assume the Black press in the 1940s would not necessarily have been read by—the media’s in this moment of wanting to reach everyone, and every outlet should reach everyone.
I assume the Black press in the ‘40s was not trying to reach white pro-segregationists. They didn’t assume that was necessarily their target audience, and they weren’t trying to have the Black readers and the white segregationists equally like the paper. And that’s the current goal of most news outlets.
Roberts Ford: That’s for sure. But let me tell you—the white segregationists, those in power, did read the Black press, because they outlawed it all over the place in the South. Which of course is another major First Amendment violation that was allowed to stand.
Bacon: Yeah. The Ashbrook versus the Journal—they seem to be defining neutrality as do we have equal approval ratings among both parties? And not even parties—
Roberts Ford: Yeah. Which is—
Bacon: Let me do two more things and we’ll close out here. The first is the White House Correspondents’ Association has decided to have their dinner again—I think it’s going to be next month. The dinner got—there was an attempt of violence against the president and the dinner was canceled. But I wanted to ask you what you think about this dinner overall. I’ll admit I’ve gone to it before—I went to it last year, in fact, when I think about it.
It’s considered a prestigious thing to be invited from your organization. There are senators in the room. But I get the critique that it’s a celebration of insiderdom, and it’s even weirder when you have a president who, as I said, calls the media dishonest almost daily. So how do you view this dinner and the role of it?
Roberts Ford: I have complicated feelings about it, and I think probably a lot of people do. On the one hand, it’s an organization that has historically overseen how the press pool works in the White House. And of course, the White House has now infringed on that historic role and is now choosing the White House press pool in certain ways. So that’s a problem—a significant problem. Some of its power has been removed from it.
And yet here it is acceding to Trump’s demand, really, that there be a follow-up dinner, and that it be held at the hotel of his choosing—I think the Waldorf Astoria—and that he be allowed to make comments, which he has already previewed. At the first dinner, there were going to be nasty comments about the press, and now will they or won’t they be? We don’t know.
Bacon: But the press is holding a dinner where the president who hates the press can attack the press. It’s a very strange dynamic.
Roberts Ford: And I’m not a fan of that. I’m not a fan of there being this big gathering. The White House Press Association says—it seems to me like it’s too easy to view it as, OK, this is a form of keeping our access and building good relationships with our authoritarian-minded president. We need the access, so we’re going to do these things, and he’s asking for it, and so yes, we’re going to do it.
That may not be fair—it probably isn’t fair. The White House Press Association talks about this dinner as promoting the First Amendment, celebrating the First Amendment, celebrating the role of the press in democracy. They raise money for scholarships for students to study journalism. So there’s some good there.
But there seem to me to be other ways to do that. It doesn’t have to be this dinner. There will not be a comedian there, because—my goodness—the comedian might possibly roast Trump or say something—we all know the history of that.
Bacon: Last thing. How do you view Graham Platner running for Senate in Maine? The New York Times did a story—
Roberts Ford: Yeah, the primary is today, I think.
Bacon: Yeah, the primary is today. The New York Times did a piece about the various accusations, or how he treats women. It was a well-reported story—I’m not trying to criticize it. How do you think the press should cover a candidate like this? Because it’s not just the treatment of women. A lot of his Reddit comments—he has no—you can’t cover his record because he’s never held office before.
He’s voted in public, but he’s never held office. How do you think we should—it seems like a lot of voters like him because he’s gruff and because he’s an outsider, but I wish I knew what he would do as a governing person. It’s nice to know if they were on the city council or something.
How do you view what the press should do? Because if you remember Zohran Mamdani—whatever you thought about him—was a state representative at that point. You could see his record. He had run campaigns. Having somebody who’s come from nowhere and is now running for the U.S. Senate is actually a very challenging thing. How do you think the media should think about covering him?
Roberts Ford: I think it’s really hard. He’s an insurgent candidate. He doesn’t have the record that you speak of. And vetting candidates is what the press does—it’s a significant role for the press to play. I certainly don’t criticize the press for doing this kind of work. Why would one? It’s an important role.
But I do think the same scrutiny that is being given to Platner’s candidacy—it’s a really important one. That Senate seat is a really important one. It’s important for the Democratic Party, but whatever one’s political orientation, if you care about elections and them being fair and open, we want there to be scrutiny of all candidates. And so for me, it’s a little bit about proportionality and even-handed scrutiny.
And also, stories could be a little—some of the stories about these matters could also describe what’s at stake, what he says his policies are going to be. I don’t know if they should only be about the vetting—the Reddit comments, the tattoo, the Nazi symbol tattoo received while he was in the military, the sexting.
Bacon: I don’t know. I like what you said, in part because we’ve had a few House members in either very red or very blue districts who miss work, don’t show up—one in New Jersey was missing for a few weeks—and we don’t cover them at all because they’re not in a contested race. But in reality, I think it’s important to say they all get a vote in Congress too. And so I wish we spread the attention.
We get a lot of attention to Talarico in Texas or Susan Collins. There are a few members in Kansas we cover extensively. But in reality, even though South Carolina is not a swing state, the governor of South Carolina—who will be basically nominated today, because that’s when the primary is—influences the six or eight million people, whatever the population of South Carolina is. That person has a lot of power, and we should probably cover them too.
And I do worry if we cover only swing states because they matter for the electoral map. But most people—you live in Massachusetts, I live in Kentucky—most people don’t live in swing states. And so it might be worth covering the politicians who are going to keep getting reelected but still have a lot of influence.
Roberts Ford: Yeah. Agreed. And I think we should be deeply concerned not only about who is going to be in office in the federal government, but also who’s in office at the state level—and what are they up to? What are they doing?
We have, as I said at the top of our time together, states that are deep into their own authoritarian projects, and they’re working collaboratively with the federal government. What’s going on? What can we expect? In what ways are people’s freedoms being curtailed? And what are the justifications or manipulations being handed out to voters that allow voters to accept that?
And to me, it seems like there’s a kind of bait and switch. I don’t want to say that voters are being truly manipulated, but you’ve got a lot of oligarchs, a lot of people of extraordinary wealth—the billionaire class and more—who have some access to political power, and they’re running as if they’re on a populist platform with populist policies.
And we don’t really see much in the way of economic reform efforts, policies meant to help everyday people with inflation. We don’t see policies trying to address wealth inequality. And instead, what we’re getting is the Voting Rights Act being gutted, tariffs, and another war—without these being things that people are being consulted on.
Bacon: I’ve written a lot about how the big organizations—the New York Times, the Post—should have more people at the state level covering politics, particularly the states you’re talking about. But I think that collides with the neutrality problem.
If you have a bunch of reporters covering Alabama’s government for a while, it would make the Republicans look worse because they’re in charge, and the Republicans in Alabama are not doing a lot of good things right now in terms of solving problems, as you say. So I think part of it is the neutrality project and also the corporate project.
There’s not a ton of corporations in Alabama. The Bezos types who want to cover Silicon Valley—there’s a lot of money there. A lot of the big problem with the news organizations is that a lot of funding is concentrated in DC, New York, and San Francisco, because that’s where the financial wealth is. You can have events, you can raise money, you can charge a very high subscriber price. But in reality, those places are—what, 5 percent of the American population?—but they have 25 percent of the journalism spending, or something like that. That’s a real thing to think about.
Roberts Ford: Yeah, it’s a huge thing to think about. And in the meantime, local journalism is just in such retrenchment. We’ve had hedge fund companies and corporate entities that have gutted them. People seem more interested in national news than in their local news. And this is a real problem for local self-governance and state-level governance as well.
Bacon: Are you in the area where the Boston Globe would be the paper, or is there an Amherst paper that’s bigger?
Roberts Ford: We have the Daily Hampshire Gazette, which is a very historic newspaper, and it’s hanging on.
Bacon: Is it owned by Gannett or Knight Ridder, or is it independent? How’s it structured?
Roberts Ford: It’s in a smaller ownership body. Regional.
Bacon: Good. I think this was a great conversation. Thanks for joining me, as always.
Roberts Ford: Thanks for having me. Good to see you.
Bacon: Take care.
Roberts Ford: You too.
