How One Journalist Is Shattering Echo Chambers: Isaac Saul

[RUSH TRANSCRIPT BELOW] “One of the major driving factors of the extreme polarization that we’re living through right now is that most news consumers can very easily … tune in somewhere where they are just being force fed worldviews and perspectives that confirm all their priors,” says journalist Isaac Saul.

“Think about what media outlets are really making their audience uncomfortable on a regular basis, and there’s very few of them,” he says.

After writing for a wide variety of media outlets and seeing some disturbing trends, Saul decided to found Tangle, a newsletter that puts viewpoints from both the left and the right side by side.

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.  

RUSH TRANSCRIPT

Jan Jekielek:

Isaac Saul, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.

Isaac Saul:

I’m glad to be here. Thanks for having me.

Mr. Jekielek:

So let’s talk about the insidious forces, to use your language, that shape media today.

Mr. Saul:

Most Americans by now are probably familiar with some of them. One of the common examples is advertising revenue or advertising pressure. If you’re a big media organization that makes most of its money off advertising revenue, then that means you necessarily need traffic. You need hits on your website. You need ratings on TV. And that has a tendency to kind of turn media companies into entertainment companies. You have to drive attention, be as sensational as possible. You know, “if it bleeds, it leads” is kind of the old-school newspaper parlance. I’ve experienced some different, I think, insidious media forces that have driven a lot of the problems that we see today in American media. 

One of them is groupthink. Roughly 7 percent of all journalists in the media space, at least at traditional media outlets, are Republicans or self-identify as conservative, which is kind of jaw-dropping if you really stop to think about it. I mean, very, very few people representing the mainstream media hold views that roughly half the country holds. So when you’re in a newsroom and you’re a minority thinker, you might feel compelled not to necessarily speak your mind or to act as a sort of check on the blind spot that the narrative the rest of the newsroom is putting forward. 

Part of that also is the sort of hiring bias that we see that comes out of that. I mean, I think like most industries, a lot of people who make their way in media do so because they know people. They have connections from journalism school. They have connections from previous jobs they’ve had. And so it’s this sort of cycle that feeds itself. It’s hard to break into the space if you are a conservative from a rural part of the country who didn’t go to Columbia Journalism School or didn’t work with somebody at Vox before they got hired at the New York Times or whatever it is. 

And then, you know, some of the stuff that I’ve written about is kind of the reflection that we see from these forced onto the content that’s being produced and how we sort of encounter it. That might look like story selection bias, which is not always so obvious as, you know, a headline that looks biased or a sentence in a newspaper that looks biased. This is just, what are we choosing to cover today? What’s the story we’re going to focus on? 

The joke that I like to tell and sort of the way to illustrate this that I talk about is, you know, if an immigrant who’s here in our country illegally gets drunk and crashes his car and kills somebody, I would bet good money that that story is going to be covered by Fox News basically 10 times out of 10. If an immigrant comes to our country illegally and ends up creating, you know, the next Google, a major tech company that creates hundreds of thousands of jobs and drives billions of dollars of revenue, I would bet my life that the New York Times is going to feature that person for a story. 

That story will be covered by the New York Times, but they rarely do the reverse. Fox News rarely picks that story up. The New York Times rarely picks up the DUI story. They’re selecting the kind of news they want to present to their audiences. And that’s a really big challenge. It’s a hard thing to navigate as a newsroom. And it’s one of the ways that I think we see bias expressed really often in the news outlets that we’re consuming.

Mr. Jekielek:

Well, what about what’s called activist journalism? How is activist journalism different from what we think of as journalism and what problems might that create? 

Mr. Saul:

Yeah, I mean, it’s interesting, because it’s sort of a new wave theory, I guess you could say. It’s kind of a new fresh look at the journalism that maybe a lot of us grew up with, but it’s also something that has some roots in older school media from the 1800s and early 1900s. And I would say, to define it neatly, I would say it’s journalism where there’s a desired outcome. You’re crafting a story because you want to create layoffs at a major oil company, or you’re crafting a story because you have a worldview and you see a way to tell a story that is journalism that affirms that worldview and sort of convinces other people that this is the truth. This is how the world really works. 

So I think what we’ve seen, and what I’ve seen even as somebody who, you know, I run a media company now and I’ve hired people. We, you know, in the last couple of years, have been growing. So I’ve been interviewing fresh-out-of-college journalism students all across the country. And there are a lot of them who, when you ask them what they want to do, it’s not about necessarily finding the most interesting, best story. It’s not about sharing some sort of, you know, lens for the country to look at ourselves through that includes everybody, that is supposed to be balanced or informative or holistic. 

It’s often about, I want to tell the story of, you know, the oppression of X, Y, or Z, or I want to tell the story of why this is a really bad thing that, you know, Republicans in Congress have done. And they’ll say this explicitly in the interviews, which for the kind of work we’re doing is a little bit of a red flag. I mean, alarm bells go off when you’re like, okay, this is somebody who wants to get results from the work that they’re doing. And they’re coming into it with a narrow lens about what constitutes good journalism or what constitutes effective journalism, which is often, you know, picking an enemy and making their life miserable. You stand up for your truth. You stand up for what you believe in through your work. 

I’m still pretty young. I’m 34-years-old. It’s not really how I was taught even 12 years ago, 15 years ago in journalism school. I mean, it’s changed for sure. And so I find that a little bit frightening. I find it, you know, disconcerting, unsettling. But I also think that, you know, we have an obligation, at least the sort of quote-unquote older guard, the people who view it differently, to kind of stand our ground and say, you know, that’s not actually the job. The job isn’t to take your worldview, take how you see things and convince people of them. 

The job is to go out into the field with an open mind on a story and really poke at the truth and try and figure out what an actual, attached-to-reality, realistic take on this story is, or to find views from people who, you know, come at an issue from all across the political spectrum and just put them up next to each other side by side and allow people to make their minds up about, you know, what they should take away from it. 

Mr. Jekielek:

I liked how you said attached to reality because I think this is, I mean, when I think of journalism, I think of truth-seeking as being the pinnacle. I think it’s very hard to do, as you well know. And indeed, you know, the reason I wanted to invite you on this show is because, you know, you have at Tangle a newsletter that you describe as non-partisan, and I want to talk about what that really means, right? 

And I can tell that you are absolutely doing this in good faith because I’ve come across all sorts of examples of people saying they’re not partisan, but it’s clear they have this kind of exactly activist, you know, agenda type thing that we were just discussing. As we’ve been hiring, we’ve come across this exact same issue. It was shocking to discover, even from one particular person that we did hire, they actually explained to us that one of the top journalism schools in this country was teaching them to do that.

Mr. Saul:

But to me, I mean, isn’t that what you were just describing? Isn’t that actually another word for propaganda, tied more to what a government wants a citizenry to believe? But there’s this sort of younger generation of reporters and writers who are coming up who believe that if they see the world in a particular way and they earnestly believe that the world is this way, then it is their job to compel their readers, compel their audience to see the world the way that they see it. 

Otherwise, I’m sacrificing my morals or I’m doing something wrong by not compelling my audience to see the thing that I’m seeing because the thing I’m seeing is bad. And I want them to believe that it’s bad. I want to show them that it’s bad. And there’s just like a general lack of curiosity, I think, that exists.

Mr. Jekielek:

And something that strikes me here, right? I think one of the examples, the New York Times, right, which has this generational, you know, I don’t know, legacy and, you know, cachet, right? All the news that’s fit to print, I say that in quotes. People might think that what you’re doing is option B, which is truth-seeking journalism, but really your newsroom has shifted into all these young people that are doing precisely what you just talked about, this activist journalism, and that disconnect, right? Could that be one of the most insidious forces? I’m not saying in the New York Times only, I’m saying anywhere where this would happen. 

Mr. Saul:

In a lot of newsrooms, at least over the last couple of years, you know, especially in the sort of 2019 to 2022 space, the people who believe that, you know, seeking the truth and speaking the truth, their truth, their moral truth to the world was necessary and a necessary part of journalism, we’re kind of winning the cultural battles inside these newsrooms. And that is definitely an insidious force. I mean, you know, I don’t want to beat up on the New York Times too much because they’re not the only people guilty of this kind of thing. 

But at the New York Times, I mean, we saw really good reporters leave the paper, in some cases in disgrace, and I’ll put quotes around that because, you know, they refuse to kind of bend the knee to that sort of new rising ideology a few years ago. I mean, we saw one of the paper’s best opinion editors, in my opinion, get forced out over publishing an op-ed from a sitting United States senator. I mean, this is kind of, that’s banana stuff to me. I mean, that’s really, you know, it’s this idea that this person who is an elected member of Congress shares a view that a fraction of this newsroom thinks is not fit to print. And their response to his argument being platformed in The New York Times is we have to punish a senior editor who allowed this to happen. And it worked. They were able to do it. 

I actually think we’re seeing some backlash to that now. Some people call it the anti-woke backlash or whatever you want to say, but especially in the media space, I think we’re seeing us sort of move back to the center, which I’m encouraged by. One of the major driving factors of the sort of extreme polarization that we’re living through right now is that most news consumers can very easily go out into the wild, open their computer, turn on their TVs, whatever, and tune in somewhere where they are just being force-fed worldviews and perspectives that confirm all their priors. 

If you are a never Trump Republican, you can just go read the Bulwark and the Dispatch and never leave that space and never have your views challenged. If you’re, you know, dyed in the wool Democrat, then it’s the New York Times opinion page where you’re rarely going to encounter, you know, maybe you’ll get some David French, conservative Republican thought, but you’re not going to get like intellectual Trumpism there. And if you’re a diehard conservative and you just want to tune into Fox News or Breitbart or whatever it is and never really see anybody criticize the Trump presidency, aside from maybe like Jessica Tarlov or something, then you can do that. And it’s really easy to do that. 

And I think the fact that it’s so easy to do that is a really scary moment for us in the information ecosystem. I mean, that’s a frightening thing to be operating in, from my vantage point. And it’s a testament to just how many news organizations are doing this. I mean, you know, you think about what media outlets are really making their audience uncomfortable on a regular basis. And there are very few of them. I mean, I like to believe that we’re doing that at Tangle, but I think there’s really, really, truly very few of them, and that doesn’t seem very healthy to me.     

Mr. Jekielek:

There is a theory behind this too. Andrey Mir has said that the way that technology has developed around the media is inherently siloing, you know, through social media and so forth, and that the business of media today largely is serving people things that they already agree with, that validate them sometimes. And the more you can excite them about that, the more they’ll pay. And there’s a lot of truth to that. And I think the business models have gravitated towards that, just as you suggested. 

 

This is obviously a really big issue for someone like the Epoch Times or Tangle. We’re really trying to reach people, I think, who don’t already agree with certain viewpoints, right? I mean, it’s a foundational issue because even your marketing team, right? We’re both subscription-based. Your marketing team is saying, hey, I want to do what works, right? I want to do what works. And what works is what we just said. But you’re like, ah, but that doesn’t really fit with what we want to be doing. So how do we deal with that? I think this is something we need to solve, actually. I don’t know the answer to that question.

Mr. Saul:

Yes, it’s really difficult. I mean, the sort of media parlance for it is the audience capture, right? You give your audience something and then you see that they really like it. And now you want to serve your audience that thing over and over and over again. I remember during the first Trump presidency, I had a lot of friends and family who were just enraged by the dominance that he had over the media. You know, like they would say to me, I go to the Washington Post or even the conservative people, you know, I go to Fox News, whatever. And it’s just Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump. Everything on the homepage is just Trump. It’s all stories about him. 

And I want to read about other things. Why do you the media, why do you guys do this? My response that I always had is, you know, if you go to the homepage of the New York Times or the Washington Post or Fox News, whatever, and there’s a story about, you know, Melania Trump and Donald Trump having some marital issues on the homepage next to a story about Republicans passing a new health care bill in the House, which story do you click? How do you vote with your dollars when you’re operating in those media ecosystems? 

And when they’re honest with themselves, they all admit that they click the Trump story. And that’s the first thing that they read. And media organizations see that. And so if you’re Fox News or The Washington Post, New York Times or Wall Street Journal, and you’re seeing, oh, God, our readers are devouring Trump stuff and you’re an assignment editor, it’s a no-brainer. You’re the marketing team, you’re on the business side, and you have any kind of pressure you can apply to the editorial side. It’s a no-brainer. It’s like they want Trump, give them more Trump. 

That’s going to do the, it’s going to get us the ratings. It’s going to get us the clicks. And it’s a really, really hard thing to sort of wiggle out of. I think for us at Tangle, the solution has been, we tell people upfront what we’re selling. And what we’re selling is we’re going to take you out of the little nice cozy bubble you’ve been in and you’re going to be made uncomfortable by the news that we’re publishing because we’re going to expose you to arguments from people across the political spectrum. And you’re going to hate some of what you read. 

And if we’re doing our jobs right, some of what you read will feel really representative of the worldview that you share. You will sort of experience the roller coaster of emotions you might if you were flipping between Fox News and MSNBC, rather than just sitting in and stewing in one of them and taking all the stuff that you want and being fed all the stuff that you want from these news organizations. That’s been helpful for us. I mean, we’re saying like, this is how we’re different. That’s sort of the brand that we’re selling. But I think if you’re there already and you’re entrenched in it, it’s really, really hard to get out of. I mean, I don’t have a great answer for a more established media organization either. It’s a difficult place to be. 

Mr. Jekielek:

The thing I like most in the Tangle newsletters is the Sunday funnies, or at least that’s what I call them in my mind. And it’s very cool. You know, you show on often the same topic what the Left is doodling and what the Right is doodling. Very, very kind of valuable. I was going to say column, but you know, I believe that’s at the top of the newsletter every Sunday. I look forward to that. Tell me a little bit about how you cook this all up and your background. Actually, you have a very interesting background when it comes to journalism.

Mr. Saul:

Yes, sure. I mean, my sort of genesis story, I like to say, is kind of two-part. The first is that I grew up in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, a swing county in the most important swing state, and it has been for most of my life. And so, you know, growing up somewhere where there’s a lot of class divisions and a lot of political divisions, I just have friends and family from all across the political spectrum. And so I, you know, A, socially just empathize with people from a wide range of political backgrounds, and I see my friends or my mom or my uncle or my old teacher in all these different political actors who, you know, you encounter in the day-to-day news. I hear them and I see them and I empathize with them. 

So I’m open-minded about the state of the country and the two dominant political tribes. And then I left Bucks County to go work in the media space. And the first job I ever got was at the Huffington Post, which I’m sure most of your audience knows is a very liberal left-leaning paper. And I did not go work at the Huffington Post because I was a bleeding-heart liberal whose dream was to work at the Huffington Post. I worked there because I was a journalism nonfiction writing major who applied to 40 jobs and I got one job and it was at the Huffington Post. 

And it was a crash course in how that kind of, you know, purposefully slanted media is produced and pushed out the door. And Huffington Post, you know, to their credit, they have some really great, talented reporters there. They focus their ire and their lens on very specific things. You know, the ills of the Republican Party, mostly they focus on people who are of ours next to their name doing bad things. That’s the beat if you’re at Huffington Post. But I got to see sort of how that sausage was made there. And then, you know, after Huffington Post, I worked for Independent Journal Review. 

Mr. Jekielek:

Before you continue, explain to me, tell me a little more about how the sausage is made. And we’ll talk more about that further, but like, what do you mean when you say that? What was that?

Mr. Saul:

Sure. First of all, if you’re a younger staff reporter, like I was, my job at the Huffington Post was kind of on the viral trends team initially, which meant we had to drive traffic to the website.

Mr. Jekielek:

What year is this approximately?

Mr. Saul:

In 2013 and 2014, in the peak era of clickbait on Facebook and kind of the BuzzFeed domination and that sort of thing before Facebook turned the knob. And yeah, being on the viral trends team, your success was measured in traffic. That’s the job: drive people to the website. And then hopefully once they get to the website, they’ll click around. We have advertisements all across the site, and so that’s how we drive revenue. 

So sometimes, you know, the really simple and obvious thing is like, how do you make a headline clicky? How do you have the curiosity gap in a story that makes people want to click into it? That was a big part of my early training. It was almost irrelevant what the content of the story was; it was like we just needed to get people onto the page and into the website. What’s this going to look like when it’s shared on Facebook, that sort of thing. 

What happened to me when I was there was that I started writing about politics and sports. I was a sports editor at the school paper in college. I went to the University of Pittsburgh and the intersection of politics and sports and culture. And I started to see when I was writing political pieces the way certain edits were suggested or how the headline was framed. 

You know, if I wanted to write a story that was really critical of Hillary Clinton, sort of in a vacuum, there would be suggestions to explore why Bernie Sanders is a better candidate. Maybe we can use this paragraph to compare Hillary to Bernie and sort of do it in a way that puts him in a more positive light. You know, that’s the kind of thing that you would experience in the newsroom where like, well, I don’t really want to necessarily say that Bernie’s better for reason X, Y, or Z. I just want to say that Hillary sucks. 

And, you know, like you sort of just see, you know, you have a headline suggested in a story and you submit it, and then you see the way the headlines change when it’s published. It’s clearly done in a way to kind of sensationalize or increase the curiosity gap in the story. You report something out and you submit it, and you’re told to go get a quote, maybe not from somebody at the Heritage Foundation, but a Democratic spokesperson. You should call their office and see how they respond to the story, what they want to say. 

And the network of your editors, if I have an editor who’s been working at the Huffington Post for 10 years, who are his contacts, who are in the Rolodex when we’re reporting out a story? Most of them are probably sources from the Democratic Party or extensions of the Democratic Party. So the lens just gets narrowed immediately by walking in the door. And I think I saw that and experienced it. And again, it’s like I learned a lot there, and there are a lot of super bright people who are great reporters who work there. And I saw a similar thing at different news outlets I worked with.

Mr. Jekielek:

You said you went to the Independent Journal Review after that. Yes, I worked there, and I saw the mirror thing. You know, I mean, a magazine that was sort of going online that has a very explicit conservative slant. I would submit a story and the ask from editors would be about, you know, seeking out a different quote or, you know, can you dig into this statistic a little more, add this stat to balance the piece in a way that, to me, looked clearly favorable to the right. Or you see the way the headlines are changed or whatever it is. Or, you know, you tell your editor, I’m having trouble getting a hold of XYZ. Can we talk to an expert about, you know, the impact of immigration on the economy? And the expert that they have is from the American Enterprise Institute, or the Heritage Foundation. It’s not from, you know, the Brennan Center for Justice or whatever it is. 

So you just see how these forces kind of happen in this space. And I think for me, it just really opened my eyes to the way all this stuff is being crafted kind of behind the scenes, both explicitly and intentionally, and also the stuff that, you know, these newsrooms can’t help. I mean, if you are a journalist or an editor who has no relationships in the conservative movement, it’s so much easier to get a quote from a sitting Democrat than it is from a sitting Republican. You can do it in less time. And so you just go do that because it’s easier and you’re on a deadline and you have to get your story published. But that comes out in the paper as a kind of bias that I think matters and changes the actual thrust of the story and the impact of it. And you saw all this happening.

Mr. Jekielek:

You had the dream to have a kind of a nonpartisan space, but probably you were wondering how that business would work. I mean, tell me what was on your mind, how this came about.

Mr. Saul:

The true story is that I was working at a company called A-Plus, which was the last job I had before I started Tangle. We were kind of like a solutions journalism, sort of an anti-mainstream media outlet in a different way. We were trying to focus on the people fixing things rather than the people breaking things. That was kind of our shtick; that was what we were putting out into the world was like, you know, the news is obsessed with all the corrupt politicians—who are the people doing good? Who are the people finding solutions to big problems? Let’s write stories about them and that has sort of run its course. 

The business wasn’t doing great. I was applying for a bunch of jobs and I had like seven final interviews at places like the Washington Post or Business Insider, you know, big news outlets that a lot of people know, and I didn’t get any of the jobs. I was really frustrated and, you know, kind of down and out and beat up and was like, this industry’s tough. I knew I was good at what I did; I knew I was a good writer and a good reporter. 

I’d always had this kind of idea for like a big tent media organization—a place for the people from home where my friends and family from home could all read the same thing and actually meet and have like a shared set of facts and also share a wide range of arguments where they’re being exposed to views from the Left and exposed to views from the Right. I wanted that big tent media organization to exist somewhere. 

And so I kind of came up with a formula, which I think is our special sauce, a format for the newsletter, which is, what if we just explain the story in the most neutral language possible? Which, by the way, is the hardest part. The introduction is the hardest part of the story to write because you have to do it in a way that’s so, so balanced and so even-handed with neutral language that you’re not going to offend the sensibilities of either the left or the right tribe in our country. And then just explicitly say, here are three arguments from people on the Left, and here are three arguments from people on the Right. And that was the concept. 

I’m going to show you the best arguments I can find, the most compelling, convincing arguments I can find from conservatives and from liberals about this divisive topic. And you can sort of make up your mind. I sent this newsletter out to a bunch of friends and family and former colleagues, you know, a kind of beta version of it. And the number one response I got from people was like, well, what do you think? There’s no conclusion to this. I’m so curious. Like there’s this big story about, you know, a bill in Congress. You’re a politics reporter. You have moderate centrist-seeming politics. Where do you land? I’d be curious to hear your analysis, calls and balls and strikes. 

So I started writing this sort of mini column in the newsletter that comes last. That’s just called the my take section where I give my personal perspective. And it’s not meant to be authoritative. It’s often written with a lot of humility. I’ll say, I don’t know the answer here. I feel torn about this issue. I might be wrong, whatever it is. But I think it’s an act of transparency. It’s like, I’m the guy delivering this news to you. So I’m going to be radically honest about where I personally stack up, where I land, and I’m going to just tell you, and you can take that as part of the full picture on the news you’re digesting. Here are the biases and the worldviews of the person providing the news. 

And I’m not going to try and inject that bias into the introduction, into the facts of the story. I’m going to contain it in this really, you know, isolated space that says my take, my opinion; this is explicitly my view. You can take it or leave it. And it gives me space to sort of have some personality in my writing. I think it makes the newsletter a little bit more interesting. It gives people something to attack or to say that they really like. Most of the responses we get are often to the “My Take” section, like the criticisms and the support. And it worked. 

People seemed to think it was a really interesting format, and they felt like they were, you know, getting a much better, more holistic view of the news. The number one piece of feedback we get from people on the Right and the Left is, “I feel like I’m going less insane when I read your newsletter. I just have a better understanding of what the other side thinks—the people I perceive as my enemies—and it makes it easier to kind of see where they’re coming from. I think the reason for that is because both sides are guilty of this thing: it’s like elevating the radicals of the other side and making them appear as if they are representative of the whole. 

So, like, you know, there’s a reason in our political dichotomy that every conservative and liberal can tell you about Marjorie Taylor Greene and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. And it’s because they’re a little bit more on the fringe of their party. Maybe they have some views that are outside the mainstream, outside the norm. The left takes Marjorie Taylor Greene, and they, you know, they’ll find the worst thing she’s ever said and her lowest moments as a human being, and they will say this person is representative of the current Republican Party. She is, you know, and the right will take Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and isolate the dumbest thing she’s ever said in an interview and they’ll say this person is representative of the Democratic Party. 

But they have a hard time telling you who, you know, Representative Jake Auchincloss is, who’s like a moderate Democrat from Massachusetts, who I think is more representative of the mainstream Democratic Party than Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. You know, there are a lot of conservatives out there who are brilliant economists and thinkers who are standing up behind Trump’s tariffs right now. Nobody on the Left can tell you who they are. 

You know, they are just obsessed with Peter Navarro and, you know, maybe something a little silly or outlandish he said on cable television yesterday, because that’s what the Left is feeding them. We try to bring forward the people who are making really compelling arguments who are sort of, at least some of our newsletter, representing the best of the left and the best of the right. I think that changes the way people feel about the country in a positive way. 

Mr. Jekielek:

Well, this is the thing I like. I mean, quite honestly, for me, the issue is believing that something is in good faith, right? I can very clearly see that what you’re doing is in good faith. Sometimes I agree, sometimes I don’t. Sometimes I think, you know, you over-represent certain things and under-represent others, but frankly, that doesn’t matter to me. We all have our biases, right? I like the fact that you like to be transparent about them. Like, you know, no one would ever accuse me of being pro-communist, for example, right? I have a very strong anti-communist bias, but I would tell you that that is something learned over 40 years. 

It’s not actually a bias; it’s factual. But that’s actually an interesting thing. Am I partisan in your view, because I’m very clearly anti-communist? But that’s earned. Like, at one point, I entertained all sorts of positive ideas about this ideology. Maybe my viewers will be shocked to learn this, right? But I educated myself, and some of it was being mugged by reality, to be perfectly honest, right? About this stuff. Yes, I think it’s a terrible ideology that destroys human beings, right? But I don’t think that’s a random assertion that I’ve come to, right?

Mr. Saul:

Yes, it’s a really great question. I would say I don’t try to separate people into, you know, who’s necessarily partisan or what that means. To me, there are just, to your point, there are hacks and there are good faith actors. And there’s a lot of both in the media space. I mean, there’s a lot of hacks, but there are good faith actors, you know? There are people who bring others onto their shows; they do interviews like this, and they do them with genuine curiosity. They don’t do it to try and get the gotcha question and the viral moment and confront somebody or make them look as bad as possible. 

They do it because they’re interested in the world around them and they want to get to some kind of truth. They want to expose some kind of truth. They want to expose some kind of interesting narrative that maybe their audience is going to be compelled by or engage with. And so I sort of view the media landscape that way. I would not say that what you’ve experienced or where you’ve landed, you know, necessarily means you’re a partisan. I think, by far, the most important part is that you have some clarity about your views and you can explain where they came from. 

What often readers say to me when I publish a “My Take” that they really strongly disagree with is, “I don’t think you’re right about this issue, but it was really interesting to see your thought process, and I can at least understand how you got there.” I mean, the amount of positive feedback I get just by showing my work, by saying, like, “I feel this way because this thing happened to my dad” or, “My mom experienced this health issue and I saw how the system worked. Our lives were impacted so deeply by it, so it’s really hard for me to empathize with this view because I went through this thing and this is what I saw. I can point to this research to sort of buttress my personal experience.” And so I land here, and people are so much more comfortable with that. 

I mean, like a good example is my dad drove Uber for a period of time in sort of a pseudo-retirement—I mean, really out of financial need—like he was struggling and he had to make ends meet. He was driving Uber, and Uber made some policy changes to how they were paying out their drivers. We actually did an edition on it as part of our coverage of some of the gig worker stuff that was happening in California, some of the laws around it. 

So I could say in that piece, you know, “X percentage of Uber drivers are going to have their wages impacted in this way, according to this study by this nonprofit.” Or I could say, “I just got off the phone with my dad, who drives Uber six days a week, and he showed me their receipts and how much money he was making in April. And now how much money is he making in May because of the change that happened?” 

That’s a way more compelling story. People empathize with him more because it’s like, “It’s my dad! I want, like, he’s being hurt by this.” And so it’s really hard for me to endorse this thing, even if I might be able to see the good or the justification around the policy change. And so I think just like being transparent about your views is the important part. To go back to the opening question, the insidious thing—the thing that happens at a lot of media organizations—is a journalist has a perspective that they’re not transparent about in their reporting, but they will seek out somebody who they know shares that view and they’ll insert the perspective into the story. 

You know, if you’re covering an issue on immigration and you have a specific view about immigration and interview five experts, and one of those experts says something that really aligns with your worldview, and you decide to lead the article with that quote, you know, that’s the first quote in the article, and it’s framing the whole story. That’s inserting your bias into the story. And it’s doing it in an insidious, not very transparent way. 

What our format allows me to do is say, like, “This is my view explicitly, and here’s how I got here. I’m not going to try and slide it into other parts of the newsletter or the podcast; I’m just going to tell you what I actually think in this really isolated space.” I’ve been thinking about this issue of partisanship as we’re talking here, you know. So let’s take an issue, and let’s take an 80-20 issue, okay? Men and women’s sports, okay? 

Although some people would describe, would even use a different term to describe that phenomenon, right? But men and women’s sports—the 80-20 issue—most Republicans, most independents, and frankly, most Democrats actually agree that that’s a bad idea, okay? However, the Democratic Party approach to that issue is that this is something that should be allowed. If you’re reporting on this issue and you even use the term, you know, men and women’s sports, you’re told that you’re being partisan, right? 

But I know that just seems like an objective statement. I don’t want to use other terminology, which has been, you know, hoisted on me by activists, right? I’m just sharing this particular thing. Does that make one partisan? Because someone says you’re partisan, right? I mean, I think you’re zeroing in on the hardest parts of our job, at least, like the most difficult thing. I agree it’s an 80-20 issue that people don’t want trans women in women’s sports; that is clear. The polling is pretty explicit about it. Is it an 80-20 issue that Americans want you to refer to them as men in women’s sports or trans women in women’s sports? I don’t know. 

I would say the polling on that is probably closer to 50-50. Like, I think there are a lot of Americans who are like, I don’t want this person on my seventh grade girl’s softball team, but I’ll respect the life decision she made. It’s not my business, whatever, you know. We run into this with issues like trans coverage. I mean, this is one of the biggest ones. It’s one of the most hot-button issues. Language choices around Israel and Gaza, you know, language choices around race, whether to capitalize the B in black or not in our articles. We don’t, and that incenses some liberal readers of ours. And we had to explain why we came to this conclusion and why, you know, why we made that choice. I mean, it’s really sticky stuff. 

Again, my experience has been, if we show our work, if we explain it, like, for instance, on the trans issue, because I’m not trying to dodge here, like we refer to trans women in sports. Like we wouldn’t say men in women’s sports. Why do we make that choice? Well, generally speaking, what we do across the political landscape with these like special interest groups or however you want to describe, you know, more like political movements is we respect the way people ask to be described. Like I would never, you know, call pro-life people anti-abortion unless I see them doing that on their own, you know, in their own language on their organizational website. When we talk about pro-life Americans, a lot of liberals write in and say they’re not pro-life. They’re anti-women and anti-life. And they’re, you know, if anything, they’re anti-abortion. 

And I say, well, they’re a pro-life group. And that’s how they describe themselves. And there’s like a degree of respect that we’re having in the dialogue where I’m gonna call them what they are asking to be called by, especially if everybody knows what I’m talking about. Like when I say trans women, I’m not obscuring the truth; like these are like you might feel like you might look at a trans woman and say, okay this is a man, it’s not a woman, but I’m saying it’s a trans woman, and like you know what I mean, I know what I’m talking about, and we’re respecting them and we’re like, you know, appreciating how they ask to be called  in the dialogue and for our brand that is the right choice. 

It’s like that’s the way that we navigate that because, you know, even if it’s an 80-20 issue, I don’t want to ignore the 20. Of the 230 million adults in our country, that means tens of millions of people. They should have a voice in our newsletter and feel represented. That’s not fringe enough for me to just exclude them. But we face, you know, if we don’t explain why we’re doing that or how we’re, you know, the explanation I just gave, maybe that’s compelling to some of your audience, maybe something here that that’s total BS liberal softball stuff, whatever, I’m fine with where you come out on that, but like we’re gonna explain it because I think, you know, to the degree we want to be a big tent media organization, inviting everybody in, showing our work and being transparent about why we’re making the choices we make is a good way to do it. 

Mr. Jekielek:

Well, so what I might say in response, or someone might say in response is, well, you know, validating a myth, validating a mystery, no matter how much someone wants to believe that, right, for example, makes its way into statistics. And this has actually happened, right, where people were in some states, statistics have been adulterated. It’s actually impossible to track men and women because you have people who are biologically male that are now being included in women’s statistics because that reality has been obfuscated because of this change in language. 

Mr. Saul:

Just to clarify, you’re saying people are filling out a government survey or something and identifying themselves as a woman.

Mr. Jekielek:

Or birth certificates. People are changing their sex on their birth certificates and now basically the medical system is considering them to be a different sex, which they’re not. Again, they can’t really change that. They can change it and they can simulate it, but they can’t change it. What I’m trying to say is that it is profound, when these kinds of realities, biological realities are compromised, that actually has a profound impact down the line. Because we’re coming back to this question of trying to be truthful. And I’m all for respecting how someone chooses to live, but there’s profound consequences if you kind of agree to things which you kind of know aren’t reality, right? Even if it helps someone feel better about themselves. 

Mr. Saul:

I think it’s an interesting point. Like, I would say that is maybe a more extreme example of how language can impact, you know, public policy or the scientific outcome of a study or, you know, like a research or whatever it is. I think the challenge for us would be a lot harder if I was in the position of being a government agency thinking about how to track this thing or being a member of a board on some scientific organization doing a study about something where the outcome is heavily impacted by whether a person identifying as male or female was actually biologically male or female. 

The challenges for us are more like if we’re describing a bill in Congress related to trans issues, and it’s sort of being generally called trans health care or gender-affirming care. Like, is that, are we obscuring the truth by describing it that way? In my view, yes. So like, what we want to tell our readers is like, this isn’t, we’re not going to call, you know, everything under the umbrella of gender-affirming care that is like referring to a 25-year-old person who’s transitioned by their preferred pronouns and also performing, you know, top surgery on a 14-year-old as the same like as gender-affirming care. We’ll be really specific about whether this bill banning pronoun use in schools or is it prohibiting surgery for minors? Like those are, and to Americans, they’re really different things. Like those are really different questions. 

So I think about how the truth is kind of being obscured in our reporting with the sort of language diktats that we might have. I wouldn’t worry so much about, you know, the outcome of a study or something like that with our choices though. I appreciate that point. I mean, it’s a really weighty response to some of the decisions that we’re making and I think again, like for us the north star is we want to be this big-time media organization where we’re bringing these people in and they’re feeling like their views are being respected, their voices are being respected, and they’re also being challenged, and that feels like the best way to do it.

Mr. Jekielek:

I mean, it’s a well-heard point. I think the big issue people have with this is if someone basically says, you need to agree with my conception of myself and my worldview. And if you don’t, that’s a problem.

Mr. Saul:

Yes. I mean, in both my personal life and my job as a media executive, I obviously reject that framing. I mean, I often reject that framing. First of all, like anytime there’s an issue of compelled speech, my hackles go up and I feel my blood curdling. I think Democrats on the Left have rightly paid a huge price for being this sort of language-policing party. I mean, that is, I think Mike Pesca recently called Democrats like the HR department of political parties, which I thought was a really funny way to put it. And Donald Trump’s sitting in the White House, and we’ve seen a huge kind of anti-woke backlash because of that. 

So, you know, I’m not doing that because I feel compelled by them or I feel, you know, like the speech pressure as much as I’m doing it because I think there’s a better chance of bringing them into our information ecosystem if they feel respected at the front door. I’ll give you an example of how this might play out in a positive way even if you’re on the other side of the issue. I have trans readers obviously, you know, and I know trans people in my personal life, and when they feel respected at the front door of the news organization and they come inside and then they encounter views that are like really fundamentally questioning the way that they see the world, their own personal identity, existence, whatever it is. 

They’re a lot more open-minded about that perspective. They’re a lot more ready for dialogue than if at the front door there’s somebody just saying like, I refuse to call you he or she or use your name or they, like dead name you or whatever, you know, like that. When they don’t encounter that immediately, they’ll actually come have the conversation. I’ve written in my take in the newsletter about the unfairness of trans women in women’s sports in many contexts. 

You know, whether it’s like Lia Thomas swimming or the boxing controversy we had at the Olympics or whatever, just talked about the science of it and like the unsatisfactory answers that the Left has in many scenarios. And I know trans women who I’m friends with who really strongly disagree with me on that issue, but they feel respected by the way that I’m addressing them, by the way I’m talking about it. And then there’s actual dialogue there where maybe I can move their position or maybe they move my position. 

But like oftentimes, I at least find that I can have some sort of open, honest dialogue about it that feels productive. And like in my most American patriotic, I love this country. What are we about? Heart of hearts feeling like we are a pluralistic society. We can choose, you know, who’s not American and, you know, who comes in like immigration; we have control over those things, we can pull certain levers. But fundamentally, we are a place that’s built on pluralism. And that is really, really hard. It’s not an easy thing to live amongst people who don’t see the world the way you do. 

But I don’t want to live in Iran, even if the sort of homogeneous view was one that I really liked or agreed with. It’s not interesting to me. And there’s something that’s really fundamentally anti-liberty about it. So these people exist. I think there’s, to your point, if you’re on a particular side of this issue, maybe you see that as seeding ground or feeding a delusion or whatever it is, but they’re here, and I respect and love some of them. 

And I want to live shoulder to shoulder with them the same way I do with people who I have all kinds of different worldviews and political disagreements that we might say are breaking with reality or whatever it is. So that’s the society we’ve signed up for; it’s uncomfortable, but it’s true, and I have to walk the walk on that. I mean, to do the job I do, I can’t just decide what the truth is; I have to kind of invite all these perspectives in and let our audience make the decision for themselves.

Mr. Jekielek:

I’m really looking forward to keeping up with my Tangle reading. I don’t read it every day, but I do find it valuable, actually, in bringing in some of these other views that I might not come across otherwise. This has been a fascinating conversation. A final thought as we finish?

Mr. Saul:

I mean, look, first of all, I would say if your audience is interested in the offer to step out of the bubble that they might be in or to just generally get a more holistic, nuanced view on the day’s news, come give us a shot. It’s free. ReadTangle.com is the place to read. And I would say, you know, we’re living in a really divisive and kind of broken time where we’re all sort of stepping into our little social circles and existing in our information silos. And I don’t think we’re doing enough interacting with each other. 

And one of the things that I hope to do with this news organization and that I try to do daily in my personal life is just to make contact with people who you might disagree with and break bread with them, share a beer with them, have honest conversations with them. I really, you know, I know it’s so cheesy and it’s so corny to say, but I really genuinely think our country could use a little bit more of that right now. I hear it from readers. They say, hey, I’ve got this Trump voter next door to me with a big Trump flag, and I’m super liberal. And I just, I don’t know what to do or how to approach it. 

I’m like, buy a six-pack of beer and go knock on his door and ask if he wants to sit on the porch and chat for a bit and get to know each other. I mean, really, I know it’s a silly answer, but I’ve seen it work, and I think it does work. And I’m trying to bring people together a little bit, not to hold hands and agree and not to do the thing, whatever it is, but just to say, we see you, we can exist together. We can have these fair-minded disagreements and hopefully not rip each other’s heads off for the next 50 years or whatever it’s going to be.

Mr. Jekielek:

Isaac Saul, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show. 

Mr. Saul:

Thanks for having me.