Episode 17: Trusted And Untrusted Sources

Neil's back for this week's video chat about Donald Trump's crime-y Cabinet picks and the evolution of our news environment

Photo credit: Fer Gregory/Shutterstock

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Today’s topic is trust, and we begin with the inherent untrustworthiness of Donald Trump’s cabinet picks, all of whom seem to have a transactional relationship with him. Then, there are the nominees that are rapey, and since the Trump transition team doesn’t vet its candidates, they are sometimes the last to know.

• We begin by noting that Republican rapiness opens doors for creepy Democrats too. At The New York Times, Benjamin Oreskes reports that former Congressman, convicted sex offender and all-around schmo Anthony Weiner is considering running for office again. Now a radio talk show host on WABC, Weiner imagines that a City Council run might “re-set” his political career.

• Predictably, details started to leak this week about the allegedly rapey former Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz, Trump’s nominee for Attorney General. The Washington Post reported that Gaetz paid two women $10,000 for sex, while The New York Times printed an elaborate chart compiled by investigators that shows money zipping around between clients and sex workers in Gaetz’s friendship circle via Venmo, CashApp, and PayPal. Gaetz has said he will not return to Congress in the spring, despite having been re-elected, and former Florida AG Pam Bondi (who put Jeffrey Epstein back on the street, declined to prosecute Trump University, and received a $25K campaign donation from Trump) is now slated to run DOJ. (In the full video, you find out who Neil and Claire guessed the new nominee would be. It wasn’t Bondi.)

• Then, there is Trump’s pick for Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, a military veteran and Fox News host who can’t seem to shake the accusation that he sexually assaulted a California woman seven years ago. Hegseth, who also has Christian Nationalist tattoos, says the encounter was consensual (we’ll see—apparently there’s some video of the encounter) but he also paid her off, so…..

• And then there’s the babysitter employed by RFK, Jr. in his Mount Kisco, NY, home, who claims that the HHS-designate groped her in 1999.

Fun times!

Our main topic today is our collective trust in the media environment as we face a second Trump presidency. Among our topics are:

• MSNBC’s morning show hosts Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough’s pilgrimage to Mar-A-Lago to say sorry—and how their audience has responded.

• The large number of Fox News hosts going to work in the Trump White House, an historically unprecedented phenomenon. Will voices that are trusted by MAGA voters also lead the Trump administration to re-invent what it means to “trust” government?

• Comcast’s announcement that it created a new company to house MSNBC and CNBC, as well as several of its less profitable channels, sequestering them from its other cable and broadcast operations. But it’s unclear why, since the company retained NBC Nightly News. Does Comcast want to shield most of its assets from a President who has sworn revenge on liberal journalism?

We also discuss is the larger context. Increasingly, people aren’t getting news from television, print, or even digital journalism sources, but through (unvetted) people they trust on (unedited) social media platforms. This week, the Pew Research Center released a study revealing that 20% of Americans get their news from social media influencers; that they trust sources with whom they feel a personal connection (here we reference a conversation between AOC conversation and Joy Reid;, and that influencers don’t just convey the news—they help their audiences understand what the news means.

We are certainly dedicated to that here on Political Junkie, but we also think there are limitations to that model. Here’s clip from the full interview, available below with a paid subscription, in which Neil proposes that Joe Rogan is the new Walter Cronkite, but with less knowledge and more power:

Your hosts:

Claire Potter is a historian of politics and media, a writer, a podcaster, and the sole author and editor of the Political Junkie Substack. Her most recent book is Political Junkies: From Talk Radio to Twitter, How Alternative Media Hooked Us on Politics and Broke Our Democracy (Basic Books, 2020), and she is currently writing a biography of feminist journalist Susan Brownmiller.

Neil J. Young is a historian of religion and politics, a journalist, and a former co-host of the Past Present podcast. His most recent book is Coming Out Republican: A History of the Gay Right (University of Chicago Press, 2024). 

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