Transcript
Susan Rinkunas: You’re listening to OnWriting, a podcast from The Writers Guild America East. In each episode you’ll hear from the union members who create the film, TV series, podcasts, and news stories that define our culture. We’ll discuss everything from inspirations and creative process to what it takes to build a successful career in media and entertainment. I’m Susan Rinkunas, co-founder of Autonomy News, a contributing writer at Jezebel, and I’m an independent journalist who covers politics, reproductive health, and abortion access. I’m joined by my fellow journalists, Matt Shuham, Sammie Smylie, and Nitish Pahwa. In the final part of our three-part series on protecting free speech we’ll discuss the escalating threats facing journalists in the US, from political intimidation to attacks on newsroom diversity. You’ll hear from industry professionals on why it’s so critical to fight back to protect journalism that informs the public and holds power accountable.
Welcome everyone, thanks for joining us for this conversation. I want to introduce our guests and have them actually say a little bit about themselves, what brought them to their role that they’re at, and what they cover. So Sammie, why don’t you start us off and then you can kick it to Nitish and Matt?
Sammie Smylie: Okay, cool. I’m Samantha Smylie, I also go by Sammie. My pronouns are they and she. I am currently the state education reporter for Chalkbeat Chicago. I have been in this role for almost six years, I started in 2020. Education has always been very important to me so I just wanted to do it in the state and in the city I was born and raised in. I am also a part of the Civic News Guild leadership, and I’m also a council member for online media for WGAE.
Susan Rinkunas: Great. Nitish, tell us a little bit about your role and what you cover.
Nitish Pahwa: For sure. I’m Nitish Pahwa, I’m a business and technology journalist at Slate. I do a lot of coverage around the media in both the prints and visual forms, do a lot of coverage of course of social platforms, AI, big tech, what have you, and the ways those very industries have been both helpful and corrosive to our Democratic commons. I will pass it to Matt.
Matt Shuham: Yeah. Hi, Matt Shuham, I’m he/him. I’m a senior reporter on the HuffPost National Desk. I’ve been a professional journalist for about 10 years now. I, for a few years, was working at Talking Points Memo and I helped start the union there, which is how I got involved with the Writers Guild. And at HuffPost, currently a member of the bargaining committee as we work towards our fourth contract, which we’re super excited about. Journalistically, I cover the national news, politics, criminal justice, far right extremism, the media, these days a lot of immigration enforcement because that’s been a big story for us and for everybody. So I’m focusing a lot on that and on law enforcement more generally.
Susan Rinkunas: Got it. Thank you for that background from everyone. And I want to talk a little bit now about the importance and value of public interest journalism and accountability journalism. And it’s interesting based on what you’re all saying, the beats that you cover, all of these things do have impact on people’s daily lives and people need to know what’s happening, and they do rely on journalists to uncover perhaps bad actors or mismanagement in any of these fields that you cover. So who wants to say a little bit about the value of accountability journalism, and even more drilled down local journalism in people’s understanding of what’s happening in their communities and even how it impacts their elected officials and democracy more broadly?
Nitish Pahwa: I could start with the accountability journalism aspect of it since I work for a more nationally focused outlet than a locally focused one. I think the most important thing to keep in mind here is that journalism exists to tell the truth, that’s just what it comes down to. And that’s regardless of political party, regardless of donors, regardless of affiliations, regardless of personal biases. We all do our best to say exactly what it is that’s going on, even if, at least in my case I often have my own opinions, but I always make sure that the facts are sterling and correct, and if they’re not then to fix those as soon as possible.
The thing is I think we too often, especially in this very sort of, I guess you could say survile attitude among certain high up access journalists I guess you could say, to butter some people up in positions of authority or power, or fail to really get to the heart of a story and kind of write around it, get a little wishy-washy, et cetera. And I think we tend to forget, well I don’t do that, but when others do that I think what we tend to forget is that governments, donors, again oligarchs, CEOs, all these people are also people, they’re also fellow human beings with flaws, mistakes, and errors. But in their cases, they stand to impact a lot more people than your normal everyday citizen. And I think that’s always worth keeping in mind, you need to look at these people in charge as people who have effects and impacts on the population at large, but who are also themselves people who are not above reproach.
Susan Rinkunas: That’s right, no one’s above reproached in our coverage. Sammie or Matt, do you have anything you want to add to that?
Sammie Smylie: Yeah, I think for me I came through journalism as a local community reporter, so I was super hyper-focused on one neighborhood, well technically three, anybody in Chicago knows Hyde Park, Woodlawn, South Shore, so that area I was covering. And then I also, now as a reporter that covers the state and the city a little bit, myself has always been directly tied to what’s going on in people’s life. Sometimes it feels highbrow but it is, I always think of my work as honestly I’m just gossiping to people. I am telling you basically, “Yo, did you hear that Chicago is going to have its first elected school board? This year it’ll be fully elected. This is what you should know.” My job is, so it’s funny to say I’m a gossiper, but honestly I just tell people about what’s going on in their neck of the woods and let them know that these are things you should be aware of.
For me, it’s also just being civically engaged because sometimes that is hard to do when you have a 9:00 to 5:00 that is so out of politics and what’s going on in education,, or housing or whatever. But hopefully with my reporting that if you just spend five minutes a day you’ll get a bit of what’s going on in your city or in the state.
Susan Rinkunas: Yes. And I think it’s totally acceptable to refer to reporting as gossip, but sometimes people in power don’t want people gossiping or don’t want people to know what’s happening, and we’ll get to that in a minute. But Matt, it seems like you wanted to jump in so go ahead.
Matt Shuham: Well just to affirm that, I feel like a lot of great or most great journalists are great gossips, and it’s such an essential skill because that’s the whole function of the job is to connect people to information. Yeah, I definitely boost what you both said. I feel like, I mean journalism and media can be so many things, it could be mindless entertainment, it could be just slop. I try to think of good journalism as sort of the nervous system for democracy, it’s the input of information that a body of people needs to determine what to do, what to do next. And I think part of that is necessarily working by a system of values. And so it doesn’t mean that we all have to be opinion journalists, but it does mean that we have to write towards some ideal, some sort of guiding light.
And as we were preparing to tape this podcast I was thinking about I.F. Stone, who was a great independent journalist of the 20th century, and he wrote these newsletters for decades that were sort of a great outsider review of journalism. And to what Nitish said about not getting too close to power, he was like the ideal of that. And I went back to his first newsletter and he had a great line about the purpose of what he was trying to do with his journalism. And he said, “I intend to fight for peace and for civil liberties, and I believe that both are indivisible.” And I think about that a lot because it’s like if you could boil down what a democratic society ought to be steering towards, I feel like peace and civil liberties is kind of the core of it. And so I’ve been thinking a lot about that in terms of free speech and how it’s really journalism’s obligation to protect the tools that it needs to actually get done, and free speech is kind of the cornerstone of that.
Susan Rinkunas: It sure is. And everyone is also talking about the different kinds of journalism that happens. There’s here’s what’s happening kind of a play by play, and then that’s happening at the local and state and even national level, and then there are other people who are doing analysis and commentary and building on that work to paint perhaps a larger picture and say things that maybe other journalists wouldn’t be able to based on their newsroom’s standards, that kind of thing. But given all that, the fact that people need information in order to make informed choices about their elected leaders and just other things in their daily life, can we talk a little bit about why some politicians might be motivated to threaten, intimidate, or de-legitimize journalists?
I want to bring in two specific examples and we can talk about them and threats in general, but in September of this year a SAG-AFTRA member, our sibling union, was reporting for a TV station and drove her vehicle to an ICE facility outside of Broadview in Illinois and a pepper ball was fired into her vehicle injuring her, and I believe that there weren’t even any protesters there. But this reporter was doing their job and had a pepper ball fired into their vehicle, that’s a physical attack.
Then we have other kinds of attacks like the President of the United States going on social media and saying things like, “The best thing that would happen to this country would be if the New York Times would cease publication because they are horrible, biased, untruthful quote unquote source of information.” And that post was in response to him being upset that the New York Times has published multiple stories about how he is being filmed on TV falling asleep in meetings and just looks and acts older than he was in his first term because he is now the oldest person elected to serve as president in the United States. So those are two different kinds of examples, but I guess want to hear people’s thoughts on why politicians or even federal agencies at large might be motivated to threaten or intimidate journalists.
Matt Shuham: I think it’s because at their worst law enforcement agencies don’t consider themselves to be accountable to the public, and I think immigration enforcement is a great example of that. It’s hard to find an example of someone who’s more vulnerable than a stateless person or someone who’s migrating from one state to another. And so when you see, especially along the border, the types of abuses that border patrol and then within the country that immigration and customs enforcement carry out on people, it’s a result of those folks not having connections in the community, not being in a position to express their rights, to stand up for their rights. And I think with the sort of nationalization of immigration enforcement and of federal law enforcement we’re seeing that being applied to everyone. So ICE and CBP are treating everyone like they’re undocumented people, which is sort of part of this mission creep that comes with authoritarianism. Folks attack journalists so that they can do their work without accountability is the bottom line for me.
Sammie Smylie: I know that we’re talking about this in the time of the second Trump Administration, but I also want people to know this has been happening to us for years at this point. Every journalist, I don’t care what beat you cover, I know a lot of people think because I cover education it’s just all children and schools and everything’s happy, and that’s not the case. There’s certain issues when I’m on the education beat where I’ve had to sue the school district, Chicago public schools for not abiding by the Illinois state laws around, I know you all call them information requests, but we call them FOIAs in Illinois. There are some sources who are afraid to talk on the record because they’re worried about their job security, whether they be school administrators like principals, assistant principals, some teachers are afraid to speak out when there’s something wrong happening. There’ve been issues with students with disabilities who are being disciplined in certain ways that definitely could be really dangerous for them, so place them in like restraints or in seclusion rooms. And it’s always been happening.
And I think for reporters who’ve covered law enforcement at the city level, for instance in Chicago there were reporters working on the Laquan McDonald case, which was a teenager in Chicago who I believe was shot 16 times, and that was covered up. All these things that’s going through my head right now, it’s like we’ve been going through this for a while, I just think that it’s escalated in this time. It seems like there’s more people jumping at the chance to harm us, they’re more emboldened now to use whatever legal capital to silence us in this moment, but it’s always been happening.
Susan Rinkunas: That’s a really great point, Sammie, that people who are on the other end of the accountability journalism have often tried to prevent it from happening, delay it from happening, doing things like not following through on public information requests. So that has, you’re absolutely correct, that has been going on forever. And then in more recent years these kinds of agencies or individuals have been emboldened, you could say, by the President of the United States and other people who claim that any story they don’t like is fake news. And that was happening in the first Trump Administration and this has been going on for years.
Nitish Pahwa: Yeah. Sammie, Matt both made great points. I think I just want to add that there have been all these sort of secretive under the radar attempts, you could say, to just undermine any journalists or fact finding for forever. And of course it’s often fallen hardest on the least privileged journalists, the ones with least access to money, resources, legal representation, what have you. And there’s so much talk or so much remembrance of looking back at Watergate like, wow, that was this amazing moment. Did journalism turn away from that now? And that was obviously an incredible moment in American history, but it was also more of an anomaly than not. I mean you can look at the subsequent decade during the Reagan years when a lot of abuses, whether related to Reagan’s own [inaudible 00:16:27] deals or to interference in Latin America, South America were often just not spoken about.
There’s this pretty infamous Charlie Rose interview from the ’90s where Elliot Abrams, who was working in the Reagan Administration in charge of a lot of those foreign affairs, he just got called out to his face by a journalist who was on the panel, Allan Naim, and then Alan never really got invited back again. You could also point to Phil Donahue during the Iraq War, I mean there are countless other examples. I do think, there is now what is different is an attack on the concept of journalism and accountability all together. You could look at some of those individual instances and just be like, oh, someone flew too close to the sun but don’t worry, we still love free speech, et cetera. Now it’s straight up, I mean the Pentagon now just invites people who, probably half of everything they say is lies, and just to sit there and ask their questions. So I mean now I think the attack on journalism has been systematized from top to bottom, and that’s what really worries me.
Susan Rinkunas: Nitish, the fact that you mentioned these attacks on the press are going to hit hardest on the most vulnerable people, I mean the Trump Administration deported a journalist earlier this year. Mario Guevara was sent to El Salvador after covering immigration. And he even said, “I will not be the first one.” So they are not attacking citizen journalists in that way yet, but I mean I get quite unnerved when you hear members of Congress saying things that they want to denaturalize people like New York City mayor elect Zohran Mamdani. He’s a politician, not a journalist, but it really concerns me that there will be more direct attacks like that.
But then there could be even more shadowy ones like lowering the standard for defamation so that people could get sued. I know, Nitish, you are thinking about that as well, like the New York Times versus Sullivan Supreme Court precedent, that a Trump stacked Supreme Court is acting in recent months like it doesn’t want to go there, at least there’s not five votes to overturn it, but this is something that people should all be thinking about, that if the Supreme Court lowers the bar for defamation that could lead to much less, I keep saying accountability journalism, but that could lead to people holding their punches. If they have a story that they know is damaging they might say, well we need way more sourcing than we would normally feel comfortable running and abuses might not come to light.
Nitish Pahwa: Yeah. I really do have to say, not to be all like a USA or whatever, but when you look at a lot of other countries, even just like the UK or India with supposedly strong histories of free expression and democracy, their bars for defamation, for libel and so on are so much lower than ours. And it’s a serious problem, it leads to a lot of people just self-censoring, frankly, or just choosing not to go in a particular direction, go near a certain famous person if they think they can get sued out of existence. I mean we kind of saw what happens with that with Gawker, one of our first unionized online media shops here, RIP.
Susan Rinkunas: I exhaled a deep exhale, yeah.
Nitish Pahwa: Yeah. It’s still a sad one, 10 years later it doesn’t sting any less. But the New York Times Sullivan thing especially haunts me because, I mean we know this with especially the so called conservative legal movement, they don’t really give up, they just kind of keep going after things decades and decades until they finally get something of what they want. I mean we’ve seen this with, obviously, Susan, you covered this quite intently with abortion rights here, we’ve seen this with affirmative action, and yeah, I mean we’ve already seen just three major attempts in recent years to overturn the New York Times versus Sullivan precedent. There was Alan Dershowitz, there was Sarah Palin, there was Trump’s personal friend, Steve Wynn. And I previously covered the now infamous All In podcast for Slate before it had gotten MAGA, fully MAGA I should say. And even then, one of the co-panelists, David Sachs, was talking about the need to overturn NYT versus Sullivan. And now that guy’s just in the White House helping to direct policy around copyright, policy around AI, policy around the vectors of information that will determine our future. I don’t love that.
Susan Rinkunas: Yeah, great.
Matt Shuham: I don’t know, I have sort of a soapbox moment that’ll only take 30 seconds. When it comes to vulnerable journalists and for standing up for our rights as journalists and for our free speech, I feel like we’ve got to call out Gaza and what Israel did in Gaza. I’ll just read some statistics since October 2023 from the Committee to Protect Journalists. They wrote, “Israel’s engaging in the deadliest and most deliberate effort to kill and silence journalists that the CPJ has ever documented.” And then to date they report 246 journalists and media workers have been killed by Israel since October 7, 2023, including 206 Palestinians killed in Gaza, Palestinian journalists. And I only bring that up because this is something that was done with US bombs, with US money, with US diplomatic support. And we’ve seen time and time again that what the US government is willing to support abroad, they’re willing to support at home.
So for me it’s not just a solidarity issue, it’s a self-preservation issue that yes, we have to demand accountability. And some of these do look like targeted killings, not just collateral damage, not just the fog of war, but targeted killings of journalists with US weapons, US money, US diplomatic cover. And so as a journalist, as a Jew for what it’s worth, but as a journalist, as a Writers Guild member we ought to be demanding as much legal accountability as we can on the world’s stage anytime a journalist is murdered. And so it’s been a historically deadly two years for journalists, and especially specifically because of what Israel’s done in Gaza. And so I feel like we should shout that out because there’s no indication that Trump would not murder journalists because he’s done it, or his allies, the US ally of Israel has done it so frequently these past two years.
Susan Rinkunas: Yeah, it’s a really chilling point, Matt. Thank you for bringing that up. Yeah, it’s not just the fact that there are fewer people to actually document what’s happening in Gaza at the hands of the Israeli government, but also your point about what happens in other countries does get imported here. We’ve been talking a little bit about the explicit threats against journalists from government actors, but there are also threats on the profession and the individual stories that we can cover coming from corporate consolidation, which is something that many of you have mentioned already. Some of this corporate consolidation has happened in the last 10 years because people are seeking to simply make more money, but in more recent months and years there has been fairly obvious political intent, and the biggest example of that is the Ellison’s Skydance buying Paramount and seeking to potentially also buy all of Warner Brothers, although they are competing currently with Netflix who wants to buy a smaller portion of that company. So I want to ask how people think that corporate ownership and consolidation is affecting how stories get told and who gets to tell them?
Nitish Pahwa: Yeah. I mean the Ellisons with Paramount is just such an extra egregious example because you immediately had right after that the purging of DEI and ERGs in the newsroom, you had Colbert fired just before the merger was fully approved, you had the settlement before that regarding 60 Minutes and the Kamala Harris edit. You had yet another sort of cave-in from CBS regarding just interviews being edited at all when it came to administration members going to the channel, being interviewed on TV, et cetera. And of course with the Warner Bros thing it’s been reported that, shout out media journalists for reporting this stuff, but it was reported that David Ellison’s daddy, Oracle founder Larry Ellison, was just sitting there with Trump and they were saying, “Okay, we can get rid of this CNN host, we can get rid of this one, we can get rid of that one.”
I mean this is I feel like so much more blatant almost than it has been in recent memory, it doesn’t really feel like the Ellisons or anyone in their orbit is really trying to hide what they’re trying to get done here. And with the acquisition of The Free Press it was the same thing, we want this particular type of quote unquote coverage included here, we want these journalists gone, we want these other newsrooms to rethink their priorities. And one thing I will say though, and this is again a testament to the power of gossip as all of you were noting before, I really give a lot of credit to the current day CBS staffers who are just leaking everything that’s going on there. I don’t know who they are to be clear, don’t anyone go sniffing around me, but I think that’s important. When it’s that major of a media takeover and that drastic of a change, just in a matter of months so much has transformed about the entire Paramount umbrella, it’s important even while you’re in the thick of it to keep telling people what’s going on.
Matt Shuham: Yeah, I mean it seems like you can’t talk about media consolidation during the Trump Administration without talking about the business interests that these folks have before the Trump Administration like you said, with all of these mergers, and just with the personal benefit that these CEOs get from being close to Trump, who is very much a person to person, usually man to man type of deal maker. So there’s immense power in being close to Trump and showing him your loyalty to him basically is again, how an authoritarian regime works. It’s an odd thing with media consolidation because you would think that the richer and the larger a corporation and individual gets, the more powerful they are, the more they would be willing to push back for their own sake. But what we’ve seen is actually the more consolidated, the bigger, the richer, the more powerful an institution, a CEO gets, the more they have to lose.
And when you have someone like Trump in office who’s willing to use the power of the State to punish his enemies and reward his supporters, it takes people power, it takes union power to align our values and our goals. And so I think from the perspective of the union movement and specifically for unionized journalists, we need to stand up on behalf of our readers and say, we’re representatives of the questions that our readers have and the answers that they need, and we can’t leave it to our CEOs to protect that interest because oftentimes they have other interests. They’ve got money they need to protect, they’ve got deals they want to do that have nothing to do with journalistic integrity or anything like that. And so it’s up to the union movement to be like, these are our values, this is what our journalistic integrity looks like in practice.
And I’m just thinking of one story, not about journalism but about a law firm that we reported a few months ago, Paul Weiss, that did a deal with the Trump Administration. And I spoke to lawyers there and the deal that they were told internally was the deal that was made with the Trump Administration was different than the deal that was announced publicly. And all those lawyers in that firm felt burned because their leadership was telling them one thing and the leadership was telling Trump another thing, or at least Trump said that the leadership was telling him another thing. And it just goes to show the leaders of an organization cannot be trusted to protect, whether legal integrity or in our case journalistic integrity, if there are other things, especially money, on the line.
Susan Rinkunas: Yes. And to your point, as companies get larger you would think that they would have more chutzpah, that they would be willing to take on more risk. And in fact, you see things happening at NBC News, for instance earlier this year they closed their verticals. Like NBC Black, they had a vertical dedicated to Black life in America, they also had NBC Out dedicated to queer people’s stories and attacks against them, and they closed those verticals earlier this year. We’ve seen workers covering these beats get laid off in the past five years with increasing pace, and I think there are some companies that are rationalizing this in 2025 by pointing to the fact that the Trump Administration is arguing that equity and diversity in the workplace is, the Trump Administration is acting like it’s almost illegal, that it’s reverse discrimination or something absolutely insane, but they are looking at where the wind is blowing from the highest levels and then making changes at their organizations as a result.
But I think your point is also a strong one that this is a place where unions can step in and try to bargain really strong contracts that require ERGs, Nitish, you mentioned employee resource groups, I believe that’s what you were referring to, or other kinds of initiatives to have a diverse workforce because we as journalists need to represent the communities that we cover and people bringing their experiences to the newsroom is a good thing, it’s not a bad thing. Some people think that your life experience makes you biased, but in fact everyone brings biases to their work, and people having different experiences helps create better journalism and have stories resonate with readers more.
I wanted to ask how perhaps these federal attacks on DEI initiatives are compounding with consolidation to change the kinds of stories that are being told. Are there newsrooms killing stories or avoiding stories that they might’ve run two years ago? I’m not sure if you can speak to it at your own workplaces, but maybe you’ve heard from other folks or even you’ve read reporting about other organizations that are kind of cowing in this moment because they’re afraid.
