Episode 225: How US Media Frames Democracy that Actually Helps People as “Buying Votes”
Citations Needed | July 23, 2025 | Transcript
[Music]
Intro: This is Citations Needed with Nima Shirazi and Adam Johnson.
Nima Shirazi: Welcome to Citations Needed, a podcast on the media, power, PR, and the history of bullshit. I am Nima Shirazi.
Adam Johnson: I’m Adam Johnson.
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Nima: “Student loan forgiveness is a bribe for young voters,” shouted Newsweek in 2022. “Harris’s call for price controls on groceries is more pandering than policy,” declared The Hill in 2024. “Free for all: Democratic socialist’s policy pitches face tough fiscal reality in New York,” warned Politico just this year, 2025.
Adam: Every time an elected official or political candidate proposes a policy with even the slightest hint of actual populism, American pundits, analysts, and alleged experts line up to tell us that it’s just a scheme to buy votes or pander to voters. Offering student loan debt relief is just cheating. Lowering grocery costs is pandering. Eliminating public transit fares is merely bribing voters. These initiatives aren’t developed in good faith in order to improve the lives of the public. They’re just cynical gimmicks to help a politician get ahead.
Nima: We know that some policy makers make promises they’ll never fulfill. Of course, they chisel away at robust and universal proposals, they backtrack on bold and transformative ideas post-election. This happens all the time. But all too often, media’s default position is to assert that even the most modest of economically populist proposals are mere strategies to buy votes during a political campaign. This posture reveals grim truths about what our media class seems to think the responsibilities of lawmakers and governments actually are.
Adam: On today’s show, we’ll examine the media’s tendency to assume that anything remotely close to populism is somehow cheating, playing the game on God Mode, democracy Game Genie, and ought to be discouraged by serious people who demand serious solutions, putting a sinister spin on what is simply doing what people want.
Nima: Later on the show, we’ll be joined by Janine Jackson, Program Director at Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, and the producer and host of FAIR’s longtime syndicated weekly radio show, CounterSpin.
[Begin clip]
Janine Jackson: One of the abiding principles is that people as individuals are self-interested and need corralling, and corporations are for everyone and they need freeing. So when a politician questions, or threatens, or threatens by questioning this view, they have to be ridiculed into silence, and that includes the sowing suspicion, this saying that they’re cheating, they’re tricking people, essentially. And how are they doing that? They’re doing that by offering things they can’t deliver, and the unspoken message is they can’t deliver because we won’t let them.
[End clip]
Nima: I’m excited to get into this today, Adam, because we have talked kind of around this topic a whole bunch in the past eight years. But really when it comes to the notion that things that are popular, things that the public want across communities, across demographics, across geography, very popular proposals, things that would literally improve people’s lives, things that poll incredibly high, when politicians lean into those things and make them part of their policy platforms, they are accused by their opponents and also by the media as cheating. Like, Oh, you’re just pandering to the unwashed masses. You’re saying the thing they want to hear. And obviously this is going to butt up against the fiscal reality of what it means to truly lead. We can’t do these pie-in-the-sky things. But this only happens really when it comes to things that would, say, take money away from corporations, or would shift power, say, to more community-led initiatives. This is when these platform policies are accused of being impossible and just used to pander. We don’t hear this, of course, when politicians talk about, say, continuing to make the US military the most lethal fighting force on the planet. Or, you know, sending more money to fund a genocide in Palestine.
Adam: Yeah, the general idea is the government, it’s a fundamentally libertarian or even neoliberal idea, that the government’s job is to sort of make the rules. It’s not to redistribute things. It’s not to redistribute money, it’s not to redistribute power. And when it does, it’s somehow a fundamental defect in the system, that it’s not what the system is set up to do. Your job is not to take from the rich and give to the poor. Your job is to, you know, whatever, your bullshit opportunity framing, right? Your job is to give people the tools to all become billionaires themselves. And anything that corrupts this supposedly organic and natural process is seen as a deviation from the norm. It’s seen as unnatural. It’s seen as artificial.
And there’s a long history to this, which we’ll get into here. Framing vaguely populist or genuinely populist policies as some version of buying votes has long been a tactic of both rightwing policy makers and rightwing media. It may come as no surprise to anyone who listens to the show that FDR was kind of the original person, at least in the United States, accused of buying votes. His New Deal programs were often characterized this way. Here’s one example from October of 1934, a United Press article published in the New York Daily News with the headline, quote, “F.D.R. Relief Buys Votes? Yes, and No, Says G.O.P.” The subheadline read,
Republicans let fly two campaign blasts at President Roosevelt last night. Both attacked Federal relief programs as helping the Democrats. They disagreed, however, as to whether the Administration was buying votes with relief funds. The President’s distant cousin, Col. Theodore, said it was. National Chairman Fletcher, however, said it wasn’t.
Okay. Well. So it’s unclear if a catastrophic depression, where one-third of people are unemployed, if helping them out is buying votes. So yeah, the article would go on to write, quote,
Chairman Henry P. Fletcher of the Republican National Committee demanded today that President Roosevelt act to prevent Democratic campaigners from capitalizing human relief needs for political purposes.
“I claim that the distribution of public funds is being used,” Fletcher said, “as a political argument in the electoral divisions with full knowledge of the administration.”
Unquote. Fletcher, supposedly, the party who was not accusing FDR of buying votes, effectively did accuse him of buying votes, saying, quote,
“I don’t mean to insinuate that this is buying votes” —
Nima: Wink, wink.
Adam: “But it is being used to influence voters in the campaign.”
Unquote. Okay. Well, there you go. So there wasn’t really a disagreement. The nature of the debate, it seems, whether the public relief funding was being used to buy votes, literally or only figuratively.
Nima: Now, in the early 1950s, a large-scale drought was ravaging crops and farms throughout the eastern United States. At the time, President Harry Truman authorized a series of relief measures for farmers, such as shipments of hay direct from the Department of Agriculture. Again, the wire service United Press reported on the matter in an October 16, 1952, edition with this headline, quote, “Republican Accuses Truman of Buying Votes with Drouth Aid.” The article would say this, quote,
Senator John M. Butler (R-Md.) accused President Truman Wednesday, of “buying votes with public funds” when he authorized an additional $5 million for relief of livestock farmers in drouth-stricken states.
The article would go on. Quote,
Butler, in a statement issued by the Republican National Committee, charged that the timing of Mr. Truman’s action was “obviously political.”
And continues. Quote,
These states have been suffering for a considerable period,” he said. “Now, just three weeks before national elections, they are given relief. It is the old Democratic formula of buying votes with public funds. If there were no elections, there would be no relief.”
End quote. Now, these types of charges continued into the 1960s via attacks on Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society social program. Here’s an excerpt from an Associated Press article dated July 2, 1964, as legislation to increase pay for federal workers was moving through Congress. It starts with this headline, quote, “LBJ accused of buying votes of older people.”
And the article says this, quote,
The chairman of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce —
Ding, ding, ding, ding.
says President Johnson is trying “to purchase the votes of government employees and their families” with the federal pay-raise bill now before the Senate.
Edward P. Neilan said that a proposed 5% increase in Social Security benefits is “bait to buy the votes of the older people.”
Adam: Yeah, this ‘buying votes’ trope was also, of course, expanded to leftwing, left-leaning politicians in the Global South, specifically against Hugo Chávez, when he came to office in 1999 in Venezuela, he was constantly accused of basically cheating. This is also true of his successor, Nicolás Maduro, who won an election after Chávez died of cancer in 2013. Consider a Foreign Policy opinion piece from December of 2015 written by Javier Corrales, a political science professor and New York Times op-ed contributor. Corrales argued, quote,
In the Venezuelan welfare state — unlike in the social-democratic welfare states of Europe and North America, where social welfare is provided based on need — you receive state benefits based on the degree of your loyalty to the state.
Unquote. Corrales added that Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, quote, “offers consumption goods as protection, on one condition: Cast your vote for chavismo!” Later, Corrales elaborated, quote,
As inflation and scarcity spiked, Maduro responded by handing out flat-screen TVs, construction materials, washing machines, and even bags with groceries. The authorities added large new groups of people to the pension systems. The minimum wage was increased four times (though always below inflation rates, so this particular form of assistance did not offer much in the way of real relief).
Unquote. What Corrales seems to be referring to is a 2013 initiative by the Venezuelan government to enact price controls and electronics and other consumer goods that private businesses have reportedly marked up by as much as 1,000%. Somehow preventing profiteering, expanding the pension system, and increasing minimum wage is merely a bribe to voters. And these policies, of course, were not just for their voters. They were universal. But since their voters are almost universally poor, they would mostly apply to them. But this was seen as a cold transaction or a sort of form of corruption. And if you suspected that Corrales did not mention sanctions when discussing any of Venezuela’s economic problems, you would be correct.
Nima: [Laughs] Right.
Adam: So the Latinos like to sort of give things away.
Nima: Poverty comes from nowhere. They are just dictatorially doing this, you know, mafia move, right? Like, Hey, here’s a bag of oranges. Also support your local Godfather. Right? That’s kind of, like, the entire premise here, even though what is being described are pro-welfare, pro-popular support policies that literally changed people’s lives, right? There’s that throwaway line that Corrales has about the minimum wage being increased four times, but then it’s like, Oh, but don’t worry, it’s still below inflation rate, so it doesn’t really do anything. It’s like, can you imagine if the minimum wage were raised four times in the United States, and that was seen as some political gambit rather than actually improving the lives of real people? And I think kind of the racialized nature of this is also kind of given away in these articles, right? Because right at the top, Corrales notes that in the Venezuelan welfare state, it goes this way, but in the social democratic welfare states of Europe and North America, it goes this other way. So it’s like, there’s clearly a racialized comparison there, meaning that, you know, Global South socialism is really just another word for cronyism and corruption, whereas, hey, if you’re in Scandinavia, that’s based on need, that’s based on really helping real people with their real problems.
Adam: Now we’re going to cite an example back in the United States from around the same time, in 2012, after Barack Obama won re-election. Bill O’Reilly on Fox News had a meltdown on air, in shock that Romney lost, and he gave a one would say, somewhat racist version of this trope, basically accusing lazy Black people of being bought off by Obama for free stuff. And it’s not very thinly veiled. It’s basically a Stormfront comment. So let’s listen to that right now.
[Begin clip]
Bill O’Reilly: Because it’s a changing country. The demographics are changing. It’s not a traditional America anymore. And there are 50% of the voting public who want stuff. They want things. And who is going to give them things? President Obama. He knows it, and he ran on it. And, whereby, 20 years ago, President Obama would be roundly defeated by an establishment candidate like Mitt Romney. The white establishment is now the minority. And the voters, many of them, feel that this economic system is stacked against them, and they want stuff. You’re going to see a tremendous Hispanic vote for President Obama, overwhelming Black vote for President Obama, and women will probably break President Obama’s way. People feel that they are entitled to things, and which candidate between the two is going to give them things.
[End clip]
Nima: [Laughs] God.
Adam: So Obama offered modest liberal reforms, which is cheating. You’re not allowed to do that. You’re not allowed to offer, because it’s also cheating with a white, #whitegenocide spin to it, right?
Nima: Yeah. Who wants stuff? The browns and the Blacks and the women.
Adam: Yeah. Now this line was used frequently to attack Bernie Sanders, specifically by Hillary Clinton herself, who wrote in her 2016 postmortem What Happened. She blamed Bernie Sanders, arguing that his economic populist message was basically a form of cheating, or it was a gimmick. She wrote, quote,
We would promise a bold infrastructure investment plan or an ambitious new apprenticeship program for young people, and then Bernie would announce basically the same thing, but bigger. On issue after issue, it was like he kept promising four-minute abs, or even no-minutes abs. Magic abs!
This was in reference earlier, to the joke about the guy who wants to compete with Eight-Minute Abs by doing Seven-Minute Abs. And so this was a common trope, that Bernie Sanders was just making unrealistic promises to young people, something Eric Adams has used against his competition in the election, Mamdani, the sort of, I’m serious, this is just pie-in-the-sky. He’s just manipulating you with these gimmicks and buying your vote.
Nima: Now this would continue well into the Biden presidency of the early 2020s. So, for instance, media panicked upon Biden’s 2022 announcement of a highly conditional, means-tested student-debt relief initiative in which the federal government would forgive up to $20,000 of federal student loan debt for Pell Grant recipients and up to $10,000 for other qualifying borrowers. The rightwing reaction was predictable and inevitable, using feigned concern for, quote-unquote, “taxpayers” to inveigh against anything remotely resembling debt cancellation.
At the time, Newsweek ran opinion pieces by conservative commentators like Liz Wheeler and Brad Polumbo. One by Brad Polumbo, the co-founder of BASEDPolitics and a correspondent at the right-leaning Foundation for Economic Education, ran on August 24, 2022, with the headline, quote, “Student Loan Forgiveness Is a Bribe for Young Voters,” end quote. Two days later, on August 26, 2022, Liz Wheeler, another conservative pundit, published this article, also in Newsweek, headlined, quote, “Biden’s Student Loan Stunt Is a Desperate Attempt To Buy Votes,” end quote. And at the time, on Twitter, Mitt Romney offered this lamentation, writing on August 24, 2022, this, quote,
Sad to see what’s being done to bribe the voters. Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan may win Democrats some votes, but it fuels inflation, foots taxpayers with other people’s financial obligations, is unfair to those who paid their own way & creates irresponsible expectations.
End quote.
Adam: Now, Biden’s student debt relief plan didn’t come to fruition. The Supreme Court struck it down in June of 2023. And more centrist media shared some of these views. Vox, for example, published a critique of the plan, calling debt relief a, quote, “politically potent but legally dubious mass forgiveness strategy,” unquote. As the Debt Collective and FAIR have both pointed out, however, the article’s author, Kevin Carey, worked, and still works, for the think tank New America, which is funded in part by the student-loan industry. Its funders include the nonprofit branch of the Educational Credit Management Corporation, which is a debt collector for the Education Department. It was also previously funded by the Lumina Foundation, which has hundreds of millions of dollars in assets from Sallie Mae.
Two years later, in the election of 2024, Biden announced a subsequent round of debt-relief proposals, which Politico, for example, referred to as a, quote, “gambit,” examining it more as a ploy to court young voters than an actual policy choice. The debt-relief plan was later halted by federal judges, a point Politico in a separate article dated June 27, 2024, viewed purely in terms of campaign value. The article stated, quote,
Biden’s student debt relief is a centerpiece of his effort to energize important parts of his base where he’s seen a softening of support, particularly among young and Black voters. Now progressive groups are urging the Biden administration to stave off the political damage of the rulings by freezing student loan payments across-the-board the way he did through the height of the pandemic.
“The good news for the president is that this overreach by these Republican attorneys general has given him a winning political hand,” said Mike Pierce, who leads the Student Borrower Protection Center, one of the advocacy groups that has pressured Biden on debt forgiveness for years. “He just needs to play it.”
Now, this isn’t necessarily inaccurate. It’s possible that Biden did indeed introduce student loan proposals to court young voters and Black voters. But that doesn’t mean the initiative has to be framed as a mere cynical attempt to gain votes rather than an attempt to help people who are in debt, which every other policy, again, policies that are about national security or about stabilizing the economy or helping crypto, these are all seen as sort of good-faith efforts on policy merits. But when it comes to giving people relief, rather than sort of, again, the more exotic, EITC tax credit, roundabout stuff, when it’s trying to give people direct relief, then it becomes, basically, a bribe.
Nima: Well, because this idea of relief is connected directly to this idea of handouts, that those are seen as synonymous, and that the handout framework, the kind of rightwing handout framework, paints anyone who is getting relief from often unjust burdens placed upon them, that this is undeserved, and the undeserving obviously should not be catered to in this kind of rightwing framework, that this just enables more kind of welfare state-ism, Welfare Queen. It’s, like we’ve said, very racialized, it’s very gendered, it’s very classist. And so you see this happen, right? It has to do with deserving this. It has to do with, Oh, well, you’re just giving folks this handout. And so obviously that’s a way to buy votes, rather than saying these are policies that are popular and that help people, and therefore people might then support you when you do this, and it benefits them and their lives and their families. And so this sort of relief equals handout, equals undeserving government corruption to buy votes is this very clever rightwing ideological framework that basically paints any kind of positive populist policy as being inherently cynical and corrupt. And this framing is really summed up very well in one particular clip from Sean Hannity on Fox News, who said at the time this.
[Begin clip]
Sean Hannity: The President announced another bold new plan. Basically, I would view it as kind of bribing voters with your tax dollars. Last week, it was a $500 billion green-energy spending spree full of handouts to all of Joe’s allies, and, interestingly, a lot of swing-state money. And this week, another round of student loan forgiveness, by the way, a unilateral act that the Supreme Court of our land ruled was unconstitutional, but the Bidens, they never let the rule of law get in the way of a good time, paid for with your money.
[End clip]
Adam: We saw similar framing of a gimmick, a buying-votes scam, around Biden’s drug price cap proposals. Around the same time, in August of 2024 Biden, announced price caps on 10 prescription drugs for Medicare recipients, much of it to the media’s displeasure. By this point, Biden had withdrawn from the 2024 race, and Kamala Harris had been named the Democratic nominee the previous month. The New York Times depicted the price negotiations as a sort of scheme, as though Biden was attempting to help Harris win the election. Here’s the opening paragraph from a Times article published August 15, 2024. Quote,
The Biden administration on Thursday unveiled the results of landmark drug price negotiations between Medicare and pharmaceutical companies, allowing President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris to cast themselves as confronting the drug industry on behalf of older Americans at a critical moment in the presidential campaign.
Unquote. In their reporting on price caps, Axios would say, quote,
Why it matters: the vibe signals how hard Democrats are going to lean into lowering health costs as Election Day nears. That’s despite the fact that the new prices won’t take effect until 2026.
President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris will make their first joint appearance since he dropped out of the presidential race in Maryland, where they’re expected to tout the results.
Unquote. Thus, the question as to why it matters, according to Axios, is not that it will help people afford lifesaving medicine. It’s because Democrats are pandering in an election cycle which is seen as illegitimate or dishonest.
Nima: Also noting that the policy won’t actually start until 2026 is this sort of cutesy way to say, Oh, it’s not even going to help people right now, as if, like, any policy starts the day after it’s signed right like, except for executive orders that destroy families and do other horrible things. But, like, actual policy, yeah, there’s a period in which it doesn’t begin right away. But this is seen as, Axios kind of painted it as like, Oh, see, like, they get to tout these populist victories, but no one’s even going to see the benefits of this for another year and a half. And it’s like, well, also that’s good. If this happens in a year and a half, that’s also good, right? And so the dismissal of this as just an election-trail gambit is very clear here, never actually taking these policies on their merits and only talking about what they are going to do on the campaign.
Adam: Well, yeah, everything’s a Machiavellian, cynical ploy.
Nima: And even if they are, if it helps people, what is the fucking problem?
Adam: Right? Who cares? It doesn’t make a difference.
Nima: And at the same time, after Kamala Harris had taken over as the 2024 Democratic nominee, media applied these same cynical framings to her campaign promise to enact minimal restrictions on price gouging. Harris’s plan was again, far from sweeping or radical, and contrary to many media assertions, it wouldn’t have implemented actual price controls, but simply would have prevented retailers from jacking up prices in times of emergency. Yet even this was deemed too dramatic and lefty for most corporate media. The Washington Post editorial board, for instance, dismissed the proposals in a piece headlined, quote, “The times demand serious economic ideas. Harris supplies gimmicks,” end quote. The editorial board opened with this, quote,
Vice President Kamala Harris’s speech Friday was an opportunity to get specific with voters about how a Harris presidency would manage an economy that many feel is not working well for them. Unfortunately, instead of delivering a substantial plan, she squandered the moment on populist gimmicks.
End quote. And just a week later, this is in August of 2024, Steve Kamin, then a fellow at the right wing American Enterprise Institute, opined for The Hill that, quote, “Harris’s call for price controls on groceries is more pandering than policy,” end quote. Never mind that, again, Harris’s proposals were nowhere near what everyone was calling ‘price controls.’ They were not that. But according to Kamin, Harris was simply doing what was easiest to get ahead in the presidential race, writing this, quote,
The worst of it isn’t in the policy analysis. It’s in what this pandering says about the chances of a serious discussion of difficult issues with the American voter.
End quote. Soon after this was published, Josh Barro, who you may know as a journalist who urges union busting for the sake of achieving quote-unquote “abundance,” penned a piece for The Atlantic magazine headlined, quote, “Harris’s Plan Is Economically Dumb But Politically Smart,” end quote, in which he made the same argument as the Post and The Hill, that this modest proposal to prevent price gouging actually revealed an ignorance of how economics really works, that the Harris campaign was merely advancing it to, quote, “help her win,” end quote.
Adam: In September of 2024 over at FAIR, Paul Hedreen wrote an article entitled, “Media Throw Everything But the Facts Against Harris’s ‘Price Control’ Proposal,” which you should definitely read. We borrowed from that. And for a glimpse in the other side of the equation, because there’s another side of this equation, there’s an implied and then sometimes explicitly said side of this the ‘buying votes’ trope, is that the government’s job is not to pander, quote-unquote, “pander,” which is to say, do what people want. It’s to discipline them, punish them, and then give them, in some cases, they’ll say, a dose of medicine, like, hard medicine, right? Their job is to be the adults in the room, where voters are kind of mindless, drooling idiots who need to be told what’s good for them, because otherwise they’ll just want a bunch of free stuff and sit around and play Xbox.
Nima: That’s right. They got to be smacked down with reality, Adam.
Adam: Right. So let’s give a glimpse of what Josh Barro thinks government ought to do. In 2010, he wrote, quote, “We should be thankful,” unquote, for the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, also known as Bowles-Simpson. The commission was created by then-President Barack Obama in order to, quote, “reduce the deficit,” unquote, i.e., cut Social Security and Medicare. Barro applauded it for, quote, “stop[ping] unsustainable growth in entitlement spending,” unquote, and dismissed lawmakers who criticized it from the left as impractical. So in Barro’s mind, the job of a politician, first and foremost, is to immiserate and discipline poor people so they get off their asses and go work for low wages for him and his rich buddies. That’s the role of government. So the government does have a role, but its role is to work on behalf of serious people in serious rooms with serious suits and serious ties and serious conferences. It’s not to sort of play to the cheap seats.
Nima: Right. The giveaway is who the policies benefit. You can see whatever policy is being proposed, who does it actually help, and who does it hurt? And when it helps poor people, for instance, that is seen as a political ploy. This is seen as the handout. This is seen as buying votes. Would it help, say, corporations or those who already have a great deal of wealth and power in our society? Well, you know, man, that’s just Econ 101, that is just the role that government should play. That is just smart policy that is being realistic, but if you do anything to actually improve people’s lives, this is just buying votes.
Adam: Yeah. I mean the brilliance of this trope, and the way you frame it as pandering or whatever, is, you effectively pathologize democracy. Democracy, which is just to say doing what the majority of the people want, is seen as a form of somehow a corruption of democracy. And I’ve made this reference before, when we touched on this trope very briefly, many years ago. But there’s an episode of Blossom where Joey is trying to find ways of cheating on a test, and then he discovers that if he can memorize the information, he can recite it later when he’s taking the test. Now this is, of course, just called studying, but no one in the family has the heart to tell him that this is not a form of cheating. He thinks he’s cheating, but he’s just doing what you’re supposed to do. And every time I see these articles, I think of that episode, because it’s like, that’s not cheating, that’s not pandering, that’s just doing what politicians are supposed to do.
And we’ve just been conditioned for so many decades, especially under this neoliberal austerity regime, this bipartisan neoliberal austerity regime, to view the point of politics, to do unpopular things that people don’t want, because of some supposed objective, adult, serious reason, rather than giving the population what they want, which is lower housing costs, lower medical. costs, lower or free education, you know, name it, right? Childcare. Without a bunch of exotic fucking runarounds to do. Just give them to people. Just pander to them, just buy their votes, right? And it turns it into this sinister thing, and it’s like, no, that’s what they should be doing. In healthy societies, that’s what governments do. They provide for people a baseline quality of life, and that’s not something to be ashamed or stigmatized of. That is indeed what politicians ought to be doing.
Nima: To discuss this more, we will now be joined by Janine Jackson, Program Director at Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting or FAIR, and producer and host of FAIR’s longtime syndicated weekly radio show, CounterSpin. Janine will join us in just a moment. Stay with us.
[Music]
We are joined now by Janine Jackson, Janine, it is so great to have you back on Citations Needed.
Janine Jackson: I’m happy to be here.
Adam: So this particular topic is pure media criticism. So we of course, had to go to the GOAT at FAIR to discuss what is a particular media posture, especially with pundits and editorial boards, but it does kind of sneak its way into straight reporting as well, which is this broad idea that any direct government intervention that’s pro-worker, pro-social welfare, that redistributes wealth is somehow cheating. It’s putting in Game Genie. And it’s a gimmick. And of course, the always popular quote-unquote, “buying votes.” It’s an accusation that’s been made from everyone from FDR to Lyndon Baines Johnson to Hugo Chávez. Even Biden’s student-debt relief program was routinely framed as Biden sort of cynically buying votes. I want to talk about why certain government welfare to corporations and the military-industrial complex is not seen as pandering or buying votes or sort of bribing a particular constituency, but that which helps the poor is kind of viewed as is actually not democracy, but in fact, something opposite of democracy, kind of undemocratic. Let’s talk about that broad media trope and the kind of inherent elitism in that trope.
Janine Jackson: Well, I would start with the whole annoyingly simple answer to many media questions, which is that corporate news media’s job is selling the corporate worldview as not only the only way to organize society, but also the best. So every day, they kind of pretend to puzzle through questions and to hear lots of voices, and then they arrive at the same answer, the status quo, you know, every time. And there’s kind of a, Don’t look behind the curtain of this fake objectivity, because there you will find the powers that be, you know? And the political arrangement that best serves the powers that be is this Potemkin democracy, the illusion of choice. So this illusion of choice with the parameters seriously policed, and there’s lots of ways that they do that, lots of expressions of that, but one of the abiding principles is that people as individuals are self-interested and need corralling, and corporations are for everyone, and they need freeing. So when a politician questions or threatens or threatens by questioning this view, they have to be ridiculed into silence, and that includes this sowing suspicion, this saying that they’re cheating, they’re tricking people essentially. And how are they doing that? They’re doing that by offering things they can’t deliver and the unspoken message is they can’t deliver because we won’t let them.
Adam: Yeah, I think about recent guests of the show Jacob Grumbach said, in reference to the Big Beautiful Bill, Oh, I get it now. You’ve got to give poor people less money to incentivize them to work hard, but you’ve got to give billionaires more money to incentivize them to work hard. It’s this kind of naturalizing of the idea that poor people are inherently lazy and sloth, and the government’s role is to sort of discipline them and to create incentives for them to work hard, which is to say, to work for very little money, and anything that kind of interferes with the natural order is viewed as being somehow artificial. But of course, governments can do whatever we want them to do. That’s, they’re artificial creations. It’s all artificial.
Janine Jackson: Exactly.
Adam: And there’s this kind of idea that there’s this capitalist natural order, and like you said, don’t mind the man behind the curtain.
Janine Jackson: Yeah. And it’s also a kind of unspoken belief in something like trickle-down democracy. We have to make things bad for people, so that somehow, eventually things will be good, you know? Except they don’t explain why you can’t just start with things being better for people.
Nima: [Chuckles] Right.
Janine Jackson: And healthcare is a great example, you know. Like, well, media say, We want everyone to have healthcare. And then when you say, So why not provide everyone healthcare? Oh no, no, no, no. We have to do it in this smart way, this incremental way that doesn’t actually do it, because mumble, mumble, mumble, the market is the best way to serve the needs of the people.
Nima: Right. And how are you going to pay for it, and freedom and choice and all of that stuff. So FAIR has been covering this very thing for many, many years. In one particular study that was written by Paul Hedreen, published on Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting, he surveyed the media response to, this is last year, then-presidential candidate Kamala Harris’s even moderate price-control plan, and in his findings, he really saw that the media was routinely covering these types of government interventions as pandering, right, pandering to the voters. This is a very close cousin, maybe even synonymous, with the idea of buying votes, this idea that to be populist means to be a liar and to overpromise and to never deliver, and that, obviously, that’s why we can’t ever have good things. But when it comes to this idea of Harris’s price-control plan, this is what the Washington Post editorial board said about it. Said that Harris, quote,
“instead of delivering a substantial plan squandered the moment on populist gimmicks.”
End quote. Steve Kamin, writing in The Hill rued this, quote,
“what this pandering says about the chances of a serious discussion of difficult issues with the American voter.”
End quote. So this idea of pandering as a framework, I’d love to kind of talk about this, and we were just touching on it, but the idea that if something is good and materially benefits people’s lives and creates less death and destruction and debt, and it doesn’t appeal to racism or xenophobia or some kind of, you know, disgusting human impulse, if it has actually good things in it and delivers good things, why is that called pandering? And if it is, shouldn’t politicians be pandering more?
Janine Jackson: Absolutely, absolutely. Why would you be answering the needs of the people that you’re supposed to represent? That’s crazy, you know? And in that Harris coverage, I think one of the telling things was a headline in the Atlantic, which was “Harris’s Plan Is Economically Dumb But Politically Smart.” So what’s that saying is, and this is part of undergirding the whole conversation on these types of things, People are dumb. People are children. They don’t know what’s good for them. They think they want healthcare. They think they want, in this case, a halt to price gouging. But serious, you hear the word ‘serious,’ the grown-up in the room. All that kind of language is a way of just smacking you down by pulling on something that is, a lot of people are vulnerable on, which is their idea of political intelligence. We are not government officials. We don’t know how everything works, and so it’s very easy for a media outlet to say, Yes, that sounds good. We see why that would sound good, but we’re smart, and we know it can’t happen, and therefore anyone who promises it or offers it, or even talks about it as possible is lying to you, and we need to step in and set things straight. That word ‘serious’ comes up again and again, and it has to do with imagining that people who want dumb little things like jobs and healthcare and food on the table are childish. They don’t understand how the grown-up world works and how it works is, No, those things are for rich people and not for you.
Adam: I want to talk about this concept of seriousness because I do think it’s where much of the ideological work is done. I think it’s also how those within newsrooms internalize it without thinking they’re doing ideological disciplining. Seriousness is kind of the acceptable ideological parameters, the range of acceptable ideas, right, from A to B, and their job is sort of to enforce seriousness, whether it’s why it’s unserious to provide healthcare for everyone in the country, these are sort of just asserted as serious or unserious. They’re reinforced by editors. They’re sort of reinforced by these Aspen Institute conferences and obviously the ideological production, reproduction of elite universities and elite journalism schools. And this idea of seriousness is just the thing you’re not supposed to really think critically about, and the enforcement of those serious parameters is what, again, what makes one, capital S, capital R, Serious Reporter, capital S, capital P, Serious Pundit.
And we see this a lot with the inverse of this, which is this idea of doing unpopular things that the people need for their own good. And FAIR covered this relentlessly in 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, this Bowles-Simpson austerity regime that Republicans were pushing hard and Democrats played along with, especially the Obama White House, which is the kind of Bowles-Simpson, National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform. And the Washington Post was posting about this like a Swiftie would post about going to a Taylor Swift concert, and they loved it. It was just nonstop serious people in serious rooms with serious ties, and they weren’t pandering to the sort of unwashed masses.
So let’s expand on this idea of seriousness as a mode of ideological production and reproduction under the auspices of assumed reality, like, under the auspices like this is sort of not even debatable. It’s just, you know, I remember in the early days where people were saying, We need a ceasefire in Gaza in October and November, before it became conventional wisdom overnight in the spring of 2024 that that’s something that we needed. It was laughed out of the room. You were not considered serious because blah, blah blah, Hamas, October 7, you know, war on Hamas defeated, right to defend itself, whatever sort of so-called serious claptrap that one would sort of vomit out on the panels of CNN.
And it’s this profoundly impactful idea. Because, again, I do think, like you said, it plays on people’s insecurities, because they would say, Well, why do we have to keep killing children in Palestine? Why do we have to have people lose limbs and die because they don’t have healthcare? Why do we have to have so much homelessness? There’s a sort of idea that, why can’t we just fix the problem? We’re an extremely wealthy country. Which seems manifestly obvious to the vast majority of people, but then gets obscured with this idea of, Oh, no, oh, you know, little head-patting, You naive child, you sweet summer child. There’s a seriousness. Talk about seriousness and its import in this broader conversation about democracy that short-circuits or is redistributive, kind of doesn’t count.
Janine Jackson: Well, the main way that media enforce their notion of seriousness is simply by not including in conversation anyone who dissents from it. The way they prove you aren’t serious is they don’t even speak to you or include your voice in the first place, or to the extent that they do, they kind of infantilize it. And what I think of is after the banking crisis, after the financial crisis, when people are saying, Shouldn’t big bankers go to jail? Weren’t crimes committed? People lost their homes due to fraud, which, last we heard, is a crime. And the way that corporate media had to scramble to say, Oh, no, no, no, no, no. Oh no. We can see the destruction. We will report on the destruction and the harms to people. But when it comes to there being accountability for that, unlike a guy who takes someone’s wallet on the street, who media want to see under the jail, when it comes to bankers who stole people’s homes while enriching themselves, Oh, well, you know, then you have the Washington Post’s Charles Lane writing under the headline, “Banks aren’t the bad guys.” Okay, so now the public is suddenly important, because now the public can be blamed for what happened to them. So for the Washington Post, it wasn’t banks that were the problem. It was, quote, “Americans’ shared erroneous belief in ever-rising housing prices and corresponding mania to profit from them.”
Nima: Ah, we’re so dumb and crazy.
Janine Jackson: And you know, didn’t we all profit? Didn’t we all? But the thing that really got me on that coverage was the real talking down to people. Businessweek said, We’ve got to get over this simple minded idea that “public revulsion indicates likely culpability.” And again, the Washington Post says people are trying to “reduce complex historical processes to the machinations of an evil few.”
Adam: Complexity trolling. Nuance trolling.
Janine Jackson: Exactly. So that’s how seriousness iterates itself in a case where a massive crime was committed, incredible harm done to people that many of them never pulled out from. But then we have media saying, I love this one from Businessweek, “the meltdown was multi-causal.” Okay, but, quote,
“That explanation will be unsatisfying to armchair prosecutors, but it has the virtue of answering the complex nature of the bubble,”
Close quote. And then just the cherry on the sundae is Joe Nocera, of course, at the New York Times.
“You’re entitled to wonder whether any of the highly paid executives who helped kindle the disaster will ever see jail time. The harder question, though, is whether anybody should.”
Nima: [Chuckles] Ooh. Man.
Janine Jackson: All right, so that’s how seriousness gets enforced and policed when it’s not just that people who don’t drink that particular Kool Aid don’t get to be in the room, full stop. So you don’t get to hear them engaged. You know, you don’t hear those ideas engaged. And you therefore, as a media consumer, imagine that those ideas are truly marginal, even when we know that many of the ideas off the page in media are overwhelmingly popular with the US public. So media, usually they can just do it little by little. We don’t talk to you. These are the people we talk to. But when something happens, like Zohran Mamdani, for example, in New York City, you see them go all out. You see how desperate they really are to say, Do not look behind this curtain.
Nima: I actually want to stay on this point of kind of the limits of acceptable analysis. It’s part and parcel with the idea of an Overton window, of course. But Janine, as you were just saying, and I think you know, you get to the heart of it in those quotes, is the idea of history always has to start when corporations, or when those in power says it starts, and that any political literacy, as you said, any systemic analysis, any historical knowledge that is brought into these conversations is then discredited as being evidence of armchair punditry, of college dorm-room, you know, bong-hit sophistry, of its own type of unseriousness.
And we see this, you know, not only in the quotes that you just shared, but when you’re talking about, say, Israel-Palestine. If you talk about the history before October 7, you get dismissed, right? Well, that’s not what we’re talking about. We’re talking about this now. We’re talking about this now. We’re not talking about 100 years of colonization, we’re not talking about 60 years of occupation, we’re not talking about 80 years of martial law. We’re not talking about apartheid. We’re talking about when history started on October 7, and anything you say after that needs to be understood within that context.
Same thing with anything about Iran. History apparently started on November 4, 1979, when the American embassy was taken over by Iranian students demanding the return of the Shah for prosecution for crimes against the Iranian people. That is when history started. It didn’t start in the 25 years of the Shah’s secret police and autocratic tyrannical rule. It didn’t begin in 1953. It didn’t begin in 1906. Whatever it is, history has to begin. The systemic analysis has to begin exactly at the point where those who are in power are deemed to be the victims. And so I’d love for you to kind of talk about even the disciplining there, when, when there is political and historical and media literacy brought into the conversation, that is then discredited as being juvenile in itself.
Janine Jackson: And those that introduce that history, or even that international context, are themselves dismissed, which is a tidy way of saying, We don’t want to hear that sort of analysis, because it’s complicated. And of course, the timeline, you know, when do you start the clock? I think lots of folks, even Media Criticism 101, is you recognize that when, in Israel-Palestine, when you start the clock allows you to then say that Israel is always merely responding to Palestinian attacks. Because, of course, you start the clock with what you perceive or represent as a Palestinian attack, so Israel is always on the back foot, is always simply responding. I feel like that timeline, particularly with regard to Gaza, is being just torn up. I do think that there is change happening there in terms of public understanding of when we really ought to start that clock. But another way, it certainly is a way of policing the conversation, of making sure the conversation stays within the constraints that elites want it to.
And even when you see, you’ll see, this is a picture of Iraqi women, or Iranian women in 1950 or something, and it’s like, Look at them! They’re wearing glasses, they’re driving cars, whatever. And that freaks people out, because it’s not the story that we’re told. If people don’t even accept it, don’t even believe it, because it does not fit within the worldview that corporate media present. And I would say, as important as the historical barriers are the international barriers, is the relentless focus on US exceptionalism. The total internalization of the idea that the United States is special, that whatever we do is great, that what the rest of the world needs to do is shut up and listen to us. That, I think, is equally important in constraining what is considered a serious contribution to the conversation.
And just to stick with Palestine for a second, we also see it in the labeling of sources. The Defense Department lies like it’s their job about civilian casualties, for example, and media still go back to them again and again, even as we saw in Afghanistan, for example, we saw the Defense Department being caught lying about casualty counts. Media reported their lying, and then still went back to them and just, you know, to recite their figures.
Adam: Yeah, if you’re an official, right? If you’re an official-official-official, you can never be discredited.
Janine Jackson: You can never be discredited, and you won’t, the reader won’t be reminded, as they’re being fed your most recent fact, that you lied about the last 27–
Adam: Israeli officials are the key example of that, yeah.
Janine Jackson: And the corollary is you cannot report Palestinian deaths without being the ‘Hamas-run,’ the ‘Hamas-affiliated,’ you know, it’s a wink to the reader to say, You know what? Take these numbers with a grain of salt, because these people are invested. So maybe you want to, you, you, logical reader–
Adam: Yeah, they’re boogie-boogie terrorists, and they don’t count.
Janine Jackson: Think about that, you know. So there’s different ways, in terms of history and also in terms of geopolitical context. You know, healthcare. Universal healthcare. It’s impossible, unless you look at any other industrialized country, and don’t–
Nima: So to that point, the idea that exceptionalism is deemed to be this kind of external perspective, right? American exceptionalism exists in foreign policy. It exists in comparison with the rest of the world, obviously, but here at home, apparently, the US is unexceptional, because we keep hearing that everything is Econ 101, and you have to be serious about what that means, and you can’t break those cycles. You can’t do anything different. And to your point about sourcing, Janine, the idea that when politicians talk about doing things that will actually improve people’s lives, those, as we’ve said, are deemed to be kind of wacky ideas, and then the grounding in seriousness is not then credited to experts or organizations that have that history of ideological priors, right? All we hear is, like, University of Chicago economist says, without any context about what that could mean, ideologically.
Janine Jackson: Absolutely. And, you know, that’s a choice. All of that is a choice. And you know, you talked about what is called Econ 101, and I really have to share, in terms of the disconnect that we’re pointing to, in terms of why don’t things happen that people overwhelmingly want or overwhelmingly need, if you just look, I mean, every survey you see tells you that people can’t afford life. And so I saw this headline in MarketWatch, and it just is, gets at the denatured way that media talk about people. The headline was, “Most Americans can’t afford life anymore — and they just don’t matter to the economy like they once did.”
Nima: The Economy. Yes, capital T, capital E.
Janine Jackson: Let’s just sit with that for a second. You know, like, what they’re saying is there’s something abstract called the economy, and it matters more than people.
[Laughter]
You know, somehow this abstraction matters more than people. And then I even hate the subhead. There’s levels and levels on this piece. The subhead was, “Years of elevated prices have strained all but the wealthiest consumers, and low- and middle-income Americans say something needs to change.” Now this gets at another issue that I have with the way corporate media treat the people the public, which is they pit us against one another. So, Well, low- and middle-income Americans are on the short end of this stick, and so they say something needs to change. Like it’s a debate. Your headline is, “Most Americans can’t afford life anymore,” and it’s still supposed to be like a fight between classes. And, you know, it’s such a bizarre way of presenting it and saying that there is this bigger god that must be served that’s called the economy.
Nima: Right. And that’s the real decision maker. It’s not people making decisions.
Janine Jackson: Exactly. And the fact that rich people are now responsible for 50.3% of all consumer spending, as opposed to that lower-income people and ‘low-income’ meaning make less than $250,000 a year, those of us are responsible now for just 50.3% of all consumer spending, whereas 30 years ago, we accounted for 64% of US spending. So since we are poorer and no longer able, or choosing to, spend as much, we don’t matter.
Nima: Right.
Janine Jackson: We don’t matter. We fall off.
Nima: Even more expendable.
Janine Jackson: We’re even more expendable. So you can have media, and I will say, when you just narrate that nightmare, you’re perpetuating it.
Nima: Well, exactly. And that’s what gets to this idea that we were talking about up top, Janine, which is identifying that, literally just even using that ridiculous MarketWatch headline, if you were to say that as a candidate, and say, I want to do something about that. People should be able to afford life. And there is something called ‘the economy’ that needs to change, because this is not working for people, that is when you become unserious. It’s like, Oh, well, this is clear, what is happening in our society. This is being reported on. There is data. We see it anecdotally. We see it rampantly across this country, across our communities, across our families. But when you actually say, And something needs to change, and here’s my plan, to change it, you can say something needs to change all day, like, whatever. Cool. Hope and change, right? But when you explain how, if that in any way takes one penny away from multinational corporations or billionaires? Well, then it’s totally unserious. And this is when it gets to, Oh, now you’re just pandering to these idiot loonies who just want to be told that things will be better when everyone knows, all serious people can agree, they can’t be better.
Janine Jackson: Exactly. I think back to a headline back in 2019, when Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders were being very well received by lots of folks within the Democratic electorate and the Associated Press had a headline, “Should Democrats be going big or getting real?”
[Laughter]
Adam: Yeah. Of course, those are the only options you have. It’s seriousness and leftwing frivolity.
Janine Jackson: And it’s, the perversity to me is that they’re pretending, media are pretending that they support these ideas. If only they could happen, you know. But they can’t, and so it’s terrible to suggest that they can. And that’s why, what is key to me is, when you look at the coverage of Mamdani, for example, He’s not going to be able to do what he says he’s going to do. I think we need to understand that as a threat. It’s a threat. It’s a threat. We are not going to allow him to do, and you know, Ari Paul has a piece on FAIR.org about coverage of Mamdani, and I was just looking at it, and I had not noticed that the New York Times, their attack, their editorial attack on Mamdani as unserious and all the things we’re talking about, they used a picture of the World Trade Center to illustrate that. I mean, wink-wink much? We’re very aware of the Islamophobic attacks on Mamdani and the idea that, Oh, we’re just saying he’s bad for the city, and this is an image of the city. I think that’s disgusting, frankly.
Nima: Right, because it totally associates this idea of the spooky, scary, quote-unquote, “Muslim socialist” with the downing of the symbol of American corporate power and dominance.
Janine Jackson: Absolutely. And that’s subtle, you know, that’s subliminal.
Nima: That he is basically a class and capitalist terrorist.
Janine Jackson: I don’t think that’s too much to say, because this is a person who was overwhelmingly popular among young people, people who hadn’t voted before. That’s a story. That’s interesting. But corporate media make it their job to say, No, no, no, no, no. Don’t get excited. And the Times editorial says, and I love it, because they tell on themselves. “He is a democratic socialist,” I mean, they might as well just say, I don’t know, He steals fruit from the store. You know, whatever. “He is a democratic socialist who too often ignores the unavoidable trade-offs of governance.” All right, so let’s sit with that for a second.
Nima: [Chuckles] Right.
Janine Jackson: You know, he doesn’t understand, you got to sell people out. You can’t just help people. That’s not how the government works. You know, you can’t just help people.
Adam: It’s cheating and it’s not serious.
Janine Jackson: And, then my thing about the trickle-down democracy. “He favors rent,” this is still the New York Times editorial. “He favors rent freezes that could restrict housing supply and make it harder for younger New Yorkers and new arrivals to afford housing.” Well, that’s a Möbius strip of a sentence. He wants rents to be lower, and that means people aren’t going to be able to afford housing. Okay, all right, you’re doing a lot of work. You’re doing a lot of work there.
[Laughter]
Adam: And market dogma, when you interfere with capital’s desire for profit, you therefore somehow make things more expensive for others.
Nima: Right.
Janine Jackson: Absolutely. But they could explain that, you know, they could say, The reason we think that is, in the same way that people say, Oh, we could raise wages. Things will cost more. And they leap over the part where management makes a decision that raising workers’ wages will come out of consumers’ pockets. It won’t come out of their insane profits. And all of that is elided. It’s just kind of, this will lead to that. Yes, minimum wages increasing sounds good, but it’s not good. And here’s why. It’s not good for you. And smarter people are going to explain to you why you think it’s good for you, but it’s not good for you. And a lot of the way that they do that is by trying to pit pieces of the public against one another. So you say, Hey, you might want your coffee to be fair trade. Hey, lady in line at Starbucks, do you want to pay $1 more for your coffee just so somebody in Colombia can make some–you know, that’s not, there’s other ways to have that conversation, but elite media would prefer poor people, working people, non-wealthy people, to point our fingers at one another as the reason things can’t change.
Nima: Well, I think that’s a good place to leave it. Obviously it’s a terrible place to leave it, but I think it really speaks to exactly where we are, that there’s a middle part that’s always left out. And the middle part that’s always left out is rich people and corporations are deciding to do the bad thing in between the good policy and the people’s lives being better. We will, of course, have you back on so soon. It’s been so great to talk to you. We, of course, have been speaking with the great Janine Jackson, Program Director at Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting, or FAIR to those who know, and the producer and host of FAIR’s syndicated weekly radio show CounterSpin. Janine, thank you so much again for joining us today on Citations Needed.
Janine Jackson: It’s been my pleasure. Thanks for asking me.
[Music]
Adam: Yeah, I think fundamentally, this episode is about the concept of seriousness, which we’ll probably give it some episode at some point, because I’ve recently become more and more fascinated by seriousness, mostly because I’m working on a project, and I spent many, many hours reading The Atlantic magazine as they constantly push and lobby for genocide in Gaza. And I just kept thinking of this idea of seriousness. All these PhDs and Hillary Clinton and think tanks for the defense of this and the foundation for this and the new security of this. And everyone’s serious, and everyone has a tie. And the idea of seriousness as an ideological thingamajig, that one not only must try to reflect and mimic to be taken seriously, but one must enforce. Seriousness must be enforced at all times. And what the cheating framing does, or the pandering framing does, is it’s fundamentally like so much of what we cover on the show, is a disciplining and a policing mechanism of acceptable thought. And that manifests, in their mind, they don’t think of it that way. It’s not like they sit around twiddling their mustache thinking, Oh, I want to punch left and go after the poor. That’s not the way it works. They view it as their job. Editors, news producers view it as their job to police seriousness, because that’s what’s drilled into them at journalism school. That’s how you sort of get to that position. Otherwise, then you have a demarcation problem without a clear demarcation of seriousness and unseriousness. Then you sort of get the murky, fringy left, fringy right.
Nima: Then any goofball can just publish their wacky opinions, but the idea that, like anything that helps people is deemed frivolous and unserious, immature, as opposed to, if you are pro-austerity, pro-corporate dominance, you are then serious, that is the policing that’s being done.
Adam: And that’s why there’s so much money that goes into credentialism and think tanks and institutions, because that reinforces seriousness and serious thought.
Nima: That’s right. The expertician class.
Adam: Seriousness has a very, obviously is a proxy for imperial interest and racism. But when it comes to austerity, really, more than anything, austerity, this is how you police seriousness, by mocking and deriding populist programs as somehow economically unserious. And it works because, again, people look around, they see, well, everyone who seems serious has the same opinion, so therefore it must be the correct one. And anyone who wants to be in proximity to power, and be in proximity to influence, therefore begins to mimic these ideological premises of seriousness. And that, I think, is a fascinating, bigger topic.
Nima: But for now, that will do it for this episode of Citations Needed. Thank you all for listening. Of course, you can follow the show on Twitter and Bluesky @citationspod, Facebook Citations Needed, and become a supporter of the show through Patreon.com/CitationsNeededPodcast. We are 100% listener funded, so all of your support is so incredibly appreciated and allows the show to keep going.
I am Nima Shirazi.
Adam: I’m Adam Johnson.
Nima: Citations Needed’s senior producer is Florence Barrau-Adams. Our producer is Julianne Tveten. Production assistant is Trendel Lightburn. The newsletter is by Marco Cartolano. The music is by Grandaddy. Thanks again for listening, everyone. We’ll catch you next time.
[Music]
This Citations Needed episode was released on Wednesday, July 23, 2025.
