Transcript: Mike Pesca
My interview with the veteran American journalist and podcast host
On the Lean Out podcast, one of the topics we often return to is the media, and the insanity of the media. For our last show of 2025, my guest is a veteran journalist and a savvy media critic, and he has some thoughts on where we are, how we got here — and where we should go from here.
Mike Pesca is an award-winning American journalist. He’s the creator and host of the long-running daily news podcast, The Gist. He’s also the author of Upon Further Review: The Greatest What-Ifs in Sports History.
This is an edited podcast for paid subscribers. You can listen to the interview here.
TH: It’s fun to have you on the show today for our last episode, for our fourth year of Lean Out. I’ve been wanting to have you on for a while. I really admire your show for its content, its longevity, its hustle. I wanted for us to talk about the media environment that we are in now — and what you see as its benefits and challenges. There’s so much to talk about. To start today, I want to just quickly sketch out your career so far. You’ve done a lot of different things since the first day that you called into a radio show as a 10-year-old. You’re an award-winning journalist. You’ve worked at NPR and WNYC, including on the iconic show On the Media. You’ve worked for Slate and written for The Washington Post. You’ve covered sports and pop culture and politics and economics. And you are the host of what may well be the longest-running daily news podcast, The Gist, which your company produces. So you have extensive experience in both legacy and independent media. Of all that experience, what do you think has best prepared you for the insane media environment we find ourselves in?
MP: It’s definitely when I called into WGBB radio to analyze the Jets defence, which wasn’t good in 1982. [Laughs] I think that it was probably working for On the Media for so long. Although I have thought about a lot of the truths that I thought were truths from that program — sometimes even from the hosts of that program, Bob Garfield and Brooke Gladstone — and over the last few years, that program itself has been contradicting the things that I heard. I’m like, “Wait a minute, I learned that when I was working on this program.”
So, it was this huge upheaval in some of the basic tenets of journalism, things like the definition of objectivity. We weren’t naive in 2008 when I was working there, but the normal line would be that objectivity is not exactly possible. It’s a concept like justice or maybe love, but it’s more or less a useful North Star [even if] you could never achieve it. And you should also think critically. I mean that just in the normal sense, not critical theory, which actually has overrun and filleted objectivity — but the way of thinking about it was though it can’t really be achieved, this is why it’s a good orientation for truth-seeking. Then, especially on that program — though they didn’t lead the drive, this was very popular in newsrooms — there was just a jettisoning of objectivity. And so, did it put me in good stead to really understand that this was happening? I mean, I had been thinking about these journalistic issues for a long time. I went from one of the most staid and least market-sensitive areas of media, which is public radio, to one of the first online startups, which was Slate. And then I contributed to a lot of legacy media. So, I had a pretty good sense of the change, and the pace of change that was happening, but I was surprised by the basic tenets [being thrown out]. But I also feel that I was helped by the fact that I had a grounding in them. So, you get back to these ground truths, and I think that has done me a service.
TH: When you’re looking at a 2016 op-ed by Jim Rutenberg — saying that we have to throw out playbook that we’ve been using for the better part of a century — or more recently, the Wesley Lowery critique of objectivity, what were you thinking?
MP: I was thinking that — especially when Rutenberg did it, who’s no longer with The Times, I believe; he was a media critic, but also did a lot of reporting on the media — I thought it was maybe more of a provocation … I very much enjoyed challenging myself with points of view that I don’t hold, to assess my way of thinking. So, I would read books like Faces at the Bottom of the Well by Derrick Bell. This is a leading light on critical race theory, and it was written for a mass audience. I would say, “I believe this, I don’t believe that, I see where the argument is coming from.” I thought that I was in a good-faith debate community.
By the time Wesley Lowery came along, I said to myself, “This is no longer in the realm of the hypothetical, or testing hypotheses. This is really a movement.” Wesley Lowery should be a journalist, but he is very pleased to be the spokesman or the tip of the spear on the movement. You read that op-ed and it says Wesley Lowery has two Pulitzer Prizes. We should say that Wesley Lowery has been discredited for pretty well-documented sexual predation. Which you could say, “All right, he did some horrible things, allegedly but also plausibly, in his own life. What does that have to do with his professional life?” Remember, what he wanted to replace objectivity with was “moral clarity.” We know what is right and let us now pursue the news on that basis. I’m not saying you have to be a paragon of moral clarity, but if that’s going to be your orientation, how could a critic like me not bring it up? But I also think of — and this is really interesting — did you read A.G. Sulzberger, who is the publisher of The New York Times? Did you read him in the Columbia Journalism Review in 2023?
TH: I sure did.
MP: What’s so interesting about that one is it does track with where the Times itself has gone, which is that they do very good journalism and they do a lot of journalism. I think they have high standards. I think they are clearly the best news outlet in the English-speaking world, maybe the whole world. I don’t know; I don’t know many Swahili news outlets. And they have tacked back. They have not tacked back to perfection because there never was perfection, just like there never was objectivity. But in 2023, you could see that Sulzberger was saying, “We’ve gone too far. We don’t believe in what Wesley Lowery was saying. We have to get back to the ideas of objectivity.” But even then, in 2023, he had to couch it. He had to be so careful because he had a cadre of revolutionaries within his own paper. That’s why they ran the [Lowery] op-ed. They sometimes run op-eds they don’t agree with. Say, the Tom Cotton op-ed. Which, even though it was hugely divisive, I don’t think most people, or the vast majority of people at the Times, wanted to send in federal troops to quell rioting. But I think the Wesley Lowery op-ed was one that Sulzberger knew had a huge constituency, one that they in fact fostered over the years.
He wrote in CJR, “Today however, the word objectivity is so contested inside the journalistic community that it is viewed by many as self-discrediting in the debate over the role of journalism. I continue to believe that objectivity, or if the word is simply too much of a distraction, open-minded inquiry remains a value worth striving for.” Then he stops using objectivity because he knows he can’t use the word. He calls it “independence,” which is a squishy way that doesn’t say anything. I’m glad he wrote the op-ed; I’m glad he tacked his paper back to where he did. But not being able to call a thing by the thing it is is a hallmark of the triumph of the forces against objectivity.
TH: There’s so many things in what you just said. I love that CJR op-ed, and I’ve thought about it a lot. In terms of Wesley Lowery, just setting aside the potential issues in his personal life — that hasn’t gone through the courts, we don’t know what is at the crux of that. But in terms of his argument on objectivity, one of the examples that he uses in his op-ed is the fiasco that happened after the Tom Cotton op-ed that was published, and the way he characterizes it through this moral clarity lens has not stood up over time. So, his very example is an example of why we need more rigorous standards and practices. I actually cover this in a book that’s coming out next year. I went and spoke to some of the people in the Times during that period when the Tom Cotton op-ed was published, when a number of staff members said it was putting people’s lives in danger, when the top editor James Bennet lost his job. And these points are all very hotly contested, you will find, when you talk to people. So, I think it’s interesting that Wesley’s very example disproves his own point.
MP: Yes. As does some sentences there: “Tom Cotton, a Republican from Arkansas, calling for an overwhelming show of force by the American military in order to quell civil unrest at protests that, while at times violent, have largely been made up of peaceful demonstrations.” That’s true, largely. But even if it’s one or two percent not peaceful expression of discontent, then you have unrest. And if it’s three or four per cent, then you have rioting, and something like that did occur. Yeah, it was, speaking of self-discrediting, to borrow the phrase from Sulzberger. I think the idea of moral clarity doesn’t even pass the second pass of critical thought. Because moral clarity is “let’s go in knowing what’s right or wrong.” But what is right or wrong? Unless we all agree, we don’t even have a basis then for pursuing our version of non-fiction journalism.
Look, there’s always been a tradition … When I was at Slate, it was an opinion magazine that, I believe, at least for the vast majority of the time I was at Slate, adhered to traditions of truth through a prism and through a point of view. That’s fine. That’s not only fine, that’s necessary. Ida B. Wells did it, and some of our greatest journalism outlets do it. But when you are the paper of record … By the way, they clearly mark their opinions. They do opinion-first reporting in The Times Magazine. But when you are the paper of record, and when the people — when your readers, but also everyone else who is informed by what you put out, because even if you’re not a reader of the Times, you’re living in a world that they very much help define — I think what the public needs is something closer to, if not “just the facts, ma’am” but just the facts with competent analysis. Not a predetermination of what is right or wrong.
Just as a practitioner of journalism, Tara — and I think you would agree with me — if you go into a story knowing who the good guys and the bad guys are, knowing what’s right or wrong, and with an unwillingness to change your mind, journalism and the world gets less interesting. To take it away from the selfish part — great, Mike is less interested in the story he just did — the world becomes less comprehensible and less real to the people in it who don’t recognize the journalism because the journalist wasn’t willing to be disabused of preconceived notions. Moral clarity is just a way of saying, “I believe in preconceived notions.” That is the enemy of journalism.
TH: Sebastian Junger has that great quote: “A journalist is someone who is willing to destroy his own opinions with facts.” When the public hears something like “we can’t even say the word objectivity anymore,” how does that play with the average person? You don’t even want to try to be fair? I wonder what they might think.
MP: Luckily they don’t hear it, because it’s in the CJR, which is something of a walled garden. But it tells you how tetchy it is among the constituency he’s dealing with. Journalists shouldn’t be this important constituency that gets in the way of clarity or the truth, but clearly they are.
TH: We touched on the Tom Cotton purge. The purges of 2020 and 2021 are something that I’ve looked at pretty closely. I want to ask you about your own experience. I’m just going to quickly summarize it, and you can tell me if it’s an accurate summary, and then we can jump into what it means. Several years ago you did your show, The Gist, at Slate. Slate had previously been a place that prided itself on offering unconventional opinion, with an office culture of rigorous debate. During COVID, that debate was taking place on Slack, which is an evil platform, but we can set that aside for a moment. Donald McNeil Jr., the New York Times COVID reporter, went on this trip several years back to South America for teens. On that trip, a teen was telling McNeil about a scandal at their school that involved another teen using a racial slur. In seeking clarification, McNeil mentioned the slur itself. And in your Slack channel, my understanding was that you were making the argument that there was a difference between usage and reference, and you didn’t think it should be a fireable offence. You did not use the slur yourself, or even the abbreviation of the slur, but it did cause a scandal. You and Slate parted ways. I remember hearing you on Blocked & Reported about this. Is that an accurate summary?
