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All this week, CJR is running a series of pieces, on our website and in this newsletter, on the fog of news and propaganda that has marked the first hundred days of Donald Trump’s second term as president. So far, Kyle Paoletta has reported on the legal battle for transparency around Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency, and Aida Alami profiled Karoline Leavitt, the press secretary. Today, Jake Lahut profiles Alex Bruesewitz, one of the leading proponents of Trump’s strategy of reaching young male voters via interviews with popular podcasters. You can read the piece here.
In 2018, it was announced that Ryan Lizza, the soon-to-be chief Washington correspondent at Politico, and Olivia Nuzzi, a politics writer at New York magazine, were writing a book together. In 2022, they got engaged. Quite the Washington power couple, I thought. But last summer, things spun wildly out of control: it was revealed that Nuzzi had allegedly conducted an online relationship with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the presidential candidate who is now the Health and Human Services secretary. Eventually, Nuzzi took Lizza to court, requesting a protective order and alleging that he orchestrated a harassment and blackmail campaign against her. Politico said that Lizza would take a leave of absence while Nuzzi’s claims were being investigated. She ultimately withdrew her request (her lawyer said this step was for her own protection, on the grounds that Lizza was using the process to defame her). Lizza, who has denied any wrongdoing and accused Nuzzi of using the process to defame him, moved over to Politico Magazine. Nuzzi, for her part, left New York. The book is no more.
Then, last week, Lizza announced that he had left Politico and was launching a new venture—Telos—on Substack. “The main reason?” he wrote in his debut post. “Their style of political coverage is not meeting the unprecedented moment of democratic peril we are facing.” This rationale faced some skepticism, however. Dylan Byers, a media reporter at Puck, posted on X that Lizza’s claim was, in fact, “not the main reason.” (Byers subsequently expanded his critique into an article.) And quickly, the situation got ugly: Politico sent Lizza a legal letter, accusing him of breaking an agreement not to disparage the outlet—Lizza denied having done so—and ordering him to delete his Telos post. Lizza alleges that Politico has since demanded that he take down three more articles, and threatened to sue. On Saturday, he was scheduled to attend the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner as a guest of his former employer, but as Oliver Darcy reported in Status on Monday, that didn’t happen. (Politico was asked for comment, but a spokeswoman declined.)
I reached out to Lizza for an interview last week, when he was still expecting to attend the WHCA dinner. A scheduling clash meant that this Q&A, originally set to be conducted by phone, was completed via email on April 28. It has been edited for length and clarity.
AM: You’re the latest in a line of journalists from large Washington-based media organizations to strike out on their own. How was week one at Telos? Have you gained a lot of subscribers?
RL: It was wildly successful. Within minutes of hitting send on the first post on Monday, I knew I had made the right decision. Telos News hit number one on Substack’s “New Bestsellers” list, and both paid subscriptions and total revenue exceeded any reasonable projections. I was flooded with emails from journalists asking to write for Telos (which is pronounced like “tell us,” by the way). Hamish McKenzie, Substack’s cofounder, had tried to get me to defect a while back. I sent him a text on Wednesday: “I should have done this years ago!”
It was not a quiet launch. What’s the latest on Politico? Did you take up the WHCA dinner invitation?
Politico is threatening a lawsuit, which could easily destroy Telos, unless I delete several articles from the internet in their entirety, which I would never do. It’s appalling that they would demand that a news organization delete critical reporting about Trump. I don’t know what’s going on over there, but John Harris [Politico’s global editor in chief and a cofounder] and Mathias Döpfner [CEO of Axel Springer, Politico’s owner] should be embarrassed. The good news is that everyone in the Politico newsroom supports Telos and not their corporate overlords. As for the WHCA, I did not go to the dinner, but there was a great Substack party instead. That’s where all the cool kids were anyway.
There’s been some skepticism after your launch post said that you couldn’t do the kind of reporting that’s needed for this moment at Politico, namely that this claim was a means to drum up interest in Telos. How would you answer such skeptics?
I think Politico’s censorship campaign against Telos validates my initial, quite mild criticism about how Politico’s editorial leadership is not equipped to meet this moment. They seem frozen in a pre-Trump mindset about where we are in America when it comes to political journalism. The good news is that it’s never too late to do better. John Harris is getting up there in age. He probably only has a few more years left in the business, so hopefully this episode will nudge him to do some self-reflecting about how he wants to be remembered. Does he really want to be remembered for accommodating himself to Trump and suing journalists over criticism?
It can’t have been easy to be placed on leave after the RFK Jr. fallout. How are you feeling now? There’s been a lot going on in Washington politics, after all.
Just to clarify, going on leave was a mutual decision between me and Politico, and it was the right thing to do, given the circumstances. I learned a lot, including about the press. For example, I dealt pretty extensively with every media reporter in our business, and I learned one thing that might be useful to your readers: never trust Dylan Byers. He was by far the dumbest reporter that I ever dealt with. As for the rest of that bizarre episode, I’m afraid that’s a story for another day. Suffice it to say that it is the craziest experience I have ever been through in my life, and the full story is a hundred times crazier than what people know. [Editor’s note: Byers was approached for comment, but declined.]
As someone who was around during Trump’s first term, what do you think is different this time around? Have you looked back at Trump 1.0 when considering how to cover Trump 2.0? For example, Trump doesn’t appear to need social media as much as he did last time.
My big takeaway in terms of coverage is that Trump and his allies weaponize our industry’s conventions (fairness, objectivity, etc.) against us, and we need to remember that it’s much more important to prioritize our industry’s ideals (truth, intellectual honesty, democratic accountability). Trump is systematically weaponizing the state against the American people, or at least his perceived enemies, and covering that is going to look a lot different than covering, say, a debate between the two parties about tax policy. A lot of us in the journalism business have been in denial about what’s really going on in Washington because it’s painful to admit it. I wrote this in Telos on our first day to capture the psychology that persists in many newsrooms: “A friend of mine who served in Iraq once tried to explain to me how psychologically disorienting warfare can be for soldiers the first time they’re in full-scale combat. It’s so horrific, so unlike any human experience, that the initial instinct is to deny that what’s happening is actually happening.” If you want to get a sense of the extreme denial, just go check out the social media feeds of top DC journalists from this past weekend. They are swilling mimosas at garden brunches and taking selfies with Scott Jennings [a right-wing pundit on CNN] and his ilk as if nothing has changed. And then we wonder why trust in the media is so low.
Some viewed the Biden administration as a reprieve from the chaos of covering Trump. But do you think this might have led to Biden’s age getting largely buried in the process? How would you classify how his White House handled the press? It wasn’t smooth sailing, was it?
Every White House I have covered manipulates reporters, pushes a propagandist view of the president, and tries to suppress damaging information. But there is no comparison between the historically typical White House efforts to shape coverage and deny reality, and what Trump is doing in terms of weaponizing multiple tools of the state against the media. Of course, one of the greatest dangers of Trumpism is that this all becomes the new normal, and Democrats emulate him when they are in power.
What’s the best journalism you’ve seen over the first hundred days of this administration?
The New York Times’ daily—hourly!—reporting about this White House. The Times is so much better than any other competitor right now that it’s a little scary. Ideally, you’d like to have multiple big outlets that are that robust. Other publications [and commentators] that have been essential are Wired, Lawfare, Techdirt, Status, the Wall Street Journal editorial page, The Bulwark, Matt Labash’s Slack Tide, Executive Functions, Wake Up to Politics, Sam Harris, and Andrew Sullivan.
What advice would you give to a young journalist who’s starting out in political journalism—or any form of journalism—in 2025?
Embrace change. Don’t follow the herd. Don’t allow anything as ephemeral as a job, which you may lose at some point, to be the source of your self-worth and happiness.
Other notable stories:
- Yesterday, on his hundredth day back in office, Trump held a rally in Michigan, and “things frankly got pretty bleak,” Politico reports. “Trump’s team twice played on big screens the entirety of that made-for-social video of Venezuelan migrants being deported to El Salvador, shackles and forced head-shavings and all. And yes, the crowd went wild.” (Among those to appear at the rally? Jennings, the CNN pundit.) Then, ABC broadcast a pretaped interview in which Terry Moran challenged Trump on the case of Kilmar Ábrego García, whom the administration mistakenly deported to El Salvador, and Trump “spent nearly two minutes arguing that a photoshopped image” of a gang tattoo on Ábrego García’s hand was real, Mediaite reports. When Moran pointed this out, Trump attacked him, saying he’d only picked him to do the interview because he’d never heard of him. “I knew this would come,” Moran responded.
- Yesterday also brought important updates in three stories involving Trump’s more concrete attacks on the press. The New York Times reported that the board of Paramount, which owns CBS, has cleared the path for a settlement with Trump over a (ridiculous) lawsuit that he brought against 60 Minutes last year; lawyers for the two sides are set to enter into mediation today. Meanwhile, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the entity that funnels public funds to NPR and PBS, sued after Trump attempted to fire three members of its board, stating in court that Trump lacked the authority to do so. And a judge ordered the administration to disburse funds that it has withheld from Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (as we noted recently).
- After Pam Bondi, the attorney general, moved last week to overturn a Biden-era policy protecting journalists against surveillance and subpoenas in leak investigations, The Intercept’s Shawn Musgrave blasted Senate Democrats for failing to codify such protections in law when they had the chance to do so, before Trump returned to power, in the form of the PRESS Act, a bill that had already cleared the House. “Every Democrat who put the PRESS Act on the back burner when they had the opportunity to pass a bipartisan bill codifying journalist-source confidentiality should be ashamed,” Seth Stern, of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, said.
- The Atlantic’s Megan Garber returned to Walter Lippmann’s classic book Public Opinion, which was written more than a century ago but foresaw Trump’s strategy of short-circuiting people’s minds with a torrent of lies and confusion. “The media environment of the 1920s already featured elements of information overload,” and Trump’s “flood the zone” approach has “lent new acuity to Lippmann’s warnings,” Garber writes. “The number of news stories alone has made it seem almost absurd to expect citizens to attempt the basic work of democracy: staying informed.”
- And Scott MacFarlane, of CBS, reports that administration officials are increasingly scheduling news conferences and media appearances for the 8am Eastern hour—so that they might catch Trump while he’s watching television, and Fox & Friends in particular. “Often, there’s an audience of one,” a former official said. “No other press really matters.” Others noted that early announcements can also set the news agenda for the day, while yielding a live audience before editors can review claims.
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