NewsFeed with @BuzzFeedBen

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NewsFeed with @BuzzFeedBen Podcast

BuzzFeed Editor In Chief Ben Smith hosts conversations on the intersection of politics, media, and technology — and all of 2017's insanity.

  1. 29/07/2017

    13: @redsteeze

    Stephen Miller, who writes under the name @redsteeze and isn't to be confused with the White House adviser of the same name, is among the most effective of the self-appointed public editors who harry journalists on Twitter. (He also got some attention recently for attending a women-only showing of Wonder Woman.) He comes from the right and has a belief that most media sins can be tracked to an attempt to push a progressive agenda. But in a universe increasingly dominated by bad faith trolls whose explicit goal is to destroy the traditional media, Miller — despite his vitriol — is usually in good faith.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

    48 min

  2. 16/07/2017

    12: Journalism In Russia's Shadow

    A conversation with Ivan Kolpakov, editor in chief of the Russian news site Meduza, and Inga Springe, a founder of the non-profit investigative journalism site Re:Baltica, about reporting on Russia from just across the border in Latvia, what it's like to live inside Russia's media bubble, and why journalists over there aren't particularly interested in the story of Russia's meddling in the U.S. election.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

    1h 1m

  3. 02/07/2017

    11: Zeynep Tufekci

    Nobody has thought more about the intersection of media, technology, and politics than Zeynep Tufekci. Her new book Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest, is about the incredible promise and the real weaknesses of these new social media movements that have been central to the news cycle and the way news is made over the last five to ten years.Although Tufekci dates that back much further. In this interview, recorded live in front of an audience of BuzzFeed reporters, she talks about her roots and what she sees as these movements' roots in the Zapatista revolution in the 1990s in Mexico. And with the explosion of social movements around the world on Twitter, Facebook and other platforms, there's been backlash and crackdowns that a lot of people, other than Tufekci, did not see coming.Find more of Tufekci's work at technosociology.org.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

    45 min

  4. 18/06/2017

    10: Benjamin Wittes

    What a student of executive power and friend of James Comey makes of Rod Rosenstein, Robert Mueller's investigation, and the first 147 days of Trump's presidency.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

    33 min

  5. 10/06/2017

    9: Bill de Blasio

    Ben interviews New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio on stage at the Northside Festival in Brooklyn. They talk about de Blasio's relationship with the press — and its parallels with Donald Trump's approach to dealing with the media — recent subway breakdowns, and his very particular gym routine at the Park Slope YMCA.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

    38 min

  6. 04/06/2017

    8: Why Have A Public Editor When Twitter Will Do It For Free?

    Margaret Sullivan, the longest-serving of the New York Times public editors, talks about the awkwardness of being the paper's in-house critic, the process of choosing to elevate some criticisms over others, and why — when she was chief editor of The Buffalo News, before taking the job at the Times — she reacted with "horror" when her publisher suggested they hire their own public editor.For tickets and info about the Northside Festival, visit northsidereport2017.eventbrite.com.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

    35 min

  7. 21/05/2017

    7: Al Sharpton

    The Reverend Al Sharpton, whose career was shaped by the same New York tabloid media that created Donald Trump, said Trump called him soon after the election to praise his analysis on MSNBC of Trump's New York roots. He also said Trump's notoriously thin skin is the result of the fact that he has no cause beyond his own brand. "I don't mind getting the crap beaten out of me if I can turn around and say to Abner Louima, “those cops went to jail for forty years.” And we did," he said on NewsFeed. "So if you're only goal is you — yeah, we all have an ego, yeah we like the spreads in Vanity Fair. But that's not the goal. That's the means to the end. To him, that is the end. So if you're attacking him, you're attacking his goal." Sharpton also talked about another longtime acquaintance on the right, the late Fox News chief Roger Ailes. "I'd see Roger Ailes and we'd talk, and the funniest thing, he would always tell me, 'You know,' and he showed me a picture he took with Malcolm X back in the day, as a reporter. And I used to tease him, I said, 'So you're going to show me the Malcolm X picture. Why don't you show me the Nixon picture?' I said, 'I think you might've interviewed Malcolm. You worked and helped create Nixon.'" And he blamed Hillary Clinton's defeat not on her failure to bring in white voters, but on her lack of effort in rallying black ones. "You lost Michigan, by what, 15,000, 20,000 votes? You could've got that if you mobilized two housing projects or three churches," he said. "You didn't identify with those in identity politics, that's why you had the lowest turnout you had around blacks in a long time."Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

    30 min

  8. 19/05/2017

    6: David Folkenflik on Roger Ailes

    When Roger Ailes' wife Elizabeth sent a statement on her husband's death to The Drudge Report instead of Fox News it was, according to NPR Media Correspondent David Folkenflik, "the final act of Roger Ailes' revenge" against the network he created. In an interview for the podcast NewsFeed with @BuzzFeedBen, BuzzFeed editor-in-chief Ben Smith talks with Folkenflik about Ailes' contentious relationship with the Murdochs and the way he wielded — and abused — his power as the head of Fox News. "It was a paranoid cult culture, it was a control culture, we knew that it was a punitive culture," said Folkenflik.  In the interview, Folkenflik also talks about the allegations of sexual abuse that got Ailes kicked out of Fox News and how the network is navigating Trump's presidency without him. "The people who are in that [morning] meeting basically have a triptych, incense, candles, a hologram machine, designed to conjure up the spirit of Roger Ailes and figure out what the hell would he do if he was handed these cards to play," he said. David Folkenflik is the author of Murdoch's World: The Last of the Old Media Empires.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

    41 min
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BuzzFeed Editor In Chief Ben Smith hosts conversations on the intersection of politics, media, and technology — and all of 2017's insanity.

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