Flipping The Bird
On the Media
WNYC Studios
4.6 • 8.7K Ratings
🗓️ 18 November 2022
⏱️ 50 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Since Elon Musk took over Twitter, there has been nothing short of crisis — leading to massive layoffs and lost advertisers. On this week’s On the Media, what this chaos means for activists worldwide who used the platform as a public square. Plus, how political predictions distort coverage of elections.
1. James Fallows [@JamesFallows], writer of the “Breaking the News” newsletter on Substack, on the political press' obsession with telling the future and the narratives that have a chokehold on elections coverage. Listen.
2. Zoë Schiffer [@ZoeSchiffer], Managing Editor of Platformer, on the mass exodus of employees from one of the world's most significant social media sites. Listen.
3. Avi Asher-Schapiro [@AASchapiro], tech reporter for the Thomson Reuters Foundation, on the impact of Musk's leadership on Twitter users around the world. Listen.
4. Clive Thompson [@pomeranian99], journalist and author of Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World, on the website many are fleeing to amid chaos at Twitter. Listen.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | From WNYC in New York, this is on the media. |
| 0:04.6 | You may know Twitter is under new management. |
| 0:07.6 | Employees have until 5 p.m. today to commit to extremely hard-core work or leave the company. |
| 0:13.8 | While U.S. Twitter users are days that confused, bigger things are at stake beyond our shores. |
| 0:20.0 | Some sort of intense sense of air against brashness, yeah, I might lend itself to bull-headedly |
| 0:24.8 | pushing to get your rocket in the air, but the priority of building a social space that |
| 0:29.0 | requires engineering for the most vulnerable among us. |
| 0:32.1 | Plus, with jitters swirling around the Twitterverse, some have set off in search of smaller, |
| 0:38.6 | more peaceful corners of the internet. |
| 0:41.3 | They're kind of like, look guys, we had this kind of quiet space that was working really |
| 0:44.9 | well for us, and now there's a ton of new people running around with very different cultural |
| 0:50.8 | assumptions. |
| 0:51.8 | That's all coming up after this. |
| 1:00.7 | From WNYC in New York, this is on the media. |
| 1:03.7 | I'm Brooke Gladstone. |
| 1:05.3 | On Tuesday, Donald Trump announced his third run for the presidency at Mar-a-Lago in |
| 1:10.3 | what he'd have called a low-energy hour if he hadn't been delivering it. |
| 1:15.0 | Our country is being destroyed before your very eyes. |
| 1:18.2 | This on the heels of a weak-long defenestration of mag-a-ism and its leader by the press. |
| 1:24.5 | Fourteen candidates endorsed by Trump, who once said that with him in charge would all |
| 1:29.1 | get tired of winning, lost, leading to the best midterm result for president in decades. |
| 1:35.5 | Since then, the pundits have been asking, |
... |
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