Hello and welcome to Use Flutey. It's I'm Katie Halfer.

And I'm Aaron Matier and we have a great show this week featuring Ben Smith of

Semafore. He has a new book called Traffic. It's all about the rise and fall of

digital media and it's a fun conversation. Yeah and he of course was at BuzzFeed

News and he was at the New York Times so he has lots of things to say about

media and the media landscape. And for UK it's kind of a trip down memory lane.

It is. I get along the nostalgic kind of but also we have a little mini debate between Aaron

and Ben respectful. Not too many sparks but good, good healthy discussion,

democratic discussion and also Ben talks a little bit about what he describes as the cluster

FUCK at the New York Times over a podcast called Caliphate. So you can catch that full interview

as well as of course our Thursday throwdown segment which is when we go over midweek

media madness and react to clips. You can catch all of that at useful idiots dot substacks.com

or useful idiots dot locals.com. If you like media gossip and gab,

which I have to admit I kind of do. I have a soft spot for it. You will like this this interview.

Yeah. It's a fun one. Alrighty, usefulities dot substacks.com as Katie said and let's get to our

four basic food groups. And just a refresher in case you're new to the show. The four basic food

groups are something that Matt Taiybi actually came up with. He had a friend, his dad's friend in

the news media business because of course Matt Taiybi's dad was a reporter. So his dad's friend

said to him once all news can be divided into four basic food groups of stories.

Democrats suck where public and suck isn't that weird isn't that terrible. So that's the origin

story. So Aaron, what do we have for Democrats suck? For Democrats suck, we are going to go back to

an old favorite, which was the Democratic obsession for years and years and years with the conspiracy

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