Giday, humans. Welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas. It has been a big start to the Trump

administration, a flurry of extremely aggressive and proactive executive orders. It's kind of

head spinning and it's a little difficult to understand and to contextualize.

So I thought that I would try to assist by identifying ways, one specific way, in fact,

in which the legacy media could be doing a better job of helping us to understand the context

of what's happening and helping us to have uncomfortable

conversations instead of sitting comfortably in our pre-existing interpretation and expectations

of who Trump is and what he's up to. My worry is that the coverage of Trump's initial

flurry of actions makes it more difficult, the coverage

by the legacy media that is, and by a podcaster stand, in fact, makes it more difficult to

understand what's really going on. And in the case of the legacy media, that is partly

caused because on a few central issues, journalism and newsrooms

have been captured by interest groups, activist groups.

And I want to look in particular at the coverage of Trump's policies on trans people and

biological sex as a case study of how damaging it can be to a healthy

national conversation when journalists do activism and when you start assigning stories and beats

to people on the basis of their identity and their activist interest, rather than on their ability to integrate

information across a wide range of different interests in a way that will resonate with

people who don't have a pre-existing preconception about that particular identity group or

activist cause. Because what's happened is that some of the coverage on hot button social

justice issues and sensitive issues has understandably in recent years become being assigned

to people who have a particular interest in that. So LGBT issues will be covered by LGBT people

...