from WNYC studios. I'm Brian Lerer. This is my daily politics podcast. It's Wednesday,

October 23rd. As we continue to cover the election, our colleagues that on the media

are continuing to cover the coverage of the

election. That doesn't just mean what's in the network news stories and things like that. It's about

the influencers on social media who answer to no editors or fact checkers. It's about the lies and

disinformation spreaders who seek to undermine our democracy, not just persuade people

to their candidate or point of view. And if you feel like you're seeing a campaign commercial

on TV or on your phones like every two seconds, well, last weekend on the media did a segment

on the overwhelming amount of money making all those messages possible.

Here's a short clip of co-host Michael Lohenger asking Rolling Stone political reporter Andrew Perez

about a particularly brazen fundraising request.

And then there was that time in April when Donald Trump hosted a dinner in Mar-a-Lago with a bunch of oil executives.

Trump said, raise me a billion dollars, and he effectively promised them anything they could

want, you know, saying that this would be a deal because they would save money on their taxes,

and he would roll back Biden's clean energy agenda. Trump also promised to fast-track

oil company mergers, which have been slowed by the Biden administration. So he's been promising

that oil industry is suite of goodies. This is a very explicit test of whether there are public corruption rules. Like,

if you can just say, raise me a billion dollars and I'll give you X, Y, Z, are there corruption

rules in America? If that kind of thing is tolerated, I think it's an open question.

And with that, with me now is what a treat, both of them, media co-hosts, the co-host of Michael Loewinger and Brooke

from On the Media. Hi, Micah, hi, Brooke. Welcome back to this show. Hi. Hey. Long time no see.

Yes. Brooke was on with us. For those of you listening, helping with Pledge Drive last hour.

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