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Hello and welcome to the Americano podcast, a series of discussions about American politics,

power and prejudices. This year, 2024, is an election year in America, a presidential election year.

And so we will be doing two podcasts a week, rather than our usual one, because we want to and because we know you can't get enough Americano in your life.

Today we are going to be talking about the American media.

And I can't think of two better people to talk to about the American media, than Naima Raza and Ben Smith, who are

at Semaphore Media, Ben Smith founded Semaphore, and they have a new podcast called Mixed Signals,

which is about the media.

Now, both of you, I'm sorry to do this to you because I think being journalist,

you're probably already very, very bored about it and think it's last week's subject.

And in fact, you've already done an episode of mixed signals on it.

But I want to talk to you about the Trump trial, because for Brits in particular,

it's still of considerable interest. And I think something you've both touched on already,

but I'd like to ask you about, is this idea that we talked a lot about the rule of law last

week, you know, the importance of the rule of law, the importance of democracy, the relationship

between democracy and the rule of law, etc., etc.

But I'm not sure in Britain, we really have a sense of the extent to which this was a trial, a media trial, or a trial that revealed so much about the role of the media in America.

And Naima, I'll start with you. What did it reveal to you about the

state of media in America? The trial itself or the coverage? Well, both. Yeah. I think the trial

itself was in some ways revelatory, in some ways not about the practices of the National Enquirer, right, which had been

...