On the other side of the political spectrum, we have the lawsuit by Dominion voting systems against Fox News during the discovery process of which we found out, surprisingly perhaps, that during the post-election 2020 drama of Stop the Steel, which Fox covered heavily, many of the executives and hosts were internally discussing just how much they disbelieve the stories that they were peddling on their show that they were feeding their audiences about an alleged election fraud. In order to please their audience, in other words, they kept alive a lie that would culminate in the January 6 riot. What's fascinating to me is the different types of media dishonest anywhere on the liberal side you encounter what seems to be ideological blindness and unwillingness to admit otherwise. Whereas on Fox News, the story is much more cynical. People know that they're promulgating lies and they do it nevertheless. So I want to start here and wonder what it means as we start building towards a unified apocalypse. What does it mean that our sources of information, our authoritative sources of information, are so corrupt either by ideological blindness or pure mercenary cynicism?

Well, I think there's always a danger in conversations about journalism with journalists because there's a tendency which is very advanced these days for the news media to think that it's the story. And this becomes a somewhat, I think, circular conversation. I'm not sure that this is really the revolutionary development of our times. I'm the midst of writing a book in which a great deal of the action takes place in the 1970s. What was the equivalent disaster which everybody was thinking about then? The answer is the Vietnam War, hardly need to tell Martin this. And there was an official narrative which was the domino theory required the United States to shore up the government of Vietnam. And then it became clear that that was not entirely true. And with the publication of the Pentagon Papers, the public was suddenly treated to an inside account of what, in fact, had happened in the 1960s and the reasons for the escalation in Vietnam under Lyndon Johnson. There then was an attempt to shut that door disastrously unsuccessful attempt that then contributed to the crisis of the legitimacy of Richard Nixon's administration. If one goes back through the news coverage of Vietnam and then of Watergate, it's striking to me how familiar the discussions are. On one side, there's an administration that's abusing its power and seeking to exert pressure only on its political opponents, but on its opponents in the press, ultimately resorting to the legal means to do that. On the other side, you have a public that is increasingly polarized on the issue. And there are indeed outbreaks of violence in the period, as well as a general sense of disenchantment with the system. So whenever people tell me that there's something very special about our situation in 2023, I say that I introduced you to 1973. And you won't find that our position as a whole lot worse. In fact, it's very similar. The Trump presidency ended with a massive crisis of legitimacy at January the 6th. And Nixon presidency, of course, ended in Watergate impeachment played a part in both cases. And the media became a story, which is what the media really loves. The New York Times loves nothing better than reporting on the New York Times. And I think that's all pretty familiar. The novel thing, and here at Marcin, you may disagree with me, or you may agree wholeheartedly, the novel thing is clearly the internet and the advent of social media to use the term casually, because ultimately, traditional media have become quite reliant on social media for raw content. And the novel thing is really the way in which news has become structurally different in the age of the internet. The old institutions play their old game. Governments try to manipulate the media. The newspapers want to write about themselves. That's all old have. But what's novel is platforms such as Twitter, but also increasing the TikTok, in which a considerable amount of power is given to the user, to ordinary people who aren't journalists, to generate news and commentary. And of course, and both Martin and I have written about this, the ecosystem of the internet went from being very decentralized to being quite centralized around network platforms, very fast. It became monetized through ad sales. It became corrupted by bots. It's continuing to be corrupted. The corruption will not stop. And it will get worse with artificial intelligence. That's what's new. Not the stuff about traditional media, not the ways in which government tried to manipulate the internet, but the complete transformation of the nature of news on our perception of the news by the internet and the network platforms.