Dean Obeidallah and Joy Reid discuss independent media’s role in an increasingly undemocratic world.
Dean Obeidallah and Joy Reid(Mark Sagliocco / Getty Images for SiruisXM; Leigh Vogel / Getty Images for Congressional Black Caucus Foundation)
Journalism is at an inflection point. At this year’s Golden Globe Awards, host Nikki Glaser called CBS a purveyor of excrement after that network shelved a 60 Minutes rreport on torture in ICE detention at the behest of its new editor in chief. CBS is now an official laughing stock, and that’s just one example. Under a hail of lawsuits, firings, new hires, and mercenary mergers, so-called mainstream media is in shambles. Then there’s the morass that is the social-media world. If democracy continues to depend on voters being able to know what’s going on and distinguish the truth from flat-out lies, the journalists’ job is as important as ever, but massively changed. Dean Obeidallah and Joy Reid embody both the doggedness and often the delight in doing journalism differently in this wildly chaotic, deadly, dangerous time. Obeidallah is a writer, lawyer, award-winning comedian, and the host of Sirius XM Radio’s national daily program The Dean Obeidallah Show. Reid is a best-selling American author, journalist, and the host of The Joy Reid Show, formerly national correspondent for MSNBC, now MS NOW, and host of the Emmy-nominated, two-time NAACP Award-winning nightly program, The ReidOut.
—Laura Flanders
Laura Flanders: What’s on the top of your mind and your heart as we begin this conversation?
Dean Obeidallah: It has to do with the ICE officer killing Renee Good. The response of this administration is unlike anything I’ve seen. Laura, there was not even any hint of compassion that an American had been killed. They began calling her a terrorist within hours. Something that you would expect to see maybe in a Middle East regime when they’re killing protesters, calling them terrorists or foreign agitators. It was happening in America. And now what’s the response of the Trump administration? To send more troops. Like the Iraq War surge, now there’s surging in Minnesota, because, on some level—and I’ve been saying this for over a year on my show—we’re at war.
Joy Reid: Think about the terminology we would use if this were a foreign country. The mainstream media, as much as it has somewhat progressed toward calling what Donald Trump and his regime are doing by the true words that the dictionary would imply, are still not able to see this as a fundamentally undemocratic regime. Seeing this woman murdered in broad daylight in a suburban neighborhood in front of her neighbors, including a doctor, it changes the stakes, I think, for white America in the same way that the George Floyd murder, not far from that Minneapolis neighborhood, changed the stakes on Black Lives Matter for everyone. People were forced to reckon with what police could really do. Now I’m interested in watching what white America is doing with the information that white women are now also on the table and open to being victimized by the state. I think that is game-changing. She is the George Floyd of this Stop ICE movement, even though she’s not demographically what the targets of ICE look like.
LF: What do you perceive your role to be in these times? Reporter, commentator, opinion maker, activist, what?
JR: I’ve been an opinion journalist ever since I got out of local news. I wrote an editorial for the Miami Herald opposing the Iraq War, almost got fired for it, and wound up leaving because the way that the media was covering the run-up to the Iraq war and the invasion, I found distasteful. And I thought, I’m done with media. So when I came back into media, I came back in as an opinion journalist. I see my role now as as an advocate, because I do believe that when you’re facing autocracy and authoritarianism, the role of the media is to be part of the resistance. I know that that makes a lot of journalists cringe because they don’t want to be in conflict with the administration, but to me, we are not in normal times. This is not politics; it’s autocracy.
DO: All of my work through the years of comedy for 20 years has been as an activist. I was doing comedy to make people laugh but try to break down stereotypes about Arab Americans and Muslim Americans. It’s our 23rd year of the New York Arab-American Comedy Festival this fall. My journalism work, if you want to call that, is opinion-based but the same idea. Trying to effectuate change, trying to be an activist. I am delusional. I believe I can change the world. I think we all are delusional or we wouldn’t be doing this.
LF: What do you think is the most grievous thing that mainstream, so-called, corporate money media are doing or failing to do?
JR: Going back to when Trump first came in, the media would not use the word “lie.” There was a big internal struggle about whether you could call an untruth a misstatement, whether you could just say it was a lie. There have been a lot of those kinds of stupid fights, where the media has been so reluctant to be in conflict with any administration. Not just Trump, with Bush, with, well, Obama, they didn’t care, because that was the Dems. If it’s a Democrat, they don’t mind being in conflict. But when it’s a Republican, because the media is so afraid of what Roger Ailes did, which is to present this notion that the media is biased against white conservatives. Now they’ve committed an even further crime, which is to become co-opted by the same oligarchs who directly benefit from the regime. They’ve now bought up most of the administration, including CBS. The Times is reporting that Bari Weiss, who is the podcaster or Substacker, who, for whatever reason, is now in charge of the Tiffany Network, CBS News, she sent a note to her staff before Tony Dokoupil’s launch as anchor of the CBS Evening News, a job he got because he called Ta-Nehisi Coates a terrorist. His reward for calling Ta-Nehisi Coates, the brilliant writer, a terrorist, was to get the evening news, I believe, that’s my opinion. I’m an opinion journalist. She said, “Let’s make sure every single night has something with viral potential. The goal for this road show of Tony Dokoupil’s is not to deliver the news so much as it is to drive the news. We need to be the news for these 10 days.” It is a crime against journalism for the editorial director of a news network to say, “Our job is not to deliver the news but to go viral.” That’s crazy.
DO: Edward R. Murrow famously said, “There are not two sides to every issue.” There are not two sides to the Klan. I remember a cable news network, and I won’t say which one it is, said to me, during Trump’s first term, they wanted me on to talk about Trump’s anti-Muslim bigotry. I said OK and they said, “We just need someone from the other side.” I go, “Someone who’s pro-anti-Muslim bigotry?” The producer just stopped talking. He’s like, “Oh, we’ll get back.” Then they just killed the segment, because they couldn’t, in their mind, do a segment where it wasn’t two sides. There are not two sides, and we know this. There are not two sides to a lie, there’s not two sides to Trump’s fascism. I would go on Joy’s show, and me and Joy would say “fascism.” And Mehdi Hasan and all the other people there, “What are you doing? How outlandish.” We’re at the point where I’m literally quoting Hannah Arendt and the banality of evil to explain to people what ICE is doing, and that’s not over the top. What I would like corporate media to understand, their job is not to make money for shareholders and executives to get bonuses, but serve the people, make them smarter, even if it means losing access. I know that’s a lot to ask. But that’s what I would like, because an educated, informed electorate is the key to saving this republic.
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LF: The crisis, so-called, in legacy media is real, but it has opened up some incredible opportunities, and you both have seized them, as have I. Talk about the sort of pros and cons of this moment.
DO: If there was ever a time for corporate media to implode, thankfully, it’s now on the ascendancy of independent media, because years ago, if they still controlled all the ways to get information out, we’d be dead. They would be just all gatekeeping and just doing pro-Trump, pro-regime propaganda, and we would not be able to get our message out there. Technically, I work at SiriusXM, which is a big corporation for sure, but I don’t think they even know I’m there. I do meet with an executive, but it’s never about the content and stuff. It’s like, do your thing. I write for Substack, where it truly is independent. I don’t have to pitch anymore to editors, who I liked, and they were great, and wait for a day and dilute what I wanted to say. We’re also building allies in the independent media world. Laura, you were the first independent media person I met. I’m not kidding, you and probably Amy Goodman. Now there’s so many! There’s too many! There’s all these young guys, have a million followers on TikTok. There’s so many more of us, so I’m more confident the future is brighter, that we can get our message out.
LF: There is a huge morass out there. How do you keep your head above water, get your head above the parapet, as it were?
JR: I wrote this book about Medgar Evers and Myrlie Evers-Williams. Medgar Evers started a newspaper because they couldn’t get real news out of Mississippi into rural communities, where they were being lied to about civil rights, lied to about the NAACP. He and a white woman, her name was Hazel Brannon Smith. She was pretty amazing. She actually was an award-winning journalist. She decided to lend her press to Medgar Evers. She was shunned by white society. What she did in response? She had all the Blacks over tea. She said, “All right, you all, come on. I got nobody to have tea and hang with me. You all come on to my house, and let’s do this.” That is the kind of underground radical advocacy journalism that was needed to fight Mississippi fascism. I think of Alexei Navalny, who was also outside of the very closed system of Russian media to get information to younger people through all these alternative means. Unfortunately, he died for it, but that is true activism and true heroism. The great thing about this moment and not having to answer to a corporate sort of overseer is that we can get on the ground and try to fight this fascism that’s overrunning our country at a rapid rate. They had a plan, Project 2025. We didn’t have a plan, but we have huge community. We have the MeidasTouches of the world. We work together. We work as a system. We’re like an amoeba. It’s harder to stop us because there’s so many of us, and we’re working in tandem.
Laura FlandersTwitterLaura Flanders is the author of several books, the host of the nationally syndicated public television show (and podcast) The Laura Flanders Show and the recipient of a 2019 Lannan Cultural Freedom Fellowship.