Isabella Redjai, Kerry Soropoulos, Charles Fain Lehman, and Renu Mukherjee discuss the fatal stabbing of a Ukrainian refugee on public transit and what it reveals about urban violence, mental health, and law enforcement. They also discuss CBS’s interest in buying The Free Press and Austin’s logo debate.
Audio Transcript
Isabella Redjai: Welcome back to the City Journal Podcast. I’m Isabella Redjai. And I’m Kerry Soropoulos. But before we dive in, don’t forget to hit subscribe or ring the bell so that you don’t miss out on future conversations. First up, have Charles Fain Lehman, Senior Editor of City Journal and expert on vices. Welcome, Charles.
Charles Fain Lehman: Happy to be here on the other side of the mic.
Kerry Soropoulos: Also joining us today is Renu Mukherjee, an MI Fellow and an expert on education policy. Thank you for joining us, Renu.
Renu Mukherjee: Thanks for having me, guys.
Kerry Soropoulos: All right, let’s get into it. And first up, a really sad and unsettling story. On August 22nd in Charlotte, North Carolina, Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska was stabbed to death on the Charlotte light rail system by Decarlos Brown Jr., a homeless vagrant and ex-con. Late last week video footage of the incident was released, circling social media and creating a really broad ranging conversation on transit, crime and mental health. Charles, maybe can you give us a little bit more background on this story, fill in any of the gaps?
Charles Fain Lehman: Yeah, you know, I think you did a pretty good job. The context that I’ll add is, A) sort of local to the story, we know that this individual had a long history of prior criminal acts, B) that he had some serious mental illness. The woman who was victimized was a refugee from the war in Ukraine. You know, I think there’s some sort of shocking and sad about fleeing a war-torn country for safety in the United States only to be brutally murdered on a train. But, I think this comes in the context of, you see these shocking videos of transit violence and I think anyone who saw it connected it to, for example, the train conflict, Daniel Penny’s brave actions to save folks on a train from disruption and potential violence. And more broadly, I think the fears that people routinely experience now on public transit in major American cities where they are afraid of disruptive behavior, of unhinged behavior, of the demonstration of serious mental illness. I think this video was shocking just because everyone has imagined something like this happening to them when they’re on an otherwise safe train car. And it really resonates on that level.
Kerry Soropoulos: And not, as you said, not the first incident, not the first video incident. Just earlier this year in New York, we saw footage of a really horrifying incident where a woman was set alight and burned to death on the subway. And these incidents really capture the public imagination. Even though short transit crime is relatively rare, even as compared to a few years ago in New York, it still really captures the imagination. So what is it about these high profile crimes that really ignite the imagination and can that energy be used to push for change?
Charles Fain Lehman: Yeah, you know, subway cars, light rail cars, public travel of all kinds is sort of a, it’s a tightly confined public space. And so if something goes wrong, then you have no way to exit. You are trapped there for the duration of the car ride where somebody is being aggressive, somebody is being violent, somebody is being unhinged. That’s extraordinarily salient and people will make a lot of decisions to try to avoid that. I was looking earlier today at data on transit ridership, which has dramatically declined, dramatically declined in March of 2020 following, of course, the onset of COVID pandemic, but it’s never really recovered. We’re still about 20 percent below where we were nationwide on transit ridership. Some of that’s the rise of remote work. Some of that is people’s resorting to less transit dependent areas, but at least some of it is that we have seen an increase in crime, violence, and disorder on American public transit systems that if you look in New York, if you look at Los Angeles, if you look at a place like Charlotte, where I’ve looked at the data, they really have become measurably less safe. And that I would sort of posit is because, you know, the less people use them, the more they are subject to the whims of the antisocial, and the more they’re subject to the whims of the antisocial, the less people will use them. There’s sort of a vicious feedback loop. You know, this is how you end up in a situation where somebody comes to this country from Ukraine where they have a relatively functional public transit system and doesn’t think twice about dangers that are obvious to, you know… I suspect many people, I know many people in Charlotte don’t use light rail. They, transit ridership peaked in 2018, it’s been down since then. But again, that’s, you know, that’s true nationwide, which represents this sort of sense that the public space that is the train car is no longer being governed appropriately.
That’s ultimately a public problem, right? These are public services. These are things that are administered by the government for everyone to use, everyone to share. And so it is a democratic matter to resolve them. It’s not just about, you know, people will exit. They will choose to move to the suburbs if they can. But, you know, there are also opportunities to say, this is something we’re all supposed to use together. The subway is something we’re all supposed to use together. We need to work together to take crime seriously as an issue, to take disorder seriously as an issue, to remedy this problem.
Kerry Soropoulos: And that’s important because you’re mentioning that it is a policy issue and it is a choice. This guy had 14 prior arrests. Charlotte police and the mayor of Charlotte confirmed that he didn’t buy a ticket to get onto the train. Why was this guy here in the first place? He should have been in jail, and if he wasn’t in jail and he was out in public and he wasn’t buying a ticket, he should have been stopped for that reason. So it’s infuriating that we have to keep seeing this over and over again. Am I losing my mind?
Charles Fain Lehman: No, and this is why low-level enforcement matters, particularly in the transit context. We at City Journal had a great piece from a recent guest, Rafael Mangual and Bill Bratton a couple of years ago about keeping the New York City subway safe. And so much of what Metro cops do in New York, transit cops do in New York and what the NYPD does in the subways is they’re enforcing for petty offenses. They’re picking up the guy who’s fare-beating, the guy who’s walking his bike in the subway, the guy who is maybe being slightly disorderly. But quite frequently, those people have more serious problems, have more serious threats. They have outstanding warrants. They’re on the top 50 list as being seriously mentally ill. They are wanted for some other crime. They have an open case. Those sort of petty enforcement things, they help deal with more serious crime.
And then at the same time, they also preserve this sort of collective informal enforcement of order, which is mostly how safety happens, right? Like, you know, when the public authorities sort of throws its hands in the air, it’s like, this isn’t really our problem. You will get this doom loop. You will get this decay spiral. When you deal with the little stuff, it doesn’t turn into big stuff. And we learned this. We learned this in the 90s. We learned this in the 2000s. We know that this is true. We have lots of evidence that it’s true. And we just sort of keep forgetting it.
Isabella Redjai: Really quickly Charles, you mentioned something earlier about people moving to the suburbs for reasons like this. Do you think public transit in and of itself are reasons that people move out of the city?
Charles Fain Lehman: Yeah, I mean, you know, there’s a basic calculus, right? Which is, if you can live in the city… Cities are very attractive. They’re very attractive economically. They’re very attractive culturally. They’re very attractive socially. There’s lots of stuff there. There’s lots of human capital there. There’s lots of cultural capital. There’s lots of economic capital. People move to the suburbs, they pay a penalty, right? They spend more time in their cars. They spend more time on transit. They change their social connections, they’re less able to access that capital. It costs them more. Why do they choose to do that? There are a bunch of different reasons. Some of it is space. Some of it is affordability. If you get far enough out, things get cheaper. But some of it really is, why am I choosing to drive an hour or an hour and a half into the city as opposed to living in the city and taking advantage of transit? It’s because I don’t trust the transit system or I don’t want to ride it in because I feel like I don’t want to make that bet every single day. Or if I have to stay late at work, I don’t want to be a woman riding home late at night.
Is that all of why people move out of the city? No, but it’s at this margins of public versus private life where, you know, people will choose the suburb, their cars, checking out of publicly available spaces if they don’t trust that those spaces are safe.
Kerry Soropoulos: I pose this question to both of you, Charles, first. One political and intellectual movement we’re thinking a lot about here at the Manhattan Institute is the abundance movement. This is a movement largely on the left that strongly advocates for cities, density. A big part of that story is transit. If you want people to live in cities to take transit, and this gets at what Isabella was talking about, people have to be OK and comfortable riding transit. You can’t have both. You can’t have urban density, abundance, transit policy, and also choose policies that allow knife-wielding maniacs to run around on your transit system. So you have to choose. Charles, can you present maybe an alternate vision? Because it’s really shameful to see people who are normally ruthless advocates for transit refuse to address this issue over and over again.
Charles Fain Lehman: And look, you know, I’ll say I was actually just at the big abundance conference in D.C. It is really very happening. No, but you know, I think I and I talked about this there. I was on a panel about this and I think a bunch of people came to me afterwards and say, yes, you’re right. We recognize this is a problem. It’s not uniformly true. And I think this is a split among the sort of quote-unquote “abundance left,” where there’s a general agreement that there need to be there to see much more investment in the provision of public services.
And my argument is that’s often true, particularly in big cities, that public transit is here to stay, that we need to build more housing, that we need to provide a more abundant public life. But that also, if you want to do that, then you need to ensure that the things that are collectively shared and collectively owned are also governed for the interests of the majority of law-abiding people, that are governed for shared ownership of public space. You know, I think that means, what Steve Teles among others have referred to as sort of this “dark abundance” vision is this idea of if you want abundance, if you want to build more housing, if you want more affordable public transit, if you want the city to get bigger and public services to grow, then you also need an abundance of safety. You need an abundance of order. You need the assertion that these things matter and we’re going to fully fund and support the services that actually make them happen. We’re fully fund the police. We’re going to, as I’ve written in City Journal, build more prisons. We’re going to increase the ability of the public to enforce its social norms so that those shared public things can actually be shared as opposed to be dominated by an antisocial few who drive everyone else out.
Kerry Soropoulos: Renu, what’s your take on this debate about abundance and the role of criminal justice policy and other enforcement of social mores?
Renu Mukherjee: I mean, I completely echo Charles. I think like on a theoretical level, not just with city governance, but governance in general in the U.S., there’s an implicit social contract that is in place. And unfortunately, in many blue cities and many progressive centers throughout the country, enforcement of that social contract has not taken place, either by legislators in those areas not wanting to enforce laws that are on the books or actively passing legislation that not only doesn’t further the social contract among citizens but actually works to effectively undermine it. The D.C. police union is very active on Twitter and, you know, great, great group and they’re talking about how crime is down. Charles is like “eh.” But they’re talking… They have their problems. But they’re talking about, they have a great Twitter presence, I guess, X presence is what I’m saying. They constantly are releasing out statistics showing that crime is down, but at the same time they say, you know, now Muriel Bowser, mayor of D.C., has said, you know, she’s actively working with the Trump administration to try to sort of prolong federal presence to maintain and keep crime down. At the same time, they’ve said the D.C. city council, I’m forgetting in this moment the exact title of the legislation that was passed recently. Charles, you might know, but it effectively just, it’s legislation that again undermines the social contract. I think now it’s something like you’re considered a juvenile if you’re under 25 years old, laws of this sort that really allow crime to proliferate. So I agree with you, Kerry and Charles that, you know, to have abundance you need sort of an enforcement of the social contract and that hasn’t been happening in Charlotte, New York City, D.C., etc.
Kerry Soropoulos: You mentioned what we’re hearing from civic leaders. After this incident, but before it really became a national story, Charlotte Mayor Vi Lyles opted not to really focus on the crime or even mention the victim’s name, but to do the same, same old song and dance that we hear about root causes so many times. “We will never arrest our way out of issues such as homelessness and mental health,” she said, arguing for the same policies around sort of addressing root causes that have never really taken action at crime where it’s actually happening. Charles, what do we do with this? How do we change the story? This is the same thing as we heard when Daniel Penny was forced by circumstance to take those really heroic actions, that it was all about mental health, but it doesn’t have to be about mental health. This seems like the perfect case where we can arrest our way out of it. This guy had 14 convictions and he wasn’t supposed to be on the train. He had no ticket.
Charles Fain Lehman: I mean, look, there are two answers. One is that you cannot arrest your way out of the “root causes,” quote unquote. You can’t arrest your way out of poverty. But you actually also don’t need to do that in order to accomplish dealing with the social externalities of a serious mental illness or propensity to violence or all the rest of it. I think this is the context of camping enforcement. On the one hand, can you shut down big public encampments in so doing address homelessness? No, you can’t. People will still have nowhere to live. On the other hand, camping has all sorts of nasty public externalities. It is unsafe. It is unclean. It is a public health hazard. It can generate fires. It can generate crime. Large scale public encampments are a major problem. And you can in fact arrest your way out of all of those problems by saying you’re not allowed to camp here. And that’s really good because those problems are independently social acid. They are extraordinarily harmful to public life and to the public that would like to enjoy the sidewalk that is dominated by a camp. So like yeah enforcement cannot address “root causes” quote-unquote, but that doesn’t matter if you’re addressing the effects very effectively by enforcement.
That’s the second point is it is certainly the case that to target homelessness and serious mental illness, you don’t necessarily want to address them by cycling people in and out of jail, but it doesn’t mean you should just let people live on the streets until they decide to murder somebody. That’s not a success of quality of life, of good governance. That’s not a success. And so, you can talk about the abundance framing. You need an abundance of serious mental illness and substance abuse disorder, substance abuse disorder treatment. And that includes compelling people to use those public resources when they don’t want to. We at, you know, at M. and CJ write a lot about access to mental health beds, the Institutions For Mental Disease Exclusion in Medicaid, which makes it impossible to build modern day institutions. If you can expand the spending on that, that is a kind of abundance issue, right? That is giving the state more capacity. But in that case, the state’s capacity is making sure that people who are a danger to themselves and others get the help that they need, whether they want it or not.
Kerry Soropoulos: Explain just very briefly, Charles, before I get to my final question, the IMD exclusion, what does that mean? How do we get more beds built? Because, sure, maybe we can’t arrest our way out of the issue, but as you said, that doesn’t mean we don’t try, and it doesn’t mean we can’t involuntarily commit ourselves, our way out of the problem of mentally ill people. The idea that this is a better alternative to putting people in institutions is ridiculous to me.
Charles Fain Lehman: Yeah, so, and I’ll try to keep this high-level and I recommend our colleagues, Steve Eide, and Carolyn Gorman have written a great deal about this topic. But at a very high level, people who are poor in America, their healthcare is paid for by Medicaid. When Medicaid was passed back in the 1960s, they included a rule, the Institutions for Mental Disease Exclusion, IMD, which says that Medicaid will not reimburse for care that is done in hospitals dedicated specifically to mental illness that have greater than a certain, I think it’s greater than 16 beds. So you can only have very small facility. You have a lot of people who have seriously mentally ill who need treatment, who aren’t necessarily cognizant of the need for treatment. States have to deal with them. They get picked up by the city or by the state and they have to go somewhere. If they go to a large-scale institution, the federal government will not pay for it. They are stuck in a hospital where they can’t really get the care that they need, and they can cycle back on the street, the feds will pick up the tab. And so the incentive is for cities and states to put these people in general-purpose facilities that aren’t really suited for their needs, to get them out as quickly as possible because that’s the most effective way to shift costs. That sounds very technical, but the effect is that we have seen a dramatic decline in the availability of institutional space over the past 60 years, almost exclusively because of this. Today, it is very hard to be put into an institution unless you literally kill somebody. It’s harder to get into an institution in the state of New York, for example, than it is to get into Harvard. And that is downstream of a choice about capacity to stick with the theme of this conversation. We choose not to build that capacity and then we suffer the consequences.
Kerry Soropoulos: Yeah, and the closure of mental asylums has really, I think, been one of the main causes of this problem, and great work on that has been done and written about by a lot of scholars at MI, as you’ve mentioned. So I encourage our readers to check some of that out. This story, it happened on August 22nd, was not picked up by basically any national outlets. It’s only gotten a revival because the video, the CCTV from the transit was released. Now it’s circling Twitter, Elon Musk has commented, the president commented on it last night. It’s provoking this discussion. What do we think? The mayor of Charlotte commented thanking outlets for not sharing the video out of respect for the family, which is understandable, but maybe, Renu, what do you think? Is this a positive or a negative for these videos to be sharing? Obviously it’s gory and horrifying, but is there some kind of silver lining that this can be used to push for a change so this never happens again?
Renu Mukherjee: I mean, I completely think so, not just with respect to, you know, violent or even petty crimes in cities, but just as an information source in general. You know, when talking to friends and family members about something like, you know, hostage releases in Israel, I have watched all of those hostage release videos on X. They’re not, you know, sometimes they’re covered by CNN and other mainstream outlets, but not to the degree that you find from like journalists on the ground, you know, sort of smaller journalists posting these videos on X or influencers on X sharing these videos. Same with the Charlotte attack, you know, there’s just a knowledge gap between, you know, what I learn and see and watch on X and just, you know, close friends and family members and what they’re able to see. I completely understand the argument that the Charlotte mayor is making, which is, you know, no one wants a video of their child being stabbed to death on the internet being shared by tens of millions of people.
That is a fair argument. These outlets weren’t even reporting that something of this event in and of itself had happened. There is a difference between the video and then also saying there was this horrific incident on public transportation. This is a problem plaguing San Francisco and New York City and D.C. and Chicago and countless other cities in the United States. This was something that wasn’t even reported. So, you know, we do have to tread carefully if family members say stop sharing the video. At the same time, I mean, these are things that the public ought to be informed about. And if mainstream media outlets are not doing so, even in terms of describing these incidents, it is, you know, it is, X in and of itself is a major public resource in that regard.
Kerry Soropoulos: And with that, thank you to our guests, Charles and Renu, and to all our listeners, thank you for tuning into the City Journal Podcast. Please like and subscribe so you never miss an episode. Isabella with our next topic.
Isabella Redjai: So we’re going to cover something that happened at the end of last week, but I think still relevant and brings about a larger conversation. It broke that Paramount is in talks to buy Bari Weiss’s Free Press for an estimated deal of $200 million. Wow. And to give her a senior editorial role at CBS News, I think this is a very interesting event that may or may not be happening, but I think nevertheless it speaks to a greater volume of what Bari Weiss has accomplished through the Free Press. For those who may not remember or aren’t familiar, Weiss was a former member of the New York Times opinion page and she left during the summer of love, of BLM riots, and COVID back in 2020 and I think that was a very tumultuous time in newsrooms. She said that a big reason for her departure was that there was a suppression of wrongthink in that newsroom. If you didn’t think a certain way, you were somehow on the outs of the opinion page camaraderie. So I think that that was a very polarized time, but it brought about a lot of innovation in the news world. So I’m sure a lot of her New York Times former colleagues are surprised by this, wish they had probably gotten in on it.
In a sentence, I want to start with you, Renu. What lesson do you think newsrooms may have learned from this, you know, this deal that’s coming about, but also that time period where they were trying to censor certain types of thinking?
Renu Mukherjee: I think that a very large portion of the American public likes ideological diversity. I think that is something that the New York Times, the Washington Post, many other mainstream media outlets, they’ve been so focused on a different type of diversity that they haven’t really understood that when you have various viewpoints in a newsroom, that’s something that the American people are itching for. Of course, everybody’s going to come down on whatever side they are. But I think ideological diversity is what’s very important and know Bari is someone who figured that out.
Isabella Redjai: Charles, what do you think about newsrooms and how this has impacted ways of thinking, censorship that was a way of many newsrooms, I would say, especially around the first Trump administration. Now we’re in the second Trump administration. What are your thoughts?
Charles Fain Lehman: Yeah, I mean, you I think you can’t talk about this without talking about the shifted medium, right? And the way in which not just the news, but just sort of communication in general has been revolutionized by the internet. That’s a very abstract claim but like I think it is salient. There was this brief period of time in you know between the 1940s and the 1990s basically when American news media was dominated by a handful of large outlets and this is downstream of concentration of capital and television plus print media being the only game in town. And so it was possible to have sort of a unified consensus. And there were dissenters from this consensus. You look at sort of the conservative media ecosystem in sort of nascent days, things like National Review, but it really was very dominant. That starts to crack with the advent of the internet, right? People talk about, Andrew Breitbart, sorry, Matt Drudge breaking the news of the Monica Lewinsky scandal before anyone else online. That was sort of a pivotal moment when the sort of media oligarchy began to fall apart, when it’s monopoly began to fall apart or oligopoly began to fall apart. But I think that has become only more true, that more and more people are invested in rather than a coherent media product connected to a legacy brand, they’re invested in individuals with whom, to whom they can relate, and with whom they can have an ongoing relationship.
And conversely, individual media figures can seize more of that value for themselves. There’s less upside in being connected to a legacy brand and more upside in being your own thing. So we talk about the Free Press, what happened was A), Bari Weiss leaves the New York Times and the Times said we’re going to have a uniformity of opinion on these topics and it cost them, it cost them in terms of their access to a lot of talent.
They, it’s not just Bari Weiss, it’s James Bennet, who left. He’s now at The Economist, but sort of forced out over this op-ed that Tom Cotton wrote. But Bari goes from there, she goes to Substack relatively early on and I think sees the power of direct-to-consumer email delivery of a highly tailored, and I think they’re very conscious of the content of the product, a highly tailored product that is connected to a personality or a set of personalities. And she’s been extraordinarily successful.
And you look at a place like CBS, a legacy institution from the middle of the 20th century, they are trying to figure out how to operate in this new media ecosystem. They’re trying to say the rules of the game have changed because the medium has changed, because people do not consume news in the way that they used to. They don’t consume content the way that they used to. We need to know what’s happening. I think Bari West understood that before many other people did, or certainly she capitalized on it before many other people did, and so she’s reaping the rewards, which is good for her.
Isabella Redjai: She certainly originated something with the Free Press that I think was only starting to happen. If not, she very much started to the ball rolling on it for a lot of other people. You mentioned Substack and the power of Substack and independent writers, independent journalists who can get paid directly from the consumer. They don’t have to go to a major legacy outlet in order to get their name in print.
Emily Sundberg, who writes a newsletter that I really like called Feed Me all about consumption in big cities, actually broke last week that the Washington Post is headed to Substack. What sort of move similar to what you were saying already Charles, but what sort of move is happening across legacy media where they’re trying to tap into places like Substack or podcasts, like we’re doing here or different things. What’s your take on that?
Charles Fain Lehman: Yeah. I’ll say without betraying anything that we’re thinking a lot about this at City Journal, so keep your eyes open, listeners. No, I mean, I think, look, in the modern environment, depth is the new breath in terms of audience. And this is particularly true given AI. Most major publications have already seen a huge hit to their views because of AI summaries, right? You don’t go to this page anymore on Google. You read the Google AI summary and that’s enough. And that’s going to be increasing. That’s not going away. That’s going to be the new reality. And so you have to shift from a model, sort of the ad driven, page view driven revenue model that’s just not sustainable anymore unless you’re a superstar like the times. That’s not sustainable anymore. And so you have to shift from breadth, lots of shallow views to depth, lots of a handful of people that you can capture who are willing to give you $5, $7, $10 a month. That really adds up, right?
Like, you know, people who, if you are a single content creator on Substack, you can make a living with a thousand paying subscribers. That’s a lot, but it’s not actually that many people. And I think outlets like the Post are starting to understand that if you want to capture those people, you need to be taking advantage of A), the sort of direct email infrastructure, B), the network effects that exist on Substack because it selects for the kind of people who want to be in that kind of relationship. You need to be taking advantage of that and you need to more generally be thinking not about how do I draw new people in? How do I get out to the marginal person? But rather, how do I deepen my relationship with the people that I already have? How do I build more connections?
Kerry Soropoulos: Is there a problem in Substack of audience capture of your writings for a specific audience who is listening to you and you’re going back and forth with them? The whole value proposition of the legacy outlets was having an institutional reputation that people could put their trust in. Is this really a better thing for our media ecosystem that it’s going? It’s being broken down to the individual level.
Isabella Redjai: Renu, do you want to go for this one?
Renu Mukherjee: Yeah, sure. Yes and no. I think more so I’m on the side with no. The reason for that is having your try, the great thing about Substack and also with the Free Press is that it lacks the sort of condescending attitude that I think many of these legacy media outlets had adopted, which for example, I’m thinking about this case in which the New York Times shockingly beat Chris Rufo to break the story that Zohran Mamdani had written that he was African-American on his Columbia College application and much of their citations and their references in that New York Times op-ed were X accounts and you saw many New York Times readers in the comments of that article saying well how could you quote this X account? You know this isn’t this isn’t you know a sort of quote-unquote “reputable” reporter etc. etc. and I’m thinking like the story is accurate, you know, this and like he’s come out and said the story is true. So I think the thing about Substack is yes, you don’t have the sort of institutional brand attached to it. But I don’t know if at this point in 2025 onward, you necessarily need that anymore. I actually think stepping away from it, like, of course, it has its flaws, but stepping away from it, you are able to do more in terms of the stories you can break, the people you can talk to, the topics you can address, that there’s seemingly much less red tape than if you’re going to go through the normal trials and tribulations of publishing in a major legacy outlet.
Kerry Soropoulos: People who really bought into that view of the institutional reputability is an older crowd. And that’s CBS’s viewers. I saw a stat that the median viewer of CBS is I think 68. Will they be around in 20 years, if that’s your average? And that’s the average. So you know, there’s tail ends. We have 120-year-old people watching CBS. Are they going to be around in CBS? Will Friend of the Pod Bari Weiss be able to bring a younger audience? Charle, Renu, yes or no?
Charles Fain Lehman: I mean, that is the challenge, right? And the extent to which you can move from the Substack model to CBS. We have no idea, A), we don’t know this is happening. B), we have, as Isabella pointed out, B), we have no idea what it will look like. Is there going to be a CBS-branded Free Press product? Is it going to be like The Free Press News Hour on CBS? We have absolutely no idea. I think that, and one argument is that the brand will continue independently. It’s not obviously what the brand synergy there is then, like if that’s the case.
Another argument is like they will be trying to sort of draw that in and will fail that you can’t map something like an upstart onto a legacy institution. But then a third argument is like the best predictor of an institution’s longevity is its longevity, which is to say like the longer an institution has been around, the longer it’s going to be around. There’s high durability in institutions. They accumulate capital, they accumulate functionality, they become integral to the overall system. And so, you know, I think that it is likely that CBS will chug along and will in some way, shape, or form sort of incorporate a piece of the Free Press into what it does. I think it has to do that in order to survive. I’m not sure there’s, you know, I think there’s a big payday in this for the Free Press. I don’t know if this will work out well for them. It’s not clear to me. It could go either way.
Isabella Redjai: And it also seems CBS News is going to get an all-new staff out of this now that employees are threatening to quit over Bari Weiss potentially having a senior editorial role at the company. But what are your thoughts, Renu?
Renu Mukherjee: I think to the first point that Kerry brought up a moment ago, I do think that there is a possibility they will be able to bring in at least an audience that on average is younger than 68. Like maybe it’ll be like 60 or 58 or something like that, which would be a win.
Kerry Soropoulos: Big goals.
Renu Mukherjee: Exactly. I think like, I don’t think it’s just dependent on, you know, exactly copying the Free Press. I think what they would also have to do is, you know, unfortunately all of this data coming out showing that the attention spans of Gen Z, of younger Zillennials, et cetera, are much shorter. So I think having shorter form articles, think incorporating a lot of video content. This is stuff that Gen Z in particular resonates with a great deal. So I think that that would be conducive to its success, as opposed to all of the, Isabella, you’re point of like the staffers revolting and leaving. I mean, sometimes it’s a benefit to clean house a bit, you know, like you’re going to get new talent, you’re going to get fresh ideas, and the people that do stay and change their approach, like those are people that, you know, ultimately care about the success of CBS because clearly what’s been going on in the past is not working anymore, which is why they want, you know, a bit of freshness, they want some change. So I think it could be a net benefit.
Isabella Redjai: to your point, Renu, that you just made about short form media in a lot of ways, taking over and being the preference for lot of people over broadcast media, things like podcasts, things like social media, a lot of original content, content creators, influencers, things of that nature. Where do you think there’s a common denominator in these products that attracts this new generation to them? Is it our shorter attention spans? Is it that we’re consuming information in a way that’s unexpected? What’s your takeaway and what is this common denominator amongst all these marketing products that new media has been pushing out?
Renu Mukherjee: I think it’s like all of the above to kind of what you just said. I think one, it’s being able to consume a large chunk of information in a short amount of time. I mean, you know, we’re all very much on the go. Gen Z is on the go, et cetera. Podcasting is much, I mean, I’m all for as a writer, you know, for City Journal, I’m all for, you know, writing my pieces and have them read. At the same time, I think, you know, I’m an avid podcast listener. There’s not something when I’m walking somewhere, when, you know, I’m washing dishes, whatever, I always have a podcast going on in the background.
It’s a quick way to learn new things and consume content. So I definitely think that’s part of it. I think the other part of it is that it’s just, there’s an aesthetic to the Free Press. There’s a particular aesthetic to their podcast, the videos they put out, and I think that’s quite attractive to Gen Z and the way that I think, for example, Zohran Mamdani’s Campaign being launched at least in the beginning almost entirely on TikTok, with the bright colors and the large letters and the songs and the dances. It’s an aesthetic that Gen Z and Zillennials really gravitate to, and Bari Weiss has also caught on to that. So I think as much as CBS can capture that energy, the short attention span combined with this sort of new aesthetic vibe shift, I think that will be conducive to success.
Isabella Redjai: I think that younger people also feel like they can almost taste the content that they’re consuming because it’s relatively low barrier to entry and very easy to create at home. I think that growing up, you know, the Gen Z growing up with Disney Channel and things like that, it was very common to want to create videos and things like that. So I think there’s actually like an inner child healing amongst the younger generation as they’re also now growing up and consuming media. Charles, I want to go to you with this next question and we can actually wrap this up because I feel like you guys have covered this exactly and what I wanted to understand. I think with the political landscape that we’ve seen in recent years with Trump, you know, on the campaign trail, just this past, you know, election year for president with him going on podcasts like Theo Von and Joe Rogan, that was truly revolutionary, especially for younger men in particular. And then Zohran Mamdani has captured the young voters of New York City through these, like Renu mentioned, man-on-the-street interviews, cool t-shirts, lots of social media content, even that guy, I forget his name, but he does like the subway takes. I feel like that is such an approachable form of media that people can interact with.
Kerry Soropoulos: I do not like that guy.
Isabella Redjai: Nevertheless, what happens next? We obviously are seeing the success of new media, but what comes after this? What do you think, Charles?
Charles Fain Lehman: I mean, the subway takes guy is a communist.
Isabella And Kerry Soropoulos Thank you.
Charles Fain Lehman: Yeah. No, I mean, the… Okay. So there’s always a push and pull, right? So like, why… One thing that we haven’t talked about on why people like new media is authenticity, right? It’s why are we on camera right now? We talked about this previously on the podcast. It’s in large part because people want to be able to see our faces because it makes us more credible. And I think that’s, that has to do with the breakdown of legacy media, with the decline in institutional trust that comes from the proliferation of alternative media, where it’s like, why can I trust the things I’m being told? It’s no longer because some institution with high authority tells me it’s true. There have to be some other set of signals. Donald Trump is really good at this. You actually know in many senses that Donald Trump means what he says because he’s such a BSer. You know that he’s being honest about his like, the moments when he is dishonest and that is actually an incredible source of credibility. He’s also disintermediated. When he goes on Theo Von, he’s going direct to the consumer. He’s saying, I’m talking to you without all this nonsense in front of me. I’m going to talk to you directly. He’s been very successful because of that. So like on the one hand, that’s true. And then on the other hand, you actually, it’s really hard to build a durable business on single authentic statements, like single authentic actors. Like Donald Trump can do it, but most people cannot. You need to like grow your enterprise and like make payroll and sort of run a functional business. And so I think you will see…
Isabella Redjai: But he’s been marketing himself since the 80s, so he laid some good groundwork for that.
Charles Fain Lehman: Right. But I think you will see this consolidation of more and more products coming together, you know, trying to build those synergies, trying to get the economies of scale that come from people working together. Like you’re not going to have a micro-creator economy forever. It’s not sustainable for the 80 percent of people who don’t win outright. And so there will always be this sort of push and pull back and forth between these things. In fact, that’s always been true in like the media market. It just, I think will happen much faster now because we have a much more efficient market in media.
Kerry Soropoulos: Quick poll before we move on from this topic. Bari Weiss to replace Stephen Colbert on CBS, The Late Late Show. Yes or yes? “Here’s Bari.” I think it has a nice ring to it, Charles. No?
Charles Fain Lehman: No. No. No, because that’s not her shtick, right? And I think the reason the Free Press works is because I mean, it is humorous. But what it is is ultimately confessional, right? There’s a there’s a very it is a gut-first publication. And I don’t say that in derogatory way. It’s about connecting to you on an emotional, personal level. And she’s really good at that. That’s not what Colbert does. He’s a comedian. You know, I can envision her like being the next Oprah. That’s very different.
Kerry Soropoulos: Renu, Bari Weiss as Oprah, Charles’s hot take of the day. Renu, what’s yours?
Renu Mukherjee: Yeah, I think she’s much more conducive to just having perhaps her own talk show or like a I mean she already the Honestly Pod is quite excellent in and of itself and it, you know, it was sort of this confessional outlet where she’s interviewing people they’re getting you know, she’s connecting with them, she’s connecting with the listeners. So I do think like amplifying that and like taking that to a larger scale is more likely than her doing comedy But like maybe you know, she’s woman of many talents. So maybe she’s you know, an excellent comedian waiting to happen.
Isabella Redjai: I like when she talks to comedians like Jerry Seinfeld. That interview was one of my faves, but I think that’s a great place to end it, and we’re going to do a quick last topic. Kerry, take it away.
Kerry Soropoulos: Last week, the city of Austin, they want to keep it weird. They’re rolling out a new logo designed at a taxpayer cost of over a million dollars, swiftly attracting backlash for its bland, soulless and frankly schlocky design.
Folks, it looks like Whole Foods granola brand and not an on brand. It looks like the store brand of Whole Foods granola. This is the second logo change in as many weeks to attract controversy after Cracker Barrel did the same. Shout to friend of the pod, Chris Rufo for helping to save Uncle Hershel. What do we think and why is this the worst thing to happen to Austin since Willie Nelson was arrested for tax fraud? Renu, you first.
Renu Mukherjee: It’s just, it’s, you know, I’m not a fan of it just because it takes away the character of the actual city. You know, Kerry, you opened with like, you know, Austin’s whole thing is like staying weird. Well, they need a funky, weird, unique logo that wouldn’t make sense in a place like New York City or San Francisco or D.C. or, you know, Memphis or anything like that. And this is pretty like, you know, black and white, basic. It’s sort of, it’s like it’s a city, but it’s kind of like all these corporations like Cracker Barrel, like Jaguar for example. You know, Isabella, I’m sure you know all of these like various like luxury brands also having like very monotone, basic, cut-and-dry, clean logos that don’t really differentiate them. It’s almost as though they all want to be one in the same and yeah, I’m here for like a really bizarre Austin logo.
Isabella Redjai: They’re all using the same font, and it’s a very monotonous vibe across all different brands, whether it’s fashion, like you said, cars. Charles, what’s your take on the new logo? Which I will mention really quick, found it interesting, the consulting group that was hired for this is called Pentagram, and was also the same consulting group that designed the logo for Hillary Clinton’s failed campaign in 2016. Just some interesting context. What do you have to say about that?
Charles Fain Lehman: It’s about harvesting the adrenochrome. Yeah, I mean, look, you know, one component of this is that governments are always slower than markets and they’re always less efficient than markets. And so you look at, you know, Austin, but you can also look at redesigned state flags. I think Utah, I want to say Minnesota. Massachusetts is talking about doing it right now. And they all want these, like, super simplistic, like, you know, new sleek, modern designs. And they’re all hideous. They’re terrible. Like they’re awful.
And everyone’s saying this. I think, you know, fashion goes in cycles. And what is, what is fashionable? Fashion is whatever everyone else isn’t doing. Right? Fashion is like is, is in many senses adaptive to prior fashion trends. Right. What Isabella is saying about it’s all monotone. It’s all the same. And yeah, because it’s because it’s burned out because everyone is now everyone has gotten onto the trend and even the city governments who are the last adopters, the late adopters have gotten onto it. And I think there is this like desire for, in some senses, you know, a return to the old, more complicated, more, I was going to say elegant, but the thing that I think about is the old Pizza Hut, right? People hate new Pizza Hut. New Pizza Hut is a subject of derision online. And you think about the classic Pizza Hut with the like the glass chandeliers and the glass lamps on the table and the checkered tablecloths and whatever. That I think is, you know, evocative of what is becoming the new style, which is bigger and more complex and more decadent and you know,
I mean, in many senses, it’s very, the new logo is very Hillary Clinton and the sort of reaction is towards a Trump. more Trumpy aesthetic, right? Everything is big and bold and glossy and covered in gold and that’s, that is where we’re moving. It is consistent and you can talk about what the direction of the causality is, but I think, you know, that this to me is a sign that that style is really dead. When city governments are getting on board, you’re done.
Isabella Redjai: Did it really have to cost $1.1 million though? I mean, that just seems really inflated, but it was really funny. A user actually that they cited in the article said, “Is the $1.1 million in the room with us now?” And I think that everyone is just very confused by where are tax dollars or where, you know, the city of Austin, Texas taxpayers’ money is going to pay for a new logo. This really?
Kerry Soropoulos: I don’t care about the tax dollars.
Charles Fain Lehman: I care about tax dollars. I care about tax dollars.
Kerry Soropoulos: As I said, this is the second logo change in weeks to cause controversy, first with Cracker Barrel. My alma mater, Fordham University, recently also castrated its logo a few weeks ago. How do we promote a reaction, a trad revolution, if you will, to fight these? Ten words or less. And how do I pitch it to the Fordham Alumni Association? Charles.
Charles Fain Lehman: I mean, the newer logos suck. And everyone knows they suck. That’s why I think it’ll come.
Kerry Soropoulos: Thank you. Renu?
Renu Mukherjee: I think just lean into the heritage of these institutions. So like you said, Kerry, the Catholic heritage of Fordham. Just really leaning into it and the aesthetics will come.
Kerry Soropoulos: And with that, important advice on how to save our logos, thank you to Renu Mukherjee and Charles Fain Lehman. Please everyone, follow them on Twitter, read their stuff, like and subscribe and comment on this, the City Journal Podcast so you never, ever, ever miss an episode. Thank you for joining us.
Photo by Luke Hales/Getty Images
