Fighting media's reality distortion, w/Axios CEO Jim VandeHei

This episode explores how media can distort reality, emphasizing the impact of social media and news algorithms on public perception and polarization.

1. Media distortion is more about sensationalism than factual reporting, often driven by business models that prioritize engagement over truth.
2. The perception of a deeply divided America is exaggerated; most people do not conform to extreme ideological stereotypes.
3. Consumers should critically evaluate news sources and strive for a media diet that approximates the truth, avoiding content from unreliable or unchecked sources.
4. The business models of media companies like Axios focus on delivering concise and factual news to combat misinformation.
5. VandeHei advocates for media consumers to engage more with their immediate social and familial environments, rather than getting lost in the online noise.

1: Introduction

Bob Saffie introduces the topic and guest Jim VandeHei, who discusses the impact of social media on public perception and the role of media in exacerbating political polarization. Jim VandeHei: "Stop getting news on social media. Stop sharing things that you've never read."

2: Media's Business Model

Discussion on how the business model of media influences content creation and public perception, focusing on conflict-driven narratives. Jim VandeHei: "The top stories are about politics because that drives traffic."

3: The Reality of American Division

VandeHei argues that America is less divided than portrayed, based on his experiences and observations across the country. Jim VandeHei: "70% to 80% of people are normal, trying to live their lives."

4: Axios and AI

Exploration of Axios' approach to AI and journalism, emphasizing human judgment over algorithmic decision-making. Jim VandeHei: "We're focusing on human expertise to stay ahead of technological shifts."

5: Conclusion

Reflections on the responsibilities of media companies and consumers in navigating a complex information landscape. Jim VandeHei: "Find sources that try to get to the closest approximation of the truth."

1. Evaluate the trustworthiness of news sources before consuming content.
2. Reduce reliance on social media for news to avoid echo chambers.
3. Engage in direct interactions and discussions to better understand diverse perspectives.
4. Maintain a balanced media diet that includes multiple viewpoints.
5. Stay informed about the motivations behind media content, particularly the business models that may influence it.

Every day we’re inundated with news and opinion pieces about America’s hopeless division — but is this really true? Axios CEO Jim VandeHei joins Rapid Response host Bob Safian to bust what he sees as myth, plus share his seemingly counterintuitive AI play. VandeHei also makes a case for why the era of business leaders speaking out on political issues may be behind us, and he weighs-in on the state of Buzzfeed, NPR, and where the future of news media is inevitably headed.

People

Jim VandeHei

Companies

Axios

Books

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Guest Name(s):

Jim VandeHei

Content Warnings:

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Jim Vande Hei
Stop getting news on social media. Stop sharing things that you've never read. Stop reading something if a friend sent it to you and you don't know what the source of it is, maybe just stop consuming altogether and go hang out with your kids, right? There's a lot of healthy things that you can do. And then, like, try to find some sources of news and information that you think are trying to get to the closest approximation of the truth, and then you're going to have a pretty healthy media diet.

Bob Saffie
That's the co founder and CEO of Axios, Jim Vande. Hei. I wanted to talk to Jim today because he recently co authored an essay that stopped me in my tracks. The piece made a strong case for why the US may not be as divided as we think. I was also eager to ask Jim about Axios seemingly counterintuitive AI play and why media businesses like Buzzfeed, NPR, and Google find themselves in hot water.

True to his style of so called smart brevity, Jim is knowledgeable, accessible, and concise. This is rapid response. Let's dive in.

I'm Bob Saffie, and I'm here with Jim Vanderheim, the CEO and co founder of Axios. Jim, thanks for joining us. Great to be here. Thanks for having me. So I am a regular daily consumer of Axios content.

Jim Vande Hei
Love it. I appreciate that. So part of the reason I want to talk with you now is that recently you co authored with Mike Allen an essay called America's reality distortion machine. And it really questioned the media drumbeat that America has hopelessly divided. And it certainly caught my attention.

Bob Saffie
What prompted you to write that now? Well, you have this perception if you're on social media or you're watching cable tv, that everyone has lost their marbles, that everyone is nuts, that they hate each other, that they're having food fights, that they're obsessed with politics, that they're in this awful tribal warfare. And the truth is, it's not real. That 70% to 80% of people that you come across are very normal people who are just trying to live their lives, navigate the complexities of your day to day challenges, are basically good people who would help you out if there's something wrong or shovel your driveway if you're caught in a snowstorm. And it got us thinking a lot about just the new media ecosystem and what has changed over the last 15 years in particular, really last five.

Jim Vande Hei
It's that because of social media, because of how the algorithms work, and because of the type of people that get the most followers, that therefore kind of rise to the top of algorithms, it usually the most provocative people, and it tends to be the most provocative people ideologically. And so it gives off this perception that everybody thinks that way, that every Republican believes that Trump is the second coming of Christ or that Joe Biden, that every Democrat thinks that he's like a young, vibrant little whippersnapper, when in fact, like, no, like most people have pretty nuanced views. And you see it even in a lot of polling. We played off this AP poll where they asked both parties about, you know, kind of the fundamental rights of being an american, freedom of speech, freedom of religion. And 90% of Republicans, 90% of Democrats all basically agree in the same tenets that kind of make this country what it is.

And so we wrote the piece just to remind people that all this hangdog behavior and kind of dogging on America, it's a little bit disconnected from the reality that you're living in. And I just noticed it even with myself some days now, wondering, is that real? Are people really that worked up? How many people are storming across the border? Are they really trying to vote illegally?

What? Could they vote illegally? Sounds hard. If I came here illegally, would I vote illegally, knowing it's a felony? Like, it's just stuff that, it's kind of like, I always go back to my Wisconsin roots.

Like, if it sounds kind of like b's, it probably is. I mean, the impression of what you're saying is like, the polarization that we're hearing about so much by journalists, by media, that it's kind of overstated. Like, how much is the business model of media to blame for the obsession with polarization? I mean, certainly plays into it, no doubt, right? Because if you look at axios, look at the New York Times, Washington Post, any CNN, the top 20 stories based on traffic on any given day are about politics.

So everybody's covering politics. And when you cover politics, you tend to cover the conflict of politics, which feels like politics is just all conflict all the time. And it is if you're a professional politician or if you're part of the political class. But for most people, it's just more complicated. I had just gotten back from doing about or six speeches in Wichita and Fargo and a couple other places, mainly very, like, meat eating Trump supporters in the room.

And obviously they come in, they're like, this guy's from the media, is from DC. I must be a communist. And I just noticed that almost instantly, once they can kind of tell you're a normal human being, you can have a very rational conversation with them. They understand the flaws of Donald Trump. One of the problems is you have a two party system, right?

So you only have two choices. So you become tribal because it's either your team or, or their team, when, in fact, I think most people wish there were a couple more choices that might better match their actual politics. But when they are, all they really have is Biden or Trump. It's going to be Biden or Trump. I mean, I'll say one of the reasons it resonated so much for me, it's like, I want to think that America is not on the brink of civil war.

Bob Saffie
And there you guys sort of laid out that, like, well, we're not looking at the numbers and sort of the reality of it that it's maybe not quite as bad as, I don't know, as we feel like it is. You have to put some of this in perspective. I've been thinking a lot about this with the protests that you're seeing at university campuses about the conflict in the Middle east, and you see these pro palestinian protesters and you're like, oh, my God, these campuses look like they're on fire and everybody's protesting. And yet, no, it's kind of the same number of people who are worked up about a topic that you probably would find at any point in history about different topics on different campuses. And even this coverage of the people who are leading these colleges.

Jim Vande Hei
You think they're all, every professor, some left wing lunatic who's trying to indoctrinate their students with some crazy left wing propaganda, when in fact, like, no, most teachers are going into the classroom and they're teaching biology and they're teaching journalism. They don't want to have time or interest in trying to, like, program people. And that doesn't mean there's not a liberal bias on campuses. There obviously is, but that doesn't mean, therefore, that every single person is trying to put a liberal chip into your kid's head. So another area that there's been a lot of hype, certainly a lot of attention to lately, has been AI.

Bob Saffie
And Axios was recently profiled in the New York Times about how AI is impacting your plans. And I actually thought it was a rather clever effort on your part because your plans aren't about deploying AI. Instead, they're kind of about the opposite. Yeah. I mean, right now, there just isn't that much AI to deploy.

Jim Vande Hei
Like it's in the early stages. To be honest, it's a little jankier than people would have thought at this point. And so I can't even copy edit yet, much less be a reporter. And so what we've thought more of is like, let's just assume that, that, that opening eye and anthropic and Google and Amazon, they're all right, that this is going to be this crazy technology that's as smart, if not smarter than humans and could displace a lot of the work that we do. If that's all true, for me as someone running a media company, what does that mean?

How would people be getting news and information? And the conclusions we came to are listening? Even if that's the case, people are still going to need human expertise, human sourcing in an artificial and virtual world. People are going to want in person connectivity around topics that they have a shared passion around. So we're building a membership program around our most famous journalist.

And so it was very much us just trying to adapt to where we think the world's going. The New York Times did do a piece on it. I was very happy with it. In the article, you're quoted as saying that we're in the middle of a very fundamental shift in how people relate to news and information. What is the shift that you see.

Happening based on the no knowns of today? What do I think that relationship will look like two or three years from now? My guess is we're all going to have a personal assistant, and that this personal assistant is going to know about the topics you care about, and it's going to know about when you care about them. And it's going to know about how you want that information ingested. Maybe you want it sung to you by Taylor Swift.

Maybe you want it delivered in bullet points. Maybe you want it longer form, more lyrical, in a more poetic style. And it's going to be able to build that news and information for you and probably even anticipate a little bit about stuff that's out there that you might be interested in. And so my guess is that's what the world's going to look like. And I just want to make sure that Axios, as a media company, that we're well ahead of that change in consumer behavior so that we can continue to have a durable company that can outlive us.

Bob Saffie
And what's going to make you stand out in that kind of engagement is the special things that your people will bring to it, as opposed to the special things that your technology will bring to it. Yeah, in all likelihood. Again, just like always, assume that the big companies are right. When they throw trillions of dollars at a technology, they're probably going to will it into existence. We'll carry that out.

Jim Vande Hei
So then what can sit on top of that is human intelligence. Like, I have access to people in power that other people don't. If I can extract information, and I could tell it to you in a way that is informative and timely and illuminating, I'm going to figure out a way to make money off of that. Is that an ad, or is the personal assistant company paying me to ingest proprietary intelligence that we're picking up? I don't know, but there will be a business model around it, and I just want to make sure that we're not.

I sleep at the wheel and you're. Not particularly wary about your content being scraped to train AI. I'm a pretty practical guy. I try to control the things I can control. It's been scraped and they'll keep scraping it.

Would I'd like for us to get paid for it. Do I feel like if you're making a product that's derivative of our IP, that was expensive to be able to create, should we be compensated for it? I do. Are we big enough to be the one that takes OpenAI to the Supreme Court to figure out what fair use laws are going to apply to content? The New York Times is doing that for us, so we'll see how that stuff plays out.

Hopefully we'll get paid by some of these models for our content. But even then, what I tell our staff is like, I don't want to be the welfare state of Google like that. My entire company is just sitting here praying that we get some kind of licensing fee thanks to the benevolence of four tech giants. That seems like a sucker's play. I'd much rather let's build something that can live on its own and if we happen to get money from these big platforms that's added, it's kind of the cherry on the Sunday like, okay, we'll take it.

We're not going to turn down money. We're not stupid, but we also don't want to be a welfare state. Something about Jim's approach to AI is really refreshing. He doesn't sound particularly excited or hyped up about AI, but he's pragmatic and focused on its potential to open up opportunities for his business. In a time when you're expected to either be anti AI or an AI evangelist, I think many leaders could benefit from this sort of clear headed and receptive approach.

Bob Saffie
After the break, Van de Hayek explores why it's more important for a news organization to be trusted than politically neutral, and how his new book aims to be the quote unquote bible for anyone looking to get ahead in their professional life. Stay with us.

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Bob Saffie
Before the break, co founder and CEO of Axios, Jim Vande Heij explained why the US may not be as polarized as the media wants us to believe. Now Van de Hyde dissects why certain other high profile media companies are struggling and why the days of business leaders speaking out on political issues may be behind us. Let's jump back in.

I wanted to ask you about BuzzFeed. I've had Jonah Peretti on the show a couple of times. The CEO and founder of BuzzFeed, Super Sharp Guy, been ahead of the curve in media on a lot of things. Last year he talked to me extensively about how he planned to use AI and content production, but they seem to be just floundering. Do you have a sense about why that is?

Jim Vande Hei
Yeah, I can. I wasn't at the company, so I don't know the thinking behind some of the decisions they made, but they were a business that was built in the Internet era around social media, and they relied solely on the benevolence of other people paying them for content. And when the, when daddy closed the wallet, Jonah's out of money and that's a problem. Like it was too reliant on, on other companies to do the work for them. And I think ever since then they've struggled to figure out what is Buzzfeed.

They've basically shut down BuzzFeed News. So I don't really think of it as a news company anymore. I think of it as a content company and their stock is at $0.40 or whatever, so they're sucking some wind. But I don't know what his plans are to try to revive it. Running media companies.

I'm sure Jonas said it was on here is hard. It is so fun. It is really exhilarating, but it is exhausting. It is difficult. Margin of error is really, really small.

This isn't a SaaS company. This isn't a whiz bang technology company. It is a human labor company. An expensive thing to run right. And hard to get audience, hard to get trust.

Hard to keep audience, hard to keep trust. So there's a lot of pieces that have to break your way to work. So I'm curious what you think about the fracas at NPR. Assertions that the news coverage hasn't been even handed or is otherwise distorted. Has that sparked any conversations inside axios about how you're doing things?

It has not. I mean, I obviously read about it and followed it. I don't know who was out there thinking that NPR wasn't liberal. Come on. Give me a break.

Like, we all know it leans left, and they have a liberal sensibility to them. They do a lot of good work in addition to that. Listen, they're publicly funded, so Republicans have every right to raise concerns with it, and people have every right to hold them accountable for it. But now, you know, I think people who work at axios kind of know what we're doing, and we don't pay a lot of attention to things that are getting other people spooled up. We don't have an opinion page.

We try not to have an ideology. We try to be very clinical in our coverage. And as long as we do that, we're controlling our destiny. I try not to get too worked up about what others do. And the goal for you is to be neutral.

Bob Saffie
Like, is that, is, is that the goal? No, it's to be trusted, right? It's to be smart and trusted. It's, like, neutral. Just being neutral or trying to offer the perspectives of both sides can lead to, like, ludicrous coverage.

Jim Vande Hei
Like, we're trying. Like, I don't want to insult your intelligence, and I don't want to waste your time. So what I want to do is have really smart people who have authentic subject matter expertise telling you something smart, telling you something urgent, telling you something important, and doing it as efficiently as possible. And if we do that, you'll reward us with more time and attention. It's just the way that it's worked for us.

And so, yes, I want our reporters to check their ideology at the door. Like, we have 550 employees. We tell every person, regardless of your position here, if you take a job here, our ask of you is to not practice politics in a public forum. Meaning, I don't want you popping off on social media. We don't want you giving money to political candidates.

We don't want you endorsing political candidates. And the reason that we do it is I just want people who are persuadable to real truth to take us seriously and to give us a chance. And if we do anything to jeopardize that bond, like if you start to suspect that Jim has an agenda or that Axios is not a worthy source of information and I lose you, then we all suffer. Well, I liked in your note yesterday about recommending a kind of media diet, you were sort of saying, if you're left leaning, here's some sources on the right you might want to pay attention to. And if you're right leaning, here's some sources on the left, which, by the way, is what I try to do to keep myself not just informed, but I hold myself accountable to the, my.

Own impulses for sure. Right? Like, I don't like we all have, like, our, our biases and our beliefs, but I find it, I don't know why people find, like, the comfort food dimension to people sharing their view or just amplifying their view. I find it much more interesting to find someone who has a different view of the media than I do. And I probably learned something from that intellectual exercise.

Now, again, we're different because we are actually paid to spend a lot of time marinating in content and most people don't. And so that's why I think most people in the column you're talking about basically outlined a healthy media diet. But the bottom of the article was probably more important than the top, which are the things you should stop doing, stop getting news on social media, stop sharing things that you've never read, stop reading something if a friend sent it to you and you don't know what the source of it is, maybe just stop consuming altogether and go hang out with your kids. Right. There's a lot of healthy things that you can do.

And then, like, try to find some sources of news and information that you think are trying to get to the closest approximation of the truth, and then you're going to have a pretty healthy media diet. As we're talking, I'm remembering my early time at Time magazine. I just started there, and it was the heat of the 2004 presidential election. And I remember they would do this. We're like, oh, well, last week we did a cover with the democratic candidate.

Bob Saffie
So this week we need to do a cover with the republican candidate. You know, it was like, it was trying to be evenhanded, but wasn't necessarily focusing on, like, what's most important for voters to know this week. Yeah. At the end of the day, it's like, it's, it's, it's about the customer. Like, what do they need?

Jim Vande Hei
Not what do we want? And listen, you don't want to just cover one side and not the other. You want to give people a full buffet of what's happening in politics. But that doesn't mean that for every republican article, there's a democratic article or that everything that Donald Trump says, if it's, if it's nonsense, and maybe he's just pumping out more nonsense today than Joe Biden is, and it's fine to say that. And by the way, it's also fine not to cover the nonsense.

Right. If someone says the same outrageous thing every single day, are we really helping by amplifying that? It was said again and again and again. Maybe just ignore it and wait until there's like something really substantial that, that someone is saying and then give people some context of why that is important, why it matters. A different sort of media company to ask you about Google.

Bob Saffie
Some staff demonstrate about contracts with Israel. They end up getting fired for disrupting the work environment. It's a challenging environment for CEO's about how they talk about Israel and Palestine. Are leaders and all of us wise to be wary about taking a position in an environment like this? I think it depends on who is the leader and what is the company.

Jim Vande Hei
At the end of the day, let's, let's level set. You're a company. Your job is to build a product. Like if you're Nike, you're selling me a shoe. I don't care what you think about foreign affairs or your position on immigration.

Like either you got a really good shoe or you got a crappy shoe and that's going to decide whether or not I buy it. So then you as the CEO of that company have to decide. Like is, are there topics that really go to the core of who we are and who our customer is? Do we want to explain ourselves? And we want to take a position?

If that flows naturally from your product and your customer base, sure, go do it. But this idea that all these CEO's got trapped into about because your employees are angry, they want you to take a position on everything. Why would you take a position on everything? No one used to think that CEO should take positions and everything. You're there to do a job.

And I think it is fine for CEO's or managers to say that's outside of work. We got a job to do and I want to make sure this is a great place for you. To work. I want to make sure it's a safe place for you to work. I want to make sure that there isn't hostility, but ultimately, you're here to do a job.

So then what happens at Google is you actually had a very small number of people. Remember, it's a massive company, it's a nation state. And you had a small number of people who were protesting while working in a way that was really making it harder for them to do work. And they said, to hell with you. You can't work here.

You're violating your job responsibilities. And so, listen, you have every right to protest, and they have every right to fire you. They do. It's just that some people don't love that answer, but they do. We're a media company, so we stay out of every political debate.

But, like, people have really passionate views, and I think it's fine internally for people to have conversations, to be able to hear it, to make sure that people don't feel like they're being shunned in the workplace because they have a view on this issue or that issue. But the more you can take politics out of business and the more you can just do your job and create an environment for people to do their best work, I think the better off you are. You've got a new book coming out, just the good stuff. So, in the spirit of smart brevity, what's the book about? What are its key lessons?

So, the book is very much written for leaders, managers, even college grads, people who are trying to think about how to navigate the tough stuff of work and life. And basically, it's by 60 some lessons inside of the book, but they're all written in smart brevity, all with action filled. Like, here's five things you can do if you're dealing with a bad boss type advice. And so there's just a lot of, like, I think, very practical advice written in kind of my no b's style. I just always say kind of what's on my mind.

I'm respectful about it, but I. But I. It's written the way that I talk. So the lesson. So can you.

Bob Saffie
Can you give us one or two of these no bullshit lessons? I think the biggest one is that people spend way too much time whining about their circumstance or what happened to them in the past and not understanding that we control so much more than we give ourselves credit for. Every day when you get up, you choose what you're gonna eat, whether you're gonna work out, whether you're gonna be kind to somebody, whether you're gonna quit because your boss is a jerk who's been making you feel like crap for the last five months or five years. You control the type of people you're gonna be around, whether you're going to volunteer after work, like all of those things you can control. And if you stop whining and worrying about the things that are outside of your control and put all of the emphasis on what I kind of call my happiness matrix, my different buckets that I know need to be full for me to be effective, you're going to be a much more productive employee.

Jim Vande Hei
You're going to be a much better leader. You're going to be a much happier person, which is all that really matters at the end of the day. It's interesting because in your job and in the coverage that axios does, you get steeped in a lot of the information about things that are really troubling, whether it's polarization or uncertainties in Ukraine, the Middle east and China and climate change and so on. And yet you seem like you're hopeful. I couldn't be more hopeful.

Listen, I opened the book, talking all true. I said, you met me at the age of 20. I'm smoking camel cigarettes. I'm drinking every day. I have a 1.491 grade point average.

I'm delivering pizzas. I'm barely getting out of college. There's nothing, not one single thing where you looked at him going, oh, my God, that guy's going to go start a couple of companies. He's going to interview presidents. He's going to be on this podcast.

He's going to write books. Nothing. So if a schmuck like me could go on to interview presidents, could start a couple of companies, be able to make more money than I thought possible, doing something that I love, how the hell could I not be optimistic the book will be a success if a bunch of people that were that like me, small town, didn't grow up in privileged or didn't have any special treatment? If they can read the book and realize, man, if, if Jim can do it, like, why can't I go do something bigger than I think I can do? And I think the book is almost a bible for that.

I think you'll learn a lot about modern leadership in the book, but I really think if you're like someone like me and you're trying to figure out how do I crush work and how do I get ahead and how do I make really good life decisions, I think that I hope will be the sweet spot. Well, Jim, this is, this has been great. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you. Appreciate it.

Bob Saffie
Jim's book called just the good stuff is a reminder to lean into what's possible. That doesn't mean leaning into every conspiracy theory or embracing everything you doom scroll. It means focusing on what you can control and trying to apply the tools we have at hand toward the future we want. I'm not sure I agree that business leaders can turn away from divisive topics. We all share responsibility for tough realities.

I get that it's complicated and risky, but maybe that's just the burden of modern leadership. Most of all, let's keep an open mind about each other as we reach the six month mark before this year's election. The pursuit of openness and empathy are only going to be threatened more and more. So keep going. Keep trying.

I'm Bob Safian. Thanks for listening.

Rapid response is await what original I'm Bob Safian. Our executive producer is Yves Tro. The production team includes Chris Gautier, Alex Morris, Shimaku Tonina, and Brandon Klein. Mixing and mastering by Aaron Bastanelli. Original music by Eduardo Rivera and Ryan Holiday.

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