The New York Times recently did a lengthy interview with comedian Andrew Schulz that unintentionally highlighted why so many people are disgusted with traditional corporate media outlets and are abandoning them in favor of podcasters like Schulz, Joe Rogan, Theo Von, and others. The entire interview was an object lesson in the dishonesty and censoriousness of the legacy press, on the one hand, and the rough candidness and genuine curiosity of the so-called manosphere, on the other.
The Times interviewer, David Marchese, obviously had an agenda going into the interview, which was to press Schultz on his “problematic” views and word choices, call him out for having Trump on his podcast, and generally scold him for holding slightly unorthodox political opinions.
Schulz was a good sport about it and more polite than he needed to be, but the conversation was a glimpse into the totally diametrical approach of the corporate press compared to podcasters like Schulz. At the most basic level, the difference is that legacy media want to control the narrative and lecture to their audiences, whereas the manosphere podcasters are genuinely curious and open to authentic conversations.
That outlets like The New York Times don’t seem to grasp this basic fact, in 2025, boggles the mind.
In one exchange, Schulz is talking about how during the 2024 election cycle he asked a bunch of Democrats to come on the podcast but they all refused, and instead attacked him and his co-hosts for supposedly being racist, sexist “podcast bros.” Marchese responds, “Who is ‘they’ in this example?” — as if he doesn’t know that Schulz is talking about media figures who did exactly that. And then he says, incredibly, “I just wonder if this is a strawman that you’ve after-the-fact concocted.”
To Schulz’s credit, he pushes back on Marchese in this and similar exchanges throughout the interview whenever Marchese tries to passively-aggressively censure Schulz for something. In another notable exchange, Marchese criticizes Schulz for not asking Trump about accusations that he groped women, or about the outrageous civil suit E. Jean Carroll successfully brought against Trump in New York City in 2023, as if no interviewer should be allowed to ask Trump questions without reciting a litany of his supposed crimes for the sake of “balance.” (To this, Schulz fires back, “The only goal of this question was to expose inadequacy, not to actually learn something.”)
You’d think that Marchese, a celebrity interviewer working for the world’s largest news organization, would have enough sense to realize that attacking Schulz this way would only confirm the widespread — and totally justified — belief that the media aren’t at all interested in the truth but merely in pushing a liberal agenda. You’d think he would know that finger-wagging at Schulz for saying “retarded,” for example, would confirm people’s general impression that liberal media outlets are mostly interested in policing speech and thought.
But no. Marchese not only doesn’t seem to get it, he actually seems to regard himself and his employer as purveyors of objective, unbiased news. At one point he says, “There is an idea of news journalism as impartial and objective. I’m not supposed to be putting my thumb on the scale.” It’s an amazing statement to make because Marchese had just spent the entire interview putting his thumb on the scales. Every question he asks Schulz, every topic he brings up, is him putting his thumb on the scales — it’s the entire point of the interview. Marchese is either the least self-aware journalist on the planet or a complete cynic who doesn’t believe half of what he spouts off.
Taken as a whole, the interview serves to underscore the extent to which legacy media outlets and people like Marchese who work at them don’t really understand why podcasters like Schulz and Rogan have attracted such huge audiences. They don’t seem to grasp that it’s the authenticity and honesty, the lack of an agenda, the lack of a need to control and manipulate the narrative, that draws people in.
For the doctrinaire liberals who work at The New York Times and Washington Post and CNN, that kind of approach to media and content creation is inconceivable, which is why Schulz has to explain it to Marchese like he’s five. “When Joe [Rogan] is bringing somebody on, he’s only bringing them on to ask them things that he’s curious about,” Schulz says, adding that people are just more interested in genuine, curiosity-based conversations than ones based on an agenda or an attempt to achieve “balance” by pandering to their audience. “There is immense curiosity in authentic, genuine things.”
Until corporate media figure that out and stop trying to lecture everyone and censor things they don’t like, they’ll keep losing readers and viewers — and they’ll deserve to lose them.
