The Scoop
This is an excerpt from an interview with Jubilee Media founder and CEO Jason Y. Lee on the Mixed Signals podcast from Semafor Media. Listen to the latest episode here and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
Ben Smith: Any Democrats in particular you feel like get it?
Jason Y. Lee: I thought Pete [Buttigieg] did an outstanding job. Pete was so lovely to work with. His team were so lovely to work with. And I think unfortunately there was a lot that was left on the cutting room floor. And I think part of that was not because of his team, but because he was still part of the administration at the time.
Wait, do you mean that part of the deal was he could edit things out?
No, that we had to, just from a legal reason, that we had to kind of check out with his team, with folks in the administration actually. So not Pete necessarily.
But after it was shot.
Exactly.
So you gave them some kind of editorial control actually.
We gave some input, yeah.
Did you do that with all of them?
No, that’s not the case for all of them, yeah. And actually in the future, I don’t think that we would do that. We just found it to be really-
Just so hard to get these people on, right? That’s crazy.
It was very, very difficult. But I think the most ironic thing is the things that folks are most interested in cutting typically are the things that often would do the best for them.
Like what? These guys are out of power, you can tell us now. And also, all those correspondents you had with them are public documents.
Sure. This is what I’ll say is I think that Pete is really, really skilled and adept at encountering difficult questions and facing adversity and responding with empathy and kindness in a very, very Jubilee way. But it was those very encounters that often the folks higher up that would say, “Oh, we really can’t feature this question.” Or, “We can’t feature this kind of back and forth.” And I think it’s like a lesson maybe for the next election. Whereas we did not face very much of that at all on the other side.
Max Tani: I have one follow up to something that you said earlier. You said that if it’s going to be in the digital realm, that any debate or major political event that you guys might do has to be authentic. Can you expand on that a little bit? What do you mean by that?
Yeah, absolutely. I think that viewers can really perceive when something is real and raw and authentic or not. And when we allow for space, opportunity to be surprised by humans, by what someone might say, by an interaction, I think that that’s really, really special. I don’t think that a lot of legacy media creates environments like that or spaces like that where people are, one, willing to participate or that they actually see a glimpse of that.
But it’s ironic, particularly in the political space, because I think those are the very moments that actually voters and young people gravitate towards and want to see. This was a common critique of Hillary Clinton, for example. Brilliant, very, very smart. Post-election, all these really, really humanizing moments with her. But why is it during the election and during these debates that we really didn’t get a sense for who she was? And you can say that about a lot of different politicians and individuals on both sides. But I think it’s a disservice to us and our country, frankly, of us not being able to see real authentic experiences with these leaders. And that’s something that we really, really want to welcome and we think will just help the country.
Listen to the full interview on the Mixed Signals from Semafor Media podcast here.