--:-- [Up First theme music plays]
--:-- Michelle Martin: Alex Jones, the talk show host who peddles conspiracy theories, says he's going to liquidate his assets. Which brings him closer to paying Sandy Hook families who sued him for defamation.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: What would a fire sale on his media empire raise?
--:-- Michelle Martin: I'm Michelle Martin, that's Steve Inskeep, and this is Up First from MTR News.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: New Washington Post CEO Will Lewis is accused of pressuring the paper's top editor to squash a story involving him when he worked at a different media organization. That editor recently quit.
--:-- Michelle Martin: We hear from NPR media correspondent David Falkenflick, who says Lewis applied the same pressure to him.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: Also, it is really, really hot in the Southwest. A heat dome put the region in a headlock, sending temperatures 20 to 30 degrees higher than normal.
--:-- Michelle Martin: And scientists link that to record levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: Stay with us. We've got the news you need to start your day.
--:-- [Up First theme music continues]
--:-- Announcer (Voiceover): This message comes from NPR sponsor Adobe. Introducing the all-new Adobe Acrobat Studio, now with AI-powered PDF spaces.
--:-- Michelle Martin: Alex Jones is one step closer to paying the families who sued him for defamation. Jones is a talk show host who built his career on spreading conspiracy theories, and he spread one about the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary in Connecticut in 2012 that killed more than two dozen people, mostly children.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: He claimed the shooting was fake, and he incited people to harass the families of the victims.
--:-- Michelle Martin: A court ordered him to pay $1.5 billion in damages, but he first sought bankruptcy protection and now is moving to resolve the case through Chapter 7 liquidation.
--:-- NPR's Tovia Smith: Well, it would basically mean that there'd be a fire sale, a controlled but a swift sale of everything from Jones's ownership in his company called Free Speech Systems to his personal gun collection.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: And it means the ball could get rolling pretty quickly on at least some payment for those Sandy Hook families who won that defamation suit.
--:-- Tovia Smith: But the payment wouldn't be anywhere close to what these families are owed. Jones's assets are estimated now at about $10 million, which might mean just around a couple hundred thousand dollars for each of the plaintiffs, at least initially.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: And I say initially because a Chapter 7 trustee would have authority to hunt down any assets that Jones may have hidden.
--:-- Tovia Smith: And this hunting license, as some call it, would be a forever thing because Jones's case, unlike most bankruptcy cases where debts are washed away and you could get a fresh start, the judge ruled in Jones's case that can't happen because his wrongdoing was intentional and malicious.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: So bottom line, the families will have a claim on Jones's future earnings for the rest of his life.
--:-- Tovia Smith: Wow. So he gives up $10 million, a tiny fraction of what he owes, and then this would pursue him forever.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: Why would Jones view that as a good option?
--:-- Tovia Smith: Well, his attorneys say in court papers that there's no hope of settlement or reorganization and Chapter 7 liquidation would be simpler and cheaper and in everyone's interest.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: It is curious, though given that Jones has been pretty obstructive and intransigent since these defamation lawsuits were filed and I say he was especially erratic on his InfoWars show just last weekend alternating between really angry defiance screaming swearing and vowing to fight And on the other hand, total despair, literally sobbing about losing his show and his company, which he called his baby.
--:-- Tovia Smith: You know, you note that he's still on the air. He's still doing his show.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: Would this actually shut down his media empire if they go through with the chapter seven?
--:-- Tovia Smith: Well, yes, but with a caveat. And this is important as a lot of the families who sued made it very clear that stopping Jones conspiracy mongering is more important than any financial windfall.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: So yes, liquidation would spell the end of his control of his company, but it would not stop him from reincarnating into a new company that does the same kind of thing.
--:-- Tovia Smith: And ironically, I'll add, that would mean that the more Jones spews his bogus conspiracy theories and the more money he makes, the more money the families could get paid.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: So something of an odd situation there.
--:-- Tovia Smith: Okay, although I suppose he continues to have freedom of speech and freedom to defame people and then freedom to be responsible for the defamation. To get sued again.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: Yeah, exactly.
--:-- Tovia Smith: So what is the judge expected to rule on this request?
--:-- Steve Inskeep: The bankruptcy judge will decide next Friday whether Chapter 7 is the way to go here.
--:-- Tovia Smith: And meantime, Jones is appealing the defamation cases and the ruling that families can keep chasing him for the rest of his life.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: And Pierre's Tovia Smith, thanks so much.
--:-- Tovia Smith: Thank you.
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--:-- Steve Inskeep: Okay, the Washington Post has one of the more famous mottos in all of journalism, democracy dies in darkness.
--:-- Michelle Martin: Yes, but long before the paper adopted that slogan, it had become one of the nation's great newspapers, famous for its Watergate investigation and others, which is why many people in the media and, frankly, outside the media are following this news.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: The paper's new CEO tried to tamp down coverage of an inflattering story involving him.
--:-- Michelle Martin: One of his efforts came in a conversation with NPR media correspondent David Falkenflick, who's been covering this story.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: David, good morning.
--:-- David Falkenflick: Good morning, Steve.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: Okay, so the CEO here is named Will Lewis. He's trying to restructure the post at a difficult time for a lot of media. Circulation is down, and he's a deeply experienced guy, worked in British newspapers for many years.
--:-- David Falkenflick: Well, Lewis faces accusations back in civil suits in London brought by Prince Harry, among others, that he was involved years ago in a cover up.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: And that's a cover up of a scandal involving illegal hacking into people's voicemails and emails by Rupert Murdoch's tabloids in their headlong pursuit of stories.
--:-- David Falkenflick: OK, so he was accused of a role there. This resurfaced in lawsuits. And then what happened this year when The Washington Post staff decided to report on its own CEO?
--:-- Steve Inskeep: All.
--:-- David Falkenflick: So Lewis has previously denied wrongdoing. He's done so again. It's important to note he's not a defendant in these civil suits and he hasn't been prosecuted for any of this.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: At the core of a lot of these accusations.
--:-- David Falkenflick: And he told Sally Busby, then the executive editor of The Washington Post, these stories simply weren't newsworthy and she shouldn't cover it.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: She ultimately did.
--:-- David Falkenflick: The Post did a bit of a coverage in March and then much fuller coverage in May.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: He accused Busby of a lapse in judgment in deciding to let her team go forward, although he didn't prevent it within about three and a half weeks.
--:-- David Falkenflick: That is at the beginning of this week on Sunday, Busby was forced out.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: My reporting shows that was part of a larger restructuring that would have diminished her authority over the newsroom really split it in two
--:-- David Falkenflick: But a lot of staff is concerned that perhaps their coverage of him was part of the reason as well Oh OK
--:-- Steve Inskeep: Well when you heard all of this from sources inside the Post, what did you recall from your own past reporting on this same topic, this story about Will Lewis that he didn't want published?
--:-- David Falkenflick: Well right. We addressed this back in December. We really broke a lot of the details of this as new evidence surfaced in court in London detailing the allegations and the heft for it that he was involved in a cover-up.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: He and I spoke, as he has now acknowledged, off the record.
--:-- David Falkenflick: But that off-the-record conversation had to do with the meat of the allegations against him, not about whether or not I should drop the story.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: And in fact, he did push me on a number of occasions to drop the story, offering me instead an exclusive about his plans for the Post's future.
--:-- David Falkenflick: Our agreement was really about the hacking scandal and not that.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: So you're saying that in a conversation that wasn't off the record, he made a quid pro quo offer to you, drop your story that I don't like, and I will give you a story, an exclusive interview that I do like.
--:-- David Falkenflick: Is that it? To misquote the Godfather, he gave me an offer I had to refuse.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: Okay, you did refuse this.
--:-- David Falkenflick: You went ahead with the story then, and now you've published his effort at a quid pro quo, and Lewis has offered some on-the-record comments about all this.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: What does he have to say?
--:-- David Falkenflick: Right. He called me an employee rather than a journalist.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: Then he explicitly said I was an activist rather than a journalist working for NPR.
--:-- David Falkenflick: He also said I dusted down comments that he had made six months ago and had made up some excuse to make a story of a non-story.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: I notice he's not denying any of the facts of your story.
--:-- David Falkenflick: Well, he certainly doesn't deny pressuring me and to try to induce me to drop my story in exchange for an exclusive.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: He does deny having pressured his own former executive editor.
--:-- David Falkenflick: But I've got to say, not only have we reported that he did that, the New York Times did, and his own reporters at The Post have done that.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: And what he's done in doing so is kind of launched a broadside attack on values held dear at the Post and elsewhere of the idea of a firewall insulating the news from pressure from those that it covers, including those who run its business side.
--:-- David Falkenflick: The idea that we have to report American journalism without fear or favor.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: That's what I'm hearing from his colleagues at the Post today.
--:-- David Falkenflick: David, thanks so much.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: You bet.
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--:-- Steve Inskeep: Let's end with Piers David Falkenflick.
--:-- David Falkenflick: Millions of Americans are trapped, for now, in a heat dome.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: And that has prompted excessive heat warnings and heat advisories that extend from California and Arizona into Nevada and then eastward into Texas.
--:-- David Falkenflick: That's a meteorologist with CBS in the Bay Area.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: The heat dome is a big pocket of high pressure that locks in heat.
--:-- David Falkenflick: It's pushed temperatures in the southwest 20 to 30 degrees higher than normal for this time of year.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: And now we have news on a cause of that heat.
--:-- David Falkenflick: New data shows that the planet-warming pollution that drives extreme weather has hit a new record.
--:-- Rebecca Herscher: Rebecca Herscher from NPR's Climate Desk is covering this.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: Rebecca, good morning.
--:-- Rebecca Herscher: Good morning.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: Okay, what is the connection between climate change generally and this specific heat event?
--:-- Rebecca Herscher: They're intimately connected, Steve. You know, humans burn oil and gas and coal.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: Releases carbon dioxide and other planet-warming gases.
--:-- Rebecca Herscher: Those gases, they accumulate in the atmosphere over the course of decades.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: And all that excess gas traps heat, and that directly leads to higher temperatures worldwide.
--:-- Rebecca Herscher: It helps drive these extreme heat events where the temperature gets really high and stays really high like what we're seeing.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: And in fact scientists can say that the most intense heat waves that are happening right now would be literally impossible without human climate change.
--:-- Rebecca Herscher: So it's a really close connection.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: But our news here is that carbon dioxide levels are hitting a record.
--:-- Rebecca Herscher: Many people who follow this are aware that the United States has been cutting its greenhouse gas emissions.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: Yeah, yeah, that did happen.
--:-- Rebecca Herscher: But the decrease was quite small.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: This was last year.
--:-- Rebecca Herscher: And two years before that, the U.S. emissions actually increased each year.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: So the bigger picture here is that, you know, one, the U.S. decrease in emissions is not that big.
--:-- Rebecca Herscher: And two, a lot of other countries are not cutting their emissions.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: So altogether, it's definitely not enough on its own to reverse this trend of CO2 accumulation.
--:-- Rebecca Herscher: Yeah, there is the question of the rest of the world, which is the majority of the world's people and the majority of the economic activity.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: So how is the carbon dioxide level measured?
--:-- Rebecca Herscher: Well, scientists continuously measure CO2 in the atmosphere, and every single year the peak CO2 amount sets a new record because humans keep adding more CO2 faster than it can break down.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: This has been happening since scientists started measurements in 1958.
--:-- Rebecca Herscher: And because scientists are able to use other methods as well to estimate how much CO2 was in the atmosphere going back millennia, we can actually say with confidence that there's more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere now than there has been in millions of years.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: In millions of years.
--:-- Rebecca Herscher: Okay, so how high is this number?
--:-- Steve Inskeep: Well, the exact number is 426.9 parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere.
--:-- Rebecca Herscher: That may not sound like a lot, parts per million.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: But the Earth is really, really sensitive to changes in the atmosphere.
--:-- Rebecca Herscher: A little bit of extra CO2 traps a lot of heat.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: What really sticks out is that this number is significantly higher than last year.
--:-- Rebecca Herscher: It was a really, really big jump.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: So the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is actually accelerating.
--:-- Rebecca Herscher: Rebecca, thanks for the update.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: Really appreciate it.
--:-- Rebecca Herscher: Thanks so much.
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--:-- Steve Inskeep: Finally, we have big news today from the World Cup, the Cricket World Cup.
--:-- Michelle Martin: The U.S. men's cricket team last night pulled off an unbelievable upset.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: The red, white and blue of USA has overcome the 2022 finalists.
--:-- Michelle Martin: The American team beat Pakistan, one of the best cricket teams on the planet.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: The star of this match was an American, Sareb Natravolkar, who steered Team USA to victory in a super over, which is cricket's version of overtime, and he doesn't even play the sport full-time.
--:-- Michelle Martin: When he isn't making cricket history, he works as a software engineer for Oracle.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: We hope his employer has a generous vacation policy because Team USA is set to take on India Wednesday.
--:-- Michelle Martin: And that's up first for this Friday, June 7th.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: I'm Steve Inskeep.
--:-- Michelle Martin: And I'm Michelle Martin.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: How about giving a listen to Consider This from NPR?
--:-- Michelle Martin: At Up First, we give you the three big stories of the day.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: Consider This takes a deep dive into one story and what it means to you.
--:-- Michelle Martin: And keep it going with Up First on the weekend.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: Ayesha Roscoe and Scott Simon have the news.
--:-- Michelle Martin: Check them out wherever you get your podcasts.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: Today's Up First was edited by Catherine Laidlaw, Emily Kopp, Neela Banerjee, Alice Schweitzer, and Alice Woelfle.
--:-- Michelle Martin: It was produced by Ziad Buchh, Ben Abrams, Chris Thomas, and Milton Guevara.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: Our technical director is Zac Coleman, with engineering support from Stacey Abbott.
--:-- Michelle Martin: Join us again Monday.
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