On this week's No One Knows Anything, we talk about why Bill O'Reilly was forced out of Fox News, how much people should really be reading into the Georgia and Kansas special elections, and how a custody trial involving Alex Jones has taken on a bigger significance within media.
Steven Perlberg, who covers media and politics for BuzzFeed News, joins to talk about O'Reilly. And regular co-host Charlie Warzel calls in from Texas where he's been covering the Jones trial.
As he wrote earlier this week:
Since Sunday evening, when the Austin American Statesman broke the news that Jones’ attorneys planned to defend his custody on the grounds that his two-plus decades of conspiracy theorizing has been “performance art,” Alex Jones' name and reputation have unexpectedly become one of the biggest stories in the country.
And while it’s unusual for a contentious family custody case to end up as fodder for late-night television hosts (the Jones case got the extended Colbert monologue treatment on Monday evening), Jones’ trial is far larger than his painful and in some ways ordinary family dispute. For the millions on either side who both adore and revile Jones, the case offers the hope of answering a near-impossible question: Where does Alex Jones the character end and Alex Jones the person begin?
But the herculean task of untangling Jones from his political views has put the 43-year-old broadcaster at the center of something bigger than himself. Unexpectedly, Jones is now the star of a courtroom drama that feels less like a quotidian family law case and more like a referendum on politics, the internet, and the media in the post-Trump ecosystem.
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