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By Samantha Bergeson
For years, Audie Cornish felt like she had to hide parts of herself as a journalist.
The former NPR host and current CNN anchor spent most of her career inside institutions that prioritized hard news and objectivity rather than cultural commentary. The latter was often dismissed as fluff entertainment journalism. But with CNN's new podcast series 'Engagement Party,' Audie is done hiding her multifaceted approach to reporting. The show reunites her with 'All Things Considered' colleague Ari Shapiro for an unprecedented take on news: contextualizing politics within pop culture, and challenging what a "serious journalist" is even supposed to sound like in the modern media landscape.
"To me, there is just as much politics out of 'Euphoria' [as there is] out of the Kentucky primaries," she says. "We're living in an era where the cult of personality and the cult of politics are one and the same."
Audie spoke with La Fronde about what the Trump administration's defunding of public media means for journalism, why she's "unsubscribed from hot takes," and why the lines between political and entertainment reporting have never been more blurred — look no further than the misogynoir of ‘Summer House’ as an example.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
How did ‘Engagement Party’ get started?
It really just felt very natural and an extension of something that I'm already doing, for the most part. At first, I was uncomfortable with the party name. I was like, 'I can't live up to that, I'm not a comedian.' And now I'm like, 'Oh yeah, at NPR we were called hosts, not anchors, because it's a party. You're the host.' You are this person managing the flow of a conversation, and that is different from being an anchor. My tradition and where I come from is being a host. I am here to welcome you into something. That's the difference I'm hoping to bring to it.
How was reuniting with Ari?
That's the thing about a work wife or a work husband: You can just look at each other and convey ideas and information. We're so used to arguing about ideas that it just flows very naturally. We have very different backgrounds, whether that is our race, gender identity, family. I think what brings us together is a very hyper-intense curiosity. We both have been curious as a matter of profession for almost all of our adult lives. We've just been on this road for a long time together.
And the road of reporting has changed so drastically. ‘Engagement Party’ is being billed as the first chat show for CNN. Is that a concept that you personally spearheaded?
I have to say, it was a confluence of personalities that have come together. I was already doing ‘The Assignment’ that had some hard news and then some feature topics that were very soft and would never get the light of day on TV, but were very common on a public media show. That's a format I felt at home with.
The second thing that happened was that CNN was changing. CNN, under [Chief Operating Officer] Alex MacCallum had hired this cascading group of people who really understood digital and who really understood culture. It's not like, 'I've reached a certain point in my career. Time to tell jokes.' It's more like, 'Oh great, next chapter.' It's totally in line with what's going on out there in our actual media business, doing the stuff I've always wanted to do. [I’m] connecting with a certain audience I've always wanted to talk to directly, but felt like I wouldn't be considered a “serious journalist” if I just hung out with them and talked about ‘Summer House’ and ‘Euphoria’ and whatever random subreddits I was in. All that stuff, I had to hide a little bit.
It's interesting that you use the term "serious journalist" because I think now, the bulk of many people’s media engagement is on the ‘Summer House’ discourse level, not hard news.
That's generationally different thinking. When I was your age, we were looking at journalists who were trying to be like the Watergate era. These people had ironclad rules about not putting themselves in the story. They had a sense of what objectivity looked like. They had a sense of justice and righteousness that came with that — and all of that is great training.
The flip side is, they were pretty dismissive about television in a lot of ways. They were pretty dismissive about laughter, if I could put it that way. That was for the Johnny Carsons, later on the Jon Stewarts. That was for the people making jokes [during late night]. It really was considered an entertainment thing and not something that had any informational value. I think that is where we're different: If you've come up in that era of magazine writing and hot take culture, you know that layering a style of analysis that you might use in a news context over a pop culture commentary actually becomes super engaging and interesting — and actually smuggles in a whole bunch of ideas that are quite sophisticated.
I know a lot of people who will make jokes or will be intensely gossipy about Summer House, but some of the nuances are stuck in siloes. The conversation about misogynoir and Black women and dating is going to be in one corner of the internet, but is not going to make it to the other. The stuff about Bravo and its business structure, and how and why they would be like Watergate level freaked out about leaking of audio from a reunion show, is a media business story. Ari and I are actually equipped to do both in one episode — and make the jokes. We're a show that is going to be like, 'It doesn't matter if you never saw Summer House. Here are all the trends and culture war conversations that actually make it a thing that suddenly became unavoidable.' We take that more seriously than the previous generation would have.
Film and TV shows are how people understand culture and politics. People will go to the voting booth and be like, "Well I just watched a movie that featured an abortion and I cried during it, maybe I should think twice about women's rights."
Or people will go, 'I watched “The Apprentice” and I think he's [Donald Trump] a great businessman.'
Where this was really driven home to me was the discussion about Bill Cosby. A lot of professional entertainment journalists sat in front of that guy and did not ask him a certain vein of questions, because that was a 'tabloid issue.' That was something in the not-so-serious column. And then it turned out it was super serious. Whether it's [Harvey] Weinstein, who is still in court somehow, whether it's Cosby, whether it's all these other people — it's the entertainment sphere where the battles are being fought in a way that is most engaging to the audience. That spread to politics and to the business world. And yet, here we are. Is the Woody Allen discussion affected by his appearance in the Epstein files? You wouldn't dismiss that just because Woody Allen makes movies. These people are avatars and archetypes for conversations that we are all having, and these conversations haven't gotten easier. They've only gotten harder.
I want to speak a little bit about who we are speaking around. With President Trump having cut all federal funding for NPR and PBS, where are we as journalists under this administration in terms of money, in terms of mergers, and in terms of public attacks on media?
To be honest, I don't have a hot take. This is not me being evasive. NPR has gotten some major donations recently from people who do want to support it. But we don't know what that will mean in a year or two. We don't know what that's going to mean for stations that spread the programming. It's still a question mark.
That's the same thing with CNN and Paramount and its sale. It hasn't happened yet. In a way, I'm off the take train. I've unsubscribed from people’s hot takes because nobody has been right in months and months. To me, there is only listening, curiosity, and actual responses between two people — not AI, not death by a thousand Substacks.
How do you think AI or Substacks will change modern reporting? Do you consider both to be threats?
I'm not threatened by Substack newsletters in any way. I just don't think they've proven to work at scale to replace what was the fourth estate infrastructure of local papers — and people can fight me on that. Very popular writers in major cities making money is great for them. But that's just not what the news is on its own, and I don't think it's scalable.
And when it comes to AI, there are better and smarter people writing about this stuff than me. AI can show me an idealized version based on millions of thoughts that have been plugged into the internet about what someone should look like, what someone should sound like, and how they should convey information. Maybe as a Black woman, I'm a little less excited about that prospect based on how that's worked out for us, based on even what we see on AI right now. The internet has exacerbated existing fissures and turned them into canyons. What I worry about with AI is the power of the companies overwhelming a very weak political system that is not engaged in oversight broadly, and is even less interested in industries that have the lobbying power to subsume them.
Let me put it to you this way: When I was in radio, I thought, 'Why did I do this? There's not going to be radio much longer.' And that's what I'm sure people thought when TV came along. And guess what we're all doing? We're just making radio TV and we call them podcasts. Even with our ChatGPTs, what do we do? One on one talking. We fucking can't help it. We have to tell stories to each other, we have to tell stories about each other. We have to hash out things for ourselves. Even if we don't have that available, the thing we look for is a mimicry of it. That's why you're dating your AI, right? For 'connection.'
A part of me feels like, if we haven't killed radio yet, we have got to have a little more faith in ourselves because, over and over again, we all tend to be interested in relationships. Not to sound corny but what's exciting about the kind of show I'm doing now is it's 100 percent in the second person. It's not us pretending to be the voice of God. This will instead be like a deep breath, like ‘phew, now we can really talk.’ We want people to want to be part of it. I expect pitches from you on this show. Do a video and send it in, because none of us can pretend that anybody knows, but we definitely know that we want to figure it out with each other.
Engagement Party is available every Friday starting at 6am ET.