“I’ve lived through the definition of insanity”: David Sirota on covering the plots for power in the United States
Don’t call David Sirota a liberal journalist. Ever. Though the journalist and founder of investigative news outlet The Lever often covers people who would label themselves conservative, Sirota is driven by one of journalism’s overarching ideas: to hold the powerful accountable.
“I think those words liberal and conservative, left and right, don’t really mean much of anything. Where I come down is that a journalist’s job is to hold power accountable. In our country, most of the power is held by people who have most of the money, and so the kind of journalism I do is ‘follow the money,’” says Sirota.
In articles, op-eds, books, podcasts, and even a film for Netflix, Sirota’s work details the often labyrinthian and secretive routes that turn out some of the most powerful players in U.S. politics and business. And, as the new season of his podcast, “Master Plan,” showcases, the decades of planning that often occurs behind those ascents.
In this edition of Depth Perception, Sirota talks about what it takes to lay out the facts about the country’s most powerful people, his devotion to transparency and fact checking, and the process of turning cut and dry reporting into a gripping podcast. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. —Jenna Schnuer
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Why does the idea of being considered a liberal journalist bother you? You even stepped away from journalism to work for Bernie Sanders during his 2020 presidential campaign.
I don’t see the work that I’ve done in politics as a conflict with the kind of journalism I do. To my mind, it’s all been one long mission to try to hold power accountable and change that unequal power dynamic. To throw around the idea that this person’s a liberal journalist or this person’s a conservative journalist, or that the people who work at The New York Times or The Washington Post, in theory, don’t have any politics at all, they don’t have any belief system at all, I think that’s kind of bullshit.
I’m a pretty open book about my basic, core viewpoint beliefs. I don’t think we’re trying to hide that. I do think there’s a difference between having a viewpoint and skewing one’s reporting. Our reporting is fair and accurate, because most of it, if not all of it, is document based. So you don’t have to agree with my viewpoint or what you perceive my politics to be, because what we’re doing at The Lever is following the money and reporting the actual facts. The demonstrable, verifiable facts.
One of the things that we adhere strictly to is we provide the reader as much of an ability to fact check us as possible. So when you read our stories, you’ll notice that there’s a lot of hyperlinks [to the documentation]. You can verify that what we’re telling you is accurate. It may offend your partisan sensibilities, and we have run into that where people don’t want to believe bad things about the political party that they personally affiliate with, or the politicians that they’ve been inculcated to worship. So there can be pushback to what we report, because people are offended by the idea that we surface facts about all different kinds of political players, regardless of party. But the facts are the facts, and we think it’s our job to surface as many of those facts to try to hold power accountable as possible.
Tell me about “Master Plan.” It’s an ambitious podcast.
What we try to do every season is look at a problem or a social political dynamic and what caused it. We essentially reject the idea that most of what we’re living in is an anomaly or brought about by one person, for instance, Donald Trump.
So season one was about the master plan to legalize corruption in America. For season two, we’re [looking at] concentrating presidential power and turning the presidency into a monarch. The idea that everyone woke up a few years ago and one guy decided to be corrupt or try to turn the presidency into a king? That’s a nice story for liberal media to tell liberal fans of the Democratic Party, but that is a fraudulent history. That is not what actually happened.
In season one, we told the story of how over 50 years, there was a deliberate movement to deregulate our campaign finance laws, narrow anti-bribery laws down to make them unenforceable, and that this was carried out in a very coordinated, focused fashion, through the courts, through politics, through the Citizens United decision. None of that was random. That was all part of a detailed master plan.
This season, we’re taking a look at the concentration of executive power to the point where many are fearing that the presidency is becoming a monarch, an all-powerful king. Obviously, the office of president is one powerful branch of government. It always has been. What we’re looking at is, how did it become, seemingly, the most powerful in an absurdly out of balance, disproportionate way, way beyond where it had been in many years of our history? And the story starts after Watergate, where so much of our modern era does.
The system that [Donald Trump is] exploiting was built for him over many decades, ignoring the warnings of many people, and it was built for a specific reason. I think that’s the important thing here. The legalization of corruption from season one of “Master Plan” and turning the presidency into a monarchy in season two, these are assaults, really, on “small d” democracy. Democracy for the master planners or the king makers is seen as a problem, not a solution to problems.
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How many people are on the “Master Plan” team?
We have four on the core team in terms of the reporting and the producing. We have another person who works for The Lever, who also happens to be a terrific musician, who does the scoring. We have fact checkers, we have legal [reviewers]. It ends up involving anywhere from seven to 10 people.
This is going against what is happening in the podcast industry, [which] is turning into kind of like talk radio, where it’s just two-way interviews. What we’re losing are deeply reported, longform, multi-episode series that can really unpack a topic in a proper way. These are more expensive to produce, more time consuming to produce, and they ask the listening public to devote a lot of time to them.
[Longform podcasts require] active listening. If you miss something, you have to actually rewind. What I worry about and lament is that a short attention span culture is not as interested anymore in longer-form storytelling. And I’m not concerned about that just for my own work. I’m concerned about that for society at large. If we can’t concentrate on anything, that’s an existential problem for human civilization.
So how do you make a longform show that appeals to a short attention span public?
For creators, it should push us to meet the world where it is as much as we can. We have really worked hard to make [the show] as entertaining as possible. We’re putting you right in the scene of history. I don’t even like the idea of storytelling. It’s really “story showing.” That’s the old idea in journalism. The most powerful stories are the ones that show you; they don’t tell you. So we’re putting the listener in the room, in the scene.
How do you get sources to talk to you for “Master Plan?” It seems like it could be dangerous for some people to speak on the record.
Getting the central characters to talk to us has been difficult and, at times, impossible. Sometimes they’re not even alive. So what we rely on are some interviews [from] the past to really bring them alive, as well as biographies, etc. Everything, obviously, is grounded in what’s been reported, what we can document and what we can verify. A lot of the people who were involved in these things don’t want to talk. I mean, the master plans that we’re revealing were secret for a reason, right? So we are piecing together the story from all of the verifiable documents and sources that we can and so getting somebody who was there in the room, if you will, is a bonus for us.
What’s it like for you to report these stories? So much of what we learned as kids has been blown apart because of these people in the background who hold the power and built the power.
It’s been an eye opening process. I think how little we understand about our own recent history is genuinely disturbing. Part of the exciting goal of this [show] is to bring that history back to life, not for its own sake, but for us to understand how we got here, so that perhaps, if we wanted to, we would make different decisions. To my mind, my lifetime has overlapped with us making the same set of decisions over and over again [with] many things getting worse and worse and worse. I’m 50 years old. I feel like I’ve lived through the definition of insanity.
Do you think people really want to put in the hard work it would take to change things?
It’s kind of mind boggling, actually. We are a society [that has] effectively, “memory holed” the Iraq War. We have “memory holed” the financial crisis. The same people who engineered those disasters and crises were effectively rewarded with stature, wealth, and media platforms. No one has really paid any kind of even mild social status price for two of the things that have caused mind boggling levels of damage.
And I pick out just those two examples because the fact that we’ve “memory holed” them, they weren’t that long ago. We’re still living through the effects of them. I would say Donald Trump, in a sense, is a reaction — sort of a terrible, catastrophic, destructive reaction, but a reaction, [and] a political reaction, nonetheless — to those things. And the scary thing is that if you can “memory hole” the Iraq War and the financial crisis, your society, basically, can “memory hole” anything.
Further listening, reading, and viewing from David Sirota:
- “Master Plan” season 1 (Released Aug. 13, 2024, The Lever)
- “Master Plan: The Kingmakers” season 2 (Released March 16, 2026, The Lever)
- “Bari Weiss’s ascent at CBS News was 50 years in the making” (The Guardian, Oct. 12, 2025)
- Master Plan (Sept. 2025, Lever Books)
- Don’t Look Up (Netflix, Released in 2021)