“Ok I have a wild suggestion👀” was the text I got from my boyfriend on Feb. 22.
Dylan wanted us to attend a “carnival” featuring the journalist/documentarian/news creator Andrew Callaghan in Medford the following Saturday. Dylan, one of Callaghan’s 3.46 million YouTube subscribers, learned about the tour from watching one of the 28-year-old Channel 5 host’s latest videos. I, the journalist in this relationship, am not one of those 3.46 million subscribers, a point of recurring contention. Dylan argues that, as a reporter working at Nieman Lab where we cover the ~ future of news in a digital age ~ I need to be paying attention to Andrew Callaghan. He frequently tries to get me to watch his videos.
“The overtly comedic (and often quite crude) videos he posted [at first] did not seem like pinnacles of journalistic integrity,” Dylan wrote in what is, essentially, a pitch I forced him to write about Callaghan. That started to change in the summer of 2020, after the killing of George Floyd, when Callaghan put out a six-minute “Minneapolis protest” video.
“While local and national outlets looped clips of protesters getting tear-gassed, the looting and burning of a Target, and the razing of a police precinct, Callaghan’s coverage of the protest was unlike anything else I saw at the time,” Dylan told me, because Callaghan actually talked to protestors, including those setting buildings on fire. (The people Callaghan interviewed didn’t mince words about their view of other news organizations: “Fuck those other media outlets because they’re going to try to portray us in a bad light by only showing what’s going on over here,” one says in the video, gesturing toward a burning building.)
This brings me back to Dylan’s wild suggestion. Here, a 10-minute drive away, was an opportunity to absorb some Andrew Callaghan live and bridge our divided house of news.
The gender ratio was the first surprise of an evening that would feature rap battles, Matt Shearer, and some visceral animosity toward mainstream media.
Dylan and I both guessed that this would be an event with, oh, maybe an 80-20 gender split. But we were proven wrong as we made our way to the Chevalier Theatre, joining a crowd of young-ish people streaming down Forest Street.
We looked at each other, waiting along with the crowd for the crossing light to turn green. “There are…more women than I expected,” I said to him sheepishly.
Were a number of those women doing what I was doing, accompanying their Channel 5 man to the show for date night? Yes. And men still solidly outnumbered women in the crowd. But the Q&A, which we’ll get to later, clearly demonstrated that there are plenty of women who watch Andrew Callaghan.
Callaghan has a “one of the boys” demeanor, down to his rumpled suit (“iconic ill-fitting suit,” according to Dylan). He harnesses that energy into approachability in one-on-one interviews, man-on-the-street news coverage, documentaries (including multiple feature films), and profiles. A few women do appear as guests on 5CAST, a Channel 5 offshoot launched last year that Callaghan describes as a “broadcast, podcast type of deal” featuring “longform conversations with interesting people about relevant topics.” But his sit-down interviewees are usually men, including Alex Jones (twice), Hunter Biden, Nick Shirley, and Shia LeBeouf.
Callaghan got some blowback when he interviewed Alex Jones, especially for a scene from his 2022 documentary “This Place Rules” where he lifts weights and drinks whiskey with Jones. His confrontation with Don Lemon on CNN, while never posted online by the news organization, was clipped and derided by other YouTube personalities from Hasan Piker to the “anti-establishment” YouTube channel Breaking Points. When WBUR asked Callaghan how he thought the Sandy Hook parents would feel about the drinking and weightlifting scene, Callaghan challenged the question as pointed and accusatory, but answered, “The lawyer Mark Bankston, [who] represented most of the Sandy Hook families, loved the scene.” He added, “There are certain surreal moments that just happen when you’re filming something like this that you would feel remiss to not put in the final cut of your movie.” (In a different vein, Callaghan recently got blowback from his Patreon audience for not pressing Pete Buttigieg hard enough and considered not releasing that interview, though he ultimately did.)
More broadly, Callaghan has argued that deplatforming doesn’t work. “If you go pluck some controversial group from obscurity,” like a SoCal Klan group, “even in the vein of, ‘I’m showing you the underbelly of society’…that would inherently amplify their profile, and it will lead to recruitment numbers,” he acknowledged in a Doomscroll podcast interview last year. “But if there’s people that are already well-known public figures — like Alex Jones; already, everybody knows who that is — I don’t see a problem in covering them, and deplatforming them will only cause their audience to move into a tighter echo chamber somewhere else, like Gab or Parler or Rumble or BitChute.”
In the Doomscroll interview, Callaghan talked about receiving a job offer from InfoWars a week after his “cancellation” following accusations of sexual misconduct in 2023. (Callaghan apologized, and has addressed his pattern of behavior and the power dynamics created by his fame.) Callaghan told the interviewer he “didn’t want to do that, because I’m not aligned with them in the way they talk and think about things.” In the same conversation, he said while he tries not to use political labels, “it seems that a lot of people think that I’m a leftist, which is true, probably.”
I’m not a big beer drinker but this felt like a beer-drinking setting so when in Rome. I sipped Coors Light (I think?) up in the balcony waiting for the event to start, classic rock playing over the speakers. The 1,900-capacity theater was not sold out, but the turnout was decent — maybe two-thirds full.
Around 25 minutes after the advertised start time, 7 p.m., the lights dimmed and Callaghan bounded out. He sat on the edge of the stage, high-fiving someone in the front row, greeting the crowd kind of like a room of friends. Then, he called up an audience member to spin a wheel to decide where we’d begin. The volunteer immediately won a free T-shirt via the wheel (he shared he’d already bought one), but his next spin landed on “secret documentary.”
What followed, despite some tech glitches, was a funny and genuinely moving half-hour doc that began as a search for an older man’s lost pet parrot and widened into a character study of someone whose life had been upended at a young age by chronic illness. The Medford audience got to see a never-before-screened ending that I don’t want to spoil, but that I did feel added meaningfully to the doc. This piece also offered a legitimate counterexample to my belief that many of Callaghan’s subjects are more open with him because he’s a guy: This documentary subject eventually turns to confiding in Callaghan’s producer, a young Jewish woman, who he connects with more intimately than Callaghan.
Still, the empathy the doc left me feeling is a credit to what it seems to me Callaghan does best: Pay attention to the humanity in people many of us might look past on the street and, by documenting it, force us to see them.
After the documentary came a rap performance (including a banger about ordering Dunkin’), an audience talent show (featuring a man who performed Mongolian throat singing and a German woman putting her entire fist in her mouth), and a rap battle. I think this segment was an illustration of three objectives Callaghan considers important: creating opportunities for audience participation; keeping his audience not just informed, but entertained; and celebrating human weirdness.
That last tenet brings us to the second screening of the evening, which requires some more Callaghan context. Before he became Channel 5, he had a different brand, All Gas No Brakes, which he launched in 2019. A contract dispute with the parent company, Doing Things Media, resulted in him losing control of that label, pushing him to go independent and launch the Patreon-funded new brand in 2021 — but last year, Callaghan successfully bought AGNB back. (I couldn’t contain my excitement when Dylan explained this to me: Just like Taylor Swift with her masters! Our worlds, legible to one another!) Now, Callaghan plans to make All Gas No Breaks an “affiliate program” of the Channel 5 news network and use it as a home for “subcultural deep dives on the American Fringe,” which he’ll keep separate from the pivot toward more political and breaking news he’s taken with Channel 5. The second video we saw at the Chevalier will be released as part of Callaghan’s All Gas No Brakes formal relaunch.
This video took us inside the Adult Baby subculture. Members of the community have “playdates” where they lie in cribs, play with toys, cry, and sometimes poop in diapers. Callaghan filmed a playdate (blurring faces) and interviewed participants about the draw, the monetary cost, the stigma, and the misconception that the participants are pedophiles. An “immersive” correspondent working with Callaghan also participated in the playdate and associated activities and described his experience. There was plenty of lively audience reaction to the video in real time, which I would characterize as, mostly, “this is completely insane” laughter.
We closed out our Andrew Callaghan extravaganza evening with yet another plot twist: A Q&A with Matt Shearer! Shearer, a reporter for WBZ NewsRadio who The Boston Globe called “New England’s most viral journalist,” is the rare on-camera, social-first news personality who is part of my media diet; his videos almost always make me laugh while warming my heart, and I think he has that same knack for seeing people and helping us see them as Callaghan. But the biggest factor behind my affection for Matt and his work is simple: he’s local. He connects me more deeply with Massachusetts and its ornery, quirky cast of characters, and I’m grateful to him for it. On this, at least, there’s no daylight between Dylan and me. Local news really can bridge divides.
The Medford audience shared my enthusiasm for the Matt Shearer cameo. And all was copacetic between that audience and Shearer through a conversation winding from the word “content” (not their favorite, but probably accurate, the creators agreed), to the rise of livestreaming, to the terrifying grip of screens on young people, to politics fatigue (Callaghan had planned to go to Iran, but said he didn’t want to put his mom through that. He added, reassuringly, that he wants to be around to cover the American civil war.) There was general agreement that mainstream media is, obviously, dead.
What was not copacetic was when Matt tried to put a small good word in for mainstream media. Shearer said, rather mildly, that he thought mainstream news still has a role to play in the evolving information infrastructure. Parts of this crowd booed, with some vehemence. This is an audience to whom mainstream media means manipulative, profit-chasing soullessness. Part of the problem, not part of the solution.
Indeed, Callaghan frequently depicts mainstream media this way, excoriating its incentive structure and presenting his own work as its foil. (He partners with Ground News, which he points viewers to as a tool for cutting through media bias. And at the event, he mentioned plans to launch a streaming platform for independent creators that will allow them to keep their own residuals.) In his documentary about hopping the border, for instance, he stated that he thinks “the majority of U.S. citizens have been strategically divided into politicized consumer groups by the investment firms who control the mainstream media. They’ve been using the border issue to stoke the flames of an internal culture war between Americans by pulling on liberal heartstrings with migrant sob stories while simultaneously stoking conservative anger by blaming the global economic crisis on Joe Biden. But both angles are deployed by the same propaganda apparatus whose primary goal is to generate revenue by bringing clicks and engagement to legacy media, which will collapse, but not yet. In the meantime, legacy media’s purpose is to distract and divide.”
This comment demonstrates that, when Callaghan says “mainstream media,” he’s generally talking about cable TV punditry. He said as much in the WBUR interview, which, ironically, also captures tensions that feel both generational and cultural between Callaghan and the NPR interviewer.
Meanwhile, I don’t think Matt Shearer was talking about cable TV. But whoever he meant by mainstream news, his good-hearted local news comment fell on (understandably) jaded ears.
Shearer pivoted, amending his point to say that maybe we could agree that there are individual reporters within mainstream media trying to do good work. To this, there was some scattered applause. A détente.
I thought back to the evening’s first video. It is difficult to imagine a “mainstream” journalist spending years, as Callaghan did, on the story of a man who has lost his parrot. Maybe a particularly persistent and well-resourced local reporter. But for most journalists, this man’s story probably would not register as newsworthy.
That leaves me thinking about the worthy in newsworthy. If the mainstream news does not deem people like him worthy, if it does not, in that sense, care about those people: Why would they care about the mainstream news?
I didn’t leave the Chevalier with newly crystallized revelations about the future of news or sudden resolve to make Channel 5 appointment viewing. My reactions were more muddled and mixed. But I did leave with a deeper respect for what Callaghan has called his “radical empathy agenda.” In different ways, that value guided the lost parrot documentary and, yes, the Adult Baby video; I was surprised, and rather humbled, to feel my own empathy being tested by the latter.
The radical empathy, I think, combined with a pragmatic sensibility for what’s entertaining, is the basic equation for Callaghan’s success building a loyal audience. He’s visibly matured as a reporter since the early days, but he continues to show millions of viewers the unvarnished weirdness of this country and the world, balking at nothing, earning their trust and even making them feel seen along the way.
“Be curious, not judgmental.” The Ted Lasso quote often misattributed to Walt Whitman gets good mileage between Dylan and me; we like to lob it at each other, with faux admonishment. But there’s always a kernel of sincerity under the roast.
I think I understand now that when he asked me, again and again, to pay attention to Andrew Callaghan, Dylan was really saying: Be curious, not judgmental. I think that’s what Callaghan himself does well. As scrappy compasses go, it’s not a bad starting point for good journalism.
