Brian Rosenwald: Fox Is Afraid of Its Audience

Welcome to the Bullework Podcast. I’m Charlie Sykes. It is Thursday, although I have to confess that we’re taping this on Wednesday afternoon. We’re joined by Brian Rosenwald, political historian of the modern United States who has a special interest in the role of media in shaping popular political cultures He’s a scholar in residence at the University of Pennsylvania, the author of Talk Radio, how an industry took over a political party that took over the United States. Ryan also co founded and his senior editor of the Made By History section in the Washington Post.

So Brian, good to talk with you again. Charlie, it’s always great to be with you. We have a lot to talk about including the Fox document dumped from last week and what it told us and what it reminded us of. But just as a couple of things, you know, catching up here, marjorie Taylor Green on on the national divorce and the fact that Sean Hannity is taking it seriously, which seems so relevant to everything else. That we’re talking about.

The one thing that is just making me crazy, and I need to preface this by saying, I almost never say that someone should shut up. I never say that someone should stop talking. I think we live in an era in which we should encourage free speech. We should encourage speech that makes us uncomfortable. We should encourage, you know, all sorts of, you know, awosomes to bloom, so I’m never generally going to be saying, this person needs to shut the bleep up except for right now.

This four person of the grand jury in Georgia who has decided to go on this media tour This is one of the most cringe worthy things that I have ever seen. She clearly is enjoying the attention and kind of the smoking cute. We have indictments I’m not going to tell you. And all of the TV networks putting her on, which, of course, it’s their job to do this. You’re watching this going no.

No. No. No. No. You this woman should not be on television.

She should not be talking about this. There’s a very real chance that she will jeopardize all of the cases. Again, I’m I’m not playing lawyer. But, you know, that there’s a chance that she could jeopardize these cases. It’s a big story in CBS right now that the possible targets are saying that well, just read that lawyers close to several Republican witnesses in the Fulton County investigation.

Are preparing to move to quash any possible indictments by the district attorney Fannie Willis. Their attempt to do so would be based on recent public statements by the four woman of a special purpose grand jury, Emily Kors, who has been giving one interview after. Have you seen any of these, Brian? It’s bad. I’ve seen like one and I saw a bunch of

people on Twitter echoing you, you know, people

who are

generally pro free speech saying, oh my god. This is cringey. How is this still going on? Like, someone cut her mic kind of thing. And it’s a reminder that sometimes there are stories that where are impulse to want to know everything and know everything immediately and have inside information It is really toxic for us as a society where patience and letting processes play out would be good.

And also, a reminder that, you know, there are certain people who are are not particularly equipped for doing high level media interviews. There’s there’s certain skill and knowledge and she clearly doesn’t have that kind of, you know, she she’s never done this before, and it shows and she’s in a kind of fraud area legally. Yeah. So you know, her being out there is is risky for the investigation. It’s cringe worthy.

And, honestly, I’m not sure this happens, Charlie. But for the fact, that as a couple of reporters I’ve talked to this week have mentioned, it is a really dead news week, you know, that they’re desperate for for substance and something to talk about. Well, except for the president of the United States being in Kiev and Vladimir Putin — Yeah. —

you know, threatening nuclear war. But, you know, So it’s all relative what a slow news week is. Right? No. I’m not blaming the producers for putting her on because — Yep.

— you know, for the first half of of the day, we were hearing the the four person who’s basically saying yes, there are many indictments. You’re not going to be surprised. And and my first reaction was, well, this is awfully newsworthy. This is interesting. Tell me more.

And then, of course, they told us more and more and more and more and more and she could not, you know, get away from the camera. And then you realize that this is a person that should have stayed secret in the secret country. I’m sorry. Is that I mean, that’s just don’t don’t don’t do don’t do this.

No. But it it it’s true. Right. Like, there there are certain people who they get on TV and they just start digging holes. And you’re you’re like, this is not going well for you.

Like, please up. I think that everybody

thinks, well, I could go on TV or I could go to a podcast or I could do any of these things. And maybe it’s not as easy as it looks, and I maybe she’s a sweet, wonderful, thoughtful person, but she comes off as somebody who has, you know, spent too much time I’m just I’m gonna leave it right there. I’m not gonna try to insult her. It’s just that what I also worry about is that she’s just providing ammunition for people who will discredit. I mean, it’s at the moment when these these charges, you know, are about to come down, she certainly does not have, you know, the persona of somebody who is, you know, serious with a lot of gravitas And maybe it doesn’t matter at all.

Maybe it does not matter at all, but it’s just unfortunate. And I needed to rant about it. Okay. So Brian, you’ve written a book about the talk radio, the industry that took over a political party. You talk to me about this.

Right? I mean, as a talk show guy, okay. So You’ve been writing about this for some time. And and and my sense is that you really do understand how it works and the dynamic, the the complicated dynamic between what I’ve called the entertainment wing of the Republican Party and the Party. And the way in which four years people thought that talk radio and Fox was an arm of the republican party.

The republican party sent them talking points. What I think you understood was that at a certain point, that dynamic flipped. And it wasn’t the party sending the the conservative media, the entertainment media. The agenda. It was the entertainment wing of the party that was setting the agenda.

It was the entertainment wing that was the one that was wagging the dog. And and that’s part of the story that I think people need to understand the way in which power and the entire incentive structure of the Republican Party and the right has shifted toward not just talk radio, but to that entire ecosystem is now formed around Fox News and and Talk Radio. Correct? That

is a hundred percent right. I mean and it’s had two impacts. First of all, you know, good chunk of the Republican party, if not, you know, all of them, live in great fear of the day that they are going to be the pinata on conservative media. That, you know, they’re gonna be the target. You know, your listeners are probably wondering why.

And the answer is that the most important election for most Republicans because of geographic polarization and gerrymandering is the primary election. And, you know, we we get, like, what, ten to fifteen percent of the the population shows up

in these

primaries. And it’s the hardest core ten or fifteen percent. Exactly the people who consume conservative media. And they are influenced strongly by their favorite hosts. They might spend more time with their favorite house than they do with their spouses.

And so what those people say matters to them and these politicians have to be afraid that if a host, especially a local host who can talk about them every day, decides to tee off on them that their careers are now in jeopardy. And so they are very cognizant of what conservative media is saying and not crossing them. You know, we talk to people on the hill and they tell you about the what they call the hope yes, vote no caucus who says, yeah, this is a really good piece of legislation or I know we have to raise the debt ceiling. But I’m gonna vote no because I wanna be back here in two years. And so you have that element of it.

And the other element of it is there was a time in congress that Margery Taylor Green would start shooting her mouth off, and she would have had her party leader calling her texting her whatever the technology at that given moment is saying you shut the bleep up. Like, shut up right now before you you make this deeper or they would have, like, exiled her.

Yeah. You know,

they would have put her on, like, the Merchant Marine and Fisheries Committee never to be heard from again. Well, what’s happened? And and I think that the story that best epitomized this was in John Bainner’s memoir. He he talks about how he’s in his office with Michelle Bachman. And she wanted to be on, like, ways and means.

So, like, the most exclusive committee that she could be on. And Bader’s sort of like, oh, that that’s not possible. You know, you’re like a freshman or a sophomore. That’s not gonna happen. You know, from the fringe, like, I don’t know what you’re you’re doing.

And and then she gets like this smile on her faces like, God, it would be a shame if I had to go to Fox News and tell them that you were like mistreating me. And Bainer has this oh crap moment where he’s like, she’s right. Like, she understands that she’s more powerful than I am even though I’m speaker of the house. And it’s because these people are the celebrities. They are the stars in the soap opera that is conservative media.

And Marjorie Taylor Green can you know, I would assume that the, you know, probably seventy percent of Americans find what she’s saying either horrifying or insane. And, you know, there was an analysis in the post a couple of weeks back that pointed out that she actually did worse, relatively speaking, in her election in twenty twenty two than most Southern Republicans. Most Southern Republicans did better in their districts than did Donald Trump in twenty twenty, and she actually did worse. So there’s a question about how popular she actually is, but she is enormously popular with the voters who are driving this whole thing. And with the media machine because, you know, the media loves her because she’s this huge story.

She’s always saying something — Oh, right. — it is incendiary that makes for a good show. And that’s what these guys are all about. They wanna make money. This is about putting on a show.

So of course, you know, the Sean Hannity’s of the world are gonna take her seriously. And she’s gonna drive this conversation because she knows exactly what they want. And she’s got this celebrity status that means that the actual official party leaders can’t really touch her without a a kind of civil war in the party. And so they, you know, tip toe around her and now, you know, McCarthy has kind of openly embraced her and this kind of trashes the Republican brand elsewhere and it hurts them with the majority of Americans, but it also elevates her. It elevates these ideas that are dangerous, and it’s a byproduct of this whole operation, whereby these media players.

The Tucker Carlson of the world are a lot more important and have a lot more power than Kevin McCarthy or Mitch McConnell does.

And yet they’re afraid of their own audience. This is the other point. A lot of this is bottom up. And one of the things that some of these politicians like Marjorie Hilary Breonna, and I would throw in Donald Trump that he’s picked up from Talk Radio. Is that is that they know what the hit parade is?

They know what actually people, you know, want to hear, not what they need to hear, not what is most important, but, you know, what gets the clicks, what gets the ratings. And we’re gonna get to this story in the Dominion lawsuit because I think that one of the things that was very, very clear is that this was not necessary necessarily, you know, top down that they were gonna be pushing out this toxic sludge of lies about the the election. I mean, maybe, you know, to a certain extent, you know, there was. But in the large part it was, this is what our audience wants. If we don’t give our audience this, they will go somewhere else.

They are worked up. And so at a certain point, you even have the Tucker Carlson’s and the Sean Hannity’s of the world who are chasing the Republican base and it becomes kind of a dune loop, doesn’t it? Because they keep feeding more and more than the demand for, you know, bigger and bigger dopamine hits, you know, keeps rising and they indeed need

to keep feeding the beast. That is absolutely right. I think the thing that that most of America on the left and in the center who don’t consume this media have gotten wrong, is they’ve always seen it as politically driven. That these guys get up and say, you know, what can we do today to help the Republican party? Right?

And in reality, they get up and say, how can we put on the best show that’s going to draw the biggest possible audience for the longest possible time? And basically, how can we make the most money? That that’s the goal. And they understand acutely what their audience wants. Especially in this day of, like, minute by minute ratings where they can, you know, on TV, especially, they can see, well, what segments did the best with the audience?

And they have their finger on the pulse of this. And they’ve always safeguarded their relationship with their audience above all else. And we’ve seen you know, increasing examples of this in the last decade where, you know, right right after twenty twelve, Sean Hannity kind of infamously said he had evolved immigration reform. Essentially, you know, we’re we’re not gonna win if we don’t do this. And whatever I said before, you know, forget about that because we need to do this.

Well, within a year or two, he had unevolved along with other people like Russell Limbaugh who had been, you know, willing to at least hear the GOP out on this and we’re we’re giving them some airtime because they realized the audience wasn’t gonna stand for it. And and this is a key change. This is not the nineteen nineties where there was a very small kind of world of conservative media. It was rush limbaugh. It was influential local hosts.

It was, you know, Michael Reagan, g Gordon Litty, were kind of the second here of nationally syndicated house, and where a host had a little bit more of an opportunity to kind of guide his audience in direction. By the twenty tens, these guys, there is so much competition. They are forever concerned about losing their audience because they know that if the audience isn’t happy with them, there are five other shows in the same day part or or the same time slot that they’re in. Or there are five other different websites that they can go to and get similar information. So they’re they’re buffeted by this.

And maybe the best example was Donald Trump. A number of these hosts invade against him, you know, in the primary in twenty sixteen, how unfit he was, how they were never gonna vote for him no matter what. And then one by one, most of them with with yourself being one of the few principal exceptions — I remember. — came around on him. You know, that you know, Mark Levin saying, well, this is not a vote for Trump, but this is a vote against her.

And then Glen Beck kind of contorting himself saying, well, the left drove me into his arms or something like this. And, you know, it really crystallized for me, I think, it was the day or two days after my book came out. I was on with a set of random conservative hosts in, like, Denver. And the house basically admitted you, and he said, I was a Ted Cruz guy, and my audience brought me around on this. And the way that that translated for me was I understood that if I was gonna, you know, not be with Trump, I was gonna lose my audience and that’s way more important than anything else to me.

And that’s what you see is that they they are afraid of their audience. They are afraid of of being in a place where their audience is not and having the the colors you know, call up it and say to them, well, what happened to you? Used to be one of the good guys. You know? No.

Wait.

I haven’t changed anything. Okay. So just just parenthetically because I told the story many, many times. I mean, what what you’re describing is is correct. And and this was kind of the the shock of twenty fifteen and twenty sixteen.

I was on the air twenty three years and had a very intimate, you know, strong relationship with the audience. In fact, they were very much with me through the Republican primary in Wisconsin, INT Trump, you know, Wisconsin was very much an outlier. But the phenomenon that you’re describing is is very real. There are so many other voices the conservative ecosystem had grown. And I think that the audience began to you know, more insistently demand a kind of tribal loyalty, a safe space.

They wanted their priors reconfirm. I think they understood how froth it was to go along with Donald Trump. So in many ways, it made the more thin skinned that they wanted the defenses they didn’t want to hear the critique. And so as twenty sixteen rolled on, I realized that I’d already planned to leave, but that that I was going to lose the audience. By losing the audience, it was, you know, people who you’d known for ten years who were going, you know, what what happened to you.

And because I’m an only child, it was easier for me to say, okay, that I’m gone. I thought about this, Brian. I don’t think that I could have done that job. Into twenty seventeen. I left at the end of twenty sixteen.

Best decision of my entire life. But I don’t know because it’s there’s no business model for conservative media that was criticizing Trump. The audience was absolutely livid at any criticism. And you have, you know, the social pressures, you have the political pressures, you have the economic pressures. As I look at other talk show hosts, they either caved in or they said, you know, forget it, I’m moving on.

I’m gonna go into the ministry or I’m gonna go into something else, but they vanished. And it was exactly the phenomenon that you’re describing.

Yeah. I mean, you know, we saw not just with you, but Michael Medved who had been pretty top tier voice national syndication for multiple decades. Saw his star go down and eventually sail him, you know, got rid of him — Yeah. — because they’re the one company that is out there that has a political agenda and Mark can approach that kind of descent. You know, his star kinda faded.

And the the one guy who sort of got around it was Ben Shapiro. Mhmm. And he did that, I think, because, well, he was as critical of Trump at moments He also was not overwhelmingly critical of Trump. He sort of toe the line a little bit and had, you know, enough of a unique brand and also was focused more on young audiences that I think he was able to get away with it. But even he told me when I interviewed him that he had lost opportunities.

And lost money over, you know, criticizing Trump in twenty sixteen. But

he he came around. He just he decided rather famously at one point he was gonna support Trump for reelection because, like, what can he do? I mean, the worst he’s done. I mean, you know, okay. Can he be worse than this?

And and, of course, lots of things have you

literally heard that over and over again. They they gave justifications for why they were flipping after, you know, saying, I’ll never vote for this guy or I’ll never support this guy. They all came up with justifications, but I suspect that the the bottom of it all was the understanding that they couldn’t do their job. And they couldn’t make a living doing their job if they were not with Donald Trump because that’s what the audience wanted. And I think one thing we know from academic research that is an important element is, you know, when Russ takes off in the nineties and and he is by far the godfather of modern broadcast conservative media People who are listening to Russia are also still reading The New York Times or watching the CBS evening news and crucial points.

You know, there’s not the SECO Chamber. And by the time you get to twenty sixteen or twenty twenty, these people are able to live in a kind of hermetically sealed world where they wake up in the morning, maybe they flip Fox and Friends on. They get in the car and and I know that people are commuting less than they used to, but they get in the car and they flip on their local conservative morning host. And they they might have listened to Rush at lunchtime until he passed away two years ago. And then in the afternoon, maybe Sean Hannity for PM Drive or if they’re in a major market, a local conservative host.

And they get home and they flip on Fox News again and they see, you know, Carlson Hennedy Ingram in in prime time. And their print sources are like Bright Bart and Red State and town hall and sites like that. There is nothing challenging this worldview. So if you’re the host who is saying, wait a second, guys. You know, there there are these pesky little facts here that that you have to pay attention to.

It’s much easier to say, well, wait. It’s like you’re the outlier. You know, what what happened to you? What are you consuming? Because I’m getting this you know, ten text messages from friends.

I’m seeing it on Facebook. I’m seeing it in the stuff I’m reading. I’m seeing it on TV. I’m seeing it on the radio. It’s very hard to be the one lone person kind of pushing back against that.

And what you see is then that they a lot of them have waved the right flag and said, Mhmm. You know, I I’m not gonna try to guide my audience. Gonna be aware of it. Now, you know, my my favorite quote of all of this is somebody who worked for for Jed Bush in the primary in twenty sixteen, said that the host said to their team, you know, look, If you can talk some sense to my audience, please do because I’m sure as hell can. You know?

They’re they’re not listening. That sounds familiar. But let me just update that. What you described, you know, the day in the life of, you know, a consumer media is true, but but I think it’s gotten much, much worse because you have all the websites, you have, you know, the constant alerts. And then you have this entire sort of, for me, shadowy YouTube universe, where every imaginable conspiracy theory can live I was talking to a prominent Republican recently and who had tried to appease all of this and we’re talking about, you know, how did this happen?

What happened to this person or that person and he said, you know, this is the thing. People come to me all the time and I’ll have, like, some weird theory or story. And I’ll say, where did you hear that? And it’s something I’ve never heard of before. It’s a YouTube channel.

It’s somebody else. And yet, there’s so much of it. There are so many voices out there. So I was gonna get to this a little bit later because this then creates a vortex that changes reality as well. Before we started this, we were talking about somebody that I had known who was just like a reasonably normal a little bit, you know, nerdy, wonky, you know, conservative who’s now become, you know, a raging, you know, extremist asshole.

And and this has happened over and over again. You know, like, what happened? What is this vortex? And part of it is the hermetically sealed world that there was a time when if you were in public life, you had to be concerned with how the general public looked at you. You had to be concerned about how the media would pour tray you and you had to think about that.

That’s no longer the case. Now you’re pandering to this new media and In many cases, you have to pander to the loudest most extreme voices otherwise you will be considered to be a rhino or a cock. So The incentive structure is to pull away from the mainstream to often be as outrageous and crazy and extreme as possible and pander to this. So you watch this evolution of people who go from, you know, garden variety to conservative to hair on a fire nut job, and it really is this new universe and the incentive structure that is created. I

think that’s actually right. And I think that maybe the best example of how complete this is is a guy you know pretty well Senator Johnson from Wisconsin who, you know, because perfect example, perfect. Most of these guys are in these deep red districts and states. But Ron Johnson is not in a deep red district or state. In fact, you you know, you can argue that if the Democrats have recruited better, he would have been in real trouble because he’s in the swing state.

But he never tried to pull back from any of this. He is someone who understands that, you know, stoking his base is the key to, first of all, More air time on Fox News, more attention and the the kind dopamine hits that come from that and, you know, fundraising and that kind of thing but also that if you don’t turn your base out, you’re gonna lose it anyway. And and we see this with even guys like him in swing states or, you know, he caught my eye yesterday Don Bacon, who is, you know, the media likes to hold up as the kind of quintessential centrist or moderate Republican who is going to be key to deal cutting in the house because he’s from Omaha, which is a Biden one congressional district, and he also loves to talk of the media. You know, some of the other moderates sort of hide because they don’t wanna get caught between crosstressors, and he’s always out there getting quoted. Well, he went on with Tucker Carlson the other night to talk about something.

And I’m thinking to myself, you have this guy is going on with Carlson, then that shows how total this thing is, where even the people who have to pay attention to general elections because they legitimately can lose them. Understand that their incentive is to make sure that base is happy with them. Make sure that they’re going on that with that conservative host who is the single most, you know, popular person with their their base. And so you have that. And I also think that there is, you know, for the hosts and the the non, you know, members of Congress, there’s a financial incentive here too, which is you can become a superstar.

You can make a lot of money. You can draw a lot of attention. You know, you can be charging more per speech. Or you can become, you know, maybe get your own show eventually. There there was reporting the other day on in puck.

I think it was. I wanna make sure credit it. One of their newsletters. They were kind of Peter Hamby and Tara Palmieri were talking about, you know, why is Nikki Haley running? Right?

I know what is her lane? And one of them mentioned that that she had access from her governor days and her UN ambassador days to making a lot of money for each speech and that that had kind of dried up over the last couple of years. Right? And there there’s this constant pressure and and lore of fame of fortune of political stardom and of of going from random congressman to, hey, this person should run for president and and being like a rock star. And that requires that you kind of tend to this this audience that wants the most extreme stuff, that wants to hear you, you know, bashing the lips, wants to hear you calling Democrats’ communist, wants to hear you throwing out outlandish conspiracy theories, and that’s a lot easier than being the congressman who says, know that thing you saw on YouTube, that thing was false.

Do you remember Bob English, Charlie? I do. It met him. Yeah. Yeah.

Down South Carolina.

Yeah. I

remember talking to him where he said to me. He said, look, I went into these town halls. And in a couple of cases, it was just small groups where he was meeting with long time donors. And he was trying in vain to say them, look, first of all, Obama is not a Muslim. That is just a fact, and that’s wrong.

And second of all, look, he’s a good god fearing american who I happen to disagree with on a lot of issues. And he got trounced in a primary and he lost donors and he had got shouted down in town halls for saying what should have been fairly unobjectionable, but you know, he he said to me all the top radio hosts in my district were absolutely, you know, fueling the fire on the other side and they were saying, you know, what happened to you, English? Where where did you go wrong? How do you not see this? And it’s it’s very hard to fight back against that, especially when there’s all kinds of laws to do the authors of things.

This point is so crucial because what

it means is that you have otherwise very intelligent people who should know better who know that they have to use certain phrases, certain language, they have to feed back into it. So I was thinking over the last actually, you know, forty eight hours Nicki Hill is very, very bright. I’m not a fan of Rhonda Sandes, but he’s he’s got some good degrees. Right? He’s a Harvard guy and everything.

And yet, you listen to him You listen to Nicky Haley. You listen to the elastophonics of congress. And they’ve done their language down. They use the same phrases. They use the same hot button words and concept.

It’s like Mad lit. It’s just the thing. And all it is, is signals to the audience. I am with you. I am listening.

I am a long time, you know, heart of this particular tribe. And so as they chase this, they know what the formula is. And so what you get is you get these repetitious word salads that you kinda wonder if that if you were looking really really close to their eyes, you know, I mean, you know, Nikki Haley going, I have to say this. I have, you know, blah blah blah. You know, is part of you embarrassed by this.

But no, they’ve made the decision, but this is what they have to do. And so this is why they all begin to sound like this.

Conspiracy theories, paranormal, UFO’s. During the

entire nineteen seventy one debacle of this red die number two, Parents all around America were buying Frank and Berry, so only a few days after the cereal was released, kids all across the country. Started being rushed to hospitals. All of them had one symptom in common.

Fairees of the third kind on YouTube or wherever you listen. Okay.

So let’s get to this big fox document, Tom. Okay? Because this was huge. It was all of these text messages and these emails showing that the the host and the executive knew that these claims the election was stolen were completely totally batshit insane, and they still allowed people to use the Fox Airways to push these these theories. And we had the story, you know, Tucker Carlson, trying to get a reporter, Jackie Heinrich fired for actually fact checking a Trump tweet because, you know, he thought it was hurting the stock price.

So you explain on your subset that the Fox Bombshell is kind of like catching tobacco executives lying about how tobacco can cause cancer. Right? But at the same time, it’s not really all that surprising for conservative media. Now, So did we learn anything that we didn’t already know about these guys? I really don’t think so, Charlie, because what it

did is it exposed everything that if you dig at it, like, when I was working on my book, you see glimpses of this. It just exposed that in a very real way. But for something that really is analogous in a lot of ways to the tobacco executives knowing that they are feeding people a toxic product. In this case, toxic for democracy. You know, it it very much had parallels to that.

But it really is what I kind of would have expected, which is that, you know, here they are November of twenty twenty. Trump is screaming about a stolen election. And what are the executives worried about? They’re worried about news maps. They’re worried about competition.

They’re worried about if if we’re not doing this. If we’re not giving these people what they want, they’re gonna go to this other guy. And and they’re somewhat skeptical, I think, of NewsMax. There were, you know, sort of, few words here or there that that indicated that but they’re wearing. They’re like, we don’t wanna keep inflaming Trump and having him tell people to go to NewsMax.

We certainly don’t wanna get into telling the truth here where it could be problematic. And they’re sort of like, oh, we have to do this, but we have to be on board with this, or we’re we’re gonna lose the audience. We know where the audience is, And I think Carlson had one quote in there. I don’t remember from a text message or an email, but he was, you know, sort of saying, like, our audience are good people and they genuinely believed Yeah. As in, I’m not gonna insult them by telling them they’re wrong or they’re being misled or or any of this kind of stuff.

And it shows why this this whole thing is so toxic because there’s literally nothing that they won’t do or say if they think that they need to do that to safeguard those rings. I think that was the one kind of new thing is I always sort of thought, you know, that this was the basic pattern, but that there was probably some line maybe that they they wouldn’t cross. And what we’ve seen now and I think we’ve seen it most clearly with both January sixth and the election lies and the tandem fact of Carlson especially pushing lies about the COVID vaccine. There really is no lie. There really is nothing they will not do or say if they think that’s what the audience wants and that will ensure ratings and revenue and everything that comes with that.

And

this is what the audience wants. Right? I mean, tens and millions Americans that still watch Fox every night, and they’re being told what they want to hear. Accuracy, as you write, is totally optional. So what will the consequences of this be for Fox?

I’m gonna divide this into two. What do you think of the legal case against them? Because of course, there’s a high bar in this country, but going after, you know, media entities. Dominion seems to have a pretty compelling case. But again, there are defenses, one point six billion dollars But then the question is, is there any fallout for the audience that’s basically being told, yeah, we were we were lied to.

Let’s start with that one. That’s easy because I actually don’t think it’s gonna hurt them with their audience.

I don’t think it hurts them at all. I think that, you know, it’s more dangerous to them that Trump called them like a rhino network and and was attacking them again than this is. And and the reason for that is pretty simple. What’s gonna end up happen thing is that the hardcore Fox believers are gonna say that all of these stories and all of these papers quoting legitimate, you know, like text messages quotes. The the mainstream media is ripping them out of context.

They hate Fox. They hate conservatives, and they’re distorting this whole thing. You know, maybe maybe it would have been different if we had like audio recordings and they could legitimately hear the people’s voices. But they’re just gonna write this off as the mainstream media is so hopelessly biased and there are hacking Fox, and it won’t hurt them at all. Alright.

What what about the lawsuit? What do you think about that? I’ve never seen what I think is a better case to get around the absolute malestander that is so high for for defamation. You know, Fox is gonna try to sell this as look, these were legitimate issues that our audience was interested in, and we were, quote unquote, covering them. Yeah.

Because there’s an exception for for covering stories even if you know their faults, if you think their newsworthy, they that you’re covering them and they’re gonna say, you know, we weren’t endorsing them. We were bringing guests on to ask them questions. I think you and I know that’s flimsy, but, you know, does it cross the minimum legal bar

maybe? Yeah. That’s what they’re gonna be resting on, of course. Just as a slight digression, I think it’s interesting and ironic that Rhonda Sandes has decided that he’s going to launch a g hod against times versus Sullivan, which is the supreme court ruling that gives media companies these protections and liable. In other words, if veranda sand has got his way, he would destroy the defense that Fox News is going to be offering.

He would make it easier for people to sue entities like Fox News for lying, but And well, what’s ironic about that is under his system, they’d be hit with this

huge judgment. And I think Fox and others like them, especially Fox. Would face significant pressure because, you know, remember, Fox and some of the major radio companies unlike say NewsMax, have much broader business interest. And so Fox has to worry about, you know, is the NFL happy with us? Is, you know, these other entities that that we have business relationships.

So I think it would really hurt some of these companies that they’re letting their hosts go in these directions under a DeSantis defamation standard where they’re getting sued left to right. You know, they they find themselves in bankruptcy pretty quickly. So they should be careful what they they wish for here.

Okay. So let’s talk about how this is politically going to play out. We have this massive debt ceiling crisis coming later this year. And my guess here, my instinct to what you agree on this is that is that the hosts are gonna be insisting that Republicans stick to their guns do not compromise. You wrote it one point.

After all, compromises capitulation in the right wing media world. These hosts will challenge the economic experts and claim the warnings are hyperbole from the hated liberal establishment, and any Republican who tries to do the right thing will be a rhino, the ultimate Judas sellout who deserves to lose a primary. I think you could take that to the bank that that’s gonna be the message from conservative media top to bottom. You

know what? It scares me because I actually, you know, listened to the economic experts, and I’m concerned about what this will do to the economy. But, I mean, we saw it with Rush Limbaugh in twenty twelve. If ever there was a moment Republicans were in a compromise, it was the fiscal cliff. Obama had just gotten reelected.

Democrats had gained seats in both houses of congress and there were real serious ramifications for going over this. And John Vayner just made one proposal. It it was just his opening gambit in this negotiation and Limbaugh called it a seminar in how to surrender. Right. And things have only gotten worse since then.

And, you know, people have to remember that there is nothing that in the conservative media world that they hate more than elite experts, whether they’re financial experts, medical experts, academic experts. They’re the bunch of elites that sneer at the audience in this world. That that’s how they’re portrayed and that hate the audience and want to drive them down. And so when experts are saying, you know, guys, that you’re gonna crash the economy here and it’s gonna be really bad, they’re gonna absolutely downplay that. And then they’re going to say, you you can’t sell out.

Don’t sell out. Don’t cave into Biden. And it it’s dangerous because, you know, when I talk to people in in Republican politics, they are more afraid that we’re going to do something economically catastrophic than I think I’ve ever heard them before. And this is a real danger and in its driven in part by the the might of conservative media and the fear these guys have of their next primary.

No. You’re absolutely right here. Okay. So What do you make of the fact that speaker McCarthy has given exclusive access to these January six security camera recordings?

I think it is a reminder that the most powerful voices in the Republican conservative coalition are these broadcasts First and foremost. Yeah. And I think Carlson has probably with with limbo having passed away, ascended to be the most important of these voices. Especially because he is a rock star in a lot of corners. This big vanity fair piece that that people are talking about about the this new kind of conservative thing out in the west, one of the people interviewed said, you know, the I think she was nine months pregnant.

I was like, I would go work for Tucker Carlson if he decided to run for president even though I’m nine months pregnant. You know, the the he is like the the ultimate hero in a lot of these circles. And so it it reflects his power. It also I think does shine a spotlight on something that doesn’t get enough attention We saw glimpses of it with the the text messages that came out through the one sixth committee. These hosts always claim how independent they are.

But they are regularly talking with and engaging with Republican leaders, whether it’s, you know, staffers, or it’s the principles texting back and forth, talking on the phone, and the Republican leaders are always trying to kind of curry favor. And as you said at the beginning of our conversation, look, the the power here is not the Republican leaders anymore. It is the host themselves you know, Bainer had an instance with Sean Hannity where he basically called him up and then drew John Bainer Fashion. He was probably, you know, puffing on a camel and drinking somewhere low. Was like, what the fuck entity?

You know, I feel like I can swear when it comes to John Bainer because it’s John Bainer. But he said, you know, we used to play golf. We used to be buddies. And now you beat the crap out of me every day on the airwaves. And, you know, these guys are trying to prevent that.

That’s what McCarthy is worried about. He knows that it’s sort of in the hearts and minds of the base that they don’t really trust him. They see through him as much as everybody else that he’s pretty transparently about what’s gonna give him power. What is gonna make Kevin McCarthy keep him in power that he’s willing to to go to great lengths. And he understands that if they start to perceive him as a rhino as someone who is not an ally of all of their extreme demands that he’s gonna have real political problems first because his right wing is gonna try to overthrow him.

And he’s not gonna have support to to kind of resist this, but also because he needs this base. To keep control of the house. If he starts to lose these people, it’s first gonna become ungovernable. And then that they may, you know, they have a very small majority they may well lose that in twenty twenty four. So he’s trying to protect that, and I think he probably knows on some level that he’s going to because of divided government.

He’s gonna have to cut deals at some point that are going to infuriate the base. And he’s trying to minimize the damage that he does with them in advance of that. So this is a way to kind of curry favor with the biggest voice on the right, and he’s probably a guy who if we could see into, you know, their their text messages is probably texting with Tucker. They have some sort of relationship. And the thing I think we forget about Tucker Carlson is that this guy was a card carrying member of the establishment for a very long time.

Oh, I know that it

came out where I wrote about it a couple months ago. But at one point, it came out that he was asking Hunter Biden, the same one who he now accelerates for help getting his kid into college. And Carlson’s son works on the hill, I think. And, you know, this guy’s part of the DC establishment when you forget he was like a twenty something year old kid in the the nineties with his bow tie on. Who is as establishment as establishment could get.

And now that he’s mister outsider and mister populace conservative, it doesn’t mean that the privately, those relationships have totally atrophied. So I think he’s probably got a a relationship with McCarthy. And McCarthy understands that occurring his favorite to the maximum extent possible is gonna help keep him in power at least in the short term. So

the key where there is to the maximum extent possible I mean, you know, giving forty thousand hours of security camera footage to one guy. I mean, that’s pretty driven. I mean, it’s one thing to suck up to the Curry favor, but Damn. And and I think it’s dangerous that, you know, this guy is going to shade this in

whatever way he wants. And you’ve got an already misinformed audience and based that you’re gonna throw that much more red meat and misinformation at. And the irony of this and the thing I think that these Republicans do not fully get is this is kind of like an extortion scheme where oh, here, like, okay. I’ll just pay this off. You know?

And With over time, they want more and more and more. Here he is giving forty thousand hours of of security camera footage. And that is a very, very, very big deal. But if he thinks that’s gonna buy him any leeway when it comes to the debt ceiling or it comes to a deal to keep the government open to reopen it, that’s not in Carlson’s incentive. And what what do these messages that we just got from this dominion lawsuit show us?

Carlson’s worried about Carlson’s incentives, which are I don’t wanna lose the audience. I don’t wanna lose my money making capacity here. And McCarthy thinks that he’s doing anything other than raising the price. Down the line, and they’re gonna want more and more from him, then I think he’s delusional. And I think that this is part of the problem with the GOP.

That they’ve tried to kind of accommodate this thing for years and years and years and what they’ve gotten is more and more boxed in instead. But I think that that’s what’s going on here is that he’s trying desperately to keep a crucial player whose at least he needs to keep Carlson at least neutral. If Carlson’s gonna go out there every single night and bash the heck out of him, then McCarthy is eventually gonna run into his right wing trying to overthrow him and all it takes is one of them to file this motion motion to vacate the chair — Yep. — that will then create a new speaker vote that he probably won’t be able to win. And so he knows how tenuous this

all is. So let let’s talk about the latest example here as a case study. As Sean Hannity apparently siding with Marjorie Taylor Green on national divorce, I mean, just think we got to know that we’re not going to have a national divorce. It’s not practical. It’s just really incredibly stupid idea.

But Sean Hannity is taking this seriously. Let me

play a little clip from Fox News. And here’s my question. How did you get to this point. I mean, I look at topics. For example, how do you reconcile defund the police and no bail laws with law and order?

How do you reconcile secure borders and wide open borders? How do you reconcile energy independence with energy dependence and new green dealism. How do you reconcile peace through strength with with people that wanna gut our defense there I I don’t see middle ground on a lot of these issues. So what is the other answer if it’s not a divorce?

WELL, EXACTLY SHAWN, THAT’S THE PROBLEM AND WHERE WE ARE TODAY. AND IN MY LIFE, IN MY WORLD, ALL OF MY FRIENDS regular Americans. Everyone I talk to is sick and tired and fed up of being bullied by the left, abused by the left, and disrespected by the left. And our ideas, our policies, our ways of life have become so far apart that it’s just coming to that point. And the last thing I ever want to see in America is a civil war.

No one wants that, at least everyone I know would never want that. But it’s going that direction and we have to do something about it.

Okay.

So little bit of chicken and egg here. So this idea of Charlie, did you know we were not regular Americans? Oh,

absolutely. I had no doubt about that. So the so with chicken and egg here, so this is not Sean Hannity deciding, okay, we’re gonna be pushing the agenda of national divorce. Margery Taylor Green, is this is this an idea that’s percolating out there? Is this a real thing?

She says, everyone I talks who wants to do this. Where’s this come? I’m trying to get, you know, drawing the chart in the ecosystem for how an idea like this ends up on primetime, Fox News. With people scratching their chins thinking, let’s discuss the possibility of a quasi civil war and breaking apart the United States. Where’s it coming from?

You know? I

don’t know where it originated. I don’t know, you know, who was the the starter of this, but it is something that is circulating in certain corners of the right. I saw Jesse Kelly, who’s a talk radio host. Uh-huh. And this helps explain why Hennady is engaged.

You know, Kelly is sort of in the next tier or the tier debt below that of national conservative media. And he is talking about how this is probably the best case scenario, and this is inevitable and and one of his tweets really jumped out at me. He said because, you know, the government is run by communists and they’re they’re they would throw you in jail if they could for your beliefs. And this is the kind of thing that’s choking it. And the thing is, you know, I don’t know who originated it.

But why is this idea living on? Well, it’s living on because of the Jesse Kelly’s and the Marjorie Taylor Greens are now planting this in the minds of that conservative base. And they are then forcing the entities of the world to take it seriously, pay attention to it, politics have always been more brutish than we think. I’m I’m a historian. I could give you example after example after example where people did some really nasty, horrible things.

But this was sort of like the one line of like, you don’t do this because when we had this, it was like, the eighteen thirties, forties, and fifties. And we saw where that got us. Right? And so here is this congresswoman who look, there have always been extremist in congress. There’s a guy in Georgia.

I think his territory was either overlapping where Greens was or it was fairly similar by the name of Larry McDonald, who was the head of the John Birch Society. Like, there there have always been kind of wing nuts in congress, but they they were marginalized at a point. And here is that this woman, you know, she says these things that are even the governor of Utah’s Fencer Cox, a Republican, a conservative Republican — Yeah. — expressed like dismay and horror at her saying this. So it’s something that there is still some appetite in some conservative corners to say, no, no, no, this is a line you don’t cross.

But here is Sean Hannity bringing her on to discuss it, legitimizing it, talking to her, you know, in a very sympathetic way about this, this is like the most dangerous idea you could have. This is the kind of thing that fuels people trying to start a civil war or fuels talk of of secession or things like that. And what he’s really talking about, if you listen to that clip is it’s policy differences. This is something where, you know, how does a democracy work? Okay.

We may not like what happens, but we abide by it and we work through the system to try to change it. And here she’s she’s going off in a totally different direction. And I’m sure she’s picking this up from some of the conservative media and social media that she’s consuming. Whether it’s YouTube stuff, whether it’s clips that people are sending her — Right. — whether it is, you know, somebody like Jesse Kelly And what what I think happens is these ideas start out in conservative social media or on YouTube channels or things that are getting passed around from out there people, but people who don’t have that much bandwidth.

And then as the margery tailored greens of the world hear these ideas, they see the the potential for their own star or the Jesse Kelly’s. They see the potential, first of all, if nothing else, but they’re gonna say this or tweet this and their left and the center and the establishment are doing absolutely nuts. And there’s nothing better for your brand and you’re on the right than owning the lips or or making people’s heads explode. On the left and center. So they latch onto these things.

And then the Sean handed these to the world who used to be, you know, extreme but they were extreme kind of in an establishment y way. There were lines they probably weren’t gonna cross, and there were things that they knew were ridiculous enough or dangerous enough. Not to say. They were few and far between, but they existed. Well, now the Hennady’s of the world are gonna push that.

Well, now if if Hennady’s saying it, now if you’re in a regular old, you know, Congressman Jones from, you know, random place in Alabama, Oklahoma, pick a red state where you win with sixty five percent in the general election and your real risk is in a primary. Well, now you can’t come out and extoriate this without risking a backlash against you. Without your base voter saying, well, wait a second. If Marjorie and Sean are saying this, you’re the guy who’s out there, congressmen. You’re the one who doesn’t get the danger here.

You’re the guy who doesn’t understand how bad things are right now. And how our values are under siege. So what you’re gonna do now if you’re that congressman is either you’re gonna kind of latch onto this in some way, because or you’re just gonna keep your mouth shut. And now there’s no one trying to beat this back with these voters. And more and more, it gets, you know, into the body politics or into the bloodstream of the political right and things that have seemed totally beyond the poll and fringy and crazy have gone into kind of the conservative mainstream and they’ve pulled the whole party towards not just the right, but towards the idea of politics as warfare that this is a zero sum game between two sides whose values are are absolutely antithetical to one another.

And where the left hates them, hates their values. We do, you know, jail them like a bunch of tin pot dictators despite there being no evidence to support this and it just stokes fear and it stokes anxiety and it

it could be leading us down a very dangerous path. Well, this is a couple of days ago. You know, I was talking with Will Sommer who’s got a new book about Q1 on and the fact that the way the Q1 on, you know, it says ten million adherence and you have supporters in position of real influence. I mean, this is this process of of ideas that used to fester in some corner of the fever swamps that now are moving into the mainstream. So, you know, ideas like this.

I like to kind of, you know, track them. Like, where did it start? How is it being spread? What is the role of this? There’s an old, you know, instinct is to let’s ignore the crack box.

Let’s ignore these crazy ideas. I think it’s a huge mistake because we’ve seen how fast and how far these ideas move, and the whole point of talking about conservative media is conservative media. Has dramatically changed the velocity with which those ideas move, but also the footprint in the size. So Brian Rosenwald, Thank you so much for coming on the podcast. By the way, Brian is Scholar Residence University of Pennsylvania, author of the book talk radio how an industry took over a political party that took over the United States, political historian of the United States.

Brian, thank you so much for coming on the pod. Cast today.

Charlie is always great to be

with you. Thank you. And thank you all for listening to today’s Bulwark podcast. I’m Charlie Sykes. We will be back tomorrow, and we’ll do this all over again.

The Bulwark podcast is produced by Katie Cooper, and engineered and edited by Jason Brown.

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