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Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, there's Chuck and it's just two of us today. That's all right. Jerry is a very busy person with loss on our plate. We understand that. Fully.
It's right.
It's still stuff you should know.
That's right. It is still stuff you should know. And today we are talking about cable news possibly ruining our country.
I don't know that there's much possibly about it.
Yeah, you know, I never really thought about it. I mean, I think about our country being ruined a lot. Yeah, but I you know, I never really thought a lot about like what was the initial cause of stuff. But it's hard to not make an argument that cable news has been like twenty four hour, twenty four to seven cable news coverage is what we're talking about. Yeah, is that didn't make a real dent in things?
Yeah, for sure. And like there's study after study that just shows all the negative effects it has, like ONLI like a collective scale, on an individual scale, Like it's just not good stuff. I looked all over. You can't really find any positive like studies on it. They're like, yeah,
it's really good for this. I mean, I guess it does make you feel alive to some degree, But I think that's also kind of like trying to find the good and mental cigarettes by saying they like make your throat feel icy when you're smoking them.
Yeah, And you know, I think we're going to talk about this a good place to start as sort of a brief little look at the old days before cable
news was. You know, when you and I were growing up, there were big the Big three CBS, NBC and ABC News or you know the networks, and they had news shows that came on at you know, in the evening and then like six or six thirty and then eleven, and that's where people got their national news, and it was reported on in a way where they just sort of said, here's what's going on in the world, here are the facts of what's happening, and we all had a shared reality of what was going on, and you
could kind of make up your own mind about it.
Yeah. Shared reality is a great way to put it. And there has been lots of study about the importance of that too. Right, So, like even if the people who are watching the news didn't agree with other people who are watching the news about, you know, what the solution was to this problem, they were still thinking and looking at the same problem, right, Right. That shared reality was a set of facts that everyone agreed like, this is what's going on, this is the problems that our
country's facing. And then you have like an argument in the marketplace of ideas about you know, what's the best solution and the best way to move forward? Right, Yeah, And when you have that kind of thing people have, it was called a sort of social, cultural, and political glue that just kind of brought people together and very importantly gave people a sense of a shared national identity, like people were all Americans, right, everybody living in the
United States, We're all Americans. Even though we don't always agree, we don't hate each other for being different. Necessarily we are all at the end of the day, Americans.
Yeah, for sure. And at the center of that glue, well, or maybe it was the glue, I guess, was that shared reality of hey, we're all agreeing on the at least the basic facts of what's going on. We did an entire episode on the Fairness Doctrine. It was released appropriately on July fourth, twenty nineteen, So if you want to go listen like in depth about the fairness Doctrine, you can, but just sort of a quick overview for this purpose though, is the FCC here in the United States.
The Federal Communications Commission was created in the early nineteen thirties and their mandate was to quote encourage the larger and more effective use of radio in the public interest. And you know, radio was their jam early on, obviously before television and the fairness doctrine was conceived in the radio days in the nineteen thirties and forties because there were a bunch of one sided political editorials on the
radio at the time. So they said, hey, after World War two pass, let's get together and at least decide on a set of rules that all radio and eventually TV stations need to adhere to.
Yeah, and a lot of it had to do with the duty that broadcasters had to serve the public good. That was the point of getting a broadcast license. Right. Yeah, you made money selling ads and stuff like that, but ultimately what the government wanted you to do was to basically serve the public. And the way that you did that was you devoted airtime to objective, non partisan coverage
of all issues. Right, you have to be fair. You had to give other people who had a different point of view a chance to get their coverage as well. If somebody in particular was criticized by the station itself, by the newscast, so it's an editorials, that person should have ample opportunity to respond. And then this also was
part of our Presidential Debates episode. Yeah, part of fairness doctrine was if you were a political candidate, you got equal time to every other political candidate, like all political candidates, had to get exactly the same amount of airtime over the course of the race.
Yeah, so that was the fairness doctrine. It worked really well for a long time. And then, you know, as we detailed in the episode, in nineteen eighty Ronald Reagan came around and said, let me quote Josh Clark of the Future nuts to that, and so he said, yeah's, you know, let's open it up to competition. If you're a broadcaster, you should be able to compete in the marketplace for viewers and just let the chips fall where
they may. And so in nineteen eighty seven, the FCC stopped enforcing the fairness doctrine, and almost immediately radio was the first place where we saw the big change. Talk radio, especially in the AM dial, exploded, I think over a thirty five year period between nineteen sixty and nineteen ninety five. There they went from two talk radio stations in the United States as in one followed by two to more than eleven hundred and most of those, I think about
seventy percent of those radio stations were conservative. That just exploded in conservative talk radio with people like you know, the King of that whole movement Rush Limbaugh.
Yeah, so they stopped enforcing in nineteen eighty seven. He went on the air for the first time in nineteen eighty eight, and in about six years he had a three hour show every day that was broadcast live across the nation in six hundred and fifty stations and there are twenty million people who tuned into it. Dittoheads, he called them. And this was like he was the first person to introduce the United States to the concept of
just bashing the other party. Yeah, he was the guy that just laid the groundwork for this, and as a result, he kind of because he was so popular and because it was so entertaining if you shared his political views, he basically brought the GOP to heel, Like he was
the head of the GOP de facto. So much so that when the GOP took over in nineteen ninety four, took over Congress, they I saw it made him an honorary member of that Congress because he was considered so responsible for getting all of those Republicans elected.
Wow, I didn't know that was a thing.
I didn't either. I think they actually made it up for him.
Uh right, honorary Congress member pretty much. So yeah, that was a you know, TV took notice and later, as we'll see, you know, we'll get to Fox News in a little bit after we talk about the first one CNN, but later Fox News would say like, hey, here's a model of you know, kind of political commentary as entertainment we can emulate, and like, people love this guy. He's got twenty million listeners every day, and like, imagine the kind of cash we can make if we brought that
model to television. But first was CNN. We just lost one of my childhood heroes growing up, Ted Turner, very recently he passed away, like less than two weeks ago as we record this in real time, but Ted was the founder of CNN, the very first twenty four hour cable news channel, and that came around in nineteen eighty after he had made a bunch of money inheriting and then running his father's billboard advertising business, and he was like, you know what, I think we could use a twenty
four hour news cable channel. And his literal quote was to bring together in brotherhood, in kindness and friendship and in peace the people of this nation and this world. That was his vision.
Ted Turner was the real deal as far as founding CNN. And this was bran New Like like you said, people tuned in at six thirty and eleven PM, and that's where you got your news. Now you could tune to CNN and watch news twenty four hours a day. No one had ever done anything like that ever, And it took a little while to catch on because people were like, it's not a lot to watch, or I'm watching the same stuff over and over again. These people seem to
be trying really hard. And then the Challenger Space Shuttle exploded in nineteen eighty six, and that is when CNN showed why it was around.
Yeah, for sure. And can I just have a quick
aside about Ted Turner? Oh sure, because he was if he grew up in Atlanta in the nineteen seventies and eighties, he was you know, a good chance he might have been your hero like he was mine, because not only did he launch CNN, but more importantly to a kid like me, he was the owner at one point of both the Atlanta Braves and the Atlanta Hawks, and he launched the superstation WTBS, which was a you know, that's where I learned about what comedy was by watching stuff
like the Carol Burnett Show and old black and white stuff like Illigan's Island and Andy Griffith and Green Acres. And he was just this larger than life guy. He won an America's Cup his philanthropy. He gave a billion dollars in nineteen ninety seven, which was unheard of it at the time for somebody to give that amount of money to the UN to support humanitarian aid and global health and the empowerment of women and developing countries. He
saved the American Bison. He's just an amazing dude. And I was at a Willie Nelson concert at an outdoor venue at Chastain Park in Atlanta in the nineties and Ted came in a little late and it was like you would have thought the ghost of Elvis had walked in. There was a murmur, like an audible murmur in the crowd, and people like pointing to the point where Willie Nelson was, like what's going on? When he was singing and he finished his song and he just went, oh, Ted's here,
And it was great. It was just like he was a He basically was Atlanta. He owned that town in the in the seventies and eighties. So yeah, very sad when he passed. So I just wanted to give a little quick tribute.
Yeah, and that's fitting too, because like his that journalistic vision of like bringing everyone together through you know, global coverage of all the issues facing us like that, Like he was a true believer in that. It wasn't like a cynical thing where he's like, I'm really just trying
to get a license to print money. I even saw Fox News article or profile on him that they ran recently after he died, and they were even speaking about him like respectfully as far as his journalistic integrity goes. So he really did. When he founded CNN, it really was like for good reason.
Yeah, So it was you know, twenty four seven news. No one had ever seen anything like that. That was the first like reporting of news in progress when something broke. It was the first time that they had the newsticker at the bottom of a screen. You know. People liked CNN. It wasn't like it was some huge, like mad success
right off the bat. But then when things started happening in real time in the eighties, like the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster, obviously, the Berlin Wall falling when little baby Jessica was rescued in nineteen eighty seven, and then like hugely impactful when the Gulf War started. CNN was there for all of that stuff, like second by second reporting, and no one had ever seen stuff like that before, no like.
And they were highly criticized for some of their reporting. They were allowed to stay in a rock and they in some ways became a propaganda arm for Saddam Hussein accidentally, but they still like showed what you were supposed to do covering a war. And also CNN was largely responsible for making the goal for the first live televised war in history because they covered it that much.
Yeah, I remember sitting around watching it with my roommates in college, like just coming home from after class and like putting the war on. Yep, it was really weird.
It was always on because CNN was always on covering it.
Yeah, for sure. And you know, we all should also point out that there would be a change at CNN after Turner, and we'll get to that. But if you're on the right side politically and you hate CNN, that was not Ted Turner's vision to start a left leaning media outlet. That was not what he was trying to do at all. So I hope those words kind of come through here.
Sure. Sure, So there was a kind of out of the gate an issue that CNN faced, which was if you're covering news, like, yeah, news happens pretty frequently, but four hours of coverage can be overdoing it. So rather than just saying the same reporting over and over and over again, they brought in people analysts to talk about to kind of unpack what that news meant, maybe make predictions about how news was going to break, like which way is Congress going to vote? You know, is the
President going to veto this? And that became like an established part of twenty four hour news and from that moment that those people started to come in, talking heads, pundits like that laid the groundwork for opinion opinion based journalism.
Yeah, for sure. It was you know, after the Gulf War in the mid nineties, when is when things really started to change and started to lead to our current kind of sad state of affairs with the news cycle. And one of those things I kind of hinted at was when Ted Turner left Scene and Time Warner brought out CNN in nineteen ninety six, and they were the ones responsible for saying, like, hey, I think if we get a little more divisive here and we lean left
of center, we can get more ad revenue. And I mean that's kind of the the sad thing about all this stuff we're going to talk about moving forward. It was it was all money driven, you know, right, Yes, it was. It was all for and still is for advertising dollars. And at the time you had two really great political foils, and Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich on the screen. Yeah, who two very much on the opposite
sides of the spectrum. Guys who you know, Clinton was a good villain for for Republicans and then you know later liberals as we would learn more stuff about him, right, and Gingrich was on the other side. Man, just he really is the guy like in entrenched in politics that ushered in that real good versus evil thing.
Yeah, as in the Democrats are evil, were good, It's up to us to save America. Before that, the existential threats to the United States were external, namely the USSR. After Ginkrich like Rose and took power of the GOP, the threat was domestic. It was the Democrats that were the threat to America as far as the GOP was concerned.
That was new. Yeah, that was new, and that was the beginning of the end of bipartisanship, whereas now today, if you defect and vote against your own party, you're a trader to your party, you know, not that you're doing what your constituents think you should do or voting by your conscience. You're a trader. That's new, and that's basically where it began.
Yeah, I mean, I remember being a kid, and I wasn't involved in politics when I was younger, like very into that kind of thing. But I remember hearing the adults during election season, not my parents because they never talked about any of that stuff, but just other people, like, you know, we're gonna I'm gonna see which one of these men speaks to me the most, and I'm going to make up my mind on who I think is
going to be the best leader. And it's just like, I mean, I know they're technically or probably independence today, but it's hard to imagine just that being a thing today at all. You know.
It's I'm sure for people who didn't grow up in times where that was possible, it's very hard to imagine Yeah. Another thing that happened in the nineties, like we talked about, Rush Limbaugh was enormous. Yeah. Fox News was another huge thing that happened when it was founded in nineteen ninety six, and we'll talk about that afterward. And then I have a pet theory, Chuck, what did you think about this?
I had a dealing this with you.
Yeah, what do you think?
Uh?
Sure, I agree.
My theory is that the Real World premiered in nineteen ninety two, and you might say, what does that have to do with anything, Well, it exposed people to reality television, which is not real. But this idea that you can just be horrible to other people and that's like an acceptable way to be. The groundwork for that was laid around. And then yeah, so you put all those things together.
The mid nineties were a really bad beginning. The seed, the evil dark seed that rotted the core in heart of America out that started in the mid nineties.
That's right. It sounds like a great time for a break because you mentioned something happening in nineteen ninety six, and we'll talk about that right after this, all right, So before we broke, you mentioned Fox News debuting in nineteen ninety six. Fuck just very quickly about Roger Ales, who helped launch Fox News. He was a Republican political consultant for many, many years. He worked. He helped to get Reagan Nixon, all the way back to Nixon George H. W.
Bush elected. He understood that TV was a very powerful thing as far as shaping public opinion. By this point, he had met Rush Limbaugh in nineteen ninety one and for a little while produced a TV version of Limball's
show in the early nineties. But it was in nineteen ninety six when in Ozzy named Rupert Murdoch, who had previously given us The Simpsons with the Fox Broadcasting Company, which he launched in nineteen eighty six, the Fox Company, he said, you know what, we need our own news station. Let's get Fox News on the airwaves, and Roger Ayles you're going to be the guy to do it.
Yeah. He designed Fox News as we understand it today, basically right out of the gate. And one thing to understand about him being a political operative who worked on the Nixon campaign. That sixty eight Nixon campaign was where a guy named Kevin Phillips came up with what's called the Southern strategy today, which was essentially the idea that politics is about who hates who and then playing on those prejudices to get people to vote essentially about other people.
It's where the culture war started. And Roger Ayles basically took that the politics of who hates who and put it on TV as a twenty four hour cable news network.
Yeah, in charge for it.
Yeah, that's another thing too that we'll see. Like they have made tons and tons of cash, but they're in a really big turning point right now because of how they their business model.
Yeah, for sure. So in the beginning they had a claim, you know, Ales and Murdoch that it was going to be Fox News is going to be an a political channel. Quote, we expect to do fine balanced journalism. But behind the scenes they were like, hey, we think that most mainstream news outlets have a liberal bias, so we're going to come along and correct that with Fox News. And that fair and balance motto that Fox News launched under Ales was a It was a literal troll to liberal critics.
It was, you know, he knew it wasn't fair and balanced, and so that was his way of poking the bear. They I think in twenty seventeen when Ales was fired and the very famous or infamous rather sexual harassment scandal. That's when they got rid of the fair and balance tag for good.
Yeah, and Roger Ales and Bill O'Reilly yeah, among others. So Ales was out, but he had been you know, he had governed this thing for twenty years and like his his vision is still still there today. Like the way that he shaped it is still Fox is essentially still the same thing as it was from nineteen ninety six.
It was he perfected it right out of the box, essentially, and it really started to kind of gain traction pretty quickly after it came along because Bill Clinton handed them a beautiful gift in like a Robin's egg blue Tiffany's box with a beautiful bow on it, and that is called the Monica Lewinsky scandal.
Yeah. In that box was a cigar and a blue dress.
Yeah.
Yeah, that was you know, yeah, there's no other way to look at it than a gift. Because they were able to run wild with that, and they saw ratings jump by four hundred percent and we're like, wow, we can literally print money now, this is amazing, you know, not too far on the heels of that was the contested two thousand election, of which we had a complete episode of bushby Gore, and then not too long after that nine to eleven and then the subsequent war in Iraq.
So Fox News really got off to a strong start thanks to these sort of big media events.
Yes, for sure. And one other thing about the same stuff too, the two thousand election nine to eleven, Fox News was reporting this from the Republican viewpoint, all of these things, like they were supporting George Bush, they weren't questioning whether we should invade a rock, like this was the angle that it was coming from. And all the way back then, say around two thousand, like they were
the only ones just overtly producing slanted news. The other cable news and broadcast news were still trying to essentially carry out the fairness doctrine to the best of their ability.
Yeah, so we should point that out. But Fox News really jumped ahead and was, you know, beating CNN in the ratings for the first time by two thousand and two. I think they command about seventy percent of the cable news audience today, right, So they're they're kicking everyone's butt on that front, right, We need to talk about MSNBC, which we'll get to the name change to ms now later. We'll refer to them as MSNBC in this section because it's about when they launched, which was a few months
before Fox News in nineteen ninety six. I never knew that it was ms was Microsoft.
I think I knew that.
Yeah, it was launched as a partnership with Microsoft. So MSNBC was Microsoft NBC, and they were trying to get like, you know, this was the beginning of the tech movement. They were trying to get young, tech savvy audience members. They had like shows kind of tailored to that. There was one called The Site Site with Solidad O'Brien. It did not work out. And then after that they were like, all right, you know what we need to do This saturation coverage model that CNN launched that Fox News is
crushing it. But they started out doing conservative news.
Yeah, they were trying to basically take Fox on where it was on its own territory. Yeah, very surprisingly, Laura Ingram and Tucker Carlson both started at MSNBC.
It's funny to think about now, right, And I.
Think Tucker Carlson was the one who later convinced MSNBC executives to hire Rachel Maddow. Yeah, the same year that Tucker Carlson was hired. So like MSNBC was this kind of Petrie dish for all sorts of TV on air newsy personalities. Yeah, that would become huge later on. And again, like you were saying, it was because they were basically trying to take on Fox. And that's one thing to understand about MSNBC is the moment it pivoted from trying to be like the tech the tech news channel, to
you know, opinion news. It was essentially just completely agnostic. It was up for whoever was going to pay the most, which is why they tried to take on Fox, because it was clear that Fox was making the most money, right, And then they found well, actually, if we present ourselves as the antidote to Fox, like the liberal Fox, then you know, we can probably make even more money. And they did, and that's what happened.
Yeah, and that's they really hit it big. In two thousand and six, when Keith Oberman hit the airwaves, he had a show called Countdown. It was a primetime show and on Countdown one week he did a rant that he called a special commentary where he was criticizing the Bush administration's handling or mishandling rather a Hurricane Katrina. And MSNBC even at that time, we're like, no, man, that's a little much like you need to tone that down.
But then the ratings were going through the roof. People loved it, and so they're like, oh, okay, well, I guess that's the new way forward, and go Keith Oberman.
Go.
Yep. They unleashed the beast, and he just set the groundwork for everybody else. And that's exactly what they were doing. During prime time. They had talking heads who hosted their own show that were just like overtly dismissing other kind of trairie opinions and talking about how dumb that was, and you know, really just trying to destabilize the opposing party's ideas. Right, Yeah, so they're there. I mean, their
primetime ratings just went through the roof. Apparently, I think it went up sixty percent from two thousand and seven to two thousand and eight when they started attacking the right and also when Obama was like a candidate and then you know, president, and it was this huge thing that apparently also boosted their ratings, and I saw the MSNBC traditionally has actually done better when they're promoting a Democrat who has who's in charge of the White House
or in charge of Congress, then they are bashing the right. Fox tends to do the opposite. They do better when there's a Democrat in power and they bash them, they do better when they're out of power.
Yeah, well, I mean that's something we should talk about quickly. I guess it was a paper in twenty twenty five from UC Boulder finance professor named Diego Garcia who analyze like who, like what these networks are talking about, who they're talking about, and like how are they talking about them?
And they found like kind of supporting what you just said that MSNBC spent the majority of their time about sixty percent of their time talking about Republicans, Fox News about the same and reverse talking about Democrats and obviously both speaking very negatively about the others. And this also trickles down to CNBC in Bloomberg and then Fox Business
on the right. And that outrage like attacking the opposite side, that outrage viewership they found really sold that you know, that goes by a lot of names like rage profiteering or you know, obviously just selling anger or angertainment. I'm not a big fan of that one.
What about the anger industrial complex?
Yeah that's pretty good. Sure, yeah, but they found out it sells listeners, which in turn sells ads and makes money. So they really all sort of are those too. At the very least down on that. CNN is still and this isn't just us opinionizing, if they're literal media watchdogs that you know, study and rate these channels, and CNN of the big three cable news networks, is ranked you know, slightly left of center compared to more left on NBC and obviously way more right for Box News.
Right. And then also bear in mind CNN typically has the lowest ratings of MSNBC and CNN. Right. Yeah, yeah, because angertainment sorry, sells like really well. And the reason why is because you get a physical like pop from being angry, like it releases neurotransmitters that make you feel
good and powerful and alive again. And then you start to come down and you want it again, so you go back, You stay tuned, you stay glued for more, and like you said, that's this divide in America has just come from people who are targeting the brains of people just sing that button over and over again to keep them on the same channel for money. That's it. That's it, That's all there is to it. Yeah.
I was trying my best to find out any kind of study on or just statistics on how many hours a day loyal viewers of each of these channels like has it on? And I could only just go from what I anecdotally see, which is I know people on the right that in their house like have Fox News just on as Oh yeah, that's the background music. It's
on all day long. When you're passing through the room, you can just pick up a tidbit here and there, not necessarily just sitting literally and watching it eyes glued forward the entire time. But it's just on. And I don't know anybody on the left that I know that has the TV literally constantly on their favorite cable news network.
It's interesting, I do. It's typically CNN that'll have that'll be on all day.
H see, I don't know anyone that does that. That's good to know that that happens, but yeah, it definitely does. It seems just to me it seems unhealthy and really out there to only have that on all day long. It is no matter what side.
You probably deeply unhealthy. It's bad for the person, it's bad for society to have that on all day long.
Yeah, any channel or any television, Oh sure for that.
Totally, totally. So there was a study also that we found. It was from twenty twenty five and they looked at it was in Nature magazine or Nature of the Journal. They looked at primetime shows from twenty twelve to twenty twenty two on Fox, MSNBC, and CNN to find out
which were the most polarized. They found that over those ten years, Fox had the largest number of highly polarizing shows Sean Hannity, The O'Reilly Factor, Tucker Carls and Laura Ingram, but stnn's Cuomo Prime Time MSNBC's Deadline White House were the most polarizing shows across all three networks. Oh, interesting, there's something else to unpack their two Chuck, These are primetime shows. Yeah, that is a that's new as well.
That means that people like this is where these these cable networks make like the bulk of their advertising revenue is prime time. That means that people left entertainment, They left cop shows, court shows, medical dramas, and moved over to news cable news. That's what they watch in primetime. Now that's just boring, But it's not though. It's like for me, like your your buttons are just pressed over and over and over.
Yeah, you know, yeah for sure. Uh. You know. One thing we do need to point out though, because these are primetime shows that like it's changing the political landscape and how our country like thinks about our fellow citizens. So it's an important thing to address. Some of the stuff you see on Fox News is not based in truth. And that is not just my opinion as somebody who's
clearly on the left side of things. You need only look at something like the eight one hundred million dollar like close to a billion dollar settlement to avoid a very public, highly anticipated trial where they were going to have to trot up, you know, Chucker Carlson and Sean Hannity and like put these people on the stand to talk about the literal lies they told about dominion voting systems.
So that trial was coming up, and they're like, no, no, no, that would be really bad if we had to go up on the stand and admit under oath that we lied about all this stuff. So let's just settle for eight hundred million dollars and never even fully admit wrongdoing.
Yeah, I mean it's not just that one, like the cover up, the idea that there was a cover up over Benghazi, conspiracy theories about the death of Seth Rich, the Birther conspiracy theory, all these things reported on lie that Donald Trump had the twenty twenty elections stolen from him.
Like these things were reported right, not like, hey, this is what some people are saying, Like these were reported as fact, right, And so this is that part of the twisting or the separating of the shared reality that has like scholars concerned, just everyday people who know about this concerned, and like it's typically viewed from what I've seen as a false equivocation to say, well, MSNBC does that too. Nobody does it like Fox does. They just don't.
That's just fact. But that's not to say it doesn't happen on other networks like MSNBC. One really stand out example is the Russia Gate episode with Rachel Maddow, who was covering the molar investigation. Is basically like here, it comes any moment, Now they're going to show that Trump is this puppet that's being directed by the Kremlin, and was really like so much so she got sued for sixty seven million dollars Reliable and she beat that, but you know, it was still it had legs like she
was really really promoting this conspiracy theory. And yes it was tied to Robert Mueller's actual investigation and that actually was happening, but the leaps and bounds and like intimation she was making just went well beyond any kind of journalistic standard. And then there's one other thing Chuck too, that all three do, and that is essentially filtering what
makes it on there? Right, So, like say CNN decides that they're not going to put some negative coverage of Barack Obama on and instead they're going to either just not cover that or they're going to cover positive coverage of him. Right, that's filtering. You're filtering news to help promote like a favored candidate. And when you're doing opinion journalism, you have a favorite candidate, you have a candidate that you hate, and your point is to teach your viewers
to love that candidate or hate that candidate. That's just that arises from it naturally.
Yeah, there was a study in twenty twenty three where they paid Fox News viewers, like conservative people. They paid them to watch CNN for a month for thirty days to see what effect that had on their political views. And what they found was they were seeing news that Fox News didn't even cover. That's part of that filtering. They were like, oh, well, we didn't know this was happening because Fox News just literally wouldn't cover it. Yeah,
they filter out that stuff to fit a narrative. And I after the month, they had a slightly lower opinion of Donald Trump, these conservatives did, and a slightly higher opinion. And this was at the time in twenty twenty three when mail in balloting was a big deal, a slightly higher opinion of mail in ballots. But then they also said in the follow up it was like a short lived thing once they went back to Fox News, and
you know, that stuff went away. But you know, this is something I see a lot when I'm I see a story or I'm like, well, here's a big factual thing that happened. That's a big black eye, and I will go see and a lot of times and this is online. Foxnews dot Com just literally just doesn't cover it, right, like at all. It's just not there, like it didn't happen.
And if you're only getting your news from one source and you don't know that something is literally happening because it's not being covered, that's bad for democracy.
For sure, you know, yeah, because you're you just yeah, you can't hold somebody accountable if you're not actually reporting on the bad stuff too. You know, should we take a break, Yeah, let's take a break, all right.
We'll be right back, So, Chuck, we talked about opinion media.
I've been calling opinion journalism, and I think that's actually a contradiction in terms. Yeah, so opinion media, like we said, it's just basically like putting somebody who's willing to say stuff about you know, they're fairly knowledgeable about a particular topic and they're going to say something and maybe it's
even a controversial opinion. Like, that's opinion media. And it is so much cheaper than actual journalism, which is one reason why it's just such a huge prominent part of prime time on cable news.
Yeah. Cheaper meaning inexpensive, not like a cheap shot just to clear that up. Like real journalism takes a lot of time, which gets expensive. You have to conduct interviews, and you have to research real data, and you have to fact check, and you have to cultivate your sources. If you just throw someone on who's like, hey, I'm mad about this thing, I'll go on TV and talk about it like I'm a famous quote unquote journalist, Like
that's super cheap. All you have to do is kind of frame the bare bones of a story and then rant about it, and that negative negativity really sells. There was an analysis into twenty eleven where a researcher examine the primetime lineups of the two really big opposing sides, Fox News and MSNBC, and they were obviously ideologically opposed, but they were Fox News was as far as the tone and language they use, was ninety two percent negative,
eight percent neutral, and zero percent positive. On the other side, MSNBC was ninety percent negative, five percent neutral, and five percent positive. And it's that cultivation of anger that in fear that very sadly, that's what drives the loyalty in the viewership these days.
Exactly because again, the anger is an addictive thing and they know how to press those buttons. One of the ways they do press the buttons too. This is groundbreaking as far as journalism goes. They've helped us with this. And the way that he put it was they make you the viewer the protagonist. Yeah, so that means that this news that's happening, it's happening to you. The Democrats are doing this to you. They're trying to take money out of your pocket or vice versa. You know, the
GOP is trying to drive this country into fascism and authoritarianism. Like, like, it's you that this is happening to Your family's going to get, you know, taken by in the middle of the night by the jack boots or something like that. Right, Yeah, So like that's new and that huts through like directly to the person. So if you're pressing someone's buttons to try to make them angry, talking to them directly and saying you are the victim, that will get things going
pretty easily. That primes the old pump pretty well.
Yeah for sure, you know. I mean, I think that's one of the saddest things about all this is the fact that that negative content is what sells, and that's just the reality of kind of where we are. But that has fueled a partisan gap that is like we've not seen at any other time in our history. And there, you know, it's always there's always been a Parson divides,
but not like we have now. There was a Pew Research study on that Parson divide in nineteen ninety four, and this was before Fox News and MSNBC launched, because I think they launched in ninety six, like we said, but fewer at the time, fewer than twenty percent of either Republicans or Democrats view the opposing party as very unfavorable. By twenty seventeen, that number was forty five percent, so
more than doubled. Also, that's from that same study. In nineteen ninety four, only sixty percent of Republicans identified themselves as quote more consistently conservative than the average Democrat. By twenty seventeen, that number had reached ninety five percent, and on the Democrat side, ninety seven percent identified as more consistently liberal than the average Republican, up from seventy percent
in nineteen ninety four. So you know, they're both according to their mandates, they're both doing what they want to do very well.
Yeah, I also saw to update it a little bit. In twenty twenty two, seventy two percent of GOP respondents said that Democrats were immoral, and sixty three percent said that of Democrats said that Republicans were immoral. Yeah, that is a character like attack. Yeah, not like you have stupid ideas or you're gonna, you know.
Waste our country.
Yeah, you are a bad person, your morals are compromised, maybe you don't even have any morals. That is a totally different level of attack. And we're talking about this American calling that American that because they believed something different politically, and all of this again is being fostered, supported and stoked by the for our cable news that different sides watch all the time.
Yeah, it's not I mean I kind of thought before we looked into this stuff and the actual data that like online, you know, because things are so siloed online as far as the echo chamber goes. If you get your news from the internet or social media especially, but there was a study from University of Pennsylvania that found that cable TV news is way more divisive. Only four percent of Americans get their online news, so you know,
social media or whatever. Online from predominantly left or right leaning sources, compared to seventeen percent of Americans that said they got fifty percent of more of their TV news from a very hard right or very hard left network.
Yeah, and half watched Fox News. The other half watched MSNBC or CNN.
Yep, right down the middle.
Yeah. I mean. One of the other things too, is like Foxes gets criticized and criticized, and yes, they were innovators, pioneers. They completely change journalism and they do stuff that CNN and MSNBC don't do. But it just makes you wonder, like how different would things be today if CNN and MSNBC had just stuck to good journalism and just let
Fox do their own thing. The fact that they entrenched and dug in on the other side because they wanted advertising dollars too, And there's a whole untapped market out there of liberals and left leaning people that aren't being spoken to if they had just kept their their journalistic integrity, Like what kind of Like I don't think we would be in this mess today.
Yeah, I mean, you don't watch this stuff. To you, I haven't turned on a cable news network in I don't know since the early two thousands.
Maybe I've definitely watched it much more recent than that, But I mean, I think once, once, once I realized, and I think this is typically the case for people, Like the point is to upset you and make you mad. That's what they're trying to do. That's the whole thing. It's tough not to resent that and just be like, I'm not subjecting myself to this.
Yeah, I think for me was when you could really source your news, very specifically online is when that's when I fully like made that switch.
Right, So, cable news is actually doing pretty good right now, even though cable as a whole is losing viewership. More and more people are cutting chords. I think, like more people are getting their news and information online, even though it's still smaller relative to the number of people who get their news from cable news. It's the proportions. The trends are shifting, and one of the reasons why is
because cable news viewers are literally dying off. Right, for the most part, the median ages of CNN, Fox, and MSNBC viewers are sixty seven, sixty eight, and seventy one. Right, Yeah, those people aren't going to live for and as they as they start to pass away, there's not new people who are younger coming in behind them. That's not where younger people are going. First of all, they don't even have cable anymore. And secondly, if they do, they're not
going to watch cable news necessarily. They're probably going to be online getting their news.
Yeah, for sure. And you know, viewership is declining. Fox News is seeing has seen the most dramatic decline. They were down twenty one percent in total primetime viewership compared to the same weeks year over year February to well, February to February twenty five to twenty six, and then in twenty twenty five that is when MSNBC late I guess late last year is when they parted ways with their NBC News parent company, and that's when they relaunched
is what is now ms now. Their viewership actually looks like that might have worked. They increased by fifteen percent year over year for the same timeframe, and CNN is the one that's really jumped up. They saw a forty six percent year of a year increase over that same period.
Yea, And I think one reason why Fox is declining relative to ms now in CNN is because there's Newsmax News Nation one American news network.
Right, three further outlets.
Yeah right, they were like, you thought Fox was hard, right, watch this. Yeah, Fox suddenly seems centrist compared to those guys. So they're dragging a lot of people away from Fox News. I think that's a big problem for Fox.
Yeah. They lost some of their stars too. You know when Tucker Carlson left, and obviously before that, what was his face, Bill O'Reilly was. Yeah, those were big losses for that network.
For sure, and I think losing Roger Als two probably was a big deal for it too.
Yeah.
Good point. But also their whole their whole business model we were talking about earlier is in jeopardy because like they make money through advertisers, true, but their advertisers are from viewers, right, and so a fewer people are buying, they have fewer viewers. They also make money from subscriptions, right. So when you pay for your cable and you're like, I have to pay my cable bill to the cable company, you're actually not. You're paying the cable company a fraction
of that. The rest is being divided up among all the cable channels who charge a fee to be included in this bundle. That's the wholesale business model. That's what cable news does, all cable channels do. That's with cable dying, they're not going to be able to do that anymore. Now They're going to have to be like, actually, we want to charge you directly like Netflix or Hulu does to get Fox we're going to be streaming online, right
or to get CNN. Say, they're in the same jeopardy too, And that means people who are going to be like, wait, I got Fox News for free before. You didn't really because it was part of cable you were paying for, but to you it was free, and now Fox is asking you to pay, you know, twelve bucks a month or something like that to get it. Some people will
do that, some people won't. So there really kind of worried about that, and not just Fox again, MSNBC and CNN are facing the same crisis, just apparently to a slightly lesser degree right now.
Right but the writing's on the wall for everybody, and they're all trying to pivot a little bit to the more online model, even in little ways like CNN prioritizing vertical video podcast. You know, MSNBC has a lot of very popular podcasts. Rachel Maddow is at the center, you know, their world podcast wise. But those have found like big time audiences, so they're you know, they they know what's
coming and they know that. I think three quarters of the baby boomer generation are going to be gone by the year twenty thirty seven, and that's a big chunk of all these audiences for sure.
One last thing, something occurred to me while I was
researching this chuck that there is a silver lining. There's a good thing to this huge partisan divide of one side versus the other that cable news has helped bring about, and that is that it is carved out a middle of people who are like, wow, Democrats and Republicans are terrible and they suck as both parties, which to me has opened like a room for a viable third party to start to develop, maybe multiple third parties start to develop and actually get rid of like the two party
system might have shot itself in the foot by going so full on tribal. That's my hope. That's I'm hoping that at least that good comes out of this.
Yeah, me too, because none of it's any good for our country, you know.
It genuinely isn't. It genuinely isn't. And to our conservative, Republican right on the right listeners like this is not an attack on you or your beliefs, and us throwing Rachel Maddow into the mix was not just bait for the right to you left leaning listeners like she really did overdo Russiagate, Like we tried to do this as a and balanced as we possibly could, so please don't have taken it any other way.
Yeah, we say, flush all three down the.
Toilet, exactly, Chuck, exactly.
Oh man, what a that's a fun episode. I enjoyed this one.
Well, I'm glad you did, Chuck. I think you just accidentally walked right into listener mail.
Then all right, I'm gonna call this a follow up about the Hindenburg episode. Hey, guys, just finished listening to the Hindenburg. Great stuff. One thing that really got me laughing was the Bend Dover comments. Magically, I have an adult friend whose name is Ben Dover. As you can imagine, he's a great guy. As I think anyone with names
like that could be teased or made fun of. Turn Out to be amazing people usually, so shout out to all the Bendovers out there in the world, including my friend Nice, longtime listener, and I work as a wildlife biologist. In the first time, I was introduced to your shows during a long drive to get a California condor sick with lead poisoning from northern California back to the San Diego Zoo to keep habituating the bird. We drove many hours with the bird in a crate in the back
of the suv and absolute silence into past time. My coworker and I shared one side of corded earbuds and alternated between our favorite podcasts. This is long before smartphones are an everyday occurrence and people could listen to whatever whenever. I'm now a mom and still find ourselves on long drives because we live in a pretty remote place. My family also listens and loves a podcast because its informational, interesting, and kid friendly, and we hope to make it to
a live show the next time you're close by. Thanks for all you do and keeping us company over so many years and so many miles. That is from Katie.
Oh thanks a lot, Katie. That was is it? Katie?
Or kt Katie.
Okay, thank you, Katie. That was a very cute little sketch that you made for us.
There.
I can just imagine you and your coworker each with the earbud.
I love that.
If you want to be like Katie and get in touch with us with a cute little anecdote, we love those. You can wrap it up, spank it on the bottom, and send it off to stuff Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com.
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