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Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHard Radio. Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and it's just two of us today. That's all right.
Jerry is a very busy person with last on her plate. We understand that fully. Right, still stuff you should know.
“That's right, that 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. 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 24 hours, 24/7 cable news coverage is what we're talking about.
Yeah, because that didn't make a real dent in things. Yeah, for sure. And like, their study after study that just shows all the negative effects it has like, unlike a collective scale, an individual scale, like it's just not good stuff. I looked all over you.
You can't really find any positive studies on it there. 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 you throat feel I see when I'm smoking them. Yeah, and you know, I think we're going to talk about this a good place to start is sort of a brief little look at the old days. Before cable news was, you know, when you and I were growing up, they were big, the big three CBS NBC and ABC news are, you know, the networks.
And they had news shows that came on at, you know, in the evening and then who looked like 6 or 6 30 and then 11. 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 were watching the news didn't agree with other people who were
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 are countries 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 were 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 4th, 2019.
“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, the FCC here in the United States, the Federal Communications Commission was created in the early 1930s. And their mandate was to quote, encourage a larger and more effective use of radio in the public interest. And, you know, radio is there jam early on, obviously, before television. And the fairness doctrine was conceived in the radio days in the 1930s and 40s.
Because there are a bunch of one-sided political editorials on the radio at the time. So they said, hey, after World War II 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 it. So it's an editorial, 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 that worked really well for a long time.
And then, as we detailed in the episode in 1980, Ronald Reagan came around and said, let me quote Josh Clark of the future, nuts to that. And so he said, yeah, let's open it up to competition.
“If you're broadcasters, you should be able to compete in the marketplace for viewers and just let the chips fall where they may.”
And so in 1987, the FCC stopped enforcing the fairness doctrine. And almost immediately, radio is the first place where we saw the big change. Talk radio, especially in the AM dial, exploded. I think over a 35-year period between 1960 and 1995, they went from two talk radio stations in the United States, as in one followed by two, to more than 1100. And most of those, I think about 70% of those radio stations were conservative. It 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 1987. He went on the air for the first time in 1988. And in about six years, he had a three-hour show every day that was broadcast live across the nation
in 650 stations. And there were 20 million people who tuned into it, did oh heads, 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 heal. Like, he was, he was the head of the GOP de facto. So much so that when the GOP took over in 1994 took over Congress,
They, I saw, made him an honorary member of that Congress, because he was con...
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.”
Yeah. All right. Honorary Congress, remember? 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, a kind of political commentary as entertainment that we can emulate.
And like, people love this guy. He's got 20 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. You know, 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 24 hour cable news channel that came around in 1980 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 24 hour news cable channel and his”
literal quote was to bring together in brotherhood and 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 brand new. Like, like you said, people tuned in at 630 and 11pm. And that's where you got your news. Now you could tune to CNN and watch news 24 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. You're I'm watching the same stuff over and over and these people seem to be trying really hard. And then the challenger space shuttle exploded in 1986. And that is when CNN like 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 1970s and 80s,”
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 Super Station WTS, 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 Gilligan'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 1997
like, which was unheard of 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 in 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 90s and Ted came in a little late. And it was like, you would have thought the coast of Elvis had walked in. Like 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 the song and he just went, oh, Ted's here.
It was great. It was just like he basically was at Atlanta. He owned that town in the 70s and 80s.
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 that 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 were in
recently after he died. And they were even speaking about him, like, respectively, 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, 24, 7 news. No one had ever seen anything like that. That was the first, like, reporting of news and progress when something broke. It was the first time that they had the, the news ticker, 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 80s, like the spatial challenger disaster,
Obviously, their Berlin wall falling when little baby Jessica was rescued in ...
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 Iraq. And they, in some ways, became a propaganda arm for, said, I'm who's saying accidentally. But they still, like, showed what you were supposed to do, covering a war. And also, CNN was largely responsible for making the Gulf War the first live televised war in history,
“because they covered it that much. Yeah, I remember sitting around watching it with my remains in”
college, like, just coming home after class and, like, putting the war on. Yeah.
It was really weird. It was always on, because CNN was always on covering it. Yeah, for sure.
And, you know, we 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 kind of out of the gate in issue that CNN faced, which was, if you're covering news,
like, yeah, and news happens pretty frequently. But 24 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, what, which way is Congress going to vote? You know, is the president going to veto this? And that became, like, an established
part of 24 hour news. And from that moment that those people started to come in talking heads, pundits, that, like, that laid the groundwork for opinion, opinion-based journalism. Yeah, for sure. It was, you know, after the Gulf War and the mid-90s 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 CNN, a time Warner bought out CNN in 1996,
“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 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 Anstilis for advertising dollars. And at the time, you had two really great political foils in Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich on the screen 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, we're good. It's up to us to save America. Before that, the existential threats to the United States were external, and the only the USSR, after Gingrich, 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 bipartisan ship, whereas now today, if you defect and vote against your own party, you're a traitor 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 traitor. 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 that stuff, but just other people, like, you know, we're going to,
I'm going to 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 you're probably independent today, but it's hard to imagine just that being a thing today at all, you know? It's, 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 90s, like we talked about
Brush Limbaugh was enormous. Fox News was another huge thing that happened when it was founded
In 1996, and we'll talk about that afterward.
about this? I had a feeling this was you. Yeah. What do you think? Sure. I agree. My theory is that
the real world premiered in 1992, and you might say, what does that have to do with anything? Well, and 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 then. Yeah. So you put all those things together. The mid 90s were a really bad beginning, the seed, the evil dark seed that rounded the core and part of America out. That started in the
mid 90s. That's right. It sounds like a great time for a break because you mentioned something happening in 1996, and we'll talk about that right after this. [Music]
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Fox, just a very quickly about Roger Ailes 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 T.D. was a very
powerful thing as far as shaping public opinion by this point. He had met Rush Limbaugh in 1991.
And for a little while, produced a TV version of Limbaugh Show in the early '90s, but it was in 1996 when an Aussie named Rupert Murdoch, who had previously given us the Simpsons with the Fox Broadcasting Company, which he launched in 1986, the Fox Company. He said,
"You know what?
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 60 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 Ailes basically took
that the politics of who hates who, and put it on TV as a 24-hour cable news network. Yeah, the charge for it. Yeah, that's another thing too that we'll see. Like they 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, Ailes and Murdock, that it was going to be Fox News is going to be an apolitical
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 balanced motto that Fox News launched under Ailes 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. I think in 2017, when Ailes was fired in the very”
famous or infamous rather sexual harassment scandal, that's when they got rid of the fair and balanced tag for good. Yeah, and Roger Ailes in Bill O'Reilly. Yeah, among others. So Ailes was out, but he had been, you know, he had governed this thing for 20 years. And like 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 1996. 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 tiff and he's boxed with a beautiful bow on it. And that is called the Monaco Louise scandal. Yeah, and 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 400%. 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 2000 election of which we had a complete episode of Bushby Gore. And then not too long after that, 9/11 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 this same stuff, too, the 2000 election, 9/11, the war in Iraq. 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 Iraq. Like this was the angle that it was coming from. And all the way back then, say around 2000, 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 and the ratings
“for the first time by 2002. I think they command about 70% of the cable news audience today.”
Right. So 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 MSNBC later. We'll refer to MSNBC in this section because
it's about when they launched, which was a few months before Fox News in 1996. 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. Those one called the site, SITE with Solidado Brian. It didn't 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.
territory. Yeah. Very surprisingly, Laura Ingraham and Tucker Carlson both started at MSNBC.
“Yeah, it's funny to think about now. Right. And I think Tucker Carlson was the one who later”
convinced MSNBC executives to hire Rachel Maddo. Yeah. The same year that Tucker Carlson was hired. So like MSNBC was this kind of Petri dish for all sorts of TV on air newsy personalities. Yeah.
That would become huge later on. And again, like you're 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 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 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 2006 when Keith Olderman hit the airwaves.
He had a show called Countdown. It was a prime time 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 Olderman 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 contrary opinions and talking about how dumb that was. And, you know, really just trying to de-stabilize the opposing party's ideas, right? Yeah. So they're, I mean, their prime time ratings
“just went through the roof. Apparently, I think it went up 60% from 2007 to 2008 when they started”
attacking the right. And also, when Obama was like a candidate and then, you know, president, and it was a huge thing, that apparently also boosted their ratings. And I saw the MSNBC traditionally is actually done better when they're promoting a Democrat who has, who's using 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, 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 2025 from a UC Boulder Finance Professor named Diego Garcia who analyzed like who, what, 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
spends the majority of their time, about 60% of their time talking about Republicans, Fox News about the same in 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 of your ship, 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 anger attainment. I don't, 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, or those two at the very least double down on that. CNN is still, and this isn't just us opinionizing. If they're, they're literal media watchdogs that, you know, study and, and
write 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 Fox News. Right. And then also bear in mind CNN typically has the lowest ratings of MSNBC, right? Yeah, because anger payments are, 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, and, um, alive again, and then you start to come down and you want it ag...
you stay tuned, you say 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 pressing 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, uh, 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, uh, I know people on the right that, uh, 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, uh, eyes glued forward the entire time. But it's just on.
And I don't know anybody on, uh, the left that I know that has the TV literally constantly on their
“favorite cable news network. Oh, I do. It's typically CNN that'll have that'll be on all day.”
Oh, see, I don't know anyone that does that. You, that's good to know that that happens because 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're on deeply, deeply unhealthy. It's bad for the person. It's bad for society to have that on all day long. Yeah, in any channel, or any television, sure, or that totally totally. Um, so there was a study also that we found, uh, it was from
2025 and they looked at it was in nature magazine, heard nature of the journal, uh, they looked at, prime time shows from 2012 to 2022 on Fox, MSNBC and CNN, to find out which were the most polarized. They found that over those 10 years Fox had the largest number of highly polarizing shows, Sean Hannity, the O'Reilly Factor, Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham. But CNN's Cuomo prime time and MSNBC's Deadline White House were the most polarizing shows across all three networks.
Oh, interesting. There's something else to unpack there too, Chuck. These are prime time 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 prime time now. That's just boring.”
But it's not though. It's like, for me, like your buttons are just pressed over and 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 prime time 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, my opinion as somebody who's
clearly on the left side of things. You need only look at something like the $800 million or 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, Tucker 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, 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 $800 million
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 Berther conspiracy theory, all these things reported on lie that Donald Trump had the 2020 election 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 the, this is that part of like the, the twisting or the separating of the shared reality
because like scholars concern, just everyday people who know this concern. 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 Roshigate
Episode with Rachel Madel, who was hovering the, the Mueller investigation is...
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 $67 million all for
libel. 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 to 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. Your 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 2023 where they paid Fox News viewers like conservative people. They paid them to watch CNN for a month for 30 days to see like 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. They filter out that
“stuff to fit in narrative. And I think 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 2023 when male and balladings a big deal, a slightly higher opinion of male and ballads. But then they also said and the follow-up 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 see a story or I'm like well here's a big factual thing that happened. It's a big black eye. And I will go see and a lot of times
on and this is online, Fox News.com does literally just doesn't cover it. 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. Because you just, yeah, you can't hold somebody accountable if you're not actually reporting on the bad stuff too, you know. So we take a break.
Yeah, let's take a break. All right, we'll be right back.
“Joy is essential and it's also elusive. You can't order it, you can't borrow it or simply”
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Hi, it's Alex Baldwin. This season on my podcast, here's the thing I'm speaking with more artists,
policy makers, and performers, but composer Mark Shaman. Once you've established that you have the talent, it's about the hang. It's the pleasure of hanging out with the people that you're with. You know, Robin Eye was always a great hang. We would sit in kibits for hours and then eventually
“get around to the music. That's what I mostly think of when I think of him, the time together, laughing.”
Lawyer, Robbie Kaplan. The great gift of being a lawyer is the ability to actually change things in our society in a way that very few people can. You can really make a difference to causes and I say it's if you bring the right case at the right time and energy quality. Yeah, when there's the perfect example. Director Morgan Neville. Film school teaches you all the wrong
Things about making documentary.
What do you hear? I feel like my job is listening really, really hard. Listen to here's the
thing on the iHeart Radio App Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. What did black music, food and culture teach us about who we were becoming? When you 16 was sort of that last era of monoculture where we still consumed things in community from beyond thing and reanna. Everybody wanted to be beyond it. I don't think we'll ever see another reanna. To soul food, memory, identity and the stories we carry through black culture. What does it mean to be black and
eat in America? So we were these group of people who knew how to work the land, who knew how to live with the land. We make it do what it do. Therapy for black girls is bringing together the
conversation and shaping black life right now. You will never make me feel bad for being a black
girl for being a black American girl ever. Therapy for black girls is bringing it all to the mic. Listen to therapy for black girls on the iHeart Radio App Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcast. So Chuck, we talked about opinion media. I've been calling opinion journalism. I think that's actually a contradiction in terms. 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, it 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 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 negativity really sells. There was an analysis in 2011 where a researcher examined the prime time line up of the two really
big opposing sides, Fox News and MSNBC. And they were obviously ideologically opposed, but they were Fox News as far as the tone in language they use was 92% negative, 8% neutral and 0% positive on the other side. MSNBC was 90% negative, 5% neutral and 5% positive. And it's that cultivation of
“anger that infere 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. It's you that this is happening to your family's going to get taken in the middle of the night by the jack boots or something like that. So that's new and that cuts through 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 is fueled a partisan gap that is like we've not seen any other time in our history.
And there, you know, it's always there's always been a partisan divides, but not like we have now.
That was a Pew research study on that partisan divide in 1994. And this is before Fox News and MSNBC launch, because I think they launched in '96, unlike we said. But fewer at the time, fewer than 20 percent of either Republicans or Democrats view the opposing party as very unfavorable. By 2017, that number was 45 percent, some more than doubled. Also, that's from that same study in 1994, only 60 percent of Republicans identified themselves as, quote, more consistently conservative
than the average Democrat, uh, by 2017. That number had reached 95 percent. And on the
Democrat side, 97 percent identified as more consistently liberal than the av...
up from 70 percent in 1994. 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 2022, 72 percent”
of GOP respondents said that Democrats were immoral. And 63 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 going to, you know, wait a sec. 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 believe something different politically
and all of this again is being fostered, supported and stoked by the 24-hour 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 in 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 4 percent of Americans get their online news. So, you know, social
media or whatever online from predominantly left or right-leaning sources, compared to 17 percent of Americans. It said they got 50 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 are CNN. Yeah. Right on the middle. Yeah. I mean, one of the other things too is like Fox is gets criticized and criticized. And yes, they were innovators, pioneers. They completely
changed 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 like Fox do their own thing. The fact that they entranced and dug in on the other side because they wanted advertising dollars too. And there's a whole on-tap 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, why don't think we would be in this mess today? Yeah. I mean, you don't watch this stuff, do you? I haven't turned on the cable news network in, I don't know, since the early 2000s, maybe? I've definitely watched it much more recent than that, but I mean, I think once, once, once I realize 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 cords. 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 67, 68, and 71, right? Yeah. Those people aren't going to live forever and 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're down 21% and total prime time viewership compared to the same weeks year over year February to, well, February to February. 25 to 26. And then in 2025, 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 MSNBC now. Their viewership actually looks like that might have worked. They increased by 15% year over year for the same time frame. And CNN is the one that's really jumped up. They had
Saw a 46% year over year increase over that same period.
is declining relative to MSNBC and then is because there's newsmax, news nation, one American
news network. Right. Three of the first. Yeah. Right. They were like, you thought Fox is 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, then obviously before that, what was his face, Bill O'Reilly was, yeah, those were big losses for that network. For sure. And I think he losing Roger Ailes too, probably was a big deal for it too. Yeah. Good point. But also 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 few are people are buying cable.
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 the fee to be included in this bundle. That's a wholesale business
“model. That's what cable news does all cable channels do. 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, 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're paying for. But to you, it was free. And now Fox is asking you to pay 12 bucks a month or something
like that to get it. Some people will do that. Some people won't. So they're really kind of worried about that. And not just Fox again, MSNBC, ANC, and then are facing the same crisis just apparently to a slightly lesser degree right now. Right. But the writings 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 a vertical video podcast, MSNBC has a lot of very popular podcasts,
Rachel Madhouse at the Center, you know, their world podcast wise. But those have found like
“big-time audiences. So they're, you know, 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 2037. And that's a big chunk of all these audiences. Oh, sure. One last thing something occurred to me while I was researching this Chuck that there was a there's 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. And which to me is open 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 more 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 overdue rusticate. Like we tried to do this as fair 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, put 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 going to call this follow up about the hidden burger episode. Hey guys, just finish listening to the hidden bird. Great stuff. One thing that really got me laughing was the bend over. Magicly, I have an adult friend whose name has been over. 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,
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Habituating the bird.
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“If you want to be like Katie and get in touch with a cute little anecdote, we love those.”
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