Engines of Outrage Pt. 1

Courtney Bud had a conversation last year that left her shaking. It was with a family number, and it was about politics. He made the comment, "Trump is a good man." I just on such a basic fundamental level just couldn't see any reason in that statement. It'd be an understatement to say that Courtney does not agree with this, but what upset her was who was saying it. Nobody whom I not only love, but really respect for his intelligence, and also his ethics and his moral compass. It felt like they weren't just disagreeing, but living in separate realities. Ron at Farland has been looking for a common ground with his sister. He thinks she's misinformed. You know, she gets a lot of things from social media and things of that nature. Ron is a Trump voter. His new sources include Fox, and podcaster Joe Rogan. He says he tries to watch CNN and other sources, but ultimately Ron thinks most news intentionally misleads. "Where is the truth? I'm always trying to search for the truth." It used to be even just a few decades ago that Americans largely used and trusted the same news sources, now the way we get basic facts about the world is polarized. We are increasingly split into separate bubbles absorbing different information that paints conflicting pictures of the same events in that environment. How can we govern together? How can we reach the consensus that democracy requires? How can there be any common ground? Now, our two media ecosystems are not the same equal from opposite political sides. And we can see this, because, well, we're all subject to psychological forces that polarize us, and we're going to explore those. Only in one of these media bubbles do a huge portion of voters consistently believe a presidential election was stolen. That is where the fraud took place, where they were flipping votes. Only one of them has led Americans to reject basic health interventions. "COVID vaccines need to be withdrawn from the market now." Only one has left its audience with the impression that climate change is not real. Climate crime is spiking, and a host of outlandish conspiracy theories. "My grants are grilling pets in America. That is true." It seems to me that this is a root problem in American politics, yet often overlooked because it feels so intractable. We have information bubbles, and one of them, believes Americans inside it, consistently misled about important, fundamental, provable facts. I started this podcast landslide to trace our political divide, where it comes from, how it developed. And I keep coming back to the same point. Nothing is more urgent than our information divide. From nuanced hails, in partnership with WFAE, distributed by the NPR Network, this is a new mini-series from landslide, Engines of Outrage. Over the course of the next four episodes, I'll have conversations with experts to explore where today's news environment came from. We'll trace how the right-wing bubble grew from small insurgency during the events of landslides first season, to a full competitor against mainstream news. We'll look at how technology and psychology amplified it and our division affecting all of our information diets. This will not be a comprehensive history, more of an autopsy. The goal is to understand what happened, to figure out what, if anything, can bring us back to a more collective, fact-based understanding of reality. We start by going back to a time when it seemed like the nation did have that. In the 1960s and 70s, when it came to most news, there was really only one game in town. A huge portion of the country of all political stripes sat down each night in front of their TVs and watched the same thing. It was something like three quarters of everybody who had a television on at 630 was watching one of the three networks and there were only three. So they were watching ABC, CBS or NBC. NBC Tucker is a media historian at the Columbia Journalism School. They were very establishment, they were white guys in jackets with silver hair. Good evening. Prince Juan Carlos de Bourbon, he Bourbon is the new chief of state in Spain. But it was, you know, people watched it, people tended to trust it, people tended to find them familiar because they came into your house while you were eating your meal. That's the way it is. Wednesday, July 31, 1968. There is no publication, no organization, no news source now that would have the same kind of reach as those three put together. In one 1969 survey, nine out of 10 Americans said they regularly watched the television news. It was not the vast variety of sources that we now have, it was, there was a sense, probably exaggerated, but a sense that people were kind of reading and knowing the same things. And changed that, or who? Maryland Governor Spiro Agnew had transformed almost overnight in 1968 from near unknown to Richard Nixon's vice presidential pick and his attack dog. As VP, Agnew was the man Nixon sent to play administration critics and colorful, a literative style. If you've ever heard the nattering nebabs of negativism, that was him. About a year after he and Nixon were elected, Agnew appeared for a speech in Des Moines that is office-build as a major address. I have a subject I think is a great interest to the American people. Tonight, I want to discuss the importance of the television medium to the American people. Agnew focused this night's eye on a surprise subject, the producers of television news. This little group of men who not only enjoy a right of instant rebuttal to every presidential address, but more importantly, wield a free hand in selecting, presenting and interpreting the great issues in our nation. He essentially said they were enacting their own liberal partisan agenda. A narrow and distorted picture of America often emerges from the televised news. The speech was cynical, the famously touchy Nixon and his advisors were furious at recent critical coverage of the Vietnam War. Agnew and Nixon's speech writer Pat Buchanan had worked up this address to fire back. It touched a nerve. While polls showed most Americans trusted the news, the accusation of bias had circulated on the right and left. Black newspapers sprang up in the 40s and 50s in response to a media establishment that was overwhelmingly white. In the battle for civil rights, segregationists, such as George Wallace routinely complained they were being treated unfairly by the media. Agnew knew this, and in his speech, he was echoing complaints of Wallace and others. But now it was coming from the vice president of the United States. Are you saying that the Nixon administration is sort of the first time, at least in modern history, that we see the president, the White House, accusing the media of having a liberal bias? In the modern era, yeah, I think so, I think so. Media historians, including Andy Tucker, point two Agnew's speech as a turning point, it gained wider play. Reporters picked up the story, it was their job, and Agnew and other Nixon allies continued over the next days and months to hammer this accusation of slant. The Nixon administration was well setting up the press as an enemy. It was a very vigorous spin operation that had the line of the day that worked very closely with journalists, but also used the power of the White House to smear the press. And it coincided with polls showing trust in mainstream news in our shared reality beginning to fall. Before we go further, it's worth discussing Agnew's charge. Was the news biased? The answer is, of course, right? Humans are subjective creatures, and choosing what stories to cover, who to talk to, requires subjective judgment. Even describing what things look like was a crowd large or small, rowdy or muted is subjective. And Agnew was clearly right that a tiny fraction of men living in the same large cities decided what of all the world's events most people would see. Andy Tucker says it led to blind spots. It did seem to confirm and valorize the idea of a dominant culture. The visible faces of that culture were middle-aged white men. There were certain advantages to the sense that we all know the same stuff, but it also confirmed the establishment as the important institution, cultural institution. It is funny, I spent a lot of time just hundreds, I don't know, thousands of hours digging through archives of old evening news broadcasts, and you look at the rundowns of their programs on any given day. They are 90% identical. Yeah, the herd instinct is very, very strong in that kind of coverage. So there were biases, but Tucker says that's different from saying these journalists were enacting an agenda. - Yeah, I went first from acknowledge, of course, that serious, responsible newsrooms do make mistakes. They get things wrong. They don't see what they're supposed to see. But there is a process that is rooted in fact finding, doing your best to challenge your own assumption so that you report against yourself. - In the wake of Agnews' speech and increasing distrust in media, other sources with a very different intent would gain influence. (upbeat music) - Outside Washington, DC, in a non-descript office building behind a locked door guarded by multiple security measures, printers buzzed. You heard about this in detail in landslides first season. They spat out millions and millions of letters to households around the nation, the direct mail operation of the political activist, Richard Vigory. - Richard Vigory, conservative ideologue, direct mail genius. - You heard how Vigory, as allies in the new right, identified voters upset about a variety of separate cultural issues, textbooks, gun rights, abortion, and linked those causes together in fiery letters to an ever-expanding list. And you heard from a Reagan strategist just briefly, how this was a new form of media. - You know, now conservatives have talk radio, they have cable news, things and all that. It wasn't anything like that back then. The only communications channel that you had directly to conservatives was mail. - Vigory's direct mail operation bloomed in the years immediately following Vice President Spiro Agnews' accusation of network news bias. - The idea that the mainstream media is biased against you and that you need to trust alternative media sources. That was something that Vigory didn't create, but he certainly like really enhances in the 1970s. - AJ Bauer is a professor at the University of Alabama who studies the rise of right-wing media. - By creating a kind of alternative ecosystem of conservative newsletters, there was not just claims that the media was biased, but also an alternative source that you could get to see exactly where the news media wasn't covering specific issues or was covering them in a flawed way of some sort. - Here's what they're not telling you. - Here's what they're not telling you exactly. It's one thing to say they're biased. It's another thing to say they're biased and here's the thing that they're missing. - This medium told you the mainstream news was lying and the truth was here, but that truth was apocalyptic, laden with conspiracy theories. The newsletters of the new right from Vigory's printers warned that textbooks were teaching cannibalism. Gay people were recruiting children that Secretary of State was perhaps sacrificing and I communists in Vietnam. - You know, Vigory wrote later on of his strategy that political inertia is the normal state for most people and it takes a sledgehammer of an issue to distract them from their ball games, shopping sprees and daily work preoccupations. The tactics of reporting, how that information hits the page and the intent of it, it's sort of fundamentally different. - Yeah, from the beginning, it's always been an ideological project. It hasn't been kind of like let's create a conservative counter news product. It was how do we create media that disrupts the kind of mainstream hegemony of the traditional press? - The newsletters provided information, that information could be true, but it wasn't a point of it. Vigory wasn't doing journalism. The intent was not to inform. It was to inspire political action, to outrage. That's really important because that intent and that style set the template for voices that would soon grow much louder. At the same time, as Vigory's letters were proliferating, a right-wing movement made other gains in American political life. In 1976, it won control of the Republican Party platform. - The issue of court-ordered buses. - The subject was the Panama Canal, which was the favorite school prayer. - Amnesty, gun control, national health. And conservative hero, Ronald Reagan, nearly knocked off the sitting president Gerald Ford for the nomination. Four years later, he won it all. It all ended legitimacy and visibility to a movement that a few years earlier had been easy to dismiss a strange. And movement premised on the idea that the mainstream media was corrupt. - Did news organizations internalize some of this criticism? - Yeah, absolutely. - AJ Bauer, the historian of right-wing media, says reporters began giving more weight to views that had long been dismissable. - Conservative movement figures increasingly get interviewed, by the New York Times and by other traditional mainstream news outlets, as though they're representing a kind of responsible opposition. - Now, this is what news is supposed to do, right? Seek and report, major sides of a debate. You could also argue that reporters became more credulous, less willing to challenge provably false information, which had bubbled up from, say, fever swamps of new right newsletters, because it came from plically legitimized voices. But Bauer says pressure by conservatives led to even more inroads in traditional media. - With in mainstream journalism, there's concern that they were losing the trust of the public and they needed to regain it. You see conservatives wedging into that vulnerability. - The New York Times in the early 1970s hired its first voice from the conservative movement to its opinion pages. But not just any voice, a PR man, a spin doctor, the writer of some of Agnew's most blisteringly partisan speeches, including his "nattering nabobs" line. William Sapphire came straight from that White House job to become a consistent critic of the times from within its own pages. After Watergate, it was Sapphire who stuck the suffix gate to other more routine controversies, an effort to suggest that presidents such as Jimmy Carter engaged in a corruption akin to Nixon's. mainstream outlets made these adjustments, concessions to quell criticism, to prove they were fair, and to restore public trust. Bauer says it had the opposite effect. - There's an increasing perception that television news is biased and that local news is biased as well. - Instead of relieving criticisms of bias, it lended more credibility to the people making them. - This is exactly the moment where conservative news, those Richard Vigory newsletters are starting to flourish. - Trust in traditional news was falling. Newsletters offering a slanted perspective or proliferating, a perspective reinforced by a new crop of right-wing politicians and think tanks. And in this climate, Bauer says, Americans suddenly got a new option. They could turn the TV dial somewhere else. - This is it exactly the moment where people are starting to tune out of watching news because they're having more choices. So let's say you're eating dinner at like five o'clock, six o'clock. You want to watch TV. Your choices, news, news, or news, basically. - Yeah. - By the early 80s, so but 1980s were cable starts to proliferate if you've got cable, you don't have to watch one of those big three news channels anymore for dinner, right? You could watch sports or you could watch a movie or something like that. - Suddenly there was ESPN, MTV. You could watch hockey while they're good luck seeing the puck or put Nickelodeon on for your kids. - So people start consuming less news, actually. A lot of times people think about it as like they people switched from mainstream news to some ideological news. But really what ends up happening is most people kind of opt out and they're getting less news than they used to. - The network news that just a few years earlier reached almost every American showing them the same reality was now easy to tune out. You could unplug from traditional news entirely and just absorb the angry alternate parts world view of those pamphlets or their ilk. - You're consuming less news, but all of a sudden you're getting all these news letters that are saying, "Oh, did you hear about the Equal Rights Amendment "and how bad it is?" - The drop in audience for mainstream news left an information void, a void that alternative media could fill. But it didn't, not immediately. For most of the 1980s, right wing media remained relatively niche. Mostly those same products, newsletters, magazines, local radio, you had to already be somewhat politically engaged to want to tune in. That was about to change with a new, polarizing voice that would become the right's first media superstar. And the bubble would expand exponentially. - Behind the golden EIB microphones it's the Rush Limbaugh program coming through you live and direct from the Limbaugh Institute for advanced conservative studies. - The brash, boisterous radio host Rush Limbaugh had not set out to become a right wing media force. But in the late 1980s, the one time failed DJ struck on a formula for success. And it sounded, eerily, like a live action, Vigory newsletter. - moral decay is rooted in the Democratic Party. - Demonizing political opponents, sewing distrust in mainstream media. Whenever they spot what they think is Republican scandal, that's where they go. - There were conspiracy theories. - We have been told a polar ice capsule melt and that when this happens, sea levels will rise. There are so many of these environmental myths and the reason they exist is because the environmental movement is the new home of the socialist communist movement of the world. - And there was culture war and racial resentment. - I thought white men were the new pigs of society. Unless of course you want a successful and happy marriage and by all means. a white boy. Then that's right. If you want a successful and happy marriage, then by all means, get a white boy. For three hours a day, Limbaugh blasted and lampooned, Democrats, feminists, gay people, liberals, journalists, and Republicans, he didn't feel were sufficiently conservative. The fact that he could do this so freely was new. A result of the Federal Communications Commission under President Ronald Reagan scrapping its long-held fairness doctrine. The fairness doctrine had required news programs to seek "balance." A year after the end of the doctrine, Limbaugh's program debuted nationally. Unlike the new rights, newsletters, and magazines, with Rush, you didn't have to take the time to pick up and pour through material sent to your home. You could switch him on in your car, your office, and just immerse yourself. All right, listen up folks, political twisters kicking up across the fruited plain, and you need a conservative compass to point you to the truth. Limbaugh added one more ingredient to the formula that would define the most powerful right-wing media. He, again, was not a journalist. He wasn't fact-checking or looking to provide multiple viewpoints, but he also wasn't an activist, at least at first. From a young age, he just wanted to be on the radio, but he washed out as a DJ at four different stations. So when he finally got this last shot, he wasn't seeking to drive voters. He wanted advertisers. He's got more of an entertainer's demeanor, right? He had worked in radio as kind of a morning zoo crew kind of guy. He understood that in order to captivate broadcast audiences, you couldn't just disseminate information you had to make them feel as though they were getting something out of it, and that something was entertainment. AJ Bauer at the University of Alabama, who studies the history of right-wing media, says Limbaugh to his target audience was fun. They could listen for hours. Primarily kind of a comedy program, not necessarily that I would laugh at all those jokes today, right? But when you're listening to it, as somebody who is sympathetic, you're laughing. "Rush Limbaugh, for most admired man in America, through the animal I railed against the long-haired maggot-infested dope-smoking protesters. Rush Limbaugh, inventor of the term Feminazi, Rush Limbaugh, your only choice for most admired man in America." There's levity, you feel a sense of superiority. You offered a sense of belonging. One person who found this connection from Limbaugh at a young age was Bauer. Yeah, yeah. So my mom got divorced in the early 1990s and would feel really sentimental listening to music. And so she started listening to Rush Limbaugh and Howard Stern while driving the kids around. And I, as a young kid, started listening to Rush Limbaugh. Was kind of a Limbaugh fanatic in the 90s? Really? What do you remember for it? Well, one thing I remember very distinctly is Limbaugh was very much against Bill Clinton in 1992 election. And I was so connected to the idea that Clinton was this kind of bad man, and that the conservatism was true, and all these sorts of things. Because of my daily listening of Rush Limbaugh, to the point that I was like deeply emotionally invested in Pride when Clinton won. Limbaugh promised, however tongue and cheek, that he was offering you facts, reliable information. "Fought you to the truth, you could live in sconce in the reality he presented." And a lot of people did. The Rush Limbaugh shows audience expanded rapidly, from just a few hundred thousand listeners at a given time, to millions, within five years, 17 million a week. And as politics became more and more central to the radio host and brand, as his influence grew. He tied himself closer, closer to the Republican Party. And vice versa, a top GOP Congressman, Tom DeLay, boasted about the relationship. "We facts Rush Limbaugh was 24 hours a day. Where do you think he gets half of the stuff that he puts on the radio program?" In 1992, Limbaugh openly called for listeners to side with President George Bush. "What I really wanted to call about was that I'm really having a hard time with the presidential election. I had a vote boy." Bush invited Limbaugh to the White House, even carried his bags in for him. And while he still lost, two years later, Congressional Republicans led by their new right leader, Newt Gingrich, one controlled the House, for the first time since the 1950s. The new class Republicans celebrated Limbaugh as their guest of honor. "We'd like to nominate and make Rush Limbaugh an honorary member of our freshman class because surely he helped us become the majority." It was an intertwining of a media figure with political figures that would be unthinkable, disqualifying, instantly fireable for a journalist at any mainstream institution. But Limbaugh wasn't a journalist. Even as he was at the heart of a rapidly expanding media ecosystem, radio broadcasters searching for profits sought out their own limbaugh's. Other popular hosts included Sean Hannity, Michael Savage, Glenn Beck. Many stations switched to all conservative talk all the time. And the radio hosts, competing for audience, found the most salacious stories in extreme conspiracies brought the highest ratings. They leaned in further. It turned out that what the new right had done for political gain could be good entertainment, focusing on outreach, waiting into conspiracy theory, villainizing opponents, eroding trust in other media, all the building, a sense of us versus them. And it was a self-reinforcing cycle because politicians and media figures echoed the same messages. Limbaugh could insinuate that the Clintons covered up a corrupt land deal by murdering a White House aide. And you can read William Sapphire New York Times, Dubit, Whitewatergate. And the Speaker of the House, New Gingrich, would stoke the theory. You can understand why for a lot of Americans and evidence lists live seemed true. And for people spreading it, there was profit and political gain. So the bubble expanded. New websites on the early internet like the Drudge Report and Newsmax adopted similar characteristics. It was an alternate information ecosystem with one flaw. Almost all of it was clearly offering opinion, not news, no matter how much you might absorb from it. Limbaugh joked about it. Now I don't take sides in political races as you well know. That wouldn't be fair, it would compromise my objectivity as a journalist. And so the final big innovation that Fox News would bring along cementing the bubble was really that word news. Tell us about Fox News and how it differed from what had come before or what was the intent of that network or the characteristics of that network. The first thing that was different was Roger Ailes. This is media historian Andy Tucker who you heard at the beginning. She's talking about Fox News founder Roger Ailes. He was a political animal who came from political consulting and campaigning had worked for Ronald Reagan, had worked for Mitch McConnell. And now he was the head of a news network. There's been a lot written and reported about Fox. And we're not going to dive into a full history. But I think this is the essential point from the beginning. Ailes had a very clear idea that he wanted it to be the voice of the right wing that was not going to acknowledge it was the voice of the right wing so that it would sound like it was the voice of the mainstream. Fox dressed up as a traditional media outlet engaged in that process of news gathering and self examination using the language of objective journalism to say that's what we do. The mainstream media are the ones who are biased. Fox famously for years adopted slogans to that effect. Fair and balanced. And here at Fox News we report you decide. And here's Ailes. The American people are very smart. They know the difference between news, analysis, commentary, opinion, spin and BS. The other news organizations won't tell you the difference. We will. This is from a Fox produced special, the channel ran about how unbiased it was. From the beginning, Ailes clearly stated the mission of Fox News to report all sides of the story, unbiased and unfiltered. But in reality, Fox's most watched programs followed the same tactics you've heard, momenting outrage, villainizing political opponents, creating that sense of us versus them. Many of its biggest names were the same people straight from talk radio Ailes plucked Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck and Laura Ingraham among others. Providing cover, Fox had a newsroom and it could do good work. That led to legitimacy and made it easier for viewers to stay locked into the bubble 24 hours a day. By the early 2000s, Fox was the most watched cable news channel, and success added to its legitimacy. In 2010, the Obama administration granted Fox a coveted front row seat at White House briefings next to the news networks, as though they were engaged in the same business. But they never were. At that point, Fox was just the newest player in an alternate media ecosystem that had developed over decades. It rose to challenge the traditional institutions that had brought news to most Americans. Those institutions had been set up to gather news, and they did it roughly the same way. Read a story in the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal, it'll usually contain the same facts, and they're constantly hiring each other's reporters. What emerged on the right had a different purpose, outrage, entertainment, activism. It makes sense why conspiracy theories would flourish in that environment. They're are of course partisan sources and manipulative content across the spectrum that news environment is muddy. But this basic asymmetry was at the heart of a growing schism in how Americans viewed the world. And then suddenly, the gap widened. A new technology made outreach exponentially easier and more profitable. Next time, on our main series, landslide engines of outreach, the internet, social media, and our own psychology, send the bubble into overdrive. My students that I begin to realize we're not looking at accidental rumors, we're looking at pervasive disinformation. It's a constant bombardment in which this audience is being told that they are under attack. If you're a fan of this series and interested in more landslide, let me tell you some good news. Our first season was among the top 25 most listened to new podcasts in 2024, according to one of the biggest industry sources, PodTrack. If these new episodes sustain that level of listenership grow, it will help us continue to do more. So you can help by doing what you did so well with our first season that I'm so grateful for. Share the series, rate it, tell your friends to listen, and sign up for updates at our mailing list at nuancedales.com. Landslide is a production of nuanced tales. It is created, hosted, written, and reported by me Ben Bradford, edited by Noia Carr. JC Bold is the sound designer and engineer. All of the music is by Matt Bradford. Landslide is produced in partnership with WFAE and distributed by the NPR Network, thanks to all the staff at both who've made it possible. You'd also see a list of key sources for this episode at nuancedales.com. Thanks so much for listening. Politics. Yeah, we know. It's a lot. And it's everywhere. Your phone, your feed, your dinner table, and probably your blood pressure. The politics is also the human story behind the headlines. Our hopes, disagreements, choices, and visions for what comes next. This fall, the American storytelling collection brings together six podcasts from the NPR Network that take a closer look at the people, power, conflicts, and turning points behind American politics from every angle. You'll hear it in a show called The Speaker, tracing the course of Nancy Pelosi's rise from local volunteer at a national power broker to lightning rod of American politics. We had a pretty better content to stand off at this hour. Head to head, knock down, drag out of there. You'll sense the real stakes in a show called Landslide detailing the most razor-close presidential primary race in history and the way it reshaped political parties thereafter. The sounds of the extremely American podcast, where they tackle how extremist movements still shape America today. We would not have one Democrat president in the last 50 years. But the series is about politics in our backyards too. Take a podcast like Swing State of the Union, a show exploring the hot-button issues in Wisconsin and how they're motivating voters nationwide. There's lots of money at stake, and if you're getting the AI data center game before your competitor, you're going to be in a better position. And scandalized, we're unpacking political scandals from history to learn more about what happened. If you were to pay me, is there any way the media can find out where it came from and how much? How the scandals aftermath changed American politics and what on earth they were thinking? I'm probably never ever going to see a story like this again. In a whole other country, a podcast traveling the bumpy roads of west Texas to explore the shocking, almost mythic story of the Republic of Texas, a real secessionist nation in the Lone Star State. All the shows in the collection reach beyond the headlines. To explore how political action is the messy, deeply human business of deciding how we want to live together. So take a breath. Here are the stories behind the soundbikes. After all, it's human to get political. Listen to all the shows now by searching American storytelling from NPR on the NPR app or on Apple podcasts.