S4 Ep17: No One’s Looking Out for You (with Brian Stelter)

Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Focus podcast. I’m Sarah Longwell, publisher of the Bulwark. And this week, we’re talking about Fox News. Specifically, Trump voters who think Fox has lost its way, and they’ve turned to other sources of news that they can trust. But I know what you’re thinking.

No. The answer is not. They became big Jake Tapper fans and are watching a lot of CNN now. These voters think has gone woke. They’re irate that Fox called the twenty twenty election for Biden.

They all think Fox caved in the dominion voting systems lawsuit And they also think they should have covered the dominion machines more because they think they were so fraudulent. And finally, they’re also really mad about Fox firing Tucker. Now this is gonna be one of those shows that’s hard for some people to hear, but I wanted to do it because it gets to a very important piece of mega voter psychology that is abundantly clear in the focus groups we listen to. These voters live in an entirely different media ecosystem than you or And while many are quick to blame Fox News for why Maga voters are steeped in conspiracy theories, it actually goes quite a bit deeper. My guest today is Brian Stelter, author of Bulwark of lies, the epic saga of Fox News, Donald Trump, and the Battle for American democracy, and the producer for the morning show on Apple TV plus.

Brian, thank you so much for being here.

It is literally an honor to be here. This is one of my favorite podcasts on the planet.

The planet. Amazing.

The planet. The planet is protesting, and it’s because I’ve learned so much about voters thanks to you.

So let’s do it. Alright. Let’s do it. So, can

I ask you a question about the morning show real quick?

I probably can’t answer if you can try.

The lesbian relationship, I’m keenly interested in this between Juliana Margalese and Reese Witherspoon.

Oh, yeah. Why? I only take creditor blame for the newsroom parts, you know, not for the emotional arcs. Don’t you wanna see these stars, you know, have a dramatic personal lives? Pretty fun.

I do. But as a card carrying member of the lesbian tribe. I would like to see lesbian characters have just like a smidge of chemistry, and I love both these women. But together, it’s not working. I’m sorry.

Anyway, I love the morning then. We’re working on season four right now and who knows what happen. By the way, I don’t know.

I’m a devoted watcher of the morning show, so thanks for that. And I do think they get so much about news right, which What was that one on HBO?

The newsroom?

The newsroom.

I

liked that one a lot less. It felt like they were missing some key things about the way that the news worked. But this one I thought got a lot right about the egos and everything else. And I didn’t realize you were a consultant on it until much later in the game. So Nice work on that.

Yeah. They bought the rights to my book at top of the morning, and they were off to the races with the show. So I I just get to help out with, whenever they have questions in the writers room, I get to help you answer, and that’s a lot of fun.

Okay. Well, if they ever need, like, somebody to help them with the lesbian story are, because you tell them to call me. I think I could help them.

You’re always looking for more consultants.

Yeah. Alright. You’ve written two books about the internal workings of Fox News. I don’t know why you do that to yourself. Here’s another thing you’re not gonna be able to answer for me, like, Who are all your sources inside Fox News?

There are still even in twenty twenty four, people inside Fox who dissent who don’t

like the Trump propaganda who know what they’re doing is wrong, who feel sick about it. And here’s the problems there. They keep quitting. You know? So, like, year after year, that pool of people shrinks, but there are still some.

Then there’s also other sources of Fox who are proud of it, and they think I’m wrong, they think I’m crazy, and they enjoy sparring with me.

Yeah. I bet. Yeah. I there’s a lot of books being written with sources. We’re very proud of what’s going on.

So I wanna just start by level setting here before we get into all of it. Because we’re gonna get to people’s many grievances, but I wanna start with some sound from voters who talk about why they were drawn to in the first place. Let’s listen.

There’s the only media outlet that seemed like they were focused on the truth.

I mean,

we’re the conservative bent to be sure, but they focused on the truth at least.

Box seem to be the only one willing to call out that the inverter has no clothes rather than trying to maintain things the way they are. That’s part of the appeal of Trump, not a perfect messenger, really a very flawed messenger, but Who else is calling out the problem here as far as all these career politicians just doing what they want to do to stay in power

I still felt they they told the truth. Even though we might not like what they said, I still believe they spoke the truth, and that, like you said, that’s that’s gone.

I’m a Fox fan. I was a little upset with Fox when they let Tucker go, and that’s when I sorta noticed a change. But if you really want to get more truth than not, that’s who you kinda have to go to, but really you should go to a a wide range of media. Either way, they’re all being controlled

When I was growing up, you idolized Walter Cronkite and all these guys whose names I can’t remember, but they spoke the truth. At least in White House, they spoke the truth. I don’t know if they really did, but, they were men of integrity and men of honesty I don’t have that. You know, the closest thing I can come to is Tucker Carlson, Hannah, Laura, But I could be wrong too.

From Walter Crown to Sean Hannity. So here’s the question I have for you. Cause you When you’re talking to people deep inside and you say that people are disgruntled, does that mean that they understand the profound impact they have on voters. Like, do they understand the chicken or the egg thing? Right?

Do they believe that they’re influencing voters, or are they chasing these voters and trying to just give them what they want.

I think it’s mostly the first part. Yes. They know the power. They know the influence. Lately though, There has been an argument, and I hear it on the inside, and I hear it a lot on the outside that they don’t know what to do with the monster that they’ve created.

And I think there’s truth to that. I think we should underscore they do know the power because they know the ratings because they care about the scoreboard. They care deeply about the scoreboard. Fox, actually, I would argue helped, like, invent this idea of a cable news scoreboard. I launched a blog called TV Newser twenty years ago, this winter.

I was a college student, but obsessed with TV news, really interested in how it worked. And in order to have content from my blog, Fox would send me the ratings every day for the previous night. They would send me the numbers to show me how well Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity were raiding because almost every night they were winning. And on the rare days, they lost a CNN, you know, CNN or somebody else who sent me the numbers instead. But the point is Fox would always share the numbers because Fox was winning and they wanted everybody else to know it.

They view the scoreboard as a sword and a shield. It’s their armor. It’s their way of saying, yeah, but we are the most popular. So what we’re doing must not be all that bad because we’re winning and winning means power and influence. Right?

It means that the audience is eating up what they are providing.

Can we talk a little bit about the history of Fox News? Because I grew up in a Fox News household. I grew up watching Fox News. I grew up watching the Beltway Boys. Now I am boys with Bill Crystal, But back then, you know, before he was a big never jumper, he was on the TV all the time.

Yeah. And I guess Either I changed or they did. But my sense of what Fox News was when I was in, like, high school, college age was that it was unapologetically conservative and felt like it was offering up something that CNN ABC, NBC, CBC, CBS, that they weren’t offering because they were of sort of the mainstream left and that Fox News was scratching an itch that audience really wanted, but it was still kind of a affectable, national review, weekly standard kind of conservatism. And I wonder, a, do you agree with that? And then b, like, when did that shift happened, because I don’t remember when I looked up.

It might have been around Trump times. It might have been a little before that. But, like, at what point did you look up and go, This thing is really off the rails.

Well, this is very much, you know, the waves are slowly eroding the beach. You know, you can’t point to Pacific year, but you can show that every turn Fox makes over the decades is further to the right. And I I would argue further away from reality. Meaning when Barack Obama’s elected. Fox takes a hard right turn.

Remember the show used to be Hannity in Colmes? After Obama’s elected, Colmes is gone. It’s just Hannity. Now you have the nightly news from the right. Sean Hannity becomes, as one of those commenters said, you know, what what what’s our kronkite?

Well, Now, Hannity pretends to be cronkite. He pretends to be the real news. He declares that real journalism in America is dead. What a hateful thing to say about your colleagues at who are out there covering the news, but I digress. So Obama is one of those.

Right? Trump’s election is actually a hard right turn because the audience doesn’t wanna hear a de centered criticism of Trump. So every turn fox makes us further to the right. So it has been changing. That that erosion has been happening.

Really ever since the network launched, but in this focus group, we heard from folks who cited Roger Ailes, and the impact of Roger Ailes’ force departure and his death. And I do think we can look back at the Ailes era you know, even though it’s it’s awkward to say this because of his awful abuse of some of his own employees. You know, he really did run Fox with an iron fist. And he knew the importance of being respectable, of appearing respectable, of having a newsroom that would try to compete with Fox and NBC. And that’s a lot of what’s been lost in the years since he was forced out.

Yeah. Well, let’s talk about Murdoch. So just in case anyone needs their memory jobs, things went pretty off the rails for Fox in twenty twenty three when they settled a defamation lawsuit with dominion voting systems for seven hundred and eighty seven million dollars. After Fox Host knowingly promoted the big lie and pegged a lot of it to claims about faulty dominion voting machines on air. Now Tucker was fired by Fox News soon after.

You wrote, Brian, a book about the Murdoch family succession plans, So can you walk us through the Palace intrigue there and what a post Rupert Fox might look like?

This is the great unknown, the great mystery, you know, at within the Murdoch family. When Rupert Murdoch dies his four adult children each have a voting share in the company’s Newscore and Foxcor. So three of them could choose to take Fox’s views in a different direction with more centrist direction and a more moderate direction and a more reality based direction. James Murdoch, his younger son, very much wants to do that. James Murdoch wants to vanquish this fox beast.

He views the fox prime time lineup as it stands right now as poison Ron DeSantis to reform it. But he needs his sisters to support him in that, and nothing’s gonna happen for as long as Rupert’s alive because for now Rupert controls the company. You know, his other son, Lachlan is the one who runs Fox. He wants Lachlan to continue running Fox. And Lachlan, there’s two things about Lachlan.

One, he’s as conservative as his dad, but two, He’s not as interested in politics. He doesn’t wanna be friends with Donald Trump. He doesn’t wanna have prime ministers on the phone. He has conservative values or once conservative policies but doesn’t wanna be a player in the game in that way. And I’d argue that’s probably actually worse, but, you know

Well, yeah. Because at that point, then all you’re chasing is money. Right? And so you can get as far into the drugs as you want as long as it’s producing a financial gain.

And that is what it’s all about. I I hate to say it. I hate to emphasize it so much, but it’s true. This is about the money. This is about the bottom line for Fox.

It’s about the stock price. It’s about keeping advertisers on board going as far as they can, you know, into Trump world without alienating Procter and Gamble. You know, ultimately, that that is what laughlin Murat cares about.

Okay. So look, in preparation for this show, we failed at a group of two time trump voters, and we screen this group for people who used to watch Fox a lot and have stopped. So let’s listen to these voters, explain their breakup with Fox in their own words. And I’ll note just before we listen to it that while we screen this group so we could get this sound, we hear this all the time in groups. This is like totally normal stuff.

The reason we wanted to do this episode is because of how often we hear people talking about why they dipped out from Fox.

They got rid of so many that really kinda told it like it is. And the thing that bugs me about Fox is they, you know, for some of the viewers, they haven’t even really noticed the change. You know, the only time I watch Fox is when it the gym, and they’ve got the TVs on. And it’s like and I always notice the ones that are watching MSNBC or CNN, but Fox isn’t much better. And the ones that really told the truth, they have left them for many reasons, and they would say how they were restricted and what they could do.

There was, Glen Beck went into an expose about Fox and what’s going on behind there, then their true motives, and it’s sad because I think there’s some still out there, you know, the less astute ones. They kind of still feel like it’s giving you the conservative, the middle of the road, and it’s not anymore.

They’re so woke. They’re gonna go broke as our buddy Trump says. Everything woke goes broke. It’s just I think ever since the Murdochs, the suns took over, but then people like Donna Brazil and them came in, we’re looking at going, why would you bring in Donna Brazil? Total liberal, total left wing, hard left wing.

And I started seeing some of that. I was gone. See you.

An approvable liar on top of it.

Yeah. Exactly.

I think once Roger Ailes was gone, and the Murdoch took, control of it. The un American Murdoch, I might add, Once they took control, they started having a narrative, they didn’t like Trump, they wanted to destroy him. And right there, and then the whole thing just became now. They’re trying to get back in. Right?

They did a town hall last night because, I mean, you got the leading candidate, and now they gotta run back in some some way, but I don’t believe a word they say. Yeah. Lord Ingram turned into a trader real quick after the last election. You know, not pretty enough to hold her job with Fox and afraid of losing it. In my opinion, she was desperate to do whatever the Murdex wanted.

And I think that goes for a lot of people over there. Some of them really resent that you can tell, but they still go along with it. I mean, Gutfield, it’s an entertainment show, but he’ll get some stuff out there. Carlson couldn’t. One by one, they took these people down, and made them join the line to get out.

But for me, it was the election, the last election. It just tore the deal. That was it. That night, the last presidential election, you could tell the way it was gonna go right then and the way it went, and it did go that way. And, now they are a voice for the socialist communist taking over this country.

It means the turning point with Fox really seemed to be after the dominion suit that were a, When did the animal pulled back from what they had done too much in reaction with an animal understandable. And DSA had overreach, but there are legitimate reasons, you know, defilling machines, whoever programs them could be biased, whatever. We really need both voting machines and hand can help.

Okay. So I gotta say what you just heard is the mark of a really high information group. Even if some of that information is total garbage, because when we ask a more normie group of Trump voters about the dominion suit against Fox last year when it was happening, We mostly got plank stairs mainly because they were still Fox viewers and Fox wasn’t covering the case. Right. But Brian, here’s the thing.

How much of what they’re doing now is driven by the fact that there’s so many other conservative media outlets breathing down their necks, like Steve Bannon’s war room and all kinds of dark corners of the internet and tons of podcasts and Megan Kelly, who was at Fox and left. Like, how much is that driving their programming decisions now?

This gets to the the part about the monster that was created not being able to control or tame the monster because, yes, Fox has tremendous power. It is still dominant. By any way, we would measure, television ratings on the right and web traffic as well. You know, fox news dot com is bigger. Than, you know, the gateway pundit type sites.

But the difference now, as you just said, there are so many alternatives. And if you are loyal to Steve Bennett’s war room, if you love watching NewsMax, You can feel like you are part of something popular and growing and important. It’s not, to be clear as big as Fox, right, like News Max, for example, much, much smaller. But if you decide to become a newsmaxed person, right, if that’s your identity now, you can easily convince yourself that it is the the the right and growing place. It’s the new fox, for example, because, you know, it is promoted that way.

And I I think that’s what’s happening in a lot of these media subcultures where I see it all the time in social media flame wars people are convinced that the fringy outlet they love is number one is the most popular. Right? And that everybody else is losing. They’re able to cherry pick data, little numbers who believe that they are on top. And I think that’s some of what goes on here with the far right now.

I don’t know. Would you say it’s the far, right? Certainly, Fox would argue that its rivals, its one of these are further to the right of Fox.

Yeah. I mean, I always struggle with these terms about, far right because it’s, like, that’s left and right versus, like, kind of an up and down, true and false insane. Yeah. You know? Yeah.

Conspiratorial versus something, like, The daily wire is further right. And it’s also, like, different personality. Matt Walsh thinks women should just stay at home and then he gets in a fight with Megan Kelly. And, like, what’s Tim Pool? Tim Pool is just a Yeah.

I have no idea what he is anymore.

Steve Van is a populist authoritarian wannabe type. I don’t know.

Like, how much of it is news versus nonsense?

Yeah.

Fox News, for all of its many faults, when Ron DeSantis dropped out of the race, Fox News broke into its tape show and didn’t almost hour long special report. They did cover the news. Now, I would argue they did not point out the important facts. I would argue they did not substantially critique what went wrong. I would argue that it was a a Trump ad, but they at least tried to cover the news.

A lot of the outlets that we’re gonna hear these focus group site as alternatives are not actually in the news business at all. And if they are only around the edges, they are not sending reporters to cover news events. And it’s probably critical to point out. A lot of folks in their partisan media bubbles don’t want real news reporting. They don’t care if there’s a reporter at a press conference asking a question.

They might claim that’s what they want. They claim they want the days of Walter Cronkite. What they really want is for Laura Ingram to not be a traitor as one of those focus group respondents said. He said Laura turned into a traitor. That’s not a journalistic term.

Like, Trader is not something that you referred to as. She reported the news wrong in the in the view of this respondent. She betrayed Trump.

Yeah. You know, one of the things that I always think is so interesting about this idea of this monster they created is how they’ve shifted expectations around news. So Yes. Sean Hannity will be like, I’m not a news program. I’m an entertainment program.

Right.

They do every now and then try to, like, get away with not being exactly news, but of course seeming like news. Right? Their opinion shows. And as a result, what happened was everybody realized like, oh, we could just have an opinion show. And we don’t need to have any news.

We don’t need to do anything like the regular news. And what’s crazy about Fox is Fox does still have. Some, like, old vestiges of some really good news and reporting.

Right.

And they’re polling shop until they got rid of, steyer Wolf for correctly calling the Arizona race.

Right. And

he was running it, but still their their polling shop is quite good. Like, you can trust their polls. They’re not biased against anybody. Exactly. Click their foreign policy, folks or some of the people who do international news are still very, very good.

Right. But it’s their sort of crime time lineup that has become the infotainment that now everybody craves. And they can go get a straighter hit of dopamine from places that don’t have any restrictions or integrity whatsoever. And it seems like a lot of them are doing that.

Yeah. The way that I described it in my most recent book, I was saying that these executives, they try to hide behind the idea that everyone can tell the difference between a news show and an opinion show. Like, for example, when Lou Dobbs was out there with his ridiculous claims about voter fraud, one of the top executives of Fox News was emailing saying, oh, that’s just an opinion show. This wasn’t being reported on as news by us. That’s an opinion show.

And I find that to be infuriating because Fox viewers do know the difference between what Lou Dobbs does and what Brett Bear does. They preferred Lou Dobbs. Like, they’re not in terms of the ratings. Lou Dobbs aren’t channel. But what I’m saying is to the extent that you can choose between news and opinion on Fox viewers choose opinion.

They wanna watch the five. They wanna watch and cut fell. They wanna watch Kennedy. They don’t really wanna watch the newscast. I’m sorry Neil Kavuto who I think puts on a a pretty strong newscast at four PM.

It’s one of the lowest rated hours of the day. A million people then come in at five PM eastern time for the five because they want the opinion. And it aggravates me because we should be honest about what the audience is is seeking. They’re not seeking news from Fox. Maybe for a couple minutes a day, but not really.

Yeah.

So going back to their power, and you just mentioned Ron DeSantis, you know, it was a little bit of a test of Fox’s power. To whether or not they could make Ron DeSantis happen. Right? Like, Murdoch Enterprises was, like, done with Trump. It cost him seven hundred and eighty seven million dollars Ron DeSantis was the future.

And, you know, he went out and, like, through the football with Brian Kilmeade and whatever. And honestly, I don’t know that anybody could have dragged DeSantis over the finish line, but what does it say about the fact that they couldn’t prop DeSantis up in a bigger way.

I don’t know. Maybe that you can’t fool all the people all the time. That Fox’s promotion Ron DeSantis was artificial, that it was a charade, that were putting on decent performances, but people saw through his weird smile. I’m not entirely sure. I do think it’s very, very true.

And should be recognized that when focus group respondents who are against Fox, when they say, you know, Fox turned against Trump, you know, the Murdochs hate Trump. They’re right. Like, that’s true. That wasn’t a conspiracy theory. That was a real conspiracy.

Right? Ruber Murdoch did try to get rid of Donald Trump. We tried to nonperson Donald Trump, and it worked for a while. And it worked on Fox for a while. And it’s true.

DeSantis became the the new chosen one. I think the x factor here that nobody could control, that Trump couldn’t control, that DeSantis couldn’t control, that Fox couldn’t was the Marlago raid and the indictments. Right? Because we know that’s what solidified Trump support brought the base back to Trump. And I think the other important piece here is that Fox itself helped bring Trump back by letting Tucker Carlson go on and lie about January six by creating a new live filled narrative about January six.

Fox created a permission structure to get behind Trump again. So, you know, I I guess I would say Fox is a multi headed beast and Some shows were hyping to Santa’s at the same time. They were seeding the ground for Trump’s return.

Yeah. I mean, it seems to me sort of like Yes. They wanted to not have to deal with Trump anymore, but also I think their the future part was also there was sense that, like, maybe the voters were ready to move on too. Like, everybody could do this together. We can all make this move, like, one happy family onto the next guy.

And then it turned out as repeated over and over again. And our time is a flat circle situation, the voters still wanted Trump. They still wanted Trump. And, again, it’s like a chicken or egg. I’m not sure whether Trump kind of went back to Fox or Fox came back to Trump, but they certainly after, what’d you say, nonpersoning him or unpersoning him and, you know, keeping him off for a while, you know, he was back with Maria Bartoromo and Even when he did this debate, it wasn’t a debate.

He did, like, a town hall recently with Brett Bear and was it Shannon Bream? Oh, Mars McCallum. Right? Two other serious folks. And my colleague Tim Miller described it as two lovers, people who used to date that have had a few drinks at a bar and they see each other.

And maybe they had a tough break up, but now they’re feeling it. They’re touching each other’s elbows, you know, they’re finding their way back to each other. And it looks like they’re rekindling that romance. And if nothing else, it seems like Fox is like, look. Trump is still the future, at least in the in for a while here.

And, you know, we’re kinda all going back to what made us comfortable in the first place. So it’s uncomfortable to be in a fight with Right? That felt bad to everybody.

I did. I mean, even for some of the talent, like, in a very real sense, you know, wondering if they’re gonna be welcome at Mar a lago. I mean, that was, like, very real. A lot of the Fox stars have flocked to South Florida. It’s important to recognize, like, Fox is not just a channel.

It’s an identity. It’s a way of life. It is a symbol of who you are, not just politically, but also societally. You know, Fox, even though it’s number one in cable, it portrays itself as the underdog. Right, as the the network for the forgotten man and woman, you know, even though it’s, like, you know, run by these billionaires, you know, Lachlan Murdoch spends half his life in Australia, but, you know, it’s It’s the most American network somehow in the branding.

Like, but I think that idea of Fox as a way of life is really critical to understanding because that’s not true, really, for many other media brands. And it impacts how people talk about it. When they feel grieved by it, they feel, insulted by it. It’s very personal. By the way, that’s how Trump is as well.

Right? Trump is a way of life for a lot of his fans.

And a brand and a yeah. An identity. No. You are a hundred percent correct about that.

They they make more sense together than part because Fox is fundamentally an anti democrat brand more than it’s a pro Republican brand. I think that’s the best way to view Fox as its anti democrat period.

Yeah. So whatever it takes to beat the bad Democrats, that’s what Fox is, and that’s why it’s now a Trump brand again. Hundred percent. And I do think that Fox you know, they laid a fair amount of the populist groundwork. Sometimes you hear folks in the focus groups talk about the uni party

Right.

Or the idea of Republicans being weak and caving to Democrats and always giving Democrats what they want. And that was sort of a rush limbaugh, and prime time Fox populist lineup is when you would go after the more establishment types than the Republican Party for always caving, but I gotta say since Russian Limblob died, there’s been kind of this, like, vacuuming conservative media. Is both incredibly diffuse and filled with stuff, but, like, in terms of there being a central person, and the only figure who seems to come close to that deep relationship that limbo had with this audience is Tucker Carlson. And so, let’s listen to what a truth teller. These viewers thought he was.

I do think with the removal of Tucker Carlson. That very clearly showed that they weren’t willing to stick up for the truth. Right? Because that was literally what Tucker was all about the truth. And as I said, having that inquisitive mind enough to report real journalism.

And I think since his removal, there’s this real sense in which you can’t really trust, but why are they saying these things? If you go to, like, the, you know, the gym or wherever you see NBC, CNN, they’re saying the exact same things in the exact same way as Fox is reporting it.

So they were pretty much on the way out for me. And then when Tucker Carlson was fired, that was the last straw. I went on Amazon and I bought a bucket of blue paint and had it shipped to them and said here, I wanted to send you this so you could re finish redecorating. I feel

like Tucker had the ability to ask questions that were more insightful and

more to the point where most news media agents kinda reported what everybody else was reporting on what, like, the story, the narrative was. Yeah. But at least Tucker had the ability to kinda look beyond that and say, okay. Well, if that’s true, then this, So what about this? You know, and so I think I felt like he again, like somebody said, it was journalism that you guys used to be.

So that last guy said what he said when we were asking about Tucker’s coverage COVID, which I, you know, as we know is maybe more often than not the opposite of truth telling. I also love this blue paint story because, you know, the Democrat blue snooze building. So, okay, Brian. Tell me about how Tucker’s future is gonna play out. Like, is he gonna suffer the same curse as others that came before him?

Like, Bill Riley and Glenbeck, the thought they were bigger than the network Right. And jump ship without their audience following them, or is something about Tucker special?

He is a special character, isn’t he?

Yeah. You mean special slightly differently.

You want him a long time, and I’ve watched him radicalize. I’ve heard him radicalize. You know, Bill O’Reilly was the predecessor at eight PM on Fox, and O’Reilly’s slogan was, who’s looking out for you? And the implication was, I’m looking out for you. Hi, Bill O’Reilly.

I’m looking out for you. The working man who’s watching my Fox show every night. Who’s looking out for you? Hunter Carlson, if he had had a slogan on Fox, it would have been no one’s looking out for you. We are screwed.

You are alone. We are doomed, especially toward the end. He was full doomsday prepper. And what I hear in the most focus group respondents is that same energy, that same doomsdays sense, that same dissatisfaction and disaffection and disillusionment They can’t trust anything, that all the parties are corrupt, that they can’t believe anything. And as I hear that, I think to myself, not only did Tucker succeed, Trump succeeded.

Like, Trump’s campaign, his propaganda campaign against the American media, worked. It was at least twenty five percent of the American people. If you go out every day and you say CNN is fake, some people are gonna believe it. Like, if you go out every day and try to destroy the New York Times, it is gonna change these brands. And and more important than in the brands, those brands are holding up pretty well.

It’s gonna change your base’s relationship to what media is, what news is. Right? If it’s not Trump approved, it’s not real, it’s not news. And that’s why I love your podcast. When you hear people, I think you can sense the extent to what Trump succeeded with that campaign.

And it wasn’t just Trump. That’s why I’m Cantier to Tucker. Tucker was critical in this because Tucker would come on basically every night and claim to have forbidden knowledge secret knowledge that you can’t know that you’re not allowed to know, but only he is gonna be able to share it with you. Very trumpy in that way. Although talker thinks he’s smarter than Trump better than Trump, obviously.

So to your question, what’s gonna happen to him? Is he is he special? Know, I think he’s made some mistakes in his post Fox months. You know, he’s, like, kind of trying too hard. He seems desperate, you know, building new sets like, with awkward Cam RANGles and and launching a subscription service and and, you know, doing a lot of UFO segments and some really hair brained topics things that wouldn’t have even been allowed on Fox, like stuff that Laughlin Merak would have intervened on if Tucker were still there, which is what contributed to his firing.

To me, it feels like he’s playing for a smaller audience. Right? Maybe a very loyal one, but a smaller audience. Whereas at Fox, he had scale. He had three million viewers a night, at least, who were hanging on his every word.

And it feels to me like his brand is shrinking.

You know, I think that’s right. But just as a quick, like, scuttlebutt talk since you’ve got all the, you know, inside dirt, you got fired for calling, I think, some of the executives’ names, Like, that was a little bit of the last straw, but, like, not necessarily the, not particularly veiled white supremacy stuff. Or right? Like, were they cool with that, or was he wearing out his welcome with his content? Like, he released footage

Right.

Of the January sixth. I think he did create that. Like, there’s an alternate narrative even though Yep. There was no alternate narrative said some different camera angles of

supremacy versus reality. It did all boil over. Look, the executives of Fox tolerated far too much for far too long. Including, as you mentioned, you know, using slurs and horrible language toward executives of the network, including conspiracy theories right on the air, you know, full throated lies on the air. You know, January six tapes were a turning point because even other Fox shows did not follow-up on Tucker’s alleged so called Scoop.

So if that was actually a big scoop, if he actually generated real news, presumably all the other Fox shows would race to cover it. None of them did. That was a tell. That Fox was breaking up with him a month or two before it happened. But those tapes, you know, they’re another example of exactly what you hear in the focus groups, right, that when able to create their own reality or choose their own adventure.

Remember those choose your own adventure books? I I always read the choose your own adventure books growing up, and that’s where I feel like I live now. I live in one of those books where people can choose to believe that the parts of the tapes from the capitol, the few scenes where there weren’t rioters. Or the reality. And in that environment, people can claim they want Walter Cronkite, but they don’t.

Like, I don’t think that’s actually what they’re seeking.

Yeah. I think that’s right. And actually, yeah, let’s listen to some of the sound because it’s like forty thousand hours of footage that then McCarthy turned over after becoming speaker. People liked this because in the focus groups telling, it was one of those stories that would otherwise go uncovered. As you were talking about, like, Tucker was the only one who was gonna tell them the real truth.

So let’s hear about some of the things they think are uncovered.

The January sixth debacle still going on. These people have been arrested and they’re going after journalists now and these sorts of things. No one’s really covering that hardly.

Something about hunter. More Where we at with this game? Oh, if Hunter’s last name was trumpy b in prison and Hey.

Long down. Go ahead.

New systems of justice. That’s what we’re talking.

So when eight times under subpoenas, and was there every time eight different times, but now Portland is gonna show up.

I mean, if you didn’t steal something, then you’ll show me. I’ll open a case send four hundred lawyers to Arizona four hundred lawyers, you can’t see anything. It’s our right to see stuff. Well, we won’t show the routers. We won’t show you this.

We won’t show you that. You know, when people are hiding stuff and spending millions of dollars to hide it, pretty apparent. We’ll go right back to a bundle birth certificate. Why not just show it to you right away instead of the four million dollars spent keeping you from it? Now I’m not saying one way or the other with that, but when somebody goes that far to hide something.

Why didn’t the lady that certified it drowned in that plane crash

Why did she indeed? In the plane crash? Was there a pool on the plane?

Let me just tell you. The number of things that get said in the focus groups that I’m like, What are they talking about? Like, I’ve heard nothing about this. Some of it is, like, you either have to be really deep in the Fox cinematic universe or you have to be really further down somewhere else in the muck. Like, I remember when the queue stuff started bubbling up, It took a long time before I started hearing it in the focus groups, but once it kind of had hit a certain point, I heard it all the time.

Like, there was, like, a turning point, but it was real. And if you brought it up,

a bunch of people would be like, yeah.

Well, you know, I don’t believe everything, but I think he has some points about x y z, and then some people were super down the rabbit hole on the, conspiracy stuff. I guess Fox is quite destructive. Tucker’s quite destructive. And yet, Somehow they’re still a layer up from the most destructive. It was almost like when you kept it contained in Fox News, it was like weird and bad, but it wasn’t like just insane off the rails.

Like, I mean, I can’t tear a lot of people questioning nine eleven now. Like, that’s a big one. Also, you know, Fox News before wasn’t super blatantly racist in a way that I think a lot of these other shows are and are giving people new permission For example, someone in the focus groups, they didn’t like ViveKramaswamy because, you know, they were still really bitter about nine eleven. No. And you’re like, Okay.

That dude’s from Ohio and also Indian. I guess I wonder if there’s something about the Fox News Tucker crack up

Yeah.

That’s actually even worse. For American media because now there’s just a billion of these little guys to make people crazy.

I think that’s a really helpful way to explain it because I I have a hard time explaining it. This crack up that’s happening. It is very real. We’re going from an environment where fifteen years ago, let’s take Glen Clinton back with still a fox. Sixteen years ago, Fox was dominant, you know, again, number one in the ratings but you didn’t have a hundred alternative YouTube live streams of far right content.

Glenbeck leaves launches the plays. That’s an early indication of how this is gonna go, where there’s gonna be these breakaway channels that are are not gonna really have news coverage, but they’re gonna have a lot of talk about how scary the world is. It’s gonna be utterly terrifying. You’re gonna wish you were on that drown on a plane or whatever. From the blaze, you know, you get the steep banner war rooms.

You get you get a lot of these I don’t even know the names of all of them, right, the right side broadcasting. I’m sure there’s ones that are wild that I’ve never even seen. And it does feel like get it’s like self replicating. You know, slicing it into smaller and smaller pieces. And within those worlds, if you opt into the Tucker Carlson, I forget what that works called TCN, I think.

If you opt into that world and that worldview and that doomsday prepper culture that he’s promoting, that apocalypse that he’s promising is coming, You can convince yourself that, you know, there’s millions of people just like you who are also consuming it, even though there’s not, by the way, there’s not. Fox is still, as you said, a layer above this paranoid fever swamp that exists, on the internet, but things seep through. Jesse Waters was wink and nod to the conspiracy theory of the day that’s online. Right? Greg got felt.

We’ll make jokes about it. But in so doing, they are mainstreaming it. So when they talk about Democrats being perverts. Right? Like, it’s kind of an, like, a wink wink to QAnonaut and to crazy conspiracy theories and Jeffrey Epstein or whatever.

I think There is definitely a dialogue almost between what Fox does up here, which is trying to still be appealing to advertisers, And then what’s happening, on x or on parlor or on two social?

One of the reasons I started to do this podcast was because I felt like they’re speaking a different language.

Right.

But they speak the same language to each other.

Exactly. It

it is a Fox Cinematic universe. And by cinematic universe, I’d start to, like, count this diaspora of podcasts and people who go lairs beyond Fox News, including sort of the OANN crowd and Fox Sexton. And there’s just, like, all these names. And, like, they don’t mean anything to people on the left

Like, the people, folks on the

left, are we, like, I know who Ben Shapiro is, Sean Handy, but, like, they don’t know who Tim Pool is, unless they’re pretty online or a lot of these other sort of

Emerald Robinson and Laura Lumer. Right. There’s all these characters.

Totally. Totally tons of characters, and the left also just doesn’t understand the language these people are speaking, but they speak it to each other, and that’s how they know they’re in group. It’s a tough thing to parse out because I also hear from a lot of voters who are Fox News adjacent. They are Republicans And the smartest person in their office or the not the smartest, but let’s just say, like, the one who talks about politics the most Yeah. He listens to Sean Hannity.

Right.

And they just absorb what this guy says about Sean Hannity. And so through that, they just set up sort of swimming in the same soup of trumpism Like you even said, right, Tucker had these big ratings. There’s three million people. Well, there’s three hundred and, I don’t know, twenty million Americans, fifty million Americans. There’s a lot of us.

Yeah.

Yeah. It’s a very small percentage of people who are listening to Tucker, but he has an outsized influence on the culture because his fans are devoted and because it has created a, like, world that these people live in that has expanded much beyond simply watching Fox News.

A hundred percent. And that’s how the talking points that start in front of three million people expand to thirty million. And I I think we’re seeing that a lot on the economy. This idea that the Biden economy, that the current economy we’re in is actually a disaster. This claim the Republicans have to advance that it was so much battery with Trump.

Sean Hannity is fighting that fight every day and coming up with crazy talking points that you should go in and share with your friends, and they are being shared with those friends. And so that echo chamber is very real, and I think we all do feel the effects of it. The cinematic universe is the best analogy because there are so many different connections it’s not just about the characters who are in. It’s also about the villains that the cinematic universe creates. I like to think that I’m a a bit character in that universe, I once had a potato mailed to me.

It came in a FedEx box. It was an actual potato. And I showed it to my kids, and, of course, my kids are only I have no idea why someone’s mailing me a potato. It’s because that within the Fox universe, I used to be called Humpty Dumpty. And from there, it became Brian’s a potato.

And so when I get random tweets from people calling me spud, I know that as you just said, they’re in that in group. It is their way of communicating to each other that they are in on the, I guess, in this case, it’s a joke, but it’s also an insult,

you know. Else, I hope you make baked potatoes with them.

I sure yeah. Actually, the other thing that showed up in the mail one day was a humpty dumpty toy, and my kids actually played with it. So that one, the joke was on the,

troll.

Thanks for sending my kids toys guys.

That’s right. Jokes on you.

Jokes on you. Alright. So I wanna talk about, like, who these folks do listen to now. In this particular group, we just said, alright. Who do you trust?

Let’s listen.

A wav pundit dot com.

You know,

incredible incredible sight and updated constantly with what’s going on. The real news is available out there on things like that. A real American’s voice, see benefits war room, another incredible program. There’s so much out there. And it’s all being suppressed.

Right? YouTube, everybody else is still suppressing them and Facebook and all those. But out there, and you can go there and you can read it in. It’s right there.

We’ve got a lot more facts from citizen journalists now. Prazek Veritas, Shoot. There’s a couple other ones out there. Tom Fitt, but who’s he with?

I probably get most of my news from the Epic Times.

Another good favor.

I enjoy listening to Tim Secret Podcast. You know who that is. Tim Pool is a younger job at thirty years old. So he’s kinda interesting because he, like, brings a lot of that’s so much conspiracy to these, but more let’s say fringe ideas on stuff, which is sort of just interesting to hear. Not that that’s my focus of news, but also for that same reason, enjoy listening to Alex Jones every now and then

So let me tell you. I do hear this all the time about Alex Jones and where they’re like, I don’t listen because I like think he’s right about everything. I just find him sort of entertaining.

Right. Right. Right.

But, like, they were absorbing that crap.

Right.

I guess we’ve always had a bit of a a vein and American. What was those national enquirer, that weird stuff?

Yeah. The weekly world news?

Yeah.

But it wasn’t accessible twenty four seven. It was not piped at us constantly. We couldn’t gorge on it, you know. It used to be available only at the supermarket checkout line. Like frat boy type, you know, humor.

Somebody makes a joke about nine eleven. Now you have people with millions of listeners making those jokes or or asking those questions and claiming to have forbidden knowledge. I did bring some numbers, by the way, Sarah Longwell, because I was thinking about this. The Gateway pun an epic times. Right?

They all do matter. Don’t get me wrong. Like gateway pundit, five hundred fifteen thousand unique visitors, you know, in a typical month. But Fox News, you know, seventy seven million epic times. Five million in a typical month.

The blade is two million. Like, the Deli Y are two million. So there are audiences for all of these. I would just say it’s all fragmented and fractured and this is a threat to Fox. I mean, this is why we see a place like Fox, put Jesse Waters in at eight o’clock, you know, put Greg Gutfeld in at eight ten, make these moves to go further to the right.

It’s because they are afraid of all the outlets that your focus group respondents just mentioned. They don’t fear what NBC or ABC are doing. They’re not trying to compete with the CBS CB News. They’re trying to compete with the Gateway pundit. They are both anti Republican party, right, because they’re anti establishment, whatever, but they’re also the base of the Republican party.

They have tremendous power over the direction the Republican voters wanna see

the Republican party go. And so, Fox News to be being sort of baited further and further into the extremes, by these smaller but still sort of potent echo chamber of other, you know, little groups What does it mean for the Republican Party that it has its own media ecosystem and the ecosystem is this toxic?

I think it means that we’re not gonna get out of this fog for a long time. I think it means that we’re gonna be in this broken situation for quite some time because the incentive structures are almost all toward the conspiratorial and the paranoid and the fringe. And the incentive structure’s disfavor news coverage and reporting and dissent and criticism you know, DeSantis, you know, God love him. He was right when he said. You know, y’all don’t criticize Fox because you’re afraid of getting yelled at.

The average Fox host is afraid of the audience. Is afraid of the audience going off to see Brandon instead? Is afraid of losing the viewer because of the ratings and and financial impact down the line. And that was proven very clearly in the Dominion filings. And, you know, Dominion’s not the last one.

Smartmatic is still suing. They’ve been deposing witnesses. That’s, you know, either gonna settle or

go to trial, their shareholder lawsuits, Fox is under tremendous pressure from that direction to reject Trump’s lies, but then it’s under even more pressure from the audience to embrace those lies. Fox News, they’re afraid of their viewers who they then in turn gin up to keep them engaged, which makes politicians afraid of their voters which leads us to where we are today in the Republican Party, and it’s sort of the answer to everything now, which is There’s no real leadership in these spaces to tell people they’re wrong, and it leads to this what I call the Republican Triangle of doom, which is the toxic and symbiotic relationship between Republican voters, the right wing infotainment media, and the elected officials. And they just feed off of each other in that way alright. This is the kind of, you know, positive, happy place we like to end these podcasts. Brian’s still Thank you so much for joining us.

It was great to have you on the Focus Secret Podcast, and thanks to all of you for listening to another episode. We’re gonna back next week to cover the two Republican contests in Nevada. If you’re asking yourself why are there two? We will Wayne. See you soon.