American History Hit - Origins of Political Campaigns: Publicity Stunts & Fake News

Episode Date: August 5, 2024

How do our politicians use the media? Throughout the 2024 election we have seen a boom in the use of social media and cable news, so how far back does this go?To find out, Don speaks first to crisis public relations expert and TikTok star, Molly McPherson, to hear about this year's election campaign. Then, he chats to author Claire Bond Potter, whose book is titled 'Political Junkies: From Talk Radio to Twitter, How Alternative Media Hooked Us On Politics and Broke Our Democracy' and whose substack carries the same name. Claire takes us through the history of political news, from pamphlets and papers to radio, TV and social media.Produced by Sophie Gee. Edited by Aidan Lonergan. Senior Producer was Charlotte Long.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Sign here for up to 50% for 3 months using code AMERICANHISTORYYou can take part in our listener survey here.American History Hit is a History Hit podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Want to explore even more history? Sign up to History Hit, where you will discover history from around the world. From the American Revolution to prehistoric Scotland, there is plenty to discover. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe to bring the past alive. Oh, make that stop. Ah, the morning routine.

Stumble to the bathroom, brush your teeth, and wash your face. In the kitchen you make coffee. And then, because it's the 21st century, you glance at your phone, and half the morning immediately evaporates. The average American cell phone user checks their phone 144 times a day. Texting to friends, scrolling social media, looking at photos, editing photos, Instagramming photos, reading the news, the weather, the traffic, the sports scores. But how has this communication tool turned human limb affected us politically? How has it helped political opinions become ingrained in our personal lives?

And how does it all impact the society in which we live? Hello, all. It's American History Hit, and I'm Don Wildman. Back in southern New Jersey, in the suburban town where I was raised, I worked as a paperboy for the Philadelphia Bulletin. The evening edition, marked final, was delivered by an army of us kids after school, riding our bikes with our big baskets, stuffed with papers, we'd sling onto the porches, front steps, and lawns. Once in a while, if you slung too hard, whoops, right onto the rooftop.

In those Halcyon days, my dad, like so many, came home from work around five or six, sat down in the living room and read his bulletin while dinner was fixed. Then the family gathered to watch Cronkite or Chancellor or Howard K. Smith on ABC, and then discussed the news over corn fritters or hamburger helper. Anyone who stayed up late might have watched the local news, but mainly for sports and weather. That was our relationship with media back then, a million years ago in the 60s and 70s. Daily papers, TV, the radio, usually in the car.

Certain big events got people excited, the Olympics or elections or moon launches, but it was rare to stare unless it was Cher or Carol Burnett, or the Jeffersons. But all that changed later in the 80s and 90s with personal computers and cable and 24-hour news cycles. And we'll discuss the dire consequences of it all with our guest today. Professor Claire Bond Potter. But first, I'm joined by Molly McPherson, sometimes known as the PR lady, to look at more topical news events. Molly works in PR crisis management, shares lessons from breaking news stories on TikTok to her 500,000 plus followers. You can find her at Molly B. McPherson. Molly, welcome to the show.

Happy to be here, Don. Molly, we're in the middle of an election campaign. It has been wildly transformed by several very recent events. I need your read. How are the Democrats and Republicans using media in this campaign differently than they may have in the past? In past elections, most campaigns would have a battlefield that took place in traditional media, television and newspaper. But now the battlefield is firmly in the world of social media.

So the ecosystem is getting quite heated. there. And it has completely changed. I was talking with a friend of mine about what has happened over the since Harris joined the campaign. I mean, her candidacy has been totally transformed in the most subtle fashion, meaning she was one thing entirely differently, even to me, you know, a year ago. And now to the to the general public, a completely different person. And it's almost like a psychological shift, never mind the way social media and media in general has affected this? In a way, it gives the appearance that Kamala Harris was finally let out of the White House, so to speak. I mean, she was really suppressed as a vice president. The focus was on

President Biden. But now that the torch has been passed from Biden to Harris, it's as if she suddenly said, now I can come out and I'm going to use social media to do that. And she has overtaken anything that President Biden, her predecessor, did on social media. We're going to come back to that in a moment, but the crazy irony is that we're not starting this conversation talking about an assassination attempt, which was but a few, I don't, days a short time ago from when we're recording. And that's crazy how quickly things get supplanted by one another. And that really is the immediacy of social media, isn't it? Absolutely. I mean, that assassination attempt is a great example of how one event can overtake everything, the conversation, the dialogue, and the media. But as soon as it appeared over the weekend, it was gone as soon as we heard about Kamala Harris. Yep. I mean, this has been in the works, obviously, since Obama really kind of that first election really mastered the, or at least introduced the mastery of social media to a whole new world.

But this is the time that now we're into the complete evolution of that, aren't we? I completely agree. And the evolution of social media, when we talk about it just as one medium, we could say, you know, that people are getting persuaded. online from their phones. However, social media has changed so much because during President Obama's candidacy when he was the candidate, his genius was really in fundraising. It wasn't about building community, but then moving the reins over to President Trump when he was president, he was the Twitter president. So he was in these brief bursts. But now that we're in the TikTok age, this is a time for Kamala Harris. This is her medium. The term Brat Sophe's,

summer. I educated myself about that yesterday. Showing my age, I had to kind of go looking for what that means. But let's define the term, first of all, for anybody like me. Yeah, no apologies there. I think everyone, Gen X and older, had to go to the internet to figure out what this Brad summer is all about. But, you know, in short, it is a way to kind of capture this movement that's happening with, you know, the youth. There's an artist, Charlie XX, X, X, X, X, you know, her new album, Brat is a kind of an anthem for younger people. And what a great way to engage younger audiences. You know, she's an artist who's different pioneering. And in a way, you know, it matches what Kamala Harris is as well. It matches her personality, which is what's so interesting. And that's what made people uneasy about her in the past was there was kind of this word salad thing that people kind of chalked her up to.

And now that word Sally kind of fits the Brat Summer thing. And it's tail wagging the dog kind of. phenomenon. Oh, absolutely. And it speaks to the segment of the population that the Harris campaign really is counting on to overtake the Republicans, and that's Gen Z. Trump, though, is calmer on this campaign. Interestingly, I wonder if that's really a choice, or he's just gotten older, or he's feeling more assured. Who knows? A calmer Trump is a very strategic Trump. I mean, where we first noticed it was in that initial debate with President Biden. I think President Biden and his campaign was not expecting that strategic of a move from Trump. I mean, he was very calm and he wasn't prepared for that. And now with the RNC, we clearly see that he was contained and tethered to the teleprompter.

It's as if he was listening to likely his new campaign strategist to remain calm. But once he comes off prompter, we got a little taste of the old Trump as well. It was always my feeling about Trump is that it was so strange to me that he didn't use that, even in the past, more effectively, because he owns his part of the electorate. They're with him one way or the other. It's the fact that he never sort of reaches out for the other side that has always been distinctive about him. Yes, I think now because his advisors are recognizing that in order to find a path to victory is he needs to speak to moderate voters and questioning the health of President Biden, the mental acuity of President Biden, was working certainly in their favor. But now with Biden out and a young, very enthusiastic and someone with a lot of mental acuity, Kamala Harris in the race, they needed a new strategy. So certainly trying to, you know, make him a more calmer choice looks to be their strategy. Well, it was, you know, just backing up a bit.

Biden's decline, I suppose, really was displayed in new and, you know, bolder fashion by social media. That was his problem. It was impossible to control that. And it was clear that the campaign was not prepared for it because before he even left the debate stage during that debate, they were saying that he had a cold. So the spin had already started, but they abandoned that theory quickly. So that's just a signal that they weren't prepared for that disastrous of a performance. How would you have approached that differently? How could they have? One, I do think that President Biden was overprepared. It just was too much. It was just too taxing on him. I also don't think he was prepared for a very calm Donald Trump. But what they should have done, which is what any political strategist would tell you, is you have to lean into the human nature of it,

just the natural energy. And that is Joe Biden being Joe, you know, Joe from Scranton. He needs to exude safety and security. He wants to be the opposite of what appears to be like a chaotic President Trump. And that's why I think the campaign, Trump's campaign, was prepared to do that by making him calmer. So it just really threw Biden off his game completely. Yeah.

I mean, and just, you know, we are a history show. So I want to put this in context. These same kinds of conversations would have been happening back in the 1800s with Lincoln and his log cabin campaign and all sorts of, you know, certainly the latter part of the 19th century as managers became aware of the fact that they needed to brand these candidates. We're really in that same tradition. It's just been supercharged by technology. Yeah, absolutely. The strategy has never changed, but the contrast is in the medium and how quickly and how effectively the, the medium that people are using and taking information and has changed.

Yeah. You can really look for precedent with LBJ's stepping aside from his 1968 election. In that case, you have a president in the Oval Office reading his speech probably off of paper in those days. But you can see it in Biden. If he's on a teleprompter, he's okay. You know, he can get through it. The problem is we now, the media arena surpasses the teleprompter. teleprompter. That's the problem. Yes. And I think one of the perhaps mistakes that the Biden campaign made that perhaps, in hindsight, would have been better, is the reason why President Biden needs a teleprompter that many people forget is that he was a lifelong stutterer. He has some devices that he uses when he speaks to help him with his clarity. And part of that stuttering, I think, came into effect during the debate. But instead of, you know,

relying on that narrative that it's just a part of, you know, his speech pattern. What took over is that there was something about his mental health that was in peril. And they didn't speak to that. And that teleprompter is so effective for him in the art of television and use. But energy can be exuded in social media and heavily edited, you know, viral clips. And that's what I think overshadowed President Biden. One of the great subplots of all of this, of course, another irony is that we haven't been talking about his convictions, Trump's convictions. I mean, that was, of course, supplanted by the assassination attempt. But I mean, that's an ongoing situation where we actually have a convicted felon running for election. That's a fact. How is social media being used to

fight that problem on their side? Well, the Republican side of this campaign is very interesting because they're also operating in a new territory. When people talk about social media, they think of the major platforms out there. They think of TikTok. They think of Facebook. They think of X, which was formerly Twitter. But what the Republicans are doing now, the Trump campaign, is they're reaching their base in more of these exclusive social media and streaming sites. Streaming is becoming the new part of social media that is an effective tool in that persuasion point. So look to like a rumble. Donald Jr. will have live streams on Rumble, which is like a YouTube, also Telegram. These are the platforms that a lot of the Trump base rely on for information. So those are the social media platforms that kind of bypass the traditional press. So it's not getting picked up in the news, those types of stories. So the base is building kind of like under everyone's feet and they don't even notice. The shooting really fit, you know, it's sad to talk about it in these terms. It really is because it's just,

an act of violence, but that assassination attempt fit right in with that immediacy, didn't it? Well, not only did it fit into an immediacy, but it also was an event that projected him to a new type of iconic status within his base. But what I find remarkable about that shooting is the suppression of the news as it happened. Now, if you were watching it full time like I was, I just turned off a Red Sox game. And I knew that the shooting happened. But when I went online, I couldn't see it anywhere. And one of the first places where it showed up, which is on X, you know, which is owned by Elon Musk, who has more of like an open source policy when it comes to news and that type of rhetoric, particularly around, you know, politics. So that's where the first news was coming. So President

Trump, former President Trump was getting this more iconic status. Now, what is so interesting about it is how much information we do not know. If you think about the Kennedy assassination, you think about the Zuprooter film, how people have been analyzing that assassination for years. And now this happened weeks ago, and no one's even talking about it. It is fascinating how quickly news moves nowadays. The precedent we have not discussed at all in all of this is the Kennedy Nixon debate, which really had so many sort of echoes in a way, where Nixon was so ill-prepared for this new media in that day, the new medium of television, whereas Kennedy was sort of built for the medium. Word was he had a cortisol shot that made him look more robust. Nixon was

sweating. You know, there's all the kind of things. It's just so interesting to compare and realize that this all has a certain kind of precedence. Yes, strategic mediums is certainly relevant today. You know, that Kennedy-Nixon debate, what we all learned is, or what we heard is that if you watched it on television. Overwhelmingly, the favorite was John Kennedy. But, you know, when people just listened to it on radio, they said it was, it was Nixon who actually won that debate. So the importance of visual presentation shaping public perception, it was still as relevant as it was then as it was with the Biden-Trump debate. Kids who are good at social media these days, I was, you know, my equivalent was, I was in the early 70s. So I was watching those Nixon moments and all the

rest of them thinking, why don't these people just be themselves? Why don't they just talk like real people? And social media has made that necessary. That has, this is, this is for me, the biggest shift in the nature of the candidates, that they have to sort of wear themselves on the sleeves. And that's what we're seeing with Kamala Harris, turning it to her advantage, surprisingly. Yeah, absolutely. And it really comes down to control because it was so much easier to control the press back in those days. I mean, if we think about the first time that the press really started to upend things, we're going back in a time of Woodward and Bernstein. You know, we're going back in the time, you know, of all the president's men.

But now the press is not in control of public opinion. The public is in control of public opinion because of what we see on social media. Exactly. Well, thank you, Molly, for joining us. We have an episode to get on with, but I just needed to talk to you about these current events. It's so cool. Thank you. Thanks so much to Molly McPherson for her PR expertise on the current election

campaign. Now, on to my interview with Claire Potter to find out historically how we got where we are today. Professor Claire Bond Potter of the New School for Social Research in New York, author of the popular substack, Political Junkies. Welcome. Thanks for coming on the show. Thanks for having me, Don. You know, it is an interesting chicken and egg story, isn't it? Politics and the media. I mean, it's always been there back to 1776. Technology has changed, but the relationship runs side by side, doesn't it? Sure. It absolutely does. And I think it's also important to think about the ways in which American liberalism is particularly linked to the media. I mean, really the first president to really get a grip on what media could do for him was Franklin Delano Roosevelt. And that's before my book,

political junkie starts. But it's really important to know that his top assistant was a guy named Lewis M. Howe, who was a journalist and an advertising guy, and it was Lewis M. Howe who understood that a president who wasn't actually very mobile, who couldn't be seen in public that much for a variety of reasons, one being that he had had polio as a child, could get on the radio, and nobody would know that he wasn't vigorous and in charge and manly. So there is this link between politics and media that begins in the 1930s that people then start to play with. And with in the 40s and 50s, and it sets us on the trajectory that we're on now. You know, last week, I was teaching a class for high schoolers in a school, and I told them

that one of the most important things they had to understand about life was storytelling. And I said, I know that sounds pat, but it's really true. And that has been the tool of media in a unique way in the 20th century. The idea of creating a protagonist and an antagonist, that was not really embraced earlier on so much. It was more like ideas, you know, out there. But 20th century really begins to shape the conflict, doesn't it? Yeah, it really does. And I think one of the things that's interesting about American media, at least, as it exists in the 40s and 50s and 60s, is that by and large, the rules of journalism that you're supposed to be objective.

And this is really new after World War II, because before World War II, you know, every political position, every political party, every ethnic group had a newspaper. But after World War II, professional journalism means objectivity. But there are a fair number of journalists that are dissatisfied with this for a variety of reasons, one being that advertisers are actually intervening with that objectivity, right? You can't get a story published about the harms of tobacco smoking because you'll lose your tobacco advertising. So you get a guy named Izzy Stone who actually is fired from his final job at the Herald Tribune. And he can't get a job. He's known to be a leftist in the 1950s. And he decides what he's going to do is the journalism he always wanted to do. And it's a lot like blogging. It's a lot like substacking today, which is he takes one topic and he follows it doggedly for weeks. And it's a four-page newsletter that takes no advertising that is entirely subscriber-driven. And he is wildly successful. And not.

not only is he wildly successful, but he's actually able to push back on this idea of objectivity by saying actually deep reporting is a series of things that ought to inform your opinions, that ought to inform your ideas about democracy. And so Izzy himself then becomes this launching pad for alternative journalism that is itself constantly in tension with this mainstream idea of objectivity. How much are these movers and shakers of media aware of their place in history? I think as you're talking about this guy, I'm thinking about pamphleteers of the 1700s. I mean, it's always been a kind of silo thing, hasn't it?

Oh, it certainly has been a silo thing. I would say that there is an awareness that you then have to pin to whatever technology is available, right? So one of the reasons Izzy Stone can do this newsletter is that printing is cheap, mailing things is cheap, cost like a penny to mail a newsletter. And as we move forward in time, you see people experimenting with existing technologies to make it do different things. So that, for example, you have broadcast television, which becomes very, very popular as a television in every home.

And then people start thinking, well, how can I use television for something else? And you get educational television. You get local television for farmers. And maybe one of the most important things of all, you get cable television because not everybody can receive broadcast television, right? So you have people who are constantly thinking about how to get the news to people, but the act of getting the news changes what is possible to do as news. Yeah. And we're back to the chicken and egg metaphor because you can't really sell something to people who don't want to buy it. And the American public loves this stuff.

or do they? Have they been forced-fed it? Or are they actually people who, you call them political junkies? Are you talking about the makers of the media or the receivers of the media? Well, I think it's both. But I think when you talk about what does the American public want out of it, there is a portion of the American public that genuinely wants to be informed. There is a much larger portion of the American public that has always existed, that has always wanted to be entertained. and news in addition to being informative, in addition to pushing politics forward and spreading knowledge in a way that doesn't require reading, which is not something everyone likes to do. When you do that, you entertain as well. And I think you mentioned the question of storytelling earlier. You know, in political campaigns in the 1950s, and I would point to the Eisenhower campaign as sort of the origins of this, telling a story,

about the candidate becomes as or more important than saying what that candidate is for or against. Because you look at Eisenhower, he's never been in politics. He's been in general. He's kind of a nice guy, okay, as a mistress on the side, but nobody's allowed to talk about that. But actually, he's this empty vessel. So being able to tell a story about him to the public that makes him broadly acceptable as president is important. And what's that story? He's likable. I like, I like ICE. Yes, exactly. But that dates back even more to the fact that presidents were never even on the campaign trail back in the day. You know, we didn't care, A, we didn't care as much about the federal government, but also we really didn't care about the personality and charisma of the president. Like he would not be out there like that. And so that changes, again, is a tail that wags the dog kind of stuff? Where does that begin? I would go back to technology, because why do people not care so much about president? Although I would say, say, you know, Roosevelt was beloved. And, you know, there are great many people that remain Democrats for years, even though they're not particularly interested in what the Democratic Party is doing because of Roosevelt. But that's also because Roosevelt comes to their living room through the radio. And as we move through time, one of the things technology has done is make

it possible for us to see and believe we are interacting with presidents more and more frequently. So if you roll things forward to today, you know, if you have truth social on your iPhone, you get to hear from Donald Trump all the time, you know. And so the ways in which presidents become indistinguishable from celebrities has something to do with how many ways we encounter them and how many platforms we encounter them on. Yeah. I think it goes hand in hand with the emergence. I mean, the prominence of the executive branch in American government, really, as that has been thrust further and further forward in our lives, we've also had to make friends or enemies with these presidents and everybody around them. And that has become the media is the vessel for all of that that happens. I mentioned in the opening there cable.

I always, in my anecdotal way, in my friends and family, I disparaged Ted Turner. I don't have anything personally against the man. But the fact that he created CNN and this idea of a 24-hour news cycle, oh, my God, did that change the world? And we didn't see it coming right away, but it really has. It really has changed the world. And I think Turner is an excellent example of someone who understood that news could be entertaining. Because when Turner starts the superstation, right, he starts at his cable station, but he almost immediately realizes that he can get anywhere in the United States by using satellites.

Public television had been using satellites for a couple of decades, you know, so it wasn't new. But Turner puts his own satellite up there and sort of turns on the dish and starts beaming CNN everywhere. Okay, so what has he got for content? And that's really the original problem for cable is all I've got is old movies. and then Turner buys the Atlanta Braves. And he's like, okay, I've got the Atlanta Braves and I've got movies. But then he's like, that's not enough. And so he starts CNN.

Now, when CNN began, it was like the laughing stock of the journalism industry. People used to call it the Chicken Noodle Network because, you know, like their sets would fall over in the middle of a broadcast, you know. They didn't have broadcasters who really made any sense to people. But what Turner was able to do is if you have a newsroom that's ready to go, whenever something happens and broadcast it to the entire nation, then you have a resource to make news out of almost anything. So really when people start watching CNN, people think it's the OJ Chase, but it's actually not. It's when baby Jessica falls down the well in Texas in the mid-1980s. And people are just glued to the television watching people trying to get baby Jessica out of the well, which will be glad to know they did get her out of the well.

But a baby falling into a well, tragic as it is, is not a national news story. And CNN made it into a national news story. And so political consultants begin to see this and say, okay, so we need to be able to grab audiences with certain kinds of stories that are human, that allow them to connect, that will keep them coming back to the news channel over and over and over again, hoping to see our guy. Exactly. And so this goes also hand in hand with the emergence of talk radio, which is a huge factor from the 70s into the 80s. There's governmental policy that changes as well that enables a new kind of journalism to be at home in our lives, right? Right. And that is, of course, the end of the Fairness Act. The Fairness Act, listeners, means that you have to tell both sides in your content.

So in a broadcast like this one that Don and I are having, we don't have to represent both sides. But when the Fairness Act was in effect, if somebody carried this broadcast, they would have to carry another broadcast with someone who represented a point of view different from ours. What the Fairness Act also does, and this is actually really important

to the development of talk radio, is it creates this space on, all radio stations, particularly college radio stations, that has to be filled. They have to get conservative content. And so one of the architects of the new right, Paul Weirich, he's a guy from Wisconsin, when he is in high school, he makes money by driving around the state, putting conservative politicians on tape and driving those tapes around to local radio stations, right? Who, must broadcast them because they're dying for conservative content. And so this sort of big gap that the Fairness Act creates begins to be filled by entrepreneurial people who are trying to popularize

conservatism. The other thing that I would say that's really interesting, now Paul Weirich actually is a college graduate. He's a very hardworking guy. He also, weirdly, is one of the architects of Amtrak, because he was obsessed with trains. But a lot of the talk radio guys only graduated from high school, like maybe, right? And so there is this category of very, you know, big personalities. And some of them start, like Rush Limbaugh started in sports broadcasting. And you can actually, if you listen to some of his tapes, that's sort of robust uping and downing and cheering.

It's very like a sports broadcast. And that's significant, I think, because when we think about politics as entertainment, we also have to think about how talk radio, people like Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, started as a radio person, how people like that turned politics into what we now call horse race politics. I'll be back with more American history after this short break. Just a few days ago, maybe it was yesterday, a friend of mine who's a good pal of mine, conservative guy I grew up with. And never misses a chance to mention the us against them idea of the conservatives feeling put upon by the liberal media. It's a really important thing to the right wing that we're being victimized and persecuted, isn't it? I think it is a really big thing. And I think one of the things that's responsible for it is it used to be back in the good old days. When we listen to a broadcast on CBS or NBC or ABC, we did.

didn't think about the broadcasters themselves as political. Most of us didn't. Although there were people who did. And so if you look at people like Phyllis Schlafly, for example, who self-publishes a book in 1964, a choice not an echo, that basically gets Barry Goldwater nominated for president in the Republican Party. Phyllis Schlafly self-publishes that book. Why? Because she thinks liberal bookstores will refuse to carry it. So she has to actually find an alternative way of getting it to market, and she gets it to market by buying conservative mailing lists. So what you begin to see in the 60s is conservatives carving out what is essentially a protected space for themselves, where you can take conservative magazines, you can take, read conservative books, buy them from conservative booksellers, you know, I was about to say online, but actually people. will get catalogs. And that's actually different than what is happening in the so-called mainstream or

liberal media. And so one of the things I think we begin to see developed, and now this is true of people on the left as well as people on the right, is a sense that you shouldn't actually have to listen to people you don't agree with. And, you know, that actually used to be sort of a mainstream belief in journalism that having different views. about something got your audience to think harder. And that that was at the heart of democracy, was that thinking business. And now what we see as democracy

is people assembling all the opinions that they're comfortable with and want to be with and saying, all right, I'm going to fight for that. Sure. I'm as guilty as the next person. There's an addiction factor here. You know, there's a pleasure principle. You are reinforced on what you like.

And over and over again, you get more of what you want. And it makes you feel good about yourself. That's kind of this reinforcement thing that happens. That's true of all of capitalism, by the way. Right, right. It's trying to entertain that impulse in your, it's sugar, you know. And yet sugar is dangerous after a while. And so is biased journalism.

I think that's absolutely right. And that said, I've always been fascinated with conservative media. And part of it was I was interested to hear you mention the bulletin because I grew up outside Philadelphia. We took the bulletin too. But I spent my summers in southern Idaho, where I was surrounded by people who were much more conservative, many of whom were Mormon. There's no choice but to listen and engage and talk. And, of course, the newspapers we got were conservative newspapers. So I've never really felt as though these views were alien or that I could do without them.

You know, in particular, I think MSNBC, which relies on that cable model where you have personalities who are friends, who are telling you stories about the news, I think they could do a much better job about... I completely agree. I watch MSNBC, but less and less so because of that, that sense of like, guys, come on, you know, shake it up a little bit. This mentality of like, exactly, they're playing into exactly the trap that they're accused. of setting. Yeah. Well, and it's interesting because different audiences will tolerate different kinds of dissent. Like, you probably remember a couple of years ago when the New York Times published an op-ed by

Tom Cotton. And Jim Bennett got fired over that, basically. I mean, he resigned, but he, you know, he knew it was time to go. Whereas if you watch the PBS News Hour, you will see people like Tom Cotton being asked for their point of view. And people do not attack the News Hour for that because the format of the News Hour has always been bringing together people who have starkly different views about things. Sure, yeah. You were a big fan of Robin O'Neill and Jim Lear, huh? Yeah, oh, I loved Robin. And, you know, I interviewed him for my book. It was actually one of the high points of doing the research for this book was getting to visit with Robert McNeil, who, of course, died about a week ago.

But it was wonderful. And, you know, I said in a... substack post that I wrote the other day, that he greeted me at the door. And I said, hello, Mr. McNeillan. He said, my friends call me Robin. And I was so thrilled because I've always felt like he was my friend. Right. I had a roommate from boarding school who interned later on for Robin McNeillan really felt very close to the man. He was a very sweet guy. Yeah. What's fascinating is we're talking about a lot. And I want to focus down a little bit more on really the effect of the baby boomer generation. I mean, that has a huge impact on everything we have today. Some of us are the baby boomers. But they grab onto this media independent and otherwise and shape it themselves,

isn't it? It's this, again, a huge effect of this enormous population coming onto the scene. Well, I think that's right. They do grab onto it and shape it. What they also do is they begin to port it into mainstream journalism. So you look at somebody like Seymour Hirsch, who was a famous reporter, broke the Mealai story. He was a huge fan of Izzy Stones. And so there's this whole generation of reporters who are reading Izzy Stones Weekly who say, why can't I do that at the Washington Post?

Why can't I do that at the New York Times? And of course, there are a variety of very good reasons why you can't. But someone like Sy Hirsch is always pushing the edge of the envelope, which means that by the time the Washington Post and the New York Times are really acknowledging the power of the anti-war movement and the criminality of the Nixon administration, there's an opening for SAI to bring that investigative reporting to mainstream outlets.

And then he sort of gets pushed out of them again. But every time that happens, it changes what becomes possible in the mainstream. I mean, history will tell that there's an intersection between that population growing up and Watergate, you know, because they're hitting their 20s right at Watergate. Everybody's out in the job market, becoming these journalists. Woodward and Bernstein are the celebrities. The whole thing becomes a big movie. Oh, my God.

It's a real wildfire of, oh, my goodness, the effect I can have on the United States by virtue of journalism is really turned on by Watergate. Yep. That's absolutely right. And, of course, what you also get in the post-Watergate era is women finally starting to get jobs in mainstream journalism. So you have, for example, in 1970, Susan Brown Miller, right. a front page New York Times Magazine article about women's liberation. I'm writing a book about Susan now, actually a biography of her. And her ability to seize that space means that suddenly everybody's talking about women's liberation.

And the few women that are in newsrooms start saying, yeah, no, we're not getting promoted. I've been working on the women's page for 10 years, and I actually have. have a master's degree in foreign policy. What's going on here? And so in the 1970s, you begin to see certain kinds of news that was seen as peripheral or less than being ported into political news as well. And you and I from Philadelphia know Jessica Savage. Oh, yeah. Wasn't she great? She was the best. I would tune in just to look at her jaw. Oh, my God. I know. My sister was an NBC News employee. She was a producer who became a correspondent.

She replaced Daniel Shore when he got kicked out and became the first female correspondent covering the U.N. Wow. Well, you know, one of the things that's interesting about television and radio, for that matter, is it's the place where women who can't get jobs in print journalism are able to get jobs. So there was a great book about the original women of. NPR, Koki Roberts and that whole group. And they were women who actually had no experience in journalism whatsoever. And by, you know, just sort of working their way through ended up broadcasting the news at NPR. And similarly, a woman named Marlene Sanders, who you may not have heard of, is sort of

working in low-level jobs and begins to make herself just indispensable in production. So you see a lot of women journalists coming up through the ranks in production and newswriting because it's seen as sort of less than, less than print journalism. It's not an alternative, but it certainly is seen as a slightly more degraded jobs. So the very ambitious men are not competing for those jobs. So you see a whole generation of women journalists and Jessica Savage is one of them who are going on camera, are producing the news, are creating a whole bunch of stories that are disseminated to far wider audiences than a newspaper is ever going to reach. Interesting. As a journalist, do you see this in the long run as empowering democracy or

destroying it? I mean, is it a positive or negative in the long run with democratic politics? Well, people have to tell the truth. Okay. And I don't think it's as hard to tell the truth as some journalists seem to think it is. But I would also say that the one thing that I think a more dispersed and independent news environment has done is it has made people sloppier. There are certain kinds of reporting and editorial practices that simply don't occur if you're writing a substack or if you are working at an underfunded independent publication. You know, recently The Intercept published a story in which they questioned whether rapes had actually occurred on October 7th in Israel. very distressing to many of us. But Michael Cohen recently in the Atlantic sort of took a deep dive

into that article and showed that at every important point in the article, they were actually reporting it off Twitter. They had actually not spoken to any of the sources. They hadn't spoken to anyone in the Israeli government. They hadn't spoken to anybody in the women's organizations that had been part of those investigations. And that's a problem. It's not that they intend to lie, but by not following certain kinds of practices that allow them to sift facts, and by not having editors that are willing to force them to do that, they create narratives that are incomplete and then become false. And I think it's very dangerous that they sort of catch fire on their effect on elections, and that becomes its own form of ratings, I suppose. It's a terrible cycle to get into.

Well, I think it is. And I think it is also important to challenge your radar. You know, it's always distressing to me. When I was editor of Public Seminar, which was a publication at the New School, we would sometimes publish a piece by sometimes a conservative voice, sometimes just a dissenting voice on the left. And people would just be enraged that it had landed on their desktop. And I kind of want to say, it's fine to read the piece and be enraged and think about why this makes you rageful. But the fact that it exists should not enrage you. The fact that we

published it should not enraged you. And I think there's this thing now, which is very connected, say, to the idea of boycotting as a way to punish corporations and countries and stuff like that, which is you shouldn't offer your platform to anybody I, the reader, don't like. Right? So why are you platforming this person. And the idea that you can have free speech at the same time as journalists, alternative or otherwise, are saying, well, I'm actually just not going to publish this because I don't like you or I don't like your politics. Obviously, there are exceptions to that. You know, I'm not going to publish a Nazi. I'm not going to publish a raging anti-Semite. But I might publish somebody who wants to crack down on the border

because I want my readers to know what that argument looks like and I want them to think about that. Maybe this is a wish mentality of mine, but it sounds like we share a sensibility that this country has been through many eras including these kinds of errors to do with journalism, yellow journalism I'm thinking of in the early 1900s.

It's really been a roller coaster ride, especially in media. Will the business aspect of this, I mean, we're talking a lot about entrepreneurial efforts, these substacks and so forth. That's kind of what we're in a marketplace here. Will the normal evolution of the capitalistic aspect of this take care of this problem with consolidation and, you know, grownups in the room and all that sort of thing? I think the short answer is no, because good journalism is expensive.

And it is expensive in time. It's expensive in dollars. It's expensive in, you know, the fact that the New York Times, can send Michelle Goldberg to Poland to write a story about resistance to the crackdown on abortion there. That speaks volumes. I mean, she wrote, I think, one or two columns. They probably paid $10,000 in expenses to get their top reporter there. And so really, I think we haven't thought hard enough about the importance of non-profit journalism. And I think, you know, one of the the things I would point to in my book, Political Junkies, is Robin McNeil and Jim Lerer. Their broadcast

of the Watergate hearings was not just a platform for creating the news hour, which it was, but it was the first time that a government proceeding, a lengthy government proceeding had been on the air since the 1954 Army McCarthy hearings. I think it is a tragedy that our fellow citizens do not see how government works. They don't, as, you know, you and I are historians. We always go to the primary sources. Well, when you're watching Alexander Butterfield say, well, actually, yes, there were secret recordings and I know where they are. There's no room for a conspiracy theory there. And so I think that kind of journalism has to be nonprofit. And that is a persistent theme in terms of PBS, in terms of, I mean, substack on a certain level, it's not nonprofit,

but hardly anybody gets rich off of it. But you can tell a story and get it to people. And if you're responsible, you're not beholden to any advertiser or anybody who's telling you, you can't tell that story. I know what we do. The National Endowment for Journalism, that's going to go over well, isn't it? I think it's an awesome idea. And see, here's the problem. I think there's a There is a broad constituency, and I don't think it is confined to the right, that really doesn't want good journalism. Yes, of course. Right. Just going on record.

That's a joke. Oh, no. I hear you. I hear you. But, you know, political consultants are often former journalists. And so they're sort of going back and forth, crossing the line between what journalism really is and what they know about it that can be manipulated in public. So this splintered marketplace, which has much been created as existed in the first place, is really not the enemy, but that is the challenge we're dealing with. Can that marketplace be consolidated somehow in order to empower larger organizations to move back into the grown-up role they used to have?

Well, it's interesting you should say that. You know, I was reading the update in the New York Times about the jurors in the Trump trial. I was fascinated by how many of them read the New York Times and then said, oh, I also read the Wall Street Journal or I also watch Fox News or something like that. So I think Americans are kind of taking it into their own hands to try to broaden their media diet. I mean, I was actually really impressed by these people. That being said, news is not moneymaking. It never has been. in the days in which broadcast television news was in its golden years, it was a loss leader for

everything else. You had a news program to assemble the audience for what really made money, which were the half-hour sitcoms and all their advertising. News has always cost much more to produce than it was able to earn. Even in the newspapers, it was the classified ads. That's what you're really delivering those newspapers about. Right. So I think there are people like Warren Buffer, for example, who need to think hard about how they are willing to support democracy. Claire, you've referenced your book, Political Junkies, also your substack by same name. Hunter Thompson coined that phrase, didn't he? And it was like Hunter Thompson did.

He was grabbing the zeitgeist. How much of that addiction is true versus is it all tongue and cheek? Well, I think it's totally true for those of us who feel it. And, of course, Hunter Thompson was very familiar with all kinds of. of drugs. And so he was making a very purposeful reference to the high that you can get off of politics, which so surprised him. I get high off of politics all the time. I've been out there collecting signatures from my senator, Elizabeth Warren. And every time I talk to a voter and I'm trying to talk them into giving me a signature, I get excited about it. And I think that's what

political news can do is convey the immediacy, the importance and the excitement of what it means for citizens to run their own society, which is essentially what democracy is. We're doing it through politicians, but it's us who get to make the choices. And I think one of the things that's happened to media nowadays, particularly on the right, is by trying to tell people that they can't trust institutions, they're really disconnecting citizens from the things that are most important to their lives. And the real backstop is freedom of speech, isn't it? I mean, that one, that, That never gets discussed in the news. Is anything under threat because everybody accepts that.

And as long as that's there, there's hope. Professor Claire Bond Potter is a political historian of the New School for Social Research in New York, author of the popular substack, Political Junkies. Good to meet you. Thank you. Thank you. Hey, thanks for listening to American History Hit. You know, every week we release new episodes, two new episodes dropping Mondays and Thursdays,

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