Let's Find Common Ground - How The Media Rage Machine Divides America: Chris Stirewalt

Episode Date: May 23, 2024

From cars to entertainment, technology to retailing, most large industries have faced huge changes in the past thirty years. But none more so than the news business.  Since 2000, countless numbers of local and regional newspapers went bust. Those that did survive fired a big percentage of their reporters and slimmed down. The past two decades also saw the rise of social media and highly opinionated online journalism, slanted well to the left or right of the political spectrum. Local reporting of how our towns, cities and states are run has died out in many parts of the country. Political journalist Chris Stirewalt is our guest in this episode. He is a contributing editor and regular columnist at the conservative news site, The Dispatch. Chris wrote the book, "Broken News: Why The Media Rage Machine Divides America and How to Fight Back." Find more episodes of "Let's Find Common Ground" here. Learn more about The Common Ground Scorecard here.

A lot of Americans are fed up with the media. Yeah, they've turned off TV and radio news or given up entirely on traditional newspapers. But millions of others are now addicted to rage media, cable news and social media that push sensationalism, groupthink and tribalism. So in this episode, broken news and an argument for why consumers should insist on better journalism. So, what I tell people is, if you are totally comfortable with what you see, hear, read, listen to, stream, that's not a good sign.

If you're doing it right, if you're living up to your obligations as a citizen, you should regularly be hearing things that you disagree with. This is Let's Find Common Ground. I'm Ashley Miltite. And I'm Richard Davies. 30 years ago, the great majority of Americans watched, read or listened to news that was brought to them by teams of reporters and editors, and much of the news was local. But today, the number one source for news in America is Facebook. Some of the posts are little more than propaganda, and many people only read opinions they agree with rather than being exposed to news from a variety of sources.

The dramatic changes in the news media are actually quite recent. The trend of news bubbles is something that's happened over the past 30 years. As many regional newspapers have gone bust, countless numbers of reporters have been laid off. In the place of local news, we've seen the rise of slick and profitable national opinion journalism that caters to narrow segments of the population. Very different than when most people read the same local newspaper or watch the same nightly network news. Our guest on this show is Chris Stierwold, a contributing editor and regular columnist at the conservative news site The Dispatch. He's also the co-host of the podcast Ink

Stained Wretches and the author of Broken News, Why the Media Rage Machine Divides America and How to Fight Back. Chris is a journalist who fell in love with his trade when he was still a teenager. We asked him first, how did he get into the news business? I started as a reporter when I was a sports reporter when I was 17 for the Wheeling Intelligencer in Wheeling, West Virginia, and fell in love with it from the start. It was truly a wonderful thing to do. I don't know what I thought I was going to do in my life,

but I am very blessed because I think a lot of people when they get to college are looking for what to do. I knew what I wanted to do. College was something that I needed to complete in order to get back to doing what I wanted to do. I look forward to summers working at the newspaper far more than I did to school. Why, why did you love it?

Well, it's a backstage pass to life. You get to be the skunk at the garden party. You get to ask people difficult questions. You get to see what other people don't always get to see. One of the things that's particularly appealing about journalism, you know, the sensation of choosing words, choosing stories, and then sharing them with the wider world, especially for a young man,

is a very heady feeling that the words that I chose and the stories that I chose to write about would be seen by tens of thousands of people was a pretty awe-inducing thing for me. Did anyone in your family work in journalism? Like did either of your parents, were they reporters? No, no, no, no, no. And I frankly think that's good. There's nothing wrong with families where people you know, you have multi generational news families, but we don't get enough people from outside the bubble into journalism and I am for sure from outside the bubble.

I am definitely from outside the bubble. Yeah, your dad was a coal salesman, right? That's right. He was a coal salesman and a good one too. So not too many national political commentators and reporters with folks in the coal industry. That is for sure. Can you just expand on what you said a minute ago about being from outside the bubble? When you talk about journalists being from inside the bubble, what do you mean? Where do people come from who work in journalism? They come from the

Acela corridor. There's always a couple of people from California, one dude from Chicago, and a gal from Mayan. You go into the American major national news organization, you go to the newsroom, there are not people from red states. If the main geographical draw for journalists in America come from places like Bethesda, Maryland and Northern New Jersey and Connecticut and New York and Boston. Who are you going to get? You mentioned the term, uh, a seller corridor, which for people who don't ride Amtrak, uh,

that is the express train between Washington, New York and Boston, right? And it's great, I should say. I love the Acela. So Chris says he loves being in the news business, but that with so many journalists coming from the same backgrounds and sharing similar political views, they live in a bubble. So it's no wonder the national media didn't see the Trump wave coming in 2016. And then after the election, there was a sense of shock. Look, after the 2016 election, it was not safe for any West Virginian to go have breakfast in a diner and eat their biscuits and gravy in peace because some reporter, I call it

hillbillies in the mist, some reporter is going to show up and stick their iPhone recorder in your face and say, was it more the racism or the economic despair that drove you to vote for Donald Trump? Because American journalists went on an odyssey after the 2016 election to try to find out how Donald Trump won. And that's a good impulse in a lot of ways to like,

okay, what did we miss? Let's go find out. But it also speaks to the thickness of the bubble. Now, I will point out that we're all Pauline Kael now. You guys know the famous Pauline Kael story? You know, Pauline Kael was the New Yorker of movie critic for many years. And a great writer and a great critic and by everyone's account, a lovely woman. But she came in to The New Yorker the day after the 1972 election and said, I cannot believe that Nixon won by so much.

I don't know anyone who voted for Richard Nixon. Well, yes, Pauline, you live on the upper west side of Manhattan. You work at The New Yorker, you live on the upper west side of Manhattan. You work at the New Yorker and you live on the upper west side of Manhattan. So yes, that is 100% true. And it was funny then because the bubble was small. It was very thick, but it was small.

Now we all live in self-contained bubbles, where because of political sorting, because of geographic sorting that went on in the 1990s, it's very likely that in your neighborhood, whether you're a Republican or a Democrat in America, conservative or liberal, a progressive or nationalist, whatever, you don't know many people who don't think like you, who don't believe the same things that you believe. And journalism has suffered for the stove piping of its high caste practitioners, the same schools, the same places, the same opinions and the same attitudes, which makes it impossible to really see the rest of the country. So you started out in Wheeling, West Virginia, working for a newspaper in the 1990s.

How have things changed for journalism and journalists in the 30 years or so since then? Well, I'm very lucky because I arrived in the newspaper business. At the end, it's the last days of the Raj. I arrived in the newspaper business when it was fat and sassy. Profits were reliably in the 20s, above 20%. And of course, you had to have the newspaper, right? You needed to know what time the movies were on. You needed the classified ads.

Young people cannot summon, not only can they not summon it, but it would just be crazy to think how indispensable newspapers were to be alive in America prior to 2000. By the way, laws in every state had requirements about advertising in newspapers. The state and the county and the city had to post legal ads in newspapers because they were so central to how we did everything, and by the way, how we did everything since

before the founding of the country. So America was made on and raised on newspapers. But in the 1990s, things began to change. A little tiny thing called Craigslist arrived and it was one inch tall. And they said, we're just gonna let you post ads here for free. And the newspaper industry said, oh, you're adorable.

You're so cute little Craigslist that you've come along and you're gonna do that. And you can track the arrival of Craigslist and the death of these newspapers in astonishing fashion right because newspapers relied to a very large extent on classified ads well they relied very heavily on classified ads for ad revenue but they relied on classified ads for another reason which is that you had to buy the paper to get the ads it wasn't just that you were posting an ad that you were paying the ad revenue it was a driver driver of subscriptions too. You had to be subscribed to the newspaper so that

you could have those ads. It's like we always want to flatter ourselves to say, well, they were reading it for our great journalism. No, they were getting it for the grocery store coupons and the movie listings. They needed to know what time that fatal attraction was showing at the marquee six that's what they needed and the weather and the sports and all of the things that people now take absolutely for granted as free so as Craigslist arrives it just starts knocking the legs out from under these papers and they've reached their peak in 2005 and advertising revenue just piles and piles of money. And then the collapse.

And in the course of three years or so, they lose 80, 85% of their revenue. That is a staggering drop for a once mighty and proud industry. And so much of it is because of the success of Craigslist and its competitors. They took away a huge range of classified ads for jobs, services, and all kinds of stuff from

newspapers. So, when this change in their business model swept over newspapers, what did they do? They cut content. They sack reporters in newsrooms and they give up their only competitive advantage in a doomed bid to try to hold on to their business as printers. And the results were catastrophic. And the news industry got hollowed out. And so from basically you can peg it to whatever year you want, but let's say 1998. By the time you get to 2010, we have started a process

that will end up with something like 60 or 70,000 newsroom jobs being eliminated across the United States. And we're living in the aftermath of that now. You say that the business of news is broken. Why? So you have this hollowing out as free information unhorses the newspaper industry and the collapse is swift. What comes in its place? Low quality, highly political national news. And something else happened. As local and regional newspapers

folded or let go of thousands of reporters and editors, coverage of national politics replaced news about local communities and how they're governed. Chris says some of this shift is also dictated by news consumers and their tastes. They're gravitating to a particular type of politics. What people really want and what really creates the demand, the Pavlovian response, is culture war stuff. What is Ron DeSantis doing in Florida?

If you're a progressive living in Oregon, have you heard about what Ron DeSantis is doing in Florida with Disney? You heard about the don't say gay bill, have you heard about that? Now, of course, unless you have a child in a Florida public school, it's not really that material to your life. You could very freely ignore it or keep it in a Florida public school. It's not really that material to your life.

You could very freely ignore it or keep it in a very marginal. You could consider it just very marginally. Similarly, if you live in Florida and you're a conservative, if they have drag queen story hour at a public library in Oregon, it doesn't have anything to do with you. It doesn't touch your family. It is as far away from you almost as Europe is. It's a continent away from you, and it doesn't touch anything to do with you. It doesn't touch your family. It is as far away from you almost as Europe is. It's a continent away from you and it doesn't touch your life.

But national news takes those stories and drags them into let's talk about something that doesn't affect you that you can't do anything about, but it's probably going to make you mad. Let's talk about the loss of local news. Many American towns and small cities have lost their local newspaper. There's simply no coverage and as you mentioned Chris, if there is coverage it's often hollowed out. There aren't journalists attending school board meetings or town council meetings where the business of government is done. Why

is this loss of local news coverage so important and and really so tragic? Well if you wanted to just take it in an easily quantifiable way there is research that is convincing it convinced me anyway that in communities that lost a newspaper even when there was another newspaper still there there was a crosstown competitor that closed and one still remained. The price of lending for those municipalities went up. A town's borrowing costs can go up because the watchdogs, local journalists,

are no longer watching. Over time, what happens? Your county or city is poorly run, corruption may creep in, and because of all of those things, your credit worthiness goes down. And pretty soon bond issuance costs go up, and it's harder to borrow money, and the price of borrowing money goes up. I think they found it was something like $500,000, $550,000 was the economic cost for bond issuance in a community where a newspaper enclosed. If you're a small county or if you're a relatively small county, that's a lot of money.

And it's not just the economic cost. Transparency is the promise of the internet in a lot of ways, right? We'll be able to live stream everything. We can watch everything. We can do everything. But transparency and accountability are two different things. We can have every sunshine law and I'm for it, baby. Like, let's do it. You can have all of this stuff. But if you don't have responsible people present to hold those individuals accountable, transparency

is worthless. Chris is best known as a TV broadcaster for his work at Fox News. And Fox is very successful, but he says for years, TV news didn't make any money. It was pretty sober, and the production values weren't great. But as we move into the 1980s, TV news, it starts to change. It gets better blow-dried.

The hair is better, the makeup is better, the graphics are better, and we start to get into pink slime journalism, a scary sensationalized. So as we move through this period, we're seeing news change. We get into the 1990s and cable news, CNN, when CNN started, people laughed at Ted Turner and they

said who's gonna want to watch 24-hour news? That's ridiculous. And for them of course it was the Gulf War that really stood them up in the early 90s. But for all of cable news, it wasn't really until 9-11, it wasn't really until the dawn of this century that it took off on its own. He says now the news is profitable, often sensationalized. And over the years, cable channels like Fox and MSNBC have sprung up to cater to different political persuasions. And so this profusion of options is multiplied by the internet.

And so what do you end up with? Really small market segments for news outlets. And Fox News has been remarkably successful. But remarkable success in cable news means that you have 3 million viewers. That would have been a joke for the major network newscast back in the 1980s and before. That would have been a laughably small number for Tom Brokaw.

That would have been hilarious to talk about the influence of what somebody that gets 3 million viewers does. Therefore, the need for habituated, addicted consumers grows. Because if I can't have a broad audience, if I can't broadcast, I have to narrowcast, but they better stay and they better come back. Because if I can't have a broad audience, if I can't broadcast, I have to narrowcast, but they better stay and they better come back.

Three million people is not a lot of people in a country of 330 billion. But if you can get them to come back every night, then you have something powerful and you can make billions of dollars a year. You're listening to Chris Stierwalt on Let's Find Common Ground. I'm Ashley. I'm Ashley. I'm Richard. We make this show for Common Ground Committee. You can find all our podcasts at commongroundcommittee.org. Tap on the listen button.

Common Ground Committee also produces the scorecard, which has the latest rankings and ratings of every US Senator, Member of Congress and Governor. Ratings for what, Richard? Oh, your state's elected politicians are rated on their ability to reach out across to the other side and find common ground. Even in these polarized times, you'd be surprised at the amount of legislation and also outreach to voters that's nonpartisan. And here's a bit of news.

Newly revised scores for governors, senators, and US representatives will be released next month. Learn more about the scorecard at commongroundscorecard.org. And we'll also post details about the Scorecard on our show page for this podcast. Now back to our interview with Chris Stierwalt. So you say, and it's the title of your book, Broken News, that the media is indeed broken. What can be done to improve the situation? Are you depressed or hopeful?

I'm never depressed. You know, I have had far too many opportunities in recent years to quote Abraham Lincoln's speech at the Young Men's Lyceum more than two decades before the Civil War when he laid it out and he said that we will either endure for all time as a nation of free men or die by suicide. And I hate to have to be the one to keep telling people this, but our options remain exactly the same. We will either get better at this or we will die.

Our media consumption habits are so deeply enmeshed with our political dysfunction that if we as journalists and we as news consumers cannot figure out how to operate this machine, it will kill us. And I'm not saying right now, but I am saying you can see the unravel, right? You can see the fraying of the national fabric. A republic is like a family. It exists because we say it does. It's exists because we say it does.

It's true because we say it is. There is nothing making America America other than the will of Americans to be together in this common purpose. And we have forgotten that in a pretty substantial way. And it's helping us to forget that has been very lucrative for many in the news business. And I think the events of January 6th,

I think the events surrounding the pandemic, a lot of things have made Americans realize that this could go away, that we really could lose this. So, you know, your podcast, the existence of your podcast is proof of concept that Americans understand that there is a problem. What do we do about it? Well, I hate to say, but this will have to be an inside job. There is no external factor that will come in to make us be better journalists or better citizens.

Chris argues that journalists should be grateful for their rights and freedoms and not just journalists, the rest of us too. The reason that we have crappy news isn't because it's unpopular, right? We have it because it sells and it's easy. It's the shortcut. In the TV news business, we say talk is cheap. It's expensive to send reporters out and news business, we say talk is cheap. It's expensive to send reporters out and do boots on the ground reporting and get the story and talk

to the people and investigative journalism often most of the time does not produce results, right? That's the hard part about investigative work, which is most of the time it's going to be dry wells, but you keep doing it in the hopes that it will pay off. So that's all expensive and time consumed. Not expensive to put two fat heads in a studio and have them bark at each other like a couple of seals. There's no problem there. So in less than a generation, consumers have gotten well accustomed to being catered to.

They have gotten well accustomed to being flattered. They have gotten well accustomed to being told that they are smart and the other people are dumb. That they are good and the other people are bad. One of the reasons our politics is so toxic now is that we don't say that you're wrong, we say that you're bad. He says one way to get out of that cycle of accusation, stop reading, watching, and listening to news that always confirms your own beliefs. So what I tell people is, if you are totally comfortable with what you see, hear, read, listen to, stream, that's not a good sign.

If you're doing it right, if you're living up to your obligations as a citizen, you should regularly be hearing things that you disagree with. You should regularly hear ideas and points of view that make you uncomfortable, that might even point out that you're wrong from time to time. Only of late has it become possible for a person to consume information constantly and never from the moment that they rise to the moment that they lay down ever hear anything that disagrees with their worldview? And my plea to Americans is break out. If you're conservative, you better have NPR on in the morning. You better do something

to break it up a little bit. If you're a liberal, you better be reading The Dispatch, of course, which is delightful, or National Review, or something else. You better be reading the Wall Street Journal editorial page. You better be listening to something else that shakes it up, that breaks it out. This is the personal question, Chris, because I know that the polarization, media polarization has even caused you to feel it in your own family, right? I watched my father, who was my greatest friend, until his passing 10 years ago now. But the 2012 election was for me, sort of when I, and I use this, I use, I use this term mockingly for myself when I went big time. I had a front row seat for a presidential election.

I was in an influential position. I was part of doing these presidential debates. I was part of all of this stuff, and it was really exciting. But I could not really talk about it with my best friend, my dad, because his hatred for Barack Obama was white hot. And my father was a very gentle man, a very loving man, a Christian man, one of the kindest people I've ever known. But his feelings about this election and the incumbent president were so intense that I self-edited.

I knew I couldn't talk about it with him in the way that I had about the election just four years prior. And why was that? Why were his feelings so intense? A lot of it, of course, is as we get old, our brains get cranky and we become hostile to new ideas. The world shrinks and so part of it was that but another big part of it was

he was baking his brain in cable news 24 hours a day and he sat there bathed in it. When he was home for long stretches he would just sit there marinating in political coverage. Politics, which I have devoted my entire professional life to, which is my passion and my love, I love politics. I love, love politics. I'm a weird person. It shouldn't be a subsistence food.

It shouldn't be the basis of what we're talking about and what we're doing. And losing part of my friendship with my dad was really heartbreaking. And as I travel around the country, I talk to lots of families. I talk to lots of people who have suffered this. And I know families are hurting. We had a mild case in my family, but for some families, this is really devastating and we have to get a hold of this thing. Chris Stierwald speaking with us on Let's Find Common Ground. I'm a fan of his work, Ashley. He writes with wisdom and deep knowledge of politics at The Dispatch, which is a daily

news site. Yeah, I like the bit when Chris said that he loves, loves politics and he's a weird person he said. It's good to hear from guests who are really passionate and have a love for what they do. I'm glad that you asked him that question about his family experience with media. Some of my friends suffer from this too. Their views of the world seem to come from the stuff they see on one-sided cable TV. They get kind of worked up and angry. I watch a lot less of cable than I used to. Yeah, and I have to admit I've never been a big watcher of cable news because it's just

seemed so different from the sober news that I grew up with in the UK. So I have not missed it. That's our show on Let's Find Common Ground. And thank you to Eric Olson, Penny Walker, and the producer and sound designer of our podcast, Miranda Schaeffer. I'm Richard Davies. I'm Ashley Miltite, thanks for listening.