The Bulwark Podcast - Brian Rosenwald: Fox Is Afraid of Its Audience

Episode Date: February 23, 2023

Fox isn't news, and it isn't propaganda. It's about getting the biggest audience it can, to make the most money it possibly can. And Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity are more powerful than elected GOP leaders — even if they're afraid of their own audience. Brian Rosenwald joins Charlie Sykes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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He's a scholar in residence at the University of Pennsylvania, the author of Talk Radio, How an Industry Took Over a Political Party That Took Over the United States. Brian also co-founded and is senior editor of the Made by History section in the Washington Post. So, Brian, good to talk with you again. Charlie, it's always great to be with you. We have a lot to talk about, including the Fox document dump from last week and what it told us and what it reminded us of. But just a couple of things, you know, catching up here, you know, Marjorie Taylor Greene on the national divorce and the fact that Sean Hannity is taking it seriously, which seems

so relevant to everything else that we're talking about. The one thing that is just making me crazy, and I need to preface this by saying, I almost never say that someone should shut up. I never say that someone should stop talking. I think we live in an era in which we should encourage free speech. We should encourage speech that makes us uncomfortable. We should encourage, you know, all sorts of, you know, blossoms to bloom. So I'm never generally going to be saying this person needs to shut the bleep up, except for right now. This foreperson of the grand jury in Georgia, who has decided to go on this media tour,

this is one of the most cringeworthy things that I have ever seen. She clearly is enjoying the attention and kind of the smirking, cute, we have indictments, I'm not going to tell you. And all of the TV networks putting her on, which of course, it's their job to do this. You're watching this going, no, no, no, no, no, this woman should not be on television. She should not be talking about this. There's a very real chance that she will jeopardize all of the cases. Again, I'm not playing lawyer, but, you know, there's a chance that she could jeopardize these cases. There's a big story on CBS right now that the possible targets are saying that, well, I'll just read this. Lawyers close to several Republican witnesses in the Fulton County investigation are preparing to move to quash any possible indictments by the district attorney Fannie Willis. Their attempt to do so would be based on recent public statements by the forewoman of a special purpose grand jury, Emily Kors, who has been giving one interview after. Have you seen any of these, Brian? It's bad. I've seen like one, and I saw a bunch of people on Twitter echoing you, you know, people who are generally pro-free speech

saying, oh my God, this is cringy. How is this still going on? Like someone cut her mic kind of thing. And it's a reminder that sometimes there are stories that where our impulse to want to know everything and know everything immediately and have inside information is really toxic for us as a society where patience and letting processes play out would be good. And also a reminder that there are certain people who are not particularly equipped for doing high-level media interviews. There's a certain skill and knowledge. And she clearly doesn't have that kind of, you know, she's never done this before. And it shows.

And she's in a kind of fraught area legally. So, you know, her being out there is risky for the investigation. It's cringeworthy. And honestly, I'm not sure this happens, Charlie, but for the fact that as a couple of reporters I've talked to this week have mentioned, it is a really dead news week. You know, they're desperate for substance and something to talk about. Well, except for the president of the United States being in Kiev and Vladimir Putin, you know, threatening nuclear war. But, you know, so it's all relative what a slow news week is, right? Look, I'm not blaming the producers for putting her on because, you know, for the first half of the day, you know, we were hearing, you know, the foreperson is basically saying, yes,

there are many indictments. You're not going to be surprised. And my first reaction was, well, this is awfully newsworthy. This is interesting. Tell me more. And then, of course, they told us more and more and more and more and more. And she could not get away from the camera. And then you realize that this is a person that should have stayed secret in the secret country. I'm sorry. I mean, it's just don't do this. No, but it's true, right? Like there are certain people who they get on TV and they just start digging holes.

And you're like, this is not going well for you. Like, please stop. I think that everybody thinks, well, I could go on TV, or I could do a podcast, or I could do any of these things. And maybe it's not as easy as it looks. And maybe she's a sweet, wonderful, thoughtful person. But she comes off as somebody who has, you know, spent too much time. I'm just, I'm going to leave it right there. I'm not going to, I'm not going to try to insult her. It's just that what I also worry about is that she's just providing ammunition for people who will discredit. I mean, it's at the moment when these, these charges, you know, are about to come down. She certainly does not have, you know,

the persona of somebody who is, you know, serious with a lot of gravitas. Maybe it doesn't matter at all. Maybe it does not matter at all. But it's just unfortunate. And I needed to rant about it. Okay. So, Brian, you've written a book about talk radio, the industry that took over a political party. You talked to me about this, right? I mean, as a talk show guy. Okay. So, you've been writing about this for some time. And my sense is that you really do understand how it works and the dynamic, the complicated dynamic between what I've called the entertainment wing of the Republican Party and the party and the way in which for years people thought that talk radio and Fox was an arm of the Republican Party. The Republican Party sent them talking points. What I think you understood was that at a certain point, that dynamic flipped, and it wasn't the party sending the conservative media, the entertainment media, the agenda.

It was the entertainment wing of the party that was setting the agenda. It was the entertainment wing that was the one that was wagging the dog. And that's part of the story that I think people need to understand, the way in which power and the entire incentive structure of the Republican Party and the right has shifted toward not just talk radio, but to that entire ecosystem that's now formed around Fox News and talk radio, correct? That is 100% right. I mean, and it's had two impacts. First of all, you know, a good chunk

of the Republican Party, if not, you know, all of them, live in great fear of the day that they are going to be the pinata on conservative media, that, you know, they're going to be the target. You know, your listeners are probably wondering why. And the answer is that the most important election for most Republicans because of geographic polarization and gerrymandering is the primary election. And, you know, we get like, what, 10 to 15 percent of the population shows up in these primaries. And it's the hardest core 10 or 15 percent, exactly the people who consume conservative media. And they are influenced strongly by their favorite hosts. They might spend more time with their favorite hosts than they do with their spouses. And so what those people say matters to them. And these politicians have to be

afraid that if a host, especially a local host who can talk about them every day, decides to tee off on them, that their careers are now in jeopardy. And so they are very cognizant of what conservative media is saying and not crossing them. You know, talk to people on the Hill, and they tell you about what they call the Hope Yes, Vote No caucus, who says, yeah, this is a really good piece of legislation, or I know we have to raise the debt ceiling, but I'm going to vote no because I want to be back here in two years. And so you have that element of it. And the other element of it is there was a time in Congress that Marjorie Taylor Greene would start shooting her mouth off and she would have had her party leader calling her, texting her, whatever the technology at that given moment is

saying, you shut the bleep up, like shut up right now before you, you make this deeper or they would have like exiled her. You know, they would have put her on like the merchant Marine and fisheries committee never to be heard from again. Well, what's happened. And I think that the story that best epitomized this was in John Boehner's memoir. He talks about how he's in his office with Michelle Bachman and she wanted to be on like ways and means like the most exclusive committee that she could be on. And Boehner is sort of like, well, that's not possible. You know, you're like a freshman or a sophomore.

That's not going to happen. You know, from the fringe, like, I don't know what you're doing. And then she gets like this smile on her face. It's like, God, it would be a shame if I had to go to Fox News and tell them that you were like mistreating me. And Boehner has this oh crap moment where he's like, she's right. She understands that she's more powerful than I am, even though I'm Speaker of the House. And it's because these people are the celebrities. They

are the stars in the soap opera that is conservative media. And Marjorie Taylor Greene, I would assume that probably 70% of Americans find what she's saying either horrifying or insane. And there was an analysis in the Post a couple of weeks back that pointed out that she actually did worse, relatively speaking, in her election in 2022 than most Southern Republicans. Most Southern Republicans did better in their districts than did Donald Trump in 2020. And she actually did worse. So there's a question about how popular she actually is. But she is enormously popular with the voters who are driving this whole thing and with the media machine, because the media loves her because she's this huge story. She's always saying something that is incendiary that makes for a good show. And that's what these guys are all about. They want to make money.

This is about putting on a show. So of course, you know, the Sean Hannity's of the world are going to take her seriously. And she's going to drive this conversation because she knows exactly what they want. And she's got this celebrity status that means that the actual official party leaders can't really touch her without a kind of civil war in the party. And so they, you know, tiptoe around her. And now McCarthy has kind of openly embraced her. And this kind of trashes the Republican brand elsewhere. And it hurts them with the majority of Americans. But it also elevates her. It elevates these ideas that are dangerous. And it's a byproduct of this whole operation whereby these media players, the Tucker Carlson's of the world, are a lot more important and have a lot more power than Kevin McCarthy or Mitch McConnell does.

And yet they're afraid of their own audience. This is the other point. A lot of this is bottom up. And one of the things that, you know, some of these politicians like Marjorie Taylor Greene, and I would throw in Donald Trump that he's picked up from talk radio, is that they know what the hit parade is. They know what actually people, you know, want to hear, not what they need to hear, not what is most important, but, you know, what gets the clicks, what gets the ratings. And we're going to get to this story in the Dominion lawsuit, because I think that one of the things that was very, very clear is that this was not necessarily, you know, top down that they were going to be pushing out this

toxic sludge of lies about the election. And maybe, you know, to a certain extent, you know, there was, but in large part, it was, this is what our audience wants. If we don't give our audience this, they will go somewhere else. They are worked up. And so at a certain point, you even have the Tucker Carlson's and the Sean Hannity's of the world who are chasing the Republican base. And it becomes kind of a doom loop, doesn't it? Because they keep feeding more and more than the demand for, you know, bigger and bigger dopamine hits, you know, keeps rising and they need to keep feeding the beast. That is absolutely right. I think the thing that most of America on the left and in the center who don't consume this media have gotten wrong is they've always seen it as politically driven,

that these guys get up and say, what can we do today to help the Republican Party? And in reality, they get up and say, how can we put on the best show that's going to draw the biggest possible audience for the longest possible time? And basically, how can we make the most money? That's the goal. And they understand acutely what their audience wants, especially in this day of minute-by-minute ratings, where they can, on TV especially, they can see, well, what segments did the best with the audience? And they have their finger on the pulse of this. And they've always safeguarded the relationship with their audience above all else. And we've seen increasing examples of this in the last decade, where right after 2012, Sean Hannity kind of infamously said he had evolved on immigration reform. Essentially, we're not going to win if

we don't do this. And whatever I said before, forget about that because we need to do this. Well, within a year or two, he had unevolved, along with other people like Rush Limbaugh, who had been willing to at least hear the GOP out on this and were giving them some airtime because they realized the audience wasn't going to stand for it. And this is a key change. This is not the 1990s where there was a very small kind of world of conservative media. It was Rush Limbaugh. It was influential local hosts. It was, you know, Michael Reagan, G. Gordon Liddy were kind of the second tier of nationally syndicated hosts and where a host had a little bit more of an opportunity to kind of guide his audience in direction. By the 2010s, these guys, there is so much competition.

They are forever concerned about losing their audience because they know that if the audience isn't happy with them, there are five other shows in the same day part or the same time slot that they're in, or there are five other different websites that they can go to and get similar information. So they're buffeted by this. And maybe the best example was Donald Trump. A number of these hosts invade against him in the primary in 2016, how unfit he was, how they were never going to vote for him no matter what. And then one by one, most of them,

with yourself being one of the few principled exceptions, I remember, came around on him. You know, Mark Levin saying, well, this is not a vote for Trump, but this is a vote against her. And then Glenn Beck kind of contorting himself saying, well, the left drove me into his arms or something like this. And it really crystallized for me, I think it was the day or two days after my book came out, I was on with a set of random conservative hosts from like Denver.

And the host basically admitted, he said, I was a Ted Cruz guy and my audience brought me around on this. And the way that that translated for me was I understood that if I was going to, you know, not be with Trump, I was going to lose my audience. And that's way more important than anything else to me. And that's what you see is that they, they are afraid of their audience. They are afraid of being in a place where their audience is not and having the callers, you know, call up and say to them, well, what happened to you? You used to be one of the good guys, you know? Wait, I haven't changed anything. Okay, so just parenthetically, because I've told this story many, many times, I mean, what you're describing is correct. And this was kind of the shock of 2015 and 2016. I was on the air for 23 years and had a very intimate, strong relationship with the audience. In fact, they were very much with me through the Republican other voices. The conservative ecosystem had grown. And I think that

the audience began to, you know, more insistently demand a kind of tribal loyalty, a safe space. They wanted their priors reconfirmed. I think they understood how fraught it was to go along with Donald Trump. So in many ways, it made them more thin-skinned, that they wanted the defenses, they didn't want to hear the critique. And so, as 2016 rolled on, I realized that I had already planned to leave, but that I was going to lose the audience. By losing the audience, it was, you know, people who you'd known for 10 years who were going, you know, what happened to you? And because I'm an only child, it was easier for me to say, okay, then I'm gone. I thought about this, Brian. I don't think that I could have done that job into 2017.

I left at the end of 2016. Best decision of my entire life. But I don't know because there's no business model for conservative media that was criticizing Trump. The audience was absolutely livid at any criticism. And you have, you know, the social pressures, you have the political pressures, you have the economic pressures. As I look at other talk show hosts, they either caved in, or they said, you know, forget it, I'm moving on, and I'm going to go into the ministry, or I'm going to go into something else. But they vanished. And it was exactly the phenomenon that you're describing.

Yeah, I mean, you know, we saw it not just with you, but Michael Medved, who had been pretty top-tier voice in national syndication for multiple decades, saw his star go down, and eventually Salem got rid of him because they're the one company that is out there that has a political agenda and weren't going to broach that kind of dissent. But, you know, his star kind of faded. And the one guy who sort of got around it was Ben Shapiro. And he did that, I think, because while he was critical of Trump at moments, he also was not overwhelmingly critical

of Trump. He sort of towed a line a little bit and had enough of a unique brand and also was focused more on young audiences that I think he was able to get away with it. But even he told me when I interviewed him that he had lost opportunities and lost money over, you know, criticizing Trump in 2016. But he came around, he decided rather famously at one point, he was going to support Trump for reelection, because like, what can he do? I mean, the worst he's done. I mean, he can't get any worse than this. And of course, lots of things happen. You literally heard that over and over again. They gave justifications for why they were flipping after saying, I'll never vote for this guy or I'll never support this guy. They all came up with justifications. But I suspect that

the bottom of it all was the understanding that they couldn't do their job and they couldn't make a living doing their job if they were not with Donald Trump, because that's what the audience wanted. And I think one thing we know from academic research that is an important element is, you know, when Rush takes off in the 90s, and he is by far the godfather of modern broadcast conservative media, people who are listening to Rush are also still reading the New York Times or watching the CBS Evening News. And there's not this echo chamber. And by the time you get to 2016 or 2020, these people are able to live in a kind of hermetically sealed world where they wake up in the morning, maybe they flip Fox and Friends on.

They get in the car, and I know that people are commuting less than they used to, but they get in the car and they flip on their local conservative morning host. And they might've listened to Rush at lunch time until he passed away two years ago. And then in the afternoon, maybe it's Sean Hannity for PM Drive, or if they're in a major market, a local conservative host. And they get home and they flip on Fox News again, and they see Carlson, Hannity, Ingram in primetime and their print sources are like Breitbart and Red State and Town Hall and sites like that. There is nothing challenging this worldview. So if you're the host who is saying, wait a second, guys, you know, there are these pesky little facts here that you have to pay attention to. It's much easier to say, well, wait a second, you're the outlier. What happened to you? What are you consuming? Because I'm getting this 10 text

messages from friends. I'm seeing it on Facebook. I'm seeing it in the stuff I'm reading. I'm seeing it on TV. I'm seeing it on the radio. It's very hard to be the one lone person kind of pushing back against that. And what you see is then that a lot of them have waved the right flag and said, I'm not going to try to guide my audience. I'm going to be aware of it. My favorite quote of all of this is somebody who worked for Jeb Bush in the primary in 2016 said that a host said to their team, you know, look, if you can talk some sense to my audience, please do, because I sure as hell can't. You know, they're not listening. That sounds familiar.

But let me just update that. What you described, you know, the day in the life of, you know, a consumer media is true. But I think it's gotten much, much worse because you have all the websites, you have, you know, the constant alerts. And then you have this entire sort of, for me, shadowy YouTube universe where every imaginable conspiracy theory can live. I was talking to a prominent Republican recently who had tried to appease all of this. And we're talking about, you know, how did this happen? What happened to this person or that person? He said, you know, this is the thing. People come to me all the time and they'll have like some weird theory or story. And I'll say, where did you hear that? And it's

something I've never heard of before. It's a YouTube channel. It's somebody else. And yet there's so much of it. There are so many voices out there. So I was going to get to this a little bit later because this then creates a vortex that changes reality as well. Before we started this, we were talking about somebody that I had known who was just like a reasonably normal, a little bit nerdy, wonky, conservative, who's now become a raging extremist asshole. And this has happened over and over again. What happened? What is this vortex?

And part of it is the hermetically sealed world that there was a time when if you were in public life, you had to be concerned with how the general public looked at you. You had to be concerned about how the media would portray you. And you had to think about that. That's no longer the case.

Now you're pandering to this new media, and in many cases, you have to pander to the loudest, most extreme voices. Otherwise, you will be considered to be a rhino or a cuck. So, the incentive structure is to pull away from the mainstream, to often be as outrageous and crazy and extreme as possible, and pander to this. So you watch this evolution of people who go from, you know, garden variety to conservative to hair on fire nut job. And it really is this new universe and the incentive structure that it's created. I think that's absolutely right. And I think that maybe the best example of how complete this is, is a guy you know pretty well, Senator Johnson from Wisconsin, who, you know, because-

Perfect example, perfect example. Most of these guys are in these deep red districts and states. But Ron Johnson is not in a deep red district or state. In fact, you can argue that if the Democrats had recruited better, he would have been in real trouble because he's in a swing state. But he never tried to pull back from any of this. He is someone who understands that stoking his base is the key to, first of all, more airtime on Fox News, more attention, and the kind of dopamine hits that come from that, and fundraising and that kind of thing. But also that if you don't turn your base out, you're going to lose anyway. And we see this

with even guys like him in swing states. Or it caught my eye yesterday, Don Bacon, who is, the media likes to hold up as the kind of quintessential centrist or moderate Republican who is going to be key to deal cunning in the House, because he's from Omaha, which is a Biden-won congressional district. And he also loves to talk to the media. Some of the other moderates sort of hide because they don't want to get caught between cross pressures. And he's always out there getting quoted.

Well, he went on with Tucker Carlson the other night to talk about something. And I'm thinking to myself, if this guy is going on with Carlson, then that shows how total this thing is, where even the people who have to pay attention to general elections, because they legitimately can lose them, understand that their incentive is to make sure that base is happy with them, make sure that they're going on with that conservative host who is the single most popular person with their base. And so you have that. And I also think that there is, for the hosts and the non-members of Congress, there's a financial incentive here too, which is you can become a superstar. You can make a lot of money. You can draw a lot of attention. You can be

charging more per speech, or you can become, you know, maybe get your own show eventually. There was reporting the other day on, in Puck, I think it was, I want to make sure I credit it, one of their newsletters, they were kind of, Peter Hamby and Tara Palmieri were talking about, you know, why is Nikki Haley running, right? You know, what is her lane? And one of them mentioned that she had access from her governor days and her UN ambassador days to making a lot of money for each speech, and that that had kind of dried up over the

last couple of years, right? And there's this constant pressure and lure of fame, of fortune, of political stardom, and of going from random congressman to, hey, this person should run for president and being like a rock star. And that requires that you kind of tend to this audience that wants the most extreme stuff, that wants to hear you bashing the libs, wants to hear you calling Democrats communists, wants to hear you throwing out outlandish conspiracy theories. And that's a lot easier than being the congressman who says, you know, that thing you saw on YouTube, that thing was false. Do you remember Bob English, Charlie? I do. I met him. Yeah. Yeah. Down South Carolina. I remember talking to him

where he said to me, he said, look, I went into these town halls and in a couple of cases, it was just small groups where he was meeting with longtime donors. And he was trying in vain to say to them, look, first of all, Obama is not a Muslim. That is just a fact, and that's wrong. And second of all, look, he's a good, God-fearing American who I happen to disagree with on a lot of issues. And he got trounced in a primary, and he lost donors, and he got shouted down in town halls for saying what should have been fairly unobjectionable. But, you know, he said to me, all the talk radio hosts in my district were absolutely, you know, fueling the fire on the other side. And they were saying, you know, what happened to you,

Inglis? Where did you go wrong? How do you not see this? And it's very hard to fight back against that, especially when there's all kinds of lures to do the other thing. This point is so crucial, because what it means is that you have otherwise very intelligent people who should know better, who know that they have to use certain phrases, certain language, they have to feed back into it. So I was thinking over the last actually, you know, 48 hours, Nikki Haley is very, very bright. I'm not a fan of Ron DeSantis, but he's got some good degrees, right? He's a Harvard guy and everything. And yet you listen to him, you listen to Nikki Haley, you listen to the Elise Stefaniks of Congress, and they dumb their language down. They use the same phrases. They use

the same hot button words and concepts. It's like Mad Libs. It's just the thing. And all it is, is signals to the audience, I am with you, I am listening, I am a longtime, you know, part of this particular tribe. And so as they chase this, they know what the formula is. And so what you get is you get these repetitious word salads, that you kind of wonder if that if you were looking really, really closely to their eyes, you know, you know, Nikki Haley going, I have to say this, I have to, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, you know, is part of you embarrassed by this? But no, they've made the decision, but this is what they have to do. And so this is why they all begin to sound like this. Okay, so let's get to this big Fox document, okay? Because this was huge. It was all of these text messages and these emails

showing that the hosts and the executives knew that these claims the election was stolen were completely, totally batshit insane. And they still allowed people to use the Fox Airways to push these theories. And we had the story, you know, Tucker Carlson trying to get a reporter, Jackie Heinrich, fired for actually fact checking a Trump tweet because, you know, he thought it was hurting the stock price. So you explain on your sub-stack that the Fox bombshell is kind of like catching tobacco executives lying about how tobacco can cause cancer, right? But at the same time, it's not really all that surprising for conservative media now. So did we learn anything that we didn't already know about these guys? I really don't think so, Charlie, because what it did is it exposed everything that if you dig at it, like when I was working on my book, you see glimpses of this.

It just exposed that in a very real way. But for something that really is analogous in a lot of ways to the tobacco executives knowing that they are feeding people a toxic product, in this case, toxic for democracy, you know, it very much had parallels to that. But it really is what I kind of would have expected, which is that, you know, here they are, November of 2020, Trump is screaming about a stolen election. And what are the executives worried about? They're worried about Newsmax. They're worried about competition. They're worried about if we're not doing this, if we're not giving these people

what they want, they're going to go to this other guy. And they're somewhat skeptical, I think, of Newsmax. There were sort of few words here or there that indicated that. But they're worried. They're like, we don't want to keep inflaming Trump and having him tell people to go to Newsmax. We certainly don't want to get into telling the truth here where it could be problematic. And they're sort of like, oh, we have to do this. We have to be on board with this or we're going to lose the audience. We know where the audience is. And I think Carlson had one quote in there. I don't remember if it was from a text message or an email, but he was sort of saying like, our audience are good people and they genuinely believe this. As in, I'm not going to insult them by telling them that they're wrong or they're being misled or any of this kind of stuff.

And it shows why this whole thing is so toxic because there's literally nothing that they won't do or say if they think that they won't do or say if they think that they need to do that to safeguard those ratings. I think that was the one kind of new thing is I always sort of thought, you know, that this was the basic pattern, but that there was probably some line maybe that they wouldn't cross. And what we've seen now, and I think we've seen it most clearly with both January 6th and the election lies and the tandem fact of Carlson especially pushing lies about the COVID vaccine. There really is no lying. There really is nothing they will not do or say if they think that's what the audience wants and

that will ensure ratings and revenue and everything that comes with that. And this is what the audience wants, right? I mean, you have tens of millions of Americans that still watch Fox every night, and they're being told what they want to hear. Accuracy, as you write, is totally optional. So what will the consequences of this be for Fox? And divide this into two. What do you think of the legal case against them? Because, of course, there's a high bar in this country, but going after, you going after media entities, Dominion seems to have a pretty compelling case. But again, there are defenses, $1.6 billion. But then the question is, is there any fallout for the audience that's basically being told, yeah, we were lied to? Let's start with that one. That's easy, because I actually don't think it's going to hurt them with their audience. I don't think it hurts them at all.

I think that it's more dangerous to them that Trump called them like a rhino network and was attacking them again than this is. And the reason for that is pretty simple. What's going to end up happening is that the hardcore Fox believers are going to say that all of these stories and all of these papers quoting legitimate text messages, quotes, that the mainstream media is ripping them out of context. They hate Fox. They hate conservatives. And they're distorting this whole thing. You know, maybe, maybe it would have been different if we had like audio recordings and they could legitimately hear the people's voices. But they're just going to write this

off as the mainstream media is so hopelessly biased and they're attacking Fox and it won't hurt them at all. What about the lawsuit? What do you think about that? I've never seen what I think is a better case to get around the absolute malice standard that is so high for defamation. Fox is going to try to sell this as, look, these were legitimate issues that our audience was interested in, and we were, quote unquote, covering them. Because there's an exception for covering stories, even if you know they're false, if you think they're newsworthy, that you're covering them. And they're going to say, we weren't endorsing them. We were bringing guests on to ask them

questions. I think you and I know that's flimsy, but does it cross the minimum legal bar, maybe? Yeah, that's what they're going to be resting on. Of course, just as a slight digression, I think it's interesting and ironic that Ron DeSantis has decided that he's going to launch a jihad against Times versus Sullivan, which is the Supreme Court ruling that gives media companies these protections and libel. In other words, if Ron DeSantis got his way, he would destroy the defense that Fox News is going to be offering. He would make it easier for people to sue entities like Fox News for lying. And what's ironic about that is under his system, they'd be hit with this huge judgment.

And I think Fox and others like them, especially Fox, would face significant pressure because, you know, remember, Fox and some of the major radio companies, unlike, say, Newsmax, have much broader business interests. And so Fox has to worry about, you know, is the NFL happy with us? Is, you know, these other entities that we have business relationships? So I think it would really hurt some of these companies that they're letting their hosts go in these directions under a DeSantis defamation standard where they're getting sued left and right.

They find themselves in bankruptcy pretty quickly. So they should be careful what they wish for here. Okay, so let's talk about how this is politically going to play out. We have this massive debt ceiling crisis coming later this year. And my guess here, my instinct, see whether you agree on this, is that the hosts are going to be insisting that Republicans stick to their guns. Do not compromise. You wrote at one point,

after all, compromise is capitulation in the right-wing media world. These hosts will challenge the economic experts and claim the warnings are hyperbole from the hated liberal establishment, and any Republican who tries to do the right thing will be a rhino, the ultimate Judas sellout who deserves to lose a primary. I think you can take that to the bank, that that's going to be the message from conservative media top to bottom. You know, it scares me because I actually, you know, listen to the economic experts, and I'm concerned about what this will do to the economy. But I mean, we saw it with Rush Limbaugh in 2012. If ever there was a moment Republicans were going to compromise, it was the fiscal cliff.

Obama had just gotten reelected. Democrats had gained seats in both houses of Congress, and there were real serious ramifications for going over this. And John Boehner just made one proposal. It was just his opening gambit in this negotiation. And Limbaugh called it a seminar on how to surrender. And things have only gotten worse since then. And people have to remember that there is nothing in the conservative media world that they hate more than elite experts, whether they're financial experts, medical experts, academic experts. They're the bunch of elites that sneer at the audience in this world. That's how they're portrayed and that hate the audience and want to drive them down.

And so when experts are saying, you know, guys, you're going to crash the economy here and it's going to be really bad, they're going to absolutely downplay that. And then they're going to say, you know, you can't sell out, don't sell out, don't cave into Biden. And it's dangerous because, you know, when I talk to people in Republican politics, they are more afraid that we're going to do something economically catastrophic than I think I've ever heard them before. And this is a real danger. And it's driven in part by the might of conservative media and the fear these guys have of their next primary. No, you're absolutely right here.

Okay, so what do you make of the fact that Speaker McCarthy has given exclusive access to these January 6th security camera recordings? I think it is a reminder that the most powerful voices in the Republican conservative coalition are these broadcasters, first and foremost. And I think Carlson has probably, with Limbaugh having passed away, ascended to be the most important of these voices, especially because he is a rock star in a lot of corners. This big Vanity Fair piece that people are talking about, about this new kind of conservative thing out in the West. One of the people interviewed said, you know, I think she was nine months pregnant. I was like, I would go work for Tucker Carlson if he decided to run for president, even though I'm nine months pregnant. You know, he is like the ultimate hero in a lot of these circles. And so it reflects his power. It also, I think, does shine a spotlight on something that doesn't get enough attention. We saw glimpses of it's the principals texting back and forth, talking on the phone, and the Republican leaders are always trying to kind of curry favor.

And as you said at the beginning of our conversation, look, the power here is not the Republican leaders anymore. It is the hosts themselves. Boehner had an instance with Sean Hannity where he basically called him up and in true John Boehner fashion, he was probably puffing on a camel and drinking some Merlot. He was like, what the fuck, Hannity? I feel like I can swear when it comes to John Boehner because it's John Boehner. But he said, we used to play golf. We used to be buddies. And now you beat the crap out of me every day on the airwaves.

And these guys are trying to prevent that. That's what McCarthy is worried about. He knows that it's sort of in the hearts and minds of the base that they don't really trust him. They see through him as much as everybody else that he's pretty transparently about what's going to give him power, what is going to make Kevin McCarthy keep him in power, that he's willing to go to great lengths. And he understands that if they start to perceive him as a rhino, as someone who is not an ally of all of their extreme demands, that he's going to have real political problems. First, because his right wing is going to try to overthrow him. And he's not

going to have support to kind of resist this, but also because he needs this base to keep control of the house. If he starts to lose these people, it's first going to become ungovernable. And then that they may, you know, they have a very small majority. They may well lose that in 2024. So he's trying to protect that. And I think he probably knows on some level that he's going to, because of divided government, he's going to have to cut deals at some point that are going to infuriate the base. And he's trying to minimize the damage that he does with them in advance of that. So this is a way to kind of curry favor

with the biggest voice on the right. And he's probably a guy who, if we could see into their text messages, is probably texting with Tucker. They have some sort of relationship. And the thing I think we forget about Tucker Carlson is that this guy was a card-carrying member of the establishment for a very long time. Oh, absolutely.

It came out where I wrote about it a couple months ago. But at one point, it came out that he was asking Hunter Biden, the same one who he now excoriates, for help getting his kid into college. And Carlson's son works on the Hill, I think. And this guy's part of the DC establishment. We forget he was like a 20-something-year-old kid in the 90s with his bow tie on, who was as establishment as establishment could get. And now that he's Mr. Outsider and Mr. Populist Conservative, it doesn't mean that privately those relationships have totally atrophied.

So I think he's probably got a relationship with McCarthy. And McCarthy understands that currying his favor to the maximum extent possible is going to help keep him in power, at least in the short term. So the key where there is to the maximum extent possible, I mean, you're giving 40,000 hours of security camera footage to one guy. I mean, that's pretty driven. I mean, it's one thing to suck up to to curry favor, but damn. And I think it's one thing to suck up to Curry favor, but damn. And I think it's dangerous that this guy is going to shade this in whatever way he wants. And you've got an already misinformed audience and base that you're going to throw that much

more red meat and misinformation at. And the irony of this, and the thing I think that these Republicans do not fully get, is this is kind of like an extortion scheme where you're like, okay, I'll just pay this off. And over time, they want more and more and more. Here he is giving 40,000 hours of security camera footage. And that is a very, very, very big deal. But if he thinks that's going to buy him any leeway when it comes to the debt ceiling or it comes to a deal to keep the government open or reopen it, that's not in Carlson's incentive. And what do these messages that we just got from this Dominion lawsuit show us? Carlson's worried about Carlson's incentives, which are, I don't want to lose the audience. I don't want to lose my money-making capacity here. If McCarthy thinks that he's doing anything other than raising the price down the line, and they're going to want more and more from him, then I think he's delusional. And I think that this is part of the problem with the GOP, that they've tried to kind of accommodate this thing for years and years and years, and what they've gotten is more and more boxed in instead. But I think that that's what's going on here is that

he's trying desperately to keep a crucial player who's at least he needs to keep Carlson at least neutral. If Carlson is going to go out there every single night and bash the heck out of him, then McCarthy is eventually going to run into his right wing, trying to overthrow him. And all it takes is one of them to file this motion, motion to vacate the chair that will then create a new speaker vote that he probably won't be able to win. And so he knows how tenuous this all is. So let's talk about the latest example here as a case study. Sean Hannity apparently siding with Marjorie Taylor Greene on national divorce. I mean, just, I think we've got to know that we're not going to have a national divorce. It's not practical. It's an incredibly stupid idea. But Sean Hannity is taking this seriously. Let me play a little clip from Fox News. And here's my question. How did you get to this

point? I mean, I look at topics, for example, how do you reconcile defund the police and no bail laws with law and order? How do you reconcile secure borders and wide open borders? how do you reconcile defund the police and no bail laws with law and order? How do you reconcile secure borders and wide open borders? How do you reconcile energy independence with energy dependence and new green dealism? How do you reconcile peace through strength with with people that want to gut our defense? You know, there I don't see middle ground on a lot of these issues. So what is the other answer if it's not a divorce? Well, exactly, Sean. That's the problem and where we are today. And in my life, in my world,

all of my friends are regular Americans. Everyone I talk to is sick and tired and fed up of being bullied by the left, abused by the left, and disrespected by the left. And our ideas, our policies, our ways of life have become so far apart that it's just coming to that point. And the last thing I ever want to see in America is a civil war. No one wants that. At least everyone I know would never want that. But it's going that direction, and we have to do something about it. Okay, so a little bit of chicken and egg here. So this idea of— Charlie, did you know we were not regular Americans? Oh, absolutely. I had no doubt about that.

So let's start with chicken and egg here. This is not Sean Hannity deciding, okay, we're going to be pushing the agenda of national divorce. Marjorie Taylor Greene, is this an idea that's percolating out there? Is this a real thing? She says, everyone I talk to wants to do this. Where's this coming from? I'm trying to get, you know, drawing the chart in the ecosystem for how an idea like this ends up on primetime Fox News with people scratching their chins thinking, huh, let's discuss the possibility of a quasi-civil war and breaking apart the United States.

Where's it coming from? Do you know? I don't know where it originated. I don't know, you know, who was the starter of this, but it is something that is circulating in certain corners of the right. I saw Jesse Kelly, who's a talk radio host, and this helps explain why Hannity is engaging us. You know, Kelly is sort of in the next tier or the tier below that of national conservative media. And he is talking about how this is probably the best case scenario and this is inevitable. And one of his tweets really jumped out at me. He said, because, you know, the government is run by communists and they would throw you in jail if they could for your beliefs. And this is the kind of thing that's choking it. And the thing is, you know, I don't know who originated it, but why is this idea

living on? Well, it's living on because of the Jesse Kellys and the Marjorie Taylor Greens, who are now planting this in the minds of that conservative base. And they are then forcing the Hannity's of the world to take it seriously, pay attention to it. Look, politics have always been more brutish than we think. I'm a historian. I could give you example after example after example where people did some really nasty, horrible things. But this was sort of like the one line of like, you don't do this because when we had this, it was like the 1830s, 40s, and 50s. And we saw where that got us, right?

And so here is this Congresswoman who, look, there have always been extremists in Congress. There was a guy in Georgia, I think his territory was either overlapping where Green's was, or it was fairly similar by name of Larry McDonald, who was the head of the John Birch Society. Like, there have always been kind of wingnuts in congress but they they were marginalized at a point and here is that this woman you know she says these things that are even the governor of utah spencer cox a republican a conservative republican expressed like dismay and horror at her saying this so it's something that there is still some appetite in some conservative

corners to say no no no this is a line you don't cross. But here is Sean Hannity bringing her on to discuss it, legitimizing it, talking to her, you know, in a very sympathetic way about this. This is like the most dangerous idea you could have. This is the kind of thing that fuels people trying to start a civil war or fuels talk of secession or things like that. And what he's really talking about, if you listen to that clip, it's policy differences. This is something's really talking about, if you listen to that clip, it's policy differences. This is something where, you know, how does a democracy work? Okay, we may not like what happens, but we abide by it and we work through the system to try to change it. And here she's going off in a totally different direction. And I'm sure she's picking this up from some of the conservative media and social media that she's consuming, whether it's

YouTube stuff, whether it's clips that people are sending her, whether it is somebody like Jesse Kelly. And what I think happens is these ideas start out in conservative social media or on YouTube channels or things that are getting passed around from out there people, but people who don't have that much bandwidth. And then as the Marjorie Taylor Greene's of the world hear these ideas, they see the potential for their own star or the Jesse Kelly's. They see the potential, first of all, if nothing else, but they're going to say this or tweet this and the left and the center and the establishment are going to go absolutely nuts. And there's nothing better for your brand and you're on the right than owning the libs or making people's heads explode on the left and center. So they latch

onto these things. And then the Sean Hannity's of the world who used to be, you know, extreme, but they were extreme kind of in an establishment-y way. There were lines they probably weren't going to cross. And there were things that they knew were ridiculous enough or dangerous enough not to say. They were few and far between, but they existed. Well, now the Hannity's of the world are going to push that. Well, now if Hannity's saying it, now if you're a regular old Congressman Jones from a random place in Alabama, Oklahoma, pick a red state where you win with 65% in the general election and your real risk is in a primary, well, now you can't come out and excoriate this without risking a backlash against you, without your base voter saying,

well, wait a second, if Marjorie and Sean are saying this, you're the guy who's out there, Congressman, you're the one who doesn't get the danger here. You're the guy who doesn't understand how bad things are right now and how our values are under siege. So what you're going to do now, if you're that Congressman, is either you're going to kind of latch onto this in some way, or you're just going to keep your mouth shut. And now there's no one trying to beat this back with these voters. And more and more, it gets, you know, into the body politic or into the bloodstream of the political right. And things that have seemed totally beyond the Paul and fringy and crazy have gone into kind of the conservative mainstream. And they've pulled the whole party towards not just the right, but towards the idea of politics

is warfare, that this is a zero sum game between two sides whose values are absolutely antithetical to one another and where the left hates them, hates their values, would jail them like a bunch of tin pot dictators, despite there being no evidence to support this. And it just stokes fear and it stokes anxiety. And it could be leading us down a very dangerous path. Well, just a couple of days ago, I was talking with Will Summer, who's got a new book about QAnon and the fact of the way that QAnon has 10 million adherents and you have supporters in position of real influence. I mean, this is this process of ideas that used to fester in some corner of the fever swamp that now are moving into the mainstream. So ideas like this, I like to kind of track them.

Like, where did it start? How is it being spread? What is the role of this? There's an old instinct is to let's ignore the crackpots. Let's ignore these crazy ideas. I think that's a huge mistake because we've seen how fast and how far these ideas move. And the whole point of talking about conservative media is conservative media has dramatically changed the velocity with which those ideas move, but also the footprint and the size. So,

Brian Rosenwald, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. By the way, Brian is scholar in residence, University of Pennsylvania, author of the book, Talk Radio, How an Industry Took Over a Political Party That Took Over the United States, political historian of the United States. Brian, thank you so much for coming on the podcast today. Charlie is always great to be with you. Thank you. And thank you all for listening to today's Bulwark Podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes. We will be back tomorrow and we'll do this all over again. The Bulwark Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper and engineered and edited by Jason Brown.