Episode 37: "America This Week," with Matt Taibbi and Walter Kirn

They're both massively distrusted now by their own bases, and Fox has had a catastrophic audience loss just in the last couple of weeks.

And Fox's, Obviously we've heard they've had a plunge in stock price. There are indications that its overall audience is now going to drop. To the point where it's going to be genuinely competitive, it's going to have to compete for the number one spot, maybe even the number two spot.

Where it's dominated cable news almost without exception, with the exception of a brief period in 2017, when the Russia thing was at its peak. Insanity Fox dipped under MSNBC briefly. But apart from that, it's been number one since the Lewinsky story, and now it's nosediving, which leaves most of America with what exactly?

Because MSNBC, CNN, CBS, NBC, those outlets have already suffered their big blows with their audiences, right?

It makes you think, well, there wasn't a fireable offense. It's just an editorial decision, in some way, an editorial decision at variance with their audience's preferences. Which just makes it completely mystifying. Because, you know, we thought we were in a capitalist enterprise world, but it turns out we're in some ideological world which won't explain itself in any case. I think you're right. The total effect of these events is to make you feel you're on a breaking up ice flow. That there's, you know, nowhere to stand and you can't even hop around in any assured way.

Because everything's just sort of becoming slivered and fractured. And you start to wonder if. You start to wonder if truth or any sort of reliable information can be had from places that are undergoing this process. And I think to decide negatively about the whole thing is rational at this point.

But those places now appear to be under their own form of capture, right? So, institutional news, you know, I don't know where you get the comprehensive information, what do you mean? What's your strategy?

What do you do?

Various prejudices and so on. But imagine that we could. Would it still yield anything like truth? I don't think it would.

What you have now is a multi-partite argument between institutions, which frankly, have their institutional interests first, and their audience and sort of ethical, truth-seeking interests second, third or whatever.

And none of these investigations can finally yield anything that can be counted on. You know, it's weird, the Fox thing when you can't even count on greed, when you can't even count on them serving up red meat to their audience. Then what are you to think? It's all backroom deals. And one thing that the news really doesn't do well is report on itself. And in the Fox case, though, there have been lots of weird sort of character assassination campaigns against Carlson using what appear to be smuggled video from Fox studios and inside information.

David Brock Right, right, right.

And now he, at least since 2016.

Organizations like Media Matters, which is which was founded by him, if I'm not mistaken, he founded Media Matters for America, right?

Carlson, you know, doing asides on his set.

They're loosening up their voice, their mind, their their laugh, their face. And so now we have all these clips of Tucker Carlson, you know, uncensored as it were, none of which are very damning. Not at all, especially with a guy who's on, a guy whose reputation is for being, I don't know, sort of an uptight preppy.

Now giving up on this whole institutional news world.

One has to wonder, what is lost? is anything important lost at this point? Were we in, were we, in effect, in a an abusive legacy relationship with a set of partners that were no longer devoted to us in any fashion? That resembles the past? And we probably went on long, you know, too long, out of habit in the first place.

We're not prepared to, we're not prepared to reassemble a substitute. That's true, but I think more damage was being done ultimately by our loyalty to the old model.

People, you know, I was listening to an old George Carlin interview the other day and you know, he was talking about how, how. It isn't a bad thing when you stop trusting the untrustworthy.

And maybe this is just the final blow, the sort of breakup moment where you go, you know? These places have been devoted for a long time to keeping us angry, keeping us divided.

Disciplining thought rather than opening it up. They don't seem like truth seeking agents anymore, they they seem to be in the business of behavior modification. Getting us to do something, put on a mask, take off a mask, etc.

I, for one, probably won't be much affected because my alienation happened a while ago. But I still find myself in the, you know, citizens position of wanting to know, you know, how the war is going.

I think in the under the old standard of news, if I were a news director, let's say at CB, at CBS in 1986. And this happened. And the spokesperson for the President of Russia, or, you know, going going back to then the general secretary of the Soviet Union. If they had blamed, you know, something like that, if they had said, of course, we don't think this is a key of doing this. You know, behind this stands Washington. OK, if I would have, I would lead with that, not because I care what they say or why they're saying it, but because. The implications of a nuclear power. Blaming the United States for what they're calling an attack on the Kremlin are enormous for the for all of society, like the the newsworthiness of that is.

This could be the predicate of a decision that goes that rolls us forward into active conflict and maybe even nuclear conflict. Who knows? But as you say, news is about behavior modification now. So what everybody's stressing in sort of conventional news in America is how full of it. The Russian response is how it's a false flag episode.

And there's just no discussion at all of the implications of it, no matter how, you know, crazy the Putin government is. So they're training audiences to get out of the habit of trying to understand.

To even ask questions about sort of newsworthiness or why something is important, or does that make sense?

We're training audiences to just not even not even work that into their thoughts. Instead, the reaction is, Oh, the Russians did something bad and we hate them because they're liars. And which may all be appropriate, who knows, but but this other set of considerations we're just not even going to talk about.

I think it was talk radio is people, and they're all the same now. And they were blaming Russia and saying, Oh, maybe they did it to themselves. And it was all this, all this puzzling through this thing. And I thought, you know, someday I'm going to be driving down the road and there's going to be a flash on the horizon. And my car is going to roll over off a cliff. As a nuclear shockwave hits me, and I will have had no warning whatsoever that it might hit.

It's just going to happen because if in the past I could have, I could have, you know?

Anticipated by a few days, even that international, acute international conflict, a nuclear conflict, was going to occur. I don't know that I trust that anymore. So I'm just going to have to reconcile myself to the fact that someday I'll be buying eggs or driving down the road in northern Utah. And all of a sudden, my car is going to roll over as I see an x-ray of my own hand on the steering wheel.

Oh, no, that's the cop opening the trunk.

Yeah, I mean, we're just not even covering that. I mean, you think about how they would have covered the Cuban, Cuban missile crisis today. And we go back in time and we look at how they did that. And, of course, the American news audience was massively disinformed about the sorts of things, the details, right? Like, you know how much were we really told about the fact that we had missiles in Turkey?

Right, you know what I'm saying, and that this was maybe possible, maybe possibly part of the Soviets thinking. And doing this is the is. It was a counter provocation. This was left out of a lot of the coverage at the time.

However, ultimately, the populations of both countries were deeply aware that we were hurtling towards something very significant.

And you know, this idea that we may have taken a step towards military conflict with A. With a country that can actually fight back. For the first time since World War Two. Like, it's not even on anybody's radar.

Are you really going to prioritize your, you know, your hatred of some faraway regime over the more basic calculus of? I don't want my house to blow up and I don't want my kids like, Um, I mean, this, this is. This is why this has been a constant struggle with, um, between kind of the news and audiences for a long time. We've had all of these episodes where they've, uh, going back to Vietnam, where, uh? Institutional authorities have told us that. One of the failings of of, uh, the news industry is that it's, uh, trying to rally the public behind these various wars of choice that we've entered into, um, and that, you know, we. We look at it back in triumph at episodes like the first Gulf War, when people were kind of stoked for it a little bit. And then the second one. And you know, this was ending the malaise and all that stuff. Um, and then sort of questions like, Well, why, why do we no longer vote on whether or not we're going to go, or even our representatives don't really vote on it?

Not, not really.

There might be a guest on some show who would say that, but he was the only host who would say that or behave that way. Well, yeah, but on the.

But it seems that with most topics of burning interest, we we go through a six a succession of stages. Uh, first, we get the straight on propagandistic behavioral modification, do this, do that, this is the only way to see this. Uh, et cetera. Then after that we start to get some contesting voices saying, Oh, maybe we aired a little bit, or there's some new information that we didn't have at the beginning. Uh, they start to play defense a little bit against what might be emerging stories.

And then, finally, they revise history and say, you know, we never said the vaccine would stop Covid, uh, or whatever it might be, or, you know, we never. We never claimed that, uh.

For instance, um, because wars, and we tend to, we tend to forgive propaganda in wars because we think there are existential stakes. So we go along with simplification and falsification more easily. Uh, especially at the beginning. But I think we've reached a stage with this one in which it's becoming all too confusing. The stakes are going higher. Our sense of what's.

Our, our, our, our attempts to find certainty or clarity about events are kind of going out the window. And I think more and more people are just like me. Well, you know, wake me when the when the flash happens, uh, uh, um, or they'll work it out. I've got other things to do, and if they don't, well, I guess we all go down the tubes together.

The final behavioral, uh result new arrangement is fatalism, you know, and surrender, surrender, yeah, and and and because I, uh, think, like a fiction writer, uh, I sometimes wonder if the outcome was not the purpose. We were told growing up that an informed citizenry was absolutely vital to our democracy. That somehow, without everyone making a decision that was at least based somewhat on objective truth, we would spin out and lose control. And and fall as a civilization. But in informed and, uh, sort.

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