Matt Gertz: This is how he gets his news. This is how his worldview is shaped. It's one segment at a time.

Brooke Gladstone: Donald Trump has reopened the revolving door between the White House and Fox News. From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: And I'm Micah Loewinger. Also on this week's show, a brief history of fact-checking and why the much-maligned job is in a tough spot.

Bill Adair: In half the states, there are no fact checkers holding members of Congress responsible for what they say. That's like driving on the interstate without any fear of getting a speeding tape.

Micah Loewinger: Plus, The Onion bought Alex Jones' Infowars and gets the last laugh.

Ben Collins: This is an incredibly funny joke, and when people got the push notification on their phone, their first reaction should be like to cackle at it and that was our goal, we wanted a little bit of hope and joy into the world.

Brooke Gladstone: It's all coming up after this.

Micah Loewinger: From WNYC New York, this is On the Media. I'm Micah Loewinger.

Brooke Gladstone: And I'm Brooke Gladstone. On Thursday, Donald J. Trump presided over a gala at Mar-a-Lago.

Sylvester Stallone: We are in the presence of a really mythical character.

Brooke Gladstone: That's actor Sylvester Stallone who compared the president-elect to the protagonist of his Oscar-winning Rocky, among others.

Sylvester Stallone: Guess what? We got the second George Washington. Congratulations.

Brooke Gladstone: Trump's own speech touted the names of his freshly announced cabinet picks.

Donald Trump: I guess if you like health and if you like people that live a long time, it's the Most important position, RFK Jr.

Brooke Gladstone: Robert Kennedy Jr. anti-vaccine activist and conspiracy theorist is Trump's choice to head the Department of Health and Human Services. For now at least.

Donald Trump: People like you, Bobby. Don't get too popular, Bobby.

Brooke Gladstone: Among the 20-odd names Trump announced this week, many share or have shared a common employer.

Female Reporter: Tulsi Gabbard is a former army reservist. She's also a Fox News talking head who once ran for president.

Male Reporter: Fox News host and army veteran Pete Hegseth was nominated as defense secretary. He unsuccessfully ran for Senate in Minnesota in 2012 before joining Fox News.

Brooke Gladstone: Tom Homan, Trump's pick for "border czar," became a Fox contributor in 2018. Michael Waltz, national security adviser to be, perhaps, was a contributor too. Mike Huckabee, tapped his ambassador to Israel hosted his own show on Fox from 2008 until 2015.

Matt Gertz: Donald Trump is using Fox News as a staffing agency.

Brooke Gladstone: Matt Gertz is a senior fellow at the left-leaning Media Matters for America. He says it's worth revisiting all that we learned in the first term about Trump's relationship with his cable news channel of choice.

Matt Gertz: Fox & Friends, has for a long time been his favorite show. Pete Hegseth, the potentially incoming Defense Secretary, has been working as a co-host of Fox & Friends Weekend Edition for the last several years.

Brooke Gladstone: What should we know about him and his career trajectory from Fox News contributor to secretary of Defense nominee?

Matt Gertz: What Hegseth was able to do after catching Trump's eye was get Donald Trump to sign on to his own aims, which during Trump's first administration was securing executive clemency for several service members who had been accused or convicted of war crimes.

Brooke Gladstone: Yes, the killing of civilians.

Matt Gertz: He put family members of various accused or convicted war criminals on the show to talk up how they had been persecuted.

Pete Hegseth: These are men who went into the most dangerous places on earth with a job to defend us and made tough calls on a moment’s notice. They're not war criminals, they're warriors who have now been accused of certain things that are under review.

Matt Gertz: This is how Trump gets his news. This is how his worldview is shaped. It's one segment at a time.

Brooke Gladstone: He has particular skills, certainly, as a Fox News host, right? But Secretary of Defense needs a different set of skills.

Matt Gertz: Right. The set of skills that you need for being a Fox News host is understanding how to push the buttons of the MAGA faithful. The way that Fox hosts traditionally do that is by making those viewers afraid, making those viewers angry--

Brooke Gladstone: Providing enemies.

Matt Gertz: Providing enemies. Obviously, that is not the job of Defense Secretary. We're talking about a sprawling bureaucracy that employs nearly three million service members and civilian employees that has a budget of hundreds of billions of dollars. It's a serious job for serious people.

Brooke Gladstone: You've also noticed that this revolving door also works the other way. Several Trump staffers signed on with Fox News after Trump left office.

Matt Gertz: During or after his term. Yes. Tom Homan was previously the head of ICE. After he retired from ICE in the summer of 2018, he got a job at Fox News. He would denounce Democrats for standing against Trump's border policies. He would call forever more draconian measures. He would say the things that Donald Trump wanted to hear.

Tom Homan: I keep hearing the wall is ineffective from them people. I don't know what data they're basing it on, but every place a border barrier has been built, illegal immigration has declined. That's a fact.

Matt Gertz: Now he's gone through the revolving door. Now he's coming back into the administration.

Brooke Gladstone: You have observed that the more often you go on Fox News, the more likely you are to clinch one of these top jobs in the Trump administration. One Fox frequent flyer was Congressman Matt Gaetz, just nominated attorney general.

Matt Gertz: We have counted at least 347 weekday Fox appearances that Gaetz did from August 2017 through Election Day of 2024. He's actually not the most frequent Fox guest to be taking a jump to the administration, though. His Florida colleague, Representative Michael Waltz, who is Trump's pick for national security advisor, actually made at least 569 weekday Fox appearances, 176 since January 2023, which is of any member of Congress over that period.

Brooke Gladstone: Wow. The last nominee, Tulsi Gabbard, is a former Democrat turned MAGA Fox News contributor and more. Is that how she caught Trump's eye?

Matt Gertz: In Gabbard's case, she became a favorite of Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News star host. As she underwent a sort of political transformation that brought her further and further onto the right, Fox was an option opportunity for her to rebrand herself. Tulsi Gabbard is the pick for Director of National Intelligence. It's a position that oversees the 18 US intelligence agencies. It's also responsible for the presidential daily brief, though that is somewhat less important in a Donald Trump administration. As Donald Trump rather famously ignores his daily briefing, he would take advice from Fox News hosts either through their programs or he would reach out to them directly. Those were the experts he wanted to hear from, not people with actual subject matter expertise.

Brooke Gladstone: You wrote that during Trump's first term, he consulted privately with an array of Fox stars, creating a shadow cabinet of advisers with immense influence over government affairs. You dubbed this the Trump-Fox feedback loop.

Matt Gertz: Take you back to January of 2018. One morning, Donald Trump sends out a tweet criticizing a surveillance bill that the House is supposed to vote on that day. The administration theoretically supported the bill, but all of a sudden he was sending out a tweet criticizing that very bill. What happened, I discovered, was that shortly before Donald Trump's tweet, a Fox contributor had turned directly to the camera and said--

Judge Andrew Napolitano: Mr. President, this is not the way to go. Spying is valid to find the foreign agents among us, but it's got to be based on suspicion and not an area code.

Matt Gertz: And that was enough to send Washington into chaos for hours. There are so many more. There were federal investigations that were launched on the basis of Trump watching Fox News and hearing some conspiracy-minded nonsense and instructing publicly or privately the Justice Department to look into it.

Brooke Gladstone: This time around, when Trump is dissatisfied with Fox, he can turn to a host of other folks like he did when he was campaigning. Joe Rogan, Charlie Kirk, and the Fox News diaspora of former stars like Carlson, Ben Shapiro, Megyn Kelly. Also a heap of MAGA influencers. Do you see that complicating the ties that bind Fox and Trump together?

Matt Gertz: There have been big changes in the right-wing media since Donald Trump left office, but Trump is a creature of habit, and his habit is watching Fox News. It is not listening to podcasts or watching streaming shows. I do think there will be a battle for his attention, though. There will be other outlets trying to position themselves as Trumpier than Fox. That will in turn pull Fox further to the right. It will keep the network from getting any distance from him at all.

Brooke Gladstone: Right now, it's a little early to judge what the media coverage of this revolving door is. Do you think that it gets enough coverage because there's so much to cover? You've said that the media have regarded this as kind of funny.

Matt Gertz: There are ways to treat it as a sideshow, as a kind of carnival act, as the next ridiculous person down the line who Trump is putting in a position of power, and isn't it silly that someone like that is getting a job like the one that they're getting? But this is really just on a different scale as far as lack of preparation, lack of seriousness around any of it, you literally have a President of the United States casting his administration from the people he sees on his television and that could have very profound consequences, as it has in the past.

Brooke Gladstone: Thank you so much.

Matt Gertz: Always happy to come on, though. Unfortunately, I am most in demand when things are at their darkest.

Brooke Gladstone: Matt Gertz is a senior fellow at Media Matters where he covers the relationship between the right-wing media and the GOP.

Micah Loewinger: Coming up, if a fact is checked in the media, but no one is around to read it, does it make a sound?

Brooke Gladstone: This is On the Media.

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Brooke Gladstone: This is on the media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: And I'm Micah Loewinger. Conspiracy theories about the vote have flooded the Internet since election Day, including from Democrats.

Speaker: Not to be a conspiracy theorist, but there's a couple of things that I've been seeing on TikTok over the last couple of days.

Speaker: Like how could all of the swing states voted in Democratic governors, senators, and President Trump? Where are all of the votes if there was record voter turnout that didn't--

Speaker: I wasn't going to chime in on all the math, not math and stuff, but remember this data breach that happened three months ago that was like massive. Did you think anything ever happened with that? I wonder what someone could--

Micah Loewinger: Some of the posts went viral, but without boosts from elected officials, like in 2020, these bogus stories of election fraud will likely fizzle out. Anna Merlan is a senior reporter at Mother Jones covering disinformation, technology, and extremism. She says it's quite common for some people to turn to conspiracy theories to make sense of a loss they weren't prepared for.

Anna Merlan: The best example is the 2004 election. John Kerry lost to George W. Bush, and a big thing that happened in that election was that the exit polls were super, super wrong. Pretty much every exit poll seemed to predict a Kerry victory and there was a lot of postmortem devoted to this, like, why were the exit polls so wrong? But some people turned to an explanation of fraud, including, ironically enough, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Micah Loewinger: He wrote a piece in Rolling Stone to this effect, right?

Anna Merlan: He did, yes. It was very widely viewed and discussed, but in fairness, he was not alone. Now, of course, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is serving on Trump's transition team and expected to play a role in a second Trump administration.

Micah Loewinger: You quoted one man named Wayne Madsen, who you describe in your piece as a former journalist and documented conspiracy theorist who posted on Threads, the social media site, writing, "I'm beginning to believe our election was massively hacked."

Anna Merlan: Generally, there seemed to be an impression among some Harris supporters that Starlink was in some way being used to tabulate votes, which is not correct. It's not used that way.

Speaker: Number one, why in the flying frickin flap were voting ballot boxes or whatever in the places where you go to vote, why were they connected to the Internet?

Anna Merlan: The kind of two main flavors of videos on TikTok have been stuff from people identifying themselves as experts in tech in some way or working in IT in some capacity, and then, weirdly enough, psychics saying that something is just not adding up from kind of an astrological perspective. I don't mean to make light of it, but that's what's going on.

Amy Tripp: Will Kamala Harris be President of the United States? I'm not just going to tell you. I'm going to show you. This is Harris's birth chart. This is what was promised at the time of her birth. Kamala Harris is Gemini rising, making Mercury the lord of her chart.

Micah Loewinger: And you could hop onto Twitter threads, TikTok, Instagram, any day of the week and find people saying unsubstantiated stuff about current events. How popular is this really?

Anna Merlan: I don't think that it is an overwhelming point of view among Harris supporters or people on the left or Democrats. That is not the sense that I get, but it is a substantial and vocal minority and certainly enough that the AP, for instance, has had to put out a fact-checking piece on the fact that some rural communities use Starlink as an internet provider, but their voting equipment is not connected to Starlink. Election officials in multiple swing states have had to reassure people that this didn't happen. What I think is important to note is that it's not driving official policy or an official response from the Harris campaign from the Democratic Party. That's not happening. Election officials and officials at FISA, which is the federal agency responsible for cyber defense, have said that they believe this was an incredibly secure election.

Micah Loewinger: Yes, to your point, Kamala Harris conceded quite quickly after she lost the election. Donald Trump never conceded after he lost the election in 2020 and used the big lie to justify a violent mob storming the Capitol to block certification. Certainly, we don't want to draw a false equivalency here, although the Internet and a growing number of media outlets are reviving an old term to describe this kind of conspiratorial thinking.

Speaker: Is the left starting to go a partial or full QAnon? BlueAnon, if you will?

Speaker: BlueAnon. What are y'all doing? I'm not coming down there with y'all. How y'all get way over there?

Anna Merlan: The term BlueAno is first started being used in 2016 to refer to a loose collection of conspiracy theories about Donald Trump. Conspiracy theories that he was like a literal Manchurian candidate or a Russian agent who was acting solely at the behest of Putin. I think actually Marjorie Taylor Greene was one of the first people to use it in public life. As I've written about, conspiracy theories really are for everyone, and in this case, we see a really clear example of the ways that people, when they are facing a moment of loss, a moment of confusion, a loss of power, they engage in conspiratorial thinking.

Micah Loewinger: I do want to look at Wisconsin. Republican Senate candidate Eric Hovde has yet to concede to Democratic incumbent Tammy Baldwin. He posted a video on social media about how, among other things, Baldwin received a big push in absentee ballots, which were counted late on election night--

Eric Hovde: At 1:00 AM, I was receiving calls of congratulations, and based on the models, it appeared I would win the Senate race. Then at 4:00 AM, Milwaukee reported approximately 108,000 absentee ballots, with Senator Baldwin receiving nearly 90% of those ballots. Statistically, this outcome seems improbable as it didn't match the patterns from same day voting in Milwaukee where I received 22% of the votes.

Micah Loewinger: And he said that he's considering asking for a recount, but that "there are meaningful limits of a recount because they don't look at the integrity of a ballot." What's the point of this play?

Anna Merlan: Often when folks are making these claims, it is a fundraising effort, but it also really speaks to how deeply allegations of voter fraud and electoral misconduct are embedded in the way that many Republican candidates now talk about elections and election security. Donald Trump has really pioneered this way of talking about elections and voter fraud by national candidates in the way that he does, making these very, very bold allegations of fraud and now we're seeing it play out in a down-ballot race.

Micah Loewinger: Hopefully, we put some of the so-called BlueAnon conspiracy theories in context. I guess, ultimately, are you concerned that election denialism is becoming an increasingly bipartisan problem?

Anna Merlan: I think in the short term, yes, I am a bit concerned that this is happening. We wrote about this Marist poll that came out in October where I believe a majority of voters said that they were concerned about fraud or interference. A slim majority was 58% of Americans. I worry about that on a couple of levels. One, obviously, is folks not accepting the results of free and fair elections I think would be just sort of generally bad for the country. The other is that we have evidence that these types of conspiracy theories can actually dissuade people from voting and from other forms of civic engagement. People can decide if the system is rigged. Why should I bother? I think it would be a real loss if folks get disillusioned and disenfranchised out of civic participation.

Micah Loewinger: Anna, thank you very much.

Anna Merlan: Thanks for having me.

Micah Loewinger: Anna Merlan is a senior reporter at Mother Jones covering disinformation, technology, and extremism.

Brooke Gladstone: As the new Trump administration approaches, telling truth from fiction grows more imperative by the day. The Washington Post counted over 30,000 whoppers in his last term, but are the media ready for this moment?

Bill Adair: You know, in addition to having the problem that there aren't enough fact-checkers, we have a huge PR problem.

Brooke Gladstone: Bill Adair is a journalism and public policy professor at Duke University, founder of the website PolitiFact, and author of the new book Beyond the Big Lie. Adair says that skepticism about the value of fact-checking is very familiar. In fact, it was once held by many journalists themselves until a political ad hit TV screens in the late '80s.

Bill Adair: Yes, if you look at the short history of fact-checking, the Willie Horton ad in 1988 was the spark that launched the fact-checking movement in American journalism.

Ad: Bush supports the death penalty for first-degree murderers. Dukakis not only opposes the death penalty. He allowed first degree murderers to have weekend and passes from prison. One was Willie Horton, who murdered a boy in a robbery, stabbing him 19 times. Despite a life sentence, Horton received 10 weekend passes from prison.

Bill Adair: It was an ad that used race to scare people about Michael Dukakis. It was very subtle in the way it did this. David Broder, a very influential political journalist, said, "Hey, we need to fact-check ads and we need to provide people with more context." So that got the movement started and it was really tremendous what happened in the early '90s, a lot of television stations, a lot of American newspapers started fact-checking ads, but it kind of petered out. By the late '90s, fact-checking had lost its steam, but it did lead in 2003 to the birth of FactCheck.org, started by Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Brooks Jackson.

Brooke Gladstone: At the University of Pennsylvania.

Bill Adair: And then I started PolitiFact in 2007 as a product of the St. Petersburg Times.

Brooke Gladstone: Why don't we address the elephant in the room which you start your book with.

Bill Adair: Which indeed is an elephant.

Brooke Gladstone: Describe what you learned, how you learned it, and when you came to stop worrying and accept it.

Bill Adair: When I started PolitiFact, I had a sense that Republicans lied more and that really went back to when I began covering Congress in the late '90s. It was apparent then that--

Brooke Gladstone: And you kinda, kinda, lied about that.

Bill Adair: I did. In 2012, I was on C-SPAN national television live taking calls, and Brian from Michigan calls in. Brian says, "Mr. Adair, I read in the Nation that when you add up the fact checks that Republicans lie more and they lie worse. I answered Brian, and I lied. "You know, I can honestly say I don't keep score." Well, we did keep score. We kept score by person. We didn't reveal the party total, but I knew that Brian was right and instead, I gave him this dodge that I always gave people when they asked this.

I said, "Asking me that question is sort of like asking an umpire who's out at home more, the Yankees or the Red Sox. I don't know. I look at every play independently, and I think it's important that we do that." I want to find Brian so that I can apologize to him, because Brian was right then, and Brian is even more right now. But I was trying to show that I was impartial.

Brooke Gladstone: Why are they such big liars? I know you posed that question to a broad group of people. Elected officials, journalists, campaign operatives, current and former members of Congress. Some are former Republicans who left because of Trump, so they bring some special insight. Some are Democratic operatives. So answer the question.

Bill Adair: At the root of it is culture. It's really now a big part of Republican culture. When Newt Gingrich took over the House of Representatives in the early 1990s, he established this kind of anything goes culture that included this acceptance for lying, that we need to win, go ahead, lie. This was summed up really well by a Republican congressman I talked to Denver Riggleman, who said when you're in this epic struggle that Republicans believe they're in, that anything goes.

Another is complete lack of shame, and these things are related. Many people I talked to said that whereas Democrats still feel shame if they're called out for a lie, many Republicans do not.

Brooke Gladstone: When you started PolitiFact, you created the Truth-O-Meter, which is a dial with an arrow like the hand of a clock, indicating the seriousness of the lie. There are six rankings. True, mostly true, half true, barely true, later changed to mostly false, and false, plus the lighthearted pants on fire for remarks that are ridiculously false. There are a variety of these enterprises across outlets now, including the Washington Post's Glenn Kessler, the seriousness of the fact checks are determined by the amount of Pinocchios you see, but when you attempt to impose a scale on untruths, doesn't that open up Pandora's box of subjectivity?

Bill Adair: Well, the whole thing is subjective. Ultimately, Fact checkers at PolitiFact are taking journalistic work that they've done and then making a subjective rating on this imaginary device. So, yes, that can create challenges. I'll give you one example. Politician in one state makes a claim. Politician in another state makes a pretty similar claim. Do they both earn exactly the same rating? Where do you distinguish between the slightly different words that have been said?

This in PolitiFact terms, in keeping with the quasi-judicial nature of the rulings, as PolitiFact calls them, is known as jurisprudence. So when, say, PolitiFact, North Carolina makes a rating on Josh Stein, the governor-elect, and then a Democrat in California, Gavin Newsom, makes a similar claim, the PolitiFact editors for the Gavin Newsom item look and say, well, what's our jurisprudence on that, and they attempt to be consistent. Are they consistent every time? Ew, that's tricky, and PolitiFact's critics have had a field day looking for inconsistencies in things like that. It's a human enterprise. They do their best.

Brooke Gladstone: You also say that not everything can be fact-checked, that the political ether is lousy with lies large and small, that reporters should concentrate on the ones with the highest impact, or liars, where everything is said to a large audience. But how do you curate Trump?

Bill Adair: Well, I think the solution for fact checking Trump is to get some funding to literally fact check everything he says.

Brooke Gladstone: Fact-checking all of those claims, hiring someone to do it, wouldn't that have a numbing effect?

Bill Adair: Well, yes, but there are also people who transcribe everything he says.

Brooke Gladstone: So how exactly does more fact-checking help our current environment?

Bill Adair: People would say, with me, like, when you're a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Here's why. I think that, first, if you look at just the most basic thing, we talked about Trump, but this also exists at the state and local level.

Brooke Gladstone: Even more important, because those local papers have been hammered so hard.

Bill Adair: Exactly, and so here's proof of that. My team looked at fact checking across the country and found that in half the states, there are no fact checkers holding governors, US Senators, members of Congress responsible for what they say. That's like driving on the interstate without any fear of getting a speeding ticket. You can go as fast as you want. Those politicians can say anything and never worry about getting fact-checked. We need more fact-checkers. The simple process of holding politicians accountable for what they say is a useful exercise that provides a ground truth. So that's step one. Okay, so is fact-checking working when it's done? No.

Brooke Gladstone: And part of that is structural. Our media is crafted so that we never have to encounter an idea or a fact that we don't like.

Bill Adair: Exactly. So we have to get creative in thinking about how we might get fact checks to people who aren't seeing them. Two thoughts on that. One, I'm not sure that shouting pants on fire is going to have an appeal to conservative audiences. I'm not sure that Truth-O-Meters are going to have an appeal to conservative audiences because they're associated with fact-checkers that probably conservative audiences have been told not to trust.

In researching the book, I searched how often PolitiFact and its fact-checking has been mentioned in negative ways on Fox, and it gets insulted a lot. We probably need to think about how we package fact-checking for conservative audiences. The other thing we need to do is to get more conservative media organizations to do their own fact-checking. Now, this is already happening. The Dispatch, a center-right publication, does fact-checking and it's very popular, and we need more conservative media organizations to do fact-checking. I think those two things could really help because what we're doing now is not working.

Brooke Gladstone: In writing this book, you stepped away from the day-to-day role of fact-checking and you've come to the conclusion that maybe pants on fire isn't the way to go. But have you gotten yet any insights or any really compelling ideas about how to package the truth in a way that can cross party lines?

Bill Adair: Not yet. That's kind of next on my to-do list.

Brooke Gladstone: To me, that's a sort of, aside from that Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play?

Bill Adair: That's a big task. I think that we need to figure out what could appeal beyond this NPR listening, New York Times reading, New Yorker subscribing audience and so.

Brooke Gladstone: But nothing yet.

Bill Adair: Nothing yet.

Brooke Gladstone: You got nothing?

Bill Adair: I got nothing for you, Brooke.

Brooke Gladstone: Thank you so much.

Bill Adair: Thank you for having me. Bill Adair, founder of PolitiFact, is the author of the new book Beyond the Big Lie.

Micah Loewinger: Coming up, a really funny thing happened this week.

Brooke Gladstone: This is On the Media. 

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Brooke Gladstone: This is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: And I'm Micah Loewinger. In the aftermath of the election, journalists, us included, have been soul-searching about whether the press did enough to convey the stakes of the race. But Matt Pearce, former reporter at the LA Times and president of Media Guild of the West, thinks more journalists should be interrogating a different question. How much sway does the legacy media really have anymore?

Matt Pearce: I think that is the existential question of this election for the media because a lot of what we think of as legacy media are very often not people's primary source of information, so we are arguing over a dwindling share of what people actually encounter out there in the world.

Micah Loewinger: I've heard from some listeners who feel that perceived bias, either for or against Trump, has slowly driven people away from mainstream sources.

Matt Pearce: There is something to that, especially when you think about who's producing the news now. Predominantly college-educated professionals, often in the big cities, often on the coasts. A professional class that is also the makeup of the modern Democratic Party. The kind of people who are making journalism very often are themselves liberal, whether they're professing those views openly or not.

Micah Loewinger: To be clear, it's good to hold journalism to high standards, but you believe there's a mismatch between how people consume news and how legacy media regards itself.

Matt Pearce: We have a mismatch even in our aspirations in being universalist institutions. We don't have a universalist audience. NBC News did a poll of 1,000 registered voters in the US earlier this year in April, asking about their media preferences and of the people who get their news from newspapers, 70% were for Joe Biden, who was the Democratic candidate at the time, and 21% were for Donald Trump. That was for newspapers. For national network news, so that's ABC, NBC, et cetera, 55% of the people who watch those channels are likely to vote for Joe Biden or the Democrat, compared to 35% for Donald Trump.

Micah Loewinger: Perhaps the biggest correlation on this chart was among the people who don't follow political news at all. Fifty-three percent of those people in this thousand-person survey voted for Donald Trump, versus 27% who voted for Biden. There does seem to be a relationship between people who read mainstream news outlets or don't read news at all and how they vote.

One big threat to the news business is these investment funds, private equity groups buying up and then destroying local news outlets, stripping them for parts. You say though, that if you believe that this is the biggest threat to journalism, "You fundamentally do not understand the epically bigger and more corrosive story happening on your own iPhone." What do you mean by that?

Matt Pearce: The one problem that every type of news organization has in common, whether it's an old commercial newsroom owned by a hedge fund, or whether it's a new digital startup that's organized as a nonprofit or a cooperative, is that we all have the same funnel where we have to go through platforms to get to our readership. Google, Meta, TikTok, X decided, especially in recent years that they've wanted to break up with the news media.

Meta has very aggressively gotten away from hyperlinking to news stories on its platforms, which include Instagram, Facebook, Threads. YouTube, I don't think allows revenue sharing at a scale that would allow for something like ABC News to have a really aggressive presence on its platform. We've had many, many years of Wall Street devastating local newsrooms. The problem is that we haven't had as much aggressive growth from everything else that's supposed to replace it as it should, and that is the overwhelming story that's happening right there in your pocket on that 3x5-inch screen.

Micah Loewinger: You used the word feeder to describe the role of journalism in so much modern media, where podcasters, TikTokers, YouTubers refer to journalism from legacy news outlets as kind of source material for their own work. The thing that concerns me is how so often content creators online present themselves as a foil to mainstream media while relying on the reporting from mainstream media.

Matt Pearce: This is kind of a dynamic that's always been there. If you think about the ecosystem that cities would have with the alternative weeklies, they'd be the counter-voice to the large newspaper in the city. It's good for people to circulate the journalism that we produce and to talk about it, and that story may influence your local radio station, the coverage of your local TV station. Now it's the content creators in your community. That stuff has always been there. If you just go on TikTok, you will encounter a content creator who's just like, pointing to a story that's in the background of their video and narrating the journalism that we produce.

I don't think that's necessarily a horrible thing, but you can't really monetize that if you are the publication producing the original work. That's why we have so many nonprofit newsrooms. Now it's why philanthropy has moved in to try to support more of journalism because journalism in many parts of our profession is reliant on having a 501(c)(3) tax exemption, getting donations, and contributions that isn't connected to a purchase of a subscription. That makes the whole thing much more tenuous for all of us, because funders can change their mind.

Micah Loewinger: You introduced me to a new term I hadn't heard before, and maybe I'm saying it wrong, Baumol's cost disease, a term that could help us understand the economic problem of quality news production. Do you want to define it?

Matt Pearce: Baumol was an economist who used the metaphor of string quartets. What does it take to put on a performance of Brahms? You can cut corners. You can create, like a synthetic string quartet. You can have AI recordings of classical music now, but if the thing that you really want is a performance of a string quartet in your local concert hall, that thing is going to look exactly the same as it did 150 years ago.

My argument is that journalism, and particularly investigative reporting, which to me is one of the core civic features that we do, has a similar problem with Baumol's cost disease. The basic act of reporting for investigative journalists, going to people's houses, filing public records requests, fighting with government agencies to get those records, cold calling potentially hundreds of sources, like all that stuff, is basically the same kind of work that it was 50 years ago.

That's not something that AI is going to suddenly make easier. AI is very unlikely to go knock on the mayor's door. It's very unlikely to persuade over the second beer in your happy hour, a government official to leak a sensitive document. The ability to spread around quality investigative journalism has only gotten more costly.

Micah Loewinger: You write, "If you want a press that will serve as a bulwark against autocracy, shove money at anything that produces high-quality professional investigative journalism." There's also legislation that supporters of journalism could champion, right?

Matt Pearce: New York and Illinois both created journalist employment tax credits. The big picture idea there is that, if the work of journalism is going to need subsidy, if you're going to want to have it around, then you can make the labor cheaper. One way you can do that is through refundable tax credits. Lawmakers aren't just interested abstractly in saving journalism. They're interested in having vibrant communities. They're interested in having another business on Main Street to make the community more interesting, to help knit together their constituents. That's a pretty promising policy.

One of the other policies that places like New York have been talking about are government advertising set-asides to advertise with local independent media as a way of steering some more public dollars toward local newsrooms. I have been also involved in some much more adversarial legislation that would require companies like Google and Meta to pay back local newsrooms for scraping our journalism, given that they are digital advertising monopolies now.

Micah Loewinger: Matt, at the end of one of your recent Substack pieces, you turn for some hope from Walter Lippmann, who is the author of the well-known 1922 book Public Opinion. Do you mind reading that quote?

Matt Pearce: Give me one second here to pull it up. One moment. "Democracy is more than the absence of czars, more than freedom, more than equal opportunity. It is a way of life, a use of freedom, an embrace of opportunity. A nation of uncritical drifters can change only the form of tyranny, for like Christian's sword, democracy is a weapon in the hands of those who have the courage and the skill to wield it; in all others it is a rusty piece of junk."

Micah Loewinger: Tell me what this Lippmann quote means to you and where you find hope in it.

Matt Pearce: I think democracy is an ethic that we bring to the world. Tocqueville, when he wrote Democracy in America, he came over and saw the way that Americans were practicing democracy in a time of aristocracy and he was inspired by our genius for association to make change required us to build with other people using the tools that we have, whether those are newspapers or the local clubs or labor unions.

Through this, we've created the Progressive Era, the Great Society, the New Deal. They were major reforms in times of massive trouble in this country to try to lift up the people of this country to have better access to services. I think we should do that for information, too, because our debate is only going to be as good as the information that we're debating over, and without quality journalism or without quality information, we'll be arguing over phantoms.

Micah Loewinger: Matt, thanks so much.

Matt Pearce: Thanks so much, Micah.

Micah Loewinger: Matt Pearce is the president of Media Guild of the West, a local union of the News Guild.

Brooke Gladstone: Speaking of disinformation and fact-checking, remember this guy?

Alex Jones: Ladies and gentlemen, it is Tuesday, November 12, 2024. I'm your host, Alex Jones.

Brooke Gladstone: Earlier this week, The Onion, the satirical news site, acquired Infowars, owned by the far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. The media platform was auctioned off to help pay for a $1.4 billion defamation lawsuit won by the families of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting victims for promoting lies that the 2012 massacre was a hoax. The Onion took over the whole disinformation empire, including its social media sites, broadcasting equipment, health supplements, and Jones desk.

Alex Jones: I just got word 15 minutes ago that my lawyers and folks met with the US Trustee over our bankruptcy this morning and they said they're shutting us down this morning.

Brooke Gladstone: The morning after the acquisition, Alex Jones was in his studio already live streaming.

Alex Jones: I share this everywhere. This is a total attack on free speech. The deep state is completely out of control.

Brooke Gladstone: The Onion didn't disclose how much it paid, and the deal will need to clear some additional legal proceedings, but a statement from its fictitious CEO said it cost less than a trillion dollars. Joining me is the real CEO of The Onion, Ben Collins. Welcome back to the show.

Ben Collins: Brooke, I'm so glad to be here.

Brooke Gladstone: This was your idea.

Ben Collins: It wasn't really. I think it was kind of everybody's idea. Everybody saw it and I was like, this would be funny if we did this. In fact, there's a lot of parallel construction, as you call it, in the comedy world. A lot of other people were like, wouldn't it be hilarious if The Onion bought this? Because my friends and I had just taken over The Onion seven, eight months ago as people started to think about it and really ideate on what this could be in the world that we could create and also the stuff that The Onion is too good to cover.

Frankly, a lot of the stuff that Infowars covers, The Onion is above it and it should be like, The Onion should not be covering random people who drink raw milk all the time, but Infowars is not above it. So this is a good space, it's a new canvas for us. When we took over The Onion, we said we need more avenues for jokes. We brought back the newspaper, we brought back The Onion News Network, we brought back all these other things, but we're like, what's the thing that's really happening right now that's kind of uncovered? And that's what this is.

Brooke Gladstone: When you're talking about things that Infowars would cover and you're planning a parody Infowars site, is it along the lines, although different, of course, from Stephen Colbert pretending to be Bill O'Reilly for a decade?

Ben Collins: Stephen Colbert was like an amalgam of every Fox post that ever existed back then. Alex Jones has spawned millions of people who took his business model and effectively transformed American life for the considerably worse for all of us, where they get you addicted to fear, and then they get you addicted to hating somebody specific, and then they give you the bomb or the salve for it, which in Alex's case, it's Brain Force Plus, it's a bunch of supplements that made him a multimillionaire. This guy's very rich.

Brooke Gladstone: You'll be getting all the supplements and maybe you'll melt them down into a single candy bar-sized omnivitamin?

Ben Collins: Yes, that's correct. Our CEO plans on taking a bite of the big vitamin that we make because it will give him, we pre presume, based on what we've been told from Infowars, it will make him immortal.

Brooke Gladstone: You mean your fictitious CEO?

Ben Collins: Who's to say?

Brooke Gladstone: On Thursday on his live stream, Jones claimed that the Connecticut Democratic Party and the deep state were involved in the acquisition. The New York Times said that accusation was inevitable given that your purchase was, says the Times, backed by a wealthy gun control group and brokered by a Connecticut law firm, "steeped in Democratic politics."

Ben Collins: Brooke, you can quote me on this. There is no way in any world The Onion would be in business for the state of Connecticut.

Brooke Gladstone: But with a Connecticut law firm steeped in Democratic politics?

Ben Collins: Oh.

[laughter]

Brooke Gladstone: Oh, that.

Ben Collins: Yes, that. No, look, I mean, Everytown was founded after Sandy Hook.

Brooke Gladstone: Everytown is the gun control group.

Ben Collins: Yes, exactly. Everytown has long been fans of us because we have this one headline that says, "No Way To Prevent This," Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens. We print it after every single mass shooting. We've published it 37 times, verbatim.

Brooke Gladstone: Oh, geez.

Ben Collins: People share this as shorthand for there's been another one, and so do they at Everytown. These people went through the worst thing in the world, and then afterwards were told that what happened to them didn't really happen. They were the bad guys all along, or they deserved it, or these horrific things. They will never get full restitution for this, but they do get a little bit of justice with this. Infowars is a media empire being revealed as a farce and hopefully in a few years being associated with this ridiculous joke. I hope that's how history remembers Infowars.

Brooke Gladstone: I remember there was an attempt by Dan Savage to connect Rick Santorum with an unsavory substance, and it really worked for a while. It was called Santorum. A frothy mixture, I'll just say.

Ben Collins: That's really generous, Brooke. Dan Savage, by the way, got a start in The Onion back in the day. Brooke, we've tried fighting this battle with just being like, actually, this is what's true, and it doesn't work when the weight of the other side is like, your whole identity is constructed around these lies or your ability to feel like you are part of a movement or that this miracle elixir you get in the mail is the thing that's going to fix all of your problems. We've tried to battle that with facts. Unfortunately, I don't feel good enough. When you can do a Santorum-like thing with this, every article I wrote as a disinformation reporter doesn't hold up to that one word you just said.

Brooke Gladstone: Dan Savage's attack against Rick Santorum's attack against being gay.

Ben Collins: Exactly. I know the whole context of that in one word, and that's the beauty of doing gigantic pranks like this. Brooke, look, everybody looked at their phone yesterday and didn't want to run into the woods immediately when they saw their push alert for once. It was the opposite. It was like, oh, my God, did something good happen? What? What's the catch? And that's what we want to bring to people.

Brooke Gladstone: Okay, so misinform me. What does his chair look like?

Ben Collins: I will let you know, Brooke. I'll take some pics for you. The second I get some, I'll send them over. In fact, do you want it? I'm sure we can give you a chair.

[laughter]

Brooke Gladstone: Can I get back to you on that?

Ben Collins: Yes, of course.

Brooke Gladstone: Ben Collins, CEO of The Onion. The real CEO. Thank you so much.

Ben Collins: Thank you, Brooke.

Micah Loewinger: That's it for this week's show. On the Media is produced by Molly Rosen, Rebecca Clark Callender, Candice Wong, and Katerina Barton.

Brooke Gladstone: Our technical director is Jennifer Munson. Our engineer is Brendan Dalton. Eloise Blondio is our senior producer, and our executive producer is Katya Rogers. On the Media is a production of WNYC Studios. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: And I'm Micah Loewinger.

 

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