When News Broke

0:03I'm Aisha Roscoe and this is the Sunday Story where we go beyond the news of the day to bring you one big story.

0:16so i've been going on some dates now not a lot but a little bit and dating is a fascinating activity um you know you meet people you wouldn't otherwise met and they say something you might not expect. One guy believed vaccines cause autism. You know, that's been debunked multiple times, but you know, I didn't press it. And then he also said that Kamala Harris isn't black. Well, she did go to Howard and you know, her dad is black, but I let that go. um another one had some some interesting theories about the shape of the earth this was after a nice time I really enjoyed this person and so when they mentioned this I said oh oh no oh no but I wasn't ultimately deterred

1:22You know, look, people think different things. People think different things. And of course, this isn't just about, you know, conversations over a glass of wine or margarita with somebody who you just talking to or trying to have some fun with. Some of these ideas have also reached the highest levels of the White House and are reshaping our country and our world. So, how did we get here, like, to this moment where so much quote-unquote news isn't based in the truth? That's what we're going to explore today in a segment from Engines of Outrage, a new miniseries from the Landslide podcast distributed by the NPR Network and hosted by reporter Ben Bradford.

2:10Here's Ben. It used to be, even just a few decades ago, that Americans largely used and trusted the same news sources. Now, the way we get basic facts about the world is polarized. We are increasingly split into separate bubbles, absorbing different information that paints conflicting pictures of the same events. In the introduction to the series, he goes on to explain that our information ecosystem divides into two distinct sides, conservative and progressive. And these bubbles follow different rules. Only in one of these media bubbles do a huge portion of voters consistently believe a presidential election was stolen.

2:53Only one of them has led Americans to reject basic health interventions. COVID vaccines need to be withdrawn from the market now. Only one has left its audience with the impression that climate change is not real, violent crime is spiking, and a host of outlandish conspiracy theories. Migrants are grilling pets in America. That is true. After the break, Engines of Outrage takes us back to the moment where our shared media ecosystem split to find out if we can sew it back together. Stay with us.

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4:15This time, his most recent expose puts him head to head with a powerful family that rules Tulsa, meaning only one thing. He must be on to something big. FX's The Lowdown. All new Tuesdays on FX. Stream on Hulu. This message comes from Charles Schwab. When it comes to managing your wealth, Schwab gives you more choices, like full-service wealth management and advice when you need it. You can also invest on your own and trade on Think or Swim. Visit schwab.com to learn more. We're back with the Sunday story. here's an excerpt of the first episode of Engines of Outrage, hosted by Ben Bradford. He starts by taking us back to a moment when it seemed like the nation did have a shared, fact-based, collective reality.

5:04In the 1960s and 70s, when it came to most news, there was really only one game in town. Direct from our newsroom in New York, this is the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite. This is NBC Nightly News, Thursday, A huge portion of the country, of all political stripes, sat down each night in front of their TVs and watched the same thing. It was something like three quarters of everybody who had a television on at 6.30 was watching one of the three networks. And there were only three. So they were watching ABC, CBS, or NBC. Andy Tucker is a media historian at the Columbia Journalism School. They were very establishment.

5:42They were white guys in jackets with silver hair. Good evening. Prince Juan Carlos de Bourbon y Bourbon is the new chief of state in Spain. But it was, you know, people watched it. People tended to trust it. People tended to find them familiar because they came into your house while you were eating your meatloaf. That's the way it is. Wednesday, July 31st, 1968. There is no publication, no organization, no news source now that would have the same kind of reach as those three put together. In one 1969 survey, nine out of ten Americans said they regularly watched the television news. It was not the vast variety of sources that we now have.

6:25It was, there was a sense, probably exaggerated, but a sense that people were kind of reading and knowing the same things. What changed that? Or who?

6:39Maryland Governor Spiro Agnew had transformed almost overnight in 1968 from near unknown to Richard Nixon's vice presidential pick and his attack dog. As VP, Agnew was the man Nixon sent to flay administration critics in colorful, alliterative style. If you've ever heard the nattering nabobs of negativism, that was him. And about a year after he and Nixon were elected, Agnew appeared for a speech in Des Moines that his office billed as a major address. I have a subject I think is of great interest to the American people. Tonight I want to discuss the importance of the television medium to the American people.

7:20Agnew focused this night's ire on a surprise subject, the producers of television news. This little group of men who not only enjoy a right of instant rebuttal to every presidential address, but more importantly, wield a free hand in selecting, presenting, and interpreting the great issues in our nation. He essentially said they were enacting their own liberal partisan agenda. A narrow and distorted picture of America often emerges from the televised news. The speech was cynical. The famously touchy Nixon and his advisors were furious at recent critical coverage of the Vietnam War. Agnew and Nixon speechwriter Pat Buchanan had worked up this address to fire back.

8:06It touched a nerve. While polls showed most Americans trusted the news, the accusation of bias had circulated on the right and left. Black newspapers sprang up in the 40s and 50s in response to a media establishment that was overwhelmingly white. In the battle for civil rights, segregationists such as George Wallace routinely complained they were being treated unfairly by the media. They try to make it appear that we are bigots, that we are prejudiced, that we are biased, that we are immoral. Agnew knew this, and in his speech, he was echoing complaints of Wallace and others. But now it was coming from the vice president of the United States.

8:43Are you saying that the Nixon administration is sort of the first time, at least in modern history that we see the president, the White House, accusing the media of having a liberal bias. In the modern era, yeah, I think so. I think so. Media historians, including Andy Tucker, point to Agnew's speech as a turning point. It gained wider play. Reporters picked up the story. It was their job. And Agnew and other Nixon allies continued over the next days and months to hammer this accusation of slant. The Nixon administration was, well, setting up the press as an enemy. It was a very vigorous spin operation that had the line of the day, that worked very closely with journalists, but also used the power of the White House to smear the press.

9:30And it coincided with polls showing trust in mainstream news and our shared reality beginning to fall.

9:41Before we go further, it's worth discussing Agnew's charge. Was the news biased? The answer is, of course, right? Humans are subjective creatures, and choosing what stories to cover, who to talk to, requires subjective judgment. Even describing what things look like, was a crowd large or small, rowdy or muted, is subjective. And Agnew was clearly right, that a tiny fraction of men living in the same large cities decided what, of all the world's events, most people would see. Andy Tucker says it led to black spots. It did seem to confirm and valorize the idea of a dominant culture. The visible faces of that culture were middle-aged white men.

10:25There were certain advantages to the sense that we all know the same stuff, but it also confirmed the establishment as the important institution, cultural institution. It is funny. You know, I spent a lot of time, just hundreds, if not thousands of hours, digging through archives of old evening news broadcasts. And you look at the rundowns of their programs on any given day, they are 90 percent identical. Yeah, the herd instinct is very, very strong in that kind of coverage. So there were biases. But Tucker says that's different from saying these journalists were enacting an agenda. Yeah, I want to first acknowledge, of course, that serious, responsible newsrooms do make mistakes.

11:13They get things wrong. They don't see what they're supposed to see. But there is a process that is rooted in fact-finding, doing your best to challenge your own assumptions so that you report against yourself. In the wake of Agnew's speech and increasing distrust in media, other sources with a very different intent would gain influence. We'll be right back with Engines of Outrage.

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13:34Outside Washington, D.C., in a nondescript office building, behind a locked door guarded by multiple security measures, printers buzzed. You heard about this in detail in Landslide's first season. They spat out millions and millions of letters to households around the nation. The direct mail operation of the political activist Richard Vigery. Richard Vigery, conservative ideologue, direct mail genius. You heard how Vigery and his allies in the new right identified voters upset about a variety of separate cultural issues, textbooks, gun rights, abortion, and linked those causes together in fiery letters to an ever-expanding list.

14:14And you heard from a Reagan strategist, just briefly, how this was a new form of media. You know, now conservatives have talk radio, they have cable news things and all that. There wasn't anything like that back then. The only communications channel that you had directly to conservatives was mail.

14:36Vigery's direct mail operation bloomed in the years immediately following Vice President Spiro Agnew's accusation of network news bias. The idea that the mainstream media is biased against you and that you need to trust alternative media sources, that was something that Vigery didn't create, but he certainly, like, really enhances in the 1970s. A.J. Bauer is a professor at the University of Alabama who studies the rise of right-wing media. By creating a kind of alternative ecosystem of conservative newsletters, there was not just claims that the media was biased, but also an alternative source that you could get to see exactly where the news media wasn't covering specific issues or was covering them in a flawed way of some sort.

15:16Here's what they're not telling you. Here's what they're not telling you, exactly. It's one thing to say they're biased. It's another thing to say they're biased and here's the thing that they're missing. This medium told you the mainstream news was lying and the truth was here. But that truth was apocalyptic, laden with conspiracy theories. The newsletters of the New Right from Vigery's printers warned that textbooks were teaching cannibalism, gay people were recruiting children, that Secretary of State was perhaps sacrificing anti-communists in Vietnam. You know, Vigery wrote later on of his strategy that political inertia is the normal state for most people.

15:55And it takes a sledgehammer of an issue to distract them from their ball games, shopping sprees, and daily work preoccupations. The tactics of reporting, how that information hits the page and the intent of it, is sort of fundamentally different. Yeah. From the beginning, it's always been an ideological project. It hasn't been kind of like a, let's create a conservative counter news product. It was, how do we create media that disrupts the kind of mainstream hegemony of the traditional press? The newsletters provided information. That information could be true. But it wasn't the point of it. Vigery wasn't doing journalism.

16:37The intent was not to inform. It was to inspire political action, to outrage. That's really important because that intent and that style set the template for voices that would soon grow much louder.

16:55At the same time as Vigery's letters were proliferating, a right-wing movement made other gains in American political life. In 1976, it won control of the Republican Party platform. The issue of court-ordered bussing. The subject was the Panama Canal. In favor of school prayer. Amnesty, gun control, national health. And conservative hero Ronald Reagan nearly knocked off the sitting president, Gerald Ford, for the nomination. Four years later, he won it all. It all lended legitimacy and visibility to a movement that a few years earlier had been easy to dismiss as fringe. And movement premised on the idea that the mainstream media was corrupt.

17:38Did news organizations internalize some of this criticism? Yeah, absolutely. A.J. Bauer, the historian of right-wing media, says reporters began giving more weight to views that had long been dismissible. Conservative movement figures increasingly get interviewed, right, by the New York Times and by other traditional mainstream news outlets as though they're representing a kind of responsible opposition. Now, this is what news is supposed to do, right? Seek and report major sides of a debate. You could also argue that reporters became more credulous, less willing to challenge provably false information, which had bubbled up from, say, fever swamps of new right newsletters, because it came from politically legitimized voices.

18:22But Bauer says pressure by conservatives led to even more inroads in traditional media. Within mainstream journalism, there's concern that they were losing the trust of the public and they needed to regain it. You see conservatives, you know, wedging into that vulnerability. The New York Times in the early 1970s hired its first voice from the conservative movement to its opinion pages. But not just any voice. A PR man, a spin doctor, the writer of some of Agnew's most blisteringly partisan speeches, including his nattering nabobs line. William Sapphire came straight from that White House job to become a consistent critic of the Times from within its own pages.

19:02After Watergate, it was Sapphire who stuck the suffix gate to other more routine controversies, an effort to suggest that presidents such as Jimmy Carter engaged in a corruption akin to Nixon's. Mainstream outlets made these adjustments, concessions, to quell criticism, to prove they were fair, and to restore public trust. Bauer says it had the opposite effect. There's an increasing perception that television news is biased and that local news is biased as well. Instead of relieving criticisms of bias, it lended more credibility to the people making them. This is exactly the moment where conservative news, those Richard Vigery newsletters, are starting to flourish.

19:43Trust in traditional news was falling, newsletters offering a slanted perspective for proliferating, a perspective reinforced by a new crop of right-wing politicians and think tanks. And in this climate, Bauer says, Americans suddenly got a new option. they could turn the TV dial somewhere else. This is at exactly the moment where people are starting to tune out of watching news because they're having more choices. So let's say you're eating dinner at like 5 o 'clock, 6 o 'clock. You want to watch TV. Your choice is news, news, or news, basically. Yeah. By the early 80s, so 1980 is where cable starts to proliferate.

20:21If you've got cable, you don't have to watch one of those big three news channels anymore for dinner, right? You could watch sports or you could watch a movie or something like that. Suddenly, there was ESPN, MTV. You could watch hockey, although good luck seeing the puck, or put Nickelodeon on for your kids. So people start consuming less news, actually. A lot of times people think about it as like people switched from mainstream news to some ideological news. But really what ends up happening is most people kind of opt out and they're getting less news than they used to. The network news that just a few years earlier reached almost every American, showing them the same reality, was now easy to tune out.

21:00You could unplug from traditional news entirely and just absorb the angry, alternate, partisan worldview of those pamphlets or their ilk. You're consuming less news, but all of a sudden you're getting all these newsletters that are saying, oh, did you hear about the Equal Rights Amendment and how bad it is? The drop in audience for mainstream news left an information void, a void that alternative media could fill. But it didn't, not immediately. For most of the 1980s, right-wing media remained relatively niche, mostly those same products, newsletters, magazines, local radio. You had to already be somewhat politically engaged to want to tune in.

21:38That was about to change with a new, polarizing voice that would become the right's first media superstar. And the bubble would expand exponentially.

21:54coming to you live and direct from the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies. The brash, boisterous radio host Rush Limbaugh had not set out to become a right-wing media force. But in the late 1980s, the one-time failed DJ struck on a formula for success. And it sounded, eerily, like a live-action, vigory newsletter. Moral decay is rooted in the Democratic Party. Demonizing political opponents. Sowing distrust in mainstream media. Whenever they spot what they think is Republican scandal, that's where they go. There were conspiracy theories. We have been told a polar ice capsule melt.

22:35And that when this happens, sea levels will rise. There are so many of these environmental myths, and the reason they exist is because the environmental movement is the new home of the socialist communist movement of the world. And there was culture war and racial resentment. I thought white men were the new pigs of society. Unless, of course, you want a successful and happy marriage, then by all means get a white boy. That's right. If you want a successful and happy marriage, then by all means get a white boy. For three hours a day, Limbaugh blasted and lampooned Democrats, feminists, gay people, liberals, journalists, and Republicans he didn't feel were sufficiently conservative.

23:16The fact that he could do this so freely was new, a result of the Federal Communications Commission under President Ronald Reagan scrapping its long-held Fairness Doctrine. The Fairness Doctrine had required news programs to seek, quote-unquote, balance. A year after the end of the Doctrine, Limbaugh's program debuted nationally. And unlike the New Rights newsletters and magazines, with Rush, you didn't have to take the time to pick up and pour through materials sent to your home. You could switch him on in your car or your office and just immerse yourself. All right, listen up, folks. A political twister's kicking up across the fruited plain, and you need a conservative compass to point you to the truth.

23:56Limbaugh added one more ingredient to the formula that would define the most powerful right-wing media. He, again, was not a journalist. He wasn't fact-checking or looking to provide multiple viewpoints. But he also wasn't an activist, at least at first. From a young age, he just wanted to be on the radio, but he washed out as a DJ at four different stations. So when he finally got this last shot, he wasn't seeking to drive voters. He wanted advertisers. He's got more of an entertainer's demeanor, right? He had worked in radio as kind of a morning zoo crew kind of guy. He understood that in order to captivate broadcast audiences, you couldn't just disseminate information.

24:36You had to make them feel as though they were getting something out of it. in that something was entertainment. A.J. Bauer at the University of Alabama, who studies the history of right-wing media, says Limbaugh, to his target audience, was fun. They could listen for hours. Primarily kind of a comedy program. Not necessarily that I would laugh at all those jokes today, right? But when you're listening to it, as somebody who is sympathetic, you're laughing. Rush Limbaugh, for most admired man in America. During the Vietnam War, I railed against the long-haired, maggot-infested, dope-smoking protesters.

25:11Rush Limbaugh, inventor of the term feminazi. Rush Limbaugh, your only choice for most admired man in America. There's levity. You feel a sense of superiority. Limbaugh promised, however tongue-in-cheek, that he was offering you facts, reliable information. Point you to the truth. You could live ensconced in the reality he presented. And a lot of people did. The Rush Limbaugh's show's audience expanded rapidly, from just a few hundred thousand listeners at a given time to millions. Within five years, 17 million a week. And as politics became more and more central to the radio host's brand, as his influence grew, he tied himself closer and closer to the Republican Party and vice versa.