The Jackpod: A TV-run state
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I'm Meghna Chakrabarty, and this is The JackPod, where On Point news analyst Jack Beattie helps us connect history, literature, and politics in a way that brings his unique clarity to the world we live in now. Hello there, Jack. Hello, Meghna. Okay, we are at episode 83, and your headline for today? A TV-run state, I'm quoting. Okay, interesting. So tell me more.

Well, there are 23, count them, 23 Fox alumni in the Trump administration, including three cabinet members. And this prompted Bill Maher to quip, I've heard of state-run TV. This is TV-run state, pointing to the degree of melding between Trump and Fox.

And in the story we're going to tell, it is so clear from the facts that this was almost destined that Fox News had created the Trump voter before Trump and effectively was waiting for Trump. Interesting. Okay. You know, June 16th, 2015, Donald Trump, we all remember, descends the Gildan Escalator at Trump Tower waiting for,

is an atrium peppered with paid actors. Extra Mile Casting had put out an alert saying, we're looking to cast people for the event to wear T-shirts and carry signs and help cheer him in support of his announcement. And they were paying $50 for three hours' work

If you look at clips of that scene, you see people in jerseys and holding signs, and they may well be the paid actors. Quite a moment, a sort of faux introduction. But waiting also is Fox News. And in fact, the ideology had been waiting for Trump since really 1970, right?

That's when a political consultant, Roger Ailes, who was an aide to Nixon in the 1968 campaign, in 1970, he wrote a memo to President Nixon outlining a plan to launch a, quote, pro-administration TV network. Ailes wrote, people are lazy.

The memo noted, with television, you just sit, watch, listen. The thinking is done for you. End quote.

Now, Nixon warmed to the idea and he wrote back, yes, it'd be good to have our own news, quote, to mount, I'm quoting Nixon's memo, a brutal, vicious attack on the opposition. Well, this is, you know, that's Fox News. That's what it became. It's Nixon's vision and it's Roger Ailes' vision.

Roger Ailes' waiting was over in 1996 when Rupert Murdoch made him CEO of Fox News. And he was able, Ailes was, to mount, quote, our own news, in Nixon's phrase, to mount a brutal, vicious attack on the opposition.

Murdoch was connected to Trump and it's really something how the worst demagogue of the 20th century joins hands through Roy Cohn with the demagogue of the 21st. Murdoch was introduced to Trump by Roy Cohn in 1976. As far back as that? Oh, I didn't realize that. Okay. Okay.

And Murdoch saw in Trump, he had the New York Post, that was his tabloid, he saw in the lush lifestyle of Trump a good copy. And indeed, you know, Trump's affairs, his marriages, his ups and downs provided tremendous grit for the mill of Murdoch's scandal sheet.

And that Murdoch has contempt for Trump has been well documented. He's quoted as calling Trump, this is more recently, much more recently, quote, a blank moron.

But Trump doesn't seem to mind because, of course, it's so useful to him to have Fox News in his corner. So, Jack, the thread you're pulling here is that there's this longstanding connection, which I didn't – I had honestly no idea. It went all the way back to 1976 between Rupert Murdoch of Fox News or the Fox – yeah, Fox News –

Donald Trump, Roy Cohn, amazing, and Roger Ailes. But between 1976 and, well, I guess 2015, right, that's quite a long time, Fox News was operating sort of without Donald Trump being its most important visual asset. But it was, I think, are you saying here that it was sort of helping create the world that Trump would then take over? Yeah.

I think there's no question about it. They had created the audience. You know, they really had primed the audience for the coming of Trump. And Fox primed Trump for the first GOP debate in 2015. Ailes, this is according to reporting in The New Yorker in 2019 by the irreplaceable Jane Mayer,

Three different sources told her that Ailes had primed Trump, tipped Trump to the following question from the moderator of the debate, Megyn Kelly. One of the things people love about you is you speak your mind and you don't use a politician's filter. However, that is not without its downsides, in particular when it comes to women.

You've called women you don't like fat pigs, dogs, slobs, and disgusting animals. Your Twitter account-- Only Rosie O'Donnell. No, it wasn't.

Thank you. For the record, it was well beyond Rosie O'Donnell. Yes, I'm sure it was. Your Twitter account is... Wow, Jack. I remember that moment. It really had... It changed Megyn Kelly's career for quite some time. But you were saying that Roger Ailes had told Trump that this question was coming? Yes. That was reported by Jane Mayer in The New Yorker in 2019. The White House...

passionately denied it at the time, as they did a second revelation she had that they primed him later on that he would be asked in a debate whether he would support the GOP nominee, no matter who it was. And he was the only one.

who said, no, I'm not going to do that. And that sort of stamped him as independent of the Republican Party. And it marked him off as not just, I'm in this for, you know, what's right for the people, not what's right for the GOP. And, you know, that quip that, you know, Rosie O'Donnell, that's one of the only funny things I can remember Donald Trump ever saying.

He's not funny. He doesn't even, he may try to be, but that is genuinely witty, even if it's disgusting because of the things that he's called women. But that was almost certainly, if Jane Mayer is reporting, the three people who told her

was right. That was a prepared answer. And that launched him. You can hear the audience. That's emblematic of he was already ascending in the summer of 2015. This sealed his romance with the

Trump audience. Oh, interesting. I mean, with the Fox audience. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I don't blame you for eliding the two, Jack, or for combining the two. So that's 2015. And then he goes on to win the election. And that romance only just gets more intense.

Yes, it does. And, you know, and how close is it? Well, you know, Sean Hannity, back in the first administration, he told colleagues that he spoke to Trump virtually every night after his nine o'clock show.

Trump reportedly ranked Fox hosts on a scale of friendliness to him. You know, Brett Baier got a six. Hannity a 10. Steve Ducey on Fox and Friends, he's off the scale at a 12. And by 2018, his audience is so Fox besotted that he can cleave off the

the last names of the Fox stars. Here he is at a rally. We got a lot of good people. Do we like Tucker? I like Tucker. How about Angelo? Brian? We got a lot of great friends.

Oh, that's interesting, Jack. I hadn't noticed that he didn't even need to say their last names. Everybody knows them. It's all part of the same machinery. There are people. Never has there been a relationship between an ostensibly independent private company, medium, broadcaster, and a politician. And Fox has gone to lengths to

to protect him from, and to protect its audience, really, from awkward facts. For example, I dug up this in a 2020 photograph of Jeffrey Epstein with Trump and someone else. The fox airbrushed the picture

the picture of the image of Jeffrey Epstein from the photograph. Now, they later apologized, but the apology really catches up with the deed. A very close connection indeed between these people. And the question is, you know, well, what has Fox got out of this? We see what Trump has got out of it. All the publicity around that. Well, you know, at least in the first term,

Reed Hunt, he was the former FCC commissioner. He pointed to three decisions that the Trump FCC had made that were, quote, pro-Fox, pro-Fox and pro-Fox. Maybe it's just a coincidence.

But it looked like Murdoch was getting a lot from Trump and no doubt is getting a fair amount from Trump now. Well, yeah. I mean, not only in terms of then influence within the government, but speaking of those Fox viewers that you had mentioned earlier, a larger and much more loyal audience is what they got, which is – that's money, right, for Murdoch and for Fox? Yeah.

Oh, yes. And it's the big, you know, it's by far the biggest, you know, primetime audience is bigger than all the other. It may be bigger than the other two combined, MSNBC and CNN. It certainly is bigger than both. Because, Jack, I remember from the start, at least at the beginning, Fox News seemed to have this approach that made the audience think that instead of being so didactic like network news, it was going to be more respectful of people who watched Fox.

Yes, and respectful. That's a word that has been abused by Fox News and used to justify deception. What happened was the night of the election, I believe it was the night, Fox called the state of Arizona for Biden's

And they were, if I'm not mistaken, days, if not weeks ahead of anybody else in making that correct call. They were. I remember that actually because I think that was the day that – yeah, their statisticians called Arizona and on the air was Karl Rove. He got mad about that and actually even questioned Fox's own statisticians. But they were right. You're exactly right.

Yeah, and actually, I think that Rove business was in 2012. I'm not sure. It's all a blur. It's all a blur. And Megyn Kelly was involved in that one, too. Jack, how is it not a blur for you? Your brain is just amazing to me. Anyway, continue, continue on. Well, so and that call was.

loosed a flood of complaints and disgust from the Fox audience, who were primed by Trump throughout the election campaign to understand that if Biden won, it would be a hoax, it would be a trick. So he couldn't have won. The election was fixed. That's what they had been told. That's what they believed. And by the way, they had been sort of told by Fox to expect that.

And now they were saying, we're canceling our subscription, never going to watch you again. Goodbye, Sean. Goodbye, Brian. Goodbye, Ainsley. And this created a crisis in the Fox executive suite because

They were losing their audience. And then a Fox reporter from the White House asserted the fact that Biden had won the election. That brought forth strong condemnation from Hannity and Carlson saying, fire this woman, how dare she? And it came out in a suit brought by Dominion Voting Systems.

against the Fox for defamation, and Dominion finally won a three-quarter of a billion dollar settlement.

It came out that the executives were panicked about what was going to happen to their audience. And they were talking about, we have to, quote, respect the audience. That's what one executive wrote. And it's what Hannity and Carlson were saying on the one hand. And on the other hand, they were admitting privately that Trump did lose. So respect the audience meant respect.

Well, here is Brian Stelter of CNN explaining what respect meant. He's the author. He was speaking to the PBS NewsHour about his book, Network of Lies.

It's the most Orwellian phrase, respect the audience. What they really mean is we don't want to tick the audience off. We don't want to tell them anything they don't want to hear. We don't want to discomfort them or upset them with the truth. The truth that month, November 2020, was that Biden was the next president. But Fox whispered the truth and shouted the lie instead. They gave false hope about a second Trump term.

And I think we can say for sure that some people bought tickets to fly to Washington on January 6th because of all that nonsense they were hearing on television. So when you have these Fox producers, executives, Sean Hannity as well, saying we need to respect the audience, what they really meant was we're going to disrespect the audience. Mmm, patronize the audience. Yes, and, you know, it shows contempt for the audience to deceive people. It's instinct with Trump.

Things we've heard about Trump disrespecting his base. Howard Stern, who knows him as well as anyone, has said he would never have people like his voters in his hotels. Michael Cohen has talked about in his memoir, he described the contempt that Trump voiced for his evangelical opponents.

voters. Olivia Troy, who was a member of the coronavirus task force and saw Trump at meetings and so on, Trump said that, well, one of the good things about this pandemic is I don't have to shake hands with these disgusting people anymore.

And Stephanie Grisham, the former White House press secretary, she said she heard Trump refer to his voters as basement dwellers. So this is how respect works in the world. The point is, if anybody in the liberal media or...

A politician had spoken of Trump's people as basement dwellers. I mean, we would say snobbery, contempt, you know, looking down your nose. It sounds like Trump, you know, has been looking down his nose at them along with Fox News for a long, a long time. I guess if you fool people, you have contempt for them. You know, Jack, a lot of what you're describing to me

if I'm honest, sounds a lot like what a good salesman does, right? They're a bit sycophantic. They're constantly complimentary. They tell the customer, the customer's always right, right? Like that's the phrase. The customer's always right so that they will purchase your product. And, you know, the product that Fox is selling is, well, essentially it's the advertising that they want their viewers to see. But they're also selling Donald Trump. So, yeah,

Like, I just don't see any incentive for that to change. And I don't think it has at Fox, right? No, not at all. And in fact, just this month, Fox has been respecting its audience full time. Here is a piece of sound of Sean Hannity.

The CBO came out, and usually the CBO is pretty negative when it comes to estimating the costs of Republican policies, but they're projecting that because of Trump's policies, they will reduce the deficit by $2.5 trillion over 10 years. That is not money we expected.

That's not how I remember the CBO report, Jack. The CBO said exactly the opposite, that it would increase the deficit by that amount and not reduce it. So that was just a bald-faced lie. I mean, he had to know, or maybe he misspoke. Let's give him the benefit of the doubt. But imagine having that kind of

poison in people's minds. And that's what they do. They're respecting the audience. The audience wants nothing but

the untruth, the falsehoods. And they also want the heat. Nicole Hemmer, who's a professor of communications at Columbia, she said, Fox is not just taking the temperature of the base, it's raising the temperature. And here is Brian Kilmeade, Brian from Trump's litany of Fox friends,

Here's Brian on the composition of the protesters in Los Angeles.

Jonathan, what about the opposition? We hear it's three predominantly groups, the Coalition for Humane Immigration Rights, supported by the state, the government, and the Chinese government, the Party for Socialism and Liberation, and the Service Employees International Union. Have you seen them handing out face shields? Have you seen them sanding out rocks and things like that? Some of them are wearing all black. Some organization there?

Oh, interesting. He doesn't talk about where he gets the information to make those claims? No, no.

That's the Fox way. One study in 2020, a five-month period, found that Trump—sorry, I keep making this mistake—Fox used the word hate five times more than MSNBC did.

and CNN. And they used the phrase they hate 101 times in five months compared to five on MSNBC. Well, now you have to wonder, priming them for what now? I mean, Trump's won his second term in office. I don't know. Do you have an answer for that, Jack?

Well, I think we're going to be finding out how they handle what looks like an imminent war with Iran. We're going to see how they handle that. If the past is prologue, they're going to go, and Trump goes ahead, they're going to justify this war at every turn. A 2003 study, a big study from...

I think the University of Chicago found that 67% of Fox viewers believe the U.S., quote, has found clear evidence linking Saddam Hussein to al-Qaeda.

Only 16% of NPR listeners believe that. No wonder they want to get rid of NPR. So, in other words, this errant falsehood was one of the justifications, the main one really, along with weapons of mass destruction for that war. And Fox viewers went for it hook, line, and sinker. Nearly 70% saying, yeah, Saddam Hussein is tied in with al-Qaeda.

And what are they going to do with the Iran war? How are they going to handle that? Will they? And I think it may even be a point of issue for their audience. Trump has ran saying he's going to be the peace candidate. He ran against stupid wars. This looks like a stupid war if I've ever seen one for the United States.

Israel, it's another matter. But for the United States, it sure looks like what Trump would call a stupid war with ramifications into the future.

dire ones we can't even imagine. How will they cover this? How will they deal with this? And what about their, how will they bring their audience aboard the Trump war train if he goes in that direction? Or will there be a split having to choose between pandering to, oh, I'm sorry, respecting their audience and supporting Trump on the war? I think that's a very important question and worth keeping in mind

an eye on what Fox is doing because of that. And I would say, Jack, just to reiterate what you said, the only difference between now and

2001, 2002 is what you said, that A, Trump ran on not having America get involved in overseas entanglements like that, and B, we're already seeing the split in the Trump base, right, on some folks who are very vocally opposed to the United States getting involved. So, yeah,

We'll see. Maybe Fox will see its mission as getting those MAGA doubters back on the Trump train. Who knows? But this was really interesting, Jack. And I want to turn the question that we asked to our jackpotters back to your headline for this episode about a TV-run state. So, you know, what do you think? Do you think that the Trump administration is very much like a TV-run state?

And if so, I mean, do you watch Fox News or do you have close friends or family who watch Fox News? How do you see the relationship between what's on Fox versus what you or people that you know think? Definitely want to hear from you. You know the routine. Grab your phone. On Point Vox Pop app. If you don't already have it, go to wherever you get your apps and look for On Point Vox.

Vox, Pop, and as I've asked before, if you've never participated as a contributing listener to the Jackpot, this is your week. I would love to hear from you because Fox is the most popular cable news network in the United States. So I'm going to imagine that a lot of you listening either watch it or know people who do. So want to hear from you. And with that, Jack, we're going to take our quick break. And when we come back, we're going to hear some very interesting stories

references that your discussion of Christopher Ruffo inspired in Jack Potter's last week. So we'll have that in just a moment. Support for On Point comes from Indeed. You just realized that your business needed to hire someone yesterday. How can you find amazing candidates fast? Easy. Just use Indeed. There's no need to wait. You can speed up your hiring with Indeed.

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OK, Jack, we're back. And just as a little reminder, last week you talked about Christopher Ruffo, a Trump policy influencer, I'll call him that, and a messaging master for the MAGA base out there. And you talked about how he's reshaping the way conservative Americans, Trump-supporting Americans, think about our nation's institutions. And that got a lot of interesting feedback, Jack. So let's kick off with Tom Good, who brings us this from Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Mr. Ruffo's assault on American higher education seems to me as part of a broader attack by this administration on all kinds of expertise.

Climate scientists at the EPA, public health researchers from NIH and CDC, judges, artists and curators and creatives of all kinds, professionally trained journalists, former intelligence and national security officials. The list goes on. And it reminds me of a line in Bob Dylan's song Desolation Row. At midnight, all the agents and the superhuman crew.

Wow, Jack, what do you think? Oh, that's wonderful. That's just wonderful, Tom. Thank you. Thank you for that. It's so obvious. You know, there was an article in The Atlantic, really, in the headline saying, Trump's attack on knowledge. You know, knowledge is power. And centers of knowledge...

are rival centers to Trump's power. And discrediting them has long been an ambition of the American right so that

The messy intellectual and policy and political pluralism of America can be leeched out and we can find a kind of consensus around Trump truth. The attack on knowledge and on independent centers of possible challenges to Trump truth.

It's comprehensive from the board of the Kennedy Center to tax on the law firms, on the universities, newspapers, on and on.

They don't want anybody who knows more than they do. Yeah. Well, let's move on because several people wanted to talk about why Christopher Ruffo may have a particular appeal to certain members of America's white working class. And here's Jeffrey Addison in Buffalo, New York.

And he wanted to inject this because he's doubtful that people like Rufo, the creators of what he calls the new language of the conservative movement, Jeffrey doubts that they're actually sincere in their own beliefs. I question whether they even believe it themselves or is it just a ruse? Do they just realize that they can win on this particular issue and that

This is a way for them to sell you anti-wokeness in order to gain power for themselves.

and end liberal American beliefs. So that's Jeffrey from Buffalo. I wanted to add this from Howard Turner, our man with The View from Elkhart, Indiana. And folks who are regular jackpot listeners will know that Howard has shared directly with us that he has been part of the working class, the American working class, his entire life. And that particular personal experience gave him

gave him the authority to speak about this aspect on Rufo's attack on higher education. For me, there is nothing wrong with an English major college grad then making a career out of being a CNC lathe operator. You can never have enough education.

But if we are able to control what is taught and who it is taught to, the more you're able to control the working class, which is the biggest group of people there are, the more control you have over the country as a whole.

And the whole idea is to keep white rich people in power for as long as possible. At some point, I hope that my fellow workers realize this and start working together to harness the power that we actually have in numbers. Jack, it's that last point of Howard's cri de coeur to his fellow workers. I mean, what do you think?

Reminds me of a famous phrase, workers of the world unite. You have nothing to lose but your chains. That line from the Communist Manifesto terrified the powers that be throughout the 19th century. And of course, it's based on the notion that there's some sort of false consciousness among working people that they're sold a bill of goods they don't really believe in.

I'm not sure about that. I really am not sure about it. And it's usually argued that, well, they're not voting for their economic self-interest. They're voting in such a way that it benefits rich white people, is how it's said.

But maybe also they're voting their values. You know, they don't want trans rights. They're skeptical. They're not high on abortion rights. They don't want, quote, wokeness. They don't like the turn in modern culture toward abortion.

exploitive junk. They want a better world for their children. In other words, I'm not sure that false consciousness is at work here and that someday working people wake up and say, oh my God, we've been gulled. I don't know. I think they haven't been gulled. I don't know about you, but I don't vote my economic self-interest. It never occurs to me. I vote my values. I think that's the way it is with everybody. And this view that, you know, well, you're voting, if you vote for Republicans, they're going to

Yeah, but they're also going to, you know, as they did, crack, you know, eliminate abortion rights. They're going to be tough on trans rights. They're going to be tough on woke. Those are my values. I'm voting for them. Oh, interesting. Now we've got one more here, Jack. You keep inspiring our jackpotters to make references to things that bring sort of richer content into the conversation. So here's Kyle Joyner.

I lovingly call him the heckler from Helena, Montana. And for Kyle, your insights on Christopher Ruffo reminded him of something in particular.

Okay, so Kyle is right. On Point regularly is a public radio broadcast. So we are regularly

ruled by FCC regulation, but the jackpot is a podcast. So the rules are a little bit different, which means... They don't want people who are smart enough to sit around the kitchen table and figure out how badly they're getting f***ed by a system that threw them overboard 30 f***ing years ago. They don't want that. You know what they want? They want obedient workers. People who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork and just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly s***

Your jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours to reduce benefits, the end of overtime and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it. And now they're coming for your Social Security money. OK, so that is George Carlin himself. And I have to say, technically speaking, I could have left the expletives in there. But old habits are hard to break. And I went ahead and bleeped him anyway. And this is a family podcast, Jack. So I didn't want to.

Didn't want to muddy the waters with some foul language here, but you get the picture. Let's go back to the second half of what Kyle in Montana had to say.

Trump needs a labor force to replace the low-income migrant workers who are being deported or are not going to be inclined to work. And so therefore, he's going to need a large-scale American population willing to do heavy, hard, dirty jobs at a low rate of pay and minimal to no protections and not realize it.

Conservative media is very good at kind of creating this Trumplandia zone of thought where people don't realize what's at stake. Jack, it's almost as if Kyle knew what you were going to talk about this week.

Yes, gosh. Trumplandia and the conservative media that panders to it and panders to a caricature of it that they have created themselves. Even if you say working class voters are not victims of false consciousness, they vote for their values.

Even if you say that, you can't miss that exploiting that workforce is also the aim of the biggest givers to the Republican Party, corporate America. They want a docile, well-behaved, and in some cases, perhaps fairly paid or not, workforce. And so there is a

You could put it another way. There's a difference between the movers and shakers and the moved and the shaken. Oh, did you just come up with that, Jack? No, I've been nursing that one for years. Okay.

Well, I'm thinking, given your masterful timing, Jack, that there's only one way to bring this episode to an end today. So I'm going to give George Carlin the last word. They want your retirement money. They want it back so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street. And you know something? They'll get it. They'll get it all from you sooner or later because they own this place. It's a big club.

And you ain't in it. You and I are not in the big club. But you know what? You are in the jackpot club. So, Jack, thank you as always. Thank you so much. I'm Meghna Chakrabarty, and this is The Jackpot from On Point. ♪

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Just in your mind, what is short-termism? If there's a picture in the dictionary, what's the picture? I'll start with one ugly one. When I was still doing activism as global head of activism and defense, so banker defending corporations, I worked with Toshiba in Japan. And those guys had five different activists, each one of which had a very different idea of what they should do right now, like short-term.

Very different perspectives. And unfortunately, under pressure from the shareholders, the company had to go through two different rounds of breaking itself up, selling itself and going for shareholder votes. I mean, that company was effectively broken because the leadership had to yield under the pressure of shareholders who couldn't even agree on what's needed in the short term. So to me, that is when this behavioral problem, you're under pressure and you can't think long term, becomes a real problem.

real disaster. Tony, you didn't have a board like that. I mean, the obvious ones, I mean, you look at there's quarterly earnings. We all know that you have businesses that will do everything they can to make a quarterly earning, right? And then we'll get into analysts and what causes that. I'm not even going to go there. But there's also, there's a lot of pressure on businesses to, if you've got a portfolio of businesses, sell off an element of that portfolio. And as a manager, you say, wait, this is a really good business. Might be down this year, might be, but it's a great business.

Another one is R&D spending. You know, you can cut your R&D spend if you want to, and you can make your numbers for a year or two, but we all know where that's going to lead a company. And you can see those decisions every day, and you can see businesses that don't make that sacrifice. And I think in the long term, they win.

Andy, I'm going to turn to you. Maybe you want to give an example of people complaining about short-termism that you think isn't. I don't really believe it exists. I mean, you know, again, I don't really even understand what it is. But what I hear is we take some stories and then we impose on them this idea that had they behaved differently, thought about the long term, they would have behaved differently. That's not really science.

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