Pod Insights Revisionist History Introducing The News from Scene on Radio About this episode Scene on Radio is a two-time Peabody-nominated podcast that dares to ask big, hard questions about who we are—really—and how we got this way. Their new season, The News, asks: what’s really wrong with the news? Some have called the news media the oxygen of a functioning democracy. But if that’s true, America’s lungs are in rough shape. Most Americans say they don’t trust the media. The business model for local journalism has all but collapsed. And we all know about the barrage of misinformation that flows from our splintered mediascape. You can’t separate the state of our news media from the other profound crises that America keeps on failing to solve. John Biewen explores the roots of this crises. Here's episode 1. Find The News, from Scene on Radio https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/scene-on-radio/id1036276968, wherever you get podcasts.
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:09 Malcolm Gladwell? Hi listeners. You know that here on Revisionist History, we ask a lot of questions about the systems that have shaped our worldviews. While we're hard at work on our new season, we wanted to share another podcast that hits these points and asks big questions, too. It's called Seen on Radio, and today I'm bringing you an episode from their aptly-named new season, The News. Some have called the news media "the oxygen of a functioning democracy," but if that's true, America's lungs are in rough shape. Many Americans say they don't trust the media. The business model for local journalism has all but collapsed. And we all know about the barrage of misinformation that flows from our splintered mediascape.
0:53 Malcolm Gladwell? You can't separate the state of our news media from the other profound crises that America keeps on failing to solve. Hosted by John Biewen, and now in its eighth season, the two-time Peabody Award-nominated show explores the roots of this crisis and asks, "What's really wrong with the news?" It's an eight-part series, so you'll want to check out the rest. But for now, here's episode one. Find Seen on Radio wherever you get podcasts.
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1:53 Malcolm Gladwell? This is a paid message from Apple Card. It's easy, I think, in the hubbub of our lives to lose track of our spending. We pay the bills and move on, and don't understand the deeper patterns in our spending, the many different decisions we're making knowingly or unknowingly. You have to understand where your money is going in order to make better decisions about it. That's one reason Apple Card stands out to me. You can earn unlimited daily cash back on every purchase you make. I also appreciate the simplicity. Apple Card doesn't have annual, late, or over the limit fees. No fees ever. There's even an option to open a high-yield savings account through Apple Card. And while I haven't done it yet, if I do, my daily cash can grow automatically over
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3:22 Speaker 02 My name is Jessa. One of the things I love the most about working for United Healthcare is that everybody matters. Every moment matters. There's a person behind every problem. I care because it's what I was put on this earth to do.
3:38 Speaker 03 I'm Ben, and I work at United Healthcare. I am just one piece of a larger puzzle, but every piece matters. It's more than just work. We want to make the healthcare system better for everyone. I care because I want to make a difference. That's what committed to care means to me.
3:55 Speaker 03 All right, we're rolling.
3:57 Speaker 04 Good show. Here we go. Asian markets are mostly down today. Dangerous flash flooding ripping through parts of Milwaukee. This is a Fox News alert. This is our camera angle from our compound.
4:10 Speaker 05 Americans, if we want to be, are inundated with news from countless sources. From New York Times, I'm Michael LaLa.
4:17 Speaker 06 Welcome back to One American News. Thanks so much for... And at the same time, we're stuck in a deep information crisis.
4:28 Speaker 05 It seems like we're helpless to solve our problems. It doesn't help that we have no shared narrative and few shared facts. What is happening right now in the world and what just happened to my friend Charlie Kirk is a battle of sheer evil versus goodness.
4:46 Speaker 01 To me, Fox News just not, they don't tell the whole story. I consider myself a centrist. I'm not particularly interested in MSNBC.
4:54 Speaker 07 No, what I'm saying is, don't do me, don't try me today, Scotty. What I'm saying to you is that you know...
5:05 Speaker 06 On big questions, a whole lot of us don't know what's true. Or we firmly believe and will fight you over things that are not true.
5:15 Speaker 03 Let's get rid of these voting machines. There's a half a dozen people, whether it's the House or Senate, Larry, that are up here as we speak, that did not get elected. It was all bogus. Just so people understand, wind and solar only work when there's wind and sun. We don't have technology to store the energy from wind and solar. So if you make yourself...
5:33 Speaker 01 I'm very disappointed in the mainstream media, and that's all I'll say about that.
5:39 Speaker 05 It's hard to imagine putting the toothpaste back in the tube. And maybe there's no golden age to return to anyway. So now what?
5:57 Speaker 05 Change your eye.
5:59 Speaker 06 Hey, John.
6:00 Speaker 05 You know, our little montage could have just kept on going.
6:04 Speaker 06 I better stop now because I feel like you're going to get us in trouble. You know what I mean? We got hundreds, thousands more news and news-ish outlets to choose from.
6:15 Speaker 05 We are awash in media, at least some of us are. But we don't seem very happy about it.
6:22 Speaker 06 Yeah, man, everybody's mad at the news media. And if I'm being honest, yeah, like, I get it, right? Because if you look around, so much of what passes for news out there is like, not that good. In fact, a lot of it is trash.
6:37 Speaker 05 We could easily find people who would disagree with you or me about which acts of journalism are the trashy ones. But no question about it, people are not happy. According to a Gallup poll in 2025, only 28% of Americans had even a fair amount of confidence in the major media. 70% of us say we have not much or no confidence at all.
7:03 Speaker 06 That crisis of trust is a huge problem for American journalism. And it's not the only problem.
7:09 Speaker 05 A lot of people at first blush might not care about a media crisis, especially if they think the media sucks. But...
7:18 Speaker 06 But people need the media to live, right? They need to know what the status of their healthcare is. They need to know what the weather is, you know what I'm saying? And if there's gonna be like, an earthquake, they need to know if their rights are gonna be violated, right? I mean, it's just like, something that you need to live your everyday lives. And also, how are you gonna run a democracy where the people are supposed to govern ourselves if we don't have the information? If we don't have any shared sense of what's going on out there?
7:45 Speaker 05 That's more or less what Thomas Jefferson said, our good buddy. Wherever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government.
7:54 Speaker 06 That's good, because I only try to say things that Thomas Jefferson said. You know that about me.
8:01 Speaker 06 That's what I check the child. Every time before I say something, did Thomas Jefferson say this? Okay.
8:05 Speaker 05 Yeah, exactly, right. We've picked on him a number of times on this show.
8:10 Speaker 06 Yeah, but I mean, look, he was right, you know what I'm saying? Being a slaveholder, a racist, that don't mean you're not right about anything.
8:15 Speaker 05 Right. But yeah, does anybody here think that the fourth estate, the news media as it's now constructed, is doing its job? That Americans are well enough informed to be trusted with our own government?
8:34 Speaker 05 From the Keenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University, welcome to Seen on Radio, Season Eight. I'm John Biewen, producer and host of the show.
8:42 Speaker 06 And I'm Chenjeraj Kumanyika, excited to come back as the co-host.
8:46 Speaker 05 Chenj, you are an award-winning podcast maker, Empire City, Uncivil, Unruly Subjects, and Seen on Radio. You were my co-host for seasons two and four. And you're a professor at New York University's Journalism School with a PhD in Mass Communication and Critical Media Studies. So you're officially an expert on the thing we're here to explore this time around.
9:13 Speaker 06 Finally, you know what I'm saying? We in my lane now, you know what I mean?
9:18 Speaker 05 You got the paper credentials this time. We're calling this season "The News." We're going to take a hard, deep look at the troubled state of the news media in the US and how that crisis relates to the other profound problems we seem unable or unwilling to solve.
9:38 Speaker 06 Another key thing we're going to do is sort through the various crises in our news and information system and the most common reasons people say they're pissed about the media. And we're going to ask, what's really wrong? Is it what we think it is?
9:51 Speaker 05 We will do some history along the way. We might challenge some mythology around journalistic tradition in America and parts of US history itself, for that matter, in ways that could also shed light on how our news media are failing us in this pivotal, historical moment.
10:09 Speaker 06 And eventually, we're going to talk about solutions, what it might look like to unbreak the media. Because the thing is, this stuff really matters. The stakes are about as high as they could be.
10:21 Speaker 05 Media are so much a part of our lives that, in a real sense, we're made of media. The media helps to shape a society, but also act as a mirror, showing us who we are.
10:33 Speaker 06 And, John, like, I have a confession. We talk about people being angry at the news media, and of course, folks are angry for wildly different reasons. But what I'm looking at, so-called journalism that I see as completely false and dishonest, I find myself getting mad at the people who consume that news and believe it. Like, why are y'all drinking the Kool-Aid?
10:54 Speaker 05 I know what you mean. And let's, let's put a pin in that thought, as they say. Right now, before we go further, just a quick note for the grammar purists. Yes, you will hear us do that thing that a whole lot of people do now where we say "the media" as if it's one thing.
11:14 Speaker 06 Right, but the word is plural. And we'll never lose sight of the fact that the media is a tangled web, not a monolith.
11:23 Speaker 05 Here in episode one, let's start with "us." Not Chenjerai and me, but "us." Everybody who consumes news media, whether you take in a ton of it or hardly any. What drives us as we try to inform ourselves?
11:41 Speaker 06 That's the question, you know what I'm saying? We talk so much about whether we can trust our news sources, but can we trust ourselves?
11:49 Speaker 05 I've spent some time over the last year or so in a corner of North Carolina, talking with folks about a lot of things: their politics, what their lives are like, and about the news.
12:01 Speaker 06 And why'd you go to that particular place?
12:04 Speaker 05 It's a good question. In one sense, we could have gone almost anywhere. But as folks will hear throughout the season, this patch of North Carolina, which is not far from where I live, is a compelling place to see some of the most pressing problems with our news media, and some impressive efforts to respond and fill the gaping holes in the system. By the way, Chenj, I think it's safe to say some of those news consumers you're frustrated with live in this place.
12:34 Speaker 06 All right, well, in that case, let me take a deep breath. All right, I can't wait to hear what you found.
12:51 Speaker 05 We're going to refer to this part of North Carolina as the "Border Belt." It's an old term, used over the last century for a tobacco-growing region that ran along both sides of the North and South Carolina border. A lot of the tobacco's gone. Now the farms grow corn and soybeans and other crops. The radio signals in these rural counties come from a ways off, mainly the bigger cities of Wilmington and Fayetteville. And they sound like it.
13:21 Speaker 01 So get your Wednesday off to a good start with me, Gilbert Bay's on News Talk 640 WF.
13:27 Speaker 05 Turn left onto North Carolina 41 South. I spent time just on the North Carolina side, in a cluster of counties, Scotland and Robeson to the west, Bladen and Columbus to the east. This place is racially diverse, with large white, black, and indigenous populations, and long struggling. North Carolina ranks in the bottom half of states in per capita income. In the border belt, folks make $12,000 to $20,000 less than the state average.
14:02 Speaker 05 There are a lot of manufactured homes, trailer parks, single wides, double wides, kind of dotted everywhere.
14:24 Speaker 05 Most of these counties are also what are called "news deserts." That means they have no more than one local news source. And often, the surviving newspapers have shriveled to a few pages of mostly sports and features. They don't print a whole lot of news.
14:45 Speaker 05 I talked to a range of people in the border belt about their media diets.
14:49 Speaker 04 I usually sit here and have my coffee.
14:52 Speaker 07 And I'm sitting here on the couch, and I'm watching the news. Local stations, which are located in Wilmington, but they carry this area. I don't watch a lot of news, but what I watch, I watch Newsmax or Fox.
15:05 Speaker 04 I try not to get my news from social media too much, but sometimes I'm scrolling through Twitter and I see something, and it catches my eye.
15:13 Speaker 06 I would still think that a lot of our people get their information from their local radio station, too. Whatever they play in between songs and stuff like that, whatever type of news update.
15:27 Speaker 05 We're going to spend more time getting to know this guy, Ethan Jordan. I find him in Columbus County. He's driving a big John Deere tractor, pulling a planting rig down the road near his family's place. I can just leave it here?
15:47 Speaker 05 I climb the ladder to his two-person tractor cab. You got enough room to make it work? Oh, yeah.
15:54 Speaker 05 How you doing? Good. Nice to meet you. Here, let me get that door a little bit better, so it won't rattle. Ethan's in his late twenties. He has reddish-brown hair and a round face. He and his family raise corn, soybeans, peanuts, and beef cattle. On this April day, he's planting corn. Um, right here, we farm total 2,200 acres. Between me and my dad and two employees. I believe, if you go back, I'm the eighth generation of Jordan farming on this land that we're on right now. Actually, this is some of the original farm we're on. In front of Ethan, in the cab, are a half dozen screens. They monitor the seed and fertilizer he's dropping, the weather conditions, the technology that's doing the driving.
16:39 Speaker 05 Yes, sir, that's my GPS, which controls the auto this year. As you see, I'm not touching the steering wheel, and it's steering. And for the long hours he spends in the tractor, he also has media handy. I know I have Fox News on this iPad, and I will watch Fox News from time to time. And it's not Newsmax, it's that app that has all the news in it. Well, you see, I have Fox News here. But there's an app that I can't call the name of right now. He finds it, his go-to news aggregator. It's right here, it's this app right here. As a matter of fact, Newsbreak, Newsbreak app. And it kind of, you know, I guess it goes through your algorithm of what you look up and stuff like that, because if you look at mine, it talks about farmers react to Trump's
17:23 Speaker 05 tariffs, tells me about the local news, and stuff like that. I have that that pops up, and it'll be anywhere from CNBC to WCT to Daily...
17:36 Speaker 05 Really beast? I don't know, but anyway, it just shows, you know, local and national news. And if it's national news, it's more related to what I look up, which is obviously farming, you know, agriculture-related topics. It's where I get a lot of my news from. To say I actually sit down and watch the news, it's kind of hard to say. Now, I will watch it if something interesting is going on on the iPad, if I'm in a tractor running it. Ethan lives with his fiance, who's a lawyer. There's a local newspaper, The News Reporter, out of nearby Whiteville, that comes out twice a week. Ethan sometimes looks at its website, but he and his fiance don't subscribe. I've lived by myself.
18:19 Speaker 05 I lived out of my parents' house for now going on the fifth year, and I can say I've honestly never had a newspaper in my house, or even picked one up. I know there's not one that's been in my house. My parents get one every week, but... For local news, he relies on Facebook, which includes reports from nearby outlets and comments from the community. He mentions a recent criminal incident in a nearby town. We're sitting there talking with a group of friends, and where'd you read that at? Oh, if you go on Facebook, look at WWI's post about it, but look at the comments and you can see the video. So now you kind of, you know, you look at Facebook, cause yeah, the papers and, you
19:00 Speaker 05 know, they'll tell you about it, but a lot of times you can read through the comments and find somebody who actually lived it and see their opinion. And, you know, sometimes opinions are biased, but you do get kind of see more of a real live feeling by reading the comments on it. So a lot of my news, not gonna say I trust Facebook by no stretch of the matter, cause everybody has a different opinion, but you can kind of see the gist of what's going on. Ethan votes Republican, along with everybody in his family and their neighbors, he says. Historically, this region, white folks included, voted for Democrats until 10 or 20 years ago.
19:42 Speaker 03 And we're Republicans.
19:45 Speaker 05 As much as we all rely on the media to get information and to decide how to vote, it's worth highlighting what Ethan says when I ask who he voted for in the North Carolina governor's race in 2024.
19:58 Speaker 03 Mark Robinson.
19:59 Speaker 05 You did?
20:00 Speaker 03 Yes, I did.
20:01 Speaker 05 You may remember hearing about Mark Robinson, no matter how far you are from North Carolina. He was the Republican nominee who lost to Democrat Josh Stein. Robinson made international news for inflammatory statements he apparently made, including on a porn website, maligning Martin Luther King, defending Hitler, questioning the Holocaust, and calling himself a black Nazi. Ethan tells me he had to choose between the two candidates, suggesting it was a vote for his preferred party. But he also says this about Robinson.
20:37 Speaker 03 I have met him personally. So, I mean, I, you know, I look at politics different than some people. You know, you got diehard Republicans, you got diehard Democrats, you got diehard liberals, and there's other parties. I don't, you know, there's a whole list of them. I look at the ones like that, that I've personally had shook their hand or met him personally. And I have met Mark Robinson. He spent some time down in Columbus County, and I have met him personally. So, he probably didn't remember my name or know who I was, but he called my name one time and shook my hand. So, I mean, if you feel like you got a personal connection with him, that's kind of the way I look at whether you're Democrat or Republican.
21:18 Speaker 05 Maybe there's still special power in what comes to us not from a screen, but through in-person experience, the way people used to learn most of what they knew about the world. Despite his conservative views, Ethan says he finds Fox News too far to the right at times, when it harps too much on gun rights or undocumented immigrants. But then a network like NBC will annoy him even more in the other direction.
21:46 Speaker 03 During the election, it was always negative on Trump, negative on Trump, constantly, you know, this, that, and the other. And, you know, and I kind of look at it, and I'm like, well, everybody's not perfect. But the one y'all were pro for, Kamala, you were pro Kamala. Like, I can find problems with her, too, just as good as you can find with Trump. It's kind of, you know, if you don't tell the story...
22:10 Speaker 01 Tell it on both sides. Tell the bad pros and the cons of both, not just constantly, over and over and over and over again. And that's where I'd get irritated and not want to listen to it.
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23:10 Malcolm Gladwell? These days, there are more people than ever telling you how to manage your health. And we've all gone down an internet rabbit hole, exploring the latest health trends. Your social media feed is packed with wellness advice, telling you to cold plunge, protein max, detox, track your sleep. But what's actually real? What's exaggerated? What's just wrong? That's exactly what Health vs. Hype from the American Medical Association and iHeartMedia's Ruby Studio is here to find out. Each episode, Emmy-nominated science communicator Trace Dominguez, who's racked up billions of views across PBS, Discovery Channel, and YouTube, talks to health influencers, real people, and most importantly, doctors, to separate fact from fiction.
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25:37 Speaker 05 Hey, Tenj. What are you thinking so far?
25:40 Speaker 06 Well, I gotta say, I really like listening to Ethan. And I'm not mad at him. I mean, if you said to me, white North Carolina farmer who votes Republican, I feel like I was gonna picture somebody very different, somebody who's maybe not as open or really just has their mind made up. Now, I would like to hear Ethan explain why he voted for Mark Robinson, who's a Holocaust denier who called himself a black Nazi for governor. So there is that part. But putting that aside for a second, just listening to him, I got a feel for where he's at, even though we only heard him for a few minutes.
26:18 Speaker 05 You wouldn't vote for the people he votes for, you're saying? But he comes across as a sincere person, doing his best to make sense of things, right?
26:26 Speaker 06 Yeah, like, based on the information he has. You know what I'm saying? And when he talks about the news he pays attention to, he sounds real familiar to me. He wants the facts. He wants fairness. And when the news tells him something very different from what he and the people around him think is true, then it sounds unfair or oversimplified.
26:47 Speaker 06 That makes him want to change the channel or tap over to a different source.
26:51 Speaker 05 We said this episode was going to be about us, those of us on the receiving end of the news. I talked to an expert who has fascinating insights into our biases as news consumers, including how changes in our society have amplified those biases.
27:10 Speaker 02 Often when I'm talking about this to audiences, I'll say, you know, how many of you would say that your main goal as you're engaging with the world is to be accurate in what you perceive? And everyone raises their hand. And I'm like, actually, it's not. Actually, you're wrong.
27:25 Speaker 05 This is Dana Gal Young.
27:27 Speaker 02 I'm a professor of communication and political science at the University of Delaware, where I direct the Center for Political Communication.
27:35 Speaker 05 Young studies how people process information in connection with our politics. She wrote the recent book, Wrong: How Media, Politics, and Identity Drive Our Appetite for Misinformation. Dana says when you turn on a cable news and opinion channel or go to a news website, you're bringing along deep desires, needs, really, that go well beyond wanting accurate information.
28:02 Speaker 02 Your goal is not to be accurate, because your goal really is survival. And there are three areas that sort of speak to survival needs that serve as sort of the underbelly of human survival. They all facilitate action, because in order to survive, you need to act in your own survival interests. So those three needs are comprehension, control, and community.
28:26 Speaker 05 As we go about our lives, we want to feel that we know, basically, what the hell is going on in our world, and we want to feel some ability to control what happens to us. But Dana says maybe even more important than comprehension and control is that third C-word: community.
28:46 Speaker 02 And this simply captures the notion that we are social animals who do not exist truly as individuals in a vacuum. We only exist embedded within a social context. And that has to do with how we were able to survive historically. Even here in the US, that notion even of rampant, you know, ardent individualism is itself, believe it or not, a group norm. We are individualists because everyone around us also prizes that value of individualism, which I think is kind of hilariously ironic.
29:21 Speaker 05 So Young says as we take in the news, we do so consciously or not, as members of the social groups we identify with. And in a country that's bitterly divided politically, most Americans identify with a political team. We might as well be wearing our team's uniform as we go looking for news.
29:42 Speaker 02 That means that when we comprehend the world, we're going to comprehend the world the same way that our team does, and we're going to want to comprehend the world in ways that make our team look good.
29:54 Speaker 05 Dana is talking about general human tendencies in part, but it hasn't always been like this. She says historical trends in the US in politics and the media have helped to intensify our divisions. These changes have made Americans less open to information we don't like and more vulnerable to miss and disinformation. To start with, she points to the sorting of the political parties, starting in the middle of the 20th century.
30:24 Speaker 02 Up until the 50s and 60s, our two major political parties were actually quite mixed in terms of policy positions, in terms of the kinds of people who identified with each, in terms of where those people lived, in terms of the religious identification of the people within the parties. And part of the reason that that was the case was because there was this great compromise that was made on the issue of race in the United States.
30:54 Speaker 05 That's a nice way of saying the two parties were pretty much in sync, white supremacy-wise.
31:00 Speaker 02 Both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party had members, elite members within them, who supported the idea of states' rights, who supported the idea of the disempowerment of African-American people.
31:23 Speaker 05 As millions of black people migrated out of the Jim Crow South, populating northern cities and turning into voters, that put pressure on the Democrats and gave them an opportunity.
31:34 Speaker 02 And we ended up with that sort of great racial realignment, where the Democratic Party became the party of civil rights and the Republican Party became the party in opposition to that movement.
31:46 Speaker 05 Most black people moved from the GOP, the party of Lincoln, to the Democrats. Most white Southerners and other conservative white people, many of whom had been Democrats, joined the Republicans. Other kinds of sorting followed. Evangelical Christians and people in rural places turned mostly Republican, while secular and city people grew more overwhelmingly Democratic.
32:13 Speaker 02 Such that the Republican Party of today is overwhelmingly white, rural, Christian, and culturally conservative. And the Democratic Party today is overwhelmingly racially and ethnically diverse, secular, agnostic, urban, suburban, and culturally and ideologically liberal.
32:37 Speaker 05 Research has found that increased homogeneity within a political party serves to crank up the emotional temperature for those on that side.
32:47 Speaker 02 There is something primal in us that happens when we look like our team, we live like our team, we live in the same places as our team, we worship like our team. There's something really primal that ignites in us because we have such good group fit. That is what has happened in American politics, and it's happened in a way that is not symmetrical. Because as you may have noticed, as I described it, in the Republican Party, those identity categories are far more homogeneous than they are within the Democratic Party. And so the engine runs fast and furiously on the right in the US right now.
33:29 Speaker 05 That is the engine of visceral "us against them" sentiment. But that's not just a Republican thing. Political scientists have documented an increase in what they call "affective polarization."
33:44 Speaker 02 And that is simply the extent to which regular people, members of the public, dislike members of the other political party. That does seem to be pretty equal across the parties. Democrats don't like Republicans, and Republicans don't like Democrats. It's not necessarily that we've become more radical on our position on gun control or abortion. It's more that I just hate people who feel opposite me more, which is interesting.
34:18 Speaker 05 So, Chanj.
34:19 Speaker 06 Yeah, I mean, what Dan Agal is really saying is that news consumers in the US are less open-minded than ever, less willing to be persuaded by information that conflicts with what we already believe.
34:32 Speaker 05 Yes. Now stir in the social media algorithms that feed us rage bait and, in general, our fragmented, often blatantly partisan, "us against them" media environment. I grabbed a couple clips. This is Sean Hannity of Fox News and Rachel Maddow of MSNBC.
34:53 Speaker 05 Notice in each case the talk about them, they, the other side.
34:58 Speaker 03 They want you to feel pain. They want it. They want you to pay more at the pump. They want your energy bills to be higher.
35:06 Speaker 02 The chief threat among them now is not the rioters in the coops, but the slick political professionals who are turning their considerable talents to laundering violently revolutionary claims that America's elections aren't real.
35:18 Speaker 06 So when all the talk about so-called political polarization in America, there's a tendency to think that the fragmenting of the media into a thousand sources, all saying different things, that that's the problem. And if we could just go back to a time when everyone watched Walter Cronkite or Peter Jennings, we'd come together again as a nation.
35:39 Speaker 05 And I'm just gonna guess, partly by your tone of voice, but also knowing you, that you're not really buying it, Professor Kumanyika. For one thing, I know you well enough to know you don't believe there was once upon a time when the major media told the American people the unvarnished truth on all the important questions.
36:00 Speaker 06 Right. When was the media telling people the truth about white supremacy and how pervasive it is? The truth about US history and how brutal it is? Or the truth about US behavior around the world, right? And the way America's economic system works? Why folks are struggling to get by? And also, this idea that Americans used to agree on things? That we really ever had this consensus as a society? Nah. I mean, there was more of a consensus maybe among white people, especially white men, middle class and above, who held all the power in the country.
36:33 Speaker 05 Yeah, but lots of other people who didn't fit that description and saw a very different reality were just left out of the public conversation for the most part.
36:44 Speaker 06 Yeah, and if you kinda are sure, you want some receipts on that, I encourage you to go check the other seasons of this podcast.
36:51 Speaker 05 But there are other reasons to doubt that somehow reversing the splintering of the media, if that were possible, would help Americans to find common ground on what our problems are and how to solve them. First of all, it seems a lot of us have gotten a somewhat mistaken idea about just how siloed the news media are. This whole idea of the echo chamber. Here's Danah Gal Young again.
37:18 Speaker 02 By and large, political scientists and communications scholars have come away from the empirical evidence with a conclusion that the echo chamber is largely a myth in that people are not only seeing content that supports their side.
37:38 Speaker 06 So the usual idea of the echo chamber is that people on different sides of the political divide aren't even exposed to voices from the other side.
37:46 Speaker 05 Yeah, the idea that you only hear right-wing voices on right-wing media and likewise on the left.
37:53 Speaker 06 But Danah Gal is saying that's not how it works. If you watch MSNBC Now, what used to be called MSNBC, you see a whole bunch of Donald Trump and his allies and what they have to say about things. And if you watch Fox News or look at its website, you'll see a ton of content about Democrats and the left. Like, that's actually like the major thing that they're doing is getting people outraged about what the left is doing.
38:15 Speaker 05 So the question is not, do opposing perspectives get covered? It's how are they presented? Here's what Dana said.
38:24 Speaker 02 You are seeing claims that are being made by the other side, but they're often presented to you, perhaps shared by someone who's on your side, right? Who says, "Look at how awful these people are. This is the kind of thing that they're saying over on that other network. Here is what they're saying, and it is a moral violation. It's a violation of our moral order."
38:49 Speaker 05 Dana brought up an example. Remember when Katanji Brown Jackson was being confirmed for the Supreme Court in 2022? In your understanding, what does critical race theory mean? What is it?
39:01 Speaker 02 Senator, my understanding is that--
39:05 Speaker 06 Oh, I remember. Republican senators on the committee asked her a bunch of questions about her views on CRT, which was like the, you know, conservative rage issue at the time. And Ted Cruz, the senator from Texas, asked her about an anti-racism book that suggested babies can be taught to be racist.
39:23 Speaker 05 Do you agree with this book that is being taught with kids, that babies--
39:27 Speaker 06 He's a racist.
39:30 Speaker 06 Senator. So you had a black nominee for the court, and lots of the questions were about her views on race.
39:36 Speaker 05 To Danagel's point about the echo chamber issue, MSNBC, as it was called at the time, the heavily pro-democratic, anti-Republican cable channel, gave these exchanges a lot of attention. I mean, there's no question that Ted Cruz figured prominently on the so-called, you know, left-leaning channel, along with analysis like this from a Democratic political strategist.
40:02 Speaker 03 This is about her being a black woman, basically casting her as a radical, as a black radical who is out to get white people. I mean, quite frankly, it looked like I saw Ted Cruz commit a hate crime in that hearing room.
40:16 Speaker 05 Meanwhile, over on Fox News, Sean Hannity brought Cruz onto his show that evening.
40:22 Speaker 03 Ted Cruz is with us, Senator.
40:23 Speaker 05 And invited him to talk some more about his grilling of the judge.
40:27 Speaker 06 And when it came to critical race theory, she didn't want to answer the question. She claimed she didn't. So it's an interesting clarification that Dana is making, right? She's saying, no matter how much you're in your news bubble, you're still hearing voices and ideas from the other side. Maybe a lot. But that doesn't really change the fact that people are getting wildly different views of the world if they're watching Fox News versus MSNBC, whether you call them echo chambers or not. Really, it just highlights how crucial framing and analysis are in presenting what's happening out there.
40:58 Speaker 05 There's another common idea that people are strongly influenced by the media they consume, especially if it's news that we think of as strongly biased. That whole, "My Uncle Ned's a right-winger because he watches Fox News" idea.
41:12 Speaker 06 But it's more complicated than that. Did Fox News turn your uncle into a right-winger? Or did Uncle Ned turn the Fox because he already had right-wing views?
41:27 Speaker 05 This whole discussion can almost make you wonder if it even matters what the media reports.
41:33 Speaker 06 Yeah, and I mean, there's another reason to wonder about that. It has to do with our hobbled, corrupt system of government. There was a study in 2014 by scholars at Princeton and Northwestern.
41:44 Speaker 05 2014, so back when I think, well, let's say, when more Americans felt reasonably secure that the US had a functioning democracy.
41:53 Speaker 06 Right. Before the Trump administration launched this newest assault on democratic norms, it was before the Congress basically neutered itself and let the president decide everything. But even then, this study found that there was almost no relationship between what American citizens wanted, according to opinion polls, and the policies we get from our government. Large majorities favor higher taxes on rich people, more gun safety laws, stronger action on the climate crisis, and that's just listed a few things. And year after year, our representative government doesn't deliver what the people want.
42:28 Speaker 05 We did a whole series, our season four, The Land That Never Has Been Yet, about the ways America's democratic system of government was designed from the start to be not too democratic and to stymie the will of the majority of the people.
42:46 Speaker 06 I mean, it's not all media, but can't let the media off the hook. Journalism is a core mechanism of a functioning democracy, right? And there are real problems with the way our media system carries out this crucial role, and some of those problems are structural. We'll have a lot more to say about that.
43:04 Speaker 05 Chen, when I told people we were working on a season on the news media and the country's information crisis, some people said, oh, so it's going to be about AI and how we can't trust what we see and hear anymore. You know, think AI photos and videos especially. Other people said, oh, so it'll be about the Trumpian attack on news companies and the First Amendment.
43:28 Speaker 06 And I mean, look, all that stuff is wild, no doubt about it. But at the same time, I don't think anybody thinks this all started with AI, right?
43:37 Speaker 05 Right.
43:38 Speaker 06 I think it goes back a little further than that. So those things will definitely come up. We're going much deeper into the structures and forces that have shaped American news media for a much longer time.
43:50 Speaker 05 And it can all seem pretty daunting. But I don't know about you. I'm not ready to throw up my hands and say, we're doomed. The news is just a way to amuse ourselves and it can never change anything because the system's rigged and anyway, people are hopelessly dug in and won't listen to facts they don't like. There are so many examples where journalism has made a difference and is making a difference. Information comes out and shifts public opinion, leading to change that affects people's lives.
44:26 Speaker 06 Look, yo, let me tell you something. As somebody who literally like, this is what my degree, this is my job, nobody gets madder at journalism and the media than me.
44:35 Speaker 05 Right.
44:36 Speaker 06 But at the same time, most of what I know about the world comes from journalism. You know what I mean? When I see ICE kidnapped somebody, that's because a journalist reported on it. When I know that like, it's about to snow or that there was an earthquake, it's because the, you know, I didn't see it myself usually. And I think as angry as we are, the end of the day is, we have to have journalism because we have to know what's going on in the world just to live our everyday personal lives. If we're fired up, a person who's fired up about social justice or feels like something wrong, chances are, everything that you know that's getting you angry is something you learned because of some kind of journalism or media.
45:13 Speaker 06 So I think we can be infuriated about it, but we actually have to solve this problem.
45:22 Speaker 05 Here's a taste of what's to come here in season eight.
45:26 Speaker 02 With the local county commissioner races here, I had, I tried like the Dickens to find out where people stood because I'm not gonna vote if I can't get the information.
45:34 Speaker 07 Now I recognize sadly, that the Washington press corps is all too often the Praetorian guard of the left. No wonder people hate the media.
45:42 Speaker 05 Depends what one means by left wing, you know?
45:44 Speaker 06 Wait a minute. If you even address the issues of climate change and environmental destruction, that signifies a strong left-leaning philosophy?
45:54 Speaker 02 One thing that can be hard for us to imagine is that a lot of news you would actually get in church. The early founders, they truly believed that democracy was impossible without a free press and a press that people could actually access. So today, we rededicate.
46:12 Speaker 05 A part of the airwaves which belong to all the people. When you're suddenly fighting with 30 channels instead of just two for eyeballs, you start to get the rise of political entertainment. You're doing theater when you should be doing debate, which would be great. No, it's not true.
46:32 Speaker 03 A new report is raising alarms about the state of American democracy. I wrote a piece before the election saying, if Trump wins, blame the New York Times. And I meant it.
46:43 Speaker 05 And eventually, we'll wrestle with what to do about it all.
46:50 Speaker 05 The news was created and produced by me, John Biewen, with Chenjerai Kumanyika and story editor Diane Hodson, assistant producer Arlene Arevalo, fact checking by Anna Pujol Mazzini, music by Brian Blade and the Fellowship Band, Michelle Osas, Alex Weston, James Nathan Jones, and Jason Hill, music consulting by Joe Augustine of Narrative Music. You can find transcripts at our website, scenonradio.org. The show is distributed by our friends at PRX. Seen on Radio comes to you from the Keenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University.
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