Angelo Carusone and The Bulwark's Tim Miller discuss backlash right-wing radio hosts are facing from callers to their show over Trump administration
Written by Media Matters Staff
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From the February 26, 2025, edition of The Bulwark, streamed on YouTube
TIM MILLER (HOST): The attack on the bureaucrats is easy when it's faceless, right? It's like, "Oh, there are these -- there are real FBI people, but there are also guys you don't even know about. They're in the Hoover building, and they wear suits, and they sit behind desks, and they create problems, and they come after" -- you know? And then, like, with the bureaucrats, it's like, "Oh, there are these people that are on K street in DC and they wear suits, and they're liberals and they put their pronouns in their bio." And it's like, okay, like, that is easy to demonize those people. But then when it's like, oh shit, it's a forest service guy. It's the nurse at the VA. It's, like, the law -- it's the cop. You know, it's the federal law enforcement guy that's doing drug arrests, right? All of those things are much more sympathetic. And I think that, like, the reality is -- I mean, again, it's not like this is -- that everyone's the scales has fallen from everybody's eyes, but for certain people, the reality is starting to sink in.
ANGELO CARUSONE (MEDIA MATTERS PRESIDENT): Yeah. And I think that -- I'm not like some cockeyed optimist here. I'm certainly not in the camp of some officials or public figures that are, you know, writing op-eds saying that we should not be doing anything. I'm not, like, sort of in that position, but I'm realistic about what's happening. And to your point, it has been faceless. And that's one thing when you express these policies, because when it's faceless, you put a face in. And when you're a listener and you're hearing this, you're thinking about the worst version of a caricature of a DC liberal disconnected from everything, right? You're not thinking about the fact that you live five miles from a park that is managed by the Bureau of Land Management, or that you, like, literally engage with them, or that your fiancé is filing for immigration status and that all of these -- you don't think about it from that perspective. You just sort of inject the worst caricatures. That's because these people live in a narrative.
And the calls, I'm very surprised by how many calls there are because, you know, if you just -- take a step back, these call-in shows, they have -- these are millions of listeners, right? People are getting call-ins all the time. They're screened, right? So if you're letting some of these calls through, you should think about -- it's like when somebody calls a member of Congress. They always assume that there's a certain number that are just like that that didn't actually call, you know? It's the same thing here. If you're a radio host or you're a show, you're letting some of these calls through, which means you're getting a lot of that topic. And sometimes you just can't avoid it, so you let through the more reasonable callers because that's what you got that day, which means that the boards are probably saturated with this. And that is because it's really hard to find an area that's not touched in some way by this.