Angelo Carusone discusses right-wing dominance of online media with SiriusXM's Zerlina Maxwell
“What I worry the most about is that because they can control the story so effectively, that when that anger and frustration finally does brew up to the top, they'll just be able to distort it and say, well, we didn't mean to do all these things.”
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Angelo Carusone discusses right-wing dominance of online media with SiriusXM's Zerlina Maxwell
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From the March 18, 2025, edition of SiriusXM's Mornings with Zerlina
ZERLINA MAXWELL (HOST): Welcome back to Mornings with Zerlina. Angelo Carusone is the president of Media Matters, and he is on the line. Good morning.
ANGELO CARUSONE (MEDIA MATTERS): Good morning.
MAXWELL: So, I think that you are the perfect person to talk about the media with in this particular moment because it's very clear to all of us, and I think it's been clear for some time, that we need some improvement. So let's just talk about the lay of the land. One of the things that Media Matters discovered in new analysis is that 9 out of 10 at the top online shows are right-leaning. How did we get there? How did we get here?
CARUSONE: Oh, boy. I mean, it's a long arc. I mean, I would start with — there's two really big ingredients, though. One is that, you know, starting in the '90s with the birth of Fox News and talk radio, you basically had the emergence of a right-wing echo chamber. And did those two things create a center of gravity. They would sort of hammer away at an idea or a narrative or a story. And then the rest of these right-wing media outlets would sort of just echo the very thing that they were hearing, and that's how you get an echo chamber. And that's basically been the landscape for decades.
What happened though, you know, 20-plus years later, is that as we got into sort of the online ecosystem is that they did two really big things. One, they invested in pipelines for creators. So, you know, they build podcast companies, they gave a bunch of money to Tucker Carlson and Ben Shapiro, both in forms of nonprofits that they could then leverage but then also as businesses. And the idea was just find talent and give them a chance to to grow. So you know, they may not be able to survive as a host or a podcast creator or their own sort of influencer online, but give them a shot. You know, you can give them a paycheck for a year or two and and you'll let them go. So one, they built the pipeline.
And the other thing they did, and this is where their political leadership came in, is that they understood social currency. Donald Trump retweeted people. So he took an already existing amplification imperative on the right, and then he leverages. So if you're a sort of a user, you would sort of see, you know, Trump out there retweeting people and think, well, there's a chance I could get retweeted. I'm gonna go ahead and talk about this content. I'm gonna engage. And that has an effect on the algorithms. That's how you start to, you know, sort of get things to be a little bit more lopsided or engaged to the right. It actually just creates engagement, and when you add up those two things together, you have the recipe for really shifting the ecosystem.
And then the last thing they did, which is the cherry on top, is they worked the refs. They hammered away at the platforms, so that they wouldn't enforce their rules, or privilege the sort of content that they were producing, which allowed them to to sort of build on the two foundations that they already had.
MAXWELL: So it feels like the answer is you should pay people on the left if you want them to be successful in creating podcasts and online content and media platforms.
CARUSONE. Yeah. Right. I mean and that's the thing. And it's not even it doesn't even — and that sounds so dirty, but it's not. You know? It almost feels — I'm not saying you should pay them to espouse specific ideas or to promote specific candidates — nothing like that. You know, I think that's actually the model that's emerging, which is pay to post. It's like, hey. You're a creator. Here's $3,000. Can you make two videos about this topic? You know?
I think that's — I understand why because that's what people think. But what's so weird about this is that especially Democratic donors and liberal donors, they understand the importance of being a patron. They give money to the arts. They give money to cultural centers, to their local theaters. Like, they understand that, to a degree, that you have to give money to artists. And in a way, that's what creators are. That's what radio hosts are. That's what podcast hosts are. You know, it's a business, yes, at — for a very select few, but for the most part, those people are basically artists. They are creators. They are building something, and what their — their art is storytelling. They're not doing gumshoe journalism or investigative reporting. They're taking the already existing material out there, and they're weaving it into a story that is reflective of a world view that people can internalize and that, more importantly, people could then evangelize.
MAXWELL: I think it's such an important distinction. Right? Because when I say pay people, what I'm saying is that you're allowing them to sustain, like, life. Right? Pay their bills and and create. Right? So in order to lift up creators and allow them to survive, you pay them not to say a specific thing, but literally to pay their rent.
CARUSONE: Yeah. Yeah. No. That's the thing. When I suggest that sometimes in circles, people think that's what I'm saying. That I'm saying, oh, you should, you know, do something really crass and try to buy them out. No. I'm — exactly what you just said, which is most of the time too, some of these people are making some money, they're getting, you know, five grand or ten grand from some monetization, but they're working at least one other job, maybe even two other part-time jobs. So doing this work is secondary. And why that matters is that one, if you don't have a — if you're not planting a bunch of seeds at the bottom, if you're not incubating talent and storytellers and creators, then there's less of a chance that some of them will grow. And that's — you need that — you need to sort of hedge your bets. And, you know, in the private sector, that's called venture. Right? And people get rewarded for that. They get rewarded for making really bad bets, on the chance that one of the bets they make will be a good bet, a great bet. And it's not that different in this space. You have to take the people that are already doing this work for free, and exactly what you just said. Make it sustainable, make it viable for them, invest in talent, and that is where the sort of optimization came in on the right.
People like Charlie Kirk and, you know, they did some things years ago where they started going to college campuses. Yeah, people will see the debate videos, but the other thing they did, which I think was way more influential, is that they just helped support creators. If you were a young, you know, if you were in college and you had an Instagram account and you started posting content related to sort of conservative right-wing ideas, if you had a show, they would give you a little boost, a little grant, a little contract, not to push the Charlie Kirk theory, but just to exist, on the chance that in two or three years when you got out of there, you would have an audience and you'd have a following and you would maybe even have a chance to develop.
And the other thing they understood was that if you have a bunch of people talking to very similar audiences, that audiences matter a lot. And when you're investing in creators and storytellers, you're also investing in audiences. And so even if some of those people change jobs, they don't want to do it anymore, once you've sort of built that audience, you've created that demand, that audience will move, that audience will go to the other creators that are sort of like, you know, continuing to sustain and do this.
And that is how you build demand, and that's how you ultimately get the capacity to shape the narrative, which right now, we don't have at all. The Democrats just don't have the ability to shape a narrative. That's just the reality.
MAXWELL: It's such a key point because one of the criticisms of the Democratic Party always, every single election cycle, is that they weren't able to get their message out or there was something wrong with the message. And I've actually said this repeatedly on the show: It's not the message. It's the fact that your message isn't on the platforms where people are consuming content right now. That is what has changed, and Republicans figured that out a long time ago.
CARUSONE: Yes. And I think one example — and this has come up, I've heard so much of this since the election — which is concern or criticism about Democrats' values around trans rights. And, you know, when I hear that and they say, oh, we need better messaging on this, we need better messaging, it's like, well, maybe. But that really wouldn't matter because, ultimately, there — the thing that really broke that out on the online space, in the information landscape, was that there was this moment where there was a total hoax about claims that teachers were being forced to put kitty litters in classrooms.
It was total, total fabrication. But that lit up all of these sort of, not just the red bubbles, but the places that don't consider themselves to even be ideological, but they are even. And they all talked about that. That was a moment where it actually broke through into the zeitgeist, and the perception was created that Democrats had gone too far. It was all a hoax, but it saturated the landscape so far and so fast that you can't message your way out of that.
And that's the thing that penetrated into the zeitgeist is that they understand that you have to leverage these moments. You have to leverage your ecosystem and create a few of these breakout moments that then you could use to define either the issue or the other side. And that's my alarm bell for the current moment, which is that there's this sort of perception that, well, what Trump is doing now is so bad and so destructive that once people experience the harms, they will turn on him or they will at least not support it anymore. And that might be true if you had a sort of a modestly functioning information landscape, but actually what I worry the most about is that because they can control the story so effectively, that when that anger and frustration finally does brew up to the top, they'll just be able to distort it and say, well, we didn't mean to do all these things. That was malicious implementation. That was the deep state. That was the news media distorting it. You need to give us more power so that we can fix it.
And that's the real issue. And that's the part about all of this moment that ties in with politics and power, which is that if you don't sort of begin to think about how you win this broader information battle, then a lot of these things that that are happening in the political arena, they're on the edges because politics at this point is downstream from culture. And what they're really doing is changing our culture and by extension our society.
MAXWELL: It's actually one of the reasons why this show is a politics and culture show, because I very much see the importance of that intersection. I want to talk to you a bit about misinformation on these platforms, because one of the things that you mentioned is that they're, you know, the hoax example, it spreads like wildfire on these platforms, and they basically condition the algorithms to amplify that misinformation. What are the ways in which a progressive media infrastructure, if it were to exist, how do we get, you know, in the mix there and disrupt what the algorithms are spreading in terms of misinformation?
CARUSONE: I mean, this is the million-dollar question. And in a way, there's a few factors. One, if the scales are — I mean, the scales are really imbalanced right now. Right? They have 82% of the online audience is based on — these big programs are basically theirs. Like you said, 9 out of the top 10 are theirs. I mean, they can supercharge any hoax or false story, and in an online landscape, in a tech platform landscape, you know, unless you have the platforms putting in some guardrails or speed bumps, which they've all removed them and reduced them, if they can sort of tip the scales in favor of those hoaxes, they can supercharge it. So one is that, you can actually — it's like putting speed bumps in a school zone. If we have a better-functioning ecosystem, the scales are a little bit more balanced. There's some antibodies in the system, it's harder for that stuff to spread because you have something to counterbalance it. So one is participation and counterbalance it. That actually does make a difference. And if we have our own ecosystem, we can do it.
The second is that just straight business. If we have a bigger voice at these platforms, because ultimately, they make money on the creators regardless of if they're left or right, and that's what this is still — it's still a big business, you can push the platforms to do things that they wouldn't ordinarily do. They needed to be driven and nudged to put in place some guardrails for civic participation, for anti-extremism. All that stuff is rolled back. They took that all away in recent months, so things are about to get worse.
But if we have the ability to speak to sort of create the actual monetary incentives, just like the way the right wing worked the refs for years, there's no reason that we can't work the refs either. I want to just note that as bad as everything seems — and it sure does — they barely are able to eke out a victory even with all these advantages in their favor. And when it comes to working the refs at these platforms, nobody's counter-working them. The left isn't in these rooms sort of pushing them in the other direction.
It's been a one-way street with the right-wing for quite a while, and they've gotten a lot of things in their favor, but not everything. And I think — so it's not that I'm cockeyed optimist about it, I'm just a realist, and I think the two biggest things that we need to do right now is one, make sure that we're participating — because both in terms of not just building our own ecosystem, but our own engagement really matters too because that factors into the algorithm.
And then the second thing is when we start to invest in these things, we can actually leverage that from a business perspective. Everything other than that — the last thing I'll just note is that is state AGs have a lot of power and ultimately what we're really talking about here is a consumer product. You know, it's not that we're asking them to police this or take editorial standards or even treat themselves as media properties.
Their algorithm is the product. And their algorithm is privileging a bunch of things that it really shouldn't do. It's defective in some ways, and I think some intrepid state AGs could take some pressure at them from this in that way to help sort of, again, put some speed bumps into school zones. We're not gonna be able to stop all the bad stuff. That's the reality. But I think our focus right now should be on slowing it down because all the research does show that when you slow it down even just a little bit, it has a massive order-of-magnitude effect on its ability to proliferate and spread.
MAXWELL: I want to talk about the mainstream media in the last five minutes because I feel like I was saying this before the election. As somebody who's been in the, quote, unquote, mainstream media for a while now, I recognized 10 years ago that it was changing. And I know that you focus so much on Fox News and the Newsmaxes of the world, but I feel like the influence and the importance of cable news and the mainstream media, that has been waning for more than a decade.
CARUSONE: Yeah.
MAXWELL: And I think we're at an inflection point now where people are just consuming things differently. They're watching YouTube. They're watching TikTok. Talk a bit about how that factors into this conversation in conversation in terms of the way in which progressives potentially in this moment could take advantage of that shift.
CARUSONE: Yeah. When we think about the mainstream media, there's sort of two functions that they serve. One is the one that you're describing, which is the agenda setting. You know, they talk and they sort of create, you know, conventional wisdom and they sort of help steer people's direction and attention toward topic stories, and then those stories get reverberated, that's their agenda-setting power.
The other is their actual just like news-making function, you know, doing actual reporting and putting news out there.
There's no doubt that their influence is greatly diminished, as agenda setters. They just don't have the agenda-setting power anymore. Not even Fox News. Fox News is a laggard. They're not agenda setting. They're not driving the conversation every day. They're basically just echoing what's happening, on, you know, on X and on Truth Social. They're a laggard. That is a reality, and that will just continue to diminish.
In terms of the other part, though — I think this is a significant piece — is that they're still doing news reporting and that they don't have the the one-to-one relationship. They can't broadcast that out and by extension sort of transform people's perceptions around a story simply by posting it, because they still will — they rely on this online ecosystem, on these changing habits.
And so but the news piece is still important because so much of what the discussion online is is just sort of kernels or pieces of news reports that then get put into a wrapper or weaved into a story. They're they're still providing a lot of the raw material. So what I would say is that while their agenda-setting power is greatly diminished, what they choose to report on, even though it doesn't have a mass audience in the way that it had, is still significant. So when they're not covering important stories, that matters a lot because that means you're not putting that stuff into the bottom of the food chain and even giving it a chance to proliferate and spread online.
But it does mean broadly that we're in a landscape now with no arbiters. And it's not even like they had — they were the best arbiters in the past, but at least they had a process and and some mechanism for how they determine — some standards. Those don't exist anymore. And I think we just haven't fully adapted to that. And worse, I think the political ecosystem, especially amongst the Democratic Party, they haven't fully internalized that lesson that, you know, the media that they thought mattered no longer really does anymore.
MAXWELL: No, I go on this rant at least once a week.