On SiriusXM, Angelo Carusone and John Fugelsang discuss the media and building power
Published
Angelo Carusone on Tell Me Everything with John Fugelsang, 11/7/24 excerpt
Citation From the November 7, 2024, edition of SiriusXM's Tell Me Everything with John Fugelsang
JOHN FUGELSANG (HOST): Want to thank you for everything you've been saying and doing in the last 48 hours. You've been talking a lot of people off ledges, and I appreciate it. Everywhere I go, sir, people always say to me the same thing. What — why isn't there a liberal radio network? I mean, we're right now on the only 24-hour progressive talk station in America here on satellite, and we're subscription. And everyone always says there's so many — there's enough progressive billionaires. Why don't they put a couple of billions towards starting up a progressive radio network? I hear it all the time. Angelo, it seems that that's never gonna happen as long as our friends in the Democratic party believe the mainstream media is their home base.
ANGELO CARUSONE (MEDIA MATTERS): Yeah. I think that's one of that — he'd hit the nail on the head. I think that part of it is that they somehow think that journalists and newsrooms, corporate media are on the same side as the Democratic party, which is a mistake. They're not, you know, in a way Fox has poisoned their brains, and they seem to think they're immune to it, but they're not. They seem to think that news media has to pick a team on the partisan side. So they have Fox, we have everything else. Right? They literally bought Fox's lie that they are balancing out the scales of the rest of the news media. Journalists aren't supposed to be on somebody's side. They're supposed to do their job, which is a profession. And sometimes if the — you know, tends to advantage Democrats, right, if they talked honestly and earnestly about what the economy looked like over the past few years, people would see it differently. They'd understand it differently. Just like a lot of things, they'd understand differently. But they just seem to think that journalists are on their side, and it's ridiculous.
And I think the other part is — and so that's one part of it — and the other part is that, you know, they say, well, because of Air America — I hear this sometimes too, which is that, well, Air America failed. So our people just don't want it. And I point out that there were real structural issues with Air America in terms of on the corporate side. Clear Channel made decision — they chose winners and losers when they didn't need to.
You know, right-wing talk radio, even though it makes a bunch of money or was making a bunch of money at the time, also had a lot of structural advantages in its favor. But it depends on how you measure failure. Because I look at it in a slightly different way. Yeah. It obviously failed as a business, right, for a lot of reasons, but it also did something critical to this moment, and there's a big lesson from it. Rachel Maddow came out of Air America. A lot of other people cut their teeth being guests and hosts and on Air America.
FUGELSANG: I did.
CARUSONE: Yup. That's what the right wing has. They have pipelines like that. There are Instagram people from years ago that got a grant from Charlie Kirk, and now they have a show on the Daily Wire because there's a pipeline.
Right? Yeah. And so one of the lessons to me is it was it was a failure. It's like, well, actually, we are still living off some of the fumes from Air America, And I don't consider that a failure if you're thinking about it in terms of shaping the terrain that elections take place in. And that's fundamentally it.
They just don't — it's not that they don't get it. They just bought this idea that spend — ads equal votes. And they missed the idea that the media is the issue and that that shapes the terrain and ads are only playing within the space of the terrain. And most of the time, especially these days, it's entirely too late for them to have a meaningful effect.
FUGELSANG: Is the problem that we keep confusing journalists with media? Because I actually think a lot of journalists — journalists are progressive, and I mean liberal by the dictionary definition, not pro-Democratic party. Journalists believe in questioning authority. Journalists believe in fighting for the underdog. They are liberal in that sense.
The media's job is not to fight for the little guy or to deliver truth. The media's only job is profit. I think a lot of Democrats have got us lulled into this thing that this 21st-century conventional wisdom that okay, well, it's Fox versus everybody else. And just because the journalist you're talking to might like you and vote for you, it doesn't mean the media company that employs them wants you to win.
CARUSONE: That's exactly right. And, you know, and to put a real fine point on it, and you see this play out in the coverage, not just at the cable news channels, but even in some of the major papers, it's as much about what they cover and how they cover it is what they choose not to cover. Right? What they choose to put — if they choose to cover it all, where they place it, and how much emphasis they put on it. Those decisions are made at the absolute top-est level. And I can't think of a clearer illustration of that than what happened with the Washington Post presidential endorsement.
FUGELSANG: Thank you. Please.
CARUSONE: Where the corporate owner came in and said no. And I get it, oh, people's endorsements don't matter. Yeah. They really don't usually in this context. But the mechanisms by which you see how the overarching entity, in this case Bezos, came in and said no. And that's the mistake that people have that they bought — because the Washington Post was doing journalism for so many years in the Trump era, that they say, well, they're on our team. Right? They're not gonna help get Trump elected, and that's not their mission at the end of the day.
FUGELSANG: That's right.
CARUSONE: And that's okay. It doesn't have to be their mission, but then we just need to have the players to build power, and that's the thing that Trump did. And that's the part that to me that I when I look ahead, people talk about the policies and everything, and that, yeah, that scares me. But the thing that scares me more is that what he did was build an organized power on what used to be considered the fringes.
FUGELSANG: That's it.
CARUSONE: And the vehicle for doing that was his media apparatus, everything from social media to the right-wing echo chambers that exist to Fox. That's how he built and organized power. And now our country has taken that poison pill, and it will spread unless we inoculate ourselves against it and start to marshal our own forces to respond.