Why does the media lie to you so much? Because they view you with contempt. In a word, they hate you. Michael Walsh spent years as a reporter, but now knows the industry has changed beyond recognition. He joins Charlie to discuss his new book, "Against the Corporate Media," a collection of 42 essays on media dishonesty, duplicity, malevolence, and more. The two of them also discuss whether Gen X can save America and more. Check out Walsh's book at https://www.amazon.com/Against-Corporate-Media-Forty-two-Press/dp/B0CWYYX1CSSupport the show: http://www.charliekirk.com/supportSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Hey everybody, against the corporate media, Michael Walsh joins the program of a new book that I helped contribute to, Why Americans Need to Fight the Corporate Media and Why We Need to Realize How Much They Hate Us.
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We're honored to have a friend of mine and a great American with a project that I helped participate in.
It is Michael Walsh, Against the Corporate Media is the book.
Everyone should check it out.
Against the Corporate Media, 42 Ways the Press Hates You.
Michael, welcome back to the program.
Hey, Charlie.
Thank you so much.
It's a pleasure to join you from far off Ireland, right this minute.
Well, very good.
You're in a very beautiful place.
I love Ireland and glad you could join us.
So, Michael, tell us about the book.
I was honored to participate.
We have all hours so we can go through elements of this and connect it to the news of the day.
Tell us about the book.
Great.
Well, first of all, your contribution was really important, Charlie, because it's your audience that we want to reach.
I've been around a long time and Don't know as many of the people from your generation, obviously, as you do.
And to have your voice in the book is super helpful for us, because your contribution, which is about the half-life of a lie, I think will really resonate with your listeners and followers and fans all across the country and the world, because your generation has been brought up on a lying media.
Back in the day when I was covering the fall of the Soviet Union in East Germany and in Russia, in East Germany, the press was referred to as the Lügenpresse, the lying media, because the citizens of East Germany who were prisoners, that's why they had a wall to keep them in, knew the media was lying to them.
And there wasn't anything they could do about it because it was a one party state and it was a one media party.
And we see the way America's going now, so as a result of that, my colleagues and I in this project decided that the media should be our next target.
We started off with a book a couple years ago called Against the Great Reset, and now we've followed it up with Against the Corporate Media, 42 Ways the Press Hates You.
And they hate us, let's face it, Charlie.
You know, you're on the receiving end of it a lot.
Oh, no, they love me, Michael.
Are you kidding me?
No, I'm not.
Well, you're a sweetheart.
I'm the darling of their... So we got a lot of great people in this book.
Yeah, talk about some of the names.
Talk about some of the contributors you have.
Yeah, well, I've got it here and I can read off some of them.
I mean, they're all going to be familiar to everyone who's listening.
So we start off with the great Lance Morrow, who was a colleague of mine at Time Magazine for many years in the 1980s and 90s, still quite an active writer.
Drew Klavan, I think a lot of people know him from his thrillers, from his screenplays, from his work now with Ben Shapiro and his very influential podcast.
Dave Reavoy, John O'Sullivan, another old friend and colleague of mine.
Charlie Girk, that would be you.
John Gabriel, who's a fellow Arizonan.
Let's see, who else have we got here?
From Canada, we have Elizabeth Nixon, who's got a huge following on Substack, talking about the dreadful media and the situation in that country.
I talked about criticism, so I got the best movie critic in the United States, who's a man named Armand White, who has written for many publications over the years, now writes for National Review.
Uh, Monica Crowley, of course, everyone knows her.
Steve Hayward, Nick Searcy, Sebastian Gorka.
You get the idea.
We, I reached out to as many really interesting and thoughtful people as I could think of.
And, and finally we're here.
September 10th is our pub date and September 12th, we launched the book with a media event in London, England.
So we've gone international with this and I think it's crucial.
As you well know, this is not just a local fight.
The forces we're battling are everywhere.
They're here in Ireland, they're in England, they're in the United States, and these are the forces against freedom of expression, against the First Amendment, which only we have, of course, in this country, but generally against your right to speak your mind, and that is the most fundamental right In the development of liberal democracy in both 18th century Britain and in 18th century United States.
So we're in a fight of our lives, and I think it's really important everybody understands that.
So, I want to just go through historical analysis first.
I love the title, Corporate Media.
Has the media always been an attache of the biggest companies and the most powerful interests?
Did we see that change in the 80s, 90s, early 2000s?
And how would you define that term, Corporate Media?
Yeah, yes and no is the answer.
I started out Working for Gannett Newspapers in Rochester, New York in 1972.
Gannett was at one point the largest newspaper chain, I think in terms of number of newspapers in the United States.
It later went on to create USA Today, which was the most widely distributed newspaper in the United States.
This is before the death of newspapers.
I worked for Hearst in San Francisco at their flagship paper, the San Francisco Examiner.
And I worked for Time Incorporated at Time Magazine for 16 years between 1981 and 1997, more or less.
So the criticism of the media being a tool of the moneyed interests, the aristocracy, the business class, uh, the political classes has always been leveled against the media.
And I think in generally, generally speaking, that's been true.
It's, it, it, it hired reporters from The lower middle classes, if not actually the poor in many cases in the early 20th century.
But it was owned by rich guys with barrels of ink and access to newsprint.
What's changed is the reporters, Charlie.
So when I started as a 22-year-old kid out of the Eastman School of Music, so I was a musician, pianist, etc., they put me right on the police beat.
And that was the best thing that ever happened because you got to learn journalism from the ground up.
Murders and suicides and robberies and how to write your story fast and get it in on deadline.
It was a morning newspaper.
So you wrote right up to the magic hour of midnight if it was a breaking news story.
And the men that I worked with, and they were mostly men, although women were starting to come into the profession.
were didn't have college degrees.
I don't think some of them had high school degrees.
They tended to be streetwise and ambitious in the sense that they were devoted to their profession, which wasn't opinionating or editorializing.
It was about getting the story.
You weren't allowed to express your opinion.
So until you had earned the right to do so, and even then as a reporter, you never got that right.
That was reserved to other people on the staff.
But as we started to insist on higher education degrees for media people.
This is such an important point.
I completely agree with this.
That's when it changed.
When everybody you work with went to Harvard, you're in the wrong place.
You are in the wrong place.
Because I remember the guy that was on the copy desk when I was just starting out turning in copy.
John B. Kenney, he was an old Irishman from Rochester, upstate New York somewhere, and he held you to the strictest standard to being on time, being right, expressing yourself.
You really honed your craft.
And later on, when I became a critic, I was allowed to express my opinion because that was the job.
But those early years that I spent as a reporter were formative, formative in terms of Information gathering, how to write fast, how to write quick.
And frankly, all the success I've had since then, whatever it's been, whether it's been literary success, writing thrillers, writing in Hollywood, is because I had those two years on that.
And because it was not an Ivy League guy telling me what I should think, but it was a street guy telling me what I should do.
And that's what made great reporters back in the day.
And now I think the Ivy League and the college degrees, Uh, you, you draw from the same social class as the people you're supposed to cover.
And that's not good because they're all friends.
You know this.
I mean, I've been in business 50 plus years and I know many of the most famous names in American journalism or I've worked with them or they're, they're, they were friends, certainly social acquaintances.
Uh, This is such a profound point.
It's more of a social club and protecting the class than actually challenging or exposing the powerful.
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Against the Corporate Media is the book Against the Corporate Media.
Michael, you were talking about how reporters themselves have changed.
It used to be where you had to do very difficult, hustle-type work, as you mentioned.
You have to work your way up through the ranks.
But what are they now teaching at J-schools?
It seems as if they're not teaching them how to be journalists, but instead just kind of snobby, snippy defenders of the ruling class.
Well, I think it's not so much J-schools as it is, as we were saying, the social class.
The reporters today all have been schooled in the same narrative, which is the left is good, the right is evil.
America is flawed.
All the standard tropes of leftism.
They've absorbed this in the classrooms.
Now, I haven't been in a classroom for quite a while, but they, More to the point, they hang out together, they congregate together, and they do it with the people that they cover.
So this is very important.
When I was a young music critic, just starting out, I know this sounds boring, but actually, classical music is a very interesting world, and the journalism was very top quality back in the day when it was important to the readers.
And my particular rabbi on this was the late Harold C. Schoenberg of the New York Times, who was The most important voice in the cultural world on the most important newspaper in the country.
And Harold's rule was never to fraternize with anyone he would cover.
So if he saw a famous pianist walking down the street, he would cross the street to avoid meeting that person.
He felt it was so important to be impartial, to be above it, to be honest to yourself and to your principle.
That's all gone now.
The New York Times doesn't believe that anymore.
Uh, the old, what they were called times men in those days who lived by that, that is not true.
Now you're supposed to be friends with them.
You're supposed to have access to them.
You're supposed to have an opinion about what they do that totally agrees with everyone else's opinion, including theirs about what they do.
So as someone else has said, it's a club and you ain't in it, but the media is in it.
And that's what we have to break.
We, On the conservative side, have access to shows like this, to the heirs and the signs of Rush Limbaugh, really, Charlie, if you take your own patrimony back to the arrival of Rush Limbaugh in New York in the 1980s.
And he begat Sean Hannity, and Sean begat, begat, becomes like the Bible.
So, we have that, but what we don't have is access to places like the New York Times.
Time Magazine, where I worked, For many years, and at the absolute apogee of its power and influence and honesty, even though it was criticized, and rightly, for an attitude, because it did have an attitude.
But that's now completely in the hands of the left.
And the way we have to fight them is the way we are fighting.
And this book, with all of you in it, is a contribution to that, because I want the audience to pick it up and see, okay, how do they hate me, right?
Well, You're a gunner.
Well, they hate guns.
So they know nothing about guns.
You're a cop.
They hate cops.
They want to defund the cops.
You're in the service.
I'm a Marine Corps kid.
I was born on a big Marine base in North Carolina.
They hate the Marine Corps.
They hate the Army.
They hate the Navy.
They hate everything.
And they don't know anything about it.
They just know that they hate it.
And that I think is the big difference now with journalism.
is that they just don't know anything, but they're very sure they don't like it.
And in the idea, what should the media be?
In a free society, how should the media operate?
What role should they play?
It should be an honest broker, Charlie.
If you go back to the 18th century, to where freedom of speech starts in Britain, they asked for honesty.
This famous line from the lines of Two guys run into the name of Cato, a man who cannot call his tongue his own, cannot call anything his own.
And that is the most important dictum.
And we've lost that.
We're losing it.
And we have to address that starting right now with freedom of speech.
Without that, there's nothing.
Nothing.
So Michael, let me ask you, in the last couple of years with Elon Musk purchasing Twitter and X and liberating it, with shows like ours that are ascendant and Tucker Carlson now in podcasting, your career in journalism and seeing the ups and the downs of American media, are you hopeful that the current trend is towards a freer and more open, at least, I don't want to say media environment, but one where people have more choices and we're not restricted to how things were maybe a decade ago?
Yes, I am, Charlie, and it's because of people like you and the guys just before you.
I'd be very remiss if I didn't point out that here in Against the Corporate Media, 42 Ways the Press Hates You, that I didn't mention the late Andrew Breitbart.
We have two essays by Breitbart people in it, besides myself.
We have Hannah Giles, who was the young woman in the famous Acorn videos.
And we have Larry O'Connor, who's now a talk show host, as you well know, in Washington, D.C., talking about the early days of Breitbart.
And I'll tell the audience how impulsive and how exuberant Andrew was, those of you who didn't know him in life.
I became involved with creating the site then known as Big Journalism for Breitbart.
After meeting Andrew at a party one day in Los Angeles, we had a monthly gathering of interesting people, not political, but interesting, mostly writers and people who worked in the industry.
And after about 20 minutes of talking to Andrew, he suddenly said, Michael, you've got to start big journalism for me and do it.
And before you knew it, we had that site up and running in early 2010, because as everyone knows, Andrew despised the corporate media.
And wanted to hurt them as badly as he could.
Now, he was taken from us too soon, as you know.
But I think he, like Rush, was a formative figure in the revolt against the corporatism and the clubism and the credentialism of the media.
My generation is lost.
50% of us hate the other 50%.
We're dying off at a rapid rate.
Do you mean boomers?
I mean boomers, yeah.
When we're gone, you guys will all be much better off, believe me.
But don't forget we did invent sex, drugs, and rock and roll, and you didn't, so there's that.
That's our point of thing.
But once we're gone, you'll see the media will start to respond.
Musk did a great thing by liberating Twitter.
It's wonderful to see President Trump now joining forces with people like Bobby Kennedy Jr.
and Tulsi Gabbard, a big Tulsi fan, and thought she should be in the administration and has said so quite publicly for the last few years.
You can't have too many friends, Charlie.
We can't break up along rigid ideological lines.
If you're a student of history, which I am, and a data historian myself, you You've seen these movies before.
You've watched how revolutions come together and how they either succeed or how they fail.
But if we insist on things that people instinctively want, the primacy of your freedom to say what you want.
Now, that doesn't mean it's consequence free.
It doesn't mean people can't say, gee, you're a bigot or you're a horrible person, or I don't want to deal with you.
I don't want to hire you or I don't want to do this.
Okay.
That's the consequence of freedom.
We embrace that and we accept that.
But what you don't want to see is no such and such allowed.
I'm sitting here in Ireland where my great grandmother in her birthplace, as a matter of fact, went to the United States as a teenage girl.
And when she got to Boston, there were signs that said, no Irish need apply.
Well, we don't want to see that directed against anybody.
And not ourselves.
No freedom of speech people need apply.
That's not good.
And what you're doing and what everyone else in the sort of counter media field is doing is making a difference.
And they know it and it hurts them.
And you have to understand they're very sensitive about their reputations.
And they believe they are on the side of the angels.
They believe that they are doing work.
And to red pill them is devastating.
And this is why I think what Trump and the new crowd around him was so brilliant, is take their own people away from.
Take Bobby, the most famous man in American politics, take it away from.
Take someone as appealing as Tulsi Gabbard, who is a woman, is beautiful, is well-spoken, is a military veteran, a real military veteran, who's a patriot.
Take her away from them.
Hurt them.
You know, it's like David Mamet, who's one of us, by the way.
Best, greatest playwright in America.
You want to know how to get Capone?
That's that speech from The Untouchables that everyone should memorize, because that's the way you get Capone.
That's the way you win.
So what we tried to do with this book, how does the media hate you?
They hate everything about you, as I mentioned, but they know nothing of what you believe.
They know nothing.
They will misquote you.
They will make stuff up about you, and you just have to power through it and insist On the truth.
The truth shall set you free.
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So you mentioned something interesting about boomers.
I'm not allowed to criticize boomers on this program, Michael, because the hate mail I receive from boomers is, it is like you wouldn't believe.
Why is that?
Can you comment on that?
You're chuckling.
If I ever say anything about boomers in a negative fashion, holy crow, I have to duck for cover.
Well, there's so many of them, you know.
All the deaths came home from the war and they got busy as soon as they got back to the United States, or even before, I would say.
But I'm a Truman administration baby, so I'm born in 49, right in the middle of the immediate post-World War II wave.
And I'm the son of a veteran, fought in Korea, Vietnam.
The boomers, we believe we're just the greatest generation ever.
You know why?
Because we were told we were the greatest generation ever.
And what we said went, and we're used to bossing people around.
We started the rock revolution when we were still in our teens and 20s.
And we've dominated the popular culture and Hollywood in the 70s and 80s, and we're not going quietly into that good night.
And we don't like sass from young people like you, you know, considering how great we are.
That's why.
No, that's well said.
So there is something interesting happening, though, and I want you to help explain it, which is that there is the polling shows that Gen X hates the corporate media, is more pro-Trump, is against Kamala Harris, is against big
government, far more than baby boomers. We have Elon Musk, for example. We have J.K. Rowling.
We have Tulsi Gabbard. What is it that makes Gen X so different than baby boomers and how
they view the world, how they view the corporate media and politics? Well, I think they see the
mistakes of their parents and they react against them. Remember, the whole 60s Woodstock generation
is reacting against the perceived squareness of the 1950s Eisenhower era.
So I'm very happy.
But if I may inject something now here, which I think is pertinent, and I know it's important to you.
Oh, go any direction you want to.
Yes.
But we're looking at the return of masculinity.
Masculinity has been so marginalized in this country over the past 10 to 15 or 20 years.
And I think the guys of your generation now have realized this has not been a good deal and that there's
a lot of great things about masculinity, like most things about masculinity, and a
country that doesn't appreciate its men, it literally falls apart. As I mentioned, my work as a
historian, I have a new book coming out in January, which is called A Rage to Conquer, and it's
about the great generals of history from the Greeks to World War II and what they have in common, and
the maleness of the art of war, effectively.
So I followed a book called Last Stance two or three years ago with this new book, A Rage to Conquer.
So for boys who want to know what it is to be a man, This is a good place for you to start.
I was lucky that I had a father who fought with the Marine Corps at the Chosin Reservoir in Korea, which has survived it.
One of the most historic battles in Marine Corps history.
So I was raised with that aspect of masculinity my whole life.
And I think boys have lost their role models and they've been demonized.
And this is not good.
And what you're seeing in this coming election, I think, is a boys versus girls election.
I totally agree.
That's exactly right.
I think that's where we've come, that single women vote Democrat, as you know, and young men of your generation are
saying, hey, wait a minute.
I want to, I like guns.
I like physical contact sports.
I like danger.
I'm not a safety-first guy that sits at home and never does anything.
No one wants to be that guy.
And now we're seeing the revolt of it, and I think it's great, and I'm cheering it on.
Well, the New York Times-Siena poll shows that Gen Z men are more conservative than boomer men.
Do you believe that?
Well, they see how bad the world is that they're being given.
And they're not stupid, and they can look around and say, well, what's different about the way it was when my father was poor, when his father was poor?
And I think it's what I mentioned.
By creating a female-dominated world in which safety is the most important thing, you have a society that stops functioning because it no longer takes risks.
We've got people in outer space we can't get them back because we failed.
And the guys that put them there in the 1960s were these nerdy little guys in white shirts with slide rules and pocket protectors for crying out loud.
You know, I'm joking, but I think Elon Musk is going to build his own private space taxi and drive it up there and get them and bring them back home.
No, that's the whole point.
The Gen X is going to save them.
The Gen X-er will go save the problem of the boomers.
Gen X, they're not as big as boomers, but they are big.
There's a fair amount of Gen Xers, and the numbers, I'll send them to you, Michael, offline, that they are the most conservative of any generation by far.
In fact, Gen X men, for at least the poll that I looked at with New York Times-Siena, which is directionally correct, Gen X men favor Trump by 25 points.
Young whippersnapper, old fartism involved in generations as they change and hand over.
But I think that the Baby Boomers antipathy might originate with the fact that many of us who have been successful in this generation We're like you, successful very early on.
We rose through the ranks as they were then assembled.
I got to Time Magazine when I was 31, and that was 20 years younger than the guy they thought they wanted for that particular job.
And there's always some resentment on the part of the guys that got passed over that job or that It's not a book you have to read from start to finish.
didn't make it. And I would attribute that just purely to resentment,
Charlie.
I would pay no attention to it because they'll be gone soon enough.
But back to the book here. I want to encourage people to look at it.
It's not a book you have to read from start to finish.
It's got essays from people who've been in the business longer than I have to
people who are brand new to the business. It has people who write for a living,
people who talk for a living, people who do things for a living.
It has people who write movies. It has people who write novels.
It has all the kinds of of diversity in the good sense that we have on the right to show people we're not just a bunch of cave people sitting around resenting progress.
Not at all.
We are very well educated, very articulate, and with the access to the new media that we have, we can change the world.
Again, the one thing baby boomers love to do is change the world.
They want to meddle in everybody's life.
So we've been doing it since 1967, as far as I can think, and we'll probably continue to do it.
So last point I want to make is that you worked with the great Andrew Breitbart, which he really started this rise of citizen journalism.
And we've seen that continue to grow over the last decade.
Is that the way that we eventually crush the corporate media, is thousands of people doing the work, shows like this?
We've talked about this throughout the hour, but the decentralized idea that we no longer need gatekeepers, that because now we all have smartphones in a right-hand pocket, you could buy lights, you could have your own show, that the barriers to entry are largely removed.
Yes, they are.
I want to make two points.
Yes and no.
Yeah.
Yes, I'm all for the democratization of the media, because that takes it back to the way it was in the first place.
The notion of gatekeepers is a notion that has now been destroyed by the internet.
But I would argue, and I argued with Andrew about this a lot, is we can't just say any old thing that comes into our head in an unstructured way.
The technique is important.
The rules are important.
You get to break them after you know them, but you don't get to break them before you know them.
We are more effective discipline, like any military organization, discipline.
The Romans were little guys.
They were little guys.
And they went up against the Germans who were twice their size, and they were scared of the Germans.
But they knew they could beat them because they had better organization, they had better discipline, and they had greater, stronger desire to win.
And that's who we are now.
We're the Romans.
And we need to go up against these without fear.
There's nothing these people can do to hurt you.
All they can do is call you a nasty name.
But it helps to know the rules.
It helps read good writers.
Look at good examples of people who have succeeded in the past.
That's the wisdom that my generation can pass to you guys, is learn the rules and then break them.
But learn them.
And then use them against the enemy.
That's the key.
That is well said.
And we must understand that each of us have a voice, but the technique matters a lot.
