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May 19, 2025 - Epoch Times
22:59
How One Journalist Is Shattering Echo Chambers: Isaac Saul
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One of the major driving factors of the sort of extreme polarization that we're living through right now is that most news consumers can very easily go out into the wild, open their computer, turn on their TVs, and tune in somewhere where they are just being force-fed worldviews and perspectives that confirm all their priors.
You think about what media outlets are really making their audience uncomfortable on a regular basis.
And there's very few of them.
After writing for a wide variety of media outlets and seeing many disturbing trends, Isaac Saul decided to found Tangle, a newsletter that puts viewpoints from both the left and the right side by side.
We're going to take you out of the little nice cozy bubble you've been in and you're going to be made uncomfortable by the news that we're publishing because we're going to expose you to arguments from people across the political spectrum.
This is American Thought Leaders and I'm Jan Jekielek.
Isaac Saul, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.
I'm glad to be here.
Thanks for having me.
So let's talk about the insidious forces, to use your language, that shape media today.
Most Americans by now are probably familiar with some of them.
One of the common examples is advertising revenue or advertising pressure.
If you're a big media organization who makes most of their money off advertising revenue, then that means you necessarily need traffic.
You need hits on your website.
You need ratings on TV.
And that has a tendency to kind of turn media companies into entertainment companies.
You have to drive attention, be as sensational as possible.
You know, if it bleeds, it leads, is kind of the old school newspaper parlance.
I've experienced some different, I think, insidious media forces that I think have driven a lot of the problems that we see today in American media.
One of them is...
Groupthink.
Roughly 7% of all journalists in the media space, at least at sort of traditional media outlets, are Republicans or self-identify as conservative.
Which is kind of jaw-dropping if you really stop to think about it.
I mean, very, very few people representing the mainstream media hold views that roughly half the country holds.
So when you're in a newsroom and you're a minority thinker, you might feel compelled not to necessarily speak your mind or to act as a sort of check on the blind spot that the kind of narrative the rest of the newsroom is putting forward.
Part of that also is the sort of hiring bias that we see that comes out of that.
I mean, I think like most industries, a lot of people who make their way in media make their way in media because they know people.
They have connections from journalism school.
They have connections from previous jobs they've had.
And so it's this sort of cycle that feeds itself.
It's hard to break into the space if you are a conservative from a rural part of the country who didn't go to Columbia Journalism School or didn't work with somebody at Vox before they got hired at the New York Times or whatever it is.
And then some of the stuff that I've written about is kind of the reflection that we see from these forces.
Onto the space, onto the content that's being produced and how we sort of encounter it.
That might look like story selection bias, which is not always so obvious as, you know, a headline that looks biased or a sentence in a newspaper that looks biased.
This is just...
What are we choosing to cover today?
What's the story we're going to focus on?
The joke that I like to tell and sort of the way to illustrate this that I talk about is, you know, if an immigrant who's here in our country illegally gets drunk and crashes his car and kills somebody...
I would bet good money that that story is going to be covered by Fox News basically 10 times out of 10. If an immigrant comes to our country and is here illegally and ends up creating, you know, the next Google, a major tech company that creates hundreds of thousands of jobs and drives billions of dollars of revenue, I would bet my life that the New York Times is going to do a feature person on that story.
That story will be covered by the New York Times, but they rarely do.
The reverse.
You know, Fox News rarely picks that story up.
The New York Times rarely picks up the DUI story.
They're selecting the kind of news they want to present to their audiences, and that's a really big challenge.
It's a hard thing to navigate as a newsroom.
One of the major driving factors of the sort of extreme polarization that we're living through right now is that Most news consumers can very easily go out into the wild, open their computer, turn on their TVs, whatever, and tune in somewhere where they are just being force-fed worldviews and perspectives that confirm all their priors.
If you are a, you know, never Trump Republican, you can just go read The Bulwark and The Dispatch and never leave that space and never have your views challenged.
If you're a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat, then it's the New York Times opinion page where you're rarely going to encounter Maybe you'll get some David French Republican conservative thought, but you're not going to get intellectual Trumpism there.
And if you're a diehard conservative and you just want to tune into Fox News or Breitbart or whatever it is and never really see anybody criticize the Trump presidency, aside from maybe like Jessica Tarlov or something, then you can do that.
And it's really easy to do that.
And I think the fact that it's so easy to do that is a really scary moment for us in the information ecosystem.
I mean, that's a frightening thing to be operating in from my vantage point.
And it's a testament to just how many news organizations are doing this.
I mean, you know, you think about what media outlets are really making their audience uncomfortable on a regular basis, and there's very few of them.
I mean, I like to believe that we're doing that at Tangle, but I think there's really, really, truly very few of them, and that doesn't seem healthy to me.
Well, and there's theory behind this, too.
I don't know how familiar you are with Andre Meir's work, and his idea in this sort of Marshall McLuhan, you know, the media is the message form.
He believes, and he's actually convinced me of this, that just kind of the way that technology has developed around the media is inherently siloing through social media and so forth, and that the business of media today largely...
Is serving people things that they already agree, that validate them sometimes.
And the more you can excite them about that, the more they'll pay.
And there's a lot of truth to that.
And I think the business models have gravitated towards that, just as you suggested.
This is obviously a real big issue for someone like the Epoch Times or Tangle, where we're really trying to reach people, I think, who don't already agree with certain viewpoints, right?
I mean, it's a foundational issue, because even your marketing team...
Right?
We're both subscription-based.
Your marketing team is saying, "Hey, I want to do what works." Right?
I want to do what works.
And what works is what we just said.
But you're like, "Ah, but that doesn't really fit with what we want to be doing." So how do we deal with that?
I think this is something we need to solve, actually.
I don't know the answer to that question.
Yeah, it's really difficult.
I mean, you know, the sort of media parlance for it is the audience capture, right?
You give your audience something, and then you see that they really like it, and now you want to serve your audience that thing over and over and over again.
I remember during the first Trump presidency, I had a lot of friends and family who were just I'm enraged by the dominance that he had over the media.
They would say to me, I go to the Washington Post, or even the conservative people, I go to Fox News, whatever, and it's just Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump.
Everything on the homepage is just Trump.
It's all stories about him.
And I want to read about other things.
Why do you, the media, why do you guys do this?
And, you know, the response that I always had is, you know, if you go to the homepage of The New York Times or The Washington Post or Fox News, whatever, and there's a story about, you know, Melania Trump and Donald Trump having some marital issues on the homepage next to a story about Republicans passing a new health care bill in the House, which story do you click?
I mean, really, how do you vote with your dollars when you're operating in those media ecosystems?
And when they're honest with themselves, they all admit that they clicked the Trump story, and that's the first thing that they read.
And media organizations see that.
And so if you're Fox News or The Washington Post or New York Times or Wall Street Journal, and you're seeing, oh, God, our readers are devouring Trump stuff, and you're an assignment editor.
It's a no-brainer.
You're the marketing team.
You're on the business side, and you have any kind of pressure you can apply to the editorial side.
It's a no-brainer.
It's like, they want Trump.
Give them more Trump.
That's going to get us the ratings.
It's going to get us the clicks.
And it's a really, really hard thing to sort of wiggle out of, I think.
For us at Tangle, the solution has been we tell people up front what we're selling, and what we're selling is We're going to take you out of the little nice cozy bubble you've been in and you're going to be made uncomfortable by the news that we're publishing because we're going to expose you to arguments from people across the political spectrum and you're going to hate some of what you read and if we're doing our jobs right, some of what you read will feel really representative of the worldview that you share.
You will sort of experience the rollercoaster of emotions you might if you were flipping between Fox News and MSNBC rather than just sitting...
And stewing in one of them and taking all the stuff that you want and being fed all the stuff that you want from these news organizations.
That's been helpful for us.
I mean, we're saying, like, this is how we're different.
That's sort of the brand that we're selling.
But I think if you're there already and you're entrenched in it, it's really, really hard to get out of.
I mean, I don't have a great answer for a more established media organization either.
It's a difficult place to be.
Isaac, just one quick sec.
We're going to take a break, and folks, we'll be right back.
And we're back with Isaac Saul, founder of Tangle News.
The thing I like most in the Tangle newsletters is the Sunday funnies, or at least that's what I call them in my mind.
It's very cool.
You know, you show on often the same topic what the left is...
Doodling and what the right is doodling.
Very, very kind of valuable.
I was going to say column, but, you know, I believe that's at the top of the newsletter every Sunday.
I look forward to that.
Tell me a little bit about how you cook this all up and your background.
Actually, you have a very interesting background when it comes to journalism.
Yeah, sure.
I mean, my sort of genesis story, I like to say, is kind of two-part.
The first is that I grew up in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, so Swing County in the most important Swing State, and it has been And so, you know, growing up somewhere where there's a lot of class divisions and a lot of political divisions, I just have friends and family from all across the political spectrum.
And so I...
You know, I socially just empathize with people from a wide range of political backgrounds.
And I see my friends or my mom or my uncle or my old teacher in all these different political actors who, you know, you encounter in the day to day news.
I hear them and I see them and I empathize with them.
So I'm open minded about, you know, the state of the country and the two dominant political tribes.
And then I, you know, left Bucks County to go work in the media space, and the first job I ever got was at the Huffington Post, which I'm sure most of your audience knows is a very liberal left-leaning paper.
And I did not go work at the Huffington Post because I was a bleeding-heart liberal whose dream was to work at the Huffington Post.
I worked there because I was a journalism, nonfiction writing major who applied to 40 jobs, and I got one job, and it was at the Huffington Post.
And it was a crash course in how that kind of purposefully slanted media is produced and pushed out the door.
And Huffington Post, you know...
To their credit, they have some really great, talented reporters there.
They focus their ire and their lens on very specific things.
You know, the ills of the Republican Party mostly.
They focus on people who are of ours next to their name doing bad things.
That's the beat if you're at Huffington Post.
But I got to see sort of how that sausage was made there.
And then, you know, after Huffington Post, I worked for Independent Journal Review.
Before you continue, explain to me, tell me a little more about how the sausage is made.
And we'll talk more about that further.
But, like, what do you mean when you say that?
What was that?
Yeah, sure.
I mean, first of all, like, if you're a younger staff reporter like I was, my job...
Actually, at the Huffington Post, I was kind of on the viral trends team initially, which meant we had to drive traffic to the website.
What year is this approximately?
2013, 2014, yeah.
So in the peak era of clickbait on Facebook and kind of the BuzzFeed domination and that sort of thing before Facebook turned the knob.
And yeah, being on the viral trends team, it's like your success was measured in traffic.
That's the job.
Drive people to the website, and then hopefully once they get to the website, they'll click around.
We have advertisements all across the site, and so that's how we drive revenue.
So sometimes the really simple and obvious thing is how do you make a headline clicky?
How do you have the curiosity gap in a story that makes people want to click into it?
And that was a big part of my early training.
It was almost irrelevant what the content of the story was.
It was like we just need to get people onto the page and into the website.
What's this going to look like when it's shared on Facebook?
That sort of thing.
And I started to see when I was writing political pieces the way certain edits were suggested or how the headline was framed.
If I wanted to write a story that was...
Really critical of Hillary Clinton sort of in a vacuum, there would be suggestions to, like, okay, well, let's explore why Bernie Sanders is a better candidate.
Maybe we can make this, you know, use this paragraph to compare Hillary to Bernie and sort of do it in a way that puts him in a more positive light.
And I saw a similar thing at different news outlets that I worked with.
You said you went to the Independent Journal Review after that.
Yeah, and I worked there, and I saw the Mirror thing.
I mean, a magazine that was sort of going online that has a very explicit conservative slant.
And I would submit a story, and the ask from editors would be about...
You know, seeking out a different quote or, you know, can you dig into this statistic a little more?
Add this stat to balance the piece in a way that, to me, looked clearly favorable to the right.
Or you see the way the headlines are changed or whatever it is.
Or, you know, you tell your editor, I'm having trouble getting a hold of XYZ.
Can we talk to an expert about, you know, the impact of...
Immigration on the economy.
And the expert that they have is from AEI or Heritage Foundation.
It's not from, you know, the Brennan Center for Justice or whatever it is.
So you just see how these forces kind of happen in this space.
And I think for me, it just like really opened my eyes to the way all this stuff is being crafted kind of behind the scenes, both explicitly and intentionally, and also the stuff that, you know, these newsrooms can't help.
I mean, if...
You are a journalist or an editor who has no relationships in the conservative movement.
It's so much easier to get a quote from a sitting Democrat than it is from a sitting Republican.
You can do it in less time.
And so you just go do that because it's easier and you're on a deadline and you have to get your story published.
But that comes out in the paper as a kind of bias that I think matters and changes the actual thrust of the story and the impact of it.
You saw all this happening.
I mean, tell me, you had the dream to have a kind of a nonpartisan space, but probably you were wondering how that business would work.
I mean, tell me what was on your mind, how this came about.
Yeah, so I mean, the true story is that I...
I was working at a company called A +, which was the last job that I had before I started Tangle.
We were kind of like a solutions journalism, sort of a sort of anti-mainstream media outlet in a different way.
We were trying to focus on the people fixing things rather than the people breaking things.
That was kind of our shtick.
That was what we were putting out into the world was like, you know, the news is obsessed with all the corrupt politicians.
Who are the people doing good?
Who are the people finding solutions to big problems?
Let's write stories about them.
And that has sort of run its course.
The business wasn't doing great.
I was applying for a bunch of jobs.
And I had like seven final interviews at places like the Washington Post or Business Insider, you know, big news outlets that a lot of people know.
And I didn't get any of the jobs.
And I was really frustrated and, you know, kind of down and out and beat up and was like, this industry's tough.
And I knew I was good at what I did.
I knew I was a good writer and a good reporter.
And I'd always had this kind of idea for like a big tent media organization, a place for the people from home where like my friends and family from home could all read the same thing and actually meet and have like a shared set of facts.
And also share like a wide range of arguments where they're being exposed to views from the left and exposed to views from the right.
And I wanted that big tent media organization to exist somewhere.
And so I kind of came up with a formula, which I think is our special sauce, a format for the newsletter, which is what if we just explain the story in the most neutral language possible, which, by the way, is the hardest part.
The introduction is the hardest part of the story to write because you have to do it in a way that's So, so balanced and so even-handed with neutral language that you're not going to offend the sensibilities of, you know, either the left or the right tribe in our country.
And then just explicitly say, here are three arguments from people on the left and here are three arguments from people on the right.
And that was the concept.
I'm going to just show you the best arguments I can find, the most compelling, convincing arguments I can find from conservatives and from liberals about this divisive topic, and you can sort of make up your mind.
And I sent this newsletter out to a bunch of friends and family and former colleagues and, you know, a kind of beta version of it.
And the number one response I got from people was like, well, what do you think?
There's no conclusion to this.
I'm so curious.
There's this big story about...
You know, a bill in Congress.
You're a politics reporter.
You have moderate, centrist-seeming politics.
Like, where do you land?
I'd be curious to hear your analysis, calls and balls and strikes.
So I started writing this sort of mini column in the newsletter that comes last that's just called the My Take section, where I give my personal perspective.
And it's not meant to be authoritative.
It's often written with a lot of humility.
I'll say, I don't know the answer here.
I feel torn about this issue.
I might be wrong, whatever it is.
But I think it's an act of transparency.
It's like, I'm the guy delivering this news to you, so I'm going to be radically honest about where I personally stack up, where I land, and I'm going to just tell you.
And you can take that as part of the full picture on the news you're digesting.
It's like, here are the biases and the worldviews of the person providing the news.
And I'm not going to try and inject that bias into the introduction, into the facts of the story.
I'm going to contain it in this really...
You know, isolated space that says, my take, my opinion, this is explicitly my view.
You can take it or leave it.
And it gives me space to sort of have some personality in my writing.
I think it makes the newsletter a little bit more interesting.
It gives people something to attack or to say that they really like.
Most of the responses we get are often to the my take section, like the criticisms and the support.
And it worked.
People seemed to think it was a really interesting format, and they felt like they were, you know, Getting a much better, more holistic view on the news.
The number one piece of feedback we get from people on the right and the left is I feel like I'm going less insane when I read your newsletter.
Like I just have a better understanding of what the other side thinks, the people I perceive as my enemies, and it makes it easier to kind of see where they're coming from.
And I think the reason for that is because Both sides are guilty of this thing.
It's like elevating the radicals of the other side and making them appear as if they are representative of the whole.
There's a reason in our political dichotomy that every conservative and liberal can tell you about Marjorie Taylor Greene and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
And it's because they're a little bit more on the fringe of their party.
Maybe they have some views that are outside the mainstream, outside the norm.
And it's because the left takes Marjorie Taylor Greene, and they'll find the worst thing she's ever said, and her lowest moments as a human being, and they will say, this person is representative of the current Republican Party.
And the right will take Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and isolate the dumbest thing she's ever said in an interview, and they'll say, this person is representative of the Democratic Party.
They have a hard time telling you who, you know, Representative Jake Auchincloss is, who's like a moderate Democrat from Massachusetts, who I think is more representative of the mainstream Democratic Party than Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
You know, there are a lot of conservatives out there who are like brilliant economists and thinkers who are standing up behind Trump's tariffs right now.
Nobody on the left can tell you who they are.
You know, they are just obsessed with Peter Navarro and, you know, maybe something a little, some silly or outlandish he said on cable television yesterday, because that's what the left is feeding them.
And we try and bring forward the people who are making really compelling arguments, who are sort of, at least some of our newsletter is representing the best of the left and the best of the right.
And I think that changes the way people feel about the country in a positive way.
Well, Isaac Saul, it's such a pleasure to have had you on.
Thanks for having me.
Thank you all for joining Isaac Saul and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders.
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