#894: Chatting With Brian Stelter
In this installment, Jordan sits down with Brian Stelter for a chat about his book Network Of Lies, what it's like to get drunk dialed by Alex Jones, and much more.
Jan. 31, 2024 - Knowledge Fight
01:31:21
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
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unidentified
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I'm sick of them posing as if they're the good guys, saying we are the bad guys. | |
| Knowledge fight. | ||
| Dan and Jordan, knowledge. | ||
| I love you. | ||
| Hello, everyone. | ||
| Welcome back to Knowledge Fight. | ||
| Today, it's just me without my co-host, Dan. | ||
| However, I am joined by the man himself, Brian Stelter! | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, that's the only way I can say it on mic now. | ||
| Brian, thank you so much for joining me today. | ||
| How are you? | ||
| I'm okay. | ||
| I'm a little nervous, but I respect what y 'all do, so bring it on. | ||
| A little nervous. | ||
| It is funny for me to hear somebody who was on TV for a decade being nervous about talking to a clown with a radio show that can only be found on the internet. | ||
| Well, to be fair, I did have you on TV once, I believe. | ||
| True. | ||
| Didn't we do a little TV together? | ||
| We did. | ||
| This is the first time I'm actually seeing your face live. | ||
| To give a little behind-the-scenes to people, we were taken to a very small room in downtown Chicago, and we looked at a camera hole, and that was our whole experience. | ||
| So it's fascinating. | ||
| Your face is real. | ||
| TV is weird. | ||
| TV is weird in a lot of different ways for a lot of different reasons. | ||
| But, you know, you all have exposed and revealed Alex Jones in a way nobody else has. | ||
| I think I've learned a lot from listening to your podcast. | ||
| For example, the episode where you all broke down the... | ||
| I don't know why I'm saying y 'all so much. | ||
| What's wrong with me today? | ||
| It's part of the game. | ||
| This is a great place to say it. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| You can also say fuck, too. | ||
| I don't know if those two are the same. | ||
| I think it'll probably come up. | ||
| The episode where you all took apart Tucker Carlson's interview, it wasn't an interview, Tucker Carlson's, you know... | ||
| Spawning... | ||
| Yeah, what he described with Alex Jones. | ||
| I couldn't bear to listen to the actual conversation between the two of them, but I was able to experience it through you all, so thank you. | ||
| It is one of the only ways that I can stomach it. | ||
| I couldn't possibly, you know... | ||
| The greatest of gifts that Dan perhaps has is his ability to endure torture beyond what anyone I think I've ever experienced can do. | ||
| So yeah, that's the first thing that we want to talk about, I suppose, is that in Infowars world, you are a demon. | ||
| You have all kinds of crimes under your belt. | ||
| Ranging from the sex criminal type to, I believe, I believe you've eaten a baby in the past. | ||
| Something along those lines. | ||
| Yeah, I don't even know. | ||
| I don't even, I can't even keep up with all the things he's accused me of. | ||
|
unidentified
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That's my question. | |
| What's your favorite thing that you've not done? | ||
| Okay, so I'm gonna have to admit, I don't follow Alex Jones's rants about me that closely. | ||
| So I hate to disappoint. | ||
| I rely on you to tell me what he has said. | ||
| There was one, though, the very famous one, the one where he accuses me of drinking children's blood and running the banks, which you all have dined out on in the past, which Tucker Carlson recently celebrated on his web show. | ||
| Yes, yeah. | ||
| I will tell you, that was actually the one night during the Trump administration that my wife was worried about my line of work and was fearful about our livelihood and our life. | ||
| We were living in the city. | ||
| We were about to have our first child. | ||
| And she watches this insane, unhinged rant with my smiley face plastered up on the screen. | ||
| And I found it rather amusing. | ||
| I was trying to laugh about it. | ||
| And she was freaked out. | ||
| And rightfully. | ||
| And I totally understand why. | ||
| Because little Pepe the Frog logos started getting sent to us in the mail. | ||
| And the interesting thing about that is, like, there was no message attached, right? | ||
| There was no, like, threat or anything. | ||
| It was just their way of saying, we know where you live. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And which I find to be a really interesting tactic. | ||
| So that was the one, like, all the other stuff that happened, the bomb at CNN, you know, the death threats, the time that Trump tweeted about me, like, none of that really spooked my family. | ||
| But it was Alex Jones and the drink children's blood. | ||
| So I've got it. | ||
| I mean, how can I can't top that one? | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| Genuine fight or flight response tends to... | ||
| Totally. | ||
| And, you know, what do you do? | ||
| Well, that's my question to you. | ||
| They don't fucking talk to us at all. | ||
| No one recognizes. | ||
| I want to be threatened. | ||
| No one is threatened by life once. | ||
| It's terrifying. | ||
| So what is it like? | ||
| You don't want this. | ||
| You don't want to be called his enemy. | ||
| Nine times out of ten, I think this is just online chaos. | ||
| Most of the time, almost all of the time, it is just this reality distortion field that only exists on people's computers and screens. | ||
| Every so often, as Oliver Darcy experienced, something else that you all have covered, you know, Alex will show up in person and confront you on camera in your face. | ||
| And so every so often the real world like breaks through. | ||
| It's like the Internet world breaks through into the real world. | ||
| And you never know when it's going to happen or if it's going to happen. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, it is kind of fascinating because there is so much of that online harassment that's a joke. | ||
| It's nothing. | ||
| And you shouldn't worry about it. | ||
| And the more time you focus on it, the more it's going to drive you insane. | ||
| And it's nothing. | ||
| Until it is that one time. | ||
| And you didn't see it coming and you don't know who it is. | ||
| So you should be worried all the time. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| And I'm not blaming Alice Jones for this, but I went to the flower shop one day. | ||
| In a town near me. | ||
| And this guy starts growling at me. | ||
| Hey, fuck CNN. | ||
| This was back when I started to CNN. | ||
| Fuck CNN. | ||
| And I couldn't tell if he worked there or if he was a customer. | ||
| So I decided to leave. | ||
| I just took myself out of the situation. | ||
| And, you know, let me say, knock on wood, that's very rare. | ||
| This stuff doesn't happen every day or every month. | ||
| No, not at all. | ||
| But every once in a while, you know. | ||
| And I do think there are women in this media industry who will tell you it's much uglier for them. | ||
| Let me check my privilege as we talk about this, you know, that the Alex Jones stuff doesn't affect me very often and is not in my face very often. | ||
| But yeah, every once in a while. | ||
| And then, of course, he called up recently, and we can talk about that. | ||
| Well, yeah, we're going to get to that in a second. | ||
| Can I tell you a bigger picture, though? | ||
| Can I tell you a bigger picture? | ||
| What was he doing in that rant seven years ago? | ||
| He was saying, you're my enemy! | ||
| You're my enemy! | ||
| I see you! | ||
| I'm not going to fake it much. | ||
|
unidentified
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Sure, sure, sure. | |
| You are my enemy! | ||
| There it is. | ||
| There's something really deep, and there's a deep despair to that, right? | ||
| He is a character who has to create other characters in order to mock, destroy, ridicule, whatever he does to them, right? | ||
| But I think what I learned in the Trump years as an anchor at CNN was that, Brian, they're not talking about you. | ||
| They're talking about a cartoon character villain they've created. | ||
| With your name and your face. | ||
| And I don't just mean that about Alex. | ||
| I mean, about Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, you know, these guys will come up with nicknames and fat jokes and stuff and ridicule. | ||
| And I had to kind of accept that layer of removal from it because... | ||
| There was one night, and I don't mean to sound like the victim here or whatever, but we're talking about this weird life of being in the public square and having these... | ||
| I feel like people send Nazi signals to your house that's victimizing. | ||
| I feel like you can just say, I'm a victim of being Nazi attacked. | ||
| It was weird. | ||
| Yeah, that counts. | ||
| There was a night I was flying to LA. | ||
| I was on a late night flight, and it was a coast-to-coast flight, and I wanted to get up to the bathroom, and I'm walking up to the bathroom, and I see on Fox News... | ||
| All the people in the rows in front of me are watching Fox, and there's a segment bashing me as I'm walking up the aisle. | ||
| That's insane. | ||
| It was Tucker's show, I'm pretty sure, but it might have been Sean's, because that night, Tucker, Sean, and Laura all did segments where they ridiculed or attacked or whatever. | ||
| I can't remember what I did wrong that day or what I did right that day. | ||
| Three hours in a row, Brian Seltzer was one of the villains. | ||
| And I remember, like, being nervous about walking back from the bathroom, right? | ||
| Like, I hope none of these passengers recognize me, right? | ||
| Yeah, this isn't the internet. | ||
| This is fucking TV. | ||
| Yeah, and some of them are probably Democrats who just hate watching Fox, and that's cool. | ||
| But, you know, it was... | ||
| And I actually, that was like one of the... | ||
| So I mentioned the one night that it bothered my wife. | ||
| This... | ||
| Plane ride was the one night that it ever really got to me. | ||
| And I mentioned it to my boss, Jeff Zucker. | ||
| I mentioned it in an email. | ||
| We were emailing about something else. | ||
| And I said, like, this actually kind of sucks. | ||
| This is weird. | ||
| I don't like this feeling. | ||
| And he said, this is not hard, Brian. | ||
| What's really hard is cancer. | ||
| I mean, I'm paraphrasing, but I appreciated the reality. | ||
| No, I needed the reality check. | ||
| I needed to remember. | ||
| I'm with you, but also. | ||
| It was just. | ||
| It was TV. | ||
| Well, agree or disagree. | ||
| I liked it as a gut check. | ||
| Sure, sure, I understand. | ||
| But it's definitely an out-of-body experience. | ||
| When you're on a plane, everywhere around you, the people are watching this trash, these lies about you. | ||
| It is an out-of-body experience for sure. | ||
| What I find fascinating so much about that is that your story just now... | ||
| Of being in the clothing store is identical to an Alex lie. | ||
| You know, Alex tells that type of story all the time. | ||
|
unidentified
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I was walking down the street and then there was this person and I tell you, liberals, they're just demons. | |
| They just go... | ||
| They just look at me in the eyes and go... | ||
| And you're literally walking into a store and someone growls at you. | ||
| Yeah, and the difference for me is that's like the only time it's ever happened, right? | ||
| You know, I can count on my fingers. | ||
| You can admit that it's a real experience. | ||
| That's why it's interesting. | ||
| Like, most of the time, if I get recognized by a big MAGA person, we have a funny conversation. | ||
| Like, it's usually amusing, not scary, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But for Alex Jones, it has to all be demonic. | ||
| It has to all be, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| No, because when we describe it as the internet or their world catching up to us or breaking into the real world, I think that is an example of you getting sucked into a fantasy world. | ||
| You have suddenly walked into a LARP that you had no idea even existed. | ||
| Right, that's right. | ||
| And I find that so fascinating. | ||
| I had to realize early, like, again, this is in the Trump years, and this was my education about this, and now we're kind of still in the Trump years, that... | ||
| We'll die in the Trump years. | ||
| Don't worry about that. | ||
| The afternoon that Trump randomly tweeted about me, and I didn't hear from a single friend of mine. | ||
| I didn't have a single family member call me. | ||
| I'm not that much of a... | ||
| I have friends. | ||
| I'm a social person. | ||
| It's just that nobody in my world, in my reality, cared what Donald Trump was tweeting. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Like, it was so removed from their daily existence. | ||
| Why would they care that the president's calling this reporter a lapdog? | ||
| Sure, sure. | ||
| And then, so you go on Twitter and you look at the replies and there's thousands of trolls, you know, or whatever they are, just eating it up and having fun and going hog wild. | ||
| But out in my sphere, it was like it never happened. | ||
| And I'm really grateful for that perspective, to have that perspective. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because I think otherwise it would probably get to me more than it does. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's fascinating. | ||
| You could make the case, though. | ||
| You can make the case, Jordan, that I don't take it seriously enough. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Well, I mean, all right. | ||
| So imagine you're, let's call it a straight white guy in 1792 or so, right? | ||
| Thomas Jefferson's talking shit about you. | ||
| As you're a newspaper writer. | ||
| Can you imagine? | ||
| So you're in the media, right? | ||
| And the president of the United States is talking shit about you. | ||
| But really, one thing we don't think about is that nobody had any fucking clue. | ||
| It was only like 30 guys who were allowed to even participate in reading about this shit. | ||
| You know? | ||
| So it's an interesting kind of reflection of that in the present tense. | ||
| Except everybody... | ||
| Halfway knows about it. | ||
| It's very strange. | ||
| Yes, and so it becomes like a background music to one's existence in a way that I find unsettling. | ||
| Sometimes you realize, what's the saying about... | ||
| Now I'm blanking on it. | ||
| It's so embarrassing on a podcast. | ||
| Like, oh, I'm taking up space in your head. | ||
| First time for everything. | ||
| No, living rent-free. | ||
| Living rent-free in one's head. | ||
| So I get the sense, I might be wrong about this, that Alex, for example, might care more about me than I care about him. | ||
| Right? | ||
| So not only do we come at it from different angles, I come at this as a reporter interested in him as a story, a subject, a character, a danger. | ||
| He comes toward me as using me as a villain, thinking that I'm part of this evil global conspiracy. | ||
| Oh, we should talk about Davos. | ||
| I think he came after me when I went to Davos last year, too. | ||
| And I got all the facts wrong, of course. | ||
| So not only do we come at it from different angles, but I also am not as interested in him. | ||
| The night that he drunk dials me and, you know, I guess Prank calls me and then goes on Tucker's show and talks about it. | ||
| And it becomes like, they, like, used it to promote their show. | ||
| Like, they used it, like, to promote his comeback. | ||
| As if, like, wow, he burns up. | ||
| And I'm like, who? | ||
| I didn't even bother. | ||
| You know, it's just interesting the difference between, like, yeah. | ||
| I guess in my head, he's just a supporting actor, right? | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| And in his head, I'm, like, one of his stars. | ||
| Aw. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That's interesting, because I also think that you have the same perspective, in a sense, because Alex Jones isn't real to you, you know? | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| Alex Jones is a character in the same way that you're not real to Alex. | ||
| You're a character. | ||
| And I kind of find that to be a strange place, and one I want you to kind of see if there's a different experience for, because we're not characters. | ||
| We're completely separate. | ||
| We're in the crowd. | ||
| We're henchmen, essentially. | ||
| There's no respect. | ||
| There's no character building between the two of us. | ||
| But that's not because he's scared of you. | ||
| If I were him, I would never want to mention Knowledge Fight because it actually undermines what I do. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| It takes apart the entire business and brand of everything. | ||
| I think that would be how it would go for a normal human being and stuff. | ||
| I think it genuinely, I think we just make him feel bad. | ||
| I feel like he can't find a way to make himself feel good about what he does if he listens to our show so he doesn't tell people about it. | ||
| For you, whenever he gets pushback from you, when Stelter says, Alex Jones did an evil thing. | ||
| You know, he can be like, yes, the establishment media is coming out of me. | ||
| Right. | ||
| CNN knows what we're up to. | ||
| They're trying to take us down. | ||
| That might be a good person. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Two asshole comedians from Chicago have weirdly spent the past seven years studying me. | ||
| That sounds like I'm a creep, you know? | ||
| I don't want to feel like that. | ||
| I totally get why he doesn't talk about us. | ||
| We're stalkers. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Why would you talk about your stalker? | ||
| Makes perfect sense. | ||
| I don't think you're stalkers, but I hear you. | ||
| I take your point. | ||
| But you're 100% right. | ||
| And this is something that, you know, this was true about Trump also. | ||
| And what I think this was a no-win and is a no-win situation for mainstream media. | ||
| Fact-checking Trump only... | ||
| Fact-checking Trump does many things. | ||
| It's important to fact-check Trump. | ||
| It's not an option not to fact-check Trump. | ||
| But those fact-checks are sometimes fuel for him to say to his voters that the media doesn't like you, which is false. | ||
| But, you know. | ||
| That's the story he can tell. | ||
| And the same thing with Alex Jones. | ||
| The coverage from CNN, and this is where being a media reporter gets all sorts of wacky and convoluted because you're trying and you hope you're shining a light and exposing how the world works or doesn't work. | ||
| But in so doing, you might be raising more awareness of these individuals. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And so that kind of... | ||
| Paradox, or if that's what you want to call it, has kind of been around. | ||
| I mean, the thing about it is that it's less a paradox and more a Gordian not so much as like, oh, well, the mainstream media can't exist in the form it does. | ||
| Like, it just has to go. | ||
| Right, there is no, yeah. | ||
| There's no way to have a... | ||
| A billionaire owned the Washington Post and then have, just by virtue of a billionaire owning it. | ||
| It doesn't even matter if he touches it. | ||
| What matters is that he owns it, you know? | ||
| And that can never be undone. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| What's the insinuation? | ||
| Well, the insinuation is that no matter what happens, it's just a business. | ||
| So... | ||
| The business is what will be sold or dismantled. | ||
| It doesn't matter how good the work you do is, which is fantastic. | ||
| Tons of people are fantastic. | ||
| And I don't think that they are in there making editorial decisions for people. | ||
| That's not the case at all. | ||
| It's simply that if you can destroy something, then there will always be the inherent fear of being destroyed by that person. | ||
| And that is just something that you carry with you, whether you can acknowledge it or not, because it is always there. | ||
| How many people have been laid off in media in the past 30 days? | ||
| You know? | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| And there's always going to be that threat. | ||
| And the more everybody in the media hears about that threat, the more it's going to be a, you know, we're going to keep my job somehow. | ||
| It's just part of the game. | ||
| Which is how we get to Fox News. | ||
| A network of lies, which, for the people who can see this on the video, you have the cover directly behind you. | ||
| It's a very delightful cover. | ||
| Yeah, there we go. | ||
| There's another one. | ||
| And in it, you start with, I suppose, was it the triple C's? | ||
| The three forms of accountability, which are civil... | ||
| Criminal and then canceling, I believe, was the third one, right? | ||
| And Tyra Carlson was literally canceled. | ||
| It was not cancel culture, right? | ||
| It was cancel a show, but yes. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| So I want to talk about how effective those are in your estimation of the Fox News kind of verdict. | ||
| Like, is anything, has anyone really been held accountable? | ||
| Is anything going to change at the network? | ||
| In real focus. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Well, Fox News is not going to magically turn into a mainstream news network. | ||
| No, that's not going to happen. | ||
| Fox is always going to be more anti-Democrat than it is anything else. | ||
| I view it as... | ||
| Even more than a right-wing or pro-Republican channel, it's an anti-Democrat machine. | ||
| It exists to try to defeat the left, whatever it thinks the left is. | ||
| And that's not going to change as well as all these lawsuits. | ||
| But around the edges, yes, they have had to make changes. | ||
| And the amount of money they had to pay Dominion is extraordinary, even for a publicly traded big company like Fox Corporation. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| They're in about a billion dollars. | ||
| They are approaching a billion dollars total in settlements as a result of Trump's election lies. | ||
| And Smartmatic is still suing their shareholder lawsuits. | ||
| So the financial toll is enough to be actual accountability. | ||
| It actually is a form of accountability. | ||
| But whether that causes changes, this becomes the question. | ||
| I think that's kind of the question, isn't it? | ||
| What is accountability if it doesn't? | ||
| I mean, let's fast forward to November of 2024. | ||
| Donald Trump has lost the... | ||
| I was like, wait, where are we in the book? | ||
| He has lost, let's say he's lost again to Biden. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Let's say it was close, but clear that he lost, and he starts lying about it again. | ||
| Let's say that he encourages his supporters to protest, to have a wild event the way he said January 6th would be. | ||
| What does Fox do in that scenario? | ||
| And I think the answer to that hypothetical is Fox does not... | ||
| Defame specific voting companies. | ||
| If you're booked on Fox in November of 2024, if Donald Trump loses again, if you start saying, Dominion did it, you're going to be cut off. | ||
| You're not going to be booked again. | ||
| So in that very narrow sense, something will have changed. | ||
| There will be specific companies that you're not allowed to defame on Fox in 2024. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| It might not be very satisfying to your listeners. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Now, I do think around the edges also, there might be a little more news and maybe a little bit less propaganda because there's going to be this increased attention on how does Fox play it? | ||
| How does Fox handle it? | ||
| Right. | ||
| And so in the scenario I just described, if Trump loses again, Fox will be torn once again between Trump and the truth. | ||
| Same problem they had in 2020. | ||
| Same problem they had basically every day. | ||
| Trump or the truth. | ||
| Trump or the truth. | ||
| And they try to side with Trump, but it gets them into financial and legal trouble and costs them a lot of money. | ||
| So, you know, we're going to see a version of this play out again this year, I guess, is the answer. | ||
| Right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I suppose the interesting question there is, you know, based upon the book, going through all of the internal communications and all of that stuff that you've put together, I'm wondering... | |
| Like, what is the difference there in terms of being a functional mouthpiece for fascism? | ||
| So I'm not there on the F-word yet. | ||
| Tell me why I should be. | ||
| Or tell me where I should be. | ||
| Well... | ||
| If you are part of the laundering chain, and that doesn't mean, you know, like, first off, we've got Tucker on there. | ||
| So Tucker is gone, definitively. | ||
| But my question is, if Trump wins election, how fast does Tucker come back to Fox News? | ||
| That I don't see. | ||
| Well, that's the fascism question. | ||
| That's where we are running into that. | ||
| That's kind of an interesting discussion there. | ||
| So, if Tucker is literally saying that immigrants are bugs, how is that not in the fascism conversation? | ||
| Once you dehumanize immigrants, an entire population, that's fascism conversation, right? | ||
| At the very least. | ||
| Well, and certainly Trump has engaged in that for years. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| It's disturbing to me how he got up there before the Iowa caucus and said, this chance, you in Iowa, it's the ultimate chance for you to declare victory. | ||
| Over the perverts and the Democrats. | ||
| He starts naming all these groups that he considers not real Americans. | ||
| And it was a very explicit dehumanization call. | ||
| And everyone was like, yeah, it's Saturday. | ||
| And I'm thinking, no, this is not just Saturday. | ||
| This is a big deal still. | ||
| And I feel for the folks, and I'm sure many of your listeners feel this way, where you want the media collectively to somehow take Trump more seriously. | ||
| Something along those lines. | ||
| And yet, you know, we're in an environment where individual journalists will impress, but institutions will disappoint. | ||
| The collectors will disappoint. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And that's for all sorts of reasons, and many of them are boring and mundane. | ||
| I would say the most dangerous ones are the boring and mundane ones, where it's like, there's no heroic way to solve this. | ||
| That you need 300 bureaucrats who all decide, like, we're going to do this the right way, I guess, this time. | ||
| You know? | ||
| It's a lot harder than somebody coming in like Trump with a sword saying, I have fixed the mainstream media. | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| Right. | ||
| The thing I think about Fox as it relates to all this is that Lachlan Murdoch, his father, his father, Rupert, the shareholders, What they care about most is the profit and the bottom line of Fox and keeping Fox as a strong business going forward. | ||
| So to the extent that they can align with Trump, but not be accused of defamation, not be found liable, not be accused of helping set a riot. | ||
| They want their hands clean while profiting from Trump and Trumpism. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| And that's a difficult thing. | ||
| But firing Tara Carlson, I think, was Lachlan... | ||
| One might even say impossible. | ||
| One might even say something that they would have to lie a great deal about in order to pretend to pull off. | ||
| I think, you know, you're on to something. | ||
| But Tara Carlson's firing was Lachlan Murdoch's way of trying to make his network seem a little more center-right. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| As opposed to far right. | ||
| Now, we can dismantle all of that and we can say that's all bullshit. | ||
| But in his head, at least, and in his boards, in the minds of his board members, they were taking Fox, which was with Tucker, even further out toward that Alex Jones conspiracy world and dragging it a little bit back closer to a shared reality. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| And, you know, that's not nothing, even though it's far from what... | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| I'm not saying that it's not nothing. | ||
| That's absolutely not my point. | ||
| My point is that they are doing this as a Tucker right now, right? | ||
| We are civilly on the hook for billions of dollars, so we get rid of Tucker. | ||
| We pull it back to kind of create more of a shared reality. | ||
| The idea being because there's a greater amount of scrutiny, right? | ||
| What happens when that scrutiny stops for a second? | ||
| If Tucker is back, did they change anything or were they just waiting it out? | ||
| And if they're waiting it out, what are we doing? | ||
| I don't see any world where he comes back. | ||
| You don't seem to believe. | ||
| You think he's coming back. | ||
| I don't see that world. | ||
| I think they've shown, once again, they don't need any individual star. | ||
| That they're just as well off with Jesse Waters at 8pm and they don't need Tucker. | ||
| And they wouldn't have him return. | ||
| But I guess crazier things have happened. | ||
| Well, I mean, that's kind of the situation. | ||
| Well, one, with Tucker, Lord knows the man's been killed in the media, what, five times now. | ||
| You can't get rid of him. | ||
| He just keeps coming back. | ||
| He just keeps coming back. | ||
| That's problem number one. | ||
| But, I mean, problem number two is just a little bit of, if Trump is re-elected... | ||
| As you've described, you know, the business sense in one way is pull it back from the center to the center right. | ||
| And if Trump is reelected, is the business go farther right? | ||
| And if the businesses go farther right, why not? | ||
| Yeah, it just makes me want to ask the question, what is farther right in that scenario? | ||
| You know, I think that's a good question, too. | ||
| I think that is a really good question. | ||
| What is pulling it back to the center right? | ||
| What exactly are we discussing in terms of what people are saying? | ||
| Is it a matter of degree of language or is it a matter of substance? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| And so much of what's broken relates to the Republican Party that acts more like a media operation than a law-making operation, than a legislative operation. | ||
| You know, we hear so little, other than around immigration, with Trump trying to torpedo this border deal, we hear so little about policy out of the far right, but really from the right. | ||
| It's become so much more of a television production arm than operation. | ||
| And so that's part of what makes it hard to hash this out and forecast what it would be. | ||
| I think there is a world in which, like, so to me, if you look at Fox Corporation, Lachlan Murdoch, Rupert, Paul Ryan, who's on the board, the other board members. | ||
| These are still, maybe not Lachlan, but these are still mostly country club Republicans. | ||
| These are still mostly tax cut Republicans. | ||
| And, you know, they make all sorts of compromises, you know, to try to appeal to a more populist crowd, to try to appeal to an anti-immigration crowd. | ||
| But, you know, that's who is at... | ||
| On top of Fox. | ||
| And I think that's important and relevant when we talk about how would they approach and how would they handle Trump. | ||
| I guess I hadn't thought a lot about what a second term of Trump means for Fox News yet. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| But that's because it's very hard for me to see him being reelected, to be honest. | ||
| Really? | ||
| That's bananas! | ||
| That is truly bananas. | ||
| See, that's the other thing that I wanted to talk about. | ||
| You and Alex are... | ||
| Let me put it this way. | ||
| Your world is closer to Alex's than it is to mine, if that makes sense to you. | ||
| How so? | ||
| Like being in the media, being on TV, being a character not just in the story of what's going on, but outside. | ||
| You're a main character, in essence. | ||
| And so is Alex worldwide. | ||
| You're a main character, that kind of conversation. | ||
| And so I find it interesting because that kind of social strata, at that level, it feels like Trump is going to lose, right? | ||
| Do you have conversations regularly with people in your area that are like, okay, well, I can't believe that people would vote Trump again, right? | ||
| I would try to frame it a little differently. | ||
| Because, honestly, I don't think I've asked more than a few people what their gut says about what's going to happen in November. | ||
| It still feels hella far away. | ||
| We don't know what the environment's going to look like financially, economically, foreign policy, etc. | ||
| But we did see at Davos recently articles from the Times and Axios and others saying the conventional wisdom among the banker types was that Trump is coming back. | ||
| And I think there is a certain, there is within, I think, some elite groups that sense of Trump coming back. | ||
| With the caveat, of course, that those persons are almost always wrong out of places like Davos. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Here's, so I guess I would frame it the following way. | ||
| I look at the country in 2024 and I see a disillusioned, dissatisfied, depressed electorate, right? | ||
| People who don't like these choices, who don't want to rematch, who don't want to rerun, but are sucking it up and accepting it. | ||
| I see a political class that thinks this is all really, really important, and then... | ||
| Virtually everybody else saying, no, thanks. | ||
| We don't care. | ||
| We're shrugging it off. | ||
| I see these groups that are dedicated to defending democracy that are doing all the right things because they're absolutely right. | ||
| There are real threats. | ||
| And yet, how do you get your mother to care? | ||
| How do you get your neighbors to care? | ||
| So in an environment where it just feels like the electorate is disillusioned, dissatisfied. | ||
| With that said, I think we can also say... | ||
| Trump doesn't have half the country. | ||
| He doesn't have that many fans. | ||
| He has, what, 60% of the Republican voter electorate? | ||
| He has maybe 70% on a good day? | ||
| He has definitely, for sure, tens of millions of MAGA loyalists, but not even close to half the country. | ||
| Now, it doesn't mean he can't win, right? | ||
| Because when faced with a red or blue choice, some people who don't like Trump are going to vote red. | ||
| I understand that. | ||
| But I think it's important to recognize that he's coming No, no, no, no. | ||
| I'm listening intently. | ||
| I'll go further then. | ||
| I have very strident and very strong opinions, but I always listen to people in order to change them. | ||
| I'll go further. | ||
| Most Americans don't want an autocracy. | ||
| They don't want... | ||
| That doesn't mean they won't vote for a wannabe autocrat, right? | ||
| But most Americans don't want that. | ||
| We know that about, what, one in four Americans would prefer a strongman-style leader. | ||
| We've seen that in polling for decades. | ||
| We know there's a strain of authoritarianism in America that dates back to the founding. | ||
| There's always been a minority, but it's a minority, right? | ||
| It's not even close to 50%. | ||
| So I look at the polls, I look at the rematch, and I think a lot of people are just going to stay home. | ||
| And that means it could be a close election, and that means anything could happen. | ||
| But most people don't want to... | ||
| I guess what I find interesting is that despite... | ||
| Trump having the mega media, having Fox, having all these sources, having all these outlets, having all this incendiary rhetoric, most people still aren't buying what he's selling. | ||
| Right. | ||
| There. | ||
| Right. | ||
| No, I understand. | ||
| I understand. | ||
| What I question is that, you know, even for naming your book Network of Lies, you believe a lot of these people. | ||
| Believe them in what way? | ||
| I mean, all of the sources in Fox News, the producers, the people who were there on the ground. | ||
| You kind of have this almost blanket acceptance that they wouldn't be lying to you in a network of lies kind of off-air. | ||
| These are people who wouldn't lie to me. | ||
| On-air, they'll lie all they want. | ||
| Is that kind of the vibe that you... | ||
| That you take with you into Fox News. | ||
| Because that's the vibe I got from the book. | ||
| Yeah, no one's asked me that in that way before. | ||
| That's a really interesting question. | ||
| Why would I believe any of these sources? | ||
| Yeah, why would you believe any of these fuckers? | ||
| They're Nazis. | ||
| So first of all, again, I reject that word. | ||
| No, I understand. | ||
| I think... | ||
| I guess one of my takeaways, having covered... | ||
| I basically have blogged and covered and written about television news for 20 years now. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| Including Fox and CNN and MSNBC and all the rest. | ||
| I've been on all these networks as a guest, even Fox. | ||
| Greg Gutfeld had me on Red Eye years ago, incredibly. | ||
| Rest in peace, Red Eye. | ||
| Gutfeld! | ||
| Yeah! | ||
| He put me on the cover of his book recently. | ||
| I went to Barnes& Noble today and it was on sale with 50% off and I felt bad for him. | ||
| I feel like I've soaked in this swamp for long enough to feel like most of the incentives are the same. | ||
| Most of the people care about the same things. | ||
| Most of them are not degenerate liars. | ||
| Most of them are not wholly lacking in ethics. | ||
| Most of them want to come over to their families and make a lot of money and yada, yada, yada. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| Like, most of them exist in a way that I can... | ||
| Now, within that, there are some that are, you know, incredibly maniacal and, like, you know, author rockers and all that's true, but, like, I feel like when I sit across from an executive at Fox or an anchor or a host at Fox or a commentator on Fox, I can have a honest conversation, I guess, is the... | ||
| And maybe that's because I come from this... | ||
| What's that? | ||
| Or is that off-air or on-air? | ||
| Off-air. | ||
| You don't have the same confidence on-air. | ||
| I don't know what it would be like to be on Fox as a guest, and I don't think that opportunity is ever coming. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure, sure. | |
| You and me both, brother. | ||
| Yeah, there's no openness to... | ||
| I have been pursued by Newsmax recently, and I've been debating whether to go on Newsmax. | ||
| And so far, the reason I have not said yes is because I feel like it might be some sort of trap. | ||
| Or, you know, I don't know if I would trust the host. | ||
| There's no reason. | ||
| There's no conversation to be had. | ||
| I mean, like, that's kind of the thing. | ||
| We just covered the debate, quote-unquote, that Alex Glenn Greenwald and some other fucker. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, yeah. | |
| I hadn't heard the other guy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Destiny shitbag and the crashing steam dickwads. | ||
| And it is so much, like, it doesn't matter. | ||
| They made a good point. | ||
| They made a great point. | ||
| They dunked on him. | ||
| It was an awesome point. | ||
| And then Alex went, and that's it. | ||
| That's all that matters. | ||
| It didn't matter that they said anything. | ||
| It didn't matter that they had a point. | ||
| It didn't matter. | ||
| What mattered is it was entertaining, and the people who want to go, there was a winner, get to go, the big angry guy was the winner. | ||
| There's no going into that situation that is not going to be just pointless for you and useful for them. | ||
| That very much, that does get to this disconnect that I feel. | ||
| I tried to say earlier, like, I'm just a reporter. | ||
| Like, he's the entertainer, right? | ||
| I feel very much as if one of the root of all of our problems, at least in our media society. | ||
| Are those disconnects? | ||
| You have lots and lots of reporters who are flawed but trying to tell people what's going on in the world, and they're up against this entertainment and propaganda thing that doesn't exist to compete with them editorially. | ||
| They're not trying to beat those writers to the news. | ||
| Jesse Waters is not trying to get the scoop before CNN. | ||
| No, Jesse Waters is on a mission. | ||
| His project is to... | ||
| Take out the CNNs. | ||
| To remove them from the playing field in order to advance a political agenda so that he has to pay lower taxes. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| But it's this constant category error because... | ||
| Fox News' primetime talk shows look like news. | ||
| They're framed like news. | ||
| They sit at news anchor desks. | ||
| They have news-looking graphics. | ||
| They actually go in the field to news reporters sometimes. | ||
| It's all just... | ||
| Oh, yeah, for sure. | ||
| InfoWars has the studio, the trappings of... | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| To provide a level of legitimacy that isn't there. | ||
| Let me ask you a question. | ||
| It's very hard for a writer or reporter to compete with that because what do you do? | ||
| How do you... | ||
| What do you... | ||
| It's like, where do you even start? | ||
| Okay, sorry. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| I totally understand. | ||
| I'm with you. | ||
| I've got a comedy poster from an open mic I read on my wall. | ||
| Yeah, I get it. | ||
| I do not have a studio. | ||
| No. | ||
| I want to ask you about Jesse Waters. | ||
| How is it that you know that Jesse Waters is doing all that shit? | ||
| Doing what shit? | ||
| I mean, just like... | ||
| Are you saying that you know this because it's obvious from the behavior? | ||
| Are you saying you know this from conversations from within? | ||
| Are you saying that you know this from knowing the guy? | ||
| I don't know him personally. | ||
| I'm not interested. | ||
| If he was a source, I would avoid the conversation. | ||
| Meaning I wouldn't admit it anyway. | ||
| I think in general... | ||
| I just look at these, the kind of the MAGA host people on Fox, the commentators, the right-wing commentators, as, you know, they're mostly interchangeable, right? | ||
| Jesse's more of like comic relief. | ||
| He was the Bill O 'Reilly sidekick, and then he grew into this job and all of that. | ||
| But he's putting on a very predictable show. | ||
| But when I say he's doing it in service of political agenda, I think that part's clear. | ||
| Based on what he decides to lead his show with every night, he very clearly wants Biden to be removed and all that. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So you can see that right away. | ||
| Now, what confuses me, this is why I go back to this kind of blanket belief in the people that you're talking to at Fox News, is that in a way, you are essentially calling all of them fucking stupid. | ||
| Because they would have to be fucking stupid not to know what you know. | ||
| You know, they would have to be fucking stupid not to be able to look at what Jesse Waters does and make the same conclusion that you do. | ||
| So how is it that they can tell you, like, oh, well, you know, we have all of these things in place to kind of do all this stuff, and you not just go, you know exactly what the fuck you're doing. | ||
| Well, so I think Fox has evolved over time or devolved over time. | ||
| There was an era where they claimed to be fair and balanced for real. | ||
| That was not just a slogan, that was reality. | ||
| And there was a time when if you called the channel conservative, the PR people would object and would complain and would go to your editors and demand a correction. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| That era is over. | ||
| And there's not really the same kind of denial of what Fox does or is. | ||
| So I don't think, I don't know if there's really a dispute there in terms of like, what is Jesse Waters there for? | ||
| I kind of disagree with you. | ||
| If you call Fox News an explicitly racist network. | ||
| Designed and for the purpose of demonizing immigrants and people of color and non-white males, then the PR department will come after you. | ||
| You are not allowed to say that on TV, right? | ||
| I mean, I can say it on my dumb little... | ||
| I think they would... | ||
| Well, you can say it, but I think they would object to the term racist, yes. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| Same difference. | ||
| They're lying about that in the same way they were lying about being a conservative back then. | ||
| But you know how these arguments go. | ||
| There is actually a problem on the southern border. | ||
| There is a real immigration challenge in this country. | ||
| They happen to talk about it a lot more than CNN. | ||
| They happen to dedicate more resources to it. | ||
| You know all the arguments they could make. | ||
| I'm not talking about arguments about that. | ||
| I'm talking about the conversation that we just had about them lying. | ||
| As you pointed out. | ||
| They said way back when, if you called them conservative, their PR people would come after you. | ||
| And then, of course, the mask came off five years or ten years later, whatever it was. | ||
| And they were always the conservatives, right? | ||
| It was always who they were. | ||
| They were telling you, the PR people were angry at you for telling the truth. | ||
| Well, yes, but the channel has also changed, right? | ||
| The channel used to have more... | ||
| You know, they might have been conservative newscasts, but things that actually were designed to be news reports. | ||
| You know, the product really has changed quite a lot. | ||
| I'm just saying on something like racist, you know, obviously the pushback would be severe. | ||
| And what they would say are things like the following. | ||
| Do you not think that there's an immigration challenge at the border? | ||
| No, fuck off. | ||
| But these are our political debates now, right? | ||
| No, they're not. | ||
| They're go fuck yourself. | ||
| That's the political debate. | ||
| They're bullshit. | ||
| That's bullshit. | ||
| All of that is nonsense. | ||
| What are people talking about? | ||
| Look, wasn't it Ron DeSantis who flew migrants up to Martin's Vineyard or Nantucket? | ||
| Can I ask you a question? | ||
| Is that illegal? | ||
| I'm just saying when Fox, you know, Fox makes sure, you know, Fox has the cameras there to meet the planes. | ||
| Like, Fox has raised the salience of the immigration conversation, of the topic, in a dramatic fashion. | ||
| Like, Fox deserves a lot of credit or blame or whatever for raising the salience. | ||
| Can you lie to a group of people to get them on a plane and send them somewhere else? | ||
| Is that... | ||
| I'm just a media reporter. | ||
| I'm not the... | ||
| No, but I mean, that's my kind of response to you. | ||
| Is you are talking about the argument they're having. | ||
| I'm saying that Ron DeSantis committed a crime. | ||
| I don't really give a shit what everybody has to say immediately following that beyond either that is a crime or that's not a crime. | ||
| Do you know what I mean? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I do. | |
| There's no argument about the border until Ron DeSantis is in jail or I know that I can kidnap people. | ||
| Well, except that that's the way you're from. | ||
| The argument's already happening. | ||
| The debate's already happening. | ||
| You can't stop it. | ||
| You're not stopping it with your point. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| That is what I'm saying. | ||
| That is what I'm saying when I say that you and Alex are kind of closer than you are to me. | ||
| I can have no effect on that debate. | ||
| Do you know what I mean? | ||
| Like, I'm not a main character in there. | ||
| Well, see, my instinct is to push back on that and to say, of course, everyone can make a difference. | ||
| And I don't mind trying to say that in a sarcastic way. | ||
| I would like to say in a sincere way. | ||
| It's a struggle to make it come out, though. | ||
| Yeah, I would love to tell you that every voice matters. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| But listen, I'm on the outside now. | ||
| Well, yeah, that's another thing that I'm interested in. | ||
| Yeah, I'm not, you know, I don't even know where to find Alex Jones' show anymore. | ||
| Is there a web? | ||
| How do you find it now? | ||
| I mean, I believe it's band.video. | ||
| I should know that more off the top of my head. | ||
| So, like, when he drunk dialed me that night, by the way, can I just give the context? | ||
| Tell me the whole story. | ||
| We listened to his version of it, and now I would like to hear your version, yeah. | ||
| So the phone call came from Justin Wells, who was Sir Carlson's top producer, producing partner. | ||
| And of course, when someone's writing a book about Fox and Tucker, the reporter, the author tries to reach the producer. | ||
| So I had Justin Wells' phone number. | ||
| So when his number pops up on screen, it's like 10 o 'clock. | ||
| I've been drinking, but I wasn't looking to drunk dial anybody. | ||
| So when he calls late at night, of course I'm going to answer. | ||
| Like, heck yeah, I'm going to answer. | ||
| So I answer. | ||
| I hear Alex's voice. | ||
| I don't know if it's really Alex or if it's an imposter. | ||
| Like, I kind of played along in part because I wasn't sure if it was really Alex Jones. | ||
| Wouldn't that be so disappointing if it was one of those? | ||
| Those guys suck so bad. | ||
| I hate that shit. | ||
| I hate that. | ||
| I'm going to pretend to be. | ||
| I assumed it was the real guy, but I just didn't want to... | ||
| Well, it's two things. | ||
| One, I assumed he was recording the call. | ||
| And two, I didn't want to go all the way down. | ||
| I just wanted to keep my guard up. | ||
| But they were obviously trying to have some fun. | ||
| There was a point at which, and by the way, as a reporter, my whole attitude with these kind of things is, keep him on the phone. | ||
| Like, let's keep talking. | ||
| Also, my kids are still got nothing better to do. | ||
| Like, this is entertaining. | ||
| But like, keep him on the phone, ask a few questions. | ||
| But anyway, at one point, we were like ribbing each other a little bit. | ||
| And I made a comment about, I don't know where to find his show. | ||
| Like, I don't even know, does he still have a show? | ||
| And he hit back with the, well, I know you don't have a show anymore. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Or something to that effect. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| And this, I think, kind of crystallizes the difference between Alex and I. So I appreciate your point about the similarities, the certain kind of broadcasting world. | ||
| Here's the big difference, though. | ||
| One of the differences. | ||
| One of the big differences between you and I. Oh, no, no, no. | ||
| There's tons of differences. | ||
| I'm not trying to make them the same. | ||
| I'm trying to say the similarity. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| But the big thing that struck me was... | ||
| When I left CNN, when the Reliable Sources program was canceled, when I was fired, for me, it ended up being the best thing that ever happened to me. | ||
| You know, look, maybe in 10 years or something, I'll feel differently. | ||
| But at least now, 18 months out, I've been having the time of my life. | ||
| And so what it was so revealing is Alex thought he was insulting me, right? | ||
| Like for him, it is a... | ||
| Put down, like, ha-ha, you loser, you got canceled. | ||
| And it's like, no, Alex, I just had the best day. | ||
| Like, I'm my daughter's class dad, like, at school. | ||
| Like, I get to go off and write wherever I want, whenever I want. | ||
| Like, I have a great gig and a great life now. | ||
| But it's so revealing because people like Alex Jones, who are addicted to the red light, the red light on the camera. | ||
| It's kind of a metaphor. | ||
| TV agents talk about this sometimes. | ||
| They have clients who are addicted to the red light, who need to be on TV. | ||
| That's how it shows. | ||
| He needs to be heard. | ||
| He needs to be out in front of the world. | ||
| And it turns out I don't have that addiction. | ||
| And I've been relieved to learn that I don't. | ||
| But it was so revealing to me that that was his insult, and it's not insulting. | ||
| I mean, I would say that... | ||
| I would say all of us have that addiction to a varying degree. | ||
| I spent 10 years going up on stage for zero people. | ||
| Later on, more than zero. | ||
| Not enough. | ||
| Not enough more than zero. | ||
| I'll tell you that. | ||
| If I wasn't addicted to that, at least a little bit, I could have just not done this show. | ||
| I could have just gone back to... | ||
| Bricklaying. | ||
| I don't know why. | ||
| I've never laid a brick before in my life. | ||
| But I don't know why that would be my next gig. | ||
| Anybody bricklayers, that's right there for you. | ||
| Great. | ||
| So, yeah, I wanted to go down this one interesting thing in your book later on. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The Cavuto kind of... | ||
| What? | ||
| Revolt? | ||
| Not revolt. | ||
| Like the Cavuto gentle slight pushback breeze during that time period. | ||
| Does he walk around thinking he's fucking noble? | ||
| So I don't think I have the first hand knowledge to answer that question. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I think he's of a different I think he is like he is of the 1997 Fox News. | ||
| And has somehow miraculously stayed and remained and been able to be on the 2024 Fox News. | ||
| But he is very much a vestige of an earlier and different era. | ||
| He has been there since the beginning. | ||
| And, you know, he's... | ||
| I wish I knew exactly how to explain this. | ||
| He's among the lowest rated hosts on Fox, his 4pm hour. | ||
| And yet, among the executives, one of the most respected. | ||
| You know? | ||
| Because he is this real, true... | ||
| I mean, you're going to think this is all BS, but he actually is an honest reporter. | ||
| He's a truth teller. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| So what you're saying is he made a pact with the devil. | ||
| Oh, here, there you go. | ||
|
unidentified
|
E.G. Come on, come on. | |
| E.G. Carroll, the E.G. Carroll defamation. | ||
| Settlement comes down, $83 million, and he just honestly calls it. | ||
| It's a staggering amount. | ||
| He has guests on who told the truth about it. | ||
| And then an hour later on The 5, the 5 p.m. talk show ignored it. | ||
| Of course, didn't even mention E. Jean Carroll's success. | ||
| Obviously, that's a higher rated show. | ||
| The 5 is a really popular show. | ||
| You know, Kubota's hour is not. | ||
| But they keep him on, right? | ||
| They keep him on, and he keeps on going. | ||
| And I respect that. | ||
| I don't think you do, but I do. | ||
| Let me ask you a question. | ||
| Do they keep him on for you? | ||
| Well, that is an interesting question. | ||
| And I mean, you know, I don't mean you specifically, obviously, but I mean, in the larger sense, he is that pulling back from Tucker Carlson, right? | ||
| He's the varying degree in the laundering process of bullshit. | ||
| I am trying to look up the phrase that I have in the book for this because I don't want to misquote it. | ||
| Oh, here it is. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I describe Chris Wallace, who decided to leave Fox at the end of 2021. | ||
| He's now at CNN. | ||
| But there was this dinner that I described in the book where Lachlan Murdoch comes to D.C. and he's hanging out with the whole D.C. Bureau. | ||
| Tucker Carlson's show was based in D.C., so Tucker's at the dinner. | ||
| And Tucker's sitting on one side of the CEO, and Chris Wallace is on the other side of the CEO. | ||
| In terms of financial impact and identity with the brand, Tucker's the star, not Chris Wallace. | ||
| But Fox really tried to keep Chris Wallace from leaving. | ||
| They tried to renew his contract. | ||
| They didn't want him to go to CNN. | ||
| And so in the book, I say a senior staffer called it a double or triple game that the Murdochs play. | ||
| They make money from the Tucker people, the opinion people, but they reap other rewards from the news people. | ||
| And so I think that applies to Cavuto as well. | ||
| It's a double or triple game. | ||
| I mean, that requires awareness. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So if you are aware that you are specifically hiring this person to give you a veneer of legitimacy, that means you're aware you are illegitimate functionally. | ||
| You can't not understand that as a concept, right? | ||
| Well, legitimacy is an interesting word. | ||
| I mean, how about... | ||
| We are mostly a right-wing talking points brand, but we occasionally want to have people on who break that mold. | ||
| I mean, that's not about legitimacy, right? | ||
| That's about content. | ||
| The reason we have these people on is to make the other lunatics seem less crazy. | ||
| Or it is to make us feel less bad about putting these lunatics on the air. | ||
| Either way, it is somebody saying, I know what I'm doing is wrong. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm a child knowing what I'm doing wrong. | |
| Right, but you keep bringing moral and ethical arguments to a financial fight, right? | ||
| Sure, sure. | ||
| No, but this is where we get back to the conversations that you're having. | ||
| Like, I'm still going back. | ||
| I don't let shit go. | ||
| This is why I'm telling you that I find it so fascinating that when somebody, when a Fox News exec tells you something, you don't spit in their face. | ||
| Because if this person is aware that what they're doing with the five is what pays their bills, and what they're doing with the four is what makes them feel good, then they know what they're doing. | ||
| So they can't come to you and say, you know, we have this kind of thing. | ||
| Sure, let's try that a different way. | ||
| What they're doing at four is the honorable thing to do, but what they're doing at five is what the audience wants. | ||
| And what the audience wants is the key. | ||
| Right! | ||
| Yes! | ||
| Sure, but I think the audience is the point here. | ||
| You're the only one to brought morality into it this time. | ||
| They are doing it to win ratings points on every hour of every day. | ||
| This is why I am somewhat sympathetic to the view that, you know, they're... | ||
| Gosh, I don't even want to say it because they're going to laugh. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I know. | |
| Held hostage by their audience. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| You can't escape that. | ||
| And I think part of the issue is, again, I truly believe that it's kind of almost evolutionary. | ||
| We're social creatures, and I can't talk to them. | ||
| They are characters to me, the characters at Fox News. | ||
| I can't, you know? | ||
| I will never be able to interact with them, despite the fact that they have a material, destructive force upon my life. | ||
| I can't push back on them whatsoever, right? | ||
| So it's easy for me to go fucking spit in their dumb fuck faces, right? | ||
| But you have to... | ||
| It's entirely possible that you'll go to dinner with them. | ||
| Do you know what I'm saying? | ||
| So, doesn't it make more, doesn't it feel more likely that you would believe somebody who is lying to you? | ||
| Because, you know, I gotta see them next week. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, look, first of all... | ||
| You know, I live out in the suburbs. | ||
| I don't see these people in person very often. | ||
| Just to be honest. | ||
| I'm not trying to paint you as anything that you're not. | ||
| And I'm not trying to say that what you've done is any good or bad or anything like that. | ||
| Well, I'm just trying to, like, this is kind of the mold of what it is that we're dealing with, you know? | ||
| And you have first-hand, intimate knowledge of it. | ||
| Well, here's a fun example. | ||
| So Alex Jones and others freaked out when I went to the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos last year. | ||
| There were these propaganda stories saying that I was being paid and that I was there to promote disinformation and all this stuff. | ||
| They're paying for Brian Stelter to go lie to us. | ||
| All these crazy stories. | ||
| And in fact, it was like they asked me to moderate a panel. | ||
| I paid for my own flight and hotel. | ||
| I actually left a day early because I wasn't enjoying the conference very much. | ||
| I missed my kids. | ||
| But it was cool to see what it was. | ||
| What I realized is it's just a giant networking event for rich people. | ||
| It's just a networking thing. | ||
| They're there to schmooze and see each other and go to their parties. | ||
| But I'm at Anthony Scaramucci's party. | ||
| And which was hard to get into this line out the door. | ||
| And, you know, former Trump official turned Trump opponent. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And who do I bump into? | ||
| But Maria Bartiromo, Maria Bartiromo, who more than any other person is responsible for the defamation case by Dominion, who started the Dominion lie on Fox, who had the first interview with Trump after Trump lost the election and who who indulged his delusions and encouraged his attack against the government. | ||
| You know, not physical attack, but you know. | ||
| Marie Bordoromo, who used to be this renowned CNBC anchor who now lives in a different reality on a different earth than I do. | ||
| And there she is, looking for a great glass of wine in this overly crowded party in Davos. | ||
| And, you know, we smiled at each other and, like, I feel like neither of us really actually wanted to have a conversation because it would be too awkward for both of us. | ||
| So there is a point at which it's... | ||
| Why do you think it would have been awkward? | ||
| Because I don't know who she is anymore. | ||
| Where five years ago, we were at a party together and we were dancing next to each other on the dance floor in the Hamptons. | ||
| And now it's like, there's so many... | ||
| Gosh, now you're going to turn to my therapist. | ||
| There's so much to say. | ||
| There's so many objections. | ||
| How could you have done that, Maria? | ||
| There's so much of that now in between us. | ||
| And by the way, I don't think she's ever thought about me. | ||
| Ever since she blocked me on Twitter, I doubt she's ever used the breath of her energy to talk about me or think about me. | ||
| But my point is... | ||
| There are limits to the dynamic you're describing, which is real. | ||
| I have gone to lunch with folks from Fox, and sometimes they pay the check, and sometimes I pay the check, and we end up, and it all evens out. | ||
| And we have great conversation, and I learn a lot, and I feel like we're on the same planet. | ||
| But I guess I'm just trying to say there's also a point at which there is such thing as too far. | ||
| What's the metaphor? | ||
| There is a point at which it's not possible to have a dialogue. | ||
| It's when Coyote looks down. | ||
| I don't know that reference. | ||
| What is that? | ||
| Wile E. Coyote. | ||
| When he looks down, that's when the conversation is over. | ||
| There's definitely a point at which you can't... | ||
| And it is that point where you don't know if she'd even be... | ||
| You don't know if you'd be able to believe her answers anyway. | ||
| No, here's what I'm coming to believe, coming to realize. | ||
| As we go back through the past, we go back and we listen to Alex Jones episodes from 2003. | ||
| We did the night of Y2K. | ||
| We were there. | ||
| Joe Rogan was there. | ||
| Why not? | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| Joe Rogan was there on September 11th. | ||
| Because why not? | ||
| He also might have been there. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Anyways. | |
| I, you know, people have said, oh, Alex has changed. | ||
| Alex's content has changed and all that stuff. | ||
| And there are changes. | ||
| What hasn't changed is the most important part. | ||
| I'm looking at so many people and we have this point of view of like, they are different to me. | ||
| I see them differently. | ||
| And I find that it's more likely that the world has changed around them. | ||
| And these are the same people that they always were. | ||
| I mean, you know, we talk about CNBC at the idea, but what you used to get away with saying as a quote-unquote liberal in the early 2000s was nuts! | ||
| You could be like, eh, fucking kill gay people. | ||
| That would be fine! | ||
| That was on the TV! | ||
| You know? | ||
| I mean, not in so many words. | ||
| But it was, oh, well, Obama's evolving on gay marriage. | ||
| It was all of these different words that we know now mean Obama was fine with it, but politically he wasn't ready to talk about it. | ||
| So he was lying to us. | ||
| You know, he would rather put it that way. | ||
| It's a little bit easier. | ||
| You know, Obama didn't change. | ||
| Obama hired Geithner. | ||
| Obama isn't 100 millionaire right now because he's different. | ||
| Do you know what I mean? | ||
| So my question is that if you have that conversation with her, do you think it's awkward because she's changed her because you've changed? | ||
| Again, back to the therapy. | ||
| There are some people, and I put this in the book, that some people say she's always been the same person. | ||
| That at CNBC, she sucked up to CEOs. | ||
| And at Fox, the CEO was Trump. | ||
| And so she just did the same. | ||
| She had the same sort of approach, but to politics as to business and with a businessman politician. | ||
| And so there's logic to that, that there's actually a consistency. | ||
| There's a through line. | ||
| And maybe I'm the one injecting my own sense of moral superiority. | ||
| I guess my trajectory or the journey or whatever, it's this sense of... | ||
| Look, what it does, it goes back to 2016, when it becomes clear that fake news is actually a real problem. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| And I mean fake news meaning made-up stories designed to deceive you, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| If you Google Brian Stelter Gitmo, you'll find a bunch of fake news stories that say, I was executed at Guantanamo Bay after being fired by CNN. | ||
| I think we can confirm those are fake news stories. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| But that day... | ||
| Right. | ||
| Always possible. | ||
| But that moment that Trump took the term fake news and redefined it to mean news he doesn't like, news you shouldn't believe, the moment that that happened, we got fucked as a country. | ||
| That really deeply wounded us. | ||
| And you might think I'm making too much of that moment, but that moment to me, that's... | ||
| Couple days, it's two weeks later, they lie about crowd size. | ||
| And we're off to the races in terms of this disinformation campaign. | ||
| It's before we were even using the word disinformation, you know? | ||
| But then we started using these terms to try to understand what was happening to our sense of shared reality. | ||
| To me, these were formative years, and I learned a lot about my belief system, my value system. | ||
| And there's a lot of stuff out there that's garbage, but it's not disinformation. | ||
| There's so much stuff out there that's nonsense, but I wouldn't call it fake. | ||
| I wouldn't call it a lie. | ||
| Where I reserve my most, you know, attention, I guess, is for the straight up likely provable lies. | ||
| Now, here's why I appreciate you. | ||
| You come at it totally differently from a comedy lens, like with a comedian's head on it. | ||
| And you are so much blunter, right? | ||
| I'm a clown, yeah. | ||
| I wouldn't use that word. | ||
| I would use that word. | ||
| But you're making me think that Fox promoting Greg Gutfeld was genius. | ||
| Because a comedian is able to... | ||
| I would like to stop you very quickly. | ||
| I know what I just did there. | ||
| If you ever call Gutfield... | ||
| Anything similar to a comedian. | ||
| Or give him any credit towards humor. | ||
| I would rather shit myself. | ||
| And I don't mean that from a point of view of his politics. | ||
| Anything along those lines. | ||
| I just mean that from a joke writing standpoint. | ||
| We've gone back and forth on our show so often about like, okay. | ||
| Here's why conservatives should... | ||
| This is what they should have done to make the bit work. | ||
| It's just what we do. | ||
| We make bits work. | ||
| We're the writer's room. | ||
| So it's not that his politics are terrible. | ||
| It's that he's a shitty comic. | ||
| It's that he's not fucking funny. | ||
| And it drives me insane. | ||
| And I can be a proof point for that because he has made dozen scores of jokes about me. | ||
| Probably more than a hundred. | ||
| All the very same fat joke. | ||
| And it... | ||
| It makes me worry about his audience. | ||
| Like, does he think this audience is asleep? | ||
| Like, does he think that they're not actually listening? | ||
| Because they've heard the joke before. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's another thing. | ||
| I'm sorry. | ||
| That's just one of those... | ||
| And, you know, people who... | ||
| Generally speaking, it's a bad idea to insult people if you're using something that you could insult anybody else with. | ||
| It has to be specific. | ||
| And then it has to make them think about it later on. | ||
| Like, if you take a shower, the only good insult is one where if I have insulted you, you should take a shower the next day and go, oh, and feel bad about it. | ||
| That's an insult. | ||
| Well, he has not succeeded on that front with me. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| God. | ||
| So, but, well, I mean, even that, though, that aspect of a gut felt. | ||
| We're going to put gut felt on our network. | ||
| That is as much a business decision of like, well, we want to diversify our I mean, first to give him a talk show, then to move to primetime and then to promote Jesse waters. | ||
| To me, it was very much a bring in the clowns approach, like send in the clowns. | ||
| You know, we need, we need humor. | ||
| We are more than a news brand. | ||
| I think it says two things. | ||
|
unidentified
|
One... | |
| Fox is more than a news brand. | ||
| It's a way of life. | ||
| It is a lifestyle brand. | ||
| It is an identity for many of its fans. | ||
| It's important to recognize that, to face that for what it is. | ||
| No, totally. | ||
| InfoWars. | ||
| Yeah, same thing with InfoWars. | ||
| And then second, I think, leaning on humor. | ||
| Allows them to get away with stuff that they can't otherwise, right? | ||
| In the same way that you see this with a lot of the right-wing rhetoric around race, for example, or gender. | ||
| Oh, I was just kidding! | ||
| Or the, was he kidding? | ||
| Allows them to move the conversation, right? | ||
| Yeah, no, the joke is that you let them get away with it. | ||
| That's the joke. | ||
| Like, if you have somebody like Gutfeld say, you know, like, oh, we should put all black people in cages, you know, the joke is that you and I will go, well, clearly he doesn't mean that. | ||
| And for the record, he has not said, no, he does not, and he has not said that. | ||
| No, no, no, no, I'm giving you an example. | ||
| I'm not saying that he specifically said that, but like in any number, you know, in Anna Merlin's book, in Republic of Lies, whenever she's going to these groups of people, these youths. | ||
| Uh, with their, with their coats, you know, any number of things, you know, the far right youth, uh, there is like that element of like, ha ha ha, we'll rape somebody. | ||
| And the joke is that they mean it. | ||
| The joke is that they're going to say this to her face and she's going to watch them say it. | ||
| That's the, that's what makes them laugh. | ||
| And that's kind of why it's horrific to compare them to humor. | ||
| There's also, right. | ||
| Well, there's also, isn't there also an element of, This is our politics now, right? | ||
| That we can't... | ||
| On MSNBC at 10 p.m. Eastern Time is Lawrence O'Donnell, who grew up in his formative adult experiences. | ||
| We're working for Moynihan, working in the Senate, working on Capitol Hill, learning how policy is crafted, learning how laws are made, and he'll book. | ||
| Senators as guests. | ||
| He'll book Andrew Weissman. | ||
| He'll book legal figures as guests. | ||
| And that's the show up against Greg Gutfeld's Insult Fest, right? | ||
| And the fact that on Fox... | ||
| Well, right, but it's a different audience, right? | ||
| Lawrence rates well. | ||
| But what does it say about the Fox brand and the Fox base that it's a comedy show they've decided is what works and not a serious conversation about policy? | ||
| You see what I'm saying? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah! | |
| I mean, I suppose... | ||
| You think they're all just too far gone that it doesn't matter? | ||
| No, no, no, no. | ||
| Absolutely not. | ||
| No, I don't think... | ||
| I don't think that there's much difference, I suppose. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Like... | |
| Okay. | ||
| I understand how it seems like, oh, disinformation 2016 was kind of a thing, but, you know... | ||
| You go back and you read some of the political shit that they wrote in the 1800 elections. | ||
| You know, go back and read about how Thomas Jefferson fucked a slave in the newspaper. | ||
| And they thought they were lying. | ||
| Like, it is that type of thing, you know, where I wonder if this is just we keep seeing America be America with newer shit. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| All right. | ||
| I'm trying to think what the counterargument to that is. | ||
| America's good to America. | ||
| What are you going to do? | ||
| Well, I'd like to say that, I mean, I was born in 1985, so I kind of remember the 90s. | ||
| We had a political environment that was not nearly as toxic and polarizing. | ||
| Can we say that? | ||
| Is that true? | ||
| I think that's true. | ||
| That's another thing. | ||
| That's another thing for me. | ||
| We say that. | ||
| And then if you go back and you watch a 90s movie, you're going to go, oh, the R word was fun to say back then. | ||
| Oh, boy. | ||
| They just tossed that about like nothing, you know? | ||
| Yeah, I recently rewatched The Hangover, an even more recent movie, and I was surprised by some of the jokes. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| But that's different than can neighbors disagree about politics and not fear a fist fight. | ||
| Definitely. | ||
| That's where Trump has taken us, is this fear. | ||
| And it's what's led, I think, to the dissatisfaction and depression of the electorate that I was talking about earlier. | ||
| People just are tuned out and checked out. | ||
| They don't want to deal with it. | ||
| They don't want to think about it because they don't want to get into that argument with their neighbors. | ||
| They don't want to have that dispute. | ||
| That, to me, feels like the world that Fox and Trump created or nurtured. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And Alex Jones. | ||
| Yeah, you know, I think it is a good question. | ||
| Something of a chicken and egg. | ||
| How often these things coincide with a group of non-white people getting slightly more power. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| You know, is it Trump's America or are LGBTQ people getting slightly more representation than they were back then, you know? | ||
| It's because now it's trans people. | ||
| It's not gay people. | ||
| 20 years ago, it was gay people. | ||
| Should we be allowing them to be in public? | ||
| 20 years before that, it was anybody who's ever done drugs. | ||
| Anybody with AIDS should be killed, should be dead. | ||
| These are things that were there that we pretend didn't happen. | ||
| Reagan laughed at people dying of AIDS. | ||
| That's pretty fucked up in the discourse, right? | ||
| I was a little too young for that. | ||
| My favorite analogy on the point about whites and power is Robert P. Jones, head of PRI, this institute that does a lot of surveys on this topic. | ||
| And he said, picture America as a dining room table where it used to be that white Christians controlled who sat at the table and where they got to sit, right? | ||
| Like the head of the family. | ||
| And now, in an increasingly multicultural country, there's no single demographic group controlling the table. | ||
| Everybody is invited to sit wherever they want. | ||
| And that's what's deeply threatening and deeply unsettling to the core Fox viewer, like to the typical 70-year-old white male Fox Christian conservative viewer. | ||
| That idea that anybody can pull up a chair is the entire story. | ||
| All right. | ||
| So, if that idea is what... | ||
| Is what motivates the Fox News program. | ||
| How is that not institutionalized racism? | ||
| It is our job to keep everybody away from our table. | ||
| Well, I think they would say, we are defending what made America great. | ||
| So that's another good point. | ||
| I don't want to pretend to be the Fox pundit. | ||
| I'm not good at that. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| I'm interested in how it is that this is allowed to fly. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| You mean free speech? | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| I mean with the conversations with Fox News employees. | ||
| That idea of you have just explicitly explained racism. | ||
| That's what it is. | ||
| White people should be the only people at the table. | ||
| That's racism. | ||
| There's no other way to describe that. | ||
| Right? | ||
| It's not exactly what I said, but okay, let's go with it. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| All right. | ||
| And if that is what motivates their viewers, that is what they are doing, that is what they are. | ||
| So if that is something that you know that we can talk about that is demonstrably provable, right? | ||
| How is it that they are still allowed to say, you know, like, whoa, no, we're defending what makes America great again without all of you going, no, fuck you, Fox is racist from now until the end of time. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Why hasn't every TV journalist said on TV right now, as we know, Fox News is a threat to the United States of America, these racist fucks. | ||
| Do you know what I mean? | ||
| Okay, we can go down your theoretical hole for a minute, because even if that happened, which would never happen, what would the outcome of that be? | ||
| Let's find out! | ||
| It would never happen! | ||
| It would never happen, but I think the answer is even more disillusionment, even more polarization, even more taking sides, nobody's opinion changed, nobody persuaded, right? | ||
| Persuasion is no longer possible, right? | ||
| I don't like to believe that's true. | ||
| I would like to believe that there are many... | ||
| Let me rephrase that. | ||
| You're right. | ||
| That's unspecific. | ||
| Persuasion is absolutely possible. | ||
| Given the challenges that we face, is persuasion realistically a possible way to solve these problems? | ||
| That's a better question, I think. | ||
| It is. | ||
| I think there have to be and there are areas of common ground that can be found. | ||
| And the media can help to do that. | ||
| Or the media can make the situation a whole lot worse. | ||
| And I think when we look at an hour of Sean Hannity's show, that is making the situation worse. | ||
| He is not looking for common ground. | ||
| He is not trying to find areas where we can make progress. | ||
| He is so in division. | ||
| But I think there's a lot of media that helps to show people they have in common. | ||
| That's the area that I'm more interested in. | ||
| What do I have in common with people that are perceived to be my opponent? | ||
| Maybe not all the way in Alex Jones' direction, but that's the difference, right? | ||
| It's good faith actors versus bad faith actors. | ||
| What you're getting at a lot with Fox is there's an assumption, and I'm not disagreeing with it, but there's an assumption in your comments that they are bad faith actors, right? | ||
| That they know that they are lying, that they know they are doing damage. | ||
| And I'm not claiming that's not entirely false or whatever, but there are also people at Fox, I know some of these sources at Fox, who are truly I agree. | ||
| Fox is doing the right thing, who believe Fox needs to fight harder for Trump's America, like who, like, and those are good. | ||
| Believers. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Believers. | |
| And I would argue that's a good faith actor because at least I can meet. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I agree with you. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| You can't have a debate with that. | ||
| You cannot have a debate with a believer. | ||
| What are you talking about? | ||
| We can have a discussion. | ||
| Yes, you can have a discussion. | ||
| Yes, that is true. | ||
| We're coming up against the bad faith actors. | ||
| That is the issue. | ||
| It's like the bad faith actors who are, they're just nihilists, right? | ||
| They just want to watch the world burn. | ||
| They'll say anything, do anything, whatever. | ||
| That's where I have more scorn. | ||
| I mean, then, like... | ||
| I have this problem with that argument every time because it's always applicable. | ||
| That kind of like, oh, you know, not all bad apples argument, right? | ||
| My question then just always comes back to then, like, why don't the rest of you fucking descend upon them like ravens on somebody who talks shit? | ||
| Like, that should be your job. | ||
| Okay, so fine. | ||
| We all know that there are good faith actors. | ||
| Why aren't all of you... | ||
| Dogpiling on top of Jesse Waters. | ||
| And I mean that physically. | ||
| I mean, I want you out there. | ||
| I want Lawrence O'Donnell out there. | ||
| I want Rachel Maddow. | ||
| I want them landing on top of these people. | ||
| Do you know what I mean? | ||
| Like, is it not your responsibility to police your own? | ||
| So, I think the idea that Rachel Maddow would view Jesse Waters as one of her own is hilarious. | ||
| I do. | ||
| I know you do. | ||
| Very similarly. | ||
| But she would laugh at you and say, she would say she is a scholar, an author, a journalist, and a broadcaster. | ||
| And he is a monkey. | ||
| He's a performer. | ||
| He reads other people's scripts. | ||
| For example. | ||
| She writes her scripts. | ||
| He reads someone else's. | ||
| I'm just telling you that, yes, they are on channels close to each other on the cable dial. | ||
| That is basically the only thing they have in common. | ||
| I think you're getting something I think interesting about the media accountability and holding people accountable and how seriously you take this stuff. | ||
| And I think that's been a problem. | ||
| I think it's been a problem over the years that the national news media will focus intently on what Marjorie Teller Green is saying, for example, a freshman congresswoman with relatively little power. | ||
| I started to realize there's a power dynamic here. | ||
| They recognize that I'm the one with the Pulpit every week. | ||
| I was on for only an hour and all that, but like... | ||
| There is something really warped where Sean Hannity has more influence than the average GOP lawmaker. | ||
| But he's not covered that way. | ||
| It doesn't get that kind of news coverage. | ||
| So I would say there should be more news coverage of what these opinion people are saying, of what Jesse Waters is claiming, of the conspiracy theories they are promoting. | ||
| There needs to be more fact-checking and coverage of it. | ||
| You're coming at it from like, take him out. | ||
| I'm just coming at it from a, let's take it seriously. | ||
| That's kind of there we go. | ||
| That's the last question that I have for you, kind of the place that I want to end it, is those three, obviously where we began, because I'm a lit guy. | ||
| There are three C's, you know, that civil, criminal, and canceling kind of thing. | ||
| And I think of the Fox News verdict, I think of Alex, and I think of Tucker, and I think of all of these people, and I think, civilly, has anybody been held accountable? | ||
| Alex is spending $90,000 a month. | ||
| Now, will true accountability come? | ||
| Hopefully. | ||
| But as it stands, there's no accountability if you can still spend $90,000 a month. | ||
| That's my rule. | ||
| That's my rule in life. | ||
| Until you spend at least as little money as me per month, then you have not been held accountable. | ||
| And what's the latest with him? | ||
| How are the Sandy Hook families trying to claw the money back? | ||
| Well, the most recent two settlement disputes have been around $85 million and $55 million. | ||
| Again, that $1.5 billion, that's not accountability. | ||
| And the same is true for the Fox News settlement. | ||
| I understand that they are going to pay that money, but Fox News also has an insurance company that's going to pay this. | ||
| Yeah, it came out of insurance. | ||
| And they have this that's going to pay this. | ||
| And really, they have a profit margin of like $1 billion a year. | ||
| So it's not like they lose money. | ||
| It's that they make less money this year. | ||
| You know what I'm saying? | ||
| And then they'll spread that out over time. | ||
| They'll deduct that on their taxes. | ||
| Frankly, this judgment will wind up saving them money in the long run. | ||
| I don't know about that. | ||
| I know, I know. | ||
| But you understand my point as far as accountability is concerned. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| This is not accountability. | ||
| But these are the structures. | ||
| These are the options that we have. | ||
| And to me, it does feel the courtroom has been the most productive in terms of forum for accountability. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So then we've got civil. | ||
| Then we go to canceling. | ||
| And that's ostensibly the media's job. | ||
| That is where the media gets together. | ||
| We all dogpile on some asshole. | ||
| We decided to tweet something before they got on a plane one time. | ||
| But the media doesn't get together. | ||
| I mean, but that's the... | ||
| No, no, no, but once the ball gets rolling, the ball gets rolling. | ||
| You know what I'm saying? | ||
| Yeah, sure. | ||
| Yes, but I push back because I don't want to give Alex Jones fodder for conspiracy theories. | ||
| It's not a conspiracy, obviously. | ||
| That's why you talk to a clown, is because people don't take me too seriously. | ||
| There was once some random blogger who wrote, Brian Stelter talked about the death of democracy and quoted the same book on the same day as an MSNBC host. | ||
| Who gave them the book? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'll follow that one. | |
| I was like, the library gave me the book. | ||
| What do you think? | ||
| You think we get together for these meetings to plan which books we're going to cite on the air? | ||
| It's happening now with Taylor Swift, Vivek Ramaswamy, and these people out there with these crazy conspiracy theories that Taylor Swift is a psyop that she's planted by the CIA to influence the 2024 election. | ||
| These people have too much time on their hands. | ||
| If Pat Williams said it to Shannon Sharpe, I believe it. | ||
| That's just where I'm living. | ||
| I don't know how to help people. | ||
| Like Nazi ghosts, right? | ||
| This is how I felt with the Gitmo thing. | ||
| Civil, canceling, and then criminal. | ||
| It is impossible to hold these people accountable criminally, even when they commit a crime like Ron DeSantis did. | ||
| So if we're talking about these three levels of accountability, I feel like your book has definitively proven there's no way to hold powerful people accountable. | ||
| I don't think that's the takeaway at all. | ||
| I distanced myself from your conclusions. | ||
| I think the Trump trials are going to be really interesting. | ||
| I'm interested in those too. | ||
| The criminal trials. | ||
| I'll tell you, I put my money where my mouth is. | ||
| I bet $500 on Nikki Haley because I think that ultimately Trump will be taken off of enough ballots to not be allowed to run. | ||
| That's where I put my money on it. | ||
| That's where you put me on. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So you're saying the system's working then? | ||
| Yes, that's what I'm saying. | ||
| The regime is working. | ||
| If that's what that means, I'll take it. | ||
| I subscribe to the Harvey Milk slogan. | ||
| You gotta give them hope. | ||
| You gotta give him hope. | ||
| So I look around and I say, uh, the Dominion settlement was a lot of money and yes, Fox can afford it, but it was painful for them. | ||
| And I look around and I say, Tucker being canceled suggests that maybe kooky conspiracy theories are not quite as welcome at Fox as they were the week before he was on the, like, you know, like a little bit, a little bit of hope, a little bit of hope here. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| Those, those are like, I, I understand that I'm, I'm an asshole. | ||
| So it comes off as though I invalidate kind of. | ||
| What are very, very valid things that you, you know, that's true. | ||
| That's very true and that's awesome. | ||
| And it's something that we should celebrate, you know. | ||
| I'm just a person who's always going to be like, cool, but why didn't you break his knees? | ||
| You know, that's where I live, right? | ||
| Listen, your utopia sounds incredible. | ||
| And I hope you can get there someday. | ||
| Hey, if everybody has one eye, then I've done my job correctly and gotten revenge. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think that's a great place to end it. | |
| Brian, thank you so much. | ||
| This has been an awesome conversation. | ||
| This has been a delight. | ||
| Your book, Network of Lies, could you please advertise it however you want? | ||
| I'll hold it up again for the video viewers. | ||
| Thank you for having me on. | ||
| This was a challenge in the best way possible. | ||
| Why does everybody keep saying that about me? | ||
| Well, thank you so much, and you have a great day. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| You too. | ||
| Andy in Kansas, you're on the air. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thanks for holding. | |
| Hello, Alex. | ||
| I'm a first-time caller. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm a huge fan. | |
| I love your work. |
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