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Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman discuss the legacy of a person who is arguably the most responsible for the current morass in politics today as he announces his retirement. They then talk about the UAW strike and the notion that every union in America could one day band together in solidarity and force corporations to pay and treat their workers fairly. Terrific audience questions abound on a variety of topics as they finish off the pod.
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Everybody, that is the sound of a long, long week coming to an end.
I'm Jared Yates-Exton.
I am here with my good friend Nick Hausman, who was amazing in my absence.
It is so good to see you.
Be back to the regularly scheduled programming of our show, my friend.
I hope people liked the insights into Ken Paxton because I feel like it's been so under the radar, although people are vaguely aware of it, that who knew how much intrigue and innuendo was involved in that and yet he got off.
It's one of those amazing things of this modern era.
It's like, there's a moment of, like, consequence for things that have happened, and then we just sort of roll past them, right?
That's the thing.
I remember when the Paxton thing first occurred.
Everybody's like, oh, the GOP at least aren't looking past this.
And it's like, well, here we are again.
You know, interestingly enough, there's way more comments on that video than any of our other videos on YouTube.
So I don't know.
There's some weird lighting and like some right wingers kind of got involved.
I don't know how they came across it, but either way, check it out.
We are on YouTube.
We are posting these and it's a great way to listen to this as well.
And engage with right wing talking points.
That's fantastic.
Yeah, at least there could be another level.
If you're not a Patreon subscriber, in theory, you could at least comment on the on the shows there.
And we have a little bit of a back and forth.
Yeah, so we got that going on.
And on that note, Nick, before we get started with this jam-packed episode, we have to say goodbye to Rupert Murdoch and eulogize just an awful, awful career, talk about these massive strikes, and also answer your questions.
We have a really good mailbag ready later on in this episode.
A reminder to everybody, go to patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast.
First of all, To gain access to this entire episode, which you want to do.
You're already listening in this preview.
Come along.
Support the show.
Keep us going.
Keep us growing.
But also, Nick, I'm so excited.
Next Wednesday, September 27th at 9 p.m.
Eastern, the second GOP debate is going down.
And as soon as that ends, we will be going live with our analysis, our thoughts on that.
And I don't know if you remember this, Nick.
I'm sure you do.
And I'm sure the listeners who are there do as well.
We kind of told you exactly what was going to happen in the wake of that debate, how the next couple of weeks were going to play out, and alas, here we are.
Here we are.
Here we are.
So, that again is Wednesday, September 27th, 9 p.m.
Eastern is when the debate starts.
It'll be live from the Reagan Library, which means they'll have that Air Force One sort of hanging from the rafters.
I hate that shot.
I hate the whole production.
But immediately following that, we will be live at patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast.
Everybody, listen.
We have to start with the number one story, which is this morning, 92-year-old Rupert Murdoch The head of Fox News, Fox Corp, Core News, whatever in the hell we're calling it these days.
He is stepping away after 70 years of being an absolute awful media mogul, I guess we can call him that.
He gave an announcement Nick, he's going to become chairman emeritus at Fox and News, and before he walked away, leaving the company in the control of his son Lachlan, who sucks, in case you're wondering, he didn't miss an opportunity to say that Self-serving bureaucracies are seeking to silence those who would question their providence and purpose.
Elites have open contempt for those who are not members of the rarefied class.
And most of the media is in cahoots with those elites, peddling political narratives rather than pursuing the truth.
That's right, Nick.
He went out the way that he came in with a massive trail of slime following him.
Good riddance to bad rubbish.
Don't let the door hit you on the way out, Rupert, for sure.
But you know, he's still got his fingers, his gnarly fingers with, I'm picturing the Howard Hughes fingernails, you know, in the pie.
So, uh, it, you know, these guys don't go away.
They don't, they don't lose their influence.
He'll still be around doing his stuff.
So, um, you know, I don't know.
And is Lachlan, is it, is it Waystar?
Can't we call it that now?
Yeah.
I mean, this has, this has been a real, real secession type situation.
Um, you know, Rupert, I, and, you know, all these people are already doing their eulogies for him, and they're saying, listen, one of the most consequential men of the last century.
100%.
One of the most destructive individuals of the last century.
Fox News is an innovation, which, um...
We're going to look back on for a very long time and realize how much damage it did to the body politic and the health of not just humanity, but the world in general.
But it needs to be stated, Rupert Murdoch inherited his media empire, all of the wealth that made it possible for him to create an empire that spread a bunch of disinformation and propaganda about self-made men.
And what happened was that Rupert took advantage of rapid, aggressive deregulation in order to go ahead and slice up a part of the market to create a right-wing, GOP-driven propaganda machine that did nothing but spread anti-Semitic conspiracy theories 24 hours a day, all to help people like Rupert Murdoch and other people of his rarefied class.
It's funny, I bet you if you watched Fox News in 1997, 1998, when it first came out, it probably would have seemed very tame and almost very normal back then.
It took them maybe a little bit of time, I feel like.
In 96, basically the worst they had to offer was Bill O'Reilly, which was peddling a bunch of angry white men, like, why is culture the way that it is?
It went into overdrive, of course, with the Bush years, and obviously it fed off the Clinton controversies.
The Bush years went crazy and then just completely changed the entire game around September 11th and the 2000 election and it's just been running off for the races since then.
And I express my contempt for people who are old enough to remember Watergate because when we haven't gone through the Trump era, they should know better because we've gone through that before.
And yet, this is how Rupert Murdoch got his, you know, his, the impetus for this whole channel was because of how Nixon was treated in Watergate and felt like if we'd only had a network that was more propaganda that would back the president up, then that would never have happened.
Nixon would have continued to do all these horrible, illegal things, like bugging, you know, the Democratic National Headquarters.
Nixon's downfall was possible in a shared reality situation in the 1970s.
just disappeared and it built it basically built an empire uh rooted in that and that's that's all add to the disgustingness uh of that list nixon's downfall was possible in a shared reality situation in the 1970s people were still watching and reading the same things which gave not totally an objective version of reality but something more objective than what we have now roger ailes who of course was uh murdoch's partner
when he came to fox news and a documented serial sexual assaulter was one of the pioneers of using television as propaganda uh he's a He did this on behalf of Richard Nixon and had the idea that if only they had one channel that could be marketed towards Republican supporting viewers, that Nixon would have not just survived his impeachment, but that nobody would ever be held accountable afterward.
He was right.
And both he and Murdoch rode the waves of deregulation of telecommunications in the 1980s and then the 1990s, but also took advantage of something that capitalism wanted them to take advantage of.
I wrote about this today in my sub stack.
These people are simply carrying out the functions of what the market wants them to do.
The market created segmented channels where, you know, if you wanted a Republican reality, it was there.
If you wanted a channel that was about nothing but history, it was there.
If you want a hunting channel, it's there.
Basically, it created marketed segmentation that these guys took advantage of because somebody was going to, and it just so happened that they went ahead and they created what the market wanted.
The market wanted Fox News.
It wanted to create a right wing voice that would move things in that direction.
As a result, objective journalism, or as close as anything we've ever had to it, it was completely undermined and destroyed because it wasn't profitable.
The market didn't want that.
It didn't reward that.
And as a result, we have now entered into a late capitalist dystopia.
And we have to look at how we got here, not just that Rupert Murdoch was some sort of a genius, But that all of the things were in place to move this thing forward.
Well, here's the thing about that is that I don't know that Fox News created the right-wing movement only because we had never had a more contentious period of our political history until now, until Trump comes along, right?
The early 70s around Watergate and Nixon, You had much more civil unrest, right?
But look at the difference.
Then you have a president forced to resign because his own party made him do that.
And now there is no shame for any of the actions that these politicians do.
And I would have to say that that is probably the biggest result from Fox News.
Well, what they did, Fox News basically, before there was Fox News, there was AM Talk Radio, of course, which the Fairness Doctrine, you know, getting gotten rid of, made possible.
But what they did, too, is they sort of expanded the reach of quote-unquote mainstream media, right?
Because before that, basically to get the information that you got from Fox News, you either were listening to crackpots on AM radio or you were trading tapes and cassettes.
And this was like the Patriot movement, right?
These are like real, real crazed, wild-eyed people.
What Fox News did is it went ahead and said, hey, that's a commodity.
We'll We'll go ahead and bring that in.
We'll air these conspiracy theories all day long, but we'll give them a professional sheen.
And that's the legacy that he leaves behind, is that it wasn't, you know, it's almost like, Nick, you remember this, the 1990s, everybody was like, man, nirvana is this world-changing sound.
Then within a couple of months, all of a sudden, every car commercial that you watched had something that sounded like nirvana, just like with, you know, without the blood in it.
That's what Fox News did, is it went ahead and captured that extremism and it made it sound more rational and mainstream, and there was no need for that shame anymore.
You were operating in a poisoned atmosphere that Rupert Murdoch and all of his corporate friends wanted.
What has happened is that they had moved discourse so far to the right that it changed culture, it changed our politics, and now, evolutionary-wise, Lachlan Murdoch, who is more extreme than his father, Who believes these conspiracy theories that have been peddled by his family's corporation for years, he's going to take over, which we've been covering for the past couple of years, Nick.
Fox News was always going to have to keep moving further right in order to protect itself and its market share and its audience.
That's what's going to happen.
And now that he's leaving, Rupert Murdoch is well, he's leaving quotes around that.
Like you said, he'll still have his fingers in that pie.
But as this is happening, what we're watching is a sea change with Fox News, which is just only going to get worse until it's rained in and until it's actually held accountable.
And by the way, I'm really glad I thought you were going to crap on Pearl Jam for a second there as your nirvana.
Point.
But the question is, is Lachlan a guy like, you know, Roman from Succession or not?
And either way, I would suspect growing up in that environment, there probably isn't any kind of platform they believe in.
I think they believe in money.
This is the proven path to enormous riches and there's no reason to change that so we will continue to do that.
So that's the only thing I could think of as far as the religion that Lachlan might believe in is simply what he was birthed into in that primordial evil soup.
It's what we cover all the time, which is ideology is simply giving a story to the things that are good for you, right?
That help your bottom line.
They'll believe whatever it is, you know?
At one moment, they're completely anti-Trump.
The next, the network is nothing except for Trump 24 hours a day.
It's whatever story you need to tell yourself or whatever story you need to put out there in order to help your bottom line.
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