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Sept. 11, 2023 - Straight White American Jesus
37:32
Can Democracy Survive 24/7 Cable News?

In her new book, 24/7 News: Cable Television and the Fragmenting of America From Watergate to Fox News, Dr. Kathryn Cramer Brownell, Associate Professor of History at Purdue University, shows how cable became an unstoppable medium for political communication that prioritized cult followings and loyalty to individual brands, fundamentally reshaped party politics, and, in the process, sowed the seeds of democratic upheaval. In her conversation with Brad, Dr. Brownell reveals how cable TV created new possibilities for antiestablishment voices and opened a pathway to political prominence for seemingly unlikely figures like Donald Trump by playing to narrow audiences and cultivating division instead of common ground. Subscribe for $5.99 a month to get bonus episodes, ad-free listening, access to the entire 500-episode archive, Discord access, and more: https://axismundi.supercast.com/ Buy the book here in order to support SWAJ: https://bookshop.org/lists/swaj-recommends-september-2023/edit To Donate: venmo - @straightwhitejc Paypal: https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/BradleyOnishi Linktree: https://linktr.ee/StraightWhiteJC SWAJ Book Recommendations - September 2023: https://bookshop.org/lists/swaj-recommends-september-2023/edit Order Brad's new book: https://www.amazon.com/Preparing-War-Extremist-Christian-Nationalism/dp/1506482163 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi, faculty at the University of San Francisco.
I'm joined today by just a fantastic guest who's written a fantastic new book, and that is Dr. Katherine Cramer Brownell.
So I'll just say, Dr. Brownell, thank you for joining me.
Thank you so much for having me.
So your new book is called 24-7 Politics, Cable Television, and the Fragmenting of America from Watergate to Fox News.
You are an associate professor of history at Purdue University and the author of a previous book called Showbiz Politics, Hollywood and American Political Life.
For those of you on YouTube, here's the book and you should all check it out.
And as soon as I saw the book, and I think I saw it on Twitter, I was so excited to reach out to you because I thought, So much of what we talk about on this show is related to the development of cable news in our country.
And there's amazing things in here, like you spent a lot of time on Richard Nixon, and people who listen to this show know I come from Richard Nixon's hometown.
I'm going to share something with you also, just so you know we're friends and I'm willing to embarrass myself in front of you.
I'm going to say something I've never said on this podcast, which is you also spent significant time On the 1992 election, Bill Clinton, Ross Perot, George H.W.
Bush trying to get a second term.
And guess who dressed up as Ross Perot for Halloween when he was in fifth grade?
None other than me.
Oh, wow.
Was that you?
My mom bought me these big ears to wear around and a suit.
And luckily, there's no pictures for the internet to get ahold of.
But I dressed up as Ross Perot for Halloween.
So there you go.
There it is.
Let's start at the beginning.
I'm going to ask you to do something that's going to be hard, but in the first two and a half, three chapters, you really give us this incredibly intricate look at the development of cable television in this country.
And the thing that really Grabbed me about those chapters, which are just filled with way more details and way more characters and stories and and events than we can get into right now.
But is that from the beginning of American television in general and cable TV as a whole, there's this war between, hey, we want to make money, which is always an American obsession.
And the cultivation of civic values through television.
Can you help us understand just a little bit, a brief snapshot of what that looks like, say, in the 1930s, the 1940s, as we kind of lead up to the post-war period and the beginning of what might look like modern America?
Well, I think that there is a tendency with any new technology that really comes into play.
And in the 20th century, we see a lot of new technological developments.
And time and time again, there is a hope that a new technology could advance democracy by making citizens more informed.
This was the promise, of course, with the telegraph.
It was a promise of motion pictures.
It was a promise of radio.
But of course, these are private industries, and they're private industries because of the very regulatory structures in the United States that really wanted to foreground commercialism and, again, capitalism.
And so this tension between capitalism and democracy has always been at play with the development of new technologies.
And particularly around radio and then television, which follows in its format, there is something different that emerges is that these new technologies depended on airwaves, which were seen as a public good.
And so early on, there's this question of what is the civic responsibility then for businesses if they use these airwaves, which early on regulators said belong to the public.
And so they decided to develop a system that again is a private enterprise, it's a business, but because those new technologies relied on public airwaves, early on regulators said that they had to, you know, they had a public interest responsibility.
And they structured the regulatory system with this expectation that these commercial corporate entities that develop would, you know, have some responsibility to bring education and public affairs to the broader public.
I as a young 20 something left my hometown for the first time and moved to Oxford, England to get a master's degree.
And one of the things that I just was so struck by was turning on the television and here was the BBC.
There's no commercials on the BBC.
The only thing they advertise are other shows on the BBC.
It is looked at.
Now, there are contentions and arguments and debates about the BBC in the UK.
It's not a uniformly loved entity by any means.
It really is a public good that is offered to the public.
I just, even as a young 20-something, I could not sort of get my head around that because I was used to American television.
It's for money.
Even if you have news, It's for money.
That is the reason these folks put all this effort into making these things.
It is not to enhance the public square.
And so, as I read your book, I was just brought back to all of those memories of kind of realizing, oh, there's countries that do this differently, but the United States certainly has had its own kind of development as time has gone on.
Yeah, that's one of the things I find really interesting as a scholar of politics and media, is that it's so clear.
I think people sometimes forget that TV, radio, motion pictures, technology develops because of political decisions.
And it takes the shape it does because of those decisions about, do we want to have this be federally funded?
Do we want to have this to be a nonprofit?
Do we want to have this be a corporate infrastructure?
These are policy, very contentious policy debates.
Yeah, there's so much to say here, and my brain really wants to just make comparisons to, like, what's happening with Twitter and Elon Musk and other things.
There's so many ways that we can think of what happened in 1930s America or 40s America just being the same debates now.
But I want to jump ahead to a figure who really just jumped out at me in the book, because not only because I come from his hometown, but because he played a role in the development of cable news and specifically like the 24-7 cable news cycle.
But but also the like use of cable as a way to get away from broadcast networks and the regulations and limits on them.
And that's Richard Nixon.
You write in pages 89 and 90 that Nixon had a rage against media bias.
He really felt like when he ran against John Kennedy in the early 60s, he should have won, but John Kennedy looked better on TV and played better to the crowds in that way, so he lost.
And Nixon really gets into office As president, and he wants to kind of work around what you call the monopoly of the networks.
I'm really interested in this because on this show we talk about Christian nationalism, we talk about the religious right, and of course Fox News and all the other kind of networks are always on our mind.
I don't think many people listening would think of Reagan, excuse me, think of Nixon As one of the four most figures in the development of our kind of current landscape when it comes to cable news, can you talk about Nixon's just absolute desire to get away from the limits of broadcast television in order to be his own man on television and say his message how he wanted?
Yeah, this is something that drew me to the book.
And this really was the beginning of, I knew I wanted to write a book about cable television and how it really reshaped American politics.
And like many people, I assumed that this happened under Reagan in the 1990s.
That's where you see cable really dramatically Expand.
And I thought it was part of Reagan's deregulatory agenda and his desire to, you know, really expand media as, you know, a former actor, a former broadcaster.
I thought that that was a product of the 80s.
And then I saw a line time and time again in some of the media studies scholarship about Richard Nixon and his anti-media politics.
And I thought, I've studied Richard Nixon.
I know there's much more there.
And I started digging and found out that he was deeply obsessed with what he called the network news problem.
And he firmly believed that these big three, ABC, NBC, and CBS, that had developed, that dominated the television marketplace, again, because of federal regulation.
That these three monopolies did develop and made tremendous money and had tremendous political and social power because they controlled the information that people understood about the world around them that was coming into their TV screen.
And Nixon saw the problems of that.
He took it very personally.
He thought that, you know, the news program was really out to get him.
And so he wanted to really decentralize this media landscape.
And so he really, I have the chapter in my book about Nixon, I call Revenge Politics, because he is really driven by this revenge.
Like he's determined, he wants to hit their pocketbook.
Not because he thinks it's going to be good for American democracy, because it's going to advance information, but because it will take down his enemy and give him more political control.
And his advisors, many of his advisors actually really did want to decentralize the media landscape to allow new voices to kind of come in.
Because, of course, these networks were very exclusive.
They advanced a view of the world that was elitist, white and male, and very exclusionary.
And so his advisors had different motivations, but they could agree that cable television could be a tool not to expand the reach of broadcasting as it originally had, but to actually challenge broadcasting and provide a different form of TV.
I was really struck by the idea that Nixon might have been The real progenitor of the idea that the media has liberal bias, that we have to find our own outlets as conservatives, as people who don't want to be beholden to these sort of liberals who control the television.
And as you say, his interest was not developing or cultivating civic values, but gaining a political edge.
But I think some people listening would thought, "Oh, I thought that was Roger Ailes, the guy that really got in on the ground floor at Fox News." Or maybe, as you said, it was Ronald Reagan.
But I just couldn't get away on those pages from the idea of like, "Oh no, it was Nixon." Nixon started stomping around in the way he did, saying, "The media is out to get conservatives." And that's where the turn to cable news as a way for conservatives in his mind, and many others, to sort of get an edge really emerges.
I mean, is that a fair sort of encapsulation?
Or is there things I'm missing there?
Well, there are conservatives on the airwaves, conservative broadcasters in the 1950s and 1960s.
Many of them actually organized for Barry Goldwater in 1964.
And so there are conservative media activists that have been loudly proclaiming liberal media bias before Richard Nixon.
But Nixon firmly believes this.
He believes that not just because of these other activists, but he believes it personally.
He thinks that, and again, he makes this more about attacks on him than conservatism, but he believes in this notion of media bias.
And he's able to appeal to many conservatives who distrusted him on other issues because of their shared conviction that there was this liberal media bias that they had to counter.
One of the things that's different that I think that Nixon does that's very different from media activists or conservative media activists like William Buckley or Clarence Mannion or some of these other conservative publishing houses is that Nixon turns the conversation about media bias into a regulatory shift.
That his solution, his administration's solution to media bias is deregulation and that we have to rely on the market.
The market is going to deliver more information.
The market is going to counteract this liberal bias.
And so it's a very specific and a very narrow solution.
You know, there are civil rights activists and feminists, like they also saw the bias in the media.
They identified it differently in terms of sexism and racism in there.
But they also looked at different solutions, many of them non-profits, you know, foundation funding.
And so Nixon's key change that he implemented is really making the solution to media biases to rely on the marketplace.
Those pages were so... I learned so much there because what really dawned on me was like, hey, I know that Reagan and to some extent Nixon were 20th century conservatives who thought deregulation is the answer.
I mean, we still hear this.
But I had never thought about it in terms of broadcasting, television, and the news that Americans received every night.
The answer was, deregulate, let the market decide.
As you say, there's others.
There's people who are fighting for civil rights, for BIPOC Americans, women, and so on.
And their answer is, yes, we need to get away from the monopoly of the big three, but we can do that through what?
Nonprofit like not not money making but by like setting up different ways that various voices might be represented and you just start to see like American politics in a nutshell in in the kind of approach to media this brings me to the development of C-SPAN and CNN which is so great like these chapters are so great in your book because I'm a child of the 90s.
I grew up with CNN.
I've never considered where did C-SPAN come from?
Who thought that up?
What is the development of C-SPAN and CNN almost sort of in tandem, like in parallel?
Well, they both represent different ways in which private industry is pledging to and trying to deliver for democracy.
C-Stan is a nonprofit and it is funded by Cable Company.
And so they fit the bill, although, you know, they include that in your cable fee each month.
So, you know, in theory, they're funding it.
But it's also part of, you know, they pay a per subscriber fee.
And so it's part of your cable package every month or the fees that you pay.
But it is part of the promise by cable corporations.
They all come together and give early seed money for C-SPAN because they recognize that their industry is still highly regulated.
Even though Richard Nixon is introducing this idea that cable needs to be deregulated to expand and to compete against the big three, in 1978, 1979, a lot of cable legislation is stymied because broadcasters have a lot of power.
They have a lot of power because they have a lot of friends on Capitol Hill.
And so C-SPAN develops as a way to get cable friends on Capitol Hill.
Again, there's the promise to bring transparency and more information to the broader public.
But one of the reasons that, and that's certainly what the founder of C-SPAN, Brian Lamb, had envisioned.
And that's certainly his passion and his mission with C-SPAN.
But the reason cable operators jumped on board was because they could curry favor with elected officials.
If they put them on TV, if a congressman is on TV, he's a lot more likely to want to expand that form of TV because it's going to expand his national presence.
And so it's that symbiotic relationship that cable operators saw that broadcasters had early on with elected officials, and they wanted to kind of bring that.
So again, there's this democratic promise, but the reality is a lot more pragmatic politics.
The C-SPAN history is so fascinating to me, but one of the things I couldn't stop thinking about as I read the book was like, As you just said, hey, if we have cameras in the house chamber when the house is deliberating, when the house is doing its business, transparency.
And there's so many of us that are like, yeah, yeah, let's see what's going on in there.
We want to know.
But you do such a wonderful job of showing us.
That this changes the way that business is done in Congress because all of a sudden congressmen are like, oh yeah, Congress people are like, hey, there's a camera over there.
So the speech I'm about to give, yeah, it's kind of to like, you know, have some effect here in the congressional chamber, but you know what I'm really doing?
This is campaigning.
This is a stump speech.
This is me winning votes.
That happens back in the 70s, and now it's completely out of control.
I mean, you know, it's basically Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene and everyone else sort of standing up to get news clips they can send out to fundraise.
I mean, that part of the C-SPAN story I had never considered and is so interesting.
Now, CNN's a completely different story.
Tell us about Ted Turner and the launch of CNN.
Yes, so CNN is a for-profit business, and it also promises that it's going to cover the news non-stop.
I remember before, in the broadcasting era, the news was really about 22 minutes a day.
Half an hour shows, you know, intermixed with commercials.
Sometimes you might have a one-hour documentary or one-hour program, but it's very limited.
And the networks always said that the news costs them money, but it was part of their commitment to the public interest and justified upholding these regulations that gave them a monopoly and so much money.
Well, in reality, the news always made money.
This was more of a PR strategy by the broadcasting networks.
But Ted Turner does something different.
He says, I'm not going to apologize.
I'm not going to make up this myth about civic interest and public interest.
I think that the news can fundamentally make money.
And let's embrace that money-making nature of the news.
And again, it's during the early 1980s when there are a lot of regulatory debates about, you know, how cable should function.
Should you kind of pull back some of these regulations on how much they charge each month?
And do they have to fulfill their promises at the local level?
All of these different things that really made it so a cable company couldn't just jack up your rates one month.
That's being debated at the same time.
And so cable operators are saying, deregulate us, let the market deliver.
And CNN and C-SPAN become a way in which they show elected officials, look, we'll cover you more.
We'll cover conventions, you know, like nonstop.
We won't just have the highlights.
Well, we'll talk with people who aren't presidents, right?
We'll get a variety of different activists.
We'll get representatives and senators.
To participate in the conversation.
And so they're always kind of dangling the carrot of more television coverage and more malleable television coverage that doesn't necessarily come with hard-hitting questions from the Washington press corps.
Well, and it, yeah, reading those pages, I just, I could not stop thinking about Wolf Blitzer.
And like, I don't watch much CNN, but every time you turn on CNN, I feel like Wolf Blitzer is on somehow.
And it's like this ridiculous stage with like 88 different lights.
And like the, there's, there's like things streaming on the bottom.
There's always a, it doesn't matter what's happening.
It always says like breaking news.
Like you, you kind of think something really big's happened, like.
You know, an assassination or something.
And it's really just like that's just what's up on the screen 24 hours a day at CNN.
And reading your your work really illustrated like Ted Turner turned the news into show business without apology.
And here we are.
Let's turn to another figure that I was, yeah, I mean, happy is the wrong word, but I was really fascinated to see in your pages, and that's Newt Gingrich.
So Newt Gingrich, people of a certain age will know, former Republican leader in the House, a firebrand still today, still pops up on Fox News and other outlets.
But you show us that Gingrich realized that with C-SPAN, Having cameras in the congressional chamber, that you could use that for your advantage, and here's a quote, for perpetual smoldering outrage.
So we go from Nixon, who's like, I'm going to rage against the media bias, to Gingrich, whose strategy as a GOP politician is, use the media to create perpetual smoldering outrage so that we can gain an advantage in elections.
That's incredible.
Can you talk about Newt Gingrich and the way he kind of innovated some of this in a really deleterious fashion?
Absolutely.
So he comes in and I think he is a great example about, again, political choices over how to use new media really shape the programming, the messages, and its development.
So C-SPAN is introduced, again, to bring transparency on media literacy, civic education, but how elected, how representatives responded, how they manipulated, is really what shaped the medium's development more broadly.
Gingrich is a classic example.
He understood that he could, he needed, he could use this kind of, there weren't a lot of viewers watching Seastan.
You know, there, it was only when in the early 1980s, it was in about like 7 million homes.
And so this is just a fraction of the audience.
But Gingrich understands that it's still an audience.
And even if only 200,000 people are watching, that sure was better than no one watching, right?
And so he starts to think about ways that he could appeal to see-fan listeners and to get their attention.
And he uses these special orders at the end of the day.
Special orders have long been around.
Generally, people would try to, at the end of the day, the house is done with business.
And traditionally, people might use them to wish a couple in their district a happy anniversary or something like that.
It's a way to get things in the congressional record.
Well, on C-SPAN, they become something else.
Gingrich and people like Bob Walker, this fringe of the minority party in Congress, or in the House, that they use them to just lambast the Democratic leadership, their Democratic opponents, even moderate Republicans.
They are waging really, really strident attacks On what they're doing, on their character, questioning their patriotism, really directly calling out these individuals.
And if you were a TV viewer, you would just assume when they say, come challenge me, you would assume that no one would know they were right because no one challenged them.
Well, in fact, the chamber is empty.
And so really it's one of those things where they started to get this loyal following, and through some of these really outrageous speeches, they get a very dedicated minority, a national following.
So now all of a sudden, Gingrich isn't thinking about his constituents in Georgia.
He's thinking about kind of building a small but very dedicated minority by stoking that outrage and getting people so angry, like, what are they doing in there?
And it's really effective to build a loyal following, but then it also becomes effective because when he crosses the line, then it generates a national media news story in and of itself.
And so his media strategy is now on Nightly News talking about it.
And he's then the star of the conversation.
He's driving the broader media narrative.
So again, I can't get out of my head.
So here's Gingrich yelling into an empty chamber and This is why we can't have nice things in this country, because usually you use this time to be like, hey, I want to I want to congratulate John and Emma back at home on their 50th wedding anniversary.
And instead he's up there just launching political bombs and creating a spectacle.
And it's almost like Newt Gingrich was the first TikTok star, just like, you know, empty, empty chamber up there doing a dance.
And he's got his loyal following.
And he realizes, hey, I don't need to be on ABC.
I can talk to 200,000 people direct, just like media influencers do now, just like podcasters do now, right?
And it's like Gingrich realized that way ahead of his time.
Anyway, I just, all of those, all of those pages, just now when you go on YouTube, it's Here's a video about Marjorie Taylor Greene destroys leftists.
And it's Marjorie Taylor Greene in Congress yelling.
Right.
And I'm just thinking, well, that's Newt Gingrich.
That's Newt Gingrich 30 years ago, 40 years ago, who innovated this.
Yeah, exactly.
It's it's narrow casting.
And I think that's one of the things that cable brings to politics.
It is so fundamentally different from broadcasting.
Broadcasting, the term, is appealing to broad audiences, thinking about, you know, critics would say the lowest common denominator, right?
But it's thinking about how to appeal to a diverse range of people to get your message out there, to get your programming out there.
Narrowcasting is fundamentally different.
It's about appealing to a very narrow segment and for particular purposes.
And for Gingrich, it becomes to build this loyal following by creating this spectacle and bringing kind of wartime strategies into politics.
I mean, he talks in these memos that he has about politics as war.
And you'd do anything to destroy your opponent.
And TV, he saw, was essential.
Cable, in particular, because of those narrow audiences you could appeal to, was essential in terms of how he waged battle.
If I'm not mistaken, Gingrich was a historian before he was a congressperson.
Do the historians still claim Newt Gingrich?
I'm not going to make you answer that, so we'll just leave that for now.
So, getting towards the end of the book really hit home.
I'm a child of the 90s.
When I was 13, we got MTV at my house and I was just, like, hooked.
And I still remember Kurt Loder doing the MTV News.
And some of you will have to look Kurt Loder up, but you know, go ahead.
But you really talk about an MTV presidency, Bill Clinton being overwhelmingly effective at connecting with the MTV audience.
His emotional connections really won the day.
And that's how Bill Clinton's always kind of been successful.
And there was this hope once again in the 90s that something like MTV would lead to more transparency, more civic-cipation, and young people out here, democracy, let's do it.
But on page 297 of the book, you quote this searing Op-ed by Tabitha Soren.
Tabitha Soren was another figure on MTV in the 90s who was part of this whole Choose or Lose campaign to get young people involved in voting and politics and so on.
And here's what you write and what Tabitha Soren writes.
20 years later, Tabitha Soren called out how the MTV promise of democratic engagement fundamentally conflicted with the business of cable television.
The pretense of a lot of political coverage today is that it aims to improve and edify our civic life.
She wrote in an editorial for the New York Times, the reality is that it's just whoring for our attention.
I feel like in those statements, we've come full circle from the thirties all the way now to a place where we have this 24 hour news coverage.
MTV of all places is where young people are going to to like get engaged in politics.
And when she looks back on it, she's like.
We didn't help democracy.
We didn't build up the public square.
All we did was create a situation where politicians were whoring for our attention.
Can you talk about how that is a kind of inheritance of American cable TV as it developed, but also a foreshadowing of like living in the Trump era and the TikTok era and the social media era?
Absolutely.
It's a really powerful op-ed and I encourage people to read it.
She wrote it again during the 2016 election for the New York Times.
I think it really gets at exactly what cable changes about our public sphere.
I talk in the book that the broadcasting ushered in a commercialized public sphere, where again, corporate interests are driving it.
It's a private business is really shaping information that people are getting.
But there is some expectation that businesses will serve the public interest.
And again, how well they did.
Sometimes they tried.
A lot of times they did not.
Sometimes they tried and failed.
A lot of times they just, again, were more focused on profits.
It was really contentious.
And that's the opening that Cable really grabbed.
But because Cable, its development went hand in hand with a deregulatory media agenda, increasingly with Cable, There emerged this argument that consumption and the consumer interest and the public interest were one and the same.
And that creates by the time of MTV, and especially in the aftermath of the 1996 Telecommunications Act, Um, is that you have what I call a privatized public sphere where it's all about making money.
It's all about what's good for the consumer and what's actually good for the public interest.
What's good for democracy kind of stays away because it's a reliance on just the marketplace.
And so MTV emerges again out of this promise that private industries can really advance the civic knowledge and and again I think Tabitha Soren bought into that idea as she went on the campaign trail in 1992.
But MTV executives realized in 1992 that the real goal was to make sure that people didn't turn the channel, that younger viewers could get all their information about politics, not by going to CBS or ABC, but by getting personalized news that is, you know, really pandered to them about what issues that MTV executives thought the youth cared about.
And so again, it's this more, it's all about the business of television.
And at times, I think it does kind of advance civic awareness and engagement.
In 1992, you do have youth participation does increase, but it doesn't cultivate enduring ideas of education and civic knowledge.
that persist.
And so it's more fun than it is informative.
And again, there can be times where that can benefit democracy, but overall the benefit is truly to the business of television.
One of the things you say in the conclusion is that Soren realized that doing all of this work on MTV didn't create a situation of, as you say, more civic participation.
It simply turned politics into entertainment packages.
And that is just such a fantastic Diagnosis of where we are today.
I think my favorite line from the book is how you talk about Tabitha Soren saying that what 24-7 media coverage of politics has done is created a situation where our leaders are whoring for our attention, and it's not hard to see how that leads to the development of alternative facts.
Hey, if the goal is just to keep views and downloads and clicks on me, then yeah, Facts, my facts are what matter and my facts and my audience's facts are what matter.
So alternative facts, those can exist now, right?
And it's just such a, the way you end the book is really pointed on that front.
Excellent.
Thank you.
You know, I think one of the things that's important there too, is that this The political media on cable, on MTV, Bill Clinton had complete control over the conversation.
So he's really shaping the narratives.
And so this type of programming, it's not only advancing the business of television, it's also advancing the political agenda of elected officials who are not challenged, who are not questioned.
There's not a lot of follow-up.
They're getting some of these softball questions that allow them to, you know, Not be challenged on these facts, right?
And just present their point of view and really bypass a Washington press corps that might ask harder hitting questions.
And you see this, just final comment, I'm sorry, but there's so many things that your book has made me realize, but it's like, this is never more evident than when a BBC reporter or someone from another country comes over and actually asks Ted Cruz or Donald Trump or someone else real questions that need, and then they won't let them wiggle out of it like they're used to being able to do and just sort of spew nonsense.
And, you know, everyone sort of in these moments is like, why doesn't the American press do this?
And why is it so?
Hard for American reporters to do what they're doing, the BBC reporters doing or so on.
And it's all about how the system is constructed, how it works, how you get success, how you get profits and so on.
So anyway, I've taken up enough of your time.
Thank you for writing just an amazing book.
Here it is, folks.
24-7 Politics, Cable Television and the Fragmenting of America from Watergate to Fox News.
Where are places people can link up with you and your work as you talk about the book and have more on the horizon?
Great.
Thank you so much for having me and for the terrific conversation.
Do you have a website or anything that people can go to or is it, are you, and if, if you say that you're like completely offline, I'm going to like buy a hundred more copies of your book just in like complete admiration.
So if you say, yeah.
I do have a website, it's kathrynkramerbrownell.com, but I encourage you to just go to my faculty webpage and you can follow, I am still on Twitter, and my Twitter handle is at kathryn.brownell.
Perfect.
That's great.
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