Michael Walsh
speaker
176 appearances
3 recordings
2 series
first heard May 2025
last heard 15 Mar
Michael Walsh’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Mar 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Oh, it was Charles Corral. No, it wasn't Charles Corral.
I don't think that's the right name. Yeah, Mike Wallace was part of that. There was a whole group of very distinguished. Yeah. Yes.
That is absolutely correct. In my time in Eastern Europe and in the Soviet Union, you're generally accompanied by a translator or a babysitter, someone to watch, make sure you don't get into trouble. And in my private conversations with them, they were very frank about the true state of affairs. I like to tell people that in the Soviet Union, when I was there between 86 and 91,
Literally, almost literally, every man was bribable and every woman was a freelance prostitute. Almost within a certain age group. So you could get your way by moving in the black interstices of that country. And that's how people flourished. They listened to all the rock music they could get. I had a friend there who basically bootlegged rock albums in the 80s from our American 60s and 70s.
And so just to say one last thing about this, I came back in the 80s. I went with Vladimir Horowitz, the famous great pianist. And President Reagan had us to the White House. And that was the episode where Nancy Reagan fell off the stage. But that's a whole other story. I went on the Lynn Samuel show in New York. And she was a leftist, liberal talk show host on WABC, I think. And I said in 86...
germany will be reunited within five years and everybody laughed at me and i was way off because it was three years that germany was reunited but if you this my point is if you're a good journalist or an honest journalist you go in objectively without preconditions and you could see these countries were doomed they were collapsing they had collapsed morally
but nothing worked the place was a mess it stank to high heaven there's a smell about communist countries you never get out of your nose and so when when they both came down i i wasn't surprised it's just that we were so committed and i must say our government uh especially the cia was so committed to the notion that the soviets were our antithesis another first world country with nuclear weapons
And I said, you've got to be kidding. It's a third world country of peasants with nuclear weapons, which actually makes it more dangerous than you think it is. So I would just say, you know, to the point about the media, just tell the truth for God's sakes. It's not that hard. And don't let people badger you into framing it into some kind of overarching narrative, as you discovered on CNN.
Well, I think being 75 has taught me that wishes and reality sometimes don't coincide. But what we did in this book is I asked 40 other writers, many people of color,
very distinct uh distinctive and honorable bylines to attack the media from all sides so we did it as political entity we did it as an entertainment medium a number of us were critics i wrote a piece uh the two pieces that i wrote for the book one was about my experience as a music critic and functioning in the media. We did it about propaganda. We hit it from all angles that we could.
Not so much to say, how can we improve? Because that's the beginning. Objectivity. That's been thrown out now, Drew. It's interesting for me to hear some of my old colleagues at Time Magazine who are on Morning Joe regularly and have large Twitter followings and have been in the State Department. say, there's not two sides to every story. There's only one side.
And they were literally coming out during the election and saying, you cannot write anything good about Donald Trump. That is a violation of journalistic ethics. There is only one story to be told here. And when journalism gets to that part, then what's the difference between it and Pravda? That was my question. Nothing.
Yeah, well, there were two newspapers in the Soviet Union, Pravda and Izvestia. And Pravda means truth and Izvestia means news. And people would say there's no news in the truth and there's no truth in the news. And that was pretty much how they viewed their own state-run media. And the sad thing now, Drew, is that a lot of the European media is is turning into that.
I live in Ireland half the year. I rebuilt my great-grandmother's birthplace. My whole family is there now. And the media in Ireland is entirely state-controlled, almost entirely. There are a couple of independent voices. But all you hear is the EU, EUSSR propaganda line. Untrammeled immigration is good. National borders are bad. Nationalism is bad.
And you see this struggle going on in Europe that, frankly, we saw in Eastern Europe in the late 70s and into the 80s. It's distressing to watch. But as you pointed out earlier, we never really do learn. We just get to keep doing the same dumb things over and over again.
Yeah, I hope not. I hope the EU falls. It's been very, very bad for Ireland. It's destroyed. As I like to say in Ireland, we were a slave state for 800 years under the British. They took our language. They took our property. They destroyed our homes. They starved us to death. They put us on coffin ships and sent us out.
We had freedom for 100 years, and we couldn't wait to give it away to Brussels. Not if it ain't, I'd take London again compared to Brussels. But it's become a slave state of the EU, and it's very sad. But you're right. Hungary is a good example. I spent a lot of time in Hungary, and that's a wonderful country under Orban. And yet our media treats Orban like he's the second coming of Hitler.
It's really disgraceful. I just think there's not enough honest people in journalism anymore. I think they're all activists now and they're taught to be activists and they think that's the job. And I come back to, so what's the difference between you and Pravda? In the end, there isn't any.
Yes. As a matter of fact, I wrote a review of it for some academic publication. I think that's Helen Pluckrose. And is it Lindsay? Yeah. Yeah.
Well, I wrote a book 10 years ago that turned out to be very influential on the right. It's called The Devil's Pleasure Palace, and it's about critical theory and the Frankfurt School. I mean, that's a whole other subject, but those people applied cultural Marxism, a phrase they deny that cultural Marxism exists, so you know it must exist. And they took it to every aspect of our lives.
Showing 121–140 of 176 · page 7 of 9
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