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Chapter 1: What is the historical context of 24-hour cable news?
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How's it going, boys? Hey, Niall. It's the same thing with slow hands. Slow hands is not about anything else, really, is it? You know, our taste so good can't be about food. You do the same, Nick, with some of the stuff that you've done.
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Chapter 2: How did the Fairness Doctrine impact broadcast news?
That's right. But it's still stuff you should know. That's right. It is still stuff you should know. And today, we are talking about cable news possibly ruining our country. I don't know that there's much possibly about it. Yeah, you know, I never really thought about it. I mean, I think about our country being ruined a lot. Yeah.
But, you know, I never really thought a lot about, like, what was the initial cause of stuff. But it's hard to not make an argument that cable news has been, like, 24-hour, 24-7 cable news coverage is what we're talking about. Yeah. That didn't make a real dent in things. Yeah, for sure.
And there's study after study that just shows all the negative effects it has on a collective scale, on an individual scale. It's just not good stuff. I looked all over. You can't really find any positive studies on it. They're like, yeah, it's really good for this. I mean, I guess it does make you feel alive to some degree.
But I think that's also kind of like trying to find the good in menthol cigarettes by saying they make your throat feel icy when you're smoking them.
Right.
Yeah, and, you know, I think if we're going to talk about this, a good place to start is sort of a brief little look at the old days. Before cable news was, you know, when you and I were growing up, there were the big three, CBS, NBC, and ABC News, or, you know, the networks, and they had news shows that came on, you know, in the evening, and then like 6 or 6.30, and then 11.00.
And that's where people got their national news. And it was reported on in a way where they just sort of said, here's what's going on in the world. Here are the facts of what's happening. And we all had a shared reality of what was going on. And you could kind of make up your own mind about it. Yeah. Shared reality is a great way to put it.
And there has been lots of study about the importance of that, too. Right. So, like, even if the people who are watching the news didn't agree with other people who are watching the news about, you know, what the solution was to this problem.
Mm hmm.
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Chapter 3: What role did Ted Turner play in the rise of CNN?
Well, or maybe it was the glue, I guess, was that shared reality of, hey, we're all agreeing on at least the basic facts of what's going on. Right. We did an entire episode on the Fairness Doctrine. It was released appropriately on July 4th, 2019. So if you want to go... listen in depth about the Fairness Doctrine, you can.
But just sort of a quick overview for this purpose, though, is the FCC here in the United States, the Federal Communications Commission, was created in the early 1930s. And their mandate was to, quote, encourage the larger and more effective use of radio in the public interest. And, you know, radio was their jam early on, obviously, before television.
And the Fairness Doctrine was conceived in the radio days in the 1930s and 40s because there were a bunch of one-sided political editorials on the radio at the time. So they said, hey, after World War II passed, let's get together and at least decide on a set of rules that all radio and eventually TV stations need to adhere to.
Yeah, and a lot of it had to do with the duty that broadcasters had to serve the public good. That was the point of getting a broadcast license, right? Yeah, you made money selling ads and stuff like that. But ultimately, what the government wanted you to do was to basically serve the public.
And the way that you did that was you devoted airtime to objective, nonpartisan coverage of all issues, right? You had to be fair. You had to give other people who had a different point of view a chance to get their coverage as well. If somebody in particular was criticized by the station itself, by the newscast, so it's an editorial organization,
That person should have ample opportunity to respond. And then this also was part of our presidential debates episode. Part of the fairness doctrine was if you were a political candidate, you got equal time to every other political candidate. Like all political candidates had to get exactly the same amount of airtime over the course of the race. Yeah. Yeah. So that was the Fairness Doctrine.
It worked really well for a long time. And then, you know, as we detailed in the episode, in 1980, Ronald Reagan came around and said, let me quote Josh Clark of the future. Nuts to that. And so he said, yeah, let's, you know, let's open it up to competition. If you're a broadcaster, you should be able to compete in the marketplace for viewers and just let the chips fall where they may.
And so in 1987, the FCC stopped enforcing the Fairness Doctrine. And Almost immediately, radio was the first place where we saw the big change. Talk radio, especially on the AM dial, exploded. I think over a 35-year period between 1960 and 1995, they went from two talk radio stations in the United States, as in one followed by two, to more than 1,100.
And most of those, I think about 70% of those radio stations were conservative. It just exploded in conservative talk radio with people like, you know, the king of that whole movement, Rush Limbaugh. Yeah, so they stopped enforcing in 1987. He went on the air for the first time in 1988.
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Chapter 4: How did Fox News change the landscape of cable news?
I didn't either. I think they actually made it up for him. Honorary Congress member? Pretty much. So, yeah, that was a, you know, TV took notice. And later, as we'll see, you know, we'll get to Fox News in a little bit after we talk about the first one, CNN. But later, Fox News would say like, hey, here's a model of, you know, kind of political commentary as entertainment. that we can emulate.
And like, people love this guy. He's got 20 million listeners every day. And like, imagine the kind of cash we can make if we brought that model to television. But first was CNN. You know, we just lost one of my childhood heroes growing up, Ted Turner. Very recently, he passed away like less than two weeks ago as we record this in real time.
But Ted was the founder of CNN, the very first 24-hour cable news channel. And that came around in 1980 after he had made a bunch of money inheriting and then running his father's billboard advertising business. And he was like, you know what? I think we could use a 24-hour news cable channel.
And his literal quote was, to bring together in brotherhood and kindness and friendship and in peace the people of this nation and this world. That was his vision. Ted Turner was the real deal as far as founding CNN. And this was brand new. Like you said, people tuned in at 6.30 and 11 p.m., and that's where you got your news. Now you could tune to CNN and watch news 24 hours a day.
No one had ever done anything like that, ever. And it took a little while to catch on because people were like, It's not a lot to watch or I'm watching the same stuff over and over again. These people seem to be trying really hard. And then the Challenger space shuttle exploded in 1986. And that is when CNN like showed why it was around. Yeah, for sure.
And can I just have a quick aside about Ted Turner? Oh, sure. Because if he grew up in Atlanta in the 1970s and 80s, he was, you know, a good chance he might have been your hero like he was mine. Because not only did he launch CNN, but more importantly to a kid like me, he was the owner at one point of both the Atlanta Braves and the Atlanta Hawks.
And he launched the Superstation WTBS, which was a... That's where I learned about what comedy was, by watching stuff like The Carol Burnett Show and old black and white stuff like Gilligan's Island and Andy Griffith and Green Acres. He was just this larger-than-life guy. He won an America's Cup.
His philanthropy, he gave a billion dollars in 1997, which was unheard of at the time for somebody to give that amount of money. Yeah. to the UN to support humanitarian aid and global health and the empowerment of women in developing countries. He saved the American bison. He's just an amazing dude.
And I was at a Willie Nelson concert at an outdoor venue at Chastain Park in Atlanta in the 90s, and Ted came in a little late. And it was like... you would have thought the ghost of Elvis had walked in.
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Chapter 5: What strategies did MSNBC employ to compete with Fox News?
He owned that town in the, um, in the seventies and eighties. So, uh, very sad when he passed. So I just wanted to give a little quick tribute. Yeah, and that's fitting, too, because that journalistic vision of bringing everyone together through global coverage of all the issues facing us, he was a true believer in that.
It wasn't like a cynical thing where he's like, I'm really just trying to get a license to print money. I even saw a Fox News article or profile on him that they ran recently after he died, and they were even speaking about him respectfully and as far as his journalistic integrity goes. So he really did, when he founded CNN, it really was like for good reason. Yeah, so it was 24-7 news.
No one had ever seen anything like that. That was the first reporting of news in progress when something broke. It was the first time that they had the news ticker at the bottom of a screen. People liked CNN. It wasn't like it was some huge... like mad success right off the bat.
But then when things started happening in real time in the 80s, like the space shuttle Challenger disaster, obviously, the Berlin Wall falling when little baby Jessica was rescued in 1987. And then like hugely impactful when the Gulf War started, CNN was there for all of that stuff, like second by second reporting, and no one had ever seen stuff like that before. No.
And they were highly criticized for some of their reporting. They were allowed to stay in Iraq, and they in some ways became a propaganda arm for Saddam Hussein accidentally. But they still showed what you were supposed to do covering a war. And also, CNN was largely responsible for making the Gulf War the first live televised war in history because they covered it that much. Yeah.
I remember sitting around watching it with my roommates in college, like just coming home from after class and like putting the war on. Yeah. It was really weird. It was always on because CNN was always on covering it. Yeah, for sure. And, you know, we should also point out that there would be a change at CNN after Turner, and we'll get to that.
But if you're on the right side politically and you hate CNN, that was not Ted Turner's vision to start a left-leaning media outlet. That was not what he was trying to do at all. So I hope those words kind of come through here. Sure, sure.
So there was kind of out of the gate an issue that CNN faced, which was if you're covering news, like, yeah, news happens pretty frequently, but 24 hours of coverage can be overdoing it. So rather than just saying the same reporting over and over and over again, they brought in people, analysts, to talk about, to kind of unpack what that news meant.
Yeah.
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Chapter 6: How has opinion journalism influenced public perception?
Yeah. who two very much on the opposite sides of the spectrum guys who, you know, Clinton was a good villain for Republicans and then, you know, later liberals as we would learn more stuff about him. And Gingrich was on the other side, man. Just he really is the guy like entrenched in politics that ushered in that real good versus evil thing. Yeah. As in the Democrats are evil, we're good.
It's up to us to save America. Before that, the existential threats to the United States were external, namely the USSR. After Gingrich rose and took power of the GOP, the threat was domestic. It was the Democrats that were the threat to America as far as the GOP was concerned. That was new. Yeah. That was new. And that was the beginning of the end of bipartisanship.
Whereas now today, if you defect and vote against your own party, you're a traitor to your party. You know, not that you're doing what your constituents think you should do or voting by your conscience. You're a traitor. That's new. And that's basically where it began. Yeah. I mean, I remember being a kid and I wasn't involved in politics when I was younger, like very into that kind of thing.
But I remember hearing the adults during election season, not my parents because they never talked about any of that stuff, but just other people like, you know, we're going to I'm going to see which one of these men speaks to me the most. And I'm going to make up my mind on who I think is going to be the best leader.
And it's just like, I mean, I know they're technically are probably independents today, but. It's hard to imagine just that being a thing today at all, you know? I'm sure for people who didn't grow up in times where that was possible, it's very hard to imagine.
Yeah.
Another thing that happened in the 90s, like we talked about, Rush Limbaugh was enormous. Fox News was another huge thing that happened when it was founded in 1996. And we'll talk about that afterward. And then I have a pet theory, Chuck. What did you think about this? I had a feeling this was you. Yeah. What do you think? Sure. I agree. My theory is that the real world premiered in 1992.
And you might say, what does that have to do with anything? Well, it exposed people to reality television, which is not real. But this idea that you can just be horrible to other people and that's like an acceptable way to be. The groundwork for that was laid around then. Yeah. So you put all those things together. The mid-'90s were a really bad beginning.
The seed, the evil, dark seed that rotted the core and heart of America out, that started in the mid-'90s. That's right. It sounds like a great time for a break because you mentioned something happening in 1996, and we'll talk about that right after this.
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Chapter 7: What are the effects of media polarization on American society?
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All right, listen up. The Jonas Brothers here. Our podcast is called Hey Jonas. Since everyone has a podcast, we wanted to as well. And we've had some incredible guests so far. And now our good friend Niall Horan is joining the show.
How's it going, boys? Hey, Niall. It's the same thing with Slow Hands. Slow Hands is not about anything else, really, is it? You know, our taste so good can't be about food. You do the same, Nick, with some of the stuff that you've done.
You too, Joe.
Drop what you're doing and listen to Hey Jonas on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your podcasts.
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Chapter 8: What potential solutions exist for the issues caused by cable news?
All right. So before we broke, you mentioned Fox News debuting in 1996. Just very quickly about Roger Ailes, who helped launch Fox News. He was a Republican political consultant for many, many years. He helped to get Reagan, Nixon, all the way back to Nixon, George H.W. Bush elected. He understood that TV was a very powerful thing as far as shaping public opinion by this point.
He had met Rush Limbaugh in 1991 and for a little while produced a TV version of Limbaugh's show in the early 90s. But it was in 1996 when an Aussie named Rupert Murdoch who had previously given us The Simpsons with the Fox Broadcasting Company, which he launched in 1986, the Fox company. He said, you know what? We need our own news station. Let's get Fox News on the airwaves.
And Roger Ailes, you're going to be the guy to do it. Yeah, he designed Fox News as we understand it today, basically right out of the gate.
And one thing to understand about him being a political operative who worked on the Nixon campaign, that 68 Nixon campaign was where a guy named Kevin Phillips came up with what's called the Southern Strategy today, which was essentially the idea that politics is about who hates who. And then playing on those prejudices to get people to vote essentially about other people.
It's where the culture war started. And Roger Ailes basically took that, the politics of who hates who, and put it on TV as a 24-hour cable news network. Yeah, and charged for it. Yeah, that's another thing, too, that we'll see. Like, they have made tons and tons of cash, but they're in a really big turning point right now because of how their business model works. Yeah, for sure.
So in the beginning, they had a claim, you know, Ailes and Murdoch, that it was going to be Fox News is going to be an apolitical channel. Quote, we expect to do fine, balanced journalism. But behind the scenes, they were like, hey, we think that most mainstream news outlets have a liberal bias. So we're going to come along and correct that with Fox News.
And that fair and balanced motto that Fox News launched under Ailes was a literal troll to liberal critics. He knew it wasn't fair and balanced, and so that was his way of poking the bear. I think in 2017, when Ailes was fired in the very infamous sexual harassment scandal, that's when they got rid of the fair and balanced tag for good. Yeah, and Roger Ailes and Bill O'Reilly. Yeah.
Among others. So, Ailes was out, but he had been, you know, he had governed this thing for 20 years. And, like, his vision is still there today. Like, the way that he shaped it is still, Fox is essentially still the same thing as it was from 1996. It was, he perfected it right out of the box, essentially. Yeah.
And it really started to kind of gain traction pretty quickly after it came along because Bill Clinton handed them a beautiful gift in like a robin's egg blue Tiffany's box with a beautiful bow on it. And that is called the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Yeah. And that box was a cigar and a blue dress. Yeah.
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