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Episode: The Rise of Fox News | 5. Ludacris Has Been Fired
Author: Slate Podcasts
Duration: 01:04:35
Episode Shownotes
As Fox News gathered strength, progressive activists turned to comedian Al Franken and fledgling online communities to punch back. But could the left put up a real fight without a Fox News of its own? And what did Fox’s critics miss when they focused only on its politics? Want more
from Slow Burn? Join Slate Plus to unlock full access to all seasons, including members-only bonus episodes from The Rise of Fox News. You'll also enjoy ad-free listening to all of your favorite Slate podcasts. Subscribe now by clicking "Try Free" at the top of the Slow Burn show page on Apple Podcasts. Or, visit slate.com/slowburnplus to get access wherever you listen. Season 10 of Slow Burn was written and reported by Josh Levin. It was executive produced by Lizzie Jacobs. Slow Burn is produced by Sophie Summergrad, Joel Meyer, and Rosie Belson with help from Patrick Fort, Jacob Fenston, and Julia Russo. Derek John is Slate’s executive producer of narrative podcasts. This season was edited by Susan Matthews and Hillary Frey. Merritt Jacob is our senior technical director. Mix and sound design by Joe Plourde. Our theme music was composed by Alexis Cuadrado. Derreck Johnson created the artwork for this season. Episode artwork by Ivylise Simones. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Summary
In 'The Rise of Fox News | 5. Ludacris Has Been Fired,' host Josh Levin examines the early 2000s tension between progressive activists and Fox News. Al Franken emerges as a pivotal figure critiquing the network, emphasizing its lack of journalistic integrity, while also highlighting the challenges faced by progressive media like Air America. As grassroots movements such as MoveOn and Daily Kos developed online, they created spaces for Democrats to express dissent against Fox's narratives. The episode underscores the struggles and strategies of the left in countering a powerful conservative media, particularly focusing on how racial narratives shaped activism, culminating in initiatives like the documentary 'OutFoxed.'
Go to PodExtra AI's episode page (The Rise of Fox News | 5. Ludacris Has Been Fired) to play and view complete AI-processed content: summary, mindmap, topics, takeaways, transcript, keywords and highlights.
Full Transcript
00:00:00 Speaker_13
Hey, it's Josh Levine, and I want to thank you for listening to this season of Slow Burn, the rise of Fox News. You can hear new episodes every week on Amazon Music, where you can find Slow Burn and all your Slate favorites.
00:00:12 Speaker_13
You can also ask Alexa to play any of your favorite Slate podcasts.
00:00:18 Speaker_12
This is the Convention Center in downtown Los Angeles, California, the site of this year's Book Expo.
00:00:25 Speaker_13
Book Expo America was the social gathering for the publishing industry. And in May 2003, everyone was talking about one special event, a luncheon and author talk, televised on C-SPAN 2 and moderated by former Congresswoman Pat Schroeder.
00:00:41 Speaker_13
Going in, it was clear that this wouldn't be an ordinary book panel.
00:00:46 Speaker_04
I'm thinking about changing into a black and white uniform and a whistle. I think I'll be more like a referee, but it's going to be a lot of fun.
00:00:54 Speaker_13
On the left side of the podium, wearing a dark suit, was a Jewish comedian from Minnesota.
00:01:00 Speaker_04
Ladies and gentlemen, Al Franken.
00:01:04 Speaker_13
Al Franken had made his name as a writer and performer on Saturday Night Live.
00:01:08 Speaker_35
Because you're good enough, you're smart enough, and doggone it, people like you.
00:01:16 Speaker_13
After the timeline of our series, Franken would become a powerful Democratic politician, getting elected to the U.S. Senate in 2008. He'd resign in 2017, after allegations of sexual misconduct.
00:01:29 Speaker_13
In this moment, in the spring of 2003, he was somewhere in between comedy and politics. Franken had already written a best-selling book, Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot, and other observations.
00:01:43 Speaker_13
Now he'd come to Book Expo to promote a new takedown of right-wing media with a new villain.
00:01:48 Speaker_32
— I felt that Fox was this propaganda machine that did not have any integrity, and that's the opposite of what the press has to be. So much of what was coming out of Fox wasn't true. It just wasn't true.
00:02:06 Speaker_13
— That book hadn't been released yet, but it did have a title.
00:02:09 Speaker_32
— Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right.
00:02:14 Speaker_13
— That was the left side of the podium. On the right side, wearing a teal shirt underneath a blazer, was one of the people that Franken called a lying liar.
00:02:25 Speaker_04
— Bill O'Reilly, who I'm sure all of you know.
00:02:31 Speaker_13
O'Reilly had been a reporter for CBS and ABC in the 1980s, but as a network newsman, he was pretty much a washout. He'd revived his career as the host of the syndicated tabloid show Inside Edition.
00:02:44 Speaker_13
That's where he was when he got caught on tape flipping out about his teleprompter.
00:02:48 Speaker_19
— We'll do it live! Fuck it! Do it live! I'll write it, and we'll do it live!
00:02:55 Speaker_13
O'Reilly, who did not respond to our request for an interview, moved over to Fox News when it launched in 1996. Behind the scenes, he quickly got a reputation as a workplace bully.
00:03:06 Speaker_13
You'll hear more about that and his alleged sexual misconduct in our next episode. But by 2003, O'Reilly's public popularity was at an all-time high.
00:03:17 Speaker_13
On his show The O'Reilly Factor, he dressed up his conservative views on taxes, welfare, and homosexuality as nonpartisan common sense.
00:03:26 Speaker_29
— That's my advice to all homosexuals, whether they're into Boy Scouts or in the Army or in high school, shut up, don't tell anybody what you do, your life will be a lot easier.
00:03:33 Speaker_29
It's not a conservative position, it's a logical position, and it's good advice for human beings.
00:03:39 Speaker_13
— At Book Expo, he was promoting his upcoming book, Who's Looking Out for You?, which he claimed was totally apolitical.
00:03:46 Speaker_29
I feel that ideology is harmful to you. I don't feel that people pushing political agendas and philosophies does you any good at all.
00:03:56 Speaker_13
O'Reilly told the crowd and the C-SPAN cameras that he was no Al Franken.
00:04:01 Speaker_29
But I don't call anybody a liar. I'm not doing that. If I'm going to be accused of being a liar, now you better have something there. Because in six and a half years on O'Reilly Factor, I have not had to retract one story. Not one.
00:04:19 Speaker_32
I don't call people liars. And I don't lie. And then I went, oh boy, OK, I'll do it then.
00:04:31 Speaker_13
Franken proceeded to tell a story about his own investigation into Bill O'Reilly's honesty. It started when he heard O'Reilly say something surprising. He'd won a prestigious journalism award when he hosted Inside Edition.
00:04:45 Speaker_29
That experience was tremendous, even though the program wasn't a prestige program. But it wasn't bad. We won some Peabody.
00:04:51 Speaker_13
Franken said that he'd confronted O'Reilly about that claim, and the Fox News host had admitted he'd made a mistake, that it was actually a Polk Award.
00:05:00 Speaker_32
— I say, a Polk. He said, yeah, it's just as prestigious as the Peabody.
00:05:06 Speaker_13
— A lot of people probably would have let it go. But Al Franken got The Washington Post to do an article about the mix-up. The kicker was that Inside Edition won that Polk Award after O'Reilly left.
00:05:21 Speaker_13
O'Reilly told the Post that he had no intention to mislead, but then he went on a show and was extremely misleading. He told the Fox News audience that he never claimed to have won a Peabody, and that suggesting otherwise was disgusting.
00:05:37 Speaker_13
That was why Franken was so ready to fight. He felt certain that O'Reilly had lied on air, baldly, about something he'd clearly done.
00:05:46 Speaker_32
So Bill, I'm sorry I call you one of the many people who do lie in my book. And there are so many other people on the right who do it too. I could go on all day. I know you could.
00:06:00 Speaker_13
O'Reilly had sat through Franken's monologue for 20 minutes, fidgeting with a pen. And he was steaming.
00:06:08 Speaker_29
This guy accuses me of being a liar, ladies and gentlemen, on national television because I misspoke and labeled a Peabody a Polk. He writes it in his book. He tries to make me out to be a liar. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. Shut up.
00:06:20 Speaker_29
You had your 35 minutes. Shut up. This isn't your show, Bill. This is what this guy does.
00:06:27 Speaker_13
What's it like for Bill O'Reilly to yell at you to shut up?
00:06:30 Speaker_32
I was mad enough or I was in enough of an attack pose that for some reason I didn't get very nervous. You know, a lot of people who were watching it were nervous. It's uncomfortable to watch.
00:06:43 Speaker_29
This is what he does. He's a vicious, and that is with a capital V, person who is blinded by ideology.
00:06:50 Speaker_32
I thought that what I was doing was absolutely fair. So I was fortified by righteousness. You know, I can't say that's me all the time, at all. But I knew I was right. And I was angry. We've been just taking it.
00:07:06 Speaker_32
We have been taking it and taking it on the left. And we're not going to sit for it anymore. We just aren't.
00:07:14 Speaker_13
This is Slow Burn Season 10, the rise of Fox News. I'm your host, Josh Levine. As Fox News gathered strength, the American left was desperate for someone to punch back. And Al Franken came out swinging.
00:07:30 Speaker_32
I consider myself a nice guy, but I feel sometimes you have to stand up and fight.
00:07:37 Speaker_13
Franken was a new kind of opponent for Fox News, an unapologetic partisan taking direct aim at the channel's biggest stars. But in 2003 and 2004, he was just one part of a growing left-wing movement on the airwaves and online.
00:07:54 Speaker_13
As rage bubbled up about the Iraq war in the Republican White House, progressive activists saw Fox News as an enemy to be destroyed, but maybe also something to be emulated. Could the left put up a real fight without a Fox News of its own?
00:08:09 Speaker_13
What did Fox's critics miss when they only focused on its politics? And what did a team of women discover when they watched Fox News more closely than anyone ever had?
00:08:20 Speaker_24
Everybody piped up, oh my God, yes, I can't sleep. I'm sad all the time. I'm angry all the time. And it was hard to get away from.
00:08:29 Speaker_13
This is Episode 5. Ludacris has been fired.
00:08:38 Speaker_20
The 2024 election is upon us, and the stakes couldn't be higher. But the outcome might not be clear till long after everyone has voted.
00:08:46 Speaker_20
If the race ends up being as close as it looks right now, we could be in for a repeat, or worse, of the year 2000, when the presidency came down to a recount in Florida that ended at the Supreme Court.
00:08:58 Speaker_20
To hear the whole story, check out Fiasco Bush v. Gore, a podcast from the co-creators of Slow Burn. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
00:09:17 Speaker_13
After the angriest book panel in the history of C-SPAN 2, Al Franken and Bill O'Reilly left out of separate doors. But that was just the first round of their big public fight.
00:09:29 Speaker_13
Before Franken's book, Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them, went on sale, he got some urgent news. You're being sued by Fox. And I went, really? That's fabulous. Fox's lawsuit wasn't a defamation complaint over the whole lying liars thing.
00:09:46 Speaker_13
It was about Franken's subtitle, a fair and balanced look at the right. Fox News was arguing that Franken had committed trademark infringement.
00:09:55 Speaker_42
Fox News claims that it registered the expression fair and balanced in 1998.
00:10:00 Speaker_13
Fox's suit also said that Franken appears to be shrill and unstable.
00:10:05 Speaker_32
Well, I was unstable. There's no doubt about it. I mean, it's like, what a weak flail at me.
00:10:17 Speaker_13
It wasn't unusual for Fox News to attack its perceived enemies. They'd said much worse about Ashley Banfield and Paula Zahn. What was out of the ordinary is that Franken had taken the fight to Bill O'Reilly.
00:10:31 Speaker_13
Now, Fox was on the back foot and secretly reluctant to get involved. While Fox News was officially the plaintiff in the Franken lawsuit, the channel's corporate leaders hadn't wanted to go to court.
00:10:43 Speaker_32
O'Reilly was so offended, and he was their biggest star at the time, so he insisted that they sue me.
00:10:51 Speaker_13
Fox and O'Reilly got their public hearing in August 2003 in a federal courtroom in New York. The judge deliberated for only a few minutes before ruling. He said, This is an easy case. For in my view, the case is wholly without merit.
00:11:12 Speaker_32
And I thought, you know, if they want to get rid of fair and balanced, holy without merit would have been a good new slogan for them.
00:11:19 Speaker_13
Franken publicly thanked Foxx's lawyers for filing what he called one of the stupidest briefs I've ever seen in my life. His publisher also moved up the book's release date and printed an extra 50,000 copies.
00:11:32 Speaker_32
— My wife wanted me to get a marching band outside of Fox doing, ♪ Thank you very much, boom.
00:11:40 Speaker_13
Thank you very much, boom. ♪ — Thanks to Fox News, Al Franken had a bigger audience than ever for his research, his jokes, and his political views.
00:11:49 Speaker_13
In his book, he wrote about how Bill O'Reilly had claimed he was a registered independent when he was actually a registered Republican. Franken mocked the timid Fox News liberal Alan Combs by printing his name in a tiny font.
00:12:02 Speaker_13
He also looked beyond Fox to reexamine the Bush administration's case for war in Iraq and admitted that he felt ashamed for believing the White House's talking points.
00:12:12 Speaker_32
I mean, we went into Iraq on a lie about proof that they're making weapons of mass destruction.
00:12:18 Speaker_13
By the fall of 2003, support for the war had shrunk, and anti-war voices were starting to resonate, with Democrat Howard Dean becoming George W. Bush's leading challenger in the 2004 race.
00:12:30 Speaker_02
You have the power to give us foreign policy consistent with American values again.
00:12:35 Speaker_13
But that shift in the public conversation didn't shake Fox News. The anchor Brit Hume even said that the fighting in Iraq wasn't all that dangerous.
00:12:45 Speaker_17
U.S. soldiers have less of a chance of dying from all causes in Iraq than citizens have of being murdered in California, which is roughly the same geographical size.
00:12:54 Speaker_13
That claim was totally wrong. U.S. soldiers in Iraq were getting killed at a rate 60 times higher than Californians. Hume later admitted it was a crude comparison, but one that was illustrative of something.
00:13:08 Speaker_32
And I agree with him. It was illustrative of something, which is how shameless these guys are at Fox.
00:13:14 Speaker_13
— In speeches on college campuses, and in his best-selling book, Franken was building a public case that Fox News and its leading voices could not be trusted on any subject, no matter how small or large.
00:13:26 Speaker_32
— What I do is taking what they say and using it against them. What I do is jujitsu. They say something ridiculous, and then I subject them to scorn and ridicule.
00:13:40 Speaker_13
But no matter how much time he spent discrediting Fox, it was going to keep on broadcasting 24 hours a day. The left didn't have anything like it— a message machine that could transmit a signal into millions of American homes.
00:13:55 Speaker_13
In 2004, a bunch of Democrats would try to change that.
00:13:58 Speaker_17
— Air America Radio. We're not Fox. Period.
00:14:07 Speaker_13
The idea for Air America Radio came from Democratic donors who were alarmed both by the rise of Fox News and by Republican victories in the 2002 midterm elections. Launching a brand new TV channel seemed unrealistic, but a radio network?
00:14:23 Speaker_13
That felt possible. Franken was one of the first people they pitched.
00:14:28 Speaker_32
Well, the concept was pretty simple, which is to give right-wing radio some competition. There wasn't any progressive stuff. The closest was NPR, which was straight down the middle.
00:14:40 Speaker_13
At first, Franken was skeptical that liberal radio could be a viable business. But he thought a daily radio show would give him the most influence over the 2004 election, like a liberal Rush Limbaugh.
00:14:52 Speaker_13
Franken was in, and when he joined up with Air America, he suggested someone else the network should reach out to.
00:14:57 Speaker_15
— I got a call from this guy who said, I got your number from Al Franken, and we're looking for a Liz Winstead type. And I was like, I have a type?
00:15:09 Speaker_13
Liz Winstead had quit The Daily Show after the original host made a sexually explicit joke at her expense, and she felt upper management took his side.
00:15:18 Speaker_13
Now this job and the whole idea of liberal radio felt like a godsend and an answer to a question that had bedeviled the American left for years.
00:15:28 Speaker_15
Should you go on Fox? Should you not go on Fox? Or should you create a radio network that has a different wall of sound? It was like, yeah, this is the way to do it.
00:15:38 Speaker_13
Liz joined Air America as a top executive and an on-air host.
00:15:42 Speaker_37
You know, Bush made this big speech yesterday in Iowa saying, uh, I am not a lawyer. That's the other team. And it's like, dude, you're not a lawyer because you did not get accepted into law school.
00:15:54 Speaker_15
Programming 18 hours of progressive radio and using comedy and satire within it. It was great.
00:16:04 Speaker_13
Liz's show Unfiltered was co-hosted by legendary public enemy frontman Chuck D.
00:16:09 Speaker_37
— Is that when you're most creative?
00:16:10 Speaker_13
— Yes. — Oh, man. — One to five. — One to five, and then that's it? — Nope. — And an unknown, who'd been doing local radio in Massachusetts, Rachel Maddow.
00:16:21 Speaker_23
— Right now, there is a contentious back-and-forth going on between Condoleezza Rice and Richard Benveniste, who is a Democratic commissioner on the 9-11 Commission.
00:16:30 Speaker_13
Comedians Janine Garofalo and Mark Maron had shows, too. So did environmental activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. But Air America was banking on one man, the liberal hero who'd taken on Bill O'Reilly.
00:16:43 Speaker_32
Broadcasting from an underground bunker 3,500 feet below Dick Cheney's bunker, Air America Radio is on the air. I'm Al Franken, and welcome to The O'Franken Factor. I was hoping he'd sue me again. Just one more chance.
00:17:03 Speaker_13
This time, there wouldn't be a lawsuit. But Franken pressed on regardless.
00:17:08 Speaker_32
Today is both an ending and a beginning. An end to the right-wing dominance of talk radio. The beginning of a battle for truth, a battle for justice, a battle indeed for America itself. Not to be grandiose.
00:17:27 Speaker_13
Franken was kind of joking, but also kind of not. He was going with a different approach than the one Jon Stewart took on The Daily Show, a point he made to Stewart on Air America.
00:17:38 Speaker_32
The country is just in so much trouble, and you're not doing anything about it. You're just making fun of people. I am a flaming sword of justice. You are a clown.
00:17:53 Speaker_13
At The Daily Show, the phrase beacon of truth was a jokey reminder that they shouldn't take themselves too seriously.
00:18:00 Speaker_13
For Al Franken, flaming sword of justice was a jokey reminder that he was a flaming sword of justice, that his main goal at Air America was to win against Fox News and George W. Bush.
00:18:13 Speaker_32
The Bush campaign has taken the low road in this campaign and is now into the gutter and now maybe in the sewer.
00:18:22 Speaker_13
Jon Stewart's less nakedly partisan approach was, I think, one of the main reasons he was so popular with liberals. It felt like The Daily Show was going after Bush and Fox News because they were just objectively bad.
00:18:35 Speaker_13
That was the approach Liz Winstead thought Air America should take. Praising and criticizing politicians based on their actions, not just their party affiliations.
00:18:44 Speaker_15
I just want to be honest. That's what I want to have is a consistency so that people can actually trust us, that we'll call balls and strikes even on our side.
00:18:54 Speaker_13
These big questions about what Air America wanted to be hadn't been resolved when it went on the air in March 2004. And the early reviews said the whole thing felt confused.
00:19:05 Speaker_43
Variety called it an awkward affair. The Washington Post called the O'Franken factor meandering and discursive.
00:19:13 Speaker_13
Some of those initial struggles were just a startup thing, the radio equivalent of Fox's inept 1996 election coverage. But at least some of Air America's awkwardness was baked in.
00:19:25 Speaker_13
Most of the shows featured comedians with no radio experience, like Franken and Marc Maron, alongside radio veterans with no background in comedy.
00:19:34 Speaker_33
It was a decent pairing, but everybody had a role.
00:19:39 Speaker_13
Mark Reilly had started out in talk radio in the 1970s. At Air America, he was Mark Maron's co-host on the show Morning Sedition.
00:19:48 Speaker_33
Maron was the centerpiece. He was the driver. Our job was to kind of laugh at jokes.
00:19:54 Speaker_37
More pictures from Abu Ghraib. I can't even believe it. How far are we from the Girls of Abu Ghraib edition of Playboy? Not far. Man, I bet you it happens.
00:20:05 Speaker_33
Let's just say that not everything Marion did rattled our funny bones, not initially. And then we had some producers who essentially said, look, you got to laugh at what he's doing. And, you know, we did.
00:20:18 Speaker_13
One of the lessons of Fox News is that ambitious projects need time to find their way. Fox could have died all the way back in 1996 if it didn't have Rupert Murdoch's bank account as a safety net. But Air America never found its liberal Murdoch.
00:20:33 Speaker_15
We would just be reading about ourselves all the time, and they would say, like, that George Soros funded Air America. If George Soros ever gave us a penny, it would have been the greatest day on Earth. George Soros didn't give us a dick.
00:20:46 Speaker_13
It turned out that a lot of the money they did have came from a shady loan. And the whole calamity burst into public view just a couple of weeks after Air America went live.
00:20:56 Speaker_39
A radio network gamed at a liberal audience suffered a setback today. A financial dispute caused the program to be pulled off the air in two cities.
00:21:04 Speaker_32
We lost some stations, L.A. and Chicago are big markets. To lose, it was embarrassing, right?
00:21:13 Speaker_13
On Fox News, Bill O'Reilly was sympathetic, saying these kinds of growing pains were natural, and it wasn't fair to judge Air America too harshly. Just kidding.
00:21:24 Speaker_29
Well, we predicted the network would be a bomb. And now comes word that the liberal talk show people didn't get a paycheck a couple of weeks ago. Obviously, there are financial problems. No gloating here.
00:21:35 Speaker_13
That thing about not getting paychecks, that was true.
00:21:40 Speaker_15
I paid some of my staff's salary one week because there wasn't money. It was like, oh, I'm living in a Vanity Fair article. Oh, my God. This is insanity.
00:21:51 Speaker_13
All those money problems meant it wasn't possible for Air America to be an instant success. But even after the financial side stabilized a bit, it never really took off. Looking back, Liz Winstead thinks they should have taken a lesson from Fox News.
00:22:06 Speaker_15
The biggest mistake we made at Air America was announcing we were progressive.
00:22:12 Speaker_13
Fox never celebrated its conservatism, and sometimes outright denied it. Even if that rightward lean was the world's worst-kept secret, it was still a fact that Fox's viewers had to discover for themselves.
00:22:24 Speaker_15
— If we would have just said, it's a new voice of talk radio, like, nothing you've heard before, I think we would have done better.
00:22:36 Speaker_13
Liz's colleague Janine Garofalo argued that Air America's issue wasn't labeling. She said that progressive radio asks people to be better, while conservative talk shows allow assholes to think they're patriots.
00:22:50 Speaker_13
That perspective is obviously flattering to liberals and unpersuasive to everyone else.
00:22:57 Speaker_30
The left says, crap, look how successful these conservatives are with cable news channels, with talk radio. And they think, OK, what we need to do is recreate those things.
00:23:07 Speaker_13
Jonah Goldberg is the editor-in-chief of the conservative website The Dispatch. His theory is that Air America was like a copy of a copy, a left-wing version of a right-wing institution that had itself been created to combat alleged left-wing bias.
00:23:23 Speaker_13
And the further the idea got from its original source, the blurrier the image became.
00:23:28 Speaker_30
— This symbiotic thing that conservative institutions have about feeding off of mainstream media makes it almost impossible for left-wing groups to replicate the model.
00:23:40 Speaker_30
Because when Rush Limbaugh would turn the pages of The New York Times, it was a movable feast. Rachel Maddow or whoever was doing that stuff for Air America, what are they going to criticize? They're going to criticize Fox News, Jonah.
00:23:55 Speaker_30
Which is what they ended up doing, right? So left-wing media criticism has basically just been Fox News criticism. And that's really boring.
00:24:04 Speaker_13
All of these theories about Air America might be true. That it didn't have enough funding. That its hosts weren't experienced enough. That it was too muddled, too political, too preachy.
00:24:15 Speaker_13
But I think the biggest issue was that it wasn't clear who Air America was for. Roger Ailes built an empire by selling the idea that everything but Fox News was biased and corrupt. Liberals didn't have that kind of relationship with the media.
00:24:32 Speaker_13
Even after mainstream journalism failed horrifically around the Iraq War, they didn't want to dismantle NPR, CNN, and The New York Times. Democrats may have hated Fox, but back then, they weren't sure they needed a liberal version.
00:24:47 Speaker_13
It's possible that Air America was just ahead of its time. Before it signed off in 2010, the radio network became a launchpad for Al Franken in politics, Marc Maron in podcasting, and Rachel Maddow on cable news.
00:25:02 Speaker_13
Air America was also an early preview of today's more partisan MSNBC, which saw its audience grow after bringing on Maddow in 2008 and openly tilting to the left.
00:25:14 Speaker_13
For all it did accomplish, Air America never came close to becoming the liberal Fox News. But in 2004, something else would, and it wouldn't be on the radio or TV. We'll be back in a minute.
00:25:33 Speaker_14
I'm Maria Konnikova. And I'm Nate Silver. Our podcast, Risky Business, is a show about making better decisions. Decisions like, should you bet on the election? Maybe. Should you even be able to? Yes.
00:25:45 Speaker_18
And questions like, have presidential candidates made the most optimal decisions in their campaigns? And how's that translate into the polling?
00:25:52 Speaker_14
We're talking about it all in the lead up and aftermath of the election.
00:25:56 Speaker_18
Listen to Risky Business wherever you get your podcasts.
00:26:03 Speaker_07
Hey, everyone, it's Mary Harris, host of Slate's daily news podcast, What Next? It's been a long road to Election Day. How you doing? We've had crazy cat ladies, coconut trees, not to mention a little last minute candidate swap.
00:26:18 Speaker_06
I think viewers saw something other than what they were expecting. In an election that seems as close as this one does, you know, any one of these little factors can matter so much.
00:26:28 Speaker_07
But after all that, here we are, at the end of the road. Or maybe it's just the beginning. And what next has got you covered?
00:26:36 Speaker_07
Every step of the way for November 5th and the aftermath, we'll have all the deep insights and tongue-in-cheek political analysis you know and love from Slate. So don't miss out. Follow and listen wherever you get your podcasts.
00:26:58 Speaker_13
As a Black man who worked in tech and played a lot of golf, he didn't have much choice.
00:27:03 Speaker_21
You know, you're sitting in the clubhouse. Well, Fox News was kind of on, or Udina Airport. Every airport lounge, it's on. And if I had forgotten for a second where I was, it would remind me.
00:27:14 Speaker_13
Some people got a feeling of connection when they watched Fox News. But in these predominantly white spaces, James felt very alone. There were moments where I'm like, wait, are you fucking serious? Like, what?
00:27:28 Speaker_13
There was one Fox News pundit who was almost guaranteed to leave him cursing at the screen. A conservative minister who was a regular guest on Hannity and Combs.
00:27:37 Speaker_21
Jesse Lee Peterson would reliably say what a white racist would say. And he'd say it, you know, full-throated and as a black person.
00:27:44 Speaker_09
— To a point that most blacks, not all of course, but the average black person does not think for themselves.
00:27:51 Speaker_21
— It's so obvious what the tool is that's being used. And it serves to inoculate every other white person on Fox News from being called racist, because this black guy is saying it.
00:28:00 Speaker_13
— James could feel Fox's power to sell ideas that he found loathsome. Living in San Francisco in the early 2000s, he was searching for Fox's mirror image, a place built around his values. He didn't find it on the airwaves or in traditional politics.
00:28:18 Speaker_13
The community he was looking for was online.
00:28:22 Speaker_21
Before MoveOn, I had no political background. It was like a political home for me that I could not find in a place like the Democratic Party. I loved it.
00:28:31 Speaker_13
MoveOn started with a married couple who struck it rich in the software business, thanks to a screensaver that featured an endless loop of flying toasters. In 1997, Wes Boyd and Joan Blades sold that company for millions.
00:28:46 Speaker_13
A year later, they created a simple website to oppose the impeachment of Bill Clinton, urging Congress to censure him and move on to more pressing issues. Then they emailed the link to about 80 people.
00:29:00 Speaker_21
basically out of frustration, sending a petition to their friends, you know, that they were going to deliver to Congress.
00:29:05 Speaker_13
— That petition would get more than 500,000 signatures, and mark the beginning of something new in American politics— online grassroots political organizing.
00:29:19 Speaker_13
After 9-11, move-on shifted into anti-war activism, collecting signatures and money to oppose the march to Iraq. James came on in 2003 as the director of MoveOn's Political Action Committee.
00:29:34 Speaker_21
There was the rapid response component, like, something's wrong out here. And there's someone who recognizes the problem and has a belief about what we could all do about it if we all banded together.
00:29:45 Speaker_13
James was just one of the leaders of the Internet Left. Another was Marcos Melitzus.
00:29:51 Speaker_16
In the run-up to the Iraq War, I was just so frustrated at the state of the nation and where politics were headed and how we were rushing the war.
00:29:59 Speaker_13
Marcos had grown up in El Salvador, where he'd seen communist guerrillas kill students in a brutal civil war. His family fled to America as refugees in 1980, and as a young adult, he'd served in the U.S. Army.
00:30:12 Speaker_13
In the military, his politics started to swing left. After his service ended, he developed a loathing for cautious, centrist Democrats, and for George W. Bush, who he called a frat boy idiot of a president.
00:30:26 Speaker_16
Fox News was basically cheerleading for Bush, and then the AM radio kept filling out with more and more of these right-wing talking heads, and there was nothing on the left. And so I started Daily Kos as a place for me to vent.
00:30:41 Speaker_13
When Marcos launched his site in May 2002, blogs were still known as weblogs. His first post began with a simple declaration. I am progressive. I am liberal. I make no apologies. And after that, he never really stopped typing.
00:30:58 Speaker_16
I would write furiously. I would write like 15 blog posts a day. And then I remember taking a Sunday off and I got an angry email saying, I thought this was daily, Cos.
00:31:07 Speaker_13
Marcos was a less funny, more online Al Franken, writing about Republican lies and Fox News propaganda. Very quickly, he built such a devoted following that his site couldn't handle all the traffic.
00:31:20 Speaker_13
In October 2003, he moved Daily Kos to a souped-up platform, one that included a new built-in feature. If he wanted, all of his readers could now publish their own stories. known as diaries.
00:31:33 Speaker_16
And I was like, how do I turn this thing off? Like, I'll just worry about that later. So I launched the site. I go away for an hour. I come back and there's a couple of dozen diaries at the beginning. They're like, oh, cool. Wait, anybody could write.
00:31:45 Speaker_16
We were like, Marcos, you're brilliant putting this thing on. Like, yeah, I was so brilliant that I couldn't figure out how to turn it off.
00:31:56 Speaker_13
The people writing those diaries were just as enraged as he was. And these new members of Marcos' community were everywhere. By 2004, Daily Kos was getting 400,000 visitors a day.
00:32:10 Speaker_16
We were disproportionately represented by Democrats who lived in red states and red districts, people who felt disconnected from their communities and needed somewhere to talk about the politics that they cared about, but there was nobody around them, or they felt particularly at siege.
00:32:26 Speaker_13
At Daily Kos, red state Democrats weren't under siege. They were among friends, forging connections in their shared outrage over the Bush administration, the Iraq War, and Fox News.
00:32:38 Speaker_13
This was social media before social media, a place to share ideas, get pissed off, and have those frustrations validated without ever leaving your house. It was definitely a product of the Internet. It felt new, and I think it was new.
00:32:52 Speaker_13
— James Rucker's activist group, MoveOn.org, was operating on an even larger scale. By 2003, there were about 2 million people on their email list.
00:33:03 Speaker_13
Those members voted in what MoveOn called the first-ever Internet primary, won by Howard Dean, with John Kerry coming in third. They also chipped in to buy TV time for anti-Bush commercials. — We could have insured more of our children.
00:33:18 Speaker_11
Instead, George Bush wants to spend that $87 billion in Iraq.
00:33:23 Speaker_21
I love the idea that there are these other things I can do. It's not just, oh, I get to vote. My one, you know, little check or my showing up someplace is going to be aggregated into something bigger that can make change happen.
00:33:35 Speaker_13
It wasn't just small donors pitching in. The philanthropist George Soros, who had not bankrolled Air America, donated millions to MoveOn.
00:33:44 Speaker_13
But like with Daily Kos, the group's passion came from left-wingers who felt isolated and under attack, like this C-SPAN caller from Louisiana.
00:33:53 Speaker_10
I have never in my life have seen people as scared to do anything that opposes the government because you're being called unpatriotic, anti-American, or a terrorist. And thank God for people like MoveOn.
00:34:04 Speaker_10
I'm a retiree, and I don't have much money, but I'll give the last cent I got.
00:34:10 Speaker_13
Air America Radio had tried to spark that kind of feeling, to animate its audience the way that Fox News riled up conservative viewers. But it was these online communities that actually pulled it off, electrifying and organizing the American left.
00:34:26 Speaker_21
There are Fox viewers who, I think, feel like, oh, Fox is family. Like, just for me with Move On and, like, Daily Kos, I'm like, oh, good. The sense of filling this gap.
00:34:36 Speaker_13
Move On wasn't just trying to inspire Fox-like devotion in its members. It also wanted to get Fox News running scared.
00:34:48 Speaker_13
In the fall of 2003, MoveOn announced a project called Foxwatch, where volunteers would monitor the channel for distortions of truth and partisan bias. The way MoveOn saw it, Fox was the public relations wing of the Republican Party.
00:35:03 Speaker_13
And that was pretty much their critique. James Rucker says that narrow focus wasn't an accident.
00:35:09 Speaker_21
We did not take on issues that were outside of what we believed our membership would get, be comfortable with, and our constituency was largely white.
00:35:21 Speaker_13
When James saw Fox News, it wasn't just the pro-Bush stuff that got to him.
00:35:26 Speaker_29
Those who are streetwise in America's big cities know that drug pushers and liquor stores make a ton of money the day the welfare checks arrive. It's a tough thing to say, but it's true.
00:35:38 Speaker_13
Bill O'Reilly liked to say that his show was an antidote to political correctness. In practice, that included questioning Black Americans' loyalty and their behavior.
00:35:48 Speaker_13
Less than two weeks after September 11th, O'Reilly asked the president of the NAACP why Jesse Jackson hadn't encouraged Black people to support George W. Bush.
00:35:59 Speaker_13
Then, on Martin Luther King Day, O'Reilly did a segment on what he called disturbing statistics about the Black community and out-of-wedlock births, juvenile arrest rates, and welfare.
00:36:11 Speaker_21
But the idea being reinforced is Black people, you know, we're thieves, we're hustlers, and not to be trusted.
00:36:20 Speaker_13
James hated to watch those narratives about Black pathology go unchallenged. And as a leader at MoveOn, he'd sometimes get invited to go on Fox News and share his perspective. But he always said no.
00:36:33 Speaker_21
And it's not to say that there aren't nuggets of powerful truth being spoken, let's say, by a black person on Fox News. I just think that there's no way you actually can change the message coming across.
00:36:46 Speaker_21
And to whatever degree you challenge that message, you're outnumbered. They've got editorial control. They're there after you leave, still talking to the audience.
00:36:57 Speaker_13
While James knew he couldn't control Fox, he did want to transform his side. MoveOn had become a force in progressive politics, but there were a lot of Democrats the group didn't represent.
00:37:09 Speaker_21
There's definitely Black folks in America who are ready to be mobilized, but we don't have anything we're giving them.
00:37:14 Speaker_13
James wasn't alone in feeling that all these liberal organizations sprouting up in the early 2000s weren't thinking about race.
00:37:22 Speaker_33
If you want to do an actual progressive radio station, you have to include Black people. Air America's Mark Reilly again. And not just me, and not just Chuck, you have to infuse the programming with a Black sensibility.
00:37:39 Speaker_33
There were Black people that would have listened to Air America if they thought Air America was speaking to them. But the consensus was, they weren't.
00:37:46 Speaker_13
There actually were plenty of Black people that listened to the local radio station that carried Air America in New York City. At least, there had been.
00:37:55 Speaker_05
WLIB was there primarily to give voice to the voiceless. Talk radio aimed at black audiences. A lot of speaking to activists that couldn't get arrested on any other radio station.
00:38:20 Speaker_13
Mark had worked at WLAB for more than 30 years as a host and program director. Then in 2004, the station got a new format.
00:38:29 Speaker_33
They made an agreement with Air America to give over their programming hours. I got called into the president of the company's office, and, you know, he said to me, how would you like to make, like, three times what I was making at the time?
00:38:44 Speaker_33
I said, what, are you kidding me? Of course.
00:38:46 Speaker_13
Marc says the Air America crew came from a world that he didn't really understand, and vice versa.
00:38:53 Speaker_33
I realized very quickly that they were blissfully unaware of what we had been doing before they got there.
00:39:00 Speaker_13
While WLIB had been talk radio aimed at Black listeners, Mark believed that Air America only really catered to a white audience. One reason he felt that way was that the network seemed obsessed with Fox News.
00:39:14 Speaker_33
I can't speak for everybody, but Black people don't wake up in the morning and say, damn, what is Fox News doing now? It's not like that. Black people are concerned with getting to work, with getting their kids fed, with gut bucket kinds of issues.
00:39:27 Speaker_13
It may have been true that a lot of Black Americans didn't care about Fox News, or cared about other things more. But Fox viewers were concerned about Black Americans. Just ask Ludacris.
00:39:39 Speaker_33
In 2002, the Atlanta rapper starred in a major ad campaign for Pepsi. That Ludacris spot was a move by Pepsi to reach out to Black customers.
00:39:56 Speaker_13
and Bill O'Reilly wasn't having it.
00:39:58 Speaker_29
It was irresponsible of Pepsi-Cola to hire a man to pitch their product who is, in my opinion, subverting the values of the United States.
00:40:08 Speaker_13
That was kind of nuts coming from O'Reilly. He'd actually written a novel about a newsman violently murdering his colleagues that also included graphic sex scenes.
00:40:18 Speaker_13
Now he was telling his viewers that Ludacris's rap lyrics encouraged anti-social behavior and degraded women. And he called on all Americans to stop drinking Pepsi.
00:40:30 Speaker_32
I will tell you this, Mr. Bain, hold it, hold it. The bill is not your job to tell people what art is. And that's what he's claiming. I'm not telling anybody what art is.
00:40:38 Speaker_29
I'm giving you my opinion. It says he's not an artist. He's a thug and I'm entitled to it.
00:40:44 Speaker_13
The day after O'Reilly asked for a soda boycott, the company responded.
00:40:49 Speaker_29
Pepsi-Cola late today. Capitulated. Ludacris has been fired.
00:40:56 Speaker_13
O'Reilly said that he didn't deserve credit for canceling Ludacris. It was O'Reilly Factor viewers who had fired off more than 3,000 emails, leading Pepsi to declare that it had a responsibility to listen to our customers.
00:41:10 Speaker_13
The size and influence of Fox's audience wasn't always visible. But in this case, their power was clear. And it wasn't being directed towards partisan politics.
00:41:21 Speaker_13
Thousands of Fox viewers were outraged about seemingly whatever Bill O'Reilly told them to be outraged about. But cable news wasn't the only way to harness anger. And a whole lot of rage was about to come flying back in Fox's direction.
00:41:41 Speaker_13
Let's take a quick break. I feel a little self-conscious given that you've made so many documentaries that you'll just be judging me.
00:42:01 Speaker_31
Oh no, I'll be judging you for sure.
00:42:04 Speaker_13
In close to 50 years making movies, Robert Greenwald has gotten multiple Emmy nominations and taken home a Peabody, not a Polk. He also won the inaugural Golden Raspberry for Worst Director.
00:42:17 Speaker_13
He got that award in 1980 for his work on a roller disco musical starring Olivia Newton-John. After Xanadu flopped, Robert built a thriving career directing TV movies. Eventually, he earned enough money to leave Hollywood behind.
00:42:36 Speaker_31
— I chose the option of not pursuing financial gain, but pursuing social impact.
00:42:44 Speaker_13
In 2003, he released a documentary called Uncovered, the whole truth about the Iraq War.
00:42:51 Speaker_31
Here were people with expertise, scientists, harms negotiators, who had no platform. Virtually all the media was walking in lockstep. Don't criticize the war.
00:43:06 Speaker_13
Instead of focusing on a theatrical release, he sold the DVD online and got 100,000 orders. He was a new model for independent filmmaking, one supported and funded by the outraged American left.
00:43:19 Speaker_13
When Robert's Iraq movie started getting traction, Wes Boyd of Move On and John Podesta of the Center for American Progress proposed they work on a new project.
00:43:28 Speaker_31
As a presidential election coming up, Fox News is terrible. How about doing a film about them?
00:43:37 Speaker_13
Robert had never watched Fox News, but now he tuned in, got outraged, and got to work. He'd named this documentary Outfoxed.
00:43:48 Speaker_31
I remember Wes, when we started on it, he said, oh, well, could you have this in a month? Robert could not make a documentary in a month, but he needed to get it done fast.
00:43:58 Speaker_31
— They all said you need to get it done before the election, because Fox can have an effect on the election.
00:44:04 Speaker_13
— In January 2004, his production team set up a dozen DVD recorders to grab Fox News footage 24 hours a day. The bulk of the day-to-day monitoring would be done by volunteers. They would call themselves the Newshounds.
00:44:22 Speaker_31
And it turned out they were all women, and they just became more and more committed.
00:44:27 Speaker_24
We had two women named Chris. So my nom de newshounds was Marie Therese.
00:44:35 Speaker_13
That's Chris Bradley. She was a piano teacher in California and a MoveOn member, and she was looking for a cause that she could support from home.
00:44:44 Speaker_24
I broke my ankle and I couldn't march in the San Francisco anti-war protests. I just felt so powerless. I had to do something.
00:44:54 Speaker_13
In early 2004, she found her opportunity, a chance to help out on Robert Greenwald's documentary.
00:45:02 Speaker_24
I have all the emails. Here's February 5th. My application. I actually have my application.
00:45:12 Speaker_13
Can you read some of that for us?
00:45:14 Speaker_24
I want to know how Fox has managed to co-opt the hearts and minds of its viewers. Most of my family and even some of my liberal friends watch Fox regularly. This stunned me. I feel that one must learn the opponent's tactics
00:45:31 Speaker_24
before one can successfully mount a counter-offensive. That was my application, and I was one of the eight people who were selected.
00:45:41 Speaker_22
We had a woman from Maine, we had a woman from Boston, a woman from Kansas City, I was from Michigan.
00:45:49 Speaker_13
That's Judy Daubenmayer. She'd been a reporter for 25 years, mostly for the Associated Press, and had always kept her beliefs to herself.
00:45:57 Speaker_13
But by 2004, she was out of journalism, angry about the war, and primed to become a newshound, even if her family and friends didn't get it.
00:46:06 Speaker_22
I don't think a lot of people, like my husband, really understood why I was doing it. People ask me, what difference does it make what the media says?
00:46:15 Speaker_08
I thought it would be like a two-week project. And I thought, you know, I could do that.
00:46:21 Speaker_13
Ellen Brodsky lived in New Mexico and worked as a paralegal and a librarian. Like Chris and Judy, she was a MoveOn member. But before she volunteered for OutFoxed, she'd never paid much attention to Fox News.
00:46:34 Speaker_08
When MoveOn said it was propaganda, I may have taken it with a slight grain of salt.
00:46:41 Speaker_13
Each of the newshounds had specific shows she was supposed to monitor. One of Ellen's was a news program hosted by Shepard Smith.
00:46:50 Speaker_36
Get ready for the Fox Report.
00:46:51 Speaker_13
— She'd record Fox Report every afternoon, then watch when she got home from work.
00:46:58 Speaker_08
— I had dial-up internet during that whole time. So I had my computer on the dining room table, my laptop with a cord stretched across to plug into the landline phone outlet.
00:47:11 Speaker_13
— It didn't take long for Ellen to form her own opinion about Fox News, and to toss aside those grains of salt.
00:47:21 Speaker_08
I was shocked at the propaganda. I was also shocked at the racism and the xenophobia.
00:47:29 Speaker_13
Would you ever yell at your TV?
00:47:31 Speaker_08
Yes, I still do.
00:47:35 Speaker_22
Oh, yell at the TV a lot and scream. No, not too much because it was distracting from taking notes.
00:47:47 Speaker_13
A lot of people got mad about Fox News, but it was on these volunteers, the newshounds, to do the first thorough accounting of Fox's themes and techniques. Chris still has the list she used to mark down what she saw.
00:48:01 Speaker_24
One, liberals not being liberals. Two, victims of cut off their mic and other insults.
00:48:10 Speaker_08
Then there was the browbeating, with Sean Hannity talking to somebody and calling him, you're a left-wing radical nut, you're a moron, you're mean.
00:48:19 Speaker_24
Five, general over-the-top statements, spin and exaggerations. Six, we are fair, liberal media is not. Seven, demonizing minorities.
00:48:33 Speaker_08
One of them that really shocked me was Shepard Smith saying, why can't the city attract more minorities to the police department? Well, because black guys are afraid of water.
00:48:45 Speaker_36
Because local leaders say black people are frightened of the water. That's what they said. But the area is surrounded by water.
00:48:52 Speaker_13
The reporting in that segment, on swim tests for police in North Miami, was actually pretty straightforward. But when ABC and NPR covered the same story, they introduced it by talking about policy, not Black people's fear of water.
00:49:07 Speaker_13
That snarky lead-in on what was supposed to be a hard news show was part of the Fox News formula.
00:49:13 Speaker_08
— A lot of it was almost a sneering kind of reporting on Democrats.
00:49:19 Speaker_03
John Kerry first claiming he had endorsements from foreign leaders, but not saying who. Then he tells us about one that he's gotten, but doesn't want. Now he's snowboarding in Idaho. What's going on with the Kerry campaign?
00:49:33 Speaker_13
With a lot of help from the newshounds, OutFoxed was ready to go in July, right on the heels of Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9-11, and just before John Kerry accepted the Democratic nomination.
00:49:45 Speaker_13
Robert Greenwald's documentary included interviews with Congressman Bernie Sanders, progressive media critics, and Fox whistleblowers.
00:49:54 Speaker_40
Fox News Channel's stated practice was to embarrass, humiliate, challenge, or disrupt whatever Jesse Jackson did.
00:50:05 Speaker_13
Robert had also done his own shoe leather reporting.
00:50:09 Speaker_31
Someone met me in a hotel, seen too many movies, came in a trench coat, had a briefcase, opened the briefcase, handed me the infamous Fox memos.
00:50:23 Speaker_13
By 2004, the world knew that those memos existed. But before Outfoxed, nobody had actually leaked them. Here's the narrator reading one.
00:50:33 Speaker_01
Let's refer to the U.S. Marines we see in the foreground as sharpshooters, not snipers, which carries a negative connotation.
00:50:42 Speaker_13
The heart of the documentary was all the clips the newshounds had flagged. Some of the footage got used to catch Bill O'Reilly in a flagrant lie.
00:50:50 Speaker_29
Bill, if you are so concerned about public figures being bad role models for children, please stop rudely interrupting your guests and telling them to shut up. Well, the shut-up line has happened only once in six years, Ms. Evans.
00:51:01 Speaker_13
The shut-up line happened more than once.
00:51:04 Speaker_23
— You know, I think that asking a student to stay in the closet in order to go to school is a lot like asking an African-American student… — Shut up.
00:51:13 Speaker_19
Shut up.
00:51:14 Speaker_13
— Footage from the early years of Fox News is pretty hard to come by. So the clips that the newshounds and Robert Greenwald collected are a valuable public record of how Fox News looked and sounded.
00:51:28 Speaker_31
I remember sitting in the editing room and we started to see that pattern where any time they wanted to say something, they would put it in terms of some people say.
00:51:40 Speaker_03
Some people say that'd be a pretty good choice.
00:51:42 Speaker_28
Bring in the Hispanic. Some people say nice posturing. Some people say and excuse me, I'll get to you, Joe. And just to say, but some people say that you may be setting up Sharpton for a run against Hillary in 2000, which is very clever.
00:51:54 Speaker_31
the notion that it was public discourse versus Fox propaganda.
00:52:03 Speaker_13
Outfoxed cost a couple of hundred thousand dollars to produce, and Move On wanted to get its money's worth.
00:52:10 Speaker_21
A film on its own, I think, rarely has produced change. Change happens through some kind of campaign.
00:52:17 Speaker_13
MoveOn's James Rucker worked on the campaign to promote OutFoxed. They bought a full-page ad in the New York Times, saying the communists had Pravda, Republicans have Fox. They handed out DVDs to people walking into Fox News headquarters.
00:52:33 Speaker_13
And they organized more than 3,000 OutFoxed house parties, hosted by MoveOn members across the country.
00:52:40 Speaker_00
People are invited to watch the film, and then later on, they'll be participating in an interactive website with famous writer Al Franken.
00:52:49 Speaker_21
People were extremely excited. You're not just sharing, let's say, an email, forwarding it to your friends, right? You are helping to distribute a film. So there was this empowerment effect, and you felt it.
00:53:03 Speaker_13
The newshounds felt that energy too, and they believed their research on Fox News might make a difference.
00:53:10 Speaker_22
I was hoping people would understand what they were watching and turn away from it. And I was hoping unsuspecting people wouldn't get sucked into it. And I was hoping Fox News would go out of business.
00:53:27 Speaker_13
Fox News had no idea that OutFoxed was coming. Robert Greenwald had kept the documentary secret out of fear that Fox would try to shut him down.
00:53:36 Speaker_13
After the movie got released, Fox called it illegal copyright infringement and said that the Fox News employees who appeared on screen are hardly worth addressing.
00:53:46 Speaker_13
On the air, Fox anchor John Gibson called it a cheesy little so-called documentary produced by the liberal hatchet organization MoveOn. As for accusations that Fox News was biased towards conservatives, Gibson said, That's Caroline Bruner.
00:54:03 Speaker_13
You've heard from her throughout this series.
00:54:05 Speaker_41
She was a producer in Fox's Washington, D.C. bureau. While they had legitimate stuff, it was told really, really poorly, and it was easy to bat away. I mean, I think people at Fox gave it away as a joke.
00:54:24 Speaker_13
Caroline is kind of biased, since OutFoxed used stories she'd worked on to argue that Fox News was a propaganda outlet.
00:54:31 Speaker_13
But she pointed out to me that some of the sources who appeared in the documentary actually worked for local Fox stations, not Fox News Channel. The Fox News PR team had said the same thing back in 2004.
00:54:44 Speaker_13
I'll admit that when I watched Outfoxed earlier this year, I found it hard to get through. It's definitely a polemic from the left, not a measured journalistic examination.
00:54:54 Speaker_13
Outfoxed also barely acknowledges Fox News' treatment of Black Americans, even though one of the categories the newshounds tracked was demonizing minorities.
00:55:04 Speaker_13
And even Robert Greenwald acknowledges that his movie wasn't an artistic filmmaking achievement.
00:55:09 Speaker_31
Nobody would accuse it of that. I hope not. the goal was to make it, don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
00:55:18 Speaker_13
Back in 2004, The Hollywood Reporter declared the whole project kind of pointless, saying, it will do little to change the minds of those with already fixed opinions. I asked Robert about that critique, that Outfoxed was just preaching to the choir.
00:55:35 Speaker_31
If you look at it from a movement point of view, there's very strong arguments for preaching to the choir. That's what Dr. King did. That's what the peace movement did. It's what the labor movement did. It's what the women's movement did.
00:55:49 Speaker_31
Preach to the choir. Organize the choir. Motivate the choir. Get the choir to take action.
00:55:55 Speaker_13
The choir was motivated by Move On and Daily Kos, by a new website called Media Matters that put Fox News under constant surveillance, and by a volunteer-driven anti-Fox documentary. And the choir did take action.
00:56:16 Speaker_13
During the Republican National Convention in New York City, demonstrators gathered outside Madison Square Garden They also protested outside Fox News headquarters.
00:56:29 Speaker_13
— The Fox News shut-up-a-thon, where members of… — Robert Greenwald was there, holding a sign with Bill O'Reilly's face on it, and a speech bubble that said, shut up.
00:56:42 Speaker_38
— We've sold over 150,000 DVDs, it was number one on Amazon, and that's because people really care about the media. The media's trying to convince us they don't care, but the truth is people care passionately about this.
00:56:54 Speaker_13
For Fox News, Outfoxed the documentary wasn't anything to worry about. The anti-Fox movement the documentary was helping to build? That could be a problem.
00:57:04 Speaker_38
— Because what we're starting to do is we're affecting the sponsors. So we're extremely hopeful, over time, that we will see change.
00:57:12 Speaker_13
— Election Day would be in two months, and it would test everything that had been building since Fox News called the 2000 presidential race for George W. Bush.
00:57:24 Speaker_13
In four years, Fox had become enormously powerful, but its opponents were getting stronger, too. This election season felt like a final battle, a chance to topple Fox News, or for Fox to prove that it was never going anywhere.
00:57:48 Speaker_13
Next time, on the season finale of Slow Burn,
00:57:51 Speaker_24
We want to tell you that Fox News is coming after Kerry. They're going to come after his war record.
00:57:59 Speaker_27
You've got Kerry on your show and you sniff his throne and you're accusing us of partisan hackery?
00:58:04 Speaker_25
Those people stormed the Capitol and I was thinking, did I have anything to do with creating that audience?
00:58:17 Speaker_13
We couldn't make Slow Burn without support from our members, and I strongly urge you to sign up for SlatePlus today. You'll get all kinds of perks, including ad-free listening and member-exclusive episodes of Slow Burn.
00:58:30 Speaker_13
In this week's Plus episode, you'll hear from Ian McCaleb, who worked as a producer in Fox News' Washington, D.C. bureau from 2002 to 2008. You'll get an insider's view on what made Fox an appealing place for a journalist who thrived on breaking news.
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And what happened when Fox News got a story wrong?
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I would hear something on air or a source at one of the departments would call and say, look, one of your morning talking heads just misdescribed something that you reported accurately yesterday. You might want to do something about that.
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Join now by clicking Try Free at the top of the Slow Burn show page on Apple Podcasts. Or visit slate.com slash slowburnplus to get access wherever you listen.
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This season of Slowburn was written and reported by me, Josh Levine, an executive produced by Lizzie Jacobs. Slowburn is produced by Sophie Sommergrad, Joel Meyer, and Rosie Belson, with help from Patrick Fort, Jacob Finston, and Julia Russo.
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Derek John is Slowburn's executive producer. The season was edited by Susan Matthews and Hilary Fry. Merritt Jacob is Senior Technical Director. Mix and sound design by Joe Plourd. Our theme music was composed by Alexis Quadrato.
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Derek Johnson created the artwork for this season. We had production help from Emily Gannick, Chris Sinclair, and Shir Figman.
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Patrick Farrelly and Cato Callahan's documentary about Air America Radio, Left of the Dial, was a helpful resource in the making of this episode.
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Special thanks to Rachel Strom, Matt Bai, Jeremy Klusche, Angelo Carusone, Peter Hart, Gera LaMarche, and Ben Wickler.
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And to Slate's Evan Chung, Madeline Ducharme, Forrest Wickman, Christina Cotterucci, Greg Lavallee, Ben Richmond, Seth Brown, Katie Rayford, Caitlin Schneider, Alexandra Cole, Emily Hodgkins, Ivy-Lise Simonis, Joshua Metcalf, Heidi Strom Moon, and Alicia Montgomery, Slate's VP of Audio.
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Thanks for listening. We'll see you next week.