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Elliot Kalin spent his childhood studying the classics.
You're despicable.Looney Tunes and goes on through the Marx Brothers and Monty Python.
Start in your general direction.
The things that your average Jewish New Jersey nerdy kid is going to find funny, I found funny.
Elliott found politics fascinating too, especially in 2000, the first election year when he was old enough to vote.But the political comedy he saw on network TV didn't really speak to him.
SNL was doing their kind of Bush-Gore debate sketches.They were about the idea that Bush is kind of dumb and that Gore is kind of boring.
So I will ask each candidate to sum up in a single word the best argument for his candidacy.Governor Bush?Strategery.Vice President Gore?Lockbox.
And I remember even as a young person watching that being like, well, this isn't really about anything.
But there was one show on cable, a half hour parody of TV news, that felt like it had been made just for him.
The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, weeknights at 11.We know what's really going on in politics, really.
The number one thing that drew me to the show was it was funny, but it was also exciting to have any show that was presenting a viewpoint that's similar to mine.
Stephen, are you seeing parallels with tonight's election?A country flushed with prosperity, two young, energetic candidates perhaps ready to lead us back to Camelot?
No, I'm getting more of a nom vibe.You know, unwinnable wars, inescapable downward spiral, chaos in the streets, that sort of thing.
Finally, there's a show that's saying the kinds of things that I would say about this if I was smarter and funnier and had a television show.
Elliott wanted as much Daily Show as he could possibly get.He'd watch it every night in his college dorm room, then stay up for the rebroadcast at 1 a.m.
This was pre-everything being available all the time.I may never see it again.And I want to know these jokes.
In 2001, Elliott was starting his junior year at NYU.After the attacks on the World Trade Center that September, he and his roommate found that comedy was the only way they could cope.
We just watched my Mr. Bean tapes because we needed something that had no connection to reality.
In the immediate aftermath of 9-11, old comedy bits were all Elliott could watch.All the late-night TV shows had gone dark, and nobody knew what they would sound like when they came back.
John Stewart was off the air for more than a week until the night of September 20th.
They said to get back to work and there were no jobs available for a man in the fetal position under his desk crying, which I gladly would have taken.
I remember very well sitting in that dorm and seeing John's speech about it.
The idea that we can sit in the back of the country and make wisecracks, which is really what we do.We sit in the back and we throw spitballs.
And feeling like he's saying the next step of what we would think if we could process that far.
But never forgetting the fact that it is a luxury in this country that allows us to do that, that is a country that allows for open satire.And I know that sounds basic, but that's really what this whole situation is about.
If you had asked me when I was 17, I already would have wanted to work on that show.But now it felt like it wasn't just kind of like a silly luxury that I would allow myself, that maybe there was something more to it than that.
This is Slow Burn Season 10, The Rise of Fox News.I'm your host, Josh Levine. After 9-11, the Fox News channel rallied a huge portion of the country around the Bush administration's vision of the world.
But a lot of Americans, like Elliot Kalin, got drawn in by a different vision.One that was more skeptical and suspicious of the jingoism that Fox News was selling, especially as the U.S.marched to war in the Middle East.
The first half of this series focused on where Fox News came from and how it stampeded into American life.
Now I'm going to talk about what happened after it became a media juggernaut and a big group of people tried to show the world what Fox really was.Those critics and antagonists took very different approaches to going after Fox News.
The Daily Show's satire allowed an audience of millions to get to know Fox without actually having to watch it.
Your hell doesn't scare me.I make my living watching Fox News eight hours a day.I'm already in hell.
On Fox itself, liberal pundits tried — sort of — to win over the network's conservative viewers.
Why are you insulting me?Because they try to make me a strawman doesn't make me a strawman.
And a former Fox News employee exposed the channel's secrets and saw for himself how Fox got revenge.
— We wish him well.They say that to everybody, which means, screw them, I hope they die.
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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.
And questions like, have presidential candidates made the most optimal decisions in their campaigns?And how's that translate into the polling?
We're talking about it all in the lead up and aftermath of the election.
Listen to Risky Business wherever you get your podcasts.
Madeleine Smithberg got into two comedy relationships in the early 90s that would change her life.The first came after she left a job with David Letterman and met a young New Yorker who was developing his own late-night show.
And Jon Stewart and I kind of started playing comedy ping-pong, and we instantly fell in comedy love.
And now here's your host, he makes his own gravy, Jon Stewart!
Madeline would go on to produce The Jon Stewart Show, first on MTV and then in syndication.And it wasn't long after that collaboration kicked off that she met her next creative partner.
One day Liz Winstead moved in upstairs from us and instantly she had like 30 people over and all I could hear was laughing and screaming.Did you start hitting the ceiling with a broom? No, I didn't.I didn't.
But then we kind of met and just, she was great.
I was like a punk rock kid with a lot of anger and I never saw any comics with my experience at all.
Liz Winstead grew up in Minnesota.She'd moved to New York to try and make it as a stand-up comedian.
I think what really propelled me was just, you know, sexism, patriarchy, and also just being the youngest of five kids in a Catholic family.It's like searching for any place to complete a sentence, and the stage was one of those places.
When Liz moved into Madeline's building, she was totally broke and desperate for work.
And she was like, do you want to be a segment producer on the Jon Stewart show?
Liz took the job, gratefully.But by the time she came on board, that project was just months away from flaming out.
Marilyn Manson set the stage on fire.John Leguizamo mooned the camera.And they wouldn't tell us if we were canceled or not.And finally, we figured we were canceled because they stopped filling the soda machines.
SIMON After the soda ran out, Madeline and Liz started developing a new show about a fictional cable network.That series was supposed to be for Comedy Central.But an executive there kept steering them towards a different concept.
He said, I need a show which will do what SportsCenter does for ESPN, and that is, if something happens in the world, you'll have to turn on The Daily Show to see how they handle it.
That idea was pretty vague, and Madeline and Liz had never even seen SportsCenter.But they got a deal they couldn't pass up.A guaranteed year on the air, with a big promotional budget.
The Daily Show would premiere in the summer of 1996, just before Fox News had its debut.But first, they had to figure out what exactly their show was going to be. Liz had started thinking seriously about television news a few years earlier.
It had all started when she went to a bar on a blind date.It happened to be the first night of the first Gulf War, and the whole place was captivated by CNN's coverage.
And I remember sitting there thinking, are they reporting on a war or trying to sell me a war?And moments later, my date was like, this is so awesome.
After that night, Liz became obsessed with how stories get packaged and consumed.That was the angle she wanted The Daily Show to take.
I said, it shouldn't just be us talking about the news.I think that the media should be a character in the show.
We all, like, in unison, in my memory of it, uttered, what if we pretend we're them? And we all kind of like started drooling and our jaws fell.
Pretending were them meant creating a fake news show.To pull that off, they brought in actual journalists.
One of our first hires was a guy named Brian Unger.He and Liz were dating and he was working for CBS News.
Brian really introduced the concept of the satirical correspondent.
Our team of investigative reporters uncovers the toughest stories.We are at the potato sack race.
The mock seriousness would actually pave the way for us to be as silly as we wanted to be.
The host of The Daily Show, Craig Kilbourne, had actually anchored SportsCenter.He was tall and blonde and did a dead-on impression of blow-dried TV news fatuousness.
I am out there every night for one reason and one reason only.To give good news.To look good.
To give great news.No? to look great.
We didn't want the audience to know whether or not he was in on the joke.I think it was unclear whether or not he was in on the joke.
Kilbourn definitely looked the part, but with him in the host chair, The Daily Show didn't have a clear perspective on the world, and it lacked political bite.After two years, Kilbourn left to host a late-night show on CBS.
His replacement was Liz and Madeline's old friend.
Welcome, welcome to The Daily Show.Craig Kilbourne is on assignment in Kuala Lumpur.I'm Jon Stewart.
When Stewart took over in 1999, Liz had already left, under circumstances we'll get into later in this episode.Now, from the outside, she watched her original vision start to snap into focus.
When Craig Lepton John took over, he made a decision that I think was a good strategic move, which was, I'll be the voice of reason, but I'll surround myself with these imbeciles so that I can be the voice of the viewer.
That shift, to make The Host an island of sanity in insane worlds, was very well-timed.Because in the fall of 2000, the Florida recount would take American politics totally off the rails.— That's where we went a little crazy, in a good way.
— That's Ben Carlin.He came on as The Daily Show's head writer after Jon Stewart became the host.
Along with the hanging Chad... As it got deeper and deeper, it became more comedically absurd.The words were ridiculous.The process was ridiculous.
Double somersault half pike Chad over barrel flamenco style, which degree of difficulty 3.1 should only be tried by the most skilled voters.
The Daily Show's coverage of Indecision 2000 didn't just make fun of ridiculous ballot terminology.
The 2000 election was when we really started zeroing in on the Fox News of it all.
The show took its first big swing against Fox when it came out who'd been running the channel's decision desk.
Meanwhile, a new flap has developed after it was revealed that John Ellis, the man responsible for calling Florida and the election for George W. Bush, happens to be George W. Bush's first cousin.
Fox's John Ellis moment hit John Stewart like a blinding flash of light.He would later say, that was the first time it occurred to me that we took it a little bit more seriously than the media did.
We were serious people doing a very stupid thing, and they were unserious people doing a very serious thing.
They're killing me.Slowly eating away my flesh.
During the weeks-long purgatory after election night, The Daily Show and Fox News were rising in parallel.They both saw their viewership multiply, and they were both cementing their points of view.
— Fox was rooting for Bush.I mean, that's not a secret, but seeing once they're so close to the end zone, how they're willing to kind of spin it, was so funny to us and so bald.
For the most part, The Daily Show's audience was not rooting for Bush.Just listen as Stewart announced the official winner in the state of Florida.
— It wasn't just the crowd that felt that way.How would you describe the politics of the writers?
— I mean, everyone, most everyone, was fairly left of center.— Do you think you had anybody who voted for George W. Bush?— Not in the writers' room, no, absolutely not.
Regardless of the staff's political persuasions, Stewart insisted that he and the show weren't partisan.He said that he identified with the disenfranchised center, the group of fairness, common sense, and moderation.
The Daily Show definitely did not discriminate when it came to ragging on the media.In the early 2000s, CNN was just as big a target as Fox News.
Let's face it, no form of entertainment can be sustained for 24 hours.CNN's got so much time to kill, they report on the future.
Let me start with you, what's your lead in the paper tomorrow, you know?
Lead story's still the war, Aaron.That's a little segment called... Anybody?Anybody?I'm dying over here.Anybody?
One Daily Show producer told us that their segments on CNN were pinches of love.Basically, that they wanted to encourage the original cable news network to be better, live up to its own standards.
The show's breakdowns of Fox News were a lot less loving.And when The Daily Show won a Peabody Award for its coverage of the 2000 election, Stewart couldn't resist making a little dig.
You know, the news parody division, which I think is what we want in, was not that much competition this year.It was us and Fox.
The Daily Show took its news parodies very seriously.One of their secret weapons was a research chief who said that without credibility, the jokes mean nothing.
They also dug up material that nobody else had, thanks to young go-getters like Elliot Kalin.— When I got the internship, I was so excited.
— Elliot had watched Jon Stewart's post-9-11 monologue in his NYU dorm room, and been inspired by what a comedy show could do.He got his foot in the door a year later. One of his jobs at The Daily Show was recording the news.
— In the reception area, there was like a TV with a VCR, and we would set up tapes for shows that we knew we wanted to watch.
— That one VCR, and later a whole bunch of TiVos, expanded The Daily Show's scope and ambition. In the spring of 2003, the show put together a debate on the invasion of Iraq by grabbing news clips and stitching them together back-to-back.
On one side of that debate was President George W. Bush.
— Mr. President, is the idea to just build a new country that we like better?
— We will tear down the apparatus of terror, and we will help you to build a new Iraq.
— On the other side was presidential candidate George W. Bush.
— I don't think our troops ought to be used for what's called nation-building.
— Strong words from two very different men.
— That juxtaposition of clips to call out hypocrisy might seem banal now, in the age of social media.But The Daily Show basically invented it.
— I remember when that piece aired, there was this feeling around the office of everyone being like, we did a new thing.
Like, we did a new cool thing.
— This was a fake news show doing real journalism, at a time when most of the press wasn't asking tough questions. As the Bush administration sold its case to invade Iraq, pretty much every American media institution just went along for the ride.
But Fox News' guests and pundits weren't a category of their own.They weren't just passengers on the drive to war.They were putting a cinder block on the accelerator.
this irrefutable, undeniable, incontrovertible evidence today.It was so compelling.I don't see how anybody at this point cannot support this effort.
We expect every American to support our military, and if they can't do that, to shut up.
— In the days before YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, there were only two ways for most people to see and hear what Fox was saying about Iraq.
you could either flip over to Fox News, or you could watch The Daily Show and trust Jon Stewart to dissect Fox on your behalf.
Who among us could ever forget where they were the night Fox set the war to music?That was real. Sounded like our troops have liberated a Yanni concert.
— For millions of Americans who didn't watch Fox News, The Daily Show's critical eye helped define what Fox was and what it stood for.
— This war has truly belonged to Fox.Not only did they start it, but they managed to offer fair and balanced coverage while combining the subject they were covering with their own promotion.
— I'd like to say hello to all my friends and all my family in North Carolina.
You're watching Fox News.
— This was exactly what Liz Winstead had wanted The Daily Show to be.The kind of place that would go after an influential media outlet for hyping up a war.The show's critiques brought Fox News attention it wouldn't have gotten otherwise.
But all that scrutiny didn't shame Fox or change it.
It always felt to me like they were much bigger than us.They were this leviathan, and we were like a much smaller boat that was just kind of stabbing them with spears or pitchforks or whatever, and then they would shrug it off.
Elliott has that right.Fox didn't see Stewart's jokes as something that could ever hurt them.The Daily Show staff actually heard that directly, that every time they made fun of Fox News, Fox people gathered together and watched. and loved it.
It was kind of disappointing that they were enjoying it because it took away some of our oomph.
The Daily Show's co-creator, Madeline Smithberg.
Here we were like scrappy little fighters in the corner.We're going to take them down.And they were like, oh, look how cute they are.And you felt like, no, we really meant what we were saying.We're not cute.We hate you.
A big chunk of The Daily Show's audience hated Fox too, but probably not as much as they loved Jon Stewart.Around the time of the Iraq War, Stewart started getting celebrated as a crusading hero.
There was a sign that someone had put up in the writer's room that said, beacon of truth, I think, that we put up ironically.
Elliot Kalin would build a long career at The Daily Show, going from intern all the way to head writer.He first fell in love with the show because it didn't only care about being funny.It also had a moral compass.
But that balance between humor and righteousness was always tricky to strike.
Whenever things would get too serious in a meeting, every now and then someone would point to the beacon of truth.That would be a good reminder for us that it is jokes.If we're not funny and we're not entertaining, then why are we even doing this?
The thing that I'm the most proud of in the show is the seriousness and the silliness at the same time.
The Daily Show built a cult following around the idea that a fake news show could expose phoniness and hypocrisy.But Jon Stewart wasn't much of a cult leader, because he wasn't leading his viewers anywhere in particular.
He was only telling them what not to believe in. According to one academic study, watching The Daily Show was strongly correlated with cynicism about candidates, the American political system, and the news media.
I buy that premise, that people would get more cynical, but I think that then it is the job of the authorities to earn that faith back.
I think that cynicism keeps you healthy.It's like vitamin C. I don't think you can take too much.
If you only knew about Fox News from watching The Daily Show, you might think that everyone on the channel was an unabashed conservative shill.But that wasn't entirely true.There was a place on the network for a different kind of voice.
— The right has been much better at packaging and marketing itself, and the left wing has not fought back.
— Let's take a quick break.
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.
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.
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.
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?Uh.We've had crazy cat ladies, coconut trees, not to mention a little last minute candidate swap.
The polling indicates where they're slipping.
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.
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.
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.
Before Fox News went on the air in 1896, the network announced one of its new stars, a young, brash Atlanta radio host named Sean Hannity.
I don't make any qualms about it.I consider myself conservative, and I don't hide that fact.
Hannity got hired to co-host a primetime political debate show.His TV partner was, well, that part wasn't clear.Fox News chairman Roger Ailes said the other slot would be filled by an LTBD, a liberal to be determined.
Liberal is really a great word.I mean, people should not duck in that word.
Alan Combs made his name in New York talk radio.Despite his loving tribute to the word liberal, he was no raging lefty.He actually called himself quite moderate.
And thanks to Sean Hannity's personal recommendation, he would become Fox News' liberal-to-be-determined, the guy who got second billing on Hannity and Combs.
Fox is fair and balanced.My role is to give a point of view, a strong point of view, you know, on whatever the issue is that comes up.
Most people had a different explanation for why Combs was on Fox News.The conservative journalist Jonah Goldberg told me about that theory.
You needed the Washington Generals, the team that plays the Harlem Globetrotters.
The Generals need some baskets.The Harlem Globetrotters still with their big league.
The Washington Generals are the biggest losers in the history of basketball.And they're supposed to lose entertainingly.
That was truly the only reason they existed, to get dunked on and embarrassed by the Harlem Globetrotters, night after night after night, to the great amusement of the Trotters' adoring fans.
And those four generals, they've waited 17 years to beat the Trotters, and they'll have to wait to another night in another town.
Alan Combs, the Fox News liberal, suited up every night.
I don't want to be unfair.He was a nice man doing a difficult job, but everybody's good looking.And then there's Alan Combs.They cast him to look apart against this choir boy, Sean Hannity guy.
— Well, he was on a conservative TV network.He was never set up to win.
— That's Mark Reilly.Like Combs, he was a fixture on New York talk radio.
— I loved Alan Combs.Alan Combs, good people.But, you know, he was there for a reason.He knew why he was there, he had a role to play, and he knew who the audience was.
— Combs did score some points, occasionally.If you listen closely, you might hear him challenge a guest, or stick up for the Democratic Party.
Can you name a Democrat who wants us to lose the war on terror?
I wouldn't put words in your mouth.I don't say that.I just say you do not support what President Bush is doing.You're undermining him.We don't support his policies.That's not undermining.
But Combs, who died in 2017, seldom ventured beyond the center-left or really confronted Sean Hannity.Some of Combs' biggest fans were actually in the Republican caucus.House Speaker Newt Gingrich blurbed his book, and U.S.
Congressman Tom DeLay called him, Despite those pats on the head from Republican officials, and despite the fact that the New York Times referred to Combs as Hannity's sidekick, he insisted they were equal partners with equal airtime.
By the way, we have a producer who sits in the control room with a stopwatch.It is actually timed.
Roger Ailes liked to talk about that stopwatch thing, too.In his version of the story, he held the timer himself to ensure that everything was fair and balanced. It was a convincing-sounding story, if you'd never watched the show.
When Combs did a Q&A on C-SPAN, he heard from someone who had been watching.
Hey, Alan, I think you're a nice guy, but your partner dominates the show.It seems like you're too nice to disagree.
Okay, I'll be meaner from now on if it'll make you happy.
Alan Combs may have been the pundit equivalent of a basketball team that never won, but he argued that just being in the game was its own kind of victory.
He said that liberals had a lot to gain by reaching out to audiences that didn't agree with them.He also said that if Sean Hannity went on the air alone, then that would only serve the right-wing's interests.
It was a reasonable argument, one that plenty of Democrats used to explain their own appearances on Fox.But for some left-wing pundits, noble defeats just weren't good enough.They wanted to go on Fox News and win.
I have nothing against Alan Combs, he wouldn't harm a fly, and that's why they chose him.That's Jeff Cohen.
He's a bona fide left-winger, the founder of the progressive media watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting.He got his start as a TV pundit on CNN's classic partisan debate show, Crossfire.
Every time they invited me, I would say yes.So, you know, is there too much nudity on TV?I'm ready to debate that.Or we're thinking of doing feminism.I'd say fine.
Jeff was willing to go anywhere that let him share his liberal beliefs.And so in 1997, when Fox News was looking to round out its weekend media criticism show, he agreed to come on board.
I'm Eric Burns, and I'm all out of ideas.So here's the panel this week.We begin with Jeff Cohen, fairness and accuracy in reporting.
— On that show, Fox News Watch, Jeff found himself on an ideological island.His longtime fellow panelists were moderate journalist Jane Hall, Christian conservative Cal Thomas, and former Reagan and George H.W.Bush advisor Jim Pinkerton.
— I was outnumbered by right-wingers from beginning to end.It was good interplay to have me on that show.
— This idea that immigrants have to immediately learn English when we demand that they learn English is silly.
My close political colleagues were utterly amazed.It's unbelievable what you said.I can't believe you're saying that anywhere on TV, let alone Fox.
You've got Bush and Gore, who the evidence suggests both have violated drug laws, but the prisons are not filling up with rich white guys born into privilege.
I think it's important to talk about... Writing in Vanity Fair, critic James Walcott said that Jeff was farther to the left than any other talking head on cable, and that his presence on the air was a credit to Fox News.
For Fox viewers, he was an object of fascination, like a zoo animal who'd wandered into the wrong habitat.
for the part of our show that we call Letters About Jeff.Jeff Cohen could be replaced by a row of buttons that play the top 20 hits of international socialism.
There's no individual on that show that got more email pro and con, and some of it was pro.
And finally, from a very surprised Marty in Boise, Idaho, regarding last week's show, I couldn't believe it.I agreed with Jeff Cohen twice.Keep watching, Marty.
It was calls like that one that convinced Jeff that Fox News was a worthwhile venue for his ideas.He was even allowed to criticize Rupert Murdoch and the decision to put George Bush's cousin on the Fox decision desk.
— Those were thrills.It's what you call biting the hand that's feeding you.
— No matter what Jeff said, Fox News seemed to enjoy having him around. so long as he stayed in his enclosure.
I was on in the weekend, so I got away with it.Would I have been able to do that in prime time?No.Would they ever have allowed me into prime time?No.And I knew that any moment I could be fired.
Jeff ultimately left Fox News of his own volition.While he enjoyed being Fox's house contrarian, he knew it was never actually going to be fair and balanced.And so in 2002, he took a job with another cable news channel.
on America's news channel, MSNBC.
MSNBC had debuted alongside Fox News in 1996, but in the cable news wars, it was a very, very distant third.
Top-rated Fox has quadrupled its ratings, CNN has as well, and MSNBC has seen its viewership jump from three to nine people.
It wasn't just that nobody watched.MSNBC didn't seem to know what it wanted to be.
CNN is the reporter's network.Fox News Channel is the opinion maker's network.MSNBC is the confused network.
In 2002, MSNBC was not a liberal channel.Far from it.But Jeff thought he might be able to turn it into one.The job he took was to help launch a talk show hosted by a left-wing icon. Phil Donahue.
This is an email from Michael.I'm 17.I'm the person the Bush administration wants to hold a rifle and go off and kill Iraqis.I would like to know why.Is that too much to ask?
Donahue was a daytime talk pioneer, the guy who paved the way for Oprah Winfrey and Jerry Springer.By the early 2000s, he was a TV elder statesman and unabashed about his liberalism and his opposition to war in Iraq.
I have to tell you, when you're called unpatriotic, it's very personal and it hurts your feelings.I ought to know.
One reporter called MSNBC's decision to showcase Donahue a bold move to lift the channel's sagging ratings.
They guaranteed him that he could be as progressive and biased toward the left as O'Reilly was biased in favor of right-wing themes and issues.It would be counter-programming against Fox.
Donahue became MSNBC's highest-rated show, but that promise, that he could be as progressive as he wanted, got broken very quickly.
Management said, whenever you have a guest who is anti-war, you have to have two guests that are pro-war. If you have two guests that are on the left, you have to book three guests that are on the right.
Even with those rules in place, the network canceled Donahue in early 2003, after just seven months on the air.
An MSNBC higher-up told Jeff, So instead of distinguishing itself by moving to the left, MSNBC brought in new hosts that hacked aggressively to the right.
In primetime, Republican ex-Congressman Joe Scarborough called anti-war protesters leftist stooges.And on weekends, the conservative zealot Michael Savage swerved even further.
— I don't want Osama bin Laden driving around in a Burka and a veil with a suicide bomb strapped to his chest.Do you liberal idiots want that?
— TV executives had a term for this phenomenon— the Fox effect. MSNBC was copying Fox News' pro-war, pro-troops, pro-flag philosophy, both to juice its ratings and to avoid being seen as a home for the liberal anti-war agenda.
One journalist who'd risen to stardom at MSNBC was not on board with that approach.And she decided to speak out.
Ladies and gentlemen, please help me welcome Ashley Banfield.
Ashley Banfield had anchored her own primetime show on MSNBC and reported from hotspots around the world, including Gaza, Afghanistan, and Iraq.
By 2003, Ashley's show had gotten canceled and her star had dimmed at NBC News, a sign, one colleague said, of the network's fickleness.
That spring, she made a speech at Kansas State University criticizing the American media for turning the war on terror into sanitized TV entertainment.And she said that one cable channel was driving everything.
Many talk about it as the Fox effect, Fox News effect.
Fox has taken so many viewers away from CNN and MSNBC because of their agenda and because of their targeting the market of cable news viewership that I'm afraid there's not a really big place in cable for news.
What was the response from your bosses at NBC to your speech?
Oh, God, NBC News President Neil Shapiro called me into his office and chewed me out and said they'd already written my statement apologizing.And I said, but I'm not.I'm not apologizing for it.I spoke the truth.
NBC said publicly that they were deeply disappointed and troubled by her remarks.They also took away Ashley's office.
And my agent sort of pressed them to say, what's Ashley supposed to be doing every day right now?Because no one will respond.
Eventually, she was given a space of her own.
So they cleared out a tape closet.Wedged a desk into it.But I went to work every day.I refused to not show up.
Ashley says that she got sidelined for 17 months until her contract ran out.NBC News' then-president, Neil Shapiro, told us that he recalls things dramatically differently, but wishes her all the best.
Looking back, it's undeniable that Ashley's career stalled out after she talked about how Fox was changing cable news.But in 2003, she wasn't the only one taking a risk to call Fox out. That fall, someone else would make his voice heard.
A whistleblower that Fox News couldn't ignore.
— What I was thoroughly naive about was that there could be a network news operation that would be an arm of a political party.— We'll be back in a minute.
Charlie Rena was a very experienced journalist when he started at Fox News in 1997.Back then, the channel was just a few months old, and Charlie wasn't sure what approach Fox was going to take.
The guy who schooled him was Chet Collier, Roger Ailes' right-hand man.
I asked Chet one day, I said, there's so much shouting.I said, I can't even hear what they're saying.He said, look, this is how it works.The people out there are just turning that dial.
If they don't see something that gets their attention, they're going to just go on to the next station.We want to stop them at Fox.
Charlie was a producer in New York for Fox News Watch, the not very shouty weekend media criticism show.Chet Collier was not a fan.
I came into the newsroom, Chad happened to be sitting there talking with someone and he turned and he said, sleaze it up, sleaze it up.The next day I walked in and the same thing.Dumb it down, dumb it down.
Did you sleaze it up and or dumb it down? No, we did it our way.For years, he mostly managed to keep Fox News Watch insulated from the suits, a fact that the panelist Jeff Cohen appreciated.
Charlie Reno was a serious reporter.He was a serious TV producer and news writer, and he understood journalistic ethics.
Charlie had worked at the Associated Press, CBS, and ABC, outlets that he says aimed for neutrality.
Anything that showed the slightest partisan bias of any sort would be stopped, would be edited, you'd be hauled on the carpet.It was just not done.
Fox News was not the AP or CBS.And there were some orders for management that Charlie felt he couldn't ignore. Once, he was told to be careful with the special on Ronald Reagan, because Reagan was one of Roger Ailes' favorites.
And when he was producing an environmental package, he got told, you can give both sides, but make sure the pro-environmentalists don't get the last word.Then there were the memos.
The other news organizations Charlie had worked for sent around internal messages about big events and who was covering them. But Fox's editorial notes, written by Fox News Senior Vice President John Moody, were different.
They were a signal to the reporters in the field and to the people writing news copy here of what our editorial position, most often partisan, was going to be that day.
One note that stuck with him was from the spring of 2003, after the invasion of Iraq.
And John Moody's memo that day said something like, you're going to hear a lot of whining from protesters about American troops killing civilians.Don't fall into that trap.
A few hours later, Charlie was in the newsroom and saw a young producer preparing a story about the war.That item included a brief clip of children in an Iraqi hospital.
And he decided to kill the whole report because the editorial note that morning, it said there are going to be people whining about civilian deaths.
Moody's memos weren't always treated as gospel, especially by the news crew in Washington, D.C.But even their editorial freedom had its limits.
I remember this very clearly.It was January.It was around the anniversary of Roe v. Wade.
That's Anne McGinn.She was a producer in the D.C.Bureau.
I was on the mall to do live shots with one of my correspondents, Major Garrett, and it was the first time I'd ever heard the term pro-abortion.
In one respect, in Washington, it is a ritual, and in another respect, it is a profound yearly recognition of the importance this issue plays to people on both sides of the issue, anti-abortion and pro-abortion forces.
And he finished his live shot, and I said, what was that?And he said, ah, I see you hadn't read Moody's editorial note this morning.We now refer to it as pro-abortion.And I looked at the note, and sure enough, it was in there.
Anne believed that shift in language, turning pro-choice into pro-abortion, was not a journalistic decision.
When we're talking about the anniversary of Roe v. Wade, to talk about one side of the issue as those folks being pro-abortion, I don't think that's factual.And I think that skews the conversation.
She says that she and Major Garrett decided to work around Moody's order. And the tape we acquired from that day shows that in his next live report, Garrett says pro-choice.But then there's this, 90 minutes later.
— Anti-abortion forces are convinced the Supreme Court will eventually overturn those rights.
Pro-abortion forces believe that will never happen, and even if it does— — A Fox News producer in New York, Randy Lubratich, got the same command.Pro-choice was now pro-abortion.
And I morally disagreed with that terminology because you can be against abortion and still be pro-choice.
Randy is the self-described screaming liberal who you heard in episode three defending Fox's post-9-11 patriotism.But this mandate about language was something she couldn't get behind.
I said, I'm sorry, I cannot in good conscience write pro-abortion.I will not write pro-abortion.I will write pro-choice.And I was told I could go home for the day.I wouldn't be paid for that day.If that was my hill, then that was the repercussion.
Fox News told us that its Human Resources Department has no record of Randy's suspension, which has not been revealed publicly before now.Neither has the existence of Fox's directive to use the term pro-abortion.
I did find one published report about a Fox memo, an order that staffers not use Terminator puns when Arnold Schwarzenegger was running for office.
But that was all anyone outside Fox News heard about the editorial notes until the fall of 2003, when Charlie Rena blew the whistle. Charlie had quit his job at Fox News in April 2003.That decision wasn't about politics.
He'd been given tasks that he felt were a demotion, and he wanted to get out with his dignity intact.After that, Charlie kept his mouth shut for six months, until he saw some quotes from the journalist Chris Wallace.
Wallace had left ABC to join Fox News, and he said in an interview that Fox gets an unfair rap.Its reporting is serious, thoughtful, and even-handed.
— I thought, that really deserves a reply.It deserves an answer, a rebuttal.
— Charlie wrote a letter to Jim Romanesco, a media blogger whose website was essentially a national journalism message board. The letter said that the roots of Fox News Channel's day-to-day on-air bias were John Moody's editorial notes.
Charlie described Moody's whining protesters memo and how it led a young producer to kill a story rather than show injured Iraqi civilians. And he said that wasn't an isolated incident.
Now, the last thing I wrote was, at the Fair and Balanced Network, everyone knows management's point of view.And in case they're not sure how to get that on the air, the memo is there to remind them.
Before Charlie's letter, the Fox News memos were a secret. Now they'd been exposed, and other journalists were talking too.
A former staffer at FoxNews.com said he'd been told to seek out stories that cater to angry middle-aged white men who listen to talk radio and yell at their televisions.
Someone else said the memo's existence proved that fair and balanced was an empty slogan, like tastes great, less filling.There was even a public call for someone inside Fox to leak each day's editorial note.
Fox News' response to all of this was to try and discredit the source, Charlie Rina. A Fox executive, Shari Berg, sent her own letter to Jim Romanesco.And it was intense.
It was a personal attack full of lies.
She used the word fuck in it.That letter said that Charlie's co-workers found him so clueless that he'd leave them muttering, go fuck yourself.The letter also claimed, falsely, that Charlie had never worked in the Fox newsroom.
She knew I worked in the newsroom, but it's OK to lie. A Fox News spokesperson told us, we have no knowledge of this, and did not provide additional comment when we sent them a copy of the letter.
Charlie would do interviews with newspapers all across the country.But after about a week, the whole thing blew over, which I guess isn't surprising.It was about memos, after all.A bunch of journalists carping at other journalists about journalism.
But Fox News had felt threatened enough to write that letter with a go-fuck-yourself.Charlie wasn't really surprised that Fox had attacked him publicly.
A few years earlier, when he was still working for Fox News, he'd watched the channel's PR shop go after MSNBC's Ashley Banfield for seemingly no reason at all.
In a 2001 Washington Post story on Banfield, a Fox spokesperson said, Fox News considers her a lightweight.She's the Anna Kournikova of TV news.
this tennis player who had the reputation of being a pretty face.It was cruel.It was really cruel.And therefore, I thought that he had been quoted on something that he thought he said off the record.
I happened to see him a few hours later coming out of the newsroom, and I took him aside.I said, did they snooker you here?He said, oh, no.He said, we generated that whole story.We're out to get her.
Wow, I hadn't heard that.Well, maybe I should be flattered that they felt threatened by me.It would be great if they went after my journalism, but they didn't.
Maybe they couldn't find anything wrong with the actual work I was doing, so they went after me.
Six months later, Fox News went after her again. Roger Ailes told the New York Times that there are news anchors and news actors.He said that Ashley Banfield was a news actress, that it's all about her performing the news.
It was extraordinarily hurtful.I actually reached out to him about it.I said, I don't understand why you would attack me in this way when you were trying to hire me.
That part, about Ailes trying to hire her, is a story she hasn't told publicly. It happened before Ashley was a big name, when she was still on local TV in Dallas, looking to go national.
I met with Roger Ailes in his office, and he asked me a couple of questions that I thought were very off-base.One was how I voted.And he asked me to do a twirl, which I have come to learn was not unique to me.
Gretchen Carlson, Megyn Kelly, Alison Camerata, and more women who worked at Fox News have all described Ailes harassing them in exactly this way, ordering them to spin around so he could examine them from all angles.
After Roger Ailes asked Ashley to twirl, he offered her a job, but NBC was recruiting her too.
The reason I didn't go to Fox News at the time was that they didn't have a show.And NBC was offering me three hours on MSNBC.And so it was a no-brainer.I said, you know, thank you so much.
It's been great to meet you and I appreciate you showing interest.And he seemed very affable and kind.And then, you know, the vitriol started after I started doing well.
— Those specific details may help explain why Ailes and Fox went out of their way to demean her.
But Ashley's experience also reminds me of something we heard from Teri Anser, the anchor from America's Talking, who we interviewed in our second episode.
Teri told us that she loved her job, and that she still remembers wanting to cry before she went on camera.
— You can win five million Emmys and only hear about how your hair looked that day.
That kind of pressure and scrutiny is only part of what women at all levels of the industry have to navigate.
— I had no idea that a situation that I was working in would qualify as a hostile work environment.
— That's Fox News producer Anne McGann, and this is Fox producer Randy Lubratich.
— Who was going to complain?Who was going to HR?I didn't even know that HR existed at Fox News.
— I thought he was actually legitimately interested in what I had to say.
In late 2003, Caroline Bruner was working behind the scenes at a presidential debate that Fox News was hosting in Detroit.She was still in her 20s and trying to prove herself as a producer.
After the debate, she got what she thought was a rare opportunity to speak peer-to-peer with a senior executive, the guy who sent the daily memos, John Moody.
He was asking me questions about shows and news to get my perspective.And then later that night, we went to a bar across the street.Everybody was there, and he tried handing me his hotel room key.
And I held the hotel room key in my hand, and I handed it back to him.
Fox told us that HR was not made aware of this allegation.Caroline told us she never filed a complaint, but we confirmed her story with three people she told at the time.John Moody left Fox News in 2018.
He declined to be interviewed for this series and did not reply to a request for comment about this claim. There's been a tremendous amount of reporting about Roger Ailes' years-long campaign of sexual harassment and sexual assault.
And later in this series, we'll be looking at how the sexual harassment allegations against Bill O'Reilly changed Fox News and the country.But most of the stories we heard didn't make headlines.
sexual harassment, and misogyny in the workplace have taken so much away from so many women.Security, confidence, joy, and the opportunity to have the careers they've always wanted and come tantalizingly close to getting.
And that is not just a story about Fox News.
I had a tumultuous relationship with the host.I don't know why, but he felt like we didn't have his best interest. at heart.
Liz Winstead, the co-creator of The Daily Show, has rarely spoken about why she left her dream job.But she told us that she's now ready to talk about the original host, Craig Kilbourne, and why she chose to quit.
It all came to a head when he went out with a writer from Esquire magazine and said something in the magazine to the effect of, Liz was hired to give me blowjobs?
He said that you would blow him if he wanted you to.
Oh, yeah.And when it came out, there was a big push to not have me say anything.And it was very protective of Craig.He got suspended for a week.And I was like, if that's how you're going to view this, then I'm leaving the show.
Like, you're the one who... Yeah, I'm the one that had to leave.
Back in 1997, Craig Kilbourne apologized for his regrettable remark.And when we reached out to him last month about his relationship with Liz more generally, Kilbourne said,
I think the one thing, if I learned anything, it's you have two choices.You become the person who treated you like shit, or you make a vow to yourself that you'll never do that to other people.
And I think that I've made that vow to myself and it's paid off.
Liz made it clear to us that her choice to leave the show wasn't just about one comment in one magazine.It was about the overall atmosphere that comment exemplified.
And that atmosphere didn't magically improve when Jon Stewart replaced Craig Kilbourne.The Daily Show was created by two women, but it was dominated by men.
When the show won an Emmy for Outstanding Writing in 2003, Stewart joked about all the white guys who joined him on stage.
I've always felt that diversity is the most important part of a writing staff.I don't know if you can tell, but Steve has a beard and JR isn't Jewish.
That award was for work done in co-creator Madeline Smithberg's last year as executive producer.Multiple sources have reported that at some point before Smithberg left, Stewart threw a script or newspaper at her head.
An unnamed Daily Show staffer has said that Stewart then apologized, saying, You could see and hear The Daily Show's perspective on the world whenever Jon Stewart denounced Fox News.
But its point of view came through in a different way when he interviewed Ashley Banfield about her reporting in war zones.
You couldn't walk through the street without everybody glaring at you and gazing at you.
Was that blonde hair or was that because you're kind of a hot lady?
Is that because I would think that you could even wrap a veil around that and they'd still be like, well, check out that booty.
— Ashley now hosts a show on the cable channel NewsNation.But there was a time, after she gave that speech about the Fox effect in 2003, and NBC put her in a tape closet, that Ashley thought she might never work again.
— I couldn't get a phone call returned.So my agent said, well, I got an interview with Ailes.And I thought, oh my God.Well, that's bizarre, but I need a job.I'm not working, and it's been a year.
A few years earlier, Ashley had turned down a job offer from Roger Ailes, and he'd insulted her publicly.But now she felt she had no choice but to meet with Ailes again.So she went to Fox News headquarters in Manhattan.
And I remember being in the boardroom and he was sitting at the end of the board table with his foot up on a chair.And I remember him for like an hour suggesting that I didn't get it, that I didn't understand how it works.
And then at the end, he just gave me a big look up and down.He said, but you're still looking hot.That's how he ended that meeting.
Next time on Slow Burn, the left tries to build its own Fox News and runs into some challenges.
If George Soros ever gave us a penny, it would have been the greatest day on earth.George Soros didn't give a dick.
If you aren't already a Slate Plus member, please consider joining.You'll be supporting Slate's independent journalism, including the creation of this season and future seasons of Slow Burn.
And by joining, you'll unlock full ad-free access to Slow Burn and all your other favorite Slate podcasts. In this week's Plus episode, we're diving deeper into the world of The Daily Show of the early aughts.
You'll hear from head writer Ben Carlin, writer Chris Regan, and correspondent Ed Helms about how they did their jobs and how they thought about Fox.
I really think that The Daily Show was just trying to say what the fuck to institutions or public figures who were being shitty or disingenuous.
Subscribe on Apple Podcasts by clicking Try Free at the top of the Slowburn show page.Or visit slate.com slash slowburn plus to get access wherever you listen.
This season of Slow Burn was written and reported by me, Josh Levine, an executive produced by Lizzie Jacobs.Slow Burn is produced by Sophie Sommergrad, Joel Meyer, and Rosie Belson, with help from Patrick Fort, Jacob Finston, and Julia Russo.
Derek John is Slow Burn'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.
Derek Johnson created the artwork for this season.We had production help from Kate Mishkin, Karen Mischel, Chris Sinclair, and Travis Bell at the Westport Library in Westport, Connecticut.
Special thanks to Rachel Strong, Chris Regan, Eric Burns, Peter Hart, Steve Rendell, and to Slate's Evan Chung, Madeline Ducharme, Forrest Wichman, Christina Cotarucci, Greg Lavallee, Ben Richmond, Seth Brown, Katie Rayford, Caitlin Schneider, Alexandra Cole, Emily Hodgkins, Ivy-Lise Simonis, Joshua Metcalfe, Heidi Strom Moon, and Alicia Montgomery, Slate's VP of Audio.
Thanks for listening.We'll see you next week.
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