A (4:59)

Ailes came to the Fox News Channel from his work packaging presidential candidate Richard Nixon in 1968. One Nixon media advisor explained how they could put their candidate over the top by transforming him into a media celebrity. Voters are basically lazy, the advisor told reporter Joe McGinnis. Reason requires a high degree of discipline, of concentration. Impression is easier. Reason pushes the viewer back. It assaults him. It demands that he agree or disagree. Impression can envelop him, invite him in without making an intellectual demand. When we argue with him, we seek to engage his intellect. The emotions are more easily roused, closer to the surface, more malleable. Ailes presented Nixon in carefully curated televised town halls geared to different audiences in which he arranged the set, Nixon's answers to carefully staged questions, Nixon's makeup and the crowd's applause. Let's face it, he said, a lot of people think Nixon is dull, think he's a bore, a pain in the ass. But carefully managed television could make them forget all that. Ailes found his stride working for right wing candidates, selling the narrative that Democrats were socialists who wanted to transfer wealth from hardworking white Americans to to undeserving minorities and women. He produced the racist Willie Horton ad for Republican candidate George H.W. bush in 1988 and a short lived television show hosted by right wing shock jock rush Limbaugh in 1992. It was from there that he went on to shape the Fox News Channel after its launch in 1996 Ailes sold his narrative with what he called the orchestra pit theory. He explained, if you have two guys on a stage and one guy says I have a solution to the Middle east problem and the other guy falls in the orchestra pit, who do you think is going to be on the evening news?

A (7:10)

This is a theory Trump has always embraced and one that drives his second term in office. He has placed television personalities throughout his administration, to the apparent disbelief of ChatGPT, and has turned the White House into, as media ally Steve Bannon put it, a major information content provider. What Trump does is the action and we just happen to be one of the distributors, bannon told Drew Harwell and Sarah Ellison of the Washington Post. The administration has replaced traditional media outlets with right wing loyalists and floods the social media space with a Trump narrative that is untethered from reality. Communications director Steven Cheung says their goal is to create full spectrum dominance. Their attempt to convince Americans to accept their version of reality is showing now in Trump's repeated extreme version of the old Republican storyline that the economy under him is great and that the country's problems are due to Democrats, minorities and women. Since voters in November elections turned against the Republicans, citing their concerns about the economy, Trump has doubled down on the idea that the idea of affordability is a Democrat con job. In an interview yesterday with POLITICO's Dasha Burns, Trump said he would grade his economy a.

A (8:43)

Any problems with it, he and his loyalists say, stem from former President Joe Biden's having left them an economy in shambles. But in fact, in October 2024, the Economist called the American economy the envy of the world. As news cycles have turned against his administration on the economy as well as the Epstein files, immigration sweeps, strikes on small boats in the Caribbean and his mental acuity, Trump has tried to regain control of the narrative by diving into the orchestra pit. He has turned to an extreme version of the racism, sexism and attacks on Americans who use the social safety net that have been part of Republican rhetoric for decades. He has gone out of his way to attack Somali Americans as garbage, to attack female reporters and to use an ableist slur against Minnesota governor Tim Walz, whose son has a nonverbal learning disability, prompting imitators to drive by the walls home shouting the slur. The fight to control the media narrative is on display this week in a fight over a media merger. As Josh Marshall explained in Talking Points Memo yesterday, the media conglomerate Warner Bros. Discovery, which used to be called Time Warner and includes news division cnn, had agreed to be acquired by Netflix. But as the deal was moving forward, Paramount Skydance launched a hostile takeover to get Warner Brothers Discovery for itself. David Ellison, son of right wing billionaire Larry Ellison, who co founded software giant Oracle, bought Paramount over the summer and appears to be creating a right wing media ecosystem dominated by the Trumps. Part of the financing for his purchase of Warner Bros. Discovery would come from the investment company of Trump's son in law, Jared Kushner, as well as from Saudi and Qatari sovereign wealth funds. Paramount told Warner Bros. Discovery shareholders they should accept its offer because Trump would never allow the Netflix deal to happen. And as Marshall notes, Trump appeared yesterday to agree with that suggestion.

A (11:04)

The Paramount merger gave Ellison control of cbs, which promptly turned rightward. At stake now is cnn, which Netflix doesn't particularly want, but Paramount does, either to neuter it or turn it into another version of Fox News. Joe Flint, Brian Schwartz and Natalie Andrews of the Wall Street Journal reported that Ellison told Trump he would make sweeping changes to CNN if Paramount acquires Warner Bros. Discovery. The Wall Street Journal reporters note that Trump has told people close to him that he wants new ownership of CNN as well as changes to CNN programming.

A (11:45)

During the Gilded Age, a similar moment of media consolidation around right Wing Politics, a magazine that celebrated ordinary Americans, launched a new form of journalism. S.S. mcClure, a former coffee pot salesman in the Midwest, recognized that people in small towns and on farms were interested in the same questions of reform as people in the cities. He and A partner started McClure's magazine in 1893 and in 1903 published a famous issue that contained Ida Tarbell's expose of the Standard Oil Company, Lincoln Steffens's expose of the corruption of the Minneapolis municipal government, and Ray Stannard Baker's expose of workers violence during a coal strike. Their carefully detailed studies of the machinations of a single trust, a single city and a single union personalized the larger struggles of people in the new industrial economy. Their stories electrified readers and galvanized a movement to reform the government that had bred such abuses. McClure wrote that all three articles might have been titled the American Contempt of Law. It was the public that paid for such lawlessness, he wrote, and it was high time the public demanded that justice be enforced.

A (13:13)

Capitalists, working men, politicians, citizens, all breaking the law or letting it be broken. Who is left to uphold it? McClure asked the lawyers. Some of the best lawyers in the country are hired not to go into court to defend cases, but to advise corporations and business firms how they can get around the law without too great a risk of punishment. The judges, too many of them, so respect the laws that for some error or quibble they restore to office and liberty men convicted on evidence overwhelmingly convincing to common sense. The churches. We know of one, an ancient and wealthy establishment which had to be compelled by a Tammany holdover health officer to put its tenements in sanitary condition. The colleges, they do not understand.

A (14:15)

There is no one left, McClure wrote. None but all of us.

B (14:27)

Letters from an American was written and read by Heather Cox Richardson. It was produced at Soundscape Productions, Dedham, Massachusetts, recorded with music composed by Michael Moss.