Introducing The News from Scene on Radio

Summary

Podcast Summary: Revisionist History – "Introducing The News from Scene on Radio"

Podcast: Revisionist History
Host: Pushkin Industries / Malcolm Gladwell
Presented Episode: Scene on Radio – "The News" (Season 8, Episode 1)
Original Air Date: June 4, 2026

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Episode Overview

Revisionist History temporarily hands off the mic to introduce Scene on Radio’s provocative eight-part series, "The News." Hosted by John Biewen and co-hosted by Chenjerai Kumanyika, the episode digs into America’s ongoing crisis of trust in news media and the important role journalism plays in democracy. With expert interviews, on-the-ground reporting in North Carolina "news deserts," and sharp self-reflection, the show asks: What’s really wrong with American news? Is it what we think it is? And how do we begin to fix it?

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. State of the News Media in America

(Started ~03:30)

• America has more news sources than ever, yet trust is collapsing.
• Classic quote: “Some have called the news media the oxygen of a functioning democracy. But if that’s true, America’s lungs are in rough shape.” (Revisionist History Host, 00:45)
• Only 28% of Americans have even a fair amount of confidence in major media (Gallup 2025).

2. Trust, Misinformation, and the Public’s Relationship to News

(05:55–10:48)

• Americans are frustrated and distrustful; there is no shared narrative, and even basic facts are contested.
• Chenjerai Kumanyika confesses to frustration at both the media and consumers clinging to falsehoods.
  • “When I’m looking at so-called journalism that I see is completely false and dishonest, I find myself getting mad at the people who consume that news and believe it. Like, why are y’all drinking a Kool Aid?” (10:09)
• Journalists and scholars question whether media, as currently structured, is up to its professed democratic task.

3. The "Border Belt": Voices from a News Desert

(11:22–22:07)

• Biewen travels through a rural, racially diverse, economically struggling region on the NC/SC border—an area with little meaningful local news.
• Residents like Ethan George (young farmer, Republican voter) reveal media consumption patterns: local radio, news aggregators, Facebook, but little newspaper reading.
• On political choice, Ethan says:
  • “I had met Mark Robinson…so if you feel like you got a close personal connection with him, that’s kind of way I look…” (20:10)

4. Bias, Identity, and News Consumption

(23:21–34:23)

• Interview: Dr. Danigal Young, University of Delaware.
  • Human brains prioritize "comprehension, control, and community over objective accuracy."
  • Our news choices are shaped by a need to fit in with our social/political groups.
  • “When we comprehend the world, we’re going to comprehend the world the same way our team does, and we’re going to want to comprehend the world in ways that make our team look good.” (26:12)

5. Historical Realignment and Political Echo Chambers

(26:24–37:28)

• The US political party sorting from 1950s onward (especially on race), led to increasingly homogenous parties, amplifying tribalism.
• Today, affective polarization is high—people hate the other “side” more than they diverge on specific policy.
• Perceived “echo chambers” aren’t as closed as commonly believed; people are exposed to content from the "other side," but through adversarial frames.
  • “You are seeing claims that are being made by the other side, but they’re often presented to you…by someone on your side, right, who says, look at how awful these people are.” (34:55)

6. Does News Shape Us, Or Do We Shape Our News?

(37:28–39:16)

• Media exposure interacts with prior beliefs; we may choose outlets that reflect our worldview, rather than vice versa.
• Loss of faith in the media is part of broader systemic failures: US democracy delivers results not aligned with majority public opinion, encouraging cynicism.

7. Structural Problems and What Comes Next

(39:16–41:52)

• The crisis isn’t just about bias, polarization, or technology (AI, social media)—the problems are deep, historical, and structural.
• Despite frequent anger and frustration with journalism, credible news is indispensable to daily life and social progress.
  • Kumanyika: “Most of what I know about the world comes from journalism…as angry as we are…the end of the day is we have to have journalism because we have to know what’s going on in the world just to live our everyday personal lives…” (40:56)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On News Distrust:
  • “According to a Gallup poll in 2025, only 28% of Americans had even a fair amount of confidence in the major media. 70% say we have not much or no confidence at all.” (John Biewen, 06:10)
• On Local News Deserts:
  • “Most of these counties are also what are called news deserts. That means they have no more than one local news source, and often the surviving newspapers have shriveled to a few pages of mostly sports and features.” (John Biewen, 13:58)
• On the Power of In-Person Politics:
  • "And I had met Mark Robinson, he spent some time down in Columbus county…if you feel like you got a close personal connection with him, that’s kind of way I look…” (Ethan George, 20:10)
• On Social Needs in News Consumption:
  • “Your goal is not to be accurate, because your goal really is survival. And there are three areas—comprehension, control, and community.” (Danigal Young, 24:32)
• On the Echo Chamber Myth:
  • “By and large, political scientists and communications scholars have come away from the empirical evidence with the conclusion that the echo chamber is largely a myth…” (Danigal Young, 33:48)
• On Historical Mythologies:
  • “When was the media telling people the truth about white supremacy and how pervasive it is? The truth about U.S. history... Right. And also this idea that Americans used to agree on things, that we really ever had this consensus as a society? Nah.” (Chenjerai Kumanyika, 32:30)
• On Why Journalism Matters Despite It All:
  • “Most of what I know about the world comes from journalism…when I see ICE kidnap somebody, that’s because a journalist reported on it…as angry as we are...we actually have to solve this problem.” (Chenjerai Kumanyika, 40:56)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• Introduction & Framing the Crisis: 00:00–06:36
• Why We Need News / Jeffersonian Democracy: 06:42–08:16
• Meet the Border Belt / News Desert: 11:15–14:15
• Ethan George Interview (Media Habits): 15:00–22:10
• Expert Interview – Dr. Danigal Young (Media Psychology): 23:40–34:08
• Party Sorting, Polarization, and History: 26:54–30:48
• Echo Chambers & Coverage Framing: 33:48–36:41
• Effect of Media on Political Identity: 37:28–39:16
• Addressing the Structural Problems Ahead: 39:16–41:52
• Preview of Season 8: 41:52–43:13

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Tone & Style

The tone is reflective, questioning, and slightly playful—with humility and occasional sardonic humor (“I only try to say things that Thomas Jefferson said…”). Hosts debate, challenge assumptions, and lean into uncomfortable questions, inviting listeners on a journey of re-examination. The voices from North Carolina are delivered with empathy and without caricature.

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Summary Takeaway

This episode sets the stage for a season-long inquiry into America’s fractured relationship with news. It challenges the listener to reconsider what’s truly broken: Not just polarization or “fake news,” but a long history of structural flaws, shifting political identities, and misunderstood roles of journalism. The solution, as the hosts tease, is neither nostalgia nor resignation—but a search for a better path forward.

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Transcript

[Chenjerai Kumanyika]

Foreign.

[Revisionist History Host]

Hi listeners. You know that here on Revisionist History, we ask a lot of questions about the systems that have shaped our worldviews. While we're hard at work on our new season, we wanted to share another podcast that hits these points and asks big questions too. It's called Scenon Radio. And today I'm bringing you an episode from their aptly named new season, the News. Some have called the news media the oxygen of a functioning democracy. But if that's true, America's lungs are in rough shape. Many Americans say they don't trust the media. The business model for local journalism has all but collapsed. And we all know about the barrage of misinformation that flows from our splintered mediascape. You can't separate the state of our news media from the other profound crises that America keeps on failing to solve. Hosted by John Biewen and now in its eighth season, the two time Peabody Award nominated show explores the roots of this crisis and asks what's really wrong with the news. It's an eight part series, so you'll want to check out the rest. But for now, here's episode one. Find seen on radio Wherever you get podcasts, we spend hours deciding what to buy. But there's a split second decision that can make or break a sale. Do you have the trust to hit buy now? Agentic commerce is testing that moment more than ever. And that's where PayPal comes in. With 25 years of checkouts, 400 million consumer accounts globally and the benefit of purchase and seller protection. All of which make sure wherever a purchase starts, it ends with trust. Built for payments, growth and agentic. PayPal open built for all business.

[Gilbert Bayes]

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[Jacob Goldstein]

Hey, it's Jacob Goldstein from business History. In our new series American Genius, we tell the stories of three great writers who changed the way business works in America. Our first episode is about Benjamin Franklin, who among many other things was a best selling business writer.

[John Biewen]

Take a listen.

[Jacob Goldstein]

He's writing this much later in his life, consciously creating this image of himself. And I do want to emphasize how unusual this model is at the time. This self made man myth. Because you don't want to be self made. It's low class to be self made. You know this idea that we have today is the opposite, right? And it comes from Franklin. Today there is the derisive term nepo baiting.

[Chenjerai Kumanyika]

Well, exactly right. And these days if you are a billionaire, you had better Have a Benjamin Franklin story about starting in a garage, coming up with the idea from nothing.

[Jacob Goldstein]

And here is Benjamin Franklin in inventing

[John Biewen]

it right before our eyes.

[Jacob Goldstein]

This has been brought to you by Odoo to listen to more of our American Genius series. Listen to business history. New episodes release every Wednesday on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Chenjerai Kumanyika]

All right, we're rolling.

[John Biewen]

Good to see you.

[Ethan George]

Here we go.

[Gilbert Bayes]

Asian markets are mostly down today. Dangerous flash flooding ripping through parts of Milwaukee. This is a FOX News alert. This is our camera angle from.

[John Biewen]

Our Americans, if we want to be, are inundated with news from countless sources. From the New York Times, I'm Michael Milan.

[Gilbert Bayes]

Welcome back to One American News. Thanks so much for.

[Chenjerai Kumanyika]

And at the same time, we're stuck in a deep information crisis.

[John Biewen]

I read the news today.

[Chenjerai Kumanyika]

Helpful.

[John Biewen]

It seems like we're helpless to solve our problems. It doesn't help that we have no shared narrative and few shared facts.

[Gilbert Bayes]

What is happening right now in the world and what just happened to my friend Charlie Kir is a battle of sheer evil versus goodness to me. Fox News, just not. They don't tell the whole story.

[John Biewen]

I consider myself a centrist.

[Jacob Goldstein]

I'm not particularly interested in msnbc.

[Gilbert Bayes]

No, what I'm saying is don't do me.

[Chenjerai Kumanyika]

Don't try me. Today, Scotty, we put out a cnn. Here's a letter to the New York Post.

[John Biewen]

Yo, ain't worth the papers.

[Chenjerai Kumanyika]

Put it on on big questions. A whole lot of us don't know what's true or we firmly believe and will fight you over things that are not true.

[John Biewen]

Let's get rid of these voting machines.

[Chenjerai Kumanyika]

There's a half a dozen people, whether

[John Biewen]

it's the House or Senate, Larry, that

[Chenjerai Kumanyika]

are up here as we speak, that

[John Biewen]

did not get elected.

[Chenjerai Kumanyika]

It was all bogus.

[John Biewen]

Just so people understand, wind and solar only work when there's wind and sun.

[Ethan George]

We don't have technology to store the energy from wind and solar.

[John Biewen]

So if you make yourself. I'm very disappointed in the mainstream media.

[Ethan George]

That's all I'll say about that.

[John Biewen]

It's hard to imagine putting the toothpaste back in the tube. And maybe there's no golden age to return to anyway. So now what? Chenjerai.

[Chenjerai Kumanyika]

Hey, John.

[John Biewen]

You know, our little montage could have just kept on going.

[Chenjerai Kumanyika]

I better stop now. Cause I feel like you're gonna get us in trouble. You know what I mean? We got hundreds, thousands more news and newsish outlets to choose from.

[John Biewen]

We are awash in media, at least some of us are, but we don't seem very happy about it.

[Chenjerai Kumanyika]

Yeah, man, everybody's mad at the news media. And if I'm being honest, yeah, like, I get it, right? Because if you look around, so much of what passes for news out there is like, not that good. In fact, a lot of it is trash.

[John Biewen]

We could easily find people who would disagree with you or me about which acts of journalism are the trashy ones. But no question about it, people are not happy. According to a Gallup poll in 2025, only 28% of Americans had even a fair amount of confidence in the major media. 70% of us say we have not much or no confidence at all.

[Chenjerai Kumanyika]

That crisis of trust is a huge problem for American journalism. And it's not the only problem.

[John Biewen]

A lot of people at first blush might not care about a media crisis, especially if they think the media sucks. But.

[Chenjerai Kumanyika]

But people need the media to live, right? They need to know what the status of their healthcare is. They need to know what the weather is, you know what I'm saying? And if there's gonna be like an earthquake, they need to know if their rights are gonna be violated. Right? I mean, it's just like something that you need to live your everyday lives. And also, how are you gonna run a democracy where the people are supposed to govern ourselves if we don't have the information, if we don't have any shared sense of what's going on out there?

[John Biewen]

That's more or less what Thomas Jefferson said, our good buddy. Wherever the people are well informed, they can be trusted with their own government.

[Chenjerai Kumanyika]

That's good because I only try to say things that Thomas Jefferson said. You know that about me. That's when I check the child every time before I say something. Did Thomas Jefferson say this?

[John Biewen]

Okay, yeah, exactly right. We've picked on him a number of times on this show.

[Chenjerai Kumanyika]

Yeah, but I mean, look, he was right, you know what I'm saying? Being a slaveholder and a racist, that don't mean you're not right about anything, right?

[John Biewen]

But yeah. Does anybody here think that the fourth Estate, the news media as it's now constructed, is doing its job? That Americans are well enough informed to be trusted with our own government? From the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University, welcome to Scene on Radio Season eight. I'm John Biewen, producer and host of the show.

[Chenjerai Kumanyika]

And I'm Chenjerag Kumanyika, excited to come back as the co host.

[John Biewen]

Ceng, you are an award winning podcast maker. Empire City on civil unruly subjects and seen on radio. You were my co host for seasons two and four. And you're a professor at New York University's journalism school with a PhD in Mass Communication and Critical Media studies.

[Chenjerai Kumanyika]

So.

[John Biewen]

So you are officially an expert on the thing we're here to explore this

[Chenjerai Kumanyika]

time around, finally, you know what I'm saying? We in my lane now, you know what I mean?

[John Biewen]

You got the paper credentials this time. We're calling this season the News. We're gonna take a hard, deep look at the troubled state of the news media in the US and how that crisis relates to the other profound problems we seem unable or unwilling to solve.

[Chenjerai Kumanyika]

Another key thing we're going to do is sort through the various crises in our news and information system and the most common reasons people say they're pissed about the media. And we're going to ask what's really wrong? Is it what we think it is?

[John Biewen]

We will do some history along the way. We might challenge some mythology around journalistic tradition in America and parts of US History itself for that matter, in ways that could also shed light on how our news media are failing us in this pivotal historical moment.

[Chenjerai Kumanyika]

And eventually we're going to talk about solutions, what it might look like to unbreak the media. Because the thing is, this stuff really matters. The stakes are about as high as they could be.

[John Biewen]

Media are so much a part of our lives that in a real sense, we're made of media. The media helps to shape a society, but also acts as a mirror, showing us who we are.

[Chenjerai Kumanyika]

And John, like I have a confession. We talk about people being angry at the news media and of course folks are angry for wildly different reasons. But when I'm looking at so called journalism that I see is completely false and dishonest, I find myself getting mad at the people who consume that news and believe it. Like, why are y' all drinking a Kool Aid?

[John Biewen]

I know what you mean. And let's, let's put a pin in that thought, as they say right now. Before we go further, just a quick note for the grammar purists. Yes, you will hear us do that thing that a whole lot of people do now where we say the media as if it's one thing, right, but

[Chenjerai Kumanyika]

the word is plural. And we'll never lose sight of the fact that the media is a tangled web, not a monolith

[John Biewen]

here in episode one. Let's start with us. Not Chanderai and me, but us. Everybody who consumes news media, whether you take in a ton of it or hardly any, what drives us as we try to inform ourselves.

[Chenjerai Kumanyika]

That's the question. You know what I'm saying? We talk so much about whether we can trust our news sources, but can we trust ourselves?

[John Biewen]

I've spent some time over the last year or so in a corner of North Carolina talking with folks about a lot of things, their politics, what their lives are like and about the news.

[Chenjerai Kumanyika]

And why'd you go to that particular place?

[John Biewen]

It's a good question. In one sense, we could have gone almost anywhere. But as folks will hear throughout the season, this patch of North Carolina, which is not far from where I live, is a compelling place to see some of the most pressing problems with our news media and some impressive efforts to respond and fill the gaping holes in the system. By the way, Chang, you know, I think it's safe to say some of those news consumers you're frustrated with live in this place.

[Chenjerai Kumanyika]

All right. Well, in that case, let me take a deep breath. All right. I can't wait to hear what you found.

[John Biewen]

All your favorite country play back to back to back. Today's country, the big 957 KML. We're going to refer to this part of North Carolina as the border belt. It's an old term used over the last century for a tobacco growing region that ran along both sides of the north and South Carolina border. A lot of the tobacco's gone now. The farms grow corn and soybeans and other crops. The radio signals in these rural counties come from a ways off, mainly the bigger cities of Wilmington and Fayetteville, and they sound like it.

[Chenjerai Kumanyika]

So get your Wednesday off to a good start with me, Gilbert bayes on Newstalk 640, WFNC.

[Gilbert Bayes]

Turn left onto North Carolina 41 South.

[John Biewen]

I spent time just on the North Carolina side in a cluster of counties, Scotland and Robison to the west, Bladen and Columbus to the east. This place is racially diverse with large white, black and indigenous populations and long struggling. North Carolina ranks in the bottom half of states in per capita income. In the border belt, folks make 12 to 20 thousand dollars less than the state average. There are a lot of manufactured homes, trailer parks, single wides, double wides, kind of dotted everywhere. The Breakfast Club Turn it up.

[Chenjerai Kumanyika]

Interviewing surprise guests, music and more.

[John Biewen]

It's all on the Breakfast Club weekday

[Chenjerai Kumanyika]

mornings on Fayetteville's official number one station for hip hop and R and b, the big stick, Foxy 99.

[John Biewen]

Most of these counties are also what are called news deserts. That means they have no more than one local news source and often the surviving newspapers have shriveled to a few pages of mostly sports and features. They don't print a whole lot of news.

[Gilbert Bayes]

John, you want to come in or you want to sit on the porch?

[John Biewen]

I talk to a range of people in the border belt about their media diets.

[Gilbert Bayes]

I usually sit here and have my coffee and I'm sitting here on the couch and I'm watching the news. Local stations, which are located in Wilmington, but they carry this area.

[John Biewen]

I don't watch a lot of news,

[Ethan George]

but what I watch, I watch Newsmax or Fox.

[Gilbert Bayes]

I try not to get my news from social media too much, but sometimes I'm scrolling through Twitter and I see something and it catches my eye.

[Chenjerai Kumanyika]

I still think that a lot of our people get their information from their local radio station too. Whenever they play in between songs and stuff like that, whatever type of news update,

[John Biewen]

we're gonna spend more time getting to know this guy Ethan George. I find him in Columbus County. He's driving a big John Deere tractor, pulling a planting rig down the road near his family's place. I can just leave it here. I climb the ladder to his two person tractor cab.

[Ethan George]

You got enough room to make it work?

[John Biewen]

Oh, yeah. How you doing?

[Ethan George]

Good.

[John Biewen]

Nice to meet you.

[Ethan George]

Here, let me get that door a little bit better so it won't rattle.

[John Biewen]

Ethan's in his late 20s. He has reddish brown hair and a round face. He and his family raise corn, soybeans, peanuts and beef cattle. On this April day, he's planting corn right here.

[Ethan George]

We farm total 2,200 acres. Between me and my dad and two employees. I believe if you go back, I'm the eighth generation of Jordan farming on this land that we're on right now. Actually, this is some of the original farm we're on.

[John Biewen]

In front of Ethan in the cab are a half dozen screens. They monitor the seed and fertilizer he's dropping, the weather conditions, the technology that's doing the driving.

[Ethan George]

Yes, sir, that's my GPS which controls the auto steering. You see, I'm not touching the steering wheel and it's steering.

[John Biewen]

And for the long hours he spends in the tractor, he also has media handy.

[Ethan George]

I know I have Fox News on this iPad and I will watch Fox News from time to time. And it's not Newsmax, it's that app that has all the news in it. Well, you see, I have Fox News here, but there's an app that I can't call the name of right now.

[John Biewen]

He finds it his Go to news aggregator right here.

[Ethan George]

It's this app right Here, matter of fact, newsbreak newsbreak app. And it kind of, you know, I guess it goes through your algorithm of what you look up and stuff like that. Because if you look at mine, talks about farmers, react to Trump's tariffs, tells me about the local news and stuff like I have that, that pops up and it'll be anywhere from CNBC to wct, the Daily Daily Beast, I don't know what. But anyway, it just shows, you know, local and national news. And if it's not national news is more related to what I look up, which is obviously farming, you know, agriculture related topics. It's where I get a lot of my news from. To say I actually sit down and watch the news is kind of hard to say. Now I will watch it if something interesting is going on on the iPad, if I'm in a tractor running it.

[John Biewen]

Ethan lives with his fiance who's a lawyer. There's a local newspaper, the news reporter out of nearby Whiteville that comes out twice a week. Ethan sometimes looks at its website, but he and his fiance don't subscribe.

[Ethan George]

I've lived by myself. I lived out of my parents house for now going on the fifth year and I can say I've honestly never had a newspaper in my house or even picked one up. I know there's not one that'd been in my house. My parents get one every week.

[John Biewen]

But for local news he relies on Facebook which includes reports from nearby outlets and comments from the community. He mentions a recent criminal incident in a nearby town.

[Ethan George]

We're sitting there talking with a group of friends and where'd you read that at? Oh, if you go on Facebook, look at WWA wise post about it. But look at the comments and you can see the video. So now you kind of, you know, you look at Facebook cause yeah, the papers and you know they'll tell you about it. But a lot of times you can read through the comments and find somebody who actually lived it and see their opinion and you know, sometimes opinions are biased, but you do get kind of see more of a real live feeling by reading the comments on it. So a lot of my news, not gonna say I trust Facebook by no stretch of the matter cause everybody has a different opinion, but you can kind of see the gist of what's going on.

[John Biewen]

Ethan votes Republican along with everybody in his family and their neighbors. He says historically this region, white folks included, voted for Democrats. Until 10 or 20 years ago, we were all Democrats.

[Ethan George]

And then all of a sudden we wake up one day and we're Republicans.

[John Biewen]

As much as we all rely on the media to get information and to decide how to vote, it's worth highlighting what Ethan says when I ask who he voted for in the North Carolina governor's race in 2024.

[Ethan George]

Mark Robinson.

[John Biewen]

You did?

[Ethan George]

Yes, I did.

[John Biewen]

You may remember hearing about Mark Robinson, no matter how far you are from North Carolina. He was the Republican nominee who lost to Democrat Josh Stein. Robinson made international news for inflammatory statements he apparently made, including on a porn website maligning Martin Luther King, defending Hitler, questioning the Holocaust, and calling himself a black Nazi. Ethan tells me he had to choose between the two candidates, suggesting it was a vote for his preferred party. But he also says this about Robinson.

[Ethan George]

I had met him personally, so, I mean, you know, I look at politics different than some people. You know, you got die hard Republicans, you got die hard Democrats, you got die hard liberals, and there's other parties, you know, there's whole list of. Now I look at the ones like that that I've personally had shook their hand or met them personally. And I had met Mark Robson, he spent some time down in Columbus county, and I had met him personally, so he probably didn't remember my name or know who I was, but he called my name one time and shook my hand. So, I mean, if you feel like you got a close personal connection with him, that's kind of way I look at whether you're doing Democrat, Republican, maybe.

[John Biewen]

There's still special power in what comes to us, not from a screen, but through in person experience, the way people used to learn most of what they knew about the world. Despite his conservative views, Ethan says he finds Fox News too far to the right at times when it harps too much on gun rights or undocumented immigrants. But then a network like NBC will annoy him even more in the other direction.

[Ethan George]

During the election, it was always negative on Trump, negative on Trump, constantly, you know, this, that and the other, you know, and I kind of look at it, I'm like, well, everybody's not perfect. But the one, y' all were pro for Kamala, you were pro Kamala. Like, I can find problems with her, too, just as good as you can find with Trump. It's kind of, you know, if you don't tell the story, tell it on both sides, tell the pros and the cons of both. Not just constantly over and over and over and over again. And that's where I'd get irritated and not want to listen to it.

[John Biewen]

Hey, Tench, what are you thinking so far?

[Chenjerai Kumanyika]

Well, I gotta say, I really like listening to Ethan, you know? And I'm not mad at him. I mean, if you said to me, white North Carolina farmer who votes Republican, I feel like I was gonna picture somebody very different, somebody who's maybe not as open or really just has their mind made up. Now, I would like to hear Ethan explain why he voted for Mark Robinson, who's a Holocaust denier who called himself a black Nazi for governor. So there is that part.

[John Biewen]

Yeah.

[Chenjerai Kumanyika]

But putting that aside for a second, just listening to him, I got a feel for where he's at, even though we only heard him for a few minutes.

[John Biewen]

You wouldn't vote for the people he votes for, you're saying. But he comes across as a sincere person doing his best to make sense of things, right?

[Chenjerai Kumanyika]

Yeah. Like, based on the information he has. You know what I'm saying? And when he talks about the news he pays attention to, he sounds real familiar to me. He wants the facts. He wants fairness. And when the news tells him something very different from what he and the people around him think is true, then it sounds unfair or oversimplified. That makes him want to change the channel or tap over to a different source.

[John Biewen]

We said this episode was going to be about us, those of us on the receiving end of the news. I talked to an expert who has fascinating insights into our biases as news consumers, including how changes in our society have amplified those biases.

[Gilbert Bayes]

Often when I'm talking about this to audiences, I'll say, you know, how many of you would say that your main goal as you're engaging with the world is to be accurate in what you perceive? And everyone raises their hand, and I'm like, actually, it's not. Actually, you're wrong.

[John Biewen]

This is Danigal Young.

[Gilbert Bayes]

I'm a professor of communication and political science at the University of Delaware, where I direct the center for Political Communication.

[John Biewen]

Young studies how people process information in connection with our politics. She wrote the recent book How Media, Politics and Identity Drive Our Appetite for Misinformation. Dana says when you turn on a cable news and opinion channel or go to a news website, you're bringing along deep desires, needs really, that go well beyond wanting accurate information.

[Gilbert Bayes]

Your goal is not to be accurate, because your goal really is survival. And there are three areas that sort of speak to survival needs that serve as sort of the underbelly of human survival. They all facilitate action because in order to survive, you need to act in your own survival interests. So those three needs are comprehension, control, and community.

[John Biewen]

As we go about our lives, we want to feel that we know basically what the hell is going on in our world, and we want to feel some ability to control what happens to us. But Dana says, maybe even more important than comprehension and control is that third C word, community.

[Gilbert Bayes]

And this simply captures the notion that we are social animals who do not exist truly as individuals in a vacuum. We only exist embedded within a social context. And that has to do with how we were able to survive historically, even here in the US that notion, even of rampant, you know, ardent individualism is itself, believe it or not, a group norm. We are individualists because everyone around us also prizes that value of individualism, which I think is kind of hilariously ironic.

[John Biewen]

So, Young says, as we take in the news, we do so, consciously or not, as members of the social groups we identify with. And in a country that's bitterly divided politically, most Americans identify with a political team. We might as well be wearing our team's uniform as we go looking for news.

[Gilbert Bayes]

That means that when we comprehend the world, we're going to comprehend the world the same way that our team does, and we're going to want to comprehend the world in ways that make our team look good.

[John Biewen]

Dana is talking about general human tendencies in part, but it hasn't always been like this. She says historical trends in the US in politics and the media have helped to intensify our divisions. These changes have made Americans less open to information we don't like and more vulnerable to mis and disinformation. To start with, she points to the sorting of the political parties starting in the middle of the 20th century.

[Gilbert Bayes]

Up until the 50s and 60s, our two major political parties were actually quite mixed in terms of policy positions, in terms of the kinds of people who identified with each, in terms of where those people lived, in terms of the religious identification of the people within the parties. And part of the reason that that was the case was because there was this great compromise that was made on the issue of race in the United States.

[John Biewen]

That's a nice way of saying the two parties were pretty much in sync, white supremacy wise.

[Gilbert Bayes]

Both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party had in sync members, elite members within them who supported the idea of states rights, who supported the idea of the disempowerment of African American people

[John Biewen]

as millions of black people migrated out of the Jim Crow south, populating Northern cities and turning into voters. That put pressure on the Democrats and gave them an opportunity.

[Gilbert Bayes]

And we ended up with that sort of great racial realignment where the Democratic Party became the party of civil rights and the Republican Party became the party. In opposition to that movement, most black

[John Biewen]

people moved from the gop, the party of Lincoln, to the Democrats. Most white Southerners and other conservative white people, many of whom had been Democrats, joined the Republicans. Other kinds of sorting followed. Evangelical Christians and people in rural places turned mostly Republican, while secular and city people grew more overwhelmingly Democratic, such that

[Gilbert Bayes]

the Republican Party of today is overwhelmingly white, rural, Christian, and culturally conservative. And the Democratic Party today is overwhelmingly racially and ethnically diverse, secular, agnostic, urban, suburban, and culturally and ideologically liberal.

[John Biewen]

Research has found that increased homogeneity within a political party serves to crank up the emotional temperature for those on that side.

[Gilbert Bayes]

There is something primal in us that happens when we look like our team. We live like our team. We live in the same places as our team. We worship like our team. There's something really primal that ignites in us because we have such good group fit. That is what has happened in American politics. And it's happened in a way that is not symmetrical. Because as you may have noticed, as I described it, in the Republican Party, those identity categories are far more homogenous than they are within the Democratic Party. And so the engine runs fast and furiously on the right in the US Right now.

[John Biewen]

That is the engine of visceral us against them sentiment. But that's not just a Republican thing. Political scientists have documented an increase in what they call affective polarization.

[Gilbert Bayes]

And that is simply the extent to which regular people, members of the public, dislike members of the other political party. That does seem to be pretty equal across the parties. Democrats don't like Republicans and Republicans don't like Democrats. It's not necessarily that we become more radical on our position on gun control or abortion. It's more that I just hate people who feel opposite me more. Which is interesting.

[John Biewen]

So change.

[Chenjerai Kumanyika]

Yeah, I mean what Dana Gal is really saying is that news consumers in the US are less open minded than ever, less willing to be persuaded by information that conflicts with what we already believe.

[John Biewen]

Yes, now stir in the social media algorithms that feed us rage, bait and in general, our fragmented, often blatantly partisan us against them. Media Environment I grabbed a couple clips. This is Sean Hannity of Fox News and Rachel Maddow of Ms. Now notice in each case the talk about them. They the other side. They want you to feel pain. They want it. They want you to pay more at the pump. They want your energy bills to be higher.

[Gilbert Bayes]

They want the chief threat among them

[John Biewen]

now is not the rioters and the

[Gilbert Bayes]

kooks but the slick political professionals who are turning their considerable talents to laundering violently revolutionary claims that America's elections aren't real.

[Chenjerai Kumanyika]

So in all the talk about so called political polarization in America, there's a tendency to think that the fragmenting of the media into a thousand sources, all saying different things, that that's the problem. And if we could just go back to a time when everyone watched Walter crowd Peter Jennings, we'd come together again as a nation.

[John Biewen]

And I'm just gonna guess, partly by your tone of voice, but also knowing you, that you're not really buying it. Professor Kumanyika. For one thing, I know you well enough to know you don't believe there was once upon a time when the major media told the American people the unvarnished truth on all the important questions.

[Chenjerai Kumanyika]

Right. When was the media telling people the truth about white supremacy and how pervasive it is? The truth about US history and how brutal it is, or the truth about U.S. behavior around the world? Right. And the way America's economic system works, why folks are struggling to get by. And also this idea that Americans used to agree on things, that we really ever had this consensus as a society? Nah. I mean, there was more of a consensus maybe among white people, especially white men, middle class and above, who held all the power in the country.

[John Biewen]

Yeah. But lots of other people who didn't fit that description and saw a very different reality were just left out of the public conversation for the most part. Yeah.

[Chenjerai Kumanyika]

And if you kind of aren't sure you want some receipts on that, I encourage you to go check the other seasons of this podcast.

[John Biewen]

But there are other reasons to doubt that somehow reversing the splintering of the media, if that were possible, would help Americans to find common ground on what our problems are and how to solve them. First of all, it seems a lot of us have gotten a somewhat mistaken idea about just how siloed the news media are. This whole idea of the echo chamber. Here's Danigal Young again.

[Gilbert Bayes]

By and large, political scientists and communications scholars have come away from the empirical evidence with the conclusion that the echo chamber is largely a myth in that people are not only seeing content that supports their side.

[Chenjerai Kumanyika]

So the usual idea, the echo chamber, is that people on different sides of the political dividend aren't even exposed to voices from the other side.

[John Biewen]

Yeah, the idea that you only hear right wing voices on right wing media and likewise on the left.

[Chenjerai Kumanyika]

But Danigal is saying that's not how it works. If you watch Ms. Now, what used to be called msnbc, you see a whole bunch of Donald Trump and his allies and what they have to say about things. And if you watch Fox News or look at his website, you'll see a ton of content about Democrats in the left. Like that's, that's actually like the major thing that they're doing is getting people outraged about what the left is doing.

[John Biewen]

So the question is not do opposing perspectives get covered? It's how are they presented? Here's what Dana said.

[Gilbert Bayes]

You are seeing claims that are being made by the other side, but they're often presented to you, perhaps shared by someone who's on your side, right, who says, look at how awful these people are. This is the kind of thing that they're saying over on that other network. Here is what they're saying. And it is a moral violation. It's a violation of our moral order.

[John Biewen]

Dana brought up an example. Remember when Ketanji Brown Jackson was being confirmed for the Supreme Court in 2022. In your understanding, what does critical race theory mean? What is it,

[Ethan George]

Senator?

[Gilbert Bayes]

My understanding is that, oh, I remember

[Chenjerai Kumanyika]

Republican senators on the committee asked her a bunch of questions about her views on crt, which was like the, you know, conservative rage issue at the time. And Ted Cruz, the senator from Texas, asked her about an anti racism book that suggested babies can be taught to be racist.

[John Biewen]

Do you agree with this book that is being taught with kids that babies are racist,

[Chenjerai Kumanyika]

Senator? So you had a black nominee for the court and lots of the questions were about her views on race.

[John Biewen]

To Danagal's point, about the echo chamber issue, msnbc, as it was called at the time, the heavily pro democratic, anti Republican cable channel, gave these exchanges a lot of attention. I mean, there's no question that Ted Cruz figured prominently on the so called, you know, left leaning channel, along with analysis like this from a Democratic political strategist. This is about her being a black woman, basically casting her as a radical, as a black radical who is out to get white people.

[Chenjerai Kumanyika]

I mean, quite frankly, it looked like I saw Ted Cruz commit a hate crime in that hearing room.

[John Biewen]

Meanwhile, over on Fox News, Sean Hannity brought Cruise onto his show that even Ted Cruz was with us, Senator, and invited him to talk some more about his grilling of the judge. And when it came to critical race theory, she didn't want to answer the questions. She claimed she didn't.

[Chenjerai Kumanyika]

So it's an interesting clarification that Dana is making, right? She's saying no matter how much you're in your news bubble, you're still hearing voices and ideas from the other side. Maybe a lot but that doesn't really change the fact that people are getting wildly different views of the world if they're watching Fox News versus MSNBCow. Whether you call them echo chambers or not really, it just highlights how crucial framing and analysis are in presenting what's happening out there.

[John Biewen]

There's another common idea that people are strongly influenced by the media they consume, especially if it's news that we think of as strongly biased. That whole my Uncle Ned's a right winger because he watches Fox News idea.

[Chenjerai Kumanyika]

But it's more complicated than that. Did Fox News turn your uncle into a right winger or did Uncle Ned turn to Fox because he already had right wing views?

[John Biewen]

This whole discussion can almost make you wonder if it even matters what the media reports.

[Chenjerai Kumanyika]

Yeah, and I mean, there's another reason to wonder about that. It has to do with our hobbled, corrupt system of government. There was a study in 2014 by scholars at Princeton, Northwestern, 2014.

[John Biewen]

So back when I think, well, let's say when more Americans felt reasonably secure that the US had a functioning democracy,

[Chenjerai Kumanyika]

right before the Trump administration launched its newest assault on democratic norms, it was before Congress basically neutered itself and let the president decide everything. But even then, this study found that there was almost no relationship between, between what American citizens wanted, according to opinion polls and the policies we get from our government. Large majorities favor higher taxes on rich people, more gun safety laws, stronger action on the climate crisis. And that's just listing a few things. And year after year, our representative government doesn't deliver what the people want.

[John Biewen]

We did a whole series our season four, the Land that Never Has Been yet, about the ways America's democratic system of government was designed from the start to be not too democratic than to stymie the will of the majority of the people.

[Chenjerai Kumanyika]

I mean, it's not all media, but can't let the media off the hook. Journalism is a core mechanism of a functioning democracy. Right. And there are real problems with the way our media system carries out this crucial role. Some of those problems are structural. We'll have a lot more to say about that.

[John Biewen]

Ceng. When I told people we were working on a season on the news media and the country's information crisis, some people said, oh, so it's going to be about AI and how we can't trust what we see and hear anymore. Think AI, photos and videos especially. Other people said, oh, so it'll be about the Trumpian attack on news companies and the First Amendment and I mean,

[Chenjerai Kumanyika]

look, all that stuff is wild, no doubt about it. But at the same time, I don't think anybody thinks this all started with AI, Right?

[John Biewen]

Right.

[Chenjerai Kumanyika]

I think it goes back a little further than that. So those things will definitely come up. We're going much deeper into the structures and forces that have shaped American news media for a much longer time.

[John Biewen]

And it can all seem pretty daunting. But I don't know about you, I'm not ready to throw up my hands and say we're doomed. The news is just a way to amuse ourselves and it can never change anything because the system's rigged. And anyway, people are hopelessly dug in and won't listen to facts they don't like. There are so many examples where journalism has made a difference and is making a difference. Information comes out and shifts public opinion, leading to change that affects people's lives.

[Chenjerai Kumanyika]

Look, yo, let me tell you something. As somebody who literally, like, this is what my degree, this is my job. Nobody gets madder at journalism in the media than me, right? But at the same time, most of what I know about the world comes from journalism. You know what I mean? When I see ice kidnap somebody, that's because a journalist reported on it. When I know that, like it's about to snow or that there was an earthquake, it's because, you know, I didn't see it myself usually. And I think as angry as we are, the end of the day is we have to have journalism because we have to know what's going on in the world just to live our everyday personal lives if we're fired up. A person who's fired up about social justice or feels like something wrong, chances are everything that you know that's getting you angry is something you learned because of some kind of journalism or media. So I think we can be infuriated about it, but we actually have to solve this problem.

[John Biewen]

Here's a taste of what's to come here in season eight with local county

[Gilbert Bayes]

commissioner races here, I tried like the dickens to find out where people stood, because I'm not going to vote if I can't get the information.

[John Biewen]

Now I recognize, sadly, that the Washington press corps is all too often the

[Ethan George]

praetorian guard of the left.

[John Biewen]

No wonder people hate the media. Depends what one means by left wing. You know, I mean, wait a minute.

[Chenjerai Kumanyika]

If you even address the issues of climate change and environmental destruction, that signifies a strong left leaning philosophy.

[Gilbert Bayes]

One thing that can be hard for us to imagine is that a lot of news you would actually get in church.

[John Biewen]

The early founders, they truly believe that democracy was impossible without a free press and a press that people could actually access. So today we rededicate a part of the airwaves which belong to all the people.

[Gilbert Bayes]

When you're Suddenly fighting with 30 channels instead of just two for eyeballs, you start to get the rise of political entertainment.

[John Biewen]

You're doing theater when you should be doing debate, which would be great. It's not honest.

[Gilbert Bayes]

A new report is raising alarms about the state of American democracy.

[Chenjerai Kumanyika]

I wrote a piece before the election saying, if Trump wins, blame the New York Times.

[Jacob Goldstein]

And I meant it.

[John Biewen]

And eventually we'll wrestle with what to do about it all. The news was created and produced by me, John Biewen with Chenjerai Kumanika and story editor Diane Hodson assistant producer Arlene Arevalo Fact checking by Anna Pujol Mazzini music by Brian Blade and the Fellowship Band Michelle Osis, Alex Weston, James, Nathan Jones and Jason Hill Music consulting by Joe Augustine of Narrative Music. You can find transcripts at our website. The show is distributed by our friends at prx. Scene on Radio comes to you from the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University.

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