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Operatives reveal how America's conservative power brokers built influence by exploiting racial divisions and promoting White victimhood narratives over decades.

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00:01:00This isn't a story about just one man.
00:01:03It's a story about a media phenomenon that changed a father and divided a nation.
00:01:22Here's my dad with me when I was a baby.
00:01:25He really loved me.
00:01:26This was in Arizona where I was born.
00:01:31He was goofy, like a lot of other dads, I guess.
00:01:35My dad was a really fun dad.
00:01:38All the kids in the neighborhood really liked him because he was funny and told jokes and would play with
00:01:44us.
00:01:45He was a really good dad.
00:01:47He loved animals.
00:01:48He could always be counted on to help persuade my mom if we wanted another pet.
00:01:53For vacations, my dad took us on camping trips.
00:01:56It was a lot of fun.
00:01:58My mom didn't like it so much.
00:02:00She didn't really like roughing it.
00:02:02But we all still had a really great time.
00:02:06He came from humble roots.
00:02:08He never had any bad words about any race, people, or person.
00:02:13I remember this one time when we all went to New York.
00:02:16We got outside Port Authority, and there was an African-American homeless man, and he asked my dad for some
00:02:23money.
00:02:23My father gave him what was at that time a decent amount of money and called him sir.
00:02:29That made such an impression on me and taught me you treat everybody with respect.
00:02:35We weren't really a political family.
00:02:38My dad was a non-political Kennedy Democrat.
00:02:42But then, when he started listening to talk radio, I saw him change.
00:02:49A lot.
00:02:50You used to consider yourself a Democrat, right?
00:02:54Yeah, before I knew anything, I had any sense.
00:02:58I was stupid then.
00:03:00I was listening to people and they were bullshit.
00:03:04And they didn't know what they were talking about.
00:03:06Until then, I was fat, dumb, and happy.
00:03:11I think I first noticed something different about him when I came down to visit.
00:03:16I was working in New York at the time.
00:03:18He picked me up at the bus station and was driving me back to the house.
00:03:22On the ride home, we passed the Hooters.
00:03:25He mentioned that he was really pissed off that some feminazis did not want women with their breasts hanging out
00:03:32to be working at Hooters.
00:03:34I said something like, well, maybe the feminists have a point.
00:03:38He was so mad, he threatened to pull the car over and let me hitchhike home.
00:03:54I was very surprised because I was thinking, I bet he never even walked into a Hooters before.
00:04:01He became really angry about stuff.
00:04:04Stuff that I didn't know he ever even gave a thought to.
00:04:08Like, you know, Hooters.
00:04:24Whether they're in jail or not, they are appropriating their own kind.
00:04:28That's why we should go in there and stop them before they destroy our country.
00:04:32When we moved and he had a very long commute by car, he would listen to the radio on the
00:04:39long drive.
00:04:41Then he started to change.
00:04:42The feminazis began their quest to make women more like men.
00:04:46Dress like us, acquire power like us, have careers like us, all that.
00:04:50Rush Limbaugh is one of my heroes.
00:04:52I agree with him in politics.
00:04:56And then his Rush Limbaugh-loving buddy told him he could listen to more talk radio at night with a
00:05:01tiny portable radio and earbuds.
00:05:04But it would still disturb my mother.
00:05:07So he decided to move into the other bedroom.
00:05:10And then it got worse after he discovered Fox News.
00:05:14His new beliefs came first.
00:05:16It was almost like he joined a cult or had a new religion.
00:05:20Frank is the family pest.
00:05:22He has to force his political views on all of us.
00:05:25I did it Frank's way.
00:05:26It was his way or the highway when it came to politics.
00:05:30I was not aware that Frank had strong political leanings one way or the other.
00:05:37It was just pretty much food and family was what he was interested in.
00:05:40After emailing came in.
00:05:43Yeah, then you get all kinds.
00:05:44I would get political emails too, but they were factual, bringing things up to date.
00:05:51Where dad's emails were hateful against Democrats, and he would forward them to me and the children and ask him,
00:05:59please don't send these emails or I'll block you.
00:06:03He started getting fanatical.
00:06:05Oh, he would send some nasty email back like F you or you guys are full of S blank, blank
00:06:14T.
00:06:15I started getting his emails and I got 394 emails.
00:06:20I really thought there was somebody else other than Frank Senko sending these things.
00:06:26And in fact, he didn't author any of these.
00:06:28They were just, you know, recycled things that he received from his other cronies.
00:06:35I was wondering what happened to Frank since the time I saw him.
00:06:41I'd always thought that he was capable of deeply thinking about issues, but it was apparent at that point that
00:06:50it's not that he wasn't capable of it.
00:06:53He wasn't interested in it.
00:06:55And that to me was a dangerous signal.
00:06:58Brain is not only being washed, as they say, just being dry and clean.
00:07:06So what did happen to dad?
00:07:08Was he brainwashed?
00:07:10I didn't know.
00:07:11This went on for years.
00:07:13So I finally decided to make a film to figure it out.
00:07:17Jennifer, is this your book?
00:07:19Yes.
00:07:19He's my hero.
00:07:21Why is he your hero?
00:07:22Politically, I agree with him.
00:07:24Beautifully.
00:07:24I always agree with him.
00:07:26We knew better than to discuss politics together because it would just end in arguments and bitterness.
00:07:33I had a Kickstarter campaign to raise some money.
00:07:37And before I knew it, people were coming out of the woodwork, contacting me from all over the country, telling
00:07:44me similar stories.
00:07:45And I thought, wow, this is a real phenomenon.
00:07:51They just drummed into her what they wanted her to hear.
00:07:55She's a completely different person.
00:07:56My brother became very factories.
00:07:58My reaction was, who are you and what have you done with my stepfather?
00:08:02Disjointed existence.
00:08:04And he was completely changed.
00:08:05He was bitter and angry.
00:08:08At one point, he decided to get a bus.
00:08:12He became obsessed.
00:08:14And she had never been like that.
00:08:15He was carrying a small pistol.
00:08:18He was not hateful.
00:08:20He broke my heart to see my periods.
00:08:21I feel I don't really know these people anymore.
00:08:31I spoke with each one and found we all had one thing in common.
00:08:35Someone close to us became enraged and unreachable after excessively listening to or watching right-wing media.
00:08:44How did this happen?
00:08:45The great story here for anybody willing to find it and write about it and explain it is this vast
00:08:52right-wing conspiracy.
00:09:00Decades ago, I was a junior hippie.
00:09:02My big brother was the real thing with hair down to his waist.
00:09:06I witnessed and felt part of the social revolution happening at that time.
00:09:11And I believed our country was going in a more open direction.
00:09:17Years later, when Reagan came in, I could feel the country was shifting to a more hardened place.
00:09:24And that's around the time my dad started to change.
00:09:32I wouldn't have necessarily thought to go all the way back to the 60s.
00:09:36But author Claire Connor, who wrote Wrapped in the Flag, contacted me after she saw my trailer.
00:09:43Her personal experience with the John Birch Society helped put into place a major piece of the puzzle.
00:09:50The John Birch Society came out of the McCarthy era and was built on this concept that the communist menace
00:09:59was right around the corner.
00:10:01Very quickly, the John Birch Society moved from those bad guys over in the Soviet Union, China, or in Cuba,
00:10:11to the idea that we had those bad guys right in our own government.
00:10:17In 1964, Republican candidate Barry Goldwater had many Birch supporters.
00:10:23But this damaged him because, years earlier, word had leaked out that their founder, Robert Welch, had written a secret
00:10:30book branding sitting Republican president and World War II hero, Dwight D. Eisenhower, a communist.
00:10:37The Birch's were labeled as nutty extremists.
00:10:41Goldwater and his platform were hammered by Lyndon Johnson.
00:10:45The right wing was declared dead.
00:10:48So they started to hit back.
00:10:50One of the most powerful ways was through creating their own media.
00:10:55I first spotted David Brock in a documentary called The Hunting of the President.
00:10:59He had been a conservative operative involved in the organized effort of trying to take President Clinton down.
00:11:05They came to regret it and wrote about what he learned from an insider's view.
00:11:10When I read his book, The Republican Noise Machine, I knew I had to talk to him.
00:11:15It took me a year and a half to get him, but I finally got to interview David Brock.
00:11:19One of the very first things that the conservative movement did in trying to get control of the debate in
00:11:27the country was to do that through the media.
00:11:29And they established a couple of different organizations that market the notion of liberal media bias to the public.
00:11:38And so one of them is called Accuracy in Media by someone named Rita Irvine, who had worked in the
00:11:43Nixon administration.
00:11:44And basically the idea behind this group was to counter their feeling that the media was opposed to Nixon's policies
00:11:53in Vietnam.
00:11:54We're certain than ever that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate.
00:11:59You could see how the campaign to discredit the media would lay the groundwork for a vast alternative media that
00:12:08would come later.
00:12:15One night I was watching Bill Moyers on Channel 13, and I learned about the role of Roger Ailes.
00:12:22And I went back to the Nixon administration, and Roger Ailes, who's chairman of Fox News, was in the Nixon
00:12:29administration.
00:12:30He was Nixon's television advisor.
00:12:32Then I found Gabriel Sherman. He was the guy to talk to about Roger Ailes, for sure.
00:12:38Roger Ailes understood that TV is about one thing. It's about emotion.
00:12:42And you need to communicate to the audience and hook into them on an emotional level.
00:12:49And Richard Nixon, who by all accounts was a very smart, a brilliant man who had a command of the
00:12:53issues,
00:12:54he couldn't connect with the audience.
00:12:56You know, he came off as stiff, as shifty-eyed, as famously in the 1960 presidential debate against John Kennedy,
00:13:03he was sweating. It was a terrible performance.
00:13:05Then he meets Roger Ailes in 1968.
00:13:07At the time, Roger Ailes was a young producer, the wonderkind of television at the age of 26.
00:13:13And so Roger Ailes coached Richard Nixon on how to communicate those ideas to the average American
00:13:18who was watching television every night at dinner table.
00:13:21Richard Nixon, whose political career almost blew up because of television,
00:13:26was able to win the presidency because he mastered it.
00:13:29At the time, in the late 1960s, TV had finally become a mass medium.
00:13:33And yet there really weren't people who had decoded the medium.
00:13:37Roger Ailes told Nixon that to appeal to the audience,
00:13:40he needed to use short, snappy one-liners that can stick in the audience's mind.
00:13:44A great philosophy is never one without defeat.
00:13:48It is always one without fear.
00:13:50And so really, Roger Ailes was a pioneer in the whole art of the soundbite.
00:13:55He told Nixon that America is dumb.
00:13:58So give them something simple, boil it down, and they'll get it.
00:14:02Ailes was so involved with advising the administration,
00:14:05he even outlined Nixon's role in the lighting of the White House Christmas tree.
00:14:10But his designs for the GOP went much deeper.
00:14:13Ailes was outlining a way to avoid, quote,
00:14:16the censorship, the priorities, and the prejudices of network news selectors and disseminators.
00:14:22Written in 1970, this memo talks about how television had become the most powerful news source
00:14:28because people are lazy and want their thinking done for them.
00:14:33It became the blueprint for Fox News.
00:14:36And although its authorship is unclear,
00:14:39Roger Ailes' handwritten notes are seen throughout the document.
00:14:43There are simple things that the American people believe in.
00:14:47It's the reason John Wayne is still one of the top five movie stars of all time.
00:14:52He's been dead for 40 years.
00:14:55But you always knew about him.
00:14:57Don't touch my woman, don't steal my horse, and don't ever draw a gun on me.
00:15:01Otherwise, we're going to get along fine.
00:15:04It offers you a little action.
00:15:11Roger Ailes was fired from the White House for seeming like he could go too rogue.
00:15:16Basically, he was caught talking behind Richard Nixon's back to author Joe McGinnis.
00:15:21After that, Ailes started working for TVN, a television news network owned by the Coors family.
00:15:27Their goal was to be like a tugboat to the Queen Mary.
00:15:34They were just going to be going along and pushing the boat a little further to the right
00:15:40and a little further to the right.
00:15:42And their goal is ultimately to put the great ship over as far right as they could.
00:15:49And Ailes was working for them at the time, and he didn't know much about news.
00:15:55I'm not even sure I know that he knows much about news now, but he sure does know television.
00:16:01He's as good as television as anyone in the country, and he's a great propagandist.
00:16:05By the way, the motto they came up with was fair and balanced.
00:16:12My father and my stepmother used to be very loving and caring, patient, very kind-hearted, Christian-based individuals.
00:16:23And we noticed that they became more hostile towards people that were not believing the way that they did.
00:16:32Their conversation became very hateful.
00:16:40The brilliance of Nixon was to bend a politics that was based on deference to money and plutocracy
00:16:49and frame it in terms of a kind of cultural populism.
00:16:55The idea that the real snobs are not the people who hire and fire, but the people who kind of
00:17:02decide cultural trends.
00:17:03When Nixon was running for president, he had a problem.
00:17:07In 1964, Goldwater lost.
00:17:10Conservative was a dirty word.
00:17:12Everybody wanted to be a liberal.
00:17:14Nixon comes along in 67, and he says, we've got to get working people to vote for Nixon.
00:17:19How do we do this?
00:17:20Between 1964 and 67, the anti-war movement felt like a betrayal to many veterans who saw it as unpatriotic.
00:17:28Nixon seized on this and was openly hostile to the protesters.
00:17:31At the same time, women were pushing the boundaries of societal norms, which dictated they stay at home, raise children,
00:17:39and dress like ladies.
00:17:40Nixon came out for traditional family values, thus capturing the vote of the working men who felt threatened and didn't
00:17:47like what they saw as radical feminism.
00:17:57In 1964, the Civil Rights Act was passed.
00:18:01Nixon capitalized on both racist and economic fears of whites and ran against school busing and for law and order.
00:18:09The Republicans could change the party labels in the South by appealing to the racism and the strong opposition to
00:18:21the civil rights legislation and making that their stand.
00:18:26In the spring of 1970, after Nixon orders the invasion of Cambodia, which was the instigation for the same protest
00:18:34at Kent State University that led to the deaths of the four students,
00:18:38one of the protests was at Federal Hall in Lower Manhattan.
00:18:42And right in the middle of this anti-war rally, this almost marauding army of construction workers came marching in,
00:18:49in their hardhats,
00:18:50and started beating the protesters with their hardhats.
00:18:55It was all captured on film. It was on the evening news.
00:19:03Rather than excoriating these, basically, vigilantes,
00:19:10Richard Nixon invites the head of construction trades in New York, Peter Brennan,
00:19:15and Peter Brennan presents the commander-in-chief with a ceremonial hardhat.
00:19:20So he's almost kind of throwing his lot with the people who are beating the protesters.
00:19:25He created conservative populism.
00:19:28We're going to bring them together and have them vote on the basis of their morality against their self-interest.
00:19:36It's not vote on their economics, but vote on the moral issues.
00:19:41So that was Nixon's contribution in pushing the country a little further to the right.
00:19:46In the meantime, my little brother and I had both gotten into the hippie culture.
00:19:50Even my dad kind of did.
00:19:58In the 60s, you had the Voters and Rights Act and Civil Rights Act.
00:20:02All this happened in about a 10, 11-year period, you know.
00:20:05By 71, you had cities burning because people were saying the change is not happening fast enough.
00:20:10Virtually every group in America, other than wealthy white guys, was in open revolt and calling for a change.
00:20:19Now, it wasn't tear down the government change.
00:20:21I mean, this was being covered by the CBS Evening News and Walter Cronkite.
00:20:25I was so lucky to be introduced to Jeff Cohen.
00:20:29Aside from being a first-rate journalist and author, he was a former commentator at Fox News and an all
00:20:36-around mensch.
00:20:37As a result of these movements for social change, especially among young people, there was a real backlash in the
00:20:46elite centers of conservative power and corporate power.
00:20:51And one of the symbols of this backlash was a memo written by the general counsel, whose name was Lewis
00:20:57Powell.
00:20:58It was starting to get really interesting.
00:21:00This confidential Lewis Powell memo was from August 1971, just a year after the Roger Ailes memo.
00:21:08And so Lewis Powell wrote a memo to the head of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce saying Americans view
00:21:13businesses as the big bad guys and people like Ralph Nader as the heroes.
00:21:19What he claimed is that the whole country is being taken over by the radical left, the government, the media,
00:21:27the universities, of course.
00:21:29He said basically the following.
00:21:30We have a problem.
00:21:32Our best and brightest of our students do not want to become conservative businessmen.
00:21:37We have to change this.
00:21:38We have to get wealthy conservatives to put their money together, to appoint professors in major universities to teach our
00:21:47principles.
00:21:48We have to set up and support organizations in major universities to do this.
00:21:53They said we can't trust the universities.
00:21:55We have to set up our own research establishments, which became the think tanks.
00:21:59We have to make sure that they get published.
00:22:02Start journals.
00:22:03Start publishing houses so they can publish their books.
00:22:07And we have to buy media so their ideas can get out.
00:22:10These were right-wing think tanks putting forward stuff that basically wasn't academically sound or intellectually sound, but had good
00:22:18propaganda value.
00:22:19Powell, after writing the memo, was appointed by Nixon to be on the Supreme Corps.
00:22:25So they set up this infrastructure and then ultimately it led to the right-wing media itself, where they were
00:22:30setting up their own channels of communication.
00:22:33And that was the big boom in right-wing talk radio nationally and across the country in every locale, and
00:22:41ultimately Fox News Channel.
00:22:44This Lewis Powell memo was extremely influential.
00:22:47It impacted the realms of politics, judicial law, media, and education.
00:22:54They have regular meetings of various kinds.
00:22:57The best known are the Grover Norquist Wednesday morning meetings.
00:23:02Now, and this has been going on for a good 20 years.
00:23:05Norquist was so proud of his meetings, he invited my students to attend them for three months.
00:23:10There were people there from groups that represented the full gamut of political issues on the right,
00:23:19from fur trade commissions to evangelicals.
00:23:24The real genius of the meeting is that you can get these dozens of people who might not otherwise agree
00:23:32into the same room every seven days,
00:23:37talking and sort of ironing out their differences.
00:23:40As long as you're on board with pro-life, pro-gun, and anti-tax agenda, you're with us.
00:23:48Writing up talking points, which then gets sent out to all the people who are around the country,
00:23:56who are going to be booked on radio and TV.
00:23:58And by five o'clock tonight, everybody's saying that, the same thing.
00:24:01We'll take on Obamacare regulations that threaten the 40-hour workweek.
00:24:05Let's put on his desk things like restore the 40-hour workweek.
00:24:09The loss of the 40-hour workweek, big, big mistake. That ought to be restored.
00:24:13We must take action and restore the traditional 40-hour workweek.
00:24:17And by 10 o'clock, it's on The Daily Show.
00:24:21Obamacare will destroy all that we once held dear in this country by requiring health insurance from employers
00:24:27for the 15% of Americans who don't currently get that.
00:24:30The law only applies to full-time workers, people who work 30 or more hours a week.
00:24:35Guess what?
00:24:36A lot of employers are saying, we don't want to pay for these health care benefits,
00:24:39so we're going to move full-time workers to part-time workers.
00:24:44The Powell Memorandum was written in 1971, and the Heritage Foundation started in 1973.
00:24:52The effect of having conservative think tanks clearly outgunning and outnumbering and outfunding
00:25:00the think tanks of the left has been much more effective in dominating policy discussions.
00:25:08There was a universal agreement that the goal of journalism was objectivity
00:25:14and to discern the truth of conflicting claims.
00:25:21The conservatives move the argument from objectivity to one of balance.
00:25:26Under the rubric of balance, the conservatives do better
00:25:30because the way the media now treats balance is
00:25:34there's 99% of scientific consensus on global warming
00:25:39and 1% of scientists funded by the coal industry to say that's not true,
00:25:43but they're presented in a balanced way, giving credit to both sides.
00:25:48And so the conservatives were able to infiltrate the op-ed pages of the country
00:25:52on the same notion that, well, you have liberal columnists, you need conservative columnists.
00:25:56So when Hillary Clinton referred to the vast right-wing conspiracy,
00:26:01I believe she had in mind the full gamut of conservative organizations,
00:26:07from legal foundations to media organizations, to think tanks, to advocacy groups,
00:26:15and including Wednesday Meeting as its linchpin.
00:26:19After that, people called the Norquist Meeting
00:26:22the headquarters of the vast right-wing conspiracy.
00:26:27The stage was now set for Ronald Reagan to give the greatest performance of his career,
00:26:32selling the American people on supply-side trickle-down economics.
00:26:37The economic ills we suffer have come upon us over several decades.
00:26:41In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem.
00:26:47Government is the problem.
00:26:49You know, we keep hearing about trickle-down economics and Reaganomics
00:26:54and how if you help the people at the top, the wealth and income will trickle down.
00:26:59And Studs Terkel said,
00:27:00the only thing I've seen trickle down in the 1980s is meanness.
00:27:04And what he meant was, you know,
00:27:06the kind of country club looking down on people less fortunate than you
00:27:10had sort of gone, and thanks to Limbaugh and Bob Grant and people like that,
00:27:15sort of like they were aiming at making white males, middle-class males,
00:27:22to be as angry and looking down on people and being angry at these social movements
00:27:27as anyone who used to be in a country club in the 1950s.
00:27:31That was what was disseminated, was this mean, angry streak.
00:27:35That's what the 1980s did, according to Studs Terkel.
00:27:39You know, the Reagan Revolution pulled people.
00:27:41Was your dad ever a Democrat?
00:27:43Oh, yeah.
00:27:43Yeah, okay. Right, it pulled a lot of working-class Democrats.
00:27:47The Reagan Revolution, they started voting Republican.
00:27:49They were called Reagan Democrats.
00:27:52There are two things that made Democrats willing to vote for Ronald Reagan.
00:27:56Reagan developed this political vocabulary
00:27:59that made traditional conservative economic ideas
00:28:02sound really positive and really good to ordinary people.
00:28:06And what Ronald Reagan was promising these voters
00:28:09was a return to a simpler time.
00:28:13The America they want to take us back to is mythic.
00:28:16So you might want to say the place they want to take us back to is like Brigadoon.
00:28:20You know, it's this kind of sort of shimmering vision
00:28:24that, you know, kind of exists in the space of the imagination.
00:28:28They saw 1900 in America as like the apex of when we were great as a nation.
00:28:351900.
00:28:37Before the income tax.
00:28:40Before the Federal Reserve.
00:28:42Before any progressive legislation was considered or passed.
00:28:48Before child labor laws.
00:28:50Before women had any rights.
00:28:52Before women even had the right to vote.
00:28:54Robert Welsh, who was the founder of the John Birch Society,
00:28:58talked a lot about 1900 as this glorious time in American history.
00:29:03And he said, he said, there were pockets of poverty,
00:29:07but it was a healthy kind of poverty.
00:29:11Poverty free from government interference.
00:29:14Where every man understood that relief from dire want
00:29:20was entirely his own responsibility.
00:29:23Thus, the blessings of liberty outweighed the poverty.
00:29:33When during the Great Depression,
00:29:36when people would come to our house
00:29:39and go around to the back door
00:29:41and ask my mother if they could have the meal
00:29:45and she'd cook them bacon and eggs or something,
00:29:48they'd eat it on the back.
00:29:49So that's how people had to survive.
00:29:52Maybe he wants to go back to that.
00:29:54I don't know.
00:29:55We had like a one-room school, you know,
00:30:00and we'd walk to school on our bare feet, you know,
00:30:04and that's how we lived.
00:30:08Looking back, I know that we live in poverty
00:30:13or pretty close to it all the time.
00:30:15But we didn't know that at the time
00:30:17because the government didn't come around and tell us we were poor.
00:30:21One of the brilliant innovations
00:30:22was a new theory about how taxation worked,
00:30:26about how the economy worked.
00:30:27It used to be that conservatives, the Republicans,
00:30:30were all about balanced budgets.
00:30:32They were all about kind of making the people eat their spinach.
00:30:35But they came up with this new theory
00:30:36called supply-side economics.
00:30:39And supply-side basically means you give money to business.
00:30:42And that way, they'll basically produce more plenty
00:30:46that will trickle down to the ordinary people.
00:30:49And that was what George Bush in 1980
00:30:52referred to as voodoo economics
00:30:54because it almost did sound like magic.
00:30:56It was kind of like he was promising you the candy store.
00:30:59He said he could lower everybody's taxes.
00:31:02And by doing so, everyone would benefit.
00:31:05It was like the miracle of the loaves and fishes.
00:31:08In actual fact, how it ended up turning out
00:31:10was hurting the very working-class voters
00:31:14who trusted Ronald Reagan with their economic future.
00:31:19Of course, inequality just skyrocketed.
00:31:22The rich got richer,
00:31:23and ordinary people's wages ended up stagnating.
00:31:26And my dad thought Reagan was the best guy in the world.
00:31:30And he was a Democrat.
00:31:32And somewhere in this Reagan-Bush change,
00:31:37he told me, well, I'm a Republican now.
00:31:39I realized how wrong I was all those years ago.
00:31:42And the only thing I could attribute the change to
00:31:46was his change in taste
00:31:49about the news stories he watched.
00:31:54We used to watch Cronkite and Brinkley and Brokaw
00:31:59and what I consider sort of middle-America, middle-ground views.
00:32:05And later on, all he watched was Fox.
00:32:16The Fairness Doctrine actually said that you have to program in the public interest.
00:32:21And so as a result of that, radio and television stations had real news.
00:32:25It operated for 50 years.
00:32:27In 1949, it was actually voted in as law by the U.S. Congress.
00:32:31It said, if you are watching or listening to your local television or radio station,
00:32:37and there are points of view that are not being included in a discussion,
00:32:41and you wish for them to be in there, go complain to your station.
00:32:44If they don't give you satisfaction, then send a complaint to the FCC.
00:32:49It didn't guarantee equal time.
00:32:52It reminded broadcasters that they had a public trust,
00:32:54that they should include some views that might go against their own
00:32:57or that might not be popular or favorable to them.
00:33:01It was dropped in the 80s by the Reagan administration.
00:33:04The repeal of the Fairness Doctrine ended up resulting in an explosion of talk radio.
00:33:09In 1987, I couldn't believe what I heard.
00:33:12I'd hear overt, gutter racism.
00:33:14And this was coming from different talk show hosts,
00:33:18but the main one was Bob Grant.
00:33:20I'd hear black people referred to as savages.
00:33:22The savage mind, the primitive primordial mentality, being immature,
00:33:30anything they think they can get away with, they will press and press and press,
00:33:34which, of course, is what they've been doing all over the United States of America.
00:33:39The allure of the Limbaugh's and the Grant's is that they tap into a kind of resentment,
00:33:48a kind of insecurity on the part of mostly white men, in large part middle-aged and aging white men,
00:33:56a kind of injured pride that the world is passing them by.
00:34:00It's typical of demagoguery to say that your problems really aren't problems caused by you,
00:34:07they're caused by these other people that aren't like us.
00:34:11He found out that I was dating somebody who wasn't white and just was like,
00:34:17I can't, you just don't agree with any of my values.
00:34:19You don't believe any of the conservative things that I do.
00:34:23And you're so far left that you're willing to date people outside of your race.
00:34:27And I just, I love you, but I just can't talk to you ever again.
00:34:32Talk radio was always in the hands of right-wing backlash artists.
00:34:38A bunch of white guys on the right railing against the women's movement, the civil rights movement.
00:34:43So that's the beginning of talk radio that people forget about.
00:34:46It was all local then. There was no national.
00:34:48It never went national until Rush Limbaugh, you know, really made it national beginning in 1988.
00:34:55I learned that Fox, God love them, is televising this speech on the Fox News channel.
00:35:02Which means, ladies and gentlemen, this is my first ever address to the nation.
00:35:07Ah, Rush Limbaugh, my dad's hero.
00:35:10I heard him say it so many times.
00:35:12The way my dad spoke of Rush is like he found a new religion.
00:35:16Quoting him constantly as if he were the word of God.
00:35:19Talent alone from love.
00:35:27Now let's give it up on road.
00:35:31Thank the Lord.
00:35:32Thank the Lord.
00:35:33Rush Limbaugh's role.
00:35:34Rush Limbaugh's role.
00:35:34Talk radio is so influential.
00:35:36And Rush Limbaugh is especially good.
00:35:38that me a walking encyclopedia that basically could debunk things on the spot in many cases
00:35:44with talk radio host limbaugh sounded so confident that they actually sent me back to the books
00:35:50you know i would be right in the end but i wasn't sure i was right because of the absolute
00:35:56confidence
00:35:57that this guy exudes and it's very affecting i'll never forget my dad sent me something in
00:36:05mail he had put a pita label on it and he had taken a black magic marker and kept and
00:36:15rubbed out pita
00:36:16like just scribbled it and scribbled it and scribbled it until he almost ruined the envelope and the pita
00:36:24thing was out it was just crazy he was an animal lover he always was an animal lover it just
00:36:29filled up all of him it became all of who he was like it really is if he were a
00:36:38cult member and
00:36:39that's why i used the term brainwashing and he said to me i don't care what your facts are my
00:36:46beliefs
00:36:47matter more and i believe rush limbaugh every day when he works when i became involved with occupy wall
00:36:53street my parents were furious and when my parents heard bits and pieces about my involvement they
00:36:59cut me off completely didn't speak to me my dad has been a trucker for the last 40 years who
00:37:05does
00:37:05he listen to rush limbaugh and he's he's pretty much become unbearable president obama had just come into
00:37:14office the first time the economy was in the toilet so i felt it was safe to discuss the economy
00:37:23because clearly president obama couldn't have had anything to do with it it was too soon and my uncle
00:37:30got very upset he says you get out of my house you can't stay here and talk to me about
00:37:36that guy
00:37:38he walked towards me and was carrying a small pistol i saw the gun pointing at me
00:37:45and he dropped his hand to the floor and shot twice into the ground
00:37:51most people don't think about this but talk radio is something unlike a lot of other media that's done
00:37:56alone people listen to it alone and they're listening to this one other person and there's sort of a
00:38:03personal thing there and a connection people who are on the radio and tv are there for one reason only
00:38:08that's to make you mad and the formula for making you the viewer or the listener mad hasn't changed a
00:38:15bit yet people keep falling for it if you embellish the opinion with confidence and cockiness then you're
00:38:21getting into generating hatred the law of averages indicates that half the people who listen to you're
00:38:26not going to like you still going to find a way to make those who don't like you enjoy listening
00:38:30to
00:38:30your program a lot of people say you really believe in stuff you say i don't know it's for you
00:38:35to figure
00:38:35out excuse me a lot of people say you really believe in stuff you say i don't know it's for
00:38:41you
00:38:41to figure out limbaugh was telling people for years you're right to be prejudiced you're right to be
00:38:48angry listen to what the feminazis are telling you now or these environmental wackos who say that
00:38:54cigarettes secondhand smoke you know and then he'll make up some study one day years ago when my
00:39:01dad was at the height of his limbaugh lunch days i went down to visit my parents and my mom
00:39:06and dad
00:39:07and i went to our favorite restaurant old time cavern as we were walking towards the restaurant door
00:39:13there was a bench outside where several people were seated smoking as we passed them my dad stopped
00:39:19to talk to them he inhaled the smoke and said i love the smell of cigarette smoke it reminds me
00:39:28of
00:39:28the time i used to smoke i was stunned because the only thing i ever remember my dad smoking was
00:39:36the
00:39:36occasional pipe he also hated wearing seat belts and would absolutely refuse to wear one even after
00:39:43he got a ticket something told me it had to do with brush limbaugh he wasn't just wrong factually he
00:39:49would
00:39:49take like reality upside down he became what we call a champion of the overdog any powerful group
00:39:56that was being criticized by scientists or medical people um was the victim so the tobacco industry was
00:40:05a victim and that's where he came up with his concoction that you know no one's ever proved that
00:40:10nicotine is addictive or is linked to these horrible diseases there's no science involved and you know
00:40:17cigarettes secondhand smoke making you go outside of the restaurant to smoke it's not true here's
00:40:24the real facts and then he comes up with his false facts you don't like seat belts it's ralph nader
00:40:29he made
00:40:30up this stuff ladies and gentlemen the top 10 limbaugh lies number 10 there are more native americans alive
00:40:37today than when columbus arrived number nine the government is going to have the right to get into your bank
00:40:43account with the health care bill and make transfers without you knowing it number eight egyptian husbands
00:40:49will soon be legally allowed to have sex with their dead wives for up to six hours after their death
00:40:54number seven president barack obama shut down the nasa space flights and turned the agency into quote
00:41:01a muslim outreach department end quote number six the united states has more forest land than it did in
00:41:091787 number five president obama wants to mandate circumcision number four there's no conclusive proof
00:41:18that nicotine is addictive and the same thing with cigarettes causing emphysema lung cancer and heart
00:41:24disease number three if the ice caps melted the ocean level wouldn't rise number two styrofoam is
00:41:32biodegradable number one i'm not making this stuff up folks how can all these people believe such outlander
00:41:42statements but it wasn't just like my dad or barbara's brother or maria's uncle who believed rush
00:41:48limbaugh that troubled me clarence thomas one of our supreme court justices who officiated at the
00:41:54third wedding of rush limbaugh i think it was in clarence thomas's house and clarence thomas you know
00:42:00tell anyone that asks him no i don't listen to mainstream media i don't trust it but he taped rush
00:42:06limbaugh's radio show all three hours and would try to always listen to that now imagine this you're a
00:42:12supreme court justice deciding on things like war and peace and civil liberties and gay marriage and
00:42:19your window to the real news world is rush limbaugh's three-hour monologue that's pretty damn scary
00:42:29there was a sense of seamless argumentation that this guy is giving me the complete explanation
00:42:37and he's got facts and studies to back it up and i'm listening to him three and a half hours
00:42:44a day
00:42:44when we put out our study in 1994 debunking dozens of these lies or distortions or exaggerations from rush
00:42:53limbaugh we encountered thousands of ditto heads now the cult-like nature is you know is obvious when a
00:43:03guy is preaching for hours at a time and people come on instead of saying amen but just like saying
00:43:10amen they say ditto's rush mega ditto's rush that's their contribution it's like here's the preacher
00:43:17and i'm part of the cult the congregation and i'm just amening with this phrase ditto's or mega ditto's
00:43:24rush you're the greatest rush did they actually say that oh they go on the air and they say mega
00:43:30ditto's
00:43:30rush oh that's why they call them ditto heads yes uh in in other words everything you say i'm dittoing
00:43:37hey rush how are you mega ditto thank you and mega ditto with rush um mega the constitutionist
00:43:42dittos from southern california rush so i watched the little 30 minutes of rush limbaugh and i didn't
00:43:47like him at first because he was kind of just being critical of clinton well i had about an hour
00:43:51and 15 minute commute to a factory two towns over where i worked and i drove i worked second shift
00:43:57and i drove midday to that factory and i'd catch the last hour of his show and i i just
00:44:03immersed
00:44:03myself boom i was voting down straight republican ticket and i had been convinced that clinton was
00:44:10more corrupt than nixon ever could have been clinton was part of this global initiative to get the u.n
00:44:15to control our country clinton was going to bring in u.n troops to take our guns and put dissidents
00:44:20in
00:44:21concentration yes and then bill clinton gets elected
00:44:27there's this backlash against clinton spearheaded by rush limbaugh and limbaugh becomes almost the
00:44:35leader of the opposition several times he said on the air that vince foster the white house aide
00:44:41for bill clinton had actually been murdered and that his body was found in hillary clinton's apartment
00:44:46he said that one said in the air you know so there's weird conspiracy theories and talk radio
00:44:51is really peaking at that point he's incredibly rich well that's because he signed a contract
00:44:59that gives him approximately 34 million dollars a year one of those funders we know for a fact in 2011
00:45:05was the heritage foundation because it was listed as a line item on their budget i remember when clinton
00:45:12was president and i came to visit my parents one time my dad was hunched over in the living room
00:45:19chair reading one of the books against president clinton i believe slick willie was in the title
00:45:24you couldn't mention president clinton without him yelling about how he was a murderer and going to
00:45:30destroy the country it made me think again of what hillary clinton said during that interview when her
00:45:36husband was in office this vast right-wing conspiracy that has been conspiring against my husband since
00:45:42the day he announced for president i was actually watching it when she said that and i knew that
00:45:48what she was saying was true i was involved with and knew very much firsthand that people who i was
00:45:54working with in places like the american spectator magazine back in 1993 shortly after clinton was
00:46:00elected were trying to figure out how to get him thrown out of office how to impeach him and the
00:46:06strength of the backlash against bill clinton in his first two years for the first time in decades
00:46:11the republicans took over a very low turnout november 1994 election they made rush limbaugh an honorary
00:46:20member of congress so the role that limbaugh and talk radio played in the ascendancy of the right wing
00:46:28in congress is crucial most of us liked clinton at one point almost 66 percent of us but some of
00:46:36my more
00:46:36liberal friends were mad at him for some pro big business things he did like signing nafta into law
00:46:43and signing legislation that repealed the glass-steegall act in 1999 the glass-steegall act had been enacted
00:46:49after the great depression basically it separated and protected your checkings and savings from investment
00:46:56banks and that worked for 60 years one of the biggest steps forward to handing our whole media
00:47:06system to a handful of corporations was completely bipartisan it was the 1996 telecommunications reform
00:47:14act and i put reform in quotes consumer rights advocates were calling it the time warner enrichment
00:47:19act but president bill clinton and the democrats were getting huge soft money donations from the big
00:47:24media and telecommunications companies so was the republican speaker of the house newt gingrich
00:47:29and together behind closed doors they developed this telecommunications act which gave away the
00:47:36media to these few big companies these these few fat companies got even fatter mainstream media didn't
00:47:43scrutinize it because they were getting rich at the top and when you have that kind of bipartisan
00:47:50corruption corrupting our media system it explains why we ended up with the media system we have
00:47:57signing the telecommunications act helped set the stage for something even bigger something that would
00:48:03change the media landscape forever remember young roger ailes in the nixon days in that memo called
00:48:10a plan for putting the gop on tv news in 1996 25 years later fox news was launched with the
00:48:19backing of rupert murdoch
00:48:23thanks in part to the telecommunications act rupert murdoch's news core conglomerate grew even larger
00:48:31and guess whom he hired to create fox news fox news grew to be the dominant cable news network and
00:48:38its
00:48:38effect on the other major news stations was profound rupert murdoch is a media giant he owns news
00:48:46organizations all over the world these include tv the internet magazines newspapers and books that's a lot of
00:48:54influence for one man in terms of you having a global media enterprise and have you shaped that
00:49:00agenda at all obviously if you're in media and you're concerned with what's going on in the world
00:49:05you'd like to make a difference by putting forward your opinions excuse me if you're in media and you're
00:49:10concerned with what's going on in the world you'd like to make a difference by putting forward your
00:49:14opinions murdoch may have his empire but it's roger ailes who has the talent
00:49:23fox news is really roger ailes's megaphone and when he comes into work every day there is a morning
00:49:29meeting that takes place in his office at 8 a.m and his control over fox news is so absolute
00:49:35that when he says something it happens what happens in 1998 bill clinton has an affair with an intern well
00:49:43for an entire year they do wall-to-wall coverage what happens in 2000 another year when fox news uh
00:49:49exploded in the ratings the bush gore recount how did ailes cover that story he covered it as not
00:49:55that it's too close to call and we need to do a recount he covered it as al gore and
00:50:00the democrats
00:50:00are sore losers and they're trying to steal the election fast forward to 2001 and 9 11 how did he
00:50:07cover that story as a second pearl harbor not that this is a a terrorist attack that there are other
00:50:12ways of dealing with terrorism law enforcement targeted strike fox news more than any other media
00:50:18outlets sold the war as this grand struggle in america was gonna go in there and kick ass and
00:50:25george bush was this john wayne figure i mean all of the symbolism the patriotism the anchors wearing
00:50:31the flag pins you know roger ailes knew that these stories these big stories could be boiled down to
00:50:36very simple plot lines he says things like if we can convince the audience that we are fair and balanced
00:50:43we can actually uh move the audience to the right uh by introducing kind of right-wing themes uh
00:50:49surreptitiously
00:50:56we're getting fast it's damn cold
00:51:02fox news is a real and fairly important development because what it does
00:51:07is is bring out explicit right-wing views right into the heart of the media and making no hardly
00:51:14any pretense at objectivity it makes sometimes statements of suggesting that it's being fair but
00:51:22it's it's it's blatantly biased and it has republican politicians on the hardly minces words that it's it has
00:51:31a political agenda and it's also very important in that it's had an effect on the rest of the media
00:51:38it was already pretty nice to the right wing but it has to go even farther being nice to the
00:51:44right wing
00:51:45the most dangerous thing about fox news is not the fact that it exists and speaks to
00:51:52its audience of a few million people it's the effect that fox can have on the rest of the media
00:51:58time and again you will see a false and wrong story that is aired and starts uh moving through the
00:52:05fox
00:52:05news channel on a given day and it bleeding over spilling over into mainstream institutions of
00:52:12journalism media critics coined this term fox effect to mean media is an ecosystem and all media affects
00:52:18other media and so the existence of fox news and having that wrong approach to journalism out there
00:52:26has a toxic effect in the rest of journalism these are areas which even the government officials have
00:52:32said these are no go zones you don't go in them if you're not a muslim there's no law enforcement
00:52:38other
00:52:38than what's enforced by the muslim communities there the finch government has created an environment
00:52:44in these certain neighborhoods where they don't allow local law enforcement to come in these uh no go zones
00:52:51in uh in france and they become then recruiting grounds they become a sort of festering region
00:52:57where islamic extremism can thrive right so now this extremism could grow in that environment so they
00:53:04air the stories and then they start to bang the drums that the mainstream media is censoring and won't
00:53:10report to try to uh pressure and guilt the mainstream media into following their lead when i was at fox
00:53:18news
00:53:19i can remember sitting in the green room before a show was taped and a particularly biased segment
00:53:25comes on and uh and then someone in the green room where we're all waiting these include
00:53:31fox news producers fox news staff fox news contributors someone will say wow that was really
00:53:38fair and balanced and the whole place erupts in laughter there's actually almost no journalism involved
00:53:44and i mean when the tsunami hit fox news literally couldn't cover it they just they didn't have
00:53:49anyone with a camera within for weeks for days and weeks they just didn't care so it's very uh cheap
00:53:55way to run a quote news organization you just sort of sit around and talk about how awful democrats are
00:54:00most of fox's audience is older however we were surprised to find out that there were parents and
00:54:06grandparents who introduced their children and grandchildren to it and we were more surprised to
00:54:12find out that some teenagers were watching fox i had my granddaughter with me the other day she's 19
00:54:21she has taxes taken out of her check and she just came up with this comment you know graham i
00:54:28don't
00:54:28really like my taxes paying for lazy people who do nothing and i just was so shocked i calmly gathered
00:54:37myself and said hey do you know why the library's closed on fridays now it's because there's no taxes
00:54:44to keep it open after reading an article by a 24 year old ex fox devotee we decided to interview
00:54:54him
00:54:55the name of his article was i was a teenage fox news robot sean hannity destroyed my childhood we had
00:55:02one
00:55:02computer with a dial-up modem that was really slow so it was just faster to get the news off
00:55:07tv back in
00:55:08the day and so i'd turn on the tv and uh that's what started to make me political and um
00:55:14you know i
00:55:15turned i turned the tv on and if i put on cnn or msnvc my father would walk by and
00:55:20he'd go that's liberal
00:55:21propaganda you got to watch this and he would change the channel to fox news and then uh a led
00:55:26to b and so
00:55:27on years ago i was dating this nice lovable sweet lady and um we broke up that happens not a
00:55:33big deal
00:55:34we stayed in contact good friends very sweet because you know she's likable however right
00:55:40around the 2004 election she started watching fox news and that sweet lovable likable person
00:55:47was gone and it was replaced corrupted by fox into this intolerant willfully ignorant
00:55:56compassionless individual i tried to steer her away from fox into listening to every anything else but
00:56:04fox but she got more and more sucked into that foxhole and now that sweet little person i once knew
00:56:11is
00:56:11gone and i miss my friend i wish she'd come back i wish she stopped watching
00:56:18i basically believed that bill o'reilly was sort of like the champion of the rights for the common
00:56:24people right which is totally ridiculous but at the time i believed it right i remember he was arguing
00:56:30that the aclu was a terrorist organization yeah because they're trying to take away all our rights
00:56:37which is totally i mean patentedly false as big of a lie as you could possibly propagate but he was
00:56:45saying it as if it was true and i was there in the gym or wherever i was listening to
00:56:49it and be like
00:56:49oh my god this guy gets it you know this guy gets that if they take away our right to
00:56:55say merry christmas
00:56:56we're no better than the terrorists and that's the kind of insane
00:57:01bullshit that fox news gets people to believe
00:57:11i never knew there was war on christmas until my dad started sending us the whole family emails about
00:57:20dreaded horrible terrible evil liberals who wanted to kill christmas and liberals who didn't even want
00:57:29christmas trees in schools or red or green allowed anywhere and whether it was christmas day or not
00:57:37in fact it usually wasn't christmas day he would just say adamantly merry christmas wherever he went
00:57:46to if if he saw somebody in front of a synagogue let's say he would say merry christmas because
00:57:54those those damn liberals they weren't going to take christmas away from him there was no happy
00:57:59holidays for frank senko my dad
00:58:10so i learned how the country was pushed to the right and a whole new media was created to help
00:58:17that
00:58:17along my dad and many others got swept up in that tide i didn't think he was actually brainwashed didn't
00:58:26you need brainwashing camps like where someone is locked away with constant words and images coming
00:58:34at them in their every waking hour but i wanted to explore that notion i found neuroscientist kathleen
00:58:41taylor from london who was an expert on brainwashing i interviewed her via skype there are kind of two
00:58:48ways you can think about brainwash you can either think of it as this very coercive forced psychological
00:58:54torture where people are put into situations put through horrors um you know actually browbeaten into
00:59:01believing or pretending to believe something new so that's brainwashing by force if you like
00:59:05then there's brainwashing by stealth which is where it's not so much that they are forced to believe
00:59:11stuff it's just that all the information that comes at them is pushing a line and so there is
00:59:17no alternative in terms of information and if you control the information that goes into a brain
00:59:21to a great degree you control what that brain is going to do in terms of what the person is
00:59:26going to
00:59:26believe you're not forcing anybody to believe it but you're making it difficult for them to think
00:59:31anything else because the horizons are narrowed what's happening is that there's a kind of
00:59:36filtration process whereby information comes in and it's checked to see how easily it fits into
00:59:43what's already there that brought me back to george lakeoff you can only understand what the neural
00:59:49circuits of your brain allow you to understand any fact that doesn't fit that will be ignored or
00:59:56rejected as ridiculous and so on they don't know their brains are being changed they don't know this
01:00:01mechanism they're just there they listen to it it slides in and you barely notice because the
01:00:06information is familiar you don't have to think about it if those beliefs are very strongly and
01:00:10passionately held then you may find that any belief that threatens them is just rejected out of hand
01:00:18you can't win because it doesn't make any difference how many facts you put out there
01:00:23it's all about the emotion of of anger and hate and fear when i think about um brainwashing i tend
01:00:32to
01:00:33think about a kind of five important factors that are involved in creating this kind of belief change so
01:00:40those are isolation um control uncertainty repetition and then there's also the use of strong emotions
01:00:47it often seemed that my dad was actually addicted to these angry emotions he just couldn't wait to
01:00:55shut himself off and listen to rush limbaugh for three hours and get all pissed off if you watch
01:01:01something that makes you very angry you can start getting addicted to that because you get angry you get
01:01:07angry that drives stress response endorphin is released as part of the stress response and endorphin is
01:01:12the main pleasure chemical in the brain the tricky thing is it's mostly unconscious people are sort of
01:01:17tricked like in the case of your of your father okay so clearly the media has a very powerful and
01:01:22profound effect on all of us so i wondered if there were certain techniques right-wing media especially
01:01:29uses to create that belief change that kathleen taylor talks about which quite often results in people
01:01:37voting against their own interests or even going against the very core of who they are
01:01:43and i came across several scientists and doctors who identified some of these tactics
01:02:01we know he's got tons of weapons in his own country and we're not going to ever locate them until
01:02:07he's
01:02:08gone at the time was we thought he had weapons of mass destruction it turns out he didn't
01:02:12he followed the rules bush did and we lost that we lost the weapons they never found weapons of
01:02:18mass destruction they haven't but they moved them they were moving everything into syria you gov found
01:02:24that 63 percent of republicans still believe that iraq had weapons of mass destruction when the u.s
01:02:31invaded in 2003 what news shows often do is they'll they'll cite a statistic or they'll cite a finding but
01:02:42they won't really tell you where it's from they won't tell you much about the study they won't tell
01:02:46you who's compiling that statistic they just kind of cite it out of thin air who's put the statistic out
01:02:52is this scientifically proven was it peer-reviewed who paid for it fairly dickinson university's
01:02:58public mind survey asked 1185 nationwide respondents what their news sources were
01:03:05and then asked them about the events in the u.s and abroad fox viewers got less right than people
01:03:12who watched no news at all they'll say something that's just blatantly obviously false i'll say
01:03:19find me any legit source that backs you up and fine i'll believe it they're like oh well every single
01:03:27newspaper in america is run by liberal elites with an agenda well okay if the only news source that you
01:03:34can trust is fox news that sounds really paranoid the noise machine is really designed to create
01:03:42confusion create misinformation create fear uh and so the republican noise machine is when the republican
01:03:50party sort of works in concert with fox news with rush limbaugh with am talk radio and it's really
01:03:57designed just to distract people to attack and smear people the absolute base of it is the deliberate
01:04:04dissemination of misinformation in order to confuse viewers and news consumers and get them all riled up
01:04:10i asked eric to give me some examples of deliberate misinformation during the um 2008 campaign
01:04:17there was sort of this right-wing crusade about voter fraud and voter registration there's very little
01:04:23voter fraud meaning someone shows up to the voting place and pretends to be somebody else to vote
01:04:29i mean some of the worst things are the massive attempt to create the climate change denial
01:04:38huge programs american chamber of commerce petroleum industry they've announced publicly that they're
01:04:44carrying out propaganda probably called educational programs to explain to people that the humans don't
01:04:53have anything to do with climate change and so on but you gotta make profit tomorrow and if the species
01:05:00goes down the tube that's somebody else's problem and the arctic ice gap at the north pole
01:05:04it's in its so-called normal range not only is the ice not melting more polar bears are alive and
01:05:11happy
01:05:12today than we've had in a hundred years life is good miss miss kelly i gotta tell you life is
01:05:19good
01:05:27the goal is to get people so mad at each other that they a don't notice who's really causing their
01:05:35problems b they won't join together to oust the truly guilty parties c they're then capable of feeling
01:05:42nothing towards the group that's blamed john haldeman nixon's famous uh chief of staff went on the
01:05:48today show said all politics is the politics of division the team that manages to divide the country
01:05:53and end up with the bigger side wins on one side president obama the democratic party want america to
01:05:59become an entitlement state versus a self-reliant one with african americans this is that we all own
01:06:05welfare the assumption is is that is that we can't get that without taking it from somebody else and
01:06:10that's simply not true welfare is very very generous you're not motivated to succeed because you are
01:06:15getting free stuff from the government you are surrounded by goodies that are put onto you
01:06:22well as long as he's as long as the government is supplying him the the money just that he needs
01:06:29to live
01:06:29on he's not interested in getting a job so he so he can he'll go on year after year after
01:06:37year
01:06:37on the government dole and not bother getting a job branding is about creating an image that will
01:06:46stick in the mind whether that image created is accurate or not doesn't matter democrats liberals
01:06:52and progressives are branded as big government spenders dishonest america hating elitists who are
01:06:57all atheists who hate christmas and are soft on crime and weak on defense they've branded the media
01:07:02as liberal so much so that it's taken for granted that it's true one um catchphrase that i i hear
01:07:11over and over again is liberal media did you hear your dad all the time i heard him use the
01:07:19term liberal
01:07:19media all the time he'd be like oh you can't listen to liberal media as if there was no such
01:07:24thing as
01:07:24the conservative media if you analyze news coverage as fair has done you find that the news tilts a little
01:07:32bit to the right it's sort of center right republicans usually outnumber democrats it's just pure math
01:07:38and then people say well why do so many people believe the liberal media myth if you keep handing
01:07:43opinion shaping power to right-wingers who don't have evidence to yell about all liberals the liberals the
01:07:49liberals the liberal sudam well it's going to have some traction the liberal media liberal media liberal
01:07:55liberal bias liberal media folk liberal press it is the liberal media and so he watches fox news and he
01:08:04says to me fox news tells the stories that the liberal media does not want to air and i think
01:08:14yeah but fox news makes stuff up you know so no wonder you can hear things there that you won't
01:08:21hear in
01:08:21so-called liberal media language is not neutral in politics it's anything but neutral this became
01:08:31professionalized in 1994 when newt gingrich hired frank luntz frank is the genius right-wing wordsmith
01:08:39who taught republicans to instead of saying estate tax say death tax so you have managed to shift popular
01:08:47um uh opinion on a lot of unpopular everyday concepts like um inherited wealth by labeling it death tax i
01:08:56have fought over the validity of the death tax since i started working in this space and i went out
01:09:04and
01:09:04tested it and my god it changed the dynamic of how people looked at policy instead of saying poor people
01:09:12say the takers did i say don't tax rich people i meant encourage the job creators what's the difference
01:09:19between drilling for oil and energy exploration nothing except one sounds like something assholes do and
01:09:26one sounds like indiana jones did i say don't let black people vote i meant clamp down on voter fraud
01:09:33healthcare reform everyone likes that government takeover of healthcare so i asked which frightens you
01:09:40more government control or government takeover oh clearly government takeover well i think it's 27
01:09:44out of 30. that's it once the word is decided on every single republican from the presidential contenders
01:09:52on down to the feces throwers on hate radio all chant it like rain man over and over until it's
01:10:01beaten into our skull
01:10:05the idea is to terrify and terrorize the audience during every waking moment when people are afraid
01:10:11they don't think rationally and when they can't think rationally they'll believe anything fox news is
01:10:18built on this formula of just getting people really really angry it's this phony outrage machine
01:10:24particularly on fox news i mean they really are actors acting about how outraged they are give me one
01:10:31damn program anybody else a little pissed off by that obama attacks america i'm more angry about it than you
01:10:37are
01:10:37i told you that you need to be afraid because they are coming for you isis coming into america i
01:10:44would bet my life on the fact
01:10:46they're already here and i have caught these people before and i've seen korans prayer rugs you name it they're
01:10:51already here
01:10:52a self-styled militia patrolling the mexican u.s border contacted breitbart.com and relayed the discovery
01:10:58of the rug monday night just south of the sierra vista and coronado national forest you want to know
01:11:06what it turned out to be an adidas jersey isis i mean you know they're here they're here you think
01:11:14they're here oh yeah absolutely i think they're waiting for the whistle blow they're going to come out
01:11:17and take over i think that's what i think they will i really think they do i'm scared for the
01:11:22country
01:11:25the effect of bullying is simple it operates on two levels one is it shuts the guest up if they're
01:11:32making a point that the bullier doesn't want the audience to hear is hamas what part of this can you
01:11:38get through your thick head i think is hamas a terrorist organization orbital eye socket fracture okay and
01:11:45eyewitnesses say that michael brown charged at him you weren't there oh i'm sorry i i believe you
01:11:49cut my mic off and two the fake outrage makes the bullier look justified as they try to shame their
01:11:56frustrated guest into silence understand you've got an agenda here we just think we don't have an
01:12:01agenda our agenda is to report the news fair and balanced i understand you don't like it and sometimes
01:12:06your candidate has complained about it but that's what we're going to do you may have the rest of the
01:12:10media in the tank but fox news reports it straight fair and balanced as always bill burton thanks so
01:12:16much for being here and he listens to rush limbaugh they have on fox news in almost every room fox
01:12:24news
01:12:2524 7. just watching talking heads all day on fox news all the homes in their neighborhood are tuned
01:12:31into fox news all the time fox news is on 24 7. rush limbaugh is on five days a week
01:12:37there's michael savage
01:12:38alex jones the mark levin show the new york post the wall street journal op ed the drudge report the
01:12:44weekly standard newsmax breitbart american spectator tea party express and then there's the avalanche of
01:12:50conservative emails fox news can be found in hospitals bus stations gyms airports and even bars and
01:12:58restaurants the primary tv outlet for the right is fox and their audience is loyal how loyal consistent
01:13:06liberals have an array of news sources according to pew research whereas 47 of consistent conservatives
01:13:13tightly cluster around fox news as far as talk radio goes roughly 97 of talk radio stations are conservative
01:13:22while only three percent are progressive carol wallen told me that rush limbaugh is being played on
01:13:33in 1993 representative robert dornan gathered up 70 of his closest representative friends
01:13:43he thought it was really important that rush limbaugh be played on the armed forces network that this was
01:13:49absolutely a necessity but robert dornan himself is famous for the fact that he grabbed another
01:13:57representative's tie on the floor of the house and threatened him with bodily harm
01:14:04it's not just language it's also visuals in his book state of confusion dr bryant welsh says the
01:14:11sound and visual effects of fox news are almost carnival like with their multiple crawlers and a
01:14:17seemingly constant state of news crises created by fox news alerts then there are the more graphic
01:14:23images that strongly suggest a point they want to make that image looks like it's saying that hamas
01:14:29and hollywood are one in the same ouch sometimes a camera movement is used to distract on fox the
01:14:37colors are vivid and the graphics are overwhelming it is more stimulating than most other news shows
01:14:43it creates a mood that mesmerizes its audience and holds them captive then while they are captive and
01:14:49overwhelmed and maybe a bit confused they have someone like bill o'reilly or sean hannity with
01:14:54their confidence and passionate certitude telling them who they should blame for their confusion and
01:14:59uncertainty each one of these gestures that i have helps communicate an idea or a principle a thought a
01:15:06fact an emotion you start with one hand first and then you get the two you count off with your
01:15:12finger
01:15:12one two three the the audience that you're speaking to is actually counting with you
01:15:20my dad's very changing when this guy called glenn beck came on the air and now he he expects there's
01:15:27supposed to be some sort of civil war next year he buys a lot of ammo a lot of guns
01:15:32why what does he
01:15:33expect obama to do i don't know take over the world he believes obama and his administration is buying
01:15:42up all the ammo and so that's why they have to buy the ammo before the government gets it off
01:16:25the savage mind uh will respond to uh to authority if they are convinced of that authority is serious
01:16:39this is important for all of us and we are tired we want to come out of the shadows you
01:16:44have other
01:16:44people at the border who are here illegally who are crossing over the border and they're very much
01:16:49out of the shadows long time ago the feminazis began their quest to make women more like men acquire
01:16:54power like us careers like us all that believe scientists no all flights from west africa should
01:17:08immediately be discontinued these guns don't fire themselves don't we have to deal with mental health
01:17:26parenting well how did you start turning away from rush limbaugh in the late 90s just playing around
01:17:33the radio dial i found a uh i was driving to work one weekend i had to go to work
01:17:38on a saturday had to be
01:17:39there by noon and playing around the radio dial i found a very very funny show it sounded like it's
01:17:45a lot of fun to listen to it was uh wait wait don't tell me on npr never really listened
01:17:49to it before
01:17:50and i discovered they had great shows on the weekends and then through the week i stopped listening to
01:17:57hannity at three to switch over to all things considered i'm not going to say npr has a left slant
01:18:03or or liberal bias but i think their journalism is solid and i started basically comparing the quality
01:18:10of what of how the information is presented and what i was being told as opposed to well i guess
01:18:17i could start seeing the right-wing talk radio as what it is sure propaganda we went about trying to
01:18:23deprogram these people i mean there's one thing that you didn't have to worry about a ditto head
01:18:27is knowing about the study at tufts university saying a woman's bra size you're the bigger her bra size
01:18:33to lower her iq you know they'd heard all these stories so it was in some sense easy to open
01:18:39them
01:18:40up when you say well you want to know something there was no study at tufts university you know
01:18:44that story about chelsea clinton hillary and bill clinton's daughter being forced to write an essay
01:18:49why i feel guilty being white there was no such essay there was no such cbs news report saying there
01:18:55was
01:18:56an essay so this begins to you know the deprogramming begins when they realize that so much of what they
01:19:03believed was not true what the book does is it basically goes after rush limbaugh looking at the
01:19:10things that he has stated as facts on his radio show and basically debunking them and many of the pages
01:19:17have the format where it says limbaugh colon and then a quote and then reality colon and then our
01:19:25research uh where it was a highly technical or scientific issue we'd go to experts and get them
01:19:32and we'd quote them debunking limbaugh and it had a it had a tremendous effect the name of our group
01:19:38is
01:19:39flesh rush we listen to radio stations all over the country to monitor advertisers of rush limbaugh and
01:19:46there's usually hundreds of us from all over the country over 3 000 advertisers are no longer
01:19:52aired on rush limbaugh station what we call for is we want reform and restructuring so where it can be
01:19:59done we would like to see more progressive shows more balance more um working people the voices of
01:20:05working people in our commercial and our public broadcasting i mean it's just amazing that public
01:20:11broadcasting has almost no voices of disenfranchised people in it that's one of the beauties of
01:20:16wiki leaks wiki leaks is really a form of journalism that's desperately needed in the existing system
01:20:24because the mainstream media won't collect and report data such as wiki leaks will collect have to have
01:20:31masses of people organizing and putting pressure on really what it amounts to is a revolution i mean
01:20:40you're in some kind of political economic social revolution because you have a powerfully embedded system
01:20:46to change it significantly change the media significantly uh you have to have people organized and enforce a change
01:21:01there was so much misinformation that you had to weigh through that we felt like it was really important to
01:21:06to finally take that on directly so much of the work that we do around different issues
01:21:10is around putting out fires responding to this attack or this bad bill motivated by far-right ideologues
01:21:17this is a problem that a whole lot of people are dealing with in different states in different
01:21:21cities and different communities so you know we're working at the grassroots working one-on-one with
01:21:25people around their specific issues and situations to help them deal with that because you know these kind of
01:21:31changes have to happen person by person family by family interaction by interaction what they say
01:21:37about deprogramming specifically i think you know with cult folks who get involved in cults the
01:21:44bubble of uh conspiracy or misinformation with one fact right that helps the entire artifice ultimately
01:21:51crumble if you're wondering what happened with my dad here's the story my parents moved to a senior
01:21:58community apparently during the move my dad's kitchen radio broke he never got around to fixing
01:22:04it so it sat in the garage with the other broken radios my parents started eating lunch together again
01:22:11but he still watched fox and still got the right-wing emails and snail mail when the tv and the
01:22:17kitchen
01:22:17broke they got a new one and mom programmed the remotes he didn't want to bother to figure out how
01:22:23my
01:22:23mother programmed them so he just watched whatever my mother watched one time when he went in the
01:22:28hospital for a kidney stone she asked me to weed out his emails to save some computer space when i
01:22:34told
01:22:34her they just keep coming she decided to unsubscribe him from some of the more extreme political emails
01:22:40but then she got the idea of subscribing him to liberal and democratic ones but much to our surprise
01:22:46when he got back he started reading them what does he read now truth out rsn news
01:22:53you know all that stuff yeah i've been i've been listening to rush limbaugh for quite a few years
01:23:03and of course if for some reason or other i don't know what happened i guess somehow got away from
01:23:10it
01:23:10and uh but before that like i was i was i had on all the time the political chatter you
01:23:21know but
01:23:23then i stopped he doesn't listen to rush limbaugh anymore and he doesn't listen to fox news do you think
01:23:33your political views have changed halfway between the republican and democrat oh i'm not all democrat
01:23:43i'm not all republican do you believe in the minimum wage minimum wage yes do you believe in personal
01:23:50freedoms some people believe that gay people don't have the right to get married and other people say i
01:23:56couldn't care less let them get married if they want to well i guess if they want to do that
01:24:03go ahead
01:24:04and do it yeah yeah that's the way i figure i spoke to uncle frank the other day it's hard
01:24:10to explain
01:24:11but just a a kindness in his voice thank you
01:24:25thank you
01:24:30happy birthday yes i haven't seen you in so long i know how you bet
01:24:40the other day he surprised me president obama was on he said to me you know i i kind of
01:24:50like him
01:24:52and then later he said again at a different time i like obama i look glory be he's a pretty
01:25:01good guy yeah he's oh he's doing he's doing all right he's forgetting all that other stuff that he
01:25:08learned and i guess whatever mom would shut down his computer at night and she started subscribing
01:25:19them to truth out and uh alternet and reader supported news only would just read whatever ended
01:25:25up in his he just read everything and he's an avid reader he sits at that computer and he reads
01:25:31whatever's in front of him well that that's very interesting and and see his thinking changed his
01:25:38politics have totally changed he voted for obama what he voted for obama in these past couple years
01:25:46there's finally been peace in our house my dad is more content than i've ever seen him he's not angry
01:25:54he's not argumentative and he's really fun the way he used to be and we get along really well and
01:26:01i
01:26:01dote on him in fact i get along with him better than i ever have and it's sort of a
01:26:07bittersweet
01:26:08pill because i know these are his last years but i'm happy that he's happy he is my pal and
01:26:18i'm his
01:26:43so that is the story of jen and her father her father had changed into a person none of them
01:26:49recognized
01:26:50or even liked a persistent wife who continued to challenge her husband it eventually made a difference
01:27:04it's a mixture polish and ukrainian i mix them a lot he used to be very fanatical
01:27:12yes yeah i've listened to him for a long time yeah but you're not as you're not as fanatical as
01:27:20that
01:27:20anymore so that's what the movie is about is about how uh you used to be very fanatical and now
01:27:29you're
01:27:29much better i think i'd like to see that yeah you'll still see it dad yeah
01:27:49well they learned about santa a long time ago little bunnies at easter and pick unicorn
01:28:00tiny two fairies have lost their appeal but they still think fox news is real my parents think fox news
01:28:11is
01:28:12real i tried to explain but they just won't sit still all that jumping and shouting has put them off
01:28:22off keel and my parents think fox news is real well now bill's not your buddy and the five aren't
01:28:32your
01:28:32friends they're in it for money they're just talking heads once was a time when i was a muse
01:28:48and my parents think fox news is real i tried to explain but they just won't sit still
01:28:57all that jumping and shouting has put them off keel and my parents think fox news is real
01:29:07well now if i could change things you know that i would but banging your head on a rock can't
01:29:14be good
01:29:17maybe just singing this song is a start so for now i'll just say bless their heart

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