Jay Rosen on right-wing TV drifting 'further from the real,' and how journalists should 'rethink and rebuild' to cover it

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3.4 • 1.4K Ratings

🗓️ 17 June 2021

⏱️ 44 minutes

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Summary

Jay Rosen, who teaches journalism at NYU and authors the PressThink blog, discusses the devolution of Fox News; the difficulty of describing a "shifted political universe" in the United States; and the need for news outlets to be "much more explicitly and aggressively pro-democracy." He says "Fox is becoming in some way more demand-driven" because "its audience is in the driver's seat in a way that's more extreme than when Roger Ailes ran the network." For example, Rosen comments, "Do you want January 6 to be the fault of Antifa? You can have that. Do you want Trump to have won the 2020 election? You can have that." Rosen explains that "these kinds of maneuvers are attempting to sever people from reality so that you can do what you want with them... to just sort of de-anchor people from anything that they have in common with their fellow citizens so that they can be manipulated further. And that's why it's so insidious." Rosen says "journalists have to rethink and rebuild their routines" to cover this new political universe. To learn more about how CNN protects listener privacy, visit cnn.com/privacy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Language is everything. Words can pack such a punch, but language can also conceal,
0:10.8	confuse, whitewash. Think about the language we use to describe this complex
0:21.7	chaotic moment in American political and media history. We use terms like
0:27.2	post-truth and alternative reality. But are those words or those phrases the
0:37.8	best ones? Are we actually describing what's going on in the plainest most
0:44.6	accurate language possible? Those are some of the questions for this week's
0:50.1	reliable sources podcast. So let's cue the music. I'm Brian Stelter and as you
0:56.2	probably know, this weekly podcast is our chance to go more in depth talking
1:01.4	about how the media really works or doesn't work. I find myself grappling with
1:08.9	these questions about language all the time. Especially when I was working on
1:15.6	this book about Fox News and Donald Trump called Hoax, which recently came
1:19.8	out in paperback. I was trying to find the right words to describe the
1:25.4	radicalization of right wing TV. How Fox has changed over the years. And I've
1:33.4	really appreciated the feedback and in some cases the criticism that I've been
1:37.6	getting for the word choice, for the phrases, for the language that I've been
1:42.0	using. So I wanted to tackle that head on this week with a guest who has a
1:47.6	different framing, a different phrase to describe what Fox News is and how it
1:55.2	operates in the year 2021. Jay Rosen teaches journalism at New York
2:01.7	University. He's the author of the press think blog. He's active on Twitter and
2:06.4	that's sometimes where I engage with him and and hear his critiques. And Jay is
2:11.4	joining me now. Jay, thanks for coming on the podcast. Thank you Brian. I feel
2:15.7	I'm always conversing with you during a normal week anyway through Twitter or
	...

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