Political Bias in Media, from a Progressive’s Perspective | Josh Elstro

But our framework that we sort of decide of like, what are we going to talk about?

Who do we talk with that we use is block and build.

We’re trying to block the rise of authoritarianism trending towards a fascist movement.

And then we also are sort of looking to speak with people who say, “What are you building towards a more progressive, inclusive, multiracial democracy in the future?”

Because it’s quite a broken system right now.

This is Viewpoints.

A deeper look into the ideas that shape our politics and culture.

Break free from the orthodoxies of mainstream media and hear diverse perspectives from interesting people across the political spectrum.

[Music] Sean Rasmussen here, the host of Viewpoints.

Many of the guests on Viewpoints so far have been critical of the mainstream media for being too left-leaning.

Well, in this episode, you’re going to hear from someone who thinks that mainstream media is, if anything, still too right-leaning.

Josh Elstrow is a podcast and multimedia producer for Convergence Magazine, a publication that works with organizers and activists to promote socially progressive causes.

Just to tease some of the issues out here that we get into, obviously whether media is too left or too right, we disagree on that.

We talk about NPR.

He worked for NPR for a while and has some interesting insights into their programming.

The coverage of the Palestinian cause, what he calls a neoliberal capitalist dominance in the media, his concern about billionaires’ influence in politics, his questioning of whether wokeness is even a thing, and much more.

So without further ado, here’s my conversation with Josh Elstrow.

You’re heavily active in podcasting, generally speaking, and you have some public radio experience as well, I believe.

Yeah, I will say specifically I am involved in podcasting what we call a sort of like movement organizing podcasting.

We are explicitly a political project, but we’re a C3 project, so we are not a partisan outlet towards any candidate or party per se.

So we cover more the groundwork of progressive organizing that’s happening in the United States for the most part, and what work is being done, what successes and failures do they have.

And that’s kind of like just the broad strokes of what we cover.

And I also just want to reiterate, I am not the editorial voice of that publication.

I am the podcast producer.

I handle way more on the technical side than I do the editorial side.

So nothing I say here is the voice of Conversion’s Magazine.

I’m interested by this term using movement.

You said movement something.

Can you explain that a bit more?

Movement media, speaking mostly towards social progressive movements, that if they do get covered in the mainstream media, it is because they’re mad, for example, that college students are out protesting for Palestinian liberation, right?

There’s no pro-Palestinian media in America.

And that’s not really like our just singular bread and butter.

That’s just one example of something.

That’s really big right now, that you’re not going to see a fair and balanced coverage of people that are supporting social movements.

And if you go back, you see this is an example that happens over and over and over again, especially with college protest movements.

You look at the civil rights movement, and there’s a lot of people, not a lot of people like holding water for what the college kids are up to, or Vietnam protests, right?

So that’s the tip of the iceberg of where I would say the mainstream media does not have a left-wing bias.

See, I feel that’s probably different in Canada from the Canadian context.

I feel like there’s not enough in Canada of people criticizing the Palestinian protests on campuses.

And I feel like there’s not enough being done about the problems that are going on, both with regards to the kind of campus culture that they’re creating and some of their messaging.

But I wonder if in the US where you are, you kind of have like a right-wing ecosystem and a left-wing ecosystem down there?

We have a right-wing ecosystem and a center-right ecosystem.

And then up here, I would say we have a left-wing ecosystem.

We don’t have a right-wing ecosystem up here.

Although I think you would probably categorize our media ecosystem as center-right, maybe or center-centrist.

You probably wouldn’t think of, from the sounds of it, like you are quite a bit further left of where I would consider my position to be.

I don’t consume Canadian news, to be honest.

But I am based in America.

So I would say there’s sort of some core tenets that any American media outlet is going to have to adhere to if it wants to be considered “mainstream” or have much influence.

That is sort of like an unflinching, you do not question American cultural and economic exceptionalism.

You don’t question American imperialism.

And your bottom line motive is profit.

The three things that as a news organization, we have trended towards in the past 40 or so years of just like neoliberal capitalist dominance in our culture and economic system.

On the center and the right, there are a lot of people who are …

There’s a lot of hand ringing going on right now about basically the kind of woke takeover of a lot of institutions.

I give you look at education and J school, journalism school and all these different places.

People are kind of coming out with fairly, from my perspective, fairly radical identity politics perspectives that are based off of postmodernism and critical theories.

And that a lot of those messages and kind of framing of issues tend to dominate in mainstream media.

Well, at least my experience of that is like, you know, if you look even at something like the New York Times, they are to my mind way too woke.

Is the wokeness in the room with us right now, Sean?

Because I’m going to need to have some definition of terms here.

If we’re just going to throw Blake’s statements that it’s the New York Times is woke.

What does that mean?

Sure.

I was assuming that you might understand what I mean by that, but …

Well, this is part of the problem with this like wokeness in the media and like, where is that coming from?

What is woke?

What is the problem that the New York Times is doing that academia is doing?

Again, this is a factor of media capture by the right and the center right as we get to throw around terms like it’s woke.

And everybody goes, “Oh no, it’s woke.

What is that?

What is the problem here?”

And for me, I’m always going to ask, what is the material result that is harming people from wokeness?

So like, what am I talking about when you ask me to say it is or is not woke?

Some of the key parts of it are things like an over emphasis on identity, identitarian politics, less emphasis on class and more on like immutable characteristics like race, gender, and things like that.

Like a focus on those issues at the expense of the many other issues that could be covered.

If all of those things are interesting in and of themselves, but they should be maybe 5% of the coverage, but right now it’s like 95% of the coverage.

I mean, I look at the New York Times every day and I don’t really see stories that are just like, “Hey, can we have a chat about identity politics unless it’s their columnists, which are usually coming from the right criticizing like these quote unquote woke issues about like, should we let trans kids play sports?

Should we do this, that, and the other?”

And like, I mean, these things you can trace to right wing movements is why we’re even having the conversation, you know?

It’s like in the average Americans day to day life, they’re not running into, “Oh my gosh, there’s a trans kid who decided to be, call themself a girl quote unquote and join my kid’s sports team and now they’re beating my kid.”

It’s like this just isn’t a problem.

The reason it’s being covered by the quote unquote woke media is because we have groups like Moms for Liberty.

Are you familiar with them?

Yep.

Yep.

I mean, so Moms for Liberty is a group that just came out of nowhere in like 2021.

Within a month, they’re on the Rush Limbaugh show.

They’re doing a right wing media circuit.

They’re getting millions and millions of dollars invested in them by billionaires, by the Heritage Foundation and the Mercer Group.

And now they dominate the media conversation.

They are the reason we are having these woke conversations.

And this is a design by people like Steve Bannon.

He champions strategies like this of what we’re going to do is we’re going to spend a ton of money to get these people to go and aggravate at the local level and claim problems are there that aren’t there.

And now it’s elevated to the national conversation.

And so quote unquote woke coverage is really coming from these astroturfed right wing groups at the end of the day.

Trans people just exist.

They just want to exist.

They’re not trying to come for us.

They’re just out trying to live their lives.

And the idea that there’s some infiltration happening is entirely a right wing cultural messaging project.

Hmm.

Okay.

And that’s that pretty strongly.

But where’s it coming from then?

Well, I mean, I don’t know if I think in my like in my context in Canada, a lot of identitarian politics plays itself out very directly just in terms of policies.

Like they literally are a lot of job listings in Canada right now.

No white male need to apply right in the job description.

That’s in the text of the job description.

Yeah.

They’re basically saying like they won’t say it that way.

They’ll say a preference given to the rattle off like a million identities that are encouraged to apply.

Not one of them would be a white male.

So that’s a case where like that’s directly like these these ideas of identity politics are directly affecting the livelihood of people based on characteristics that they can’t change.

And so to me that’s illiberal and anti-democratic and I don’t think that should be the case.

And even though like all the arguments you could put forward for that, I don’t think they hold.

It’s very complicated because some of that is real to a extent, but a lot of it is class based and not identity based in my opinion.

And that’s very, very specific sectors of the workforce.

I very highly doubt Amazon warehouse factories are saying no whites necessary.

You know, it’s you will see this a little bit, a tiny little bit in like academia and media because those are the spaces where there is admittedly like a little bit of an identity capture and where I will agree with you is lacking a class intersectionality to the way it approaches it.

And there is some cynicism to that response that they are having to, I call it sort of like the 2020 moment where like here in the U.S. we had the uprisings for like racial justice and we’ve had the Black Lives Matter movement happening since like the early 2010s.

And those have been sort of co-opted by institutions to say like, oh, there is a market of socially liberal people, people who want to be seen as like the good conscious whites or whatever.

And that they want to be seen as doing the right thing.

But like the top positions at all those institutions, like we’re mostly just talking about universities and media outlets, news outlets, I call it sort of like the East Coast liberal elite media, both sort of like condescendingly because that is like a right wing term.

But like there’s a tiny, tiny bit of validity to it, but it’s more class based that like those became jobs that people who come from a certain class background who can afford to go to elite schools and go into student debt, get to go to or get to apply to and then they can afford to do an internship where they’re going unpaid for six months to a year at a time.

For sure.

For sure.

And like when they’re hiring, they’re looking for the tiny scratches off of those identities of non-white people who have the class privileged background to have made it that far so that they can sort of check off a box.

I will agree.

That is a somewhat real thing, but it’s like not a threat to anybody in any way.

So I would say it is a threat if it becomes policy, like if these things are policy related.

Is there policy that is like saying there are quotas of non-whites that must be hired?

Yeah, for sure.

For sure.

If you look at the stats, I have the American stats on this.

I don’t have them in front of me, so I can’t give the exact stats.

If you look at the hiring, remember when the Great Awakening happened like in 2020 or so around COVID and everything.

When corporations decided to jump on the bandwagon around identitarian stuff, they actually, if you look at the curve of people who were hired from these diverse groups, it just jumps like insane amounts from one year to the next over the course of like from 2020 to 2023 or whatever it was.

A huge, huge increase in that.

So the hiring definitely, and this is corporate America.

This isn’t like government and academia.

This is corporate America.

So it directly affected the job market for a lot of people in a way that was detached from merit and pushed to- How do you know it’s detached from merit?

Because it’s clearly, it’s not a coincidence that it’s from these identity groups.

It’s like you either hire on merit and then you get what you get or you hire on identity and you get your checkbox filled, but you don’t have the best of the best.

I disagree that it’s as black and white as that because I would also argue like there is a problem in America in the fact that most, we’ll say, well, at least the black population in America, most of them are descendants of chattel slavery.

And we ended that slavery 200 years ago and people go, “What’s the big deal?

It’s over.”

But when you apply a historic and material analysis to the reality of that situation, when you take a white settler colonizing class who just gets to keep gardening more and more and more and more wealth, and then you say, “Okay, all these people that we brought here by force, many of them like children of rape and worse,” and just say, “All right, you’re free now, okay, but we won’t hire you.

You have to stay separate.

This, that, and the other.

We do that for another 100 years.”

And I don’t know if I have to keep teasing this example out.

That kind of argument has been made for years and years and years and we’ve heard it too often.

It’s the slightest bit of saying, “Hey, maybe we shouldn’t throw out this person’s resume just because their name isn’t Josh or Sean.”

I don’t think that’s a bad thing.

Yeah, but I think you’re mischaracterizing the reality of it though.

But anyways, I don’t really want to litigate social injustice per se in this conversation.

I think it’s, obviously, we differ.

We come from pretty extreme opposites on this topic, I would say.

So can you explain a little bit more about this movement media thing, some of your objectives and how you guys go about doing what you’re trying to do?

At the end of the day, we see the modern right-wing movement represented by the American GOP as honestly sort of an existential threat for a number of reasons.

We watched Donald Trump try to do a coup in 2020 and said, “That’s bad.

I don’t think that guy should be president again.”

And so we sort of came up with this foundation of progressive movements are sort of on the defensive, even though Joe Biden is president or whatever.

But our framework that we sort of decide of what are we going to talk about, who do we talk with that we use, is block and build.

We’re trying to block the rise of authoritarianism trending towards a fascist movement.

And then we also are sort of looking to speak with people who say, “What are you building towards a more progressive, inclusive, multiracial democracy in the future?”

Because it’s quite a broken system right now.

Again, I don’t know much about Canadian politics, but our electoral politics is entirely captured by financial money interest.

I don’t know how much you know about how it works, but basically almost every seat in Congress is bought and paid for by millionaires and billionaires.

So we cover the movements that are trying to restructure those things from the ground up that aren’t going to get covered elsewhere.

Okay.

And then can you talk about one or two of those movements just that you might cover that would be of interest to people who are listening?

So I think the biggest sort of organization or group that we might sort of affiliate and try to platform some coverage of would be something like the Working Families Party is a good example.

They are a truly grassroots party-building effort that they look at where are winnable races for a progressive who is entirely grassroots funded and not pack funded, et cetera.

And they’ll look for those types of races and try to organize a ground game around it.

And we might cover what are some successes or failures of groups like that and do analysis of where they succeeded and failed.

And to bring it back to this mainstream media conversation, the only time you’re ever going to hear about the Working Families Party in the mainstream media is to be finger pointed at as a wrecker for the Democratic Party, which is very much not what they do.

So are they sort of like a class based initiative where they’re trying to get better share of wealth?

Is that what the idea is?

Yeah.

I mean, I don’t want to go too deep into that because I don’t like work for them or represent them.

Just curious.

Just curious.

I love it.

Here’s a bigger name of an organization that comes up in our work.

Maybe another example then too, just to get a sense of what you guys are looking at.

That’s an example of an electoral organizing project.

And then there’s other groups that are…

Because this level of organizing on the left, when we live in a time and space that there are lots of…

From our perspective, identity based groups that are under attack, our government that just got elected in is like, “We’re going to do mass deportations.

We’re basically going to make it illegal to be trans, et cetera, et cetera.”

So there’s a lot of groups that will focus more on just mutual aid in their community or trying to do grassroots protective work in their community, maybe in small local electoral work.

So there’s another group called Rising Majority and what they do…

And again, I don’t want to speak too much to them because I’m not a member of that group.

I don’t represent them.

But I attended…

They did a Congress this summer and it was…

I forget how many…

I don’t know, something like 4,000 or 7,000?

I don’t know.

Thousands of people from…

What they did is they pooled together a lot of small left progressive organizing groups so that we could convene over the course of five days and discuss, “Okay, there’s this potential very authoritarian coalition moving into power and it’s already been in power.

What are the things we are working towards building towards a more progressive, inclusive future and trying to build a 10-year and a 50-year plan for that?”

So you guys have a 10-year or a 50-year plan?

Numbers are not huge.

That’s they do or you do?

That’s their project.

I’m not here representing these groups.

Sure.

No, that’s interesting.

Okay, so…

It’s definitely not a heritage funded project 2025 level thing.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You are involved in production of media, podcast and radio at various times in your career and currently.

And I guess some of those shows probably discuss politics.

Right now, the reason I ask is that right now it seems like the podcasts that do well are the ones where you just go in and you actually preach to the choir.

You talk to your audience and they’re already on your side and so you’re kind of just reinforcing each other’s echo chamber bubble.

And I didn’t want to do that in my podcast, but it does seem like that even from an audience point of view could be popular.

But also too, maybe is it more authentic just to be who you are and say, “Hey, I think this is dumb.”

Right.

I think the left wing media is too crazy.

I don’t know whatever it is.

Yeah, I would lean towards the latter.

I guess this is where I’ll try to reiterate what I think I said on that post that originally connected us is like there’s no such thing as an unbiased media and that comes through even in a reporting based newsroom.

So here’s something like if people take away one thing I need them to understand.

People don’t know the difference between reporting and punditry.

A reporter does not opine on the things they are reporting.

So when I worked in public radio, we had a newsroom of reporters.

They did not ever, obviously we could never endorse anything because public radio is a C3, but they would never bring their own voice into what they were covering.

They would say, “This is what I saw.”

Where the bias comes in in that situation is in the stories you choose to cover, which is often decided by maybe one editor or a small handful of editors who can then come down like the individual.

That individual can have a political bias axe to grind who says, “I don’t like this story because you’re connecting too much to the people on the ground and we only want to hear from the corporations that we have money profitable interests with.

We only want their perspective.”

I would argue is most news media, Canada is probably the same in spite of the fact that I don’t read it.

Or you might have an editor who just says, “Our resources are restrained and this is something I ran into a lot and I worked for a local public radio affiliate.”

I’ll say this is different.

This is not national public radio.

Public radio affiliates in America, that usually means they are syndicating, they are proved to syndicate content from national public radio.

We were just fortunate enough that we could afford our own newsroom as well.

But that newsroom was limited in capacity that if somebody says a big story around here is like, “We’re always building stadiums where I live.

Everybody needs to build a new stadium.”

It’s easier because the people who have financial interests, they have the money and the time to just be emailing you press releases and saying, “This is why the thing I want to build is great.”

And the Chamber of Commerce is able to say, “This is why the thing we want them to build is great.”

Because they have the finances to do that and promote that.

Whereas the people who are living in those spaces and are going to be displaced by projects like that, they don’t have lawyers and PR firms to go out to the media and say, “Hey, you need to listen to us.”

An investigative reporter has to have the time and resources and the approval of an editor to go out and find the people who are actually going to suffer from displacement when some big commercial development like a stadium comes in.

So this is where that bias, whether conscious or not, I would argue that’s a pretty right-wing leaning bias of sort of like, “Law’s a fair, let the market do its thing.”

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, I guess too, coinciding with our time in media has been the decimation of the budgets of newsrooms so that there are fewer and fewer reporters trying to do more and more and more articles that spread really thin.

Again we can thank Law’s a fair economic decisions of Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton who have worked very hard to deregulate the spaces in the industries where that money floats around and those choices are made.

Okay.

I mean, again, we could dive down a whole discussion about economics, but I think that’s beyond the scope of this particular episode because I think that ultimately it was the killing of the ad revenues that killed newsrooms and that was because of the internet.

So I don’t think Ronald Reagan had much to do with that.

Well, Ronald Reagan killed the fairness doctrine which led to the proliferation of things like cable news which now you basically incentivize this idea of having an endless conversation about the news, quote unquote, so that 24/7 ad-based CNN, Fox News, et cetera, MSNBC, they all come out of that.

And then you have the Telecommunications Act in 1996 that Bill Clinton signed that said, and every corporation, every body who wants to own a radio station, own a TV station, you can buy up and gobble up as much as you want and run it as bare bones as you want and make as much money as you want.

Whereas we could have had a model where we say, look, there’s this much sort of like social funding towards certain news outlets.

NPR is the last bastion of that.

And that’s, I believe, 6% of their funding.

It basically covers their fundraising efforts.

It’s not like NPR is state-sponsored media as Elon Musk labeled them on Twitter at one point.

It’s just like, that is just a pool of money set aside for something that is designed to be managed as unbiased as possible news source.

And even that is a drop in the bucket of what it costs to run something like NPR.

Sure.

Sure.

So political neutrality is not obviously easy.

If you look at something like NPR, I used to be a huge NPR fan.

I kind of, my radio heroes I mentioned before were people like Ira Glass and early radio lab episodes and things like that.

And that’s kind of what got me interested in doing audio productions.

But over the years, I got less and less interested in what NPR is producing because from my perspective, it was all just too, it was too focused on these issues like identity politics that I felt like were both predictable and boring and kind of cliche at some point.

But also to- I mean, I mean, I mean, I’m not really feeling because I like, there’s a part of me that agrees with you.

And this is before I was even political.

Like I wasn’t even like political at that point when I got bored of the constant, oh, no, here we go.

Here’s a story about so and so who’s from this identity group in there and like a presser or press whatever it is.

And so I just got bored of it.

Like I know exactly where the story arc is going to go.

It’s like, it’s like basically, we have a story and we’re just going to plunk in some things and that’s going to be the story every single time.

And so I literally just lost interest in all of those shows.

I don’t even listen to this American life anymore because the younger staff are completely, I think they’ve lost their mission to present America as it is as opposed to trying to present America that they would want it to be.

Yeah.

I mean, I was a big this American life head for a long time.

I would argue it was always a very like progressive leaning show and like for sure.

The thing I will say, like there is some validity in what you’re talking about is that NPR over time as it had less and less public funding and is more and more dependent on the subscriber base that it built, which I haven’t worked there in like four years.

So I haven’t looked at sort of like what the demographics of listenership looks like, etc.

But like it’s it is like it’s a like college educated leaning sort of like liberal audience, probably Gen X boomer.

And so what happens is a market response to the fact that those people want to hear this identity based yada, yada, yada because there’s no sort of like economic political solution for the woes of the world.

We’ve just like narrowed ourselves into this just culture war argument about identity and that’s politics now.

And so they is like, I’m the good white liberal are like, I want to hear the stories that make me feel like I know what’s wrong with the world.

Yeah.

I agree.

There is an element of that.

Yeah.

And that drives me that even if I was politically inclined towards it, I would still be pretty bored with it.

Yeah.

But like and I personally got a little bored with it and I moved on myself.

But that’s like designated that or that level of subjectivity for it is designated towards like what we would call like the weekend shows.

So if you listen to NPR enough, you might be able to connect the dots when I’m talking about like during the day NPR is what I was talking about for reporters reporting the news.

That’s good to hear.

That’s good to hear because anything I’ve probably heard from it for the last while has been some pretty.

So like turning on during morning edition and what’s the afternoon one?

I forget.

But like they and the first five minutes of every hour is hard news reporting on, I think that’s 24/7.

I don’t remember exactly.

But like so NPR is still most of the time hard news.

Because weekend shows are to cater towards a specific audience that they’ve said, oh shoot, we don’t get funded very well by government social programs anymore.

We need to hold on to this audience that we are learning has like these identity based interests.

So we’re going to lean in hard to that.

Okay.

So it’s like audience capture.

Audience capture.

That’s the market doing its thing.

So like that audience exists.

We need to capture it because that’s how we keep funding our existence.

But who’s to blame?

Is it NPR or the audience?

I mean, maybe it’s the audience to blame because they’re not willing to question their own kind of luxury beliefs.

I don’t know.

What is there to blame?

It’s just like an institution just responding and surviving to be honest.

For sure.

You can be.

Yeah.

So you have like NPR, which has still a fair amount of real reporting, you say?

Oh yeah.

And I’ll say like the, I worked on local shows.

I wanted to talk a little bit about like my experience and that like the fact that I left NPR because it was too catering to like the real right wing craziness that was like going on at the time in the name of fairness, in the name of like we need to platform both sides.

So like I left in like early 2022.

The big thing in 2021 was CRT is coming for our schools, which nobody on the side of the threat who were like, this threat is coming.

We could even just find what CRT was.

And yet we still had to platform people who were saying like, oh, they’re indoctrinating our kids, et cetera.

They couldn’t cite an example, but because it was happening locally in our schools and people are trying to have like school board votes on it, we had to platform equal time to both sides.

And I’m sorry that the side that was saying like they’re indoctrinating our kids, CRT is coming.

We’re absolute idiots every single time.

And I just got tired of it.

Like they had nothing to offer.

There was no real political grievance towards anything that they had to say.

It was all like culture grievance all the way down.

And like no evidence for like anything that they claimed.

And yet we had to give them equal time because we were public radio and that’s what we do.

I know that there’s probably a pretty significant contingent of Americans out there who do think that CRT is a problem.

Yeah.

And I’d go back to argue that’s like the moms for liberty effect.

They weren’t thinking about this until it was showing up in their social media algorithm, you know, things like libs of tick tock.

If you’re familiar, what’s that lady’s name?

Shia Reichig, like looking for the most extreme examples of things that like might make you feel uncomfortable because you don’t see it in your day to day life and saying, this is what’s happening in your schools and in your to your kids.

And it’s like, yeah, I could find the most annoying right wingers if I just sat down and did it all day.

I don’t think you could.

I don’t think that you’d find much of that in in sort of education though.

I mean, I think education is clearly indefinitely.

I live in Ohio and they’re about to pass a law that says a few hours a day, kids can be taken out of school for religious education.

Okay.

I mean, I think that’s crazier than the fact that like a kid wants to show up and address sometimes.

Okay.

Okay.

That’s probably where I would say, I probably, like I’m not religious at all, but I do feel like there’s a lot of value in religious education.

So I probably would be.

And again, this is because religious education here is funded by billionaire groups who have an agenda and they want to dismantle public schools and put kids into religious schools that have no oversight and are teaching exactly what they want to teach.

It’s like every right-wing culture warfare, mongering thing is projection.

I guess what they actually want to do and are doing, but because the media is captured by their side, no one’s hearing my side of the story on this.

That’s interesting.

It’s funny because like we’re having this with this funny conversation because I would probably be on the right of the line in terms of this, where the center is.

But I haven’t always been.

I’ve actually been quite left-leaning for a long time in my life.

But my experience of a lot of this stuff is that it’s actually quite the opposite to your experience.

Like I literally experience a kind of left-wing takeover of education and media.

That’s kind of what I see.

And I can see it all over the place with just by looking at the handouts they give the kids or like whatever it is that they’re.

What are the handouts they’re giving to kids?

Like some critical race theory based stuff, which is like.

What is critical race theory?

Okay.

I’m not going to get into that with you right now.

I think if you’re going to do this sort of like define the terms thing, that’s just disingenuous.

I feel like.

No, this is important.

Critical race theory is a very specific collegiate level academic train of education about like legal framework around race.

Sure.

For sure.

You can narrow it down to that if you want to.

No, that is what it means.

No, but you’re saying that is what it means, but the term is broadened.

No, no, no, no.

The reason you think it means something else is because of the right-wing messaging project.

I feel like you have to give people like me some benefit of the doubt.

And now it’s involved a meaning of woke.

Benefit of the doubt, right?

Like you have to kind of give the other side the benefit that they’re actually something real there.

Otherwise, I could just say to you, all of your stuff is like woken doctrine nation and you’re completely captured by like bullshit left-wing stuff.

No, the difference is.

I’m not going to do that because I want to have a conversation.

But the difference is this is an actual definable thing that there’s been a right-wing messaging project to expand the definition of as you say.

I don’t want to get into a huge debate about CRT because that’s not really the point of this.

We’re talking about media.

But the point of like the CRT thing is pros I’m concerned is that, yes, they’re not teaching CRT to kids in class, but all the teachers who’ve gone through teacher education have been basically indoctrinated with CRT thinking such that they come out and they want to structure their lesson plans and they want to separate out people based on identity stuff.

All this stuff comes from a place and it’s coming from a place of people who espouse this sort of stuff based out of black nationalist movements from this late 60s, Derrick Bell and all these people.

It comes from a place and it’s really gained a lot of popularity in education.

And I don’t think you can deny that that’s the case.

You may want to call it a different term and I’m happy to call it a different term.

But it’s true that people are concerned about this and I think they should be concerned about it.

I don’t think it’s terrible to sort of shunt kids into identity groups while they’re just there to go learn something.

So I’m more interested in the political and legal dictation of what, like if we’re talking about education.

What you’re talking about is a cultural vibe.

There’s no laws being passed, where I live at least, saying there are quotas of you need to teach this, that and the other.

It’s like, okay, we made Juneteenth a federal holiday.

Is that a problem?

And again, I cited an actual law that is being passed that is dictating that parents can take in a country that says we have separation of church and state in our constitution that parents can take their kids out of public education for several hours a day into a unregulated religious indoctrination program.

I’m talking about a real material change in the laws.

You’re talking about vibes.

The counter to that would be that actually the state is overreaching in terms of what it should be teaching kids.

I think it’s a good thing that people have choice about what they can or can’t teach their kids.

I don’t think the state should take that over.

So would you disagree with the idea of basically just a public education department?

I mean, I don’t disagree.

I grew up with public education.

That’s the sort of way in Canada.

And it was pretty…

Actually, I didn’t have a very good experience of it honestly, but that had more to do with my coming from a lower class background and not having the kind of benefits of having parents who knew how to do school and stuff like that.

Well, I’ll admit I had a bad experience from the opposite direction.

I was like, I went to Catholic school for eight years and then was allowed to go to public school and got a much better education at public school.

Yeah.

But I mean, but generally speaking, I would not…

Like, based on what they’re kind of teaching kids nowadays, I would not be happy to send my kid to public school.

I would probably send them to private school.

Yeah.

I’m quite the opposite.

So yeah, so you’re kind of happy with the direction things have gone in the last while, although you do seem to express something which is quite, I mean, surprising to me, which is that you think that things are still quite right-wing and from your perspective, like that we’re still battling the right, whereas I see a complete domination of left ideology in almost every single institution.

We just reelected a guy who tried to do a coup, a right-wing coup.

How was I not right-wing capture?

And part of how we did that is his buddy Elon Musk bought Twitter and then there’s evidence for this is there’s actually like research out that shows he endorsed Donald Trump, I was like July 12th or something, and then basically flipped a switch so that all you saw was right-wing dogma all the way down on Twitter.

The day after he endorsed Donald Trump, and then he spent $130 million to get him elected, and now he is the quote-unquote best buddy and is in charge of, or allegedly going to be in charge of something that’s supposed to dismantle the social welfare state, et cetera.

How’s that not right-wing capture of media, meeting right-wing capture of the government?

Yeah, I actually used Twitter.

I used Twitter before and after Musk, and I felt it was better after Musk took over.

One other thing is there’s also very good evidence that 30% of the tweets you see now since Musk took over are bots.

They’re not real people.

I mean, it depends on how you use it, right?

If you follow people and you know what you’re doing.

Well, it’s designed to show you things that will …

And this is relevant to the media conversation.

All social media is designed to show you things that will get you aggravated.

Keep you on there, yeah.

And keep you there.

And they found the easiest way to do that is to upset people and show things that …

For sure. … bother you, which brings us back to …

I think most people who are bothered by …

We keep bringing up quote-unquote wokeness, et cetera, et cetera.

If you just log off, you probably won’t see it in your day-to-day life.

A lot of it’s media-dominated stuff.

I mean, if I go to a movie, I know guaranteed I’m going to get some kind of woke thing right in the plot line, right?

Yeah, but that’s like what’s on TV.

That’s not politics.

Yeah, I don’t know.

I think all that stuff matters.

The decisions of how a society is run, right?

I think all that stuff matters, yeah.

And also, I contend of that, there’s a pretty big movement in right-wing culture media that they are attempting.

And this is where I will, even again, concede a little ground about East Coast liberal elite media.

There’s a really interesting graph.

I really wish I’d saved it about the number of think pieces written about TV shows and a ratio correlation to how many people watch it.

There was a show, one of the last TV shows I enjoyed, Succession, it was just like thousands and thousands of think pieces have written about it and its viewership was like, I don’t want to say less than a million or something.

Okay.

Critically acclaimed, but not widely popular.

Whereas a show like Yellowstone, which is like, I forget the guy’s name, but like…

Kevin Costner.

Well, the guy who made it, it’s like everybody’s watching Yellowstone.

So again, it’s like, what is this woke left liberal capture of the media?

And then if we talk about movies, it’s like, okay, well, everything is owned by Disney at this point.

And this is just on my mind, just because I logged into my partner’s Disney Plus account the other day.

And it’s just mindless content slop all the way down.

None of it is designed to challenge a narrative of the way the world operates and exists as it is.

Which again, is like, we just elected a right wing authoritarian in this country who tried to steal the government four years ago.

We’re not exactly just like, hey, we’re hanging out in the center, kind of imperial power here in America.

So you look at what Disney puts out and they will have what you would describe as like woke content, maybe I shouldn’t say you would describe.

I see the arguments online of like, oh my gosh, they cast a black person as this, a trans person’s in that.

And again, it’s like, these aren’t political arguments.

They’re arguments about what’s on television.

That’s not a woke takeover of politics.

Okay.

I mean, I think there are a lot of people who think culture is really important actually.

And so like culture actually determines downstream politics, political.

And I agree, but these things are one, they’re strictly identity representation base.

Two, what’s the problem with that?

And three, like again, like going back to Disney Plus, you’re never going to see anything that challenges the idea of like corporations can spend as much money as they want to own the government.

So like, what’s the problem here?

I was hoping to have conversations like this when I started Viewpoints, which is that we clearly have really different viewpoints.

You know what I mean?

And we’re able to have a good civil conversation and it’s fine.

It’s fun.

And that’s exactly what I wanted Viewpoints to be.

And I think listeners will enjoy this conversation.

So I was kind of surprised in the sense that, like when you were talking about the issue around NPR giving a bit of airtime to the CRT discussion, I guess my critique of the left media generally speaking is that they, and also the culture of like people who endorse progressive politics is that they really, really want to shut down and clamp down on conversation.

They don’t want to have anyone who disagrees with their position.

And that creates a kind of chilling effect around conversation.

It’s hard to have a competition of ideas where the best rise to the top.

And so I was curious to hear, like when you hear me talk about things, obviously, like I’m one of these people who’s been, I guess, sort of like brainwashed by right wing media or something like this or I don’t know.

How do you kind of make sense of the differences between you and I, for example?

How do I make sense of them?

You have pretty strong opinions about people who hold the right wing positions.

And I don’t feel like you have a lot of time for them necessarily.

No, I don’t have time.

Well, something I thought about like while you were setting that up is like people, you’re talking about how like people want to clamp down on conversation.

I only want to clamp down on it when it’s like, no, I already know exactly why.

Why this is a talking point you have.

It’s because it’s a astroturfed thing that was put into the culture, which as we were talking about politics is downstream of that by groups like the Heritage Foundation, Moms for Liberty, the Mercer Foundation, the Cokes, et cetera, et cetera.

This was like go back to the 2009 Tea Party Movement.

That was covered by mainstream media is like, wow, look at this grassroots movement.

These people are just so mad.

We have no idea why.

And I was like, I know why.

I watch Glenn Beck every day.

He’s telling them to go out and be mad.

And then I trace the funding on all of their organizing posters.

It’s like, no, the Cokes spent millions and millions of dollars to rile people up.

So I get mad when the conversation is rooted in cheerleading for billionaires and holding water for them.

And that’s where a lot of the right wing, identifying grievance is rooted.

And the quote, unquote, left media, the mainstream media, is not often interested in antagonizing and covering that.

That’s part of when I go back to my public radio experience, that was one of my frustrations is like, we’d platform somebody who showed up out of nowhere to agitate at one of our school boards or our library and with yell about CRT or wokeness.

And I would pull up the one or two NBC reports that said, look, we follow the money.

These people are paid to go agitate.

And it just gets hand-waved away.

And we’re like, that’s too messy to mess with.

Because again, we don’t have enough resources and editorial financing and staff to really properly investigate that.

So the loudest, most obnoxious person who was funded by billionaires to agitate gets to dominate the conversation.

I guess one of the things comes down to whether you trust the audience to be able to make decisions up for themselves and analyze what’s being said and how much faith you give the general public around thinking through these issues.

I hate to be cynical, but I don’t have a lot.

And I don’t mean that to say, oh my gosh, everybody who falls for the right-wing stuff that I’m talking about and complaining about is a mark and an idiot and dumber than everybody who votes for Democrats.

I think the centrist Democrat voter is captured in a very similar way to, I’ll just call it the MAGA Trumpy Right Voter Block, in that the center, left, Democrat, whatever, again, to those core things that I said, the mainstream media is never going to question is the importance of American imperial dominance, the importance of American cultural and economic hegemony.

These are just culturally facts of life in America.

I don’t know what it’s like in Canada.

Unless you go out and investigate these things and read books on your own, that’s just what you believe in this country because it’s indoctrinated in our school system.

We say the Pledge of Allegiance every day.

And the one day I didn’t stand up for it, I got yelled at for an hour.

So what kind of indoctrination is that?

So I say this to say that I don’t blame people if they’re in one of these pipelines because there is real economic precarity in this country, and I’m sure in Canada as well, that is very frustrating to deal with.

When you can’t pay your student loans, your health insurance, your mortgage, whatever, and Joe Biden and the Democrats in the mainstream media that holds water for them is like, “You idiots, why aren’t you voting for us?

The economy’s good.”

I understand that frustration, and it’s because nobody’s being honest with them.

So the right wing with the identity politics nonsense is sitting there waiting to catch them.

You said I maybe don’t hold much for them, but I do.

Actually, my anger is for people like Tucker Carlson and everybody else on Fox News, OAN, et cetera, who get paid very, very well to wind these people up, not the individuals who are following for it.

It’s interesting.

It’s a challenging problem because I like to think that if once the ideas are out there, I think one of the big appeals of some of these right wing people you’re talking about, like, I don’t listen to Tucker, I don’t really follow any of the right wing media down in the States, but I do listen to some podcasts which could be coded kind of center right.

And so I see, you have millions of people out there, say like, who are being told they’re the deplorables, right?

Like Hillary Clinton would call people the deplorables, all those people who don’t agree with their take on the world.

He will catch me holding any good faith for Hillary Clinton.

Yeah, for sure.

For sure.

But the general sentiment still exists on the left, which is that if you don’t agree with my position on things, that means it’s because you’re either a racist, a bigot, you’re captured by some kind of cabal of evil tycoons or something like this.

And that’s where, that’s part of why I work to the left of the Democratic Party, as I would describe it, is that we understand that, no, those people, the root of their anxieties and concerns are the same as ours.

And I would agree that those things from, then these are like more Democrat messaging talking points you’re referring to, are not helpful.

No.

Yeah.

They just offer them nothing and are really just Republican light that they just don’t do the sort of agitating scapegoating that Donald Trump does.

The thing about Donald Trump is he’s just good television.

That’s a big part of his appeal, is people just are entertained by him.

And if you’re not going to offer me anything politically, at least fucking entertain, can I swear?

At least fucking entertain me is kind of a reaction a lot of people have.

And I think what a lot of his following sort of falls into.

I don’t know if that answered what you were saying.

I kind of got it.

Sure.

But I think it’s definitely, it’s also like a, it’s a bit of an FU to all these sort of moralizing people on the left calling everyone, you know, kind of self-righteously calling everyone, all these names that disagree with them.

Again, it’s like I would challenge like who is the left that we’re defining there?

Because I work in spaces where we’re basically trying to like clean that up.

It’s like we’re not going to apologize for the fact that like we want trans people and people of color and women in a coalition.

We’re not going to apologize for that.

But like we also are aware that like there is some amount of what you’re talking about coming from say like the Democrats and that like the mainstream media does this weird like fetishization of the poor, like the working poor, if they ever do talk about them.

And like we are trying to change the narrative of like you’re mad at the wrong people.

Like it’s not some guy coming up from South America to work a job you’d never want to do that’s causing your problems.

It’s the billionaire class and et cetera, et cetera.

So, and you produce some shows on these topics or is it just separate?

Like you just produce shows just as your job?

Like how does that work?

So, no, we are like an explicitly political project.

So right now, so like the main show that I’m working on right now, the only one I have like any sort of editorial control on because again, I’m more of like a technical producer at my day job is called Block and Build.

So like we will cover some like headlines from the week for a few minutes and just sort of put a more measured left leaning take on them.

That’s maybe not happening in the mainstream discourse.

And then we will talk to people that are yeah, doing like local or regional organizing around like an explicit progressive project to block the authoritarian right that is captured at you know, the executive branch, the Supreme Court all the way down and then like build something to save us from impending doom.

Sure, sure.

Okay.

I mean, that sounds so it’s like an activist organization.

And I mean, this discussion of it kind of circles back to our initial discussion around political neutrality.

I mean, do you feel like there’s a danger there in if you create media from a particular position, are you always going to sort of see things in a certain way?

Are you going to be open enough to the reality on the ground if you have a specific idea in your head about what you think is going on?

Again, it’s like I’m making no bones about a bias that I have.

But like I again, it’s like I feel like throughout this conversation, I’ve cited quite a few legal and political things happening that were like, it’s not good.

You know, and I sort of describe my politics or like left politics is it’s like, you can think of, I don’t know if you’re familiar with like the concept of like an overton window.

Right?

Yeah.

I can think of it as like on the like material political side of something like an overton window.

I think of it more as like it’s like a car going down a highway.

I think it’s going pretty fast to the right.

It’s like first things first, we got to do a U-turn and turn this thing around because it’s doing a lot of harm to a lot of people the direction it’s going.

And that we can argue about which exit we want to get on off on how far left we’re going to go once we turn the car around.

But right now it’s heading a pretty ugly direction.

And like I think we’d have to like to really like get into the nuance of that.

We’d have to like drill down into sort of like sort of first principles of why we came to the politics we came to as individuals here.

For sure.

For sure.

Yeah.

I mean, I tend to be more, you know, classical liberal, I guess.

I tend to put the priority of the political, my political interest is more in the individual.

And I think that’s the ultimate minority group.

And you know, if you can’t protect the individual from collectivist goals of any sort, whether it’s from the right or the left, then you’re politically in big trouble.

Right.

And I would argue like a lot of individual civil liberties are under attack by the current like right wing coalition that has swept our government.

Yeah.

I mean, I think they espouse the opposite.

They would espouse that they are actually trying to free up like some of these things from the…

Yeah, they would say that.

Well, no, but like I do experience like the left is quite authoritarian.

Like we have a left, more left leaning government than you do in Canada.

Like what authority are they wielding?

And like for example, they have like a, they’re trying to get a bill passed through called Bill C63, which basically could you could go to jail for thought crimes basically.

It’s a really intrusive, they want to control that they’re dressing it up as a, to protect children, what’s called the online harms act.

But really it’s just a complete overreach in terms of what their, their scope and powers are in terms of what they can control for the individual Canadian.

And so that’s a case where, and it’s getting a bit of pushback and I don’t, I’m hoping it’s not going to go through in Canada, but these, this government is really, really getting quite authoritarian.

And obviously during the COVID lockdowns, it was insane up here and civil liberties kind of went out the window basically.

So there’s been a lot of problems up here from an authoritarian left, I would say.

And yeah, I’m not going to get into the nuances of Canadian politics that I read about.

But I have a feeling you would start to look at our politics as being sort of kind of middle of the road, even center right probably because of it’s, because it’s not, it’s not far enough left, I guess would probably be your take on our politics.

Again, I’m not, I’m not going to comment on a country whose politics I do not investigate because I, I, I just would venture to guess that because Western civilization is sort of dominated by like a ideology of neoliberal capitalism, profit for corporations above all is just like, that’s the dominant ideology that is not really questioned.

I highly doubt there’s a big movement in Canada, correct me if I’m wrong, of, you know, passing off as, as much control of like the means of production to workers as possible and stripping power from corporations.

So that’s, that’s what I would deem left politics.

Everything all this other stuff, I don’t know, I only just pulled up this bill you talked about and I, at a glance I saw something about regulation of child pornography.

I’m like, that sounds like something we should do.

I don’t know the details of the rest of the words in the bill, but basically there’s already laws in place in that case to already cover that stuff.

So that it’s not really a bill about child porn.

It’s about, it’s about an overreach in terms of other things.

Yeah.

And again, it’s like the COVID lockdown stuff, et cetera, et cetera.

That was like an anomaly of world public health that like it was screwed up on all ends.

Nobody was prepared, which I’m sure we can also trace to like the more we deregulate things, the less we are prepared as a like organized society for eventualities like a global pandemic and you end up in a situation where everybody’s mad.

Yeah.

So, I mean, and I think, so you are kind of like your ideas to me sound like, you know, you’re interested in more stain intervention in terms of the control of the economy of wealth allocation and regulation of business, say for example, all those things.

I mean, there’s a pretty broad things to peg down, but I mean, I don’t think sort of going back to something like, I forget when it was, the 40s and the 50s, which is funny, the time that all these conservatives and classical liberals dream of going back to when everything was great, we had a marginal tax rate of like 90% above a couple million dollars or something.

I don’t think the world is going to end if you can only be a 500 millionaire instead of a 300 billionaire, you know?

And I like, and then on top of that, all of our government spending, not all of it, I mean, between 40 to 50 some percent goes towards the military, which is like what our economy is based on.

America makes culture and weapons.

That’s it at this point.

Because we shipped it all away.

I like would say not like, oh yeah, we just need to take more money in for the government and then it’s solved.

No, I think we need to like, no one should have to, there’s enough houses in this country to house everybody.

And put them in them.

Like things like that.

I don’t believe that you have to earn the right to be in a home and fed.

I think that’s just a general human right that we as an organized society can find ways to do, but instead we’ve decided it’s very important that Elon Musk gets to do a meme department in the government.

So here we are.

All right, so do you have any last thoughts before we sign off this conversation?

No, I was having fun.

I could probably go for a couple more hours.

Yeah, me too.

But it’s been really enjoyable talking to you a lot of fun.

Yeah, no, it is fun.

I appreciate the space because there aren’t a lot of people willing to hear other sides of things.

And if people want to find out more about your organization and some of the podcasts that you’re involved in, where can they go?

So yeah, the show I mentioned is called Block and Build.

It’s hosted by our publisher, Kate and Mock.

And the website for our print reporting is convergetsmag.com.

Don’t be weird, like be civil if you’re going there because you disagree with us.

Don’t email my colleagues and yell at them.

We’re all just trying to figure this out together.

The internet is a weird place.

That’s why I’m trying to just double down.

I’m not the editorial voice of the organization.

I’m just, yeah.

Thanks so much for doing this.

It’s been a lot of fun.

Cool.

All right.

Thanks, Sean.

All right.

Have a good one.

You too.

That’s it for this episode of Viewpoints.

Thanks for listening.

If you like viewpoint diversity and you want to hear more like this, don’t forget to subscribe, rate and review the show wherever you get your podcasts.

To find out more, visit ViewpointsPodcast.ca.

And if you have ideas for topics or guests, we’d love to hear from you.

You can connect using the contact form in the website or you can send me an email directly at www.Sean@ViewpointsPodcast.ca.

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