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Show Notes
In this episode, political communications expert Dan Pfeiffer speaks to the wide influence of right-wing media, why Democrats keep losing messaging battles, and what they need to do about it.
Text transcript:
David Roberts
You probably know Dan Pfeiffer best as one of the hosts of the wildly successful Pod Save America podcast, part of the growing Crooked Media empire of which he is a co-founder. Or perhaps you know him as the author of the Message Box newsletter, where he dispenses communications advice to left-leaning subscribers.
But before he was a new media mogul, Pfeiffer was in the thick of politics as a top aide on Obama’s campaign and then in Obama’s White House, where he ran communications and strategy.
Pfeiffer has seen the media war between the parties play out, and he has seen Democrats lose messaging battles again and again. He has first-hand experience of the growing power of the right-wing media machine to spread disinformation, set the agenda for the rest of the media, and deflect accountability.
Now he has written a book on the subject: Battling the Big Lie is an extended examination of the growing imbalance between the conservative movement’s massive media megaphone … and the left’s lack of one.
Listeners know that I have been obsessed with this imbalance for as long as I’ve been following politics, so I was super geeked to talk with Pfeiffer about how right-wing media grew, how it successfully intimidated both mainstream media and social media companies, and how Democrats can begin building a comparable megaphone of their own, before it’s too late.
Dan Pfeiffer. Welcome to Volts. Thanks for coming.
Dan Pfeiffer
Thanks for having me.
David Roberts
Congratulations on writing a book under extreme time pressure. An extremely stressful time to be alive. I hope the psychological damage has been minimal.
Dan Pfeiffer
I think we'll only know how much damage there was many years from now, so the full cost of this endeavor will not be known.
David Roberts
Well, I want to talk about the current situation, but just briefly at the beginning, let's look a little bit at history. So I wonder what you think are sort of the kind of the landmarks on the road to the current situation. So for instance, tell us a little bit about when the press, the mainstream press as the enemy, became a popular thing on the right. That's sort of the first and then the second is like, what are the sort of markers of the growth of their own media apparatus? How did we get here?
Dan Pfeiffer
Sure, there had been a bubbling sentiment of conservative anti-press sentiment dating back to the New Deal and FDR and Democrats sort of dominating the conversation. But it became a political strategy, primarily in Barry Goldwater's 1964 campaign. He hammered the press, he hammered Eastern elites. He handed out pins to the press on the press planes, calling them members of the Eastern establishment. The press as enemy became an explanation to the right, themselves and their voters why they kept losing elections. It wasn't that their policies were bad. It wasn't that they were unpopular. It wasn't that their rhetoric wasn't good.
It was that the press hated them. Nixon took that into hyperdrive because of his own set of insecurities and grievances. And even before Watergate, like in the course of the Nixon administration, there was real thoughts on how you go about destroying the press. Richard Nixon had his enemies list, which included members of the press. He also explored with Roger Ailes and some of his other aides very specific forerunners, the Fox News. In terms of state sponsored propaganda, there was an effort where they explored creating local news pieces created by the White House that would then be under a sort of undercover that would be sent to local news stations.
There was an effort to fund a pro-Vietnam War documentary to push back against the Pentagon Papers and other efforts out there. And then when the press, in the common "tell all the President's men" telling of what happened, took down Nixon, that became sort of the cause celeb in the right. "The press is out to get us. The press is out to get us." Reagan took that in the 80s. Getting rid of the Fairness Doctrine as a part of it was part of his campaign.
David Roberts
One question about that, about the Fairness Doctrine thing, I'm curious what sort of the public versus private justifications for that were, like, did Reagan and his people consciously do that in order to bolster right wing voices or was there some sincere ideological motivation back there somewhere?
Dan Pfeiffer
I think there was probably some sincere ideological motivation, but the primary driving factor, as I understand the history, was the fact that the Fairness Doctrine was putting downward pressure on efforts to have an emerging right wing radio ecosystem. And that in order to have that, every time they kept trying to move towards local stations, kept trying to move towards sort of the forerunners to Rush Limbaugh, there would be pressure from the FCC for equal time, et cetera. And so ending the Fairness Doctrine basically created the environment by which right-wing radio could thrive. Which created the environment by which Fox News could thrive.
The idea that the FCC and the Fairness actor and the big government were preventing conservative media was one of the motivating factors among grassroots activists that pushed Reagan to do it. And then there are a couple of moments in time where the idea of aggressive Republican Party adjacent media comes from. And I use that to distinguish between ideological media like Human Events and the Weekly Standard and sort of National Review, of which we have examples in the pre-Trump era on the right and the left, right sort of real magazines. It's pushing the party agenda, left or right, depending.
And that's obviously Roger Ailes recognizing that the power was in the press and so get partnering with Rupert Murdoch to start Fox News. Fox News becomes very, very powerful over the course of time finds a real market. And then there are two other moments that I think are incredibly significant. One is right after the 2012 election, there was a view pushed primarily by Steve Bannon that the right is losing the messaging wars and they need to double and triple down in the ability to push the political conversation in their direction. Their direction. And his view was cultural wars, immigration, et cetera.
And that leads to Breitbart, The Daily Caller, Free Beacon with real investment from a new set of, quote unquote, "Rupert Murdochs," like the Mercers who help start Breitbart, or take Breitbart from its previous version to the Steve Bannon pro-Trump version. You have Foster Freeze, who gives money to Tucker Carlson to start The Daily Caller. And then the moment that really sort of takes that, which would be in Supercharges, is Facebook really hits a tipping point in around 2014 where its reach, the news feed and the algorithm all sort of combine with these new right wing digital outlets to move the political conversation powerfully towards right wing extremist messaging. And that takes off and then that sort of ends in Trump, and then Trump takes the whole thing to another level from 2016 on.
David Roberts
I remember, even back in the day, it's sort of early, after the emergence of Fox, the situation it created, which persists to this day in mainstream sort of especially like mainstream cable news, is you have this weird form. Of balance now, where the balance is on one side, explicit ideological right wing propaganda media, and then the other side, and I'm air quoting here, is just a couple of mainstream journalists from like the New York Times or whatever. Mainstream journalists who are scrupulously, as always, attempting to appear objective and unbiased. And that's just like a bizarre form of balance, a bizarre way of drawing two sides that always struck me as surreal but now is just absolutely bog standard and no one blinks at it.
That's what balance basically means now, on like a Sunday show.
Dan Pfeiffer
That's exactly right. The right has so convinced the media itself that it is left that in order to balance itself, it must seek out a right-wing voice. Like you mentioned the idea of the Sunday shows and that is often the lineup, particularly Meet the Press is a Republican, a Democrat, some journalists and a member of the conservative media. And then Facebook took this to another level when they started putting in trusted news sources in order to, quote unquote, "balance CNN and the New York Times," they had to have Breitbart and Fox or The Daily Caller or whatever it is.
And it is like this I think this is one of Roger Ailes's great insights because he is someone who came from he was in media, was a political consultant, went back to media as he understood how to exploit the cultures the mores and the insecurities of the press in a way to push conservative messaging. And he knew that they were incredibly self conscious about liberal bias because many of them are personally liberal. They may live in New York or they may live in Los Angeles and then use it simply to bludgeon them into becoming a vehicle for pushing additional right wing messaging. I mean, it must have been Roger Ailes's dream.
Like, he could not believe how successful his endeavor was that after Barack Obama was elected, the New York Times assigned an editor to monitor Fox for story ideas. That The Washington Post executive ... that is a real thing. The Washington Post executive editor at the time, Marcus Brauchli, said that he wanted his paper to spend more time paying attention to Fox, to learn more. In his wildest dreams, when he started thinking about Fox, in the idea of Fox, in the 70s and 80s, the idea that his hated New York Times would be so cowed by him that they would sign an editor to watch his network in order to hold a Democratic president accountable, it must have been beyond his wildest dreams.
David Roberts
It's wild. It's been one of the wildest things about the whole process is the extent to which explicit ideological right wing media has been protected at every stage by the very establishment that it is devoted to destroying. It's so surreal and one of the most infuriating chapters of the last, actually. It's more than a decade ago. I'm revealing my age here, but that you cover in your book is Obama came in, you all came in with Obama. And by that point, I mean, it's pretty obvious from the jump, I think. But certainly by the time Obama took office, it's just super obvious that one of these things is not like the others.
Right? That Fox is not just another objective news network, that it's very explicitly devoted to taking Obama down, it's devoted to the Republican Party. Seems very obvious, and I'm sure seemed quite obvious to you inside the White House. But then you all consciously decided to push back on it and just reaped a shitstorm not from the right wing media, but from its defenders in the mainstream media. That drives me mad to this day. I can only imagine what it was like from the inside.
Dan Pfeiffer
I was one of the people in the White House that were in the book who pushed to go aggressively against Fox. And my mistake, I guess three mistakes. One is misunderstanding the nature of it's, sort of like the NATO defense pack among journalists, that an attack on one is attack on us all. So that's mistake one is that we weren't just fighting, we're going to fight Fox. We're going to end up fighting everyone. And that's not worth our time and energy and not a fight you're going to win. The second, I think, was in sort of in our tactics.
We made some mistakes, and when we got into their access, that's where the press, I think to some extent understandably comes to everyone's defense because it's not whether we're going to do interviews with them or not. It's not whether we're going to acknowledge them or not. It's whether they get to show up and participate in sort of communal activities which they pay for.
David Roberts
Right.
Dan Pfeiffer
And then the third was that Fox would see it in their this part we sort of understood, but would see it in their interest too. Right. Obviously our attack on them became proof to their base that they were doing what they said. And now in situations like that, we can both win. Because as painful as that whole battle was, it did have at least I think and then maybe this is just me justifying my own decisions, a moderately moderating impact on how much the press was following Fox. It still obviously was a problem, but there was less like we really were in those first years of the White House would be like Glenn Beck segment.
Phone call from Politico about Glenn Beck segment. Right. And that people created at least a little bit of more self conscious echoing of Fox before they came to us. But these are small victories.
David Roberts
Yeah. And it still begs the larger question, which is why it was just super clear for me, as an outside observer looking at the media landscape, that Fox is not like other news, other news stations. It's very clear they're doing a different thing. And it just begs the question of why other journalists couldn't acknowledge that or couldn't see it or weren't. And this is what I always wonder, why they weren't pissed off about it. If you're a real journalist and you really care and you're dealing with fact checkers and editors and you're having to confirm things with two sources and et cetera, and then these people come along and just sort of, like, call themselves a news network, even though it's, like, 90% bloviating opinion and it's full of falsehoods and it's full of b******t.
And they're calling themselves the same thing you're calling yourself. Where's the professional pride? Why are journalists not mad about Fox? Why instead are they defending and welcoming it? Have you ever figured that out?
Dan Pfeiffer
Yeah, I think there are a couple reasons for it. Part of it is this sort of self conscious liberal bias where it's like, yeah, we are kind of liberal. Maybe it's not bad if someone balances out in the sense that this view that maybe Fox is a center right journalism entity during the day at least, as opposed to a propaganda operation. The second one is basically, up until 2012 or so, the people that Fox hired to be campaign reporters or White House reporters, they almost operated as intermediaries between the Fox higher ups and the people they were covering.
And it's a pretty like people who had been at other entities and were well respected by their colleagues, like Major Garrett, Carl Cameron, and we would have conversations, I'm not going to out specific conversations with people. A lot of the people who would cover us, they'd come to you and say, look, we'd sort of kind of know this is b******t, what's your complaint? And they'll try to serve it as intermediary. So I can see in a world in which I'm not defending this, but just understanding sort of the fraternity or culture among journalism, is it's like we respect Major Garrett or we respect Carl Cameron, and he is one of us and worked with one of us.
And then it began to take a transition with the sorts of people those sorts of people started leaving the network and going to other things and you end up with other people like Ed Henry or Peter Doocy or others who are you had to be all in on the scam or all in the propaganda to be there after a while. So it's like, I think it was a not a deeply naive approach from a lot of the press. It was born of subconscious liberal bias and some complete cockiness in their position in the political firmament that like, yeah, they attack us, but we are the fourth estate. We exist.
We will forever be trusted and important. And before long that very, very they didn't realize they were. I often sometimes joke that the, you know, Fox and Roger Ailes in the right declared war on the press, and the press covered that war instead of participated in it.
David Roberts
Let's turn to real quickly to Facebook, because one of the more disheartening episodes the last few years so many disheartening episodes, but one of them is I sort of came into political consciousness in the early 2000s and watched as the right wing media sort of chipped away at mainstream media. Just accused it of bias over decades, even before the 2000s, like you say, starting back in the 70s. Just accused it of bias. Banged on it. Banged on it with these critiques, slowly wore it down until it sort of submitted to being polluted and ending up in this bizarre two sides objective versus right wing situation.
But at least it took a while to bring the media down. Then along comes Facebook. The same exact arguments, the same exact disingenuous arguments, the same accusations of bias, the same whining and grievance, the same right-wing playing the refs thing came out again, except Facebook resisted it for all of like a few months and crumbled in just spectacular total fashion almost immediately. So is the explanation for that that tech-guys are even more naive about the ways of the political world than journalists are? Or is the right interpretation more cynical? Just that these guys just wanted to buddy up to power and never had any pretensions of journalistic integrity in the first place?
Dan Pfeiffer
I don't know that anyone at Facebook had any intentions towards integrity at any point. I don't think. That wasn't the I think I have always understood Mark Zuckerberg to be an entirely amoral person who stumbles into immorality when he's not paying attention. And so I think the answer to your question is both. So in the pre-Trump election, there was a inside Facebook like, deeply, deeply, deeply naive people about how politics works. So the moment that I think is notable in the pre-Trump period that leads to things going really bad in the Trump period is right around the time that Democrats are about to win the election.
Now, the leadership at Facebook, whether it's Zuckerberg or Sheryl Sandberg, has become relatively they're well connected with Democrats in Washington, either via Nancy Pelosi or through President Obama. I mean, Chris Hughes, who was one of the original founders of Facebook, worked on the Obama campaign in the early days of Facebook. They had plenty of connections among Democrats, as a lot of tech companies would do, from California would do, right? And then right when the Republicans are starting to control the House, they're starting to build up their government affairs operation because now they're a real company, and they're going to start bumping into the regulatory state.
And Republicans are coming into Congress, and they figure, we have the Democratic side figured up. We can get people on the phone, so we need to hire Republicans. So they hired Joel Kaplan, who was George W. Bush's Chief of Staff, had worked in the Office of Management and Budget. Incredibly well-respected, well-liked, moderate-ish Republican like, not a Tea Party Republican. That was sort of the MAGA version of 2010. They hire him, and he's the only Republican of note in the company. So his word is like, he is the only one who if there's a question about product or marketing, there are lots of people there who have opinions on it.
No one has an opinion on how to deal with Republicans other than Joel Kaplan.
David Roberts
He's the Republican whisperer.
Dan Pfeiffer
Yeah, he may be the only one that they even know, right? And so he starts giving them advice, and so they're like giving money to Republicans and doing meetings and all of that. But this first becomes a real issue in 2016 when this fake scandal emerges that suggests that Facebook is biased against conservatives and what they put on their trending news page and other Republicans yell. Then Joel Kaplan sort of puts together a plan that causes them to, even though they essentially did nothing wrong to apologize for it, accommodate these Republicans. Zuckerberg begins his outreach program.
He dines with Tucker Carlson and all these people and some well meaning conservatives like S.E. Cupp and some other people. It's not all just like proto MAGA types. It's some conservatives in good standing, even if we disagree with them on a lot of issues. And then Trump wins. And this is where I think it takes the transition from sort of self conscious, naive liberal bias to we got to make money. And so there's fear of Trump using the power of the state against them. Republicans control all the levers of power in Congress. They're threatening all sorts of things around overturning Section 230, which gives them legal immunity from things published on their page.
And the other thing that's important to know about Facebook is the Facebook audience is much more Republican than any other social media company. Twitter is overwhelmingly Democrat. The Facebook audience is older people, trans-Republican. And so they have a challenge. They're setting an inside game of being seen as being able to influence a process and prevent and be able to keep making gobs of money without interference from the Trump administration. And then there is the problem of if Trump turns on them, that would affect their bottom line because people will stop using the platform. They'd already lost a bunch of liberals over Cambridge Analytic and all these other things.
And so if MAGA fans, Trump fans, started deleting, "hashtag deleting Facebook," that was going to be a real problem. So they were trying to navigate the situation where they were not upsetting. Their customer base was sort of in the old Michael Jordan apocryphal quote, apparently Republicans use Facebook too, or even may use Facebook more. So there was a fear about losing those people. So it is a combination of ignorance and avarice, I think, that got them in this position.
David Roberts
I want to come back to their sort of unsolvable problem at the end because I think it's kind of the root of everything. But first, let's get to the present day. So one of the most, I think, key points you make in the book, and it's a point I have been trying to make again and again and again for years, to no effect, is that everybody on the left seems convinced that the left has a messaging problem. And what you point out is that the problem is not messaging. The problem is megaphone. The problem is not the words we're saying what we're saying.
The problem is the left simply does not have the capacity to get its words into its voters ears in a direct way. We don't have the big machine that the right has built that we're just discussing. But nonetheless, you can say that over and over again. And it proves incredibly difficult to dissuade average people on the left from obsessing over words, magic words. One of that you describe in the book being at these high dollar fundraisers in your suit, kind of hiding over in the corner, trying not to talk to anyone, and these rich people who hold the fundraisers finding you and buttonholing you so they can tell you their thoughts about messaging.
And I have been at those fundraisers and I have talked to those people, and it was so vivid to me that I was getting beads of sweat on my forehead reading about that. I can't tell you how much sympathy I have for you being forced to listen to overconfident old rich white guy telling you how dems should talk, like the phrases that will magically make things work better. And of course, I'm in climate change. The first thing everybody knows about climate change is that environmentalists are talking about it wrong and instead should use this set of magic phrases which would open up the politics.
It's really hard to dissuade people from that. But one of the points you make, which I thought was good, is if it came down to the quality of messaging and messengers, then how are these people winning? Look at these people on the right. Look at what they're saying. Don't over 3D-chess yourself into thinking that they're brilliant. They are in fact dumb and sound dumb. They're not good at messaging.
Dan Pfeiffer
That's right. As I have made this point over the years, and then particularly in the context of this book, some people read my focus on the megaphone problem as an endorsement of every message the Democrats have ever had. And of course, look, I would stipulate our message could always be better, right? Strictly congressional messaging is inherently bad because you need anything that you need 50 Democrats to sign off on. And one of those Democrats is Bernie Sanders and one is Joe Manchin. Of course it's not going to be like super sharp, right? It's lowest common denominator strategizing.
I worked in Senate leadership for a time. We went through that, though. In my world, it was Bernie Sanders and Ben Nelson. Or my world or Bernie Sanders and Joe Lieberman. And so it was very challenging. And I think Democrats have a little bit of this was described to me once by many, many years ago, back when Bush was president, that Democrats have a slot machine addiction, which is we're just hoping to pull the lever and get lucky on one thing as opposed to actually doing the work. Right. It speaks to our obsession around messaging, which is we can just come up with our bigger government, less smaller government, less taxes or ...
David Roberts
Better together.
Dan Pfeiffer
Yeah. Or MAGA. If we could just find one bumper sticker slogan, it would solve all of our problems. Or it also speaks to, and I think this has changed a lot in the last four or five years, our obsession with presidential elections, right? Presidential elections, if you can just they're exciting, they're sexy, they only happen every four years. It's a substitute for the hard work of building bottom up progressive power through candidate recruitment, candidate training, state legislative races, all of those things. And so we're constantly looking for shortcuts. And I think our messaging obsession is a shortcut to thinking if we just figure out this one magic zinger, we will solve all of our problems.
And that's just simply if we come up with it, no one's going to hear it. And I obviously wrote this book about the megaphone, both their megaphone and our lack of one. You could write another book about the messaging, but I felt like we have a gazillion people working on the words and not enough people working on the megaphone. So I wanted to try to balance the scales in terms of what the focus was on.
David Roberts
I can't tell you how many classes of graduate students I've talked to, all of whom are busy-beavering away doing little experiments, trying different combination of words to see how people react in focus groups, looking for the magic combination of words. And I just want to tell them, like, so much of this is wasted effort.
Dan Pfeiffer
Yeah.
David Roberts
Problem is the friggin' West Wing view of politics, because in West Wing, Bartlett solved every problem by pulling out the magic words, by having the magic speech by persuading people. And that's just like a very, I think, for liberals. Liberals are educated over-educated. Some might say love words. They love the idea of reasoned persuasion. And it's very self-flattering to think that that's what politics runs on, right? Because that's what you're good at and that's what you know. So it's just real easy to think that that's the engine of politics. But of course, as I tell people who come along and say, well, why don't you talk about climate change as a national security problem?
It's like, do you think no one's ever said that I can send you 500 white papers. Like, people have been saying that until they're blue in the face for years. It just doesn't go anywhere. It doesn't get out anywhere because we don't have the mechanisms. We just shout it out into the mainstream media and hope that it filters down through the mainstream media to people, and that is not what happens. So I want to talk about building this megaphone, but first, just the most depressing realization I ever had about climate change is when the IPCC report came out and said, we got about ten years.
Not 'til the Earth ends or not 'til it's too late, all this b******t, but we got about ten years to turn the ship around before we cross these thresholds that are going to be devastating. And when you hear it like that, you're like, oh, ten years? Well, if we have to solve it in ten years, that means we got to solve it with these people that we've got now, like, these people and these institutions, which is just like, "wah, wah, wah" So how big of a problem is the fact that democratic leadership, by and large, is old AF and have their, you know, their thoughts on messaging were formed not even by the Internet, but, like, by TV coming along, you know what I mean?
Dan Pfeiffer
Right.
David Roberts
So do you just work grassroots up around them? Do you persuade them? Have you been able to persuade any of them to get a clue on this? Or like, what do you do about this lump of. Gerontocratic leadership that is on top of the party.
Dan Pfeiffer
My theory of politics has been that people's understanding of the media environment is frozen in amber from the time in which they entered national politics. And so that was a huge advantage for Barack Obama in 2008, was he was a person who had campaigned and come up in politics in the age of the internet, right? You sort of can divide the world into time periods. There's the TV period from 1960 on. There's the cable TV period, which starts in the then the Internet really starts in the early two thousand s. And that goes in my mind up until 2014, which I think is the Facebook-Twitter period of campaigning.
But so we have a bunch of people who are incredibly skilled leaders at certain aspects of their job, like Nancy Pelosi is, I think, without a doubt the greatest legislative leader in American history. She has done incredible work over a very long period of time. And she is in that role because she's the best vote counter, right? Chuck Schumer is in that role because he's a great vote counter. Joe Biden was, I believe, probably the only Democrat who could have won that election. But his skill set is not getting attention for himself. He was a perfect person to run against Trump.
But in this day and age, what matters more than anything else is can you get people to hear what you're saying? And that means you have to change how you say it, when you say it, whom you say it to, and all of that. And I think that's very challenging for this group of people. The positives of it, I think, are that I really have felt in the larger progressive universe, including the progressive donor community, that in the last two years, since 2020, since I think the closeness of that Trump election of Trump almost winning that race, and then the power of the big lie scared a lot of people into realizing that we have to narrow the media gap.
And you're seeing more investment from democratic donors into entities that are trying to solve that problem, either media companies or content factories and things like that. So there is some positive and there are among ... there was a group of us, I wasn't the only one, but sort of by far from the only one. There are a group of people after 2016 who were making the round saying this was the challenge. And there were all ... a gazillion meetings after the election between people in politics, old Obama people, silicon — I live out in the Bay Area — Silicon Valley people, like rich people.
Holy s**t, what happened? How do we fix this problem? And there were massive gaps all across the board in the infrastructure, right? We had a data problem, we had an organizing problem. We didn't have the organizations to capture the huge wave of resistance that was coming in. Who's working on local stuff, all of that and the messaging thing often fell by the wayside for a whole host of reasons that we can talk about that has shifted. And there are even like you have to look for small victories, I think. But I've seen some things. I know the people in the Biden White House, I worked with lots of them at all levels.
This is certainly not Joe Biden's natural skill set is communicating in this environment. And we knew that going in. We knew that when we nominated him. We knew that when we elected him. The people around him are pushing and working on lots of things and there are some small things that I think are really positive. Like I took note of Biden doing some progressive media interviews. Like with Brian Tyler Cohen and Heather Cox Richardson. There are some efforts happening out there. The DNC just launched a really, I think, potentially game changing program if they can scale it, where people can download an app that gives them content to share to their networks, whether it's what we're trying to do at Crooked Mmedia, whether it's the stuff that you're doing and other people Midas Touch, Demcast, there are more perfect union.
There are lots of out there. Like we have a long way to go. But I've seen so much more focus and investment on trying to solve this problem in the last couple of years than I have in the full balance of my career in politics before it.
David Roberts
One of the things that struck me as I was reading your book is the media and communications environment has changed so fundamentally in the last ten years that it has basically rendered the skill sets of the Democratic consultant class anachronistic. They just have a bunch of skills now and talents that no longer matter. And this was rendered vivid when James Carville goes on TV or actually was in Vox. He went on Vox and he's complaining about how Democrats are woke, how novel James, and says, we need to get this other message out there, so we need to start calling cable bookers and writing op eds to get this message out there.
And I just thought, my God, how revealing is that, that when you think about how to get a message out there, your first thought is calling cable bookers and getting op eds placed in regional newspapers. That is just like some grandpa s**t. But that's the skill set that most of the consultant class has. And if you are talking about pivoting to a completely new environment, you are going to render a lot of those people useless and presumably they don't want to be useless. So what's your sense of how much resistance there is from the people who learned the old way, the old way of press management?
Dan Pfeiffer
There definitely is some level of resistance. There has been over the course of my time in politics, mostly the same set of people making television ads for presidential campaigns, and the dominance of broadcast linear television advertising as a communications medium in presidential elections. In particular, the value of an ad, television ad in a highly polarized environment where an election is decided by 40,000 people is probably pretty small. It's like a historically inefficient way to communicate with people. I think it's slightly different in races where the candidates don't have 100% name ID. And I mean, this is getting sort of nerdy, but the way Facebook has changed its political advertising policies, you're sort of being pushed back in some ways to the old world.
I think there is resistance. There's a sense, I think, that the whole consultant class is corrupt and this is all about making money. And there are certainly some people who on both parties who are not as ethical as everyone else. But for the vast part at least, the consultants I've worked with, they want to win. They want to win because they're Democrats, they care about the country. And also winning elections is better for business than losing elections. And most are pretty open to some new ways of doing things. It is sometimes hard because the candidates are less so because they are from an old world.
They want their race this way, some of them, just because the way demographics have changed, haven't had a tough race in a very long time and so they're sort of operating in the way they were thinking. If you're looking for positives in this, the number of people with digital organizing and communications experience who are running campaigns, who have the actual campaign manager title and are making budgetary decisions, has gone way up. That's actually what most campaigns that I talk to, that's what they look for first. Someone who is digitally savvy and understands analytics, performance, measurement of communications and all of that.
So there is some positive stuff there. The hard part is like, and I argue this in the book, is you have to entirely change the apparatus of how campaigns are structured to fully maximize a new way of communicating. And that is a hard thing to get anyone to wrap their mind around. And one of the challenges we had in this presidential election, this past one in 2020, was the old way of doing ... of how you communicate, where 99% of your communications is focused around press management is not a terrible way to win a primary. The Democratic primary electorate is the highest percentage consumer of political media and so maximizing your press coverage and managing your press narratives was a huge part of those campaigns.
So there wasn't an incentive to radically rebuild the model for the general election. And then when Biden won the nomination, he was probably the person least likely to do it, just given his experience. But he did hire Jen O'Malley Dillon as his campaign manager, someone who has thought as deeply about these issues as anyone I know in the party. And they did a lot of things sort of under the radar in terms of how they communicated strictly towards the end. But making those changes in a pandemic when the headquarters shuts down, whatever it was, seven days after you win the nomination, and the day your new campaign manager arrives at the office makes it very hard under all scenarios.
And so I think that there are some good things happening, but change is always hard, and change is particularly hard in the White House because of the way it's set up.
David Roberts
Let's talk about, then, the megaphone. You say it in your book. I've said it a million times. It seems so obvious to me that it's baffling, that it needs saying over and over again. But the right has this giant machine whereby they can directly channel their message to their voters and get all their voters on the same page. So, for instance, if the left comes out with a Green New Deal on the left, they introduce the Green New Deal at a press conference and then mainstream reporters write it up. And the left just hopes that the spirit and the details of the thing survive those write ups and make it somehow to left voters.
Whereas on the right you're like, oh, here's a new thing. What do I think about it? Well, every one of a dozen radio stations and web pages and TV shows are telling you exactly what you think about it and what all the other people on the right think about it. So whether it's AOC debuting on the scene, or the Green New Deal debuting on the scene or what have you, like the left fumbles around with it, but the right swings around in opposition to it immediately and in lockstep because they have this megaphone. So the left needs something like a megaphone.
But there are issues around that that people on the left struggle with, and I think of two in particular. One is whether it can find an audience. So one of the things you say in your book is that obviously the left's megaphone, the left needs to tell the truth, right, because trust is much more important on the left than it is on the right for a variety of reasons. We need people to trust government for the government to do things. We need to be persuading people who are not our natural ideological allies, people in the mushy Center.
So we need trust. So we need to tell the truth, and we need to be transparent about where we're coming from and sort of what our priors are. But problem number one here is, I feel like one of the things we've learned from this, our miserable current media environment, is just that calm, honest transparency doesn't necessarily get clicks. It certainly doesn't get as many clicks as being a provocative a*****e. So the first question is just if such a thing happened, if the Democrats created something like this and started calmly explaining their positions in all their sort of truth and nuance.
Why do we think that anyone would consume it? Do you think there's a demand for that kind of thing?
Dan Pfeiffer
This is maybe a sad statement on the world, but I don't think there is a demand for nuance. Calm nuance is not something if you want calm nuance you can listen to NPR or read the New York Times if that's what you want. The calm nuance market exists and it's doing fine, but it's not necessarily helping Democrats and it's not the job of the people in the calm nuanced market to help us.
David Roberts
Right?
Dan Pfeiffer
So I think a couple of things about this. One is I would say one stipulation is that there are two economic models for media, right? And I use I define media broadly. There is subscription model and I think there are people who've indicated they will pay for calm nuance or in depth reporting or policy analysis. There are people who will pay for that. And then there is digital advertising. And digital advertising is a click-driven model and those clicks often come through Facebook. So you are a prisoner of the Facebook algorithm. Now we know what the Facebook algorithm values, which is on a daily basis.
It's Candace Owens, Ben Shapiro, and Dan Bongino who dominate Facebook in terms of engagement and posts that perform, right? And so in the media environment which exists, you have to find ways to get attention. You have to be loud. You often have to be oppositional just.
David Roberts
To sort of put a pin or an exclamation point on this. People hating on you and yelling at you counts as engagement. So you can be the most hated post in the world and it could still be incredibly successful.
Dan Pfeiffer
Yes, that is the most important thing for anyone to understand and I write a chapter about this in the book, just is that weaponizing liberal anger is one of the primary right wing media strategies, which is they want like in the sort of and this is a real Steve Bannon project, the Breitbart headlines. There's one I don't remember what's topic, but something like "Birth Control Makes Women Ugly" or something. There is all these horrible things that they say and they're specifically trying to trigger liberals into expressing their anger about the article online because Facebook counts your angry comment, your thumbs down emoji just like it counts a thumbs up emoji and therefore we are inadvertently spreading their content all over the place. So what do progressives do?
We have to be willing to anger the right. You have to be loud, you have to be clear. You have to be like I named the book "How Fox, Facebook and the MAGA Media are Destroying America" as almost a model for the sort of the very direct, clear language you have to use to get attention. If it had been "How Fox Facebook and the MAGA Media are Undermining Democracy." That is not as clickable, right? That is the world we live in. And you have to be direct in how you do it now. Humor, so there are a couple of things about how this works in a progressive media ecosystem.
One is being clear, indirect, and authentic and offering some differentiation between just more liberal New York Times, right? It has to feel like authentic. The second is it has to be entertaining and engaging. And that can be funny, that can be provocative, whatever that is. But I talk about this in the book. But it's like I watch these Trump rallies even now, and obviously there's no place in the world I would want to be less than a Trump rally, especially when you see the press going live from the parking lot or whatever. Those people I don't think it's a great statement in America those people are having a blast.
David Roberts
Yes, they're very engaged. They look like dead audiences. That's what it reminds me of over and over again.
Dan Pfeiffer
Yeah, there's all these merchants in the parking lot selling weird, oftentimes racist chuchkis. There are people wearing funny shirts. They're having a blast.
David Roberts
And these are people who have never had a Grateful Dead.
Dan Pfeiffer
Yes.
David Roberts
You know what I mean? Or a fish. Like they have never had a sort of cultural occasion to do something like a traveling festival like this. So for lots of them, it's like you can tell it's really life changing for them.
Dan Pfeiffer
Yeah, it's like the bizarro version of Obama rallies in '08, very similar vibe. People wanted to like if it was in your town, you didn't want to miss it. And we were able to bring a lot and I think Trump succeeded from this as well, bring a lot of people into the process who just wanted to check it out because everyone was talking about it. And I think that that is like as I wrote in the book, we are trying to engage people who don't like to engage in politics. Our math depends on new people or people who've checked out the process.
David Roberts
Right?
Dan Pfeiffer
And so we got to make it fun. Like I tell the story, John Lovett tells the story all the time in my pocket puzzle. America co host that back when he was a speechwriter for Senator, then Senator Hillary Clinton. They had written a big climate change speech that she was going to give. This must have been like in six or seven or something, even before she ran for President. And Lovett had worked on the speech and like they often do with the big speech, they had shared it with President Clinton. And like at two in the morning, love its time, because I think President Clinton was in Vegas.
He gets a call from the A traveling with Clinton with all of Clinton's notes. And Clinton's big takeaway is, you got to make solving our climate problems seem like an adventure that people want to engage in, that it's going to be huge, joyous, important work that you're going to want to be a part of. And we have to think about politics of it in progressive media is this is going to be something that is fulfilling and even fun and entertaining and you're going to want to be a part of. And if we're just trying to and the Republicans don't have to do it that way.
Their math means they can just make people angry and get them to turn out. We have to do something a little more complicated, and our media has to reflect that.
David Roberts
But you were saying earlier you have to be provocative. You have to have some kind of hook. But it's not just that you have to be provocative on step one. It's that when you're provocative and then you get scolded by the right and probably by some well meaning, goo-goo centrist Democrat, you have to not back down, right? You have to stick with your guns. And this is an intangible that I feel like it just gets undercounted in terms of what makes people want to you're talking about making it seem like a fun adventure, making it seem like a festival, like a cultural event, like something you want to be part of.
Part of that, I think, is people are attracted to people who have the courage of their convictions, and it's just not I just don't think it's lost on the public that over and over and over again you see dems or people on the left backing down in the face of scolding and blowback and apologizing. I mean, this whole cycle of defund the police is just like a paradigmatic example, right? You got, like, three leftists say, defund the police. The right wi