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Unfiltered Politics and the Power of Podcasts

• Michele McAloon

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Is the rise of new media reshaping the future of politics?" Join me, Michelle McElhune, as I sit down with Bradley Devlin, politics editor of the Daily Signal and the voice behind the new podcast, Signal Sit Down. Together, we dissect the evolving landscape of media bias, drawing parallels between the decentralized power structures in Congress and the historical breakdown of the Holy Roman Empire. With Trump's recent election victory, we discuss how genuine, unfiltered conversations can offer a fresh take on political dynamics that mainstream outlets often overlook.

In our discussion, we uncover how alternative media, especially podcasts, have transformed political campaigns, allowing figures like Trump to engage with audiences outside traditional channels. As corporate media grapples with this shift, we explore the potential risks and rewards of trading old media power structures for new ones dominated by social media platforms. By reflecting on the media's role during Nixon's era and its introspection—or lack thereof—since the 2016 elections, we highlight the need for a balanced media diet to truly understand the complexities of today's world.

Tune in as Bradley introduces his podcast, "The Signal Sit Down," which promises to bring a conservative perspective to light in a landscape crowded with noise. As we anticipate future episodes, the spotlight will be on whether corporate or alternative media will emerge more influential post-election. Our conversation sets the stage for a deeper analysis of the media's credibility and its crucial role in shaping public perception in the modern political arena.

Speaker 1:

You're listening to Crossword, where cultural clues lead to the truth of the word, and my name is Michelle McElhune, your host, and I sit down with Bradley Devlin of a brand new podcast, host of a brand new podcast called the Signal Sit Down where he talks about the media and we talk about the media in relationship to this election. Now it's November 6th, the day after the election, and Trump has won, the Republicans have overwhelmingly won, and kind of the autopsy a part of this election cycle has to be on the role of the liberal media and probably the right-wing media too, but it was definitely the liberal media influencing this election or how they did not influence this election. And there's a lot of new media sources that have come up in this election cycle, so hopefully we'll get to talk to some more of those people that are participating in new forms of getting the news out, new forms of media that are not part of the legacy media. I hope you enjoy the podcast. Thank you, like and subscribe. You can always find me at bookcluescom it's my website or Michelle McElhune1 on X. Or Michelle McElhune1 on Truth Social.

Speaker 1:

Thank you, welcome to Crossword, where cultural clues lead to the truth of the word, and my name is Michelle McElhoun, your host, and today we have a really unique opportunity to talk to a fairly young man who is doing media in Washington DC. In Washington DC, he has a brand new podcast out and I think is a part of a trend of more independent voice in the media world. His name is Bradley Devlin. He is politics editor of the Daily Signal and he does. He has a brand new podcast that just started in the beginning of October, the Signal. Sit Down, bradley. Welcome to the show. We're looking forward to talk to you about media bias and how it has played out in this election. But first I have to ask you why did you decide to launch your podcast in October, prior to the election? What was your motivation for doing that?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I moved over to the Daily Signal in August and this was a show that I had wanted to put together for quite a long time, and the Daily Signal gave me the resources and the opportunity to do just that. If you look at the conservative media apparatus, there's not a lot of conservative outlets that cover the hill in a way that captures both the day-to-day fights and also the larger metanarratives. And when we talk about metanarratives, we're not just talking about the letter that Senator Rubio sends to the NIH about suppressing scientific studies on puberty blockers. What I want is actually to say hey, matt Gaetz and Kevin McCarthy don't get along. Clearly, what's behind that?

Speaker 2:

How are those disagreements inside the Republican conference shifting the way that business is done in Washington? You no longer have an empowered speaker, or an empowered Senate minority or majority leader, for that matter, right, because Mitch McConnell at this point is a lame duck leader. And so what is it turning into? And you can kind of look at these individual players as if you look at a geopolitical landscape, right, in the Cold War we had bipolarity, we had the Soviet Union and we had the United States, and maybe you could consider the early aughts and the 20-teens as an era of bipolarity in Congress, where you have a very strong speaker in Nancy Pelosi or opposite John Boehner or opposite Paul Ryan, and you have a very strong Republican leader in Senator Mitch McConnell, across from Harry Reid or across from Chuck Schumer. And as we see these different personalities and structures shifting within Congress, what you get is a more decentralized.

Speaker 2:

If you've ever seen a map of the Holy Roman Empire as it's breaking down right, there's like a zillion different little fiefdoms and that's kind of what Congress is, and so for me I wanted to come in and say, okay, the left does this quite well. They're able to connect the congressional like the day-to-day fights in Congress to larger metanarratives, and when the right and conservatives don't present their own metanarratives of what's happening in Congress or in Washington DC, we're constantly playing catch up or fact checking, quote unquote the left's narrative on whatever's happening in Washington from the 10,000 foot level. That so Political Playbook has a podcast that's kind of similar but comes at it obviously from a more centrist or center-left bent, and my podcast, especially starting before the election. It was okay. Not only do we have a very consequential election for the presidency, we're going to be replacing the Senate majority leader, the Speaker of the House. His future is unknown, and so let's get some of the people's representatives to sit down and talk for an hour in a comfortable studio.

Speaker 2:

Your whole mission is to get these people comfortable and get them talking, and the more casual the conversation sometimes, the better material you'll get, because they're being candid with you. You're not in an adversarial interview saying like, or do you support the kids in cages, and then instantly, you're just going to get a canned political response. What I want is I want to approach people with a sense of Christian charity, because that's what I'm called to be as a Christian, and in that way you get to have more genuine conversations. So that's why it kind of started before the election and I think the show after the election you know this next episode coming out tomorrow it's going to be all about the possible things, that the things that could possibly go wrong with the election, and then, when we return after a week break, we're going to be talking about what does President-elect Trump need to do in transition to hit the ground running come January 20th?

Speaker 1:

You know, Bradley, your explanation is probably one of the first that I've heard that actually sort of goes into the nitty gritty of what needs to be reported from a conservative angle. Why do you think it has not?

Speaker 2:

happened until now, until someone like you why are you could say, in the past 70 years, but really especially, I think, in the past 30 years, with the rise of digital media? And this sounds like a materialist, marxist argument. I think there's something true at its core. Think about it this way, michelle so, with government licensing for major media corporations, it inherently is an oligopoly. Because you have economies of scale, right, like it's very difficult to have a TV network, it's very difficult to have a major paper. Why? Because you need, like, a major urban area and you need a lot of consumers and you need a lot of institutional backing and you have close relationships with city government, etc. This is true for the New York Times and the Washington Post, it's true for CNN and Fox News, which are your cable news, 24-7 mix of political opinion and straight reporting, and it's also true for your ABCs and NBCs, which have their nightly world news, world news with David Muir. Yeah, so you think about it that way. Well, that's not how things used to be and what you see is like okay, you have a natural oligopoly.

Speaker 2:

What the digital era does is it frees up people like me and like others to enter into the digital space. But what do you need to make a digital publication viable? You need ad revenue and potentially subscriptions. And so, with ad revenue, what do you get? You get that clickbait right. Everyone's heard of this Clickbait. You get that and you get more content the better.

Speaker 2:

We call it journalism, right? So, like, a reporter working for an outlet is turning out seven pieces a day and not a single piece is over 200 words. I've done that job. It's kind of dehumanizing and it's kind of humiliating and it's long hours and little pay. That's how, like, digital media outlets and a lot of them conservative like, tried to fight back against the oligopoly.

Speaker 2:

But in fighting back, there's an overcorrection, right. What we lose in that is the historical sense of journalism, where we're focused on personalities and structures and we're not afraid of doing some literary journalism which combines reporting and analysis, right? Literary journalism really kicks off in the end of World War I, through the Great Depression and into World War II, because people reading major news publications are saying the world is moving so incredibly fast and I don't know what the czar like. I hadn't spent two minutes thinking about the czar until World War I. So, like, what do I do now with this information? Please like, give me some sort of direction, bring me some sort of expertise. And so you have.

Speaker 2:

You have folks who do that on the corporate media level.

Speaker 2:

Right, this is how the New York Times makes its bones back in the Civil War, all the way through the World War II era.

Speaker 2:

But also you get, you know, your Hunter S Thompson's Upton Sinclair is another good one who focus on these kind of structures, personalities, and it not only is better writing and a better opportunity to reveal true things about human nature for the reporter, it also is received better because it's more in line with human nature. Right, we know as people that there are objective truths and you find that in faith, you find that in the natural law, you find that in your conscience and what's written on your heart, that intrinsic sense of right and wrong. So it reveals powerful things about human nature and it also reveals how, not only the objective true things, but also the subjective, the conventions of the world, mix with that. So you have the universals and you have the particulars playing out in real time, and that's why people are drawn to that sense of journalism, because it's actually how, like, human beings organically operate. Have you ever met a human being. That's completely objective and neutral.

Speaker 1:

No, no, and you know it's. Even pretend like that is ridiculous.

Speaker 2:

And you would instantly, if you met that, that person on the street and they said I'm completely objective and neutral, you would say this person is either going for something Exactly, he's a robot One, a robot Two, something is terribly wrong with this person and I feel bad for them. Or three, this person is trying to sell me a false bill of goods Right, bad for them. Or three, this person is trying to sell me a false bill of goods right. So it seems like a Marxist argument because it's relying on structures and material like structure you know, we hear about this word all the time systemic, this systemic, that systemic racism, Like we're talking about systems of economies and we're talking about material conditions.

Speaker 2:

But I do think that material conditions, when relating to the incentive structures and human nature, like, can actually tell us something about what's gone wrong, and so that's for me, like I'm not a pioneer in this space, I'm trying to recapture that and I think, luckily, a lot of young journalists who've experienced I think you know you can call it the Trump era of politics like has seen the purportedly objective, completely neutral corporate media to be exactly what they've always been, which is like real people with real political biases and real connections to the Democratic Party be a blank slate. That's not who I am. I'm an embodied soul, and so what do I need to do then? Like I need to be honest about my priors, I need to be upfront about my biases, but that doesn't mean that I still can't tell a good story, and so that's what we try to do. We try to tell good stories as people who are trying to reveal objective truths, but also have our own conventions and cultures and traditions behind it.

Speaker 1:

And I think the podcast industry has really is actually shaping news as much as any force, and because that is away from the 24-hour scroll, and that 24-hour scroll produced, I think, what you talked about that 200-word, you know. Just get it out. It's not realistic to think that you can produce 24 hours worth of news, of that thoughtful news. So the podcasts, whether from what I'm listening to and from what I'm hearing from on the left or on the right, are actually more thoughtful, because it's a slower news cycle. To be honest. You're not on this manufacturing belt of having to get out certain stories. So and you're really seeing this among young journalists now, and I think there's a rebellion with the exception, that's what they are. Fox News, though, is just as egregious, as you know. Msnbc sometimes it's not their viewpoints as much as who they are in their news format.

Speaker 1:

The constant news cycle and one of the results of this election cycle too, is I've seen some good sources now coming out. It was very interesting this past week with Jeff Bezos, and whether Jeff Bezos is true or not saying that he needs more of a conservative voice in his newspaper. I don't know if I believe him or not, and I don't know what he is defining as conservative. Same thing USA News. They've refused to endorse Kamala. What do you read?

Speaker 2:

into this refusal to endorse the presidential candidates? Well, I will address your question, but I want to address a few things first. The first you talked about the structure of specifically like 24-hour cable news political media. I couldn't agree more. Like we were talking a little bit about Ukraine before we came on the air and you and I see that conflict differently. I think what we'll agree on is are either one of our perspectives better served by saying hi, bradley Devlin and Michelle joining us today? Michelle, you have 90 seconds to explain why the Ukrainians should be supported and Bradley Devlin, you have 90 seconds to explain why the Ukrainians should be supported and Bradley Devlin, you have 90 seconds to refute her.

Speaker 2:

And it just goes haywire and no one understands what either one of us has said and no one's left thinking to themselves hmm, I really learned something right, there is right. There is big, big decisions in in politics, in life, require big conversations and I think you see a natural yearning for that and that's why the podcast, the podcast realm, has been such a big impact on this election. And going into that, like come Tuesday, if President Trump wins the alternative media strategy from President Donald Trump by going on, all of these podcasts reaching low propensity voters that Trump needs to win right. A lot of these people watching these shows. They're like, naturally Trump aligned but they're not really involved in politics and all of a sudden they click on their favorite podcast with X comedian and Donald Trump is the interview. If Donald Trump can turn those people out and say, like you know what, I am going to vote for Donald Trump, like I thought his, his interview with Theo Bond was fun and it looks like he genuinely cares, and he came off as likable, like that's a massive win, and also like, as someone who's invested in that type of decentralized media environment, like you hope that that kind of media strategy is vindicated because it takes power away from the corporate press, who would love nothing more than to just bring us on for two minutes and 30 seconds and pit one of us against each other. And then, finally, the endorsements yeah, I think one. I can't speak to the specifics of the Washington Post because let's keep in mind that, like Jeff Bezos, his ex wife and Jeff Bezos have long running circles, long running liberal and democratic circles, specifically in the nonprofit world. A promise for a long time from the Democrats has been we're going to, there's going to be hell to pay for Amazon and we're going to tax the heck out of them. Enough of this, amazon pays $0 in taxes every year. Maybe that's something behind it.

Speaker 2:

They revealed something about the corporate media, though. Right, sure, a bunch of Washington Post people are outraged, and they wrote an op-ed about how they wish they could endorse Kamala Harris. When you sign up to be a part of the corporate media, you have to realize the muzzle is upon you. There was a hit on Bloomberg with one of the Trump campaign advisors, and the Bloomberg host said well, why don't you just condemn this thing that Trump said? I know that you work for him and that you like him, but in your personal capacity, just condemn this thing that Trump said. And he goes. I'll condemn what Trump said as soon as you sit here on television and tell me all the bad things that Michael Bloomberg has done. And, of course, there was no response from this TV host. Well, kind of would be inappropriate. We're not talking about Michael Bloomberg here, hello, so you know who knows what's really behind this. What I will say is I think the corporate media realizes that the dam is breaking and they need to do things to patch it up.

Speaker 2:

If you recall, back in the 1970s there was another era in which the Washington Post because the head of the Washington Post hated Richard Nixon more than anything and just detested Richard Nixon Couldn't stand seeing him at a Georgetown cocktail party and said you know, I just, I really hope Nixon doesn't win. Nixon ends up winning in 68. And all of a sudden someone says hey, your hatred is blinding you. Richard Nixon, you might want to consider hiring a conservative columnist. Well, that conservative columnist that the Washington Post did end up hiring was one, george Will, who saw Watergate yeah, who saw Watergate happening supported Nixon though Watergate was already public information supported Nixon in 72. Nixon has a landslide victory. I actually have the poster. I have the original New York News poster right there of Nixon's win in 72, because I'm from Richard Nixon's hometown in Yorba Linda, california, all that is aside.

Speaker 2:

So George Will supports Nixon in 72. More comes out about Watergate and George Will flips on. Nixon says that Nixon should resign because of Watergate and that kind of is the first domino to fall in the media for Richard Nixon and Richard Nixon ultimately ends up resigning the presidency. So you know, these eras come up every once in a while in the corporate media. If you remember, in 2016, I mean, cnn and all the corporate media outlets promised that they'd go to the hinterlands, go to heartland America, and figure out what they don't understand about rural Americans and regular Americans and why they supported President Donald Trump.

Speaker 2:

And that lasted all of three seconds and no one did any sort of introspection. And you know, there's a human element there where, like, who wants to admit that they're wrong but at the same time, like their inability to admit that they're wrong but at the same time, like their inability to admit that they were wrong or to take responsibility for some of the reckless things that they've said on air, has ended up killing them right, like a lot of people who, what's their first source of news? Now? It's not just young people, it's, it's people all the way up to, like the boomer and silent generation, like where do they get their news?

Speaker 2:

predominantly social media, and right, yeah, sure, absolutely, yeah, yeah, and that's a big yeah that's a yeah X and that's a big blessing because it means, at least with information going directly to individuals, that the media landscape is decentralizing. The hazard there, right when we're looking at social media and we're looking at the way that that information is getting from the media to the individual, is there's a big possibility that we've just switched our overlords in the corporate media executive room for overlords in twitter, absolutely yeah or in facebook suite, c-suite, etc.

Speaker 2:

So it's a. It's a very interesting time to be in media, because we have a media environment that presents as decentralized but still has very strong centralizing elements.

Speaker 1:

Absolutely, and it's always been said that what the media did was present facts, and I think it was. I believe his name is Mark Sappenfield, from the Christian Science Monitor, and he was recently talking about how what we expect news now to be is more interpretive of the facts. And this is where we get these media biases in as they contextualize the facts. So we will always need someone to tell us about Sudan, to help us understand Sudan right, or to understand what's happening in mainland China or Kiev, ukraine. We've got to because we cannot be there, and it is actually the challenge to find the trusted source to help us interpret the facts, and I'm of the opinion that that can only come from mixed voices and not from one side or the other.

Speaker 1:

It's easy for me to go with one side because I'm a moderate conservative, so I want to listen to conservative voices, but if I really want to challenge myself, I also need to go to left voices too, to understand this interpretation. The one thing that has always flummoxed me is 50% of the country is conservative, as we can see with these elections that are just razor close. How a corporation making money that wants to make money. We assume news corporations that they're in the business to make money, how they actually just slough off one half of the population, and that to me is it always perplexes me.

Speaker 2:

Like when you have a mixed product. Are you actually reaching properly the target demographic? Victoria's Secret everyone knows that brand. What does it cater to? It caters to 50% of the population Exactly. If, all of a sudden, Victoria's Secret was like we're selling boxer briefs, Don't expect to see me in a Victoria's Secret anytime soon picking up the boxer briefs.

Speaker 1:

Why? Yeah, I got it.

Speaker 2:

It's just not a brand that I'm interested in. This is where the business side comes in the thing. It's not a brand that I'm interested in.

Speaker 1:

I also don't want to be the weirdo, the dude, the married man hanging out at Victoria's Secret checking out the boxer briefs because, like, everyone's gonna look at me and say what the heck are you doing here Now?

Speaker 2:

So yeah, I mean it is a difficult situation. Is, though, are those economic factors good for the body politic? And the answer obviously is no, it's not. I think a lot about what the media apparatus looked like in the early republic. This might take a minute to get through.

Speaker 2:

The American republic has always had massively higher literacy, high literacy rates. The reason for that is because what do we have coming over from England and from Europe? Protestants, protestants who are suppressed by their governments. And what do these Protestants believe? Some of them are more of the Anglican or the English Reformation mold, others are more of the continental Europe Reformation mold, but all of them agree like literacy is number one. And why is literacy number one? Because you've got to read the Bible to know how to live, and so you have a population that is very, very literate. What does that breed in the revolution and in the founding era? Of course, a media environment.

Speaker 2:

Right, common Sense by Thomas Paine wasn't an essay written from a professor, it was a pamphlet. A pamphlet that was widely distributed. Same thing with why Benjamin Franklin was such a massive figure in the American Revolution and in the founding era. What he started out as. What? Oh, a paper man. A paper man who constantly pissed off the colonial authorities so much in Boston that he's forced to flee and eventually settles in where? Philadelphia, of course, at the age of just 17, he's forced to flee Massachusetts Bay.

Speaker 2:

So after the founding era, right, you have the Federalist Papers advocating for the Constitution. And everyone knows that a lot of these writers are writing under pseudonyms. But they realize that all of these people writing these pamphlets have their own political biases and opinions. And the purpose of writing for these papers is to invite the demos, the population, right demos, democracy, into a higher level conversation about politics. And so, throughout the early republic era, what do you have? You have more papers per capita than existed in the year 2000. That's the first thing. So a densely concentrated media environment and two papers explicitly supported by functions of parties and of governments. So you would read like have you ever wondered why certain papers are called the Democrat Republican?

Speaker 2:

or the such and such Republican or the such and such federal, you know the Federalist, et cetera. That's because those old party roots, and so when you picked up a copy of the Democrat, republican, you knew what perspective you were getting. And then you could just as easily walk across the street and pick up a paper you know the opposing party's paper and read them both and be invited into that higher conversation of politics that inspired you to civic virtue. And the founders did not see politics as a science. Right, you go to school. Now you get a political science degree.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, whatever that is right.

Speaker 2:

There is no scientific method for politics, right? Right, and we talk about. This is why we talk about facts in politics a lot. I think it's an oversimplification and an attempt to make politics science. It's not.

Speaker 2:

Politics is choice based on universal principles, in particular situations interacting with other human beings, and that is anything but a science. So we can't just have a fact-based media. It wouldn't mean anything. What does the fact that, like an apple a day keeps the doctor away actually mean in my life? Well, like, hey, maybe it's good for you to eat a salad with some apples in it every once in a while, or maybe it's it's it's good to include fruit with your breakfast or whatever, you know, whatever that health and ramifications may be. But it's not just the fact. How does the truth interact with what I need to do in my daily life? And so that's what the early republic, its citizens and its aristocracy, its ruling class, understood, that our current media and political ruling class no longer understands, because it's to make human nature submit to our control completely through scientification. I don't think you can turn human nature and all of its beauties and all of its foibles into science. I think it beautifully has too many variables to make human nature submit.

Speaker 1:

It does. It does I tell you. A lot of people lambast the United States for including our own US citizens, for the amount of dialogue that we have. But actually, you know what? It is absolutely our blessing, because I sit inside of Europe now and Europe is very, very quiet. It doesn't have the same level of dialogue that we have and actually in that dialogue, I think we become who we are, we become what we are. It's messy, it's not clean, it's not factual, but I think we can strive towards a perfection in that noise. And why do you strive for perfection in that noise? Because you become more of yourself and you know yourself better through words. So I think this is good. Bradley Devlin, you are absolutely amazing and I really, I really wish you the best of luck in this new podcast. I think it's really important. I think people need to listen to it. It is called the Signal Sit Down, and how often do you put it out?

Speaker 2:

We will be putting out episodes once a week. We air on Thursdays and we're going to be taking a week off election week.

Speaker 1:

Okay, Bradley, after the election, let's talk again about media and the results of the media. What do you?

Speaker 2:

think Absolutely. I'd love to come on because it's going to. You know, will the corporate media feel vindicated or will alternative media reign supreme? It's a big question and I think we're going to get some answers on November 5th.

Speaker 1:

That's yes, I think you're right. Thank you so much.

Speaker 2:

Thank you.