thanks for being with u tonight. it is very, very good to hav you here so, it was labor day weekend 1936 it was hot it was around 90 degrees and 100,000 people turned ou to see him he himself said from the stage from the podium at the front o the crowd that the crowd was about 80, 000, but the polic actually said it was bigger. the police said it was 100,000 people and, again, this was in 1936 so, if you want to adjust that for inflation, like it was $ amount, if you want to adjus that to account for how big th whole population of the countr was at the time compared to now, 100,000 people then compared t the overall size of the country, that will translate today to a crowd of, like, 250, 260,000 people which is a really big crowd, particularly since the perso that they were all there to se was just some guy with a radio show have you ever heard of a politician named william lemke it s okay if you haven t william lemke was a candidate for president, a third party candidate i
you could have lived through 1 million other scandals to se what his emails even looke like and fox has had those emails that they turned over to dominion for many, many months so, it is actually a littl unclear. let me ask you about, i mean, beyond whatever personally happened with this one fox employee, and whatever drama there is around him and hi show, i feel like the more important question for me, especially when i take a bigge view of this, looking at all the other people who even just in my time in the business hav come and gone in the conservative media is there any way to tell whether this is an important moment for us testing th strength of the fox news corporation? and indeed, the strength of th conservative media industry as a whole. is this kind of just the lates guy to be fired, and there wil be somebody new. or does this tell us something about what s going on in the business you know, actually, i disagree with what ron klain said before. i think, as you said, there
its jewish, its power, it capacity, importantly to dra the republican party around in its wake, no matter how haples that party s and remains that s the question. joining us now is jay rosen, he s a professor of journalism at new york university, and longtime observer of this part of the media world mr. rosen, i really appreciate you making the time to be here thank you. thanks for having me. first, let me just ask yo to tear me apart and tell m if you think there s anythin that i m fundamentally wrong about, or missing, or gettin the wrong way around about tha take on the strength o conservative media and its stars. nothing wrong, but there is something missing. let me introduce you to verification and reverse, whic i think is a factor in thi history that you are accountin for us verification it s taking something that might be true and trying to nail it down wit
world is built around th success of verification an reverse. that s how trump became leading political figure wit the missing birth certificat case that s what stop the steal was all about. it is taking something that been established as true denying it, and the power of that denial moves your movemen closer and that movement now it s taking over the republican party, which is why th democratic party, and that republican party, we no longer resemble each other. that s why we have such an asymmetry in our politics, which screws around a lot of other values and norms and practices that no longer makes sense, because the two parties operate in such a different way. also, i would add one othe thing, rachel, which i underneath that history that you gave us, there was the ris of the american consensus, a historians call it, the postwa
same song. you re right to se commonalities among them i style and in terms of the kind of appeal they have, the kin they re selling, the way the try to get americans to hate each other, present each other particularly the way they tr to get americans to hate minority groups. but i also think it can be overstated, right? even though there s always one of them who is dominant, the magnitude of their dominance decreases overtime and you can see that, when you look at who s been the dominan figure and decade after decade generation after generation, a big as any of these modern guy are, there is never ever going to be anyone as dominant a father charles coughlin was in the 1930s. and as big as the broadcasters were, you know, in the 80s and 90s, they ll never compete wit coughlin and the broadcasters who wer huge in the 80s and 90s, the were more dominant in thei time than any of the flavor of the month broadcasters are dominant now