Volts podcast: Dan Pfeiffer on the Democratic Party's megaphone problem

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.


(PDF
transcript)


(Active
transcript)


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
wing successfully hangs the thing around the entire party. And
rather than saying, we believe in our activists this is not the
best slogan, but we believe in the policy.


And moreover, we would like to emphasize again the dire need for
police reform. Instead, they just scrambled backwards,
apologized, and did a big speech about funding the f*****g
police. And that's just a classic example of every time they get
smacked on the nose, they back down. How do you I don't even know
what you would do, but how do you break that habit? How do you
give people on the left some of the sort of bullishness and
tenacity to just shake off criticism and double down?


Dan Pfeiffer


I mean, part of this is generational in a lot of ways, and there
are always exceptions to every generational critique here because
I talk in the book about how largely it is our older Democrats
who struggle with this new media environment. But Bernie Sanders
is actually pretty good at it, and so is Elizabeth Warren, even
though they are also in their 70s. This is somewhat, I think,
generational the way to do this Obama always used to say, in
situations like these, don't play the game, call out the game.
And so the way I have tried to convince people who I've talked to
about the defund the police situation is, one, you have to
understand what's happening here.


This is not an on the level discussion of law enforcement and
criminal justice policy.


David Roberts


I can't believe that's so basic.


Dan Pfeiffer


Yeah. I mean, this is about race.


David Roberts


We're not having a reasoned policy discussion here.


Dan Pfeiffer


Yeah. I mean, it is about dividing people largely along racial
lines. It is to scare the s**t out of white people. And you have
to understand that in your response. And so simply yelling, we
want to fund the police is not a solution to the problem. You
have to take their critique of you and turn it back on them. Why
are they trying to divide us or to exploit people is because they
want to do why? The language that I always push people to is the
language that was put forward in the race-class narrative about
how the work that was done by Demos and a bunch of other groups
is they want to attack you for defund the police.


You should attack them for attacking you for defund the police
and pivoting back onto your core set of issues like why aren't
they trying to solve the problem? Why are they trying to exploit
the problem? Why are they trying to divide us? Because they want
to protect tactics of the law that you can pick your issue that
you want to put in there, but is you have to punch back. Right. I
kind of hate the idea that you should never apologize because
there are times in which you are wrong, and when you are wrong,
you should apologize.


You should never back down in the face of bad faith critiques.
Right. If something you say does not generate a backlash from
someone, then you probably didn't say something provocative
enough to get it.


David Roberts


I know we need to start training people to view this blowback as
a sign of success.


Dan Pfeiffer


Yeah.


David Roberts


The first problem I raised about a Democratic microphone is how
to attract eyeballs and viewers for accurate information. When it
seems like lying. It's so much easier to be provocative and to
get engagement with lying. The second problem, though, is the
nature of the Dem coalition sort of legendarily. The right is
much more homogenous than the left. Racially, ideologically,
culturally, however you name it. The left has all these different
groups, very different cultures, different ages, different
whatever class, whatever. So, a. it's very difficult to sort of
come up with a message that unites all those people, as you were
saying.


But also one of the problems I've seen is that for any attack on
the left by the right, there will be some other faction of the
left who also hates that faction of the left. And will join in
the right's attack, right? So if the right is attacking AOC,
you'll have centrist Dem saying, "Well, they kind of have a
point." Whatever. Like whoever you attack on the left, you'll
find somebody else on the left who will join in because the left
isn't legendarily fractious. So the upshot of that is that every
criticism coming from the right ends up looking bipartisan,
right?


Because they'll get somebody on the left to go along with it,
right? And if you're too provocative or too left in your
megaphone, you'll get wishy-washy mainstream Democrats
tut-tutting, you scolding, you telling you to calm down, telling
you to not be so provocative. Or as I'm sure you're familiar
with, if you're out trying to sort of sell the mainstream
Democratic line and sort of help the mainstream Democratic Party,
you're going to come under constant attack from the left for
being a simp and a sellout and whatever, a mouthpiece, et cetera,
et cetera. So it just seems like so many factions on the left are
so invested in battling one another.


That sometimes strikes me as just like an insuperable barrier to
anything like the megaphone we're talking about. What's the
answer to that? You're not going to get the factions to get
along. Is it just multiple megaphones? Is there a solution to
that problem? Just from the point of view of messaging and media?


Dan Pfeiffer


Probably not. We have always been the Democrat has always been
somewhat of a circular firing squad. I mean, Republicans present
a more united front via Fox News and all of their other entities
than they are in real life. They are trying to destroy Liz Cheney
and a whole bunch of other people. Right now they're in these
incredibly divisive primaries. Most Republicans actually hate
Mitch McConnell. It's one of the few things that gives me hope
for America, that Democrats and Republicans both hate Mitch
McConnell personally.


David Roberts


But I'm not sure normies, I'm not sure political normies are ever
even aware of those divisions.


Dan Pfeiffer


Right. That's because the right is communicating. All that
matters is whether your target audience knows about those things.
And so this is what happens when this is how journalism works,
right? And there's something wrong with this. It's just how it
works, which is you say something, they call up someone to
criticize to give the other side of whatever it is that you just
said to offer it and post a review. And that's always more
valuable, particularly in a polarized time from the perspective
of journals, if that person is ideologically aligned with you on
other issues, right? So Democrat crapping on Democrat is more
interesting than Republican who craps on Democrat for waking up
in the morning.


But that is the price we pay for depending on traditional
political media to be the primary distributor of our message. If
you build up your megaphone. I want to try to find the right
balance in this between internal party debate, which I think is
largely healthy and should be understood. And I don't mean
performative crapping on AOC or even sometimes left attacking
Biden for things Biden can't do for the sake of clicks. It
happens both ways, right? And some of these fights that happen
between one left member and one centrist member are beneficial to
both of them individually because the criticism of the other
approves their bona fides to their base.


But it's negative for the party as a whole. But having big
debates about what we should do on various things, or pressuring
an incumbent president to do something like cancel student debt,
those voices should be heard. But when it comes time to focus the
mind and win elections and we become more aligned around things,
you need media outlets, ways to communicate where the price of
that communication is not highlighting disarray within your
party, which is, I think, what happens when you if you are
relying on the New York Times or CNN as the way to brand your
party.


David Roberts


Yeah, the way I sort of convey this story, the anecdote I tell to
convey this to people is one of my early sort of formative
political experiences was tracking the Waxman-Markey Climate Bill
back in 2009, 2010. And I naively read the bill and studied the
policies involved and was all geared up to have a discussion with
someone, anyone, about the policies involved. And what I noticed,
and this didn't really become clear to me until kind of it had
passed, but you had a left who was invested in crapping on it
because it was a sort of mainstream market based policy that
didn't go far enough. So you had the whole left apparatus
crapping on it.


You had this whole sort of like goo goo centrist above it all
left who crapped on it because it's too complicated and it has
too many compromises and a clear, simple carbon tax would be
better. It's sort of this virtuous crapping on it from that side.
And then of course, you had the right distorting everything about
it and crapping on it. And the sort of net effect was the thing
a. didn't have any real champions, right? And b. didn't have ....
at no point was there a discussion in media about the actual bill
itself as opposed to the weird symbol that various factions had
made out of it.


Kind of that's what I saw as missing. I was like, yeah, the left
has its little megaphone for bashing stuff and the centrists have
their megaphone and the right has their megaphone. But the actual
meat and potatoes of mainstream Democratic politics, the bill
that's actually on the table and might actually pass, has no
megaphone behind it, has no one behind it. And so that's what I
sort of struggle to envision when we talk about a megaphone is
like, I understand how the left faction thinks they're kind of
like cool and rebellious and how they get excited.


And how the above it all centrists get excited by their priors
being confirmed, but it just doesn't seem sexy or exciting or
cool at all just to be a Democrat and to defend what Democrats
are doing and to try to help Democrats. I don't even know that I
can put my finger on it, but just culturally, it seems like
there's no cool identity there.


Dan Pfeiffer


Yeah, I mean, look, these are very challenging problems. There
are incentive structures on all side that push people in various
directions. And we used to joke sometimes in the Obama White
House that the place where we would always find ourselves was
where the left was mad at us and the right was mad at us just in
that middle. Because that's oftentimes the correct possible
policy solution. Right. It's not as nice as you would do it if
you could do whatever you wanted, right? That is Obamacare in a
lot of ways.


David Roberts


Yes.


Dan Pfeiffer


If you were starting from scratch and the President could just
pick whatever plan he wanted, it would be different than the ACA.


And no matter what plan you pick, the right was going to s**t on
it. And so you often do find yourself in that place. I think
there's not an easy answer there. I think a more sophisticated,
more advanced, more digital friendly way of communicating from
more people in the party could offset some of that would put more
throw-weight behind what is happening if you were more
aggressively using paid media and organic digital media and
leveraging the existing in an expanded progressive media
megaphone to just communicate directly with your people. Because
that's the problem is the discourse is about the discourse,
right?


What people are hearing is they're hearing that some people are
mad about something. Some of those people may be people that you
like and therefore you think, maybe I shouldn't like this thing
so much. And if you had more direct line of communication for
Democratic Party leaders and progressives, I define that broadly
progressives to tell their story on their terms, you would be
able to it would not just become this is Obamacare problem, left
is mad, right is mad. Everyone else throws up their arms and
think, this thing must be fucked. And over the course of time, as
the Affordable Care Act became so popular, that trying to repeal
it cost the Republicans, the House and almost the Senate.


And so things can change over time, but in the moment, if you can
communicate more directly with people, you're going to have a
better chance to at least compete with those other voices because
there's going to be people. The right has this in some sense,
too. Less so when Trump was president. But right wing media is
shitting all over Mitch McConnell, right? Just attacking him,
attacking him, attacking him, because there is a financial,
political, click based incentive to do it. We have a similar
thing on our side, but they then have Fox and a bunch of other
entities who can balance the scales so that they're telling a
more direct story.


And that's kind of what we have to do.


David Roberts


There's something perverse about the fact that the exact space of
kind of political possibility is perfectly located at a spot that
nobody loves. It's almost possible because nobody loves it. So
that is like an intrinsic communication problem that mostly faces
the left, because it's always the left that's trying to do
things, trying to advance things and do things. And people will
always default back to status quo bias, even if the status quo
sucks.


Dan Pfeiffer


Yeah, I mean, the political system is biased towards
conservatives both in terms of the way that which the Electoral
College and the Senate disproportionately value Republican base
voters. But also it is a system designed for inaction and that is
a problem for the party that wants to do things and it is an
advantage for the party that wants to not do things. Where
Republicans get in trouble is when they're trying to undo the few
things Democrats did accomplish and then they generally fail at
those things.


David Roberts


Yes, the few things that we can make part of the status quo, then
we can finally get status quo bias working in our benefit. But
it's so difficult. It's so slow. Well, I've kept you a long time.
I just want to wrap up with a final question, which is probably
the biggest question at all and the least answerable of all, but
I think is ultimately at the root of all this. So what you lament
in this book, and what a lot of people have lamented recently, is
that there used to be a core media that everybody had to deal
with, right, that everybody got their news from, and that if you
wanted to get your voice out, you had to go through them.


This was through scarcity. Before the Internet, we just had a set
number of TV stations, a set number of newspapers, and people go
on and on about the disadvantages of that, all the biases that
were built into that and all the blind spots that were built into
that. And that's all very true. But the flip side is that we're
all acknowledging now is it's not really good when there's no
common source of information or facts, that there's no
institution that is trusted across lines in the US. That's what
we sort of come back to again and again.


Like the mainstream media could do all these reforms that you
suggest in your book, but ultimately, if it tells the truth
consistently, it's going to be unfavorable to the right. So if
the right doesn't have to trust it, it won't. And as long as the
right has its own media machine, it won't. You see this sort of
playing out now and how people talk about Facebook. Now we're
talking about wanting Facebook to moderate content, but just step
back and think how insane that is. We're asking Facebook to
decide in our society, in our culture, what are the bounds, what
are the moral bounds on dialogue, what is okay to say and what's
not okay to say?


What's merely controversial versus out of bounds, right? Like
these are sort of things that are governed by norms and common
understanding. And if those things are gone, if we don't agree
about those anymore, why on earth would we think that a board of
tech dudes could step in and play that role in our culture? It
just seems honestly like I understand the recommendation for Dems
for the left to create its own megaphone because the right has
one and the left has got to fight back. But then if you're just
left with two megaphones and no shared authority, that means in
terms of messaging and news, but also more and more in terms of
government and literal authority figures, it doesn't seem like
the left just having fighting back the way the right is fighting.


Seems like you just end up spiraling down this sort of
partisanship black hole.


Dan Pfeiffer


Yeah.


David Roberts


And it seems like what we need if we want to survive as a society
long term is restoring something like some shared authority,
something that we can all trust and just. Do you have any
thoughts on that? I mean, do you worry if there are just two
competing sides and there's nothing above them, there's no
transcendent rules or guidelines that we're kind of doomed?


Dan Pfeiffer


I worry deeply about the state of our democracy, the state of a
country where there is no shared set of facts. Now, when you say
it that way, it makes it sound like republicans don't believe
these facts and Democrats don't believe these facts when the fact
of the matter is we have a majority in this country. It's a
majority that is frankly growing, that has a shared ... is
attached to reality. It has a shared set of increasingly
progressive, fact-based values and views of the world. Now, that
majority, because of our political system and the current
demographic world we're in, does not have political power
commensurate with its numbers that Joe Biden can win by 7 million
votes.


David Roberts


These are not two mirror images, not two equal sides. That's
always important to point out.


Dan Pfeiffer


Yes. And I do not believe that anytime in the near future we are
going to return to the pre-internet world of media where you had
a series of trusted, a small number of trusted, putatively
objective arbiters of fact and fiction in this country.


David Roberts


Right.


Dan Pfeiffer


I think there are a few things that can happen. I think there are
some and I'm far from an expert in this there are some regulatory
moves that can be made that can make it so that there is less
disinformation and conspiracy theories flowing on social media.
These platforms can be held more accountable. There are some
proposals out there this is beyond my expertise, certainly about
more transparency and regulation of the algorithm itself. So we
take Mark Zuckerberg's individual whack a mole decisions about
what to keep on the platform, when to take off out of it.


I agree that is a losing battle. So that is one thing. I also
think that we are also in a very strange period in American
history about where the media and how people get information
change so fast that we have a particularly vulnerable population
to disinformation, right? Where younger people who have come up
on Facebook, on social media, are going to be much better at
separating conspiracy theory from reality, fact from fiction,
genuine good faith arguments from bad faith arguments because
they are much more savvy. Most people over the age of 50 were
trained to believe, to have presumed to believe as true headlines
they read.


And the right has ruthlessly exploited that. Fox News has
exploited it. A bunch of these digital sites have exploited it,
and that has put us in this bad position. So I don't think we're
going to go back to the old world. I think there is a way in
which the new world is better. And one of the reasons why we have
to build the Progressive Megaphone and I don't mean to be
mercenary about this, is we have to defeat this MAGA extremist
faction in this country that is existing at a very very dangerous
time because of where we are in our technological evolution,
where we are in information ecosystem, and where we are in the
demographics of this country that the midwest is turning red
before the southwest and southeast are turning blue.


It puts us in a very, very vulnerable place. And if we can
survive this and get to a better place and protect democracy and
prevent Trump or Ron DeSantis president, we have a chance to age
into a better information environment with more sophisticated
information consumers.


David Roberts


I'm old enough to remember now when a vital young man named
Barack Obama came into office and everybody thought, we did it.
We made it past the boomers, we aged like the young people are
finally here. And then, no.


Dan Pfeiffer


We went right past the boomers, but we went the other way. We
went to the silent generation to be in charge. So we went past
the boomers, we just went the other way. And so hopefully we're
getting towards some very young Gen X or late stage millennials
to be in charge soon.


David Roberts


It's looking like odds are a big Republican victory in the
midterms. Odds are a Republican victory for President in 2024.
Obviously, you and millions of other people are going to fight to
change that outcome, but at least purely in terms of the
statistical odds, that's what looks likely. And I wonder if one
of the very small and very few bright points of that might be
that if, like, a full on authoritarian movement takes over all
three branches of government. If that might not just by force of
pressure, cause the media to be more self aware of itself and its
own norms and practices and its own health as an independent
institution, if it might, in some perverse way, accelerate some
of these needed changes in the media outlook?


Or is that just wild optimism.


Dan Pfeiffer


If your optimistic take is that a shift towards an authorian
torment government would be good for the media, but I would file
that. I would file that under I don't want to find out.


David Roberts


It's like at the end of Watchmen when you bring in the giant
space octopus to unite humanity against it. That's kind of the
only thing I can imagine. Making the media be more self conscious
about itself as an institution and its own prerogatives.


Dan Pfeiffer


Yes.


David Roberts


Obviously not the way you would want that to happen. Anyway, Dan
Pfeiffer, your book "Battling the Big Lie" is out now. It's
great. I read it. I appreciate the work you do. And thanks for
coming on Volts.


Dan Pfeiffer


Thanks, man. Thanks for having me.


David Roberts


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