The Podcaster War
Where some might think that the recent feud between liberal and progressive podcasters is just a spat within liberalism, the reality is quite different
If you are a regular listener or subscriber to almost any liberal podcast, you know all too well by now the very public and sometimes cringeworthy war that has been taking place between leftist podcasters. I mean specifically the feud between Jimmy Dore (progressive) and The Young Turks (TYT, a corporate liberal voice), with Kyle Kulinski attempting to create a middle ground between them. The issue, incorrectly referred to by Kyle as just a “drama,” is at root a fight over respective answers to the question “Who controls information?” While both Kyle and Jimmy reference the book Manufacturing Consent (MC) by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky (I will just use “Chomsky” in reference), I will make the case that this work is more appropriately supportive of a critique of liberal news outlets such as TYT and (to a much lesser extent) Kyle’s casts, and more generally that one must be vigilant regarding news media services, especially those claiming to be liberal and most especially podcasts. The reason is that many so-called “liberal” podcasts are either being funded by or have direct connections with the Democratic Party, and others are simply taken in by the Democratic party ideology and/or Democratic National Committee (DNC) propaganda that goes with it. As such, none of these types of media podcast outlets are neutral arbiters of information.
The specific podcast rift between TYT and Dore is one chapter of a larger “winner take all” war between the corporate Democratic Party supporters and the progressive voices who dissent from it, as witnessed by the way the DNC is actually opposing the Democratic candidacy of Nina Turner in Ohio. Here, just as in the podcast war, the end of controlling information by defeating progressive voices justifies any means to do it. What motivates much of the Democratic-affiliated attacks on progressives that we see in TYT is based in ideology (i.e. an unflinching opinion that does not change based on evidence) and the need to gain larger audiences for their message. What it shows is that some Democrat liberal podcasters like TYT, whose viewer numbers are declining and thus reducing their once megalithic standing in liberal podcasts, now have taken it as part of their mission to attempt to crush the upstart dissenting voices and those critical of their unsupported assertions, specifically regarding Syria, mainly through their deceptions and diversion away from evidence-based discussion of issues through smearing on-the-ground journalists like Aaron Mate and progressive commentators like Mr. Dore (this has been well established by Jimmy Dore and Aaron Mate, so I won’t detail them here).
On the contrary, the progressive left is focused on fighting for independent control of the information and commentary they have, and for following the evidence where it leads. The electronic war between the parties took a particularly nasty turn when Cenk Uygur of TYT claimed without evidence on his May 26 podcast that the Russians paid Mate, and his co-host Ana Kasparian made vague and unsubstantiated claims that Mate is supported by dictators, presumably referring to President Assad of Syria, and ended her harangue by flipping off Mate on camera. Kasparian also attempted to “MeToo” Jimmy by accusing him of sexual harassment from an incident seven years earlier. There is no other plausible reason for such personal and false attacks on progressives like they have done to Mr. Dore and especially to Mr. Mate than attempts like these to discredit far-left media sources which directly contradict their narratives (Aaron Mate was the first and foremost reporter who debunked the Russiagate conspiracy and also the claim that Assad had used chemical weapons on his people).
To be clear, progressives are more focused on First Amendment rights to both be fully informed of all issues and to express their thoughts on them (no matter which side one takes), supportive of Medicare for All, Universal basic income (or at least a high minimum wage), equal human and civil rights, and are generally suspicious of, if not contemptuous of, capitalism as an economic system. They see the need to work from outside the institutional systems in order to change them. Liberals, by contrast, believe in principle some of these things, but are much more supportive of capitalism (seeing it as in need of “adjustment”) and of current institutions, advocating that we work for change within those systems. These are just starting points for differentiating progressives and liberals. It must be said that there has been a general agreement between them on many of these issues, although obviously their strategies are vastly different. Liberals tend to agree “in principle” with these issues, but when it comes to acting on them, they want to work within the system while regularly wanting to put action off to a “better” time. Progressives want change right now, and that requires activism from outside of the two political parties.
Many liberal podcasters simply, honestly, and sincerely believe in the DNC—both party and propaganda. But that the Democratic Party is throwing money behind the liberals of (now once) popular podcasts as TYT seems not just intuitively obvious, but has some evidence to it. In the case of TYT, they have accepted two quite large donations: one from a wealthy Hilary Clinton backer [$20 million in 2017] and one from the former Republican Governor of Louisiana [$4 million in 2014], and it was not long after this that their messaging changed from progressive to a corporate and institutional liberal one. Supporters of TYT claim these donations have changed nothing about their views, but not only does a timeline show that their message change coincides with these donations, but as Chomsky argues persuasively in MC, such large financial backers as these consolidate their control of media information through their financial support. “The large entities that provide this subsidy become ‘routine’ news sources and have privileged access to the gates.” (p. 22) Most important for our purposes here, Chomsky argues that “The dominance of official sources is weakened by the existence of highly respected unofficial sources that give dissent views with great authority. This problem is alleviated by ‘co-opting the experts’–i.e. putting them on the payroll…” (p. 23)
Thus, we may conclude that this is not reducible to a simple squabble between liberals. To see it this way is reductive and frankly, either dishonest or naïve. Given what we have just examined, it is closer to reality to understand these pod wars as an attempt of the corporate-leaning or funded liberals to determine what it means to be a leftist, and they thus seek domination of the information and analysis people have at their disposal. From what I have seen, since these corporate liberals are rooted in DNC ideology, they cannot consistently argue objectively by following principles and evidence alone, so many resort to the subterfuge of emotion, and the logical fallacies of ad hominem and suppressed evidence to make their arguments. In fact, in the case of TYT, there is no appeal to evidence at all to refute Mate’s articles or Dore’s criticisms of the journalism of TYT. All the latter has is their ideology and their and the logically fallacious attacks attempts to crush criticism while at the same time masking their ideology of being pro censorship, pro war, pro party, etc.
If Chomsky is right, the smears and lies of corporate-leaning Democrat podcasts such as TYT are not necessarily always deliberate (although they sometimes are), but rather, as Chomsky argues, they have bought into the corporate ideology and agenda long before they begin attacking true progressives (MC, p. xii; see also p. 24, where Chomsky also makes the insightful comment that mass media “experts” are chosen and funded when they “regularly echo the official view.” This is especially true in their choice of “former radicals,” whose function as “serviceability to power” is that they have come to “see the light”).
All of this shows their willingness to co-opt their basic principles so as not to alienate themselves from the corporate contributors whose support can mean not just survival but thriving, by providing stable finances and potential access to a wider audience than they would normally have otherwise.
Lou Reed once sang: “This is no time for circumlocution…This is a time to put up or shut up.” This is a time of serious internecine conflict in liberalism today. It happens to be seen rather clearly in the Julian Assange case. If you support Assange and his release from Belmarsh prison, you are on the side of the progressives, who believe that a necessary condition for people to exercise their right to self-determination and expression of opinion is an informed and knowledgeable people. If you do not support Assange’s release from prison, and think Assange is a “traitor” and/or a “Russian agent” (although how these characterizations are the case its advocates never explain), then you are on the side of the corporate liberals and conservatives. TYT smears Assange mercilessly; Jimmy and Kyle support Assange. In either case, it is a question of who controls information, how they use it or don’t, and now which side of the liberal divide they are on. Those who try to stay in the middle, like Kyle, are either going to get run over by the corporate-liberal media juggernaut, and/or they will be completely ostracized by the very parties they are trying to keep in between.
So the specific feud between Dore and TYT is not about friendship alone, if at all, as some like Kyle have said. Rather, it is friendships that split apart because of both an ideology and a willingness versus unwillingness to “get along” with corporate-sponsored outlets and American imperialism abroad. Truly independent and fact-following journalists like Mr. Mate, and progressive commentators like Mr. Dore, are completely unwilling to be so friendly to corporate sponsorship, while TYT clearly is very friendly to them, and Kyle seems to want to stay cosey with them.
If the podcaster war everyone is now talking about has shown us anything, it is the corrupting influence of money on providing what information to pass on to viewers, and it further shows the underlying corporate split of progressives and liberals that was ignored during the years of the Trump presidency, but now has been clearly revealed. This split is a significant one between siding, however mildly, with corporate-friendly institutions like the Democratic Party, and completely rejecting the latter as corrupt and at odds with the needs of the people at large. Can there be a truce and peace treaty between them? It is possible, but to do so will require corporate liberals to surrender their weapons of mass deception: rhetoric and of serving monied corporate interests, since these issues will likely be non-negotiable ones for progressive leaders. That will make for a difficult peace process. It will be interesting to see how this plays out in the end, but it is a war that needs to be fought if we are to retain what Abraham Lincoln saw as the promise of our nation, that ours is to be “a government of the people, by the people, and for the people.”
Dr. Robert P. Abele holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Marquette University and M.A. degrees in Theology and Divinity. He is the author of three books: A User’s Guide to the USA PATRIOT Act (2005); The Anatomy of a Deception: A Logical and Ethical Analysis of the Decision to Invade Iraq (2009); and Democracy Gone: A Chronicle of the Last Chapters of the Great American Democratic Experiment (2010). He wrote eight articles on political theory in the Encyclopedia of Global Justice, by Springer Press (2012), as well as many other articles, which can be read at www.spotlightonfreedom.com. His new book is entitled The Self-Conscious, Thinking Subject: A Kantian Contribution to Reestablishing Reason in a Post-Truth Age (by Palgrave-Macmillan/Springer, available in September 2021). Dr. Abele is a professor of philosophy at Diablo Valley College, located in the San Francisco Bay area.
