CAPTivated

EP 01 Unpacking Conservative Media with Nicole Hemmer

• CAPTivated • Season 1 • Episode 1

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Welcome to the very first episode of the CAPTivated Podcast! Hosts Hanna, Julius and Sage sit down with Dr. Nicole Hemmer, Associate Professor of History and Director of the Rogers Center for the American Presidency at Vanderbilt University, to explore the history and power of conservative media in American politics. From William F. Buckley Jr. and Rush Limbaugh to Ben Shapiro and Charlie Kirk, this episode traces how and why right-wing media evolved into a dominant force in the digital age. Nicole also breaks down what’s different about contemporary conservative influencers, why fact-checking fails and media literacy isn’t enough, and how strong local communities matter more than perfect information systems.

Three Key Takeaways from Nicole

  1. Politics and media are inextricable - You can't fix one without addressing the other
  2. 20th-century solutions don't solve 21st-century problems - We need forward-looking approaches, not nostalgia for a media "golden age"
  3. Touch grass with others - Strong local communities and real-world connections are essential foundations for both better media consumption and democratic health

Find out more about:

Some of the texts we refer to in this episode:

Nicole’s Media Diet:

This podcast is part of CAPT’s efforts to encourage open and diverse intellectual exchange. The ideas presented by individuals on the podcast are their own and do not represent Purdue University, which adheres to a policy of institutional neutrality.

We would love to hear your thoughts on this episode! Send us feedback to captivatedpod@gmail.com

Welcome to the very first episode of the CAPTivated Podcast! Hosts Hanna, Julius and Sage sit down with Prof. Nicole Hemmer, Associate Professor of History and Director of the Rogers Center for the American Presidency at Vanderbilt University, to explore the history and power of conservative media in American politics. From William F. Buckley Jr. and Rush Limbaugh to Ben Shapiro and Charlie Kirk, this episode traces how and why right-wing media evolved into a dominant force in the digital age. Nicole also breaks down what's different about contemporary conservative influencers, why fact-checking fails and media literacy isn't enough, and how strong local communities matter more than perfect information systems.


Three Key Takeaways from Nicole

  1. Politics and media are inextricable - You can't fix one without addressing the other
  2. 20th-century solutions don't solve 21st-century problems - We need forward-looking approaches, not nostalgia for a media "golden age"
  3. Touch grass - Strong local communities and real-world connections are essential foundations for both better media consumption and democratic health


Find out more about:


Some of the texts we refer to in this episode:


Nicole’s Media Diet:


Transcript:

[00:00:00] Nicole Hemmer: 
It was just a different model. Don’t trust us because we’re objective. Don't trust us because we're experts. Don't trust us because we're professionals. Trust us because we are conservatives.

[00:00:17] Hanna Sistek: 
Welcome to the very first episode of CAPTivated, a new podcast hosted by the Center for American Political History, Media, and Technology at Purdue University. In each episode, we will examine a specific facet of our digital public sphere, how it works, and how we got here. We're here to help you sort through the noise. I'm Hanna. 

[00:00:38] Julius Freeman: 
I'm Julius. 

[00:00:39] Hanna Sistek: 
And I'm Sage. 

[00:00:40] Julius Freeman:
On today's podcast, we have Dr. Nicole Hemmer, who is an Associate Professor of History and the Director of the Roger Center for the American Presidency at Vanderbilt University. Alongside her research, writing, and teaching, she does amazing work using history to inform the wider public. She hosts a podcast called This Day. She writes a column for CNN and Co-founded Made by History, the historical analysis section of the Washington Post.

[00:01:06] Sage Goodwin:
Niki's thinking has been very influential for my research, especially her book, Messengers of the Right. So I was super excited to have her on the podcast to talk to us about conservative media.

[00:01:17] Hanna Sistek: 
As it happens, we also recorded this podcast shortly after the death of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk. 

[00:01:23] Sage Goodwin: 
You know, I had heard one reporter describe Charlie Kirk as the millennial Rush Limbaugh. In this conversation, Niki had really interesting insights on how Charlie Kirk was actually different from that earlier generation of conservative media personalities.

[00:01:36] Julius Freeman: 
Later in the conversation, Niki brings up a point about why conservatives have an advantage in their approach to the media. 

[00:01:42] Hanna Sistek: 
And towards the end, she talks about how access to information is not enough. Pointing out that the problem is not a lack of information, but how information is filtered through our different partisan lenses.

[00:01:53] Julius Freeman: 
So, as we opened the podcast, we started by asking Niki a question about how she became interested in conservative media. 

[00:02:00] Nicole Hemmer: 
It was not originally what I went to graduate school to do. I originally had gone to graduate school to study the progressive era, and actually, there was a media component to this. I was really interested in the way that people like Muckrakers were using journalism and storytelling in order to affect political change. That was really fascinating to me because it seemed like the idea that you could write a book and change the law and change the way that people understood their relationship to the government was fascinating to me. So I had started off, thinking about doing that, and at the same time, my dad had retired from his job of 30 years or so. He was spending a lot more time at home and was consuming a lot of conservative talk radio. And so, because it was a way of bonding with my dad, I got really interested in conservative talk radio. And in fact, I should tell you, there was this one specific moment that just really stands out, where I was home from the first year of graduate school. It was 2004, so the 2004 election was coming, and my dad and I were in the car together, and we're driving around, and he says, “You know, my goal for you while you're visiting this summer is to get you to vote for George W. Bush.” And then he reached over, and he turned on the radio, and we listened to Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh. It did not get me to vote for George W. Bush that fall. 

I'm so shocked that Rush Limbaugh is not convincing to you. 

It was not a conversion experience, but my dad thought that it would be. He thought, “Well, if she listens to these radio programs, she'll see the light. Well, yeah, that she'll change her understanding of politics because it has shaped his understanding of politics.” And that got me super entrusted in contemporary conservative media. And from there, serendipity stepped in because I was working on a project on the 1964 riots in Harlem, the uprisings there. And so I was going through all of the media, the magazines and newspapers from that summer, which was also the summer of the 1964 presidential election, where Barry Goldwater was the conservative standard-bearer who was running.

And I came across this article in The Nation called Hate Clubs of the Air, and it was all about right-wing radio. And I was like, “But wait. Right-wing radio started with Rush Limbaugh in the 1980s and 1990s”, and from there it was off to the races. 

[00:04:21] Julius Freeman: 
There it goes. History. 

[00:04:22] Nicole Hemmer: 
Right? That's how history works, right? Like it pops up and you're like, “Oh, well, now I have something that I need to figure out.”

[00:04:29] Sage Goodwin: 
Your work is so relevant, it's always relevant, but can you tell us what is happening right now as we record today, the 15th of September, 2025? What is happening today that makes your work particularly urgent and relevant?

[00:04:44] Nicole Hemmer: 
Well, if we're talking about what's been happening in the last two hours or so. Today, the Vice President of the United States, JD Vance, is sitting down to host the radio program of Charlie Kirk, who was killed by a gunman last week, and this is a remarkable moment. One, because Kirk himself represented a fusing of media and political organization and a presidential administration in a way that we have not seen before in US history.

And even though I have spent a great deal of time charting the relationship between media activists and various campaigns and presidential administrations. Rush Limbaugh slept over in the Lincoln bedroom in 1992. Right-wing radio hosts were invited to air their programs from Congress in 1994 during the Republican Revolution. In 2001, they were invited to the White House to do their shows from there. So there has been this intimate relationship between right-wing media and right-wing administrations. Before Mike Pence became Vice President, he was a radio talk show host. He called himself Rush Limbaugh decaf. If you have seen Mike Pence speak since, that's almost an understatement, right? We're like Rush Limbaugh and Valium. 

[00:06:03] Julius Freeman: 
Yeah. No.

[00:06:05] Nicole Hemmer: 
But, this is a new step in that evolution because to have a vice president host a program, obviously, we've never seen that before, but the synergies now between. Right-wing media and a right-wing administration. We are certainly an unchartered territory there, and that has real consequences for an administration with an authoritarian bent that has this extremely well-developed propaganda arm now.

[00:06:31] Julius Freeman: 
Yeah, I think it's been really interesting, being someone who grew up in the era in which the Ben Shapiros and the Charlie Kirks came about. I remember, I was actually teaching today, and I was telling my students, because this came up, this is just a conversation that is on a lot of college students' minds, because of how impactful he was in the college space. And, we were talking about it, and I said that, “It's really interesting to think about Charlie because for me. When I was growing up in high school, the first person who really hit the stage for us was Ben Shapiro. He comes out there, and it's the quick talking, the fast hitters”. And I mean, like all the YouTube videos Ben Shapiro demolishes, a college student, all over the country, and it was every week. It was so consistent, and it was a speed of content that  I feel like is so unprecedented that Rush Limbaugh was daily, but even then, you're segmented to the radio. Then Shapiro was everywhere. Like, it was constant. You turned to Instagram, he was there, Snapchat, he was there, Facebook, he's there, YouTube, he's there, and if you watch even one video, then there are 10 more of him doing the same thing. And so it became really influential for not only me, but I started to see my peers be influenced by what he was talking about.

And so Charlie Kirk emerges from that and then takes it to a different space because I would say that even Ben Shapiro didn't reach the level of direct political influence that Charlie had with Trump, where Trump is like, “Hey, you're talking too much about Israel and Palestine. I need you to, because of how impactful you are.” Like, that is so unique to me. 

[00:08:16] Nicole Hemmer: 
Yeah. That's spot on. That very much aligns with how I think about Kirk being different because you do have other figures, media figures, who have those kinds of close ties with the administration. Somebody like Sean Hannity, who no young person listens to, absolutely takes marching orders from the White House. But Sean Hannity is and has always been only a media figure. 

Kirk was a political organizer. He was a fundraiser, and that, I think, gave him extra cache in the political world. Definitely extra cache on college campuses where he was a physical presence as well as a media presence. But also what you're charting about the changing velocity of right-wing media, that it goes from the 15-minute-a-week shows that I looked at in my first book to the 3-hour Rush Limbaugh shows, to suddenly you have Fox News going 24 hours a day. You suddenly have conservative radio stations that are 24 hours of conservative content. And then with social media, it's something else entirely because of the shareability and because of the multi-platform coverage, and the virality. It's that algorithm-driven media is something entirely new and has consequences, I think, that we haven't even begun to explore.

[00:09:26] Julius Freeman: 
I really started to think about what you talked about; it wasn't just the online presence that he had. Turning Point USA, if anyone has any doubt, was a real movement that was really changing things at every major campus in the United States. 

[00:09:44] Sage Goodwin: 
I think there are 800 chapters across…

[00:09:45] Julius Freeman: 
Pretty much any big school that you can think of, I promise you, there is a turning point. The USA was established on that campus that has such a profound impact on the ground, the base, the foundation. 

[00:09:59] Nicole Hemmer:
That story is so fascinating on a bunch of levels. Like me, growing up in the 1980s and 1990s as a Catholic, we had the same sort of approach to right-to-life marches. There was the Right to Life March once a year, and that was a stage in your political development. You would go to that march, and it would be your own on-the-ground political activism, which it sounds like Turning Point served as well. And Kirk was interested in people, not just being conservative voices. He wanted them to be conservative voters. He wanted them to run for student government. He wanted them to run for the school board. He understood the connection between media and political change, but he couldn't stop at the media. Like the media wasn't enough. And the thing is, these early conservative media activists I write about understood the same thing.

It was William F. Buckley Jr., who was the founder of National Review, who created Young Americans for Freedom, which is the precursor to Turning Point still exists. And, Clarence Manion, who is a radio host, and William Rusher, who is the publisher of National Review. They're the ones organizing the 1960 and 1964 Goldwater campaigns. And so, that sense that media are absolutely central to politics, that's how you change the message. That's how you bring people together. It's how you build a movement. But it is not the end of things. And I think that's the difference with somebody like Shapiro and some of the other media voices today, is because you can make so much money in media and you can gain so much fame as an influencer, unless you're really dedicated to building political power, you're not going to do that on the ground. 

Often, thankless organizing and fundraising that somebody like Kirk did, which makes him in some ways an irreplaceable figure in the movement, because there's nobody else out there who's doing what he did. And there's certainly nobody on the left who does that. 

[00:11:42] Sage Goodwin: 
Thinking of a great line that you wrote in one of your books. He's taking that original conservative playbook from the thirties, forties, fifties, I think you put it as transforming audiences into activists and activists into a reliable voting base. So if we think about the thorough lines, that's not something that Charlie Kirk has pioneered. He's picking up on a playbook that exists from decades before in the conservative movement.

[00:12:08] Nicole Hemmer: 
Exactly. So that he is replicating something that the right has done for a very long time, but innovating in the sense that it's an entirely different media environment and in many ways an entirely different political environment.

[00:12:21] Sage Goodwin: 
And one thing that I just wanted to pick up on, an amazing talk that you gave earlier today, is how the conservatives have a leg up in comparison to the left because of their ongoing relationship to… Like, they have a leg up with social media because of their relationship to the media. The word you used then is their “epistemological relationship” to the media. Can you unpack that for us? What does that mean? 

[00:12:50] Nicole Hemmer: 
Sure. This is something that I found so fascinating because the US journalism profession really started to cohere in the 1920s. The New York Times begins to set some professional standards around objectivity. There's a lot of theorizing about how to be objective, factual, and have a distance from your sources, have the voice from nowhere, not have an opinion about things. They always had an opinion about things, and it often came through, but that was the ideal for which they were supposed to be striving. And when right-wing media began to develop in the 1950s and 1960s, they came at it with a very different set of beliefs about how media should function. And the place that I like to point to that demonstrates the difference so well is Human Events.

Human Events was a news weekly that started publishing back in the mid 1940s, but then really took off in the mid 1950s. And its purpose was, we are objective, and we are biased. We are both. We are right-leaning, and we are right because the conservative viewpoint is the correct viewpoint. So yes, our eyes are biased through patriotism and Americanism and Constitutionalism, but those are the right values. So there is no conflict between our bias and objectivity. And what's so interesting about that is that it was part of a theory of communications that Cold War conservatives were developing. Those are objective. Don't trust us because we're experts. Don't trust us because we're professionals. Trust us because we are conservatives.

Theological stance of a person whose writing or reporting, then you have enough information about how to evaluate them, whether to trust them or not. That's very unusual in the media realm of the Cold War. Certainly, in terms of professional journalism, it was very stuck in objectivity by the 1950s and 1960s. But that particular epistemological approach, that particular way of thinking and evaluating the trustworthiness of a particular media source works so well in our current social media environment. Because the way that social media works, trust is based on influence. It's based on connection. It's based on, do I trust the people who follow you? Are you getting tons of retweets, reposts, and likes and things? Do you have an avid following? Is the algorithm pushing you into this? And how do you feel when you hear this person speak or see their content? That's how you decide whether you wanna see more or how the algorithm decides on whether you wanna see more… The level of response that you have to it.

And so conservatives have a bit of an advantage in this field because they have 70 or 80 years of making the argument that the validity of media is based on that emotional response that you have to them and the ideological stance of the creator. And that is something that, for most centrist and liberals, I think would take them quite a while to catch up with.

[00:16:03] Sage Goodwin: 
That's speaking to emotion rather than logic. So, I think, this gets us to a bigger question in thinking about what ties all of the work that you do together. What do you see as being the main problem that you're interested in examining? What's the core question that you're trying to reach through your work? 

[00:16:24] Nicole Hemmer: 
What I'm really interested in is this intersection of media and politics. Going back to what I was saying about how I got interested in history? Why do people do the things they do? And the political question that I have is, why do people vote the way they vote? Why do they see themselves as a particular political identity? What shapes the beliefs that they have about their relationship to the state and to other people? And I think the media plays an enormous role in that. And so, trying to understand how different kinds of media shape people's self-identity, their political identity, and their feelings about the world is really important to me. And coming out of that work, I've come to understand that our media and our politics are co-constitutive. They share the same values. They reflect the same broader social and economic conditions. So during the era of centrist liberal consensus, you had a media that was founded on the idea of expertise and objectivity. And we're going to give you the middle of the road, and we're not going to give you far left opinions or far-right opinions, that's not valid. And you had a government that operated in much the same way that said bipartisanship is at the top, we're going to be a technocratic democracy, and we're not going to give into the passions of the left or the right.

That began to break down in the late 1960s, unsurprisingly, as white Americans became more politically active and became more drawn to movements on the left and right. And as that is changing politically, the media change as well. So, news programs in the late 1960s and 1970s began to have opinion segments where they would have on a right-wing activist like Phyllis Schlafly, and they would have on a left-wing activist to be in conversation or debate with one another. 60-Minutes, which was one of the leading television news magazines at the time, started to have a counterpoint where it featured a liberal and a conservative yelling at one another every week. And that idea that the only way to understand politics is to be given the left side and the right side. And then Americans can just decide which one of those they believe that the truth is probably somewhere in the middle, which develops together because politics and media are the product of the same underlying social and economic forces. So that's the big idea that I've been wrestling with for the last 15 or 20 years. 

[00:18:47] Julius Freeman: 
And I think it's really interesting. I read a great book, maybe a year ago, called The Fires Upon Us, about James Baldwin and William F. Buckley Jr., and it basically tracks their history separately and marks the moments in which they meet in a clash. And it culminates in this big debate that they have in England and the UK. And it was so interesting to me because it's marking, trekking, that same history that you're talking about, that as the media started to develop for both of them, they started to realize that their influence was bigger than just talking in local settings.

But William F. Buckley Jr. started to realize, “Oh, I have this groundswell, but I also have now this political influence in the media, and I can actually affect change by just using my voice and going on these public spaces.” And so this kind of debate system started to emerge for both of them and culminated in this debate. And it seems that a greater version of that has emerged, where the whole system is built around. We just debate. The whole ecosystem is around the idea that there are these equally good or equally valid opinions on both sides of every topic. It doesn't matter what the topic is; there are these equally valid opinions, and that if we can just all come together and talk about it like this… This great democratic style will always come to the right answer. That we always have this assumption that people are looking for and desire to find the ethical, appropriate, and moral answer to all the questions. 

[00:20:26] Nicole Hemmer: 
And when you watch the debates that take place these days, do you find that they are places where people are searching for a common truth and a deeper…

[00:20:35] Julius Freeman:
If you watch the… there's this great platform I don't know about, but there is the YouTube channel Jubilee. 

[00:20:42] Sage Goodwin: 
Yeah. I was waiting for that to come up. 

[00:20:44] Julius Freeman: 
And they have this interesting segment where they have started being surrounded. One of the last big moments that we saw from Charlie Kirk as well is where they had this thing called “surrounded”, where it's basically 20 liberals surrounding Charlie Kirk. And he would lay out these points, and then 20 different liberals could come up at any point and try to debate him on a particular topic, and it fit his model so well, like he was born for that moment. But what I'm glad that they're doing because it is starting to reveal some of the cesspool nature of these debates in the sense that people are walking away, and I actually didn't learn anything about this topic. And if anyone who actually knows something comes up to these figures. It quickly falls apart, as the facade falls apart very quickly. And so, you start to see this facade of charisma being framed as competence, thought to fall apart. And it really kind of exposes the messiness of this media culture that you're explaining that is really hard for people to walk through.

[00:21:52] Nicole Hemmer:
I love that phrase, “Charisma, interpreted as competence.” Yes. Because I think that's exactly right, what is missed is that they're performing this sort of democratic exchange of ideas. What is actually happening is they're performing in order to have clips that will later go viral in this media ecosystem. And that's different. Let's put it this way. It's not the Lincoln-Douglas debates, which themselves had their issues, but the purpose of them is different, and the performance of them is obviously very different. 

[00:22:23] Sage Goodwin: 
Yeah, I will tell you that, so William F. Buckley Jr. -James Baldwin debate happens at the Cambridge Union. We call this book The Fires Upon Us. The Cambridge Union and the Oxford Union have a very long history of these debates. They happen weekly, and they get people to come and argue for and against each side. And having been to a couple of them, I can tell you nothing about that is about getting to some ultimate truth. It is all about point scoring, grandstanding, everything you're talking about, the charisma is competence. But there's an assumption underlying what we're talking about there that I think, Niki, your work also really gets at showing the world these bad things are happening, which is the first step towards solving them. But that's not always the case. It is not the case at all. 

[00:23:14] Nicole Hemmer: 
It's a noble idea, right? This idea that transparency and information are how people understand the world. People misunderstand the world because they don't have access to good information. And if they had access to good information, then they would come to have the right beliefs, whatever those are defined as, that they would have a kind of moral clarity, and everyone would come to the same conclusion.

One of the most fascinating experiments with why this is exactly wrong has been the fact-checking movement of the past 10 years. This idea that “Oh, there's a lot of misinformation in the political system right now. Wow. People are just getting bad information from YouTube, TikTok, and Twitter. We have to figure out a way to fix this. We'll fact-check things. So when people say untrue things, we will give people the right information, and then they can correct their understanding of the world.” How did that work out? It worked out terribly, and it worked out terribly because it doesn't understand why people believe the things that they do. It assumes that the problem is a lack of information or a lack of knowledge, but a lot of the time, the problem is a different set of values and a different way of seeing the world. And right-wing media has been a big part of this. Like, they have pushed back forcefully, have called “fact-checking” liberally biased, in the same way that they've discredited news organizations as liberally biased. But the way that people understand the information that's coming at them is through the scrim of ideology and values. And so what I mean by that is that, well, you would hear a lot maybe 5 or 10 years ago about media silos or information silos. But the problem was that conservatives were only consuming conservative information, and liberals were only consuming liberal information. And that's why people disagree. That's why there was polarization in a partisan divide. But that's not true at all. Like conservatives, some conservatives are actually much better read than your average citizen who reads the Washington Post and the New York Times, but they read it through the scrim of, “Well, let's see what the liberal New York Times has to say today.”

And so what would happen is if the New York Times, for instance, was reporting on a story, if they had a big Benghazi expose, Rush Limbaugh would talk about it on his show, and he would say, “Look, even the liberal New York Times couldn't avoid this story.” So it wasn't evidence of non-bias, it was evidence of the underlying scandal or the underlying corruption. Because of the idea that people were in media silos, I think it's actually more appropriate to say that there has grown this massive divergence in the way that people receive information, understand information, and interpret information. That has much less to do with the media system, although that obviously plays a part in it, and much more to do with their values and political identities.

[00:26:04] Julius Freeman: 
Absolutely. And I think that this leads us into… We've been dipping our toes in this, but I think it's time to dive fully into this understanding of media literacy. Because hearing all of this, I'm trying to imagine, like, Okay, we have all of these assets, overwhelmed with information, all these problems. So there's information at our fingertips at all times, and people still can't figure out what is true. And even when they do know what is true, they can't really emotionally take that information. And then if the information is proven true, they also don't trust the source of the correction. So, how does this help us deal with the issue of media literacy? How do we as citizens in this society? Try to find a pathway forward. Is it possible to have a standard of shared truth of a shared reality? Is that possible in our current media climate? 

[00:27:02] Nicole Hemmer: 
Well, I think history helps us in a couple of ways. First, I think it lets some of the air out of the framing of media literacy, 'cause again, even that idea of literacy, the problem is people are illiterate in the way that they consume their media. And if they only understood the proper way to read it, then it'd be kumbaya time. And I think that is incorrect. The public-facing media literacy materials I've come across feel very shaped by 20th century media. There's a little bit of golden ageism. If we could just get back to the good old days of objectivity, reconstructing the barriers between the news page and the op-ed page, then we could finally restore sanity. There is a bit of backward-looking to it. And I think what I have come to understand is that, “Yes, media literacy is hugely important.” People have to have a way of sorting through the noise and finding the signal. They have to be able to figure out how to tell the difference between AI and human-created content and determine what they value from each. They have to have a way of discerning what reality is, like what's real and what's not real, that feels still very important regardless of the media system that you're in. But of course, the structures that we're grappling with are not editors and owners of major newspapers. It's the algorithms that we can't even see. And so that is a very different kind of problem as we're thinking about media literacy that requires us to understand the structures of the media that we're consuming, as just like a baseline for being citizens in the world.

And that's a big, complex lift for people. Like, we're asking them to do much more, and they kind of have to try to discern the reality of the world around them. That's hard. The other thing that I would say is that I hope that this history is helpful in helping us to understand.

Media literacy has to go hand in hand with political reform. You don't get to the kumbaya moment by fixing media or fixing people's consumption habits, like that. There's an underlying set of political, social, and economic problems that if those aren't solved, you're not going to solve. The misinformation problem. Because those misinformation problems are born of those political, social, and economic problems. So if just trying to get people's parrot back, particular ideas about media are not going to be enough to solve what people are really concerned with, which is polarization, political violence, and reality. Right? Why are people choosing to disconnect from the world? Are they choosing it, or is it being forced upon them? Do we even know where that stands? Are some people opting into a more unreal world because it's more emotionally satisfying, or is it a better fit for them? It's a lot to sort through.

So it feels like a very large problem, but also a distinctly political and social problem. And I think underlying all of it, and this is the answer that I have when people ask me how to fix democracy, which I also do not have the answer to, but it does seem like it starts with a strong community. And that's tricky because we've seen people have very strong communities that are also very corrosive, and at times, very violent. But providing people with strong, stable communities and strong, stable economies is probably where we have to start. And that obviously goes beyond a media question.

[00:30:31] Sage Goodwin: 
Yeah. I really like that encapsulation of sorting through the noise and finding the signal. I think ultimately that's kind of the goal that we're aiming for. 

[00:30:41] Nicole Hemmer: 
Well, I'm curious, Sage, what you see the signal as representing. 

[00:30:45] Sage Goodwin: 
I was actually gonna ask you this, the same thing, because it's a great encapsulation. I think we all understand what the noise is, we're so overwhelmed by so many different information outlets, so many different people talking. Especially given the democratization of media over the course of the last 20, 30, 40 years. And especially with the rise of the internet. And I guess to me, finding the signal is probably figuring out what is a meaningful thing to pay attention to.

Especially if we're talking about politics, what is not just intentionally designed as a distraction? What is the core of what is actually going on? I think that's real. What is real? What is actually happening? Not what is artifice, what is distraction?  All of those things. I don't know, Julius, how would you think about that? 

[00:31:36] Julius Freeman: 
I tried to break this down in my mind while you were talking, Nikki, and I was trying to put it in the context of like, maybe I can make a smaller microcosm moment about this really broad historical issue. And so I thought about the COVID era. I think the signal for me is what were people looking for? Because the noise is what is actually happening in both the political and media, at least in that era, both are trying to distract you from what was really going on. And so what were people looking for? And so the core of it is that people were looking for safety. And I think at the signal of it is when we go into these media landscapes, I think you spoke to it as people are looking to find some sense of safety, whether that be an internal or an external. And so oftentimes in our current system, we can't find the external safety because we don't trust our government, we don't trust our systems, we don't trust any of those things. And so, I think it comes down to a safety feeling for people looking to feel like I'm in a place where I belong, and I'm wanted and I'm safe there. 

[00:32:46] Nicole Hemmer: 
Yeah. I think that combination of safety and belonging is a really strong impulse and drives a lot of politics. And, I think COVID is also interesting at the moment, as we're thinking about this question of signal and information. There was some talk at the beginning of COVID that this was going to end the misinformation problem. Spoiler does not. But because now it mattered that you had the right information.

And so there was this moment where it seemed like there was some clarity. Like, we need to know how safe it is to go outside. We need to know how far to stand from one another. We need to know what the experts say. We're turning to experts to tell us how to be safe and how to survive this pandemic. If we imagine that even a perfect information environment would have required a ton of trust and an understanding of the scientific process. That this is our information and understanding of this disease as we know it at this moment. And it could change so that if we're giving you advice today not to mask, and then tomorrow we say, “Ah, you know what? We've got more information. And actually, we do think that this is going to keep you a little safer. So we're going to make sure you have masks, and we're gonna ask that you wear them in public.” And this information could change, and that tolerance for a change would have had to be built in there as well. So you can begin to see what a healthy information ecosystem would look like. It would provide security, it would provide a sense of belonging and trust. It wouldn't be rigid. It would have a fluidity to it. And a sense of we're all working on the same problem, and we all want the same outcome.

So we're gonna keep rowing together, we're gonna talk to the experts, and we're going to build out our understanding of the world based on the information as it comes in. We just don't live in a media system or a political system that has any of those tolerances left. And so what we got instead was a tremendous number of conspiracy theories, often based on things just like, “Oh, the CDC got new information, and things changed.” And that was then held against the CDC. And you see that even just like day-to-day corrections in a newspaper, printing corrections is evidence of its trustworthiness, but it is weaponized against those newspapers as a way of saying they got it wrong, you can't trust them. And so, without any of that grace in the system, it just doesn't work because nobody has perfect information for all things at all times. 

[00:35:22] Julius Freeman: 
I think that this opens us up to a conversation about some solutions here, because I think you're starting to dip there. I don't know if we have any.

[00:35:32] Sage Goodwin: 
How do you sort through the noise to find the signal?

[00:35:35] Julius Freeman: 
Describable solutions community? 

[00:35:36] Sage Goodwin: 
You're arguing with a relative that you don't agree with. Is there a way to kind of help? Can you give any suggestions? 

[00:35:46] Nicole Hemmer: 
Yeah. At the Thanksgiving dinner table, it's probably, like, the way that this is always framed is, you know, that uncle you always argue with, and like, if you're coming in hot and already arguing, there's not any trust there to begin with. And there's not going to be any growth coming out of that. And so obviously, as educators, we're not gonna solve these problems of trust. I think that some government regulation is probably needed to sort out the contemporary media situation. We probably need robust, well-funded public media. We don't have that. In fact, we're going in the opposite direction. So I think those are the kinds of things that we can talk about, but I don't think we can necessarily change. We can talk about the comparative studies between the US and other democracies with public media. We can talk about the history of media values in the United States. I do think that there's something worthwhile about demystifying how media are made, in that sense, media literacy. Like, how is the content you consume created? Where do those people get their information from?

Having students watch a 1-minute TikTok clip that's on politics around climate or on whatever, and then having them trace back, is it right? How would you verify that that information is correct? Why is this appealing to you? How is this person appealing to you? So like the things that you study in communications about rhetoric, about persuasion, those feel like absolutely critical skills, just so you know when they're being used on you.

And so you can understand your own reaction because it's so, I mean, we are all professional scholars of media, and how often do we get sucked in by the algorithm? How often do we see things and we're like, “Oh, I believe that, and I have no idea why I believe that.” So, given how vulnerable we are to it, having real open conversations with our students about the environment that they're just drenched in seems to me to be very, very valuable. And also listening to them, it was so helpful for me to hear how you saw and perceived and received Charlie Kirk and Ben Shapiro, because that wasn't my experience, right? Because I came up in the waning days of Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck. Those were my comparison points. And there really wasn't a good young generation of conservatives who we were hearing a lot from. It really was this older generation. So, spending time actually listening to students, I think, might actually be the starting point because so many of us who are teaching students are in very different media environments. And that's one of the big differences, is that media fragmentation means if we were teaching media literacy or how to get good information back in the 1990s, we would be dealing with cable and the fragmentation of cable. But people would be basically getting their news from the same sources.

And now some streamers have millions of followers, who are filthy rich from the content they create, we've never heard of, right? So our students may be living in entirely different worlds and understanding media in entirely different ways. The way that I deal with it, first of all, it's not possible to consume all the media anymore. It's just not like you can subscribe to five newspapers and six magazines and get the information you need. That's not how the world operates anymore. That's why I find it really useful to curate the people whom you trust on social media. And that's challenging 'cause it has that question of trust.

So who are the people who are reliable? Who are the people who pass along good information, and when they pass along bad information, they correct themselves? Curate yourself a list of people who are responsible, and get them from across the political spectrum. I want to read what reporters are writing, but I also want to read what people who share my values are reporting and writing. I want to know what activists are saying. I wanna understand the conversations that are happening everywhere. It's not just how to get the best information, it's how to get a broader perspective. 

[00:39:41] Sage Goodwin: I think that's so key and the difference there between what we were talking about earlier, about the truth being somewhere in between two sides, and balance being the way to find out what's actually going on. I think the difference there with what you're saying is it's about understanding. The world that a lot of different people are inhabiting and that informs you to be able to figure out how to navigate things, which I think is a different thing. 

[00:40:06] Nicole Hemmer: 
It is a different thing, right? I'm not saying read across the political spectrum and then average it out to figure out what you believe. I don't think that works. But I do think that the only way we're going to get out of this is by finding ways to connect with people who are different from us. And it's a lot harder to do that when you have no shared information about the world. And so being broad-minded in the media that you consume is not necessarily about imbibing all of those beliefs, but it is about understanding people who are different from you. I've studied conservative media for 20 years because I wanna understand why my dad felt the way that he did about politics. That's valuable to me. And it's not necessarily just about judging those political beliefs. It really is about understanding them. If I were going to say there was one big thing that we could teach people, it's understanding other people. It's not about judging other people, it's about understanding them, right? It's about why they hold the beliefs that they do. And if you still disagree, and if you have a real moral conflict there, that's okay, but you can't even begin to have a conversation with them if you don't understand them or if you're not willing to listen to them and to talk to them. And obviously, there are limits to that, but I do think that the answer ultimately lies in community. And that community only gets built if you can have conversations across differences. And so, figuring out how to do that in a meaningful way seems to me to be at least one of the steps. I mean, James Baldwin and William F. Buckley Jr. did not agree on much, and they had real moral differences with one another.

In fact, Baldwin is not coming in there as an objective journalist, right? He's making moral arguments and very powerful moral arguments. And I think those are proper, right? We should have powerful moral arguments. We also just need to be in touch with the world as it really is. And that I think is the big challenge. I think people are very comfortable having their moral values and their moral judgments, but not always as deeply connected as I made sure that I'm seeing the world as it really is. 

[00:42:15] Sage Goodwin: 
And I think there's something so important there, especially with the Buckley-Baldwin comparison, that it's not about agreeing that, “Oh, well, we all just have different perspectives on these things. Some of the differences in opinion are not equatable; it's not about giving equal weight and equal value and equal moral value to those two different things.”

But you're right, it is about how to understand why people are thinking things that they're thinking, right? 

[00:42:42] Nicole Hemmer: 
Because I think part of politics is persuasion, and if you want to persuade people that the views that they hold aren't great views, you can't come in hot and say, “You suck as a person and try to build a conversation from there.” That kind of trying to understand while still holding onto your values, I think, seems to be one place to start. 

[00:43:04] Julius Freeman: 
Thinking about our current landscape and the students that I get to interact with, and what I see from the younger generations online is that the boundary at which we decide someone is beyond a conversation is starting to become less. And so it becomes difficult to help map for people when the line is beyond what a conversation is. I think for some, that's up to you. And I think that's what you're getting at, too.

But I also think that getting at this James Baldwin, which I really love, I love that book so much, so I'm glad that this has been a part of it, James Baldwin is what they called then very radical, he was on the more radical side. He comes in an era where MLK, Malcolm X, and all these other people exist, and they call him the radical one. And so he and William F. Buckley being on the same stage is really interesting because Baldwin is called the “radical one”. But when you listen to some of the things that Buckley was saying in the era. That was some pretty wild things to say, like the beliefs that he had about black Americans and the belief that white people could kind of help mold black people into better citizens, all these things. But he was legitimized by the state, by political leadership, and James Baldwin understood that. And so, because he made a legitimate voice, you had to enter into a space with him, even if it was just to show the ridiculous nature of the arguments being made. Because if you don't enter into that space, you get the figures like Alex Jones, where they can flourish online completely by themselves, leading to real harm and danger.

For other people, and I think some people think that you can just ignore these people and they'll just go away naturally, but they tend not to do that. There is a growing figure named Nick Fuentes that I think people may be fine with Charlie Kirk being gone, but who fills that gap? Who fills that space? There are only a few people who are big enough to fill that space, and I don't think you're gonna like who's coming into that space. And so you have to decide, “Okay, if this is the best that I can get from that side, whether you're on the left or the right, you have to be willing to enter into conversation respectfully and honestly.” Even if it is just to expose the faulty nature of the argumentation and try to give people an opportunity, not that they will, but an opportunity to see a better perspective. 

[00:45:50] Nicole Hemmer: 
So this is fascinating 'cause I was just listening this morning to a conversation with Hasan Piker, who's a left-wing streamer who was supposed to debate Charlie Kirk in a few weeks at Dartmouth. Obviously, that's not going to happen. And the topic of Nick Fuentes came up, because there's been this conversation over the past decade or so about. Do you platform fascist and Nazis? Do you platform someone who would deny the humanity of the person sitting across from them, who sees them as illegitimate, who denies the Holocaust, who denies women bodily autonomy? Do you have these conversations? And so, that was the question that was posed to Hassan because there was this real sense that maybe Nick Fuentes, who's a neo-Nazi, would fill in the hole left by Charlie Kirk. And the way that Piker answered that I thought was really interesting. He said, my instinct is not to platform someone who is a fringe figure who is going to get a lot out of the publicity and the legitimacy that I give them. Having a conversation with them or having a debate with them, which is also something that we've dealt with as journalists, as somebody who was covering the white power violence at Charlottesville. I didn't need to talk to Richard Spencer in order to explain what his beliefs were and his views were, and he was using the media to get his ideas out there more. So there's a real and legitimate conversation about how much attention you draw to people. But the thing that Hassan said was at the point that Nick Fuentes becomes the leader of a movement that has real backing, as his connections with the White House and the administration strengthen, as they almost certainly will. There comes a point at which he already has the influence, and at that point, there is a real power in exposing. His ideas. And there is a real question about whether debate actually does expose people's ideas because there's a real practice among folks on the far right to use those platforms as a way of cleaning up, right?

Suddenly, they moderate, they're like, “Oh, you know, you think I said this, but this is what I really meant. This is what I really believe.” Even though they don't actually believe that, right? It is a way of gaining legitimacy and power. And so these are difficult conversations. They are debates in which many sides are understandable. But it was really great to hear Hassan sort of wrestling with what it means as our politics moves further and further to the extreme, right? At some point, you have to talk to the people who are running the country. And that creates a lot of problems when you care about where our information environment is.

[00:48:21] Julius Freeman: 
Absolutely. And so I think about something. You have started yourself, made by history. I think that it would be interesting to hear about the kind of work that you do there that helps with this issue that we've been talking about today. 

[00:48:35] Nicole Hemmer:
So we started Made by History at the Washington Post in the summer of 2017. And I think it was interesting because the idea behind it was to bring historical expertise to conversations about politics. And there was a real value in that because so much of the media coverage was so reflexive, Donald Trump would say something. Immediately, people would feel the need to say something back. And it just felt so reactive. And it also felt very reflexive in a partisan way, right?

We need to figure out what the left is saying. We need to figure out what the right is saying. And one of the great things about historical analysis, it allows you to step out of the current moment and get a kind of a bigger picture, longer-term view. And that was what we were hoping to bring to the national conversation about politics. And it was happening at the very moment that history was moving into the center of political contention and political debate. Charlottesville happens six weeks after we launch. And that's about our history, right? It's about who we memorialize? It's about what values we stand for. Who are the people who actually founded this country, right? All of those things were at the center. And in the years that followed, history just became even more intensely central to our politics. The 1619 Project came out in 2019. Trump counters with the 1776 Project and the Garden of Heroes. And so there has been, even at this moment when we've been trying to bring scholarly-informed history to the public, which I think is such a great service. History has become a real battlefield, and a real partisan battlefield. It doesn't start with Trump in the 20 teens, the bestselling history writers in the United States were Bill O'Reilly and Glenn Beck.

It's been a partisan battleground for a while, but that was the environment we were writing into, and it felt really valuable because I think so many people have done so much work who have spent their lives in the archives. Trying to piece together and to understand and interpret the past, and then to be able to bring that history and say, “You know, how we got here is not a story that goes back 18 months.” It's a story that goes back a hundred years. And if you can understand the shared history, then maybe we can have a better sense of how to deal with the problems we have in the present. Did we save America? I mean, I guess the jury's still out, but, you know, that was never the overarching goal.

But I do think that we started in an era in which there was tons of support for newspapers. There were tons of publishing happening, but that space has really constricted in recent years. Made by history, moved over to time a couple of years ago. As the Washington Post has really shrunk its footprint, in a lot of ways. And it has changed its political philosophy as well. So it is, in many ways, it has been part of a response to media problems, and it has been caught up in the changes that are happening with media in our country today. 

[00:51:39] Sage Goodwin: 
Well, we've covered a lot of really interesting ground there. And I think what's come through in this conversation is this isn't a straightforward issue, there's not a clear solution, but solve the problem. Well, if you have three takeaways for our listeners from our conversation today that you wanted them to remember, or a couple of recommendations, what would those be?

[00:52:05] Nicole Hemmer: 
So, I do want people to take away that politics and our media are inextricable. And that you can't fix one without fixing the other. That doesn't mean that you shouldn't focus more on one than the other, but they have to be fixed together. You can't just fix one of them. I think it's also important that 20th-century solutions don't fix 21st-century problems.

We can't return to whatever people believe a golden age of media was. And so our solutions have to be forward-looking in that sense. And I have a lot of other takeaways, but my other takeaway would be touch grass. That, actually again, as I believe at the end of the day, the solution is going to rest with strong communities, and that means being side by side with people in the real world, and working side by side with the people around you, and solving local problems to solve national and international ones.

The media is an enormous part of our world, but there are actual flesh-and-blood people out there, too. And spending a little time unplugged will actually probably make you a better media consumer at the end of the day. 

[00:53:09] Sage Goodwin: 
I love that as a takeaway for an individual person is to remember the importance of the unplugged time in your day. Before we let you run away, I have one little segment that I'd like to do, please, to satiate my nosiness, which is hearing about your personal media diet. I'm always interested in how people consume their media. What do you read? What do you watch, what do you listen to? How does Professor Nicole Hemmer figure out what's going on in the world?

So I'm gonna split that into three categories. The first one being what is your meat and potatoes? What's your go-to every day to figure out what's happening? What's your junk food? Guilty pleasure. Maybe, you know, he is bad for you, but you do it anyway. And then what is your way of palate cleansing, like, I guess, what's your way of getting unplugged, or what's the media you go to kind of hide from it all?

[00:54:05] Nicole Hemmer:
So my meat and potatoes is actually a mix of social media and podcasting. Podcasting is probably the staple of my media diet. Even though I'm a big book reader as a scholar, I spend a ton of time reading texts, but where I get my information about the world is by listening to The Daily. I listen to a ton of podcasts about the Supreme Court, which are analysis podcasts. So, podcasts like 5-4, and Strict Scrutiny are not giving you the up-to-date Supreme Court news, but they're keeping you updated with what's happening in the world of law. And so those kinds of podcasts. And then, my social media feed is again curated to take me to all of these different publications. So, the main stage journalistic publications are the national publications like the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post. So I did cancel my Washington Post membership, or subscription. Then, more analytical essays at places like Boston Review, the New Yorker, and those kinds of national newspapers. And I subscribe to the Tennessean to figure out what's going on in the state where I live. That's basically how I figure out the world. I don't watch television news anymore. I listen to a lot of right-wing podcasts and consume a lot of right-wing content because that's my area of focus. Guilty pleasure is probably the same as my palate cleanser. So, I love reality television. Oh, I have just started Love is Blind UK because I ran out of regular Love Is Blind episodes. Not a big “Restore Your Faith in Humanity Show”. No. But, if you need your brain to just relax, I watch this British comedy show called Taskmaster, which is phenomenal, and I wouldn't even say it's a guilty pleasure. It's just a pleasure, Bridgeton, right? I read all sorts of romcom books and novels. I think I do have a pretty clear delineation between my palate cleansing and my news consumption because I do consume so much political news for work. I really do see that as this is my professional listening, and then my pleasure listening. Speaking of Peter Shamshiri, If Books Could Kill, books could kill, and those kinds of cultural criticism, but that's not so directly about the political day-to-day. 

[00:56:18] Sage Goodwin: 
Love that.

[00:56:20] Julius Freeman: 
Yeah, I think this has been an amazing conversation. We want to thank you, Dr. Nicole Hemmer, for joining us today, or Niki, as I need to call you now.

[00:56:30] Nicole Hemmer: 
That's cool. You absolutely can call me Niki. That's really cool. 

[00:56:33] Julius Freeman: 
I usually end up calling all my professors doctors all the time, just until they say otherwise, but this has been a really interesting conversation for me, I think, to hear some of the general differences has been really impactful for me. And so I really have appreciated your insight today. And, I think you all should go buy her book and listen to the podcast. 

[00:56:53] Sage Goodwin: 
Yeah. Niki, where can listeners find more of your great insights? 

[00:56:57] Nicole Hemmer:
You can find my books, Messengers of the Right and Partisans, anywhere that books are sold. I do a three-times-a-week podcast called This Day with Radiotopia. And then I pop up here and there, on various writing outlets. I'm on Blue Sky, but I am more often on Instagram. So if you wanna go over to @pastpundit on Instagram, you can see cute photos of my dog. I was about to say, you'll get some…

[00:57:18] Sage Goodwin: 
Excellent dog content!

[00:57:20] Nicole Hemmer: 
From that, but occasionally some political analysis as well.

[00:57:25] Julius Freeman:
 This has been our very first full episode of CAPTivated. It's been hosted by CAPT, you know, CAPTivated. You guys get it. It's the Center for American Political History, Media and Technology.

[00:57:38] Hanna Sistek: 
 The ideas presented by individuals on the podcast are theirs and theirs alone. They do not represent Purdue University, which adheres to policy of institutional neutrality.

[00:57:48] Sage Goodwin: 
 To learn more about this episode's guest, check out this show notes. We really enjoyed this conversation today, and we hope you got something out of it too. Thanks for listening.   

 



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Hanna Sistek

Host
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Julius Freeman

Host
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Sage Goodwin

Host