Conservative talk radio host Mark Levin dedicated Sunday’s edition of Life, Liberty, & Levin to promoting his new book Unfreedom of the Press (set for release Tuesday) with Fox & Friends: Weekend co-host Pete Hegseth and, as expected, “the Great One” didn’t hold back, throwing the liberal media through a wood chipper and calling out their rampant Trump hatred.
Levin set the table within the first few minutes, providing yet another invaluable history lesson (click “expand”):
You know, we looked at the Constitution and many of the same people who abuse “freedom of the press” point to the First Amendment, but why do we have freedom of the press? Well, freedom of the press is aligned with freedom of speech and how did we get here? We got here because of the American Revolution and before. These were printers, who were really the great patriots and pushed the American Revolution, and pushed the ideas of the American Revolution. Printers who were printing pamphlets, and maybe two dozen newspapers in the lead up to the Revolution, and they were talking about people like John Locke and Montesquieu, and others, and colonists, farmers and others, blacksmiths.
In other words, the First Amendment doesn’t just belong to CNN or The New York Times, but rather the American people.
Before the Progressive Era, Levin noted that newspapers had a clear delineation in partisan affiliations, but that changed when the media decided that it needed to be “explain[ed]...to the plebs out there who are just too busy or too stupid,” giving way to the “so-called...media experts” today (that means you, Brian Stelter) who decree from on high what being a journalist means.
“The media is destroying the Free Press, I make a distinction between the media and a Free Press. We have mostly a media and we mostly having media not a free press because of the media. The media is destroying the press, not the President by calling out newspapers and journalists who are very thin skinned and don’t like it,” Levin added.
Throughout the interview, Levin highlighted example after example of how past Presidents in every century actually worked to undermine the First Amendment, illustrating how overblown the liberal media’s hyperventilation over President Trump are. To see more, check out the transcript at the bottom of the post.
Concerning the current media, he ruled that “we’re at the lowest point ever” with “half the American people, give or take” don’t “trust the media” and are bolstered by this simple fact: “You couldn’t tell me the difference really between the Democratic agenda and what you hear from Chris Cuomo or Don Lemon, or a whole list of so-called reporters, same with MSNBC.”
Later in the show and after he noted the concept of the revolving door, Levin went to a break by stating that while liberal media professional claim that we’re in “the golden age of journalism,” it’s actually “the yellow age” and “lowest point of journalism.”
When it comes to the lack of diversity of thought in newsroom, here’s a few excepts of Mark’s thoughts on that (click “expand”):
You do not have ideological diversity in these newsrooms. You really shouldn’t have to. In other words, your job is to try and go out there and find the objective truth and report it to the American people and let the American people synthesize that you know, in their own craniums and so forth, but apparently, we’re stupid to do that. So stupid people in the media have to do it for us.
(....)
It reminds me of what goes on in colleges and universities, faculty hiring faculty, it becomes almost an ideological inbred situation. They go to the same schools to hire people. They want people who largely agree with them. They don’t really want minority views or independent thinkers in the newsroom. You know how TV — Fox or my show or whatever — we put together these montages. Well, they say the same thing. It doesn’t matter who it is.....Last week was constitutional crisis.....Before that, for two years it was collusion. Before that, it was the President of the United States is mentally unhinged. Before that, it was Stormy Daniels day in and day out. You can change the channel you see the same thing, you don’t even really have to change the channel. There’s a number of reasons for this. Number one, as I say it, there is an incestuous hiring situation. Number two, you have a whole lot of Democrats who are now in the media and vice versa and number three, even if you didn’t, for a hundred years, this has been building since the progressive movement all the way into to our current day, but it’s gotten worse today because they don’t even really pursue objectivity.
As for Hegseth, one of the many excellent points he raised was the liberal media’s ongoing vitriol for talk radio and that individuals like Levin “are the one[s]...destroying the public conversation because of your irresponsible rhetoric on the airwaves or point to Fox News Channel in prime time.”
Here’s how Levin responded (click “expand”):
[T]his is the problem, uniformity of ideology, conformity of approach to the news. They are very intolerant and that’s the problem with an ideologically driven business model and you have a business model that turns off millions and millions of people and that’s why you have all these other new media platforms being developed, because you have new technologies that allow them and will have other technologies in the future and if the media doesn’t start to reform itself, and this is one of the things I want to talk about. I don’t expect the media to listen to me, but the media belong to the American people. The First Amendment, freedom of the press belongs to the American people. If we have basically a — a — a — state — basically, a state-run media that supports the administrative state and left-wing judges — effectively what we have now, it weakens the Republic.
In closing the show, Levin gave his outlook for the future of the First Amendment (click “expand”):
I think the future the media that is most of the current news outlets is bleak. The way they disrespect their audience, the way they deceive the American people, the way they mix opinion with news and the way they treat the American people. I think we’re going to have a Renaissance. That’s the goal here, a national discussion, a journey, just like the colonists did. We need to grab hold of our Constitution, our First Amendment, and freedom of the press belongs to us and there are going to be other outlets. We have technology now, the internet and so forth, there are different platforms and there will be technology in the future. So I say, hold on, ladies and gentlemen, we need to be very critical of what’s taking place in our country. It’s undermining our Republic, but on the other hand, it creates opportunities for others, other technology, so I think freedom of the press will see a Renaissance. The mass media today, I think you’ll see their self-destruction.
To see the relevant transcript from FNC’s Life, Liberty, & Levin on May 19, click “expand.”
FNC’s Life, Liberty, & Levin
May 19, 2019
10:02 p.m. Eastern
MARK LEVIN: You know, we looked at the Constitution and many of the same people who abuse “freedom of the press” point to the First Amendment, but why do we have freedom of the press? Well, freedom of the press is aligned with freedom of speech and how did we get here? We got here because of the American Revolution and before. These were printers, who were really the great patriots and pushed the American Revolution, and pushed the ideas of the American Revolution. Printers who were printing pamphlets, and maybe two dozen newspapers in the lead up to the Revolution, and they were talking about people like John Locke and Montesquieu, and others, and colonists, farmers and others, blacksmiths.
(....)
10:04 p.m. Eastern
LEVIN: Well, they told us what it meant. It meant that a relative handful of so-called experts would be the media, would collect the information, digest it and explain it to the plebs out there who are just too busy or too stupid. We call them the American people.
(....)
10:05 p.m. Eastern
LEVIN: And then when you study their standards and so forth, there’s actually debates that go on with so-called the media experts. They debate what objective means. Does the reporter have to be objective? Does the process have to be objective? But more and more, Pete, they’re kind of revealing themselves as social activists.
PETE HEGSETH: Do they — do they know it? Or are they lying to themselves?
LEVIN: I believe most of them know it because at this point, especially the last three years, you have got to want to be a social activist to keep this up, day in and day out, and day in and day out with the criticism they’re receiving from a lot of the public. The media is destroying the Free Press, I make a distinction between the media and a Free Press. We have mostly a media and we mostly having media not a free press because of the media. The media is destroying the press, not the President by calling out newspapers and journalists who are very thin skinned and don’t like it.
(....)
10:06 p.m. Eastern
LEVIN: As I explained in the book, John Adams, the Sedition Act, well, he put journalists in prison. He shut down newspapers. It was a big problem. Jefferson ran against this. Jefferson won. Jefferson got rid of the Sedition Act. You have Abraham Lincoln, during the Civil War. Through his Secretary of War, they shut down over 300 newspapers, they put a number of journalists in prison for a variety of reasons. You can argue one way or the other, but that’s what they did. One of the great so-called progressives, intellectuals, Woodrow Wilson, really an accidental President in many ways, he had a new Sedition Act in 1918, an extension of the 1917 Espionage Act that we often talk about and he put a number of journalists in prison. He actually put a number of political opponents in prison and even more in modern times, you have FDR who used the IRS to go after the owner of the Inquirer. His wife, Eleanor Roosevelt, used the IRS to go after Gannett because they were conservatives. They went after — Kennedy, LBJ also used the IRS and of course, Barack Obama used the FBI to go after James Risen of The New York Times, James Rosen of Fox and 20 Associated Press reporters — of course, he knew nothing about it. They just sorted it.
(....)
10:08 p.m. Eastern
LEVIN: So this is part of the problem. Part of the problem is, when you look at the — at the stretch of history in the media, I would argue, we’re at the lowest point ever. You have half the American people, give or take, the vast majority of Republicans, I’m not making this up, it’s in the book. You can look at the research that’s done that does not trust the media. You have the vast majority of Democrats that do, that’s fine, but that means you’re playing to a political party, you’re playing to agenda. You couldn’t tell me the difference really between the Democratic agenda and what you hear from Chris Cuomo or Don Lemon, or a whole list of so-called reporters, same with MSNBC.
(....)
10:09 p.m. Eastern
LEVIN: The rule is you actually have dozens of Democrats who served in the Obama administration, and now are back in the media, or vice versa. You have an enormous number of their family members who work in Democratic administrations, who worked on the Hill, there’s just no going around it. It’s the absolute truth.
(....)
10:18 p.m. Eastern
LEVIN: Everybody keeps quoting The New York Times, New York Times — tell me how many businesses would still be around if they did their very, very best to censor what took place in the Holocaust? I don’t think a lot of them would be around.
HEGSETH: Active censorship of the Holocaust.
LEVIN: Active and real time. The New York Times and many scholars — I cite three in particularly who have written outstanding books — The New York Times during the course of the Holocaust did everything it could to push the news to the back pages, to the extent it ever printed it, which was very rare. The New York Times knew some — a lot of what was going on in Europe at the time, the attempt to exterminate all the European Jews. There were eyewitnesses to this. There were foreign news reports. There were Jewish groups that came to The New York Times. The New York Times was owned by a Jewish publisher, but he didn’t want his newspaper to be pigeonholed as a Jewish newspaper and he very much was supportive of the New Deal and FDR and FDR didn’t want to really focus that much on the Holocaust.
(....)
10:23 p.m. Eastern
LEVIN: It’s the golden age of journalism. It’s the yellow age of journalism. It’s the lowest point of journalism.
(....)
10:30 p.m. Eastern
LEVIN: They want to destroy Trump. So in the book, I call these things, pseudo events and if you look at the news, and I didn’t invent that, there was a brilliant historian who did, Daniel Boorstin in 1961, he would become the head of the Library of Congress and he wrote a whole book on this.
HEGSETH: And you called them pseudo events, but President Trump calls him fake news.
LEVIN: And he’s right. He is right. It’s fake news. These are pseudo events, these are creations. For instance, The New York Times ran this hot bed call “Anonymous.” It became news for a week. The real news was, who wrote it? And they wouldn’t tell us.
(....)
10:31 p.m. Eastern
LEVIN: When Jim Acosta disrupts a press conference or makes outrageous allegations, he knows what he’s doing. He is creating fake news, pseudo events, and then all of a sudden, pseudo events become daily, you know, reports on the news and so what Bornstein says and what I write in the book, too, is, so much of what we see on TV or listen to on the radio is non-reality. It is non-reality, it’s not what’s going on in the world.
(....)
10:32 p.m. Eastern
LEVIN: You do not have ideological diversity in these newsrooms. You really shouldn’t have to. In other words, your job is to try and go out there and find the objective truth and report it to the American people and let the American people synthesize that you know, in their own craniums and so forth, but apparently, we’re stupid to do that. So stupid people in the media have to do it for us. But —
HEGSETH: They act like they’re smarter, but they’re actually not.
LEVIN: — but this is a very, very important point that you raise. I don’t think so. Because I think the pressure all goes one way.
(....)
10:33 p.m. Eastern
LEVIN: It reminds me of what goes on in colleges and universities, faculty hiring faculty, it becomes almost an ideological inbred situation. They go to the same schools to hire people. They want people who largely agree with them. They don’t really want minority views or independent thinkers in the newsroom. You know how TV — Fox or my show or whatever — we put together these montages. Well, they say the same thing. It doesn’t matter who it is. It doesn’t matter what the newsroom. Well, how is that possible? They use the same words. Last week was constitutional crisis. You could put together 20 sound bites from five different news organizations, and they say exactly the same thing. Before that it was obstruction of justice. Before that, for two years it was collusion. Before that, it was the President of the United States is mentally unhinged. Before that, it was Stormy Daniels day in and day out. You can change the channel you see the same thing, you don’t even really have to change the channel. There’s a number of reasons for this. Number one, as I say it, there is an incestuous hiring situation. Number two, you have a whole lot of Democrats who are now in the media and vice versa and number three, even if you didn’t, for a hundred years, this has been building since the progressive movement all the way into to our current day, but it’s gotten worse today because they don’t even really pursue objectivity.
(....)
10:35 p.m. Eastern
LEVIN: You know, this network, Fox, we do a better job of segregating news and opinion, I would argue than really any — certainly, any cable program better than The New York Times, better than The Washington Post. We know who the news people here are. We know who the opinion people here are, but you can’t really tell over at MSNBC what’s what and who’s who and same with CNN and really in the pages of The New York Times these days.
(....)
10:43 p.m. Eastern
HEGSETH: [W]hen you listen to the pundits and the news types and other networks talk about it. They always point to talk radio. Guys like you, the Great One, saying, you are the one that’s destroying the public conversation because of your irresponsible rhetoric on the airwaves or point to Fox News Channel in prime time. Did — what will they then try to do to shut that next thing up?
LEVIN: I’ll tell you why they do this. They do this — and by the way, they do this exactly the same thing Democrats in Congress do. They react exactly — it’s knee jerk. They ought to be listening to talk radio, if they were serious. We have people calling in from all over the country. They ought to be listening to Fox, you’re 52 percent to 48 percent according to the Shorenstein Center and this is the problem, uniformity of ideology, conformity of approach to the news. They are very intolerant and that’s the problem with an ideologically driven business model and you have a business model that turns off millions and millions of people and that’s why you have all these other new media platforms being developed, because you have new technologies that allow them and will have other technologies in the future and if the media doesn’t start to reform itself, and this is one of the things I want to talk about. I don’t expect the media to listen to me, but the media belong to the American people. The First Amendment, freedom of the press belongs to the American people. If we have basically a — a — a — state — basically, a state-run media that supports the administrative state and left-wing judges —
HEGSETH: Effectively what we have right now.
LEVIN: — effectively what we have now, it weakens the Republic.
(....)
10:50 p.m. Eastern
LEVIN: To provide context or to provide history. We’ve had past Presidents and you can look at the characters of some of these past Presidents. You can look at what they did. You can look at John Kennedy. John Kennedy had numerous affairs when he was in the Oval Office. Some of them were just — they’re really indescribable with a 19-year-old intern. Before he became President of the United States, he had an affair with an East German spy. When he was President, he had an affair with a mobster’s girlfriend. We’re not allowed to talk about these things.
HEGSETH: And the press didn’t talk about it. They knew about it.
LEVIN: The press covered it up. One of his best friends was Ben Bradlee of Watergate fame. He was working for Newsweek at the time. Ben Bradlee actually received from Pierre Salinger some FBI files on groups that opposed Kennedy. Kennedy, from time to time, would talk to Bradlee about other people like Getty how much he paid in taxes. They had a — a person, a contact at the IRS that would provide information as they wanted on their political enemies. FDR had done the same thing. Johnson did it even worse.
(....)
10:53 p.m. Eastern
LEVIN: Franklin Roosevelt, he put one of his operatives in as head of the FCC, and they changed the licensing rules from radio from two years where you had to re-up, to six months. So he can put the squeeze on them to make sure that they were doing quote unquote, “the right thing.”
(....)
10:58 p.m. Eastern
HEGSETH: What is the future of the free press in America?
LEVIN: The distinction between the media and the free press. I think the future the media that is most of the current news outlets is bleak. The way they disrespect their audience, the way they deceive the American people, the way they mix opinion with news and the way they treat the American people. I think we’re going to have a Renaissance. That’s the goal here, a national discussion, a journey, just like the colonists did. We need to grab hold of our Constitution, our First Amendment, and freedom of the press belongs to us and there are going to be other outlets. We have technology now, the internet and so forth, there are different platforms and there will be technology in the future. So I say, hold on, ladies and gentlemen, we need to be very critical of what’s taking place in our country. It’s undermining our Republic, but on the other hand, it creates opportunities for others, other technology, so I think freedom of the press will see a Renaissance. The mass media today, I think you’ll see their self-destruction.
