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America’s Media Literacy Deficit: Navigating Elections and Generational Divides

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Mickey’s guest for the hour is media scholar Nolan Higdon. They discuss how the principles of critical media literacy could help the public make sense of the current, chaotic election season in the US, and also how the divide and contrasting worldviews between the older and younger generations can be partly explained by their choices of media. They discuss the consequences of the serious lack of media literacy education in the US and how the American electorate could benefit from learning media literacy skills as well as by diversifying their media diets to include more independent outlets and fewer corporate, establishment ones too busy cheering and jeering Team Red or Team Blue to report factually on the key policy issues that really matter to voters most.

Note: This program was recorded on July 12, prior to the shooting attack against former president Donald Trump.

Dr. Nolan Higdon is a lecturer in Education at the University of California Santa Cruz campus, and a prolific author on media issues. He is the author of The Anatomy of Fake News, and co-author of The United States of Distraction, The Media and Me, and Let’s Agree to Disagree. He writes on Substack at NolanHigdon, and also has an article in the June/July issue of The Progressive magazine discussed in this episode, “The Establishment Strikes Back.”

Video of the Interview with Nolan Higdon

Below is a Rough Transcript of the Interview with Nolan Higdon

Mickey Huff: Welcome to the Project Censored Show on Pacifica Radio. I’m your host, Mickey Huff. This week on the program, we welcome back Dr. Nolan Higdon, media scholar, author of numerous books, including two co authored, together with me, The United States of Distraction, and also Let’s Agree to Disagree, a textbook on critical thinking.

Nolan Higdon also has a couple of other books that have come out just recently, and we’ll be talking a little bit about those books during our conversation today. He is also a lecturer at the University of California, Santa Cruz, among other places. Also, Nolan has a sub stack, many things that he’s going to share with us today, with his analysis of media.

So I’ll, I’ll definitely be sure that you can find his work online if you so choose. Nolan Higdon, welcome back to the program.

Nolan Higdon: Thank you so much for having me.

Mickey Huff: It is always great to catch up with you on the Project Censored Show. You always have a lot of irons in the fire and we’re looking, of course, here at a media analysis of Trump V Biden.

We’re going to be focusing for the hour on media, the election, and various issues related to the election politically, but of course we’re going to do what we do here and what Nolan Higdon does best, and that’s view these matters and analyze them through the lens of critical media literacy. So, Nolan, let’s start with a piece that you had recently done for The Progressive magazine.

Last few weeks we’ve been mentioning to our listeners that the double summer issue with The Progressive is focused thematically on media literacy and the election. This is phenomenal in and of itself because a lot of, you know, even left progressive magazines or publications, they don’t always look at media and they don’t always consider the importance of media literacy education or critical media literacy analysis, but The Progressive focused a whole issue on it. When I, again, would give kudos to them for that, to Norman Stockwell and others, but there’s a lot of information in just this issue that we’ve been sharing. You can get the articles for free online. You wrote a piece called “The Establishment Strikes Back: The Forces Behind the TikTok Ban,” remember that? That seems so a hundred years ago, but, “the forces behind the TikTok ban seek to eradicate the divide between cable news candidates and the digital electorate.” Well, look, let’s start right there. We’ll get back to the TikTok ban in a minute because it’s almost a joke.

They threw it as like a rider on a, on a bill that was throwing more money in Ukraine and Gaza. We all know, too, that, of course, that the U. S. political establishment, Mitt Romney and others, openly said that the reason for the TikTok ban was because of the Gaza coverage. I mean, they used China as a cover, but they were really upset because they couldn’t control the political content or what was happening there.

That’s the big problem. But before we get into TikTok and the rest of that nonsense, which you write about here, what do you mean by cable news candidates and the digital electorate, Nolan Higdon?

Nolan Higdon: Yeah, the establishment, you know, whether it be Republican or Democrat, you know, the big wealthy donors who support both those parties, the politicians who represent them, a lot of the consultant class who’s associated with them, they’ve enjoyed really about a, you know, 40 or so period where they’ve not really been held up by much scrutiny from media.

You know, they’ve long ago, changed the law to allow media to consolidate. They, they’ve made friendly relationships with the few media entities that exist. That’s why we have roughly about, you know, five, six corporations controlling 90 percent of our news media. And so as a result, you know, they haven’t really had to deal with much pushback.

And I think they’ve created a, a narrative of the world, you know about policies, policy agreements about always spend money on military. What’s good for the market is good for the people you know public interest and public ownership and public say on things is bad and dangerous. We should let companies do it.

These have all been kind of consensus politics. Yes, people will say, well, what about the hyper partisanship? Yeah, they disagree on some cultural issues like abortion and things like that. But even that even those issues, it’s largely they just disagree publicly because their voters, the voters they need agree on those things. Donald Trump, for instance, is a well known, not an anti abortionist, but he took that position in 2016 because he had to get the evangelical vote.

Mickey Huff: Well, and they’re playing with that language now, even, in the Republican platform, right?

Nolan Higdon: Yeah, it’s all, you know, this is, they’ve never been committed to this, and the reverse is true with the Democrats.

But, they had a media system that largely supported this, and as a result, they weren’t really ever dealt with tough questions, about any of these things, and then social media emerged, and, for, for younger audience members, they won’t really remember this, but when social media first emerged, in a lot of ways, it was sort of like the Wild Wild West, you could go on there anonymously and set up accounts, you know, there were very little moderation and rules and, and things like that.

Mickey Huff: And I remember, I remember the late in the mid late 90s, the chat room experience and the kind of things you get away with reminded me almost of growing up back in the day in Western Pennsylvania being CB vigilantes. Yeah, like the anonymity of like saying things out loud. Oh, yeah, you’re right. It was a wild west continue.

Nolan Higdon: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, and that, that just, you know, and that, that died off in the 2000’s, slowly initially it was fears over terrorist communications after 9/11. And so these companies started working with the government. But really, when we see the big changes, when Donald Trump was elected, once he took the white house, Democrats in particular, but establishment figures in general started putting a lot of pressure on social media companies that look, you got to get rid of a lot of this stuff that allows a Donald Trump type to be elected.

You got to get rid of this fake news. You got to get rid of this hate speech, et cetera, et cetera. And they had a lot of power and leverage over those companies because those companies enjoy basically a low tax status, almost not regulated at all. They get huge government contracts. And so the government could always come in and say, like, look, if you don’t moderate the content we want, we can revisit your regulation status. We can revisit your tax status. We can revisit those contracts we have. And as a result, these companies capitulate to what the government wants to do, but TikTok was different. TikTok is a, a, platform that’s owned outside of the country.

And so a lot of those leverage points weren’t available to the US government. And so what does this have to do with the current electorate? Well, legacy media could go on and on about telling one side of the narrative with Gaza versus Israel. That is parrot the establishment talking points. A lot of the, social media platforms would only allow content that did parrot that talking point to be on, on the platform, except TikTok. TikTok allowed basically all of the above.

So TikTok ended up being one of the few places where you could get, you know, videos from inside Gaza, or you could get, you know, content from Hamas, to figure out what their, you know, perspective is or whatever it may be. And what we saw was just a bifurcation of the electorates you know, the establishment Dem Republican voters were watching legacy media and they had one view of the war and the subsequent protests.

And then there was the younger TikTok generation that had a totally different view and interpretation of the war and the protests. And as you know, as a scholar and then someone who pays attention to media politics, and I know Mickey and you and I have done a ton of work in this area, we find it very fascinating when people just talk right past each other.

You know, it wasn’t even necessarily these two sides were disagreeing, they were dealing with different sets of evidence. So you can look at someone like Bill Maher who just said that everybody who’s protesting the war in Gaza is pro Hamas, which is a ridiculous statement that’s easily, easily disproven.

You know, on the on the other side, you heard people on, on TikTok, I think, exaggerating, what, what Israel’s perspective was in terms of why they were doing this, what, what they were doing with this and, and how the protests were being treated. They were trying to hide that. Yes, there were some protesters who were anti Semitic.

There were some protesters, who oppose Israel. But there’s also some protesters who were there who are Jewish. There’s some protesters who are anti genocide.

Mickey Huff: There’s also some provocateurs. They’re provoking.

Yeah. Yeah.

Nolan Higdon: So. What we ended up with is really an inability to have a conversation about a critical issue where the United States is sending billions of dollars where some estimates have up to 200,000 lives have been lost because of this bifurcated media system.

Mickey Huff: Indeed, you write in this piece, “Since 2019, the number of people who cite social media as their number one source for news has increased by 50%. During that same time, the number of Americans who cite television news as their preferred source for news has declined from 31 percent to 25%. Half of American adults report that they access their news from social media sometimes or often. For Americans under the age of 34, social media is the number one source for news.” So why does this matter? Let’s talk about, let’s talk about what that means. Let’s talk, let’s talk about, and again, the, the, a lot of the, supporters of legacy media, including the legacy media itself. They’re in on the demonization of some of the social media outlets.

They’re in on the demonization of TikTok, much the same way that the establishment papers were against the radio and used War of the Worlds to talk about how radio spread panic and fake news all the way back in the 30s. Nolan Higdon.

Nolan Higdon: Yeah. And, look, legacy media, when they critique new media, they’re critiquing a competitor, and I think everyone needs to recognize that conflict of interest, that they have a economic incentive to make sure social media fails.

Having said that, I am someone who respects and values journalism and, although there is a lot of great journalism that’s posted on social media, it’s buried under so much crap that is not journalism, and it’s really tough for audiences to determine the difference between the two. So on the one hand, I appreciate a platform like TikTok allowing us to get some insight into Gaza that our supposed free press system won’t let us see.

But on the other hand, that information is surrounded by a lot of nonsense, lies, crap, and propaganda. So social media is not the best answer for a lot of our low media literacy inside the United States. But I also want to point out, and this is perhaps where a lot of people have been agreeing with me so far will disagree.

Legacy media is not either. I mean, legacy media for, for years has proven itself to basically be a megaphone for the establishment and not just parroting a different viewpoint that I might disagree with. But straight out lies, straight out lies, and I think this became really obvious following Biden’s debate performance.

A lot of these very same people who were, who were wagging their finger at people questioning Biden’s mental competence flipped on a dime within a day, and now all of a sudden we’re saying he really needs to drop out, Biden doesn’t look great. When just, you know, people like Joe Scarborough, who were just like three weeks earlier, literally said F you, that’s literally a quote, on his show to people who questioned Biden’s cognitive abilities.

And then three weeks later, he’s saying, yeah, I just don’t see how he’s gonna run, how he’s gonna make it. Of course now he’s, he’s flipped back the other way again, but point being a lot of these people in, in media, they knew about Biden. Media observers like myself. And I know you, Mickey, we’ve been paying attention for the last five, six years, everybody has known this, who covers the Biden White House, but they’re just terrified to say it. And if you, if you dare to speak out, the media would marginalize you. They would say you’re conspiracy theorist. You’re, you’re ageist, you’re ableist. They tried to blame it on a stutter. I mean, all these things to, to silence people who made legitimate observations of the president United States.

Mickey Huff: An interesting thing about the ageist issue, legacy press and their attack and the establishment attack, the congressional attack on a platform like TikTok that’s owned by a Chinese company, ByteDance, so that’s, that’s their big gripe is they can’t, it’s not the, oh, China is hoovering up information. Well, what do you think the rest of the platforms are doing and sharing?

That’s fine apparently, because you get it, you get to control it or what have you. But some of the other problems with social media, as we know, are shadow banning, algorithmic curation, just straight up censorship, de platforming, we’ve talked all about this. In fact, that’s a theme of your most recent book that you co edited, with Robin Andersen, Steve Macek, Censorship, Digital Media, and the Global Crackdown on Freedom of Expression, which we’ve talked about earlier this year on the program, you know, we have a whole chapter in here on censorship by proxy, right?

And so the demonetization and the different kinds of way that that government can collude or work with, or just stand by and applaud as private tech sector, censors, curates, and controls information. So I know that we just brought up a couple of different things that seem like some of them might look in parallel.

Some of some of them may be contradictory, but they’re all issues that are in play around media around the issue of of the fourth estate. Right? And I, I worry, and again, the whole theme of The Progressive magazine this summer is about why we so desperately need media literacy and media literacy education so that people are more aware, not just of misinformation or disinformation, and of course, the way in which that term is widely misused, a lot of folks are unaware of the issue of malinformation.

A lot of folks are unaware of how framing works. Andy Lee Roth at Project Censored, Sheleigh Voitl doing a whole curriculum on that and a big series on that that we’ll talk about later in the summer. But those components of media literacy, I see are the antidote to approach all of the challenges and all of the things kind of that you just rattled off.

Nolan Higdon, what are your thoughts on that role, the role that education really plays in trying to counter some of this. Well, look, Renee DiResta others, people who we’ve criticized where we’ve agreed with them, they’ve called it an information war and and and that that’s apt. We are in an information war and the technology that we’re immersed in has has made it more, more troublesome, I would say nefarious in many ways, as well as insidious, but people are becoming more aware of these challenges and problems, but I think, again, media literacy is the major antidote here. Let’s, let’s talk about that and sort of shift into what exactly does critical media literacy education promote or do that is an antidote to a lot of the challenges that we just talked about earlier in the program?

Nolan Higdon: Yeah, I think one of the key things to say off the bat, and this was a, one of the horrible kind of perspectives that came out of 2016, you can never get rid of false information.

The idea that we can censor our way out of it or delete it or silence people is just ridiculous. It’s, it’s childish. It’s going to be around forever. So those of us in the adult world need to accept that and just, you know, get potty trained. But now that we know that that false information is out there, what we also want to make sure occurs is, you know, true information or well supported arguments, or new stories that have context so we understand the past and what and when they’re occurring. So we don’t end up for that mal information you discussed a moment ago. But to do that you need to really reframe how you think about media.

And that’s where media literacy comes in. You know, I can’t tell you how many people I talked to say, you know, before I took a class with you or before I read your guys books, I thought, you know, media was just kind of trivial entertainment. I would just sort of sit there and, and, and take it in like a mindless consumer.

But now I realize there are messages, there are values, there’s a production process, there’s money behind it. There’s representation issues, et cetera, et cetera. So once you once you start to teach people media literacy, they start to see those things. What is the message? Why was this made? Who was it made for?

What decisions were made in terms of how people were represented or who wasn’t represented? What’s the moral of the story they’re, they’re trying to tell? How come they don’t offer different morals, different interpretations, etc, etc. So media literacy is not about telling what’s right from wrong, although that is a skill that’s developed in the process, but it’s being able to navigate this really complex landscape of information and hopefully identify certain media messages, media outlets, media creators that you can gravitate toward not only because you can trust them, but also because they produce solid content.

They may have a message you disagree with, but you know it’s well supported and it has the right context for you to understand it. That’s what media literacy is about. We do not tell people in the classroom what they should think or what sources they should go to. That’s not our job. We give them the skills and how to analyze information for themselves.

Mickey Huff: Right, putting them in their own driver’s seat rather than have the big tech sector, like you put their people in these companies like NewsGuard, which you and I have talked about for a long time. That embeds in a browser and gives you green, yellow, red shields to label news outlets, right? They’ll outsource all the thinking for you.

These companies are, are staffed by people from, you know, national intelligence organizations and institutions, the big tech sector. In other words, these aren’t people that are even journalists or have the best interests of the public in mind. They want to curate and control messages in many ways, which is why a lot of these people are also so-called fact checkers at Meta at Facebook, at these social media outlets and companies, you know, which are really surveillance companies. Ed Snowden said that a number of years ago that the rebranding of, of a total surveillance apparatus as, as social media, is one of the best propaganda achievements since the, since the Department of War rebranded itself as the Department of Defense after World War II.

Nolan, jump in here.

Nolan Higdon: Yeah. I I do have to, you know, to, to politicize a little bit too. I, I do have to blame people from both so-called both sides of the political spectrum here on the right and the left for promoting this type of censorship and allowing these companies to do this work. The Republicans were all too happy to champion digital censorship coming after the war on terror as a way to combat terrorism.

And leftists were really willing to censor content after Donald Trump was electored. And I and I think in both cases, it came back to bite these people in a horrible way. The right wing was very upset that they saw figures they liked and stories they liked. Like, of course, famously, the Hunter Biden laptop getting censored online.

They were frustrated with that. And I think now you see a lot of young leftists who are upset they’re being surveilled over the Gaza issue. Teachers are getting fired in the classroom. You know, students are losing future job opportunities because of the surveillance digitally. And it’s a, the very form of censorship that the leftists were championing in the era of Trump.

And so I think we really need to encourage the population to return to principles that we’re against censorship. We don’t care what the justification is or what the target is, just like genocide or anything else. We oppose it. I don’t care what justification people have. I oppose censorship. I oppose genocide.

I don’t need to hear the reason why it’s taking place. That’s irrelevant to me. I oppose censorship. I oppose genocide, period.

Mickey Huff: Well, we certainly see a lot of obfuscation around the definitions for those kinds of terms, you know, the, the one very Orwellian quote, I’ll paraphrase here, and, and of course, mangle it, but the gist will get across.

I’m sure, you know, the party’s last directive, you know, was basically to, to have you just disbelieve your own eyes and ears. Right. The, the main directive of the, we, even if we called it a uniparty, I’m referring to Orwell, there are differences between Republicans and Democrats. Even though we could talk about the many similarities, there are some key ones, but in the Orwellian sense, whichever party’s in power, it behooves them to be able to curate your reality.

Right. So even if you’re reading a lot of independent media and getting very different perspectives on what’s happening in places like Gaza, you know, the establishment press is basically telling you not to believe any of that. And they’re demonizing not only are they demonizing that those sources, whether it’s TikTok, they’re trying to ban it or literally shoot the messenger where they’re killing record numbers of journalists in Gaza.

The Israeli defense force is killing record numbers of journalists. Now we’re being told that we’re not allowed to use the numbers of dead coming out of, Gaza, of Palestine because Hamas is controlling it. I mean, again, these are very Orwellian, times in that regard. I mean, of course, and also we have the Huxley in control of the desire machines that keep us addicted to these social media algorithms and so on.

I mean, we’ve really created a perfect stew here for us to cook ourselves in, right? It’s, it’s, it’s not like we’re in a great place. But this is why I want to go back to the significance of critical media literacy education and what we do so much of our work around is this kind of pedagogy is that all of us can benefit from having skills to decipher this

we, we all will benefit from critical media literacy education. We all need these skills to navigate these very troubled and these very confusing times.

So critical media literacy education, again, is the focus, and I just wanted to point out, even though your book is several years old now, the Anatomy of Fake News’ final chapter, the Fake News Detection Kit, has a ten point process that is supposed to reinvigorate our democratic republic and remind us of how important the free press really is.

Not, not every outlet, look, every outlet has its issues, and, you know, many outlets will report great things, and then they’ll also report things that maybe aren’t very accurate. Sometimes, even if something’s accurate, it can be malinformative, as we said, where it will delete context, or, you know, again, going back to Jacques Ellul and Nancy Snow, the scholars, the best kind of propaganda is often just the truth.

Right? But it’s the partial truth, or the historically contextless truth, right, that makes it malinformative, and of course, as you say here, you know, you write and say, well, do I want to be informed, or do I want to be a fake news disseminator? Do I want to read something and think about it, or do I just want to click like and share everything?

Right, and given, you know, the social media landscape, should I react to something or should I actually investigate it to trust, you know, to check its claims? Why was I attracted to a particular piece of information or a broadcast? What, what tactics were used to capture my attention? Who published the content, right?

That, who, not just who published Who owns that? Who’s the author of the content? Who are they supported by? Do you even understand what the topic or the content actually is? Or are you trusting that the person writing it or the institution is giving you that information? Now again, back to the malinformative issue.

So, I mean, you’ve got a lot of great information in here that’s, I hate to use the tired phrase, but it’s a toolkit, right? It’s a toolkit to figure this out. When people make claims, does, does, does the evidence back it? What’s missing from the content that’s being given, who benefits or is harmed by the way a story is being reported, right?

And then of course, does it really, is, is your source journalistic? Does it, does it seek to report the truth and not cause harm? You know, those are all very important things. We talk about the Society of Professional Journalists Code of Ethics on this program quite a lot. And I think that’s also a core of critical media literacy education, is getting people to broaden their media habits, particularly into the independent media realm.

Not because the independent media is true and the establishment media is false. You know, black and white, but because people can become more and more media literate just by expanding their media consumption diet into the world of independent media. Nolan Higdon, your thoughts on those myriad things.

Nolan Higdon: Yeah, I think, yeah, that’s a very important point. I wouldn’t throw out everything legacy media does. They have a ton of resources, way more than a lot of independent outlets. And when they decide to report on something, they can report on it very well. So it’s a very good point. And I’ve, I want to echo something you said.

I’ve never been a fan of telling people throughout entire outlets. So, you know, people be like, I list, I like the New York times. I don’t watch this, or I like this. I don’t listen to that. Outlets are a organization of many different contributors. I try and focus on good contributors. Good journalists within those outlets and I follow them regardless of what what outlet they go to I think that’s really important.

But the, to your, to your point about asking more questions. I think that’s the important part. I think so much of our, our news media habits are just mindless consumption. Like I get terrified. I spent all day researching news media narratives and you know I’ll hear this and that on MSNBC and the Times and then I go out and talk to people randomly in public and they’re echoing the very things I just heard on those shows and and it it happens consistently and I know that they’re echoing what they heard on TV because it’s usually wrong It’s historically incorrect or it’s not supported by, by evidence and

Mickey Huff: Or it’s through a partisan lens, right? Or it’s partially true, but through a totally partisan lens.

Nolan Higdon: Yeah, something like that. And so when you when you get those, when you get those talking points and examples, it’s really terrifying. It shows how many people take what they, they hear and just repeat it out loud. And so one of the things I want people to do is just stop and ask questions, just interrogate this stuff.

And I would encourage audience, be extra skeptical whenever you agree with the story because the best fake news convinces you you agree with something regardless of the evidence. They, they make these leaps in, in judgment, that you accept because you already hold that viewpoint. It’s really important when it feeds into your bias to extra slow down, extra research, because the best fake news catches you, when it thinks it’s, confirming a view you already hold.

Mickey Huff: We really have to be mindful of the confirmation bias, right? Part of critical thinking, in fact I’d say a crucial part of the critical thinking, is applying all the standards to yourself before you apply them everywhere else. Which is a challenge, because of the confirmation bias, and then of course there’s implicit bias, right?

That’s a tough one. Because the implicit biases are the ones that we’re conditioned to have, that if we don’t examine ourselves carefully enough, they totally skew and frame the way we interpret the world. And we are the ones that aren’t aware of our own frame. Nolan Higdon, can you talk maybe a little bit about the issue of the implicit bias and maybe how that connects to the Dunning-Kruger problem?

You know, the little bit of information is a dangerous thing, right? People that are armchair experts from YouTube, because they went and, you know, looked a few things up to confirm their bias. Nolan Higdon.

Nolan Higdon: Yeah, Dunning-Kruger is an interesting effect. It’s been researched over and over again, but, but basically it’s when people don’t know something, they seem to feel more confident in what they know when, where, when people are well versed in something, they feel less confident in what they know.

So oftentimes some of the loudest, most confident voices, are usually some of the most ignorant. And I think that definitely applies in a lot of broadcast news media or cable news media. I can’t tell you how many, I mean, basically the name of the game in cable news media is to sound like an expert.

Whether or not you are one is irrelevant. But to sound like one on, on television. And so a lot of folks say just seemingly vapid, empty, baseless things on TV, but they say it in such a way that audiences think they said something intelligent.

Mickey Huff: Deep or profound. Yeah.

Nolan Higdon: Yeah. You know, and I always like, some of the guys who are really good at this, I think, are like Elon Musk.

You ever notice he always does these, like, slow pauses, like he’s deep in thought, but really the sentence just totally means nothing.

Mickey Huff: Oh, yeah. Yeah, like, He’s particularly adept at that.

Nolan Higdon: Yeah, they can talk really slow. They won’t notice I have nothing to say.

Mickey Huff: Yeah, well, it’s a tactic that works. And look, rhetorical tactics are, that’s kind of the name of the game.

I know you and I are going to talk a little bit about the quote unquote debate on CNN, some of the fallout on that. So one of the themes that we brought up, Nolan Higdon in United States of Distraction really looked at the team blue team red media frames, even before that, that language became more prevalent.

I know Alan MacLeod has kind of made that more commonplace. We at the Project, of course, have talked about the team red, team blue frame, but in USOD, in the United States of Distraction, we, we, and we actually were criticized for some of this, we basically looked at the way that the establishment press, you know, sort of couched itself, Fox News, Republicans, CNN, MSNBC, Democrats, and we looked at the way that they covered some of the same issues, and a lot of what we were discovering even then, after the 2016 election, Was that they often, even if they were covering what we thought were the same topics or issues, they weren’t really, it didn’t seem like they were speaking the same language.

It didn’t seem like they were inhabiting the same reality. And so, because of what we were just talking about before the break, confirmation bias, how people seek out information that kind of confirms what they already think or believe. People’s aversion to, to, disagreements, stressors, etc, etc.

That people have become more and more incapable, not just unwilling, but incapable of talking to people that have different views of the world. Right? I know you have plenty of things that you want to talk about. You’ve done a whole series of interviews with media outlets on the debate stuff, but going back to to this playbook, as it were, right? You and I talked about the team red team blue as a means of dividing and distracting. We also talked about not the Trump candidacy or Trump as a politician, but the tactics that the Trump campaign and presidency utilized to manipulate and control narratives.

Some of it we just heard of the debate called the Gish gallop, right? Or the, just a stream of lies and falsehoods that one can’t even keep up to. And so, you know, the explanation for Biden’s bewilderment was like, well, he just couldn’t keep up with a chronic prevaricator, you know, fire hose of lies. Yeah, but there’s, there’s more going on here and the media is complicit in not deconstructing that.

And it’s part of the team red team blue nonsense that really contributes to that lack, lack of sober analysis. Anyway, that’s a lot to dissect and for us to think about, but I know you have much to say on it. So, I’m going to get out of your way and let’s hear some some of your thoughts on those issues.

Nolan Higdon.

Nolan Higdon: Yeah, but you know, back to what we were talking earlier about principles, it always surprises me that team blue or team red can always rightly critique the other side for not upholding said principles but can never understand how their own side is not upholding those same principles or using the same tactics to undermine them.

Was Trump lying during the debate? Yes, absolutely. You know, I’ve spent almost a decade crackling Trump’s lies. Trump lies all the time. You know, that’s not a great thing, but it’s also not a shocking thing. But guess what this may be shocking to team blue Biden lies too I mean, did anybody else catch in the George Stephanopoulos interview, he talked about bringing how he brought peace to the middle east? I mean, it’s just insanity look at the what’s going on in the middle east right now. So yes politicians lie I guess this is news to to team blue. But yeah both sides lie. So yeah, we should stand against lies. We should stand up for truth.

But if you only hammer one side, you’re never going to get to truth. You’re never going to tease that out and ditto with a lot of news media narratives. If you talk to liberals, they will rightly critique like Fox News. How Fox News, Fox News, you know, use- weaponizes race in a way to get voters out how it manipulates its coverage.

Absolutely. How it only give absolutely you one side. Guess what, so does the, the left wing media, they also only give you one side. They also manipulate issues of race. They also give you a bias viewpoint. So it’s, it’s not even that some of these concepts aren’t even above people’s heads. It’s just they only apply them to, to one side.

We’re stunned. No.

Mickey Huff: Nolan, and I, yeah, I, and you wrote this in the, in the piece we were talking about earlier, the establishment strikes back, you wrote about MSNBC, for example, right? You, you wrote about how MSNBC hired former Democratic Press Secretary Jen Psaki, who, I mean, the press secretary’s job is to lie, spin, obfuscate.

I mean, they all, that’s their whole job. MSNBC hired former Secretary, Psaki to be an on air personality on MSNBC, in 2024. You said, however, in 2024, to Biden’s advantage, they opposed NBC, their parent company, hiring former Republican National Committee Chair, Ronna McDaniel. So again, you just mentioned, right, what’s good for the goose isn’t good for the gander.

It’s like, well, it’s wrong when they do it, but not when we do it. And then, in addition to hiring Biden friendly personalities, MSNBC has also skewed its coverage to defend Biden. When Biden and Trump held dueling press conferences in 2024 about the U. S. Mexico border, you wrote MSNBC chose not to air Trump’s comments and largely focused on lauding Biden instead.

You put when the New York Times noted that Biden’s declarations about the economy, taxes, and jobs were often a combination of statements that were false, misleading, and in need of context, NBC’s Claire McCaskill, a former Democratic U. S. Senator, said it was ridiculous that the New York Times would fact check Joe Biden when the Washington Post ran a lie count for Trump his whole presidency.

Nolan Higdon.

Nolan Higdon: This just happened again. During the Trump presidency, Democrats rightly attacked a lot of the spokespeople for the White House for lying. Remember that the one of them had to hide behind a bush from the press because he lied too much, right? But, but just this week, Lawrence O’Donnell bashed White House correspondent reporters for daring to push Karine Jean-Pierre and calling her a liar.

Even though Karine Jean-Pierre did lie about five days earlier, saying that Biden had never seen a doctor. And then it came out, of course, because Biden mentioned in an interview, he’s seen a doctor multiple times. So the press was basically hammering her, like, what is the truth? And rather than, applaud those journalists for doing, you know, journalism, Lawrence O’Donnell on MSNBC said it was rude.

It was out of line. She was just trying to protect privacy. All the excuses in the world that they would never apply to Trump spokespeople, but they do it for Biden. That’s the, that’s the hyper partisan nonsense that drives those of us who actually are committed to truth nuts. It’s like, we don’t want any of these people to lie.

We want all these journalists to do their job. We don’t want anyone in media to play cover for these establishment hacks, but consistently that’s what they do for their one side, their one team.

Mickey Huff: So Nolan Higdon, let’s get a little bit more into the fallout from the so called debate over at CNN.

I don’t even know why the people there were there. There was no pushback. There was no calling out. There was no fact checking. I mean, it was, it was a pseudo event as Daniel Boorstin wrote in 1961. If ever there was, it was an event produced for ratings. Maybe it was an event produced to out, the, the thing that people have been suspecting for quite some time that number one, you know, Trump is, is marauding ever forward with unstoppable in his prevarication and attacks and ad hominems and distortions. But on the other end, you know, Biden is not in his most articulate phase, but he, he bungled many responses, he even uttered outright falsehoods, even if some of them might have been blurted out accidentally.

I mean, I’m not here to run cover for him either, but I don’t think there’s any way to sugarcoat this. Trump’s performance was incredulous, but Biden’s was a disaster, Nolan Higdon.

Nolan Higdon: Yeah, I think one of the, one of the things that needs to be really disentangled in, in media, and I think pollsters are partly responsible for this.

If you, the polls show like upwards of 70 percent of Americans say they’re concerned about Biden’s age. I, not to sound like a Democrat, I don’t think that’s true. The reason why is I don’t think the age, the number actually bothers people. I think it’s the cognitive abilities. And I think oftentimes we use age in place of saying that.

And I think that’s where it’s creating a lot of confusion. I personally do not think we should set any age limits on people. We should, you know, people can do the job. They can do the job. Who might have told, you know, an 82 year old, they can’t do the job or whatever. Maybe the cognitive abilities is a whole different question.

This is why we have the 25th amendment again, which the pros were happy to apply to Donald Trump. And there may have been a case there to do so. But this, this is what the 25th amendment was created for. If there really is doubt that a person has the cognitive abilities to do some of the basic aspects of the job, that’s why we have the 25th amendment in place.

Mickey Huff: But Nolan Higdon, if we had real primaries, wouldn’t this have been sorted out a year ago?

Nolan Higdon: Oh, that’s, yeah, so there’s a, there’s a

Mickey Huff: Who’s responsible for that?

Nolan Higdon: These questions came up in 2018, but because there was a, global pandemic and so many competitors on the stage, Biden was largely able to avoid a lot of these, public talks, a lot of these debates, things like that, that I think would have exposed this.

And in the four years since, he’s gotten much worse.

Mickey Huff: I’m talking about 2022, 2023. Let’s jump to that.

Nolan Higdon: That’s what I’m saying. So, but, but as 2022 or 21, 22, 23 emerge, Biden has given less press conferences than any president in the modern period.

Mickey Huff: And George W was the previous record holder there.

Nolan Higdon: Right. And, It’s a lot of jokes being made there.

But Biden, Biden and the Democrats really thought they could just float through this election because Trump had so many legal problems and Trump was such a hated figure and that as long as they kept the focus on Trump, Biden would win again.

Mickey Huff: I’m hearing echoes of Hillary Clinton. Let’s, let’s make sure we make sure we run against Trump.

Nolan Higdon: Right. That’s lost in history. The Pied Piper strategy, the Democrats pumped a bunch of money to support Trump because they thought he was the candidate to beat. So they owe, they are own some of the, Trump victory in 2016, to their own, disaster. But, well,

Mickey Huff: they’re still playing the same tune.

Nolan Higdon: Yeah, but it’s, it’s, it’s unfortunately blowing up in their face.

I mean, Trump’s got a lot of help from the Supreme Court. He’s gotten a lot of help from, Savvy. That he helped stack.

And Biden is now, Biden is now, you know, forced, he was forced in this debate, but this is the interesting thing. And I will never, this hasn’t come out in reporting, but I assume they did this debate early in June because they did it, this is one of the earliest debates ever. They did it outside the traditional system. I thought they were trying to do it because, you know, Trump would look like Trump and they thought that would boost Biden in the polls, but instead, the opposite happened, Biden fed into the worst fears of voters that he is not cognitively able to handle the position and it turned against him.

The attention actually turned off of Trump for once and for once I think Trump played this quite brilliant. Trump said, I’m just not going to say anything. I’m going to let Biden’s age dominate for the next two weeks. I’m not going to introduce my VP. You know, there’s some observers who think that Trump actually wants to run against Biden.

That’s why he’s not saying anything. He hopes Biden stays in the race and who can blame him when you, when you look at these polls, but yeah. This was another disaster by the Democrats. I can’t really say Trump played this well, except for staying silent for those two weeks, more or less. For the most part, this is the Democrats own doing.

They knew this was in 2018. Polls showed people were worried through, about this throughout, Biden’s first term. And then they still pushed it all the way to the end. And, and part of that push into the end was, they decided not to have a traditional primary. They weren’t going to have debates. They weren’t going to have votes.

This is why, RFK Jr. left the party because he knew he wasn’t going to get debates and, and, they were also, they were also pushing some things about money he, he raised and votes he got in certain states. They weren’t going to count him or take him away from him. So, RFK stepped out and they basically forced the nomination on Biden.

And here we are in July. People are afraid of whether or not Biden can beat Trump. And we have a truncated timeline and a primary process that’s impossible to restart. Again, the Democrats have just manufactured this and the media enabled it.

Mickey Huff: The media enabled it. And that’s that’s where we are. Within the earlier in the program, we were talking about the media fighting itself, establishment press, team red, team blue establishment versus social media, right?

Silicon Valley. But here we are. These are the companies that frame and project what they want us to think is the reality. And then they conduct polls to find out how well that constructed reality is sticking. So how do we get out of that feedback loop? I think is one of the things that we want to examine more carefully.

And again, I’m going to, again, I, we always sound like broken records in this, in this, in this way. Critical media literacy education, right? If you learn basic skills, if you understand that this is all happening, how and why. You are better. You are better positioned to ask critical questions, but where we are now, Nolan Higdon, with this, we didn’t even have really any primary season.

I mean, we had primaries where people were voting, but there’s nobody running. Maybe you can talk a little bit more about what is your analysis of how Trump and Biden just dominated the whole program? I mean, even Nikki Haley. Even though she stayed in the race for a while. We remember Don Lemon, right?

Past her prime in her fifties. That, that nonsense. But. This is the sign, these are signs of a much, much deeper problem. And that gets into things like dark money. How do people even get in? How do people even, what’s the control of party politics? There’s a lot of other things to unpack here, including the packing of the Supreme Court, which, which Trump did.

And now the Supreme Court has been, well, basically doing what folks predicted they would do. Hand down rulings that might eventually protect or promote either his candidacy or someone else’s like him. let’s get into the deeper politics here maybe, and how it relates to media and how our political landscape, this is another thing that we’ve written about before.

The whole shift of neoliberalism and corporatization and privatization of the entire, entire political apparatus. You mentioned earlier that the debate this time was earlier and done completely outside of any kind of convention that’s historical. And that even goes back, interestingly, you know, the, the presidential debates used to be run by the League of Women Voters until the Bush Dukakis years, right after 1988.

The parties moved away from that because they couldn’t really control the outcomes of what was happening and they couldn’t control who was or wasn’t invited now. And then, of course, they had a private corporation nonprofit that did it. And they had we found out this from open secrets. This was a Project Censored story years ago.

About how the debates then were controlled, literally a pseudo event. I mean, again, Daniel Boorstin wrote about this about the Kennedy and Nixon debate decades ago. But it’s really on steroids now. Now not only have they moved away even from that bipartisan, you know, corporate effort to like, see who gets in and who gets out, that’s how they decided Nader got kicked out of the debates years ago.

They changed the rules mid stream. Now they just basically reached out to people and CNN was like, hey, how about we go and do this? What does that say about who has political power and control both in our media system? And in the two party structure Nolan Higdon.

Nolan Higdon: Yeah, I I think it’s well succinct way you said that and and one of the things coming out of the 1970s, as you mentioned, was that that neoliberal approach to government, and there’s been way too many books written on that, but just one of the key points for what you’re mentioning here is, neoliberalism likes to appeal to expertise.

It has little faith in the humans who are the public, and so it likes to take decision making away from the public and put it in the hands of private experts. So they like a lot of, you know, boards and things like that. They’re big supporters of like the Federal Reserve, like the Federal Reserve should be deciding economic policy, not the people or the legislature, for example.

But that over the long, you know, since 50 years since you’ve seen people have less and less influence over national electoral politics, less and less over national governance. They still have, you know, quite a significant amount of influence over local, but including less and less at the state.

And so regardless of where you stand on that, when the system doesn’t work for you, and this is known as anti system politics, there’s some great scholarship on this, when you believe the system doesn’t work for yourself, and you believe you don’t have a possibility within the system to get your voice heard, you turn to figures who want to tear down the system. And that’s exactly what Donald Trump’s rhetoric is, dealt rhetorically, and we can debate what he actually does legislatively, but rhetorically, Donald Trump champions that message. And I think until you get a counter leftist party that talks about dramatically shifting the system so it does serve the people and it does include the, the human voice, Trump’s going to mop, mop the floor with these people every time. And I think this was one of the things that had me pulling my hair out in 2020. Biden barely won. He won by 40, 000 votes in three key states. I know we had millions of new voters turn out, but he barely won.

And Donald Trump at that moment was hamstrung by a global pandemic that was not going well and the worst economy since the great recession. So he had huge factors tearing him down. He still only lost by 40, 000 votes in three states. And so I think Democrats have been living in this kind of fantasy world that they beat Trump.

It’s like you barely squeaked it out and you needed help from a poor economy and a global pandemic. And now you’re surprised that four years later you find yourself behind this guy again. Well, people still feel like the system is not working. And you know this and no Democrats know this because one of their talking points is like, well, Biden’s done a lot and people just don’t know it yet.

We just need to tell them. Look, if you’re doing things that are transforming their lives in a positive way, I trust people. People know their own lives. They’ll know if their lives are better off. They don’t need you to come down and tell them. They know themselves, what they make of their lives. And when you keep telling them that message and they don’t see their lives improving, I’m not surprised.

They either don’t vote or vote for a third party candidate or go for the guy who wants to burn down the system in Donald Trump. And so I consistently come back to Democrats on this one. I think they continuously set up an environment where someone like Trump can win. I, I, I don’t anticipate Trump changing in any positive way.

I’ve given up on that, that side of the political spectrum but on the Democrat side, they’ve got to create an alternative that, that brings people out, that gives people hope that makes people want to buy into the system. Or to answer your question earlier about where we’re going, we can’t have a, we can’t sustain a politics for decades where our goal is to tear down the system, but not rebuild something in its place.

That’s how you end up with the end of democracy.

Mickey Huff: So, Nolan Higdon, I referenced this earlier, but didn’t get into more detail, it was, it’s kind of a theme riffing, riffing off of our, our, our City Lights book, United States of Distraction, from 2019, Chris Lehman, writing for The Nation, recently wrote a piece, this is a July 9 piece, I’m talking to you on July 10th, this program airs next week, but when people hear it, it’ll be this week, “Biden’s salvo against party elites is a cop out. From his perch in the nation’s highest office, the president has positioned himself as the underdog against elected democratic representatives,” I’m sorry, I’m trying to keep it together here. But the interesting thing about this article, again, and it’s, it’s, you know, well done with some zingers, that’s for sure.

But the last paragraph’s what struck me, because it’s what you and I have been talking about for years. “Here we are with the most powerful man on earth posturing as the persecuted victim of shadowy elites, shoddy polling, and feckless media. It’s not so much a strategy to defeat Donald Trump as a playbook for imitating him,” and that’s exactly what we argued five years ago now.

With that, Nolan Higdon, I wanted to hear your thoughts on, on, the idea that Lehman is writing. That, that in fact, Biden’s strategy is not really about defeating Trump at this point. It’s about imitating the playbook in an effort to do so.

Nolan Higdon: Yeah, for, you know, a little historical perspective, anytime you have an, in the United States history, we’ve had different versions of the market economy.

And whenever they come crashing down and there there’s huge economic suffering for a large swaths of the population, we slightly tweak it. So civil war, you know, collapsed the country from the half slave, half free market, we had unfettered capitalism that came crashing down with the depression. We had a more activist, new deal, liberalism government that comes crashing on the seventies.

We have neoliberalism. Here’s where history changes. When neoliberalism came crashing down in 2008 in the Great Recession, rather than change to try a new economic system, they put band aids on it and maintained it. And people like Barack Obama knew that what people wanted was change. Remember, he ran on hope and change.

But then he got in office and maintained the neoliberal position. Trump also, he knew people wanted change for neoliberalism, ran on that rhetoric.

Mickey Huff: But hold on one second, yeah, continue with that theme one second, but during the Obama administration where Biden was vice president, we had one of the largest class protests going on in recent history with the Occupy movement, the 99 percent that they eventually were able to fizzle out, right, and move aside, and then of course Black Lives Matter.

During the first black presidency, right? When race no longer mattered. We talked all about this, the punditocracy talking about how, Oh, we’re post racial America. We ended up having this, one of the larger civil rights movements for African Americans come out of that presidency. Now, naturally it sparked up again during Trump.

So go ahead, continue. You were just now getting to Trump. And then of course we saw what happened in Charlottesville and we saw what happened, you know, there. So Nolan Higdon.

Nolan Higdon: Yeah. And Obama, I mean, he kept the neoliberal agenda. He basically dismissed Occupy, dismissed, Black Lives Matter. That’s why we say he lost a thousand seats for the party.

Obama’s only political talent is getting Barack Obama elected. That’s basically the only thing the guy can do. But he, he maintained this neoliberalism with populist rhetoric, because again, that, that signals to me that they know people want change, but they don’t actually want to deliver it. And same thing with Trump.

Trump gives the populist rhetoric, really doesn’t have any change. Trump’s legislative accomplishment is tax cuts the same thing that, you know, Bush accomplished, the president before Obama, George W. Bush. And so, Biden, Biden now is trying to do what Trump and Obama did previously, which is he knows the system sucks.

So he’s trying to adopt this populist rhetoric, this anti elitism. But the, the striking part of it is you’re the one in power.

Mickey Huff: Senator from MBNA. I mean, how much more elite can you get than the Bidens at this juncture?

Nolan Higdon: Yeah, so you’re basically rallying people to rise up against you. You’re the one in power.

So it just it lands terribly, I think it’s another example of kind of the last desperation hail mary of a campaign that’s in its dying months but we we see this constantly and and regardless what you feel about the populist rhetoric, if you are populist and you do want to see these change, you’ve got to demand these figures go beyond the rhetoric.

Otherwise, they will manipulate you with the rhetoric as they have done through the Obama years, Trump years and now Biden is trying to do contemporaneously.

Mickey Huff: Well, we certainly have quite the conundrum here, right? And you know, our, our, you know, Project Censored and Project Censored Show and what we do, we don’t, we don’t, we aren’t, we never endorse candidates and we don’t do any of these kind of things.

We talk about media, media framing, we talk about censorship, we talk about things that we hope the public can learn about and get to know so that they can make more well informed decisions so they can be more meaningfully civically engaged. That’s what we’ve that’s what we’ve promoted since 1976 and here we are promoting it again.

But, it’s hard to promote sometimes because because of the team red team blue phenomenon because of issues like confirmation bias. And I’m going to come link back to it once again. You know, there’s only five states that mandate media literacy education. There’s not a lot of specificity in it. And I think that critical media literacy education runs hand in hand with civic literacy.

And those things need to be taught in tandem at early ages, K 12, every state, and all the way up through the collegial years. But some people don’t go to college. Fewer people maybe even are going to go to college in the future because of economic reasons, but that doesn’t mean they don’t need to learn.

These vital skills, Nolan Higdon, and I know you a focus of your research is specifically on education, pedagogy, curricular development. So in the couple minutes we have left, I wanted to let you talk a little bit about that work and the importance of it that you do. I know you have another book coming out with media scholar Allison Butler on higher surveillance, higher education in Silicon Valley, which is another we’ll have another whole hour on that coming up.

But I wanted to give you a chance to talk a little bit more about critical media literacy education and its importance and also give people information where they can follow, find your work, or be in contact. Nolan Higdon.

Nolan Higdon: Yeah, I guess a couple points I just make. If you’re an educator out there and you’re saying like, God, I’ve always wanted to have media literacy, but I’m so busy.

Feel your pain, but I’ll say one of the things that we do through Project Censored or through Mass Media Lit where I work with Allison Butler, we try and work with teachers on replacing existing assignments with media assignments to get the same learning outcome. So there there is a way to do it without creating more work and we could, we could help with that to your to your other point, Mickey about formal education, informal education.

I agree. Everything doesn’t need to be done in a classroom. There’s a great community resource out there. I highly encourage people to look, obviously, at Project Censored. It has great community resources, but so does USC’s, Critical Media Project. It has a lot of great things. They’re designed for parents and community members.

And then, Jeff Share has a great library guide, Education 166, on, I think it’s called, or Education May 466, library guide, Critical Media Literacy Guide at, UCLA, has a lot of free resources too, and so, those resources are out there. And if you contact organizations like Mass Media Liter Project Censored, you can, you know, get folks like myself and others who are willing to work with that.

And then you can also always follow a lot of my work at Substack. So it’s nolanhigdon. substack. And you can find my work there and you can sign up for free. It’s a newsletter. Everything’s free on it. It’s a lot of the articles, videos, resources, things like that, that I offer to my subscribers and that’s Nolan Higdon dot sub stack.com.

Mickey Huff: Nolan Higdon. Thank you so much for taking the time out of your very busy schedule to join us for the hour. On the Project Censored Show today. Nolan Higdon co editor most recently book from Peter Lang Censorship Digital Media and the Global Crackdown on Freedom of Expression Nolan Higdon is founding member of the Critical Media Literacy Conference of the Americas He’s a Project Censored national judge author lecturer at Merrill college in the education department at University of Santa Cruz University of California Santa Cruz Nolan Higdon again always a delight to catch up with you on the Project Censored Show.

Nolan Higdon: Thank you.