Volts podcast: Dan Pfeiffer on the Democratic Party's megaphone problem
In this episode, political communications expert Dan Pfeiffer speaks to the wide influence of right-wing media, why Democrats keep losing messaging battles, and what they need to do about it.
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(Active transcript)
Text transcript:
David Roberts
You probably know Dan Pfeiffer best as one of the hosts of the wildly successful Pod Save America podcast, part of the growing Crooked Media empire of which he is a co-founder. Or perhaps you know him as the author of the Message Box newsletter, where he dispenses communications advice to left-leaning subscribers.
But before he was a new media mogul, Pfeiffer was in the thick of politics as a top aide on Obama’s campaign and then in Obama’s White House, where he ran communications and strategy.
Pfeiffer has seen the media war between the parties play out, and he has seen Democrats lose messaging battles again and again. He has first-hand experience of the growing power of the right-wing media machine to spread disinformation, set the agenda for the rest of the media, and deflect accountability.
Now he has written a book on the subject: Battling the Big Lie is an extended examination of the growing imbalance between the conservative movement’s massive media megaphone … and the left’s lack of one.
Listeners know that I have been obsessed with this imbalance for as long as I’ve been following politics, so I was super geeked to talk with Pfeiffer about how right-wing media grew, how it successfully intimidated both mainstream media and social media companies, and how Democrats can begin building a comparable megaphone of their own, before it’s too late.
Dan Pfeiffer. Welcome to Volts. Thanks for coming.
Dan Pfeiffer
Thanks for having me.
David Roberts
Congratulations on writing a book under extreme time pressure. An extremely stressful time to be alive. I hope the psychological damage has been minimal.
Dan Pfeiffer
I think we'll only know how much damage there was many years from now, so the full cost of this endeavor will not be known.
David Roberts
Well, I want to talk about the current situation, but just briefly at the beginning, let's look a little bit at history. So I wonder what you think are sort of the kind of the landmarks on the road to the current situation. So for instance, tell us a little bit about when the press, the mainstream press as the enemy, became a popular thing on the right. That's sort of the first and then the second is like, what are the sort of markers of the growth of their own media apparatus? How did we get here?
Dan Pfeiffer
Sure, there had been a bubbling sentiment of conservative anti-press sentiment dating back to the New Deal and FDR and Democrats sort of dominating the conversation. But it became a political strategy, primarily in Barry Goldwater's 1964 campaign. He hammered the press, he hammered Eastern elites. He handed out pins to the press on the press planes, calling them members of the Eastern establishment. The press as enemy became an explanation to the right, themselves and their voters why they kept losing elections. It wasn't that their policies were bad. It wasn't that they were unpopular. It wasn't that their rhetoric wasn't good.
It was that the press hated them. Nixon took that into hyperdrive because of his own set of insecurities and grievances. And even before Watergate, like in the course of the Nixon administration, there was real thoughts on how you go about destroying the press. Richard Nixon had his enemies list, which included members of the press. He also explored with Roger Ailes and some of his other aides very specific forerunners, the Fox News. In terms of state sponsored propaganda, there was an effort where t
