Podcast Corner: Two shows ahead of the US presidential election
Fox News now has a major influence on current affairs in America. (Picture: Greg Lehman/Walla Walla Union-Bulletin via AP)
Season 10 of Slow Burn (Slate Podcasts) is about Fox News and its rise around 2000-2004. Of course the seminal event of those four years is 9/11 and the attack on the Twin Towers in New York.
That is dissected in episode three, entitled ‘The Other Guy’s Hamburger’; the idea being that a hamburger joint can be well established in a town, but then a new one rolls in offering a different kind of sauce, and suddenly it looks a little more appealing than the established spot.
Josh Levin, reprising his Slow Burn host duties after the season about the Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, explains that CNN was the only cable news channel on offer in the US and then in 1996 along came the new networks in town, MSNBC and Fox News. After yet another analogy aping fast food, Levin deadpans: “Okay, that’s probably enough with the hamburger thing.”
Slow Burn, started in 2017, focuses on politics and society, with seasons about Watergate as well as the feud between rappers Tupac and Notorious BIG in its archive.
The rise of Fox News might not sound like a season to rope in listeners but well, with mentions of Rupert Murdoch and the late blowhard Roger Ailes, who was president and chairman, it’s hard not to think of Succession. And in particular the show’s finest moment, America Decides, which went behind the scenes of ATN News on the night of a presidential election. Surely it was based on the 2000 election, when Fox News prematurely called the election in favour of George W Bush.
That matter opens this season of Slow Burn - which will likely conclude around the 2024 US presidential election - and is still jaw dropping more than two decades later. It all came down to one state. Fox News wasn’t the only network to call Florida for Bush - just the first. His lead was in the tens of thousands when they made the call but it was shrinking rapidly over the course of the night. The episode is a thrill ride, as compelling as Succession at its finest.
We’ll have to wait and see if the 2024 election comes down to one singularly defining moment as that Fox News move in 2000. But perhaps the seminal moment of the campaign came earlier this year on the increasingly influential Ezra Klein Show.
In his audio essay in February, 'Democrats Have a Better Option than Biden', he articulated concerns about the Biden campaign that seemingly hadn't been voiced in the mainstream media: "I can now point you to moments when he is faltering in his campaign for the presidency because his age is slowing him."
Klein's concerns proved prescient; will he have more interjections in the leadup to election day?
