Landslide:
Engines of Outrage
Key Sources

A note on the premise for this series:

I have been thinking about the issue of misinformation and the role of right-wing media for years. I remember in 2017, when a man drove from North Carolina to Washington, D.C., burst into a restaurant with a rifle (which he fired), because he believed prominent Democrats were using it for Satanic rituals involving children — a wild conspiracy theory he absorbed from the right-wing bubble. If it had been true, his actions would have been heroic.

Plenty of research has shown how right-wing media misinforms its consumers. The episode lists some of the major conspiracy theories that have circulated widely within right-wing media, including on climate change, vaccines, and the 2020 election.

In addition, a New York Times reporter tracked “news” on the right-wing social media app Rumble for a week. An IPSOS poll in 2024 found conservative media consumers were more likely to answer questions about crime, inflation, and immigration (prominent election issues) incorrectly. A TIME column traced how disinformation led to January 6th. The nonpartisan site Medias Bias Fact Check ranks Fox News as a “questionable source” because of its promotion of conspiracy theories, propaganda, and pseudoscience. As I write this, prominent Republicans are spreading a myth that the news outlet Politico was secretly funded by the federal department USAID.

Media historian Nicole Hemmer has a well-researched book that traces the rise of conservative media, called Messengers of the Right. She records how a researcher at the conservative Cato Institute warned in 2010 of “the construction of a full-blown alternative media ecosystem . . . worryingly untethered from reality as the impetus to satisfy the demand for red meat overtakes any motivation to report accurately.”

“Engines of Outrage” Part One:

Main Interviews:

Andie Tucher, Columbia Journalism School

A.J. Bauer, University of Georgia

Other Key Sources:

Nine out of 10 Americans say they trust evening news - NY Times, 1969

Falling trust in mass media - Gallup

TV became America’s most trusted news source in 1964 - Pew Research

Falling TV news viewership - Pew Research

New Right newsletters - examples taken from Thunder on the Right by Alan Crawford and letters from the National Conservative Political Action Committee from the Reagan Library collections.

William Safire hired by New York Times, NY Times, 1973

Safire author of ’nattering nabobs,’ NPR

Safire’s usage of “-gate” remembered - The Conversation

For biographical details of Rush Limbaugh, I relied primarily on Talk Radio’s America by Brian Rosenwald.

Other books I consulted involving Limbaugh and his role in politics include Storming the Gates by Daniel J. Balz and Ronald Brownstein, The Hollow Parties by political scientists Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld, and (including the detail of Bush carrying Limbaugh’s bag) Destiny and Power by Jon Meacham.

Newt Gingrich on Vince Foster, Scripps, 1995

Safire on Vince Foster and “Whitewatergate,” NY Times, 1994

Media I consumed about Fox included Breaking News, by Kathryn Brownell, Foxocracy by Tobin Smith, The Loudest Voice in the Room by Gabriel Sherman, the aforementioned Messengers of the Right, and the most recent season of the podcast Slow Burn, which is all about Fox and its effect on news, cable, and television more generally.

“Engines of Outrage” Part Two:

Main Interviews:

Kate Starbird, University of Washington

Hany Farid, University of California, Berkeley

Matt Gertz, Media Matters

Dannagal Young, University of Delaware

Other Key Sources:

Description of map of conspiracy theories after 2015 shootings, University of Washington

Number of active users at Facebook over the years, Associated Press

Fear inside Facebook, Financial Times

Facebook adding features - timeline, Washington Post

Google and recipe lengths, Mashable