Michael Walsh joins the program of a new book that I helped contribute to, "Why Americans Need to Fight the Corporate Media and Why We Need to Realize How Much They Hate Us." by Charlie Kirk and his co-hosts to talk about the book and the people who helped write it. Michael Walsh is a friend of mine and a great American, and I was honored to have him join me on the show today. He is also the author of the book, "42 Ways the Press Hates You: 42 Ways the Media Hates Us." and is a member of Turning Point USA, a group dedicated to fighting for freedom on campuses across the U.S. and around the world. He has been a long time friend and supporter of the TPCU movement, and has been involved in writing and contributing to many other projects that have helped to build the organization into what it is today. I hope you enjoy this episode of The Charlie Kirk Show and that it resonates with your friends and family! and that you find value in this book and book. The book is a must-listen. and I hope it inspires you to write a check to your friends, family and loved ones! Thank you so much for listening and supporting the show! - Charlie & The CharlieKirk Show. Peace & Love, EJ & The Trotting Point USA. Timestamps: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. Intro Music: Intro & Outro Music: "I Love You" by Ian Dorsch (feat. Michael Walsh ( ) Intro and Outro: "Thank You, Charlie Kirk" by: John Rocha (ft. ) Music by: Chacho Chacho ( ) & John O'Sullivan (Music by: Jeff Perla ( ) (Outro: ) Outro and Accompanimentation: "The Good Morning, My Old Town Road" by Scott Holmes (Music: "Let's Get Into It" by Jeffree Song) & "Good Morning America" by Haley Shaw ( ) Outtro: "How Do You Know You're Not a Bad Person?" by
00:00:00.000Hey everybody, against the corporate media, Michael Walsh joins the program of a new book that I helped contribute to, Why Americans Need to Fight the Corporate Media and Why We Need to Realize How Much They Hate Us.
00:00:09.000Become a member today, members.charliekirk.com.
00:00:38.000He's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.
00:00:44.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
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00:02:07.000I've been around a long time and Don't know as many of the people from your generation, obviously, as you do.
00:02:14.000And to have your voice in the book is super helpful for us, because your contribution, which is about the half-life of a lie, I think will really resonate with your listeners and followers and fans all across the country and the world, because your generation has been brought up on a lying media.
00:02:37.000Back in the day when I was covering the fall of the Soviet Union in East Germany and in Russia, in East Germany, the press was referred to as the Lügenpresse, the lying media, because the citizens of East Germany who were prisoners, that's why they had a wall to keep them in, knew the media was lying to them.
00:02:59.000And there wasn't anything they could do about it because it was a one party state and it was a one media party.
00:03:05.000And we see the way America's going now, so as a result of that, my colleagues and I in this project decided that the media should be our next target.
00:03:16.000We started off with a book a couple years ago called Against the Great Reset, and now we've followed it up with Against the Corporate Media, 42 Ways the Press Hates You.
00:03:28.000And they hate us, let's face it, Charlie.
00:03:30.000You know, you're on the receiving end of it a lot.
00:03:42.000Talk about some of the contributors you have.
00:03:44.000Yeah, well, I've got it here and I can read off some of them.
00:03:47.000I mean, they're all going to be familiar to everyone who's listening.
00:03:51.000So we start off with the great Lance Morrow, who was a colleague of mine at Time Magazine for many years in the 1980s and 90s, still quite an active writer.
00:04:02.000Drew Klavan, I think a lot of people know him from his thrillers, from his screenplays, from his work now with Ben Shapiro and his very influential podcast.
00:04:18.000Dave Reavoy, John O'Sullivan, another old friend and colleague of mine.
00:04:33.000From Canada, we have Elizabeth Nixon, who's got a huge following on Substack, talking about the dreadful media and the situation in that country.
00:04:45.000I talked about criticism, so I got the best movie critic in the United States, who's a man named Armand White, who has written for many publications over the years, now writes for National Review.
00:04:57.000Uh, Monica Crowley, of course, everyone knows her.
00:05:01.000Steve Hayward, Nick Searcy, Sebastian Gorka.
00:05:14.000September 10th is our pub date and September 12th, we launched the book with a media event in London, England.
00:05:22.000So we've gone international with this and I think it's crucial.
00:05:27.000As you well know, this is not just a local fight.
00:05:31.000The forces we're battling are everywhere.
00:05:33.000They're here in Ireland, they're in England, they're in the United States, and these are the forces against freedom of expression, against the First Amendment, which only we have, of course, in this country, but generally against your right to speak your mind, and that is the most fundamental right In the development of liberal democracy in both 18th century Britain and in 18th century United States.
00:06:00.000So we're in a fight of our lives, and I think it's really important everybody understands that.
00:06:04.000So, I want to just go through historical analysis first.
00:06:27.000I started out Working for Gannett Newspapers in Rochester, New York in 1972.
00:06:35.000Gannett was at one point the largest newspaper chain, I think in terms of number of newspapers in the United States.
00:06:42.000It later went on to create USA Today, which was the most widely distributed newspaper in the United States.
00:06:48.000This is before the death of newspapers.
00:06:50.000I worked for Hearst in San Francisco at their flagship paper, the San Francisco Examiner.
00:06:56.000And I worked for Time Incorporated at Time Magazine for 16 years between 1981 and 1997, more or less.
00:07:04.000So the criticism of the media being a tool of the moneyed interests, the aristocracy, the business class, uh, the political classes has always been leveled against the media.
00:07:16.000And I think in generally, generally speaking, that's been true.
00:07:21.000It's, it, it, it hired reporters from The lower middle classes, if not actually the poor in many cases in the early 20th century.
00:07:31.000But it was owned by rich guys with barrels of ink and access to newsprint.
00:07:38.000What's changed is the reporters, Charlie.
00:07:40.000So when I started as a 22-year-old kid out of the Eastman School of Music, so I was a musician, pianist, etc., they put me right on the police beat.
00:07:55.000And that was the best thing that ever happened because you got to learn journalism from the ground up.
00:08:01.000Murders and suicides and robberies and how to write your story fast and get it in on deadline.
00:08:25.000I don't think some of them had high school degrees.
00:08:28.000They tended to be streetwise and ambitious in the sense that they were devoted to their profession, which wasn't opinionating or editorializing.
00:09:12.000Because I remember the guy that was on the copy desk when I was just starting out turning in copy.
00:09:20.000John B. Kenney, he was an old Irishman from Rochester, upstate New York somewhere, and he held you to the strictest standard to being on time, being right, expressing yourself.
00:09:35.000And later on, when I became a critic, I was allowed to express my opinion because that was the job.
00:09:41.000But those early years that I spent as a reporter were formative, formative in terms of Information gathering, how to write fast, how to write quick.
00:09:48.000And frankly, all the success I've had since then, whatever it's been, whether it's been literary success, writing thrillers, writing in Hollywood, is because I had those two years on that.
00:10:00.000And because it was not an Ivy League guy telling me what I should think, but it was a street guy telling me what I should do.
00:10:07.000And that's what made great reporters back in the day.
00:10:12.000And now I think the Ivy League and the college degrees, Uh, you, you draw from the same social class as the people you're supposed to cover.
00:10:21.000And that's not good because they're all friends.
00:10:24.000I mean, I've been in business 50 plus years and I know many of the most famous names in American journalism or I've worked with them or they're, they're, they were friends, certainly social acquaintances.
00:11:06.000They know that 90% of permanent change comes from the mind, and they work on eliminating the reason you gained this weight in the first place.
00:11:12.000There's no shortcuts, pills or injections, just solid science-based nutrition and behavior change.
00:11:16.000And finally, and probably most importantly, I lost 30 pounds.
00:12:50.000They've absorbed this in the classrooms.
00:12:52.000Now, I haven't been in a classroom for quite a while, but they, More to the point, they hang out together, they congregate together, and they do it with the people that they cover.
00:13:04.000When I was a young music critic, just starting out, I know this sounds boring, but actually, classical music is a very interesting world, and the journalism was very top quality back in the day when it was important to the readers.
00:13:17.000And my particular rabbi on this was the late Harold C. Schoenberg of the New York Times, who was The most important voice in the cultural world on the most important newspaper in the country.
00:13:31.000And Harold's rule was never to fraternize with anyone he would cover.
00:13:38.000So if he saw a famous pianist walking down the street, he would cross the street to avoid meeting that person.
00:13:45.000He felt it was so important to be impartial, to be above it, to be honest to yourself and to your principle.
00:13:55.000The New York Times doesn't believe that anymore.
00:13:57.000Uh, the old, what they were called times men in those days who lived by that, that is not true.
00:14:03.000Now you're supposed to be friends with them.
00:14:04.000You're supposed to have access to them.
00:14:06.000You're supposed to have an opinion about what they do that totally agrees with everyone else's opinion, including theirs about what they do.
00:14:14.000So as someone else has said, it's a club and you ain't in it, but the media is in it.
00:14:22.000We, On the conservative side, have access to shows like this, to the heirs and the signs of Rush Limbaugh, really, Charlie, if you take your own patrimony back to the arrival of Rush Limbaugh in New York in the 1980s.
00:14:40.000And he begat Sean Hannity, and Sean begat, begat, becomes like the Bible.
00:14:44.000So, we have that, but what we don't have is access to places like the New York Times.
00:14:50.000Time Magazine, where I worked, For many years, and at the absolute apogee of its power and influence and honesty, even though it was criticized, and rightly, for an attitude, because it did have an attitude.
00:15:04.000But that's now completely in the hands of the left.
00:15:07.000And the way we have to fight them is the way we are fighting.
00:15:12.000And this book, with all of you in it, is a contribution to that, because I want the audience to pick it up and see, okay, how do they hate me, right?
00:16:04.000It should be an honest broker, Charlie.
00:16:06.000If you go back to the 18th century, to where freedom of speech starts in Britain, they asked for honesty.
00:16:14.000This famous line from the lines of Two guys run into the name of Cato, a man who cannot call his tongue his own, cannot call anything his own.
00:16:25.000And that is the most important dictum.
00:16:39.000So Michael, let me ask you, in the last couple of years with Elon Musk purchasing Twitter and X and liberating it, with shows like ours that are ascendant and Tucker Carlson now in podcasting, your career in journalism and seeing the ups and the downs of American media, are you hopeful that the current trend is towards a freer and more open, at least, I don't want to say media environment, but one where people have more choices and we're not restricted to how things were maybe a decade ago?
00:17:08.000Yes, I am, Charlie, and it's because of people like you and the guys just before you.
00:17:15.000I'd be very remiss if I didn't point out that here in Against the Corporate Media, 42 Ways the Press Hates You, that I didn't mention the late Andrew Breitbart.
00:17:26.000We have two essays by Breitbart people in it, besides myself.
00:17:31.000We have Hannah Giles, who was the young woman in the famous Acorn videos.
00:17:36.000And we have Larry O'Connor, who's now a talk show host, as you well know, in Washington, D.C., talking about the early days of Breitbart.
00:17:46.000And I'll tell the audience how impulsive and how exuberant Andrew was, those of you who didn't know him in life.
00:17:58.000I became involved with creating the site then known as Big Journalism for Breitbart.
00:18:04.000After meeting Andrew at a party one day in Los Angeles, we had a monthly gathering of interesting people, not political, but interesting, mostly writers and people who worked in the industry.
00:18:15.000And after about 20 minutes of talking to Andrew, he suddenly said, Michael, you've got to start big journalism for me and do it.
00:18:21.000And before you knew it, we had that site up and running in early 2010, because as everyone knows, Andrew despised the corporate media.
00:18:32.000And wanted to hurt them as badly as he could.
00:18:35.000Now, he was taken from us too soon, as you know.
00:18:38.000But I think he, like Rush, was a formative figure in the revolt against the corporatism and the clubism and the credentialism of the media.
00:20:24.000But what you don't want to see is no such and such allowed.
00:20:28.000I'm sitting here in Ireland where my great grandmother in her birthplace, as a matter of fact, went to the United States as a teenage girl.
00:20:36.000And when she got to Boston, there were signs that said, no Irish need apply.
00:20:41.000Well, we don't want to see that directed against anybody.
00:21:16.000And this is why I think what Trump and the new crowd around him was so brilliant, is take their own people away from.
00:21:25.000Take Bobby, the most famous man in American politics, take it away from.
00:21:30.000Take someone as appealing as Tulsi Gabbard, who is a woman, is beautiful, is well-spoken, is a military veteran, a real military veteran, who's a patriot.
00:23:30.000So you mentioned something interesting about boomers.
00:23:33.000I'm not allowed to criticize boomers on this program, Michael, because the hate mail I receive from boomers is, it is like you wouldn't believe.
00:24:46.000So there is something interesting happening, though, and I want you to help explain it, which is that there is the polling shows that Gen X hates the corporate media, is more pro-Trump, is against Kamala Harris, is against big
00:25:01.000government, far more than baby boomers. We have Elon Musk, for example. We have J.K. Rowling.
00:25:07.000We have Tulsi Gabbard. What is it that makes Gen X so different than baby boomers and how
00:25:13.000they view the world, how they view the corporate media and politics? Well, I think they see the
00:25:18.000mistakes of their parents and they react against them. Remember, the whole 60s Woodstock generation
00:25:24.000is reacting against the perceived squareness of the 1950s Eisenhower era.
00:27:42.000Well, they see how bad the world is that they're being given.
00:27:46.000And they're not stupid, and they can look around and say, well, what's different about the way it was when my father was poor, when his father was poor?
00:27:58.000By creating a female-dominated world in which safety is the most important thing, you have a society that stops functioning because it no longer takes risks.
00:28:08.000We've got people in outer space we can't get them back because we failed.
00:28:14.000And the guys that put them there in the 1960s were these nerdy little guys in white shirts with slide rules and pocket protectors for crying out loud.
00:28:23.000You know, I'm joking, but I think Elon Musk is going to build his own private space taxi and drive it up there and get them and bring them back home.
00:28:33.000The Gen X-er will go save the problem of the boomers.
00:28:40.000Gen X, they're not as big as boomers, but they are big.
00:28:43.000There's a fair amount of Gen Xers, and the numbers, I'll send them to you, Michael, offline, that they are the most conservative of any generation by far.
00:28:52.000In fact, Gen X men, for at least the poll that I looked at with New York Times-Siena, which is directionally correct, Gen X men favor Trump by 25 points.
00:29:03.000Young whippersnapper, old fartism involved in generations as they change and hand over.
00:29:11.000But I think that the Baby Boomers antipathy might originate with the fact that many of us who have been successful in this generation We're like you, successful very early on.
00:29:26.000We rose through the ranks as they were then assembled.
00:29:30.000I got to Time Magazine when I was 31, and that was 20 years younger than the guy they thought they wanted for that particular job.
00:29:40.000And there's always some resentment on the part of the guys that got passed over that job or that It's not a book you have to read from start to finish.
00:29:47.000didn't make it. And I would attribute that just purely to resentment,
00:29:53.000I would pay no attention to it because they'll be gone soon enough.
00:29:56.000But back to the book here. I want to encourage people to look at it.
00:30:02.000It's not a book you have to read from start to finish.
00:30:05.000It's got essays from people who've been in the business longer than I have to
00:30:10.000people who are brand new to the business. It has people who write for a living,
00:30:15.000people who talk for a living, people who do things for a living.
00:30:19.000It has people who write movies. It has people who write novels.
00:30:22.000It has all the kinds of of diversity in the good sense that we have on the right to show people we're not just a bunch of cave people sitting around resenting progress.
00:30:38.000We are very well educated, very articulate, and with the access to the new media that we have, we can change the world.
00:30:46.000Again, the one thing baby boomers love to do is change the world.
00:30:49.000They want to meddle in everybody's life.
00:30:51.000So we've been doing it since 1967, as far as I can think, and we'll probably continue to do it.
00:30:59.000So last point I want to make is that you worked with the great Andrew Breitbart, which he really started this rise of citizen journalism.
00:31:06.000And we've seen that continue to grow over the last decade.
00:31:11.000Is that the way that we eventually crush the corporate media, is thousands of people doing the work, shows like this?
00:31:17.000We've talked about this throughout the hour, but the decentralized idea that we no longer need gatekeepers, that because now we all have smartphones in a right-hand pocket, you could buy lights, you could have your own show, that the barriers to entry are largely removed.
00:31:35.000Yes, I'm all for the democratization of the media, because that takes it back to the way it was in the first place.
00:31:41.000The notion of gatekeepers is a notion that has now been destroyed by the internet.
00:31:48.000But I would argue, and I argued with Andrew about this a lot, is we can't just say any old thing that comes into our head in an unstructured way.
00:32:13.000And they went up against the Germans who were twice their size, and they were scared of the Germans.
00:32:18.000But they knew they could beat them because they had better organization, they had better discipline, and they had greater, stronger desire to win.