Episode 216: Sunday Morning News Shows and the Problem With ‘Agenda Setting’ Court Stenography
Citations Needed | March 12, 2025 | Transcript
[Music]
Intro: This is Citations Needed with Nima Shirazi and Adam Johnson.
Nima Shirazi: Welcome to Citations Needed, a podcast on the media, power, PR, and the history of bullshit. I’m Nima Shirazi.
Adam Johnson: I’m Adam Johnson.
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Nima: “It’s fair to call the deteriorating situation at the US/Mexican border a crisis,” declared NBC’s Meet the Press in 2021. “[CNN anchor Dana] Bash presses Netanyahu on Gaza death toll: ‘Is Israel doing everything possible to… avoid civilian casualties?’,” boasted CNN’s State of the Union in 2023. “Principle over party… The latest high-profile Republican endorsement for Harris. And she got another Cheney endorsement,” announced ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos in September of 2024.
Adam: Since the 1940s, these weekly shows have featured panel interviews with government officials, lawmakers, random rich people, candidates for office, and other political figures, usually from the United States, as part of their stated mission to quote, “tackle pressing issues,” unquote, produce robust discourse on current events, and hold electeds and aspiring electeds accountable.
Nima: A relic from a different era, these Sunday news shows still loom large today. No, they don’t have particularly high ratings, but much like the role editorial boards of major newspapers play, they matter to people who matter. They shape the agenda and tell lawmakers, advisors, CEOs, and other people who wield power across our political, economic and social systems, what to care about that week and how to analyze the current moment.
Adam: But to what extent do they serve any real journalistic function? To what extent do they actually ask difficult and challenging questions?
Nima: Do the Sunday morning shows truly illuminate our political moments and interrogate the powerful, or essentially, do they do the opposite? And what effect do these shows, known for “setting the agenda” in Washington, have on policymakers, news media, and the public at large?
Adam: On today’s show, we’ll discuss the history, ideology and effects of Sunday morning news shows, look at how despite their lofty claims of revelatory and challenging journalism, they prioritize and revel in prestige and access, flattering existing power structures, and further enabling reactionary policy and politics.
Nima: Later on the show, we’ll be joined by Julie Hollar, senior analyst and managing editor at Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting.
[Begin clip]
Julie Hollar: I think the Sunday shows are really illustrative of how both the elite media and our government elite think about what expertise is and whose voices matter in our democracy. When we look at their guest list, this is something that FAIR does often. We do studies. We look at who gets to speak on these shows. You know, the format is such that you’ve got the headliner interviews, the sit-down interviews with some kind of, usually, government officials. And then you’ve got, most of the shows have these roundtables afterwards that discuss what those officials were just talking about, and a few other major stories of the day. And on those roundtables, it’s usually mostly journalists. And then you also have some of these think tank people, lobbyists, etc. And the voices that are excluded are so many of the voices that would be able to offer some sort of a counterpoint to what is otherwise a very, very narrow range of debate.
[End clip]
Adam: This is the spiritual accessor to Episode 16: Editorial Boards: Protectors of Establishment Ideology, where we had on Jim and Janine from FAIR, who, who’s the same organization this episode’s guest is on, and that was, yeah, seven-and-a-half years ago.
Nima: Episode 16, season one. The early days.
Adam: Sunday morning TV shows are the television equivalent of editorial boards, in that their sort of job is to shape what powerful people think, so it trickles down to the plebes. Because, like we mentioned, these shows aren’t blockbusters. The clips aren’t usually going viral, although sometimes they do. They’re not really directly influencing people. But they influence reporters, major editors and major newspapers, bookers, producers, and anchors on major TV networks and other platforms. So they influence people who matter, and therefore they matter to us. So whereas you might not directly ingest them, you are certainly downstream from their pernicious effects.
Nima: And these have been staples of prestige political TV since the early days of television. That’s why they kind of hold this very lofty reputation in the political news media ecosystem. The Sunday morning shows have been part of how we understand televised politics, this kind of mass-media production of politics, for nearly a century. So let’s go into the four major Sunday morning news shows, Adam. We’ll do a little background on each to kind of, as we say, set the table for these setting-the-agenda type shows.
Let’s start with Meet the Press. Meet the Press debuted on NBC in 1947. It was the first Sunday morning public affairs show and is now the longest-running show on network television. The show had been a radio broadcast for two years prior, serving, by some accounts, as a promotional outlet for the struggling magazine The American Mercury. In later years, under different ownership, the magazine would become extremely antisemitic, just as a sidebar. From its inception, NBC Meet the Press took inspiration from presidential press briefings and featured high-ranking government officials, policymakers and, occasionally, other public figures, fielding questions from a panel of journalists. The idea was to hold the powerful accountable. The creator and first moderator of Meet the Press, Martha Rountree, was a broadcast journalist herself who harbored fairly standard religious-right political views, at least in the years following her time on the show. In the 1960s Rountree founded a nonprofit called the Leadership Foundation that sought to reintroduce prayer in public schools, create stricter drug laws, and prevent the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment. This was the first moderator of NBC’s Meet the Press. Later, various moderators took the head of the table at Meet the Press for years to come, including Tim Russert from 1991 to 2008, David Gregory from 2008 to 2014, and Chuck Todd from 2014 to 2023. Meet the Press is now moderated by Kristen Welker.
Adam: Seven years after the debut of Meet the Press, in 1954, Face the Nation premiered on CBS. It was the brainchild of Frank Stanton, then president of CBS, who created the show in part to compete with Meet the Press. Under Stanton’s leadership, CBS employees were required to take an oath of loyalty to the United States. According to The New York Times, in 1951 Stanton, quote, “created a security office staffed by former F.B.I. agents to investigate the political leanings of employees. Writers, directors and others were blacklisted.” Unquote. Face the Nation is currently hosted by Margaret Brennan, who, as far as we know, is not a communist.
Nima: She stated her loyalty today.
Adam: To be clear, they don’t still have that policy to my knowledge, I think it’s implied. But you know, it was the ’50s. You got to cover your bases. You never know. You know, pinkos are everywhere.
Nima: It was the McCarthy era. Let’s turn to ABC. ABC’s Sunday morning show is This Week, and it debuted many decades later, in 1981 replacing the Sunday news show Issues and Answers which had aired since 1960 as ABC’s equivalent of Meet the Press And Face the Nation. The original host of this week was David Brinkley, and as of 2012, it has been hosted by George Stephanopoulos. The heir apparent, though, looks like ABC correspondent Jonathan Karl.
Adam: The fourth and final Sunday morning news show, State of the Union on CNN with Jake Tapper and Dana Bash, first aired on CNN in 2009, succeeding the cable channel’s, Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer, which premiered in 1993. It’s currently anchored by Tapper, who joined in 2015, and Dana Bash who joined Tapper in 2021.
Nima: Now, Fox News also has its own show, but that show, Fox News Sunday, debuted many decades after these kind of standard broadcast shows. We will get to that in a bit as it relates to some of the things that we’ll talk about. But just want to mention that, yes, Fox also has a Sunday news show, but it is nowhere near the kind of establishment prestige of the four.
Adam: Yeah. I mean, it’s Fox News. It’s a glorified version of the five. It’s not influential outside of a very specific bubble. So obviously it’s total dogshit. Criticizing it would be basically cheating. We’re focusing on the sort of major four, quote-unquote “mainstream,” even though, of course, Fox is mainstream now.
Nima: Now, as we’ve been saying, there’s been a lot of political conservatism baked into the establishment of these Sunday morning shows, from loyalty oaths to far-right moderators, but for a glimpse into the longstanding rightward lean of these shows, let’s take a look at one particular broadcast of NBC’s Meet the Press, when its guest was Dr Martin Luther King, Jr. This episode aired in 1965, after the Selma to Montgomery Marches in Alabama in March of that year. Nearly every question that was asked of King was in some way accusatory, adversarial, and/or condescending. So let’s listen to a clip from this show. The question, which actually started the interview, was asked by Lawrence Spivak, a permanent member of the NBC panel and partner of Martha Rountree in developing the show. Let’s take a listen.
[Begin clip]
Lawrence Spivak: Dr. King, former President Truman was quoted by the AP as saying that the march from Selma, and this was his word, was “silly, and can’t accomplish a darn thing except to attract attention.” Now there have been two murders, many beatings and a federal expenditure for troops of about $300,000. Would you say that what the march accomplished was worth that cost?
[End clip]
Adam: Yeah, I think that’s a slightly loaded question. $300,000 meant so much money that the cops said they spent to do something, I don’t know. I mean, it’s again, this is the same thing we heard during Black Lives Matter, George Floyd. They spent such-and-such on managing the protests. And, you know, is that worth the cost? It’s like, why is that how social justice works? You have a fucking ledger where you–
Nima: That’s right. What was the return on investment, Adam?
Adam: What was the ROI on that protest where you can’t vote? So yeah, that’s pretty much the function of these shows, in a nutshell, really, which is like, ask really loaded, hostile questions to powerless people, and at powerful people, you lob up some grapefruits. Occasionally, maybe you’ll make them slightly uncomfortable to sort of maintain the image. But broadly speaking, it’s not really your MO. because again, if you were actually hard on them, they wouldn’t keep coming on the show, which everybody knows.
Nima: And just to note, the murders that were mentioned by the questioner, Lawrence Spivak, the victims of those murders were demonstrators killed by KKK members and by Alabama State Troopers. It was not the protesters who were killing anybody, of course, yet the implication of the question, you know, Hey, there were murders. Was it really worth it? The implication there, of course, is that those murders were the fault of the march organizers, implicating King in that. Let’s listen now to the second question of the panel, also asked by Spivak, in which he essentially implies that the marches are unnecessary.
[Begin clip]
Lawrence Spivak: Dr King, I think the demonstration was largely to get your voting rights bill through. Was it necessary for that purpose? Aren’t you going to get that bill? Wouldn’t you have gotten it whether or not you marched?
[End clip]
Adam: Yeah, I guess the benevolent whites would have just handed it to them if they just asked nicely. A vis-a-vis letter campaign.
Nima: Everything you’ve ever wanted was coming your way anyway. Why do you need to make a ruckus? Why do you need to go outside? Can’t you just be obedient?
Adam: Dr. King, of course, responded by saying that the right to vote was only one of the many causes motivating the marches, namely, police brutality and the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing, all issues that didn’t seem that important to Spivak. Spivak continued to needle King about when the demonstrations would stop because he thought that was the true barrier to allowing the South to, quote-unquote “catch up.”
Nima: Right. So this is like a way into our dissection of these Sunday news shows. This is the kind of thing they do. They are not there to afflict the powerful.
Adam: It’s a variation on the New York Times editorial on slavery from 1859 that we’ve read on the show, I think, a couple times, where their argument is, I mean, they even say, like, quote, “leave them alone.” It’s like the South needs to be left alone, and that they’ll sort of eventually through some kind of, I guess, theology, will have a moral awakening.
Nima: Yeah, exactly. The Christian spirit will just shift in them.
Adam: Right, right. Which, again, we’re unclear why this didn’t happen 100 years prior. So there’s some mysterious force that’ll fix it for them. They just need to shut up and go home. This is a popular ethos amongst a lot of the extreme center throughout American history.
Nima: Now we should also note that the inclusion of Dr. Martin Luther King on a show like Meet the Press is somewhat unusual. The majority of guests of these programs, and really across all Sunday morning news shows, are usually government officials and lawmakers. Very rarely are they members of, say, oppositions or even advocates from protest movements or organizers, of course. In 2001, Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting, or FAIR, published a study that tracked shows including Meet the Press, Face the Nation, and This Week between June 1995 and May 1996. FAIR found this, quote,
Of the 20 most popular guests on political talkshows aired between June 1995 and May 1996, seven were senators, four were representatives, four were Clinton administration members, four were presidential candidates, one was the head of the Republican Party and one was a campaign manager. Of the top 20 guests on shows aired during the last seven months of 1999, 10 were presidential candidates, six were senators, four were representatives, two worked in the Clinton administration and two were governors.
FAIR continued:
When such a staggering majority of guests on Sunday morning political talk shows are government officials, government is essentially listening to government. Issues raised outside the halls of Congress, from the detrimental impacts of globalization to the failed war on drugs, are disqualified. Rather than participating in substantive discourse with labor leaders, consumer advocates, political activists, professors and public interest lawyers, corporate-financed Democrats vigorously engage corporate-financed Republicans in horse-race disputes concerning “centrist” issues, like Chinese espionage and welfare reform, acceptable to their corporate patrons.
End quote.
Adam: That fair study came out 10 days before 9/11, so things were about to get a lot worse. In fact, Chuck Todd, who again hosted and moderated Meet the Press from 2014 to 2023, relayed his guest-booking credo to the Atlantic in 2018, during Trump’s first term, stating that the show booked guests from presidential administrations who, quote, “actually offer something on a topic that we’re dealing with, or truly have the president’s ear on an issue that we’re dealing with.” Unquote. Todd added that a major criterion for booking was that a guest had “pertinent information that makes the viewer smarter.” If these are the criteria, then there’s virtually no obligation to engage with anyone outside the president’s orbit, no matter what political value they add, nor how much, quote-unquote, “smarter” they make the viewer.
So this is all kind of, you have to be an insider, you have to be in the loop, and we want to hear from you not to really ask you hard questions because, again, if I did that, you simply wouldn’t come on. And to the extent to which there are hard questions, they’re over fatuous gotchas about some minor inconsistency. They’re not based on any kind of ideological critique. But for the most part, you can kind of just say what you want to say, get your message out, and they’re going to mostly just sit there and let you do it.
Nima: Yeah, exactly. It’s a messaging platform for already high-powered voices.
Adam: But speaking of 9/11, during the early 2000s, during the George W. Bush first term, officials from the administration, including Bush himself, took to the Sunday shows in the days and weeks after 9/11 as part of a concerted effort to sell their so-called War on Terror and subsequently the Iraq War. There’s one infamous episode where Donald Rumsfeld goes on. You may have seen this clip. It goes viral on Twitter sometimes because it’s so absurd. And you truly have to see how absurd this image is. If you can, go Google it. It’s a supposed map of Bin Laden’s cave in Afghanistan that looks like a Bond villain lair. It is well developed. It’s got 16 different layers. This clip we’re going to listen to, from late 2001, is Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld going on Meet the Press, where Tim Russert credulously, which is putting it generously, I’m sure he probably knew it was bullshit, lets Rumsfeld talk about this absurd Bond villain lair as if it’s an actual thing. Of course, we now know it’s not a thing. It’s, in retrospect, quite laughable, but this is the kind of reportage we were getting from these hard-hitting newsmen after 9/11.
Nima: And the cartoon drawing that accompanies it, as Adam said, you need to look it up. Obviously, it’ll be in our show notes for Patreon subscribers, but look it up. It’s basically the same as, like, Matt Groening’s Bongo’s Dream House drawing, where there’s like a ping pong room and a fully stocked bar and three bathrooms and a fun slide. It’s hilarious. Here’s Tim Russert.
[Begin clip]
Tim Russert: There was constant discussion about him hiding out in caves. And I think many times, the American people have a perception that it’s a little hole dug out of a side of a mountain.
Donald Rumsfeld: Oh, no.
Tim Russert: This is it. This is a fortress, a complex, multi-tiered bedrooms and offices on the top, as you can see, secret exits on the side, and the end, and on the bottom, cut deep to avoid thermal detection, a ventilation system to allow people to breathe and to carry on. The entrance is large enough to drive trucks and even tanks, even computer systems and telephone systems. It’s a very sophisticated operation.
Donald Rumsfeld: Oh, you bet. This is serious business. And there’s not one of those. There are many of them.
[End clip]
Adam: Right, so the work of art was produced by The Times of London. My assumption was it was curated by US officials, quote-unquote, “leaked” to The Times of London, because at least back then, the government can’t directly propagandize Americans. So they put it in a British newspaper to launder it through American media.
Nima: That pretense is gone now. These were the salad days.
Adam: These were the salad days indeed. Now, in the run-up to the Iraq War, the Sunday shows were central to pushing the Iraq War. For the Zoomers out there, this is a Millennial grievance for a reason, because it was a horrible, just made-up thing and lie that killed hundreds of thousands, if not over a million people. So we want to listen to a clip from March 16 of 2003, which was the day before Bush announced the invasion that would take place on March 19, 2003. So this was, Face the Nation host Bob Schieffer offers a quote “analysis” of an interview he conducted with Dick Cheney, in which Cheney made the case for the invasion in Iraq with no pushback, merely questions about process. Not Should you be doing this, but Is this the best way to do it? The first voice you’ll hear in this clip is that of Schieffer’s. The second is that of New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, obviously one of the biggest pushers of the Iraq invasion.
[Begin clip]
Bob Schieffer: What the vice president seemed to be saying was, The time has come. We’re about to embark on this.
Thomas Friedman: I do believe, Bob, the diplomacy basically, is over, barring some last-minute Hail Mary. My guess is, talking to my own sources, that the president will address the country as early as tomorrow night to lay out basically what’s at stake here. And whether you were for the war, Bob, or against the war, it’s too late. There’s going to be a war. And now really the question is, Will the administration be right in many of the bets that it’s been making? And you certainly heard the vice president lay them out here. Let me just go through a quick–
Bob Schieffer: One of one of the things he said today, he does believe it will be a short war, a matter of weeks.
Thomas Friedman: Well, that’s certainly number one on the checklist. They’re predicting it will be a short war. Weeks, not months. Second, I think what they’re counting on is that the war itself will be self-legitimating. Okay, we couldn’t get the UN to do it before the war, that when we see Iraqis celebrating in the streets, which I think there’s a good chance we will, and if we can produce a decent alternative to Saddam in a reasonable amount of time, the war will be self-legitimating.
[End clip]
Nima: Yeah, these should be entered as exhibits in war-crimes tribunals. So what we see here is Face the Nation doing, again, the work of the Bush administration to lay out the case without actually having to make a case. They’re just saying, This is happening, and now we need history to absolve the war criminals from their criminal acts, and we’ll see how it goes. I mean, not giving a shit about the lives that will be destroyed in the process, the many countries that will be destroyed in the process with Bush’s quote-unquote “War on Terror,” but really hearing from Schieffer and Thomas Friedman here, just doing the work of Cheney all over again, three days before bombs start dropping. A
As for how history would determine whether the Bush administration was right about its obviously false claims, Donald Rumsfeld, along with General Richard B. Myers, who is the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, returned to Face the Nation in September of 2003, six months into the occupation of Iraq, and both were essentially chided a little bit by the Face the Nation hosts for not sending enough troops to Iraq. That was the process critique.
Adam: Yeah, this was the big process critique for like, two years. It was like you didn’t send it to troops, or enough this, or enough that.
Nima: Right. You said it was going to be a short war and they would be greeted as liberators. And I think the process is that you didn’t invade hard enough.
Adam: You’re doing the war crimes badly, rather than doing them at all. Yeah, and Bush would appear several more times on the major networks defending his record. So let’s cut to the 2010s. The show that spent most of the Obama years laundering the records of Republican officials. Another FAIR study from 2012 examined This Week, Meet the Press, Face the Nation, and Fox News Sunday from June of 2011 to February of 2012 and found that quote, “partisan-affiliated one-on-one interviews were 70 percent Republican — 166 guests to Democrats’ 70.” So they spent the Obama years basically attacking Obama from the right and in general by, again, playing into the austerity, the sort of budget belt-tightening stuff, a lot of Paul Ryan, a lot of Eric Cantor, a lot of Newt Gingrich, a lot of, like, Obama spending too much money. So of course, no real attack on Obama from the left. It was always, he’s too far left, and we need to kind of rein him in. That was the general ethos of the Sunday morning shows and the guests that appeared on them, to the extent to which such a thing can be studied.
So cut to the 2020s. The Sunday morning news shows have continued to lean right on a range of issues, from immigration, public health, climate, general policymaking. As our guest, Julie holler has documented extensively. She is the official documenter of how shitty Sunday morning shows are, so we’re so happy to have her on. For example, to cite another FAIR analysis, Julie noted how multiple Sunday news shows have also adopted the rightwing quote-unquote, “border crisis” framing regarding immigration in the US.
In March of 2021, the show gave ample air time to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. Now, at the time, increasing numbers of people were attempting to cross the US/Mexico border, the vast majority of whom were being expelled under Trump’s Title 42 policy, which allowed US officials to turn people away who came to the US Mexico border on grounds of preventing the spread of COVID-19. Biden preserved this Trump policy for all migrants except unaccompanied youth. Meet the Press’s Chuck Todd, in his introduction of the topic stated, quote,
It’s fair to call the deteriorating situation at the US/Mexican border a crisis, even if the Biden administration refuses to use that word. But it’s more than that: It’s a political crisis for the new president, with no easy way out.
Unquote. Todd began to question Mayorkas by wondering if the Biden administration’s policy of exceptions for unaccompanied youth, quote, “sends a message,” unquote, “that the border is open,” unquote, asking Mayorkas this, quote,
Are you concerned that a market efficiency has been created where folks have decided, “Look, my kid’s got a shot at getting in the United States if I don’t go with them?
Unquote. Now, Todd later suggested that some might perceive this policy as not expelling unaccompanied children at the border without due process as a so-called “loophole.” So we’re getting a lot of real humanizing questions centering the humanization of those crossing the border. They’re attacking Biden for creating a quote-unquote “loophole” of not turning small children away to die in the desert of thirst.
Nima: Now in 2021, the same year, Julie Hollar reported for FAIR that during the year 2020, neither This Week, Face the Nation, nor Meet the Press asked a single question that mentioned the climate crisis, climate change, or even the Green New Deal until September of that year, 2020. At that point, Meet the Press asked three questions, This Week asked four, and State of the Union asked a whopping 13. Here’s what Julie wrote, quote,
Face the Nation asked only two questions referencing the climate crisis the entire year. In the first, CBS host Margaret Brennan (9/13/20) challenged Oregon Gov. Kate Brown’s statement that the wildfires were “a wake-up call for all of us that we have got to do everything in our power to tackle climate change. Brennan responded:
‘Governor, I understand that’s your conviction. But I know four former Oregon lawmakers have written an op-ed in the Washington Post, though, saying you can’t blame climate change. Instead, it’s a failure of your state government to prepare, and that warnings were ignored regarding mismanagement of Oregon’s forests. What is your response to that?’
End quote.
Adam: Real hard-hitting stuff. Now, to be clear, the fact that wildfires are made far more likely by climate change is 100% scientific consensus. A 2022 UN report concluded that the risk of wildfires would surge as climate change intensified. You can go read it. It’s pretty clear. It is scientific consensus what she said. But then again, that goes after the fossil fuel sponsors, and makes things a little messy. So again, the goal is to always ask the hard questions from the right. It is to the extent to which they do ask hard questions, it’s always, always, always from the right.
Nima: And we’re hearing the same thing right now, as wildfires have been raging in California at historically destructive rates. And so yeah, always, always be aware that the critiques from these Sunday morning shows, just as they often are from newspaper editorial boards, the critiques come from the right, never, never the left. Let’s stay in 2020 for a moment though. Meet the Press at that time reiterated its hostility toward racial-justice movements during the show’s coverage of the George Floyd protesters, again moderated by the all-knowing Chuck Todd. Though the show did explore police brutality to an extent, it also featured numerous government officials denouncing the protesters without Todd, of course, providing any kind of pushback to their claims.
In one example, in a May 2020 broadcast, Chuck Todd asked Pat McCrory, the former governor of North Carolina, how he would have handled the uprisings. McCrory made a passing mention about the legitimacy of the protests, but spent far more time grousing about quote, “groups of anarchists,” end quote, and “domestic terrorists,” end quote, and sympathized with the quote “poor mayors and governors who have to call in the National Guard.” End quote. Chuck Todd did not challenge these statements at all.
Adam: Now finally, we can move on to Gaza, where the Sunday morning shows, of course, have been utterly horrible. Now, many of the same problems we’ve discussed are magnified tenfold with respect to their coverage of Gaza over the last 15 months, ignoring really any dissenting voice. I did a study with my research partner, Othman Ali, for The Nation magazine, documenting their coverage of Gaza for the first year of the four big Sunday morning shows, ABC, CBS, NBC, and CNN. We found that over 208 episodes, and scores and scores and scores of mentions of Gaza, the Sunday morning shows only interviewed one Palestinian or Palestinian American the entire time. It was Face the Nation in the first few weeks of the so-called war. They interviewed Husam Zomlot, the Palestinian ambassador to the UK, and that was it.
Meanwhile, the show featured 20 Israeli guests, either government officials or families of Israeli hostages. Benjamin Netanyahu alone was interviewed five times, twice by CNN’s Jake Tapper and Dana Bash, where they asked him really, really softball questions, as I detail in the piece along with my co-writer. We also found that the use of emotive words like “massacre,” “slaughter,” and “brutal” were all used almost exclusively for Israeli victims, a convention we’ve seen in other coverage. The word “massacre” was used on the Sunday morning shows during our survey period of one year for Israelis, 33 times and only twice for Palestinians. “Slaughter” was used 33 times to describe violence against Israelis and only three times for Palestinians. And the word “brutal” was used 79 times for Israelis, only four for Palestinians.
Additionally, the Sunday news shows did not mention Palestinian human shields or rape victims, even though the New York Times and Washington Post have documented, and CNN have documented, the use of both human shields and Palestinian rape victims under Israeli custody, and yet claims of mass targeted rapes of Israelis were mentioned 15 different times, and the phrase “human shields” was mentioned to describe alleged actions by Palestinians 37 times. The shows also regularly platform Israeli officials who have been credibly accused of war crimes, including Netanyahu, who, as I mentioned, was largely thrown softballs.
One useful example here was from CNN’s State of the Union. In an interview with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in November of 2023, host Dana Bash accepts the Israeli government assertion that Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City was sitting atop a, quote, “Hamas command and control center” when there have been zero evidence to this effect. The claim, later categorically debunked by the Washington Post that looked for this alleged command center, went to the physical location, used aerial satellite footage and Israelis’ own videos, and found no evidence. There was one underground room that was built by Israel in the ’80s that had a few metal cots. There was no evidence of any Hamas command and control center under the supposed hospital. Not that that would justify blowing it up anyway, but nevertheless, this was the claim that Dana Bash did not push back on at all. So let’s listen to that clip right here.
[Begin clip]
Dana Bash: Israeli forces have said that they are engaged in intense fighting around Al-Shifa Hospital, the largest medical facility in Gaza. I know that you say that the hospital sits on top of a Hamas command and control center, but of course, there are also patients, civilians sheltering in that complex getting treatment. So how do you intend to go after Hamas without putting sick and injured civilians in that hospital at more risk than they already are?
Benjamin Netanyahu: Well, we’ve called to evacuate all the patients from that hospital, and in fact, 100 or so have already been evacuated. I’ve called for field hospitals. The French president has sent a floating hospital ship. I’ve asked the emirates to send a field hospital. They have, and other countries have done the same. I expect the UN to build this. So there’s no reason why we just can’t take the patients out of there instead of letting Hamas use it as a command center for terrorism, for the rockets that they fire against Israel, for the terror tunnels that they use to kill Israeli civilians.
[End clip]
Adam: So, again, the idea that you can just randomly transport patients is, of course, false. That’s why hospitals are the last places to evacuate. Now, what Dana Bash doesn’t mention was that on October 13, Israel issued an evacuation order for all of northern Gaza, and Israel was carrying out that evacuation order. The idea that there’s a Hamas command and control center is obviously pretextual. Israel never provided any evidence. They provided a 3D rendering they made in a blender, again, showing a Bond villain lair that was absurd on its face, that, again, we later now know, according to The Washington Post and other investigations, is not true at all. So she doesn’t interrogate the fundamental substance of the claim, right, this idea that there’s a Hamas commander control center. She just breezes past that, accepts that premise, and then does this kind of totally empty liberal handwringing about, Well, what percentage of Palestinian civilians deserve to get killed? Which should be ripped off dialysis? Which babies should be taken out of their incubators?
And this is, of course, why he goes on these shows. He goes on these shows because they offer zero fundamental pushback. It is simply minor liberal handwringing. They let him tell a bunch of lies about how we can just replace people and patients and then move them. Again, this is ethnic cleansing, which we now know, according to Haaretz, Israel has now completed what’s called the Generals’ Plan, which is an ethnic cleansing plan in northern Gaza. This was pursuant to that ethnic cleansing plan. The Hamas commander control center was clearly pretextual. It was not real. And this is the kind of dopey, Well, how many, what percentage of people deserve to die? Blinken says it’s 20%. You say it’s 80%.
Nima: Yeah, clearly you need to flatten hospitals and schools.
Adam: Yeah, clearly, clearly, you have to, but is there a better way you can do it? And this is again, similar to the Iraq War. It’s not that the invasion’s based on lies, which it was, just like Al-Shifa Hospital’s command and control center was just another WMD lie. There’s Israeli ethnic cleansing and genocide in Gaza. Is just a series of mini-WMDs, right? There’s no existential critique of the fundamental premises. They just accept it and move on to debating, basically liberal hand wringing, nothing, meaninglessness. And this is par for the course with these shows. The reason why powerful people go on them is because they know they’re going to accept all of their reactionary premises, and then they have to sort of debate process. They have to debate if they’re doing genocide too much or too little,
Nima: Right. It’s so noble that Netanyahu and the Israeli government has demanded the UN do the job of moving patients and people to secure locations, at which point they then bomb those locations as well. And so these things are never really brought up on these shows. It is all providing these very high-profile, prestigious TV news platforms on broadcast networks that has been going on for decades and decades and continues to do this, setting the agenda, hearing from the leaders that shape our world, but really never interrogating anything that they say, just allowing them the platform to spout their talking points and well-honed messages that then are allowed to set the frameworks for further TV reporting, further newsprint reporting, and further editorial board handwringing. To discuss this more, we’ll now be joined by Julie Hollar, senior analyst and managing editor at Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting. Julie will join us in just a moment. Stay with us.
[Music]
Nima: We are joined now by Julie Hollar. Julie, thank you so much for joining us again on Citations Needed.
Julie Hollar: Thanks for having me. It’s great to be here.
Adam: So we went into detail about the history, and, I guess, nominal purpose of the Sunday morning news shows at the top of the episode. We wanted to begin by talking to you about their perceived function versus their actual function within our media system. As we mentioned, they don’t really garner very high ratings, but they’re a classic example of media that matters to people who matter. They’re kind of, you know how The Economist would always say, ‘We’re aboard Air Force One.’ They’re sort of in the know, people in Washington, CEOs, corporate leaders, thought leaders, politicians, of course, all kind of watch it, and they sort of set, quote-unquote, “set the agenda,” which is how the Atlantic magazine put it. For Washington, I want to start off by asking you to kind of generalize what they kind of view their perceived role, like if I took Chuck Todd or–
Nima: And the ghost of Tim Russert.
Adam: The ghost of Tim Russert, I asked him, What do you think your point is? And what is your moral and political utility? What would he say versus what the kind of reality of their function is?
Julie Hollar: Sure, I mean, I think they have long perceived their role as being one of setting an agenda, as you said. It’s like, what do we want the news to be talking about for the next week, especially prior to the 24/7 news cycle? This really was something that they did. You know, they’d have a big newsmaker on and ask them questions, and the responses would be headline news. They would help to shape the follow-on reporting that would happen for the next week. They would say that they are getting big interviews with important people in order to hold them accountable, in order to really ask them the tough questions about the big issues of the day.
In terms of holding officials accountable or asking them the tough questions, that’s something that at FAIR, from the time FAIR started, we’ve been documenting how they fail at that. You talked about Tim Russert, who had a reputation of being this tough questioner. He was sort of sometimes seen as the golden age of the Sunday-show questioning in the early 2000s. And during the George W. Bush administration, they actually, their strategy was when we need to really get out there and defend ourselves, and especially around things like when questions really started coming out about their whole fabrication of the WMD stuff, they were like, Well, we need to get someone on Meet the Press with Tim Russert, because we know that he’s not going to ask us tough enough questions to really bring out the truth. This is how we can get out there and make it seem like we have been held accountable when we can just keep on putting out our talking points.
Nima: Yeah, they’re very much like a relic of television monoculture. I think the kind of need for this thing has waned. But I mean, certainly, as you say, from the start, it’s been more like lead the press than Meet the Press, you know, and you’ve written to this point about the almost uniform reliance on, really, you know, lobbyists, or, as you know, they would kind of call themselves, and as the Sunday shows label them, strategists. But also, of course, politicians and pundits over, you know, over inviting independent sources or issue experts, and this is especially the case in their total ignoring of climate change, for example, is a fact of not only American politics, but global safety and health. You’ve written before, in one 2021, study, quote,
ABC’s This Week, CBS’s Face the Nation and NBC’s Meet the Press didn’t ask a single question that mentioned the climate crisis, climate change or the Green New Deal until more than two-thirds of the way through the year.
End quote. We discussed this a little earlier on the show, but now that we have you, Julie, please tell us about how matters of environmental health and general social welfare, really, somehow never make it onto this quote-unquote “agenda” for the week. How can one even begin to calculate the effect of routinely, and even deliberately, omitting what is almost certainly the most existential issue of our time from these all-important Sunday news shows?
Julie Hollar: Yeah, I mean, climate is the perfect example, because it is truly, I think, it’s very easy to argue that that is the most important political issue of our time, and to be able to say that these Sunday shows, they’re trying to make the case that they are agenda setting, they are the most important, they are holding our government officials accountable. For them not to be asking questions regularly about the climate crisis, it really demonstrates how far away they are from the real needs of people and the planet and what kind of political conversations we need to be having, and instead focusing on the political conversations that Republicans and Democrats want to be having. Because, really, what they’re doing is following the Republican and Democrat agenda. They just feature Republican and Democrat politicians. And then, you know, these strategists, lobbyists, journalists who take these two parties as sort of the end-all-be-all of expertise and of agenda setting.
And so I think the Sunday shows are really illustrative of how both the elite media and our government elite think about what expertise is and whose voices matter in our democracy. When we look at their guest list, this is something that FAIR does often. When we do studies, we look at who gets to speak on these shows. You know, the format is such that you’ve got the headliner interviews, the sit-down interviews with some kind of, usually, government officials, and then you’ve got, most of the shows have, these roundtables afterwards that discuss what those officials were just talking about, and a few other major stories of the day. And on those roundtables, it’s usually mostly journalists. And then you also have some of these think-tank people, lobbyists, etc. And the voices that are excluded are so many of the voices that would be able to offer some sort of a counterpoint to what is otherwise a very, very narrow range of debate. You know, public-interest voices are almost never included. Labor leaders, when’s the last time you saw a labor leader on a Sunday show? Even academics, whose expertise would often be very valuable, are generally excluded.
Nima: And when they are there, they get tougher questions than the politicians.
Julie Hollar: Yeah, often true. I mean, going back to climate, the few times that they did ask questions during our study, they were almost always targeted at Democrats. There was one question that entire year to a Republican guest.
Adam: And this leads into, to the extent to which they do ask quote-unquote, “tough questions,” it’s always almost from the right. It’s a candidate not being, you know, having a past comment about LGBTQ rights that’s sort of seen as anathema, or immigration, quote-unquote, “open borders,” or they’re in sort of insufficiently pro-war for whatever the sort of given fervor is at the moment. And this is what we call the kind of corporate media sweet spot where, and this is kind of what Jake Tapper built his career on, which is, you get to ostensibly look like you’re opposing power by asking tough questions, but because you’re attacking them from the right. This is why the Afghanistan pullout was like their Super Bowl, because you got to attack them from the right, but look like you were at being adversarial to power because you were criticizing them for being insufficiently pro-, in this case, in the case of Afghanistan, you know, pro-indefinite occupation. So you get to have your cake and eat it too. You get to serve power, but kind of look like you’re taking on power.
Because, again, I think a lot of these people genuinely see themselves as descendants of true journalism, that they’re not just people reading off the teleprompter, but they’re really sticking it to the powers that be. But you never, ever, almost never see with, you know, with the exceptional occasion of maybe some comment about raising the retirement age, you really never see them really go after politicians for being conservative, especially not Democrats for being rightwing. You never really see them talk about cutting Medicare, cutting WIC, food stamps, all these things that are now on the table from Republicans that are back in the chopping block. You never see that really hard, sustained questions around that, at least not in the studies that I’ve done, or episodes that I’ve seen. So I want to talk about how the attacks, really, 90% of the time just come from the right. They’re there to sort of discipline politicians who are perceived as being unrealistic or off-program with respect to quote-unquote “national security” or other kind of sacrosanct issues.
Julie Hollar: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that’s really true across corporate media, right? Not just the Sunday shows. I think about the election debates that they always have, and we always do studies of the questions asked, and that’s always true in those debates also. It’s so rare to find anyone being asked a question being challenged from the left when they would have Republican primary debates. They would always include some kind of rightwing media journalist like Hugh Hewitt, or someone to question the Republican candidates, and for the Democratic primaries, you never got someone from The Nation or Democracy Now!, you know, that would just never happen. Probably on Sunday shows, this is exacerbated because it’s already so narrow, because they’ve already decided we’re just talking to this very narrow range of people.
And this just goes back to the corporate media model, right? You can be far-right and still be acceptable to corporate owners and advertisers, as we clearly have seen from the lurch to the right of the GOP under Trump and all these corporate sponsors who were backing away at first, you know, after January 6, and all these businesses who were, like, Oh yeah, we can’t support that. And they all quietly went back to them. But then, you know, views to the left, anywhere to the left of center-left, basically, are off-limits because those start to challenge capitalism. So no corporate owner or sponsor wants to hear that on their shows.
I think it’s really useful to look at the advertisers on the Sunday shows. Going back to the question of why climate is never mentioned, America’s Natural Gas, BP, Chevron, Exxon Mobil, Koch, car companies. These are all–
Adam: Don’t forget pharma. They do a lot of medical–
[Laughter]
Julie Hollar: Yeah, that’s a little bit less consistent.
Adam: ‘Symptoms may include.’
Julie Hollar: Yeah, for sure. But a lot of these fossil-fuel companies, they don’t advertise on the nightly news so much. It’s the Sunday shows. Nightly news, you see things like energy drinks and alcoholic drinks and Aflac and more consumer-oriented stuff. And it’s like the heavy hitters are advertising on the Sunday shows.
Nima: Yeah, it’s like, basically whoever funds CSIS then advertises on the Sunday shows.
Adam: Well, it sort of matters to people who matter. It is watched by disproportionately wealthy, influential people, because, even though it may be a dinosaur for us, and we look at it saying, Who gives a shit? You know, again, the people who run this country are 85 years old, and they give a shit, unfortunately.
Julie Hollar: And it’s also, you know, these fossil-fuel companies are, by putting their ads on, they’re reminding both the media and the politicians, We’re watching you, we’re here, we’ve got our eye on you.
Nima: So to this point of who the audience is, what is determined to, you know, be the agenda that is set for that coming news cycle, Julie, talk about how there’s maybe, like, an outsized discussion of quote-unquote “national security threats” or quote-unquote “foreign policy issues” on the Sunday shows that I think those of us that kind of follow these things we see time and time again when there are, like election polls, it’s like foreign policy tends to be low down on the list, right? economy is very high up, cost of living high up, stuff like that . But foreign policy tends to be lower. I mean, maybe with the difference being if there’s an active genocide going on. But why do you think national security as it’s understood in the you know, Washington Beltway, is discussed so often on these Sunday shows, but issues like Social Security or Medicare or at least, not just talking about cutting those things, but about strengthening them, that is usually backgrounded when there are national security issues to discuss. Why do you think there’s that kind of outsize influence on these Sunday shows?
Julie Hollar: Well, whenever you talk about national security, you’ve got again, Sunday show format, Republicans and Democrats that you’re talking to here, they’re all big military. So you know, everyone’s getting money from the military. They’re all taking, almost all of them, are taking money from the military-industrial complex. So they all want to talk about it. They all want to boost it. It’s something that’s generally pretty safe to talk about, again, for corporate owners and corporate advertisers. And these are the people who all talk to each other. And you know, we did our study of the Afghanistan withdrawal in 2021, like you’re talking about, they’re able to pretend like they’re having this vigorous debate and being and challenging the powerful by basically pumping up viewpoints against withdrawal. But in that you know, we did a source study, and 20 out of the 24 guests that they had on had direct ties to the military-industrial complex. So ranging from either they’re current or former members of the military, they’re elected officials who take PAC money, they’re serving on boards of some sort of military industry or an advisor or something, it’s just like, there is no range of debate there, even though they make it look like it because they’ve got Republicans on one side and Democrats on the other, just sort of like, how pro-military or how pro-intervention are we going to be right now? Super or just moderately?
Nima: [Laughs] Or super-duper? Yeah. I mean, I wonder if there’s a sense of, like, when you talk about foreign policy issues on Sunday shows, there’s this expertise or prestige factor, right? You have generals on, you can have elected officials on, discussing things that maybe don’t seem as day-to-day for the average viewer, and therefore there’s this kind of elite conversation that gets to be had, like over the heads of your average citizen. Whereas, if there are things that are really directly connected to people’s lives, they may kind of see through the veneer a little easier.
Julie Hollar: It might also seem more, you know, because of the way that media have so long defined what is expertise on national security matters and defining it as military, you know, if you’re talking about something more like Social Security or housing, or any of these things, it’s maybe more obvious how they would be restricting the debate, and people might question more if there was an absence of, like, public interest voices.
Nima: Yeah. Like, why is there no housing advocate when you’re talking about housing, but if you’re talking about dropping bombs, well then you just bring on, like, a brigadier general.
Julie Hollar: Right, right. They would never consider having a peace activist, you know.
Adam: Well, because, again, this capital S, capital P, Serious Pundit, like, there’s a sort of acceptable, there’s a seriousness. And it’s funny, because these journalists, who are kind of intellectually, socially, and economically, like on the periphery, like, really, not much more insider than me, they’re so obsessed with kind of looking official and looking serious and asking the same kind of official, serious questions that they begin to obsessively, again, discipline. It’s all sort of disciplining. There’s a kind of infamous Tim Russert interview with John McCain where he’s, I think John McCain was like, US soldiers are fighting boys with guns, and Tim Russert’s going back and forth about, Well, technically they’re not boys, because the people they killed were this age, and it was so inane, and it was like, but it was this gotcha. And this is what they do. They do these kind of trivial gotchas. You said this in 2019, and then you say this. And it’s like, within such a narrow framework, there’s really not much performative journalism you can do. And so there’s this obsession with minutia and trivia and sort of, again, being insufficiently consistent to the national security state.
Julie Hollar: I think again, it kind of goes back to this idea that you focus on the minutia, because if you ask questions that are too tough, you also risk losing access to those sources. You know, this is a mutually beneficial relationship where they feed each other. You know, the like the Sunday shows want the big get. They want the big name, and maybe the name who’s going to draw viewers who might say interesting things, maybe they’ll say controversial things, but you don’t want to push them too hard, make them look bad, because then they’re not going to want to come back on. And these officials, they want this platform, but they don’t want the platform if it’s going to make them look bad. So they’ve got to work together in a way that they both look good in the end, meaning that the journalist has to look like they did something, like they kind of held them accountable by asking tough questions in some sort of way. It’s like a trick question, you know, you’ve got to ask them something that doesn’t really make them look bad, but makes you look good. And so it’s all very performative.
Nima: Well, before we let you go, Julie, tell us a little bit about what you and the good folks over at Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting are up to these days, and where folks can find your work.
Julie Hollar: Well, this is all making me want to do another Sunday show study, so keep an eye out for that. [Laughter] Yeah. I mean, we’re definitely trying to keep a close eye on what’s going on with shifting coverage with the Trump administration. You know, it’s the ways that preemptively, a lot of media outlets have been backing off already to try to stay in the good graces of this administration.
Nima: Yeah, it all gets back to that kind of, currying favor, right, by being deferential.
Julie Hollar: Yeah. And when you have an administration coming in that is so hostile to the press, there are a lot of legitimate fears that journalists and media outlets have about being shut down and losing access in various other ways. And so you’re already seeing a lot of that, just it’s kind of coming to more of an extreme right now, so we’re keeping a close eye on that and what’s going to happen. And you can find all that at FAIR.org.
Nima: And you absolutely should, folks. FAIR has been amazing for many, many, many years. Both Adam and I have written for FAIR and can’t recommend it enough. There probably would be no Citations Needed without FAIR. So thanks again, Julie, for joining us today. We’ve been speaking with Julie Hollar, senior analyst and managing editor at Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting. Julie, as always, thanks for joining us on Citations Needed.
Julie Hollar: Thanks for having me.
[Music]
Adam: You know, the funny thing about the Sunday morning shows is that they’re very, very similar to editorials, where there’s this, there’s this tone of, like, officialdom and authority for a media genre that is quite antiquated and sort of had its heyday in like, the ’70s and ’80s, or in the case of editorials, in, like, the 1890s.
Nima: [Laughs] Right.
Adam: But it still sticks around.
Nima: But they have this hallowed, sacred vibe.
Adam: Yeah. And again, it is influential with people that matter, which is why we’re talking about it. Otherwise, you know, if it was sort of trivial, we wouldn’t be discussing it. But it actually does matter. It does reinforce ideology and promote ideology to those who unfortunately pull the buttons that blow up people or decide how much money we cut from a budget for WIC and for Social Security. So it matters. But there’s this kind of air of officialdom that I think is funny, because it’s like, you’re just some guy. You just work for Comcast, or you just work for you know, Paramount. No one elected you.
Nima: Right. And that the hosts also take that hallowed sensibility very seriously themselves, and therefore make themselves into very serious, important features of our media ecosystem. I’m reminded of George Stephanopoulos in 2002 when he was hosting This Week, and he said this, quote,
It’s not my job to express my opinions. It’s my job to ask the right questions, to make sure that people learn something from the program, to present all sides of the story and let people make up their own minds.
End quote. So yeah, that idea of, you know, we’re just presenting the platform. There are going to be two sides to everything, and probably only two sides, right?
Adam: Right. But in the case of This Week, Meet the Press, and State of the Union with Jake Tapper, their all sides did not interview a single Palestinian during the genocide in Palestine.
Nima: Exactly. So there’s only, right, there’s two sides, and those two sides mean Republican and Democrat. That’s what those two sides mean.
Adam: Exactly, exactly, yeah. And if they agree on something, you’re cooked. I mean, that’s the worst place to be in the world.
Nima: Exactly. Then you just have someone to come on and kind of make that point, and then you move on. I mean, since I’m in a quote-y mood, I’ll also note that in an interview that Tom Brokaw did, a veteran NBC news anchor, he did in 2008, he really made that clear, the idea that for political junkies of a certain kind, these Sunday shows were everything. They were kind of the alpha and omega. They were either the end to a really important news week, and did the recap, or they kind of set the stage for the next week. And, you know, he described Meet the Press as a, quote, “secular mass in Washington; the faithful never missed it.” End quote. Which is to important people, quote-unquote, “Important People,” capital I. To capital P, Powerful People, these are extremely important platforms to be on. But, Adam, I guess, the question is, you know, have they outlasted their usefulness? Which then begs the question, Were they ever useful?
Adam: Indeed it does.
Nima: Yes. Well, that will do it for this episode of Citations Needed. Of course, you can follow the show on Twitter and Bluesky @citationspod, Facebook Citations Needed, and become a supporter of the show through Patreon.com/CitationsNeededPodcast. We are 100% listener funded, so your support is so greatly appreciated. I am Nima Shirazi.
Adam: I’m Adam Johnson.
Nima: Citations Needed’s senior producer is Florence Barrau-Adams. Producer is Julianne Tveten. Production assistant is Trendel Lightburn. The newsletter is by Marco Cartolano. The music is by Grandaddy. Thanks again, everyone. We’ll catch you next time.
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This Citations Needed episode was released on Wednesday, March 12, 2025.
