Michael: We're always told the biggest threat to a free press is a tyrant's government. What if the real threat is the press itself, willingly setting its own house on fire? That's the explosive idea we're tackling today. Kevin: Setting its own house on fire? That's a heavy accusation. Where is this coming from? Michael: It's the central argument of Unfreedom of the Press by Mark R. Levin. And Levin isn't just a random commentator; he's a major, and often controversial, conservative voice. This is a guy who was a top advisor in the Reagan administration, a constitutional lawyer. His whole angle is that the danger isn't external censorship, but a kind of internal decay. Kevin: Okay, so he's arguing the call is coming from inside the house. I'm intrigued. What does he mean by 'internal decay'? It sounds almost biological, like an institution rotting from within. Michael: That's a perfect way to put it. He argues that the American press has abandoned its original purpose. He starts by painting this picture of the early 'patriot press' during the revolution. These were printers and pamphleteers who were openly dedicated to promoting the ideals of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. They were biased, sure, but their bias was towards the founding principles of the new republic. Kevin: Right, they were picking a side, and that side was "Team America." That makes sense. Michael: Exactly. But Levin claims that today's newsrooms have undergone a profound transformation. They're no longer champions of those founding principles. Instead, he says they're dominated by what he calls a "self-perpetuating and reinforcing mindset." It’s a culture of progressive social activism and Democratic Party partisanship that has replaced impartial, independent thinking. Kevin: Hold on, though. Hasn't the press always been partisan? I mean, in the 19th century, you had newspapers that were explicitly Republican or Democrat. They would tear each other to shreds. Is this really a new phenomenon, or is Levin just unhappy with which party is currently dominant in the media landscape? Michael: That's the critical distinction he makes. He acknowledges the history of the "party-press." But he argues there's a fundamental difference. Back then, those papers wore their allegiance on their sleeve. Everyone knew the New York Tribune was a Republican paper. There was no pretense. Kevin: It was transparent. You knew what you were getting. Michael: Precisely. Levin's charge is that the modern press is just as partisan, if not more so, but it cloaks itself in the mantle of objectivity and journalistic integrity. He says they present themselves as neutral arbiters of truth while functioning as a propaganda arm for a single ideology. Kevin: Ah, so it's the difference between a wrestling match where everyone knows it's staged for entertainment, and one where one of the wrestlers is also the referee, pretending to be neutral while body-slamming the other guy. Michael: That's a fantastic analogy. And Levin argues this creates a dangerous groupthink. He says today’s journalists often see themselves not as reporters of fact, but as "societal filters." Their job is to enforce a certain uniformity of thought. And when anyone criticizes them, from the President to a regular citizen, the reaction isn't self-reflection; it's a knee-jerk, defensive circling of the wagons to protect the institution from any accountability. Kevin: That defensiveness is something I think we can all recognize. The immediate charge that any criticism is an "attack on the free press" itself. But if they've abandoned objectivity, what are they doing instead? How does this 'filtering' actually work in practice? It sounds a bit conspiratorial when you put it like that.

Michael: Well, this is where he moves from the diagnosis to the specific tactics. He argues that if your goal is no longer to report the news but to shape society, you need different tools. He introduces two powerful concepts from other thinkers: propaganda and what historian Daniel Boorstin famously called "pseudo-events." Kevin: Pseudo-events? That sounds like something out of a science fiction novel. What on earth is a pseudo-event? Michael: It's an event that exists only because the media made it exist. It's not a thing that happened in the world which a reporter then discovered. It's an event that was planned, planted, or incited, often for the very purpose of being reported. Boorstin said it perfectly: "News gathering turned into news making." Kevin: Okay, my brain is starting to hurt. I need a concrete example. How do you just... create news out of thin air? Michael: Levin provides a chilling case study: the Obama administration's campaign to sell the Iran Nuclear Deal. He details a 2016 New York Times profile of Ben Rhodes, Obama's Deputy National Security Advisor. Rhodes was brutally honest in the interview. He admitted that the administration concocted a completely false narrative to sell the deal. Kevin: A false narrative? What was it? Michael: The story they pushed was that the deal was only possible because a new, "moderate" faction had come to power in Iran in 2013. It was a story of hope and change. But Rhodes admitted the meaningful negotiations had actually started a year earlier, with the hardliners. The "moderate" storyline was a fiction designed to make the deal more palatable. Kevin: So they just made it up. Michael: They made it up, and then they built what Rhodes himself called an "echo chamber" to amplify it. They fed their talking points to experts and journalists who, in his words, were "saying things that validated what we had given them to say." The press reported the administration's narrative not as a PR pitch, but as objective reality. The event—the rise of Iranian moderates enabling a deal—was, in essence, a pseudo-event. Kevin: Wow. That is... deeply cynical. The 'news' was literally a pre-written script. It makes you question every official narrative. What about the other big example he uses, the Russia collusion story? That dominated the news for years. Michael: He frames that as the ultimate pseudo-event. A narrative that was born from a political campaign—the Clinton campaign and the DNC, who funded the Steele Dossier—and then was picked up and relentlessly amplified by the press, creating a storm of speculation that consumed the national conversation. Kevin: And he backs this up with data, right? Michael: He does. He cites a study from Newsbusters that found the ABC, CBS, and NBC evening newscasts alone devoted a combined 2,284 minutes of airtime to the "collusion" story over two years. The coverage of Trump during that period was found to be 92% negative. Kevin: Two thousand minutes. That's almost 38 hours of network news time dedicated to one story. Michael: A story that, in the end, the Special Counsel's report concluded did not establish that the Trump campaign "conspired or coordinated with the Russian government." Levin quotes the veteran journalist Brit Hume, who called the media's performance "the worst journalistic debacle of my lifetime," and pointed out that after it all collapsed, there was very little soul-searching. The news organizations just seamlessly moved on to the next narrative. Kevin: It's like they built this enormous, elaborate movie set, filmed on it for two years, and when the film flopped, they just quietly dismantled the set and pretended it was never there. Michael: That's the essence of the pseudo-event. It's dramatic, it's ambiguous, it's repeatable, and it serves a purpose. And once it has served its purpose, it just vanishes from the news cycle, often without a real post-mortem. He also points to smaller-scale examples, like CNN's Jim Acosta at press conferences, arguing that he wasn't there to ask questions and get information, but to create a confrontation—to make the news, with himself as a central character. Kevin: The journalist as the star of the show, not the reporter of it. Michael: Exactly. And this ties into the other tool: propaganda. Levin points to things like Chuck Todd on NBC declaring the science on climate change "settled" and refusing to give airtime to "climate deniers." For Levin, that's not journalism; that's enforcing an ideological line. It's shutting down inquiry, which is the opposite of what a free press should do. Kevin: So the argument is that the press has moved from being a window, through which we see the world, to being a projector, which beams a pre-made movie onto the wall for us to watch. Michael: A perfect summary. And sometimes, he argues, they even turn the projector off. He goes into the history of the New York Times downplaying the Holocaust and the Holodomor in Ukraine. He's making a broader point that the media's power isn't just in what it shows you, but in what it chooses not to show you.

Kevin: That brings up another point that seems central to his book: this idea of historical amnesia. He seems to spend a lot of time arguing that the media's attacks on Trump for things like collusion or abuse of power are presented as unprecedented, when history is full of similar—or even worse—examples. Michael: Yes, that's a huge part of his case. He argues the press operates with a stunning lack of historical context, which allows them to frame contemporary events in the most dramatic and damning light possible, especially when it involves a political opponent. Kevin: What are some of the examples he uses? Michael: They're pretty explosive. On the topic of collusion, while the media was laser-focused on Trump and Russia, Levin unearths a declassified KGB memo detailing how Senator Edward Kennedy allegedly reached out to the Soviet leadership in 1983 through a back channel. He was supposedly offering to help them undermine President Reagan's reelection campaign. Kevin: Wait, a sitting U.S. Senator allegedly colluding with the Soviet Union to influence an American election? Michael: According to the documents Levin presents, yes. Kennedy was supposedly going to help arrange interviews for the Soviet leader Yuri Andropov with American journalists like Walter Cronkite to help shape American public opinion against Reagan's defense policies. Levin's point is that this story, which is documented, received almost no mainstream media attention at the time or since, while the Trump-Russia narrative, which was not ultimately substantiated, became an all-consuming media event. Kevin: That's a powerful contrast. It suggests a massive double standard in what is considered newsworthy. Michael: He does the same thing with abuse of power. He details how presidents like Franklin D. Roosevelt used the IRS to target political opponents like Andrew Mellon and Huey Long. He talks about John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson using the FBI and CIA for political espionage against their rivals, including bugging Martin Luther King Jr. and Barry Goldwater's campaign. Kevin: These are things that are historically documented, not just speculation. Michael: Correct. And his argument is that these were far more egregious abuses of state power than anything Trump was accused of, yet they are either forgotten or treated as historical footnotes by the same media that portrayed Trump as a unique threat to the republic. It's this selective memory that allows the creation of a crisis narrative. Kevin: So, by erasing the past, you can make the present seem uniquely terrifying. It's a tool for manufacturing urgency and outrage. Michael: Precisely. The lack of context is a form of distortion in itself. It allows for a narrative of constant, unprecedented crisis, which is great for ratings and for advancing a political agenda, but terrible for an informed citizenry.

Michael: So when you put it all together, Levin's picture is of a press that has fundamentally lost its way. It's not just about a little bias here or there; it's a structural shift from reporting reality to actively constructing it to serve an ideological purpose. Kevin: And it's a powerful argument because it completely reframes the debate. It's not about 'fake news' in the simple sense of a reporter getting a fact wrong. It's about the entire architecture of what even becomes news in the first place. The book is definitely polarizing—reader reviews either praise its courage or blast its partisanship—but it forces you to ask a really tough question. Michael: Exactly. The question isn't just 'Is this story true?' but 'Why is this a story at all?' And 'What stories aren't being told while this one takes up all the oxygen?' Kevin: It's a call for a much deeper level of media literacy. You can't just passively consume information anymore. You have to be a detective, constantly asking about the motives, the framing, and the history behind what you're seeing. Michael: That's Levin's final call to action. He says the responsibility falls on "We the People." He urges the citizenry to demand better, to support alternative media, and to become more critical consumers of information because, as he puts it in a really stark line, a press that functions as a propaganda tool "threatens the existence of a free republic." Kevin: A powerful, if unsettling, thought to end on. It's not a comfortable read, but it serves as a potent reminder that the institutions we rely on to protect our freedoms require our constant vigilance. It’s a call for intellectual self-defense, in a way. Michael: This is Aibrary, signing off.