Ep 317 - Fatal Distraction with Shealeigh Voitl

Steve Grumbine: 00:00:42

: All right, folks, this is Steve with Macro N Cheese. It is another trip down Project Censored Lane. I am extremely excited to have Shealeigh Voitl on. Shealeigh is the digital and print editor at Project Censored. She first began her research with the project at North Central College alongside Steve Machek, coauthoring Deja Vu News chapter in the State of Free Press 2022 and 2023 yearbooks and the top 25 chapter and SFP 2023. In addition to her editorial contributions to the yearbook series and work with the campus affiliates program, Shealeigh helped develop the State of The Free Press 2024 teaching guide and the project's Critical Media Literacy in Action social media series. Her writing has also been featured in Truth Out, The Progressive, and This Magazine. Without further ado, let me bring on my guest, Shealeigh Voitl. Welcome to the show.

Shealeigh Voitl: 00:01:44

: Hey, Steve, thanks for having me.

Steve Grumbine: 00:01:46

: Absolutely. You know, I'm sitting there just dumbfounded with the way the news has gone under Trump part two now, right. Trump part two. I don't even know how to catch my breath. My compass is just spinning in circles. It doesn't find true north. I can't figure out what's going on. And with that in mind, I figured the last year plus, you know, we've covered Gaza quite a bit as well. And I thought it was just going to be horrific with Biden. Well, now all of a sudden we've got Trump coming out talking about ethnically cleansing Gaza and basically the US Taking over Gaza. And he's like, "I don't need to buy it. There's nothing there. We're just going to take it." And I just don't even know how to process this. And over the course of the last year, we have seen places like the New York Times basically be an unmitigated clap trap for the Zionist genocide in Gaza. It has been almost uncritical to the point of the extreme. And all the news outlets almost to a fault, have been an unending echo chamber of applause for Israel. Do you condemn Hamas. Do you this. Do that. It's always focused at the little guy that has been in an open-air prison now for 50 years.

Shealeigh Voitl: 00:03:05

: Right.

Steve Grumbine: 00:03:06

: And, and we've watched that prison get smaller and smaller and smaller. What is wrong with the news. Why is the news presenting things in such an outrageously imbalanced way?

Shealeigh Voitl: 00:03:16

: Yeah, I mean, there's, I think, a lot to be said about problems with the news. There's just a handful of powerful corporations that own a majority of mainstream media outlets, you know, which limits the diversity of perspectives and can mean, you know, news coverage reflects the interests of the media owners instead of being in service to the public. And that's a long-standing issue of conflicts of interest. You know, one issue that I think is really evergreen is one that was raised by one of the project's longtime judges, Robert Hackett, who said that for corporate media, news is about what happened today and not necessarily what happens every day. That stuff is less exciting, there's less room for sensationalism. And I think that's a really important thing to remember about the establishment press. Every year we see these thematic clusters of stories represented in the top 25 environmental issues, labor rights, health care. You know, we've seen stories about Palestine for several of the past top 25 stories. And that's because these are systemic issues that exist in our society. These are issues that happen every day and many, as we find, are invisible. So, it's important to call the things that we're not seeing out when we see them and champion the independent reporting that is doing things right.

Steve Grumbine: 00:04:38

: So, with that said, honestly, we've watched the New York Times in general be a mouthpiece, but the New York Times is considered like the word. It is the word in all news. I mean, if it came from the New York Times, from my vantage point and from many leftist vantage points, it's kind of like we don't even look at it that way. We look at as complete and utter propaganda.

Shealeigh Voitl: 00:05:00

: Yeah.

Steve Grumbine: 00:05:01

: News has come out that various editors at like The Guardian and BBC and other places have literally been told to only tell the news from a Zionist perspective. Although they would just say the state of Israel and it would be told in a completely... "The poor, poor state of Israel has, you know, suffered this horrible thing by these horrible terrorists." And then you go and you watch the video clips of what's happening over there and you see gravel everywhere. You see homes destroyed. You see children with amputated legs and children being sniped, literally four-year-olds being shot in the head by snipers, and videos of the snipers laughing and dancing in the women's clothing that they took out of the homes they raided. And it's like in your face. Like it's almost impossible to ignore, yet somehow they managed to ignore it. I feel like we're living in a Truman Show kind of world with the way that the news is presented. Is that your experience. Do you see how a person could be completely uninformed by watching the quote unquote "news?"

Shealeigh Voitl: 00:06:15

: Yeah. Oh, absolutely. And I think one thing also that's really important to remember is something can be even factually accurate and still be misleading because of how know certain things are framed by especially the corporate media. But this is something that Robin Andersen unpacks a lot in the news abuse chapter this year in the State of The Free Press 2025. And for your listeners that don't know, "news abuse" is a term coined by Project Censored by Peter Phillips, the former director of the project, to describe sort of how big media distort public understandings of significant news events. And that was something that was really rampant in the establishment press's coverage of the genocide in Gaza. And this was also very evident in how strikingly biased coverage has been since October 7, 2023. Presenting this pro-Israeli frame in language in photos chosen. And Robin discussed a study by The Intercept which analyzed how Israeli and Palestinian casualties were reported across the New York Times, Washington Post, and LA Times. And the language that was used was distinctly different, which I'm sure, as you've described, you've noticed Israeli victims were slaughtered and massacred and Palestinians simply died. And reporters infrequently identified the Israeli military as responsible. And you know, these patterns of reporting shape our understanding of what's happening in Gaza. And the public should be able to trust that journalists and media outlets are not making decisions behind the scenes to purposely mislead their readers or viewers. And as you kind of alluded to, there was an internal memo from the New York Times that was leaked directing its reporters to skew reporting on Gaza and instructing them to not use words like carnage or, or slaughter, or massacre when reporting on Palestinian deaths. And these are the kinds of things that you see and, you know, as horrifying as what's happening on the ground. We shouldn't be news fatigued out of our way of understanding the plight of the Palestinians. And if you're following corporate media, you're just not getting the full story. And we should be searching for that instead of just saying like, this is the best news has to offer.

Steve Grumbine: 00:08:47

: You know, I am on the record many times over saying I believe in abolition in terms of getting rid of the police. I don't believe the police serve the people. I believe they serve capital. I don't believe a lot of these laws on the books and our founding documents really serve the people. They serve wealthy landowners and so forth. I believe pretty much everything that we've been sold about the American dream is really an American nightmare. And I say that without an ounce of hyperbole in my voice. I mean that. And when I think about, you know, everybody says we should do this. We should go after corruption, we should go after these people that are misleading us. And when I think about it, you know, we as regular people that wake up in the morning, go to work, do our thing, come home to our families or whatever, and then go to bed at night, we have limited opportunities to really, truly study and dig in and have sources that we know are trustworthy and that we can validate their work and that they source their work and that they reference their work. So when we watch these things, most people are uncritical as they watch the news. They just sit down, they're fatigued. Most of them have news fatigue, probably, but also don't have the knowledge. I talk to you offline about the economic space, and this is not going to be an economics conversation, but for my purposes, I read the news, and I do know economics. And when I read it, I can tell when they're lying. And they're lying constantly because I have a frame of reference that can destroy and debunk their lies. But, because I don't have the megaphone of the New York Times or the Guardian or the BBC or the LA Times or the Washington Post, you name it. I reach tens of people where they reach millions of people. So I'm like bailing water out of a boat that's already sunk. And I sometimes wonder, is there any laws out there that protect us from being repeatedly lied to. Is there anything that holds media accountable. How can we trust what's being fed to us. And knowing that we can't, what can we do about it?

Shealeigh Voitl: 00:10:57

: Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, I think that's so much of the focus of our work at Project Censored is trying to equip the people that follow the project with the critical media literacy tools that are necessary to navigate today's media landscape. And I don't even mean print media and broadcast media exclusively, you know. Now, obviously, social media is how many young people get their news. And that's not necessarily a bad thing, but it can be if you're just passively consuming and scrolling and not also understanding how algorithms function to sort of trap us in these echo chambers. And that part is concerning because misinformation is obviously very pervasive on platforms like Instagram and TikTok and all that stuff, too. And so, the more you engage with this specific kind of content, more of that content the platform will show on your feed. And it's not only sameness in terms of opinions and ideology but also voices. You're just getting the same thing over and over again. And so without these critical media literacy tools that we talk about in our books on our website, projectcensored.org, in a book that was released a couple years ago called The Media and Me, which was really focuses on critical media literacy for young people, how we see ourselves in the media, how we can be media makers, and how to navigate this big, chaotic world of media that is at our fingertips but can be misleading in so many subtle ways. Like I said, we talk so much about fact checking and overt misinformation, but not as much about how news frames can really paint a picture that is incompatible with the full truth of a specific news story. And I know I've said critical media literacy a lot in this period of time, but it is. It's my focus at the project. And I will say, too, you know, I started as a student in college. I learned about the project, and it opened my eyes in a lot of ways that, like, I was very passively consuming news and following the New York Times and following the Washington Post, which I believed was just the epitome of good journalism. And there was just so much that I was missing, and there was so much that I was interested in that I wasn't really exploring because I just thought, like, these are the media outlets that I was taught to trust, you know, and so understanding how things like language and photos and captions in a news story and context, you know, things people that are quoted, like, what kind of positions the people that are quoted are typically in. Is it more of, like, everybody that's quoted in the story has sort of like an official bureaucratic status. Are we talking to people from the community. Like, all of those things contribute to our understanding. And so I guess my journey for the project is really full circle of I was a student, and now I talk to students and see how they're getting their news and what they feel unsatisfied with, you know, patterns that they're noticing on their news feeds. And that has been really eye opening and also just makes me feel like I learn something new every day. Yeah, critical media literacy is at the heart of it and it's so important to consider those things when you're watching the news, reading the news, getting the news on TikTok or wherever.

Steve Grumbine: 00:14:32

: You know, one of the things that I noticed, and I have talked about this at some length with others, is the way that academia works hand in glove with this disinformation system as well. And I happen to be a big advocate for education, so I don't want it to come off that I'm being anti education here. But there is a capitalist element to the university system and there is an expected toe the line that people that don't have tenure and even those that do to some degree have to toe in order to maintain employment. And then you have the sycophants that are trying to peddle access, favoritism to be able to get access to stories or access to jobs or have access to influence that toe the party lines as well, and the parties that funnel the disinformation to these outlets and those outlets that spew the lies. Even further, I am curious about your thoughts on the relationship of academia's complicitness with the disinformation campaign and the overall media apparatus that puts that out for the rest of us to consume.

Shealeigh Voitl: 00:15:46

: Yeah, I mean, it's frustrating, I think, to see corporate media often prioritize profit over in-depth independent journalism. There are still plenty of independent journalists and outlets that do exemplary work holding these powerful institutions accountable and providing insightful coverage, filling the gaps of reporting we constantly see in corporate news. Bill Yousman, actually in this year's chapter, has a really, really great chapter focusing entirely on disinformation. He's a professor in the Media and Performing Arts department at Sacred Heart University and his chapter is called Eleven Theses on Disinformation with Apologies to Karl Marx. And he describes disinformation as this deliberate subset of propaganda that emphasizes intentional use of falsehoods to shape public opinion, reinforce power structures, achieve political objectives. And he highlights the insidious nature of disinformation and its capacity to masquerade as credible information, which complicates the efforts to identify and counteract it. And while I can't maybe fully speak to the relationship, I guess, between academia and what you described, I think his background in academia talking about how to combat disinformation effectively, advocating for reducing the influence of these wealthy individuals and corporations over media outlets, and suggesting diminishing this control is essential for fostering a more democratic media landscape, you know, underscores sort of the necessity of not only understanding disinformation, but also taking steps to address and rectify its impact on society.

Steve Grumbine: 00:17:33

: Well, I try to bring it to areas that I feel are necessary to explore. One of the things that I know for sure of is that, you know, going back to the academic element, and I'll just speak to this real quickly, that a lot of academics in general feel tremendous pressure to toe the line or to not say certain things or to stay within a certain realm of acceptability. And that goes with both their teaching, the way that they teach, even if they know something to be false, if it's the accepted orthodoxy, they're expected to toe that line. And I think that a lot of people I know, myself included, when I went through grad school, I was getting a business degree, an MBA at Maryland. And one of the things I was taught by a CFO from, I believe it was United Airlines, who had previously worked with, I believe it was even Verizon. But he basically taught us a very, very right-wing component to how companies flourish and how they deal with business and deal with their employees and so forth. So you walk away feeling completely entitled. This is the right thing. And it's very ideologically driven. It's not training people how to learn, it's telling them what to feel, what to think, how to think it. And when they release you from your degree program into the world, you are now basically a walking advertisement for capitalism and for the way that their worldview is. And, you know, I think that that fundamentally impacts an educated class of people, people that do have university training. And as they see the world, they're conditioned to read these things with a very different lens. Like they feel like they're being critical, they feel like they're intelligent, they feel like they've done an incredible amount of research to come up with these ideas and thoughts, but in reality, it was programmed into them. To what degree do you think the programming we receive, even from elementary school, middle school, high school, colors how we read the news. How does that change us versus our lying eyes?

Shealeigh Voitl: 00:19:46

: Yeah, that's really interesting. I mean, I always think too, not only the way that we read the news now.  I guess as a journalist, I see all these things about, like, objective journalism and both sides, and it just seems ridiculous to me because just as a news consumer, we have, you know, our own background and the way that we've learned about things and certain things that were emphasized, certain things that were downplayed, you know, all of that sort of pushes us to investigate things or search for things that we're not seeing. And so, yeah, I guess it goes hand in hand. As a journalist, like I said, the idea of objective journalism to me is just, like, completely a myth. And so, I think that also, I guess, makes me feel a certain way about how we read the news as well. It's like, it's really hard to be unbiased. It's really hard to be neutral, and you shouldn't be, you know, But I think that can be hard is like, when you're somebody that isn't given those media literacy tools to, like, understand where to look for that stuff if you're not seeing it on CNN or wherever. You know, when I was a kid at home, like, that's the news that my mom would watch, you know, CNN all the time. And it took me a really long time to just, like, think critically about that, like, what I'm not seeing, how they're talking about things, you know, what's missing. And then I got to college and, you know, I thought I really had this full idea of what news I could trust and what I couldn't. I grew up in a family of, like, my dad's Australian, so he's completely, like, I think, cynical about all American politics. And then my mom's, like, pretty liberal, you know, liberal, like, like CNN, MSNBC liberal.

Steve Grumbine: 00:21:38

: Yep. I gotcha.

Shealeigh Voitl: 00:21:40

: And no shade, like, I really do think she wants to know things. It's just that it's this focus that is surface level stuff.

Steve Grumbine: 00:21:48

: Yeah.

Shealeigh Voitl: 00:21:49

: That we're not really unpacking. We're not looking further into things. Like I said, shamefully, like, I majored in journalism, and it took me a really long time to think about those things. But I feel really fortunate, I guess, to have found the project and to, you know, have my colleagues that really show me new things to look out for. But like I said, even when you have those issues that you care about, whether it's environmental issues or labor issues, healthcare, if you're looking at three organizations to tell you everything, it's just, like, not going to happen. And that's, I think what we're really used to doing is like, okay, we've got the New York Times, we've got Fox News, we've got whatever. And there's a lot of reporting that is obviously not a part of the corporate media that we're just not searching for. So I guess that's part of it. You get used to this pattern of just like, this is what's true. This is the good side. There's, like, a lot of that. There's like, the good side and the bad side. There's the right and the left. And, you know, I should rely on this because they align with maybe my political beliefs, but there's so much that is not being reported.

Steve Grumbine: 00:23:01

: You know, I want to touch on the junk food news that you are very excited about, but I want to paint something for you. And I'm doing this in a way where I know that this is not your sweet spot because I'm going to put you in our position where we're the ones consuming information from places and we're not really sure of it.

Shealeigh Voitl: 00:23:18

: Yep.

Steve Grumbine: 00:23:19

: But I want to play a little role play with you. And I already know where this is going and forgive me for that because we did talk offline, but I on my feet quick as I can be. I decided this is where I'm going. So here's the deal, right. So obviously you've got Trump and Musk right now pushing this DOGE thing. The average American person is very terrified of their hard-earned tax dollar being wasted. And so, Musk and Trump playing on the economic illiteracy of the nation is telling them we're finding all this abuse and we're going to cut it and we're going to, we're going to give the taxpayers back their money and all this other stuff. And the media uncritically just repeats this garbage ad nauseam.

Shealeigh Voitl: 00:24:01

: Yeah.

Steve Grumbine: 00:24:02

: And the overarching MAGA, you know, regular working-class person that's misguided or whatever is hearing this stuff. And to them, they don't know economics, they don't know macroeconomics. In fact, they went out of their way to not learn economics because why would I want to learn that. And so they skipped that in school. They didn't want to take it. And so now they're being expected to live in a world where macroeconomics is not only a weapon of war. The global south with NATO, with Russia, with Ukraine, with Israel, each and every time you wake up, you hear somehow or another, out of nowhere, $8 billion of new weapons is going to Israel. And you're like uncritically saying, well, how come my taxes didn't go up. This is new spending. Why aren't my taxes going up to pay for this military thing. And nobody thinks to ask where the money's coming from. They go, well, that's my hard-earned tax dollar or worse. Let's say it is an uneducated individual that has all kinds of problems with LGBTQ, you know, all the rest of it. They don't understand that. They're like, hey, you know these people are taking my hard-earned tax dollar to get gender reassignment surgery, or they're using it to get an abortion or the insert whatever your icky thing is that you don't like.

Shealeigh Voitl: 00:25:17

: Yeah.

Steve Grumbine: 00:25:18

: And so they fundamentally don't understand the way country that creates its own money spends. So they're instantly thinking that they're funding this thing. So even though they're completely wrong based on their worldview and based on the lies and misinformation coming from the media, coming from the political class, coming from university, they can say, hey, my instructor told me that the US has to sell bonds to survive and we're in debt to China and we're going to drown in it. Hey. And so they've got all these quick answers to things that they're ill equipped to speak to, and yet they're being asked to vote on these things. They're being asked to play a contributing factor in the way society runs. And all they do is they see this guy Musk, who's the richest man in the world that gets over 9 billion in subsidies alone for his businesses from the federal government of which your tax dollar never went up to pay for, and they can't figure out where the money comes from. So you as a media literacy person, and you're seeing all the stuff about the national debt, oh my God, it's ballooning, whatever we're going to do, and we got to reduce the deficit. And these are things that if someone understood macroeconomics, they would understand. Article 1, Section 8 of the United States Constitution gives the power of the purse to Congress. Number two, they would realize that money is spent into existence when a bill is written and money is taxed out of existence when they tax and the two are not related to each other. In other words, if I raise taxes, it doesn't give me more money to spend. If I lower taxes, it doesn't save the government money, it doesn't rob the government of money. Your taxes are meant to maintain the power of the US dollar so that you need it, so that you'll do work for it and you'll exchange it. And the government can then in turn use that dollar to buy your labor, to buy your goods and services, because if you didn't need that dollar, the dollar would be worthless as toilet paper. And so this is the thing, and our media doesn't cover it this way. Someone like yourself, who has a media literacy organization, I'm hoping we can get you guys on this thing. But in reality, when you think about what the average American's doing. They're literally cheering for 200,000 people to lose their jobs because they think that it's DEI hires that are just wasting taxpayer money. Yeah, they think you're sending condoms to Gaza. They think all these crazy things because they are illiterate, economically illiterate, and media illiterate. And the media barks it out. I'll put one final touch on this. There's a documentary that was put out called Finding the Money. A lady named Maren Poitras. Yes, of the Peter, Paul and Mary Poitras. But her, she's the daughter. She put out a video, a great video. It's won some awards, been around the world called Finding the Money. And it's a beautiful expose of all the democratic and idiot economists that we look up to. And they literally couldn't answer where the money came from. And they literally showed it to [them]. It's the most embarrassing thing these people have ever done.

Shealeigh Voitl: 00:28:22

: Yeah.

Steve Grumbine: 00:28:23

: But in reality, that is not covered. But it is the most incredible documentary you will ever see. And I'll send it to you after this call.

Shealeigh Voitl: 00:28:32

: Yep, please do. Sounds really interesting.

Intermission: 00:28:36

: You are listening to Macro N Cheese, a podcast by Real Progressives. We are a 501c3 nonprofit organization. All donations are tax deductible. Please consider becoming a monthly donor on Patreon, Substack, or our website, realprogressives.org. Now back to the podcast.

Steve Grumbine: 00:28:59

: To me, this is where the rubber hits the road. Because if people understood that we could write off the student debt without any impact to society at all other than freeing the burden on students and families, Right. They wouldn't be like, oh, my hard-earned tax dollar.

Shealeigh Voitl: 00:29:14

: Yeah.

Steve Grumbine: 00:29:15

: And you think about the immigrants that are desperately coming to this nation and we're busy closing the door and sending them out of the nation because we're acting like we don't want our hard-earned tax dollars paying for those illegals, right. And so it's all this disgusting, you know, xenophobic, racist, homophobic garbage that's baked into a fake understanding of the economic system. So when you think about this, like, you can translate this, I'm sure, to a million other things. You can take out economics and put in, you know, vaccines, or you could take out economics and you can put war, you know, Gaza, you name it. But it's the same thing. And the misinformation is fed by that junk food industry, that junk food, junk news. Can you explain. Even though I sat there and went down a lane, that is not your wheelhouse. Is there something that you can relate this to how do we take that junk news that saturates everything and distracts us and keeps us from actually reading the important stuff to know these things.

Shealeigh Voitl: 00:30:16

: Yeah. Thank you for all of that. I'm looking forward to seeing that movie. Like I said, for listeners that don't know, every year Project Censored does a chapter in the State of the Free Press and it's called Junk Food News. And as you can kind of maybe guess by the title, it suggests this information that isn't conducive to a well-balanced news diet. So it's, you know, the year's most sensational, inconsequential stories the establishment was covering, diverting attention away from informative news stories, news stories that affect our daily lives. I feel like one thing that is super consistent in our coverage in the top 25 very represented all throughout the list are environmental issues. Every single year we see many, many issues related to the climate crisis that aren't being widely covered. I think another thing that the Junk Food News chapter does exceptionally well is highlighting how the public's engagement with, you know, these sort of like celebrity gossip stories, how that engagement might reflect these deeper societal issues, the public's fixation on fame, the media's role in shaping cultural values, or the systemic sort of inequalities that undermine progress. And we sort of pair these junk food news stories that receive overwhelming coverage with news stories that receive significantly less attention but have, you know, broad societal impact. And in this year's book, it was a lot about Barbie, there was a lot of coverage about, you know, the cast and the branding strategies and the Oscar snub. And I mean, even Hillary Clinton likened the Oscar snub to her winning the popular vote in 2016 but losing the electoral college. And so, like, by devoting extensive attention to pop culture phenomenon like Barbie, the analysis of its cast and marketing and award snubs, the corporate media sort of creates this illusion that it champions women and women's issues. But, you know, these are stories that often focus on superficial aspects rather than addressing some of the systemic challenges faced by women. You know, wage inequality, reproductive rights, violence against women. And for example, one thing that we included in this year's chapter was a United Nations investigation conducted in February of last year, which uncovered hundreds of reports of Palestinian women and girls arbitrarily detained by Israel Defense Forces since October 2023, finding instances of inhumane treatment, denial of basic necessities, allegations of sexual assault. And so these are the stories that are neglected as a result of this fixation on celebrity news and things that are maybe less substantive. But one thing that is really important to me when I think about the junk food news chapter, is it doesn't shame the pop culture reader or talk down to those who enjoy reading stories about celebrities or entertainment. While we have agency and we can choose what we watch and what we read, ultimately it encourages readers to examine the ways in which corporate media has failed them by overrepresenting this news and completely neglecting stories that may drastically impact their daily lives. You mentioned illiteracy in many ways. And so that's like a mountain that we climb in terms of there's an education gap. But then, there are things as simple and basic as the practice of lateral reading, where you read a news story and maybe you see red flags, maybe there's passive language that feels misleading, maybe there's an image that feels like, cropped in a strange way, or the focus, maybe the quotations used, what's being cited, maybe there are red flags, but you're not looking further out. What is really important when we think about reading a news story. If it feels like you don't understand something, say one of Trump's executive orders, if you don't understand it, you know, open up a new tab, find other credible sources, read on, like, read and read and read. And it's hard work. It's annoying that the corporate media fails us in so many ways, including misleading us in their coverage of specific issues in favor of representing corporate interests. But lateral reading, like I said, is a basic, basic building block of media literacy. And it is truly just opening up a new tab and reading further and investigating further and doing that work so that you are understanding not only the news story, but also maybe how the corporate media is misleading you in very specific and subtle ways.

Steve Grumbine: 00:35:17

: You know, I think to myself when I watch the news, and I don't anymore, by the way, but when I used to really, really watch the news, I would walk into the workplace and I can remember stirring my coffee, talking to a coworker, and feeling very informed and spreading the disease one person at a time in the workplace, and they would inadvertently have their version. It was usually not too far off from my version. Or, maybe it was completely the opposite, because they went to the other side of the corporate media for their version. And so maybe you have a little bit of a political banter at the water cooler, but largely it was very, very transactional, very surface level. And, you know, I go back and I imagine you're younger than me. I was born in '69, so when I think back to the first Iraq war, when I think of us back in, I guess it was the early '90s when we were over there in Iraq or Kuwait, I should say, with W. Bush Senior. I remember seeing the pictures of our downed fighter pilots and seeing their face all bloodied and swollen and terrified that that was coming to America for us. I had no understanding. None. Zero. Yeah, but that to me, I mean, I'm 55 now. I'll be 56 here shortly. And that stuck with me. And I mean, I was only a 20 something, you know, maybe 20 something years old, 21 maybe. And that really, really stuck with me, how terrifying that was. But it wasn't terrifying in a way that was like, you know, oh my goodness, I don't want to go to war. It was terrifying with me that all of a sudden I wanted to kill those Kuwaitis or those Iraqis. I, I wanted Saddam dead. It was like the jingoism of the media, really manufactured consent for that.

Shealeigh Voitl: 00:37:10

: Yeah.

Steve Grumbine: 00:37:11

: I became ready to wave my flag and talk about, how dare you. Are you a treasonous. It was like, I think back to 1984 and George Orwell, and obviously this is really a bit hyperbolic because everybody points to either, you know, Mein Kampf or 1984 to make their big points. But I think that in the absence of Godwin's Law here, I'll just take a moment of the newspeak and the, you know, all the insane things that they did with changing the news. Are we at war with East Asia or Eurasia. And it's like one minute to the next and, you know, verifiably we're increasing the chocolate rations from negative one to one. And everybody was originally getting five, but somehow or another they were able to somehow or another make their brain process that. Oh my. Jolly good. Double plus good. We're. We're getting one piece of chocolate now. And I see that happen even in this country. Much more, you know, subliminally, much less, not quite like Laney Riefenstahl with the proud German and the strong chin and the, the perfect, you know, whatever. But I see a lot of that right now, even, you know, as we talk about. What are you a, a traitor. Are you not a USA person. What are you woke. What are you this. So there's a lot of other things that are playing into that article, whatever it is, wherever it's from. There's a lot of norms in society that are manufactured through other means. I'm curious as to what your thought is on societal norms and the way we interpret media.

Shealeigh Voitl: 00:38:45

: Oh, interesting. Yeah. I feel like it evolves so quickly. You mentioned, you know, the woke, woke mind virus. Now we have like these descriptors that really sort of seem to generalize an entire belief system that there's no attempt to understand. It's just like, oh, too woke, you know. And I just think it's so ridiculous. It's really how it helps us interpret media.

Steve Grumbine: 00:39:10

: Inherent biases. Right. We're bringing a bias to the table.

Shealeigh Voitl: 00:39:13

: Right.

Steve Grumbine: 00:39:14

: Because some of these biases, for example, when I think about woke, I go back to long ago. Right. I go back to Fred Hampton. I go back further where people understood the system. They understood that I've got a code switch. They understood that I had to be the perfect Negro in front of white people. But then when I got around my own people, I was able to quote, unquote, "let my hair down."There was these norms that were established by the white capitalists and the white supremacist people of yesteryear, and those folks understood. And so the term woke wasn't what we have today. Today it's weaponized identity politics where they split the working class up into micro slices so they're never strong enough to fight back. However, each of these micro slices are a real legitimate battlefield in and of themselves.

Shealeigh Voitl: 00:40:02

: Right.

Steve Grumbine: 00:40:03

: These people shouldn't have to shut up because some white guy from Appalachia thinks he's an idiot. Right. You know, there's this whole almost like, you know better than to speak out on this. Otherwise, you're going to be put into a bucket of woke idiots. You're going to be called an idiot [woke]. In Pennsylvania alone, the MAGA guy that was running for the Senate, not this round, but previously, was literally putting ads out there, basically saying, we're going to get rid of these woke people in your communities, kind of thing.

Shealeigh Voitl: 00:40:32

: Yeah.

Steve Grumbine: 00:40:33

: It's like, oh my God, what does that even mean. Are you going to go after people that are not white supremacists, that aren't gay haters and that aren't anti-immigrant and you're going to chase them down in jail. What do you mean you're going to get rid of them. What do you mean. And that thinking permeates and you're afraid to step out of that. So when you read news, I think it takes some courage to not stay in the norm, to break from the norm.

Shealeigh Voitl: 00:40:55

: Yeah.

Steve Grumbine: 00:40:56

: Because now you're an outlier, now you're othered.

Shealeigh Voitl: 00:40:58

: Yeah.

Steve Grumbine: 00:40:59

: Othering is a real thing. I know as an activist that is a real thing, if this isn't your sweet spot, I truly am apologetic for bringing it to you, but I want to make sure that I'm saying this stuff because it's what's on my heart.

Shealeigh Voitl: 00:41:10

: Yeah, absolutely. No, and I appreciate it. I think it's interesting I'm seeing online like that my area of interest when it's especially comes to media literacy is like, online spaces, online communities, how sacred that can be for marginalized communities. And I'm seeing a lot of the language sort of being reclaimed, like, oh, not to be the woke friend, but this is actually, you know, the truth of the matter or whatever. And it is interesting that the idea that this label of woke can other you and make you feel ashamed of these things that you believe in and not even believe in but need to become activated and advocate for as a means of survival. But, yeah, like you said, it does take a lot of courage to read the news and to seek that out where you're not seeing it.

Steve Grumbine: 00:41:59

: You made a great point a little while ago about how some people, when they, this is like this fake neutrality, this false neutrality that, you know, hey, I see it both ways, or I can. Yeah, I can see both. You know, it's kind of fake thing. And I was talking to a friend here recently, and he basically said, hey, your way of getting these people to pay attention to you isn't good because you're disrespecting them. So they're probably tuning you out. And basically what I was talking about was standing up for my trans friends who, you know, whether or not I am. I'm not trans, obviously, but, you know, if I were, it doesn't matter. The point is, is that why should they not be able to have a job. Why should every job they get be labeled DEI. Why should they be okay firing them. Just because it's just presumed.

Shealeigh Voitl: 00:42:49

: Yeah.

Steve Grumbine: 00:42:50

: That they are not qualified. That the only reason they're there is because they're trans. And this is more of that woke ideology. And this is in the newspaper. Donald Trump said, you know, basically, "I can look at an immigrant and know whether they're the good one or not." How did that go without, how did that go without outrageous blowback. But it didn't it passed for, "Well, you know, he's just a man telling it truthful right from his heart. He's speaking from his gut. I relate to that man. I could respect that." And this is what goes down. And the idea that I'm talking to friends and I'm saying, hey, listen, if you're a Christian, and you believe your Bible?

Shealeigh Voitl: 00:43:27

: Yeah.

Steve Grumbine: 00:43:28

: Jesus said, whatsoever you do to the least of these, you do unto me.

Shealeigh Voitl: 00:43:31

: Right.

Steve Grumbine: 00:43:32

: And he's like, better for you to tie a millstone around your neck than to mislead one of my little ones. I mean, this is Christian doctrine if you're a Christian. But yet they're out there supporting the most bigoted, hateful stuff, and it's uncritical. I don't even think they realize it because they have been into this manufactured consent where that is kind of the norm. I'm a Christian. I know a lot of people freak out by that. But I'm a Lefty man because I think when you understand Christ said to do all these things. Whether you believe in Christ or not, it's not my point here. My point is, is that if you believe these things, I don't see how it leads you to being a bigoted, hateful person of foreigners and of people that are different, and the poor in particular. I mean, Jesus himself. Again, if you believe this, and I'm just saying this for people out there because I know there are people that do, for those that believe this. If you read your Bible, Jesus was flipping tables in the money changer section. He wasn't coddling bankers, he wasn't coddling these people that predated upon the poor. He was taking them down. You know, so again, this is like Media Literacy 101. How do you resolve the conflict of the spirit and of the person, of the individual and marry it up to the propaganda that they're consuming and the trends that they end up adopting that are so full of contradictions to their core values?

Shealeigh Voitl: 00:44:56

: Yeah, you touched on too, like this norm of individualism too. It's like when we are seeing like, what's playing out, I guess like you said Trump 2.0, there's this emphasis on like, I want my groceries cheaper. I want this for myself. I want this for myself. And meanwhile, we're watching people be harmed by this super violent administration. And not only like in terms of action, but this extremely hateful rhetoric that has direct real-world consequences. And it's frightening. And like you said, there's this contradiction of love thy neighbor, but it just falls short in so many ways. And that's hard to media literacy your way out of. It's like a really challenging societal issue that I am increasingly frustrated by when I watch people talk about certain issues in such an individualistic way.

Steve Grumbine: 00:45:53

: Yes.

Shealeigh Voitl: 00:45:54

: I was raised to embrace your community and to look out for those in need and those that are maybe not getting the fair treatment that you are receiving. And so that's a hard thing to figure out. I mean, like I said, there are certain tools that we can provide and promote in terms of how we navigate the media landscape. But then there are just these system of really tough rhetoric that is really hard to break through right now. And it doesn't make me feel necessarily hopeless. When I was 18 and Trump first got elected, I felt that way. I was looking to all of the adults being like, what do I do. Like, I feel like this is it. This is just like a complete disaster, and there's no way that I can participate and change things. Now I don't necessarily feel that. I just feel like it becomes a humongous responsibility on me and as like a white woman with privilege to look out for the people that are being directly and actively harmed by this administration. And I can also call out where the media is failing us and not representing the full picture of the plight of those marginalized communities, because that's important, too, is where there's that lack of public understanding because these narratives are being peddled uncritically that just really feeds and fuels this issue that we talk about, like, at the core of our society, where people are just not caring as much about each other, which, you know, it's a tough thing to acknowledge, but it's true I think, especially when we think about this administration.

Steve Grumbine: 00:47:37

: I want to go back to something that happened in 2014. The Princeton University professors, Martin Gilens and Northwestern University professor Benjamin Page did a research study on the actual fact that the US doesn't have a democracy, that it's an oligarchy. And they showed also that inherently people do not have agency within this system.

Shealeigh Voitl: 00:48:03

: Yeah.

Steve Grumbine: 00:48:04

: That in reality, there's 0.0% public policy deriving from public sentiment. And they showed that the only way the public policy is impacted is by those with money. And you kind of have that duh moment.

Shealeigh Voitl: 00:48:21

: Yeah.

Steve Grumbine: 00:48:22

: But if you think to yourself, though, we got one side of the group running around telling everybody, you got a phone bank harder, you got a vote harder, donate harder, blah, blah, blah. I mean, AOC recently came out and said she was never going to go against the Democratic Party ever again. She was going to toe the line.

Shealeigh Voitl: 00:48:39

: Right.

Steve Grumbine: 00:48:40

: And that was a devastating gut check, because day one of AOC, before she even took office, she was standing on Nancy Pelosi's desk with the Sunrise Movement wrapped around the table, and she's sitting there talking about a Green New Deal. Well, since then, all she's done is punch left and punch down.

Shealeigh Voitl: 00:48:55

: Yeah.

Steve Grumbine: 00:48:56

: And you realize fundamentally that we can't, we can't vote our way out of this.

Shealeigh Voitl: 00:49:01

: Yeah.

Steve Grumbine: 00:49:02

: And you watch Hakeem Jeffries saying, hey, we're going to move to the right to win back the House and Senate. And you're saying, what. Wait a minute, what. And you're watching more and more people just sort of put the I voted sticker on their forehead and uncritically going about their day like a bobblehead.

Shealeigh Voitl: 00:49:20

: No. Yeah, for sure.

Steve Grumbine: 00:49:21

: Just, yay, you know, I voted. Do your part. Why didn't you. Oh, this is what happens when you don't vote for blah, blah, blah.

Shealeigh Voitl: 00:49:26

: Yeah.

Steve Grumbine: 00:49:27

: Well, I go back to Bernie part one, and there was a case that was down in Florida against the DNC that they've rigged the primary. And what came out of that in federal court was the Democrats have no requirement whatsoever. They're a private corporation. They have no requirement to run a primary, much less honor the results of a primary. And they will select who they want, when they want, how they want. And, and so this is once again truly not a democracy in any way, shape or form. But private corporations are once again controlling the political apparatus. They are then in turn controlling the news apparatus. And we go around talking about we're in a free country full of freedoms and all this other ridiculous nonsense. I'm curious, why do you think the media uncritically acts like we can vote our way out of this. Is it part of keeping the ruse alive. Because it's manufacturing consent. Because there's literal, empirical evidence that we live in an oligarchy. There's literal, empirical evidence that anything that we care about never happens. It was like some ridiculous 70 plus percent of Americans wanted Medicare for all. And it was like, no, we're not even going to vote on it. And Biden even said, if it comes to my desk, I'd veto it.

Shealeigh Voitl: 00:50:42

: Right.

Steve Grumbine: 00:50:43

: How do we pair this up. How do we get people to be aware of the corporate rule in this country, the corporatocracy, the, quite frankly, the proto fascism that we live under today?

Shealeigh Voitl: 00:50:54

: I mean, yeah, it's a really good question. I think I saw during this election this strategy of like, okay, well, you don't want that guy to be your president. Right. Like, you've got. And it's like, that's such a, not compelling.

Steve Grumbine: 00:51:07

: It didn't work.

Shealeigh Voitl: 00:51:08

: Yeah, I mean, exactly. And there was just this staunch, stubborn, not listening to so many voters, concerns about Gaza specifically, but trans issues and women's issues. And while trans and women's issues are the same thing, but there's just so much that was just ignored. And I think also something that is frustrating is just this participation in politics. Just when there's an election, this like go vote and then that's it. And then I close the door on it, and then, you know, kind of live my life. And that's insignificant. It really is, in the grand scheme of all the work that we are capable of doing individually and together. It's just so important to be paying attention always. But the media is just, like, all about maintaining the status quo. You know, they're all about doing the horse race sort of reporting of the elections, who's ahead, who's behind, but often this missing substantive information about candidates. And I think, obviously that does a huge disservice to voters. And I think we are just often in this mindset of, like you said, maybe we can vote our way out of it, but it's just like that is such a small, small, narrow worldview. There's just so much power that we have that we just are not unlocking in many ways. Like I said, we can be media makers. You know, we can be searching for things that we're not seeing. We can be using our platforms online to engage with other people and learn about things that we're not exposed to directly. And so I would hope that this administration doesn't make young people like me feel completely hopeless and small, that it activates them towards something useful like protest and getting involved in their communities and mutual aid groups and learning, learning, learning, learning about these things that are actively at risk as a result of this presidency.

Steve Grumbine: 00:53:18

: That's fantastic. I mean, I want to be clear, you know, I was a truth slayer against the Biden and Harris team. Yeah, I beat the taste out of their mouth over Gaza and all the other austerity things that they did in the lies they told. Same thing I'm doing with this administration. It's not partisan. It's just truth telling. And I guess as we're coming up on time, Shealeigh, I want to thank you for your time. Can you tell us a final parting word on what you would like if we didn't cover it, what would be great for our listeners to understand about media literacy and kind of the world they're in today from your vantage point? 

Shealeigh Voitl: 00:53:54

: Yeah. Well, thank you. Thank you so much, Steve. This has been an awesome conversation. There are so many resources that I would really encourage listeners to access. On our website, projectcensored.org we have chapters from past State of the Free Press volumes that are available at no charge. And a lot of really helpful education guides. One guide that I wrote with my colleague Andy Lee Roth about frame checking, which I kind of talked a lot about in this conversation, is just the power of news frames and how they can be very, very misleading and subtle and easy to miss. And so that's something that is really important to keep critically evaluating corporate media narratives and framing and just really try to avoid passive consumption of news. And I know that's, like, really hard because we're just always scrolling. I'm always on Twitter, I'll never call it X, but just always scrolling. And it's just, like, really important to form the habit of questioning sources, headline construction, captions, things that you are noticing are omitted and why, and challenge that and just also break the habit of relying on establishment media for all of your information. I think it's a good resource to see comparatively. You know, like, here's what the New York Times, this is how they covered this issue. This is how Fox News covered this issue. But now let's go to Truth Out, to Mother Jones, to The Nation, like Democracy Now!Let's see how these outlets are covering things differently and why. And that is hopefully very eye opening and enlightening for people that are really trying to engage with the news without being fatigued by its chaos and also just misinformation.

Steve Grumbine: 00:55:47

: Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. And I gotta tell you, it is wonderful to see young people. And it's so weird. I'm a dad many times over again, and I still, trust me, you're gonna get old one day, God willing, and you're gonna feel young still. Like, I'm still feeling like, hey, we can hang, but I'm, like, old enough to be your dad, you know. And I think to myself, just, it's good to see the kids are all right. It's good to see younger people. And I don't mean anything bad by that. I'm truly, like, kind of in a weird twilight zone as I'm getting older and dealing with that and realizing, you know, I've got more years behind me than I do ahead of me and just sort of processing all that. It is wonderful to see people like you exist that are willing to look and dig and really help others to do the same. Because that's all we got right now. Yeah, we don't have the establishment helping us. We don't have the powers that be helping us. They're there to confound us so they can serve capital.

Shealeigh Voitl: 00:56:44

: Yeah.

Steve Grumbine: 00:56:45

: And we are sitting here on the receiving end of the disinformation campaign. You're a hero in my book. All right, I, I really do appreciate it. I mean that from the bottom of my heart. I was not nearly as grounded as you when I was your age, and I, it's real heart [warming] to see that you are. I really appreciate that.

Shealeigh Voitl: 00:57:02

: That is so kind of you to say. I really appreciate it very deeply. Thank you so much, Steve.

Steve Grumbine: 00:57:06

: You got it. All right. Well, listen, folks, my name's Steve Grumbine. On behalf of my guest, Shealeigh Voitl, and this podcast, Macro N Cheese, we are a part of Real Progressives, and we are a 501(c)3 nonprofit. That means that your donations are tax deductible and that we live and die on those donations. So, please, if you consider what the work that we're doing worthwhile and valuable, consider becoming a donor on our Patreon account. Or you can go to our website, realprogressives.org and go to donate. You can also go to our Substack. We have a Substack for Real Progressives as well, and you can become a donor there as well. We genuinely live and die by your support. And without further ado, I bid you adieu. And I thank my guest, Shealeigh Voitl for joining me today. And on behalf of Macro N Cheese and my guest, we are out of here.

End Credits: 00:58:07

: Production, transcripts, graphics, sound engineering, extras, and show notes for Macro N Cheese are done by our volunteer team at Real Progressives, serving in solidarity with the working class since 2015. To become a donor please go to patreon.com/realprogressives, realprogressives.substack.com, or realprogressives.org.