Where is john ziegler now

Why did your experiment fail? There are a lot of reasons why it failed, but the straw that broke the camel's back was the election of Donald Trump. The part of this equation your audience will be most interested in is the reality that talk radio, in the era of Trump, isn't remotely conservative.

It's also no longer about the truth. It's about telling people what they want to hear. It's very much like a cult now, where the purpose is to substantiate what the religion is telling you and anything that runs counter to the religion is inherently false and blasphemous, even evil.

So anyone who breaks from orthodoxy is a traitor. For instance, you can't simply say, as a conservative radio host, that Donald Trump lost the popular vote. Now that's an obvious fact, but listeners can't deal with it, they won't deal with it.

Fifty-two percent of Republicans , in fact, don't accept this fact, and they don't accept it because they don't have to in their echo chamber.

They live in an alternative reality in which Trump won the popular vote and the Electoral College vote, and that reality is propped up by conservative media. How have you navigated this? Well, it hasn't worked well. As a Never Trumper, I'm basically selling beef to vegans at this point.

There's just no interest in what I'm saying. Sean Hannity without a doubt. Here's a guy that's worth tens, maybe hundreds of millions of dollars, whose guy won and he still spends Friday nights attacking guys like me on Twitter. I think he realizes what he's done on some level and I think he's incredibly insecure about it. But he's completely sold out whatever principles he had and he's an abject hypocrite. It's been great for his ratings, though. In your column for Mediaite.

Why is it so hostile to honest brokers? A good fairy tale will always be more sellable than a harsh truth. Truth is not always comfortable for people, and we're not living in an era in which you don't have confront the truth if you don't want to.

There are a couple of things that have happened in terms of the economics of media that have altered the content. In the past, talk radio basically had a monopoly on non-liberal thought and opinion. But Fox News emerged and the internet exploded and talk radio lost that monopoly.

So talk radio was then forced, increasingly, to pander to its niche audience in order to compete for their attention. Now, no matter how insane or crazy a belief is, you can find a media outlet that will affirm it for you.

So the pressure to feed the crazies is immense in this media environment. What this means is that talk radio hosts are now gravitating toward their audiences rather than audiences gravitating to hosts.

If a host refuses to do this, the audience disappears. People like Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh and Mark Levin were so afraid of pissing off the Trump supporters that they were co-opted, and that's about ratings, not conservatism or truth. My question is, how did we arrive at this place? It seems to me that the demands from conservative audiences have been cultivated for years by the very talk radio hosts who are now imprisoned by them.

I'm glad the NYT used that quote because I think it's an important point. There's a lot of blame to go around here. In my view, this started with the mainstream media being both extremely biased and remarkably incompetent, and I'm not just talking about political media.

I've dedicated an enormous amount of my life to correcting what I consider media malpractice. You're right in that this problem stretches back a long time. In my opinion, the point of no return was the advent of overnight television ratings. Once you had overnight television ratings, news was dead. Because that's the moment the tail began to wag the dog. It changed everything. Once this happened, the news media had no choice but to succumb to the same pressures everyone else did.

They had to feed the monster, they had to satisfy the audience. And so we're now in this place in which ratings are booming and facts are irrelevant. Well, as I said, I think there's been a liberal bias in the mainstream media for a long time.

People like me rightly criticized it. What's happened, though, is that conservatives now don't trust the media at all. My side no longer trusts the other side. There's just a complete divide.

Trump, to his credit, has been very effective at using this to his advantage. That Trump, a liberal con artist, is the guy who most benefits from the legitimate criticisms of mainstream media over the years is unbelievable to me.

Trump is a monster created in large part by talk radio. His success, then, seems likely to aggravate the problem because his supporters are precisely the kinds of listeners who will demand affirmation, not information, from hosts. I don't see how this ends well. I don't see how it gets better, because hosts are now in a situation in which they either defend Trump at all costs or they will be seen as a traitor and no one will listen.

So I don't see a scenario under which a Sean Hannity or a Rush Limbaugh abandons Trump — they're too committed at this point. That's exactly right, and that's why I use the word "consumers. It never got off the ground, but the premise is clearly correct. And therein lies the problem: Conservative media is invested in the marginalization of conservative ideas, and so the rise of right-wing media has been a disaster for serious conservatives.

The worst thing that can happen for conservative media is to have an actual conservative as president with a Republican Congress. That's a ratings disaster. Obama was the greatest thing that ever happened to Fox News and talk radio because he fueled the victim narrative on the right.

He gave them an enemy to obsess over, and that's always a boon for ratings. What is it about conservative audiences that makes them so susceptible to fear-mongering hucksters like Limbaugh? To be clear, I think liberals are drunk on their own biases, but there does seem to be something about the conservative psyche that is attracted to the tribalistic narratives being spun on the right. I think you have it a little backward, though I understand why you see it this way.

One of the more devastating revelations this year is that my side is as susceptible as the other side is to believing incredibly stupid and non-factual things. However, I'd suggest that the liberal reaction to Obama was very similar to the conservative reaction to Trump, which is to say it was emotional and non-fact-based. I have to push back on that point. I grant that there was an element of the left that unconditionally supported Obama, or supported him on largely emotional grounds.

This is what human beings tend to do. But there's absolutely no equivalence between candidate Obama and candidate Trump, and here I'm not talking about political views. Trump is a serial liar who is grotesquely unfit for office, as many conservatives recognize. Obama, whatever you think of his policies, is a decent man who operated well within the bounds of reasonable discourse. The act of faith required to embrace Obama is not equivalent to the unconditional surrender to Trump.

Again, I'm not saying that credulity is strictly a conservative problem, but there's no liberal equivalent to Trump and so your comparison is misleading. Well, if you let me finish, I'll probably shock you by saying that, given a choice between a third term for Obama or a first term for Trump, I'd vote for Obama. But, more to the point of your question, why do conservatives buy into this post-fact Trump world? Zeigler took exception to that story with this tweet : "LMAO the dude selfishly and cowardly chose to kill himself despite having a family.

More important were all the blatant inaccuracies in the first paragraph. Ziegler, who claims he's spent 50 hours with Matt Lauer, says the disgraced NBC TV host has made mistakes, "but those mistakes did not include… any sort of sexual assault, sexual abuse, sexual harassment, or anything that was in the non-consensual category. Nevils is engaged to be married to Luke Thompson. Ziegler tweeted to Thompson that he has information to share with him—information that "I would like to know if I was in your situation.

Happy to talk! Ziegler has an entire website, framingpaterno. Ziegler's not alone in his contrarianism. Mark Pendergrast, author of Victims of Memory ," has also written The Most Hated Man in America , a book that suggests Sandusky was the victim of a moral panic triggered by the media, police overreach, and memory-warping psychotherapy. Social psychologist and public intellectual Carol Tavris reviewed Gladwell's book and scolded him for not stating outright that Sandusky was innocent.

As for the Holocaust denial charges against Ziegler, they stem from a six-year-old tweet in which he questioned the veracity of that figure because it was rounded to the nearest million back in Recent Twitter activity by Ziegler indicates he believes that the figure is lower, but he hasn't named a figure.

The charge that Ziegler's a Holocaust denier doesn't hold up. He's a provocateur questioning an estimate. He said that Wallace killed himself because he was afraid of being revealed as a fraud, which is self-serving and ludicrous. On Sandusky, Ziegler does have some respectable people on his side.

You take that blow on the chin and move on, because Thompson has a right to see what you're tweeting about him and his future wife. Having studied Ziegler, I don't believe he's a liar.

He's the kind of guy who gets obsessed with contrarian stories and loses sleep over them. He's often, however, his worst enemy. His bad behavior—even the Paterno family has distanced itself from him—makes it even more difficult for him to sell the hard-sell stories he loves to tell.

I will say this. Ziegler at least brings facts unlike the mainstream media who just spout off whatever they are told. What happened to journalist investigating on what they are reporting and actually reporting facts and their honest opinion.

Since when does mainstream media choose sides? I will give you one example : Michael Jackson! USA media should be ashamed. Now I have researched the Sandusky trial and John Shares nothing but facts. When you look at those facts come back and tell the world how it is that he should have been convicted. He may give his opinion but at least he puts facts behind it. This man has a right to speak his voice just as much as any other American journalist.

They are afraid of loosing their jobs or ruffling feathers so they go with whatever they are suppose to say. Get out in the world and talk to people. The American public has caught on to the fake news crap. America needs someone like John who will remain ethical in his journalistic travels and let us know both sides not the side the media wants us to hear.

Maybe you and other media outlets feel negative towards the man but I can tell you the public does not! They should have had the backbone he does. You just don't get it do you? The reason being is that he would bury them in the investigated truth he is in possession of!

He is not the kind of journalist who would stick his neck out, if he wasn't confident in his convictions.