Duration: 50:38 | Recorded on June 17, 2026
S3E22 – What does it take to spend nearly a decade reading the news your side doesn’t want to read? Howard Polskin has been doing exactly that since 2017. In this episode, Kent and Kyle interview Howard Polskin, the founder and editor of TheRighting, a newsletter designed to help mainstream and progressive audiences understand the landscape of conservative media. Their conversation explores the fragmentation of modern journalism, the prevalence of disinformation, and the editorial omission of key stories, such as the cognitive health of political leaders, which often fuels public distrust. The discussion emphasizes the importance of civil discourse and encourages listeners to step outside their personal bubbles to foster a more nuanced understanding of their political opposites.
Featured Spirits
Kyle: W.L. Weller Special Reserve
Kent: Cruzan Aged Dark Rum
Howard: Woodford Reserve, poured into a cocktail glass once owned by William Safire, Nixon’s speechwriter and New York Times language columnist.
Who Is Howard Polskin?
Howard is a career media veteran who has written for The New Yorker and worked inside major outlets including CNN and Sony. But it was the 2016 election that changed his focus entirely. Like many, he woke up the morning after and asked: how did we get here? His answer was to go read the other side and share what he found. TheRighting, now in its ninth year, curates the top right-wing headlines each weekday morning, and boasts thousands of subscribers worldwide. Howard also serves on the Board of Advisers at the Newhouse School of Communications at Syracuse University.
What You’ll Hear in This Episode
An admission: Before launching TheRighting, Howard harbored a dismissive view of conservative media. He assumed that if you didn’t read the Times or watch NBC, you weren’t truly informed. Building TheRighting forced him to confront that assumption, and it has gradually changed how he thinks.
An observation: If you read only Fox News and Newsmax, you will still be a reasonably informed person. What you lose isn’t the facts, it’s what those outlets choose not to cover.
An insight: Kent and Kyle push back, agree, and build on that idea, landing on what may be the sharpest insight of the episode: it’s not the bias in what gets reported, it’s what gets ignored.
From there, the trio digs into the collapse of traditional media gatekeeping, the rise of AI in journalism, the concept of the “political nomad,” and why Howard and Kyle find themselves oddly aligned with Bill Maher liberalism.
Key Themes
- The echo chamber isn’t only a right-wing problem. Howard discusses how mainstream outlets buried the Biden cognitive decline story
- Why “right vs. left” may be the wrong frame altogether and why Trump has scrambled both
- The economics of outrage: cable news manufactures division and we lose because of it
- Howard’s unlikely friendship with the Heritage Foundation
- AI and the future of journalism
Howard’s Advice
“No matter what side of the fence you’re on, try and look over the other side of the fence — maybe for 20 or 30 minutes a week. Don’t always look for news sources just to affirm your beliefs. Challenge yourself a little.”
Find Howard’s Work: Subscribe to TheRighting.com