A breathless BuzzFeed article published today says that the right is building a new “upside-down” media, parallel to the universe of facts. “If you’ve been paying attention during the long run-up to Trump’s unexpected victory, you may have noticed a new dynamic in the already fractured and chaotic political media ecosystem,” the article reads. “It is unedited and unabashedly pro-Trump, and it often posits an interpretation of reality dramatically different from that of the mainstream media.”
Scary. But is this something to be anxious about? Not really.
The problem with BuzzFeed’s report is that it’s stuck in the weeds of an ecosystem to which it helped give rise. BuzzFeed loves reporting on the amorphous “alt-right” and its more notable trolls and dilettantes, like self-styled “Twitter pundit” Bill Mitchell, Mike Cernovich, a lawyer-cum-blogger whose writings cover topics from fixing “gamer posture” to date-rape apologia, and Jim Hoft of Gateway Pundit, who has been called “the dumbest man on the internet.” And those people do a pretty good job selling BuzzFeed on the fact that they’re doing something important. It helps that their main talent is being able to string together semi-coherent sentences to the delight of the media despite the fact that they’re full of hot air. BuzzFeed, however, in the effort to give credence to a fake trend, conveniently does not mention the foibles of these men while covering them.
Fake news itself is a red herring for our time. A Bloomberg View piece published Monday more or less demolished the idea that “fake news” of the sort that these trolls aim to peddle in their alternate reality contributed to Trump’s election. Researchers found that just 1.2 percent of people they surveyed recalled reading a fake news story, “meaning the average American remembered about 0.92 pro-Trump fake stories and 0.23 pro-Clinton ones.” The findings further revealed that even fewer people believed fake news stories.
It is true, as BuzzFeed says, that Trump seems to delight in fake news, and will likely give fuel to those peddling conspiracy and misinformation; he has invited them into his White House with open arms. Yes, this is an odd thing for a president to do so baldly, but not that strange considering all politicians are masters of their own propaganda. How many Pete Souza photos have you liked on Instagram over the years? Trump is too dumb to manipulate the media like Obama, who was able to distract reporters with his (quite good) singing voice while drone-bombing the shit out of the Middle East, and he has none of the organization skills or foresight of top Nazi Joseph Goebbels, who was the mastermind of a decades-long propaganda campaign that eventually subsumed the entire German media. Trump, as I wrote yesterday, is an easily trolled fool.
The media trend to be concerned about is not the nascent rise of bullshit written by nobodies who can barely type, but a more persistent and, I suppose, less exciting force: the creeping influence of Fox News. Fox dominates the cable ratings, and other networks, like NBC and the traditionally left-leaning MSNBC, are poaching their pundits in the hopes to garner some of that popularity. This phenomenon, in which Megyn Kelly leapt from Fox to NBC and Greta Van Susteren went from Fox to MSNBC, has been described as the “normalization” of the racist media right, but it is simply capitalism in its truest essence. Despite what they may say, networks are not motivated by truth-telling, but by money and power and having the most viewers. If truth-telling ability were a requirement for any of these pundit jobs, Corey Lewandowski would be working at a Blockbuster in New Hampshire, unknown to the preening public. Instead, CNN head Jeff Zucker defended his decision to hire the irascible ex-campaign manager as a way to cater to “the 14 million people” who voted for Trump, and said that people who were mad that he was employing Lewandowski simply didn’t “like the idea of the Trump candidacy.”
The “upside-down” media described by BuzzFeed no doubt wants money and power too. Who wouldn’t! The election of Trump was hugely advantageous for these media charlatans; a look back at Cernovich’s blog posts finds that he was relatively uninterested in politics until Trump started becoming a media sensation. By hitching his noxious star to Trump, saying absurd and outlandish things, and agreeing to be interviewed by any journalist who asks, he too can be a character in this new American saga. Meanwhile, BuzzFeed does readers a disservice by reporting on this wave of new media as if it has a credible toehold in society. The piece allows trolls to boldly describe their plans and ideas without any numbers or outside voices to support or refute what they are saying. When BuzzFeed publishes Cernovich saying that “Trump supporters didn’t think they were being treated fairly or accurately by the media. So many of us weren’t sure we could trust the basic facts of what’s being reported in the news. And so we created the answer, which is something I call ‘reality news,’” it is giving weight to his idiocy while refusing to interrogate it. When taken at face value, however, and in the context of the larger media, all we really get from BuzzFeed’s reporting is that these guys thrive on attention.
