Journalists were in high demand, commanding bigger and bigger salaries with less and less editorial oversight. A reporter with three months of experience could get $1 per word for transcribing a State Department press release (headline: “All’s Well That Ends Well in Kosovo”) and still make it to the bar by noon. Best of all, there was absolutely, positively no way for average people to talk back to journalists and pundits, to publicly call out hacks for their career failures and physical deficiencies, or to publish journalists’ private correspondences with women twenty years their junior replete with winky faces and ambiguous complaints about their wife.
But that was all about to change.
Digital Media: Truth Gets an Upgrade
* * *
Throughout the 1990s, the Internet was a slumbering giant. Newspapers and publishers expected it to remain an alternative platform that mainly catered to Neopets enthusiasts and lovers of age-regression porn. In a 1998 column, New York Times elder wonk Paul Krugman summed up this frame of mind with his pedantic, antisocial flair:
The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in “Metcalfe’s law”—which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants—becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s.I
Unfortunately, a different law of the market, “Benzino’s Paradox,” ended up proving that people have a lot more to say to one another than Krugman assumed. Things like, “My personal review of Halo 4: Too Many Black Aliens,” and “r u horni? cool!” This is the online landscape we have come to know, love, and take for granted. But back in the 1990s, before social media and shitposting, everyone running the newspaper and TV industries thought like Krugman. There was no real preparation for a massive shift in technology that would destabilize and ultimately destroy the print media’s business model and leave them selling themselves even harder than they did in the old days when they hawked reverse mortgages and Doctor Haines’ Golden Specific.
Instead, newspapers patted the newborn Internet on the head and gave it some of their print material to post online for free (including Krugman’s dumbass column above). They planned to make money off it, of course, but the industry saw the Web as a sort of bonus market, a medium where distribution would be free, unlike the expensive chain of materials that delivered papers to homes and newsstands across the country through a complex series of News Tubes. Paying for that distribution was part of why they always needed big bucks from advertisers like Rolex, Blackwater, and the Church of Scientology.
But our media overlords made the classic mistake of feeding a Gremlin after midnight: in a flash, the Internet mutated from a cuddly novelty into a grotesque monster that gored its masters to death in a way that was alternately scary and entertaining.
These companies started to panic when readers understandably decided to get more and more of their news from the free Internet rather than paying for subscriptions. And so began the death spiral: newspapers underestimated the Internet, posted their shit for free, then realized they would go broke unless they started charging for it. Problem was, readers had already tasted free and didn’t feel like suddenly shelling out for Gerald Fletch-Queefen’s latest column in the Wall Street Journal.
Blindsided, papers tried to make money off their new cyber-readers by running ads on the Internet the same way they did in print: banner ads, sidebar ads, and pop-ups, like the one you closed five minutes ago that tried to sell you fair-trade lube or the next generation of “Vapes for Latinos.” This gave birth to the metric of Web traffic, the numbers that would be waved in front of advertisers as the new (and false) analog for print-circulation numbers. After ad-blockers fucked up that plan, too, publishers set up paywalls. Foiled again! A new breed of sites with ridiculous names like FeedBag, NewsBoner, and Business Insider cropped up, supplying aggregated II stories from other III sources, gratis. Pretty soon the Web’s free real estate wasn’t so free anymore, and, watching their print and digital ad revenue shrivel like a chilly scrotum, everyone from the New York Times to the Mormon Science Sentinel scrambled to build from scratch an entirely new edifice of digital media production, sales, and distribution.
Ever since then, a galaxy of news sites has exploded across the Internet: you have your BuzzFeed types, whose output is mostly memes stolen from Reddit, plus the occasional news article deciding whether the latest massacre in Syria is EPICWIN or LOLFAIL; your Politico types, which take the bullshit, “objective” tone of legacy media and ratchet it up 200 percent for an even more elite market of scum-sucking DC consultants; and your more “partisan” news shops, like the Huffington Post on the yuppie-left and the Federalist on the Francoist-right, who reliably distribute pellets of nourishing, ideologically agreeable information to their respective audiences. These media creatures were native to the Web Zone. To quote Christopher Nolan’s twisted philosopher Bane, the Washington Post merely adopted the darkness—Vox was born in it, molded by it.
Still, that hasn’t given the moguls of News 2.0 any better ideas for a business model. Eventually, they will stop receiving truckloads of venture-capital money just for appearing “innovative” or “having a presence” and they’ll be locked on the same ice floe as the old-timers. Everyone is fucked, with the exception of billionaire-backed sugar-daddy projects like Bloomberg, which exists because an insane elf manlet is willing to spend millions so he can see his name printed in a news outlet that isn’t calling for his banishment from public life.
In the interest of helping any young oafs make a two-year career for themselves before all this blows up, we introduce to you here a guide to success in New Media.
How to Win Fake Friends and Influence Nobody
* * *
Journalism isn’t the stuffy career path it used to be: instead of covering a beat at your local paper, working your way up the totem pole to a national outlet, and enjoying comfy union benefits all the while, the contemporary journalist can now embrace the life of the common deer tick, jumping from host to host until being plucked off and left to die in a pile of shit.
Indeed, most young reporters observe their local papers foundering and look to start their careers at one of the many hip, VC-backed news sites online—hell, you’re a millennial, you know their names: Mic, Vox, Vice, HuffPo, BuzzFeed, Dang-That’s-News, r/creepshots, Sproing, and Fappe.
The market is volatile, yes, but that doesn’t mean you can’t game the system with some lifehacks. Here are the steps anyone can follow to become part of the perpetually insecure floating labor reserve army of Digi-News.
1. A Good Twitter Avatar: People need to know that you’re a legitimate journalist whose opinions on Russia can be taken seriously. For your avatar, use a screenshot of the one time you were on TV talking to a congressman’s dumbest child about how the 2018 midterms are like Jumanji. If you’ve never been on TV, take a perfectly centered selfie from your chest up in which you have a smirking-yet-serious look on your face that says, “Sorry, we only serve facts here. But you can also get snark if you really want it.”
2. A Good Twitter Bio: As a media kid, you’ll need to signal-boost a lot of different news content, which will probably include some nasty right-wing cranks and racist bloggers. In your bio, warn your followers that retweets of these assholes aren’t endorsements, even though they will almost certainly end up as your colleagues and drinking buddies. If you’re under thirty-five, include a fake job title like “Anti-cronut Activist” or “Honorary Canadian”; if you’re over thirty-five, quote some turgid classic rock song with lyrics like, “Caught between left and right / Lookin’ for truth in this fallen world.”
3. Good Tweets: Don’t share too many spicy political opinions, for which you could get disciplined or fired. Instead, quote-tweet everything, adding only “This x100!” or “Big if true.” This is funny because the story is usual
ly not true. Or, say something about the weather and then just write “Sad!” as Donald Trump would. This is funny because the user in question is someone other than Donald Trump. Keep eighteen-month-old puns and jokettes going—they’ll never get stale.
4. Good Tweet-ups: Now you’ve hit the big time. Thanks to trenchant observations like “Hmm, fake news much?” you’ve achieved a level of notoriety sufficient to earn you an invite to a bona fide Journalism Happy Hour. Hop onto the surface train down to one of the worst bars New York or DC has to offer; some kind of always crowded watering hole for dead-eyed people called the Lanyard Lounge or Capitol Cloak Room where you’ll get to meet the doughy whites behind the avatars. Regale the crowd with the latest memes and hot takes that everyone already knows because you’re all chained to the same stupid website, get a little too tipsy on $7 Amstels, and find yourself in a handicap stall desperately making out with a thirty-seven-year-old Medium writer who’s thinking about pivoting to improv comedy. You’ve earned it, rookie.
5. Good Journalism: Find some time to do this. Maybe post a C-SPAN video of a politician saying something different than what they’re saying now. That’s called an exposé, and it’s the highest form of journalism.
So much for the exciting new world of digital media, an industry that in 2018 appears vast and thriving but is actually financially dependent on getting enough people to click on links like “One Weird Trick for Putting Your Dong in a Light Socket.” With ad-blockers torpedoing the last scraps of traditional revenue, most news outlets are set to march into the twenty-first century as proud slaves to megacorporations like Facebook and Google, the last beacons of hope to get people to read anything.
The Shilling, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Blog
* * *
Here we should pause to discuss a significant moment in the early 2000s, after the legacy media began to fail but before the new media kids like BuzzFeed and Vice took over. It’s remembered as an exciting turn in the history of journalism—by the main character in Memento. In the real world, it produced some of the shittiest characters and methods of contemporary media.
We refer, of course, to the birth of the blogosphere.
The accepted history goes something like this: While traditional media companies stumbled through a technological shift, a bunch of freethinking, self-published writers used platforms like Blogspot, WordPress, and AdultFriendFinder to democratize journalism. Voices outside the political and media establishment entered the fray and disrupted the discourse. They forged direct relationships with their audience, crowdsourced information, and hosted dialogues and debates with their readers. They weren’t media professionals, either—these “citizen journalists” were salt-of-the-earth constitutional lawyers, doctoral candidates, financial analysts, and unemployable loners like Will Menaker. They did not play by the rules.
In fact, they were portrayed as the Young Turks of the Old Media Empire—rebels overturning a stuffy and moribund status quo. The analogy holds up well enough, given that the insurgents who created modern Turkey went on to ally with the Central Powers in World War I and carry out the Armenian Genocide.IV We shall find our blogging heroes also had a penchant for shitty politics and mass slaughter in the Middle East.
For it was indeed around this time that the media led the country into war with Iraq, again on false pretenses, through breathless and selective reporting about Saddam’s possession of WMD, a total fabrication that was used to justify invading Iraq for a second time, building a new American empire, and creating ISIS.
THE FORERUNNERS
Ben Smith, editor in chief of BuzzFeed, celebrated this “golden era of political blogs” in a 2013 postmortem:
I was a local politics reporter in New York, and I’d spent the 2004 campaign obsessed with its central, vital new media outlets—Josh [Marshall]’s liberal Talking Points Memo; Andrew Sullivan’s pro-Bush Daily Dish; Little Green Footballs and the other conservative sites that punctured Dan Rather’s killer story on Bush’s National Guard service. Matt Drudge was already the grandfather of that ecosystem; Sullivan had, legendarily, gone down to Miami to seek his advice before launching his blog in 2000.V
Once Drudge lent Sullivan his lucky pair of calipers on this fateful occasion, the new age was under way.
Matt Drudge—credit where it’s due—was indeed a key founder of the blogosphere and therefore a transformational figure in the history of American journalism. He is also an inveterate racist, paranoiac, and creep who wears a dumb little hat all the time, and is therefore a continuation of the Old Media style. Embracing the tabloid principle of “I’ll take credit if it’s true and claim free speech if it’s not,” Drudge struck gold in the late 1990s. He skimmed enough e-mails from demented Republican readers to finally stumble onto a genuine scoop: the Monica Lewinsky affair. (Newsweek had the story, too, but decided not to run it.) Twenty years after Watergate, the political scandal of the year was published by a man who looked like a real-life Max Headroom. Out of nowhere, the Drudge Report had beaten the mainstream press to a story that struck at the heart of the president’s dignity, stature, and ability to effectively prey upon interns. Just as the mentally ill Chicago hospital custodian Henry Darger did with art, Drudge inaugurated a new form of outsider journalism.
But for every new gumshoe reporter who took up this new style of “blogging,” the Internet generated a hundred more citizen-pundits gushing unearned confidence and horrid opinions. The story arc that unified all the bloggers was 9/11, the reign of George W. Bush, and the Iraq War, which virtually all of them supported—from conservative techno-glibertarian ghouls like Instapundit to “liberals” like Democratic consultant John Aravosis. And so the political blogosphere emerged first and foremost as an interminable, half-decade-long symposium made up of insecure, overeducated armchair generals, dipshit philosophers, and racist crackpots, each one playing a pint-sized Thucydides, possessing none of the wisdom and all the side effects of venereal disease.
One such crackpot was the next guy on Smith’s list, Little Green Footballs, otherwise known as Charles Johnson (not to be confused with redheaded goon Chuck C. Johnson, a different piece of shit who showed up later on). Johnson’s blog was a great example of the baby-boomer-warmonger type: a ponytailed website developer and accomplished jazz guitarist, Johnson was one of the most vicious and repulsive “critics” of Islam occupying the early Internet, spewing every anti-Muslim trope in circulation and tirelessly advocating that America treat the Islamic cancer with good old-fashioned radiation.
In a twist that makes him an even better model-blogger specimen, Johnson got woke around 2009, became a staunch opponent of conservative “wingnuts,” and meticulously deleted and even altered many of his old posts that clashed with his new liberal brand. Like George Lucas re-editing Star Wars every five years, Charlie was simply retouching his work to reflect what the posts should have said.VI This included scrubbing the scores of times he or any of his devoted readers ranted about “Islamofascism,” seethed over the Ground Zero Mosque, or referred to American pro-Palestine activist Rachel Corrie—killed by an Israeli bulldozer in 2003—as “St. Pancake.”VII Good guy.
Anyway, Little Green Charlie is a perfect manifestation of the self-promotional and protean qualities of the blogosphere. He illustrates how someone whose “work” was once approvingly cited in the manifesto of white supremacist mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik can successfully pivot to being against genocide.
Another one of Smith’s blogging titans was Andrew Sullivan, once upon a time the biggest pro-war pundit in the game. He was an exception to the blogger-as-outsider origin story: Sullivan rose to prominence as the boy-wonder editor who ran the New Republic during the height of its “welfare-queens-are-selling-your-children-crack” years. (But he also advocated for gay marriage, so, who’s intolerant now, bitch?) It was Sullivan who published the infamous excerpts of race scientist Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve, which blamed America’s racial inequality on black people�
�s IQ levels. To this day, Sullivan still insists Murray’s theory is onto something and urges his fellow intellectuals to teach the controversy.
His blog began as yet another cranky right-wing LiveJournal until 9/11 and the buildup to Iraq, which catapulted so many of these humps into the ranks of the War Bloggers. The war liberated him, and so many others, from any remaining threads of sanity, and it earned Sullivan a loyal audience of equally pretentious psychos. A sample frothing, written a few days after 9/11:
The middle part of the country—the great red zone that voted for Bush—is clearly ready for war. The decadent left in its enclaves on the coasts is not dead—and may well mount a fifth column.VIII
Another:
When you look at the delighted faces of Palestinians cheering in the streets, we have to realize that there are cultures on this planet of such depravity that understanding them is never fully possible. And empathy for them at such a moment is obscene. But we can observe and remember. There is always a tension between civilization and barbarism, and the barbarians are now here.IX
Sullivan’s prose was always tidier than that of his American comrades, but the unhinged paranoia in that first quote and the bloodthirsty jingoism in the second are prime examples of what was teeming in the minds of all these oafs: History, capital H, had arrived, and these dorks were eager and willing to chronicle it, maybe even shape it, and deluded enough to think that their razor-sharp polemics would help guide Bush’s wrecking ball across the Middle East.
But just like Little Green Johnson, Sully did an about-face in 2006, around the time America’s campaign of death and misery in Iraq was getting a little too sloppy, and Pvt. Charles Graner & Co. were discovered reenacting their favorite scenes from Salò at Abu Ghraib prison. Always one with a wet, sticky finger to the air, Sullivan’s ideological weathervane proved slightly more attuned than those of the native Yanks. As such, he distinguished himself by turning against the Iraq War a full two weeks before everyone else did. Over the next several years, he moved from panic to doubt to full-on antiwar ideology, just in time to embrace the shimmering, redemptive light of Barack Obama’s candidacy in 2008. (Full disclosure: a young Brendan interned at the Dish in 2013, after this woke transformation took place.)
The Chapo Guide to Revolution Page 14