by Jonathan Kay
The prototypical JFK conspiracist was Harold Weisberg, a lifelong Warren Commission critic who wrote eight books, and accumulated sixty filing cabinets full of JFK documents (many procured through his own laborious Freedom of Information Act requests) at his Frederick, Maryland, farmhouse over the course of thirty-five years. By contrast Weisberg’s 9/11-era equivalent—mega-Truther David Ray Griffin—wrote even more books in the space of just five years, all of them based in large part on material he found while surfing the Internet.
This dumbing-down effect explains the downward shift in the age profile of conspiracists: While influential JFK conspiracy theorists tended to be bookish middle-aged eccentrics, many of the Internet’s noisiest Truthers are barely old enough to shave: Conspiracism is something they fit in between video gaming and Facebook.
Muckraking 2.0
The birth of the Internet was not the first time a media revolution had remade the world of conspiracism. In 1906, U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt delivered a speech denouncing a new kind of journalist—“the man with the Muck-rake, the man who could look no way but downward with the muck-rake in his hands; who was offered a celestial crown for his muck-rake, but who would neither look up nor regard the crown he was offered, but continued to rake to himself the filth of the floor.”
Roosevelt was thought to be singling out the yellow journalism produced by William Randolph Hearst’s media empire. But Hearst wasn’t the only offender: By the early twentieth century, “muckraking” was a well-established practice everywhere across the American journalistic landscape.
The negative connotation associated with the term is undeserved: The muckrakers’ mission—to expose corruption in business and government, and document the wretchedness of society’s have-nots—aroused popular support for the reforms ushered in by the Progressive Era, and set the stage for the modern forms of investigative and human-interest journalism we know today.
Early muckraking investigations detailed payoffs at city hall, inhumane working conditions in factories and mines, and the predatory practices of great industrialists. The common theme throughout was power and its abuses. As legendary twentieth-century journalist Robert Cantwell put it, the muckrakers “traced the intricate relationship of the police, the underworld, the local political bosses, the secret connections between the new corporations . . . and the legislatures and the courts. In doing this, they drew a new cast of characters for the drama of American society: bosses, professional politicians, reformers, racketeers, captains of industry.”
Readers of this new brand of journalism came to view their country as a dark, dog-eat-dog place, full of secret conspiracies. “Reality now was rough and sordid,” Richard Hofstadter wrote in The Age of Reform. “It was hidden, neglected, and off-stage. It was conceived essentially as that stream of external and material events which was most likely to be unpleasant. Reality was the bribe, the rebate, the bought franchise, the sale of adulterated food. It was what one found in [Upton Sinclair’s] The Jungle, [Frank Norris’] The Octopus, [Henry Demarest Lloyd’s] Wealth Against Commonwealth, or [Lincoln Steffens’] The Shame of the Cities . . . Reality was a series of unspeakable plots.”
As we’ve seen, populist fearmongering against big government and greedy corporations was a dominant political theme in the United States long before the rise of the muckrakers. But the new forms of journalism, coupled with a trend toward realism in literature, invigorated populism by providing a vivid human element. Till the early twentieth century, America’s bogeymen generally were ill defined in the public imagination. In many cases, they were simply crude caricatures—fat men in top hats who appeared in editorial cartoons and satirical pamphlets. Beginning with the rise of the muckrakers, newspapers, radio stations, and eventually television would show Americans the true face of America’s power structure. To quote Hofstadter again, this time writing in The Paranoid Style in American Politics (1964): “The villains of the modern Right are much more vivid than those of their paranoid predecessors . . . For the vaguely delineated villains of the anti-Masons, for the obscure and disguised Jesuit agents, the little-known papal delegates of the anti-Catholics, for the shadowy international bankers of the monetary conspiracies, we may now substitute eminent public figures like Presidents Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower, Secretaries of State like Marshall, Acheson, and Dulles, Justices of the Supreme Court like Frankfurter and Warren, and the whole battery of lesser but still famous and vivid alleged conspirators headed by Alger Hiss.”
Even in the 1950s, Hofstadter seemed to understand the threat to rationalism posed by the mass media. Indeed, much of what he wrote in his era directly foreshadowed the overall shrillness and paranoia that would come to infuse cable television and the Internet—technologies that wouldn’t arrive in American homes till after his death in 1970. “The growth of the mass media of communication and their use in politics have brought politics closer to the people than ever before and have made politics a form of entertainment . . . an arena into which private emotions and personal problems can be readily projected. Mass communications have made it possible to keep the mass man in an almost constant state of mobilization”: These are words that could have been written about the media climate surrounding the 2010 midterm elections. Yet they were published by Hofstadter (in his essay “The Pseudo-Conservative Revolt”) during Dwight D. Eisenhower’s first term.
During my law school years in the mid–1990s, I spent a lot of time on east coast highways, driving back and forth between the Yale campus in New Haven, Connecticut, my family home in Montreal, and my various summer jobs at law firms in Washington, D.C., New York City, and Pittsburgh. During my late-night drives, I would flip through the AM dial trying to keep myself entertained.
My favorite station was WFAN, a popular all-sports outfit broadcasting throughout the northeastern states from its studios in Astoria, New York. The Fan, as it’s widely known, covers all major American sports. But the overwhelming focus is on the Giants, Jets, Yankees, Mets, Knicks, and Rangers—with a significant dose of Islanders, Nets, Devils, and college sports when circumstances warrant. Listening to the Fan was like hanging out with a bipolar friend: When a New York team won, the mood of WFAN’s callers was euphoric. If they lost, the callers’ collective mood ranged from depressed to apoplectic.
Coming from Montreal, where hockey is a secular religion, I was used to obsessive sports-fan culture. But the New York City variant has a different tone. For the regulars who called in to WFAN, a loss could never be chalked up to something so banal as the other team just playing better. There was always a scapegoat—the coach, the ref, league officials, an underperforming deadbeat star. The loathing heaped on these figures was like something out of a Stalin-era communist shaming ritual. While rooting for the home team is seen as an all-American activity, there was something unhinged about these radio rants. Looking beyond the slick burbling of the hosts, and the canned studio effects, I sensed a sort of seething, tribalized fury at the unjustness of a world in which Patrick Ewing was incapable of bringing the Knicks an NBA championship.
As I surfed the dial, I found that the motifs of resentment and outrage were constant and inescapable. Dr. Laura Schlessinger—who seemed always to be on the air back in the mid–1990s, no matter what time of day it was—held forth dogmatically about the evils of sexual promiscuity, the gay lobby, permissive parents, and doormat girlfriends. The Evangelical stations offered the “Good News” of Jesus’ message, but in the same breath denounced the depravity of modern America, and urged godly listeners to prepare for a coming apocalyptic confrontation with the forces of the Antichrist. In the wee hours, one could hear whole shows given over to secular conspiracy theories—UFOs, bizarre medical experiments, flying cars.
Then there was the king of the dial, Rush Limbaugh, a former disc jockey from Sacramento who’d become a force of radio nature in the late 1980s. Like the preachers, his tone was superficially chipper—but his message was serious. “Liberalism is a scourge,” he declared t
o an interviewer in 1993, summarizing his worldview. “It destroys the human spirit. It destroys prosperity. It assigns sameness to everybody.” I found myself hypnotized by his style—which channeled all of the populist rage I’d heard on WFAN into the equally tribalized world of American politics.
As Brian Anderson argued in his 2005 book, South Park Conservatives: The Revolt Against Liberal Media Bias, the populist AM talk-radio movement that Limbaugh godfathered changed the face of American politics. Among other accomplishments, it sank Hillarycare, propelled the Republicans to domination of both houses of Congress in 1994, and (most significantly) convinced tens of millions of Americans that the news they read and saw in the mainstream media was tainted by liberal bias. Better yet, Limbaugh spread his message with a confident, entertaining, self-satirizing brio that differed sharply from conventional network news broadcasts. The fact that it was a mass phenomenon—a world away from the somewhat haughty, rarified world of NPR—was itself a selling point for the Limbaugh brand: Many of his listeners felt they were enlisting in a newly formed ideological legion, not unlike the modern Tea Party, that would make its collective voice heard in Washington. In 1996, that legion would go on to become the core audience of a brand new, unapologetically opinionated television network called FOX News.
What launched Limbaugh’s career wasn’t a backlash against any particular development in American politics or culture. (He started his nationally broadcast show in 1988, at a time when the Republicans still controlled the White House, and Bill Clinton was still the governor of Arkansas.) It was something more mundane: the reform of broadcast regulations that had been muzzling American radio hosts since 1949.
The old policy was the Federal Communications Commission’s Fairness Doctrine, a rule that required broadcasters to give equal time to both sides of an issue. In theory, the rule meant that if a radio host promoted, say, gun control, his station was required to provide time for the NRA to deliver a rebuttal. In practice, most station owners simply avoided political talk entirely. But in 1987, Dennis Patrick, named as FCC chairman by Ronald Reagan, repealed the doctrine, setting off an immediate boom in political programming.
When Limbaugh began broadcasting nationally in 1988, Americans still thought of political talk as a stuffy business conducted by Beltway insiders and bow-tied pundits, the sort of thing one endured before football on Sundays. But Limbaugh was an entertainer who salted his rhetoric with satire. “Greetings, conservatives across the fruited plain,” went an introductory riff. “This is Rush Limbaugh, the most dangerous man in America, with the largest hypothalamus in North America, serving humanity simply by opening my mouth, destined for my own wing in the Museum of Broadcasting, executing everything I do flawlessly with zero mistakes, doing this show with half my brain tied behind my back just to make it fair because I have a talent on loan from . . . God. Rush Limbaugh. A man. A legend. A way of life.”
Prior to the 1980s, the primary forum for movement conservatism had been think-tank newsletters and wonky magazines like National Review. But these weren’t outlets for the common man: National Review’s circulation peaked in 1994 at 270,000, about one-fiftieth the number of listeners that Limbaugh attracts every week. With the rise of conservative talk radio and then FOX, William Buckley, George Will, and other members of conservative’s old, patrician guard suddenly found themselves on the sidelines.
But even after deregulation, the basic structure of the mass media still presented a problem for true conspiracy theorists: Radio stations and cable channels, no less than newspapers and magazines, generally remained in the control of large, profit-seeking, risk-averse corporations. And all of them—including Limbaugh’s show—remained staffed by a hierarchy of gatekeeping producers and editors.
Historically, these factors never have served to exclude conspiracism from the mass media entirely (as a late-night trip through the AM radio dial will attest). But they generally have restricted it to themes that were politically popular, or at least tolerated, by society at large—such as anti-Masonry in the nineteenth century, racism and anti-Semitism in the decades before WWII, and anticommunism in the 1950s. In all other contexts, conspiracists were forced to the disreputable margins of the media marketplace: pornographic magazines, leaflet handouts, church-basement lectures, late-night radio, and community-access television.
The Internet destroyed all of these communications barriers overnight, which is why it immediately became the dominant hub for virtually every conspiracist subculture in existence—including jihadism. (The only exception is Scientology, which continues to be promoted primarily through the movement’s well-funded bricks-and-mortar urban drop-in centers—and this only because its controlling body operates as a moneymaking business, and therefore aggressively enforces copyright on the movement’s texts.) Communication on the web is cheap, global, immediate, and uncensored. And so it is perfectly suited for unfunded, geographically disparate activists seeking to promote a dissident message.
Just as importantly, the Internet fuels the conspiracist’s fervor by providing him with a sense of community. In the modern age, conspiracism has blurred into social networking in many contexts: Activists are constantly leaving comments on one another’s blogs and Facebook pages, emailing tips and links back and forth, and even interviewing one another on Internet radio shows. While some of this networking consists of the exchange of substantive information, it also represents an exercise in mutual self-congratulation and emotional support.
As this positive social feedback becomes addictive, the conspiracist’s network of enablers grows—often to such a point that it crowds out the conspiracy theorist’s nonbelieving friends. The process resembles the formation of an electronic cocoon that envelops a conspiracist with codependents. Surrounded by an enabling group of the like-minded, he gradually embraces the delusion that his movement has gained critical mass, and that his blog postings and email petitions are being read in the corridors of power.
The modern web-based conspiracist has a conflicted attitude toward the mainstream media. On the one hand, he is a futurist who triumphantly dismisses the printing press and the evening news as a relic of a bygone pre-Internet age. And so he takes a reflexive, shoot-the-messenger approach to any mainstream criticism of his movement. Whenever a mainstream newspaper or magazine cuts jobs or goes bankrupt, conspiracist websites inevitably erupt in spasms of schadenfreude—citing the news as proof that the old top-down, elitist model of journalism is giving way to an epic communications revolution that they themselves claim to be leading. To quote Truther Kevin Barrett: “It is necessary that folklorists and others in the human sciences think about the way the many-to-many medium of digitally-enhanced folk communication is overthrowing the old one-to-many media of elite-generated social control that have dominated more and more of this planet over the past 5,000 years. To study the 9/11 truth movement is to study what may turn out to be the cutting edge of the most significant social-structural change in the history of humanity.”
Yet notwithstanding such utopian notions, most conspiracists understand that the hated “MSM” is still an influential player in the marketplace of ideas. And so it is maddening that CNN and the New York Times persist in ignoring their “discoveries” about 9/11 and other false-flag plots. At Truther events where I was publicly outed as a journalistic observer by someone at the microphone (a common occurrence after I’d published a few National Post columns about my interest in conspiracy theories), I noticed a mix of contradictory reactions. On one hand, I was applauded for my “courage” in breaking an MSM taboo, and exposing myself to the Truth firsthand. On the other hand, I also was treated as a flesh-and-blood target on which Truthers could unleash cultish, pent-up hostility against my industry. Often, angry activists would lecture me about what other journalists had written about their profession—as if I bore some fraternal responsibility for the crimes of my MSM colleagues.
Through the Internet’s Looking Glass
In 2005, Harvard Law School pr
ofessor Cass Sunstein and two other researchers performed an experiment involving sixty Colorado adults. Sunstein divided the participants into two sets of small groups—one conservative, one liberal—based on their responses to a screening questionnaire, and then asked them to discuss three contentious questions: (1) “Should states allow same-sex couples to enter into civil unions?” (2) “Should employers engage in ‘affirmative action’ by giving a preference to members of traditionally disadvantaged groups?” (3) “Should the United States sign an international treaty to combat global warming?”
Not surprisingly, the self-identified conservatives were more likely than self-identified liberals to answer no to all of these questions, both before and after their discussions. But Sunstein noted another interesting pattern: In virtually all of the groups, members ended up embracing more polarized positions following fifteen minutes of conversation with their ideological bedfellows—a phenomenon he describes in his research as “group polarization.”
These results help demonstrate why modern electronic communication tools have done little to break down ideological divides—and, in many cases, have helped exacerbate them.