“Union Organizers Are Murdered in Some Parts of the Country, and That’s Okay”Take away the newspaper—and this country of ours would become a scene of chaos. Without daily assurance of the exact facts—so far as we are able to know and publish them—the public imagination would run riot. Ten days without the daily newspaper and the strong pressure of worry and fear would throw the people of this country into mob hysteria—feeding upon rumors, alarms, terrified by bugbears and illusions. We have become the watchmen of the night and of a troubled day.
—HARRY CHANDLER
RIP my menchies.
—@VOX_MICHAEL
Extry extry! Read all about it! “Daring Dirtbags Disrupt Daffy Democrats’ Discombobulated Discourse!”
That’s how this chapter might have read if we still lived in the ink-stained era of print news. Today, however, virtually all Americans get their news, opinions, and pornography through the Internet. How did we get from dead logs to live blogs, from editorial boards to circuit boards? Put on your newsboy cap and read on, because Chapo Trap House has the “scoop”!
The first mass-produced newspapers emerged in Germany shortly after the invention of the printing press. They included Relation aller Fürnemmen und gedenckwürdigen Historien (Account of All Distinguished and Commemorable News) and Liste der bekannten Juden (List of Known Jews). These publications disseminated vital information about current affairs to the literate masses.
The concept spread to London, where gazetteers on Fleet Street added such innovations as editorials and the Page 3 Slags. Across the Atlantic, a media culture flourished in the thirteen colonies, where the issues of the day were hotly debated within the pages of newsletters and pamphlets. Among the early commentators was a young publisher’s apprentice named Benjamin Franklin. He was a polymath and the first true American man of letters, in that he generated reams and reams of extremely horny correspondence. As a sexual degenerate who disseminated totally useless advice to the ignorant masses (sample aphorism: “The fool wakes up to the cuckoo’s crow whilst the wise man rises to the songbird of Reason”), Ben Franklin was also our nation’s first pundit.
Out of the colonists’ pamphleteering culture emerged an uncompromising devotion to freedom of speech, which produced such widely read radical polemics as Common Sense and No Taxation Without Fringeless Flags. After the Revolution, ratification of the proposed US Constitution was hotly debated through competing serials such as the Federalist Papers and the vastly more popular Wow. I Had No Idea About These 10 Bills of Rights (Number 6 Will Shock You).
American journalism in the first part of the nineteenth century consisted mostly of libelous attacks on politicians’ illegitimate octoroon children, classified ads for bounties on escaped slaves, and advice columns. Newspapers tended to be partisan outlets, loyal to single-issue parties like the Anti-Masonics and the Hose Down the Irish League. Some periodicals, however, were brave enough to challenge entrenched power. Notable among them was Harper’s Weekly, which ran Thomas Nast’s political cartoons depicting corrupt politicians as rotund gluttons with dollar-sign-adorned bags for heads (part of American media’s long and disgraceful legacy of body-shaming) and showing the Catholic clergy as vicious crocodiles crawling out of the Potomac to hunt for children (part of the American media’s long and honorable tradition of truth-telling). But such publications were few and far between.
In the late Gilded Era a new model emerged, one in which the news could be underwritten by paid ads for Dr. Consham’s Miracle Woman-Hysteria-Curing Tonic and opium-based baby formulas. Media magnates like William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer snatched up local papers and forged the first news conglomerates. Political content slowly sank off their pages, replaced by lurid true-crime stories about debauched women exposing their bare shoulders on the beach, crotchety opinion columns about how Pullman porters weren’t entitled to exorbitant half-penny tips, and, for illiterate consumers, comic strips.
It was also around this time that a Hearst paper led the country into war with Spain on false pretenses through breathless and selective reporting about the sinking of the USS Maine in Havana, a naval accident that was spun as evidence of Spanish aggression against America.
At a penny per copy, papers publishing such sensationalistic “yellow journalism” sold extremely well. But some readers craved more than just bulletins about Italian-on-Italian crimes and daily reports of President Taft’s expanding waistline. Yellow papers could also be serious as well, as several Hearst titles published accounts of Bella Allabonne, a seven-year-old trapped in war-torn Belgium who urged President Wilson to “do something.”
The Progressive movement spawned a class of hard-nosed investigative journalists who dedicated their lives to rooting out corruption, challenging the entrenched power of monopolists, exposing the horrifying conditions in which the working classes lived, and doing their best to make sure those working classes didn’t breed too prodigiously. Fearless muckrakers like Upton Sinclair, Ida Tarbell, and Jacob Riis showed how dedicated journalists could improve the lives of the millions by doggedly pursuing the truth.
But most journalists were not fearless muckrakers. Ninety-nine percent of newshawks were what we like to call “hacks.”
In this era, long before Columbia J-School and valuable résumé-building unpaid internships, the job of reporting the news was not the province of failsons of the educated upper class like it is today. Instead, most journalists were the children of impoverished immigrants. They were the seventh sons of a proletariat deemed too sickly and weak to pursue a respectable child-labor trade like coal runner or Triangle Shirtwaister. These young cowards were plucked from the slums at an early age and sold to the Hearst Corporation.
The media industry put these amorphous lumps of raw humanity through a brutal baptism by fire. The cubs were instilled with a healthy fear of challenging entrenched power, taught to fairly report on both sides of any given issue—such as women’s suffrage or lynching—and totally sequestered from contact with females so they would emerge from their chrysalides as weird sexual neurotics. The ones who survived earned the right to call themselves bona fide journalists.
Some of them became investigative reporters, adopting the moniker “gumshoe,” a reference to their habit of stopping women on the street and offering to inspect their feet for grime, often even going so far as to offer a thorough tongue-cleaning, free of charge.
The cream of the crop became pundits—regular columnists paid to pontificate about every single issue, with special emphasis on the issues they knew absolutely nothing about. In the rapidly modernizing world of the 1920s, when women’s skirts were getting shorter and wearable tech like polio braces proliferated, the common man relied on these noble perverts to analyze, predict, and explain. To today’s reader, the concept of an individual possessing a perfectly average level of intelligence and education (at best) shitting out half-baked analyses of complex political and social matters to be closely read by millions as if they were the divinely inspired words of a prophet descending a mountaintop may seem absurd. But remember that people were stupid back then and didn’t have Yahoo! Answers and r/legaladvice to explain things to them.
Some examples of punditry from the early twentieth century:
“Union Organizers Are Murdered in Some Parts of the Country, and That’s Okay”
“Why We Need a Second Great War to Toughen Up the Entitled ‘Greatest’ Generation”
“What My Rickshaw Driver Taught Me about Nanking, the Next Up-and-Coming Global Hotspot”
“Limiting the Workweek to Just 80 Hours Will Hurt the People It’s Meant to Help”
“Spanish Flu or Spanish Boo-Hoo? New Influenza Nothing to Worry About”
“We Need to Talk about Al Jolson. Is He Ashamed of Being White?”
“Civility and Compromise: Why the Weimar Republic Will Last for a Thousand Years”
No matter their specialty, these journalists all shared in the belief that their high salaries (seventy-three cents per annum) and total subservience to robber barons made them superior to normal human beings. They knew that their obvious physical and social deficiencies were more than compensated for by the strength of their minds, and that any criticism leveled at them was wholly due to the fact that others were just jealous and intimidated by their massive intelligence. Occasionally one of them would be publicly humiliated by the leaking of their private telegrams to Ida B. Wells, but overall, print scribes were the undisputed alpha males of the media.
Or so it was until the print guys were hit by a wave—a radio wave, to be exact. In the 1920s and ’30s, radio (or “talkies”) emerged as a news medium that could transmit live coverage of sporting events, political rallies, and Hindenburg explosions. With the advent of radio came a new form of slick demagoguery, exemplified by the most popular radio host of the Depression era, fascist anti-Semite Father Charles Coughlin.
Excerpt from a Transcript of The People’s Pulpit Radio Broadcast, August 5, 1938
FATHER CHARLES COUGHLIN: Imagine my surprise when the conspiratorial Hebrew showed himself not just to be a wandering interloper of national affairs, not simply a cancer in our body, but painfully and proudly illogical. Time and time again, I have challenged “comedian” Jack Benny to debate me about his obfuscation about the factual claims I am making. When pressed to prove his claims that Jews are not infecting Caucasian Americans with buggery using pies and seltzer made with dark Talmudic science, he told me to “Take a hike into the lake, pal.” This is the supposedly peaceful and easygoing Yiddish liberalism the media tells us about? Let’s look at the facts: If I were to walk into a lake, I would most likely perish. When I simply ask him if he is using scientifically altered food to make Catholic fathers abandon their families for bathhouses, he issues a death threat. Furthermore, Sid Caesar has yet to condemn this political violence. Tell me this: If they truly believed in the merits of their arguments, why would they avoid a spirited debate?
As if there weren’t enough war waged on Christian men by the psychotic liberal entertainment industry, The Three Stooges Meet the Mummy continues these Jewish-controlled attacks. Tell me, if these are just “comedy talkies,” as abusive Bolshevik liberals insist to me they are in their many letters, why do all three of the Stooges get their feet caught in buckets in this production, thus revealing their location to the clearly Jewish mummy? Why have we seen similar such buffoonery in their previous entries, such as The Three Stooges Meet Frankenstein and Dopes at Sea, wherein their antics defy reason and show them repeatedly humiliated by several varieties of Draculas, Wolfmen, and Negroes? Yet when they encounter other whites such as wealthy dowagers, they attack them with pies. Explain to me how this makes logical sense, that these men would get the better of intelligent Caucasoids but are humiliated by Hebrew-like creatures. You cannot make such a good-faith argument. The “Stooges” are simply that—stooges for the Hollywood Jews who seek to emasculate Christian men by portraying them as mute, dumb, and lame nincompoops who cannot paint a house or even move a heavy safe without saying “humina humina!”
That about does it for today. As always, please share this broadcast with your friends by inviting them over to listen to your radio. ’Bye, guys.
The outbreak of the Second World War gave radio the opportunity to prove it could be used for more than just broadcasting fascist propaganda. Radio correspondents stationed in Europe brought the war right into Americans’ living rooms. A young CBS man named Edward R. Murrow issued gripping dispatches from the Blitz, each one heralded by his signature line, “This is London, brought to you by Stevenson & Sons Goiter-Be-Gone: When you absolutely, positively need your goiter gone before prom night, look for the Stevenson & Sons label.”
After the war, television slowly grew to replace radio as the dominant news medium. Richard Nixon used it to defend his sending his adopted dog, Lamby, back to the shelter. Joe McCarthy used it to broadcast a list of known queers in the State Department, carefully compiled by his cool bachelor friend Roy Cohn. And a handful of brave journalists used it to push back against the preferred narrative of the ruling class. Among them were Martha Rountree of Meet the Press, Huntley and Brinkley of the Huntley-Brinkley Report, and Spy and Spy of Mad Magazine Roundtable. In 1954, addressing a soda jerk in the Annapolis, Maryland, malt shop where he had just been denied a third free refill on his root beer float, Edward Murrow coined the journalist’s creed that would ring through the ages: “Have you no sense of decency, sir?”
It was also around this time that the media led the country into war with Vietnam on false pretenses through breathless and selective reporting about the government’s version of the Gulf of Tonkin incident, a total fabrication that was used as evidence the North Vietnamese had attacked the United States.
Television brought Mr. and Mrs. Middle Class face-to-face with the bedlam of the 1960s: civil rights marchers mauled by dogs, protesters brutalized by Mayor Daley’s thugs outside the 1968 Democratic National Convention, and the seemingly endless torrent of visceral carnage that spewed from Vietnam. As the nation’s folk-poet laureate, Bob Dylan, put it, “Blood on the screen, Mr. Clean, can’t wipe the sheen, with your dope fiend [harmonica solo].”
The terror in Indochina—massacres of innocents, soldiers fragging their commanding officers, endless exports of flag-draped coffins, and torturous comedy radio broadcasts by Robin Williams—gnawed at our nation’s conscience. In an appearance on the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, Davy Jones famously declared, “This war’s a bummer, huh. It’s far out.” Back in Washington, Johnson reputedly said, “If I’ve lost the Monkees, I’ve lost Middle America.”
Meanwhile, in the print media, a different kind of revolution was taking place. At the top of the decade, novelist Theodore White took political reporting to a new level with his behind-the-scenes account of the 1960 election, The Making of the President 1960. Before White, campaign reporters were essentially stenographers, filing dry and matter-of-fact dispatches from the trail (e.g., “Whistle-stop at Akron, Ohio. A waterfowl gets itself embedded in the crevice between Mr. Taft’s hefty bosom and generous gut whilst the candidate was in the middle of a hearty stemwinder against the Polack, much to the amusement of all but the be-periled Ohio Gentleman”).
That all changed when White’s gripping narrative, written in a novelistic style replete with psychological probing of powerful men and careful attention to symbol and conflict, showed that political reporting could be something more contextual and profound than transcription. Namely, it could be about the winners and losers of the week. It could be about which candidates have the “It” factor and which are failing to project strength and vision. About what the candidates’ wives are wearing.
Since White, this new mode of nuanced, analytical political reporting—modulated by the insights of gimlet-eyed pundits—has helped guide voters to the 100 percent correct decision in every single presidential election. Reporters were further freed from the shackles of objectivity by the innovation of New Journalism, ushered in by Tom Wolfe’s landmark Esquire article, “Encomium for the Whisky Slum High-Octane Junkie Rat Mothers Kill Kill!” about the Boy Scout Jamboree. And the drug-laced gonzo reporting of Rolling Stone’s Hunter S. Thompson further allowed egg-shaped pundits with nascent alcohol problems to think of themselves as outlaw rebels.
But journalists didn’t truly reach the apex of esteem until two lowly print reporters brought down a president in their hit investigative series, All the President’s Men.
Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford were just two green reporters working for the legendary Washington Post. Redford’s reporting style was classically handsome in a blond, all-American way, while Hoffman’s writing was offbeat, shaggier, but no less dreamy. These two young guns combined forces to break one of the biggest stories of all time. Along with their memorable editor, the legendary Jason Robards, Hoffman and Redford beat the streets and worked the phones, turning what started out as a minor break-in at the Democratic Party’s national headquarters into a conspiracy that went all the way to the White House. The reporting in All the President’s Men is a popcorn classic that still holds up to this day.
With the reputation of the federal government and the military shattered after Watergate and Vietnam, journalism emerged as the most respected institution in the country. In the public imagination—and in their own—reporters and pundits were finally perceived as whisky-slugging alpha dogs, fearlessly challenging the powers that be, beating up sources in dark alleyways, and bedding woman after woman. By the end of the 1970s, they could carry themselves as thought leaders, opinion makers, and sex symbols. In children’s bedrooms across the country, posters of Gerald Ford, Gen. Westmoreland, and Lt. Calley came down, to be replaced by cheesecake pinups of Rowland Evans and Robert Novak.
Journalists spent the coke-fueled 1980s living the dream. The nascent twenty-four-seven cable news channel CNN put frowzy pundits in front of cameras, increasing their celebrity and vanity. Meanwhile, America elected a Hollywood actor president, and unflinching, heroic newsmen got to the bottom of Iran-Contra, the S&L crisis, and AIDS denialism by demanding that Reagan tell them folksy stories about being friends with Tip O’Neill.
It was also just a little later that the media led the country into a war with Iraq on false pretenses through breathless and selective reporting on Saddam’s regime, claiming it dumped Kuwaiti babies out of incubators—a total fabrication that was used as evidence the Iraqis were committing grotesque war crimes against an American ally.
The Gulf War and the O. J. Simpson trial, two high-budget TV specials produced by CNN, generated massive ratings for cable news, encouraging the establishment of imitators like MSNBC and Fox News. Conservative talk radio gave voice to the millions of reactionary white men who couldn’t speak for themselves due to their mouths being stuffed with hoagies. The good ol’ print world boomed as well, with innovative new magazines springing up, such as George, founded by John F. Kennedy Jr., and Brill’s Content, founded by Steven Brill and sadly shuttered in 2001 for being too successful. Over in the UK, so-called lad mags like Council Bottoms, Fanny Mates, and Rude exploded in popularity. Even photojournalists got into the action by murdering Princess Diana.
Events like the Oklahoma City bombing, the Columbine massacre, and the White House–Lewinsky drama whetted the public’s appetite for more stories, more gossip, more context, and more baseless speculation. Ad revenue was through the roof. The New York Times commissioned an $850 million skyscraper in Midtown Manhattan. In the words of Times publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., “The good times for newspapers will never, ever end.”
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.
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.
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 usually 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.
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.)
Though Sullivan still clung to dumb, Third Way, Simpson-Bowles–style domestic politics, he’d become a vocal opponent of everything from the drug war to interventions in Libya and Syria to support for Israel. He never did kick that race science, though, even as Obama’s #1 fan. And sure enough, recent years have once again soured Sullivan’s brand as he dispenses five-thousand-word essays about how Plato would likely blame Donald Trump’s election on college kids who want to assign pronouns to your yogurt.
As you can probably tell, the blog era was a shot in the arm for the conservative commentariat. But there were still some lefties and liberals in the mix—least of all the progressive hub Daily Kos, founded by a young clone of Gilbert Gottfried named Markos Moulitsas. Kos was, for its time, a firebrand site that raged not only against the nightmarish Bush machine but also the weak Democrats who enabled barbarism at home and carnage abroad. The bottom-up “Netroots Nation” was hailed as the liberal answer to the resurgent right-wing media embodied by Fox News and their newly recruited army of bloggers like RedState’s Erick Erickson, Town Hall’s vaudeville dummy Ben Shapiro, and the Gateway Pundit, aka the Dying Pundit, a racist invalid who refused to let his myriad terminal illnesses affect his output of xenophobic tirades. Daily Kos fought fire with fire and spoke not for the liberal party elites but for the ponytailed, guitar-owning grassroots.
But once Obama took office, Kos went soft. By the 2016 primary, the site had been completely assimilated by the Borg of the Democratic Party, launching illiterate polemics against anyone who dared to endorse or support the tepid New Deal Democrat Bernie Sanders over the bloodless, focus-grouped, corporate-approved campaign of Hillary Clinton. His brain broken by the 2016 primary, Moulitsas himself now spends his days screaming in the street about “the alt-left” and writing screeds against the distinctly progressive goal of universal health care so as to more effectively exterminate the lumpenproles who voted for Trump: “Be happy for coal miners losing their health insurance. They’re getting exactly what they voted for,” he wrote in December 2016.X
THE YOUNG TURDS
Once the template had been erected by pioneers like Drudge, Sullivan, and Moulitsas, the gate swung open and the children of Yog-Sothoth were now able to pass through into our realm. Thus a fresh generation of unnameable, social-climbing heels were free to parlay their vile ambition and Internet savvy into full-blown careers promoting war and the interests of the unspeakable Elder Gods that spawned them. The New Blogs had arrived.
Perhaps the most successful of these has been the dynamic duo of Matt Yglesias and Ezra Klein, who have gone on to found one of the most influential and infuriating new media properties, an entity you know as Vox.com. Ezra and Matt were liberal wunderkinds who used the nascent medium of blogging to talk about serious issues in “a post-9/11 world” in a hip, cool way, while still getting a pat on the head from teacher. For instance, Ezra would always make sure to lard his blog with Manchurian Candidate–style recitals of how “kind,” “talented,” “smart,” and “reasonable” people like David Brooks were. And why wouldn’t these mooks look up to someone like Brooks? Ezra once described his fellow wizard wonks as “free-traders, interventionists, fiscally conservative, market-friendly peeps.” How do you do, fellow kids?
Still, united by their mutant neoliberal politics, he and Matty had different styles: where Ezra was always a soft touch, Yglesias started his blogging career as a liberal hawk, trying to get the coveted Instapundit link, which meant shitting on weenie human rights types, fantasizing about a war between Islam and the West, and daydreaming of Gitmo prisoners being shot while trying to escape. (Wink, wink.) But for both Ezra and Matt, supporting the Iraq War was never a moral failing on their part but an analytical one. For them, the main question was not “Should the United States invade a country that poses no threat to us and had nothing to do with 9/11?” but was “If we oppose a war every reasonable person supports, how could we possibly look ‘Serious’?” In a 2004 blog post, Ezra explained his support for the war like this:
As Matt and I have both noted in the past, part of what sent us towards the hawk camp was that, without much historical context for what war means, we simply evaluated the arguments (and sadly, that means the spokespeople) for the two sides. In that calculus, becoming a hawk seemed not just warranted, but unavoidable. That’s not fair to the doves and not fair to the Democratic party, and while we (hopefully) won’t make the same mistakes again, it’s really incumbent that the anti-war wing funds a media savvy opposition (instead of protests organized by subsidiaries of Maoist groups [read: ANSWER]) so future generations aren’t turned off by the absurdity of their spokespeople.XI
In their own words, they really had no choice. Camp Hawk was where all the “serious” jobs were! You see, if the antiwar side had developed a “savvier” media shop in 2002—instead of simply turning out millions of ordinary people into the streets, all over the world—there’s a good chance they could have given Matt and Ezra the “historical context” that war involves mostly senseless cruelty and slaughter. People like M&E generally regard everything to be a matter of “optics,” and at the time, being against the War on Terrorism would look very, very bad! To their finely calibrated moral and aesthetic compass, the hippies and dopey Marxists shouting in the street looked absurd and clueless, whereas Donald Rumsfeld, Fred Barnes, Bill Kristol, and Paul Wolfowitz looked dignified, smart, and fuckin’ hot to boot.
His credentials as a smooth-brained cretin established, Ezra went on to write for legacy progressive publications like the American Prospect (where he wrote in favor of single-payer health care),XII became WaPo’s resident “wonk,” and finally founded Vox.com (where he wrote against single-payer health care).XIII Matty, meanwhile, managed to con editor after editor into allowing him to write books about things he knew less than nothing about. Reinventing himself as a business expert, a foreign policy expert, a Bangladeshi factory expert,XIV and a housing policy expert, he eventually joined Ezra to found a website whose purpose is to “explain the news.”
Of course, along the way, they both wrote lukewarm mea culpas for their Iraq days. Ezra came up with this rather novel excuse: “Rather than looking at the war that was actually being sold, I’d invented my own Iraq war to support—an Iraq war with different aims, promoted by different people, conceptualized in a different way and bearing little resemblance to the project proposed by the Bush administration. In particular, I supported Kenneth Pollack’s Iraq war.” XV In other words, Ezra was like the autistic boy in the finale of St. Elsewhere, the war he supported existing only inside his little snow globe. Meanwhile, Yglesias also blamed Kenneth Pollack’s 2002 book The Threatening Storm—the Turner Diaries for the liberal-hawk set—as just being too damn convincing! In 2017, Yggy smugly announced that he is now “against all war,” having had this elementary moral breakthrough at thirty-six years old.
It can’t be stressed enough that Matty and Ezra’s subsequent media careers were direct rewards for their shallow, dim-witted support of the biggest foreign policy disaster of our lifetimes (so far). To join the op-ed industry, like La Cosa Nostra, you become part of an elite brotherhood of murderous sociopaths who dress like shit and eat too much. You have to “get made,” and in This Blog of Ours, you pledge your support to a disastrous and completely unnecessary war the same way mafia thugs burn the likeness of a saint, except instead of a card it’s a city full of people.
But enough about the wonder twins: their friend on the right, Megan McArdle, provides an even more nauseating portrait of the upward trajectory of those who fail in all the right ways. McMegan began her blogging career writing under the pseudonym “Jane Galt,” named after one of the characters in Ayn Rand’s dystopian classic Atlas Farmed: 1984. As a recent college graduate in 2001, Megan—like most of us—figured out if you couldn’t get the job you wanted on Wall Street or in “management consulting,” you could at least spend your hours at the shitty job you do have posting on the Internet.
However, unlike normal people stealing time for wholesome things like playing fantasy football, downloading music on LimeWire, or watching pornography, Megan spent her time as “Jane Galt” on her even more insufferably named blog, Asymmetrical Information, where she was free to share thoughts such as why she had no opinion on gay marriage, even though it’s still bad:
This should not be taken as an endorsement of the idea that gay marriage will weaken the current institution. I can tell a plausible story where it does; I can tell a plausible story where it doesn’t. I have no idea which one is true. That is why I have no opinion on gay marriage, and am not planning to develop one. Marriage is a big institution; too big for me to feel I have a successful handle on it. . . . Is this post going to convince anyone? I doubt it; everyone but me seems to already know all the answers, so why listen to such a hedging, doubting bore? I myself am trying to draw a very fine line between being humble about making big changes to big social institutions, and telling people (which I am not trying to do) that they can’t make those changes because other people have been wrong in the past.XVI
And why the Iraq War will absolutely not cost “trillions of dollars”:
Anyone who’s sat through a budget meeting knows that almost everyone overestimates their successes, underestimates their costs; it’s easier to go back for money later, when you can wave a nice hunk of sunk costs around, than say up front that you think whatever it is you’re proposing will be expensive as hell. But trillions? US GDP is roughly $10 trillion. [Eric Alterman] is saying that over the long run, this war is going to cost us at least 20 percent of GDP. That’s nuts, and it’s not the first time I’ve seen those sorts of numbers around. Reality check: the entire US military budget is in the range of $350b.XVII
In the same post, Megan estimated the death toll to be in the “hundreds” and also blamed critics like James Galbraith for not taking into account the “positive effects” of a war such as increased consumer confidence. As J. Galt, Megan cultivated a unique blogging style that perfectly matched being stupid with thinking your readers are stupid. She would loudly announce her disinterest and lack of expertise in a given subject, and then opine on it at length. Her specialty was laundering hard right-wing free-market ideology behind bullshit “on the one hand, on the other hand” hedging in an unbearably twee writing style.
None of this would be particularly noteworthy amid the sea of mediocrity that was the early blogosphere. However, Megan truly distinguished herself when she called for Iraq War protesters to be literally beaten in the streets:
I’m too busy laughing. And I think some in New York are going to laugh even harder when they try to unleash some civil disobedience, Lenin style, and some New Yorker who understands the horrors of war all too well picks up a two-by-four and teaches them how very effective violence can be when it’s applied in a firm, pre-emptive manner.XVIII
Damn, that is some asymmetrical information! When she was eventually called out for these ghoulish sentiments, Megan claimed she was only talking about violent protesters and then brought up the volunteer work she did at Ground Zero and her high school boyfriend who was killed on 9/11 by Saddam Hussein.
After a few years of arguing that poverty is caused by inner-city types not getting married and skewering all forms of social welfare, government regulation, consumer protection, child labor laws, and anyone who opposed the Iraq War with her snark-tastic wit, McMegan got the call: she was leaving the minors to join the Economist as a professional blogger. Like Yglesias, she would then go on to blog at the Atlantic, covering “business and economics” amid personable, relatable digressions about the dangers of using a Kindle in the bathtub, the problems caused by being tall, having a cold, and waiting on line for Apple products. As in her Iraq War days, she used her Criswell-like powers to advise readers “not to panic” about the sudden contraction in the financial markets in 2007. When the entire market collapsed a year later, she dutifully churned out post after post absolving bankers of any criminal or moral wrongdoing and blaming the crisis on government regulation and the individual avarice of greedy homeowners and borrowers.
Following her stint at the Atlantic, Megan fused with the Kuato-like mutant that was the Daily Beast/Newsweek, where her biggest hit was a four-thousand-word meditation post–Sandy Hook on why we should condition children to do human wave attacks on mass shooters:
I’d also like us to encourage people to gang rush shooters, rather than following their instincts to hide; if we drilled it into young people that the correct thing to do is for everyone to instantly run at the guy with the gun, these sorts of mass shootings would be less deadly, because even a guy with a very powerful weapon can be brought down by 8–12 unarmed bodies piling on him at once.XIX
Her writing was so smart and good that she got a massive salary boost at Bloomberg View.XX There, she now shares Patrick Bateman–style reviews of kitchen appliances in between columns about how hundreds burning to death in an inadequately regulated firetrap isn’t really anyone’s fault because they could have eventually died some other way.
McMegan is truly the perfect model for new media #successwin: she shows that demonstrating an adequate level of contempt for your readers, the universe, and the human race will get you noticed and hired by people even more evil than you, i.e., the demons who own and run media companies. After all, Matty and Ezra now run their own company at Vox, and why shouldn’t they? They’re smart, serious, know more than you do—and, what’s more, they hold the keys to your new career as an opinion explainer.
We’ve been tough on the grand tradition of American media, but honestly, almost any part of its history was probably light-years better than the garbage that emerged in the mid-2000s. A couple good eggs pushed through: Gawker was a genuine example of an independent media company that skewered basically all the right assholes sucking off the political and media establishment. Sprinkled elsewhere were plenty of fresh non-bougie bloggers, many of whom managed to leverage careers out of their writing, and good on them.
But for the most part, the blogosphere was a league of pathetic, repulsive morons who mastered a technology every child knows how to use and used it to become the new generation of talking heads thanks to credulous media executives at CNN and the Washington Post. Don’t take it from us—take it from human toothbrush Ezra himself, reminiscing on his early blog, Tapped: “Without Tapped, there would certainly be no Vox.” As Ben Smith pointed out, besides the radical Left, virtually all factions’ boats were lifted by a tide of shit: led by right-wing blobs like Erick Erickson, smug careerists like Yglesias, and just plain dumbasses like Chris Cillizza, the blog boys piloted journalism into a newer, even more idiotic frontier of toxic hackery.
The fresh, sleek presentation of new media—held together with fictitious venture capital and sponsored content like “Why It Takes a Pregnant STEM Graduate to Build the Perfect Missile” or “What My Poly Triad Breakup in Big Sur Taught Me about the Smooth, Low-Key Independence of the Ford Focus”—is a departure from journalism’s humble past, but no one can deny that it retains the goofiness of its origin. The future may hold horrors for the blogmasters, whether it’s everyone finally figuring out that no one buys stuff from online ads, young people seeking op-eds further left than Steny Hoyer, or a disastrous accidental reply-all e-mail wherein every single editor accidentally sends hentai to senior White House sources. Indeed, the night is dark and full of blog fails, and these thought leaders are waddling into an uncertain world that may spell the end of their line. But as it is written in The Blogger’s Code (2004):
Let ye wander into lands unknown
Let commenter and blogger moan
Post in light, post in dark
From Ebaum’s World
All th’way to Fark
We know not what the road betrays
But only in our blogging ways
Let ye screen illuminate the path
Before ye wife unleashes wrath
Blog forever, and in honor
I. Krugman’s column, disappeared from the regular Internet, can still be found here: http://web.archive.org/web/19980610100009/www.redherring.com/mag/issue55/economics.html.
II. Stolen.
III. Original.
IV. Allegedly.
V. Ben Smith, “My Life in the Blogosphere,” BuzzFeed, January 28, 2015, https://www.buzzfeed.com/bensmith/this-is-my-blog?utm_term=.ufPmlmOWb#.ghlvQv9mY.
VI. Jonathan Dee, “Right-Wing Flame War!” New York Times Magazine, January 21, 2010.
VII. “Fact Check: Johnson’s ‘Saint Pancake’ Comment Stood for Years,” Diary of Daedalus (blog), December 7, 2011, https://thediaryofdaedalus.com/2011/12/07/fact-check-johnsons-saint-pancake-comment-stood-for-years/.
VIII. Andrew Sullivan, “ABC News’ John Miller Likens Bin Laden to Teddy Roosevelt,” Daily Dish, September 19, 2001 (1:59 a.m.).
IX. Andrew Sullivan, “Today,” Daily Dish, September. 11, 2001 (9:46 p.m.).
X. Markos Moulitsas, “Be Happy for Coal Miners Losing Their Health Insurance. They’re Getting Exactly What They Voted For,” Daily Kos, December 12, 2016.
XI. This post is now offline, but Will has a screenshot.
XII. Ezra Klein, “The Health of Nations,” American Prospect, April 22, 2007.
XIII. Ezra Klein, “Bernie Sanders’s Single-Payer Plan Isn’t a Plan at All,” Vox, January 17, 2016.
XIV. Matthew Yglesias, “Different Places Have Different Safety Rules and That’s OK,” Slate, April 24, 2014.
XV. Ezra Klein, “Mistakes, Excuses and Painful Lessons From the Iraq War,” Bloomberg View, March 19, 2013.
XVI. Jane Galt, aka Megan McArdle, “A Really, Really, Really Long Post about Gay Marriage That Does Not, in the End, Support One Side or the Other,” Asymmetrical Information, April 2, 2005, http://archive.today/DL3ja.
XVII. Jane Galt, aka Megan McArdle, “How Much Is the War Going to Cost?” Asymmetrical Information, March 23, 2003, https://archive.is/GSvUm.
XVIII. Jane Galt, aka Megan McArdle, “Bring It On,” Asymmetrical Information, February 13, 2003, https://archive.is/Yitep.
XIX. Megan McArdle, “There’s Little We Can Do to Prevent Another Massacre,” Daily Beast, December 17, 2012.
XX. As of publication, McMegan has failed upward again, this time at the Washington Post.