This week was long and punishing but that's the point.There's a tendency to give credit to Trump and believe that the chaos coming from the White House is of the controlled variety. The great John Herrman wrote about this 'Trump as Chessmaster' phenomenon in the New York Times, which you should read.
And I'm not trying to assign any undue strategy to Trump but I would argue that he and others have probably thought about the effect that a breakneck news cycle has on journalists. Just as a number of journalists have said that the WH has planted misinfo to trip up exhausted journalists, I'd argue there's a compelling case that the news cycle-setting tweets are designed to keep the wheels spinning fast in newsrooms until they fall off. That's certainly something the pro-Trump media are thinking about. Here's one example:
"Breitbart is over." Or at least that's what Chuck Johnson emailed me this week when I asked him about the site's firing of Katie McHugh (after some incendiary tweets post last weekend's London terror attack). But the firing is just one moment in a tough year so far for Breitbart. After a hell of a 2016, Breitbart was poised to be a definitive news org of the Trump White House. But so far they've failed to set the agenda, break stories, or even hold the White House accountable. I talked to a bunch of pro-Trump media folks on Monday and Tuesday and asked them about this:
Jack Posobiec — a pro-Trump Twitter personality — echoed that sentiment. "People in MAGA world don't really look to [Breitbart] for breaking news as much as they used to. It's more like The Hill or Roll Call," he said.
In pro-Trump circles, that perceived pivot may prove to be enough to turn away devoted readers. "New right" blogger Mike Cernovich noted that "the media market has no need right now for another Hill," he said. "We need more sites like what Breitbart was and what the Daily Caller is doing. It's a massive mistake to try to pivot to the mainstream, especially if you're on the right."
What the pro-Trump media learned from Comey: The former FBI director's testimony was the big news of the week and in the end, both sides of the aisle left the event with their own (opposite) interpretation of events. For the pro-Trump media, the takeaways were: the New York Times is fake news & Trump is vindicated.
CNN's Oliver Darcy and Tom Kludt did a a nice roundup of the pro-Trump reaction to the testimony, which I suggest you read. I want to focus for one moment on the New York Times 'fake news' element.
Short recap: during his testimony, Comey suggested that a Times story from February — which reported that Trump campaign aides had repeated contact with Russian intelligence — was "in the main...not true."
Why it's important: The pro-Trump media is not a formal entity. It's disparate and it's not coordinated. It's full of all kinds of personalities with their own goals and motivations — some of which aren't even attached to President Trump. But what truly unites the pro-Trump media is the desire to destroy the MSM.
And Comey's testimony — despite whether or not the Times story is accurate (and the Times is standing by its story forcefully) — is powerful ammunition in this fight. Especially, with regard to anonymous sourcing. The Times piece in question relies on anonymous sources — a standard practice with sensitive information like this but one that most casual readers don't understand.
For example: the Times' Executive Editor, Dean Baquet has said before in interviews that "I always know who the sources are for these stories." And of course he does! People in journalism know the painstaking efforts that are taken to protect high level sources. But there's data to suggest (as we've written here before) that a huge percentage of Americans disagree with anonymous sourcing and, in many situations, "think reporters are simply making up those sources."
So when the pro-Trump media — which has been leading the charge calling the Times, Washington Post, CNN, and most other MSM sources "fake news" — saw the Comey admission, it was, in many ways more potent than any Comey revelation, including that Donald Trump was at no point personally under FBI investigation. You can see this in the reaction where everyone from Drudge to Cernovich to Hannity to Laura Ingraham seized on this narrative for the better part of two days.
Those anonymous sources again! There seems to be a reluctance inside places like the Times to try and better educate readers about anonymous sources in the Trump era. Though the talking point in the mainstream media institutions is that they're 'working hard to restore trust' with readers — there seem to be few actual attempts to do that in practice. There've been focus-group approved new slogans, which help sell subscriptions but what seems to be lacking is a way to let readers know (in the copy of a story or in an addendum of some kind) exactly why sourcing has been protected.
And while it may seem straightforward or like it's pandering to the lowest common denominator, there's clearly an issue and its one that seems like it could be ameliorated with any number of technical fixes (for example: mouse over a "according to one source" bit of text in a story and get a few sentence explainer about publisher policy on anon sources and an editor's/reporter's note about why it was used here).
I'm not sure what the answer is but it feels like a problem worth at least attempting to solve. I think part of the problem is that there's a lack of understanding of just how bad the anonymous sourcing trust really is.
Which brings us to things like The Media Equality Project.
The MEP — according to its own description — is "dedicated to fighting back against an unprecedented, well-funded campaign by the left to silence conservative opposition voices." It recently launched a GoFundMe page to build a website to fund its operation and has raised $76k of its $80k goal in 9 days by 1,451 people (I don't link to any particular crowdfunding pages, so you're on your own to Google).
It appears to be connected in some way with "Stop the Scalpings" which is a Twitter account that might best be described as an Anti-Media Matters. At any rate, it's goal seems to be to attack the mainstream media's credibility with its own media apparatus. And its funders are pretty excited about it. Here's just one example from a donor:
Big week for pro-Trump crowdfunding! After McHugh was axed from Breitbart, she started up a collection on the far-right crowdfunding and bounty site Wesearchr (owned by Chuck Johnson). She's got bills to pay and salacious things to say about Muslims, says McHugh.
And a new alt-right crowdfunding site has emerged. It's called Counter.Fund and it seems to have support from folks like Richard Spencer, comedian Sam Hyde, and Roosh V who identifies himself as a "Neo-masculinity writer." The gist:
Which...honestly...sounds overly complicated! But regardless of whether it takes off: Counter.Fund and Wesearchr and the Media Equality Project highlight an important trend in the pro-Trump movement. And that's multiple attempts to organize and raise money and capitalize on the groundswell of support they have across the internet. And it's worth noting that the favorite target of all of them appears to be the MSM.
More weird sourcing on Trump Twitter bot stories. NY Daily News has a piece from Saturday that suggests billionaire conservative donor Robert Mercer is behind the Trump Twitter bot scourge. But the piece is super thinly sourced. I wrote last week about how the freakout over Trump Twitter bots is overblown. And how humans are the real problem.
Alex Jones and Megyn Kelly (jfc, TV reporters need to stop taking awkward pictures like this with their interview subjects):
Megyn Kelly has so far decided to use her new Sunday news magazine show to score big name interviews with professional trolls. Last week it was Putin. This week she interviewed Alex Jones (which is slated to air at a later date). Jones had a small meltdown post interview on his show and went off on Kelly in a typically misogynistic way, calling her “Not feminine -- cold, robotic, dead. I felt zero attraction to Megyn Kelly.”
He then made some gross comments about her sitting in Trump's lap — which spoke volumes about Jones' inexperience being around famous/powerful women than anything else.
That said: It doesn't seem like Kelly understands Jones (or trolls for that matter). For one, she interviewed Jones and then gave him the chance to go first and discuss the the interview on his show. Here's how he spun it (transcript from Media Matters):
Jones declared Kelly’s interview of him to be “fake news” and said of the show’s producer: “I felt like the lady that’s the lead producer -- nice southern belle lady, older lady -- is like somebody that leads you to the gas chamber, or to the hangman’s noose, or to the electric chair. They comfort you, give you your last meal.”
Jones continued complaining about the interview later in the show, suggesting that Kelly is associated with the “New World Order” conspiracy theory and claiming that she “was kind of snickering about world government and forced population control.”
Never let Alex Jones go first.
More thoughts on this after the interview airs, I promise!
I guess it's technically two words but I'm just one man and it's Sunday and I'm writing this so deal with it. Breitbart sets the tone (they're very emoji happy lately...) and the rest follow:
Why the pro-Trump media needs the MSM. The New York Times dropped into the pro-Trump media world last night with a piece tracing how a Jack Posobiec kicked off a whole conservative news cycle. The piece contained critical descriptions of Posobiec and the whole Pro-Trump media ecosystem. But when it came out, Posobiec seemed somewhat delighted by the whole thing. Here's how he spun it:
Takeaway: this isn't exactly a novel conclusion but this particular instance highlights that even though pro-Trump media wants to destroy the MSM, it revels in the exposure it gets when The Paper Of Record takes notice. 
Lastly! A thing I wrote this week about the race to be the top reply to a Trump tweet.
Replying to Trump on Twitter is a very weird growth hack because 2017 is a dystopia.
Good things you should read this week:
A nice interactive by the Washington Post on cable news chyrons during the Comey hearing and what they were saying and at what time. Cable chyron writers arguably have one of the most important jobs in journalism right now (oof).
This Twitter thread by my colleague Joe Bernstein on how 4chan trolls found an old, out of context tweet by journalist Julia Ioffe and tried to turn it into a full-fledged scandal.
NOT sharing this because I think it's good but because it is something I think people should read. It's a few weeks old and it's ostensibly about the Montana reporter bodyslam but it's really conservative venting about how liberals have coarsened culture and how they're tired of pretending to be above it and are ready to "hate [liberals] right back." I think this piece gets a lot wrong but it's also eye-opening to see this opinion (which I'm sure is widely shared) laid out so starkly. Worth your time.
Until next week!