Welcome back to Infowarzel! It's been a huge couple weeks for subscribers during our hiatus (where I feverishly followed Alex Jones around Texas for this profile). Thank you to all who subscribed and for Columbia Journalism Review which listed Infowarzel as a must read newsletter! Now, forward into the fever swamp!
What Happens When The Pro-Trump Media Get Actual Scoops?
This week I wrote about the phenomenon of trolls like Mike Cernovich and Jack Posobiec and Chuck Johnson getting some real scoops. If you only read two bits of it, I'd suggest these:
And"For all the understandable hand-wringing about the legitimization of the pro-Trump media, its rise makes perfect sense: Their people are in the White House. Trump, clichéd as it may be, is an effective troll, and he brought with him a troll press corps."
"All of this is uncharted territory. The implications of legitimized, proudly ideological former trolls breaking news and gaining trust could further blur the lines between fact and fiction and lend credence to their older, provably false stories, like Pizzagate."
A more recent example: On Thursday, Infowars' Paul Joseph Watson reported that Spicer was going to be out by week's end. Infowars' track record (it's easily the biggest conspiracy website on the internet) led this to fly well under the radar. Until this AM, when Axios published a big West Wing shakeup "scoop" that is eerily familiar to Infowars'.
PJW's response:
The left has its own fringe media group. As my colleague Joe Bernstein reports, "some of the country’s leading liberal lights — respected figures including elected officials, prominent legal scholars, members of the media, and celebrities — are themselves sharing wild allegations about the Trump administration from unreliable sources."
The Pro-Trump Media Tries To Elect Le Pen, Does Not Succeed.
Last weekend, the pro-Trump figureheads like Jack Posobiec attempted to replicate the homestretch of the 2016 U.S. election, by drawing attention to a trove of hacked documents (#MacronLeaks) that appeared 48 hours before voters went to the polls on 4chan.
The effort was unsuccessful, in part because they, uh, didn't translate any of it into French! My colleague, Ryan Broderick wrote the definitive explainer of all of this. Read it here.
But Let's Not Call It A Failure!
My theory is that the #MacronLeaks campaign was never just about swinging the election, but about undermining the faith in the mainstream media among a generation of young Europeans. Which might be why the hackers waited until just before the 24-hour mandated media quiet period to drop the documents. Basically: they wanted the media to be unable to address the dump so they could claim bias. And if that's the case, we'll have no idea how successful their campaign was for a long time.
My Reporter's Notebook:
Jack Posobiec — who really popularized the #MacronLeaks dump — spoke with me last weekend and said the French media blackout "an old school 19th century thing" and said the media had "taken themselves out of the game in the 4th quarter."
Cernovich had a slightly different/ominous take: "This is a test run - can social media outflank traditional media?"
But the dump was largely ignored in France, raising an important question: just how much does the pro-Trump media depend on the mainstream to survive?
How the Conservative Media Reacted To Comey's Firing
As CNN's Oliver Darcy reported this week, Fox, Breitbart, and others largely towed the line on Trump's controversial dismissal of the FBI director. One nugget in his story about Breitbart sounds very fawning:
"Breitbart, the far-right website previously led by White House chief strategist Steve Bannon, went further. Matthew Boyle, the outlet's Washington editor, contended that the "shocking decision" reflected "the latest in a political outsider's crusade against entrenched Washington."
But what about Russia?! Vox had a slightly different round-up of the conservative media's reaction to Comey. Their take: you can tell a lot about a news source by how and where they mention Comey's investigation into Trump and Russia:
"And then we have the right-leaning news sites. Breitbart talks about Comey’s Russia probe briefly in the 14th paragraph of its story. But there’s no word of Russia at all in the breaking news stories from the Daily Caller, a site started by conservative pundit Tucker Carlson. Glenn Beck’s website, the Blaze, hints vaguely at the investigation, telling readers that 'Comey has been assailed by the left and the right for his recent actions.'"
Thing to watch: Pro-Trump media looking to bring back 'lock her up'
As the Comey news broke, a number of pro-Trump folks had only one thought: Hillary.
How A Shitpost Becomes An Official Piece Of Government Communication (Vol 2.):
Trump fired a shot at Rosie O'Donnell on Twitter this week and everyone freaked out. But the real story here is — as my great colleague Brandon Wall pointed out — where Trump got the insult from (Reddit).
The key takeaways:
1.) Trump's people are *still* closely monitoring r/the_donald!
2). The memecycle is a well-oiled machine and can make its way from the web's underbelly to the President's Twitter feed in under an hour. What a country!
Trend to watch: The Battle for Trump's Mentions
There are TONS of people competing for the top real estate in the mentions of one of his instantly viral tweets. This isn't new but, as Matthew Pearce smartly noticed, the game to be the top mention has taken on a new form: threaded tweets!
Is it a new *content strategy?* One of the handles competing for good position (and winning!) in the replies to Trump's tweet was Tylt, a viral aggregation site owned by Advance Publications, which owns Conde Nast.
The takeaway: the replies to Trump's tweets are the new SEO for politics.
Pro-Trump media is still obsessed with the White House Briefing Room.
Fresh off his #MacronLeaks popularity, Jack Posobiec became the second #Pizzagate champion to enter the briefing room. As I wrote in April, this has driven a number of mainstream media folks CRAZY. But this appears to be something that's here to stay!
Bonus: Read Rosie Gray's piece about Posobiec in the briefing room over in The Atlantic.
Small thing to keep an eye on: Paul Joseph Watson of Infowars seems to be pretty cozy with YouTube mega-star PewDiePie. Paul has a giant following himself on YouTube. Their alliance could be...formidable!
Final thought: Last night I watched the new Netflix documentary, 'Get Me Roger Stone.'
It's terrific and completely and totally required watching for anybody who wants to understand the pro-Trump media. Stone is the originator of the kind of bad faith politics that the pro-Trump media has fully embraced. The style is cynical, ruthless, and dirty. It plays to the fears of a base that they may or may not believe in, and most of all, it's INCREDIBLY effective. Cannot recommend it enough.