Presumably, Tracey’s superiors at VICE aren’t big fans of “I-told-you-so” moments, and quickly found an excuse to get rid of him after the election. They didn’t even care that his readership appeared to be growing. He had to go. Unwilling to be as blatant in their pro-Clinton bias as Huffington Post, VICE instead opted to fire Tracey after he pointed out that Lena Dunham could not have participated in the closed Democratic primary in New York because she was not registered with the party. VICE fired him for reprinting a screenshot of publicly accessible, easily searchable voter registration data.123
I don’t think Tracey or Seaman will end up with their careers particularly damaged in the long-term. They were right, and the furious progressive editors who fired them were wrong. They won’t want for employment in the new media ecosystem. But in addition to creating a chilling effect in the mainstream media, where journalists decline to defy the narrative out of fear for their jobs, it also shows how committed the mainstream media is to remaining in its cycle of error. The few reporters who do see past the biases of the bubble are purged. And so, the cycle continues.
Nevertheless, I have good news for Japan’s politicians, and for anyone else wondering where to look for truth in this new age of progressive propaganda masquerading as impartial journalism. You see, as virtue signaling intensifies and the Overton window—the range of ideas acceptable in political discussion—grows ever narrower, it’s no longer just the cranks and the UFO-hunters who are left outside the mainstream. Journalists and fact-hunters who actually do know what’s going on in the world are left outside too. If you want to know when the next Donald J. Trump is coming around the corner, all you have to do is find them.
I am of course referring to myself, to my former colleagues at Breitbart, to my new comrades at MILO Inc., and to my fellow travelers in the anti-establishment press. The very people and publications that are frantically decried by the opposition as “fake news.” They don’t understand why our star is rising and theirs is falling—it’s because we’re upfront about our opinions and priorities, and are committed to reporting the stories that the discredited mainstream media routinely ignores.
We also have respect for our readers. Unlike most of the press, we don’t look down our noses at ordinary Americans.
I made many mistakes in my youth: dropping out of college, spending too much time blowing drug dealers, not resisting Father Michael’s advances, but picking journalism as a career was probably the biggest one.
It’s certainly not a path I’d advise anyone else to take, unless you fancy answering to miserable, soft-spoken nerds in plaid shirts who want you to convince the public that Islam is nothing to be worried about and “mansplaining” is a serious threat to women.
If you are a journalist, tell the truth. Your career options will be limited initially, but honesty pays off where it matters—with the public. And you don’t even have to be right-wing! I trust anti-establishment leftists like Michael Tracey far more than National Review or Red State columnists, who revealed themselves during the campaign to be little more than watered-down versions of the virtue-signaling mainstream.
The alternative media is increasingly difficult to ignore. Breitbart, for example, maintained the top spot in political news on Facebook and Twitter for most of the 2016 election year. Despite the best efforts of biased Silicon Valley CEOs to silence our leading voices, we are the ones that people want to share, and we are the ones people want to hear.
During my career as a tech journalist in Europe, I quickly learned that tech journalism is a corrupt mess populated by hacks. Then during GamerGate we learned the gaming press is a corrupt mess populated by hacks not interested in the hobby, merely in politicizing it. Now during this election I’ve learned that the entire mainstream media is a corrupt mess populated by hacks pushing the political views of those in power with zealotry and mendacity.
Just a few years ago, you’d have been laughed out of the room for saying stuff like that. Now everyone knows it’s true.
FAKE NEWS
You would expect the mainstream media to show a little humility after Trump’s victory. Instead, they opted to double down, in an ill-conceived attempt to take vengeance on those who humiliated them. Their efforts have backfired completely.
Instead of asking themselves why they lost people’s trust, the media instead asked why the people had lost trust in them. A subtle, but important difference.
The media decided that the people had been duped because they were listening to, reading, and watching—shock, horror!—alternative media. Something had to be done. But what? Well, the mainstream media could always engage with the alternative media and its arguments directly—but that would require facts, evidence, debate, open-mindedness, and other long-forgotten qualities.
So they didn’t do that.
The media could always start listening to its readers again, by reopening comment sections and engaging with what they had to say, rather than writing off all criticism as “trolling.” But that would require humility and the ability to admit that perhaps those backward losers in the flyover states knew something they didn’t.
So they didn’t do that.
In the days following the presidential election, the media seized on a new meme emerging from left-wing academics and analysts desperate for a reason to absolve them of responsibility for losing America.
That meme was “fake news”—the idea that Donald Trump had won because of the power of social media to spread misinformation. Voter’s anger at elites wasn’t legitimate, it was all because of the alternative media—sorry, I mean fake news sites—and mean-spirited lies about poor Hillary.
A few examples of genuine fake news (sites that create fake stories for clicks and ad revenue, like the sites with the extra suffix “.co”: abcnews.com.co, DrudgeReport.com.co, MSNBC.com.co) were seized upon by the media to prove the existence of a wider problem. Two false stories about high-profile endorsements of Trump (from Pope Francis and Denzel Washington) and one activist’s mistaken photo about bussed-in anti-Trump protesters in Austin, Texas were used to paint a picture of a deluded electorate.
Breitbart didn’t report on any of those stories. But, along with InfoWars, Prison Planet, The Blaze, Project Veritas, Private Eye, The Independent Journal Review, World Net Daily, and ZeroHedge, Breitbart was placed on a list compiled by a left-wing academic of so-called “fake news sites.”124 It wasn’t just the alternative media either—even more liberal independent sites like Red State and the Daily Wire made the list.