The media, with Rolling Stone the latest player, are waging a coup against pop culture.
Media distrust not only applies to political journalism; entertainment journalism has also been infected by the profession’s corruption as demonstrated in Rolling Stone’s recent 4,757-word takedown of filmmaker Zack Snyder. It’s the latest example of the elite media’s peculiar attack on a populist movement by demonizing fans of Snyder’s superhero movies — especially the epic, full-length restoration Zack Snyder’s Justice League, one of the very best American films this century.
This media coup against popular passion started with the benign oddity of Snyder films’ winning two commendations at last spring’s Academy Awards ceremony: #OscarsCheerMoment for the “Flash Speed Force” scene in ZSJL and #OscarsFanFavorite for Snyder’s Netflix project Army of the Dead.
There was hardly enough time to assess the Motion Picture Academy’s breaking of precedent and desperate groveling after viewership — by initiating an Internet-based vox pop distinct from the regular Oscars — before corporate media, including Hollywood’s trade press, began to question the legitimacy of those surprise wins. Snyder’s films beat out the more lucrative, media favorites, Avengers: Endgame and SpiderMan: Take Me Home. So it is curious that Rolling Stone — no longer a cultural beacon after the collapse of pop music and music criticism — renounced the special triumph of art over commercialism. Instead, the deep-dive article exhibited the media partisanship of which we are increasingly suspect. In what is now referred to as “Snydergate,” it deployed bias against Snyder and his artistic handling of the DC Comics Universe.
As with the Russia Russia Russia hoaxes and the J6 show trials, Snydergate shows corporate media working against the public’s best interests. Snyder’s singular resistance to comic-book movie formula is demeaned along with any taste that select media disapproves of as deplorable.
Rolling Stone’s Tatiana Siegel used the same investigative-journalism approach that’s seemed shady ever since Woodward and Bernstein glorified themselves for taking down Nixon’s presidency. Siegel hides her snark and disbelief behind dubious “facts.” First doubting the validity of Snyder’s Oscar victory, Siegel alleged behind-the-scenes industry skullduggery, accusing Snyder of using fake bots on social media to wage ad hominem attacks against Warner Bros. executives — specifically Geoff Johns and Jon Berg — who impeded Snyder’s plans for DCU. (He had been chosen to design the “architecture” connecting films in the franchise until the suits rescinded his leadership and vision.)
Siegel then discredited Snyder’s Oscar victories by implying they resulted from his personal intrigue, his plot of corporate revenge after Warner Bros. released the first version of Justice League (botched by industry hack Joss Whedon).
Rolling Stone’s allegations of social-media shenanigans resemble the now obvious Democratic Party strategy of accusing others of your own tactics: The magazine enlisted three cybersecurity firms that track social-media traffic (Q5id, Graphika, and the Alethea Group) to “fact-check” the authenticity of the #ReleaseTheSnyderCut hashtag that had gone viral, thus probably ensuring the Oscar victories. That boon for democracy was unexpected — and undesired by corporate bureaucrats and their media flunkies.
The beauty and power of Snyder’s cinematic vision are what matters most, but Rolling Stone’s allegation of showbiz treachery demonstrates how venal media operatives (always corporate allies) can be. Rolling Stone demonizes Snyder because his artistry doesn’t fit the rampant Gnosticism of Snyder’s competitor, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which godless corporate media endorses.
If Siegel’s interference in show business, using Rolling Stone’s prominence to corroborate mainstream attacks on Snyder, seems familiar, that’s because it is indeed similar to the excuses and recriminations used in political monkey business.
Notice how Siegel employs J6 Committee insinuations when defaming the use of social media by Snyder supporters as though they were conservative protesters: She mentions threats against the “safety of [Warner Bros.] employees,” even implying criminal misconduct (accusing Snyder of stealing his own intellectual property from his Warner Bros. employers).
Fact is, Siegel stooges for Warner Bros., just as corporate media does for the Biden regime. She’s a trade-war assassin known for besmirching entertainment figures Scott Rudin, Amber Heard, and others, working in the same gotcha manner as Taylor Lorenz and the short-lived Disinformation Governance Board (DGB) czar Nina Jankowicz. Siegel’s sinister gossip invokes the anti-racketeering RICO act — a vicious counter to Internet-fan democracy. It’s she who weaponizes the social-media enthusiasm that should be seen as a victory of popular taste over mass indoctrination.
Snyder’s double Oscar win was stirring. It was like those J6 crowd scenes — the ones before the chaos at the Capitol — that evoked what Griffith, DeMille, and Fritz Lang understood about the power of surging, justifiably emboldened crowds whose flowing banners (plus peaceable “Jesus Saves” signs) tell a different democratic story than the one that the corporate media want us to swallow.
Check out the merits of ZSJL’s Oscar-certified “Speed Force” scene where The Flash (Ezra Miller) runs so fast that he reverses time. It’s a rare example where an image’s visceral impact is also emotionally rousing — it makes viewers cheer. Snyder depicts the emotional intensity that Flash and Cyborg (Ray Fisher) feel, suspended in their ethical teamwork, just as Homer described Achilles and Patroclus in The Iliad. In Marvel films, ticket buyers merely check off the routine fights, chases, explosions, and F/X they’ve been trained to expect — a jaded response to stimuli, not to mythology or art.
Publications from Vanity Fair to Vox have deemed the #ReleaseTheSnyderCut fans as a “toxic” movement. Rolling Stone reinforces that insult in order to claim control of popular consensus. Such rotten journalism is shockingly analogous to what’s destroyed confidence in our political media, similarly focused on favoring or renouncing election results according to their partisan preference. Siegel ends her Rolling Stone attack with tyrannical fear, quoting a cybersecurity “expert” worried about “the court of public opinion.” This replaces criticism and aesthetics. It’s cultural politics because in the end, Snydergate is all about power.
