In today’s Morning Jolt, I asked whether the malevolent actions of Alex Jones were partially fueled and exacerbated by the fact that he knew he had an audience, hungry for whatever nutty conspiracy theory he would offer. As I describe from witnessing him at the 2016 Republican convention, Jones’ rise and continued prominence was helped along by a literal pack of reporters following him everywhere and eager to showcase Jones’ lunacy to their own audiences.
Today Parker Molloy offers a spectacular tour of mainstream media institutions that gave Jones a short-lived soapbox, and asks whether any of these powerful media voices realized what they were doing at the time.
That is the message that seems to be lost on Jones’s many “I may disagree with him, but…” defenders. It doesn’t matter if 90% of your audience thinks he’s a nutcase. He doesn’t care. It doesn’t matter if you “win the issue” or “expose” him as a liar. None of that matters at all to him because he lives in an alternative reality. All that ABC, CNN, and NBC did in these cases was help make Jones a household name, guaranteeing him more subscribers and a larger profile moving forward. It’s a numbers game, and Jones knows it. If he goes on TV and gets “exposed,” that’s fine, too, as it gives him something he can go back to his viewers with. Remember: these are people who hear the lies and nonsense he peddles and watch him, anyway. He’ll do what he always does in these situations and go back to them so he can claim that “corporatists” and “globalists” sabotaged him; it will only harden his viewers’ resolve to trust him and only him.
It’s a game, and as long as you invite Jones to play, he wins.
As you’ve likely learned in your time on this earth, the world is full of bright, fascinating, original, thought-provoking, learned, creative, and sane people, who rarely get much time in the spotlight. We’ve all seen researchers, writers, authors, bloggers, scientists, artists, academics, and idiosyncratic geniuses who we feel should be more well-known and discussed than they are. But for some reason, our media world seems much more interested in the latest news about a Kardashian, or some so-called “social media influencers” or a provocation from a professional outrage-monger, like Alex Jones.
Molloy accurately observes:
The press is powerful, and when it elevates people with abhorrent views, it provides them with an opportunity that very, very, very few people get.
I’m not asking anyone in media to stop covering important individuals.
I’m not asking anyone in media to “ban” anyone.
I am asking people in media to understand that their editorial decisions, from who gets invited to appear on talk shows to what topics we actually hear about in the news (and how often), are not value-neutral.
We’re simultaneously told that a figure as abhorrent as Richard Spencer should be “deplatformed” from social media… and at the same time, that figure should be invited onto CNN to discuss whether Trump’s tweets are racist. (Spencer argued that Trump’s tweets were indeed racist, but he was disappointed that Trump’s racist words were not being backed up by racist actions.) Does anyone in media recognize the contradiction here? “These people must not be allowed to influence public opinion by showcasing their views on a large media platform… but it’s okay for us to have them as guests, to showcase their views.”