Writing about Christian fundamentalists and Republicans in general, journalist Matt Taibbi stated, “Their faith both in God and their political convictions is too weak to survive without an unceasing string of real and imaginary confrontations […] and for those confrontations, they are constantly assembling evidence and facts to make their case.” This was back in 2004 when whipping media consumers into a barbaric and xenophobic frenzy was largely left to the Rush Limbaughs and Sean Hannitys of the world. But what are we to make of a media environment where, according to a survey conducted by the Pew Research Center in September, two-thirds of American adults get their news from social media?
What is one to make of the New York Times’ October 2nd article that examines the spread of fake news in the aftermath of the Las Vegas shooting this week? Whereas Matt Taibbi criticized misinformed editorializing and invective opportunism inspired in part by the fringes of the political spectrum over a decade ago, according to the New York Times, “Over the past few years, extremists, conspiracy theorists and government-backed propagandists have made a habit of swarming major news events, using search-optimized ‘keyword bombs’ and algorithm-friendly headlines” and that these organizations “are skilled at reverse-engineering the ways that tech platforms parse information, and they benefit from a vast real-time amplification.”
Alex Jones’ Infowars website, for example, was in rare form this week, publishing unsubstantiated claims such as, “The Las Vegas shooter didn’t commit suicide as the mainstream media is reporting, but was killed by a FBI hostage rescue team who also found Antifa literature in his hotel room” a day after the October 1st shooting in Las Vegas. The author, Kit Daniels, cites a source “linked to the team” that raided the hotel room but one suspects that citations such as the ones Infowars use are merely for aesthetic purposes than for actual transparency. Elsewhere in the article, Daniels will go on to quote a “deep-level Intelligence insider” who will lay all kinds of pre-verified truths and speculations on readers such as “I was forced to reach the conclusion that [9/11] has finger prints of a possible false flag event itself […] so, sadly we now have to consider that as a possibility here” and that “we can be sure this will increase the Shadow Government’s surveillance state, specifically inside the United States.” Not only has the FBI not announced the finding of Antifa literature in the shooter’s hotel room but law enforcement officials have plainly denied statements that the shooter was “killed by a FBI hostage rescue team”.
The question remains: what are we to make of the systemized (and weaponized) use of misinformation and plain fake news in our mainstream media diet? Matt Taibbi, once again, goes a long way to understanding this issue. In his same 2004 article where he dissected the motives of fundamentalists and Republicans for believing unsubstantiated editorials, he wrote, “ They are not looking for facts with which to defeat opponents […] they are looking for facts that will create opponents.” The ultimate goal, he concludes, is not to win the argument but to make sure the argument is never-ending. Confrontation is the currency of our new political discourse – faith through conflictive reinforcement. It does not matter whether or not your arguments are logical or whether they are even based on facts or not; what matters is that the reactionary outrage never stops.
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