The End of Woke Legacy Media Has Arrived
There are plenty of heartbreaking, insightful analyses of The Situation. This is not so much about The Situation (after all this is neither a political Substack, a foreign policy wonk stack nor a war blog) as it is about the media that has been irrevocably altered in its wake. Not since Trump was elected has there been such a seismic paradigm shift. When Trump beat Clinton, legacy TV and films, in addition to major advertising campaigns and mainstream journalism, mirrored the woke tweetniks of the era. That ended on October 7th. Were it not for legacy media slavishly trying to synchronize itself with the moves of Twitter1 teens, today’s rift between cultural progressives online and behind a news desk would have never happened.
Before the rift, when a celebrity said something that was politically not in fashion, the studio, station, whatever entity hired that celebrity, canned them at the same time as or after social justice warriors demanded they be brought to justice. Yet when Kylie Jenner shared an image of the Israeli flag with the text “Now and always we stand with the people of Israel” from the group StandWithUs, she lost a million followers and deleted the post. To be clear: she did not get thrown off of her Hulu show (although quite a few MSM outlets called her out for deleting the post). So the criteria for getting canceled has just gotten more complex. If you support Israel, you will be fine with legacy media, but you can expect to lose your social media clout, especially if you are a person who trades on being anticolonialist, etc. But if you support Palestine, expect to strictly be a social media figure who will never make the jump to legacy media outlets.
Ryan Long’s TikTok perfectly captures the “dilemma”:
Tiktok failed to load.Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
Let’s not forget that Kylie Jenner’s previous political oopsie was for a tasteless Pepsi Black Lives Matter ad. This was when soft drink commercials needed to pick hashtags. If Bud Light dropped Dylan Mulvaney because their progressive branding strategy backfired, why would Pepsi want to back Israel or say #freepalestine? The risk Hollywood, beer companies and cable journalists now face when skewing progressive about identity politics is it opens them up for an attack by online leftists calling them out for not taking the Palestinian cause. Easier to avoid the topic of social justice altogether. Much like in the early aughts, immediately after 9/11, politically incorrect shows like Family Guy, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia and Tough Crowd were allowed to thrive. Expect the comedians of the politically incorrect Roganverse to get a bigger piece of the legacy media pie. Perhaps Ari Shaffir gets a sitcom. Maybe Andrew Santini hosts The Daily Show.
The center left mainstream media that is currently supporting Israel — and that is frustrated that the youths on social are not following them — need to remember that, for about an entire decade, they themselves have helped fan the flame of radical chic. Even during lockdown, everyone was supposed to stay at home — except during the George Floyd riots. For years, while jokes about trans women led to pearl clutching, jokes against imperialism were met with hosannahs. Trevor Noah, etc. From the ‘70s onward, the center left MSM was able to completely ignore class issues without pushback while focusing exclusively on idpol and imperialist aggression because, once again, it was never actually about being progressive. It was about saying to the world “hey, we’re not Nazis!”
Quite a few posts on Threads (which has gained followers [including myself] because Twitter 2 got too muddled with old videos of war footage and other bizarre posts) have tried to frame support for Israel as “woke.” After all, Hamas is anti-Semitic. For those who do support Hamas, like Mia Khalifa, the strategy works. She got fired from everybody. Time will tell whether it works against Black Lives Matter, the granddaddy of all hashtags that narcissistic clout chasers social media influencers used to manipulate the algorithm to maintain their inevitably dwindling relevance connect with the people.
We have looked at legacy media and at content creators, but we need to keep in mind that the biggest online media company is Chinese. Since the 1920s, America controlled the media and thus controlled the media narrative. Now TikTok does. Now China does. 3Much like the graphic news footage of the Tet Offensive in 1968 attracted eyeballs from viewers even as it repulsed them, graphic videos on TikTok are getting the same attention. And mainstream legacy media was worried about losing attention to TikTok before last week….
“These TikTokers are skeptical of mainstream media news agendas,” said Jamie Cohen, assistant professor of media studies at Queens College in the City University of New York system. “They’re very aware of news agendas that are driven by capitalism, politics and access and [they] have less of an interest in participating in that.”
Another way TikTok has the edge: it has now become the home of media analysis. For years, conservatives and socialists have parsed and analysed the double-speak of the mainstream media, sniffing out its agenda on message boards and reader-supported publications. The SJW liberals hadn’t needed to do that for a very long time. But they used to do it publicly on Twitter and YouTube. This was how legacy media was shamed into black mermaids and nonbinary pirates to begin with. And it worked for a while. A new media property with mediocre writing and acting would be feted by the Twittersphere because it had proper ethnic and gender representation. During COVID, mainstream center-left outlets like CNN and MSNBC were touted as reliable sources of public health information by the hashtag hippies while only conservative outlets like Fox News and Newsmax would go under the microscope. Now, on TikTok, for the first time ever, media coverage of Israel is getting analyzed by queer teens and black activist college students with such fervor and gusto, you would think Jacobin was paying them.
Either that or they are admitting they need to listen instead of speak. Perhaps this is the biggest element of the cultural shift: an end to agendas. Before, there was a general disgust with “bothsidesism,” a term that exploded in popularity after Trump claimed there was blame on both sides in Charlottesville. But just as there is false balance, there is also false imbalance. Charlottesville, like Trayvon Martin, like the Pulse nightclub shooting, like most lightning rods of controversy this past decade, were specific events that had a beginning, middle, end, time and place.
This is different. This is war. Jews and Arabs in this country have relatives in Israel and Gaza. Palestinian supporters in Israel still have to contend with the real possibility that they may die in an attack. Countless atrocities have been committed and many will be impossible to document. There is humility in acknowledging that perhaps some things are bigger and more complex than you or outside of your scope. War is not woke.
Josh Gad recently shared something on Threads:
Here’s the full text of the Thread he reposted:
As anyone who has read this Substack knows, I have been noticing a new left (not the dirtbag left, not the post left, certainly not the woke left, a different left) coalescing for some time. During COVID, it was growing more and more class conscious. I had, perhaps prematurely, predicted that AI would help it build a politics of consciousness like in the ‘60s. Might still happen but, again, might be wrong. But now, another facet to this brand new left is that it is exhausted with flattering pet causes and easy infographics. I have never seen so many people in a single week admit they have no fucking idea what’s going on. Who knows? Maybe by next week even news anchors will admit the same.
Yes, I am deadnaming X.
Still deadnaming baby!
The Russia-Ukraine War was the first TikTok war, but most people either sided with Ukraine or thought the threat to Ukraine was overblown. Few stood with Putin proudly, not even that many Russians. Gory videos were not as necessary because few people needed convincing that the Ukranians, not the Russians, were more the victims. Whereas this conflict is like going through an audit of corpses.
“Playboy cancels a pr0n star for supporting Hamas” sounds like a Mad Lib I’d have filled in while drunk. And yet it’s real. What a world.
It’s only in recent times we’re seeing irrefutable proof of just how narcissistic, self-interested, and outright scammy the last 5-10 years of (mostly) online activism was. Some may have felt it all along, but either there was little evidence or they still wanted to believe in the best of people, even if those people were annoying.
I’ve also felt a lessening of a cultural pressure to always post an opinion on something or to tie all your personal interests as being part of some greater and nobler political movement (the most eye-rolling of which are people trying to politicize their dating lives and justify why all the factors that help them are moral while those that don’t are “white supremacist” or “patriarchal” or whatever).
Silence is violence? Loud-mouthed ignorance motivated more by vague hopes of internet stardom than altruism is violence too then.