So, it turns out that Fox News wasn’t really all that fair or balanced.
Matt Sheffield, a pioneer of conservative online media, is now fighting to burst the information bubble he helped inflate. I knew Matt a little back in the day, running into him at various blogger events when they were a thing as well as various conservative gatherings like CPAC. Indeed, I even attended one of his NewsBusters galas as his guest.* I haven’t seen him in years, probably since I stopped commuting into DC upon taking my current job seven-plus years ago. His charge is hardly new: “I basically built the infrastructure for a lot of conservative online people and personally taught a lot of them what they know,” he said. But Mr. Sheffield, who is 42 and lives in the Los Angeles area, grew disillusioned in recent years. He said facts were treated as an acceptable casualty in the broader political war. “The end justifies the means,” said Mr. Sheffield, who hosts a politics and technology podcast called Theory of Change and is writing a memoir about growing up in a strict Mormon family. He now blames right-wing media for undermining faith in American democracy by spreading unsubstantiated claims by President Trump and others that the election was rigged. Through websites and platforms like Facebook and YouTube, Mr. Sheffield said, right-wing media has created an environment in which a large portion of the population believes in a “different reality.” Much of this has been obvious for a long time. Even in the early days of the site—more than seventeen years ago now—I was frustrated by the increasingly inane and dangerous rhetoric coming from the likes of Ann Coulter. And it didn’t take long for me to tire of the scene at CPAC, which was, at best, simply serving warmed-over platitudes from the Reagan campaign decades after they were overtaken by events. Then again, I’m more than a decade older and wasn’t drawing a paycheck from the conservative entertainment complex. What are some of the most important things about right-wing media that people don’t understand? Almost all right-wing support in the United States comes from a view that Christians are under attack by secular liberals. This point is so important and so little understood. Logic doesn’t matter. Fact-checking doesn’t matter. What matters is if I can use this information to show that liberals are evil. Many of them are not interested in reporting the world as it is, but rather to shape the world like they want it to be. Having come up politically in the Deep South, I’ve long since undertood that this sense of persecution exists. And, frankly, they’re not completely wrong. While Christmas is decidedly winning the so-called “war” against it, the “traditional values” espoused by fundamentalists have been beaten into submission. Still, I’m not sure to what extent this explains the disregard for facts or even the “own the libs” mindsight. A recent poll suggests about 70 percent of Republicans now believe the election was rigged. Can that be blamed on right-leaning media when President Trump is spreading misinformation about the results? They go along with whatever he says. Before Trump won in 2016, conservative media was actually, finally, starting to develop a marginal sense of independence. But once he became the president all of that just fell apart. Now you can’t have a conservative outlet unless you worship Donald Trump. Your business will be destroyed. You can’t have a career in conservative media if you are against Donald Trump, with only a few exceptions. This is rather circular but there’s some truth to it. The news side of Fox News is doing a solid job of presenting the facts of the case, matter-of-factly declaring Biden the winner of key states and, ultimately, the winner of the 2020 election in step with the other media outlets. But that’s led to a backlash against it by “conservatives.” Would this be possible without Facebook and social media platforms? Facebook is the primary protector and enabler of the far right in the United States, without question.
