A Dad-Coded VP Pick. Plus, Trump Courts Gen Z Influencers
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But then we're going to go get some food, corn dog. I'm vegetarian. Turkey then? Turkey's meat. Not in Minnesota, turkey's special. Tim Walls is the dad the internet has been waiting for. From WNYC in New York, this is On The Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone. And I'm Michael Loewinger. We're going to have big ratings today, I can see it. Yeah, I want to break a million. I think we can do it. Candidate Donald Trump appeared on a popular influencer's show this week.

But was it good for his clout? Yeah, young man with like LeBron James' kid. He's got to be cool, right? And so by association, somebody like Donald Trump must also be cool. Also, the DNC has credentialed a whole lot of news influencers. Is that good or bad for journalism? I don't think anyone's really cracked the business model for news. But I have to say, having had my own stories read by many TikTokers, it boosts the story. It's all coming up after this.

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Well, the presidential campaign has certainly entered a fascinating phase, as writer Filip Gorevich noted Thursday in this tweet. Quote, "Sometimes you see an elderly couple declining together, but they keep each other going. They become each other's context and lend each other coherence. Then you see them alone and you realize that one of them is totally lost and gaga without the other. Witness Trump without Biden."

MAGA, at least temporarily, has lost the plot. They're the weird ones. And if you've ever seen her with the laugh and everything else, that's a weird deal going on there. They're the weird ones. Nobody's ever called me weird. Trump's even losing his beloved name-calling game. Laughin' Kamala? Lame. Lyin' Kamala? Boring. And on his truth social platform this week, Kamablock?

Meanwhile, the epithet Fox News slapped on running mate Tim Walz as a loser due to the ick factor alone. Jesse Waters. Coach Walz, where are the tampons? I don't think football coaches stock tampons in the boys' locker rooms. Tampon Tim spent his honeymoon in China, which Chinese intelligence paid for. More on that later in the show.

But now Trump's running mate, J.D. Vance, enabled by Fox and its many friends, have deployed a time-tested tactic that could do real damage if the legacy media let them get away with it, like they did in 2004.

That's when a group called Swift Vote Veterans for Truth smeared Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry's military service in Vietnam in the awarding of his Purple Heart, his Silver Star, and his Bronze Star. Eventually, Jane Fonda apologized for her activities, but John Kerry refuses to. In a time of war, can America trust a man who betrayed his country?

Ever since, swift voting has referred to a dishonest campaign tactic, attacking candidates by smearing their decency and patriotism. Like what's happening now, choreographed by the very guy who deployed it against John Kerry, political operative and Trump campaign co-manager Chris LaCivita.

First, here's Army National Guard veteran Tim Walz. I spent 25 years in the Army and I hunt. I've been voting for common sense legislation that protects the Second Amendment. But we can do background checks. We can do CDC research. And we can make sure that those weapons of war that I carried in war is the only place where those weapons are at. And here's J.D. Vance on Wednesday in Michigan. What was this weapon that you carried into war given that you abandoned your unit right before they went to Iraq?

and he has not spent a day in a combat zone. What bothers me about Tim Walz is the stolen valor garbage. - Walz misspoke. He never carried a weapon in war, though after 20 years in the Army National Guard, he did sign up for another four after 9/11 and trained many others on those weapons when he was stationed at an army base in Italy.

In a 2009 interview, Wall said that he and the members of his battalion first thought they were being deployed to shoot artillery in Afghanistan, as they had trained to do, but that didn't happen. After much thought, he filed paperwork for a congressional run in February 2005. According to a fellow soldier, rumors about a future combat deployment were swirling, but the first unit wasn't mobilized until that fall.

Walsh faced similar criticisms about how he portrayed his overseas service when he ran first for Congress in 2006 and during his runs for governor in 2018 and in 2022. He answered them with facts and won. But many in the national press still seem to feel there's a story in this thrice-litigated steaming pile of poo, so hey, maybe fourth time's the charm.

Meanwhile, the pushback from vets has been faster and furiouser. Adam Kinzinger is a former Republican congressman, lieutenant colonel in the Air National Guard, and now a senior political commentator for CNN. I am furious about this attack. He could have retired at 20 with a pension. He stayed for 24. Eventually, he makes the decision to retire. They said that he is claiming to have worn a rank that he didn't wear is complete bulls**t.

How military retirement works is after 20 years, you're eligible to retire. You retire at the rank you last held for three years. That's what Walls did. He reverted to senior master sergeant. So wait, which rank did he reach? Chief master sergeant, which is like the highest enlisted rank in the army. Okay.

And then since he didn't finish his education requirements for that, which happens all the time, and since he wasn't in that rank for three years, he reverted to senior master sergeant. There is still nothing cowardice or unethical about that. So it is an unhinged wrong and sick attack against a man that did 24 years of service.

J.D. Vance enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps out of high school in 2003 and served for four years, including six months in Iraq. But he never saw combat. He was charged with writing articles behind the lines. No one dare claim that's not real service, because it is.

Trump evaded military service when a podiatrist who worked in his dad's building said that young Donald had bone spurs. The doc's daughter later said that her dad gave that diagnosis as a favor to Donald's dad. Meanwhile, speaking of dads, everyone's speaking of this dad.

Harrison Walls once again filled a stadium with their rally, the line stretching for blocks. Many there to see the man nicknamed America's dad on social media. We finally have a vice president who's just giving us Midwestern dad. Comedian Alex Edelman. A vice president who, after he tried Reese's Pieces for the first time, just went, oh, these are dangerous. A vice president who, when he's trying to pass someone on a sidewalk, just goes, just going to sneak right by you.

Just a vice president who calls little kids slugger. A vice president who, when he gets on the elevator and there are a bunch of people there, he's like, oh, it looks like it's a party. Walls appeals to the older white guy who always tells the same joke to the server at Denny's. The Daily Show's Josh Johnson. The one where he points to his empty plate and says, I guess I hated it. Meanwhile, J.D. Vance appeals to the older white guys who say things like, I'm not racist, but...

And then say the most racist s*** you've ever heard. Tim Walz appeals to white guys who hang an American flag. J.D. Vance appeals to white guys who hang a bunch of American flags.

Hi Minnesota, Governor Walz here along with Hope. We're making sure we remind all of you hands-free driving starts on the first of August. We want to make sure our teen drivers are not texting and... No, no, no, I think it's actually mostly bald men. Cut.

All right, once again, Minnesotans, we're here making sure millennials are putting down the phone. I think it's actually adults, Dad. Like, older people like you. Cut. The idea of the dad stereotype is a person who's really grounded, right? Charlie Warzel is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of its newsletter, Galaxy Brain. And I think that the idea of the dad stereotype is also somebody who...

is supportive when you need them, but also stays out of your business, right? In Minnesota, just like in Wisconsin, we respect our neighbors and the personal choices they make.

Even if we wouldn't make the same choices for ourselves, because we know there's a golden rule. Mind your own damn business. If you go up to Tim Walls and say, I'm hungry, he'll say, hi, hungry, I'm Tim. And then he'll make sure that your school-aged children have free breakfast and lunch. He represents the dad that a lot of liberal women lost. A lot of us had moderate to conservative educated sons.

sensible fathers that we lost to Rush Limbaugh, that we lost to Fox News, that we lost to Donald Trump. I think that there is a feeling of hope and optimism, excitement and enthusiasm around these people. Charlie Warzel. It might not even be completely around the policies, but it's around the idea that democratic apparatus felt very stuck.

very party governed, very institutional government.

And when Biden stepped down due to a chorus of people saying, we need something to change here, it gave people this feeling that their advocacy, their concerns were being listened to. Whether they were or not, there was a feeling of something changed. That you could make a difference or that you could win. It's both. There was a crack in the earth and then all this energy, all this lava just bubbled up, right? It's this enthusiasm, this feeling that change is possible.

But not inevitable. It was 2016 all over again today. MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell on Trump's hour-plus press conference Thursday in Mar-a-Lago. And all of the cable news networks, including this one, carried it live, just like they all did repeatedly in 2016. It would be hard to find a sentence in what Donald Trump said today that did not include at least one lie. Some of the networks

tried to play catch up with fact checking after Donald Trump finished speaking. But that, of course, is way too late and utterly useless. And to make a bad news coverage situation worse, none of the networks, none of them carried Kamala Harris's speech live after the Trump appearance. None of them, which all of the networks knew was coming. They knew what time it was coming. They knew how to cover it live and they didn't.

after giving Donald Trump more than an hour of live coverage on all of their networks. The same mistakes are being made. I have never seen an industry slower at learning from its own stupid mistakes than the American news business. And you cannot expect them in the next 89 days to figure out what they haven't been able to figure out in nine years: how to cover a Trump for President campaign.

One of the Harris-Wall campaign slogans now is "We're not going back." But we just went back today. Donald Trump answered no questions today. None. He stood up there in a room where he made sure the reporters' questions could not be heard by the TV audience. And so when he spoke, the TV audience had no idea what the question was. Most of the questions were terrible.

What a waste of a moment with a convicted felon former president to ask questions like that. Here's one question. Mr. President, can you tell us a bit more about your upcoming interview with Elon Musk?

That was an actual question to Donald Trump today. And so Donald Trump could just ramble about anything that came to mind, including lying, of course, about the size of his crowds. He has been telling crowd-sized lies for nine years, and he wants to wear the news media down to the point where they just accept it. And he has won because no one in that room fought him on that in any way today or on anything else.

No other candidate or president has ever been so deferred to in my long living memory, and I can't imagine ever will, once Donald casts off this mortal coil. But hey, the good part may be that an old school media steeped in old school traditions that no longer apply can no longer entirely determine the news agenda. Everyone can get into the pool.

Coming up, a look at the people for good and ill who are getting into the pool. This is On The Media. This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance.

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I'm Maria Konnikova. And I'm Nate Silver. And our new podcast, Risky Business, is a show about making better decisions. We're both journalists whom we light as poker players, and that's the lens we're going to use to approach this entire show. We're going to be discussing everything from high-stakes poker to personal questions. Like whether I should call a plumber or fix my shower myself. And of course, we'll be talking about the election, too. Listen to Risky Business wherever you get your podcasts.

This is On The Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone. And I'm Michael Loewinger. When did this race get so manly? As we just heard, the liberal internet has cocooned itself in Tim Walz's soft bear hug. Meanwhile, the Trump-Vance camp is projecting a far more muscular energy. The president is now on TikTok. It's my honor. Yay!

That's Dana White, president of Ultimate Fighting Championship, or UFC, in Trump's very first TikTok video posted in June. Keep scrolling and you'll see him holding his fists up with Jake and Logan Paul, the bad boy brothers who have over 20 million YouTube subscribers apiece and now do boxing and mixed martial arts. You heard it right, mother f***er. I'm fighting Mike Tyson, b***h.

We plan on this being the biggest fight of the 21st century, dummy. The only TikTok on J.D. Vance's page features the Nelk Boys, the fratty edgelords known for their college party videos and their viral pranks. I said before, we're the only people to book a five-day cruise with the intention of getting kicked off. We're there for one day.

And that time they surprised Tucker Carlson with an enormous Zin container, the nicotine pouch product, which they flew in by helicopter.

Gentlemen, you've lost control. I stand in awe before this. This is the largest zintin in the world. The volume of nicotine in here could save the world. Perhaps that stunt helped inspire writer Max Reed to coin the term zinternet, his shorthand for a giant nexus of internet subcultures, where crypto bros, habitual sports bettors, and southern sorority girls converge.

a group that the MAGA campaign is apparently courting. On Monday, Trump plunged even deeper into an even stranger, younger male subculture. So do you know what live streaming is on these platforms? More or less, yeah. It's the new wave. It's the new wave. I'm going to explain it to you, all right? This is Aiden Ross, a 23-year-old live streamer, in a 90-minute interview with the former president at Mar-a-Lago on Monday.

Ross is a big name on a small streaming platform called Kick, a clone of Twitch.

Turns out Barron Trump is a fan and helped convince his dad that Aiden Ross might be key to attaining the ever elusive youth vote. All of you young people, and he's got a lot of them. All I know is my kids say, Dad, you have no idea how big this interview is. I said, don't tell me that. But I love this press hit for Donald Trump. Radio host Charlemagne the God. There is a new potential voter turning 18 every day.

You got some elitist, bougie liberals who will say things like that audience doesn't vote. How you know? It's a good question. One of many that I put to Nathan Grayson, a reporter and co-founder of the gaming publication Aftermath.

I asked him who exactly watches Aiden Ross and how he became famous enough to interview the former president. He was a variety streamer. So basically he did, you know, whatever would get him viewership, whether that involved playing specific video games like Grand Theft Auto or whether it involved like a lot of, you know, just chatting and kind of like what's known as react content. So watching videos online, watching things happen to other content creators and voicing his opinion as it occurs.

interacting with his chat. Live streaming for hours and hours a day and filling the time. Yes. For a while, he was playing the basketball game 2K, and he was streaming with LeBron James' son, which I believe led to one of his first breakthroughs when he won a big game on stream. And as a reward, LeBron James' son called up LeBron himself. It's LeBron? It's LeBron.

He said, is this LeBron? Yo, first of all, I got to say, gigantic fan. I love you. No, it's all respect, man. I appreciate it, man. And look, show love and respect to me and my son. Yeah. I mean, it's interesting because somebody like Aiden Ross at first glance is not the first choice that you would think of for a political figure like Donald Trump because most of his content has not been politically oriented. It's been stuff like this.

where, you know, as a result of his increasing fame, he's rubbed shoulders with more and more famous people, but they're not like politically oriented famous people. But at the same time, if that's the kind of clout you have, then there are a lot of people who would not normally be predisposed to an interest in politics who

who then look at you and when you get involved in this they're like that suggests it means something that suggests it matters more and also then you know you have that memory of like yeah young out with like lebron james's kid he's got to be cool right and so by association somebody like donald trump must also be cool on twitch ross had something like seven million followers at his peak 2021 he was in the top five streamers on twitch

And he was making a lot of money from live streaming gambling. He had an arrangement with like a sketchy crypto company. What was going on there? Like a lot of streamers during that time period, he was working with Stake. Stake is basically an online casino company.

And there are a lot of places that outlawed it. And so what they started doing is making all of these deals with various content creators to just gamble on stream. And they were paying like a lot of money for this. To some of the biggest streamers, these deals were more than a million dollars per month.

which is just astronomical, right? Dumb money. And I saw a YouTube video essay documentary about Aiden Ross by YouTuber called Patrick CC. And he says an online crypto casino was paying him at least $1 million per month, according to a private conversation that Aiden leaked himself. So the sponsor, they pay me to play on their website, right? And then they pay me an amount to gamble with. However, if I lose the amount, I have to withdraw my own money.

Break that down. The stake would give you house money to play with. So you weren't spending your own money. And so that would enable these streamers to place ridiculous bets that most of the time wouldn't pay off, right? But if you're sitting there gambling all day long, eventually, after, you know, one of your massive bets is going to pay off, and that will result in this huge viral moment. And that makes for great content. Yes! Yes!

Come on, that's it, that's it, that's it, that's it. How much we at? 84. That's it. That's it, boy. Let's go. Both live content because like people want to hang out in your chat and be there for that moment. And then also for like a YouTube video or a TikTok clip or whatever of you reacting to this huge win. And so it's amazing advertising for a site like Steak.

which is why they were willing to spend so much money to make sure that these streamers kept gambling. And then of course you had the broader issue of the fact that some of these content creators have audiences that skew younger, probably late teens into early 20s and 30s. We're not talking a ton of 12-year-olds or whatever. But still, it's not great to advertise gambling to kids.

In 2022, Twitch effectively banned gambling on the platform. And soon after, Aiden Ross moved to a lookalike live streaming platform called Kik, the same live streaming site that ultimately hosted his conversation with Donald Trump.

How does Kik compare to Twitch and why did Aiden Ross ultimately move over there? It's really similar with the crucial distinction that it allows gambling. It was started by the founders of Stake, the online casino I mentioned earlier.

just a few months after Twitch banned gambling and basically lured over a lot of popular streamers with non-exclusive deals. So they said, okay, come and stream on our platform, but also you can still go stream on Twitch too. And your contract would say that you're going to get paid a certain amount. But the fine print said, you've got to spend a certain amount of time per month on kick for this payment to actually happen. So it was a really smart strategy in that what it would encourage people to do is go stream on Twitch for a little bit

and then say, hey guys, I'm ending my stream on Twitch right now. Now I'm going to go over to Kik. Follow me over there. And so it was a funnel. It really is just kind of a reskin of Twitch in that they are literally using Amazon technology that Amazon in turn got from Twitch. And so Amazon is actually making money off of both Twitch and Kik, which, you know...

is either really funny or really dystopian depending on how you want to look at it. Yeah, pretty dystopian. And Kik has a lighter terms of service than Twitch. There's much less content moderation. And when Ross moved over to Kik, we

we started to see a kind of ratcheting up of the offensive factor in his content, right? He went from being edgy guy who makes homophobic jokes and stupid fart jokes to kind of an explicitly right-wing influencer. I think it's a pretty standard right-wing grift move where, you know, you kind of do enough to get cast out of quote-unquote like liberal society and

And so you just cultivate this new audience of people who want to see that and who believe that in, you know, saying all these things and doing all these things and supporting these figures, like you're finally saying what you really meant the entire time, what you really believed. So yeah, he streamed with people like Nick Fuentes, who is a very far right figure. I think a lot of people just would call him straight up a Nazi. You said something that like Jews are the spawn of Satan. I don't think I said that, but...

But I do believe that Jews are doing the work of Satan. Absolutely. All right, all right, all right, all right. Slow it down. Take it back a notch. Yeah, and then the most obvious thing that Aidan Ross did is he became friends with Andrew Tate. The self-proclaimed misogynist influencer who has...

been prosecuted for sex trafficking and sexual assault. Yeah. Aiden Ross's courting of Andrew Tate culminated, perhaps, when Aiden Ross accidentally tipped off Romanian police to the fact that Andrew Tate was trying to leave Romania before he was scheduled to stand trial for rape and human trafficking charges. Andrew had hit me up. He said, hey,

I'm going to be leaving Romania soon and probably never coming back. If you want to come over and do a week of long streams and content before I leave, I think it'll be big. And it's never, it's, I'm sorry, he said it's not, it's basically now or never. That again speaks to Aiden Ross's weird combination of like opportunism and a kind of startling lack of savvy. I think a thing that you see recurring with Aiden Ross is that he, you know, despite his many deficiencies in terms of understanding the

Even basic concepts like fascism, there's a clip out there of him discovering what it means and mispronouncing the word repeatedly. I don't know what the f*** a fascism is. I don't know what the f*** that is. Benito Mazzulli and Giviante Genital and Jason Stanley. Who the f*** are these people, bro? I don't want to make fun of people for not being well-educated because that's much more of a systemic issue than it is necessarily an individual one.

But it's telling of, I think, what his kind of attention has been on prior to this in both his life and his career.

And I think that that's kind of revealing of what Aiden Ross is good at, which is that he is very opportunistic. You've described him as a sycophant. How did we see that in his relationship with Andrew Tate? I mean, with Andrew Tate, yeah, he was just like, I'm all about this guy. At one point, he even shaved his head and wore the same glasses as Andrew Tate to be like a little miniature lookalike of him. It was tongue in cheek, as with any of these things.

That's sort of what a lot of these streamers who flirt with far-right ideology do is they make it all kind of a joke. It could be that they're just being ironic or not because, again, that's part of opportunism is you're always trying to play for the winning team. So you give yourself some plausible deniability so that if it becomes apparent that this is not working out anymore, you can take a step back from it. But by the same token, if it's going great, then you can go all in. You can put all your chips on the table.

Let's dive into Aiden Ross's interview with Donald Trump this week. What moments stood out to you? One of the big talking points that's come out of the whole interview is

was that in addition to sort of talking to Trump and having a stream with them, Aiden Ross also presented Trump with a couple of gifts, one of them being like a really expensive Rolex watch and the other one being a Cybertruck. You can already see the gift. Yeah, I can. Wow. You can't miss it. That's an Elon. It is an Elon. Emblazoned with basically the moment right after somebody tried to assassinate Trump. Check out this wrapper. Let me know your honest thoughts. I think it's incredible.

It's kind of the perfect thing to do if you're trying to suck up to somebody who presents himself as authoritarian. And you approach him and say, look at these things I got you. And they have your face on them. They're about you. Aiden Ross is kind of modeling what a lot of these far-right figures kind of want out of their own audiences. Which is somebody who just says, yeah, man, you're the best. I'll do anything for you. I got you.

And so then Aiden Ross in turn is making behaving that way seem cool to these audiences of people who are still trying to figure out like what their identity is. We heard Donald Trump start his pitch to Aiden Ross's viewers by saying the American dream is no longer working for you, but I will, I'll make it work for you. I love having a young audience. This is young. I think you have a, some oldsters too, because I also know some oldsters that are listening and watching, but yeah,

It's about the American dream. Right now, you don't have the American dream. And some pundits and personalities like Charlemagne the God, the radio host, has talked about how this was a brilliant play on Trump's part coming on Aiden Ross's kick livestream.

How influential do you think this interview actually was? That's a hard question because we don't have that many points of reference against which to measure it. But we do have some. The kind of big example is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez went on Hasan Piker's Twitch stream a handful of years ago and actually streamed with a bunch of different streamers. They played Among Us, which is a multiplayer game. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. I knew it.

All right, so AOC has found a body. I didn't even know I recorded myself. It was not like a super overtly political stream. Nonetheless, it drew 400,000 concurrent viewers, maybe more, so comparable numbers to Trump's viewership on kick. And then, you know, the next time Ocasio-Cortez went on Twitch, it was deliberately a like get out the vote.

But there was not really a disproportionately higher youth vote turnout in that case. It didn't lead to anything measurable. And so in the aftermath of that, you just didn't see that many politicians show up on Twitch. And when they did, they didn't do very well. Matt Gaetz tried to go on Twitch. Admittedly, this was like after a bunch of his scandals. So, you know, public opinion about him wasn't great.

And the live stream barely attracted notice, peaking at a mere six viewers. Wow. Yeah. You know, these things don't really translate to votes. What they do translate to is people who are younger being aware of politicians and liking them more. The thing about Twitch is, and just streaming in general,

is you've got to stick with it. You've got to be consistent because it is this ever-evolving world where there's always something new happening. There's always something new people are commenting on. And so if you don't have the time to do that, and politicians don't,

then it's just not really worth it to stream sporadically because you just get lost and you become noise. You don't think that this one-time live stream with Aiden Ross on kick is necessarily going to help Donald Trump score big with a whole bunch of first-time voters?

No, I definitely don't. On Twitch this week, the live streamer Kai Sanat claimed that the Secret Service and the Harris campaign had reached out to him to maybe explore an interview. He might have just said that as like a ploy for views or something, since some outlets are reporting the campaign has done no such thing. But it's an interesting idea at the very least.

Sanat is a hugely famous black streamer on Twitch who some listeners might remember from having incited a riot in 2023 in New York when he told his followers that he'd be giving away free PS5s in Union Square.

but he didn't have a permit. I kind of think of him as like a modern day late night talk show host. He's an extraordinary showman. He helped invent the term Riz, a popular slang term for, you know, a person's ability to seduce or charm somebody else, like their charisma. Kai is edgy in his own way. He's kind of a loose cannon. Do you think it would be a good idea for Kamala Harris to go on his stream?

I mean, it could be, but I think the people who have done best on his streams are the people who can like rise to the occasion of being almost as unhinged as he is. I recently watched his stream with Kevin Hart and that was like ideal. They match each other's energy really well. Why you got a bucket of Vaseline? Because I always use my Blitz sticks. No, man. Where are you taking that? Like it's a home. That don't fit in your pocket?

Goddamn! You don't... Is this crazy? That's absolutely insane. Don't let people see you operating from a bucket of... Y'all see how big that Vaseline is? I'm not sure if it's Kamala's vibe. So...

That said, again, Kai's audience is absolutely massive. And Kamala's definitely, you know, trying to court Black voters. That's definitely a way to reach them. But Kamala's kind of like a consummate politician. I just find it hard to imagine her fitting in in that environment or like being able to sort of embody the energy that Kai gives off. I would like to see it happen, though. I think that would be fantastic content no matter what. I just don't know if it'd be good for her. Ha ha ha ha.

Nathan, thank you very much. Yeah, of course. Thank you. Nathan Grayson is a reporter and co-founder of the gaming publication Aftermath and author of a forthcoming book about Twitch called Stream Big. Coming up, the DNC credentialed a whole bunch of news influencers. So who are they? This is On The Media. On The Media.

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This is On The Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone. And I'm Michael Loewinger. As the battle for online attention rages on, the Democratic National Convention, beginning next week, is trying something a bit new. In addition to legacy press, the party has credentialed a record-breaking 200 content creators. A lot of these influencers position themselves as the everyman.

as a normal person who is looking at the news and sees it how it is. McKenna Kelly is a senior writer at Wired covering politics and the internet. She's been reaching out to some of the big news influencers who will be in attendance, like V Spear of Under the Desk News with over 3 million followers on TikTok. They have, in the post-pandemic world, plotted the path for what a news influencer looks like.

Hi, it's V Spear from Under the Desk News, one of the most trusted voices on the Internet. And I'm here to try and give big content creators a look. During the pandemic, V was underneath their desk talking about the news because everything was very scary back then. And now they're always at the White House and they're always reporting on all different policy issues, election related issues. Also at the DNC, we can expect videos from Brian Tyler Kemp.

Cohen, a 35-year-old liberal commentator on YouTube where he also has 3 million followers. At a time when the media has largely failed us, I discuss not only the extent to which our current both sides media is utterly incapable of meeting the moment, but also how the Republicans have come to rely on gaming the refs.

But, McKenna Kelly says, the convention will also host influencers who aren't necessarily known for explicitly political content, like food reviewers. I talked to this guy named Jeremy Jakobowitz, and he is a part of this group called the Brunch Boys. For most of his content, it's him going to a restaurant, trying the food, and reviewing it on TikTok. This might be the most underrated pizza spot in New York City.

Let me tell you why. But he also received an invitation to the DNC. There's a lot of nurses who I've spoken to have been invited to White House events who are also really big on TikTok and Instagram. And they dedicate a lot of their work online to reproductive rights.

I think it shows like a real understanding of the internet moment that we're in right now where, Micah, my For You page is probably a lot different from yours. Like we're not seeing the same stuff for sure. There are a wide array of creators who focus on a whole host of different things that are going to show up at the DNC.

interact with a directly political environment and then deliver that to hundreds of thousands, millions of people online who maybe wouldn't have been trying to seek out political content in the first place. I think the Democratic Party rightly recognizes that the way people get news and information and especially information about this election has radically changed, especially from just four years ago. Taylor Lorenz is a columnist at The Washington Post.

She says this election should be a wake-up call for the legacy press, which is quickly losing ground to independent news influencers.

A lot's changed since the first time she covered the Democratic convention in 2016. I was actually there as a Snapchatter because I had my Snapchat show at the time, and it was really difficult. I was trying to shoot for my Snapchat show, but I was like in the photographer pit. They were like, who's this girl with her phone? Get out of here. You know, we're trying to get the official AP shots and stuff. And now we're seeing both parties really embrace the new media landscape. How do you define that term, news influencer?

I personally consider these people independent journalists, and I know that makes a lot of journalists unhappy to hear. But what these people are doing is a form of journalism. They educate their audiences on the news. A lot of them do their own original reporting when they can. Of course, many of them don't have the resources to do tons of original reporting, and they do aggregate a lot of news stories. But nevertheless, they're communicating news and current events to their audiences.

Somebody like V Spear, for instance, who does under the desk news, does, I would say, really sophisticated original commentary and analysis about the news. And I've seen them do some original reporting as well. And just to add a little bit of self-awareness into the mix, at On The Media, sometimes we do some deep dive original investigative reporting. But a lot of what we're doing is maybe not so different. It's analysis and commentary. But then you have somebody like, say, Kelsey Russell, who has...

95,000 followers on TikTok. And what she's doing and what some other news influencers do is reading an article every day. Many of her videos are her taking reporting from a legacy outlet, throwing it up on a green screen, summarizing it, and building a following off of that.

Yeah, exactly. I mean, she's communicating the news to millions. What's the difference between her and a newsletter writer, you know, that aggregates things? You know, my first job in media was at the Daily Mail. We would just get links from other outlets and have to aggregate those stories for their audience. I would say with Kelsey, at least she cites where this news is coming from.

having had my own stories read by many TikTokers, it boosts the story and the culture. You have people suddenly knowing more about the story and that should be our goal. Our goal should be to inform the public and...

And I think that's what a lot of these news influencers are doing. If you had to estimate the proportion of news influencers doing original journalism, original analysis versus explaining articles, explaining TV news segments created by other journalists, what would you estimate as the breakdown? This is a total speculation, but I would say it's about maybe 80% just aggregating other stuff and then maybe 20% original analysis.

content. Sometimes it's maybe even higher than that, like 90-10. But I would say that's about the same for a lot of popular news websites. I came up in the era of digital media, Micah, when most of what newspapers do is cover stories that other people are covering. I mean, like,

Look at any major news website today. You see a lot of announcements. You see a lot of breaking news that's covered by everybody else. And these influencers are increasingly getting the opportunity to cover things on the ground, right? They're getting directly briefed on the war in Ukraine or invited to the White House State of the Union or things like the DNC. These give them the opportunities to do that original reporting. But it reminds me, again, a lot of bloggers...

I started as a blogger. When I first started out, of course, I didn't have access either. Most bloggers didn't. So you just blogged about things that were happening that you saw, right?

As things progress and as the sort of lines between these worlds blur, you know, you see bloggers getting more traditional access. Suddenly bloggers are sitting front row at Fashion Week, et cetera, and then suddenly writing for mainstream outlets. I think we're seeing that with these content creators. I think a few years ago, you're right, they didn't have much access. Most of what they were doing is reading headlines. Now, a lot of them, this is their on-ramp to the journalism world.

In your own work, you've referred to the Reuter Institute's digital news report, which shows that as there's this plummeting trust in the news, young people are increasingly getting their news from social media, especially TikTokers, Instagram, YouTubers.

Many of these news creators are using that falling trust as marketing. And they're saying, I'm not like the mainstream media, even as in many cases, they're relying on the reporting and work of legacy outlets, the same outlets that are struggling. I mean, this dynamic feels pretty unsustainable, no? Well, it's unsustainable for the traditional media, which is losing ground every single day because they refuse to adapt to the current media climate.

For decades now, decades, the media has becoming more digital and more distributed. Trust in traditional media is falling for so many reasons. There's political attacks on it aimed at dismantling trust. I think there's a broader shift away from trusted institutions. I think rather than acknowledge that and allow reporters to build these more direct relationships with audiences, traditional media has really retracted and pulled back and gotten scared.

How so? One example I'll give. I think a lot of people in traditional media think of objectivity as like this view from nowhere, right? I think in the actual world that we live in, the majority of people realize that that is a farce, right? That there is no such thing as a quote-unquote objective person. We all come with specific...

world views, right? And backgrounds. And that's actually really valuable. People online want commentary. They don't want to get news from somebody whose view they don't know. It makes you seem untrustworthy because the truth is, is that none of us are objective. None of us are truly sort of like these neutral beings that operate in the world without any sort of life experiences or opinions. And so when traditional media comes and tries to

purport that and give that to people, people are like, well, who is this person? I don't want to trust this person. I want to trust this other guy on Instagram. I don't agree with him all the time, but at least I know where he's coming from. And I think that's caused a lot of sort of rifts in trust. A lot of people don't understand how journalism works either, which is a problem because they are only familiar with commentary.

That said, I have seen research from Pew that suggests that a majority of journalists, when polled in 2022, 55% of journalists said that they didn't believe in a both sides approach to news reporting. Whereas 76% of U.S. adults said that they believe journalists should give equal time to each side when they cover a story. That's not what their consumption says.

People love to say that, but then they watch the commentators that, frankly, validate a lot of what they want to hear, you know? Fair point. And this brings us back to TikTok. Is there not some risk to journalists who don't come up in newsrooms, who are not instilled with...

some sense of traditional journalistic ethics and who end up commanding a large audience online with very partisan inflected coverage of current events, some of whom are extremely savvy on these platforms but lack that traditional training. I mean, as a journalist and as somebody that believes deeply in the need to have traditional media,

There is something about the traditional media which is worth saving, I would argue, which is the resources that they give to journalists to produce original content and the rigor. I can't just get on The Washington Post and start posting my thoughts and opinions, right? There's an editorial structure that deems what's newsworthy, what's factual. Exactly, exactly. And that structure doesn't exist anywhere.

among these influencers. But I very much caution people against this idea that somehow these influencers are all biased, but the traditional media has some sort of completely neutral point of view. Every outlet has their own sort of editorial point of view. And that is reflected through the stories that they choose, through the framing on headlines, through how stories are reported, through what stories get told, through who gets quoted in those stories. All of these micro decisions

shape coverage. And I think we need to recognize that. That said, you do think that there are some clear downsides to the direction that all of this is headed. I want to play you something that you said in a video that you made this past January. I don't want to live in a world where all of the news is delivered through 60 second TikTok videos with retention editing.

And I think there's a ton of really talented journalists that are also just not great like social media people. I think of some of my friends who are journalists who do really deep investigations or local reporting or sit through hour-long city council meetings to, you know, hold some local politician to account. That's really important work and it's work that somebody should pay for and it's work that's not rewarded by these social media algorithms. So,

Break that down for me. The problem is, is that although people's attention is shifting to these online platforms, these online platforms are very hostile to news and it's almost impossible to build a sustainable business model around news gathering and reporting on these apps.

There's so many of my colleagues, like I mentioned in that video, that are phenomenal reporters but aren't great marketers. That's fine because the Washington Post will market their stories for them. In the internet world, you've got to be everything. You've got to do everything. You've got to be your own video producer and fact checker and do all the marketing and promotion and figure out monetization. And do the reporting. Where's the time for the reporting? That's...

the thing. And by the way, you're up against Meta banning everything you say because of community guidelines, because they've decided they don't want news anymore. And, you know, of course you're dealing with onslaught of harassment and abuse probably, because that's what being a person with an audience on the internet comes with. So it's really hard and you have no support. By the way, you also have no legal support.

Do you think TikTok or Instagram or YouTube or all of them together can replace legacy media? I don't think it's the best replacement. No, I don't think it's the best replacement. I think it is a extremely flawed replacement. That said, I think there are enormous upsides of the fact that more people are getting informed, more people are learning about the news, more people know about current events, especially young people today than in the past. How

How do we know that? How do we know that more people are getting informed thanks to social news versus the old model? Because it was so difficult to get news in the old days. You had to go out and buy a magazine. I guess you could turn on the TV, but you didn't have very many options. You certainly weren't getting a lot of alternative points of view. You certainly weren't getting anybody that was actually challenging structural power. You'd have to subscribe to alt weeklies and stuff, but there just wasn't very much...

Yeah.

And I think we need traditional media to adopt and sort of recognize that the news landscape is not becoming less digital or less distributed or less personality driven, frankly. People want to get news from people and figures that they trust.

So you think taking the personality driven approach is a potential antidote to this plummeting that we're seeing in trust in journalists? I think it's a start. I think you don't want to build the cults of personality, but people need to know who you are, what your background is, where you're coming from. And I think the best journalists have always done this.

I agree that basically all journalists should become stronger advocates for their own reporting, better messengers for the stories that they're writing and the reporting that they're doing on all these platforms. That said, I look at the outlets that are doing it well, like The Washington Post with Dave Jorgensen, like NPR with the Planet Money TikTok guy.

These outlets haven't shored up their financial issues. They're still laying people off. I mean, I'm concerned that we're in pivot to video V2, V3, whatever, where we're chasing an answer out of something much bigger. I would argue you're thinking about it the wrong way. So many people, when you say the word influencer or content creator, they think of somebody with a ring light and a cell phone.

That's not how it works. There's so many forms of distributed media. Podcasts, which by the way have been a huge business for the New York Times. Newsletters, which also are huge businesses. And The Post has a ton of amazing newsletters. That's what Axios was built around a lot as well. Monetizing these newsletters, Politico as well. They've all leaned further into developing these digital products.

What's different about newsletters and podcasts is that you have this direct relationship with the audience. You're not going through social media. I think anyone in the news business knows that social media is incredibly fickle. TikTok might be banned. Meta's banning politics. YouTube is completely subject to an algorithm. So it's hard. I'm not saying that any of this would fix traditional media. If being social media first was...

the only answer, we would still have BuzzFeed News thriving today. We know that this was not the answer. We know that leaning fully into social is not necessarily going to make anybody millions of dollars. However, we also recognize that consumption patterns are changing and we need to be up with the times. This is the media landscape that we're living in 2024. And I think it doesn't do anyone any favors to deny it.

Zooming out, what's at stake, do you think, if legacy media fail to adapt to this explosion in short form video and this huge transition in consumption habits?

I think they'll lose control of the narrative. They won't be able to shape the narratives around their own stories. They won't be able to continue to grow their audience. They won't be able to continue to keep their brands relevant. And I think that that will ultimately, you know, hasten their decline. That's not to say that if some of these local newspapers had just gotten on TikTok a little more, that would have saved them. No, there are bigger problems with the business model of news.

But I will say, as somebody that has covered the content creator industry and just wrote a book on it, these shifts have been happening for decades. We've seen it happen before. Short form video is just the latest format that's in vogue. It won't be here forever. We need to just recognize how these consumption patterns evolve and meet people where they are and try to get our stories out and try to tell stories in ways that consumers want to engage with. Taylor, thank you very much. Thanks for having me.

Taylor Lorenz is a columnist at The Washington Post and host of the podcast Power User. Her book is titled Extremely Online, The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet. ♪

That's it for this week's show. On the Media is produced by Molly Rosen, Rebecca Clark Callender, Candice Wong, and Katerina Barton, with help from Pamela Appia, our intern who leaves us this week. Pamela, thanks for everything.

Our technical director is Jennifer Munson. Our engineer is Brendan Dalton. Eloise Blondio is our senior producer. Our executive producer is Katya Rogers. On the Media is a production of WNYC Studios. I'm Brooke Gladstone. And I'm Michael Ellinger.