Bad News Bears

Junk media is rotting legislators' brains, and that's bad.

Once a week or so, very important fax machines would whirr. On Wall Street, around Dupont Circle, and as far away as London, Tokyo, and Berlin — the machines would spit out a much-anticipated edition of The Johnson-Smick Report.

Such a machine sat in Rush Limbaugh’s studio. And on March 10, 1994, Limbaugh excitedly reached for the fax’s output.

“OK, folks, I think I’ve got enough information here to tell you the contents of this fax that I got. Brace yourselves,” he told his listeners. The paper he held in his hands teased promise of a bombshell exposé, from The Johnson-Smick Report, which “claims that Vince Foster was murdered in an apartment owned by Hillary Clinton,” Limbaugh said with some glee.

Foster, Deputy White House Counsel and a childhood friend of Bill Clinton, had been found dead inside his car in Fort Marcy Park, Virginia the summer before. And now Limbaugh — who had, as he often proclaimed, “almost a monopoly on the truth” — was blowing the case wide open, with the help of a Beltway gossip mill. He was quarterbacking the idea that Foster had been murdered, perhaps as a part of a White House cover-up, and moved to the park to make it look like a suicide.

Limbaugh was, at this point, the biggest name in talk radio. But the prevailing wisdom of the newspaper intelligentsia was that he was a buffoon. A clown. A joke.

On that March day, as he wielded the scandalous fax, the media gatekeepers were ready to declare his days numbered.

“Rush Limbaugh's star has already burned its brightest and has begun the process of collapsing upon itself,” columnist Joe Spear boldly predicted. “Someday there will be nothing but a big black hole where old Rush use to be.” The Vince Foster lie, he said, would be the nuclear reaction which would prompt the cosmic event.

Not only did Limbaugh’s listeners stay with him, eagerly demanding more details of the White House murder plot: His power only grew. Newt Gingrich, the highest-ranking Republican in the House, embraced Limbaugh. The radio host’s loyalty was worth his liabilities. Or, perhaps those liabilities were actually assets.

Rather than shy away, the Republicans began finding ways to engage with the Vince Foster conspiracy theory — fixating on documents which supposedly went missing, evidence tampered with, a cover-up cooked in the White House. When Hilary Clinton refused a Republican demand to hand over her phone logs from the night of Foster’s death, the theory spun itself.

Limbaugh started getting invites on all the buttoned-up political panel shows on all the major TV networks to discuss the scandal-plagued Clinton White House, climate change, and just about everything else.

As the speculation ramped up, so did the relationship between kook and Congress. A political activist named Floyd Brown, author of the Clinton Watch newsletter, pumped out so much rampant speculation about Foster that he inspired Congressman Dan Burton to re-enact the supposed murder in his backyard with a rifle and a pumpkin.

It all, of course, proved to be nonsense. The Johnson-Smick Report would later, sheepishly, admit that they had no idea if their initial report was actually true or not. Turns out it wasn’t. Five official, independent investigations — including two bi-partisan Congressional studies — concluded that Foster died by suicide, depressed and distraught over his implication in a minor scandal.

Limbaugh never actually care about being right, nor did he seek the approval of the institutions that frown on his sort of shtick. By casting aside any scruples or notions of non-partisanship or accuracy normally associated with high-profile figures in the media, he had not only created a movement of diehard listeners, the dittoheads, but he had become a political powerhouse. He had unlocked an incredible ability to drive the narrative.

This would become very clear in the 1994 midterms, when Gingrich and the GOP romped to a midterm victory. Their ‘Contract With America,’ rife with paleoconservative pledges dreamed up inside the Heritage Foundation, had certainly won over plenty of middle class voters, disgusted with a rise in crime, nervous about a tumultuous world, and fearful of a declining America.

But what would really win them that election was, at least according to the Republicans themselves, Rush Limbaugh. At their swearing-in, where he was feted as an ‘honorary member’ of the new Congressional class and gifted a button. It read: MAJORITY MAKER.

All this time, Limbaugh and Gingrich spent their days excoriating the mainstream press, insisting that they could not be trusted to report the weather. Appropriately enough, when Limbaugh’s fandom amassed in Fresno, California for their annual dittohead picnic in 1995, a local weatherman reported there was a chance of showers. His boss insisted that he report, instead, that the better chances would be for clear skies during the Limbaugh hubbub. When the weatherman stuck to his professional commitment to reporting the truth, he was fired. (The picnic made it successfully through the Al Gore Tree Hugging Contest, but a downpour began during the Miss Dittohead swimsuit pageant.)

That strange moment in the mid-90s feels mighty familiar to us now. The symbiosis between alternative, conspiratorial, and co-opted media and the powers that be inside the Republican Party has grown much bigger than just one man.

This week, on a very special Bug-eyed and Shameless, we take a quick look at the state of that incestuous relationship — a random sampling of the off-beat and misinformation-prone podcasts and livestreams on which elected officials are choosing to spend their time. Some new research provides some critical insight into just how big of a problem this really is.

It’s bad news bears.

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It is essentially impossible to take stock of the myriad pop-up news sites, live events, podcasts, blogs, newsletters, and regular livestreams which invite subscribers to turn on, tune in, and get mad.

I wrote more than a year ago about the surge in popularity of alternative social media (Dispatch #22), and put together a case study of how Danielle Smith, now premier of Alberta, was radicalized into an alternative reality, fed by junk media. (Dispatches #23, #24). But I’m not sure I’ve yet completely conveyed how much this misinformation capture of our politicians has ramped-up over the past few years.

Some of this may feel a bit obvious. Donald Trump’s shunning of Fox News for refusing to pump out real-time lies about the results of the 2020 election, and his subsequent embrace of the bug-eyed Newsmax is as clear and example as you can find.

But sometimes I think this problem is framed as one-directional — a sycophantic media class competing for support from their political idols. That may be true at the top level. This relationship, however, goes all the way down. At the very low level, there is constant cooperation between misinformation broadcasters and bloggers and elected representatives. In some cases, the lines blur entirely: The politicians become the pugilists.

To illustrate this problem, I logged on to Rumble and grabbed a few dozen interviews featuring elected representatives in the United States, Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom. These are interviews, I would wager to guess, that few journalists have listened to — and I can’t blame them. The sheer volume of this content is a massive endeavour to follow. But this is the media ecosystem that more and more people are opting for instead of CNN, the New York Times, and so on. Consider this dispatch just a cross-section of the funhouse mirror media.

Let’s start with Congressman Drew Nehls, a recent guest on The Dinesh D’Souza Podcast — hosted by the filmmaker behind the completely discredited 2000 Mules documentary-cum-fantasy-flick. Nehls, a member of the Freedom Caucus, has been increasingly influential in this increasingly hard-right Congress. He, for example, has consistently fought against sending more military aid to Ukraine and, increasingly, his colleagues are coming around to his position. D’Souza, who has long fawned over Russian autocrat Vladimir Putin, wanted to get Nehls’ thoughts on Tucker Carlson’s interview with Putin. (Dispatch #89)

Dinesh D’Souza: The thing to me about these brutal dictators is that sometimes they do tell the truth. […] I guess it takes me by surprise, because I'm so used to thinking of disinformation coming from other people's governments — coming from Putin, coming from Xi Jinping — that the idea of massive disinformation, coming not just from abroad, but to our own citizens, coming from our own government. I mean, that's something we have to contend with today, don't we?

Congressman Drew Nehls: It is. Whether it's Russia, whether it's Ukraine, you can't really believe too much what you see on television or what's been reported today. […] I don't think the American people can actually truly believe what they're seeing or reading anymore. And I think people have a right to be concerned about what they're being told by our our fake news media today.

It’s a sentiment that, no doubt, the listeners agreed with. But equating CNN to Россия-1 is a pretty ridiculous take that would get you laughed out of most rooms. Yet this reflexive and automatic rejection of journalism makes it a lot easier to accept and internalize the ravings of someone like D’Souza, a man convicted of campaign finance fraud who accuses everyone else of being a cheater.

Or take Congressman Keith Self (please!) During a visit to the border, he submitted to a fawning interview from Rebel News cameraman Lincoln Jay. At one point, Jay holds up his phone to show Self a tweet from Elon Musk: “Biden’s strategy is very simple,” the tweet reads. “1. Get as many illegals in the country as possible. 2. Legalize them to create a permanent majority – a one-party state.” Jay asked for the congressman’s thoughts on the tweet, for some reason, and the congressman concurred. (A minute earlier, Self insisted that the plan was “to make these people pseudo-citizens as soon as possible.”)

The interplay between broadcaster and politician has some powerful financial incentives, as well. Sebastien Gorka, who you will remember from such films as I’m A Fugitive From Justice In Hungary and Will Work For Pizza(gate), is now a moderately successful podcast host. One of his sponsors is Patriot Mobile, a right-wing carrier which advertises aggressively on right-wing radio and podcasts while also running a pro-MAGA superPAC. When Representative Andy Ogles joined Gorka, the host’s first question was: “Is it true your phone is connected to Patriot Mobile?”

“It is,” Ogles said enthusiastically. “I mean, anytime I can do business with a company that loves America, versus hates America, I'll take that that opportunity. And Patriot Mobile — I saw the ads, quite frankly, on one of your episodes — and I was like: ‘Well, I need to give those guys a shot.’ And so here we go.”

Later in the interview, Gorka offhandedly notes that he hadn’t actually requested the interview with Ogles. “Your team approached me,” Gorka said. But Gorka, a protégée of Steve Bannon, didn’t seem to know much about Ogles, so he consulted the Congressman’s Twitter page. “You say [Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro] Mayorkas shouldn't be impeached. He should go to prison,” Gorka said, barely able to hide his glee. “I've been saying that he should be arrested by some patriotic sheriff for the last three years! So god bless you.” Ogles basked in the praise, and topped it: “Every murder, every rape, every burglary, every carjacking at the hands of illegal is at the hands of Joe Biden.”

It seems that no media outlet is too deranged, too unreliable, too low-quality to put off some members of Congress. Indeed, the more low-quality the media outlet, the more likely they are to appreciate the patronage. Representative Eli Crane recently opted to sit down with The Gateway Pundit, which has risen to become one of the most toxic sources of misinformation in the media ecosystem — eclipsed during the 2020 election by only Breitbart, per news monitoring service pressrelations.

“When I was down to the border,” Gateway Pundit host Jordan Conradson told the Congressman. “I see 90%, if not more, of military aged males [crossing the border]. They're single, they look dangerous.” Crane, who wants to entirely shut down the border, couldn’t have asked for a better set-up. He goes on to say that Biden’s real agenda is “other countries and imperialism, honestly.”

Later, Conradson openly remarks about how excited he is for a second Trump administration, made up of hard-right figures like J.R. Majewski, a QAnon-affiliated congressional candidate who also got caught lying about his military record. “He got your endorsement,” Conradson gushes. “Can you tell me about J.R., and what you're looking forward to with him?”

“I think he got railroaded, to be honest with you” Crane said. “Honestly, Jordan, one of the things that I look for in endorsing a candidate is: Who are your friends? Show me your friends, I'll show you your future. Many of the people that I trust and respect the most up here are supportive of J.R. It's one of the reasons I'm supporting him.” Friends, one imagines, like Jordan Conradson and The Gateway Pundit, who have heaped positive press on the conspiracy theorist.

Some members of Congress have gone a step further: Matt Gaetz now partners with Rumble to host his podcast, where a revolving door of his caucusmates arrive to receive their tongue-washing. (Is Gaetz disclosing any of this in-kind support from Rumble, who offer up their recording studio and advertising? Hard to say, as Gaetz hasn’t filed his financial disclosures since 2022.)

Rumble, cementing its relationship with the Republicans, was the exclusive live-streaming partner of the Republican National Committee, sponsoring their nominal primary debates.

I think it’s important to underline that this new symbiotic relationship between the alternative press and right-wing politicians is not just a game of political propaganda — it makes a claim of being a sort of investigative journalism.

Earlier this month Jim Jordan appeared on Tudor Dixon’s podcast to share the findings of one of his recent congressional investigations — Dixon, who ran for governor of Michigan, is a one-woman conspiracy generator. Jordan’s investigation has shown that several banks, at the behest of the FBI, conducted keyword searches through some of their clients’ financial records on and around January 6. There’s a reasonable debate to be had about whether that process is appropriate or not, or whether it needs better safeguards. But this is a pretty routine investigative technique, designed to help law enforcement develop a timeline of suspects’ movements and behavior. Jordan and Dixon did not have a reasonable debate.

Dixon, lauding Jordan’s report, said it appeared that the Biden White House is trying to replicate “what we’re seeing in China, with social credit scores.” Jordan, for his part, said he proved that Biden is trying to use law enforcement “to label everyone domestic violent extremist if they disagree with where the left is.”

This new coziness between politician and paranoid propagandist is spreading throughout the liberal world. XCandidates, an Australian podcast run by a pair of ardent conspiracy theorists, have had no trouble snagging interviews with some fringe parliamentarians who complain of the “globalist agenda” at a so-called “reckless renewables” rally earlier this month. That includes Bob Katter, the politician famous for prioritizing croc attacks over gay marriage. This podcast has, worth noting, a tiny audience. But that is exactly why this incestuous relationship is mutually beneficial: Start-up media can use politicians’ built-in platforms and distribution networks, and the politician can groom new media lackeys.

Andrew Bridgen, who sits in the UK House of Commons, is a prime example of someone radicalized by their own media diet, and is now helping others lose their minds in a similar way. The Tory MP, who has represented North West Leicestershire since 2010, was booted from his party in 2023 after tweeting that the supposed death toll from the COVID-19 vaccines rivalled the Holocaust. He cemented his slide into insanity when he accused the American and Canadian militaries of actually being responsible for cooking up the coronavirus. All the while, he was sharing links to websites with names like The Daily Skeptic and The People’s Voice — the latter of which is run by a fake news maven whose work has been cited by the EU as a vehicle for Russian propaganda.

Bridgen spends ample time basking in the praise of his ideological compatriots. Last week, he gave an interview to Malue Montclairre, the head of the anti-vaccine advocacy group The Danish Freedom Network. They discussed how the World Health Organization and the international deep state were dead-set on setting up a global biolab network to invent new bioweapons. The interviewed racked up 300,000 impressions¹ on Twitter and another 34,000 views on Rumble. The Freedom Network previously covered Bridgen’s expenses to fly out to their confab in Copenhagen in the fall of 2023, where he appeared onstage with celebrity anti-vaccine doctors Peter McCullough and Peter Kory. More recently, he was a guest of alleged rapist Russel Brand — who insisted that Bridgen was “a renegade MP, cast out of his own party for asking questions.”

Up in Canada, Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre has clearly recognized the benefit of conspiratorial sites like Rebel News, as I wrote about recently. (Dispatch #88) Some, like MP Marc Dalton, have set up dedicated Rumble channels. Others, like lightbulb-truther Cheryl Gallant, have been hosting their own fake news broadcasts for years.

Rumble, which was founded in Canada but moved most of its operations to Florida, has even spent some money lobbying their Conservative allies. Last year, they dispatched a lobbyist to meet with Marilyn Gladu — who Poilievre tapped to be his shadow minister for civil liberties, whatever that means. The pair discussed, amongst other things, the media industry.

This is just a snapshot of a few weeks in this alternative media world. It feels fundamentally unreal, yet internally consistent and coherent. Limbaugh may have almost had a monopoly on the truth — but he could only broadcast so many hours in a day. Now, you could spend your every waking moment trying to listen to the bevy of conspiratorial, hard-right, paranoid media on offer, and you’d still go to bed with hours of content in your queue.

Elected officials who submit to this hagiography speak directly to pockets of hardened ideologues, and reap the rewards. Broadcasters profit off the affective polarization, which demands that partisans accept the truth decided-upon by their party — or, at least a faction of it. Platforms like Rumble create a safe space where this is all possible, and profitable, and where countervailing views and tough questions are exceedingly rare.

In the end, everyone winds up a little more insane than when they started.

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Kevin Greene, a researcher at Princeton’s Empirical Studies of Conflict network, recently sought to answer a question with an obvious answer: Who shares more junk news, Democrats or Republicans?

The answer isn’t surprising but the scale of it is.

As a part of his research², Greene sifted through the Facebook pages of every member of Congress between 2016 and 2021. Relying on a database of media websites big and small, categorized into two categories — good and junk — he coded how many times each politician shared news from each column. The latter category includes those sites frequently chided by fact-checkers and media fairness organizations as consistently unreliable, conspiratorial, or outright invented. (Fox News, to give you a sense of their criteria, is not bad enough to be included on the junk list.)

As a baseline, about 9% of news articles shared by the general public on Facebook come from domains on that junk list. At the high end, Greene found that 23% of Democratic lawmakers shared links to these junk sites. For their counterparts across the aisle, as many as 85% of Republicans were guilty of similar fake news sharing.³

That volume is staggering. But what’s even more interesting is how Greene slices this data to find an explanation.

First he looks at the supply-side problem. “There are roughly ten times as many right-leaning low-quality sites,” he writes. But: “Republican officials share forty times as many links to low-quality sites.”

Here’s where it gets really interesting: “There is a much larger gap in sharing low- quality news sites between elected Republicans and Democrats than between individuals aligned with the two parties.” However, regular users are far more likely to engage in junk news shared by Republican (but not Democratic) politicians than with regular content.

So what does this research tell us?

For starters, Republican lawmakers seem to be leading indicators of conspiratorial belief and low-quality information. Their endorsement of a particular media outlet, by sharing it on their Facebook page, seems to confer some measure of trustworthiness to it. A halo effect. Viewed this way, we should appreciate that believers in conspiracy theories are not necessarily gullible, but guilty of misplaced faith.

We should also note that the elite conservative demand for junk news far outpaces supply, which means there is still a growth market for fake and conspiratorial news.

Politicians, meanwhile, are receiving clear rewards for engaging in this bullshit. We are seeing, basically, a Pavlovian need to share junk news in order to maximize engagement. There is good reason to think that going beyond merely sharing links to these outlets, by actually speaking to them directly, supercharges this effect.

All of this suggests a kind of cheat code for propagandistic media outlets. If you can entice elected officials onto your show, you can immediately buy goodwill from new listeners. If you can earn a reputation as being a support of the cause, this positive support can pass back-and-forth between broadcaster and politician. All the while, faith in the traditional media — still committed to principles of nonpartisanship and fact-checking — continues to wane.

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That’s it for this week!

I’m just back from a pleasant, much-needed, sunny vacation.

While I was gone, WIRED published my deep dive into Ukraine’s mine-clearance problem, as a part of an ongoing series on Ukraine’s technological challenges — and opportunities.

And, in Foreign Policy, I’ve got a very wonky piece on the urgent need to start talking serious about bringing democracy back to Gaza, and Palestine more broadly.

As I teased a few weeks back, I’m taking a reporting trip to Ukraine in March. My flights have been booked, and I’m excited to bring you some stories from the country, as it enters its third year of war.

I’ll be reporting for my usual roster of outlets, while producing some long-reads right here on Bug-eyed and Shameless. To that end, I’m self-financing this trip: So if you’re not already a paying subscriber, please consider upgrading your subscription. Or, if you are already a subscriber but want to chip in a bit more to finance this work, you can upgrade to a founding membership or buy a gift subscription for a friend:

As always, if you can’t swing the price of a subscription, please just shoot me an email and I’m happy to give you a complimentary one. You can also earn a free subscription by referring others.

1. I use the word ‘impressions’ instead of ‘views’ because there’s good reason to think that Twitter is inflating its video metrics by reporting eyeballs on a video, instead of counting how many people actually watched even a part of the video.

2. Partisan Differences in the Sharing of Low-Quality News Sources by U.S Political Elites, Political Communication

3. Greene gives possible ranges, depending on how you measure. So it is between 5% and 23% of Democratic lawmakers who share junk news, and 65% and 85% of Republicans.