None of us are immune to the reality-shaping effect of our own particular media bubble--that curated feed of information that is both personally and algorithmically arranged to satisfy the dumbest parts of our dumb brains. It would be arrogant and blind of me to assert that my array of news sources and disagreeable Twitter and Facebook feeds gives me some sort of more definitive grasp on a truer reality than anybody else. But if your bubble is limited to the right-wing media ecosystem, you're living in a completely different world from the rest of us.
This isn't a new or interesting claim, but I think it's getting worse. (Neither is "it's getting worse" new or interesting, I know, shut up.) I've been reading the Drudge Report for my entire adult life, listened to more hours of conservative talk radio than I care to admit, and endured enough Fox News to kill your average grandparent. (Do we *know* that Fox News isn't what's killing our seniors? I'm just asking questions, here.) As any cursory examination of Jon Stewart's entire rise to prominence will tell you, conservative media has long had a tenuous relationship with what the rest of us would consider The Real. But for all the well-chronicled bias and distortions, as a longtime observer of conservative media I've never before felt that it existed in an entirely distinct reality. Where there used to be an ideological agenda driving commentary on a shared, nominally objective world, a lot of conservative media now feels like it is simply of another world entirely.
Tuesday morning, following the Washington Post story about Trump kinda sorta accidentally brag-leaking highly classified intelligence to the Russians, Breitbart ran the following headline: Deep State Leaks Highly Classified Info to Washington Post to Smear President Trump.
Drudge's reference to the story was even more oblique--rather than a link to the story itself, Tuesday morning's most prominently-placed story was a link to a tweet from a WaPo staffer which read: "Applause in the newsroom as the Russia-leak scoop breaks the Hollywood Access record for most readers per minute." On Drudge, the link was rather desperately mis-headlined "BLOODSPORT: WASH POST NEWSROOM CHEERS AFTER LATEST TRUMP HIT." That the headline he wrote did not at all correspond to the reality of the linked tweet doesn't matter at all, and Drudge knows it. It doesn't matter to the dumb parts of your brain that the initial claim is utter horseshit if it felt true when you read the headline. Even when the facts don't correspond to your feelings, your feelings are helping to further solidify the preferred narrative in your head. The biggest story of Tuesday morning, according to Drudge, wasn't the Trump/Russia leak story, but a re-hashing of a conspiracy theory about a murdered DNC staffer's alleged contacts with WikiLeaks. (Archived version of Tuesday's morning Drudge here.)
So after checking Drudge and Breitbart in the morning, you head out for a long, hard day in the coal mines. You come home, put the kids to bed, and find yourself watching Fox News. Tucker Carlson's opening segment suggests that the real "RUSSIA CONTROVERSY" isn't a question of Trump's ties or leaks to the Russians, but why Russia is suddenly considered such a bogeyman at all. "What's really going on here with all the sudden beating of war drums" Tucker wants to know, seemingly entirely oblivious to the reality of the world around him, as though the *real story* is actually the media's portrayal of Russia. It's a rather convoluted mess, that opening segment, but one thing in it is clear: Trump isn't the problem, the media is the problem.
Then maybe you watched some of The Five, because fuck it, someday all life in the universe will be extinguished, anyway. You weren't paying very close attention, but various bros and blondes and legs (1) wrote off the Trump/Russia story as not sexy or murderous enough to matter to most people, (2) suggested that the president's expressed "hopes" to the FBI director are the wistful musings of a child and certainly not of any real import, and (3) claimed that Comey could have written these so-called "memos" whenever, and they're not to be trusted as real because there's no way to authenticate the dates they were put to paper. Seriously.
And now you're in bed, letting Sean Hannity's melting mannequin face and grating New Jersey voice whisk you off to dreamland. And what does Sean have to say tonight, assuming you can hear words beneath all the boot-licking? He outright denies the WaPo story, just straight up says it's not true. This, despite the fact that Trump himself confirmed the relevant parts of the story on Twitter. Not good enough for Sean, who gallantly lies right into the camera, claiming that it's simply not true, and fake news. Hannity then goes on to devote five minutes of his opening segment to the Drudge-linked murdered DNC staffer conspiracy theory before closing out the segment with a list of the five devious forces working together as part of the DESTROY TRUMP ALLIANCE.
It was a long day. Your eyes go droopy, and Hannity's drone recedes into the background, sputtering something about how the real story isn't the Trump/Russia leaks (which is a FAKE NEWS FAKE STORY, anyway), but how *the story of that story* (which again, isn't true) leaked in the first place. Reality is denied, and in its place is not offered some alternate reality, but just the denial, just a negation--a nice, cozy, sleepy void.
