Is Candace Owensa right-wing commentator with over five million YouTube subscribers more influential than cable news?
I started thinking about this question last year, after it became clear that popular podcasters—Owens, Joe Rogan, Theo Von—were influencing the outcome of the presidential election. On an unsatisfying and admittedly pedantic level, the answer of course depends on how you define power. Is it a matter of audience size? The amount of income received? Have hearts and minds won over a certain point of view? But that question led me to another question that's also worth asking: Are the establishment media and the algorithm upstarts really competing with each other? Sure, they're both trying to grab your attention, but are they describing and commenting on the same world?
I've spent very little time on TikTok and YouTube over the past three months, and the algorithms have decided to split my attention between golf tips and a dead sex trafficker. Jeffrey Epstein. I'm all for the former, but the latter has become so ubiquitous on these platforms that avoiding content about it there would be like going to Greenland to escape the ice and snow. Readers of this column know that I believe these video platforms now have much greater influence about how Americans get their news in a way that those of us who work in traditional media would like to admit. The mainstream press still lays out much of the information on which every creator, pundit and AI bot builds their ideas, but scoops, context and new information only go viral when they are processed through these acts of interpretation on social media. Take Owens for example. She often quotes messages in Wall Street Journal or Time, but she uses them to support a single story about how the world works, which at this point largely revolves around Epstein. Owens repeatedly suggested that Epstein, on behalf of Israel, recruited powerful people as clients for sexual services so that these people could be controlled through blackmail.
Owens stands out among the tellers of this story, but she is far from alone. Across the broad spectrum of political media, there is an emerging schism that doesn't follow traditional party lines: There's Planet Normie, home of the traditional press, and there's Planet Epstein, home of thousands of individual content creators.
When the inhabitants of Planet Normie sit down to read or watch the news, they bring with them some fundamental assumptions about journalism that CNN or Time or this magazine: reporters strive to bring the truth to the public so that the public can then make informed decisions as citizens of a democracy. These assumptions are rejected on Planet Epstein. There, such beliefs simply prove that everyone on Planet Normie is complicit in covering up what is really going on. And Owens, perhaps as much as any other media figure, has created a community for those who believe that the mainstream press is complicit in this vast conspiracy, which for her and her followers has centered on what Epstein was doing on this island. Through his video podcast and thousands of clips that appear on every major short-form video platform, Owens asks viewers an existential question: Do you believe in the world presented by mainstream media, or do you believe in her?
Opinion polls are always suspect at best, but polls do show that a growing number of Americans have begun to live on Planet Epstein, or at least may be drifting in its direction. In July Quinnipiac poll found that sixty-three percent of voters disapproved of the Trump administration's handling of the situation. Epstein filesa collection of documents related to his case that Trump once promised to make public but has since neglected their importance. A Yahoo/YouGov Poll a study conducted around the same time found that seventy percent of Americans believed the government was hiding information about Epstein's alleged client list. AND another A poll conducted in October found that seventy-seven percent of Americans want the government to release all information it has about Epstein. These numbers don't tell us exactly what the American public thinks about Epstein's story, but they do indicate that the kind of suspicion that might prompt people to do their own research isn't relegated to some small, conspiracy-minded corner of the Internet.
This speaker is a product of Planet Normie. But even after four years of expert work in New Yorker And TimeI can't confidently articulate the mainstream media's interpretation of the world, and I'm not sure what principles I'm effectively defending by ticking the establishment side box here. Neither the lofty claims about the function of the press in a democracy nor the conspiratorial critiques of our alleged role in the conspiracy seem entirely correct to me. I know many individual journalists who seek and bravely defend the truth. But I also know that recent public opinion decline in confidence in the establishment media did not happen simply because Trump said the words “fake news.” We have done a lot of things wrong, especially during the pandemic. And while I think we're also right in many ways, it's not hard to see why so many people look around and see nothing interesting or exciting about Planet Normie.
Owens and her brethren on Planet Epstein don't have this problem with chatter, at least not anymore. Before Epstein, many of them constructed their narratives in direct opposition to the mainstream media—the so-called expert class and liberal technocrats that were on the rise under the Obama administration. But there was a limit to such incitement of discontent. You can attract followers by shouting about Timeand the “woke thought police” who captured the faculty in OberlinAnd racial politics in Disney films. But at the end of the day, how many people really care about what happens at Oberlin? How many are afraid of a revolution led by Disney princesses of color?
