Is Candace Owens, the right-wing commentator who has more than five million subscribers on YouTube, more powerful than cable news?
I began thinking about this question last year, after it became clear that virally popular podcasters—Owens, Joe Rogan, Theo Von—had influenced the outcome of the Presidential election. At an unsatisfying and admittedly pedantic level, the answer depends, of course, on how you define power. Is it a matter of audience size? The amount of revenue generated? The hearts and minds won to a particular view? But the question led me to another that is also worth asking: whether the establishment media and the algorithm upstarts are actually in competition with one another. Sure, they’re both trying to get your attention, but are they describing and commenting on the same world?
In the past three months, I have been spending an unfortunate amount of time on TikTok and YouTube, and the algorithms have decided to split my attention between golf-swing tips and the late sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. I am there for the former, but the latter has become so ubiquitous on these platforms that avoiding content about him there would be like travelling to Greenland to get away from ice and snow. Readers of this column know that I believe these video platforms now have far more influence on how Americans receive their news than those of us in the traditional news media would like to admit. The mainstream press still lays down most of the foundation of information on which every creator, pundit, and A.I. bot builds their takes, but scoops, context, and new information go viral only when they are processed through these acts of interpretation on social media. Consider Owens. She often cites reports in the Wall Street Journal or the Times, but she uses them to uphold a single narrative about how the world works, which, at this point, largely revolves around Epstein. Owens has repeatedly suggested that Epstein, on behalf of Israel, enlisted powerful people as clients for sexual services so that those people could be controlled through blackmail.
Owens stands out among purveyors of that story, but she is hardly alone. Across the breadth of political media, broadly defined, there is an emerging schism that doesn’t follow traditional party lines: there is Planet Normie, home to the traditional press, and there is Planet Epstein, home to thousands of individual content creators.
When the inhabitants of Planet Normie sit down to read or watch a news story, they bring with them some fundamental assumptions about journalism of the sort that is purveyed by CNN or the Times or by this magazine: that 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 a coverup of what’s really going on. And Owens, perhaps as much as any other media figure, has built a community for those who assume that the mainstream press is involved in this vast conspiracy, which, for her and her followers, has come to center on whatever Epstein was doing on that island. Through her video podcast and the thousands of clips that populate every major short-form-video platform, Owens is asking viewers an existential question: Do you believe in the world as presented by the mainstream media or do you believe in her?
Issue polling is always suspect, at best, but surveys do suggest that a growing number of Americans have started to live on Planet Epstein—or at least might be drifting in its direction. In July, a Quinnipiac poll found that sixty-three per cent of voters disapproved of how the Trump Administration was handling the Epstein files, a collection of documents related to his case that Trump once promised to release and has since dismissed the importance of. A Yahoo/YouGov poll conducted around the same time showed that seventy per cent of Americans think that the government is hiding information about an alleged list of Epstein’s clients. And another poll, from October, found that seventy-seven per cent of Americans want the government to release every bit of information it has on Epstein. These numbers do not tell us what, exactly, the American public believes about the Epstein story, but they do indicate that the sort of suspicions that can push people to do their own research are not relegated to some small, conspiracy-minded corner of the internet.
This column is a product of Planet Normie. But even after four years of punditry at The New Yorker and the Times, I can’t confidently articulate the mainstream media’s interpretation of the world—nor am I certain what principles I am effectively defending by hanging up a shingle here on the establishment side of things. Neither the high-minded claims about the press’s function in a democracy nor the conspiracy-minded critiques about our supposed role in a conspiracy sound entirely correct to me. I know many individual journalists who seek out and bravely defend the truth. But I also know that the public’s recent downturn in trust in the establishment media didn’t happen simply because Trump said the words “fake news.” We got a lot wrong, especially during the pandemic. And while I think we also got a lot right, it’s not hard to understand why so many people look around and see little that is fun or compelling about Planet Normie.
Owens and her fellow-inhabitants on Planet Epstein don’t have this waffling problem, at least not anymore. Before Epstein, many of them fashioned their narratives in direct opposition to the mainstream media—the so-called expert class and the liberal technocrats who were ascendant during the Obama Administration. But there was a limit to that type of grievance-mongering. You can build a following by yelling about the Times, and the “woke thought police” that overran the faculty at Oberlin, and the racial politics of Disney movies. But, ultimately, how many people really care about what happens at Oberlin? How many fear a revolution led by Disney princesses of color?