Making your own dog food, or the decline of Mediaite
The popular news blog Mediaite has done some really good work over the years in surfacing interesting videos from the cable news cycle. But why does that have to come with such hideous ranting?
The past two weeks have been some of the busiest weeks for the news cycle in years—multiple shootings, some involving police, a presidential campaign that’s just starting to get ramped up into overdrive, and all sorts of other stories, big and small.
In the wake of all this, the long-running news blog Mediaite felt compelled to manufacture a controversy out of thin air. The culprit of this controversy was a guy named John Ziegler, who made an argument that Philando Castile, the man killed by police in a widely-discussed shooting in Minnesota, was the subject of a completely false narrative by the media, one that he argued that the media was compelled to follow because of a second shooting already in the news. He claimed that because Castile may have matched a robbery suspect, the media bought into a false narrative.
“The point is that there is a potentially very compelling other side of this story which is being ignored or ridiculed by the media which is already very invested in the current narrative,” Ziegler wrote.
Ziegler, it should be noted, is a guy who has never met a contrarian opinion he didn’t like—and has been willing to follow that contrarianism to the point where he is considered a Holocaust denier on some corners of the internet.
This would have been it—a bad opinion by a guy known for stirring the pot—if not for the fact that Ziegler’s boss, Dan Abrams, is a guy who frequently shows up on television as a host and commentator. And that’s where he was on Tuesday night, as a fill-in host for Dr. Drew.
One of his guests that night? John Ziegler, who he outwardly emphasized had an opinion he didn’t like. Naturally, the moment appeared on Mediaite, as it creates a perfect bread-and-butter moment for the news outlet.
This created a perfect opportunity for Abrams to get Mediaite into the news cycle—because Ziegler had an opinion that was very controversial and as a result, perfectly fit for TV news.
Starting off, here’s what Dan said: “Now, John, you wrote a piece that I have some issues with …”
Ziegler stood his ground: “Regardless of how much the news media will try to ignore it, in Minnesota we are seeing all the markings of a largely false narrative that may very well not hold up under reasonable inspection.”
And soon enough, it turned into a contentious interview, one that probably made for a couple of minutes of great yelling on television.
The question I have for Dan Abrams is this: If you’re so offended by what this guy writes, why do you have him on your staff? Why does he get a paycheck from you? Why would you want to further promote this opinion you don’t like by giving this guy some air time?
My guess: It’s because you’re trying to help Mediaite get some additional notice, no matter how good or bad that notice is.
In fact, this was hinted at by a quote in the article the website wrote about this encounter: “If you’re a regular Mediaite reader, you know that we feature writers with vastly different opinions, and we have publicly disagreed with each other from time to time.”
The next day, of course, Ziegler wrote a response to Abrams in a blog post on the site, helping close the circle and drawing the last crumbs of traffic from the nontroversy.
“In a rational world (I know), such statements in a televised ‘debate’ might be met with a substantive response with regard to the merit of my argument,” Ziegler wrote, defending his argument. “But we clearly don’t live in such a world, especially on cable television.”
That’s a particularly weird argument, especially on a site that posts videos ripped directly from cable television.
In response to that whole hot mess, I wrote a little Twitter rant, and sort of laid out my big problem with this, as a reader:
Online media outlets, hungry for traffic and attention, will take steps like these to help elevate themselves, all for the sake of the mighty click.
Mediaite has been around about seven years and played a really important role in the early part of its history—they watched cable news so you didn’t have to, and shared the most important bits with the public. But apparently, that is no longer enough, and they have to make some of the news themselves.
And that’s really unfortunate. It didn’t have to be that way. This is how once-good sites lose their influence and decline.
Ernie Smith is the editor of Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that pretty much never covers stuff like this—which is why he’s writing about it in Medium.
