Opinion-Driven Media Ecosystems

One place that conspiracy theories thrive is in far-right online outlets.  For years, conservatives have branded the mainstream media as the “liberal media.”  Starting in the 1990s, many Republicans began speaking openly about how the media were on the side of the Clintons (McIntyre, 2018).  Conservative talk radio and the rise of Fox News gave Republicans an outlet to echo their frustrations and give voice to their beliefs.  Benkler et al. (2018) divided the mass media into two distinct camps: “the right and the rest” (p. 225).  They argued that the left has no real equivalent to far-right sites such as Breitbart, InfoWars, Truthfeed, and Gateway Pundit, which traffic in misleading half-truths or made-up stories.  They conducted a content analysis on two million articles written during the 2016 election, including fake and real news stories.  They concluded that they were unable to find an example of a fake news story that started on the left and took hold for any period.

Of course, left-wing advocacy sites do exist: Daily Kos, Talking Points Memo, and Media Matters are a few examples.  However, these sites tend to be more of an echo chamber for liberal and progressive themes than outlets for fake news (Benkler et al., 2018).  Meanwhile, InfoWars promoted a conspiracy theory that the Sandy Hook shooting was a hoax involving child actors (Hemmer, 2018).  Even Fox News pushed a debunked conspiracy claiming that Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich was killed after he allegedly leaked emails to WikiLeaks.  Fox News host Sean Hannity embraced this story about Rich on his nightly show, which attracts millions of viewers.  He also routinely promotes the conspiracy of a “deep state” in which government officials are actively trying to undermine Trump’s presidency (Hemmer, 2018).  President Trump is no stranger to promulgating these conspiracy theories.  Among other things, he launched the “birther” movement, which claimed that President Obama was not born in the United States, and he implied that Ted Cruz’s father was involved with the Kennedy assassination (Benkler et al., 2018).