When Barack Obama appeared at the DNC, plenty of celebs were among the still adoring crowd. One of them was actor Bradley Cooper, who web media seems to think has some special attachment to conservatives for his Oscar-nominated performance as Chris Kyle in the Clint Eastwood film based on Kyle’s book, American Sniper.
So when Mediaite ran a story with the headline “Conservatives Are Angry Because Bradley Cooper is Not Chris Kyle” about Cooper’s appearance, a reader would expect to see quotes from actual conservatives expressing their angst at Cooper.
There weren’t any. Mediaite simply culled a handful of Tweets (two to be exact), and a single Facebook post. The Tweet calling for specific boycott of Cooper came from a Twitter user named Nat Shupe whose Twitter account by all appearances shows he’s a conservative with pro-gun, pro-military views, but there’s no real way to confirm. Shupe is not a verified user and only has 107,000 followers total.
Conservatives were so outraged en masse by Cooper’s appearance at the Democratic convention that the only evidence was one Tweet. There were no prominent conservatives writing about it, or acting out on social media. No one cared.
But that didn’t matter.
Within hours, USA Today, Washington Post (via AP), CNN, CBS News, Huffington Post, and the Daily Beast all ran pieces on this outrage. ABC News even ran a segment about it on their morning show. Buzzfeed did what Buzzfeed does — using tweets from Twitter accounts with egg avatars to make their case.
Each story featured that single Tweet from Nat Shupe and a couple others from random Twitter users. Daily Beast writer Marlow Stern managed a breathtaking 550 words about it, but only embedded that one Tweet. USA Today’s post featured a Tweet from one Twitter user with 13 followers who had joined Twitter in July of 2016. CBS featured zero Tweets in their story, simply editorializing: “Some Twitter users say they plan to boycott Cooper’s future films over his presence at the convention.”
All of these news sources based widespread conservative outrage on one Tweet, added one or two more making fun of that Tweet and hoped it reached Cooper for a response, which it did. Late Late Show host James Corden asked Cooper about this great outrage when he appeared on as guest on August 4th. “I was not expecting that. I took my mom, and we went to hear the President speak,” Cooper said. “It was just unbelievable.”
His gobsmacked reaction was then picked up by CNN, New York Daily News, E! Online, The Hollywood Reporter, Extra TV — and spread throughout the Interwebs. Twitter Moments featured the story, again showing the Shupe Tweet, and the story trended on Facebook.
This narrative was created and disseminated, essentially out of thin air. If this looks familiar, it’s because it is. There are two such recent cases involving this strange media desire to target the right with a very big gun but zero ammunition.
When the teaser for Star Wars: The Force Awakens appeared online, and star John Boyega popped up as a stormtrooper, Internet media lit up with shock and surprise at allegedly rampant racism directed at him on Twitter, Facebook and Youtube. Boyega even reacted to it all with an Instagram post. Kristen Capps at The Atlantic, among others, wrote of this great racist outrage. Except there wasn’t any. This widespread racism boiled down to a handful of anonymous YouTube users. I documented this at my website at the time.
Earlier this year, the makers of Ghostbusters marketed the film based on a wave of sexist comments by online social media users on YouTube regarding the film’s trailer, which went on to become the most disliked video post in the site’s history.
Red Letter Media ran the data on all the sexism directed at the film’s stars and amazingly, they weren’t able to find much. Sexist comments directed at the film and its stars accounted for less than 1% of overall comments on its YouTube trailer page. The video sketch of their findings is embedded here. Watch it.
The “sexist backlash” did not exist, just like the “conservative backlash” over Cooper’s attendance at the DNC.
Why does the media do this? Because as conservatives you are not allowed to participate in cultural events like film and television and you’ll be damned if a guy who portrayed a patriotic child-murdering and Muslim-hating psychopath is going to get away with ever entertaining you again.
All this especially in a year in which writers are obsessed with the departing coolness of Preezy Barack Obama, who’s leaving them saddled with a 70-year-old grandmother who can’t attempt the Whip/Nae Nae without sparks flying out of her shoulder. When conservatives attempt to gain traction in culture, they are put on notice by a combative media creating narratives against them out of thin air, or a single Tweet.
Stephen Miller is a digital media designer and contributor. He also publishes and produces The Wilderness, which focuses on viral politics and culture media.