News clip: Former Trump White House advisor Steve Bannon has been ordered to report to prison on July 1st.
Micah Loewinger: With Infowars facing liquidation and the Epoch Times under investigation, it's been a rough week for the pro-Trump media. From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media, I'm Micah Loewinger. Also on this week's show, How Birds Aren't Real, a completely made-up conspiracy theory became a worldwide phenomenon.
News clip: They described eating turkey at Christmas and Thanksgiving as ritualized bird worship, part of an elaborate propaganda effort by the US government to inure us to the bird surveillance.
Micah Loewinger: Plus, a journalist gives up the disinformation beat to buy a satirical fake news site, The Onion. You're now a suit, Ben.
Ben Collins: Yes, that's right.
Micah Loewinger: Is it complicated? Is it easy?
Ben Collins: You can't see this, but I'm in two tuxedos right now. It's one tuxedo inside of another tuxedo.
Micah Loewinger: It's all coming up after this.
Announcer: Listener supported, WNYC Studios.
Brooke Gladstone: From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media, I'm Brooke Gladstone.
Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger. Last week was a rough one for GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump. This week, the gavel came down on some of his most ardent supporters in the right-wing media.
News clip: We've just learned that former Trump White House advisor Steve Bannon has been ordered to report to prison on July 1st.
News clip: This comes nearly two years after the trial in which Bannon was convicted for defying the January 6th committee's subpoena for documents and testimony.
Micah Loewinger: Four days earlier.
News clip: Lawyers for the families of victims of the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting filed an emergency motion asking a bankruptcy judge to liquidate conspiracy theorist Alex Jones' media company.
News clip: Jones lost two lawsuits and was ordered to pay $1.5 billion to the families of victims of the Sandy Hook school shooting. Jones falsely called the deadly shooting a hoax.
Alex Jones: When I know I leave tonight, they're going to shut us down. Maybe it's tomorrow, the next day.
Micah Loewinger: Alex Jones during an InfoWars live stream last Saturday.
Alex Jones: At the end of the day, we're going to beat these people. [laughs] I'm not trying to be dramatic here, but it's been a hard fight.
Micah Loewinger: On Thursday, Jones agreed to liquidate his personal assets, giving up ownership of InfoWars. Meanwhile, as of late April, another pro-Trump outlet, The Gateway Pundit, is facing a similar struggle. A far-right blog--
News clip: That spread the conspiracy theory that Denver-based Dominion Voting Systems rigged the 2020 election is now filing for bankruptcy.
Micah Loewinger: And then on Monday, the DOJ came after another pro-Trump outlet, The Epoch Times, a mysterious media operation run by the Falun Gong, a Chinese dissident group.
News clip: The financial officer behind The Epoch Times has been indicted on allegations of a massive money laundering scheme.
Ben Smith: One of the details of the indictment was that the team in The Epoch Times that was committing these crimes was called The Make Money Online team.
Micah Loewinger: Ben Smith of Semaphore speaking on The Breaking Points podcast.
Ben Smith: It does seem like finally someone has discovered how to make money online.
Micah Loewinger: Back in 2019, ahead of the last presidential election, but before its alleged fraud scheme began, NBC reported that The Epoch Times had flooded Facebook with pro-Trump ads.
News clip: The Epoch Times has spent more than $1.5 million on 11,000 pro-Trump advertisements in the last six months alone. That is more than any organization outside the Trump campaign itself, even more than most Democratic presidential candidates have spent on their own campaigns.
Ben Collins: If you're over 50 on Facebook, you probably got one of these ads.
Micah Loewinger: Ben Collins, who co-wrote that 2019 The Epoch Times report, speaking here on MSNBC.
Ben Collins: In fact, you may have gotten in the mail, they sent out physical mailers talking about the deep state and talking about how Hillary Clinton is part of a cabal sort of taking over the government.
Micah Loewinger: Over his nine-plus years as a reporter at The Daily Beast and then NBC News, Ben Collins helped define the disinformation beat with his reporting on right-wing media personalities, including the ones we just heard about. But in April, Collins announced he was leaving journalism and the disinfo beat to run a fake news outlet, perhaps the most famous of them all.
News clip: The Onion, that satirical news site that publishes headlines like winner didn't even know it was pie eating contest, has new owners.
Micah Loewinger: In his first job in a media C-suite, Collins is responsible for the very thing that the site's old owners at Geo Media failed to do, make money online. Ben, welcome back to the show.
Ben Collins: Thanks for having me, Micah.
Micah Loewinger: First off, give us a sense of how you got onto the disinformation beat in the first place.
Ben Collins: Yes, so I was at The Daily Beast and I was mostly covering stupid internet stuff, basically.
Micah Loewinger: Like what?
Ben Collins: A good example of this is one time there were these guys who realized that Facebook events were really big in the algorithm on Facebook, and they decided to create a fake Limp Bizkit concert on 420 at the Sunoco station in Dayton, Ohio.
News clip: The creator went into great detail to fool people. He created the flyer, even came up with fake tickets and a fictional seating chart. Again, it's a hoax. There's no concert at the Sunoco gas station.
Ben Collins: Poor Sunoco station, everyone was calling it that day, and they were like, please just stop coming. The internet sort of consumed culture entirely, but mainstream media was really late to catch on because they thought it was this cute fad. They thought it was like the Tamagotchi or something. To be fair, I don't think I was particularly early to it. I was just one of the early people to take it seriously. And the reason I started really taking it seriously, tragic and weird and awful, my friend from college, Chris Hurst, we hosted, funnily enough, a radio show together where we talked about baseball, I think.
Micah Loewinger: Like a college radio show.
Ben Collins: Like a college radio show.
Micah Loewinger: Got it.
Ben Collins: His fiance was shot and killed on live TV in Roanoke, Virginia. This is in 2015. This guy live-streamed the murder. He had a GoPro on his head. It was truly awful. In the weeks after that, a bunch of ghouls went after him.
Micah Loewinger: People online went after your friend Chris.
Ben Collins: Yes. They said that Chris was a CIA plant or that Alison didn't really exist. You know all of these horrible things. They did it because it would get you to the top of YouTube. It would get you to the top of Google search results. This was before the word disinformation kind of flew around. I could just report freely on this. I could just call all these people, all these conspiracy theorists, and they would just talk at me for half an hour. At the end of it, I would just be like, just letting you know, I know you think that my friend is part of the cabal, but if he's in the CIA, he sucks at it, and he has terrible baseball takes.
Micah Loewinger: Wait, how did people respond to that?
Ben Collins: Back then, it was jarring to me to hear this, but now it's very normal to hear this. They would say, "Oh, it's just what I believe. Like, I'm sorry if that's true, but it's just what I believe." It's the total dehumanization, the idea that these people can't actually be people, creating individual human beings to turn into case studies that you then blow out into the reason everything is wrong in the world.
Micah Loewinger: Tell me how you ended up doing this same beat for NBC News.
Ben Collins: Everyone felt something fishy going on in 2016, and we had heard, obviously, there was a Russian troll farm doing stuff, right? There was an account called 10 GOP. It confused a Trump rally for a Cleveland Cavaliers victory parade. No one took a second to wonder why everyone was wearing maroon. So, this guy named Kevin Paulson, who once was indicted for doing some hacking at some point in his life, he found that all of the accounts on Facebook were basically deleted around the same time. We were able to reverse engineer which of the accounts came from St. Petersburg, the Russian troll accounts.
That wasn't enough, obviously. We had to pressure Facebook and Congress into releasing the information they had. And that got the attention of NBC News. I was like, "Well, if you want, a person who's really good at this, we should bring over Brandy Zadrozny,' who's the best reporter I've ever met in my life. I said that offhand as a way to be like, "You don't have to hire me." And they did. They brought us both on, and from there, we really started covering the economics and all the pain and physical real-life suffering that comes from pretending to be something on the Internet and spreading lies.
Micah Loewinger: There was a moment where I feel like the disinfo beat was the hot thing in media. Arguably, misinformation, disinformation are as present as ever. Yet it feels like the interest in covering and discussing these topics have lost their glow, at least a little bit. I'm thinking of that piece in 2021 in Harper's by Joe Bernstein, who now writes for The New York Times. You know the one I'm talking about, Bad News.
Ben Collins: Yes, I do.
Micah Loewinger: In which he describes, "A new field of knowledge production that emerged during the Trump years at the juncture of media, academia, and policy research,' what he calls big disinfo. And he points to this phenomenon around that time in 2021 where you had people like Katie Couric co-chairing Aspen Institute's nonpartisan, "Commission on Information Disorder." And I remember Barack Obama gave a speech at Stanford the next year about how disinformation was getting in the way of fixing what ails America.
Barack Obama: I'm convinced that right now, one of the biggest impediments to doing all of this, indeed, one of the biggest reasons for democracy's weakening, is the profound change that's taken place on how we communicate and consume information.
Micah Loewinger: I think what I saw is a salient critique was that in a sort of centrist establishment, there was a belief that our political project is sound and good. It's simply that lies and liars cloud people from seeing that.
Ben Collins: Did you see that, I don't know, it was like a New York Times thing today. It was a guy who said he was leaning towards Biden because Donald Trump wasn't an effective enough criminal to get away with paying a porn star. The minds of voters are hilarious. People have really weird motivations for doing things and maybe one of those weird motivations is kind of cool and interesting. I don't know. I think tying that to disinformation reporting is a fool's errand. Clearly, there are grifty people who co-opted the thing, try to sell a conference or something but the work itself is really important, man. I'm always going to stand up for that. I think that's good stuff. That's really good.
Micah Loewinger: Why'd you leave NBC ultimately?
Ben Collins: It was a lot, man. Like, if you wake up first thing in the morning and you look at like a Nazi message board, [chuckles] it's a tough way to live. Initially, I put in my notice, and I started writing a book about all of the people who had manipulated our media over the last 10 years through the internet, and it was making me really sad. And then I saw that The Onion was for sale, and I just started making some phone calls. I don't know, the light was back, you could sort of see the light again, and that was really good.
Micah Loewinger: Why The Onion?
Ben Collins: I grew up with it and it was the most important website of my time and not just website newspaper. Do you remember the physical newspaper?
Micah Loewinger: I do. Yes, I used to get it on the street for free.
Ben Collins: It was just jokes in a paper. I grew up with it and I just really didn't want us to die the death that I kept seeing. A lot of these sites were being turned into AI content farms or being bought by people for larger projects and I just wanted to keep it as is because I just think they've been the most right newspaper.
Micah Loewinger: Right in what way?
Ben Collins: The Iraq War started on my brother's 18th birthday. Literally, that was the day, seven days later they printed this headline. It was a point counterpoint. It said, This War Will Destabilize the Entire Middle East Region and Set Off a Global Shock Wave of Anti-Americanism versus No It Won't.
[laughter]
It's a perfect headline. This was even pre-Dixie Chicks. Fervent freedom fries time. They didn't care. They knew they were seeing through something really profound and that just never stops. Here's a good headline about AI. This is from June of last year when everyone is full panic like the robots are going to eat us all or whatever. The headline is, Guy Who Sucks at Being a Person Sees Huge Potential in AI.
[laughter]
I'm like perfect.
Micah Loewinger: Sorry listener who likes AI.
Ben Collins: Yes, sure. The Onion's very back to basics, it's just been so refreshing.
Micah Loewinger: A refrain that we often hear from journalists in this current collapse of the media economy is that the c-suites in charge of managing the money at these outlets are just mucking it up for everyone, that running a media outlet shouldn't be complicated and yet the suits make it so. You're now a suit, Ben. [chuckles]
Ben Collins: Yes, that's right.
Micah Loewinger: Is it complicated? Is it easy?
Ben Collins: You can't see this but I'm in two tuxedos right now. It's one tuxedo inside of another tuxedo. Look, it's complicated in a different way than I think that they present it. I do think that there is this thin layer of when I was at NBC, I used to call it like the Game of Thrones [chuckles] layer where there's this constant infighting among a bunch of executives over their section of the company or whatever and it has nothing to do with journalism. I don't think that needs to exist straight up and in part of taking over this thing I just wanted to get out of the way. The Onion has this truly impeccable editorial process, protecting that to me is incredibly important.
My goal is to make it so that work can get bigger and better. That to me is the goal of what an executive should do in this situation. I don't think it should be like bicker about your reporters or whatever. [chuckles] I say this because I'm very fresh, obviously, I've been in this role for less than two months. In two years when I'm in some ridiculous scandal where I'm aggressively yelling at a reporter on Glenn Beck's podcast, I’ll take it all back, but I do think that there's a place for this in the world.
Micah Loewinger: Do you think there's something that satire can do or accomplish political journalism can't or isn't equipped to do?
Ben Collins: Yes, it's completely unbeholden. You're allowed to go after people in power, in fact, you're expected to. For example, there's some really good headlines from last year that I always think about and that's when I realized that this is a really good time to run this place. It said, It is Journalism's Sacred Duty to Endanger the Lives of As Many Trans People as Possible. This is when--
[laughter]
Micah Loewinger: I remember this one going out.
Ben Collins: -- five millionth op-ed about how trans children should be shot out of a cannon. The Onion is just allowed to say, "Actually, one side has really totally co-opted this conversation for political points. I think that they are uniquely equipped for the future."
Micah Loewinger: The new owner of The Onion, Jeff Lawson, said this after the purchase, "The Onion's success is based on something different than most media companies. The Onion has been stifled along with most of the Internet by Byzantine cookie dialogues, paywalls, bizarro belly fat ads, and clickbait. The internet sucks and it's time we made it better." So, my question for you, Ben, is The Onion profitable and if not, do you feel like you have a handle on the journey to make it profitable?
Ben Collins: There's this thing called programmatic advertising, where if you see a weird ad on the internet, right, if you put a onion in your sock your pancreatic cancer will be cured or whatever. That is the secret driver of a lot of money on the internet. It's how journalism got into this space to begin with. This never-ending chase for clicks that can provide a new series of those ads that if you see them even for a second you get a fraction of a penny, and that fraction of a penny adds up. That was basically journalism business model for the last 15 years. We're going to have better ads, we're going to have non-programmatic, non-belly fat ads. That's one thing.
Then we're going to do some membership stuff and then there's other stuff we want to do. We want to do more video stuff, we want to do stuff that the staff wants to make, we'll find a way to monetize it in a way that makes sense.
Micah Loewinger: So, I heard in there make great content, sell better ads, hopefully get people to subscribe to something and if we do it right, we think it's gonna be profitable?
Ben Collins: Yes, we have a good plan for it. Part of the reason I'm being cagey is because I want to let the staff talk about all the stuff they've been cooking up. We're pretty excited about it.
Micah Loewinger: It's funny to me, Ben. You went from literally covering, for lack of a better term, fake news to now running the fake news site, the most famous one of them all, basically. How does that make sense?
Ben Collins: When I started on this beat this info beat back in the day, it was just to cover all the dumb stuff that was happening and there was a lot of joy in it. It was chaos and it was people messing around and having fun and that messing around and having fun got economized by the worst people in the world, man and reclaiming that is important. I realized this early in the year. I could sit around all day and just keep reporting on all the new cast of bad guys that come along and mess with the internet and make things worse or it can make like a good thing, or I could, in this case, hopefully save a good thing from AI death or equivalent. That's my whole goal with this. I want this thing to survive, and I want this thing to thrive.
[music]
Micah Loewinger: Ben, thank you very much.
Ben Collins: Yes, man. Thank you.
Micah Loewinger: Ben Collins is CEO of The Onion.
)
Or maybe something else.
And of course, Ben also has to bring up Elon Musk for some reason.
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