Before COVID, I’d visit my grandparents in Florida every March. These trips were comprised of swimming, fishing, beach visits, board games, cooking, shopping, movies… and a lot of cable news. My grandparents are of the TV generation. When they’re in the house, the TV is always on. Other than dinnertime, the flatscreen was always on, and always tuned to the 24-hour news or the stock market. Absorbing news and commentary this way is so foreign to me. That’s not a new idea, as we’ve labored over the differences in generational approaches to media all semester.
What feels decidedly new and worthy of discussion though, is how the political figures on social media shoot across the bow at these traditional news outlets. The very news sources that my grandparents engage with are the ones that online political figures use as fodder on their programs. News and political media is not only changing because of the internet, news and political media is being dragged by the internet, too. There is an active tension between traditional and contemporary political punditry that puts these different spheres at odds with each other.
Obviously, a lot of this is partisan hackery. I’m in a strange position where I like to get my news from sources I simply don’t agree with. Between Leftist Twitch political icon Hasan Piker and The Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro, I get a lot of perspectives on a lot of topics. I rarely agree with either, though. Often, my opinion falls somewhere between the two, which allows me to have distance from the coverage I digest and see when either figure is motivated by political partisanship above ideology.
The Politics of Hasan Piker
Source: mo1567 – https://www.flickr.com/photos/mow1567/45106029365/, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=98978894
Often, Hasan Piker is far less motivated by partisanship than Ben Shapiro, as he’s further removed from establishment politics. Piker and Shapiro both have online presences, but Piker operates outside of the political elite that Shapiro clearly belongs to. As such, the takedowns of traditional media outlets and voices comes more from Piker, who falls outside of the liberal-conservative supposed binary.
This makes his voice particularly interesting, as he’s equally likely to dismantle a clip from Fox as he is from CNN. As a Twitch streamer, a lot of his self-proclaimed agitprop involves pulling videos from traditional sources and reacting to them. Piker will turn a five minute clip into fifty minutes of vulgar entertainment. His work is one part about joking and memeing with his audience, whereas the other part is about educating his audience about the politics he espouses. Piker is obvious with his biases and his disinterest in the mainstream political media.
I’d characterize his commentary toward establishment sources as comedically hostile, actually. This ethos makes Piker particularly fun to watch and makes him a good ambassador for his Leftist ideology. By contrast to the stuffy, establishment punditry that I watch with my grandparents, Piker feels organic. He’s a charismatic figure that uses that charisma to dismantle the mainstream media with an equal opportunity bent.
Source: By Gage Skidmore from Surprise, AZ, United States of America – Ben Shapiro, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=93848075
Piker often turns his gaze to Ben Shapiro, too. While Shapiro’s “facts don’t care about your feelings” ethos presents itself a challenge to the status quo, that’s empty rhetoric. When his show is dissected by Piker, that becomes critically obvious. Ben Shaprio’s brand of politics is far closer to mainstream cable punditry than truly new wave punditry like Piker. However, while Shapiro espouses his counter-cultural political honesty as new and exciting, it’s really the direct evolution of my grandparents’ media.
Shaprio is careful to toe the party line, he’s incredibly wealthy, and he has direct connections into Republican political hierarchies. If Tucker Carlson had a web program instead of a cable network, it would look a lot like The Daily Wire. As such, when Ben Shapiro does dismantle the establishment, it feels comparatively hollow, knowing that he’s as engrained in that system as anyone he’s challenging. This is a revelation that figures like Piker have drawn for me, by employing the same tactics used to take down Fox on Shapiro.
This isn’t simply a question of Right versus Left though, as there are some conservative voices that are legitimately analogous to someone like Piker, instead of simply in aesthetics and hollow rhetoric like Ben Shapiro. There’s Steven Crowder, for instance. Crowder, while employing many similar tactics to Piker, is particularly unsavory. He may take and dissect media across the political spectrum, but he does it with rhetorical that often employs blatant racism under a veneer of comedy. Unfortunately, these tactics have skyrocketed Crowder’s popularity. He’s anti-establishment excess and certainly an unfortunate byproduct of the democratized online pundit space.
The Underlying Importance of The Conflict
Source: Dimitri Rodriguez – https://www.flickr.com/photos/98346767@N04/46115223655/, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=78701914
That said, this sort of discord isn’t only coming from anti-establishment voices. Politicians like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who operate squarely within the political apparatus, are making alliances and operating outside of their traditional context. AOC has actually worked closely with Piker to livestream video games and share political ideology. She’s also no stranger to attacking both sides of the political binary on her Twitter page. Ultimately, voices like AOC prove that the tension isn’t establishment versus anti-establishment, but instead those in touch versus those out of it.
Ultimately, my grandparents’ media is only a target because it deserves to be. Well, at least from my perspective. When I listen to these younger, digitally engaged voices, politics feel a lot less partisan and disconnected from reality. Those who target my grandparents’ media have no less of an agenda than cable pundits. But they have an ethos and platform conducive to taking the offensive against a geriatric and elitist in-group that doesn’t speak to my generation anymore. People like Piker, AOC, and even Ben Shapiro do. They understand how to amplify a message and speak to a younger crowd. They may be informal, but they’re essential political voices in today’s culture.
Maybe next time I see my grandparents, I should put Hasan Piker on for them instead.
Journalism 2.0 