Oregon Public Broadcasting reports the Trump administration is embracing right-wing media influencers and similar hacks to promote its messages, showing “a deepening alliance between the administration and an online world willing to misrepresent facts if it means furthering political goals.”
“The influencers’ personal content is blended with interviews on Fox News, Newsmax and other outlets, and reposted by federal agencies at times,” said OPB reporter Erik Neumann, adding that many influencers consorting with the administration during its Oregon “ICE tour” later appeared on a panel at the White House with President Trump, where clips were similarly repurposed and spun out to broader conservative media.
“Local media like OPB and The Oregonian/OregonLive have not been given the same access to the ICE building when they requested it,” reports Neumann. “In response to requests to tour the ICE building, DHS officials have asked OPB — a century-old media organization that has covered newsworthy events at the protests since their earliest days — to share links to OPB coverage of the protests before considering access.”
A.J. Bauer, an assistant professor who studies media activism in the University of Alabama’s journalism department, said the Trump administration is using influencers to rationalize the president’s actions.
“The streamers are actually counter-protesters themselves who are going and documenting the protests that they disagree with,” said Bauer. “The government is actually working hand-in-glove with those folks in order to promote the government’s message. That is a new development.”
While mainstream journalists have always embedded themselves with the government to cover major events, like during the Vietnam or Iraq wars, mainstream reporters are primarily free to produce stories and footage critical of the government. But Bauer said right-wing influencers adhere to no journalistic sense of balance, truth or independence. Instead, he said, they begin with an “ideological vision of the world and then narrate what they see in a way that fits that vision.”
“The consequences are that we have two competing visions of reality,” said Bauer, referencing the fabricated reality that chaos is rampant in Oregon, even carrying that fantasy world back to the White House and reinforcing it in the mind of the president.
“The amazing thing is you look at Portland and you see fires all over the place. You see fights. I mean, violence, it’s so crazy,” Trump said during the televised round table, according to OPB. “And then you talk to the governor and she acts like everything is totally normal. It’s almost like, are you waking up from a dream or something?”
One X post from MAGA influencer Benny Johnson showed DHS Secretary Kristi Noem standing with on a high rooftop staring down an “army of antifa,” which actually consisted of a smattering of catcallers, media and a guy in a chicken suit.
Read the full OPB story at this link.