Why Verrit, a pro-Clinton media platform, is doomed to fail | Michael Paarlberg
The website has been blasted for its unsubtle propaganda. There is a reason it works for Republicans and not Democrats
Michael Paarlberg is an assistant professor of political science at Virginia Commonwealth University
The set of facts you get, on your TV or your Facebook feed, is increasingly a question of how you align politically. That the chief beneficiaries of this self-sorting trend have been conservative media is not lost on liberals. We need our own echo chamber, they say, to fight fake news with real news. Or memes, at least.
Enter Verrit, the most ill-conceived startup since Juicero. Brainchild of Clinton hyper-loyalist Peter Daou, the “media venture for the 65.8 million” (referring to Clinton’s popular vote tally) offers up treacly quotes and random factoids, readymade for social media and “verified” by the site, so that you can be sure Clinton really did say “America is once again at a moment of reckoning.”
Within days, it won the endorsement of Madame Secretary herself and the mockery of everyone else, due in part to its founder’s fondness for all caps and getting in fights on Twitter.
Yet even with a more auspicious launch, Verrit would have been doomed to fail. Its model reflects a basic misunderstanding of partisan media and how it differs for Democrats and Republicans. Democrats will never beat Republicans at their own media game, because they’re a fundamentally different party playing by a different set of rules.
The presumption behind Verrit is that conservative media are winning the battle of ideas because they’re hoodwinking readers with lies, and lies can be debunked. Show them a verified statistic (Fact: “More Than One-Fifth of US Students Report Being Bullied”) or quote (Fact: “JFK Chided Those Who Maintain Neutrality in Times of Moral Crisis”), and their whole worldview will crumble.
But conservative media like Fox and Breitbart don’t succeed because they lie, they succeed because they push an ideological agenda. Their message may be flexible with facts, but is consistent in its overarching vision, as well as with the agenda of the Republican Party. And this works because, as political scientists Matt Grossmann and David Hopkins write in their book Asymmetric Politics, the Republican Party is defined by ideology.
The Democrats, on the other hand, are defined by their constituent social groups. Their agenda is to defend the rights and advance the interests of those often historically marginalized groups, and as such will pursue certain specific progressive policy goals. But they lack a holistic ideological approach, a liberal counterpart to the movement conservativism that grounds the Republicans and the media outlets that power that movement.
Thus there’s far less appetite among Democrats for the type of unsubtle propaganda that Verrit traffics. One can see it in the way Fox News trounces MSNBC in viewership: Republicans see Fox as the only news source they can trust in media landscape that does not align with their values. Democrats would rather just read the New York Times.
News outlets serve different purposes for the two parties: as Grossmann and Hopkins write, Republicans “view themselves as engaged in an ideological battle with a hostile liberal establishment, turning even their choice of news source into a conscious act of conservative self-assertion.”
Democrats, on the other hand, are happy with “traditional media sources that often implicitly flatter the Democratic worldview but do not portray themselves or their consumers as combatants in a political or ideological conflict.”
In theory, Democrats could be open to more ideological conflict, now that they are shut out of all three branches of government, the majority of statehouses, and have little to lose. And a smarter media outlet might be able to tap into that demand. But it would be one catering to a very different party than the Democrats currently are, one that sees itself as a social movement, with a broader vision for how the world should look, and a willingness to use media as a blunt instrument to get there. One that looks curiously like what Clinton’s main rival for the nomination was pushing.
But if there’s one group that Daou hates more than Republicans, it’s Bernie Sanders supporters. One of his “Verrits” reads “12% of Sanders voters cast their vote for Trump over Clinton” – neglecting to mention the study it quotes noted that most of that 12% were self-identified Republicans.
A more reflective Verrit might ask how a bunch of Republicans decided to vote for Sanders in the first place, and if his ideological approach had anything to do with it. The irony is that the kind of party in which a project like Verrit would succeed is one that Daou would hate: one that would sound more like the Sanders campaign, and look more like the Republican Party.
