How the pink slime gets made

I usually don’t do this, but if you’re going to read just one piece of any length today/this week/this month, I’m imploring you to make it this absolutely astonishing example of investigative citizen journalism by Emily Horne.

I hate to excerpt any of it, because the cumulative effect of the facts and analysis is overwhelming, but here’s just a bit:

The main takeaway here: it’s clear that the Midwesterner isn’t a real media outlet, it’s a right-wing political content mill—which the New York Times and POLITICO both failed to note when they cited its viral tweet as the kind of foreign policy criticism that Democrats just need to face.

The leading political news outlets of our time should not be sourcing their reporting from scammy, obviously partisan websites with no mastheads. They shouldn’t be linking to their content without explaining who it’s from and what it’s about. But it appears they either didn’t know what they were citing, or didn’t care to find out. . .

The level of vitriol, much of it overtly sexist and ageist, that AOC’s Taiwan answer generated in mainstream media was overwhelming. But it was also delayed. Why?

Whitmer and AOC’s foreign policy panel at Munich was at 10pm local time, Friday, February 13 (late afternoon EST). But the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post didn’t publish their highly critical editorials until three days later, Monday, February 16. Why?

The Munich Security Conference is absolutely crawling with reporters looking to break news. If AOC and Whitmer’s comments were newsworthy, they would have been covered as such in real time. But they weren’t.

What did happen – at least what’s visible with open source research – is that coordinated networks got busy, and conservative media figures dutifully shifted the narrative. Without Twitter API access, it’s hard to map exactly what happened, but the Midwesterner tweet clipping the video and mocking both Whitmer and AOC appeared the morning of February 14 and almost immediately started getting unusually high traffic. It quickly racked up over 10,000 likes (other recent Midwesterner tweets average around 100). It was quickly picked up and amplified by prominent professional cranks like Glenn Greenwald and Ian Miller. But it was also amplified by more Sunday show-friendly conservative voices like Mary Katharine Ham and Matt Whitlock.4

That’s a crucial step: for something to go viral enough to jump from pink slime to getting featured in the New York Times as received wisdom, it has to be laundered through voices that are coded more palatable than your average blue-checkmarked MAGA troll with an American flag in the bio. Volume alone, without more credible voices amplifying, can actually be detrimental – if it’s too obviously trolly and pushed by bots, savvy audiences can smell something is off.

This is one of those pieces that when I read it a bunch of things just went “click.”

Please read it.

(H/T LGM commenter Pianomover).