A Reporter in Right-Wing “Crazy Town”
The right-wing media ecosystem is sometimes described as a perpetual outrage machine (headlines on a recent day included “THE LEFT’S GRAND PLAN TO DESTROY OUR COUNTRY” and “ELON MUSK IS THE BOSS ALL WOKE LOSERS NEED”), but that doesn’t mean there aren’t occasional droughts. Last Monday morning, as Howard Polskin began prowling right-wing Web sites in search of material for TheRighting, the newsletter he founded to provide a daily roundup of the conservative commentariat, he looked worried. The previous week, the hearings into the January 6th attack on the Capitol had elicited a steady stream of headlines that were provocative enough to serve as the newsletter’s subject line (“THE J6 COMMITTEE’s REAL TARGET IS YOU”). But a weekend break had raised the possibility of an unlikely lull. Ordinarily, Polskin waits until 10 A.M. to allow himself a stick of gum, but this morning he was nervously chewing by nine. “We’ll have another in the afternoon, maybe two, if it’s a bad day,” he said.
Polskin, who is seventy-one, with bright-green eyes and a bushy mustache, was sitting at the dining-room table in his beachfront co-op, in Boca Raton. He worked from a handwritten list of fifty conservative outlets, which he peruses each day. He chooses articles for many reasons, but a big factor is having a grabby headline. He sends the top seventeen to his newsletter subscribers—a few thousand that includes people in academia and the media, plus a smattering of political staffers. “I’m looking at what’s going to reveal the heart and soul of the right,” he said. He tries to offer a full spectrum of conservative politics, in curated form. “So you get crazy shit like ‘Justin Trudeau: Fidel Castro’s son.’ But then you also get the Wall Street Journal saying freedom isn’t quite dead.”
Polskin has been in the media industry—reporter at local paper in New Jersey, P.R. for CNN—for forty-eight years. He created TheRighting after the 2016 election. “Something happened in this country that led to the election of Donald Trump,” he said. “I don’t like it, but I think it’s got to be understood more.” Subscriptions are free. A grant from the Ford Foundation pays occasional freelancers. He is driven more by curiosity than by profit, which is zero; for a week last summer, he stood on a street corner tallying whether people wore masks, simply to satisfy his own interest.
In addition to the newsletter, he tracks Web traffic to conservative sites and writes trend articles. He thinks that Breitbart and Infowars are losing their edge; they used to be Polskin’s most consistent source of headlines. “Not so much anymore,” he said. “It’s just not as interesting.” Lately, he has been more likely to cite the Daily Caller (“Pronoun Police Attempt Another Arrest”); WND (“It’s Not A Gun Crisis—It’s A Spiritual Crisis”); or NOQ Report (“Bill Gates Lays Out Plan for Global Takeover”).
What about the response to the January 6th hearings? Polskin broke the coverage down into three camps. There’s the predictable fare, deriding the proceedings as political hackery. “Then there’s stuff that’s far more, you know, going toward crazy town.” (He cited Tucker Carlson.) But, he added, “I’m seeing an increase in some anti-Trump stories, and I actually started creating a file on that.”
Polskin’s liberal friends sometimes worry that he spends too much time behind enemy lines. “The knee-jerk reaction, to the mainstreamers and liberals, is that everything coming out from the right is poison,” he said. “Does it take a toll on a doctor at the C.D.C. studying the coronavirus when he looks under a microscope? No. I have a clinical detachment to it. It’s like I’m an explorer in a new land.” Still, he’s concerned about growing numb to poisonous language, such as the comparison of Anthony Fauci to Josef Mengele.
He turned back to the headline search. The day’s batch was particularly weak. Two were so unclear that he had to paraphrase. A Bill O’Reilly headline about voters’ anger with Joe Biden (“It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World”) became “Bill O’Reilly: Biden May Resign for Health Reasons.”
Polskin also chose a few that were more straightforward: “DEMS START TO PREP AMERICA FOR THEIR MID-TERM STEAL” (“So irresponsible,” he said); “The Definitive Proof That Critical Race Theory Is Being Taught in Our Schools” (“Kind of an evergreen”); and “It Seems Black Americans Miss Trump.”
But he still hadn’t found a headline worthy of the newsletter’s subject line. After nearly an hour of searching, one caught his eye: “January 6 Was Not A Coup.” It was from The American Conservative, which Polskin did not consider to be part of “crazy town.” It was short, punchy, simple. “Any reasonable person would conclude that there was a coup,” he said. “And here we have a fairly respectable conservative publication saying it was not a coup. And I love the line ‘To stage a coup, you need tanks on the White House lawn.’ ” He looked relieved. “It ticks a lot of boxes,” he said. ♦
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June 27, 2022 at 05:02PM
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A Reporter in Right-Wing “Crazy Town” - The New Yorker
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