Despite persistent claims to the contrary, the press in this country loves to label people and groups. And this despite the fact that journalists and pundits have been warning us for years (generations?) against putting people into categories and attributing aspects to their character. To show how incapable they are of adhering to their own dictates, we often see this amusing display when they criticize the biased labeling of people while simultaneously implying that all The Republicans behave this way.
It doesn’t take much effort to think of the moments when the press resorts to this kind of labeling. We know all too well that Republicans are branded Nazis, conservatives are branded fascists, that any silent opposition to policy by a minority is attributed to racism, and that any challenge to a woman, no matter how diminutive, is attributed to sexism. An opposite attitude toward transgender people, Muslims, or other select groups leads to accusations that utilize the suffix “-phobic.”
This idle shortcut is used in another area as well. When an instance arises where a topic tends toward conspiracy, or people simply ask questions in a way that threatens to shake the accepted narrative, they are immediately labeled as participants in the “QAnon conspiracy.” This has become such a common device in the press that sometimes all they have to do is utilize the letter “Q” and the story is made up.
In this amusing passage @AP invokes his favorite smear campaign that no one listens to, “Q-Anon,” and then goes on to cite the heavily biased NewsGuard as a trusted source of “disinformation.”
5/ pic.twitter.com/l7dmcgvq2J— Brad Slager: A folksy coach and joyful as a K-Hive! (@MartiniShark) 25 September 2023
But here’s the very obvious and uncomplicated reality: No one in the press knows what the hell they’re talking about when they invoke “Q.” It’s simply a blanket accusation that, once applied, makes a target seem irrelevant. That’s a very useful dose of partisanship for journalists who slap that scarlet letter on an issue and immediately paint their target as powerless and disregarded.
This technique resurfaced in a BBC articlewhere they investigate the conspiracy minds who promote the theory that the recent attacks on Donald Trump were staged. The BBC takes a novel approach by finding cranks from both sides of the political scene, but even with this unbiased approach, bias creeps in. These are the compact profiles of the two women in focus who believe in a staged conspiracy, and it is clear how they are presented while being positioned with political polarity:
About 70 miles north, in a suburb of Denver, lives Camille, a passionate advocate for racial and gender equality who lives with a posse of rescued dogs and has voted Democratic for 15 years.
Wild Mother, the online pseudonym of a woman named Desirée, lives in the mountains of Colorado, where she posts videos to her 80,000 followers about holistic wellness and raising her adolescent daughter. She wants Donald Trump to win the presidential election.
Democrat Camille sounds almost rational, believing that the plan to imitation an attempted murder is intended to boost Trump’s popularity in the polls. Desirée has since succumbed to this pernicious movement. She is described as someone who “who already follows QAnon, the unfounded conspiracy theory that claims Donald Trump is involved in a secret war against an elite cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles.”
Let me be clear: The press LOVES the concept of QAnon. They dig it up and throw the accusations around more freely than Trump throwing paper towels in Puerto Rico. They don’t like to dig into the details of what this movement is all about. What is QAnon, who is “Q,” and what is the purpose of this organized effort? These and many other related questions will go completely unanswered by the media.
The press has spent years trying to sell QAnon as a toxic mindset that has infected the Republican Party and is both influencing political thought and driving policy in Washington. But there’s a hilarious detail to this – the only source for most “Q” information is the press itself. It seems odd that such a widespread and all-consuming movement has no basis or source for its current beliefs, and even stranger that the media is the one with all the supposed information.
That’s not to say that QAnon wasn’t a powerful organization at one time. There was a time when postings with veiled predictions and coded messages were circulating online. People who testified to what things meant and predicted spread them widely. There were rumors that “Q” was someone high-ranking in Trump’s administration or a high-ranking military official who was leaking classified information about the machinations within the government.
Did you notice the utilize of the past tense in this paragraph? That’s because the original website, founded in 2017, was banned from Reddit and moved to 4Chan, then 8Chan, and has since been shut down. Years ago. The last message posted was in December 2020, but we have to assume that QAnon is an ongoing and growing entity.
There is no archive today where followers can get the latest marching orders. We have to assume that QAnon has grown beyond its original intent into something even bigger, which benefits the press enormously; since there is no longer a center of operations, everything is attributed to QAnon, and as a resultone can be labelled a follower. Since this label carries with it a built-in demonisation, politicians or anyone else can be despised.
But what about its origins – who is/was “Q”? The press must avoid that too. Over the years, two names have been mentioned as the name of the letter of the same name, and neither of them is an critical figure. HBO documentary “Q: Into The Storm,” They explored aspects of the “movement” and ended up with a revealing scene where the production team spoke to a prominent participant, Ron Watkins, and he accidentally slipped up when he seemed to reveal that he was the driving force behind “Q” at the time.
The The New York Times also conducted a searchby using language forensics. With the support of two independent labs that analyzed word styles and other language markers, they tracked down Paul Furber. He was one of the original followers of the QAnon forums and actually seems to have been its creator, who was eventually overtaken by Watkins. So who are these guys? They are not Washington players, nor are they military power brokers. Furber was a sort of conspiracy investigator in South Africa, and the website operator Watkins joined months after QAnon became known.
Neither man is a political insider with influence or real insider contacts. But that hasn’t stopped the media from spreading the QAnon myth. Today, it’s used in a similar way to the story of Keyser Söze in the movie The Usual Suspects – a grim fairy tale that was once used to scare children and get them to behave, but has turned into a convenient cipher that can be used to spin any story you want for convenience.
This is what our media complicated has been reduced to: presenting fables as facts, bringing narratives up to their accepted level. Note that QAnon is supposedly a conspiracy disease that infects all of conservatism. To learn something fresh, we don’t hear from conservatives, but from the real passionate followers – the press.
