One of the funny things about the conspiracy beat is that it’s really young - both the beat and the reporters on it - so you get these observations of weird rumors Out There and they express this head shaking response, but some of them are actually old & rooted in something true.

I spent the late nineties in what was once a piano practice room in a student union building with a bunch of dudes who (some of them) would go on to be members of right wing media.

Anyway. The room was for a student magazine. It was nominally conservative. We got a lot of mail.

The mail wasn’t from angry readers, but from organizations who had access to the Collegiate Network’s mailing list. We got political cartoons, bulletins & press releases, newsletters, free books & subscriptions, all sent to our mail slot & tossed around the office.

And some of the dudes listened to talk radio - Art Bell late at night and Rush Limbaugh in the morning.

And this was the Clinton years. Some conspiracies got tons of legit mainstream coverage. Others were stuck in the wingnut-o-sphere.

So sometimes there’s a conspiracy story now and I’m like - wait I’ve heard this one before, and I go down a rabbit hole searching for where I heard it from and it’s almost always a new take on an old Clinton rumor, or it’s some new spin on older ones.

Like, deep state & Q feels like Trilateral Commission. 5G reminds me of the power line truthers worried about electromagnetic waves. The vaccine stuff is way old. Belief that powerful people have opponents and just “people who got in the way” killed almost constantly is ancient.

And there are stories like “maiden gate” which seem really random until you know that right after the Holder decision there were stories about women having their votes rejected or challenged because their maiden name was on the voter registration but married name was on their ID.

So this story - a true one that happened to only a few people, and caused disenfranchisement not fraudulent voting - gets twisted around in the fever swamps and resurrected in a new way. But people feel like it’s familiar, and that makes it seem possible or legit.

It’s not that there’s never been mainstream coverage of conspiracies, it’s that there wasn’t a beat for it (now there is via @BrandyZadrozny @daveyalba et al) AND it’s hard to parse or even recall stories that weren’t about the theory but referenced it as a colorful aside.

Anyway, my mind seems to be a kind of glue-paper for weird-ass conspiracies so maybe I’m the only audience for the idea-genealogy for stories shared by rando nutters on the internet.

But also, since this thread comes from listening to #withpod @chrislhayes interview Alba... it makes me think about the angle of the death of local news and how we should understand the media environment now.

To begin with the death of local news started with consolidation.

If you haven’t read The Media Monopoly by Ben Bagdikian and are interested in the slow death of local journalism, that’s the go-to. I had to read it in journalism school. (There’s an updated version from 2004: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/206221/the-new-media-monopoly-by-ben-h-bagdikian/)

Consolidation & shuttering small town papers, no longer having morning & afternoon editions, the rise of 24 hour cable news... this undermined local news before Craigslist came along - tho when it did, oops - a softening audience & a biz model kneecapped by the internet.

During this time the narrative was about media fragmentation. 3 channels to 300 channels, the internet, etc. Everybody in their own demographically driven media bubbles, audiences too small to count, declining broadcast network share as people peeled off to niche content.

So it was easy in the early internet to write off the talk radio and the newsletters and the zines and listservs as too niche to matter. But then you get Facebook, Twitter, YouTube. And now all these ideas can collide on a single platform. Algos connect them for you.

The conspiracy theories leaked out of email chains & chat rooms & AM talk radio into newsfeeds. They weren’t created by the algorithms or the platforms, they just ... spread. There has to be an X-Files episode about this. There’s definitely a Buffy ep: https://buffy.fandom.com/wiki/I_Robot,_You_Jane

This kind of folkloric history - please tell me there’s an academic who studies this. Conspiracies are memes - they replicate and evolve and spread across humans. Providing even a fraction of the historical context might be useful (though also pretty hard, I think).

Also caveat: I’m from Oregon. I feel like the Pacific Northwest is kind of uniquely suited to receiving conspiracy signals. Maybe it’s the topography, or the lithium in the water in Ashland, or something to do with Mt St Helens, or exploding whales.