Trump Superstore, outside Knoxville, Tennessee. September 18, 2024. CC-BY
13,000 Kim Kardashians
“What a bargain. Kim Kardashian charges, I dunno… $2m for an Instagram ad? That’s like 13,000 micro-influencers you could buy for the same amount of money.”
Denise Howell, This Week in Tech episode 757, 9 February 2020, at 28:41, regarding the Bloomberg campaign's plan to use micro-influencers to persuade American voters that Mike Bloomberg is cool.
Willful blindness
“So what will they do now? …They have no earthly idea.
“There is simply nothing in the playbook at Meet the Press that tells the producers what to do in this situation. […] They didn’t arrive here through acts of naiveté, but by willful blindness, malpractice among the experts in charge, an insider’s mentality, a listening breakdown, a failure of imagination, and sheer disbelief that the world could have changed so much upon people paid so well to understand it.”
The Christmas Eve Confessions of Chuck Todd, by Jay Rosen, Press Think, 26 December 2019. Chuck Todd, NBC's Political Director and the anchor of Meet The Press, confessed in a recent Rolling Stone interview that he had been "naive" about the Republican Party's commitment to disinformation.
“The notion that the future of politics might, with the internet, become less rational and more dogmatic was scarcely explored.”
Democracy without citizens
The point at which politics becomes hard to understand is the point at which it is no longer politics but just competitive play, a Risk-style board game. Once there is only a handful of self-qualified players, we no longer qualify as a democracy, or perhaps even a polity. To cover political life as a game played between elites tells citizens that politics is a spectacle to be watched, not an activity to be participated in. Such coverage creates what scholar Bob Entman refers to as a ‘democracy without citizens.’
We'll Be Paying For Mark Halperin's Sins For Years To Come, by Eve Fairbanks, Buzfeed, 22 November 2017
Old Man Principles
Tyler Ruzich (with the mic), with Alex Cline, Ethan Randleas, and Dominic Scavuzzo — candidates for governor of Kansas. (Photo Jeff Tuttle/For The Washington Post)
“‘You know, lots of people ask me, what can you, Tyler Ruzich, do for people my age?’ Tyler said, back in his car. ‘I say, we keep continuing these Old Man Principles that aren’t working. In [Alexander] Hamilton’s time, someone my age could be commander of a frigate. Did the Founding Fathers consider that a 17-year-old might be governor? I don’t know. Did they consider that a reality-television businessman would become president of the United States after losing the popular vote? Probably not.’”