Age of the Geek

By: 
Travis Fischer

Milo and Outrage
     The term "Fake News" gets thrown around a lot these days.
     Originally the term was meant to describe the kind of nonsense stories you see on your elderly relative's Facebook page. The ones about vapor trails coming out of airplanes or how cooking with aluminum foil is poisoning you. Stories that come from sites with names like "superpatriotic.net" or "therealtruth.org."
     More recently, the term is thrown around as a slander against the mainstream media, reporting on legitimate stories with verifiable facts.
     Most of the time this is a criticism of people upset that reality hasn't conformed to their preconceived narrative. It's far more convenient to write off uncomfortable stories as a product of a biased media rather than admit they might be true.
     Sadly, sometimes those people are right.
     Felix Kjellberg, better known to the world as "PewDiePie," is the most successful and widely watched YouTuber star by a large margin. With 53 million subscribers, Kjellberg made a multi-million dollar business by screaming at scary video games and performing other silly acts using his particular brand of random humor.
     Nice work if you can get it.
     So when the Wall Street Journal published a story with the headline that read, "Disney Severs Ties With YouTube Star PewDiePie After Anti-Semitic Posts," it was something of a surprise.
     PewDiePie is making anti-Semitic posts? Seems out of character.
     Did he go on a rant about Jews ruling the world? Did he deny the holocaust? What's going on here?
     The Wall Street Journal cited nine offending videos that included anti-Semitic jokes or Nazi imagery. Among these included a video where Kjellberg dressed up like a Nazi to make an over-the-top comparison to YouTube's moderation policies. Another example was his use of a random image of Hitler in an absurdist transition sequence.
     This use of Nazi imagery puts Kjellberg in the same company as Charlie Chaplin, Sarah Silverman, Monty Python, and Donald Duck. Hardly icons of anti-Semitism.
     Even the more extreme examples, such as paying non-English speakers to hold up obscene signs just to see if they would still falls in the same vein of shock humor as "Family Guy" or "South Park." Crude and shocking to be sure but you'd have to make some major leaps before concluding that Kjellberg was acting with malice.
     Kjellberg definitely used anti-Semitic statements in some of his videos, but always in the context of "this is a terrible thing to say." To call them "anti-Semitic jokes" is to completely invert the context of the joke.
     Maker Studios, owned by Disney, dropped Kjellberg from the network shortly after the Wall Street Journal story. It's unclear if the bad press was directly responsible, there is speculation that Disney is planning to make vast cuts to Maker Studios across the board anyway, but having a major publication imply you are an anti-Semite does nobody any good regardless.
     Kjellberg isn't the only provocative foreigner to get unfairly slammed by the media either in recent weeks.
     You may have heard of the conservative journalist and professional antagonizer Milo Yiannopoulos who has made college students go absolutely nuts for having the audacity to potentially say things they may not agree with.
     Riots broke out at the University of California earlier this month when Yiannopoulos attempted to attend a speaking gig he was invited to. Journalist Jeremy Scahill canceled his own appearance on "Real Time with Bill Maher," when Yiannopoulos was booked as a guest.
     It was an ironic protest considering that Yiannopoulos' appearance on Maher's show did more to discredit him than any protest or boycott had ever managed. Yiannopoulos is very skilled at provoking a reaction from the easily agitated but when sitting at the table with actual adults he turned out to be a paper tiger. As it turned out, he wasn't the boogeyman he was made out to be.
     But apparently that wasn't good enough.
     Within days of his appearance on Maher's show, an old video surfaced of Yiannopoulos where he is said to defend pedophilia.
     Well, that looks pretty bad.
     Of course, context is king and in this particular context, Yiannopoulos was being flippant about his own experience as 17-year-old in a relationship with an older man. Certainly controversial, but let's not pretend he was driving around elementary schools in a windowless van.
     Instead of applying context, the leftist sites with a grudge decided to portray Yiannopoulos as a proponent of a crime he was a victim of. In the ensuing controversy, Yiannopoulos lost a book deal, resigned from Breitbart, and was dis-invited from speaking at CPAC.
     Now I don't agree with most of the things that Yiannopoulos says, but he should be free to say them. The best way to weed out bad ideas is not to shut them down, but to put them up against good ones.
     In the long run, Kjellberg and Yiannopoulos will both be fine. Kjellberg's subscriber count has only gone up since his controversy unfolded and Yiannopoulos' new found infamy will probably wind up being more profitable in the long run than this short term setback.
     The real losers here are the press, and ultimately the people. In an age where people are more willing and able of creating personalized bubbles of reality it's harder than ever to regain that trust once lost. More than ever before we need a media we can count on to present facts accurately and appropriately. The antics of the Wall Street Journal this month haven't helped bridge that gap of trust.
     Meanwhile, a t-shirt based on "The Walking Dead" referencing the show's famous "Eeny, meeny, miny, moe" scene was recently pulled from a UK retailer because one of the many variants of that rhyme from decades ago contained a racial slur.
     Context is king.
     The king is dead.
 
     Travis Fischer is a news writer for Mid-America Publishing and disapproves of Fake News in all its forms.

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