"Anti-media ideologues like Elon Musk love to deploy disempowering language like " you are the media now " to assist in their long-term project of eroding the media's institutional authority. But thinking about the media that broke through in 2025, it really was the weird and non-traditional stuff that triumphed, from the work of Lane Kiffin obsessive Ben Garrett to white nationalist Nick Fuentes lamenting the " low IQ antisemitism" of podcaster Candace Owens, thus kicking off his " generational run.""
"Or maybe a better way of putting it is that it's the weird and sometimes traditional that works because on any given day my media diet can include lots of traditional stuff, like Joe Weisenthal and Tracy Alloway talking about credit card interest rates, or Jason Blum reflecting on why M3GAN 2.0 flopped. But while these media products come from decidedly institutional places like Bloomberg and Puck/The Ringer, respectively, it's hard to imagine them thriving outside of the weird media context of the mid-2020s."
Anti-media ideologues deploy disempowering language like "you are the media now" to erode media institutional authority. Weird, non-traditional media triumphed in 2025, with figures such as a Lane Kiffin obsessive and Nick Fuentes gaining prominence through provocative commentary. Some traditional media moments persisted inside the weird ecosystem, including coverage by Joe Weisenthal and Tracy Alloway and reflections from Jason Blum. The chaotic, fractured media environment does not guarantee success through attention-seeking strategies. High-profile attention campaigns by Sydney Sweeney, Jennifer Lawrence, and Olivia Nuzzi failed to produce predictable benefits, revealing limits of the attention economy.
Read at Nieman Lab
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]