The Conspirasphere

NOeL rOOneY struggles with a quiet news period in the Conspiraspehere, but finds that traditional news media have unexpectedly picked up the slack...

MainstreaM Mania

It’s not so very long ago that the phrase ‘conspiracy theory’, if it was used at all in the mainstream media, was uttered with a heavy lacing of either derision or moral revulsion. In a sense, this still holds true; when media outlets carry stories from the Conspirasphere on their main pages, they invariably lace their opening paragraphs with normalising shibboleths: ‘kooky’ or ‘wacky’ if the desired response is derision, ‘outrageous’ or ‘dangerous’ if a moral kneejerk is required. And yet …

Scouting for material for this column recently, and finding myself a bit short on inspiration, and the usual outlets less excited than usual, I put a few conspiracyrelated search terms into Google :‘ latest conspiracy news’, that sort of thing. I assumed I would be directed to Prison Planet, the Truthseeker, Before It’s News, or some of the higher profile websites dealing in tabloid conspiracy fare for the less discerning porters of tin foil headwear.

The Truthseeker did make the first page of results, but only just. It was last on a list that included several of the UK’s best-known newspapers (‘paper’ is almost quaint in its anachronism now, but news-æther doesn’t yet have the same ring to it). The Sun, the Daily Express, the Independent, Huffington Post, even the BBC (Auntie, how could you?) all took greater prominence. I was mildly intrigued, assuming that a combination of paid search and clunky Boolean algorithms had conspired to throw a few random phrases in the way of the real stuff.

But it turns out that several news outlets now devote pages of their online periodicals specifically to the Conspirasphere. This is perhaps unsurprising in the case of the Sun and the Express; but the Independent seems an unlikely candidate for conspiracy news outlet (incidentally, the Beeb’s search results were actually just Boolean red herrings, thank goodness). None of the pages are particularly well curated or kept up to date; several of the stories were a few years old, and a lot of the stories were more ‘wacky news’ than your actual conspiracy material. But their existence represents a considerable irony.

The advent of citizen journalism is part of the process that has seen traditional news media suffer a huge decrease in readership and, more importantly, trust on the part of readers. Article after article appears in the more august of these organs despairing at the apparent inability of the average reader to discern the real stories among the post-factual, un-checked torrent of amateur news available online. Yet at the same time, these outlets are running content designed to appeal to the same readers they are lambasting for lack of news nous.

It is a truism of journalism that a news outlet’s job is to sell its readers to the advertising industry (no, not you; FT is more high-minded than that). And no doubt several of the media bodies concerned will argue that they are presenting these stories for the amusement of their more sophisticated readers. But there is, I suspect, more than a mere postmodernist convolution of confectionary realism at work here. The Conspirasphere is not some lonely satellite of the real, wandering in a perennially distant orbit like a wannabe Nibiru; it is a core part of the thinking, of the real world, of a large proportion of the population now. As an audience, we’ve gone from ‘now that’s just silly’ to ‘I could believe that’ in less than a generation. This is not a sign of delusion on our parts (or if it is, it’s the madness of an extremely large crowd); it’s a mirror that an increasing number of us hold up to the world as presented to us via the media, Chomsky’s ‘correcting lens of irony’ taken to a logical end. Ten years hence, what will the media landscape look like?