The New Yorker Radio Hour - Trolling the Press Corps

Episode Date: January 2, 2018

Lucian Wintrich, a young blogger, was recently appointed as the White House correspondent for the conservative political site Gateway Pundit. He has no professional experience as a reporter and doesn���t claim any interest in landing big stories. His goal is to attack media outlets that he regards as leftist, and he doesn’t shy away from name-calling. The New Yorker’s Andrew Marantz questions Wintrich about trolling as a form of journalism. Originally aired on April 7, 2017.  New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

in a conversation with someone, when they have that revelation. It's pretty huge. You can make a sure. You can get a source for it? Yeah, the telegraph. From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. I'm David Remnick, and you're listening to The New Yorker Radio Hour.

Andrew Moranz has been reporting for The New Yorker on the new brand of conservatism that Donald Trump has brought to Washington, people formerly on the fringes of the right wing. And one of those is a young blogger named Lucian Wintrich. In 2016, Wintrich began writing for the pro-Trump website called The Gateway Pundit. And a big part of what he does is trolling, basically. He'll mock women, he'll mock minorities, liberals, trans people, overweight people, you name it. Wintrich himself is gay.

And he made up the hashtag twinks for Trump. pretty much anything to generate a little outrage so that you never know how much of what he's saying is real. Lucian Winchrich is now right at the center of American politics as Gateway Pundits' White House correspondent. He had no professional experience in reporting and he writes a lot about his confrontations

with other White House correspondents. Andrew Moran sat down with him in our studio in April. It is clear, and I don't know that you would deny this, that your beat as a White House correspondent is a little bit different from other people's beats. I mean, I think most people from the sort of more traditional media, they're going in there having sort of background conversations with high administration officials trying to get to the bottom of what's happening at the White House, what their connections may or may not be to the Russians. You're not doing that stuff, right? Well, here's the thing.

If you have an entire room of reporters who are in almost a humorously synchronized way are asking the exact same questions over and over and over, essentially. potentially performing to the American people and telling the American people what they need to be asking, I'm obviously not going to do that. And I do think that a lot of, if you actually observe that room in these sort of old guard media people, it's a room full of performance artists. So what exactly am I doing that differently aside from not complying to the sort of narrative or national plot line that they're working off of? Well, one thing they would say is they're pursuing the truth. Do you put any stock in that? I really don't see any more legitimacy in what they're doing than ideally what I'm doing. And I will note that I haven't even asked a question yet.

At this point, my trolling, so to speak, is literally confined to just being in the room, which apparently really triggers them. So your job in that room is not to dig up new information? Is anybody's job in that room to really dig up information? Has anybody been able to find out something that? that hasn't been already printed a million times in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, able to actually get new information from those briefing room. And they didn't even interview us. So they interviewed everybody. Wow. I have to say, Andrew, let's just stop right here and ask this question. There's a caveat that a lot of White House reporting has nothing to do with the briefing room, first of all.

What is this guy doing there? So I think of trolling as trying to incite a specific reaction. And so a lot of what he's doing there is just by being there, he is getting people to react, and that has been successful. I think part of his premise is true. There is a performative aspect to that briefing room. A lot of the real journalism doesn't happen in that room, and so by showing up, he's kind of doing almost a send-up of the serious journalist persona.

But there doesn't seem to be much beyond that. It sort of seems to be that's the schick. So why is he important at all? People are listening to what he says. The Gateway Pundit, in the run-up to the election, got a million page views a day. And while the newspaper is running a boring story about health care economics, you know, the Gateway Pundit is running colorful stories with heroes and villains.

And Lucian, therefore, when he lampoons the traditional media, when he points out their flaws, he is casting enough doubt and kind of muddying the waters to the point where it allows readers who are so inclined to sort of throw their hands in the air and go, oh, forget it. I don't know who to believe. There are sort of two different distinct portions of what I should be doing. And one is actually examining policy and relatively dry writing, which I'm going to be doing more and more of. I think simultaneously, while I'm doing that, I want to be attacking the media for not doing their job. And I think that combination can be a wonderfully enlightening one for a lot of people.

And why? I mean, break that down because when we were there, you know, Andrew Marcus was talking about how this goes back to the 90s. Like, why is this the strategy to attack the media and to delegitimize them? Because we're able to do what these, again, it's almost the American Revolution, where the Brits are playing these old military games, where you have to assemble in a certain formation. That's how the old media plays, those constraints that, oh, we'll write a piece that is attacking. I mean, come on, the Gateway Pundit has been continuously attacked by the mainstream media. And so they're doing it in formation. Now, what we're doing is I'll write an article against them, and then ideally I'll intermix that with actual articles about policy, whatever else.

But it won't just be that. Then I'll take to Twitter and Snapchat and use all the new media entities at my disposal to make a brander, more disorienting case and play a little bit of guerrilla warfare against them, which they're not used to. Right. Well, and what they would say is in addition to sort of being old-fashioned and behind the times and not knowing how to get on Snapchat, I think, Their argument would be, well, yeah, part of our formation is things like fidelity to the truth and not calling people names. If I had a dollar for every name, the mainstream media called me and every label they've given me, come on. I mean, that's disingenuous. They're babbling dirty, but they're babbling in formation.

But you call people pedophiles on Twitter. You allege that they're affiliated with PizzaGate. Like, that's a level that they don't go to. I didn't really. I just, with that specific, I know. which you're referring to with that specific writer. He did have someone of a pito mustache. And I just asked the question.

And good journalists do ask questions. And my question was, could this writer be a pedophile? No, no. I never said he was. Good journalists don't ask questions like, given this guy's mustache, is he a pedophile? That's not what they do. A good article and good journalism comes from first asking a question and then either seeing if that question is true and plays out or if it's proven. false.

Yeah, but come on. This is a good troll, but, like, you don't believe what you're saying. You know, I just, I'm a very curious person. Curious is not the word that first leaps to mine. And how can calling someone a paedophile be considered journalism? Or even interesting performance art. Can you explain a bit about where he comes from, what this, you know, what's this phenomenon source? He just, he sees it as a fight, right?

So he grew up in Pittsburgh. He went to Bard, a very progressive liberal arts college. Let's not blame this on Bard. Well, he does. He says that when he was there, he was kind of turned into a conservative. Did you like Bard? I had a very love and hate relationship with Bard. I was sort of disgusted by the crazy sort of progressive views that I was exposed to more and more,

which actually got me to sort of renounce the entire progressive movement. Like what? Well, I mean, one of the first instances for me was I was caught listening to rap music. And I'll say caught because a black student confronted me. And he said, well, you know, this music wasn't meant for you. And I said, okay, well, I mean... At Bard. But where in your room?

Yeah, yeah. Well, I was, okay, so the full story would be I had a radio show briefly. I played a rap song on the radio. And my gosh, there might have been, again, college radio. I probably had three listeners. But one of those listeners was a member of the Black student organization. He took incredible issue to me playing a rap song. And again, for me and the three other people listening.

What was the song? Do you remember? Yeah, it was a Nas song. I forget exactly which one, though. And you were just playing it? I was playing it and singing along. Singing along. And I think at one point you told me you were singing along

and you were singing along while he said the N-word and you said the N-word with him. I don't think he... Well, he said ending with an A, yeah. That inward. And you said it with him. Yeah. So that's a little bit more than playing a rap song.

Singing along to it? Yeah. Well, it's a different... You know, I personally, I also don't think words have... I mean, if I had a dollar for every time I was called a faggot. I really don't think that words have any power if you don't give them power. But again, with that specific instance, they didn't even mention me singing along to every word of the song.

The problem that they specifically had incited was that that music wasn't meant for me. And I'll never forget that. And so do you not believe that there's such a thing as hate speech or a speech that can hurt people or be offensive to people? I don't know. I mean, you know, I've been recently, the actual small groups of 15-year-old white nationalists in this country have been attacking me relatively relentlessly on Twitter. It's annoying. Do I think that am I incapacitated and not getting out of bed because of it? No. It hurts, right, to be called names? It's obnoxious. It doesn't hurt. Did it hurt you when you were younger? I mean, oh, yeah, I mean. being called names always hurts, I think, younger kids. But, I mean, I did grow up in the inner city of Pittsburgh where you're relatively frequently, even though I wasn't out at the time, very frequently called a faggot, very

frequently called a honky and a cracker. So, you know, I sort of personally became desensitized to name calling. I know that other people haven't had that luxury, and so I feel sorry for them, but that's not, again, that's not really my problem. You've been doing a lot of research into and writing about for the New Yorker the phenomenon of the alt-right and white nationalism. Where do Lucian's politics fit into all of this? And if it's all just a big, giant joke, is there any danger in it?

So he's careful to distinguish himself from the white nationalists. He doesn't like Richard Spencer. He enjoys watching the video of Richard Spencer getting... Richard Spencer, who's essentially a neo-Nazi. Yes, and who got punched in the face and there were memes made out of it. And Lucian actually enjoys consuming those memes as much as... liberals do. He's very careful to distinguish himself from any form of neo-Nazism. But I do think he engages in some slippery slope kind of rhetoric where when it's all a guerrilla war,

when it's all a sort of narrative and a counter-narrative, a lot of stuff gets lost, context, truth, reality. This conversation is dragging us into the twilight zone. When it comes to truth and lying, when it comes to, civic conversation and political conversation. Not to be a big, big old stick in the mud, but that's where we are. What the hell has happened? Yeah.

No, I know, and that's part of the strategy is that then this wing of the right... And to befuddle people like us. Yeah, to befuddle people and to make us clutch our pearls and say, oh, no, this is so serious. And then they can say, look, we're the fun ones. We're the rabble rousers. One could almost call it sad. Sad exclamation point. Yeah. Roll tape, as they say.

when I get the move of trolling, I get the move of scoring rhetorical points, but like just truly when does the spin stop and when does the trolling stop? Or do we just live in a world where that's all there is? I don't know. I mean, you can ask the left. The second they stop pushing narratives,

the right probably won't either. So it's not like there's somewhat of a symbiotic relationship, I think, between political media and political officials. And I don't know. I mean, yeah, the second, the second, they stop poking, we'll stop poking back. So it's just a nan and pooh, you did it, I can do it too. No, I mean, there's definitely, I think media right now in America is somewhat of a battlefield

where the left is trying to control the narrative and the right is trying to control the narrative. And there's always going to be that back and forth. There always has been. Is it all just narratives? I mean, isn't one of the narratives more true than the other one? Like, if the left wants to push the narrative, you've said this couple times that the left wants to push the narrative that the Trump campaign was in bed with the Russians. Whether the left wants to push that narrative or not, isn't that a separate question from whether it's true? Well, rather than screaming about Trump and the Russians continuously, I mean, you know, Hillary, there were also articles talking about how Hillary Clinton's campaign had far more and deep ties to the Russians than Trump.

And why hasn't that been all over the papers? But that's a talking point. Like literally I'm asking you as a human being, don't you worry about whether it's true. Don't I worry whether or not it's true? Don't you stay awake at night worrying about whether the Russian government has compromising material on our president that's going to cause him to act erratically? I mean, you know, until I see something, I mean, that's like saying don't you lay awake at night, scared that Trump might be from outer space. No, it's not because there's evidence for it. The FBI is investigating it. They're not investigating whether he's from outer space. But yeah, they're investigating it at the behest of democratic senators. No, no, no, no.

They're the FBI. They're doing their job. There's evidence that they're tracking down. No, I'm like literally asking you as a human being. I get what your role is as a media gladiator, as a guerrilla fighter. But as an American citizen, when do you just want to uncover the truth rather than playing your side in a guerrilla war? You know, I think that, yeah, everybody is going to be naturally continuously curious. I, um, based on, again, I, this is sort of a boy who cried wolf scenario for me with the media,

and they've been claiming these Russian connections and providing little to no evidence. The, uh, whether or not, um, the FBI, uh, was able to sort of dig anything up when they, uh, when they were monitoring Trump. Uh, I mean, they, they didn't, basically. And that's why they had to put the, uh, the request in a second time because the first time it wasn't justified. If tomorrow, the New York Times, reported that the FBI has found linkages between the Trump campaign and the Russians, you would write a post saying you can't trust the New York Times and you can't trust the FBI, right?

It depends what they, it really does depend what they exactly uncovered. If it's, if it's that a lower level official or a strategy official during Trump's campaign colluded, then would we post that? I mean, that's going to be all over the news. So, I mean, from a media perspective, We might, but you're going to be able to get much better in-depth reporting. Because we, I mean, for the most articles are relatively short form. And a story like that, it would require, say, a longer piece in the Lost Street Journal

or any number of these other fake news entities. That's White House correspondent Lucien Winchrich of the Gateway Pundit. He talked with the New Yorkers Andrew Morrance. I'm David Remnick, and that's the New Yorker Radio Hour for today. I want to wish you a happy new year, and next week, we'll have a long sit-down with Jerry Seinfeld. It's going to be fun, so please join us, and happy new year. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Yards,

with additional music by Alexis Quadrado. With help from Susan Morrison, Emma Allen, Christine Renee Miller, Emily Mann and Jessica Henderson. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.