The past week or so has not been great for MSNBC nor its reputational standing in the political media landscape.
The left-leaning cable news network has struggled with how to cover the current news cycle for an audience eager to hear only good news about President Joe Biden or dire warnings about former President Donald Trump. That formula has led to relatively strong ratings over the past few years.
The horrific assassination attempt on Trump, as well as the dire state of the Biden campaign, has disrupted the balance of coverage that kept the liberal media world in the shallow end of the pool. This week, MSNBC struggled to cover it all, and many smart and typically reliable voices on the network leaned into conspiracy theories.
The lurid spectacle echoed a phenomenon all too familiar to those who followed the rise of QAnon during the Trump administration. The QAnon theory, which holds, among other deranged ideas, that the Democratic Party is a cabal of cannibal pedophiles, that JFK Jr. is still alive, and that Trump is still currently president, sucked in some of the more conspiracy-minded members of Trump’s already conspiracy-minded movement.
I am not suggesting anyone on MSNBC is even close to that level of crazy. But there are parallels between the kind of commentary we’ve seen on the network this week and the basis for the kind of thinking that leads someone to embrace a theory like QAnon.
Namely, the tendency to see connections or patterns between unrelated or random things. The term for this strange phenomenon is “apophenia.” I first learned of it when I read a thoughtful piece from a game designer who used it to explain QAnon.
Reed Berkowitz compared QAnon enthusiasts to game players who find “perfect clues” that actually have nothing to do with reality. He cites a theoretical game where “participants started searching for the hidden object, on the dirt floor, were little random scraps of wood.” He demonstrates why that would be a problem:
It was a problem because three of the pieces made the shape of a perfect arrow pointing right at a blank wall. It was uncanny. It had to be a clue. The investigators stopped and stared at the wall and were determined to figure out what the clue meant and they were not going one step further until they did. The whole game was derailed. Then, it got worse. Since there obviously was no clue there, the group decided the clue they were looking for was IN the wall. The collection of ordinary tools they found conveniently laying around seemed to enforce their conclusion that this was the correct direction. The arrow was pointing to the clue and the tools were how they would get to it. How obvious could it be?
I stared in horror because it all fit so well. It was better and more obvious than the clue I had hidden. I could see it. It was all random chance but I could see the connections that had been made were all completely logical. I had a crude backup plan and I used it quickly before these well-meaning players started tearing apart the basem*nt wall with crowbars looking for clues that did not exist.
These were normal people and their assumptions were normal and logical and completely wrong.
Take this back to MSNBC, which has featured a series of twisted takes on Republican politics this week, particularly regarding the attempt on Trump’s life.
Perhaps the most glaring example is Michael Steele, who raised a series of questions about Trump’s injury (all of which have answers), positing the already disproven theory that a shard of glass is what grazed his ear. Steele pointed to a lack of medical information from Team Trump as evidence of something fishy going on, echoing conspiracy theorists who seize upon one fact (say, a lack of a briefing on the president’s health) as a sign something nefarious is going on.
Under this guise of just asking questions, Joy Reid took to Threads to ask her own questions about the shooting, with the implicit suggestion that things are not as they seem.
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Reid, it should be noted, has spent the week pushing other wild claims to try and give her audience something to grasp onto, including the absurd claim that Biden surviving Covid was the same thing as Trump getting shot. “This current president of the United States is 81 years old and has Covid, should he be fine in a couple of days. Doesn’t that convey exactly the same thing? That he’s strong enough – older than Trump – to have gotten something that used to really be fatal to people his age,” Reid said.
There are more examples of Reid’s odd commentary from the last few days and weeks, like her blaming the “media” for making Trump out to be a victim (after he was a victim of an assassination attempt), but there are too many to list here. Before you think I have it in for her, I argued for her getting a weekday show when she was relegated to weekends on MSNBC and before she reached this current level of unhinged opinions.
Even the reliable and sharp Rachel Maddow got in the act when she connected Vance’s love of Lord of the Rings to the far right, saying, “It’s Aryan, but you move the N to the front!”
“Like his mentor, like Peter Thiel, who had given him all his jobs in the world, Mr. Vance also when he founded his own venture capital firm with help from Peter Thiel, named it after aLord of the Ringsthing. He called it Narya, N-A-R-Y-A, which you can remember because it’s Aryan, but you move the n to the front,” she continued. “Apparently, that word has something to do with elves and rings from theLord of the Rings series; I don’t know.”
Joking? Dunno. But what are we doing here, people?
The coup de grace was provided by Alex Wagner Wednesday evening, following JD Vance’s speech in which he professed wanting to be buried in his family plot. Wagner’s curiously twisted logic, which you can see or read in full here, saw that anodyne comment as an “easter egg for white nationalism.”
If I were to suggest that analysis as a joke, it would be dismissed as implausible and unfunny. And the fact that she honestly put that forth is really not funny, particularly given our angry and hyperpartisan landscape.
No, MSNBC isn’t QAnon. The network still features analysis from many hosts who have a measured approach to their shows, like Joe Scarborough, Ari Melber, and Stephanie Ruhle, to name a few. But, there is too much breathless windmill tilting looking to find conspiracies that undermine an honest and earnest pursuit of the lies that consistently come from Trump.
I’ve said it before, and I will say it again: Trump is aduplicitous con man who prioritizes his own personal benefit over unifying the nation he wants to lead again. I’ve called for both Biden and Trump to drop out of the race.
But MSNBC is not only doing the nation a grave disservice by finding conspiratorial clues where none exist, they are also unwittingly helping Trump get reelected.
This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.
