In November of 2016, as the world braced for the results of the election between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, the Canadian former right-wing YouTube star Lauren Southern was sent on an assignment that made no sense to her. Her employer, Rebel Media, flew her out to Delhi to cover a UN conference on tobacco. Normally, she had trouble getting travel reimbursements from the shoestring operation she worked for, but this time she was put up in a luxury hotel.
Southern knew nothing about tobacco policy. What she knew was North American politics, but on Election Night, she watched the biggest story on the planet unfold from an ocean and a continent away. The videos she produced from the UN conference ended up generating view counts in the tens of thousands, as opposed to the millions she was accustomed to. Still, when she got back to Canada, Rebel wanted her to do more videos on tobacco policy.
Later, Rebel invited Southern and other staff to fly to Israel. It was supposed to be a paid vacation, with a little reporting on the side. As everyone in media knows, you don’t have to spend a cent to go to Israel; if you’re a reporter, the government is happy to fly you out on a junket. Still, she was asked to fundraise from her audience to pay for the trip. When she looked into the itinerary, she discovered that “(e)very interview was pre-arranged, every moment scheduled,” as she writes in her memoir, This Is Not Real Life. Her guide would be a former IDF paratrooper who now leads PR tours for the Israeli government.
Southern, already suspicious from her bizarre assignment in India, pushed back on the instruction to fundraise from her viewers. Then she was fired.
One might assume from this story that the “independent” right-wing media machine is just a propaganda apparatus for corporate lobbyists and foreign governments. And one would be correct in doing so. But it’s not just the right-wing media. It’s the whole dirty industry.
Drop Site News dropped a bombshell of a story yesterday that went largely unnoticed. Hacked emails have revealed that in 2014, former Bush speechwriter David Frum, who was and still is a senior editor at The Atlantic, secretly drafted a speech for Israel’s then-UN ambassador, Ron Prosor, justifying the country’s contemporaneous assault on Gaza. Even as Frum was pitching Prosor on his ghostwriting services, he was writing a fawning profile of the ambassador for The Atlantic.
Frum wasn’t the only one. British journalist Douglas Murray, associate editor at The Spectator, was also pitching Prosor on a UN speech he drafted. And Pamela Gross, then an editorial producer for CNN, was booking the ambassador on her network even while enlisting his help to raise money for Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system.
“Dear Ambassador - It was so wonderful to see you this 4th of July,” Gross wrote to Prosor that year. “Thank you for joining us. Clearly Iron Dome is doing the trick and saving lives. Please dear friend - let’s get it finished. Please let me know what is still left to be done at your soonest convenience.”
Murray, too, was privately raising funds for the IDF.
If I had to guess, I’d say the reason Drop Site’s scoop didn’t blow up on your newsfeed is that this kind of media corruption is so ordinary. Other outlets aren’t jumping to amplify the reporting because they all do it themselves. On the one hand, reporters and editors aren’t eager to bring public attention to a culture of venality and influence they participate in, and on the other, it’s so banal it doesn’t seem particularly noteworthy to them. This is just the way the sausage is made.
After Southern was fired from Rebel, she found out she didn’t need them. She did fine on her own as an independent creator. One of the first videos she made on her own got 650,000 views. She made two feature documentaries. She kept churning out content, building her following, and raising her profile and her infamy. She became a household name among the sizable population of North Americans who are both brain-poisoned by politics and terminally online.
Her book, which I highly recommend, is about internet fame addiction, how her insatiable appetite for online attention and validation drove her life into chaos. She was raped by Andrew Tate, hooked for a while on cocaine, banned from the United Kingdom, and then, after trying to save herself from her imploding life, found herself trapped in an abusive marriage and then consigned to poverty as a single mother. This was all self-inflicted, by her own admission; Southern doesn’t waste as much as a paragraph pretending she’s a victim, except for when she actually was one, first of Tate and then of her ex-husband. Her book isn’t about the institutional failures of the media industry. It’s about her own failures as a human being.
But it’s telling that the story begins and ends with her being unwittingly drafted into grifty media conspiracies. Grasping for financial stability, Southern eventually took a job with a media startup that could pay her a modest salary: Tenet Media. But that, too, turned out to be a foreign influence operation, this time run by Russia. Soon Southern found herself being stalked by a Canadian intelligence agency and being grilled in a House of Commons hearing that could have been a slapstick parody of Franz Kafka.
In the hearing, Canadian ministers kept asking her about an interview she once did with Alexsandr Dugin, insinuating that she had been doing Putin’s bidding by platforming him. The irony is that Dugin was the one interview she had sought out and conducted on her own in a trip to Russia, five years before signing on with Tenet, that she soon discovered was another government influence operation. Her handler had tried to send her to the Donbass region of Ukraine to do some useful idiot-type “reporting” on the then-slow boiling war there, but she declined. Her Dugin interview was the only one she ended up publishing, because it was the only one she had not been manipulated into. But the Canadian politicians at the hearing kept zeroing in on it anyway. Dugin is an enemy and they disapprove of what he says. Therefore journalists should not give him the opportunity to voice his views. If they do, they will be dragged before a panel of government inquisitors. It’s not that they objected to Southern being a government propagandist. It’s that they objected to her not being their government propagandist.
There’s a moment in the book — I can’t find it now — where Southern says that she just assumes everything is an influence operation now. She says it not with the feverish eyes of a conspiracy theorist, but with the tired resignation of someone who once believed in the system but has given up. I think she’s right, but the reality is even more depressing than that. Most journalists are not duped like she was; they’re like Frum and Murray: eager to use their journalism to advance the influence of politically interested parties. I understand this because I’ve done it myself. Southern did it, too, building up a short but spectacular media career by consciously painting an absurdly slanted picture of the world on behalf of the ideological activists she cheerled and whose approval helped make her famous. If it’s not someone else corrupting you, you have to be really careful it isn’t you corrupting yourself. And most people aren’t that careful. It doesn’t pay to be.
Damn, Leighton, this was good. Much fakeness abounds.
This is a slender little story that does not come close to living up to the headline. If you want to do media criticism, how about the big fish that matter, the NYT and (formerly) public media? Their narrative-driven propaganda has fueled the madness of the last half dozen years. These pillars of polite society have hypnotized Democrats and paved the way for the lunatic right by insulting and gaslighting all of us.