"Golden were the apples of desire, a hope that there was something more to taste. "
Stop giving coverage to small groups of screaming weirdos, especially when causation/correlation is in question.
This week’s soundtrack: Emma Ruth Rundle & Thou - “Into Being”
One of the things that I hold pretty dear regarding general interest journalism’s job as gatekeeper is that amplifying nonsense is antithetical to the gatekeeping job. I noted this last week when I talked about CNN’s leadership changes and I am always interested in it when it comes to all things Donald J. Trump.
But, this week, I don’t want to think or talk about the big man, rather I want to talk about journalists giving air to nutters with small(ish) followings. Authority is adhered to people and ideas when they are amplified in the mainstream media, even when news organizations specifically are fact-checking these ideas or people, though it is certainly better to put forward good information to combat bad information than to not. But, I’d argue that deciding what is important – or nonsense – and what isn’t… that’s the bigger and more important job.
This has been a big issue lately regarding Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s presidential campaign (and his completely bonkers views on all things medicine), Dr. Peter Hotez and, of course, Twitter doofuses Joe Rogan and Elon Musk. Hotez is a leading expert and those other three men are… not. But, the media landscape flatlines all three, giving Rogan and Musk the opportunity to say “Debate me!” and their acolytes – who, pre-Internet, would just be listening to Dr. Demento-type conspiracy radio shows and reading weird zines – lap it up. We live in a time that imbues authority on anyone with enough money. Same as it ever was, I guess.
But, I don’t really even want to discuss the most-recent anti-vax nonsense (partially because anti-vax people are in greater numbers than avid anti-trans people and partially because it’s deeply stupid). Rather, the anti-trans activism/Dylan Mulvaney/Bud Light story illuminates the attention economy quite well and, unfortunately, too many mainstream news outlets lapped it up.
I’m loathe to link to a site that just laid off dozens of journalists, but the LA Times put together a fairly good explainer, if you want to get up-to-speed. A tl;dr version is something like this: Bud Light partnered with and sent a trans influencer some beer to promote the brand in April, the anti-trans conservative fever swamp inhabitants found out about it, freaked out in the ways they do (shooting cans of Bud Light with guns, screaming on their podcasts… even everyone’s favorite slap-hitting-outfielder-turned-governor got involved because of course he did.) and, voilá, Bud Light lost some retail market share.
What’s unsaid here is that this is all deeply online nonsense. Like with the DeSantis Twitter implosion, most people don’t care about a trans influencer on Instagram (or TikTok or wherever Mulvaney has all of her followers). As with Twitter’s outsized importance in the news industry or what college students think, the culture of “influencers” fascinates journalists too much.
But more than anything, Bud Light did not partner with Mulvaney because it supports the trans community. It did so because it is a fairly easy way to get its product in front of young beer drinkers, in addition to its middle-aged and older customers. Bud Light is doing marketing because InBev is in the business of making money and they think this will make them some money.
Which is where the ~story~ about Bud Light falling to second in retail store market share in the U.S. shows that it is not really a story. I’d be hard-pressed to say that it matters because of the anti-trans boycotts of “experts” like Travis Tritt or because of Ben Shapiro. Bud Light may very well have some brand loyalty – there are countless anecdotal stories of some old white guy who was dedicated to one crappy beer or another – but it’s also cheap beer with the most penetration in markets nationwide. People buy Bud Light because they’re having a cookout, need a beer to put in the cooler and can find a case at every liquor store, grocer and convenience store. Old Style, it is not.
(It’s key to understand, too, that Bud Light is available everywhere. Retail store market share doesn’t include restaurant purchases or the stadiums and venues that sell beer, so who knows the expanse of Bud Light in those places.)
So, to imply causation between a fairly small, overly online crowd and a dip in Bud Light sales is… dicey. And yet, the Associated Press did just that. And covered it otherwise, as a marketing story. AP has done multiple stories on this whole ordeal when one story absolutely would have sufficed. “Bud Light dipping to number two,” as a news story, got major play on CNN and Fox News (of course) when it’s really a minor business story that legitimately doesn’t matter to anyone’s life outside of, maybe, marketing executives at InBev or perhaps some InBev stockholders.
Except it doesn’t really even mean that, because Modelo is now the number one beer in America and InBev is Modelo’s parent company everywhere outside the U.S. (antitrust rules mean Modelo is handled by someone else in the States). More importantly, Modelo’s marketing has featured Hispanic stories, stories of immigrants and stories of minority athletes ; the brand itself is Mexican. I’m going to go out on a limb and say that the anti-trans folks are probably not the ones fueling Modelo’s 12% rise over the last quarter.
So, the correlation between a tiny group of loud psychos who hate human rights and a beer giant losing some market share… I don’t think that’s causation. By reporting on it as though it is, I would suggest AP and other legacy media are doing the public a disservice by reporting on what would otherwise be a story for beer trade magazines and, maybe, marketing conferences. It’s not news. It doesn’t matter and it only gives authority (and amplification because violence is seemingly always around the corner, as we saw with Target) to these maniacs.
Lulu Update
Since I was laid off, a few people have commented something like “I bet Lulu loves that she’s got all your attention!” to me. While my girl does love attention, things haven’t actually been that different since I lost my job. I don’t keep her quiet with treats while I record a daily podcast because I’m not recording, but I’m still at home basically the same amount and I’m trying to keep a decent schedule (as in: I spend mornings in my home office doing job search/application stuff and/or writing stuff) because I could very easily fall into the depths of laziness, napping and the like. So, Lulu’s life may be about to change – many jobs are, at least, part-time in-office – but everything’s mostly the same now.
A Recommendation: Seeing Old Friends and Telling Good Stories Over Booze and Tapas
This is kinda chalk, but I had drinks last week with a former colleague and friend I’d not seen in ages. Part of it was to catch up, but part of it was also ~networking~ because she works at a shop that has some jobs open. (I did three networking drinks/lunches last week) Mostly, though, we told stories and drank a bunch because that’s how we used to do it when we worked together.
Being an adult is often an exercise in doing things you have to do because it’s responsible or because you need to. That’s just getting older. I have fewer of these things because I have no children, so I’m not even complaining. But, adulthood coupled with the isolation that modernity has given us means I don’t get to do this kind of thing a lot. And it’s good. People are herd animals; we’re social and we’re storytellers. Even a comparative misanthrope like myself needs these things and I bet you do, too.