Not long ago, in the wake of Trump’s first presidential win, we thought we could fact-check our way out of the misinformation crisis. Trump’s return has quashed that hope: turns out fake news is just part of the “disordered discourse” of truth-free narratives now running wild across online media, from news to comedy to sport.
This past weekend, just before news hit that the Trump administration was gutting the Voice of America, the organisation Media Matters for America took a deep look at the reach of right-leaning voices in the online media ecosystem of long-form audio and video such as podcasts, live streaming and YouTube — where the most recent US election was fought out — to try to find some answers.
It found that nine of the top 10 shows — with a combined follower base of 197 million people — were right-leaning, saying: “Across platforms — YouTube, Rumble, Twitch, Kick, Spotify, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok — right-leaning online shows accounted for roughly 82% of the total following of the online shows we assessed.”
Related Article Block Placeholder
Article ID: 1198603
This follows on from a Bloomberg report on the content of popular influencers during the 2024 US election: “To hear them tell it,” the Bloomberg team wrote in January, “America is in a desperate place, destabilised by soaring inflation, migrants streaming across the border and the beginnings of a third world war. Gender politics have gotten out of hand while schools and the medical establishment duped the public.”
It’s not just America. These right-leaning podcasters and YouTubers are among the top Australian programs, although, in the US, the top program, The Joe Rogan Experience, has slid from number one to third place in the face of the reality of the Trump administration.
And it’s not just political content. The US study found a right-leaning bias across programming including comedy, sport, wellness, religion and business.
A report earlier this month by journalist Taylor Lorenz and feminist YouTuber Ophie Dokie found a similar pattern in the “misogyny slop ecosystem”: a sprawling network of online creators and communities talking about true crime, celebrity gossip and court reports to manufacture and boost smear campaigns against women (most notoriously, Blake Lively and Amber Heard).
We’ve moved past the triptych of misinformation, disinformation and malinformation — the three elements of fake news identified by researchers Claire Wardle and Hossein Derakhshan back in 2017 in the wake of the first Trump election win. Back then, truth seemed a robust response as journalists reached for tools like live fact-checking or the rinse-repeat of the “truth sandwich”.
But it looks like facts just can’t get in the way of a convincing story. Welcome to the time of “disordered discourse”, per journalist and Bellingcat founder Eliot Higgins. Truth doesn’t matter, he says. Instead, “power shifts to those who control the most compelling narrative — no matter how detached from reality it is” — built out of the Lego blocks of conspiracy, grievance and performative outrage.
It’s a crisis of credibility, with the 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer this week showing trust in news media at record lows. Edelman Australia CEO Tom Robinson attributes this to a belief in media complicity in protecting the system.
Worse, it’s a crisis of credulity, according to Columbia University’s head of journalism, Jelani Cobb, who spoke at the Reuters Memorial Lecture last week: “The hallmark of quality journalism is its ability to render the complexities of the world in their proper nuances and details. Demagogues have no need for such subtleties. They paint in broad strokes and primary colours. Our first allegiance is to the truth. Here demagogues are again liberated.
Related Article Block Placeholder
Article ID: 1198027
“Our problem is not simply that the public does not trust us, it’s that they do trust other dishonest brokers.”
The hit medium of long-form audio and video is just the latest addition to the ecosystem of right-wing media, joining alt-right digital media like Steve Bannon’s Breitbart, News Corp’s print mastheads in New York, the UK, and Australia and, for aging boomers, cable news like Fox News in the US and its imitators Sky News in Australia and Britain’s GB News.
But these are networks of spreaders, not the seeders of the discourse. Misinformation journalists like Higgins point to the origin: State actors — particularly malevolent actors like Russia — “seeking to influence narratives and counter-narratives … by injecting disordered information into the discourse of a given context” through “state-controlled public diplomacy outlets such as Russia Today (RT), obvious client journalists, celebrities and politicians, or PR companies working for state actors.”
Authoritarian states have historically been countered by international public broadcasters such as Radio Australia, the BBC and Voice of America (VOA), often in local languages. Over the weekend, the Trump administration gutted VOA and related broadcasters Radio Free Europe and Radio Free Asia, handing a significant win to the Russian narrative agenda.
Higgins says the state actors also work through covert proxies (with “serendipitously aligned interests”), self-interested players (usually in it for the money) and “true believers”. As an illustration, Georgian misinformation journalist, Natalia Antelava, has traced the journey of the current anti-LGBT backlash among these players back to its Russian origins.
But, Higgins says, the real danger is when these media narratives become powerful enough to capture big institutions (like law, media, and education) “shaping how those institutions define problems, make decisions, and enforce authority”. This begins through the weakening of barriers to once-extreme commentary, legitimating and normalising fringe attitudes, followed by their open adoption by high-profile figures.
Under Trump, the US has blown past these steps and is in the next stage of institutional restructuring, with the anti-migrant narrative spilling into lawless deportations and anti-woke rhetoric leading to the effective resegregation of American society through the crushing of real and imagined programs designed to promote diversity, equity and inclusion.
In Australia, we’re not there yet. But Peter Dutton seems keen to catch up, both on deportations and a DOGE-style slashing of public services. With views and attitudes shaped by our deep engagement with the US media eco-system — and the loud voice of US-owned News Corp media — we’re deep into the normalisation phase of the disordered discourse.
Have something to say about this article? Write to us at letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication in Crikey’s Your Say. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.