For a growing class of right-wing news influencers, the Minnesota fraud scandal represents a major coup: “I ENDED TIM WALZ,” Shirley gloated earlier this week. But what does their rising power mean for politics, news, and the quaint concept of consensus reality?
Nick Shirley is one of a growing cast of viral, quasi-journalistic posters “just asking questions” on YouTube, TikTok, and X. As a genre, these videos cater to the incentives and biases of the attention economy, hacking complex issues into slick montages, sound bites, and reactions. They also frequently adopt the aesthetic trappings of conventional journalism — man-on-the-street interviews, live-at-5-style narration — without actually adhering to norms like independence, transparency, or balance.
