When the Zone Is Flooded, Move Ground
Look, "flood the zone with shit" is a strategy, but staying on the floodplain is a choice
Steve Bannon, the Republican strategist who has successfully remade the early decades of this century in his image, once gave Michael Lewis a quote that we all should have taken very seriously:
“The Democrats don’t matter,” he had said to me over our lunch. “The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.”
In the past week, the zone was flooded with announcement after announcement about would-be cabinet nominees, and the floodgates carefully controlled to ensure that an exhausted, understaffed, overwhelmed media and a frazzled political-junkie audience would respond to each new nominee like lab animals hooked to electrodes, jumping mindlessly at the stimulus, apparently helpless to do anything else.
Granted, the political media has been busy in the past week. But what is extremely striking is how literally nobody in a business of offering context and coherence to current events was capable of calling back to a quote made by the president-elect's consigliere, or asking any political strategist to go on the record as to whether or not "flooding the zone with shit" was a thing the incoming administration’s pet strategist is doing.
This year has been bedeviled by an angry discourse over whether or not the American media was able to cover the presidential race in a way that informed and served the public -- and Americans' trust in the media is at an historic low.
The past week showed us how the media is meeting this moment -- and the answer seems to be that they expect to make a flooded zone their audience's default news habitat.
SO WHAT?
Back in 2016, media companies learned that a Trump victory was good for business. As was reported last year, the New York Times' chief revenue officer explained why angry liberals were not exactly the industry bellwether anyone needed to be concerned about:
A telling moment appears at the end of Nagourney’s book. It describes a meeting between top Times editors and executives that took place on the 16th floor of the building one week after the 2016 election. The Times had apologized for missing the election, and furious liberals were threatening to cancel their subscriptions en masse because they felt the paper was somehow responsible for Hillary Clinton’s loss. Then–chief revenue officer Meredith Kopit-Levien (she has since become CEO) informs the room that, in fact, the liberals were not going to abandon them — just the opposite: “‘Let me start with the good news,’” Nagourney reports her saying. “‘What we have seen is the number of cancellations have dropped off significantly. Unbelievable performance.’” The paper added 41,000 new digital subscribers that week — the largest weekly subscription increase since the introduction of the paywall.
And as of last week, late-night hosts were already turning the presidential transition into I’m-incredulous-and-outraged monologue fodder and news-ish websites were writing explainers. The response to flooding the zone with shit seems to have been to offer people arm floaties so they feel like they’re keeping their heads above water to identify what's bobbing by on the noisome tides.
WHO CARES?
The media landscape of 2025 will not be the same as the media landscape of 2017.
A lot of journalist jobs are gone -- Gannett took a buzzsaw to local news in communities from coast to coast, the National Geographic gutted its editorial staff, the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post cut dozens upon dozens of positions. And Buzzfeed axed its entire Pulitzer prize-winning operation as a cost-saving move in April 2023.
(That move has not been rewarded by shareholders, but let's politely overlook the numbers and maintain the fiction that gutting the thing that burnishes brand equity and audience demand = recipe for printing cash.)
For another, there has been a shift in audience attention. Following Jeff Bezos' extraordinary decision to override his newspaper's leadership and pull the Washington Post's endorsement of Kamala Harris, more than 250,000 subscribers canceled their accounts -- or approximately 10% of the total readership. Losing 10% of your customer base over four days is noteworthy, but there was another notable story buried in the stats:
Chew on that: in a high-stakes election year with several unexpected developments, the Washington Post had to claw to get a paltry 4,000 new readers. Nobody wanted the product the Washington Post was selling when demand should have been highest.
News audience numbers aside, the vibes are different this time too. As Daniel Drezner wrote in his newsletter explaining why he's not going to revive his "toddler in chief" Twitter thread, "Prolonged exposure to Trump has made me meaner and dumber than I ever wanted to be."
And that's the headspace a lot of media consumers are going to be in: they'll feel like swimming in the flooded zone will make them meaner and dumber -- and unhappier. There's a reason people are logging off Twitter in droves. They're exhausted by it, and they're not finding value there. They'll go elsewhere. This has been happening in online fora since the days of Usenet -- if not before.
Sometimes, when you flood the zone with shit, the people in the zone get tired of treading sewage. They're going to clamber out and find someplace else to live. The question now is whether or not the floodplain developers -- your explainer writers, your political newsletter authors with their arch Hunger Games references, your political editors -- are going to figure out they're living in a flood zone. They can, and should, ask who benefits from them continuing to stay where they are, as they are.
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YOUR POP CULTURE RECOMMENDATIONS FOR THE WEEK: I still haven't gotten over the breadth and depth of genius lunacy in Hundreds of Beavers, a movie that manages to pay loving homage to silent movies, Looney Tunes and video games while being something wholly original and riotously funny. It's streaming on Pluto TV, Philo, Tubi and Prime Video.
And if I haven't kvelled about these books yet, I highly recommend the Shortest History series. I just finished Lesley Downer's The Shortest History of Japan, which does a wonderful job of explaining how Japan managed to avoid colonization and survive a stormy 20th century. It's a lovely, quick read. My other favorites in the series include The Shortest History of Europe (John Hirst), The Shortest History of Germany (James Hawes) and The Shortest History of England (ibid). I have The Shortest History of China (Linda Jaivin) and The Shortest History of India (John Zubrzycki) in my queue.
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All right! The old-school vibes on Bluesky have me feeling like old-school newsletter writing. Let’s see how it goes. Thanks for reading.