What do you make of this highly profitable, but admittedly cynical and nihilistic, young “conservative” blogger?
Bookworm on Mar 12 2012 at 7:59 am | Filed under: Blogs and Blogging, Conservative ideology, Media matters
We met Cyrus Massoumi three and a half years ago, when he got in trouble with the Tamalpais School District for a vaguely conservative rant that was mostly immature and non-violently antisemitic. My take back then:
Mostly, it’s a work that’s badly in need of an editor’s pencil, not a psychiatrist. The kid is just another angst ridden wannabe teen intellectual, but he frames his hysterical yelps in conservative, not liberal terms. Clearly, Massoumi feels marginalized and frustrated, but if he’s correct that he was threatened with the law and psychiatrists, it appears that the school went nuclear rather than handling him with more delicacy.
Massoumi, now a student at College of Marin, is back in the news, because he seems to have abandoned his angst, become apolitical, and turned conservative blogging into a profit machine:
According to Quantcast, a company that estimates Internet traffic for advertisers, approximately 797,000 people visited Massoumi’s mrconservative.com website last month, and his linked Conservative Facebook website has more than 1.4 million fans.
[snip]
Massoumi said he has no political ax to grind, although his partners may feel differently.
“I’m just a businessman. I have absolutely no interest whatsoever in politics,” Massoumi said. “All I want to do is make my money, get the life that I want and get out of the system. It’s a numbers game to generate traffic. If liberal news generated traffic, then it would be liberal news.”
[snip]
Massoumi attributes the popularity of his sites to the way he engineers their content “based off of people’s desire to see it.” Mr. Conservative.com‘s story, “The Tax System Explained in Beer,” was a big hit on both Facebook and Twitter.
“We take boring generic news and turn it into something that is going to have extremely high social media sharing,” he said.
Massoumi said he often selects stories that are already popular or “top trending” on Facebook and Twitter, re-engineers them to make them even more appealing and then serves them up to his Facebook fans.
Of his run-in with school authorities back in 2008, Massoumi pretty much echoes my earlier take on things:
“I was just an angry kid,” Massoumi said, adding that he has never met his father.
Beyond a weirdly Horatio Alger-esque story line, the above isn’t that interesting. It’s a one sentence story with some facts added: “Disaffected youth masters conservative social media to make money.”
What makes the story interesting to me is Massoumi’s professed nihilism when it comes to politics and news. In a scary way, despite the fact that he’s rather randomly landed on the conservative side of the spectrum, he is the end result of forty years of American MSM:
“Now I have a thorough understanding of conservative politics and how media works. It doesn’t matter what the facts are. People just want something that supports their paradigm. It’s not like anybody actually cares what the truth is.”
[snip]
Massoumi is candid about the content of the Middle East war story [written by a third party blogger, for free, that predicts a major war].
“The point of it is very obvious; it’s to scare people,” Massoumi said. “That is what news has come down to. People don’t want investigative journalism or real information, because real news is boring and we’re living in an age where news has to compete with reality TV.”
[snip]
Massoumi attributes the popularity of his sites to the way he engineers their content “based off of people’s desire to see it.” Mr. Conservative.com‘s story, “The Tax System Explained in Beer,” was a big hit on both Facebook and Twitter.
“We take boring generic news and turn it into something that is going to have extremely high social media sharing,” he said.
It’s nice that Massoumi is making money on a site that attracts conservatives — I wish I could — but I found this story very depressing. What do you think?
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11 Responses to “What do you make of this highly profitable, but admittedly cynical and nihilistic, young “conservative” blogger?”
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Good for him – he sees it as a job, and does well at it. Very lawyer-ish of him. The mistake he made was revealing in public that he doesn’t actually care one way or the other, as long as he gets paid. Lawyers generally – not always, but generally – are better at creating the impression in their clients that they do care, and certainly don’t point out in public that they don’t. (Everybody knows it anyway, but they don’t make a point of saying so. Usually.) But he’s young yet, he’ll become a better dissembler with practice.
He’s an amateur propagandist turning into a paid for propagandist. The temptation all propagandists have is basically that they start to believe in their own propaganda. Perhaps he’ll come to believe in one or another and if he does, he will become a tool or a disaffected ideologue, but he will always be a tool in one fashion or another because he only cares about the power of money. His soul can be bought. Or he can be threatened to kneel before lethal power.
I have seen some so called conservatives that are basically cowards at heart. They don’t want to deal with people that challenge their contradictory and hypocritical stances. Yet they portray themselves as logical and caring in an outwards fashion.
I don’t care what they claim to believe in. Cowards are cowards. If they cannot even face me, with the internet as their shield and anonymity FBI protection, they dare to tell me they can “fix” the problems of America? As if that was going to happen.
It’s depressing on a personal level of course, but it’s not surprising. The main problem with your analysis is that you’re using the term “blogger” and “blogging” to encompass a wide variety of specific roles/professions/attitudes which span quite a spectrum.
People like you and I are a specific kind of “blogger”: We create original content — and we do so for the purpose of expressing our actual feelings.
But there’s another kind of “blogger”: someone who also creates original content, but not to express his or her actual opinions — they’ll just write about whatever is popular at the moment. This is similar to a “staff reporter” at a newspaper, who will write about a local car crash one day and then a nuclear war the next day and then a softball tournament the day after that. They don’t care about any of the topics, nor do they really have an opinion — they just do as they’re told, because it pays well. These kind of “bloggers” often write for corporate-owned sites or “portals,” and usually don’t even come up with their own story ideas.
And then there’s yet another kind of “blogger” — someone who does not create original content, but who does have a political philosophy. They’re just not very good at writing, so all they do is link to or repost other people’s work. This role is fine and necessary, if writing is not your strong suit. This is actually the most common type of “blogger.” Most are just a zillion also-ran “me too” bloggers who don’t affect the conversation much, unless they have a huge personal social network. Only a special few, like Drudge and Instapundit, have turned this into a successful art form.
And then there’s the final kind of “blogger”: Someone who neither cares, nor creates anything original. They’re just good at “monetizing content.” These people are the equivalent of “publishers” in the book industry: The publishers simply know how to distribute other peoples’ (i.e. authors’) work, and make money doing so. Often, a publishing company will have no stated political slant, and might very well publish books by both (for example) Ann Coulter and Michael Moore. You might interpret this as “cynical,” but it’s just what publishers do — they exist to make money. And yes some of them will limit themselves to a specific political slant, if they think it is profitable, and still may not necessarily even care about politics — which is exactly what this young entrepreneur has done.
If there were different words to describe all these different kinds of “bloggers,” then you probably wouldn’t be so depressed. Despite the fact that he and you share a professional title (i.e. “blogger”), you are in fact engaging in entirely different professions. Consider: Both a poet and a printer “make books,” but a poet is pouring out her soul, while a printer is operating mechanical machinery for profit. If the poet jealous of the printer? No.
it’s the paucity of language to describe the various sub-genres of “blogging” that has misled you (and many reporters over the years) to compare apples and oranges.
So while it may be a little bit depressing that this guy has no politics and became a cynical businessman, it doesn’t really reflect on you, since he and you are actually in different fields. Yes, it’s depressing that you can’t do what he does, but then again he can’t do what you do. The art gallery owner often makes more money than the artist whose work he exhibits. Self-expression and business savvy and rarely conjoined.
I could never do what he does. I still only have the vaguest notions what Facebook and Twitter even are, and I would have no idea how to track what is popular on them. I also almost never watch the media, or read MSM news. I’m totally disconnected in my own little world, on purpose — because consuming the news consumes my time and my soul, and I want to be completely independent. If someone like our young entrepreneur manages to promote a narrative that I have crafted, then I’m satisfied with the arrangement, even though he profited from it and I didn’t. My goal is to “make a difference,” not make money.
At the risk of sounding Rush-like. . . .Oh, what the hell, with every intention of sounding Rush-like: The kid is a whore.
Like I said, he’s a propagandist. Thinking he’s someone like you, a blogger, is thinking too much. Depression comes about when people think too much. Especially under the Obama Regime.
This got me very excited. It is great news, exactly like learning how big the Young Republican club is at UC Berkeley. This means that many young people in the Facebook world are conservative or consider themselves conservative. This is a positive sign.
Its like having Fox news, talk radio with over 20 million listeners, many more conservative TV programs like NCIS (the top program on the planet), and more conservative movie producers.
No, this story doesn’t bother or depress me at all. You have people going into any sort of profession solely to make money, and this is little different. How many people in music put out songs they care about deeply, vs songs they’ve crafted solely to sell? I’d recommend rather doing something you enjoyed doing, but that’s a choice.
As jj pointed out, his problem is admitting it publicly. As this money-grubber put it:
People just want something that supports their paradigm. It’s not like anybody actually cares what the truth is.”
Well, this is just bs. HE is projecting onto all of us what HE believes: He doesn’t actually care at all what the truth is. That’s what he’s really saying. And he believes it of everyone else, too.
I agree with phillips1938 too. It is encouraging that someone took a look “where the money is at”, and they then chose to go conservative on the web, not liberal. That surprises me, and if he’s right, it’s very encoouraging.
Finally: To Charles Martel: You’re gonna lose your advertisers, calling such a deeply caring, idealistic, innocent young man a whore! ;-)
Heh.
Numbers are nice, but what counts in a war is the quality of the troops and how organized they are. An unorganized rabble will never outnumber a disciplined military force.
If being in business to serve both side of the street is what makes someone a whore, then Amazon/Barnes&Noble, the makers of your computer and its operating system, your telephone company, etc., are also whores. Even Disneyland and the rest of the Disney Empire, the airline and carmaker that gets you to the park, and the city/county that you travel streets on.
Whatever he or you or I think of his customers, it doesn’t sound like he’s advertising to be selective about who he deals with. My Church is the Church of sinners, and we welcome everybody; not to do just anything, but to do certain things, if they want to.
He’s actually not serving both sides of the street. He’s specializing in conservative news because he claims this is where the easy money and traffic is.
Epic failure if you wanted to make some kind of “pox on both their houses” classical attribution here.
When you sell your soul for money, that’s about that. Don’t make it more complicated than it is. He doesn’t.