The Scene
This is an excerpt from an interview with Gawker founder Nick Denton on the Mixed Signals podcast from Semafor Media. Listen to the latest episode here and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
Ben Smith: Do you think that Elon and the sort of folks around him sort of see the media, and the media as broadly as you say it, the whole thing, clearly and accurately or do you think they’ve lost their minds in terms of how they see us, how they see people talking about them?
Nick Denton: I think they’ve fallen for audience capture, just like Joe Rogan has in the podcast world, just like the Gawker writers did in the peak of lefty Twitter. Elon Musk is doubling down and doubling down on the most right-wing elements in his audience.
Whenever he feels insecure, he gives them some Nazi dog whistle, he’ll throw in some story about white babies on bayonets in a South African demonstration against white farmers.
So he’s absolutely race-baiting. And it looks to me like somebody who’s over-serving 3% of their potential audience, that this is a country in which policy is being made by several hundred people max on X, and they’re all, Rubio, Musk, Vance, Trump, they’re all competing for the applause from these 500 nuts on X. And that’s my media criticism of this society right now.
Max Tani: Don’t you think that that’s kind of one of the challenges that every single media company today faces because of fragmentation? Right?
There are so many options for places to get your information or so many viewpoints that are able to be expressed and surfaced to you. It’s actually quite difficult to go against your audience because once you do, somebody else is going to come and snatch them right up.
It strikes me that as far as media companies go, the only company that can really go against its audience and survive is the New York Times, everyone else- I mean, if we pissed off our audience today, I think that would be quite damaging.
Denton: It’s like we’re stuck in some eternal MAGA online primary in which, no, they can’t go and tack to the center, tack to the median voter in the way that administrations have always done throughout all time.
They have to keep on throwing some meat to these 500 nuts on X because that appears to be where the electorate is at, where their primary electorate really is at.
But there is a median voter out there, and the median voter will be heard from. And there is a stock market out there and the stock market is being heard from right now.
Listen to the full interview on Mixed Signals from Semafor Media and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.