Better her than me
A cabal of Muslim, communist, socialist refugees is coming for you. But you knew that.
During most of my Hullabaloo tenure, I worked in a cubicle. Posting during work hours being frowned upon, my social media engagement until recently was more limited. And I wasn’t about to waste limited down-time watching Fox. The staff at Media Matters does that for a living. Presumably, they get an alcohol allowance.
Kat Abughazaleh is building her online audience commenting on the slime from your video
| Oozin’ along on your livin’ room floor. She sits in her cubicle in Washington, D.C. collecting clips to post to TikTok and Twitter (Clare Malone ofThe New Yorker):
“There’s that stupid voice,” Kat Abughazaleh, a twenty-three-year-old senior video producer for the liberal watchdog Media Matters for America, said. She and I were watching Carlson’s show in side-by-side cubicles at her organization’s offices, in Washington, D.C. Abughazaleh, a pair of sunglasses perched on her head and a vape pen always within reach, was flagging moments from the episode to post online. One clip, of Carlson declaring that “the F.B.I., as an organization, has joined in the hunt for Christians,” went immediately to Twitter. “I was so excited to hear that hilarious Christian line—it was so good,” she told me during a commercial break. Another clip, an interview with the “pro-life Spider-Man”—a baby-faced young man who climbs buildings without ropes to protest abortion—was saved for an end-of-week roundup. (“Abortion is just like climbing a skyscraper,” the pro-life Spider-Man had said. “It’s a matter of life or death.”) Abughazaleh films her roundups on Fridays and posts them to TikTok, where she’s building a following. Her most popular video, which includes a clip of a Fox News host comparing Washington, D.C., to Somalia, has just under a million views.
Behold:
“I watch Tucker Carlson so you don’t have to,” the bio spaces of her social-media accounts read. Abughazaleh has been professionally watching Carlson, who has around three million viewers a night, for nearly two years. “You don’t know Fox News until you are watching it for a job,” she said. “You see all these patterns emerge.” The Fox universe is a place with a different “news” sense than most of the country, she said—narratives about I.R.S. armies, food shortages, race wars, and predatory trans activists—but its niche story lines are likely predictive of what we’ll be talking about over the next two long campaign years. Though, in Abughazaleh’s view, Carlson has floundered a bit since the midterms. “I think he’s still kind of lost right now,” she said. “He’s not really sure what direction to take it.”
My heart bleeds strawberry jam.
It helps that Abughazaleh appears on the surface to be the flavor of blonde that Fox viewers are accustomed to attending to.
Writes Malone, “Her YouTube audience is seventy-five-per-cent male, Abughazaleh told me, and on TikTok it’s sixty-five per cent. It’s not so much that Abughazaleh is seeking male attention; it’s more that she’s using herself as live bait—a way to point out misogyny and sexism in real time, or to simply tweak the conservatives who hate-follow her.”
“I think it takes a certain type of personality to do this job,” Alicia Sadowski, Media Matters’ research manager, said. “A lot of times, it can be taxing, it can be consuming, in a sense that you’re living in a reality that the people around you are not.”
Doing this every morning after watching news feeds much of the day is stressful enough.