We frequently discuss how conservative pseudo-news outlets exist to promote the interests of their financial backers, but this week we found a conservative admitting as much!
Last year, conservative author Mark Judge wrote a column at the Washington Examiner about his book on his experience as the alleged witness of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh's sexual assault of Christine Blasey Ford. Since then, the Examiner has published his opinion pieces regularly, releasing multiple posts per month.
In his latest op-ed, published Tuesday, Judge earnestly asks, "why doesn't conservative media support conservative art?" To us, it seems clear that Judge is working through his own personal feelings of failure and betrayal at the fact that only one conservative media outlet reviewed his book and that one review "was barely coherent."
But he hides his disappointment behind a patina of concern about the lack of fanfare for "a talented Catholic filmmaker named Paul Roland" who wrote, produced, directed, and starred in a black and white film that "tells the story of a priest whose obsession with social media fame leads him into criminal activity."
Yet despite Roland being what Judge considers "the kind of artist that the Right has been waiting for," Judge found that the movie "only got a notice in Breitbart — nothing in the Daily Wire, or Blaze Media, or Fox News."
Could it be because a one-man movie shot for $10,000 in black and white is boring and bad? No, of course not! It's the right-wing media that’s in the wrong!
"When a gifted young singer or filmmaker emerges on the left," Judge claims, "the entire media ecosystem works in tandem to lift that person up."
The artists “on the left” that Judge refers to are most likely just centrists; after all, if you’re right-wing enough to be regularly contributing to a fringe outlet like the Examiner, anything less than wild conservatism probably seems left-wing. In reality, the mainstream entertainment industry produces content that caters to the masses, and it turns out that art produced by regular people who aren’t right-wing extremists performs well with regular audiences.
But here comes the irony. While writing in a conservative media outlet that exists specifically to uplift conservative writing that otherwise can't compete with other sources in mainstream media, Judge claims, “Whereas on the left everyone lends a hand to uplift talent, on the right there is more of an effort to ignore it.”
Apparently, Roland told Judge that "there is a lot of gatekeeping" on the Right because "everyone is protecting their own turf."
That does make sense! Each disinfo outlet reflects the interests of its funders, so if you're a small-timer like Roland and Judge and not otherwise professionally plugged into the network, you're apt to get short shrift.
"Conservative media companies want to promote their own product," Judge admits, though he doesn’t go as far as to acknowledge that said product is disinformation, bigotry, and propaganda.
Judge should learn that if the only sources willing to mention his “art” are propaganda outlets, then what he is producing isn’t really art in the first place. Once propaganda is rendered useless, like his book was after Kavanaugh's confirmation to SCOTUS, there's no longer any reason for those outlets to promote it, in pieces neither "barely coherent" nor wholly incoherent.