What sort of media moment is this?
Ten days ago, Salem, a right-wing media company, apologized to a man who was falsely depicted voting illegally in the widely debunked 2020 election film 2000 Mules, which Salem coproduced, and said that it would no longer distribute the film. A week ago, prosecutors unsealed an indictment charging the chief financial officer of the Epoch Times—a media company tied to Falun Gong, the Chinese spiritual movement, which has in recent years backed Donald Trump and spread conspiracy theories online—with laundering tens of millions of dollars of stolen money through the publication’s accounts. (He has pleaded not guilty.) Five days ago, Steve Bannon, the Trump consigliere turned far-right media entrepreneur, was ordered to report to prison by July 1 to serve a sentence for bucking a subpoena in the congressional probe into January 6. Around the same time, the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones moved to liquidate his assets and begin paying the billion-plus dollars he owes in damages to families of the victims of the Sandy Hook school shooting, which Jones has often claimed was a hoax—setting in motion the loss of his Infowars empire, which could be ordered shuttered as soon as this week. On her MSNBC show on Friday night, Alex Wagner opened with footage of Jones bursting (or pretending to burst) into tears at this prospect. Given the other stories noted above, she said that it had been “a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad week for conspiracy theorists”—and a good one for reality.
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