[link removed]

FAIR
View article on FAIR's website ([link removed])
Forget Alex Jones—Look at His Helpers Ari Paul ([link removed])


Alex's War

Poster for Alex's War, Alex Lee Moyer's documentary about Alex Jones.

There are two publicly available displays making headlines right now about Infowars host Alex Jones, America’s best-known conspiracy monger.

One is the Alex Lee Moyer documentary Alex’s War, a one-sided portrayal so friendly Jones himself is eager to promote it. Variety (7/30/22 ([link removed]) ) noted that it offers no “mediating voices,” and “never overtly takes Jones to task.” It doesn’t “show you a thing about his personal life, or anything about his business of using politics to sell health supplements.” It is “so free of judgment," the review concludes, "an Alex Jones fan could probably watch it and think, ‘He slays!’”

Dan Friesen, co-host of the Infowars-dissecting Knowledge Fight podcast ([link removed]) , told Slate (8/3/22 ([link removed]) ) that Alex's War was “an almost comatose approach to making a film.” He summed it up:

There’s a person who’s lying—Alex Jones—who’s the main subject of the documentary. And he’s the only source of information about himself, and he’s lying. And the film gives you no reason to suspect that he’s lying.

The film's faint attempts to provide any critical balance to Jones’ statements, Friesen said, were “not meaningful at all”: "flashes of out-of-context headlines you can’t read, and then the clip ([link removed]) of Obama joking about Alex saying he smelled like sulfur."


** Cathartic and illuminating
------------------------------------------------------------
NYT: Alex Jones, Under Questioning, Is Confronted With Evidence of Deception

New York Times (8/3/22 ([link removed]) ): "Infowars falsely linked the judge to pedophilia and human trafficking; in another, Mr. Jones questioned the intelligence of the jurors in the case, implying that his political enemies had handpicked 'blue-collar' people who 'don’t know what planet they’re on.'"

The other, more balanced and revelatory showcase is the Texas trial related to Jones’ lies about the Sandy Hook school shooting. His false claims that the massacre was a hoax led to intense harassment of the parents of the dead children, whom Jones smeared as “crisis actors.” The jury awarded the parents $45 million in punitive damages (MSNBC, 8/5/22 ([link removed]) ), and the world was treated to Jones learning under cross-examination that his text messages had fallen into the hands of the parents’ attorney, showing he had withheld evidence and opening up possible perjury charges against him (New York Times, 8/3/22 ([link removed]) ).

The ordeal has been both cathartic and illuminating for the rest of society, which mostly sees Jones as a crackpot. Before the jury revealed its award to the parents, Jones put his media company into bankruptcy (Wall Street Journal, 8/1/22 ([link removed]) ). He was already found liable in a similar Connecticut case (NPR, 11/16/21 ([link removed]) ).

Jones’ empire of lies is often embraced with a sense of ridicule; there’s a whimsical quality to his rants about government chemicals turning frogs gay (New Statesman, 3/20/17 ([link removed]) ) and promises to eat his neighbors (The Wrap, 5/1/20 ([link removed]) )—akin to Weekly World News headlines at the grocery store check-out aisle proclaiming the existence of Bat Boy (Mental Floss, 8/7/20 ([link removed]) ).

And that circus-like quality has been good for Jones’ bank account. We learned this year that Jones took in $165 million selling supplements and other prepper gear (Rolling Stone, 1/7/22 ([link removed]) ), and at the trial one economist estimated that Jones and his business “are worth up to $270 million” (LA Times, 8/5/22 ([link removed]) ).

The phone disclosures from the trial reportedly show that there were “several days in 2018 in which Infowars made over $800,000 per day” (NBC, 8/3/22 ([link removed]) ). In fact, in Jones’ divorce court proceedings, his lawyer stated that Jones is nothing like the character he plays in his act (NBC, 4/17/17 ([link removed]) ), assuring us that he is less a hallucinating madman than an old-school vaudevillian who cares about one thing: sales.

The Sandy Hook case changed things, largely because his repeated fabrications so obviously rubbed salt in the wounds of grieving parents. He mobilized his audience to torment the victims of carnage, as if they were foot soldiers of the message from which Jones profits but his viewers do not (AP, 8/1/22 ([link removed]) ). Both the recent trial coverage, and the new movie, remind us that none of that could exist without helpers.


** 'Tricky to distinguish'
------------------------------------------------------------
Yahoo: Infowars Whistleblower: Staff Laughed At Pleas To Stop Pushing Sandy Hook Lies

HuffPost (via Yahoo News, 7/29/22 ([link removed]) ): "It’s something else...to not only hear the damage that you’re doing to people outside of your zone, but to actually laugh about it."

No radio or television show operates without dedicated staff, and during the trial Infowars producer Daria Karpova “ingratiated herself with the jury by remarking sympathetically that it’s very stressful being Alex Jones, because people tell horrible lies about him” (Above the Law, 7/29/22 ([link removed]) )—a claim that can either be read as classic chutzpah or an almost paternalistic loyalty to Jones.

One former Infowars employee revealed at the recent trial that he was “laughed at after repeatedly warning staff to stop publishing falsehoods about Sandy Hook,” indicating the complicity of the rest of the staff (HuffPost, 7/29/22 ([link removed]) ). Jones wasn’t even alone in promoting the lies about the Sandy Hook parents on air–Infowars contributor Owen Shroyer, who testified in the recent trial, had also gone on Infowars to help bash the grieving parents (Austin American-Statesman, 7/29/22 ([link removed]) ).

The films director, in coming out with positive spin for Jones, makes one wonder what she’s attempting to accomplish. Moyer’s previous documentary, TFW No GF, an exploration of the reactionary “incel” community (short for “involuntarily celibate”), suggests that she has some interest in the source of alt-right subcultures. Variety (5/6/20 ([link removed]) ) described TFW No GF as a frenetic attempt to capture these online provocateurs' essence, calling it "consistently difficult to watch, both in style and content,” adding the “film feels like a sloppy PowerPoint presentation, intercutting juddery-looking drone shots and Dramamine-demanding vérité footage with a barrage of screenshots.”

But this confusion leaves it unclear whether she’s a fellow traveler or an outside journalist. “Moyers meets her subjects on their own turf, constructing such a complex portrait, it can be tricky to distinguish where she stands,” Variety said.


** Racking up clicks
------------------------------------------------------------
Gleen Greenwald interviewing Alex Lee Moyer and Alex Jones

Glenn Greenwald interviewing Alex Lee Moyer and Alex Jones at the premiere of Moyer's film in Austin.

Reports about the Austin premiere of the Jones film do suggest where this film stands, however. Intercept co-founder Glenn Greenwald was so starstruck in his on-stage interview with Jones (Boing Boing, 7/26/22 ([link removed]) ) that he said Jones’ admission that he was wrong about Sandy Hook showed “the soulful Alex Jones,” when Jones had, in fact, been pressed to do so because of litigation. Such sycophancy should perhaps be unsurprising, given that Greenwald started his career as a lawyer for a white nationalist (New York Times, 3/9/05 ([link removed]) ) and has ended up as a second banana on Fox News’ Tucker Carlson Tonight (Salon, 5/24/22 ([link removed]) ), a venue also known for far-right conspiracy
theorizing (Washington Post, 7/20/22 ([link removed]) ). But because Greenwald long focused his journalistic career on exposing state secrets, including helping Edward Snowden blow the whistle on National Security Agency surveillance (Guardian, 6/11/13 ([link removed]) ), his chummy pairing with Jones gives Infowars’ conspiracy-mongering an unearned air of honest questioning of government narratives.

Also at the film’s Austin premiere, according to New York (7/29/22 ([link removed]) ), were a number of luminaries of the alt-right and post-left media circuit, including Anna Khachiyan of the podcast Red Scare. She was reportedly joined by her partner Eli Keszler, an “experimental percussionist and sound artist” (Pitchfork, 10/22/18 ([link removed]) ) who composed the musical score ([link removed]) for the film, providing a kind of sophisticated and avant garde veneer to a notorious philistine. The duo aren’t simply fans of Jones, then; they’re financially and artistically connected to Moyer’s project—Red Scare even dedicated an episode (11/22/21 ([link removed]) ) to a friendly discussion with Jones and Moyer.

“Taking photos or even collaborating with Alex Jones seems to be an easy way to rack up clicks, first and foremost,” arts journalist William Harrison ([link removed]) told FAIR.


** Media allies
------------------------------------------------------------
CNN: Social media abuzz over Piers Morgan vs. Alex Jones

CNN (1/7/13 ([link removed]) ) boasted of the social media buzz it got from platforming Alex Jones.

Media allies have played a role in ensuring Jones has had a bigger microphone than just Infowars. The Washington Post (8/5/22 ([link removed]) ) reported:

Jones going on the Joe Rogan Experience in 2020 allowed him to push false claims about coronavirus vaccination on Spotify, where he had been banned. A clip shared widely on Twitter ([link removed]) this week shows how Rogan, whose show has an estimated audience of 11 million per episode, has previously defended Jones as “hilarious” and having entertainment value.

Jones’ appearance on the Rogan show caused an uproar within Spotify (BBC, 10/29/20 ([link removed]) ), but the damage was done.

More centrist media have also done their part. CNN (1/7/13 ([link removed]) ) brought Jones to speak about gun control with Piers Morgan, presumably to draw attention to the network. Jones had earlier been interviewed on ABC's The View (2/28/11) and later by Megyn Kelly on NBC (6/18/17 ([link removed]) ). As Parker Molloy (Present Age, 8/5/22 ([link removed]) ) wrote recently, "All that ABC, CNN and NBC did in these cases was help make Jones a household name, guaranteeing him more subscribers and a larger profile moving forward."

And many other businesses depend on Jones: The New York Times (7/24/22 ([link removed]) ), citing FAIR’s research (2/11 ([link removed]) ), outlined one of Jones’ key business relationships, noting that

misinformation can also be hugely profitable, not just for the boldface names like Mr. Jones, but also for the companies that host websites, serve ads or syndicate content in the background.


** Banal accomplices
------------------------------------------------------------
Remora attached to a shark

A remora gets a free ride (cc photo: Brian Snelson).

All of these people and companies have to some extent affixed themselves to Jones and his image like remoras on a shark—not necessarily because they long to inspire wackos to attack parents of murder victims. They're more likely motivated by a cold calculus that he’s a media beast whose controversy can move their careers forward, feeding an audience that hungers for nihilist transgression.

Jones’ empire clearly helps put a lot of food on the table for a great many people. Do they know there’s a social cost to helping him? Well, as Upton Sinclair said, “It's difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on not understanding it."

Jones is also connected to the deadly January 6, 2021, Capitol Hill insurrection (New York Times, 4/20/22 ([link removed]) ). The Jones machine is more than entertaining insanity—he's propaganda for a frightening, anti-democratic ideology, with a far-right agenda that's on the record ([link removed]) . Jones now faces financial hurdles and possible other legal ramifications because of both Sandy Hook and January 6. Those who are helping him advance through the media, and to defend himself from consequences, are his banal accomplices. There should be social consequences for them, too.
Read more ([link removed])

Share this post: <a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="[link removed]" title="Twitter"><img border="0" height="15" width="15" src="[link removed]" title="Twitter" alt="Twitter" class="mc-share"></a>
<a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="[link removed]" title="Facebook"><img border="0" height="15" width="15" src="[link removed]" title="Facebook" alt="Facebook" class="mc-share"></a>
<a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="[link removed]" title="Pinterest"><img border="0" height="15" width="15" src="[link removed]" title="Pinterest" alt="Pinterest" class="mc-share"></a>
<a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="[link removed]" title="LinkedIn"><img border="0" height="15" width="15" src="[link removed]" title="LinkedIn" alt="LinkedIn" class="mc-share"></a>
<a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="[link removed]" title="Google Plus"><img border="0" height="15" width="15" src="[link removed]" title="Google Plus" alt="Google Plus" class="mc-share"></a>
<a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="[link removed]" title="Instapaper"><img border="0" height="15" width="15" src="[link removed]" title="Instapaper" alt="Instapaper" class="mc-share"></a>
​

© 2021 Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting. All rights reserved.
You are receiving this email because you signed up for email alerts from
Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting

Our mailing address is:
FAIRNESS & ACCURACY IN REPORTING
124 W. 30th Street, Suite 201
New York, NY 10001

FAIR's Website ([link removed])

FAIR counts on your support to do this work — please donate today ([link removed]) .

Follow us on Twitter ([link removed]) | Friend us on Facebook ([link removed])

change your preferences ([link removed])
Email Marketing Powered by Mailchimp
[link removed]
unsubscribe ([link removed]) .