1. Wedgewood Is What Happens When The Gatekeepers Are Gone
A poll by a new company called Wedgewood came out this summer, showing that support for Michigan Senate Democratic Primary candidate Mallory McMorrow had dropped to below 10%, a shocker in a three-way race that had, until then, been neck-and-neck.
As a result, McMorrow claims, donations dried up, volunteers defected and her campaign shut down.
Politics as usual…except this week Wedgewood admitted that the polls were complete fakes, part of an “experiment” to show how easy it was to dupe the media.
Why It Matters
This is what happens when the gatekeepers are gone. Bad actors step in and take advantage of the gap.
Political polling was once closely vetted and no respectable mainstream publication of any political stripe would take any new company seriously without first investigating their bona fides and their techniques. What’s more, they would never publish internal polls (polls campaigns do themselves, which are subject to much bias and primarily created to reassure/entice donors) without a whole host of caveats.
That’s all gone out the window though.
Accounts like the popular Politics and Poll Tracker on X routinely push out polls from anyone and everyone, including internals. The results are presented with little to no context and those showing the widest deviation from the conventional wisdom will, of course, get the most “engagement”—retweets, comments, pick-ups.
But here’s the rub. Those pick-ups are not coming from random websites. They’re coming from major players like The New York Times, which ran with Wedgewood’s poll without ever really doing a serious job of checking into it.
The result of all this is pretty frightening: a serious candidate was seemingly forced to drop out of a very important Senate race and the overall results of said race were likely impacted as well. Decisions were made by both parties and by donors based on false information, often to their detriment.
All in the name of an “experiment.”
(NB: It should be noted that an investigative outlet called FiftyPlusOne was allegedly on the verge of uncovering the fact that Wedgewood was a fake, at which point the firm's anonymous principals announced that, yes, it had all been a fake, but, you know, also an experiment. #SureJan.)
None of this is all that new.
Back in 2019, I wrote about an egregiously fake survey about cord-cutting (“60% of Americans have cut the cord!”) that the creative director of an SEO marketing firm created using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, and how it managed to get picked up by a sizable array of mainstream publications including The Daily Mail, the late Broadcasting and Cable, and the Boy Genius Report (BGR).
None of whom paused long enough to think to themselves, “Hey, if 60% of Americans had actually cut the cord, then surely Comcast and Charter would be filing for bankruptcy.”
So there’s that too.
But while that scam was immediately called out by the likes of myself and Rich Greenfield and quickly deleted, no one at the NYT seemingly thought to do any serious investigation of the Wedgewood polls.
And it matters because as the gatekeepers have all been run off, the resulting chaos has allowed for the introduction of new voices. Many of whom are people from underrepresented groups who would never have gotten past the gatekeepers.
But sprinkled in with them are bad actors of both the state-sponsored and independent varieties. Who take advantage of the lack of scrutiny and mad thirst for clicks to mess with our system.
Because you see, it’s not just always going to be about politics.
A fake survey of airline on-time scores. A fake poll about favorite running shoes. Both have the ability to upend an industry if they get enough traction.
And because there’s no mass media anymore, by the time the truth filters down into all these little bubbles, it’s too late.
Many people will never see the far-less-salacious correction and so the damage will have been done, reputations will have been destroyed and bottom lines impacted.
In the age of Feudal Media, truth is frequently just an innocent bystander.
What You Need To Do About It
If you are a legacy media site, you need to get TF off of X. That means doing your own damn research—Claude or ChatGPT can easily help you vet the various sources you’re relying on. It also means don’t rely on random tweeters for stories like this NYT gem that just make you look pathetic.
Yes, clicks matter. But so does truth.
If you are a consumer, remember to take everything with a grain of salt, and remember that news is a lot like investments: if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.
2. Political Advertising Is A Money Pit
If any one group has been hit hardest by the splintering of mass media, it is politicians, especially those operating on a state and national level.
They can spend millions of dollars on TV commercials, mailers and YouTube ads and miss large swaths of the population.
Why? Because in the world of Feudal Media, many people are just really difficult to pin down.
Combine that with the fact that a lot of people are more than happy to tune out news and politics, and you’ve got a real issue on your hands.
Why It Matters
Run an ad on TV back in the day and there was a good chance your target would see it. Either directly in their show or as they were clicking through the channels.
But today, unless the ad pops up on the exact ad-supported show they’re watching, at the exact time they’re watching, then many voters are all but impossible to reach.
That’s why all those reports you read of Billionaire X (see what I did there) or random corporate PACs donating eight-figure sums to campaigns often go unreflected in the actual results—they’re buying TV spots yet the audience is frequently not watching TV. (Or TV with ads, anyway.)
It’s a problem that brands have to deal with all the time, but their audiences are generally either wider or narrower and not as tightly bound by state or even national borders.
That’s the challenge of this Age of Feudal Media: how to reach people whose algorithms continue to show them tighter and tighter bubbles of content. So that even targeting “basketball fans” may not work if your target is a women’s basketball fan.
Making it all more complicated is the fact that many people rarely stray from their bubbles.
In days of yore, you could rely on the fact that consumers would be flipping channels on the regular, and thus would stand a better than average chance of stumbling onto your spot over the course of the month.
But nowadays that’s not a safe assumption and political advertising often misses the very people it seeks to reach while oversaturating others, usually older and less affluent voters who still watch a lot of broadcast TV.
The only ones who get a pass in this new world, funny enough, are small-time local politicians, people running for town council or mayor in places with just one or two zip codes.
Because, with enough money, you can literally buy every Instagram or Facebook feed in that zip code, which, coupled with a bunch of geotargeted mailers, has you actually reaching the majority of folks you want to reach.
What You Need To Do About It
If you are a politician or, more accurately, the comms team for a politician—and not just in the U.S.—you need to make sure that you’re spending money on people who understand targeting in this new world. People who can make a small budget go farther because they get that the right strategy on Instagram is going to change more hearts and minds than 20 million dollars worth of TV and YouTube spots, scattered like pixie dust over what is presumed to be your target.
If you’re a reporter covering elections, bear this in mind too—that it’s not how much money a campaign spends, it is how and where they spend it.
The monoculture is over, the age of Feudal Media is here, and everyone, politicians included, must adapt to it.
