“Honest and apolitical”: How YouTube Media Critics Launder Reactionary Right-Wing Discourse

• In Event: Communication, Information Technologies, and Media Sociology Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): 10. YouTube & K-Pop

Abstract

Politically-motivated, often right-wing backlash has been at the forefront of cycles in popular culture and media, converging under the umbrella term of “the culture wars”. Studies of these right-wing discourses highlight either the importance of political commentators in the cultural right (Lewis 2018; Ma 2021) or the practices of ordinary users in circulating extremist speech. Reading scholarship on the dynamics of reactionary politics with cultural sociology work on reviewers as tastemakers and moral entrepreneurs, this paper demonstrates the importance of amateur YouTube reviewers in mobilizing right-wing political sentiment around popular media. Using discourse analysis, I study how a selection of popular YouTube channels branded as “media critics” reviewed the case of Amazon television series Rings of Power in ways that transformed issues of narrative and literary merit into issues with liberal politics of inclusion and social justice. Although they expressed distaste regarding “politics” in popular culture, reviewers themselves drew on humor and literary framings to talk about race, gender, and reactionary politics. Following Barthes (1972), I discuss how a term like “modernity” became a mythological signifier that allowed YouTube reviewers to play the role of both apolitical, neutral critic and active participant in a “war” against modern cultural politics focused on liberal equality and inclusion. This paper has important implications both for work focused on how right-wing speech circulates and “mainstreams” (Miller-Idriss 2020) digitally by highlighting instances where right-wing politics increasingly breaks boundaries into nonpolitical areas, as well as the changing nature of reviewers as cultural intermediaries and authorities.

Author

• Sherry Wang, University of Pennsylvania