Media manipulation, lookalike contests, and fabricated outrage
☁️ My goal for this weekend is to last one whole day without looking at a screen
Issue #228: how to reflect on your year + avoid stress
Last Saturday, before we knew the name of the lead suspect in Brian Thompson’s murder, a writer on Medium named Burt came across a flyer for a lookalike contest in downtown New York City. It asked people to come dressed as the United Healthcare CEO assassin, offering the winner a cash prize. Burt figured his jacket looked enough like the one in the news photos and decided to go.
“I felt frustrated with the extensive media coverage of the shooting and the singling out of the shooter considering the recent unsolved white supremacist stabbing of migrants in the city,” he told me when I asked why he went. As Burt describes it, he participated not to glorify the murderer but to critique the media.
On Medium, Burt recounts that none of the contestants celebrated the assassin. Most of them didn’t even really look like him. They responded to journalists facetiously (joking about the event being organized by the FBI and saying Soros paid them to be there, when in reality the organizer was anonymous and never showed up). “It was a quickly formed in-group: you either knew what was up and how blatantly unserious the whole thing was, or you assumed some sort of odd malevolence or antisocial behavior,” Burt writes. Here’s a video. He won the competition.
Later that day, though, the media framed it differently. The New York Post wrote “New Yorkers mockingly celebrated the assassination of UnitedHealthcare CEO…” The Daily Mail: “Outrage as New York park hosts vile lookalike event…”
I see this pattern a lot: Something relatively innocuous happens and it’s covered in a way that inspires outrage or indignation. At the lookalike contest, in Burt’s experience, eight strangers in hoodies gathered for a pretty uneventful stunt to poke fun at celebrity lookalike culture. The bemused crowd was described as “outraged.” Another example is TPOT, or “This Part of Twitter,” a community of intellectually curious people posting memes about technology and self-optimization on X. It’s mostly innocuous, but since we’ve discovered Luigi Mangione’s association with it, people think the entire movement is suspect.
“Decorum is often a rhetorical and fabricated means for the media [giving them] the right to pretend that they have the higher ground,” writes Burt, reflecting on how his participation in the event was covered.
It’s a predictable pattern, I think. (It’s also a reason to watch less news.) Have you noticed this? Where and how?
💭 One more story: a year-end ritual
I never do this but always promise myself I will: Actually take time to reflect on your year, in writing. This weekend or next, maybe I’ll finally try leadership coach Tutti Taygerly’s year-end ritual. By hand, write your answers to the following questions…
- Work: What are the 3 projects you’re most proud of finishing this year (at work, in life, anywhere)? What would you change if you had to do them again?
- Relationships: Which three of your relationships grew the most this year? Where did you build unexpected trust? Who gave you the most support?
- You: What behaviors have you let go of? Which new ones have you adopted? What negative patterns have you successfully broken? What are you proudest of learning? What new identities have you adopted?
🤍 Worth remembering
“There’s a fine line between taking on a worthwhile challenge and taking on unnecessary stress.” — John Gorman, “Stop Wasting Your Time”
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Edited and produced by Scott Lamb & Carly Rose Gillis
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