The Young Turks: Alternative Progressive Media and the Reconciliation of Left-Wing/Right-Wing Populisms

Historically, left activists in print, radio, television, and online video have used terms like “grassroots,” “alternative,” “participatory,” “networked” and “horizontal” as watchwords for media populism. Each of these terms expresses a civic commitment to empowering audiences/users and a critique of the elitist, inaccessible quality of the mainstream media sphere. They also belie assumptions about what matters most in the debate over media democracy. For generations, left media activists have placed their emphasis on the conduit of communication, not the content. The gap we see between how markedly leftist outlets like Democracy Now! conceptualize media populism and how conservative outlets like Fox News envision it reflects the larger disconnect between how the American right and left understand populism, the former emphasizing political economy and activism, the latter style and identity.

Progressive outlets online have introduced a hybrid mode of left media populism. This presentation historicizes the case of The Young Turks, a progressive YouTube channel that embraces a loud, hyper-stylized aesthetic and an emotionally expressive, populist style of political commentary that resembles Fox News. But unlike Fox and like Democracy Now!, TYT positions itself against “the corporate media” and valorizes what I describe as a left organizational populist ethos. TYT advance the same political economic critiques of American journalism that left media activists have voiced for several generations. Yet, because it was born online and built its audience with the tools of for-profit, social media platforms, it tends to have, in practice, a less “pure” relationship with commercialism than the left media activists of the past. This presentation details how TYT attempts to manage a set of contradictions that have vexed left media producers for decades. These include the tension between activism and professional journalism, between anti-commercial political values and pragmatic commercial practices and between populism-as-style versus populism-as-organization.