Paul Bass photo
DNC-invited digital whizzes at work at third-floor arena lounge.
Chicago — Legendary presidential campaign journalists Theodore H. White and Hunter S. Thompson didn’t live to cover the 2024 Democratic National Convention here. If they had, they might have found their bylines buried by a digital whiz called TizzyEnt who started building his seven-plus-million-strong audience with beer jokes and lip-synching videos.
TizzyEnt — aka central Floridian Michael McWhorter — is one of 200 “content creators” with a prime spot covering the convention at Chicago’s United Center.
The party invited them to set up at one of three “Creator” lounges set up on levels of the arena stocked with nachos and drinks and space to mingle and thrust mulitmedia memes into the digiverse.
The party set up two other areas as well on the coveted (for press) floor of the arena for creators to work. One content creator, John Russell, was tapped to deliver remarks from the stage on the convention’s climactic final night.
McWhorter is churning out reports like this lively edit of “Day 2” at the arena.
“I started out with lip-synching and beer jokes,” McWhorter said during a break in content-lounge work Wednesday evening. “Then I noticed a lot of information was spreading rapidly. You end up talking about political things.”
Politicians noticed his growing audience and invited him to help them promote state-level issues in Florida, he said. Today he posts his material to 6.5 million TikTok followers, 569 Instagram followers, 615,800 Xers. The national Democrats reached out to him to invite him to work at the convention, he said. (He paid his own way.)
Meanwhile, more traditional reporters — aka members of “the press” who write and broadcast articles in news outlets — have grumbled about limited access to the floor and convention events.
“Many of the corporate-sponsored events, and even some that aren’t, are locked down to the press,” reads a subheadline from one such reporter’s convention dispatch this week.
Meme-driven short “content” has emerged as the breakout communications form in this election, veteran campaign strategist Joe Trippi told the Independent at a convention-related confab in an interview this week. Trippi was part of the brain trust of the 2004 Howard Dean Democratic presidential campaign that pioneered web-based organizing. Barack Obama won in part in 2008 by mastering the use of social media sites like Facebook for organizing, then in 2012 by mastering the Big Data-guided hyper-targeted TV ad. Donald Trump in 2016 mastered the direct connection with voters through Tweeting, Trippi observed. Now meme teams and digital mini-content creators helped propel Kamala Harris to viral attention in the weeks after she emerged as the presidential nominee, helping raise hundreds of millions of dollars in a flash and perhaps (that’s a big “perhaps”) tens of thousands of door-knockers and phone-bankers. Most famously symbolized by the explosion of “Kamala is brat” memes riffing on a hit by British pop singer Charli XCX.
Emma Mont, a 27-year-old member of an “organizermemes” collective who lives in D.C., wore green while working in the lounge Wednesday. Because that’s the “brat” color.
“My nails are green for brat. My phone is green for brat. I have a green case. I’m bratted out,” she said.
“Kamala is brat. We all are brat.”
Earlier Wednesday she had whipped up memes trashing the at-least-for-now presidential campaign of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
“Using humor as a political connection has always existed. The idea of meeting voters where they are is not new. And memes are just where voters are these days. Speaking to voters where they are makes sense,” Mont said.
“It’s a way of the campaign saying, ‘We hear you. We see you. We want to connect with you.’ That’s something young people have been looking for from the Democratic Party for a long time.”
Mont landed the convention content creator pass by responding to an add placed by the national party on Instagram. Others, like Mallory Hank-Johnson and McWhorter, were approached directly with invites.
Hank-Johnson produces her motherhood and women’s health-themed content across different platforms under the title “lifebymj.” She bills herself as “Ur fave curly-haired millennial mama in Las Vegas.”
She first received an invitation to an Aug. 14 White House “Creator Economy Conference.” “That was unbelievable. We got to hang out at her [Kamala Harris’s] house. The press room. We also got to talk with the administration about issues that affect creators” like the war in Gaza, she said.
Both Republicans and Democrats have recognized the ascendant power of digital content and meme creation, as shown in both presidential campaigns, McWhorter noted.
“We’ve lost the days of a Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather. People tuned in to them because they trusted them,” McWhorter noted. Now millions of people, especially young people, find their news outside traditional outlets.
Will that translate to people actually showing up at the polls to vote and working to get other people to the polls?
For the press, the content providers’ prominence is the latest affront in a decades-long decline in their once-dominant political power as the “fourth estate” practicing the trade with traditional tools. The content providers don’t tend to be trained fact-gathers neutrally seeking truth. They admit they’re working to convince people to support one side, unlike traditional journalists. On the other hand, critics on the left often no longer consider Fox News (on the right) or outlets like The New York Times (on the center left) as unbiased or trustworthy. Other critics argued that the fourth estate had too much power to siphon what and how information gets to people, too much influence on who prevails in political campaigns. Plus there’s a long history of openly advocacy media doing important reporting, analysis and opinionizing. Whether people approve or disapprove of the media trends, as with the weather, change is in the air.
Will the new armies of content creators end up influencing the outcome of the presidential race and future elections?
The goal of the campaigns is to generate viral messages and memes. It’s unclear whether that can be manufactured from the top, by contract — or whether true virality (as opposed to purchased bot-driven metrics) arises from independent actors inspired with original ideas.
Will that translate to people actually showing up at the polls to vote and working to get other people to the polls?
Mallory Hank-Johnson argues that it will.
She said she has seen the impact firsthand of her posts about women’s health.
“I’ve had individuals reach out to me and said, ‘You have really changed my mind about IVF. I didn’t know there was an option,’” Hank-Johnson said, then returned to her spot in the lounge to crank out more content.
