“There’s a demand amongst certain subsets of the public for outrage politics,” said Jaime Settle, director of the Social Networks and Political Psychology Lab at the College of William & Mary in Virginia. “This happens on both the left and the right. But the people who do this on the right have just found a lot more successful ways of doing it.”
The site produces little original reporting but instead mostly repackages journalism from traditional news organizations with a conservative slant.
Legum and co-writer Tesnim Zekeria analyzed 70 of The Daily Wire’s top stories on Facebook in May and June and found that almost all of them were regurgitations of another outlet’s reporting.
But as Settle explains, by only covering specific stories that bolster the conservative agenda (such as negative reports about socialist countries and polarizing ones about race and sexuality issues) and only including certain facts, readers still come away from The Daily Wire’s content with the impression that Republican politicians can do little wrong and cancel culture is among the nation’s greatest threats.