Within minutes of Charlie Kirk being shot, millions of Americans began scrambling for information. But as the public struggled to make sense of the event, media organizations were flailing too. The Wall Street Journal misinterpreted engravings on the bullets, an anchor compared social media to a cult, and some old school journalists seemed to struggle with the basic concept of a Discord server.
“The fact that there is no one in traditional media whatsoever who has any inclination to what the modern landscape of the internet is and how to navigate it is baffling at best and downright dangerous at worst,” one X user posted, amassing over 10,000 likes.
Traditional news media’s struggle to understand the internet or grasp new technology isn’t a new phenomenon. Tim Miller, a political strategist and writer-at-large for The Bulwark, an anti-Trump new media brand on Substack, compared struggling media figures attempting to decode the shooter’s internet slang to “Bryant Gumbel in 1994 trying to explain the world wide web on the Today Show.” In 2025, there are more reporters covering The Los Angeles Lakers than there are dedicated online culture journalists in all of mainstream media.
This vacuum left by the traditional media on internet culture coverage has allowed influencers, TikTokers, and streamers to step in and provide the tsunami of information that people crave. But that information is often unverified and many influencers don’t adhere to any journalistic or ethical standards. Just last month, a WIRED investigation revealed that dozens of liberal news content creators, several identifying as independent journalists, were taking part in a dark money political influence scheme without any disclosure to the public. Meanwhile right wing content creators are building massive media empires weaponizing pop culture news for political purposes with little to no scrutiny. The disinformation pushed by these types of influencers confuses audiences, leaves them less informed, and erodes trust in actual journalism.
The internet is the most powerful political tool of our time, but most media organizations treat it as an afterthought until breaking news arises. “Too many media outlets don’t employ reporters who truly live online and have a firm grasp of internet culture,” said Oliver Darcy, a long time media reporter and founder of Status, a newsletter about the media.
The journalists getting things wrong, Darcy explains, don’t have nefarious intentions. They’re often just general assignment reporters thrown onto stories that they’re unqualified to report on. This is how we have ended up with so many false reports of things like non-existent TikTok challenges. “Just like a news organization would not send a general reporter into a war zone, outlets should also not send untrained journalists into the chaotic online world and expect them to be able to have a complete understanding of what is transpiring,” Darcy said.
Ryan Broderick, founder of the newsletter Garbage Day and one of the first ever internet culture reporters, said that it didn’t have to be this way. Throughout the 2010s, digital media companies employed dozens of journalists covering various online communities and phenomena. Much of their coverage, however, wasn’t innately valued outside of its ability to generate traffic by going viral on platforms like Facebook. Once digital media crumbled and outlets like BuzzFeed, Mic, Vice, and others shuttered their news teams, online culture reporting as a beat was gutted.
Some internet culture writers ended up in traditional media. Ali Breland and Charlie Warzel, two top journalists who have reported on the darkest and most obscure corners of the internet, landed at The Atlantic. Aric Toler, who previously worked at the investigative outlet Bellingcat and has extensive experience plunging the depths of the internet, went to The New York Times. Many others simply quit the business or became content creators themselves.
Gender-based attacks also eroded the internet culture beat. In the 2010s, much of internet culture journalism was done by women. In 2025, many have been driven out of the industry by declining opportunities or a relentless torrent of abuse and blowback from the subjects they cover. Gamergate, a misogynistic harassment campaign that began in the early 2010s, provided a blueprint for the weaponization of the internet and kick-started the careers of many of the most prominent right wing internet figures today. Legacy media organizations hired women and LGBTQ journalists to cover these influencers, then, as Broderick put it, “threw them into the internet would chipper for traffic.” As many online pointed out following Kirk’s shooting, “Gamergate was… the spark for modern radicalization.”
Will Sommer, a senior reporter at The Bulwark, and author of the book Trust the Plan: The Rise of QAnon and the Conspiracy That Unhinged America, is one of the country’s top reporters on internet culture and online extremism. He said that traditional media organizations are simply “reluctant to acknowledge that internet things and internet movements and internet politics are worth taking seriously and deserve having some expertise on for a newsroom. To [cover internet culture] effectively requires newsrooms to understand a world that they’re not used to, and to understand there will be bad faith attacks against any reporters who cover it.”
Jamie Cohen, associate professor of media studies at CUNY Queens College said that the more out of touch the traditional media becomes with internet culture, the more trust these organizations lose with the public and especially younger audiences. Cohen likened the situation to 2008, right before the financial crisis.
“In 2008, [the media] lacked the financial literacy to understand crucial concepts,” he said. “Financial experts were able to not explain certain important things.” That lack of nuanced coverage of our financial system allowed for exploitation by bad actors who thrived under lack of oversight, Cohen said.
The more out of touch the mainstream media coverage of the online world becomes, the more audiences, especially younger audiences, turn to less reliable news sources. Already, the share of U.S. adults who say they regularly get news from TikTok has jumped from 3% in 2020 to 17% in 2024, according to a study by Pew Research Center. 37% of Americans aged 18-29 say they regularly get news from news influencers, compared with just 7% of those 65 and older.
Aidan Walker, a meme researcher in Washington D.C. said that instead of relegating certain people in a newsroom to understanding the online world, news outlets need to start hiring people who are hyper online for all beats. Journalists also need to recognize that spending a lot of time on X doesn’t mean that they are plugged into online culture. “Twitter cannot be the place where journalists get a sense of what’s happening in the world because it’s not a complete picture,” he said.
Some on X echoed this sentiment. “Millennial journalists spend time scrolling Twitter for headlines and mistake that as being ‘very online,’ which would be a meaningful descriptor maybe 15 yrs ago but today puts you closer to Facebook moms and dads,” the writer and trend forecaster Ayesha A. Siddiqi posted.
Adam Aleksic, a linguist and author of the book Algospeak: How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language, said that what constitutes “very online” has evolved over the years. “To be very online today, you have to understand years of meme history across platforms, as well as a niche understanding of the specific communities you’re engaging with,” he said. “Young people are digital natives, they have grown up so immersed in the online environment that they have a deep internet knowledge which may seem incomprehensible to outsiders.”
Broderick is hoping that news outlets like his Garbage Day can step up and keep people informed. Prior to the shooting, Broderick hired a researcher from Know Your Meme, the leading internet meme database, and a managing editor who came from Tumblr and BuzzFeed. So far, his investment in online culture coverage is paying off. Broderick said that his post last Friday covering the online references made by Kirk’s shooter amassed over half a million views.
Will Sommer’s newsletter False Flag for The Bulwark reaches over 861,000 subscribers. “Someone needs to explain to people,” Sommer said, “that a Gopnik is not necessarily a Pepe.”
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