Olympic Gold Metals vs. Breitbart Comment Section
#WOKE: Analyze a Breitbart article that has been shared on the publication’s Facebook page. Critically examine the article’s construction, advertising, and reception. Based on your analysis, why did this article perform so well? What does its success say about Breitbart’s readers?
In all honesty, I had never really heard of Beritbart before this. From my understanding, they are a news outlet that has quite a lot of readers, but that is as far as my knowledge for the page went, that was it.
When choosing an article, I noticed that a lot of the stories were political and that most of the top comments seemed to be coming from right wing readers. I didn’t want to write another article about Trump, or anything that political for that matter, so I went with something I thought was a little more light hearted and fun: A gold metal victory for Team USA.
As far as the headline and the photo go, it seems like an exciting piece of information.
“Team USA’s 100th Gold Metal? Awesome!” — What I thought Breitbart’s largely American following would be commenting.
The article itself was a nice read. It included White’s thoughts and comments after winning Gold and through just his words quoted in the article, it is evident how elated he is.
What really shocked me, however, were some of the top comments on the article.
First of all, I don’t even understand what Frank is so angry about. Not to sound too much like a Canadian or a millennial, but aren’t American’s all for being the best? Why is this guy not happy for the Gold? Maybe a snowboarder stole his last girlfriend or something, I don’t know. Second, what is with the jab at the Liberals? Who hurt this guy?
Marc’s comment surprised me a little bit as well. While he praises White, he also is very concerned about the way he is treating the flag, which with a bit more research, I found out that he let it drag on the ground while he was celebrating.
I clearly haven’t seen the video of him post hearing the news that he won gold and letting the flag drag, but he seems to be wearing it pretty proudly in all of the other photos I’ve seen of him.
The rest of the comments are a mix of criticizing him despite his amazing success, congratulating him, bashing him for the flag some more, and Frank commenting 4 more times about what “real sports” are and how he’s a 63 year old power lifter.
The comment sections are so hard to read on Breitbart without my angry, millennial, left-wing side coming out that I had to stop, but even the comments on the article on Breitbart.com itself are all about taxes, “leftist goofs,” immigrants, etc. but nothing really about snowboarding.
From my brief experience with Breitbart, it is very clear that most of their readers, or at least the ones commenting on their Facebook page, seem to be conservative baby boomers. On the political posts on the page, comments get much more aggressive and shocking, especially one’s I’ve seen about Florida’s most recent school shooting. Not to go too far into it, but someone commented that gun control doesn’t need to be a thing, it is “this generation” that is the problem. Says the person who is sitting at home comfortably while the kids who watched their friends lose their lives are insisting on gun control. But what do they know, they’re just kids.
ANYWAYS, I think that in terms of bursting out of my own “leftist” filter bubble, Breitbart is a great source to see what the other side of the internet has to say about current affairs. However, I don’t know how much time I can spend on their page without wanting to start an argument with every person in the comments.
