Last week, I dipped back into X just to see what I’d been missing on paternity leave. A post from Benny Johnson, a conservative activist with 3.4 million followers, caught my eye. Apparently, he had discovered “the biggest scandal in news media history.”
According to Johnson there was a “crisis” at Politico, the Washington-based news site: It was unable to meet payroll because it had been “massively funded” by USAID, but DOGE had just “deleted” the cash. “Now Politico will go out of business,” Johnson wrote. “The corruption is endless. Good riddance.”
The post went viral, boosted by influential X accounts, including Elon Musk’s. Radio personality and financial maven Peter Schiff posted: “The Biden Administration paid Politico millions of dollars under the table to spread propaganda, which Politico then fraudulently represented to the public as being legitimate news. And they call Trump a fascist!” President Trump himself weighed in, repeating the “biggest scandal” line. For days, this dominated my newsfeed.
The only problem: Johnson’s story was something between a nothingburger and a hoax.