There is a word I can’t stop thinking about recently, and once you hear it, you won’t be able to stop thinking about it either.
That word is “kayfabe,” the carney term popularized by professional wrestlers to describe what is happening within the theatre of the absurd and fantastical world of good guys and bad guys and storyline revenge of pretend blood feuds.
In short, kayfabe is used to denote what is happening “in storyline.” It’s what the audience is supposed to feel, and how they’re supposed to feel it.
Until recently, “breaking” kayfabe — like a wrestler publicly asking for health insurance because falling on his back for a living left him scrambling to pay for pain pills out of pocket — was verboten. Precarity, breaking the illusion of omnipotence, wasn’t allowed to make it on TV.
The illusion had to be kept alive.
In the 1980s, for example, Hulk Hogan would wave an American flag and high-five a six-year-old until a man named Nikolai in an ushanka hat hit him in the back with a chair. The announcers would once again lament the despicable acts of the USSR. The crowd would boo. This was all in kayfabe.
Outside of kayfabe, Hulk Hogan was doing other stuff that I cannot mention without being permanently bankrupted by American free speech hero Peter Thiel. But, in short, his real name was Terry Bollea, and he was a profoundly different person.
Over the next few decades, the veneer of kayfabe would wear off. It is hard, if not impossible, to be Hulk Hogan and not Terry Bollea in public all of the time, especially in the age of the internet.
Fans not only began to accept that the kayfabe world of heroes and villains did not comport with reality — it became part of why they liked it, and this revelation drove an entirely new business model. Backstage politicking and jockeying for more screentime on Monday Night Raw became a major reason people watched the show.
Fans started to enjoy the game within the game, often more than the game itself. They now cheer for characters who hint at having similar taste in music or comic books or even the same politics as them outside of kayfabe — and root for them to get a “push” in kayfabe.
They want their champions to be like them, even when they’re wearing a mask within the theatre of the absurd.
Unfortunately, that’s where we’re at with cable news right now. Too many news institutions have been sucked into the theatre of the absurd, and people are looking for champions who allude to that.
The good news is, the kids see the kayfabe of it all. They are now aware of the game within the game.
They aren’t watching the news because of it, but they are interested in how that kayfabe frames the ever-increasing powerlessness they feel in the ambient horrors playing in the background of their daily lives.
The cable news kayfabe, as you know, goes as follows:
A powerful person says something shocking — a far-right politician launches a nativist talking point, or a billionaire speaks of a threat of financial doom if demands aren’t met. A more reasonable voice reacts, frequently asking to please remove the racism, but conceding an underlying but unprovable point that should never have been conceded. The story is framed as reaction to the initial statement, no matter how ludicrous or even impossible that initial statement is.
The reality, in this situation, is and has never been a consideration. This is how you build a world of kayfabe, and you have to turn off parts of your brain to enter it.
You can apply this to countless stories that required a nuance many mainstream news outlets have so far refused to deploy: The apocalyptic hype cycle and predictable burnout of AI, the Israel-Hamas war, TikTok’s influence on American culture and politics.
There are strict parameters on how we talk about each of these things. It’s a sort of news kayfabe: a binary, good guy–bad guy game we’ve invented that has all too often been infiltrated by all bad guys.
Take the AI panic, for example. Earlier this year, within cable news and American op-ed page kayfabe, we were approaching an existential dilemma: a literal AI doomsday, threatening humanity itself.
This wasn’t so much framed as something we should question or even talk about in great detail, but more as a threat — about the inevitability of something that must be stopped, like a meteor barreling towards Earth.
Outside of kayfabe, people had pretty good questions that were ritually ignored by the “serious” people in op-ed sections and in boxes on TV.
Who are these people who are telling us this? Why does this all kind of sound like marketing? Shouldn’t we be more concerned about the people being laid off now to accommodate an unproven future technology? Aren’t these the same guys that were selling us JPEGs of cartoon monkeys as investment vehicles less than a year ago? Don’t all of these people believe there’s a Woke Mind Virus that’s turning their kids trans? Isn’t that a gigantic red flag? Isn’t one of these guys…Elon Musk?
Over time, it was revealed that a lot of the people pushing these questions wound up being unreliable in an almost comically novel way.
They were members of two rival Silicon Valley ex machina cults — “accelerationists” and “effective altruists” — which both, based mostly on gut feeling, believed the AI robots would quickly gain sentience and decide to destroy most of humanity. The difference between the two cults was deciding if this destruction was a good thing, since “growth at all costs” might mean killing a large portion of Earth’s population.
In reality, neither of these groups of straight-up weirdos is right. Currently, AI is doing a tremendous job of filling the web with recipes that can easily cook Google’s search results but don’t produce actual food if you try to make them in real life.
It’s now months later, and nobody in our field has seemed to take note that the original false choice presented by the “serious” people was one introduced by very rich, very strange, very wrong people.
All of this happened while real experts and good news consumers appropriately laughed off — and turned off — the kayfabe version of the news, rightly codifying it as part of an elaborate power game that did not comport with any future they believed possible.
Laughing it off and turning it off, as a consumer choice, justifiably scares a lot of people in power who really don’t want that to happen, and they have an easy answer: Blame TikTok. Narrative crafting becomes a lot easier if semiotic discussion of how the news works on one social network is simply banned, they believe.
It’s also why information studies departments at places like The University of Washington, Harvard, and Stanford are currently under attack. Jim Jordan’s special Congressional subcommittee has issued countless subpoenas to anyone who teaches or studies how information moves on the internet, part of a flagrant and abhorrent attack on the free press.
Performative centrist and reactionary pundits have lined up to do Jordan’s bidding, successfully convincing American news executives that there is a “misinformation industrial complex” trying to ban their bad takes on social media with the help of the academy. It is an idea that is laughable and untrue on its face, and yet it has somehow taken hold in America’s media executive class.
Ban TikTok and ban the study of how information moves, they believe, and the problem disappears.
But they’re wrong. The cat is out of the bag. Even if TikTok is banned, and even if the study of information at the university level is de facto criminalized, this sort of thinking will persist as most people don’t feel represented — or even respected — by false choice news coverage.
The kayfabe has worn off.
News consumers have developed positive relationships with people who know and understand that this is a game, and who actively talk about how they operate within it. It’s why people like Rachel Maddow, who dives into the news through the lens of history and talks like a human being, or podcasters like Michael Hobbes, whose detailed work in defanging moral panics pushed through mainstream sources, have developed fan bases that will follow them anywhere. (A recent episode of Hobbes’ If Books Could Kill, for one, laid out how the pervasive media story of “organized retail theft” is based on an apparently invented metric, forcing retractions from trade groups.)
Because of this kayfabe awareness, the tricks of journalism have greater awareness than ever before. “Beat sweetening” stories and segments, for example? The ones that allow your company to remain on Trump’s plane for an extra week or get you into the next SpaceX launch despite knowing where this all ends? People are now aware of that. It’s kayfabe. It’s part of the game. They realize this is character development, and they don’t like it.
That’s the bad news, at least for some people.
Here’s the good news: The faster you stop playing those games, the faster you stop making Faustian bargains for access, the faster you stop presenting weird false choices that leave out seemingly every American under 40 years old, the faster we can gain their trust back.
The other good news is that they’re right. The kind of news that they want does not have these internecine power structures and middle school-style influence games built into it. That’s not a lot to ask.
The failures of the recent past, the people turning off the news in droves, can be reversed, and quickly. People want information now more than ever.
But you have to stop blaming TikTok. Start blaming the kayfabe that’s captured our industry — something we must recognize, and hopefully abandon.
It’s time to get real with people. They don’t want to hear the debate between two rival sects of increasingly unaccountable rich people, especially when neither of them is living a life that has anything to do with their daily lived experiences.
They want to know what’s actually happening, even if it’s a little complicated, even if there are no good guys.
Kayfabe is dead, and that’s good for the truth.
Ben Collins is a senior reporter for investigations at NBC News.
