his crackpot white-nationalist shtick recently headlined Politico’s list of the “50 Ideas Blowing Up American Politics.”

So how did this particular great white bloviator manage to sell himself as an ideas man of the first order? As Trump’s campaign manager, and later top adviser, Bannon liked to pepper his on-the-record interviews with grand generalities about history and the state. He spoke elliptically, as if concealing something important yet beyond the understanding of his interrogators. And he frequently invoked a wide range of historical figures—Lenin, Franz Ferdinand, Thomas Cromwell, the Gracchi brothers—with a studied casualness.

The results, to judge by early Trump administration coverage, were stunning. Perhaps Bannon’s most successful foray into media respectability was a deep tissue massage of a profile from Michael Wolff in The Hollywood Reporter shortly afterto join its ranks is nothing short of vicious. This has become doubly true in the long hangover from the recent digital media gold rush. During that boom, a panoply of news startups turned recent college graduates into career national politics reporters—only to close up shop and force them onto the open labor market a few years later. Never before have so many people described themselves as journalists while scrambling to occupy a dwindling share of jobs in the field.

From Platform to Pedestal

But as the news media has consolidated and the role of thought leader has fallen even further out of most writers’ grasp, something strange has happened: new publishing platforms and editorial strategies have made it easier for even the most status-poor journalist to play at thought