NARRATION: Memes have become part of the cultural zeitgeist. 

ARCHIVAL:
Meme: Ballerina Cappucina.

NARRATION: Like it or not, this condensed expression offered by memes is now part of American politics.

HENRY JENKINS (PROFESSOR OF COMMUNICATION, UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA ): Memes are the people’s editorial cartoons. Historically, the news media had the ability to compress a political debate into a single image. Political editorial cartoons gave us the Democratic donkey and the Republican elephant, right? What now we have in the age of the internet is, people can create their own editorial cartoons.

What spreads spreads in part because it hits an emotional chord with people. Memes are condensed expression. They’re shorthand. Just add water, and they become something, something bigger.

NARRATION: Memes have started making news as a new kind of politics, and are being used by the left and the right to score political blows, often below the belt.

One controversial example: Pepe the Frog, which started out as a harmless cartoon in the early aughts, but was sometimes used to spread hate by white nationalists. 

HENRY JENKINS: Pepe is a cartoon character appropriated from a cartoonist who’s not too happy about it. But Pepe is appropriated by the alt-right as a political symbol, and they’re attaching all kinds of meanings to them.

NARRATION: President Barack Obama became the first president to get the full meme treatment.

HENRY JENKINS: The idea that Obama was Muslim or that Obama wasn’t born in the United States spread very far, very fast – conspiracy theories, racist memes, so forth. That expressed something we need to pay attention to in our culture but it did not have the virtue of being factually right.

NARRATION: President Trump has had to deal with an onslaught of memes since Day One, but he’s also learned how to use them.

GEOFFREY BAYM (PROFESSOR OF MEDIA STUDIES, TEMPLE UNIVERSITY): Every presidency and every election and every political era are defined by the communication technologies of the day. So, F.D.R. and his fireside chats, Bill Clinton playing the saxophone on “The Arsenio Hall Show” . . .

Trump is a really interesting figure because he is a product of broadcasting, but of fringe broadcasting – the Howard Stern radio show, it’s reality television, it’s top professional wrestling. They’re spaces, if you’re controversial, you’ll get visibility. Now add social media. The ability to use social media to route around dominant broadcasting and reach out directly to voters.

NARRATION: And Trump is clearly a fan of memes. 

GEOFFREY BAYM: The pace of which information is released, and the emotionality of these rapid-fire bursts often offer some sort of window into his psyche.

HENRY JENKINS: We have a President that likes to just pass along pieces of information and say, well, I didn’t know whether it was true or not, it just looked interesting. And that’s sort of the way a lot of teenagers relate to media, too. The things that fit their opinions, things that they find curious, things that seem outlandish, they pass along and wait for other people to decide: are they accurate or not?

​What we know about young people is they get most of their news through social media. ​They’re in fact receiving a lot of news from a variety of different sources, most of which are good. The problem is they’re not always as good as they should be at distinguishing where the news is coming from, or how to ​ascribe credibility to that information.

NARRATION: After recent tensions over immigration and ICE deportations, memes from the Department of Homeland Security, now often made by AI, spread like wildfire. 

HENRY JENKINS: So it may be you’re introduced to a topic through a meme, but that’s not where it stops. That’s just a point of entry into a larger discussion, and there’s plenty of evidence that young people, in fact, are using it in precisely that way. I think they communicate things to people that are really vital. So the meme is a flag that says: This is going on. Pay attention. Find out more.

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