I’ve scoured the interwebs all morning but the only interesting thing I’ve learned is about The Gorilla Channel, and I have only my absence from social media to blame for not getting this to you sooner.
It all started, as everything does now, with a tweet. Some guy named Ben Ward appears to be a master of the form, having released the Milkshake Duck meme into the world a while back. This time he made up an excerpt from Michael Wolff’s “Fire and Fury,” typeset to look legit, about how on his first night in the White House Trump fumed at being unable to get the The Gorilla Channel on his TV. “Trump seemed to be under the impression that a TV channel existed that screened nothing but gorilla-based content, 24 hours a day.”
Ward really nails it there, capturing Wolff’s breathlessly incredulous tone while conveying “facts” that sound simultaneously insane yet possible. The excerpt goes on to relate the many steps White House staff took to avoid disabusing Trump of his belief he was watching The Gorilla Channel, going so far as to edit the documentaries they cobbled into a tape loop that showed only scenes of gorillas fighting each other. (This is a light rewrite of the joke in “Idiocracy,” where the No. 1 TV show in the future is a constant video stream of people getting kicked in the nuts.)
The problem was that people believed it was true. A lot of people. Like, tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands. Conservative sites had a field day with how gullible Trump-haters are. Even the New York Times has had to weigh in on this entirely pointless kerfuffle, if only to get it on the record as the first big meme of the new year.
Just because it’s pointless doesn’t mean we can’t learn something from it. So many people were ready to believe such a thing because they, myself among them, already believe that if there were a Gorilla Channel, Trump would totally watch it. And if he did watch it, he’d want the boring parts edited out so he could see more fighting. It fooled people because, as absurd as Ward tried to make it — ” ‘On some days he’ll watch the gorilla channel for 17 hours straight,’ an insider told me” — it’s not far enough from some of the wackiness we’ve heard about over the past year.
The point is, this is exactly how the smears against Hillary worked, minus the part where the people who were tricked into believing the stories quickly realized their error. If you don’t live in a self-correcting media environment — if you don’t look beyond your bubble — you are more susceptible to the confirmation bias that appears to be a baked-in part of human nature.
Which leaves me with only one suggestion: Contact your cable or satellite provider and demand they start carrying The Gorilla Channel.