When Andrew Lawrence starts his night shift, he turns on the monitor and watches the evening programming on Fox News.
He and his small team at Media Matters for America, a liberal nonprofit media watchdog, spend hours each day glued to their screens, scanning cable shows, live streams and congressional hearings, clipping them and posting them on social media, looking for political moments they can denounce as absurd.
“We’re watching Fox News so you don’t have to,” Lawrence said.
The efforts seem to be paying off: His video posts often receive millions of views.
Whereas clipping political gaffes was once just a pastime for amateur political nerds, professionals have now stepped in to fuel the political debate, churning out sharply captioned videos on platforms like Instagram and TikTok, often edited to last just a few minutes or even seconds.
Despite concerns that the most-watched videos often, sometimes intentionally, omit important context, Clipper has garnered tens of millions of views, forcing candidates to pay attention and watch their words.
More than ever, clipping has been embraced by official Democratic and Republican election committees, leveraging the influence of real-time clipping to achieve results that surpass those of their independent predecessors.
Gone are the heydays of candidate trackers, political activists who shadow candidates at campaign events big and small hoping to catch their gaffes on video camera. Today, live streaming and video recording are commonplace, and any rally-goer with a smartphone is a source of viral video footage. With so much of the campaign trail now captured on video, and every microscopic, mocking detail quickly drawn attention afterward, the smallest character flaw, a momentary blunder, or momentary awkwardness can become a public relations nightmare for a candidate.
Curtis Hack, editor of NewsBusters, a conservative blog whose mission is to expose the bias of the liberal media, cuts and analyzes White House press conferences and said his X account alone has garnered about 150 million impressions since he started cutting during the 2016 presidential election.
Clippers on both sides of the partisan divide argue they’re supporting news organizations that aren’t doing their jobs impartially. “You just have a jovial bunch of us trying to hold news organizations accountable in real time when the president goes off the rails in speeches or statements,” Haq said of the team of media analysts who sift through television shows and breaking news for material.
Meanwhile, Clipper often removes from video posts the context that journalists are typically trained to provide.
That’s a common case in the case of @RNCResearch, the official Trump campaign and Republican Party X account that has garnered millions of views since it launched in 2009. In a sarcastic, trollish campaign voice, the team behind the account posts clips and memes several times an hour highlighting purportedly key moments from President Biden’s public appearances.
Fact checkers have repeatedly cited @RNCResearch for posting misleading content. For example, during Biden’s visit to Italy last week for the Group of Seven summit, the account posted a 31-second video showing the president walking away from a group of leaders unnoticed, with the caption “What’s Biden doing?”
The post did not mention that summit attendees had just watched a skydiving demonstration, or that Biden was seen briefly on screen walking toward a skydiver. Nevertheless, the video has been viewed 3.5 million times and sparked a flurry of reporting that focused on Biden’s age.
Former President Donald J. Trump mentioned the video, along with many others posted by @RNCResearch, at several rallies. In Racine, Wisconsin, on Tuesday, Trump said Biden “seemed like he had no idea where he was.”
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said the video was “maliciously crafted” and “manipulated.”
RNC spokesman Tommy Piggott did not respond to a request for comment, but wrote to X on Wednesday that the @RNCResearch post was an “unedited, unfiltered, accurate clip” taken from the publicly available video.
Trump has also complained that social media accounts are quoting him out of context.
In March, @BidenHQ, the Democratic answer to accounts like @RNCResearch, posted a video of Trump speaking to voters in Dayton, Ohio, saying “the country will bleed” if he wasn’t elected. Trump said he was quoted out of context and that he was only warning about the economic impact on the auto industry.
MeidasTouch, a self-described pro-Democracy, anti-Trump outlet, also posted the short, “gory” video. Former Florida criminal defense lawyer Ron Filipkowski now runs the MeidasTouch news platform after posting political videos on his own Twitter account for years.
He described videos as a new form of political currency. “These are like dropping a burning ember into a dry forest,” Filipkowski said of the viral videos. “Four hours later, it’s a pretty big fire.”
Another left-leaning Clipper, Aaron Luper, a progressive journalist who started making videos in 2017, said a successful video gives him the same “dopamine rush” that a reporter gets when he breaks a scoop.
In previous elections, it would take campaigns and independent fact-checkers half a day or more to correct false statements or exploit missteps, Mr. Filipkowski said. Doug Heye, former communications director for the Republican National Committee, described it as a painstaking process that involved waiting for several campaign staffers to review and sign off on the answers.
Now there’s little hesitation from Clippers as they race to be the first to post.
“We hear the term ‘rapid response’ a lot,” Hay said, “but this is now turning into a near real-time response.”
Biden’s digital team struck an empathetic and serious tone during the 2020 election, ignoring the memes and attacks from fierce right-wing social media accounts. But Filipkowski, who began clipping in 2020 as an anti-Trump Republican, said the Democrats’ messaging was lagging.
“The right wing has been attacking Democrats and Biden with deceptive posts,” Filipkowski said of a strategy the Biden campaign has used until recently. “Why aren’t Democrats doing the same with Trump?”
The Democratic Party is not turning off and going to sleep.
Parker Butler, the Biden campaign’s digital rapid response director, said the @BidenHQ account, which has garnered nearly 2 billion impressions so far, was intended to track Trump 24/7.
“Our team is constantly monitoring Donald Trump’s every move,” Butler said in a statement, adding that the account hopes to feature “Trump’s extreme and losing policies directly from his own mouth.”
With practice, Clippers say they’ve developed an instinct for which political moments are most likely to go viral, but their results suggest they’re also playing a numbers game: Of the dozens of clips about a particular event, at least one is sure to appear at the top of a feed.
And they are clearly keeping a close eye on their colleagues on the other side of the aisle.
“They’re accusing me of cutting clips that removed so-called context,” Filipkowski said of his Republican critics, “but they’re still following me!”
