Why the Independence Day media coverage felt "off" - #0085, Manny Marotta

Manny Marotta has a theory about why America’s 250th birthday felt subdued. It isn’t purely politics, though politics is tangled up in it. It’s the structure. There are simply too many feeds now, and not enough shared ones. And the ones that do break through to the masses get read as political, whether they mean to be or not.I sat down this weekend with Manny for the second time. He’s the creator and curator of the Live History Project, which takes a couple of accounts on X and posts in real time what’s happening in that moment in history.There’s:25 years ago - @25YearsAgoLive50 years ago - @50YearsAgoLive100 years ago - @100YearsAgoLiveand 250 years ago - @250YearsAgoLiveRight now, that means we’re living through 2001, 1976, 1926, and 1776 simultaneously. He pointed me back to America’s bicentennial in 1976, which he says was one of the only major stories of that year, competing for attention with little more than an Olympic Games. This year, Independence Day landed alongside a World Cup on American soil, an ongoing Iran conflict, a White House renovation project, and an MMA match. It also took place with a media landscape noticeably divided along party lines and contrasting levels of patriotism between political ideologies. “Now we have so many different news cycles, so many different news sources that people are following,” he told me. “It’s just oversaturation.” His 250-years-ago account picked up roughly 300,000 followers and 20 million views in the days around the holiday, almost entirely because a political audience decided it mattered.That’s where the story gets complicated. Manny insists the account isn’t doing anything ideological - he just posts digitized letters and meeting minutes from the Library of Congress that are available to everyone, without commentary. And yet that neutrality is precisely what got it adopted as, he describes, a patriotic rallying point by people ‘on the right’. “A neutral or positive view of not just the American Revolution but American history in general has become, in recent years, sort of right-wing coded,” he explained. “So if you are even reporting in an academic sense what happened, a lot of people do tend to see that as right-wing.”Meanwhile, news outlets covering the holiday split along familiar lines: CNN described the mood as shaping up to be “a big blah.” The New York Times ran an op-ed blaming the Trump administration for deflating the day, then was forced to revise its own headline. The Washington Post called it “an unfortunate metaphor on national divisions.” Disney, by contrast, ran wall-to-wall patriotic programming, and outlets like The Free Press leaned into celebratory content.But Manny didn’t spare the current administration either, telling me the patriotic messaging he’d seen recently during a trip to Washington, DC, centered more on a single political figure than the anniversary itself: “The only America 250 content that I saw were giant banners with Donald Trump’s face on them... nothing about the anniversary itself, more about the person who happens to be president.” His hope, he said, is “to create maybe a simulation of the monoculture that we had in the past,” which is academically sourced, uncaptioned, and a return to the apolitical. So he is trying to hold a neutral center by republishing old letters, in a country where an audience conditioned by fragmentation has decided that the center no longer exists. But a Jefferson draft, posted without a caption, still lands as a statement to somebody.This is my second conversation with Manny Marotta. Watch the first, from February, about the Live History Project’s 2001 account, here. Get full access to The Spiro Circle at www.thespirocircle.com/subscribe