The Sweeney Spectacle

This week, the biggest media controversy in America wasn’t the devastating war in Gaza, or Donald Trump’s latest attempts to distract from his involvement with Jeffrey Epstein. It was Sydney Sweeney—in jeans.

The actress’ new campaign with American Eagle launched with a cheeky tagline: “Sydney Sweeney has great jeans.” In one promotional video, Sweeney stares into the camera and says, “Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality and even eye color. My jeans are blue.” It’s denim wordplay, delivered with the kind of straight-faced charm that Sweeney has perfected.

But on TikTok, some viewers saw something else. One user accused the campaign of “eugenics-coded” messaging. Another called it outright “Nazi propaganda,” suggesting the wordplay on genes—paired with Sweeney’s blonde hair and blue eyes—was pushing a white supremacist ideal. It might have ended there, like one of many daily freakouts in the content chum of social media. But it didn’t.

The episode soon exploded into the mainstream, not with its initial critique, but its amplification—first by a few progressive outlets, then by the right-wing outrage machine. An MSNBC opinion piece authored by a producer helped crystallize the backlash. The producer wrote that “the internet’s reaction [to the ad] reflect[s] an unbridled cultural shift toward whiteness, conservatism and capitalist exploitation.” That essay quickly became the centerpiece of the controversy, giving the right a shiny new culture war object to club liberals with.

For much of the week, Fox News hosts and right-wing media outlets were in outrage mode offering performative fury over the handful of liberals’ reaction to the ad. By Wednesday, Fox was plastering its chyron with “CANCEL CULTURE MOB GOES BALLISTIC OVER SWEENEY AD.” Jesse Watters spent several minutes on the topic during his primetime show. “Liberals saw a white woman with blonde hair and blue eyes and thought she was ushering in the Fourth Reich,” he declared.

In fact, Fox spent nearly an hour and a half talking about the Sweeney non-scandal this week, while the network devoted just 3 minutes to coverage of Epstein, according to a Media Matters count, providing a shiny distraction and cover for Trump after his name was reported to be in the “Epstein Files.” Over on The Blaze, the Glenn Beck-founded site ran five separate pieces on the story in just three days, including one that said the Sweeney ad marked “a cultural shift away from the left’s demonic influence.”

The Trump White House, also sensing a chance to distract from (ahem) other developments‚ got in on the action. “Cancel culture run amok,” declared communications director Steven Cheung. “This warped, moronic, and dense liberal thinking is a big reason why Americans voted the way they did in 2024. They’re tired of this bullshit.”

And just like that, the denim ad became the latest flashpoint in the culture wars—proof to each side of the other’s insanity. By Friday, The Associated Press, CNN, Vanity Fair and others piled on with reporting about the debate stirred up by the ad. And it’s clear why.

According to Google Trends, “Sydney Sweeney” outpaced searches for Gaza, Trump, and Epstein all week. Not because the clamor had any serious substance, but because it had all the ingredients the modern media ecosystem thrives on: a beautiful celebrity, a questionable use of words, a whiff of outrage, and just enough ideological fuel to let both sides of the spectrum have a perspective.

After days of drama, American Eagle addressed the pseudo controversy Friday, writing in a statement that the ad, ”is and always was about the jeans. Her jeans. Her story. We’ll continue to celebrate how everyone wears their AE jeans with confidence, their way. Great jeans look good on everyone.”

It’s a familiar cycle by now: a stray online post becomes amplified by a media eager for clicks, politicized by ideologues, and turned into a multi-day spectacle—while far more urgent stories struggle to get oxygen.

“The right wing media ecosystem is so efficiently set up to take random posts from non public figures and turn them into pseudoevents,” The Atlantic’s Charlie Warzel pointed out. “To the point where the entire social media system rn really just favors their viral propaganda machine.”

That sideshow has threatened to overshadow stories of real importance: a humanitarian catastrophe unfolding in Gaza; Trump pushing bogus claims about former President Barack Obama to distract from the Epstein scandal; the firing of the Bureau of Labor Statistics commissioner after a weak jobs report. But in 2025, those stories don’t always win the attention economy. Sweeney’s blue jeans do.

That’s not an indictment of Sweeney or even of American Eagle, which did what brands do—try to be clever, spark a little buzz, and hope to sell some pants. It’s a reflection of where our media priorities lie: with spectacle over substance, viral conflict over actual consequence.

The Sweeney uproar wasn’t a meaningful controversy, but it became a major media story because that’s how today’s information ecosystem functions. Minor online reactions are routinely magnified into national discourse, transformed into culture war fodder, only for the cycle to begin again in constant pursuit of engagement.

It’s a vivid example of a media ecosystem where spectacle often outranks significance, and where performative outrage regularly drowns out stories with real importance. And it says more about the state of American media than it does about a denim ad.