Because when no one seems to care about you like you're accustomed to, it's far more reliable to jump on someone else's bandwagon of sycophantic rubes that will cheer you on as you suck off a fashist.
The second book is about how the news cycle is broken. A lot about write-first, verify later. Or manufactured outrage. Or straight up falsehoods.
It's a good book, I thoroughly enjoyed it.
The first book is almost a specific case of it...Hulk Hogans sex tape scandal, and the people who bankrolled his lawsuit against Gawker because of a completely unrelated personal grudge.
All shit-sloshing gutters eventually end at the RNC. It's like the famous section of that classic poem from the old gop poet, No-wokeius Bartholomew Pussyhound III:
"Give me your washed up, your publicly disgraced and purposefully-undereducated, your convicted masses yearning to molest underage boys in churches and motels while wearing flag shirts... I'm gonna scare those goofy fuckers into giving me money by talking almost exclusively in acronyms that they don't understand, but are terrified of!"