YouTube star PewDiePie rails against 'the media', but he’s a part of it too now

PewDiePie – the online alias of Felix Kjellberg - is a bit of an enigma. Here is a man who made US$15m (A$19.5m) in 2016 playing videogames on YouTube for his audience of nearly 54 million subscribers, the largest in the world. Last week, though, PewDiePie's business partners Disney and YouTube began withdrawing support following an anti-semitic "joke" in one of his video blogs. PewDiePie's response was to admit some culpability, but also to attack the messenger - which in this case was The Wall Street Journal, with its print circulation of around 2.5 million and an online reach of 20 million readers a month.