Originally Posted by Adder (Post 534009)

Remember when he cited Cernovich? Good times.

Originally Posted by Did you just call me Coltrane? (Post 534008)

I think he's off his fucking rocker.

Originally Posted by Hank Chinaski (Post 533996)

Did both you guys get laid off or retire or something?

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield (Post 534006)

More globally: https://www.cjr.org/special_report/t...ent-part-1.php

If you read this thread at all honestly, Yoel Roth of Twitter is telling Baker the Post’s story does not violate guidelines. In the face of this, Baker holds, tenuously, to the proposition, “We don’t know… it might be hacked.” https://twitter.com/mtaibbi

You’ve dealt with media. As have most of us here. Lying to media is easy if it’s not securities stuff. Who cares? No duty is owed. That’s where Baker came down on this: Plausible deniability. That’s all one needs.

It was the smart play for him. But not necessarily the smart play for Twitter? So it must be asked… Who was he really serving? Not Roth, who disagreed.

Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop (Post 533991)

Are there double standards? Sure. (For example, if Joe Biden said crazy things that Trump says all the time, the media would completely flip out, and rightly so. Trump says them and it's not news.) Does that mean the left is authoritarian? No.

Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop (Post 534013)

Do you really think major media are run by some sort of conspiracy? I sure hope not.

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield (Post 534014)

I’ll tackle the rest later. But this low hanging fruit has to be picked before pungency.

From Gore Vidal to George Carlin, to many others, the retort to your allegation one making my point is trafficking in conspiracy theorizing is:

I’m not. And one needn’t do so, as there are no conspiracies. Like actors act alike and complement each other.

In simple terms, it works in an appallingly simple fashion. A few thousand people who took too much poli-sci, had parents with enough enough bucks that they could pursue journalism, and lacked enough common sense to realize their progressive professors were charlatans, filter into the media ecosystem. They all think alike, speak alike, and reinforce each others’ unlettered understanding of how things work and ought to work. The entirety of academia is polluted with these losers who’ve never made a payroll and believe they know, and ought to profess to others, how everything should work.

They’re idiots, and they spawn idiocy in their wake, filling institutions with people who’ve never been required to meet metrics but think their sheltered views acquired in education and media confer a higher form of knowledge.

It happens on the right as well. But not as effectively or anywhere near as often as it does on the left.

It’s not a conspiracy. It’s collective self-reinforcing ignorance of the actual. An “ism.”

But people like tribes. They want to belong. Progs to the left, MAGA to the right, stuck in the middle with who? Not you.

Originally Posted by Hank Chinaski (Post 534017)

FMK

Boebert
Palin
Melania

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield (Post 534016)

I fully understand why you'd take that position. It does seem nuts. But you underestimate two things:

1. The strength of the ideological bent among those entering media (can't really call it journalism anymore);
2. The pervasiveness of the low risk economic model I'll call "serving the silo."

Regarding 1, media, particularly legacy media, is and always will be an industry the yeoman of which are idealistic. It's creative, and it attracts people who are either ego or ideals driven to have their voices heard and make a difference. The kids who just want the filthy lucre go into finance. The recent upheaval in the industry with the advent of social media and the internet isn't undoing that mindset.

Regarding 2, Roger Ailes proved at Fox that it is better to create a silo and grow it than serve unbiased news to a broader audience. While CNN struggles trying to stay in the middle, Fox and MSNBC have devoted cults of viewers behind them. It's simply lower risk/higher dependable revenue to find a rabid audience and feed it what it wants to hear than offer contradictory choices. Fox owns the conservative audience, so there isn't much inroad to be made on that side. This is why MSNBC moved hard left rather than take on CNN. In doing so, it grabbed and now owns the progressive audience. CNN is stuck with a weird audience of people like me (I still like it and think it's the most honest).



They can't help but hand the keys over to that crowd because that's the only crowd that can afford to get into media. Legacy media is a shrinking pie and the pay gets smaller every day.



Licht proves my point better than almost any example. He tried to eliminate the lefties of the network and ran into severe opposition. They simply would not have a libertarian at the helm, and they threw a hissy fit over it until he was canned.

He also should not have done the Trump town hall as he did. Giving Trump a platform is fine. He's a Presidential candidate. But giving him a series of softball questions as they did, which was a naked attempt at the "get ratings from Trump, then kneecap him later" strategy so often employed was unwise. The man does not deserve fawning of any kind. And that was commercial crassness at its worst.

Originally Posted by Icky Thump (Post 534020)

Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop (Post 534021)

Now do Feinstein.

Originally Posted by Icky Thump (Post 534020)

Originally Posted by Hank Chinaski (Post 534023)

Back in the 90s she was on a panel where I argued. She was a good judge. And it was hard to tell because of the robe, but I think she had nice tits, not Boebert nice, but still.