Headlines From the Media, and Other Foolishness: Part II

By Rich Kozlovich, Tags:

In part one I discussed what's commonly called the supermarket tabloid media, sensationalist journalism, scandal sheets, etc..  Filled with gossip, innuendo, speculation and accusation without foundation, not to mention outright lies.  As far as I can tell, all that was killed off by the internet, at least in that form.  But never fear.  Nature hates a vacuum, and so does "journalism", and I use that definition loosely. 

Now we have all that missing scandal, gossip, innuendo, speculation, accusation without foundation and outright lies being embraced by "regular media journalists", and I'm still using that definition loosely, and what they promote isn't called journalism.  It' called "confusion". 

The "confusion" promoted and exhibited by the media is amazing. First we have a male athlete who claims to be a woman, who still has all his male equipment by the way, competing against actual women and handily beating them.  We also see the media, academia, and leftists all over the nation calling him her, and lauding his achievements as a great breakthrough in human endeavor.   Imagine that!

But, according to these leftists, it's the rest of the nation who thinks this is nuts are the ones who are confused.  Really?  But, worse yet, anyone that doesn't support this is a hater.  The left, who hates everything.  The left is virtually consumed with hate, embraces a laundry list of unending double standards and vile justifications for their violence and insanity.  It has now assumed divine authority to decide who the haters are.  And that's anyone who disagrees with their thorough disagreeable positions and actions. Imagine that!

Writers are now actually publishing articles such as, how to tell if you are a woman.  Gender is now a huge mixed bag, because apparently the left has identified 112 genders with 71 sub gender categories.  And it's the rest of the nation that's confused?   It's not the media and the left that's confused mind you, it's the nation that's confused!  Equity, including gender equity, is now the foundation for everything, including issues regarding bail.  Biden releases 'gender equity' plan that calls for eliminating cash bail.  Imagine that!

We see the media constantly yapping about hate, but who are the haters and the spewers of hate:   He 'Can Choke': UCLA Race and Equity Director Wished for Clarence Thomas' Death.  His credibility?  UCLA Race and Equity Director Who Said Clarence Thomas 'Can Choke' Fabricated a Racial Incident with Police, and this isn't the only incident of outrageous race baiting by this totally contemptible man.  Or how about that paragon of leftist self righteous virtue the ACLU, when an, ACLU board member calls for Trump supporters to be shot 'before election day. 

The American Civil Liberties Union has descended to the level of self-parody. Of course, the civil liberty guaranteed by the Second Amendment has never existed in its view, but in the past it occasionally defended free speech for people with whom its liberal membership disagreed. Rarely have its officials called for murderous totalitarianism (although, in fairness, the organization was originally founded to defend the rights of American communists who supported the murderous totalitarianism of Joseph Stalin). Actual political murder of opponents in America was never advocated by its officials. Until now. Derek Hunter of the Daily Caller reports........

When was the last time you saw a conservative act in such a way and say such things?  

In fact, you almost never see any conservative discussing this idea of haters.  It's the left that spews out claims of hate, all the while claiming conservatives hate this and hate that, while in reality, mostly these claims are nothing but accusations to divide the nation using our own values against us.  More importantly, it's about silencing rational thought against their schemes dealing with race, gender, equity, diversity and other assorted assaults against reality.  When in reality, it's the left who spews out actual hate and acts on it.  Imagine that!

MasterCard has decided you shouldn't have the right to decide how much you wish to buy because it might impact .....watch out now.....here it comes......Global Warming!  So, it appears they're going to become kind of an unpaid sub-contractor for the United Nations and monitor cardholders' carbon footprint, and if they decide you're buying too much.... cap your purchases.  

Now, I just gotta ask.  Does anyone besides me see this as just a little bit.........nuts?  Well, that's okay, we can just decide to use a different credit card?  Right?  Okay, but what if the government doesn't like that? What if in response to that they decide to freeze our bank accounts, like Trudeau did in Canada? 

Then there's free speech.  In America you can say and think whatever you like, as long as the left approves of it.  I'm "restricted" (another way of saying banned) on LinkedIn, and my comments seem to either be "pending" or "removed" on seemingly conservative websites such a PJ Media and Twitchy.  Well, it turns out PJ Media, Townhall Media, Townhall, Hot Air, RedState, Twitchy, Bearing Arms, Townhall Finance, and Instapundit are all a part of a media conglomerate called Salem Media Group, "fighting" to protect conservative media. Apparently they've decided to embrace the John Kasich principle: "I can define conservatism as I see fit".  Which in his case was the embrace of the far left.  , and Governor Mike DeWine isn't far behind. 

The real kick in the pants is how the media fought tooth and nail insisting Hunter Biden's laptop was nothing more than right wing lies and conspiracy theories.  But now that everyone acknowledges (what sane people have known right along) Hunter Biden and his father are neck deep into corruption, some media outlets are nonetheless still trying to confuse the public by fallaciously defending them or suppressing the facts, as is Twitter and Facebook.  It only took CNN 532 days to admit that Hunter Biden’s laptop scandal was authentic 532 days after this scandal first broke.  Imagine that, a mere 18 months!

Well, the "regular" media is just as outrageous, maybe worse, than the supermarket tabloids of the past, only they're better at making it seem rational and truthful.  But.....it's not!    The media has history, and it's not pretty. 

I do wish more people would embrace my personal motto:  De Omnibus Dubitandum - Everything is to be questioned!   Try it.  You'll get used to it...... and who knows...you might even like it.  

 

'Dr. Jill Biden’ Sure Flies with the U.S.-Hating, Stalinist Castro Regime

Humberto Fontova | Dec 19, 2020 @ Townhall.com

“‘Dr. Jill Biden’ sounds and feels fraudulent, not to say a touch comic. Your degree is, I believe, an Ed.D., a doctor of education, earned at the University of Delaware through a dissertation with the unpromising title ‘Student Retention at the Community College Level: Meeting Students’ Needs.’ A wise man once said that no one should call himself “Dr.” unless he has delivered a child. Think about it, Dr. Jill, and forthwith drop the doc.” (Wall Street Journal, Dec. 11, 2020.)

Alas, no such “feelings of fraudulence” pricked at the conscience of the regime whose lifetime craving was the destruction of the nation that Jill Biden will soon preside over as first lady. When she honored this Stalinist, terror-sponsoring regime with a promotional visit as second lady, the KGB-trained Russia-colluders all gleefully referred to her as “Dr.” 

And why not? She gleefully starred in and helped produce a tourism commercial to boost the America-hating, terror-sponsoring regime’s income. To wit: 

“Dr. Jill Biden in Cuba to study Cuba’s achievements in health and education," read a headline in Stalinist Cuba’s media, Oct. 6, 2016.

More interestingly, during Jill Biden’s co-production with communist apparatchiks of her Potemkin tourism commercial to boost the income of Castro’s military and secret police who majority own Cuba’s tourism industry— her frequent escort was a Cuban lady named Josefina Vidal.

The KGB-trained Vidal was expelled from the U.S. in Oct. 2003 for her suspected operational links to Cuban spy Ana Belen Montes, responsible for the deepest and most damaging penetration of the U.S. Department of Defense in recent history. Montes was known as “Castro’s Queen Jewell” by the intelligence community and was convicted of the same crimes as Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. Today Montes serves a 25-year sentence in federal prison. Only a plea bargain saved her from frying like the Rosenbergs. If Jill Biden suspected Vidal’s background, she gave no indication. 

While Joe Biden served as U.S. vice president, President Obama, employing executive order after executive order, whittled down the (so-called) Cuba embargo and opened a U.S. economic lifeline to the terror-sponsoring Castro regime to a point where the cash-flow from the U.S. to Cuba (mostly in remittances and the tourism spending Jill Biden so graciously boosted) exceeded what the Soviets used to send Cuba at the height of their Castro-sponsorship. No small “achievement.”

As a result—and in a thundering refutation of the liberal/libertarian/Castroite propaganda line that an avalanche of U.S. tourists and their dollars would magically convert Cuba’s Stalinist rulers into Rotarians and their fiefdom into a Caribbean Switzerland—during this Obama/Biden-engineered deluge of U.S. dollars, Castroite repression increased both in Cuba and in their Venezuelan colony. 

And speaking of Cuba’s colonies, when President Reagan was fighting tooth and nail to arm the anti-communist Nicaraguan Contras in their desperate fight against the Soviet/Cuban colonization of their homeland, Senator Joe Biden was just as desperately fighting against the anti-communist freedom-fighters.  

Three different times (in 1984, 1986, 1987) Senator Joe Biden voted and lobbied against Reagan’s attempts to help the anti-communist Nicaraguan Contras, who were being helped by many Bay-of-Pigs affiliated Cuban American heroes including (Che Guevara captor) Felix Rodriguez as volunteers. Years earlier Biden had distinguished himself by voting and lobbying against helping the anti-communist South Vietnamese against their Soviet-lavished mass-murdering enemies. 

“I met so many strong women in Cuba!…Cuba is full of STRONG WOMEN!” Jill Biden gushes in her Cuba tourism commercial. 

She’s right. Problem is, Biden never met with any of them–or featured them in her regime-co-produced commercial. There’s absolutely no mention of the Ladies in White. Instead Biden’s version of “Cuban strong women” are the regime apparatchiks who OPPRESS and TORTURE the Ladies in White–and who spy on the U.S.

Cuban women’s prison conditions were described by former Cuban political prisoner Maritza Lugo. “The punishment cells measure 3 feet wide by 6 feet long. The toilet consisted of an 8 inch hole in the ground through which cockroaches and rats enter, especially in cool temperatures the rats come inside to seek the warmth of our bodies and we were often bitten. For week’s we’d be locked up in total darkness with a little cup of filthy water daily to drink. Nothing to wash or to flush the excrement and vermin crammed whole that passed for a toilet. Nothing to wash away the menstrual-fluid that caked to our legs. The suicide rate among women prisoners was very high.”

Indeed a study found that by 1986, Cuban women’s suicide rate reached 24 per 1,000—making it double Latin America's average, making it triple Cuba's pre-Castro rate, making Cuban women the most suicidal in the world.

How these women survived years and even decades of such horrors then “took charge of their lives” and “got their groove back,” might seem newsworthy and inspirational. Indeed their stories fairly epitomize the most popular themes of women’s chat shows. You can almost hear Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive” as Joy Behar and Whoopie Goldberg greet these long-suffering—but somehow-surviving—Cuban ladies on stage with a standing ovation, sniffles and teary hugs. 

HAH! Instead, “the national media has never shown the slightest interest in any of our stories,” shrugs Caridad Roque from Miami today. Ms. Roque was arrested by Castro’s KGB- trained police at the age of 19 and suffered 16 years of prison and torture in Cuba.     

Her torturer, on the other hand, has been fawningly interviewed by feminists from Barbara Walters to Andrea Mitchell and from Maria Shriver to Oriana Fallaci. On a visit to Cuba in 2002 Feminist pioneer Carole King (also at the “Women’s March”) sang Fidel Castro a personal and heartfelt “You’ve Got a Friend.”

 

Biden Cabinet Roundup: Retreads and Woke Folk

Something old, something new, something borrowed, everything blue.

By Leesa K. Donner November 24, 2020Articles, Election 2020, Politics, Social Issues

Joe Biden is choosing the usual suspects to fill out his proposed “Cabinet” as President Donald Trump’s chances to expose election fraud continue to meet resistance in U.S. courts. The former vice president’s picks are mainly the same political lifers we all have seen before, because appointments to power positions are what these folks do for a living.

This topic is mainly nauseating to Trump supporters, so we’ll keep it brief.

Antony Blinken: An Obama retread, Blinken also served as the former vice president’s national security adviser back in the day. According to The Wall Street Journal, “Mr. Blinken’s ties to Mr. Biden date back nearly two decades, beginning when he served as staff director of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee while Mr. Biden served as a U.S. senator representing Delaware.” Blinken is hardly a fresh face on the American political scene.

John Kerry: Remember him? The dude who likes to windsurf and play nice in the sandbox with foreign leaders has been asked to become climate czar. Who even knew that was an official position?

Avril Haines: Not exactly a household name, Haines has been lurking within the Democratic confines for-like-ever. Haines is a Democratic spook of the first order who served as a CIA deputy director during the salad days of Barack Obama. Biden wants Haines for the position of Director of National Intelligence.

Janet Yellen: The first woman to become the Federal Reserve chairman has been floated as Biden’s pick for Secretary of the Treasury. Yellen would have to face confirmation. Despite being only 74, Yellen has that Ruth Bader Ginsburg look about her, making you wonder if she’s too old to count back from 100 by seven.

Ron Klain: A political operative of the highest order, Klain was Biden’s first choice out of the box for chief of staff. Klain’s claim to fame was that he oversaw the Ebola epidemic during the Obama years. He’s a Democratic lawyer who was Biden’s right-hand man when he was V.P. Same name, almost the same position.

Woke-Folk Abound

New faces seem to be limited to the category of identity politics. Even then, they are not really new, more like hangers-around and primarily unheard of until now.

Linda Thomas-Greenfield: Biden has plucked Thomas-Greenfield out of near obscurity for the U.S. ambassador’s position to the United Nations. She held the august position of U.S. ambassador to – wait for it – Liberia. She’s also held the position of U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs. Ah, okay, whatever.

Michele Flournoy: Biden’s pick for Pentagon chief is a classic “let’s break the glass ceiling” choice. In addition to her primary qualification – that of being a woman – Flournoy appears to be ideal for making foreign wars great again. As Helen Buyniski wrote for RT.com, “Flournoy is admirably suited to this role, as the founder of a think tank (Center for a New American Security) now run by Ukrainian regime-change-cookie-distributor-in-chief Victoria Nuland. She was on the front lines of the Obama administration’s disastrous wars in Libya and Syria and helped expand the war in Afghanistan before departing for the private sector in 2012.” Chocolate chip or peanut butter, anyone?

Julie Chávez Rodriguez: Chávez Rodriguez is headed for the Office of Intergovernmental Affairs. She’s not new to the political scene, holding second-tier positions and circling the Democratic wishing well for a while now. She served as one of Biden’s deputy campaign managers and Kamala Harris’ national political director.

Alejandro Mayorkas: Having fled the Fidel Castro regime way back when, Mayorkas is Biden’s pick for Director of Homeland Security. What could be more apropos in a Biden administration than elevating a lawyer who has spent his career advocating for immigrants to become U.S. citizens in the top spot at the Department of Homeland Security? Mayorkas also worked in the Obama administration, where he oversaw the DACA program. Again, he is not a political novice, but he does fit that all-important Democratic “identity” category.

There are many more players Biden is calling on to serve his administration should he become the 46^th president of the United States. If you run down the list, these folks fit in one of two categories: They are longtime Democratic politicos of the sort about which one might ask “Oh him? Is he still alive?” or they fall into the “identity category” – woman, check, black, check, Hispanic, check. Any which way you cut it, a Biden administration would hardly represent anything new under the sun.

The Atlantic calls to cancel the Nobel Peace Prize after Trump is nominated for a SECOND

September 12, 2020 | Vivek Saxena

It’s over for the Nobel Peace Prize …After a 119-year run, the Nobel Peace Prize faces cancellation from some members of the left now that President Donald Trump has been nominated for it again.

On Wednesday, Christian Tybring-Gjedde, a member of the Norwegian parliament for the populist Progress Party, nominated Trump for the prize over the historic peace deal between Israel and the UAE that his administration has reached.

Norwegian Parliament member Christian Tybring-Gjedde nominated the president, citing efforts to resolve world conflict. He said: “Trump has broken a 39-year-old streak of American Presidents either starting a war or bringing the United States an international armed conflict.” pic.twitter.com/m5Qu3DibnB

— Kaya Jones (@KayaJones) September 9, 2020

“For his merit, I think he has done more trying to create peace between nations than most other Peace Prize nominees,” Tybring-Gjedde, who also serves as the chairman of the Norwegian delegation to the NATO Parliamentary Assembly, said to Fox News.

“I’m not a big Trump supporter. The committee should look at the facts and judge him on the facts – not on the way he behaves sometimes. The people who have received the Peace Prize in recent years have done much less than Donald Trump. For example, Barack Obama did nothing.”...............

The Atlantic staff writer Graeme Wood published a nearly 1500-word-long screed Friday calling for the Nobel Peace Prize to be outright canceled. Why? Because #OrangeManBad and because Tybring-Gjedde, whose views on immigration do not coincide with the left’s view on the issue, is allegedly a “troll.”........

The same disease that prevents members of the left from giving the president any credit seems to have also infected Biden. During a speaking event with the Jewish community this week, he claimed Trump is “dangerous” to Israel and bad for the Jewish people.  Given the big announcement this week that even Bahrain is now normalizing relations with Israel thanks to the Trump administration, the claim by Biden seemed outrageously absurd.............. Original Article

My Take - I belong to a an eclectic e-mail group that daily discusses every issue that confronts the nation and the world.  When the first nomination hit the news most of us pretty much agreed the left would go into sack cloth and ashes over this.  With the second nomination, and I can't ever believe they're reaction is even better! They're now so hysterical they're  practically frothing at the mouth!!!!

Schadenfreude!  

Backlash is swift and intense when Bette Midler attacks Melania Trump: 'She still can’t speak English'

'Get that illegal alien off the stage!'

Chris Enloe August 26, 2020

Hollywood star Bette Midler learned the hard way not to attack first lady Melania Trump over her ability to speak English.  What's the background?

The first lady headlined the second night of the Republican National Convention, delivering a well-received speech in which she urged Americans to unify while making the case that her husband, President Donald Trump, is the better of the 2020 presidential candidates.

"We all know Donald Trump makes no secrets about how he feels about things. Whether you like it or not, you always know what he's thinking, and that is because he is an authentic person who loves this country and its people," Mrs. Trump said.

What did Midler say?  While live-tweeting through the RNC speeches, Midler called the first lady an "illegal alien" — and mocked her ability to speak English.  "#beBest is back! A UGE bore! She can speak several words in a few languages. Get that illegal alien off the stage!" Midler said.................

 People were angry that Midler so callously attacked Melania, who was born in Slovenia and reportedly speaks six languages: Slovenian, English, Serbian, Italian, German, and French.

 Midler was accused of racism and xenophobia:

• "There is no one as racist and xenophobic as the tolerant left. To think that when I was growing up in Africa I fiercely admired you and many others who now are showing how low and hateful they can be. I'm ashamed for you," one person said.
• "As a Mexican immigrant I am very offended at your prejudice! My hard working parents with accents love and value this country! We put everything into what we do and do not expect to be treated unfairly because we may not sound like you ! Practice what you preach!" another person said.
• "Oh hey look everyone... a washed up, dumpy old lady racist," another person responded.
• "She speaks 6 languages, English is one of them. How about you?" another person said.
• "You are the epitome of everything you hate," another person pointed out.
• "Attacking an immigrant because of her accent. The loving and tolerant left," another person responded.
• "I'd rather listen to Melania speak than listen to you sing," another person mocked.
• "No, she's just speaking with an accent. You, however, are a fool in any language," Ben Shapiro said.
• "An immigrant woman, who doesn't have English as her first language, just got up on on a stage and was so gracious that she refused to attack classless people like you and instead focused on hope and positivity. I'll take her accent over your ghoulishness any day," another person said........To Read More.... 

The Media’s Political Suicide

Daniel Greenfield  August 02, 2020 @ Sultan Knish Blog

 

McClatchy had bought Knight Ridder for $4.4 billion to create the second largest news company. After going into Chapter 11 bankruptcy, McClatchy was won in an auction by a hedge fund, which also owns the National Enquirer, in a secret bidding which started with $30 million cash and $270 million in debt.

None of this says anything good about the future of its D.C. bureau, or the Miami Herald, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, the Sacramento Bee, the Kansas City Star, and other hollowed out husks of major urban papers carrying huge loads of pension debt and even bigger loads of radical left-wing politics.

Earlier this year, Warren Buffett had dumped 30 newspapers that he had bought for $344 million for $140 million. The Newseum, a $450 million media museum, backed by Gannett, was sold off last year.

Gannett, the biggest newspaper chain in the country, lost $80 million in the first quarter of the year even after a merger in which it slashed jobs at some of the hundreds of newspapers which it controls.

Over 20,000 media jobs have been wiped out in the previous two years and it’s just getting started.

There’s too much content chasing too few advertisers and subscribers. The internet took away the death grip that local papers had on certain kinds of advertising and made other kinds irrelevant. And people have a lot more options for breakfast reading material than just subscribing to the local rag.

The media radicalized even as it became more economically vulnerable, alienating print subscribers who tend to be older and more conservative. Papers have been chasing digital subscribers, who are more likely to be younger and leftist, but that’s only a viable strategy for a handful of national papers, the New York Times and the Washington Post, which embraced a radical agenda and a vow to bring down Trump.

The Times and the Post can drive conversation, dominate the news cycle with an anti-Trump conspiracy theory, or turn historical revisionism like the 1619 Project into a curriculum, a TV show, and a movie. But that’s not a realistic option for the Sacramento Bee or the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Advertisers will flock to the Times and the Post because they have affluent readers and drive the conversation. But local papers will go on bleeding older and more conservative readers while the hedge funds that own them slash jobs, eliminate entire papers, and eventually give up on the whole media venture as a bad idea.

Warren Buffett did.

Local papers are dying. Formerly influential national news magazines are irrelevant. When was the last time you heard anything from Time except around its annual Cause of the Year publicity stunt?

And it’s not just the dead tree media that’s in trouble. Digital darlings like the Huffington Post, Vice and Vox have been cutting jobs because clickbait doesn’t win over subscribers who will pay for content. Network television and cable news are on their last legs as cable subscribers cut the cord and content providers set up their own Netflix rivals. What happens to NBC News or CNN in a marketplace defined by Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, Peacock, HBO Max, CBS All Access, and whatever other platforms will pop up?

The media hasn’t had a viable business model in a long while. It’s a zombie that kills even as it dies.

What we think of as the media, a series of private companies reporting the news to customers willing to pay for their services, is evolving into a political movement that views its platforms as a public service.

The for-profit media is still around, but not for long. The non-profit media is the rising model and it takes many forms, from old brands like the Washington Post and Time owned by dot com tycoons for the power and prestige, to non-profits like Poynter which combines a newspaper, the Tampa Bay Times, a journalism school, and a partisan fact-checking network. Google, Facebook, and other dot com platforms have been pouring millions into subsidizing media outlets to create a hybrid model.

Other hybrid models include, Report for America, a left-wing non-profit that embeds its activists into local newspapers, and Courier Newsroom, a left-wing fake news network set up by Acronym whose arm is a PAC, that combine non-profit status and political advocacy with some of the trappings of the media.

The media has redefined journalism as advocating for left-wing policies and the advantage of this is that in the age of the internet, political activism has a better business model than journalism.

Less money is being spent on advertising and subscriptions, but the cost of elections is soaring.

In the recent past, journalists had to choose between working in the legitimate media or doing opposition research for dark organizations like Fusion GPS. But as the distinctions between the news and editorial desks have broken down, so have the distinctions between reporting and generating hit pieces. The only reason to bring in an organization like Fusion GPS is for media strategy and coordination.

To the big money pouring into elections from New York and California, media outlets are dinosaurs in terms of profitability, but redefine them as digital campaign operations and they’re suddenly hot.

Investors who wouldn’t put money into a local paper without deep cuts will pour millions into Report for America or Courier because non-profit journalism has redefined the purpose of investing in the media from profits to politics. As a political non-profit, the media can be more viable than it has in years.

The transformation of the media from for-profits to non-profits sheds any commitment to the marketplace, to a community of readers who pay for its services, and instead puts it at the service of dot com tycoons who want to invest in left-wing causes. The experience of reading or watching the media’s content also changes from information to indoctrination. As is the case with so many of the dot com giants which finance the media and on whose platforms the media depends, the reader and the viewer are no longer consumers, they are the product that is being sold to the media’s political backers.

Even as the non-profit media claims that it’s now free to pursue journalism as a public service, it’s not providing a service to the public, it’s serving a small class of donors by trying to influence the public.

The media still insists that it’s objective, trustworthy and seeking the truth. But those slogans are the leftovers of an older generation that at least believed in hypocritically mouthing such pieties. The new generation, the one leading the purge at the New York Times, doesn’t even believe in the pieties.

The campaigns, like those that hijacked the Times, are coordinated by political allies from different media outlets across social media. The participants in this new collegiality view journalism as a form of advocacy for their political agenda. They have no commitment to the organization they work for, only to the larger movement of which they are operatives, coordinating to undermine their own organizations.

In the leftist non-profit realm, organizations are just shells for an agenda and they can be jettisoned, renamed, or swapped out at the right time. As the media falls into that category, publications become mere brands to be tied to a fake news narrative, and tossed aside when they’re no longer getting clicks.

The weight of the name on the masthead matters much less than the ability of the activists it employs to appear influential by picking fights on social media. Media publications no longer serve a community, but a narrative, and constantly swapping out publication names helps make the narrative seem fresh.

The end result is State News, a product that closely resembles the government news networks in China or Russia, but which is still distributed across a variety of organizations and which is controlled by social media narratives coordinated across social networks rather than by a central government agency.

At least for now.

"Twitter is not on the masthead of The New York Times. But Twitter has become its ultimate editor," Bari Weiss wrote in her resignation letter to the New York Times.

Twitter is the media’s editor. Its platform provides the content that fills the media, but it also makes the infrastructure of the media surplus to requirements. The medium is the message and the medium of Twitter is 280 characters. As Weiss notes, “the ethics and mores of that platform have become those of the paper, the paper itself has increasingly become a kind of performance space.”

But the real performance space is on Twitter where content is consumed and debated much more rapidly in short form than in the long form pages of the New York Times. As the media transforms into a pure instrument of political advocacy whose antics play out on social media, there’s less and less use for the expensive billion-dollar operations, the newspapers, channels, and even the sites of the media.

Media bosses keep saying that their future is digital. But that digital future is a Twitter debate.

The only reason to read long form articles is to find out the details of a story or experience new ideas, but when writing exists to reinforce what readers already believe, then it doesn’t need to be read.

Hardly anyone bothered reading Soviet papers because everyone already knew what was in them.

A media that exists to tweet articles about Trump’s terribleness and a story about an oppressed person whose plight proves the need to have open borders, no police, and free everything is unreadable. Not just to conservatives, but to everyone who isn’t looking for a righteousness or rage fix in the morning.

The media envisions its own transformation into public service non-profits subsidized by dot com tycoons and then eventually the benevolent socialist state that will pay its members to put out propaganda that nobody reads. This act of literary suicide for power and profit is its real legacy.

The media has been killing cities and the country to buy a little more time for its existence. But it is becoming a zombie that is killing the basis for its own existence and then the very thing that it does.

The members of the media began by killing their ethics and morals. They tossed away the truth as a value and a goal. They turned on their colleagues, incited mobs, celebrated violence and terror. And then they set out to destroy the organizations they worked for and the country that they live in.

Their final act of political suicide will be to kill their own writing.
 

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.

 

My terrifying five-day stay inside Seattle’s cop-free CHAZ

By Andy Ngo June 20, 2020

On June 8, Seattle police frantically loaded what they could from the east precinct onto trucks and cars. Within hours, they boarded up and abandoned the station. That night, left-wing protesters from Black Lives Matter and Antifa declared ownership of the six-block neighborhood in the middle of the Pacific Northwest’s largest city. They named their new territory the “Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone,” or CHAZ. No laws or rules applied here except for one: “No cops allowed.”

During five undercover days and nights in the zone, I witnessed a continuing experiment in anarchy, chaos and brute-force criminality. In order to avoid being exposed as a journalist — several reporters have been barred or expelled — I slept and showered outside the zone. (Those inside have no showers but they do have portable bathrooms.) I took meals, and most of my water breaks, elsewhere because I was reluctant to remove my mask and risk being recognized. Every day I entered the zone twice through its semi-porous borders — once in the early afternoon, and again after sundown, staying until the wee hours.

Crime has surged inside and outside the zone................

 Mainstream media reports have focused on the “block party” atmosphere of the occupation, repeating a talking point from the Seattle mayor. She, along with fellow Democrat, Gov. Jay Inslee, have gone to great lengths to emphasize the “peaceful” nature of the occupation. For media crews that arrive during the day, that is certainly what they will see. People have barbecues in the street. Many bring their children to make street art. People walk their dogs.  But at night, a whole different side of CHAZ emerges...............

 Despite the pleas from those who live and work inside Capitol Hill for law and order to be restored, Seattle’s city council has determined that CHAZ should continue. On Tuesday, the city even provided upgrades to CHAZ, including street blockades that double as graffiti canvases, along with cleaning services and porta-potties...........To Read More....