Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Stop using mental illness to avoid talking about armed white supremacy.

Something needs to be done about our bogus SCOTUS.

“I never thought they’d lock HIM up,” sobbed a distraught member of the Lock Her Up Party.

… among the most cringeworthy communications in the history of the alphabet!

You cannot shame the shameless.

Despite his magical powers, I don’t think Trump is thinking this through, to be honest.

How can republicans represent us when they don’t trust women?

Republicans are radicals, not conservatives.

We’ll be taking my thoughts and prayers to the ballot box.

The republican caucus is already covering themselves with something, and it’s not glory.

Consistently wrong since 2002

Republicans in disarray!

But frankly mr. cole, I’ll be happier when you get back to telling us to go fuck ourselves.

My years-long effort to drive family and friends away has really paid off this year.

“Can i answer the question? No you can not!”

I didn’t have alien invasion on my 2023 BINGO card.

Republicans want to make it harder to vote and easier for them to cheat.

Our job is not to persuade republicans but to defeat them.

Wow, you are pre-disappointed. How surprising.

A snarling mass of vitriolic jackals

The next time the wall street journal editorial board speaks the truth will be the first.

It’s all just conspiracy shit beamed down from the mothership.

if you can’t see it, then you are useless in the fight to stop it.

So it was an October Surprise A Day, like an Advent calendar but for crime.

You are here: Home / Open Threads / Open Thread: Progress Report on Beltway Attempts to Breed Completely Shame-Free Media Meat Units

Open Thread: Progress Report on Beltway Attempts to Breed Completely Shame-Free Media Meat Units

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Yes, the only thing more boring than actual inside baseball sportstalk is journamalistic inside baseball, but it sure does churn up the internets. Elias Isquith, at Salon, with the shorter:

… On Tuesday, the Washington Post published a piece by Ben Terris, a reporter for their Style section, about Benny Johnson. For those lucky enough not to know already, Johnson is the content director for IJReview — a wannabe BuzzFeed for the Michelle Malkin set — but is better known as the guy who was fired from the actual BuzzFeed after being exposed as a rampant, shameless and frankly incompetent plagiarist. (That exposé came after Johnson had accused others — namely, IJReview! — of plagiarizing his work.) Readers of Salon, however, may better know him as the third-biggest hack of 2013.

Because Johnson is not only a liar and a thief, but has also built a career on pandering to his conservative audience’s baser instincts (often by relying on racism and homophobia), the profile was bound to cause a stir. This would have been true regardless of whether the piece had been a crowd-pleasing takedown, a contrarian defense, or a rumination on media economics that used Johnson as a means to write about something deeper. Call it the “BuzzFeed Benny” effect.

Unfortunately, Terris’s article was none of these things. Instead, it was a typically superficial profile that leaned heavily on the idea that Johnson is representative of the millennial generation. Yet because the prose read at times more like a PR pitch than journalism, many readers couldn’t agree on how the article wanted its subject to look. Yes, it revealed that Johnson is still lying: this time, about the “friends” who consoled him after his disgrace. But it also suggested Johnson was a harmless airhead, a “creative” guy who lets his imagination “get him a little carried away.”

Journalists write bad pieces all of the time, though. So that’s not why Terris’s article offered such a useful window into what’s wrong with the press. No, the real reason it was valuable was not so much the piece itself as the reaction it inspired. Because once some other journalists began looking into whether and how Terris and Johnson knew each other, the double-standard that the elite media holds itself to became obvious. And it was an embarrassment…

In Alex Pareene’s (excellent) 2013 Hack List post, he quotes Buzzfeed as saying “Benny is a great native talent of the social web with politics in his blood” who will “make the sort of smart, entertaining, and compelling political content people want to share.” Which sounds to me like “We needed a professional internet troll,” but then, I’m a Cynic that way.

Reader Interactions

56Comments

  5. 5.

    EthylEster

    @Baud:

    That was hard to follow.

    Why would one even try?

    AL wrote:

    but it sure does churn up the internets

    Isn’t that what YOU are doing?
    Surely you have better things to inform us about.

  7. 7.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @Howard Beale IV:

    This has been a very bad day for deaths. Christopher Lee, Ron Moody, Ornette Coleman, and now Ruby Dee.

    I thought the whole idea behind the Rule of Three was that you probably wouldn’t get to four.

    May they all R.I.P.

    ETA: Karen in GA got there first, expressing identical sentiments.

  11. 11.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @raven:

    Yes, and Ruth Younger in A Raisin in the Sun. I was incredibly lucky to see her (opposite Sidney Poitier) in the touring company of Raisin when it came to Chicago in, probably, 1960 or ’61.

  12. 12.

    Brachiator

    @SiubhanDuinne: I had read about the deaths of all but Ruby Dee. Very sad. What a great career in drama, film, and TV. And her political activism. She gave the eulogy at Malcolm X’s funeral.

    The rule of three thing is just an urban legend that will not die. Some of this might be that the average person only knows about three of the many prominent people who die on any given day.

  13. 13.

    Tommy

    Every day for many years I walked into my office and had a print edition of the WSJ, NYT, and Washington Post laid out on my desk. It was just where I got my news. Then this thing happened called the Internet.

    Those days are long, long gone where I get my news from only those sources. Sure I still read them from links. But I pride myself on knowing shit and I find places like Daily Kos, Talking Points Memo, Think Progress, Hullabaloo, Think Progress, and Media Matters all inform me in ways the “traditional” pubs do not.

    When I see the “media elites” get in a pissing match over this or that I just laugh. I used to live on Capital Hill. Regular at a bar where many media figures we all see on TV went from time to time. They were not regulars and us “normal” people would laugh and mock them.

    Maybe in their inter-circle Georgetown parties they are cool and hip. But outside that, even in DC, much less the rest of America, you guys and gals are a joke.

    Go out an report something unique and maybe I might respect you a little more.

  14. 14.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @scav:

    Didn’t know his name, but I can never forget his voice. I should just create an “R.I.P.” macro so I can quit typing it out all day long.

    Don’t mean to be flip. The world is richer for having had all these people in it, and I sincerely hope they all do R.I.P.

    *********

    And yet Dick Cheney lives on.

  15. 15.

    MomSense

    Nocturnal emissions are not what comes out of your car’s tailpipe while driving at night. #the talk

  18. 18.

    karen marie

    @Baud: Agreed. I do not know who any of these people are, but from what little I understood, I haven’t missed anything. Buzz who?

  19. 19.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @Brachiator:

    I was stunned to see that Ozzie Davis (Edit: Ruby Dee’s husband in case anyone didn’t know) died in 2005. If anyone had asked me, I would have said probably a couple of years ago — certainly not a full decade.

    Time does weird things these days. Maybe it always did, but I’m noticing it a lot more now.

  21. 21.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @raven:

    She did lead a rich life, and for once, I think it’s fair to say that she was appropriately honored for her accomplishments during her lifetime, instead of as a posthumous afterthought. Really a wonderful actor, and as Brachiator noted at #12, she was a significant activist on behalf of all the right stuff.

  25. 25.

    Another Holocene Human

    @karen marie: I remember the plagiarism thing. The most shocking part was that Buzzfeed fired him. I always took Buzzfeed for a kinder, gentler Republican front. Maybe he was making that too obvious. Or maybe the managers started believing their own hype. Seen some reporting recently that all is still not well with Buzzfeed’s journalmalism-ism department.

  28. 28.

    SiubhanDuinne

    UPDATE CORRECTION

    Well, it seems that Ruby Dee died a year ago today. I had put an RIP up on FB, and a kind friend posted the correction.

    None of which takes away my hopes that she is resting in peace, nor my opinion that she was a terrific actor.

  36. 36.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @JPL:

    I saw the Wednesday morning open thread, and such is the joy of being retired that I didn’t even realize anything was off until I saw comments from you and others making the correction.

  39. 39.

    Germy Shoemangler

    @SiubhanDuinne: There is something called the “Ruby Dee Effect”

    From an interview:

    Diana Sands never gave a public performance that was as good as her rehearsals. The public performances were terrific, but she was terrified of the Ruby Dee effect. Ruby Dee got reviews that an actress waits an entire lifetime for. Had she been white the phone would have rung off the hook. But it never rang once and it almost killed her. Diana was afraid of that. She finally got what she longed for. She was the leading lady at the Lincoln Center and got to play all the great roles…

  40. 40.

    BruceFromOhio

    Progress Report on Beltway Attempts to Breed Completely Shame-Free Media Meat Units

    This is one of the most awesome post titles I have ever seen on this site. Or any site.

  42. 42.

    Geeno

    @SiubhanDuinne: Huh – Wikipedia says
    Born Ruby Ann Wallace
    October 27, 1922
    Cleveland, Ohio, U.S.
    Died June 11, 2015 (aged 92)
    New Rochelle, New York, U.S.

    June 11, 2015 is today isn’t it?

  44. 44.

    Tree With Water

    [picture the hysterical Britney Spears video guy]: “Leave Jerry Seinfeld alo-oh-ne!!!”.

  46. 46.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @Geeno:

    Odd. The text says 2014 but the sidebar with the boilerplate info says 2015. Wikipedia is usually a bit more on the ball.

    Now that I’ve checked several sources, I’m pretty confident in saying that she died on this date in 2014.

  52. 52.

    Brachiator

    @Germy Shoemangler: I was home I’ll when a TV station was showing the complete run of various TV shows. I caught an episode of The Fugitive featuring Diana Sands as the wife of a diplomat (played by Ivan Dixon) who gives the fugitive sanctuary. Good episode.

    I must have known that Ruby Dee died last year. I think she may have been included in the Oscars montage.

  53. 53.

    jl

    OK, just getting to the top of first the block quote. THAT’s the ‘shorter’? Effit. This is either going to be hilarious epic derpitude, or a boring shaggy dog tale.

  55. 55.

    jl

    OK, I guess it’s a mildly informative piece about national affairs and political journalism in these, our great United States, today. Not hilarious but not totally boring.

    Not news that, by now, maybe most of supposed factual and informative background pieces from this group are dishonest editorializing, PR puff pieces, beat sweeteners, and incestuous back scratching.

    By degrees we get used to it. Hey, I’ve read that the reality shows, even the most gripping and compelling, like the Kardashian abd Sole Survivor epics, are actually scripted. I am slowly climbing the lower rungs of the cult of savvy.

  56. 56.

    jl

    in moderation, wonder what it was:

    OK, I guess it’s a mildly informative piece about national affairs and political journalism in these, our great United States, today. Not hilarious but not totally boring.

    Not news that, by now, maybe most of supposed factual and informative background pieces from this group are dishonest editorializing, PR puff pieces, beat sweeteners, and * nc ^ st *o * s back scratching.

    By degrees we get used to it. Hey, I’ve read that the reality shows, even the most gripping and compelling, like the K_rd_shi_n and Sole Survivor epics, are actually scripted. I am slowly climbing the lower rungs of the cult of savvy.

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