A vocabulary revival for our modern media:
Matt is a rantallion. No joke. https://t.co/gXyWKsM8yb
— Jort-Michel Connard ?? (@torriangray) July 6, 2022
This post is in: Asshole, Balloon Juice, Commentary, Open Threads, Our Failed Media Experiment
A vocabulary revival for our modern media:
Matt is a rantallion. No joke. https://t.co/gXyWKsM8yb
— Jort-Michel Connard ?? (@torriangray) July 6, 2022
This isn’t journalism. This is somebody auditioning for the male version of Mean Girls. Literally.
So, the president will return to anchor phrases to curb his stutter. How about reporting on the substance instead of ridiculing the man. https://t.co/7LdwyJPBxK
— NewbieHoward ?????? (@NewbieHoward) July 6, 2022
Also, deserved credit to DougJ:
the prophecy has been fulfilled https://t.co/h0bzVc5AUs pic.twitter.com/gYD0MX0IQH
— Robert Silverman (@BobSaietta) July 6, 2022
This post is in: Balloon Juice, Commentary, Open Threads, Our Failed Media Experiment, Proud To Be A Democrat!
Some of y’all need to understand there is going to be a coordinated attack on Joe Biden from now until midterms. The goal will be to cause Dems to stay home in Nov.
Some of y’all are doing the work for Republicans.
Don’t like Biden? Cool. I doubt you will like Desantis more.
— KerrBear (@MPLSKerrBear) June 30, 2022
It is very romantic to imagine yourself and your comrades as the Brave Underground Resistance, meeting in dark bars to plot the overthrow of the state. (Just look at the MAGAts — they got everything they wanted, and *still* never stop whining about their victimhood.)
Far less exciting, to the perennially adolescent mind, to support the unending grind of normal political work, trying to execute legislative compromises between mutually resistant forces. This is not what they signed up to accomplish! It must be a plot by their enemies…
Why do people so proudly announce they don’t know how government works? https://t.co/vV0H5X2nzi
— Magdi Semrau (@magi_jay) June 30, 2022
Completely normal that the party's supposed rapid response outlet is just filled with people constantly making insane, disingenuous against the party. Blaming them for the actions of the people who they're supposed to be doing 'rapid response' against. Very cool.
— Centrism Fan Acct ?? (@Wilson__Valdez) June 30, 2022
And furthermore…
… Do you know who my great-grandparents were?
Thursday Evening Venting Open Thread: Steam ReliefPost + Comments (131)
This post is in: Balloon Juice, Commentary, Jan 6: Hearings, Open Threads, Our Failed Media Experiment
this is of course on the whole dishonest but it’s nice to see dipshit mcgee over here admitting the guy tried to destroy the country. baby steps. https://t.co/diHIPbQD91
— World Famous Art Thief (@CalmSporting) June 22, 2022
I usually call them Idiots, which they are, but they have the self-preservation instincts of a subway rat. These guys loved having TFG in the Oval Office, churning out reams of copy 24/7, no need for the high-dollar ‘journalists’ to do more than stenography — with the hopes of TV facetime and maybe a fat book deal to keep them interested, when it all got kinda repetitive.
But what has he done for them lately?
What they don’t want, at this moment in time, is for the possible downfall of the Trump Crime Cartel to let the rubes — er, their target markets — see how rotten and shaky the whole Republican party edifice actually is. If this means downvoting TFG in order to preserve a figleaf of deniability, well, Mr. You’re-Fired should’ve known the job was dangerous when he took it!
journalist in the year 2022: really striking to me how trump turned out to be a bad president https://t.co/PlQS3MgDSa
— Comirnaty By Nature (@canderaid) June 22, 2022
(Sam Stein’s modest self-attribution on Twitter is Politico/MSNBC. Beating heart of the great media beast, and yet not a clue to be found there. )
Callback to Rich ‘Sparklepants’ Lowry, Editor of the National Review, back in 2020:
Great day to revisit this tweet https://t.co/YncbdgYLsx
— Isaac Chotiner (@IChotiner) June 21, 2022
And, apparently, those “well-heeled benefactors” are still willing to throw money down the Klout rat-hole…
“Semafor has raised $25 million from wealthy individuals, with a goal of cultivating direct relationships between its journalists and its audience.”
… Justin Smith and Ben Smith surprised the media world early this year when they said they were leaving prominent jobs at Bloomberg Media and The New York Times to start a global news organization, Semafor. They said it would tackle the lack of trust in media and compete for English-language readers against outlets like CNN, The Times and The Washington Post.
The coverage is set to start this fall, they said in a recent interview, with a staff of about 30 journalists based in London, New York and Washington, D.C., and another international location, either in Africa or the Middle East. The operations will initially be supported by around $25 million from investors, with early revenue coming from advertising and live events. They plan to eventually charge for subscriptions. They hired Rachel Oppenheim, an advertising executive at The Times, to be the company’s chief revenue officer.
The money to get started comes from a variety of wealthy people, including the crypto-billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried and his brother Gabe; Jessica Lessin, the founder of The Information; David G. Bradley, chairman emeritus of The Atlantic; and John Thornton, co-founder of the American Journalism Project and The Texas Tribune. Michael R. Bloomberg, the billionaire founder of Bloomberg L.P., was pitched but decided not to invest.
Justin Smith, who had been the chief executive of Bloomberg Media, said Semafor’s decision to seek money from wealthy individuals rather than venture firms was a sign that the founders were not looking to cash out anytime soon. In the interview, he said that he and Ben Smith, who was a media columnist at The Times, wanted to leave behind a news organization that would last for generations. Both have committed to work on the project for at least 10 years…
“I think the business model conditions for global news media are better in 2022 than they’ve ever been since before the internet arrived,” Justin Smith said, “and it has to do with the ubiquitous broad adoption of subscriptions and the loosening grip of tech platforms on global ad markets.”…
Sounds like a high-dollar SubStack, only with celebrity ‘professionals’ to do the ghostwriting for its sponsors:
… Reporter bylines will be sized similarly to headlines, part of an effort to cultivate direct relationships between Semafor’s journalists and its audience. Employees will be encouraged to offer their own perspective on social media “in a fair, analytical way,” said Ben Smith.
He said the company aimed to have a different relationship with its reporters than other newsrooms, including by ensuring that journalists receive “all or most” of the financial upside of their intellectual property, such as book deals or movie rights…
Wonder if Tucker Carlson pitched in a token few hundred thousands, as a good-faith investment. Maybe he just put it on his Fox company expense account, under ‘publicity’?
Punchbowl News, when Politico isn’t *quite* enough like Tiger-Beat-on-the-Potomac:
Wednesday Night Open Thread: Our Failed Media VillagersPost + Comments (74)
This post is in: Balloon Juice, Commentary, Open Threads, Our Failed Media Experiment, Popular Culture
The FTFNYTimes hopes it has found its new Lena Dunham:
Incisive!https://t.co/ZgLfGI7Xhi pic.twitter.com/3MkZmqK02R
— Richard Morrison (@RichardMorrison) June 16, 2022
Bimbo-ism (hand to Goddess), but from the ‘left’!
“Are you a leftist who likes to have their tits out? Do you like to flick off pro-lifers?” Chrissy Chlapecka asks the camera in a 51-second TikTok captioned “BIMBOS, RISE ‼️” In the video, Ms. Chlapecka, a 22-year-old comedian who lives in Chicago and has about 4.6 million TikTok followers, is wearing a tight pink minidress, a pink coat trimmed with faux fur and tall white leather boots; her bleach-blond hair is in pigtails. “Are you good at math?” she asks, scribbling “2+2=<3” into a notebook. She holds a pose while reading a book upside down. “Are you good at reading? Well if you are, how?” At the end of the video, she yells out the window: “I’m a bimbo and I’m proud!”
Ms. Chlapecka’s celebration of the much-maligned category of the “bimbo” is provocative, even shocking. In a recent phone interview, Ms. Chlapecka told me she identifies as feminist but that a lot of feminism needs to be “reworked.” Like critiques of many women of her generation, hers include the historical whiteness of many strains of feminism, its heteronormativity and the persistence of anti-trans voices within the movement today…
One might ask: How could it possibly be feminist to talk about how hot and dumb you are all the time? Women bragging that they can’t do long division has an obviously retrograde quality to it; it can play into juvenile stereotypes even as it attempts to manipulate them. Watching some of these videos can feel like peering into a series of conservative fantasies that have been ever so slightly warped: Is it really leftist for a woman to want to just go shopping and never get a job? But to dismiss this corner of the internet as totally backward would be to miss the point…
‘The point’ being that sexxxay young thangs acting like idiots gets the target NYTimes subscriber hot — under the collar or in the pants, doesn’t matter which.
Tangentially related — Anna Sorokin may be kind of a niche interest here, but this is perfect in its context:
the punchline could not have hit harder https://t.co/26WtEpe6eS
— kilgore trout, death to putiner (@KT_So_It_Goes) June 16, 2022
Thursday Night Snark Open Thread: We Regret to Inform You…Post + Comments (88)
This post is in: Balloon Juice, C.R.E.A.M., Commentary, Economics, Jan 6: Hearings, Open Threads, Our Failed Media Experiment
Jared's Moment: The Pardoner's Tale pic.twitter.com/3Mt0YawPWY
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) June 10, 2022
Peter Baker of the FTFNYTimes, last seen valiantly fluffing Brave Deciderer Jared‘s choice to disagree with TFG:
Maggie Haberman, consummate professional: Nothing personal, Mr. Kushner. We’re just divesting an underperforming asset, targeting a better return from our newly contrarian position…
At the other tip of the horseshoe, looks like I was right about how brilliantly Caroline Edwards’ testimony was positioned:
Fox knew that their viewer base would sympathize with an attractive, white, blonde woman (and the 50+ dudes who watch Fox would get horny), so instead they only showed the back of her head. Truly amazing. https://t.co/5ae0Kp9BOD
— Centrism Fan Acct ?? (@Wilson__Valdez) June 10, 2022
Fox News didn't take the hearings live. Instead, Tucker Carlson hosted Darren Beattie. During the attack on January 6, here's what Beattie was tweeting. https://t.co/LU0FZvlW9O
— Stephen Hayes (@stephenfhayes) June 10, 2022
Klown klaxon coda: Cameo from a blog favorite chewtoy –
Friday Night Flights Open Thread: <em>Repub Enablers in Disarray!</em>Post + Comments (96)