Tag: Jeff Bezos

Jeff Bezos Eviscerates Washington Post.  photog Unconcerned

photog Current Events , , ,

I watched a few YouTube videos by journalists.  They were hilarious.  But they were kind of long and there was a lot of swearing.  So, I embedded a news station’s coverage which was still kind of funny but shorter and without the swearing.

Bezos is firing 33% of his staff, eliminating the sports page, the Metro Section, the Middle East bureaus and most of the foreign desk in general.  And he’s getting rid of their podcast.  Well, I’m not the biggest fan of Jeff Bezos.  I think he’s a pretentious twit.  But now he’s become one of my favorite billionaire twits.  Just thinking about the number of butt-hurt leftwing journalists and their friends who will soon be looking for new jobs in a journalism environment completely devoid of opportunities makes my mouth water.  Now you might think I’m an awful human being but I’m not.  I can tell because I’m not happy about the tradesmen working on the printing presses and the other non-journalists who are losing their jobs.  For them I feel sorrow.  But the left-wing journalists are awful people who hate individuals like me and feel superior to ordinary people who don’t believe in the social justice creed that the elites follow.

So in the words of Barack Obama’s favorite anti-white clergyman, “The chickens have come home to roost!”  Bari Weiss is gutting CBS News.  Bezos is chloroforming the Washington Post and Disney is finally getting around to eliminating the crew that did a hatchet job on Lucas Films.  But this is still just the tip of the iceberg.  All of the cable and broadcast networks are being overhauled by people tasked with restoring them to profitability, if possible, or shuttering them if not.  I’m particularly curious to see what happens at MS NOW.  Initially they unloaded complete deadwood like Joy Reid but the place is still stocked to the gills with overpaid leftist lunatics like Rachel Maddow, Joe Scarborough and Jen Psaki who each make millions of dollars.  I’m waiting for at least one of these losers to get the heave-ho in 2026.  In fact, I expect the whole shooting match to be closed down within eighteen months.

So this exercise going on at Bezos’s rag is sort of a template for the rest of the industry.  Right-sizing these journalism companies will be a herculean task that may not even be possible.  The business model for journalism was upended by the internet and literally no one knows how all of this will end up.  But currently all of the people I hate in journalism sound like a chorus of scorched cats, the schadenfreude is amped up to eleven and it feels just wonderful.

And just to make sure that things continue in the right direction, that paragon of journalistic incompetence, Don Lemon has picked this moment to become a martyr for the First Amendment (or I guess maybe against the First Amendment).  But maybe sometime in the next few years one of the new or old news outfits will get its feet back on the ground and start selling actual honest to goodness objective facts at a price people are willing to pay.  And that will be really be good news.

16APR2025 – Wednesday Coffee Walk Zoom Call – To Boldly Go Where No Hag Has Gone Before

photog Current Events, Fake Science, Science, Star Trek , , ,

It’s always good talking to the boys.  What will be the topic for the week?  What will be the funniest or the craziest or the most annoying topic for the Left?  There were several candidates; NYC subway necrophilia, General Flynn’s call for Obama’s arrest and NY AG Leticia James’ real estate fraud scandal.  But everyone’s favorite by a lot was “Leftist Hags in Space!”  We all got a good laugh out of the likes of Gayle King, Bezos’ fiancée Lauren Sanchez, washed up pop star Katy Perry and nobodies Aisha Bowe, Kerianne Flynn and Amanda Nguyen squealing around on top of a comically phallic “Blue Origin” rocket that rose to an unimpressive 62 miles above Earth and then parachuted back.  The whole roundtrip took place within a ridiculously short 12 minutes.

This all female “crew” followed in the footsteps of 90+ year old fake rocket man James T Kirk, (AKA William Shatner) as he also failed to reach Earth orbit in the painfully underpowered suborbital rocket.  It was the opinion of all on the zoom call that a better effect could have been achieved if Bezos had instead equipped the ship with a female crew composed entirely of professional strippers.  There was disagreement as to whether weightlessness was a problem or a bonus from the point of performance.  Also, it was debated whether a stripper pole would be a safety hazard in the “cockpit.”

I noticed Camera Girl looking disapprovingly at me as she walked by at this point during the zoom call but free speech is a cherished right of the coffee walk tradition so I ignored the implied censorship and laughed along with the rest of the jackasses.  Ah, good times.

So, we compared the press coverage of this absurdly unimpressive publicity stunt and compared it to Space-X planning and executing a critical rescue of actual astronauts from the orbiting space station where Boeing’s failure stranded them for over half a year.  Basically, other than Fox News the rest of the media performed a virtual black out of the Space-X mission while the Bezos stunt was given 24/7 coverage by all the news stations as if it were something worthy of discussion.

And it’s impossible not to come to the conclusion that Jeff Bezos has managed to make space travel uncool.  Now I’ll qualify this.  Suborbital rocket flight is not really space-travel.  It’s really just air travel of a very inconvenient and useless kind.  But he has managed to attach a taint to rocket flight which I wouldn’t have thought possible.  And I should have expected nothing less from the founder of Amazon.com.  After all, the company who has his annoying trucks delivering things at my house seemingly before I order them would obviously be able to make rocket ships annoying too.

Well, I can always hope that the next all female crew will be Democrat politicians.  Let’s say Nancy Pelosi, AOC, Hillary Clinton and Maxine Waters.  Put all four of them in blue jumpsuits and at least for ten minutes I can hope against hope for some real excitement.  Engine, O-ring, parachute, whatever.

Do the Right Thing

photog Current Events , , ,

The Washington Post lost $77 million last year.  Now the paper’s owner Jeff Bezos spends $77 million on having his bald head waxed every month so the amount of money is almost inconsequential.  But the fact that they lost half of their subscription base was just too embarrassing and so Bezos brought in a hatchet man as publisher and now he has given the paper’s first female executive editor; Sally Buzbee the boot.

Well, the newsroom is very unhappy.  And what is there number one worry?  Loss of diversity!

  • “I don’t think she deserved to go out this way,” the first staffer told me, noting that in conversations with their colleagues, people “don’t feel good about the fact that the first female executive editor of The Washington Post got a one paragraph goodbye note at 8:30 p.m. on a Sunday, and that she’s being replaced by more white men we don’t know.”

 

  • “Everyone was pretty shocked with your email last night,” one reporter said at the meeting, according to a source present. The reporter suggested that “the most cynical interpretation sort of feels like you chose two of your buddies to come in and help run the Post, and we now have four white men running three newsrooms,” and expressed surprise at this development given Lewis’s prior commitments to diversity.

 

  • Later in the meeting, another reporter asked Lewis whether “any women or people of color were interviewed and seriously considered for either of these positions,” a question that prompted applause.

Unfortunately, their boss is a little more concerned with the lack of readers wanting to read the written product produced by this much vaunted diversity:

  • At one point Lewis was asked whether he was intentionally bringing in people who come from a different culture than the Post. “We are losing large amounts of money. Your audience has halved in recent years. People are not reading your stuff. I can’t sugarcoat it anymore,” Lewis said. “So, I’ve had to take decisive, urgent action to set us on a different path, sourcing talent that I have worked with that are the best of the best.”

 

  • “Don’t we need our brilliant social journalists and service journalists as embedded in our core product to make sure that people are actually reading the thing that’s out at the center of the mission of the Washington Post?” one staffer asked, to which Lewis replied, “You haven’t done it. I’ve listened to the platitudes. Honestly, it’s just not happening.”

 

  • “The fact that Will Lewis keeps going to his network rather than plucking Washington Post leadership implies that he finds everyone lacking, and I think that’s kind of the most disturbing thing,” a second staffer told me.

 

So, the Washington Post is no longer selling something people want to buy, threatening the jobs of everyone working there and all the drones working there care is that the people being sent in to save their jobs are white men!

It might almost make you wonder if maybe this fixation on race and gender clouds their judgement in terms of their writing.

I guess there’s some hope in the fact that the publisher they brought in openly tells his employees that they are failing at their jobs and things have to change.  Of course, what he probably really has to do is lower his costs by reducing his staff to an absolute minimum and pay them as little as possible.  He’s probably thinking he can buy an AI that will write, “Orange Man bad” for a small fraction of what he pays his Ivy League diversity hires.

The truth is that the whole news business has been upended by the impact of Google on the advertising model and also the ubiquity of news and opinion across the internet threatens the very existence of the print news industry.  Well, some of them will make it.  Apparently, the New York Times has stabilized their subscriptions by adding digital accounts successfully so it can be done.  But maybe there’s no place for another New York Times.  Maybe the Washington Post will have to go.  As I said, Jeff Bezos can pay to keep open or close down the Washington Post without changing his profit statement even a single percent.  But what will be interesting is how the delicate snowflakes react to the news that diversity doesn’t pay the bills or give the owner a reason to keep the place going in the absence of profits.

Now Christopher Rufo has become interested in the trials and tribulations of the Washington Post’s attempt to return to profitability.  And he’s come up with a recommendation.  Fire Taylor Lorenz.  You may remember Taylor from the time she doxed the woman who runs Libs of TikTok.  Because of this she is a very unpopular with a pretty good part of the American public.  Rufo’s point is that if the Washington Post wants to increase its potential reader pool maybe they should eliminate the more ethically challenged staff members.  And that’s the real reason for me writing this post.  I just think it would be hilarious if they gave Taylor the boot.