Tag: Journalism

Jeff Bezos Eviscerates Washington Post.  photog Unconcerned

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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.

The DNC Through the Eyes of the Former Woke

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Sasha Stone is one of that small group of leftist journalists who sometime in the last four years or so had an epiphany.  People like Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald realized after the 2020 election that the Left had thrown away all pretense at objectivity and abandoned all of their former devotion to freedom of speech and other constitutional rights.  Their employers at the New York Times or the Washington Post or Rolling Stone didn’t want the truth.  They wanted good old propaganda and they didn’t need any honesty.

So like her colleagues Stone has had her red pill moment and against all odds is now on the Trump train.  But I have no illusions that Stone or Greenwald view me as anything other than a knuckle-dragging subhuman with my lack of celebratory enthusiasm for the rainbow flag and all its multitudinous perversities.  But it is interesting to read their version of the red-pill moment and its various echoes down the years as they bump into the same dishonesty and delusion we all experience in Joe Biden’s America.

https://sashastone.substack.com/p/they-love-bombed-us-with-kamala

Must See TV

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Like Hamlet’s father’s ghost I am, “during the day confin’d to fast in fires, till the foul crimes done in my days of nature are burnt and purg’d away.”  But occasionally I am freed to roam the earth.  Today and Sunday are those days and I feel like a nocturnal creature blinking in the sun wondering what mythical land I find myself in where light and joy still exist.

But be that as it may, this paradise of freedom still exists within our own blighted reality.  So, I was unsurprised when reading today’s headlines that they were very reminiscent of those I remember from the before-time of last week when I was still a free man.  But they were slightly crazier.  Joy Reid appears to be close to the breaking point.  Now I can’t be totally sure of this because she is always at least incoherent.  Possibly to herself she seems rational but for me it’s like listening to the mutterings of a schizophrenic bag lady.  It is remarkable that NBC continues to employ her.  But that’s another issue.

In this video clip she tauntingly declares that she and her followers know what “we” mean by DEI.  She seems to be having a psychotic break.  Apparently, this knowledge of hers is supposed to be a potent talisman and we should fear it.  But instead of being afraid of her, I’m actually a little afraid for her.

I mean, sure, she’s a hateful wretch and a race baiter.  Certainly, she wishes evil against people not like her.  But she’s also a moron.  Her IQ must be somewhere around 75?  And I feel society has a responsibility to protect someone like that from her own stupidity.  Believing in things as far from reality as she does, leaves her open to fatal errors.

For instance, she believes herself to be highly intelligent.  This could lead her to try using her own judgement in a life-or-death situation.  As an example, she could judge that a pineapple was an appropriate food to swallow whole.  And if she attempts it from the relatively smooth side of the fruit, who knows, maybe she could do it.  She does have a really big mouth.  If she greased it with oil, who knows!  But what if she tries swallowing it crown first?  Those leaves are quite stiff and sharp.  I fear that it might lodge in her esophagus and finish her off.  I don’t relish watching a video clip of her on X where she is expounding on the guilt of White people or Donald Trump or Santa Claus for keeping her people down and then having to watch her trying to remove a wedged bromeliad from her oral cavity.  The whole idea disturbs me terribly.

What would make sense is if some kind of SWAT team could swoop in and rescue her from herself.  She could continue here career, such as it is.  But she could do it from the safety of a padded room in an insane asylum.  There, under the care of trained, psychiatric professionals, she could be dosed with Thorazine and swaddled in a strait jacket and allowed to rave and foam at the mouth and if necessary, soil herself, without any serious fear that she would expire of self-inflicted wounds.

And that would make me feel better.  In fact, I think I’d become a regular viewer of her show.  Especially if there were the hope that other characters could be added to the rubber room.  Maddow, Morning Joe and his bride and Chris Hayes would all be worthy additions to the room.  There could be special events.  Electro-shock therapy, firehose-hydro-therapy and maybe even a lobotomy could be added to the program to spice it up.

Now that would be must-see tv.

Okay, Let’s Talk About Journalism

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So, we all laughed while Taylor Lorentz wailed about the “Slaughter of the Innocents” among the millennial generation of journalists.  Of course, we did.  Everyone on our side despises them because they are everything that is wrong about the mainstream media.

They are dishonest, stupid, lazy and almost completely unqualified to perform their primary mission; discover what is happening in the world and communicate it to the people reading, listening and watching their news outlets.  Instead, they have become the Ministry of Truth.  And thereby, they have deserved the monumental collapse in public trust in them and also the huge drops in paying audience.

Now, fair to say, a part of the lost audience is not directly related to their lack of skill and honesty.  The internet has upended the financial model that used to govern how newspapers and other forms of journalism made their money; advertising.

Google and Facebook have swallowed almost all the advertising dollars by means of their surveillance of people’s search histories and other internet activity.  So, it’s not fair to blame media’s collapsing profits completely on their lousy work.  And in fact, some countries (e.g., Australia) are now forcing Facebook to pay news sites for the content that they allow people to post on their Facebook pages.  But the new world is what it is.  News sites are struggling to keep their doors open.

Well, okay.  What that means is that news will become a subscription-based product.  People will have to pay for what they want to read or see.  And most people tend to be unwilling to pay money to be insulted.  Which means one of two approaches must be adopted by the news corporations.

The first approach is to continue with what they currently do.  They can keep up a far-left-biased version of the news which insults half of the viewing public.  And this means building their financial model based on whatever payments they calculate they can get from the left-leaning half of the country.

The second approach is to try to perform objective journalism and get money from anyone who wants to know what’s actually going on in the world.  Now this would be a wholly novel idea.  So far, it’s never been tried by any major news organization.  And for all I know maybe it would produce less income than the first approach.  But I tend to believe that providing unbiased news coverage and separating it completely from a program that featured opinion pieces from both sides of the partisan divide would serve the public better and at the same time would make more money.

And why do I think unbiased news would make more money?  Because we’ve seen what the opposite looks like.  The opposite of unbiased news is Taylor Lorentz.  And that model is crashing and burning from coast to coast.  And it will get worse.  Eventually, people will get to pay a la carte for their media.  When that happens places like CNN, MSNBC and Fox News will either have to provide the public what they want or go out of business.

And all of this is actually for the good.  We pay for the awful cable companies with our cable bill and we never get our money’s worth.  I would pay extra if none of my money went to ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS and certainly not MSNBC and CNN.  Of late Fox News has been barely half a step better than these.  If my internet provider would charge a fair price for access to the internet and I could choose from the media options that I preferred and paid for nothing else it would be a much better world.  Instead of five or ten large leftist media outlets there would probably be one or two at most.

And from where I stand that would be a vast improvement.  Because that would mean that about eighty percent of the obnoxious leftist journalists currently employed by these woke fake-news corporations would be driving cabs and waiting tables in New York and DC.  Sorry Taylor Lorentz, but that’s what should happen.