Tag: media

The Cult of Free is Over

It was always fake, gay, and propped up by free money handed out to the ticket-takers. And now that the free money flow has been shut off, the propped-up organizations are failing one after another.

The American-Canadian digital media and broadcasting company Vice is preparing to file for bankruptcy, New York Times has reported citing two people with knowledge of its operations.

This news of bankruptcy comes just days after after the well-regarded TV and online video outlet laid off staff and canceled its flagship program Vice News Tonight. Last week, Vice Media said it will cancel popular TV program “Vice News Tonight” as part of a broader restructuring that will result in job cuts across the digital media firm’s global news business, capping years of financial difficulties and top-executive departures.

Vice, which operates a cable channel of the same name and creates documentaries and other video content for its own outlets and others, was once valued at $5.7 billion. Investors included Walt Disney Co. and Fox Corp., although their equity may now be worthless, the Times said. Its largest debt holder is Fortress Investment Group, according to the newspaper.

This potential bankruptcy also comes at the time when several other media and technology firms have had to downsize in recent months due to a challenging economy and a weak advertising market.

This is why it is so important to support projects like Arkhaven, Castalia Library, and UATV with your subscriptions. And the strong foundation provided by the subscribers is why these projects not only survive, but continue to thrive, while their much larger competitors are collapsing.

The deplatforming and demonetization by various platforms actually did us a favor when viewed in retrospect, as it forced us to prepare for times such as these several years in advance. Sometimes, the silver lining proves more significant in the long-run than the black cloud.

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Gell-Man Amnesia in Action

It’s fascinating to see how completely the media fails to understand both the socio-sexual hierarchy and the sigma male.

Men online are more lost than ever, to the point of turning an actual psychopathic killer into a point of reference. Bateman is hailed for not conforming to the models of masculinity that’ve arisen on the web 2.0. He’s neither an alpha (a dominant asshole at the top of the social hierarchy) nor a beta (a submissive loner who’ll never get a girl). Bateman represents a new model of masculinity: The “sigma male”, inexplicably named with another random ancient Greek letter.

According to Google trends, the “sigma male” search term first appeared in early 2021 and quickly gained popularity over the past two years. In 2023, #sigma has over 46 billion views on TikTok. Sigmas “are known as the rarest males on earth, which makes them irresistible to women,” says TikToker Sel Nakim in an explainer video with almost 900,000 likes. “They’re at the top with the alphas, but they’re outside the hierarchy.”

Instead of boasting about their status like alphas, sigmas tend to be mysterious loner types. They think outside the box; they accept themselves and are proud to be different. They attract success and respect. Basically, they’re perfect. And Bateman – a man sophisticated enough to wear a suit to murder a homeless person – is their aesthetic king.

As it happens, the term “sigma male” was coined in 2011. But given the complete inability of the media to even understand which party is winning the war in Ukraine, it can hardly be surprising that they understand neither the concept nor its genesis.

Neither fictional characters created by Brett Easton Ellis nor serial killers have anything to do with sigma males. And they are very far from perfect; to the contrary, there is usually something fundamentally broken in them that prevents them from being able to operate within the hierarchy.

Nevertheless, the ideas, they propagate.

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Tucker Leaves Fox News

FOX News Media and Tucker Carlson have agreed to part ways. We thank him for his service to the network as a host and prior to that as a contributor. Mr. Carlson’s last program was Friday April 21st. Fox News Tonight will air live at 8 PM/ET starting this evening as an interim show helmed by rotating FOX News personalities until a new host is named.

It will be interesting to see if Tucker is bigger than Fox now or if it was Fox that was propping him up. Either way, he’s in a remarkable position going forward, and if he plays his cards right, he could set up an organization capable of competing successfully with CNN and MSNBC before the end of the year.

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Experts vs Media: A Retrospective

Peter King revisits the big draft question of 25 years ago, and in doing so, underlines my point about the mainstream media. Which is, namely, never believe anything it tells you.

A quarter-century ago this week … A couple of months before the draft in 1998, I took a VHS tape with 30 to 35 plays each of Tennessee QB Peyton Manning and Washington State QB Ryan Leaf, the presumptive top two picks in the draft, around the country to show six people and to ask: Who would you pick among these two players? (VHS qualified as high-tech in 1998.) My panel of experts: Hall of Fame coach/QB guru Sid Gillman, retired Niners coach Bill Walsh, Giants QB Phil Simms, Denver coach Mike Shanahan, Tampa Bay director of player personnel Jerry Angelo and UCLA coach Bob Toledo (who’d faced both players).

There was some debate over who should go first that year. ESPN published a long magazine story opining the easy pick was Leaf. “Come 2018, Ryan Leaf, not Manning, will be strutting up to a podium in Canton,” was one line from that story, one of the great wish-we-had-that-back lines ever. ESPN wasn’t the only one to go all-in on Leaf. But I sat with each expert and asked the question.

The vote: Manning 6, Leaf 0. “Now this is a pro quarterback,” the 86-year-old Gillman said in his Carlsbad, Calif., home. “Is that a beautiful throw, or is that a beautiful throw? I’d draft this kid in a second.” The iconoclastic Walsh favored Manning over Leaf, but also said he’d pick another position first in the draft, then chose Brian Griese in the second round.

When I wrote the story in early April, I remember a few stories like the ESPN one, or ones quoting anonymous scouts or GMs saying they’d pick Leaf. I wondered if I’d picked the wrong guys to poll. But sitting with Gillman, a seminal figure in quarterback history, and Shanahan, and hearing their this-is-no-contest tone, I thought Manning was the guy. “Peyton will handle the inferno of going to a 3-13 team. He’s a sure player,” Angelo said. And he was.

Forget sports. Forget the NFL. Forget the converged reporter concerned. The salient point here is the massive gap between the unanimous position of the proven experts and the expressed conclusion of the media. The experts consulted by Peter King had unparalleled and unquestioned chops. ESPN could have consulted them even more easily than King did.

And yet, the mainstream media organ somehow managed to present a conclusion diametrically opposed to the conclusion of the experts. This is par for the course. Never forget that.

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Liars Fear the Truth

NPR flees from Twitter in response to being labeled as both “state-affiliated” and “government-funded” media despite observably being both:

After briefly being labeled “state-affiliated media,” NPR has decided to abandon Twitter.

Under the leadership of entrepreneur Elon Musk, Twitter attached a descriptor to the account associated with National Public Radio, characterizing the account as “state-affiliated media.”

After swift backlash, though, the social media site exchanged the label for a different, more accurate one: “Government-funded media.”

Supporters of NPR were angered by Twitter’s original label, seemingly lumping the U.S. news outlet in with sites like Russia Today (RT) and China’s Xinhua News Agency.

Apparently displeased with both designations, NPR announced Wednesday it was suspending its Twitter accounts.

A news article from NPR reported, “NPR will no longer post fresh content to its 52 official Twitter feeds, becoming the first major news organization to go silent on the social media platform. In explaining its decision, NPR cited Twitter’s decision to first label the network ‘state-affiliated media,’ the same term it uses for propaganda outlets in Russia, China, and other autocratic countries.”

NPR will “no longer be active on Twitter because the platform is taking actions that undermine our credibility by falsely implying that we are not editorially independent,” the outlet said in a statement.

John Lansing, CEO of NPR, told the news site he leads abandoning Twitter is about “protecting” NPR’s “ability to produce journalism without ‘a shadow of negativity.’”

The amusing thing about NPR’s little tantrum is that both Russia Today and the Xinhua News Agency are considerably more reliable than National Public Radio, which is both affiliated with the U.S. government and funded by it.

NPR gets another 31 percent of its funding in programming fees from member organizations. Federal funding indirectly contributes to the latter category because the publicly funded CPB provides annual grants to public radio stations that pay NPR for programming.

The media tries to conceal the fact that the Federal government gives the money to NPR’s member organizations, which than gives the money to NPR. There is nothing private or independent about NPR, though at least, unlike the BBC, citizens are not forced to pay a direct fee for it.

It is certainly both telling and amusing to see the extent of their reaction to being correctly identified in this way. The wicked flee even when no man pursueth.

UPDATE: The government-funded Public Broadcasting Service has reportedly followed suit and exited Twitter. It will be informative if the totally-independent and not-at-all marching-in-lockstep mainstream media organizations do the same. In, you know, protest and solidarity and all that.

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The Decline of the Newspaper

It is not to be mourned, but rather, celebrated, given the complete irresponsibility and outright wickedness of the media institutions:

The country’s largest newspaper company, Gannett, is once again forecasting it will sell off more of its daily newspapers. Since its merge with newspaper company GateHouse Media in 2019, Gannett has closed or sold hundreds of papers and slashed staff by more than half, and that is projected to continue. Joshua Benton has been writing about this for the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard, and he joins me now. Welcome.

JOSHUA BENTON: Good to be with you.

FLORIDO: Joshua, Gannett had 25,000 employees at the end of 2019, and less than four years later, it has just over 11,000. It slashed staff by more than half. I mean, newspaper revenue has been steadily declining over that time but not by that much, not at that rate. So what’s going on here?

BENTON: The Gannett that we have now is the result of the merger of two very large companies. The idea was an individual newspaper might struggle on its own, but if you buy enough of them, you can extract as much of the cost of producing the newspaper from the local community as possible. You cut down on print days. You have the page layout and editing done elsewhere. The thought was you could achieve these economies of scale and make a profitable business. The problem is, as part of the merger, Gannett took on a lot of debt, and they have to pay off that debt. So they need revenue. And the way that they have been doing that is by cutting costs to the bone. That means cutting staff and cutting the quality of their newspapers.

FLORIDO: I guess it goes without saying that print circulation of newspapers has plummeted in recent years. It’s been on the decline for decades, actually. And today, most people get their news online. Is it just the case that these Gannett newspapers aren’t managing to get people who used to subscribe to their print paper to subscribe to their digital product instead?

BENTON: Yeah. Newspapers have generally given up on the idea of creating new print readers. They’re not really making new print readers anymore. So the idea has been to shift to digital, and Gannett claims some degree of success in doing that. But even when that does happen, newspapers generally make significantly less money off of a digital subscriber than they do from a print subscriber. The other problem is that there are lots of other free alternatives for a lot of local news and information, and people will be happy to consume those without bothering to subscribe to the local daily.

Better uninformed than misinformed and propagandized by the corpocracy. The only real loss is historical, but that was inevitable once paper moved to digital. It will be good when government-funded media institutions like NPR and the BBC eventually fail as well. No one’s lives are enhanced or improved by learning very important information about a deadly hurricane in Bali or a fatal shooting in Chicago, or by being told lies about war, geopolitics, and the economy.

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Liars Protest Truth

The BBC and the British government are offended by Twitter accurately describing the British Broadcasting Corporation as “government-funded media”:

Elon Musk has risked a row with the BBC by labelling it as ‘government-funded media’ on Twitter.

The Corporation is mainly funded by British taxpayers, who pay a £159-a-year licence fee.

Although the government sets how much the licence fee is, not everyone has to pay it, and households pay directly.

When someone clicks on the BBC’s new label, it brings them to a page about government accounts and state-affiliated media accounts. Twitter described state-affiliated media accounts as: ‘Outlets where the state exercises control over editorial content through financial resources, direct or indirect political pressures, and/or control over production and distribution.’

The page does not include a definition for its ‘government-funded media’ label.

A BBC spokesperson said: ‘We are speaking to Twitter to resolve this issue as soon as possible. The BBC is, and always has been, independent. We are funded by the British public through the licence fee.’

There is nothing “independent” about the BBC. If a British person does not pay his licence fee, it is a criminal act with a penalty that averages £176 with a legal maximum of £1,000. The fact that the tax is paid directly to the corporation rather than going through the government does not change the fact that the funding for the BBC is imposed on the British public by His Majesty’s Government with the power of the law.

In summary, Twitter is entirely correct to describe the BBC as “government-funded media”, because without the threat of government force, the funding would not be provided to the corporation.

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They Do Hire Liars

Peter King is outraged – outraged – by a reader’s assertion that anyone who works for the saintly organization known as The Washington Post should not be blindly trusted at all times.

The Washington Post, one of the most trusted news sources in the world, doesn’t hire liars with a history of lying on their resumes, and it does not send liars to cover the Minnesota riots, and it does not send liars to cover the war in Ukraine, and it does not appoint a liar as national criminal justice reporter. It’s fashionable in 2023 America for people who don’t like the news that is being reported to do what you do here—denigrate excellent reporting by simply saying it is a lie, or to say that the reporter is a liar. What Klemko wrote about Memphis is the rock-solid, and disturbing, truth.

Yeah, so, about that… Literally the next day, The Washington Post’s “star fact-checker” was caught in a blatant lie in an attempt to claim George Soros had not funded a district attorney to whom he donated more than one million dollars.

Twitter users corrected the Washington Post’s star fact-checker, Glenn Kessler, when he attempted to write off the claim that liberal financier George Soros had funded the Manhattan district attorney who indicted former US President Donald Trump as ‘misleading’.

Kessler, who rated the ‘incendiary claim’ that Soros funded Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg ‘three Pinocchios’ in a Saturday fact-check, accused the Trump campaign and other Republicans who echoed the factoid of “being slippery” and conjuring “stereotypes of rich Jewish financiers secretly controlling events.”

However, his fact-check also admitted the claim was “technically correct,” a caveat he appeared to discount in his final decision to award it the triple-Pinocchio rating. Twitter users pounced, appending a community note adding context to Kessler’s own admission of truth.

Clowns protect clowns in Clown World. And they’re all lying. So stick to sports, big guy.

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The Persecution of Ricky Vaughn

The US federal government is shattering the Constitution and inadvertently revealing the existence of the surveillance state in its persecution of a memelord.

Last month, Revolver profiled the Biden Administration’s persecution of former Twitter anon Doug Mackey, who was a famous pro-Trump voice back in 2016 under the moniker of Ricky Vaughn…

In its latest filings, the DOJ reveals that one of the group chats it is currently using as evidence against Mackey contained a person who is now working with the FBI as a federal informant. According to the government, the “Confidential Witness” (or CW) was a pro-Trump, “alt right” leader who pleaded guilty to the same conspiracy to deprive civil rights charges that Mackey faces, and is now collaborating with the government.

In its filings, the government declines to say what CW’s current role with the government is, except that he is “presently engaged in proactive investigations, working with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (“FBI”), and may engage in additional investigations in the future.” Based on that statement, the government is asking that CW’s identity be kept secret, and that Mackey’s defense team be barred from asking any questions about CW’s current work.

This is a much bolder request than it might seem to the legally uninitiated. The Sixth Amendment of the Bill of Rights guarantees the right of any criminal defendant to “be confronted with the witnesses against him.” Like most constitutional rights, this law is not absolute, but limitations to it have historically been very limited. Courts have long disallowed anonymous witnesses due to the Sixth Amendment, except in extreme circumstances involving violent, organized criminal organizations with the capacity to retaliate against witnesses and their families. And even then, courts have restricted the right to testify anonymously. For instance, in 2014, the U.S. 10th Circuit said this, about the possible danger of retaliation from the ruthless Salvadoran street gang MS-13.

“…a generalized statement about danger — such as anyone who testifies against one of [MS 13’s] members faces danger from [MS-13] — would be insufficient to show that a threat against a witness was actual and not a result of conjecture.” [United States v. Gutierrez de Lopez, 761 F.3d 1123, 1140 (10th Cir. 2014)]

But now, in the Mackey case, the Biden DOJ asserts that its witness’s identity must be hidden, because if not, he might face, wait for it… harassment on the Internet!

CW through the CW’s internet moniker(s) occupied a prominent position within the online, alt-right community. In that capacity, the CW participated in, among other things, the online harassment of individuals with whom the CW maintained political disagreements, including by encouraging the CW’s followers on Twitter and other social media to amplify the harassment. In this case, the government anticipates that the CW will provide inculpatory evidence against the defendant and other individuals who, like the CW, had engaged in such harassing behavior. As such, the government anticipates that, if the CW’s true identity were to become known, then those with whom the CW associated online would likely engage in such behavior towards the CW. Revealing the CW’s true identity would also likely lead to the public exposure of the CW’s physical whereabouts. This could in turn subject the CW to more than simply online harassment and could very easily jeopardize the CW’s safety.

Mackey has never been convicted or even accused of a single violent crime, or of threatening violence online. There is no evidence at all of any kind of organized or predictable effort by the online “alt right” to physically target witnesses. Yet now, the government claims that Mackey’s Sixth Amendment rights can be nullified because of the vague possibility a witness against him might face “harassing behavior.”

This particular federal informant is widely rumored to be none other than “Baked Alaska”. But that’s not what is interesting, at least to me. What I believe to be more significant is this observation from AC:

Notice, Ricky had an informant before he had any hint of anything prosecutors might try to charge him with, going on around him. He was just a a squeaky clean, preppy guy, posting funny memes on Twitter. With an informant sent in. Which means an FBI/intelligence agent assigned to him.

So one guy posting on Twitter had an informant sent in and an intelligence operation dedicated to him on nothing more than the basis of his rhetorically-effective memes. What this means is that literally everyone with more than 200+ followers on any social media platform is being targeted, tracked, and infiltrated.

Given my family background and my national press syndication dating back to 1994, I’ve been aware of being on the radar for at least three decades, if not four. It comes with the territory and it’s understandable; no society will tolerate its iconoclastic outliers going too far astray. But it is nevertheless a little startling to see confirmation that the surveillance state in the USA is at least as prevalent and comprehensive as it was in East Germany during the Soviet years.

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