Tag: media

If you want to know where the next batch of cuckservative talking heads can be found, they’re pupating in the swamp of the controlled fake opposition at Newsmax:

As the two fringe cable TV outlets battle for former President Donald Trump’s affections, several high-profile One America News staffers have jumped ship to Newsmax—not just in pursuit of a larger audience, insiders said, but also as a respite from OAN’s increasing extremism.

Already known for its cartoonishly bonkers MAGA propagandizing, OAN in recent months has veered even further into unhinged right-wing territory. And Newsmax—which is often just as obsequiously pro-Trump in its commentary—has pulled back on its wildest election conspiracy theories while hoovering up some of OAN’s top on-air talent: news anchor Alex Salvi, correspondent Jenn Pellegrino, and reporter Amanda Brilhante. Those moves followed Newsmax poaching OAN’s White House correspondent Emerald Robinson last year.

Pellegrino, who served as a White House correspondent and on-air host for OAN, abruptly left the far-right channel earlier this month, only for Newsmax to announce her debut as co-anchor of a 9 p.m. ET program called Cortes and Pellegrino, co-hosted by former Trump campaign senior adviser Steve Cortes.

In late March, meanwhile, Salvi—one of OAN’s rare “straight news” anchors—revealed during his media-focused show After Hours that he was exiting the network after hosting since 2019. A few weeks later, Salvi quietly showed up on Newsmax, revealing his new role as a Rome-based foreign correspondent with the network. Brilhante, who’d been with OAN since graduating college in 2017, was hired away in February to be Newsmax’s breaking news reporter.

Newsmax is literally the most bogus operation with which I have ever have had the misfortune of working. I have more respect and affection for both GT Interactive and Indiegogo, and we all know how those relationships turned out. Some longtime readers may recall the brief period when VP featured ads, which were small and wouldn’t have been distracting if they hadn’t so often mentioned CELEBRITY FEET! or other ridiculous topics that still puzzle me as to how they qualify as a variety of clickbait.

Anyhow, I was paid for the ads, and the contract specified a significant boost once the blog got to a certain level of traffic, which might have been one million monthly pageviews. Like I said, this was a while ago, probably 2014. Once I’d hit that target which they’d specified, I let them know, along with a screenshot proving that the target had been legitimately hit. Newsmax’s response? They immediately terminated the target and never paid the previous two months that they’d owed.

About 18 months later, they came back and tried to pitch me on working with them again. Let’s just say that I actually laughed before declining in no uncertain terms.

So, I’ve known they were shady for some time now. But as AC points out, in light of the CEO’s million-dollar donation to the Clinton Foundation and the way they are now throwing out tickets to those willing to take them, it’s pretty clear that they go well beyond shady.

Fred Rogers’s children’s ministry wasn’t exactly what one would call conventional, and he certainly didn’t win his war against the wicked medium of television. But he fought a much better fight, and fought it for far longer, than most Christians in these latter days of the latest iteration of The Empire That Never Ended. This is the 1998 article upon which the movie I mentioned on a recent Darkstream was based; it’s intriguing to see both how much the movie relied upon it and where the movie departed from it in the interests of drama:

Once upon a time, a long time ago, a man took off his jacket and put on a sweater. Then he took off his shoes and put on a pair of sneakers. His name was Fred Rogers. He was starting a television program, aimed at children, called Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. He had been on television before, but only as the voices and movements of puppets, on a program called The Children’s Corner. Now he was stepping in front of the camera as Mister Rogers, and he wanted to do things right, and whatever he did right, he wanted to repeat. And so, once upon a time, Fred Rogers took off his jacket and put on a sweater his mother had made him, a cardigan with a zipper. Then he took off his shoes and put on a pair of navy-blue canvas boating sneakers. He did the same thing the next day, and then the next…until he had done the same things, those things, 865 times, at the beginning of 865 television programs, over a span of thirty-one years. The first time I met Mister Rogers, he told me a story of how deeply his simple gestures had been felt, and received. He had just come back from visiting Koko, the gorilla who has learned—or who has been taught—American Sign Language. Koko watches television. Koko watches Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, and when Mister Rogers, in his sweater and sneakers, entered the place where she lives, Koko immediately folded him in her long, black arms, as though he were a child, and then … “She took my shoes off, Tom,” Mister Rogers said….

The first time I called Mister Rogers on the telephone, I woke him up from his nap. He takes a nap every day in the late afternoon—just as he wakes up every morning at five-thirty to read and study and write and pray for the legions who have requested his prayers; just as he goes to bed at nine-thirty at night and sleeps eight hours without interruption. On this afternoon, the end of a hot, yellow day in New York City, he was very tired, and when I asked if I could go to his apartment and see him, he paused for a moment and said shyly, “Well, Tom, I’m in my bathrobe, if you don’t mind.” I told him I didn’t mind, and when, five minutes later, I took the elevator to his floor, well, sure enough, there was Mister Rogers, silver-haired, standing in the golden door at the end of the hallway and wearing eyeglasses and suede moccasins with rawhide laces and a flimsy old blue-and-yellow bathrobe that revealed whatever part of his skinny white calves his dark-blue dress socks didn’t hide. “Welcome, Tom,” he said with a slight bow, and bade me follow him inside, where he lay down—no, stretched out, as though he had known me all his life—on a couch upholstered with gold velveteen. He rested his head on a small pillow and kept his eyes closed while he explained that he had bought the apartment thirty years before for $11,000 and kept it for whenever he came to New York on business for the Neighborhood. 

I sat in an old armchair and looked around. The place was drab and dim, with the smell of stalled air and a stain of daguerreotype sunlight on its closed, slatted blinds, and Mister Rogers looked so at home in its gloomy familiarity that I thought he was going to fall back asleep when suddenly the phone rang, startling him. “Oh, hello, my dear,” he said when he picked it up, and then he said that he had a visitor, someone who wanted to learn more about the Neighborhood. “Would you like to speak to him?” he asked, and then handed me the phone. “It’s Joanne,” he said. I took the phone and spoke to a woman—his wife, the mother of his two sons—whose voice was hearty and almost whooping in its forthrightness and who spoke to me as though she had known me for a long time and was making the effort to keep up the acquaintance. When I handed him back the phone, he said, “Bye, my dear,” and hung up and curled on the couch like a cat, with his bare calves swirled underneath him and one of his hands gripping his ankle, so that he looked as languorous as an odalisque. There was an energy to him, however, a fearlessness, an unashamed insistence on intimacy, and though I tried to ask him questions about himself, he always turned the questions back on me, and when I finally got him to talk about the puppets that were the comfort of his lonely boyhood, he looked at me, his gray-blue eyes at once mild and steady, and asked,

“What about you, Tom? Did you have any special friends growing up?”

“Special friends?”

“Yes,” he said. “Maybe a puppet, or a special toy, or maybe just a stuffed animal you loved very much. Did you have a special friend like that, Tom?”

“Yes, Mister Rogers.”

“Did your special friend have a name, Tom?”

“Yes, Mister Rogers. His name was Old Rabbit.”

“Old Rabbit. Oh, and I’ll bet the two of you were together since he was a very young rabbit. Would you like to tell me about Old Rabbit, Tom?”

It’s not unusual that a child with a difficult experience growing up will transform that experience into strength, or even into something resembling a psychological superpower. But it’s very rare to see that sort of strength utilized in such a kind, positive, and focused manner. 

Clay Travis celebrates being bought by the Murdoch Cube:

So how do you get kids, who have tremendous advantages you didn’t have, to work hard and compete in the future? That’s what I’m going to spend the next 10-15 years working on with my boys. And it’s a new concern that I’m grappling with right now.

But after we signed the papers to sell OutKick, I turned to my wife and told her there would never be any kids, grandkids or great-grandkids who had to worry about money during our lifetimes. (They all may blow it after we die.) And that was a pretty incredible moment to have as parents, and hopefully future grandparents and great-grandparents too.

I also told my wife that since she’s going to live to be over 100 years old and I think I’m probably going to die around 51 years old from working too much that she’s going to be a really rich widow for a long time.

On the one hand, you can’t fault an entrepreneur for living the dream. Selling out is the original objective for most startups. On the other hand, if you’re preaching about the importance of independent media, being your own boss, and the evils of the corrupt mainstream media, then how on Earth can you justify selling out to the very people responsible for the problem in the first place? It’s not merely hypocritical, it’s outright wrong.

Anyhow, I thought this graphic below was an interesting comparison. Note that SimilarWeb seriously underestimates VP’s pageviews – which according to Google were over 8 million in January – but I assume it does the same for everyone, so it’s the relative aspect that matters. Fortunately, no media company is interesting in acquiring VP and I have absolutely no interest in taking any tickets. Among other things, I know how fast what appears to be “generational money” can vanish, even during the founder’s lifetime. You may be able to outkick the coverage, but once you take it, you can’t outkick the ticket.

Gandhi’s Law: First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.

Drudge’s Addendum: After which they buy you out and undo everything you accomplished.

The Drudge Report’s drift from its original Internet rebelliousness took another step into mainstream irrelevance with a purge this week of links to pioneering conservative sites The Gateway Pundit, World Net Daily, Free Republic, Daily Wire and Western Journal, and Lucianne.com. Also reportedly gone are links to the late Rush Limbaugh’s site and columnist David Limbaugh.

Infowars and ZeroHedge survived the purge, however one report observed ZeroHedge was delisted for a time this week.

The Drudge Report has gone through a sharp change in recent years leading to speculation about whether reclusive owner-editor Matt Drudge secretly sold the site and relinquished control. Regardless, the site is not what it used to be and has lost substantial traffic.

Last month the Press Gazette reported the Drudge Report lost over forty percent of its traffic year-on-year from February 2020 to February 2021, “Influential conservative news aggregation site the Drudge Report saw its year-on-year visits fall by 41{3549d4179a0cbfd35266a886b325f66920645bb4445f165578a9e086cbc22d08} from 71.4 million to 42.4 million.”

This is why the entrepreneur’s dream of being acquired or going public is so ultimately futile. Because unless you’re creating something purely for the love of filthy lucre, selling out is going to destroy what you created. The more effective and beautiful your creation, the more demand there will be to subvert it, if not entirely invert it.

Joseph Farah of WND saw it coming.

In the early days, WND had the distinguished honor of having more links back on Drudge than any other website. Joseph Farah was the second one. How did I achieve it way back in the ’90s? I simply asked for it. Yes, Drudge and I had a real relationship. That’s how I knew in recent years that it wasn’t Drudge in charge. He sold it – or sold out. 

Fortunately, there is still Infogalactic News for all your daily aggregated news links. 

Not bad, considering that unlike its traffic peers, this is just a blog that doesn’t even purport to be any sort of magazine or corporate endeavor. I’m a little surprised there are more visits here than to The Unz Review, given the higher pageviews there, but Ron features deeper and more varied content, so I suppose that makes sense. Anyhow, Ron is right to observe that while the converged social media companies can take a bite out of our traffic, they can’t stop the greater part of the signal.

Remember, the only thing you can be certain is false is what the mainstream media says is true. AC points out that the curious thing about DMX’s death isn’t that there were what appear to have been false claims made about him overdosing, but rather, the way the false narrative was instantly pushed worldwide.

Family member confirms rapper DMX was given the Covid vaccine days before his lethal heart attack, and say the heart attack that led to his death was not from a drug overdose. Even more amazing to me than the fact they killed him with their Umbrella Corporation vaccine, is the fact the Cabal propaganda machine, that is mainstream media reporters, immediately knew he had died from the vaccine, and knew they had to cover it up, and manufactured the drug overdose cover story (sullying his name in death, in the process, to save their mass experiment on the human race). Otherwise, if the story just came in he died from a heart attack, a clueless reporter would report he died from a heart attack alone, and then they’d have waited for more information. Ask yourself, how did the media know immediately that he was vaccinated, the heart attack was due to it, and they needed a made up cover story? 

It’s getting harder and harder for the media to deny the adverse effects of the not-vaccine, but that doesn’t mean they won’t try.

Spotify is slowly chipping away at Joe Rogan’s podcast library:

Months after random, woke, and easily replaceable Spotify employees threatened to strike until Joe Rogan is censored, the podcast service quietly removed 42 — 42! — “controversial” episodes of The Joe Rogan Experience.

According to Digital Music News, which first noticed the removals, Spotify took down a recent episode with Dave Asprey, the founder of Bulletproof Coffee, who claims he will live to 180. I’m not sure if Asprey will make it to 180, but fans of JRE won’t get to hear his case anymore.

Other recently canceled episodes include interviews with Brian Redban, seven episodes with David Seaman, four episodes with comedian Chris D’Elia, Gavin McInnes, Milo Yiannopoulous, and Eddie Bravo.

Taking the ticket will reliably result in regret of one sort or another. 

For the same reason that book reviews are not books. Ann Althouse turns off the comment section. Instapundit readers do not approve:

“Keep it the way it is” — that is, let comments flow into new posts unmoderated and deal with problems as they come up by deleting the trolls and the spam and so forth. I like the free flow too, but unlike the rest of you, I have to continually tend to the problems, and whenever I step away from the blog to go about my life in the material world, I have background static: I wonder what’s happening in the comments. Do I need to get in there and deal with a troll infestation? There was an open door to anyone in the world to make a mess of a place that I had bound myself to protect and that I had protected for 17 years.

I didn’t try to skew the poll by telling you about the burden it has become for me. I just wanted to see what you thought, and it’s nice to know that the majority of poll-takers were happy with the experience I had worked so hard to create. The behind-the-scenes work for me isn’t something that should concern you. Quite the opposite. The backstage labor isn’t part of the show. 

I was interested to see what people would say in the comments. That’s the up side of comments for me. I like to read what people have to say. I’m used to the sense of seeing the readers and feeling the camaraderie. But somewhere along the way in that thread that is now up over 600 comments — many of which are from me, responding to people — I could see that there is only one answer that gives me what I’m afraid I must take for myself. And that is the end of comments. 

I’ve chosen the least popular option — if you don’t count the “Something else,” which wasn’t any specific option at all. You can email me by clicking here. If you email me, you need to say if you don’t want to be quoted on the blog, because I may select quotes from the email to use in updates to the blog. But the freewheeling chattiness of the comments section is gone. I’m sad to lose it. 

In that long thread yesterday, a lot of people told me that they come to my blog not for me but for the comments. They seemed to think that argued in favor of my continuing to carry the burden of moderating the comments. It cut the other way. I didn’t plan for yesterday to be so momentous, but it was that argument — augmented with the threat that I would lose traffic, the all-important, precious traffic — that pushed me toward decisive action.

Althouse needn’t worry. A simple survey of the ratio of pageviews to comments demonstrates that only a tiny fraction of readers on any blog comment on it, which makes it particularly amusing to hear all the commenters talking about how the reason they go to a site is for the comments. That’s not true. There is a word for a site where people go just to read the comments, and that is Twitter. Except the reality is that they mostly go there to scream into the void, as most tweets are completely ignored by everyone else there.

The number of self-interested comments at Instapundit – nearly 700 – complaining about her decision are downright amusing. They appear to be mostly motivated by their sudden inability to force their Very Important Opinions on those who did not request them.

• The point of blogging is to offer the service of commentary. Blogger’s who turn off comments are forgetting why people came in the first place.
• she discontinued comments because they almost 100{3549d4179a0cbfd35266a886b325f66920645bb4445f165578a9e086cbc22d08} disagree with her. If a site wont let me or others comment, I dont go there. I read sites not only for what the owner says, but to gauge opinion.
• Goodbye Althouse. No comments, no visit. The comments were the only attraction for me.
• Not going to Ann any more. I read her and the comments. Without the comments then there is only her, which is not enough for me to go there.
• Watch as her reader numbers decrease as her “community” becomes less interested in a one-sided interaction info/news resource that became just one more out of many. She could have easily chosen not to respond personally to comments that were always going to include voices that called her out for previous issues or disagreed with her current opinion. She is simply unwilling/unable to take that route, despite the simple fact that she herself knows and acknowledges that many of her readers come for the comments. For the interaction of other voices besides her own. Now she doesn’t have to deal with any criticism that she would ever have to respond to though. And really, that is the point. Is anyone supposed to have empathy for her situation? I do not feel any.
• Without comments you have an echo chamber.
• I went there FOR the comments. Went, past tense.
• Bumner. At her site in particular, the comments were as informative and entertaining as her posts- which tended to be very short. I wonder what the metrics say when a site gives up comments? I know I don’t frequent many sites that don’t allow comments. And my activity notably drops way off on a site that had comments and then drops them.
• The comments were always by far the best part of Althouse’s site. You didn’t miss much by skipping her posts and going straight to the comments. Hasn’t been much reason to go there for awhile, none now.
• Getting rid of comments will disappear readers almost as fast as putting it behind a paywall.

The media is systematically eliminating the ability to comment on their relentless propaganda:

As of Feb. 1, we are removing comments from most of Inquirer.com. Comments will still be available on Sports stories and our Inquirer Live events, and there will be other ways for people to engage with our journalism and our journalists, including our letters section, social media channels and other features that our readers have become accustomed to, as well as new capabilities that we’re developing.

Commenting on Inquirer.com was long ago hijacked by a small group of trolls who traffic in racism, misogyny, and homophobia. This group comprises a tiny fraction of the Inquirer.com audience. But its impact is disproportionate and enduring.

It’s not just Inquirer staff who are disaffected by the comments on many stories. We routinely hear from members of our community that the comments are alienating and detract from the journalism we publish.

Only about 2 percent of Inquirer.com visitors read comments, and an even smaller percentage post them. Most of our readers will not miss the comments.

For more than a decade, we’ve tried to improve the commenting climate on our sites. The goal has been to create a forum for a civil, open exchange of ideas where readers could offer relevant feedback and criticism of our work.

Over the years, we’ve invested in several methods to try and accomplish this. None of it has worked. The comments at the bottom of far too many Inquirer.com stories are toxic, and this has accelerated due to the mounting extremism and election denialism polluting the national discourse. You deserve better than that.

What’s telling about this is that large media organizations like the Inquirer could easily institute a system that would prevent trolling. For example, they could permit only actual subscribers to the physical newspaper to comment, just to suggest one of many possible solutions. Their real objection, of course, was their inability to control the comment narrative.

This isn’t to say that the constant trolling and hasbara isn’t a legitimate problem. It is a problem, though an easily solvable one. But the media has never been interested in anyone actually being able to talk back to them.

Regardless, this won’t affect their traffic at all. Commenters vastly overestimate their own significance, as they tend to make up less than one percent of the readership of any given Internet site. That’s why I find it amusing whenever I receive an email informing me that I should be concerned that some would-be commenter finds it impossible to leave his very important opinions here for our edification.

Piers Morgan understands the importance of not apologizing when you haven’t done anything wrong:

Meghan Markle wrote to ITV’s boss to complain about Piers Morgan hours before the Good Morning Britain co-host quit on the day the show scored its highest ever ratings and beat BBC Breakfast, it was revealed today.  

The Duchess of Sussex insists she was not upset that Mr Morgan said he ‘didn’t believe a word she said’ in her Oprah interview – but was worried about how his comments could affect people attempting to deal with their own mental health problems, an insider told the Press Association.

Standing firm today, Mr Morgan told reporters outside his West London home: ‘If I have to fall on my sword for expressing an honestly held opinion about Meghan Markle and that diatribe of bilge that she came out with in that interview, so be it.’   

On Monday Ms Markle went directly to ITV’s CEO Dame Carolyn McCall, the former boss of the left-wing Guardian newspaper, who signed off on the broadcaster’s £1million deal to show the Oprah interview and said yesterday they were ‘dealing with’ the GMB host.   

Mr Morgan is understood to have been ordered to apologise – but he refused and quit instead saying he had the right to tell viewers his ‘honestly held opinions’ and declaring: ‘Freedom of speech is a hill I’m happy to die on’.  

Good for him. The deceitful, grifting Hellmouth whore simply can’t bear to take any criticism whatsoever, and she has destroyed everything she touched with the exception of Suits, in which she was a tertiary and mostly irrelevant character. If he holds his ground, Morgan will end up coming out of this kerfluffle on top.

It’s rather amusing how the British press is having such a hard time figuring out why she hates the British Royal Family so much.

Meghan hates Princess Kate for the same reason every moderately attractive girl with ambitions of being the popular hot girl hates the beautiful head cheerleader. It’s nothing more than raw, unmitigated envy. Meghan can’t compete with Kate’s position, class, style, or popularity, and her genetics prevent her from ever being considered “an English Rose”, so naturally she hates the other woman with the passion of ten thousand burning hells.