Tag: media

Apparently lying to all of the people all of the time in exchange for advertising revenue is a suboptimal business strategy:

The struggling US media industry is facing its worst year for job layoffs in a decade as news organizations continue to cut staff and close shop, according to a new survey.

The consultancy Challenger Gray & Christmas reported this week that media companies, which include movies, television, publishing, music, and broadcast and print news, announced plans to cut 15,474 jobs so far this year, of which 11,878 of which were from news organizations.

That is nearly three times more than the 4,062 cuts announced in the media sector in 2017 and the highest total since the economic crisis in 2009.

“Members of the media, especially journalists, have had a tough few years,” said Andrew Challenger, vice president of the Chicago-based firm.

“Many jobs were already in jeopardy due to a business model that tried to meet consumer demand for free news with ad revenue. As media outlets attempted to put news behind pay walls, in many markets, consumers opted not to pay.”

Interesting, is it not, that they can’t find subscribers… because literally no one actually wants or needs what they are offering. When the Devil already has Google and Facebook and Disney, the ability to further deceive people on a regional or local level is of severely declining marginal utility.

Jared Taylor is upset because he talked to CNN and – surprise, surprise – he discovered that they are going to make him look bad on TV. How unutterably stupid do you have to be to voluntarily speak to the media these days? How difficult is it to understand that they are your sworn and dedicated enemy? Of course, the guy – he must be a Boomer – is still convinced that the executive producer who set him up is sincere and professional.

In April, CNN asked me for an interview with one of its hosts, Fareed Zakaria, as part of an hour-long program on “white nationalism.” I was reluctant. Programs of this kind don’t try to understand why people become “white nationalists.” They just dismiss them as “racists,” “haters,” and “white supremacists.”

I reluctantly agreed to the interview, writing to Miss McGuirk: “Against my own nature, I grow cynical. Still, I will permit myself to hope that the word ‘hate’ will not be in the title of your program and that my interview will not be sandwiched between footage of goose-steppers and cross-burners.”

CNN’s investigation of white nationalism will air on June 30, according to a note I received from Miss McGuirk:

The program is scheduled to run this Sunday night at 8PM ET—and Fareed will also feature part of your interview on his program at 10AM and 1PM ET. One caveat—when news breaks, CNN will sometimes postpone the air time. If that occurs, I will let you know the next air time.

Miss McGuirk did not mention that the title of CNN’s hour-long, even-handed, “serious treatment of White Nationalism” is called “State of Hate: The Explosion of White Supremacy.” This somehow undercut her cheerful assurance: “I believe you will feel your views are presented fairly and thoroughly.”

Liza McGuirk has been unfailingly prompt, professional, and polite. I cannot bring myself to doubt her sincerity. She edited the program, and maybe it deserves a different title. I will leave it to others to decide.

People have occasionally asked me what I think of Jared Taylor. Since I never paid him any attention at all, I did not have an answer for them. Now I do. I think he is stupid, naive, and attention-seeking.

What part of “don’t talk to the media” is hard for these idiotic narcissists to understand? This sort of thing is precisely why I don’t do interviews with anyone anymore. I learned my lesson after that Sad Puppies interview with Wired in 2015. No more interviews, period.* Not with CNN, not with YouTubers, not with aspiring journalists in high school, not with journalism majors at university, not with the New York Times, and definitely not with [insert your favorite content creator]. Don’t bother asking me if I will talk to [fill-in-the-blank]. The answer is no.

The only reason I will do the occasional interview is if I happen to know and trust the other individual. But if I want to talk to someone, I’m much more inclined to talk to them on my turf and on my terms, rather than on theirs.

*Although I turn down the vast majority of interview requests I receive, I have made a few exceptions over the last four years. I talked to Amanda Robb of Rolling Stone about the success of Castalia House, which interview she later tried, unsuccessfully, to use in an NPR hit piece about comics. I also talked to Bleeding Cool as part of their retraction of falsely labeling me a “white supremacist”, I talked to Jesse Lee Peterson as part of his fund-raising week, and I occasionally talk to Alex Jones and Owen Benjamin on their shows. Given the way in which Ms Robb subsequently tried to interfere with our crowdfunding at Indiegogo and how the Bleeding Cool editor-in-chief lost his job after the 17,000-word interview ran, the evidence suggests that even these exceptions were unwise.

I’ll be going on with Alex Jones very soon, presumably to discuss Iran. But we’ll see… we always seem to end up off on a tangent that I didn’t see coming.

UPDATE: Yeah, we really didn’t discuss Iran. And I did NOT see those particular tangents coming.

CNN can’t even get people to watch it for free:

The far-left CNN’s ratings death spiral marched into last week as the fake news network lost one-third of its primetime audience and a breathtaking 55 percent of its demo viewers. When compared to this same week last year,  CNN also lost 21 percent of its total day viewers.

How bad is this?

Well, you can’t blame a slow news week because not only was President Trump on an overseas trip, but as you will see, CNN stands completely alone with this massive audience implosion.

By comparison, in primetime, MSNBC and Fox News only lost four percent of their viewers compared to last year and seven and five percent of their total day viewers, respectively.

What’s the answer to this death spiral? No doubt it will be MORE FAKE NEWS!

If you ever wonder why I don’t respond to anyone’s enthusiastic emails volunteering to help, why I absolutely refuse to be drawn into Internet drama concerning anyone on the Left or Right, why I keep my distance from most e-celebs, and why I refuse to place much trust in anyone outside the VFM, this explosive story by Milo Yiannopoulos should help you understand my standoffishness:

If you’ve ever donated to Tommy Robinson, the British free speech and anti-Islamist activist dubbed the “backbone” of Britain by Steve Bannon, there’s a fair chance your money didn’t end up paying for his tour bus or security guards, but was instead diverted to pay for champagne-fueled gay soirées in some of London’s most expensive zip codes. The culprits? A homosexual couple who produced both of Lauren Southern’s documentary films, and who last month released their own movie, You Can’t Watch This, about free speech.

More than a dozen former coworkers, friends and acquaintances say Caolan Robertson and George Llewelyn-John bragged to them about these and other betrayals, thefts, frauds and sabotages, including a secret, years-long collaboration with a George Soros-funded far-Left activist group that endangered the lives of Gavin McInnes, this reporter and Tommy himself. Leaked documents, revealed here for the first time, confirm many of the claims….

Yet it remains true that Tommy Robinson and Lauren Southern both employed Caolan Robertson and George Llewelyn-John knowing they were accused of stealing money from their previous employer, and that Levant had publicly alleged that they had extorted him for ever-larger sums long after they left the company. It was only thanks to their close relationships with Tommy Robinson and Lauren Southern that other conservatives granted the pair access and interviews. Tommy kept the boys around for too long, hoping they would change. But Lauren Southern’s relationship with the pair was especially close and lasted until May 2019. Not only did she live with Robertson and Llewelyn-John in London for a time, but Llewelyn-John wrote the majority of the script for Borderless, as well as Southern’s speech at the European Union.

Southern, famously, writes very little of her own material, and has often embarked on sexual liaisons with men who have helped her with video scripts or notes for her content. While giving speeches about the “trad life,” which typically refers to fidelity in same-race nuclear families, Southern was, in the indelicate words of one major YouTuber, “throwing herself around what seemed like the entire conservative movement in exchange for help with her writing.” We approached four of the men she has been linked to romantically, each of them a prominent Right-wing media figure in a position to help Southern succeed professionally. All four begged not to be named in this story.

 As a general rule, don’t trust anyone who blows up quickly to become the conservative media star du jour. Chances are, if they’re not Approved or Controlled Opposition, they are controllable opposition that comes armed with an easily-triggered self-destruct. And there are a LOT of grifters out there, all across the political spectrum.

Disney, Netflix, and Hulu hate you, your family, your Christian faith, and America. So why support them with your financial resources, asks the Red Petition.

The mainstream media and entertainment companies have come out in full force against conservative values and it’s time we show them that our voice matters. Perhaps they just don’t realize how much the conservative audience is worth?

From large cities, to rural America those who hold to conservative values still have a massive financial influence and it’s time we see just how much their opposition to our core values really costs.

With that we are asking you to stand with us to stand up to the liberal agenda against families, and basic morality.

But this is not just a petition.

Every time someone signs up and fills out our petition, it automatically calculates your value as a customer, and your loss to media companies per year. The latest total loss per year is posted at the top of this page for Netflix, Disney and others to see.

I would sign the petition myself, but then, I’ve never subscribed to any of the three services involved. On a not-unrelated note, it’s interesting to see that DC has officially denied rumors that it is shutting down its DC Universe streaming service, which tends to suggest is only a matter of time before it confirms that it is, in fact, doing so.

Embrace your extremists or you will become the extremist:

WHITE NATIONALISTS ON TWITTER

Though these accounts are easily discoverable on Twitter, publishing their names could bring them more attention. For that reason, HuffPost is only publishing their user IDs, not the @ “handles” most commonly associated with Twitter accounts.

Since we began assembling this list last month, four of the 62 accounts have been suspended. Two were not suspended but appear to have self-deleted to evade oversight. We are leaving these accounts on the list because Twitter permitted the suspended users to repeatedly post extremist content before taking action and seemingly took no action against users that deactivated their accounts.

This list is far from comprehensive. We are excluding prominent anonymous white nationalists, who can have thousands of followers and go through dozens of accounts, and propagandists such as Cernovich and Jack Posobiec, who work with white nationalists. Nor are we including Islamophobes like Mekelburg and Pamela Geller, who do not identify as white nationalists but whose views often align with the ideology. The same holds for mainstream Republican pundits such as Ann Coulter and Tucker Carlson.

In the photos below, many white nationalists wear “Make America Great Again” caps or express support for Trump. During the 2016 election, white nationalists rallied around Trump en masse, accurately viewing the racist authoritarian as a means to seize a greater share of mainstream political power. Twitter was Trump’s medium of choice. So it was the medium of choice for far-right extremists. While their bigotry and propaganda is now echoed by much of the Republican base, several prominent white nationalists have since rejected Trump. He has done too much neoconservative saber-rattling for their taste or failed to deliver on issues like the border wall. Grotesquely, some now shun him for having too many close connections to Jews. But the damage these extremists ― and Twitter (and Trump) ― have done by spreading a message of hate and radicalization will linger for years.

By the Huffington Post standard, every single Founding Father was a white nationalist and right-wing extremist. Now they’re even after hard-core radicals such as Mike Cernovich and Steve Sailer!

Get off Twitter and get off Facebook now. Because the goalposts are going to move until you’re a Nazi too.

And isn’t it informative that not a single neocon is identified?

Megan McArdle is now a Bilderberger:

McArdle, Megan (USA), Columnist, The Washington Post
McCaskill, Claire (USA), Former Senator; Analyst, NBC News
Medina, Fernando (PRT), Mayor of Lisbon
Micklethwait, John (USA), Editor-in-Chief, Bloomberg LP
Minton Beddoes, Zanny (GBR), Editor-in-Chief, The Economist

On the other hand, her presence on the list does tend to demonstrate rather conclusively that the Bilderbergers are genuinely not evil geniuses not-so-secretly running the world.

I don’t know about you, but I’m absolutely shocked that the New York Times didn’t see fit to mention any of my medievalesque fiction in its recent hit piece on Rachel Fulton Brown:

The idea of medieval studies as a haven for white nationalist ideas gained ground when Rachel Fulton Brown, an associate professor of medieval history at the University of Chicago, began feuding with Dorothy Kim, an assistant professor of medieval English literature at Brandeis, after Dr. Kim, writing on Facebook, highlighted an old blog post of Dr. Fulton Brown’s titled “Three Cheers for White Men,” calling it an example of “medievalists upholding white supremacy.”

Many scholars were outraged when Dr. Fulton Brown, in a riposte to Dr. Kim written a few weeks after Charlottesville, tagged the right-wing writer Milo Yiannopoulos, whose website then ran an article about the dispute. Last July Mr. Yiannopoulos followed up with a 16,000-word attack on the field, which assailed Dr. Kim and others as “an angry social justice mob.”

The article caused a furor, as scholars accused colleagues of providing screenshots of private Facebook conversations and surreptitious recordings of conference sessions to Mr. Yiannopoulos.

Since then, Dr. Fulton Brown has become more isolated, as some who initially supported her have distanced themselves after she began citing the far-right writer Vox Day and even, in a recent blog post, entertained the idea that the Christchurch shooting might have been a “false flag operation.” (Dr. Fulton Brown, in an interview, said the depiction of her as a white supremacist or a member of the alt-right is “a misnomer” that “depends on a fantasy about me.”)

But the climate of intense suspicion and division the feud helped foster, particularly on social media, remains.

I am, however, genuinely disappointed they didn’t mention my run-ins with English historical fantasist Mary Beard, much less run any of my well-known memes on the matter.

I did take the liberty of pointing out to Ms Schuessler that with regards to any guilt by association created by citing me, everyone from Nature to The New York Times is similarly guilty, as it is not uncommon for science journals and newspapers to cite my “Religion does not cause war” argument, although they usually attribute it incorrectly to my primary source, The Encyclopedia of Wars.

But the numbers and percentages reported are always the dead giveaway because they only appeared in The Irrational Atheist.

The obvious attack vector it presents is why it is important for every media and technological organization that is to the right of center to reject every business model that is dependent upon advertising.

Poynter is funded by Open Society Foundations, liberal billionaire George Soros’ massive foundations, as well as the Omidyar Network. The two combined for “$1.3 million in grant funding.” Funds were sent to Poynter specifically to establish the International Fact-Checking Network. The ‘UnNews’ list was started to help fact-checking organizations determine what was “unreliable.”

That anti-conservative mindset was apparent throughout the incoherent and inconsistent report. Conservative organizations were included throughout but liberal groups rarely were. The National Review and Heritage were removed from the list but Heritage’s Daily Signal was on it. That combined to create a shameless double-standard. It specifically targeted conservative media watchdog groups and didn’t include liberal ones.

The goal of the report is clear. Poynter is recommending that advertisers “who want to stop funding misinformation” should use its list. It stated that while marketers can create their own “blacklists,” those lists might be incomplete. Golding wrote that, “Advertisers don’t want to support publishers that might tar their brand with hate speech, falsehoods or some kinds of political messaging.”

Poynter has a longstanding history as an anchor in the journalism business. Its board of trustees includes  execs from The New York Times, ESPN, Harvard, Vox, CBS, ABC, and The Washington Post. Poynter is currently working with Facebook and Google for its fact-checking programs.

I have gotten offers to advertise this or that for years. I experimented once with an ad service, but quickly determined that the benefits were not worth the costs. This is why we are very unlikely to accept ads for Unauthorized at any point in the future; relying directly upon our viewers and supporters is much more reliable than trying to play the delicate game of hoping that the companies advertising won’t be converged or inclined to crumble under SJW pressure.

What I find mildly amusing about the whole thing is that the corporate left is so stupid and unable to foresee consequences that they don’t understand how their actions are multiplying the negative effects of advancing technology on the core advertising model that sustained media businesses for more than a century. If you consider that even Google, the dominant force in online advertising, is now seeing its market cap decline because it is methodically chasing away both its content creators and the rightward half of its user base, it should be obvious that all the lesser corporations dependent upon it are suffering even more.