Netflix has abruptly cancelled the show The Break with Michelle Wolf after just 10 episodes, while it was on a brief hiatus. I had watched all of the shows and am puzzled by the cancellation. Netflix has not given its reasons for the decision and since it keeps its audience view numbers private, it is hard to know what triggered this.
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Cory Doctorow has a good essay where he critiques the recent alarms sounded by conservatives (triggered by the banning of Alex Jones and his Infowars from some social media platforms) that the left is dominating the digital media world. These conservatives are arguing that America always used to be a country where people would ‘fight to the death’ to defend the right of those with opposing views to express themselves, and that that ethos is now disappearing. Doctorow says that this rosy view of the past is rubbish.
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Kimberly Guilfoyle is a Fox News personality who has abruptly left the network. She has also revealed that she is dating Donald Trump’s son Don Jr. who is in the process of divorcing his wife. Although she implied that she was leaving voluntarily because of the relationship and that she might be working for the White House in some capacity, there are now reports that she was forced out for misconduct.
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The ubiquity of cameras and social media has resulted in ordinary people being able to record events in their surroundings and then posting them online. Occasionally the videos go viral and gain wide viewership, resulting in those appearing in them to achieve a temporary fame. Sometimes the people want the fame and go to great lengths to get it but at other times they may not. This raises the issue of the extent to which it is justified to post the actions of people who just happen to be in public.
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The Kickstarter project deadline for meeting the goal is just three days away. If you can, please consider donating to it. You can read about the project and donate here.
With the open society under threat, the time has come to fulfill the promise of the Internet by launching an entirely new way for citizens to work together: securely, intuitively, and effectively. The time has come to build Pursuance.
The traditional news media, faced with filling in every single moment with content that will draw in viewers that can be sold to advertisers, has descended into the pattern that we see, of talking heads who are selected because it is already known what they will say and can be counted on to argue with each other without adding much useful knowledge. In this drive fro phony drama and confrontations, resources for real investigative reporting that requires a lot of digging and analysis, get squeezed out as being too expensive. As Seymour Hersh says in his book Reporter, the worst words a reporter can say are “I think”. But that is the most common phrase in these shows as people speculate about things they don’t know or try to predict the future.
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I have mentioned before that I am involved with the Pursuance Project and serving on its Board of Directors. It is the brainchild of activist journalist Barrett Brown to try and get better information out in this age when we are swamped with bad news, fake news, and mostly trivial news, by better enabling committed people who seek common goals to find and work with each other and avoiding wasted or duplicated effort. The project is advanced enough along that a Kickstarter project has just been launched and the following press release explains what the project seeks to do.
The project is not easy to understand at first but this article in the Observer does a pretty good job.
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Watch this ad made for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez who is challenging long time New York Democratic incumbent congressman Joe Crowley in the June 26th primary.
The ABC television network has canceled the show Roseanne because its star Roseanne Barr had sent out insulting and racist tweets about Valerie Jarrett, a close advisor to Barack Obama when he was president, one of which said “Muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes had a baby=vj.”.
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