When news broke on Christmas Eve that actor Kevin Spacey was going to be criminally charged with felony indecency assault and battery for sexually assaulting a teenager at a bar, few expected that he would respond with a bizarre three-minute video titled “Let me be Frank” where he channeled his character Frank Underwood from the show House of Cards for what seemed like an passive-aggressive pre-emptive defense.
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The magazine folded last week after 23 years of existence. I have been surprised by the level of mourning that has been expressed in media circles at its death, when the right reaction should be rejoicing. All that one really needs to know to form a judgment as to the quality of this publication was that it was financed by Rupert Murdoch and its founding editor was Bill Kristol and the magazine accurately represented their interests. The fact that Kristol has now been welcomed into some liberal enclaves in the media because of his dislike of Trump is mystifying. Thankfully Jon Schwarz delivers the appropriate epitaph for this nasty and pretentious little rag.
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I had not been aware that Fox News just started a new streaming channel called Fox Nation that features its standard garbage only in a more condensed form. Samantha Bee describes what it consists of. What I found most interesting is that she says that Fox Nation is available during the hours when the supposedly ‘serious’ news programs on Fox News is on and shuts down when the talk shows hosted by the nutcases come on in the evening. In other words, Fox Nation provides an option for those people who think that the afternoon line up on Fox News is not crazy enough.
Fox News has long since abandoned any pretense to being a news organization. It is now an unapologetic propaganda arm of the racist, white nationalist, neo-Nazi, Republican movement in America that has reached its apotheosis in Donald Trump. Long gone are the dog whistle codes to provide a face-saving façade. As Jon Schwarz points out, Fox News has done more to incite domestic political violence than Trump, and he discusses the history of how the network was designed to serve this purpose.
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Amanda Marcotte has an interesting piece where she says that the recent Megyn Kelly episode explodes the common myth that exists among the intelligentsia that the elites are too sophisticated to really buy into racist ideologies and that when they do indulge in race-baiting, it is part of a cynical but conscious political strategy that does not reflect their real views. Such people can often point to ‘friends’ to dispute the characterization. It is this kind of thinking that may have prompted NBC to hire Kelly despite her past history of race-baiting at Fox News where the willingness and ability to do so is practically a job requirement. But even though she was no longer working at Fox, she still went there.
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John McLaughlin was an influntial conservative and used to host a public affairs show on public television that I stopped watching after one episode because the discussions were so puerile and he was so obnoxious, barking out statements to the panel. Reporter Kara Swisher used to work for McLaughlin and she describes what an awful human being he was
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I have posted before about how Facebook has dominated access to the internet is countries like Myanmar and Sri Lanka and this has led to the rapid spread of wild and false rumors that have been exploited by Buddhist extremists in those two countries to launch attacks on their Muslim minorities.
In last Sunday’s segment, John Oliver discusses in detail, using Myanmar as an example, how bad Facebook is and how they let things get way out of hand before they started doing anything. He ends the segment with a far more accurate ad for what Facebook really represents.
If you blinked, you might have missed the media flutter about the New Yorker magazine reversing its decision to invite Stephen Bannon, one-time Svengali to Donald Trump, to be interviewed at its festival. The reversal was caused because editor David Remnick received a lot of criticism and pressure, with other invited celebrities such as Judd Apatow and Jim Carrey saying they would not attend if Bannon was there. Of course, this has resulted in the usual right-wing whining about the ‘intolerant left’, that they are being ‘de-platformed’ and denied the chance to voice their views.
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Many businesses have realized that society is changing and that targeting their advertising campaigns to exclusively young, white, heterosexual, conventionally attractive people is not longer acceptable even as a purely marketing strategy, since the majority of consumers do not fit into that narrow demographic. But advertisements that include more diverse people seem to anger some people who then go on social media to rage in the ugliest ways against the people shown.
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Conservative radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh used to be constantly in the news because of the extreme views he expressed. His radio show is still on the air daily, as far as I know, but we rarely hear about him. The same goes for other conservatives like Ann Coulter and Michelle Malkin who used their ability to take extreme stands and shock people to gain publicity for themselves.
I do not miss them at all but am curious as to why they have become largely marginal figures. It could be due to the operation of a media version of Gresham’s law that “bad money drives out good”. Alex Jones and Donald Trump have cranked up the outrageousness to 11 and thus hogged all the media attention and effectively muffled the voices of others in the marketplace of conservative extremism.
I am sure that there are still ‘dittoheads’ (what Limbaugh fans are called) out there who listen faithfully to his show. But he himself does not seem to be able to gain much attention from outside that world.