Whatever happened to Rush Limbaugh?

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.

Exploding the myths about free speech

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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Begin the countdown to the genital identification

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 problem with viral videos is that not everyone wants to be famous

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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Support the Pursuance Project Kickstarter project if you can

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.

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The growth of nonprofit news media

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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Pursuance Project initiates a Kickstarter campaign

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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