Society

CNN enjoyed a rare day-off from being the most despised name in broadcasting on Tuesday. The full brunt of the nation’s enduring anti-media animus got redirected at ABC News for a change following a leaked video from Project Veritas showing anchor Amy Robach on a hot mic. A frustrated Robach revealed that a full report she produced on Jeffrey Epstein’s pedophile ring — implicating Bill Clinton and Prince Andrew — had been ‘quashed’ by the network three years ago.The leak dominated trending topics across social media.

It is difficult to describe what’s going on at digital publisher G/O Media — the parent company of such publications as Deadspin, Gizmodo, Jezebel and the Onion — as anything less than a complete dumpster fire. Acquired from Univision by a private equity firm earlier this year, G/O Media in the past few weeks has seen the shuttering of one property (Splinter), a staff revolt at another (Deadspin) after executives reportedly told the newsroom to stick to its primary focus, sports, and quit branching off into culture and politics and the implosion of a million-dollar ad buy after G/O attempted to hit its promised numbers by running autoplay video ads with the sound on.

Headline-writing can be hard, chaps. Especially when you have to capture the true spirit of a person in the light of their death. But with the demise of Isis founder Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, a truly heinous individual, surely putting his character into black and white is a black-and-white issue. If you're the Washington Post, apparently not, as Spectator contributor Kelly Jane Torrance was one of the first to point out. https://twitter.com/KJTorrance/status/1188467380491640833 'Austere religious scholar at helm of Islamic State dies at 48', the paper crowed, dolefully commemorating the life of the man who inspired hundreds of deaths. Obviously, the headline of his obituary has since been changed.

Silicon Valley can’t catch a break politically these days — from either party. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was grilled extensively by members of Congress this week in a hearing ostensibly about the company’s now-on-shaky-ground Libra cryptocurrency that turned into a broader scrutiny of its ethics and business practices. Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s questioning, predictably, went viral, with even a remix that replaces Zuckerberg with Cousin Greg from HBO’s Succession. But it’s not just Democrats — such as presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren, who’s made Zuckerberg a campaign trail bogeyman — assailing venture-backed billionaires these days. Republicans want a piece of the action, too.

Time to put it away, boys, the colonists are blushing. Gays might be longing for the days when it was only marauding gangs of bachelorettes terrorizing homosexuals in their native habitats. But step into any gay bar today and you’re likely to find multiple disparate clans of shrieking girls haranguing the DJ and pounding fruity cocktails without even sporting Team Bride tiaras and penis straws. It’s one of the ballsier intrusions in this age of tearing down walls and dictating human sameness. And, inevitably, women have crashed the last frontier, gay sex apps, and it’s not going well for anyone. ‘Send me a dick pic and I will cut it off,’ screeched one women on her Grindr profile, a location-based gay men’s hookup app.

On Wednesday, Cockburn stopped by ‘Sovereignty or Submission: Restoring National Identity in the Spirit of Liberty’, hosted by conservative publications American Greatness and The New Criterion at a private club in Washington.There, Cockburn heard a wide-ranging discussion about nation states and governance, featuring Spectator columnists Daniel McCarthy and Roger Kimball, as well as the Hoover Institution’s Victor Davis Hanson, the Heritage Foundation’s David Azerrad, American Greatness editor Chris Buskirk, National Review’s John O’Sullivan, and Hillsdale College and Claremont Institute fellow Michael Anton.Over lunch, Tucker Carlson delivered a keynote speech on what he has learned since Trump’s election.

When he created Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg radically changed the world. In a speech today at Georgetown University, he seemed eager to do so again. It is my fervent hope that he is successful. In sweeping rhetoric liberally sprinkled with historical references, Zuckerberg drew a line in the sand, recognizing that ‘the ability to speak freely has been central in the fight for democracy worldwide.’ He bemoaned the fact that ‘we’re seeing people try to define more speech as dangerous’ and committed himself and Facebook to being forces for good in the fight to preserve freedom of expression.In a world increasingly intolerant of dissent, this is no small promise, and I don’t believe it’s an empty one, either.

In general, there is no point in reading articles you know are bound to make you mad. Life is too short. Read a good book. Enjoy a walk with your loved ones. Learn how to fashion something out of wood. Sometimes, though, an article crosses our path and we are gripped with the despair and anger one might feel watching a drunk driver veer across a crowded street.One such article is GQ editor-in-chief Will Welch's introduction to the magazine’s ‘New Masculinity’ issue. ‘When I found out that I would be the editor-in-chief of GQ,’ Welch writes:‘...most people said stuff like “Amazing!” and “Congrats!” But one particularly perceptive friend reacted in a way that I'll never forget. “Yikes,” she said.

Cockburn just happened to be loitering outside Fox News Channel’s Washington bureau Friday when one of the network’s most-talked-about anchors announced on air that his show was ending its run. Shepard Smith’s abrupt departure flabbergasted just about everyone on the East Coast — including, it turned out, his Fox colleagues.‘A personal moment now,’ the anchor said as he closed the 3 p.m. hour’s Shepard Smith Reporting. ‘I’ve witnessed and reported on the events that shaped our reality. Together with my colleagues, we’ve written a first draft of history and endeavored to deliver it to you while speaking truth to power without fear or favor, in context and with perspective. I am eternally grateful for the opportunity.

It seems like it should be quite the scandal: one co-founder of Facebook chastising another publicly for a business decision that has, allegedly, had major social reverberations. In response to Democratic presidential contender Elizabeth Warren calling out Facebook for loosening its restrictions on political advertising, Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes took to Twitter. ‘I have a feeling that many people in tech will see Warren’s thread implying FB empowers Trump over Warren as unfair,’ Hughes wrote. ‘But Mark [Zuckerberg], by deciding to allow outright lies in political ads to travel on Facebook, is embracing the philosophy behind Trumpism and thereby tipping the scales.

This article is in The Spectator’s inaugural US edition. Subscribe here to get yours. You have no phone service, no television, no GPS for the car and no road atlas because you threw it out in 2009. Planes aren’t flying, and that spinning sound you can’t hear is the sound of space hardware floating out of our control. So dependent have we become on satellites for everything from communications to traffic control that a day without them would mean catastrophe. In the new space race, victory won’t mean landing on the moon or sending a rocket to Mars, but developing a new arsenal to wage and win war in space.