Media

Tuesday

Aidan McLaughlin

Is Courier Newsroom really fighting fake news?

"We are not the Fox News of the left,” says Tara McGowan. “We are legitimate journalism.” We are sitting in the lobby bar of the Edition Hotel in Manhattan as McGowan tells me about Courier, the network of local-news outlets she founded in 2019 after a successful career in Democratic politics. Courier, in McGowan’s telling, “is a network of pro-democracy newsrooms across the country that reach passive news consumers where they are with good factual local news and reporting.” McGowan rejects allegations that Courier is a partisan political operation masquerading as a news outlet. Courier isn’t pro-Democratic Party, she says. It’s “pro-democracy.

courier

Friday

Charles Moore

Nikki Haley is respectable. Will she find that inhibiting?

In June 2022, I interviewed Nikki Haley on stage for JW3, a Jewish organization in north London. She was personable, clear, well-briefed and pleasingly normal, with the interesting exception of her Sikh background growing up in small-town South Carolina (she later became a Christian by conversion). Her conservatism seemed strongly felt, coherent and not extreme. I also liked her way — now highly unusual in US politics — of addressing foreign policy and setting it in the context of her general political beliefs. At that time, she was mulling the presidential bid she launched the following year. After Iowa, she remains in the race, but only just. Why would such a presentable and decent person not be preferred to Donald Trump?

Haley

Monday

Dave Seminara

Kihnu, Estonia’s imaginary isle of women

Who could resist the opportunity to visit a women’s island? Four years ago, I read an article in the New York Times travel section about an Estonian island called Kihnu, which the Times dubbed an “Isle of Women.” Its subhead asked “What would life be like without men?” and I wanted to find out, making a mental note to visit this peculiar island — “run by women” — someday, and my opportunity came last summer as part of a trip with my wife, Jen, and our teenage sons to Finland and the Baltic countries. But Kihnu, we discovered, isn’t a women’s island, or anything close to it. Before our trip, I reread the Times piece plus similar ones before combing YouTube for Kihnu videos.

kihnu

Tuesday

Bridget Phetasy

The year’s horrors have left me speechless

I’ve started and stopped three articles, written 1,500 words and hated every single one. This column was due days ago and I’ve been stuck. Completely blocked. I’m not sure if it’s one thing or many things — and sometimes the only way through writer’s block is to sit down and write all the jumbled, disconnected thoughts that are jamming me up. So I will start this piece and end this year with an apology to my editor and to you, dear reader. There is the thought that stands in the way of every other thought — and because I refuse to put horrifically graphic images in your head while you sip your coffee, I’ll let you fill in the blanks yourself. But the thought goes something like: “Hamas did X and Y and Z and I’m supposed to write or care about anything else?

horrors
right side broadcasting network
Aidan McLaughlin

A look inside Right Side Broadcasting Network

On a summer afternoon in Erie, Pennsylvania, Right Side Broadcasting Network host Matthew Alvarez was doing what the outlet does best: interviewing diehard supporters of former president Donald Trump before one of his raucous rallies, the WWE-style events that defined his 2016 sprint to the White House and continued after his 2020 election loss. At one point during his cheery canvass of the crowd, Alvarez pointed his microphone at a stocky man wearing a Trump 2024 baseball cap and a “Thin Blue Line” T-shirt. “Joe Biden is a disgrace to this country,” the man said in a thick drawl. “And so are all the left and the RINOs, the globalists, every one of ’em! Kill ’em all! Kill ’em all!” “I agree with you on that,” Alvarez cautiously replied.

premier league
Jack Holmes

Why America’s top TV networks are banking on English soccer

America’s soccer supernova is always just around the next corner, but Rebecca Lowe, who anchors NBC’s coverage of the Premier League in the United States, recalls a few corners already turned. “When I stood in LA in the rain at four in the morning and there were 5,000 people lining up to come in and join us,” she said, referencing one of NBC’s “FanFest” watch parties in 2021, “I was like, ‘Oh yeah, this has not only made it, but this is not going anywhere. This is only getting bigger.’ And there are not many things in this country that can get bigger.” It sure seems like there are more red-blooded Americans patrolling our streets in Arsenal and Liverpool shirts these days.

Friday

Roger Kimball

The changing season brings a change in politics

If you are paying attention, you know that nature is full of inklings and adumbrations. I am writing in New England in mid-September — and it was just about a week ago that a subtle change in the atmosphere proclaimed the advent of autumn. It was not just that the weather listed cooler; it was also that the entire sensory gestalt shifted. The world suddenly bristled with different smells and colors and sounds. Browns and yellows and reds were edging out summer greens in the leaves. The roads were carpeted with acorns. You knew that the world was confronting you with different prospects and expectations. Something similar happens in the world of politics. For a long time, a certain narrative reigns.

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free speech
Melanie Notkin

The rise of the underground free speech groups

Robin McDuff still lives in the same California town where she and other feminists formed a community back in the 1970s, during the heyday of the women’s movement. But by the end of the decade, McDuff had already begun to drift away from feminist orthodoxies. She’d been working in the anti-rape movement where victims said they wanted the man who assaulted them to understand the pain they caused, apologize and learn why never to do it again. They didn’t want them in jail. But most of McDuff’s feminist peers were fixated solely on incarceration as justice. “These women had no interest in considering any nuance of a case,” McDuff, now sixty-nine and retired, told me. “Nuance and feminism have never done well together.

Thursday

John Mac Ghlionn

Hasan Minhaj’s race-filled fantasies

With all the focus on Russell Brand, it’s easy to forget that another comedian made headlines — for all the wrong reasons — last week. Two days before the world came crashing down on Brand, the New Yorker’s Clare Malone wrote a devastating piece on Hasan Minhaj.  Minhaj, according to the brilliant expose, has a history of fabricating narratives. What’s particularly disturbing is that his tall tales all appear to have a unifying theme: race. More specifically, racism directed towards him, an Asian American and Muslim American, and his loved ones. Much of the New Yorker piece focuses on Minhaj’s 2022 Netflix standup special, The King’s Jester, which was marketed as a biographical account of his formative years.

Wednesday

Ethan Strauss

Why the New York Times sports section failed

The New York Times sports section finally, officially shuttered, making way for my old employers, the Athletic, to operate under the NYT aegis. That all makes sense because the New York Times bought the Athletic specifically to fill its sports void. If you read the (surprisingly) vast amount of media eulogies to the New York Times sports section, though, you’d hardly get a sense that there was any void to fill. Instead, what happened is depicted as a lamentable tragedy, possibly born out of small-minded corporate callousness. It’s the result of the NYT looking to undermine its unionized “guild” writers. The New York Times sports section, like so many defunct media properties, was superb, flawless even. Except, that’s not entirely what’s going on.

vaccine

Wednesday

David Weigel

Taylor Lorenz is optimistic about the internet

“People,” wrote Dwight Macdonald, “feel a need to be related to other people.” Not a happy sentiment, not intentionally. This was how mass culture — “masscult,” he called it — created diversion out of artless entertainment. His example was John Barrymore, an icon of a great acting dynasty whose alcoholic decline brought out raucous crowds, “because it showed them he was no better than they were.” Macdonald’s old pessimism came back to me toward the end of Extremely Online, which is more than a history of the internet creator “revolution.” Taylor Lorenz, a Washington Post columnist with a vivid online life, is its John Reed, chronicling the influencers’ victories while cheering them on.

taylor lorenz

Friday

Peter Wood

Disinfo-nation: the new censorship is here to stay

Lying is the great American pastime. We’ve been at it ever since some of the Pilgrim fathers shined on some of the folks back home with tales of the Eden they had found on the barren coast of Massachusetts: For fish and fowl, we have great abundance; fresh cod in the summer is but coarse meat with us; our bay is full of lobsters all the summer and affordeth variety of other fish; in September we can take a hogshead of eels in a night, with small labor, and can dig them out of their beds all the winter; we have mussels; and ... As the American Socrates, P.T. Barnum, may once have said, “There’s a sucker born every minute.” Or he may have not said. The Fort Wayne Weekly Sentinel in 1894 said he said it, but P.T. denied it.

disinformation

Monday

David Christopher Kaufman

What’s the media’s problem with black masculinity?

No experience in my many decades on this planet felt more degrading than being repeatedly referred to as “intimidating” by my former boss. As far as I know, the affluent, influential white women that I used to work with at Condé Nast lost their right to refer to their black male employees in such racially laden language long before the death of George Floyd. Especially when I was merely asking my (mostly white and female) underlings to simply do their jobs. I’m reminded of this charge every time I see a black man done up like a woman — which is seemingly all the time these days. Take Alex Newell and J. Harrison Ghee, who were awarded Best Actor statues at the Tony Awards in June, and both accepted them clad in colorful gowns and full makeup.

black masculinity

Sunday

Spectator Editorial

How will the decline of cable news affect politics?

The internet has transformed presidential campaigns. Barack Obama micro-targeted his way to victory in 2008. Donald Trump tweeted his way into the conversation in 2016. In 2020, Joe Biden Zoomed his way to the White House. And yet, for all the ways in which communications technology has upended how we do politics, some things haven’t changed all that much. The race for the White House remains a made-for-TV affair: from debates to campaign stops, events are planned with the television viewer in mind. Even in the digital age, the power of television has endured. But as the country gears up for 2024, could that be about to change? News channel ratings have plummeted, households are ditching cable packages and viewers’ trust in the networks is at rock bottom.

news
cable news
Aidan McLaughlin

Can the 2024 election save cable news?

No doubt Rupert Murdoch breathed a sigh of relief when Florida governor Ron DeSantis’s decision to launch his presidential campaign on Twitter proved disastrous. The announcement, hosted by Elon Musk, was derailed by technical glitches, leading to twenty minutes of awkward silences interrupted by occasional hot-mic moments of frustration. Even after Musk and his team at Twitter got things going, the highly anticipated event drew a meager audience of just 300,000 live listeners. The second stop of the DeSantis campaign, immediately afterward, was at Fox News, for an interview watched by an average of 2 million viewers.

Wednesday

Oliver Wiseman

Welcome to the media wars

Is Andrew Breitbart’s over-quoted theory that “politics is downstream from culture” really true? Today, with media machinations stealing prime newspaper homepage real estate from presidential campaign launches, it feels more like politics is downstream from media. Over the last twenty-four hours, Chris Licht was fired at CNN, just a year and a half after he was appointed, and Tucker Carlson launched his new show on Twitter. I get the impression people are hungrier for details about these media stories than, say, the ins and outs of Mike Pence’s presidential announcement.  That’s not because America is suddenly more interested in media than politics, but because the line between the two is more blurred than ever.

Sunday

Ann Coulter

Why won’t conservatives ask Trump tough questions?

The US economy is faltering, crime is through the roof, the border is a disaster, everyone hates the vice president and Democrats are not backing off one inch on transgenderism. Only one Republican could lose to President Joe Biden next year. But Democrats’ trump card is, well, Trump. Infallible two-step Biden re-election plan. Step one: trick Republicans into nominating Trump. Step two: that’s about it. I still don’t think Trump will be the nominee, but never underestimate Republicans’ ability to embrace the worst possible thing, especially with conservative media wildly cheerleading the worst possible thing.

trump
media
Ben Domenech

They wanted to break the internet. It broke them

Their declared intention was to break the internet. In November 2014, the winter issue of Paper magazine, a stalwart of the New York arts and music scene for thirty years, featured an image immediately declared iconic by social media: Kim Kardashian, her neck wrapped in pearls, popping a Champagne cork and catching the bubbly white stream that jets over her head in the coupe glass propped on her prominent derrière. And that was just the cover — the internet quickly shared photographer Jean-Paul Goude’s more pornographic images of an oiled-up Kardashian stripping out of her black evening gown to show off her famous buttocks, before going full frontal with a slightly unnerving smile. The gambit worked to the tune of 16 million views for Paper in a single week.

Wednesday

Peter Van Buren

The Durham report unmasks the Deep State

This week’s Durham report is as close as we’ll get in our lifetimes to proof that the Deep State, working in concert with the mainstream media, exists.  The final 306-page report was written by former US attorney John Durham, who was chosen in the aftermath of the Mueller report to examine the FBI probe known as “Operation Crossfire Hurricane.” Durham in this final report provides the only comprehensive review of what came to be called “Russiagate” and shows how close our democracy came to failing at the hands of the Deep State.  We now know the FBI took disinformation produced by the Russians and used that to justify spying on the Trump campaign.

john durham

Monday

Cockburn

Lemon out of juice: Don done at CNN

Don Lemon announced that he had been officially squeezed out of CNN earlier today. “I was informed this morning by my agent that I have been terminated by CNN. I am stunned,” the former anchor and morning show host tweeted. “After seventeen years at CNN I would have thought that someone in management would have the decency to tell me directly. At no time was I ever given any indication that I would not be able to continue to do the work I have loved at the network. It is clear that there are some larger issues at play. With that said, I want to thank my colleagues and the many teams I have worked with for an incredible run. They are the most talented journalists in the business, and I wish them all the best.” CNN's PR wing later disputed Lemon’s claims.

don lemon cnn