Taibbi: The News Media Is Destroying Itself

Fair enough.

Let me re-read. I read it late last night, probably wasn’t really thinking much.

I’m just hyper-sensitive to partisanship these days, that’s all.

 

Taibbi, lest we forget, is a piece of shit person and an attention whore. If anyone is abusing him, good for them. But they're not. It's just the standard "ooh, right wingers are the real victims in our society" bullshit that he knows will get him some of the notice he craves more than oxygen. Remind you of anyone?

 

Generalizations without specifics in many cases.

 

Nice juxtaposition there.

 

You are responding to an imaginary column. Based on this post, I think you maybe didn't read the piece.

 

He offered many specifics. The whole beginning of the column is a specific.

 

There is a lot right in the piece. In his usual smarmy condescending way, he makes a lot of good points. (Other than his fellating of Glenn Greenwald, who is exactly the person Joan Walsh describes him as.) But of course Taibbi suffers from the same willful blind spot as Alma. A critique of what’s happening on the right “doesn’t interest” them, so all their attention with what ails modern media is focused on the left, particularly the liberal hysteria of Twitter and identity politics. So while these are issues, they are maybe 10 percent of the problem with media, which leaves 90 percent (the corporate ass kissing; the deference to authority; the obsession with normalizing the grotesque behavior on the right; the billion dollar propaganda machine actively trying to device its audience to maintain the wealth and power of its morally bankrupt owner) unaddressed here.

Critiques of the media that focus on Twitter and its left-center, highly-educated majority of users who view it as a performative circle jerk are interesting and certainly necessary, but they represent such a tiny fraction of what’s actually wrong with media, it’s hilarious to pretend otherwise.

 

Ironically, this cancel-culture sentiment could also have come from a Hannity or a Carlson. It's Fox News' political and class agenda that turn it into a con and undermine its truth.

 

DD, first, good to see you again. I lost track of you.

Could you elaborate on the 90%?

One huge concern that I have is the intelligence of the American public. And the media can have a huge influence on that.

With the creation of 24 hour news shows on TV, I feel (and perhaps I’m wrong) that the public is inundated with more opinion instead of facts.

And this has been going on for so long now (30 years?), I fear a frightening large percentage of the American people can’t distinguish fact from opinion anymore.

And that’s what scares me. The American education system can only do so much to help increase IQ. Most people are out of school by 18 or 22, and where do a lot of people educate themselves after they are no longer in school?

A major source of information is of course the media.

And I fear the national IQ is getting lower and lower. Highly opinionated but not well armed with facts, and not well skilled to differentiate between the two.

And unfortunately not hungry enough to get to the bottom line of what are the facts.

We appear to be swirling around in way too much opinion.

And, I’ve tried to generalize my comments above, but this partially explains the quality of the voting public, a paucity of good candidates for offices, and how morons get elected.

Thoughts?

Have a great weekend everyone.
VB

 

It was an entertaining read, and his examination of the Lee Fang situation is a good example that people on both sides of the political divide not only don't understand good journalism, they don't READ anything longer than a tweet. To the extent he's arguing that we, as a country, are losing the ability to read anything substantive and/or think critically, he's 100 percent correct.

As others noted, though, he failed to touch on the right-wing thought police and political orthodoxy that has contributed just as much to the problem. And other than a passing reference to the continuous slashing of media jobs, he ignores the economic realities that are doing much more to destroy newspapers/media than leftist "thought police."

 

Taibbi is the drunk guy at the company party who hits on your girlfriend, tests linguistic oddities because Hemingway once did, files late because no one will make him do otherwise.

Here you've got a guy who's been writing about Washington and our political culture for years and he's just now getting around to some of these topics.