Category Archives: Journalism

Celebrity Journos Green Over GloZell Green

Barack Obama, Celebrity, Ethics, Journalism, Media, Morality

Lamestream media is furious that President Barack Obama has granted interviews not to their own—to the likes of fancy pants Megyn Kelly, Don Lemon, Anderson Cooper or Rachel Mad Cow. Oh no. Knowing full-well that he presides over an Idiocracy—how else did he get elected?—the president has always made an effort to get in touch with idiots. (Interviewer Hank Green is not an idiot.) This time, it’s three YouTube “content creators,” as people who suction their faces and body parts to an internet camera are known.

I’m enjoying the whining of Kelly and company about Obama doing damage to the dignity of The Office. What dignity??!!

Other than their airs and graces, celebrity journos are not that different from the freaks of YouTube. (The Green kid is an exception; he seems to be doing a good job of it.) They’re narcissists, who live not for the truth, but for a seat at the Annual White House Sycophant’s Supper, or alongside the smarmy, unfunny Jon Stewart, or next to the vaginas of The View.

Bill O’Reilly or Bethany Mota: The number of hits, the ratings and the invitations; that’s what this lot lives for.

The new journalism:

Hank Green — One of the main voices in YouTube’s vibrant education community, Hank and his brother John produce content on a variety of topics, ranging from science to the environment to current events.
Bethany Mota — An iconic young millenial creator, Bethany connects with her subscribers around life as a young woman growing up in America.
GloZell Green — The most-followed African American woman on YouTube, GloZell engages her audience in conversations about topics such as music, popular culture, and current events.

On Satire

Free Speech, Journalism

Satire—caricatures included—is a highly civilized and refined way of exposing ‘folly, vice, or stupidity,’ to follow the dictionary. The dictionary defines satire as ‘a literary work in which human vice or folly is attacked through irony, derision, or wit.’ Writers, this one included, have instantiated in writing the questions the cartoons of the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo posed in pictures.

With a cartoon, a subset of satire, ‘the subject’s distinctive features or peculiarities are deliberately exaggerated to produce a comic or grotesque effect,’ so as to bring to the fore the illustrator’s perspective. The Charlie Hebdo satirical spoofing, like the 12 Jyllands-Posten cartoons before it, did not in the least exaggerate the connection between the example the prophet set, his teachings, including the exhortation to Jihad, and the violence that convulses a critical mass of Muslims.

Beavis (Obama) & Butthead (Steve Inskeep) Do National Public Radio (NPR)

Barack Obama, Critique, Journalism, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Media

Steve Inskeep of National Public Radio “interviewed” President Obama in the Oval Office. Inskeep’s interview is really a non-probing, lighthearted quiz that can be paraphrased as follows:

* So glad you were able to pass two major executive actions. Did the fact that elections had just passed liberate you to perform so liberating a service?

* I hope you continue to do the things you want to do, Mr. president. I’m with you, Bro.

* Pretend the following is a question, when in fact it is but a way for me to “cleverly” show you the degree to which I’m down with you. Here goes: Bloody Congress! How do you, Great Leader, intend to get those rube-hicks on board with your enlightened executive orders?

* Republicans are nativists. I’m so smart. We both are. (The two laugh like Beavis and Butthead.)

* Finally, and before I suggest my own flattering explanation of how wickedly smart your foreign policy is—outwitting enemies with empathy—I’m going to get really tough and give you a chance to convince me America has not been further divided racially by yourself.

* Have I told you how awesome you are for bringing the price of oil down? Consider it said.

Each and every question posed by Steve Inskeep suggests its own, most-flattering reply.

Repulsive.

Read with vomit bag handy.

The Fourth Estate (Media) Moving Country Into Third Dimension

Hollywood, Journalism, Media, Neoconservatism, Objectivism, Technology

Being part of major US media—the Fourth Estate—means moving into a Third Dimension of your own making and taking the country with you. What was it that the Bush neoconservative Karl Rove once asserted at the heights of that regime’s manipulation of reality?

“We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

As was suggested over these pixelated pages, the “Hollywood hack hysteria” was a media event, not a journalistic investigation, as all news reporting should be. Accordingly, “the moron media shared speculations but not much credible evidence as to the source of the hack.”

It was left to an unconventional citizen-journalist-cum-blogger using conventional journalistic methods to uncover Jonathan Gruber’s utterances. Ditto the Sony hack attack. A blog called North Korea Tech by Martyn Williams did the digging. It

details inconsistencies in the Sony attack and past attacks by North Korea.
“Computers at Sony displayed a message threatening the release of internal documents if undisclosed demands were not met. North Korean hackers have never made such public demands,” Williams writes.
He also notes that little is known about Guardians of Peace, the group that claimed responsibility for the attack. No group has claimed credit in past North Korean hacks.
Williams said that the hackers stole sensitive information about movie stars, staff, and Sony management. In an apparently personal attack, the hackers posted a message on the Twitter accounts of Sony employees. This gives credence to the growing theory that the attack was an inside job.
Tommy Stiansen, the chief technology officer for Norse, a hacker-tracking company, told Bloomberg that he plans to approach the FBI and Mandiant, the private company researching the attack, with information that implicates a disgruntled Sony employee in Japan in the attack.

MORE.