RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/golden-showers-in-the-media/

Did you read the title? Did it strike you as oblique and lurid, reminiscent of the Steele dossier’s salacious allegations? “Good,” Joseph Pulitzer would say. The 19th-century businessman and Democratic Party mover-and-shaker was a pioneer of such news copy. His marquee newspaper, The New York World, was sensational, scandalous, salubrious, and graphically outrageous – filled with colorful exaggerations designed to stimulate an opera of emotion: “yellow journalism.” There’s an oft-repeated line in the media that “sex sells.” Pulitzer and his opposite number, William Randolph Hearst, invented the idea long ago. In doing so, their pages reached circulation exceeding a million people, in the 1890s at that. Yellow journalism begat a gilded lifestyle for Pulitzer, who became fabulously rich.

Now, 111 years since his death, Pulitzer’s legacy of yellow journalism lives on in the ‘Pulitzer Prizes,’ whose 2022 honorees were announced on Monday. With award-winning irony, the endowment of Pulitzer’s wealth – built atop decades of gutter-press reporting – is now used to honor what many call the most prestigious award in journalism, for reportage supposedly of the highest quality. If Pulitzer were alive today, his work would never win the prize now in his name. Nobody would ever dream of it. It’d be like giving the National Enquirer – a celebrity gossip tabloid that funneled Donald Trump’s hush money to Stormy Daniels – the Nobel Prize in Literature. As one British journalist wrote of Pulitzer, he “strove for primacy of the sewer.”

https://amgreatness.com/2022/04/26/msnbc-host-frets-about-musk-taking-over-twitter-in-pathological-display-of-liberal-projection/

A video of MSNBC host Ari Melber on Monday fretting that SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk could use Twitter to “secretly ban” or “turn down the reach” of a major party’s candidate has gone viral, and for good reason. Never has there been a more glaring and pathological example of liberal projection on display—and many conservatives are reacting with stunned disbelief.

The “Rubin Report’s” Dave Rubin tweeted, “This is exactly what the Machine\Left\Democrats have done to their opponents for years, you absolute [clown]@AriMelber. Enjoy the ride into irrelevance . . .”

“He’s merely reciting what Twitter did to conservatives. But he doesn’t realize it or convinced himself it didn’t happen,” wrote radio host Jason Rantz.

Former diplomat Richard Grenell, who served as Donald Trump’s acting director of national intelligence, tweeted: “Breaking: @AriMelber was born yesterday. Happy Belated Birthday, Ari.”

During the Monday evening episode of “The Beat with Ari Melber,” the host perfectly described what Twitter had become before Musk’s takeover—a mechanism for narrative control benefitting one political party.

Melber argued that as the owner of Twitter, Musk does not have to explain himself: “You don’t even have to be transparent. You could secretly ban one party’s candidate, or all of its candidates, all of its nominees!” he warned with wide-eyed horror. “Or you could just secretly turn down the reach of their stuff and turn up the reach of something else and the rest of us might not even find out about it til after the election.”

The takeover of Twitter yesterday by free speech advocate Elon Musk may herald a significant change in global political debate, and provide a major platform for views challenging “woke” opinion.

Predictably many in the liberal establishment – who has enjoyed a near monopoly on mainstream media opinion – are outraged.

The Washington Post – owned by the super-rich Jeff Bezos – was so alarmed that Twitter now may become more balanced that the paper called for Biden to move against Musk in order “to prevent rich people from controlling our channels of communication.”

Below are four articles on Musk’s buyout, from The Wall Street Journal, New York Post and two from The New York Times.

As the Wall Street Journal notes:

Current management is correct that most regular social-media users don’t want a daily bath of Russian bots, jihadist propaganda, noxious harassment and so forth. Ditto for advertisers, who represent about 90% of the company’s revenue. Yet Silicon Valley’s tech lords have decided they want to be arbiters of speech on political topics like climate change and the origins of Covid.

Kyle Smith writes in The New York Post:

This whole thing apparently got started because Musk was willing to spend $44 billion to keep reading the Babylon Bee. It was five days after the right-leaning Bee got suspended from twitter for making a joke about the transgender (male-to-female) individual Rachel Levine, who is the assistant secretary for health and human services, that Musk sent his famous tweet asking, “Do you believe Twitter rigorously adheres to” the principle that “free speech is essential to a functioning democracy?” In a followup post, he noted, with uncharacteristic earnestness, “The consequences of this poll will be important. Please vote carefully.”

You could argue the Bee’s joke about Levine was nasty. So freaking what? The best comedy is nasty. Jokes are supposed to say the unsayable. If your idea of comedy is people saying the sayable, watch Stephen Colbert. Neither Colbert nor anyone else ever gets banned from anything for calling Republicans Nazis, by the way. Would you rather be called a Nazi, or . . . a man?

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/04/22/the-times-tries-to-rescue-bidens-american-rescue-plan-and-fails/

When not trying desperately to damage Republicans by keeping the Jan. 6 riot on the front page, the New York Times bravely does public relations work for the Biden administration. The latest case in point is the pathetic attempt by the “paper of record” to defend the misguided, unjustified, inflation-fueling $2 trillion “American Rescue Plan.”

The article — “If Biden’s Plan Is Like a ‘New Deal,’ Why Don’t Voters Care?” — claims that Joe Biden’s big problem right now is that voters don’t know how much they’re benefiting from his March 2021 “rescue” plan.

But despite a valiant attempt to put lipstick on a pig, the report ends up making the case for how badly voters got hoodwinked.

The story focuses on the $350 billion the bill dumped on state and local governments and begins by telling the story of how Richmond, Va., plans to spend tens of millions in “rescue” funds to upgrade a community center and how excited the mayor is about this project.

“The city,” reporter Alexander Burns writes, “intends to build it in the next few years using $20 million from the American Rescue Plan.”

Wait. In the next few years?

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/cnn-grand-opening-grand-closing/

Many conservatives will be dancing on the grave of CNN+, and there’s no getting around the fact that CNN just didn’t put out a sufficiently appealing slate of programming to get enough people to shell out $59.99 per year. But as Discovery’s announcement implied, there was never much reason to pay an additional fee just to get additional CNN programming, when regular CNN was available on basic cable, and it gave you more or less the same thing.

Discovery streaming head J. B. Perrette said that, “In a complex streaming market, consumers want simplicity and an all-in service which provides a better experience and more value than stand-alone offerings, and, for the company, a more sustainable business model to drive our future investments in great journalism and storytelling.”

No, Chris Wallace is not popular enough, but it’s not clear that any news anchor or collection of hosts would get a sufficient number of people shelling out to make a streaming news network sustainable. (Fox Nation comes closest, in part because it has made a subscription to it feel like a tribal symbol — a statement about who you are and what you value. If someone tells you they subscribe to Fox Nation, you probably know how they feel about Donald Trump, Joe Biden, Joe Rogan, Elon Musk, Black Lives Matter, Blue Lives Matter, and Colin Kaepernick.)

In the end, CNN+ didn’t offer anything sufficiently unique. As I noted earlier this month, this streaming service didn’t have a programming equivalent of The Mandalorian or Stranger Things or Bridgerton — something really popular that couldn’t be seen anywhere else. It is hard to imagine what CNN could offer that would be akin to that. Maybe the work of Clarissa Ward in Afghanistan and Ukraine over the past year is the most compelling, jaw-dropping, must-watch television journalism that CNN has done in a while. But I’m still not sure people would subscribe to a separate streaming service just to watch it.

News is unlikely to ever sustain a streaming service, by itself. But it is likely that some form of CNN will appear on any streaming service that emerges from the merger of HBO Max and Discovery+.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/msnbcs-nicolle-wallace-compares-desantis-youngkin-parental-choice-bills-to-russian-war-tactics/

MSNBC host Nicolle Wallace, reacting to the fury in Florida over the recently codified Parental Rights in Education bill prohibiting sexuality instruction for kindergartners through third graders, compared such legislation to “Russian war tactics” of “dehumanization.”

Referring to the Republican governors who’ve spearheaded these measures, namely Glenn Youngkin and Ron DeSantis, Wallace lamented how effective their rhetoric and “politics of ‘parental choice’,” she said using scare quotes, have been at winning the ideological issue.

“The truth is dehumanization as a tactic for politics is from war. Russians get the soldiers to rape children by dehumanizing them,” she said.

Some conservatives have resorted to labeling those who oppose the Florida law, which empowers parents to decide when and how to teach their children about sexual orientation and gender identity, as “groomers,” an allegation of priming kids for pedophilia or sexual abuse. While the phrase has packed a lot of punch and sent many progressive proponents of sexualized K-12 curricula retreating, some conservatives argue that it’s counterproductive to the debate.

“It’s being deployed in our politics, and people like you and I sometimes lose the plot and admire its effectiveness, not its substance, but even the analysis of these tactics loses sight of what this speech brings us back to which is that dehumanization has a cost right now,” Wallace added.

“Kids will die,” she said, harkening back to Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg’s claim from February that Florida’s new law, dubbed ‘Don’t Say Gay’ by progressives,” will drive up LGBT youth suicides.