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Elon Conquers The Twitterverse Our chattering class claims Musk is a supervillain. The truth is simpler: He wants free speech. They don’t. Mike Solana

https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/elon-conquers-the-twitterverse?token

Three weeks ago, a regulatory filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission revealed that Elon Musk, billionaire Shitposting God of Silicon Valley, had acquired over 9% of Twitter, making him the company’s largest shareholder and setting in motion a chain of events that led, ultimately, to yesterday’s outright purchase of the now $44 billion company. In a press release, Elon shared his goals for the platform, which echoed the goals he’s shared all month: 

“Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated. I also want to make Twitter better than ever by enhancing the product with new features, making the algorithms open source to increase trust, defeating the spam bots, and authenticating all humans.”

“Freedom,” “open source technology,” and “man, I really hate these spam bots.” The media’s reaction to these ambitions was instant and apoplectic. They were akin, we were told, to literal Nazism. 

Welcome to the Clown World. Boy, do we have ground to cover. 

The social internet is always a Dalí painting—surreal and horrifying and beautiful. A million crazy people screaming over nonsense, with funny jokes or anecdotes mixed in, fortune cookie observations, legitimate political happenings, and “words are violence” hall monitors from The Washington Post waging daily information war on trolls and Russian bots and okay actually just a lot of regular people with whom they disagree, or simply don’t like. 

But even by the gutter standards we’ve come to accept from media, this has been a month for the books.

TOM GROSS: THE MEDIA’S TAKE ON ELON MUSK AND TWITTER

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?

The Times Tries To Rescue Biden’s ‘American Rescue Plan’ — And Fails

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?

CNN+: Grand Opening, Grand Closing By Jim Geraghty

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+.

MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace Compares DeSantis, Youngkin Parental Choice Bills to ‘Russian War Tactics’By Caroline Downey

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.

The Regime Media’s Quandary: By Exposing Joe Biden They Exonerate Donald Trump By Steve McCann

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/04/the_regime_medias_quandary_by_exposing_joe_biden_they_exonerate_donald_trump.html

The regime media (the amalgamation of the legacy media, elitist opinion writers, and the internet troika: Google/Facebook/Twitter) finds itself in a quandary of its own making.  As the nation descends into recession and societal turmoil, the candidate for whom they prostituted themselves, Joe Biden, reveals on a daily basis that he is not mentally or physically capable of being President.  Further, it has become increasingly more difficult to continuously obfuscate not only the ongoing revelations in Hunter Biden’s laptop but Joe’s life-long history of corruption and mendacity. 

By comparison, for four years, despite a lack of evidence coupled with numerous exculpatory investigations, this same cabal incessantly promoted the fictitious narrative that Donald Trump was a racist, a xenophobe, a demagogue, and the most corrupt person to ever serve as president of the United States. 

Accordingly, the regime media proclaimed that was in the nation’s vital interest to replace Trump with the “decent, honest, and honorable” Joe Biden.  As he has the “experience and character” to rescue the nation and restore “decency and honor” in the White House.

The quandary: how does the regime media avoid the exposure of Joe Biden’s lifelong corruption and failures without the public’s inevitable comparison of the two men, their families, and their accomplishments?   A comparison that would result in the effective exoneration and rehabilitation of Donald Trump, whom they relentlessly accused of being the most unscrupulous person on earth.  A cudgel they could no longer use if he decides to run for the presidency in 2024.

The CNN+ Catastrophe Who could possibly have seen this one coming? Charles C. W. Cooke

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/04/the-cnn-catastrophe/

The funny thing about markets is that they need both supply and demand to work. CNN+, America’s newest streaming service, certainly has the supply part down. It has been heralded by a multi-million-dollar marketing campaign and pushed relentlessly on CNN’s cable channels, and it is available on the web, on iPhone and Android, on Apple TV, Roku, and Amazon Fire TV. What it doesn’t have, it seems, is the demand — the customers. Per CNBC, “fewer than 10,000 people are using CNN+ on a daily basis two weeks into its existence, according to people familiar with the matter.” And this is after CNN announced The Don Lemon Show would be featured on the service. What gives?

Wouldn’t you just have loved to been in the room when CNN’s leadership met with the enablers at McKinsey and told them that the network expected its new streaming service to have 15 to 18 million subscribers by 2026? What McKinsey’s consultants should have said in response to this — what McKinsey’s consultants would have said had they been doing their job — is, “Are you joking, you delusional lunatics?” Their reaction should have been shock and embarrassment, followed by a cacophony of derisive laughter, and at the end of it all, the delivery of some tough love. What they seem to have done, instead, is jumped up onto the table like Stephen Glass describing his fictional Jukt Micronics meeting and shouted, “Yes, yes — a thousand times, yes.”

In theory, at least, the role of an organization such as McKinsey is to ask, “Why?” Everyone wants to start a streaming service. Why does yours make sense? If CNN were run by thoughtful people, it might have taken the opportunity to ask some fundamental questions of itself before procuring a new toy: “Who are we?” “What do we do?” “Are we good at it?” “Why do our staff keep getting themselves embroiled in scandals?” “Has anyone heard Brianna Keilar utter a single sentence that might be termed useful?”

Scoop’ for Today By John Rossi

https://www.realclearhistory.com/articles/2022/04/12/scoop_for_today_826782.html

Ben Rhodes, President Barack Obama’s foreign policy guru, once boasted how he had created an “echo chamber” in the press corps to publicize the administration’s foreign policy moves: they were just a bunch of 27-year-olds who know nothing about foreign policy, he said.

With war booming between Russia and Ukraine, and our foreign correspondents brushing off their flak jackets and camouflage gear, it might be time to return to the definite study of how the foreign policy elite cover a war, Evelyn Waugh’s “Scoop. ”

“Scoop” appeared in May 1938 — if you are interested in coincidences, or  what Chesterton called “God’s way of punning” — it was published less than two weeks after George Orwell’s “Homage to Catalonia,” which was a failure at first, but now like “Scoop” is considered a classic.  “Scoop” was largely based on Waugh’s experiences covering the Italo-Ethiopian war for the Daily Mail in 1935.  The experiences in that war left Waugh with unpleasant memories, and he particularly came to detest the cynicism, outright distortions and lies of the journalists covering the war.

“Scoop” subtitled “A Novel About Journalists” — was the fourth and, in my view, the funniest and most savage of his satiric novels — “Decline and Fall” runs a close second in my view.  The protagonist William Boot writes a nature column, “Lush Places,” for the Daily Beast, the largest newspaper in England. Lord Copper, the all-powerful owner of the paper mistakenly orders the wrong Boot to cover a civil war that is supposed to have broken out in the mythical country of Ishmaelia, a thinly veiled version of Ethiopia. The editor, Salter, a comic foil for Copper is told that Boot possesses a high-class style, and checks out his latest column: “Feather-footed through the plashy fen the questioning vole…”  “That must be good style,” he observes, “At least, it doesn’t sound like anything else to me.”

Maybe they will call it CNN minus By Silvio Canto, Jr.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/04/maybe_they_will_call_it_cnn_minus.html

Have you received an offer to join CNN plus?   I saw one yesterday but I decided to pass.  Honestly, I’ve already got enough to see or listen to.  And I don’t watch CNN anyway. 

CNN plus is off to a rough start according to news reports:    

Fewer than 10,000 people are using CNN+ on a daily basis two weeks into its existence, according to people familiar with the matter.

The people spoke with CNBC on the condition of anonymity in order to discuss nonpublic data.

CNN+ launched on March 29. The subscription news streaming service, which charges $5.99 a month or $59.99 annually, only became available on Roku on Monday and still isn’t on Android TV. Still, the paltry audience casts doubt on the future of the application following the recently completed combination of Discovery and WarnerMedia into Warner Bros. Discovery.

To put that daily user number in perspective, CNN’s cable network suffered a sharp decline in viewership last year but still rang up an average of 773,000 total viewers a day.

“We continue to be happy with the launch and its progress after only two weeks,” a CNN spokesperson said.

CNN continues to be happy?  Well, at least the CNN spokesperson has a positive attitude.

CROSSING A LINE IN COVERAGE OF THE TEL-AVIV CARNAGE: RUTHIE BLUM

https://www.jns.org/opinion/crossing-a-line-in-coverage-of-the-tel-aviv-carnage/

Reporters rushed to Tel Aviv on Thursday night to cover the shooting at the Ilka pub on Dizengoff Street. Less than half an hour after the deadly spree, cameras and microphones flooded the vicinity, and the whole country tuned in to watch.
The hunger for information surrounding the event, coupled with a touch of voyeurism, was unavoidable. The gunning down of young people enjoying a night out at a bar would be cause for fear and curiosity under any circumstances. But the fact that this was the fourth such act of “lone wolf” carnage carried out in the Jewish state in little more than two weeks—following fatal assaults in Bnei Brak on March 29, Hadera on March 27 and Beersheva on March 22—made the entire episode even worse.
As if the incident in itself weren’t horrifying enough—particularly as Tel Aviv residents were instructed to hole up in their homes and the city’s public transportation was halted—the terrorist was on the loose. In fact, he would remain at large until early the next morning, when he was finally located in Jaffa and eliminated during a battle with Israeli forces.
This was what set apart the Tel Aviv attack from the other three. In each previous case, the terrorist was neutralized while in the process of murdering his victims. Here, the perpetrator, 28-year-old Ra’ad Hazem from Jenin, managed to slip away among the throngs of diners and passersby, some busy administering first aid to the wounded and others fleeing for dear life.
The pandemonium was palpable as various units of the Israel Police, Israel Defense Forces and Israel Security Agency (Shin Bet) arrived en masse to scour the area for the terrorist. This was compounded by the presence of the press.
Until the TV channels ended their special broadcasts at 2 a.m., they all had reporters on the scene, who were interfering with the men and women in uniform. One correspondent went as far as to tail soldiers on a door-to-door search for the terrorist, with a camera rolling on their faces and weapons.
Another actually stepped over police tape with her cameraman, so that he could zoom in on the broken glass and blood stains on the pavement outside the pub. As a police officer grabbed her arm and pulled her away, she continued her breathless babbling.