Way back in the before times, when you got news and opinion from TV, newspapers and magazines, you just accepted the authority of the source. If you were a liberal, you were required to swear oaths about the objectivity and integrity of the news media. If you were a normal person you understood that all of it was biased. Alternative sources of information, however, were thin on the ground. If you were lucky, your city still had a paper run by normal people, like the Detroit Free Press or Manchester Union Leader.
Otherwise, normal people had to read their local paper or the news magazines with an eye for the bias. Some columnists made a career out of being lefty wackos, even getting a national reputation for it. Eleanor Clift was a proto-cat lady in the 1990’s, as a barking at the moon lefty for Newsweek. The late John McLaughin would have her on as a regular, mostly because she was such a loon. In the Clinton years he nicknamed her Eleanor Rodham Clift because she was such a ridiculous Clinton rumpswab.
The thing is though, the columnists were always people who had spent a long apprenticeship in the news business. They started out as local reporters for local papers and then advanced onto bigger stories at bigger outlets. The typical newspaper columnist was a middle-aged man who had been a reporter for a couple of decades. Every city paper had a columnist who used to cover city hall, until he got bumped up to writing polemics about the people in city hall. That was his expertise.
Even the TV people had been in the business for a long time. Eleanor Clift would argue with Pat Buchanan about politics. Both had served as reporters covering campaigns, until they got columns. Their TV persona was as a columnist with expertise covering politics as a reporter for decades. They would salt their opinions with references to events they covered. That was their basis of authority. Their expertise was from long experience reporting on politics at all levels. They were professional reporters.
Whatever one wants to say for the old model of the journalism career, there was a winnowing process to filter out the extremely stupid and dishonest. The Der Spiegel scandal is mostly due to hiring a charismatic greenhorn into a prominent position, without having put him through an apprenticeship. Odds are, the people who hired him had never been local reporters or had to edit copy for a small publication. Like Claas Relotius, they popped out of good schools and the right families into elite media.
This is, of course, the problem faced by all media now. For example, this post in The Atlantic is supposed to be expert speculation about the Treasury Secretary’s maneuverings in response to the bear market. The Atlantic is a prestige publication of the ruling class that is supposed to provide informed opinion and commentary. The post, however, does not rise to the level of daydreaming. Like everything you see in the prestige media these days, it is pointless drivel written by an airhead.
The authoress is someone named Annie Lowrey. A quick search reveals she reports on politics and economic policy for The Atlantic magazine. She also went to Harvard. More important, she is married to Ezra Klein. He went to UCLA. Nepotism is nothing new in the media, but shouldn’t she be covering something for which she has some qualifications, like the Westminster Dog Show? You don’t have to know anything to report about a dog show. She just has to like dogs and being around gay men.
Of course, it raises an obvious question, how in the hell are these people getting into Harvard? It’s not hard to see why the Asians are angry about admissions. They may lack social skills, but they can do math. Ezra Klein appears to have no useful skills. If he is, as they claim, a top-1% intellect, he has yet to display a hint of it in his career as a mover and shaker in the media. His career, according to his bio, is devoid of anything that would prepare one for having an opinion anyone should consider.
It’s not just that these two have zero useful experience. It’s also that they raced ahead to take up senior positions, decades before it was normal. In the old system, Ezra Klein would have just landed a job with a major daily, covering politics. In a couple of decades, he could expect to get his own column, where he could opine about the people he covered for decades. In other words, the major media is now populated with people who know nothing useful and have not had the time to observe people who actually know things.
This is a familiar rant, of course, but the puzzle is how the mass media has evolved into a weird playground for the stupid children of rich people. One clue is the guy who runs The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg. He is a serious guy who used to take pleasure in torturing Palestinians on behalf of his people. No kidding. His vice, however, is he likes to be surrounded by shiksas and toadies, so The Atlantic is now festooned with silly girls from good schools and young men fond of hearing Goldberg’s IDF stories.
What seems to be happening is the modern mass media selects for the ability to ingratiate oneself with the powerful. Ezra Klein has a reputation for being a world-class rumpswab, but also a ruthless courtier, who would stab his mother in the neck to gain favor with the boss. That’s how he rose so quickly in the Washington media ranks and why he is now installed in a seven figure job at a media outlet with no customers. His wife knows how to play on her boss’s vanity and inclinations.
The old joke about the new economy is you can’t have society based on everyone selling each other insurance. The modern mass media is trying to build a business model around people who wash each other’s balls. A media ball washer writes a column and the other ball washers tweet about it. The same is true when one of them writes a book. The ball washers slobber all over it, claiming it is the greatest book since the Bible. It’s no wonder that the rest of us are slowly tuning out or turning to alternative media.
The same effect seems to be in play in regards to almost every movie that comes out of Hollywood.
Ever noticed how many movies feature main characters who are writers, or wannabe actors – or maybe work in a non-profit?
Movies used to have somewhat relatable people in them. Even into the 80’s we had movies like “Light of Day” – which purported to tell a story about a dysfunctional family and how it relates to their music.
“What seems to be happening is the modern mass media selects for the ability to ingratiate oneself with the powerful. Ezra Klein has a reputation for being a world-class rumpswab, but also a ruthless courtier, who would stab his mother in the neck to gain favor with the boss.”
What you’re describing in this post is basically the structure of an old style oriental court straight out of Arabian Nights. Its an army of grifters and schemers, competing for attention and riches below a sultan who may or may not be in some sort of drug induced haze…
“One clue is the guy who runs The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg. He is a serious guy who used to take pleasure in torturing Palestinians on behalf of his people.”
The interesting thing about the career of someone like Jeffrey Goldberg is that he isn’t a serious guy but is able to portray himself as one in an act that only works in America. He was able to do it well enough that he’s running the Atlantic and was basically the court stenographer for President Obama. This is all supposedly based on him having some sort of life experience but still being able to mouth the views that flatter and agree with what the people who employ him believe. Meanwhile in Israel, peddling that his experience as a prison guard gave him some special insight into human nature and the Arab-Israeli conflict would have people pointing at him as he walked down the street and breaking out into laughter. Thats why he didn’t bother to stay in Israel and pursue his career there. He’s a grifter and the audience for his grift is the Imperial Court.
“His vice, however, is he likes to be surrounded by shiksas and toadies, so The Atlantic is now festooned with silly girls from good schools and young men fond of hearing Goldberg’s IDF stories.”
First, to be fair, as vices go, wanting to be surrounded by shiksas isn’t the worst one to have. A man wanting to be surrounded by pretty women is at least understandable. Especially considering what the degeneracy of the current year is…
The problem with Goldberg is that like Ben Shapiro, he’s a grifter. He has no real belief or position other than what keeps his grift going. Thats why he dumped Kevin WIlliamson so fast it made everyone’s head spin. (I’m no fan or friend of Williamson but getting hired, leaving your old position and then getting fired on the first day because your new boss got frightened of losing his grift due to hiring you isn’t right…)
“You don’t have to know anything to report about a dog show. She just has to like dogs and being around gay men.”
That’s hilarious. I got dragged by my then GF to the Westminster dog show one time and ZMan, you’re right on the mark.
Tiny !
We nerd to ridicule these people whenever possible.
Indian medical student kicked out of college by racist white professors for questioning their SJW beliefs
Kieran Ravi Bhattacharya was a medical student at the University of Virginia and he has been kicked out after having questioned his white college professor’s SJW beliefs.
Here is the audio of the lecture where he questioned his professor’s SJW beliefs:
https://m.soundcloud.com/user-381804527/microagressions-presented-by-amwa
He speaks from 28:45 to 34:00
Here is the audio of the suspension hearing:
https://m.soundcloud.com/user-381804527/asac
Here is a picture of the people who were at the suspension hearing:
https://imgur.com/a/RUvKXNH
Notice how 14 out of the 16 people at that suspension hearing are white people. If this is not an act of racism against a sincere indian medical student, then I don’t know what is. Look at their smug arrogant faces as they kick him out for DARING to question their SJW beliefs.
His twitter handle is kieranravib if you want to ask him questions or set up an interview with him
“Rumpswabbing ballwashers…” 🤣
Hey, you’ve been deplatformed from Jewgle. Searching for Zman no longer turns up a result for your website on the first results page (or possibly any results page).
Happy new year!
A media ball washer writes a column and the other ball washers tweet about it. The same is true when one of them writes a book. The ball washers slobber all over it, claiming it is the greatest book since the Bible.
Funny, I made this exact same point on my podcast today: the British term for it is “logrolling”. The only reason journalists from big publications are on Twitter is because nobody’s interested in what they say in their main outlet. They’re like an ageing rock star turning up at pup karaoke and making off with the £50 prize.
Meanwhile the Tibbets family is full on SJW tard mode. Anyone still feel sorry for that slain snowflake or her family?
Nope. They sacrificed their daughter on the altar of diversity for staus signalling, cheap lettuce, and tacos.
They may as well take an immigrant into their household. They have an empty bedroom now.
“If you were a normal person you understood that all of it was biased.”
Funny, in the sixties, when the US was the beacon of liberty and the Communist media were propaganda outlets, a defector from the east in an interview in West Germany was asked who was the most popular West German politician in the communist block.
Without hesitation he said Franz-Josef Strauß (head of the most right-wing party). The interviewer was astonished: How come, the communist press was surely not presenting Strauß favorably!
Of course not, the defector said, but the people have learned “to read the newspapers ‘upside-down'”.
Before Harvard, Lowrey attended Phillips Andover where she had nearly perfect grades and SATs. She’s what a merit admit looks like.
That’s does not speak well of Phillips Andover.
She’s an ideologue, as are Klein and Goldberg. Klein, however, is the inventor of the “explainer” as a form of leftist polemic. Brilliant in its own way. All of them, by the way, in spite of their ideological commitments have chosen to make careers for themselves by coloring within the boundaries of non-dissident poltics. This makes them enormously more effective than the dissidents on either side.
If you take a high-end computer and fill it with garbage data and applications, you’ll get a prodigious output of garbage. That’s Lowery — and a lot of Ivy League grads.
The media needs to stay populated by corrupt knownothing virtue signallers or modern society would collapse and the elite would need to go into hiding.
Everything is a scam these days. Our democracy is used to keep us docile. Most science is fake as seen by the replicability crisis. Social sciences are even more fake. All the acceptable narratives are counter reality. Many religious leaders are corrupt and working against the interests of their flock. History as taught in schools and the media is just propaganda. The list goes on.
Guiding all of this is an incompetent elite who truly hate us.
If we didn’t have an airhead corrupt media, this whole corrupt scam would come crashing down
Dog shows are gay?
Dog breeding is serious business. The shows are a big part of how standards are kept.
It’s not the dog shows, per se, that are gay. It’s many of the crowd associated with them.
Highly recommend the Christopher Guest movie “Best In Show” for a documentary-like view of professional dog world. Laugh out loud funny. Great dogs,too.
Tons of gays in the dog show world. Same for beauty pageants and fashion.
Newsweek lamented the onset of the AIDS crisis as “the death of fashion and the arts”.
Ugh. I dabbled in showing dogs as a teen many decades ago. I left it in disgust. Nothing has been more harmful to many breeds than exaggerated AKC standards and a general disregard for temperament among show dogs. It has made breeds like English Bulldogs into physical horror shows and caused the proliferation of useless, neurotic basket cases among many formerly useful working breeds.
Yale grad here with a PhD from the University of Chicago. I must say I’ve learned more from this blog than in Ivy-clad classrooms.
Carry on, mates.
I used to be AOL instant messenger buddies with Ezra Klein way back in the day. 99% of our discussions was about girls and video games. Typical teenager stuff. So I can confirm that at one time, he was or at least was a good facsimile of a human being.
Kevin Michael Grace mentioned something about how there’s an overproduction of elites. This seems like an example of it.
Also, it seems like there’s the “sorta elite” and the “real elite”. A lot of people on the upper east side think that they’re elite but it seems like they’re more the sycophant or hanger-on class. You could probably call them the globohomo laity. My mom once said that the actually rich people are people you’ve never heard of.
I miss KMG’s podcast
KMG is on Luke Ford’s YouTube channel about 5 times a week, analyzing the news and issues, including movie and book reviews.
The mission of today’s mainstream journalism is only minimally to tell you what the news is. Its actual program is twofold:
1. Decide what the news isn’t — whether an event is safe for you to know about, lest you draw the “wrong” conclusions; and especially …
2. Tell you what you should feel about news events or reported facts.
“Who what when where how” news gathering is dead in the establishment media. The new formula is a brief sound bite or word bite to announce the subject, followed by a lot of color to tip you off to the proper attitude you are to assume.
Online alternative media have done a lot to counteract the mainstream party line, but hardly any perform original news reporting. (Breitbart, for instance, makes an effort but also publishes a lot of AP news feeds.) The alt world urgently needs its own news media besides its own commentary.
Had a version of this discussion with an old line financial industry investigative reporter jover dinner and few beers right after the Der Spiegel thing broke. This is a serious guy with decades of reporting and few books under his belt Basically there is no adult supervision in the newsrooms any more. All the senior editors are gone due to expense cuts. A “scoop” is tweeting a rumor and its perfectly fine to bang your sources for classified info. And yes, in the hurry to accumulate acclaim and prizes, there is a lot of looking the other way when stories seem too good to be true. Unless the fakery becomes too egregious and/or embarrassing.
All so (((incestuous))). Didn’t see the Goldberg piece. One thing about the Trumster, it’s all out in the open now. What’s funny, or maybe not so funny, the inability for normies to see any depth in an argument. For instance, how many other facets of immigration need to be attended to other than the wall! But that’s what we get, oversimplification, the wall, THE WALL dammit! It might be a start, but plenty more needs to be attached to the wall. Very complex problems, covered with band-aides.
The offspring of the well heeled have always made up about 1/3 of the Ivy League. The more doltish ones managed their “gentleman’s C” and then moved on to some corner of the family business where they could do little harm. Most of the society pages were filled up with their goings on.
Now that class boundaries are widening and harder to breach the gown wearing and tuxedo wearing party crowd have to actually do something meaningful. A something that is far beyond their innate abilities and disposition.
“If you were lucky, your city still had a paper run by normal people, like the Detroit Free Press or Manchester Union Leader.”
The Chicago Tribune really stood out from the crowd until the McCormick family ceded its control in (iirc) about the early 1970s.
Here in a 2nd-tier city we had good morning and evening dailies until the early 1980s, featuring dozens of staff-writers and reporters. The slant on the editorial page – as Z man correctly notes – was navigable because it was easily identified and corrected for. But the reportage of that time had dignity, the main news features direct and trenchant, written by earnest reporters and edited by veterans. The papers respected their readers.
Sharyl Atkisson has a new audio pod show (got link from @JohnRivers Gab.ai).
Good example of former main stream media reporter (and CivNat) who is now “red-pilled”.
We need more like her!
Ivy League schools…..like Harvard…,USED to be considered the epitome of academia. A place that guaranteed good employment with a degree from such a place. Those days are long gone. Harvard accepted and gave a degree to walking brain dead leftie Natalie Portman. They just accepted the gun grabbers latest mascot David “Pigg”…. with an SAT score lower than 80% of ALL applicants. The formerly respectable Boston University clams an alumnus that walking poster child for retroactive abortion …..Alexandria Occasional-Cortex. So no…..aspiring to an Ivy League education no longer guarantees competence. Merely political correctness and social connections.
After I spit out my drink when I read:
“[S]houldn’t [Annie Lowrey] be covering something for which she has some qualifications, like the Westminster Dog Show?”
…I thought I was safe…until I read:
“The modern mass media is trying to build a business model around people who wash each other’s balls.”
Sigh. The better part of my beverage is now soaking into my keyboard…
Does anyone know what happened to MJ Rosenberg, the author of the HuffPo article on Goldberg? It’s like he’s been disappeared.
Speaking very commonsensically, you might say that the function of journalism is to tell you (1) what’s happening in the world and (2) how the world works (in the broadest sense).
But don’t you get the feeling, like I do, that “journalists” now have inverted this, and are trying very hard to prevent you from finding out what’s going on in the world and how it works? Now, a lot of reality-heavy stories they simply don’t report. But when an event is too big to ignore, it simply becomes “teen kills man” or “Virginia man kills woman.”
I suppose that’s just the difference between journalism and propaganda.
Contrast these shibboleth-spouter/ball-washer types with /our/ top socio-political commentators. Derbyshire, Sailer, Zman, Morgoth’s Review et al. all have or had jobs in the real economy for a long time. I reckon this might be a better background than political reporting.
Fortunately, the internet is redistributing authority. Pre-internet, how could a computer programmer or widget maker become a social commentator? But now such guys can build up a following just based on the strength of their commentary. That’s why They are tearing their hair out to find ways of silencing voices on the internet.
You have a point about those in the media business not having useful skills/experience outside of Washington, NYC, or government. Most of the bloggers I follow regularly are computer guys, engineers, military, or other useful occupations. Even the teachers lean towards the STEM side.
I’d love to see a graph over the past 50 years of the number of journalism majors normalized per capita. I bet there’s a 1:1 relationship between any variety of insanity and its growth curve.
How many of these corporate-approved columnists could scratch out a living untethered in online world like Stefan Molyneux, JF Gariepy, and Steve Sailer do?
You mean real work and research? Add preparation and that is a bridge too far for these entitled slackers.
Back in the 90s, I used to joke that we’d have saved America endless grief if we just repealed the “titles of nobility” clause in the Constitution. Create Bill and Hillary Lord and Lady Cornpone, l’Duc et Duchesse d’Arkansas, and let them run around having affairs and throwing parties and generally carrying on like the Bright Young Things. The tabloids could follow them around, the adults could run the government, and life would be so much better for everyone…. Sadly, I’m not even joking anymore. If we can’t kill off all the rich privileged twits’ kids by sending them over the top at Passchendaele (though that’s still one hell of an idea), give them patents of nobility. That way, they can still be media stars! And the rest of us get on with our lives.
I’ve thought for years that the problem is a massive glut of humans with norhing real or compelling to do — nothing externally mandated, with a wolf -at-the-door corrective built in …. (i,e., those sitting around dreaming about the 75th gender and dying their pubic hair must soon meet the wolf). They need something to do, so they end up making our lives miserable and ruining our society. Perhaps we should give them something real to do.
Maybe that’s why the ruling class is always talking about the potential for a civil war and world war initiated with a large mass death event (like say an EMP). Maybe that’s one of their plans (along with abortion) for killing off the surplus population.
This seems practical. Offer the Clintons and the Obamas an annual million-dollar stipend, declare them as gods – following Roman practice – and issue commemorative coins with their portrait. Hell, give them national holidays. Just make them go away!
I think one of the big turns was the deification of Woodsteinism with the movie All The President’s Men. Seemed a bleed over of the so-called New Journalism’s conflation of reporting with reporter into the political arena in a way that was new and flashy and utterly destructive to both reporting and politics.
Often times I wonder, “What would Jack Germond make of __________?” And then I am forced to remind myself that no one who looked like Jack Germond would ever find themselves on television these days.
Part of what killed journalism is that it transformed from a “craft” job where most of the reporters hadn’t gone to college and learned the job much like an apprentice to a profession where every reporters had been to college. Even in the 1980s and 90s, you could find quite a few older reporters who hadn’t gone to college, but you couldn’t find any young reporters who hadn’t.
In addition, reporting – while low paid – was considered a prestige job, i.e. rich college-educated kids could be a reporter and still be respected by their peer group. (Of course, they needed Dad’s financial support while young.) This was a particularly attractive route for women who didn’t want to soil themselves by working for an actual business. I mean, where’s the fun in that. Often these women would end up marry successful liberal guys (lawyer, doctor, etc.) so they’d stay in the same income class anyway due to their husbands.
So what job is a “craft” job any more? At least beyond the plumbers, electricians and welders?
I see a lot of “filling in the boxes” and “copy and paste” going on most places, but not much else.
My wife is a genuine Harvard prodigy hailing from the underclass, poor Irish Catholic and a trim, very pretty blue-eyed blonde. She was valedictorian of her undergraduate class at age 18 without registering less than a perfect 4.0/4.0 since second grade and near top of her class in law school graduating at age 21 with various honors. At Harvard and against all those wealthy self-selecting folks; Professor Larry Douchebag still refers to her as his best student (and then states “well considering” other names to register his momentary point).
Yet as much a workhorse and mental mapper as she is, my beautiful wife placed in the bottom 1% on her spatial reasoning tests and her free writing is atrocious. Used to placing top 1% on most standardized tests, my lady wrote the testing company requesting correction when the results indicated bottom 1%. The reply she received essentially was “nope, you’re really dumb at spatial reasoning.” And this proves out daily in real life — she cannot even drive a car without causing an accident and so she hasn’t driven since the Reagan Administration. That’s a good thing, too.
I routinely participate in various Ivy events via family and friends, MIT as well, and I can tell you without question that the while the awareness and social intelligence of most Ivy grads is high, the demonstrated intellect of the vast majority of them often disappoints like my sweetheart’s spatial reasoning and unprogrammed writing performances.
CalTech, MIT, and if I may Michigan and Northwestern (personal bias), produce just as many talented elite grads. What gets the Ivy grads into the top positions are Jewish and Catholic nepotism, money, foreign connections, and visibility. Odds are they’re smarter than you, however, they are often less intelligent than public school grads and even a percentage of non-college educated, especially those who served in elite military units.
Do not be impressed by an Ivy degree. It only means the candidate had somebody dedicated to bringing them in and a space available to fill the perceived need. That’s it, that’s all there is to them.
I’d toss University of Chicago in the “smart as fuck” pile. Went to NU, lot of kids there had siblings and friends at U of C that would come up on weekends because we went to the “party school”… Visual-spatial is an odd thing. Couldn’t figure out why my then 4 year old could dump a 600 piece lego set on the floor, look once at the picture and then build the entire thing from one glance. Until that got tested at age 7 and he was literally immeasurable on the opposite end of the scale from your wife. Go ‘Cats.
Agree about university of Chicago. I went there for grad school a couple of years and taught classes. Not hard to get in undergrad school(mostly because of where it’s located), but very high attrition rate. Anyone who graduates from there with a respectable gpa and major will be very very competent.
It is a mistake to turn them off completely. Even a liberal rag sheet like the NYT becomes a count of truth and information – once you know how to read it. You can automatically assume they’re lying about whatever the topics are – when you start reading between the lines, and looking hard at what ISNT said and what’s left out – you can get a very accurate idea of what is going on, and as a bonus – what our political enemies intend to do about it.
It’s a great way to spy on them as long as you aren’t putting any money in their pockets.
Back in the 80’s, we used to pity the Russian people living like this under the oppressive Soviet regime and their controlled “pravda” media. Now we’ve devolved into the American version with our mighty “truth” media that works with our abused legal system to keep the permanent state’s agenda alive and dissidents down.
The New York Times foreign bureau published an expose on how David Mabuza, Vice President of South Africa, was running a death squad and engaging in rampant money laundering. It made quite an impact over there, but I’m not even sure if Tucker Carlson commented on it here.
some publications are more honest than others. Mike Enoch mentioned on one of the paywall shows about a book called “tragedy and hope” that basically laid it all out there.
I disagree about not shunning all pozzed media. it will only make you feel down, and will not contribute anything interesting or useful.
Say what you will about these people but they did yeoman’s work on Trump and his henchman’s Russian collusion. That, and they are excellent Tweeters.
(We need an alternate to Tiny Duck, and I just may develop into it.)
The world only needs one Tiny Duck – if that…
Another factor in this, I think, was the media crash in the early 2000s. Craigslist killed classified ads and papers started bleeding money. Lots of older journalists were laid off or given furloughs and young people hired for less money. This was made even worse by the quest for the young demographic. Tim Pool says he heard firsthand that higher-ups wanted millennial readers and that they assumed millennials were largely “progressive.” And so we got 22 year olds fresh out of college lecturing us on the morality of Halloween costumes and Civil War statues, or telling us that socialism hasn’t really been tried yet.
The sons and now the daughters of our aristocracy always needed a place to go to keep them out of the way until needed. The surplus children as I believe you’ve written were shipped off to the military or if they were complete morons they would be Shipped to Europe. That always didn’t work out well for us dirt people when these useless people would return bearing the disease of communism or the Prussian model of schooling. These patient zeros would create a virgin field epidemic in our upper classes. Probably how we contracted “progressivism”.
Now the idle progeny of these elites go into the new church of liberal journalism, not unlike the Nobility of old carting younger sons off to monasteries or the priesthood. Thus firmly entrenching themselves, it seems history indeed may not repeat itself, but it does rhyme.
How are Clintons and Bushs any different than Yesterday’s Borgias?
The Borgias were dead ruthless but culturally sophisticated, sponsoring great art and architecture. People of today who travel to Florence and other cities they influenced still benefit from their taste and largess.
Clintons have no thought for anything outside power and egotism. Bushes have no thought that won’t fit on a bumper sticker.
Hiring incompetent people is one clever trick to keep system up. The real competency of Macron or Trudeau or jounros or College professors is in the Wal Mart counter or other easy job. They know it and keeping liberalism up to save their own ass. Somebody called this biostalinism. As we know, Stalin forced many people to commit crimes and later those people kept Soviet Union up only to avoid punishment.
Kleptostalinism, maybe. Or just gangsterism.
If “In other words, the major media is now populated with people who know nothing useful and have not had the time to observe people who actually know things.” then the same can be said about our new political class. At least as far as democrats go. Take Azzlick Occasional-Cotex as an example.
And it’s not just the media and politics, it’s entertainment too. And they are all “Ball Washers”. In fact, the entire top tier of the country is being populated by a bunch of under qualified, inexperienced, self important ball washers. Male and female. Transgender and gender-less. An entire series of graduating classes from Harvard with no personality or personal skills looking down their self-hating WASP noses at an entire nation of people among who the most average among us are far, far better people and Americans than they’ll ever be.
They are not our future any more than Hispanic hoards are and they need to be stamped out with extreme prejudice.
“In fact, the entire top tier of the country is being populated by a bunch of under qualified, inexperienced, self important ball washers.”
The Cloud’s Commissariat.
“their self-hating WASP noses…”
Heh. WASPs. At Harvard.
You don’t get out too often, do you.
The downhill slide in journalism, as in society, accelerated with PC. ‘How did the golfing Polack break his leg? He fell off the ball-washer.’ My Polish golfing friends laughed and said that I had to buy the next round when the course marshal or tee lady came around again. When laughter dies, so does some of all of us.
And don’t forget the takeover of television “newsrooms” by women. An old friend of mine who used to work in the TV industry says women are a huge problem in these organizations. The hard drinking, flinty-eyed gumshoe reporter is an unwanted relic in news organizations today. He isn’t “committed”.
A good example of the old style journalist was Mike Royko. He came from a working class family, served in the Air Force in Korea and worked his way up to being a major columnist. Yeah, he was sort of a liberal, but he hated hippies and feminists, and he wasn’t afraid to take on genuinely dangerous people, like Chicago’s Mayor Daley, or the Chicago mob. He certainly wasn’t perfect, but comparing him to assclowns like Ezra Kline or this Relotius guy shows how far journalism has fallen.
I miss Mike Royko. He’s one of several pundits no longer with us who I’d love to hear their opinions on our current clown world.
I loved Royko; he was the real-life Lou Grant.
it seems like Woodward and Bernstein were the first in the new generation of journalists. It became more of a glamorous profession and it attracted sort of the managerial class that was crystallizing in the 60s.
Royko was a piece of work. And he reported stuff that could get you shattered kneecap or worse. One of my roommates decided to interview him for his journalism class freshman year (we were at the little Big10 school up on the North Shore). Wouldn’t return his calls, so finally he decides to stalk Royko at the Billy Goat. Gets him the second day. Royko curses him out in front of the entire place, then invites him to sit down and gives him the interview.
Another great journalist was Jack Germond. He, too, was on McLaughlin Group as a regular along with Pat Buchanan, the Weekly Standard guy and Eleanor Clift. In real life, these oldsters were great friends but they hammed it up for John M.
Jack was a Royko-like character: gruff, twinkly-eyed with a wry humor, s man who drank too much and gambled away every paycheck.
My viewing area has this infection. Every single “news team” has at least one female lead anchor, and several have 100% female teams, including the roving reporters. (Of course every meteorologist is now female, but this at least makes some sense as they’re the only ones who consistently get the full-body camera shot, and wouldn’t you know it, they all wear form-fitting outfits that accentuate the curves. But they’re just reading the weather.) The anchors, in addition to having a hand in selecting what stories are covered, actively push their agenda (no “s” – it’s all the same agenda) using comments and asides, tone of voice, inflection, etc. And lots and lots of people go right along with it. I quietly chuckle at the old man getting his news from a black woman – it’s like it hasn’t occurred to him that’s what’s happening. Although I suppose he only really gives a shit about the weather forecast anyway.
https://youtu.be/WYL6iHQQLeo?list=PLXlK3C3jllBgbgXXcWSfcgDZpaoEQhyGn&t=139
There are numerous videos on Youtube that start off showing one anchor reading the “news” , then split frame to a different anchor, split again to four, then eight , then 16 …… etc.
By the time they’re done they have something like 24 different talking heads all reading the EXACT same words – across different markets and even different networks.
When the “news” is just a pre-approved talking point – why not have some hot chick reading it to you instead of some crusty old guy?
Harvard grads have excellent rhetorical skills to maneuver within the box of poz that is modern political discourse. When the overton window is as constricted and detached from reality as it is today, this value in society becomes useless. The fear of losing respectability they worked so hard to earn in going to Harvard keeps them constrained.
There’s no doubt in my mind even cucks like Ross Douhat understand far more of the world than they lead on but he knows to keep his mouth shut. The idea of being a real outlaw is anethema to the Ivy league mind.
There are two sides to this coin of social pathology. There is the dysfunction on the media side (really a disease), and there is the dysfunction on the audience side (really a debilitating addiction). Both halves are skating by on a false premise of value and usefulness; sustained solely by a financial redistribution system that rewards incompetence and dependence. Our culture now idealizes fat, stupid, lazy, conformist degenerate idiots. We are one small step away from Idiocracy. The good news is that this kind of puss can be wiped away rather easily.
The great bulk of people have always preferred to be amused, rather than informed. A necessary myth of democracy is the informed, conscientious citizen. The fact is, such a thing does not exist. There are informed partisans, who make up a minority, and the vast bulk of the population that would rather see a man repeatedly kicked in the groin than know about current events.
The 10-80-10 rule can be applied to most groupings of people.
The 10% who make things happen, the 80% who watch things happen, and the 10% who wonder what happened?
Before somebody bring up Eastern Europe, you know we actually do not have democracy. All parties have hijacked by nationalists. The Sheeple can vote as they like, they still get closed borders.
And in the USA, the people can vote as they like, and we still get open borders.
Hopefully that will change soon.
Rather than ask modern media celebrities to acquire two decades of actual grassroots reporting experience, I would settle for air-dropping them into a Congo jungle a hundred miles from civilization with only a loin cloth and KBar. Those that make it out alive are then permitted to “tell it like it is.” Win-Win.
So true. This is why we had a restricted franchise in the past. With a smallish though open group of citizens having the only ability to vote and presumably also hold office, the odds of “engaged participation” rather than glazing over to watch “ow my balls” was a bit higher
It was far from perfect of course but the age, property and possibly other limits were far better than 18+ and a pulse
The pulse is optional,as evidenced by the many dead democrats who vote every election. Which bothers the republicans not one whit.
I stopped wondering how these imbeciles got into Ivy League schools a long time ago. A high school acquaintance, above average intelligence and no more, went to Yale after we graduated. He was relatively bright but not anywhere close to the top of our little high school class but he was big enough to play football for Yale and still pass the classwork so off to the Ivy League he went on some bogus scholarship that totally wasn’t a sports scholarship. The Ivy League has some brilliant students but it also has plenty of diversity filler, trust fund legacy kids and David Hogg-types. The only people still impressed by an Ivy League diploma are people that haven’t ever interacted with someone that holds one.
Some of the worst surgeons I have ever seen were Harvard grads.
Many of the trouble makers of the past were people who were pushed into prominence before they were of a traditional age. This is especially true of late republican and imperial Rome. Whenever you read any primary source material there are complaints about them. Pericles and Alcibiades would be the Greek archetypes who led to disaster.
I’ve practiced law with no small number of Harvard and Yale grads. Most were book smart in the sense that they could regurgitate material from a text, but almost uniformly were incapable of grinding it out in the practice of law. Most practice for 2-5 years then go to a government position, investment bank, or the family business.
The Ivies are not what they used to be. Now they are reflections of the many fantasies generated by under-educated, misguided Americans:
Harvard student submits rap album as his senior thesis
“While other Harvard University students were writing papers for their senior theses, Obasi Shaw was busy rapping his.
Shaw is the first student in Harvard’s history to submit a rap album as a senior thesis in the English Department, the university said. The album, called “Liminal Minds,” has earned the equivalent of an A-minus grade, good enough to guarantee that Shaw will graduate with honors next week.”
https://nypost.com/2017/05/19/harvard-student-submits-rap-album-as-his-senior-thesis/
That’s with *honors*. Signs that we’ve already entered the dark ages, as more and more will be forgotten or ignored for perverse fantasies. As the West drowns in our own shite, the rest of the world moves forward, and after seeing the disasters that we create with our obscene culture, they move forward with confidence that the sick American way is *not* the way forward. Boy have we let down our ancestors.
Education isn’t the point of going to Harvard. The point of going to Harvard is Going To Harvard. “Meritocracy” is the way those who are “not of our class, dear” with useful skills get socially polished, in the same way “exam-wallahs” were admitted to Eton, Cambridge, the Indian Civil Service, etc. Harvard has been little more than a finishing school for proles since it stopped training ministers.
Certain “consulting” firms like Bain, McKinsey will not hire you unless you graduated from an Ivy, Stanford, etc. These firms produce a noteable, even by corporate standards, level of Poz propaganda to balance this out.
“education isn’t the point”. Clearly. One thing I noticed about the various bits of information regarding Ms. Lowery is the complete lack of any indication as to what her major was. I’m assuming, as a writer about economic policy, that if she had a degree in economics that would prominently figure in her CV. Instead all references are just about her having gone to Harvard.
I attended Harvard Law School in 2005….for a week. Being an older, white ghetto cop, I was a fish out of water. You’ll never know such a hive of handjobs in your life. I never looked back.