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How a Gawker-Affiliated Website Made ESPN Politically Correct - WSJ

Rather than sue Mr. Denton’s bullying internet pirates into submission the way tech billionaire Peter Thiel did, ESPN chose to acquiesce and adopt progressive ideology and diversity as groundbreaking business innovations. ESPN is the exact network Deadspin desired. It’s diverse on its surface, progressive in its point of view, and more concerned with spinning media narratives than with the quality of its product.

Tomi Lahren Sounds Off on Glenn Beck: ‘I Won’t Lay Down and Play Dead’ - The Daily Beast

“When your outlet is taken away from you, when your catharsis is stripped away from you, and you don’t understand why and you’re so disappointed and you’re so blindsided by it, it hurts,” she said. But as much as she “hurts,” she was careful not to come off as purely a victim.

Clinton ally's advice: Meet with NYT publisher to try to improve coverage - POLITICO

Tanden also wrote that Wolfson “thinks the brown and women pundits can shame the times and others on social media” for their coverage, and suggested that “cultivating” The Nation’s Joan Walsh, Vox’s Matt Yglesias, The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent and NBC’s Perry Bacon, among others, would be “helpful.”

Someone Who Has 3 Million Followers on Facebook Explains The Ways Social Media Is Making Us All Dumber - John Hawkins

Nowhere on Planet Earth does being crazy, hyper-obnoxious or arguing with people like a crazy homeless guy pay off like it does on Twitter.

The Death Of Expertise

There’s also that immutable problem known as “human nature.” It has a name now: it’s called the Dunning-Kruger effect, which says, in sum, that the dumber you are, the more confident you are that you’re not actually dumb. And when you get invested in being aggressively dumb…well, the last thing you want to encounter are experts who disagree with you, and so you dismiss them in order to maintain your unreasonably high opinion of yourself.

Escaping the Digital Media ‘Crap Trap’ — The Information

The creative companies will do this by paying a lot more attention to delivering better information in more efficient ways. They have to think about making people smarter and their lives easier and more enjoyable. They will stop clinging stubbornly to writing the way journalists want to write and more in the way readers actually want to read.

The Left Machine: Foundations and Media | RedState

Foundations fund research, which runs on Foundation-funded media and is laundered through mainstream media, which Foundation-funded activists use to generate more media coverage, which prompts a legal investigation that — surprise! — was the strategic goal behind the entire campaign.

A plea to pundits: Stop saying ‘narrative’ - The Washington Post

[Please remove Doocy’s show, “Fox & Friends," from the airwaves.]

The Decline And Fall Of American Political Debate

A certain logic sets in: some writers, and perhaps a great many of them, are not to be read because they’re not making good-faith arguments. Their publishers are in the business of advancing an agenda, probably at a financier’s request, and they all can be safely ignored. So we arrive at this unhappy place: why would a loyal reader of (or writer for), say, The New Republic ever read anything in The Federalist or National Review, except to sneer at it, mock its author, and impugn the motives of its publisher? The same goes for conservatives who refuse to read the New York Times or listen to NPR. Ignorance of the other’s argument, in this case, is a point of pride. The enemy is dangerous, after all, and must be stopped, not argued with, not taken seriously.

Bush’s Press Problem - The New Yorker

They reject an assumption embraced by most reporters: that we are neutral and represent the public interest. Rather, they see the press as just another special interest.

The team behind 2016’s most outrageous viral videos | MSNBC

We’re “speaking to the Internet in the way it wants to be spoken to,” Johnson told msnbc, explaining that he strives to create content that balances “Wow, I’d like to see that” with newsworthiness. “Yes, it’s cooking bacon on a machine gun,” Johnson said of the Cruz video, “but also on a very rich level it says something on his stance on the Second Amendment.”

Who Will Fact Check the Fact Checkers? | The American Spectator

The fact-checker phenomenon reflects a much older impulse, the desire to be litigant and judge, player and referee. It’s easy to dismiss the rants and tracts of a partisan. So, frustrated crusaders adopt the guise of detached arbiters without vested interest in outcomes. It’s hard to expose the truth when you’re hiding the truth about yourself. The subjective belief that our subjective beliefs are objective truths—but everyone else’s aren’t—is strong.

The troubling implications of believing our rights don't come from God

More and more, the secular left seems to want to entrust human law to always be just. That's fine when it is. But what happens when it isn't?

The Future Of Broadcast News And Punditry « The Hugh Hewitt Show

it dawned on me that within a decade or at most two, there will be no room on the airwaves for the ill-informed or the deeply biased.  Information flows are too fast for the slow, too complicated for the dense.  Every cable channel will have to jettison their good-looking but dim-witted anchors and correspondents and find good-looking, smart people.  In this regard Fox News has led the way with Megyn Kelly and Bret Baier, CNN with Jake Tapper, and NBC with Chuck Todd, but look for more network execs to realize that the public is increasingly sophisticated about who is delivering the news.  Stupid or biased –or worse, both– don’t stand a chance against the new wave of hyper-smart, energetic anchors and commentators

dear Very Serious Journalists | Fredrik deBoer

The whole enterprise was corrupt right down to its colonialist bones and if some Facebook billionaire wants to turn it into Tinder For Politico Jagbags it could not possibly suffer in comparison. Shedding tears for Leon Wiseltier’s job is like worrying about what became of Stalin’s cat.

Journalists love nothing more than to write about themselves, and particularly to write about themselves as martyrs or heroes. So you can bet they’ll be paying attention, and writing some more pieces about their harsh abuse, as the streets descend into further violence. It’s not that your rights don’t matter, of course, it’s just that their rights, you see, are just more important. Some people are more equal than others.