Friendly Fire
My Grandma Smith would say (or at least I think I remember her saying) “The paper holds still and you can write anything you want on it.”
Or, as Abe Lincoln said, “Don’t trust anything you read on the Internet.”
Gulf War I was the final nail in the coffin of my use of the Mainstream Media as a source of serious news. Not that I wouldn’t believe a report that there was a hurricane in the Caribbean, I just didn’t take it for granted that it was really a Cat4 or the worst ever because of Climate Change.
I largely turned to bloggers and aggregate sites to keep track of headlines, at least.
In the late ‘70s we lived in various cabins in the BC Kootenays and when our son arrived moved into town, Nelson, and a friend lent us his TV. I would watch the first half-hour of Entertainment Tonight so that I’d have some idea who the fresh young faces were and what movies and TV shows were hot when the guys at the mill talked about them. The same idea with the aggregate sites.
Not that I took them too seriously - there was one site that had content from the NYT and WaPo, and others that took their headlines from the other side - the Deplorables’ blog and news sites.
Both types gradually became more toxic than I wanted to have inside my head, so I settled on one for each “side”, the NYT/WaPo aggregator a retired, ex-liberal Law Professor, and the Other Side the Instapundit.
Insty gradually began to taste like an Official Media Source, just with an Official Conservative voice, and I tried to stick to the overnight Sarah Hoyt posts and an occasional scan other times to see whether there had been another attempted assassination or unexpected Moon Landing, but as of yesterday I moved the Insty link to the “Other” folder. Why? What put me over the brink with Glenn Reynolds? Was it the one-sided coverage of the latest couple of US wars? No, I can skip over mentions of Israel or Russia. The final straw was the one-sided attacks on Tucker Carlson,
I’m not much of a listener - I would prefer to read an essay any day rather than watch a video or listen to a podcast. A function of my age, perhaps. I do watch Mike Rowe sometimes, and Neil Oliver, and Fr Chad Ripperger, and yes, Tucker Carlson. But the recent attacks on Carlson for having interviewed the wrong person is just a bridge too far.
It just smells too much like the way Vox Day throws constant personal attacks at a few people who might compete with him as an “influencer”.
A serious tell that the MSM is being ordered about by someone - CIA? DOJ? - is when they all go into attack mode using exactly the same wording within minutes or hours of each other. The attacks on Carlson sound like the same sort of thing.
At any rate, that has annoyed me enough to a) find another aggregate site, and b) write a second post here at my old home, Consultingsmiths.
So, there.