Thursday, June 11, 2015

Why the MSM can’t die fast enough


Shot:

‘Dear Reader, The Editor Hates Your F—ing Guts’
Chaser:

A badge of honor, but maybe not the best business model
Related:


Logic only a journalist could love

Way-points on the path to irrelevance and oblivion
The Kardashian/Jenner circus provides more reasons to cheer MSM lay-offs, cutbacks, and closings.

The Cult of Caitlyn confirms that there is nothing progressive in transgender politics

There is a palpable religiosity to the wild hailing of Bruce/Caitlyn as a modern-day saint, a Virgin Mary with testicles. Within four hours, more than a million people were following Bruce/Caitlyn’s new Twitter account, hanging on her words like the expectant horde waiting for Moses at the foot of Mount Sinai. Her every utterance, all banal celeb-speak, was retweeted tens of thousands of times. Celebs and commentators greeted her as a kind of messiah. ‘We’ve been waiting for you with open arms’, said an overexcited editor at Buzzfeed. Across the Twittersphere Caitlyn was worshipped as a ‘goddess’, a ‘goddess in human form’, a ‘goddess made manifest on Earth’. ‘Caitlyn Jenner could fucking stab me right now and leave me for dead and I’d die fucking overjoyed we are not WORTHY OF THIS GODDESS’, said one trans tweeter, and she wasn’t joking.

In the media, the talk is of how Caitlyn and her iconic likeness might give an adrenalin shot to humanity itself. A writer for the Guardian describes Caitlyn as a ‘queen’ and instructs us to ‘bow down, bitches’, telling us her icon on the front of Vanity Fair is ‘life-affirming’. Treating Caitlyn as a kind of Christ figure, only in a push-up bra rather than smock, Ellen DeGeneres says this goddess brings ‘hope for the world’, and we should all try to be ‘as brave as Caitlyn’. Susan Sarandon celebrated Bruce/Caitlyn’s mysterious ‘rebirth’ while Demi Moore thanked him/her for sharing with humanity ‘the gift of your beautiful authentic self’. A writer for the Huff Post says the name Caitlyn means ‘pure’ – ‘what a perfect meaning, right?’ Truly, yes, for St Caitlyn, reborn to educate us all, is most pure.
Matt Labash has my favorite take on the press reaction:

Transjennered America

The pronoun police at GLAAD distributed a helpful tip-sheet for journalists who should now see that Caitlyn “is—and always has been—a woman.” GLAAD commanded journalists to “avoid the phrase ‘born a man’ when referring to Jenner.” And the fierce guardians of free speech in the press did what they always do in such situations—they hung their heads and bleated obediently, cisgenders terrified to misgender. The Washington Post’s LGBT/straight etiquette columnist (yes, they have one) highly recommended GLAAD’s tips. And a Post colleague went so far as to set up a Twitter bot that would automatically correct anyone using “he” instead of “she” when writing about Brucelyn.
The instant unanimity of the MSM reaction would make Stalin’s Politboro blush; North Korean State television is embarrassed by the hosannas that greated the Vanity Fair cover.

VDH:

Building the New Dark-Age Mind

A pre-Enlightenment Age is not just the absence of uncomfortable free expression. It is also a sort of groupthink acceptance of a lie in place of the truth on grounds of social utility.
Added bonus:

Labash remembers why Jenner is a celbrity:

By the mid-2000s, however, Jenner had become much more difficult to ignore. He’d plighted his troth to the Kardashian clan, America’s First Family of publicity tapeworms, who are as long on fame’n’money as they are short on talent, unless you consider leaked sex tapes and Instagram butt-selfies a talent. As the paterfamilias/house eunuch of the Kardashian seraglio—both in real life and in the fake reality show Keeping Up with the Kardashians (now in its tenth smash season)—Jenner allowed viewers to witness him getting ignored by his daughters and serially humiliated by his wife. “Momager” Kris (her self-appointed nickname as her daughters’ tireless manager) would leave him behind on trips, confiscate his ATM card, and generally keep his huevos in her purse
Related:

A totalitarian wind

Why Twitter?


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