Ezra Klein aims to fix the news
Just like the JournoList.
I realize most of you will not care about this, but the next big thing is Ezra Klein joining Vox Media (home of some high traffic sites) to start a new website somehow related to what we think of as news.
You can read the announcement. It’s very, what’s the word, oh yeah, hubris-ee.
Ezra, and sidekick Matthew Yglesias (of Sarah Palin target map fame), will create a website to explain what the news means, not just what the news is. In other words, more of the same, but on a higher tech platform.
But there was one sentence in the announcement that jumped out at me (emphasis added):
But we’re also hiring. If you share our passion for fixing the news, you should send us your resume here, and tell us how you want to help us do a better job informing our readers.
I think that’s a pretty revealing description, more revealing than Klein probably intended.
Fixing the news is what happened at the Journolist, run by Klein, when the mostly young and upcoming D.C. brat pack-ers strategized how they collectively should play events (such as attacks on Sarah Palin and Trig Palin) so as not to damage the Obama campaign:
The emerging picture of the Journolist is that it served as a place where like-minded people who had great influence on how the media portrayed events were able to coordinate their story lines for the benefit of the Obama campaign.
We saw the media bias on the surface; the Journolistas helped frame that bias below the surface.
Nothing has changed. Now it’s called fixing the news.
(Featured Image via NewsBusters)
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Comments
There’s more than one connotation to “fixing” something.
A horserace can be “fixed” to achieve a desired result.
So we’ll have yet on more self-appointed, self-proclaimed news/media “fact-checkers” site.
Just what we need. Like another hole in our heads.
The Juicebox Mafia strikes again.
“Fixing the news” – What happens in DC stays in DC.
Perhaps these men of towering intellect will let us rubes know when there is sum ting wong. They are, after all, trained journalists.
… and tell us how you want to help us do a better job informing our readers.
Their definition of “informing”: to subject to propaganda
aka, propagandize
I suppose telling the truth is not an option?
So, let me get this straight.
Ezra Klein, the kid who said the Constitution is “confusing” because it’s “over 100 years old,” is going to explain the news to us.
Will Spencer Ackerman be the security guard so he can realize his fantasy of shoving conservatives through plate glass windows?
I think I’ll send them my resume. Who knows? Stranger things have happened.
They shoulda called it “Pajamaboy Media” but that would probably cause a lawsuit.
Neither Klein nor Yglesias were half as intelligent as they were made out to be, they were only articulate enough to make bad policies sound plausible.
JournOList was indeed an effort to “FIX” or manage the news to spin the facts to help Obama and the Democratic positions in general. They didn’t want the poor ignorant public to get all confused with unexplained raw facts.
Both are just products of Clintonian era “spin” where well-educated aides would go out to defend every sin and crime of Bill Clinton by putting a very different story out. People like Podesta would insist day was night and black was white and the media, then yet not so overtly partisan as today, wouldn’t challenge their outrageous logic on the basis of “presenting both sides.”
Klein and Yglesias and David Gregory and the entire staff of Politico are no more “journalists” than Goebbels or any of Stalin’s editors: they are dedicated to victory for their side, the truth be damned as necessary.
There being no discernible demand (or shortage) for the opinions of pompous, arrogant young northeastern elitists who have no practical experience in anything, I predict the new site won’t be a runaway hit.
This is like when whassername, the girl who played Diane, left Cheers for a big movie career.
Has E. Klein yet won the annual “Duranty-Goebbels” award for jornolistic prater praising the presumed Messianic Leader of the World?
Vox media, vox dei?
That’s what they want us to think, especially since, as much reduced subscriptions show, it’s no longer vox populi.
This will just about as popular as Air America and MSNBC. You know there is a big market for leftist news.
At least with the New York Times you can still wrap fish with it.
You don’t want to taint the fish. Better use it to line the bird cage or to pick up dog poop.
JournOlist wasn’t about spin. It was about lies.
Recall the advice to brand opponents of The Collective and its enablers “racists”? Actual evidence of racism was purely optional – this was rote lying for purposes of deception. Straight from JournOlist.
I guess the irony is lost on Klein, et al – confirming for the rest of us that the “fix” is in.
Here is one of Ezra’s contextual explanations from 2008:
That’s downright scary. It sounds as though he graduated with honors at an indoctrination camp.
Okay. So Obama is Lucifer: bigger than God and able to do what Lucifer couldn’t do–ascend on high and place the Almighty in our lives.
What blasphemy!
One thing’s for sure, they have Obama’s blessing in this new venture.
Their new slogan: All the news that is fit to be “fixed”.
I think there’s a bubble in punditry. HuffPo, Buzzfeed, Upworthy, Gawker, Business Insider have all created multi-millionaires. The irony is that Klein and Yglesias, two pseudo-socialists always opining about how unjust income inequality is while stoking hostility toward “the 1%” want to cash in on the punditry bubble. The beauty of free-enterprise.
What are they going to offer that you can’t get from Politico, Pro Publica, the new venture Glenn Greenwald is creating with the Pay Pal guy’s money? Plus, when Jeff Bezos acquired WaPo I figured he had a plan to completely revolutionize how news is gathered, distributed and consumed, using a model so new and unorthodox that none of us can even comprehend what his plans are.
Klein has a following. Maybe he’ll be successful. But it appears to me that he may be doing the equivalent of putting his life savings into NASDAQ in March 2000 or buying a house in Nevada at the peak of the housing bubble in late 2007.
Blah, blah, blah – the little shit still has acne. Who the hell cares what he’s gonna ‘fix.’