Alas, it seems my favorite SJW doesn’t understand how Twitter works.
It Twitter had an IQ filter set for a lower limit at around 90, it’s traffic would plummet, something an advertising-based service can’t afford. She’ll just have to deal with the capitalist reality of the situation.
Q What do all these have in common: The Washington Post, The New York Times, Cable News Network, Inc. (CNN), The Guardian, National Public Radio, TMZ, Atlantic Media Inc.,Capitol Hill Publishing Corp., Diocese of Covington, Diocese of Lexington, Archdiocese of Louisville, Diocese of Baltimore, Ana Cabrera, Sara Sidner, Erin Burnett, S.E. Cupp, Elliot C. McLaughlin, Amanda Watts, Emanuella Grinberg, Michelle Boorstein, Cleve R. Wootson Jr., Antonio Olivo, Joe Heim, Michael E. Miller, Eli Rosenberg, Isaac Stanley-Becker, Kristine Phillips, Sarah Mervosh, Emily S. Rueb, Maggie Haberman, David Brooks, Shannon Doyne, Kurt Eichenwald, Andrea Mitchell, Savannah Guthrie, Joy Reid, Chuck Todd, Noah Berlatsky, Elisha Fieldstadt, Eun Kyung Kim, HBO, Bill Maher, Warner Media, Conde Nast, GQ, Heavy.com, The Hill, The Atlantic, Bustle.com, Ilhan Omar, Elizabeth Warren, Kathy Griffin, Alyssa Milano, and Jim Carrey?
A It is reported that one of these has been set to each of them—
Of course, The Truth is a defense to a defamation claim.
Everything is proceeding as I have foreseen.
One of the complaints from the Left about the Right’s seizing and pouncing on Democrat’s gaffes is that the Right is manufacturing outrage about anti-semitism or economic derpness or abortion/infanticide. OK, but to the extent that any outrage was manufactured the process involved telling the truth about what was actually said or done by Democrats.
OTOH, the outrage stirred up against the Covington kids was based on lies.
I believe the Gentle Reader can readily sort out the intrinsic difference between the two approaches.
10 A$=”I’m learning to code!”
20 PRINT A$
30 END
WaPo has a story up with this headline: Republicans seize on liberal positions to paint Democrats as radical. It begins with this paragraph—
Sen. Kamala D. Harris is raising the possibility of eliminating private health insurance. Sen. Elizabeth Warren and other prominent Democrats are floating new and far-reaching plans to tax the wealthy. In Virginia, Gov. Ralph Northam voiced support for state legislation that would reduce restrictions on late-term abortions.
A few days ago, Republicans were pouncing when they truthfully quoted Democrats. Now they are seizing. Whatever they’re doing, it seems to be getting under The Media’s skin.
The last few years have been rough on the media business, and the past week has been a real doozy. The media have been crunched between bad economic news (more layoffs) and worse reporting (fake Cohen testimony, fake Vietnam Veteran, etc.). I posted this tweet yesterday as a response to a post by my podcasting partner Stacy McCain—
This morning, Charlie Martin has a post over at PJ Media that expands on the economic wisdom in Pablo’s reply.
Some years ago, I crunched numbers from the New York Time‘s 10K financial statements and found that a single copy of the Times cost them about $4 to print, ship, and sell. At the time the cover price was $1; to make a profit they had to sell more than $3 worth of advertising or something. (Now you know why they, and many other publishers, have turned into tour organizers and sell merchandise.)
A single column of the paper version of the Times costs between 1¢ and 10¢ to print; delivering a similar amount of advertising, with full-color graphics and even video, costs between one and ten million times less, and can be targeted to the guy who just googled for fly-fishing gear instead of everyone on the Upper West Side.
When your competition can deliver a better product for 0.000001 times as much, your business model has big problems.
When new technologies make a product obsolete, it’s time to look for a new business, and that new business will undoubtedly require a new business model. If the cost of entry into journalism is vastly reduced and there are vastly more people able to engage in reporting, then some of those new competitors will drive out some of the old players. That’s the free market at work as people vote democratically with their wallets. As Stacy notes in a post today,
Liberal journalists do not want to admit that their political bias may be a major reason for their industry’s decline, but when the money crunch hits, they insist that their work is valuable to “democracy.” But what did BuzzFeed do to attract hundreds of millions of dollars of investment capital? Quite simply, they figured out how to game the Facebook algorithm for cheap hits with clickbait, which might have been good for BuzzFeed’s traffic numbers but didn’t do anything in terms of creating an informed citizenry.
It seems to me that BuzzFeed’s core problem is that it can generate lots of clicks, but those clicks don’t generate successful advertising impressions. BuzzFeed’s cost per million views may be dirt cheap, but the cost per sale seen by the advertisers is too high. The site’s product does not attract serious, qualified eyeballs for its advertisers. One of the consequences of a free market is that our competitors are free to out-compete us.
So BuzzFeed is laying off 400 employees, 15 % of its staff. That means that they had close to 2,700 people on the payroll. Now, Stacy and I haven’t been able to lose millions of dollars a year of other peoples’ money, but our blogs have generated modest profits. The Other McCain operates with one full-time and two part-time bloggers. Hogewash! gets by with me part-time and the occasional assistance of members of the Vast Hogewash! Research Organization.
To paraphrase Instapundit: You’re gonna need a smaller blog.
UPDATE—This blog is a for-profit operation. While I don’t sell outside advertising, I do have a Tip Jar, I sell stuff via The Hogewash Store, and I have links to Amazon which earn a commission.
Karl Marx was a man of the 19th Century. As such, his philosophical and economic models are less refined than later thinkers who had the benefit of more historical experience, While it is probably impossible to drag Democratic Socialist politicians (Bernie Sanders, ¡Ocasio! She Guevara, etc.) into the 21st Century, perhaps they can be induced to consider basing their programs on the work of 20th-Century Marxists.
In one sense, they already do. They keep wanting to try the same failed “solutions” to nonexistent problems. That strategy models Chico’s economic behavior; he squandered his earnings and kept betting on the wrong horses. Clearly, Groucho’s approach was better. His cheerfully irreverent approach to the facts (“How the elephant got in my pajamas …”) and willingness to deal with them usually led to desirable outcomes.
However, the correct model for them is Harpo. They should just shut up and let us laugh at them.
