Category: Lefty “Alt”-Media
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Follow The Absence Of Money
A friend of the blog emails: St Paul City Councilmember Mitra Jalali says that capitalism crushed a local alternative weekly. I’m scratching my head at this because the print and online versions were free. So, if they couldn’t survive by giving away whatever they had, how did capitalism crush them? One would think something free…
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Pining For The Hipster Fjords
I do “get” nostalgia. My first radio station – KEYJ, which became KQDJ during my senior year of high school – was one of the formative experiences of my life. But sometime around 2000, it changed from a local middle-of-the-road station to a “computer in a closet” station relaying ESPN Sportsradio and the occasional high…
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The Only Possible Explanation…
…I can think of for this piece of bilge in The Atlantic is that the magazine didn’t know why Babylon Bee should have all the fun, satirizing Big Left.
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Blue Fragility: Open Letter To Jonathan Chait
To: Johnathan “Chaitful” ChaitFrom: Mitch Berg – Red State Sleeper AgentRe: This Little “Eliminationist Hatred” Problem You Have Mr. Chait We go way back, of course – and not in a good way. You have a bit of a history of being a horrible excuse for a human being. But you are a gift that…
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There Are Millions Of Reasons…
… why I will never donate a single penny to Minnesota Public radio, even though I listen to them (primarily news and classical music) constantly. Two of them, for starters, are: Keri Miller WNYC’s “On The Media”. But a few more million of them are right here; as Minnesota Public radio lays off much of…
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Items For The “Cancel” Agenda
SCENE: Mitch BERG is walking out of the local Korean joint with a container of Galbi. As he’s committing to going out the door, MyLyssa SILBERMAN, reporter for National Public Radio’s Saint Paul bureau, covering the “Fake News” and “Diversity” beats. SILBERMAN: Mister Berg. BERG: Er, hi, Ms. Silberman. What’s new? SILBERMAN: Not much time…
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Democracy Dies In Conspiracy
Conservatives, especially conservatives who are “out” critics of the mainstream media, get routinely accused of “hating” journalism. The late Nick Coleman was particularly, er, “acerbic” in his criticism of those who had the gall to criticize the news/industrial complex, claiming in one bout of hysteria that bloggers “wanted to kill the Strib”. While we correctly…
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Breeding A Nation Of Ninnies
This tweet from Time – kids, ask your parents… …explains a lot about how Greta Thunberg became their “Person of the Year”. Among many other things. The Babylon Bee may actually be giving the big media too much credit.
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And To Think Conservatives Believe Big Media Writes Stories About Conservative / Republican People And Events Long Beforehand, Because They’re All Writing To A Narrative
Jessica Kwong, progressive stenographer at former magazine “Newsweek”, on Donald Trump’s thanksgiving: “it was written before knowing about the president’s surprise visit to Afghanistan-an honest mistake” In other words, pre-written. The Big Media aren’t “the enemy of the people”. They’re worse; after assuming the mantle of “guardian of democracy” (which, we are told, without their…
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Freedom Is Dangerous
“Liberals”, 2004: “Question authority! Free speech is *the* most essential right!” “Progressives”, 2019: “Free speech is too dangerous for people without tin ‘journalist’ badges to be using” In the old Soviet Union, citizens used to joke that when a shortage of butter was anticipated, the state media would start running stories on how *bad* butter…
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A Thousand Times “Yep”
While driving about yesterday during the mid-day, I caught a piece on MPR – basically a recycled “Documentary” podcast on “Education” looking at the tension between free speech and “inclusion” at the U of M, viewed in the context of a squabble over a panel on the Washington Avenue bridge in 2016, where Campus Republicans…
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News
It’s on the verge of becoming a Berg’s Law: “Today’s sarcastic jokes about progressives and the people who feed off them – academics, the media, entertainment, the non-profit-industrial complex – are tomorrow’s reality.” Because, just watch, this will happen soon enough. Because it already pretty much is.
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Cultural Nausea
I want to make a video, fisking John Oliver’s moronic piece claiming Australia’s gun laws “debunk” the “American gun ownership myth”. Spoiler: the only parts that are wrong are the parts where Oliver is moving his lips. The problem is, watching John Oliver gives me a very unpleasant physical reaction. Watching him literally makes me…
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Not To Indulge In Schadenfreud…
…over the recent layoffs in the hipster millennial junk news industry… …but in this case, it’s Iowahawk doing the Schadenfreud. Another @iowahawkblog work of art pic.twitter.com/BDhiXxUKRo — SixStringTweets (@SixStringTweets) January 25, 2019 I can’t tell if sound more like a Nebraska outtake or a Jay Farrar demo.
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Buzzfeed Is To “News”…
…what Ashley Simpson was to “live performance”.
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That Moment When…
….you see it in black and white: Big Left’s “elites” really, really don’t understand the Constitution, federalism, checks and balances…representative republican government. I don't think people are ready for the crisis that will follow if Democrats win the House popular vote but not the majority. After Kavanaugh, Trump, Garland, Citizens United, Bush v. Gore, etc,…
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You Gotta Have Faith In Something
Whenever you figure that there’s nothing you can count on, and all the constants are evaporating, just remember this absolute truism: The City Pages can always get dumber.
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Aborted In The First Trimester
Michelle Wolf’s really awful Netflix show canceled after three months: The move comes just a couple of weeks after BET announced it was cancelling The Rundown with Robin Thede after its first season. That cuts the number of late-night-style shows hosted by women in half, with only TBS’ Samantha Bee and Hulu’s Sarah Silverman left standing. And with a little luck, Bee’s wretched…
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Nick Coleman: Still A Monkey
The other day, I linked to an excellent Strib piece about my friend Sarah Cade – a liberal, millennial, biracial, female “gun nut”. It’s an interesting story, and one that has to be terrifying Big Left, inasmuch as millennials are more likely to be pro-gun than anti (even after a few months of puffing up…
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Just Goes To Show You
A couple of Berg’s Law references, here: Berg’s Eleventh Law of Inverse Viability: The conservative liberals “respect” for their “conservative principles” will the the one that has the least chance of ever getting elected. And its corollary: The McCain Corollary To Berg’s Eleventh Law: If that respected conservative ever develops a chance of getting elected,…
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Word Choice
Rolling Stone, reeling from a decade of decay of the print publication biz and its own growing irrelevance, is on the market; Jann Wenner is looking for a buyer. The NYTimes notes (emphasis added by me): But the headwinds buffeting the publishing industry, and some costly strategic missteps, have steadily taken a financial toll on…
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Otherwise Occupied
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails: The lead article in the August issue of the Midway Monitor is about Frogtown Radio WFNU 94.1 being on the air. It’s low-power community radio, covers a 5-mile diameter reaching from Har-Mar to the river, from the U of M to the Capital. They want to give the diversity…
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Backwards Schadenfreud
I’m not sure what I like most about the proposed plan to save KFAI Radio – the long- running ‘Publicly-Supported” Pacifica affiliate in the west bank (where, I note in full disclosure, I was a volunteer news guy 25 years ago, trying to find a way to infiltrate the MPR Borg). Is it the idea…
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1000 Words
Heh. Indeed.
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Journalism Without Limits!
Well, the title is a little misleading. Where I wrote “without limits”, I guess I what I meant was “no bottom to the barrel”. Because in the arc of downfall for the City Pages, from its heady days in the eighties publishing James Lileks, and its journalistic peak in the nineties, where they ran a lot…