The Media Has Assassinated Themselves

It's a hard world, kid. It's twice as hard if you're stupid.

And the media is very, very stupid indeed. And emotional. And partisan. And unprofessional.

Mollie Hemingway notes four recent -- as in, the past couple of days -- new outbreaks of the media's self-arson.

It's not just that they are chiefly in the business of #FakeNews these days -- it's that when one media source creates #FakeNews, the rest of the Herd of Low-Intellect Pack Animals begins retweeting it and republishing it without a single one of these idiots bothering to check a damn thing.

Mollie's first example is the New York Times' #FakeNews claim that Rick Perry only recently came to understand that as Secretary of Energy, he would be in charge of safeguarding the US' nuclear arsenal.

This despite the fact that when Perry accepted the nomination, he said:

"I look forward to engaging in a conversation about the development, stewardship and regulation of our energy resources, safeguarding our nuclear arsenal, and promoting an American energy policy that creates jobs and puts America first."

As David St. Hubbins said: "Ah well that's just nitpicking, isn't it?"

Becket Adams examines the unsourced garbage nature of this #FakeNews garbage, but also shows you all of the media -- and I do mean all of the media -- that ate this up and then vomited it back up to the world.

Well, not all of the legacy media. One outlet, New York magazine actually bothered to do some actual thinking. Here, they come very close to committing the crime of actual journalistic skepticism:

Yesterday, the New York Times posted a story by Coral Davenport and David Sanger about Donald Trump's energy secretary nominee, former Texas governor Rick Perry, that quickly went viral. That's because the article, posted under the headline "'Learning Curve' As Rick Perry Pursues a Job He Initially Misunderstood," made a rather astounding claim: that at the time he was tapped to head the department, Perry didn't even understand that one of its primary purposes is to maintain the security of America's nuclear weapons and facilities. Journalists everywhere, myself included, tweeted out the story as just another bright-red data point about Donald Trump's lack of fitness to govern.

But since the story went online, a bunch of (mostly) conservative critics and outlets has argued that the story falsely impugns Perry. They make a very convincing case.

Mollie's third example is this amazing headline. A Yale professor of computer science, widely considered an actual genius in his field, criticized unexamined liberal assumptions choking the academy.

Here's how the National Laughstock headlined this:

Scientific Genius Accused of Being Anti-Scientific Genius.

But do let the National Laughingstock tell you how intellectual they themselves are, and how much they long to touch science in its no-no places.

They have chosen the form of their Destructor, and the form they have chosen is they themselves.

posted by Ace at 03:20 PM

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