More Fireballs from Lee Smith: If Trump Is a Russian Agent, How Come the Village Voice's Gossip Columnist, Who Covered Him For 40 Years and Had a Network of Informants, Has Nothing About It In His Files?

Trump didn't rise out of nowhere with no college transcript and no who knew him in college like some presidents I could name.

He was a public celebrity -- we didn't particularly want him to be a public celebrity, but he was pretty insistent on the point -- for about forty years now.

The guy seems to even have informed on himself just to get bad press, which, to a spotlight-seeker, is good press.

So: with 40 years of extensive digging on this headline-making, misbehaving fame-chaser, how come there's no Russia Connection in his background?

There are three parts to this essay, which is a bit long. If you don't have time, let me tell what each part is about:

The first part is about the Village Voice columnist Wayne Barrett who died the day before Trump's inauguration. Smith used to work right next door to him at the Voice, and wants to know why Barret's files, and the files of all the assistants and junior reporters working under him, are barren of Russia Connection information.

The second part -- the most skippable -- follows a break from the first part, like a ***. This part is about how the media essentially died in the Internet age, due to making bad economic decisions (such as giving away their product for free just to get on to the internet, which then priced their product at zero point zero dollars). This led in turn to their having to jump into silly clickbaity bullshit just to chase eyeballs, and hire a bunch of young idiots who literally knew nothing.

As Ben Rhodes described them, in explaining how easily he got the Echo Chamber to repeat the words he said to them.

The second part segues directly into this last part, the closing, about the media's utter lack of professionalism or institutional quality or integrity. Having priced their reportage at zero dollars, they had to essentially become blogs with occasional dispatches from the Washington office, and turned into Jezebel: The Print Edition.

So if you have to skip, skip out in the middle (I have no idea if his theories about the economic missteps of the media are correct), but do read the intro and ending. The ending begins with, "In January, Bannon told the New York Times..."

posted by Ace at 02:49 PM

| Access Comments