R_P wrote:

Well exactly

anybody who's been following Elon musk for the past 10 or 15 years knows what a charlatan looks like and so this pandemic has got a variety of charlatans and charlatan behaviors.

takes one to know one 

 Animal-Farm wrote:
"We're building ventilators!!!11!1!"

Sure Melon.

Elon Musk says he's considering building a new social media platform

PUBLISHED MON, MAR 28 2022 6:36 AM EDT UPDATED MON, MAR 28 2022 9:15 AM EDT 
Sam Shead@SAM_L_SHEAD WATCH LIVEKEY POINTS

• The billionaire made the remark after claiming that Twitter doesn't allow for free speech.
• "Given that Twitter serves as the de facto public town square, failing to adhere to free speech principles fundamentally undermines democracy," he wrote on Twitter. "What should be done?"
• Musk has in the past proclaimed that he and his companies are working on exciting products — but often, the proposed innovations aren't realized within the projected timeline.

“In Defense Of Mass Censorship” 

The Onion. “When The Onion’s editorial board convened to discuss the tumultuous events of the previous month, one conclusion became evident: The world stands at a crossroads. Two visions of our collective future stand before us: On one side is a free and enlightened society, dedicated to the principles of openness, tolerance, and debate; the other is built upon ignorance, fear, and the suppression of dissent. Today, the path forward could not be clearer. Simply put, we need mass censorship now.”

BuzzFeed investors have pushed CEO Jonah Peretti to shut down entire newsroom, sources say

PUBLISHED TUE, MAR 22 20221:01 PM EDTUPDATED AN HOUR AGOAlex Sherman@SHERMAN4949WATCH LIVEKEY POINTS

• Several large shareholders have urged BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti to shut down the company’s news organization.
• BuzzFeed News has won awards, including a Pulitzer Prize, but is now shrinking through voluntary buyouts.
• BuzzFeed News has about 100 employees and loses roughly $10 million a year, according to people familiar with the matter.

Top BuzzFeed editors quit as CEO ‘pressured to close entire news division’

By Ariel ZilberMarch 22, 2022 11:33am Updated

BuzzFeed went public in December by merging with a special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC, in a deal that valued the company at $1.5 billion. The company is now worth about $660 million. Before the merger, investors in the SPAC withdrew about 94 percent of the money raised, leaving BuzzFeed with only $16 million.

 Lazy8 wrote:
Not anymore. Everything's changed! Again. Everything's true now.

The NYT, most of the press, and various social media empires are partisan hacks? I'm shocked.

This is why there is so much distrust of the media landscape. This is why conspiracy theorists can get away with fabrications: the media we use to check their claims is often just as dishonest.

The New York Times Belatedly Admits the Emails on Hunter Biden's Abandoned Laptop Are Real and Newsworthy

 Ivanhoe wrote: 
family father flushing out closet fascists to make a better world for his kids would be a better description.

 Ivanhoe wrote: 
Mach nur weiter... deine Glaubwürdigkeit is eh hin.

Bad News
Selling the story of disinformation

In the beginning, there were ABC, NBC, and CBS, and they were good. Midcentury American man could come home after eight hours of work and turn on his television and know where he stood in relation to his wife, and his children, and his neighbors, and his town, and his country, and his world. And that was good. Or he could open the local paper in the morning in the ritual fashion, taking his civic communion with his coffee, and know that identical scenes were unfolding in households across the country.

Over frequencies our American never tuned in to, red-baiting, ultra-right-wing radio preachers hyperventilated to millions. In magazines and books he didn’t read, elites fretted at great length about the dislocating effects of television. And for people who didn’t look like him, the media had hardly anything to say at all. But our man lived in an Eden, not because it was unspoiled, but because he hadn’t considered any other state of affairs. For him, information was in its right—that is to say, unquestioned—place. And that was good, too.

Today, we are lapsed. We understand the media through a metaphor—“the information ecosystem”—which suggests to the American subject that she occupies a hopelessly denatured habitat. Every time she logs on to Facebook or YouTube or Twitter, she encounters the toxic byproducts of modernity as fast as her fingers can scroll. Here is hate speech, foreign interference, and trolling; there are lies about the sizes of inauguration crowds, the origins of pandemics, and the outcomes of elections.

She looks out at her fellow citizens and sees them as contaminated, like tufted coastal animals after an oil spill, with “disinformation” and “misinformation.” She can’t quite define these terms, but she feels that they define the world, online and, increasingly, off.

Everyone scrounges this wasteland for tainted morsels of content, and it’s impossible to know exactly what anyone else has found, in what condition, and in what order. Nevertheless, our American is sure that what her fellow citizens are reading and watching is bad. According to a 2019 Pew survey, half of Americans think that “made-up news/info” is “a very big problem in the country today,” about on par with the “U.S. political system,” the “gap between rich and poor,” and “violent crime.” But she is most worried about disinformation, because it seems so new, and because so new, so isolable, and because so isolable, so fixable. It has something to do, she knows, with the algorithm. (...)

Warnings:  Aussie humour at work.....  

Brad The Breakfast Sausage In A Suit Offers To Tell Off The Mean Journalists For Gladys If She Likes

Covering Pro-Trump Mobs, the News Media Became a Target
“Murder the media” was scratched into a door of the Capitol. Violent protesters smashed equipment and punched a photographer.

The ‘Red Slime’ Lawsuit That Could Sink Right-Wing Media
Voting machine companies threaten “highly dangerous” cases against Fox, Newsmax and OAN, says Floyd Abrams.

Here’s the thing: Smartmatic wasn’t even used in the contested states. The company, now a major global player with over 300 employees, pulled out of the United States in 2007 after a controversy over its founders’ Venezuelan roots, and its only involvement this November was with a contract to help Los Angeles County run its election.

In an era of brazen political lies, Mr. Mugica has emerged as an unlikely figure with the power to put the genie back in the bottle. Last week, his lawyer sent scathing letters to the Fox News Channel, Newsmax and OAN demanding that they immediately, forcefully clear his company’s name — and that they retain documents for a planned defamation lawsuit. He has, legal experts say, an unusually strong case. And his new lawyer is J. Erik Connolly, who not coincidentally won the largest settlement in the history of American media defamation in 2017, at least $177 million, for a beef producer whose “lean finely textured beef” was described by ABC News as “pink slime.”

Mr. Connolly’s target is a kind of red slime, the stream of preposterous lies coming from the White House and Republican officials around the country.

“We’ve gotten to this point where there’s so much falsity that is being spread on certain platforms, and you may need an occasion where you send a message, and that’s what punitive damages can do in a case like this,” Mr. Connolly said.

Mr. Mugica isn’t the only potential plaintiff. Dominion Voting Systems has hired another high-powered libel lawyer, Tom Clare, who has threatened legal action against Ms. Powell and the Trump campaign. Mr. Clare said in an emailed statement that “we are moving forward on the basis that she will not retract those false statements and that it will be necessary for Dominion to take aggressive legal action, both against Ms. Powell and the many others who have enabled and amplified her campaign of defamation by spreading damaging falsehoods about Dominion.”

These are legal threats any company, even a giant like Fox Corporation, would take seriously. And they could be fatal to the dream of a new “Trump TV,” a giant new media company in the president’s image, and perhaps contributing to his bottom line. Newsmax and OAN would each like to become that, and are both burning money to steal ratings from Fox, executives from both companies have acknowledged. They will need to raise significantly more money, or to sell quickly to investors, to build a Fox-style multibillion-dollar empire. But outstanding litigation with the potential of an enormous verdict will be enough to scare away most buyers.

 NoEnzLefttoSplit wrote:
 

Rupert is pragmatic. He backs the side he thinks is going to win—within reasonable limits. He backed Labour when Tony Blair was on the rise. The WaPo piece below thinks that Fox will project itself as the underdog counterweight to Joe Biden and be even more successful as a result. 

It wouldn't surprise me if Rupert is quietly horrified by the monster he helped create, though. 

What happens to Fox News if Trump loses? Rupert Murdoch is prepared.

ScottFromWyoming wrote:

So did a posse of reporters assemble and claim that Shepard Smith was a threat to their safety, and needed to be removed for his thoughtcrimes? If so they didn't publish a manifesto.

NoEnzLefttoSplit wrote:

Or ships leaving a sinking rat.

 ScottFromWyoming wrote: 
I think the whole Murdoch empire is a bit of an enigma at present. Kind of startling how they pulled the plug on Trump. Maybe it's a succession issue in the family. Or maybe they have other plans about to unfold. 

 Lazy8 wrote:




Shep Smith, I think, probably fits the description

The internal tensions at Fox News appear to have contributed to his resignation, according to multiple people at the network and those close to Smith who spoke to The Washington Post for this story. Smith was also in the middle of a long-term contract, making his resignation — and Fox’s agreement to release him — highly unusual.

ScottFromWyoming wrote:

The point of the article wasn't that the editor resigned, but the internal lynch mob that assembled to force that—and that that mob was able to manipulate the paper's management.

I very much doubt that would happen at Fox.

 Lazy8 wrote:
 

I liked this a lot:
"Cotton's op-ed was poorly argued, constitutionally unsound, morally questionable, and factually flawed. But Cotton is not some random right-wing kook. The fact that he is a key policy maker of the Trump era might suggest that publishing his authoritarian dictates is a better course of action than keeping Times readers in the dark about them."

To be fair, and I'm sure you agree, there is equal and opposite outrage when a Fox (e.g.) personality allows "wrong" thought to creep through. Not sure it's led to any resignations but someone here can probably confirm.