Category: Media Assholes

I read Breitbart News  every day, sometimes more than once, to get an idea of what’s going on out there.  So it pains me when these guys piss in the soup by, in this case, treating a fucking commercial as a news item, viz. (don’t bother clicking on it, it’s just a screen grab):

Most of the comments are scornful of BN, saying things like “As sponsored by…” and so on.

Here’s the news:  nobody cares if you carry ads, or even advertorials.  But you have to tell people that they are just that and not actual news reports, like this example from, of all places, the Daily Mirror:

Otherwise you could (justifiably) be accused of abusing the trust of your customers, which in this case, you are.

Even the “mainstream” news has followed this principle, although they too have succumbed to clickbait bullshit recently.

I thought Breitbart News  was different.  Clearly, I was mistaken.  They just did a Bud Light.

Dumb shits.

It’s as though my Readers were to discover that all these years I’ve been paid by Springfield Armory to say all those horrible things about Glock.  (Relax, I haven’t.)

And I’m just a little blog, tucked away in the corner of the Internet.  If you’re in the Big Media Playground — and especially in the roped-off conservative area — trust is your only coin:  fuck that up, and you’re dead.  Ask Dan Rather.

No, I’m not going to stop reading Breitbart News, but I’m going to be a lot more skeptical about their reporting in future.

See how that works?

Following on from the essay above, here’s another group of stupid people:

Too many BBC journalists ‘lack understanding of basic economics’ which is creating a risk to its impartiality, an independent review has found.

A report commissioned by the broadcaster said the corporation’s economics reporting is guilty of ‘uninformed groupthink’ and dominated too much by the Westminster version of events.

More like the Kremlin- or Beijing version, but that’s a topic for another time.

It added there was a ‘lack of confidence’ to challenge mainstream arguments, along with at times a ‘temptation to hype’ in this area of reporting.

Yup.  Add ignorance to “if it bleeds, it leads”, and you have pretty much encapsulated all journalism, not just BBC journalism.

This is one reason why when a Socialist politician states that a tax rate reduction is going to “cost” money, it’s solemnly reported as fact when it’s actually not only economically illiterate, but historically refutable.

“It must be true, I read it in the paper”  has as much credence as “it must be true, I read it on the Internet”.  Depending on the topic, maybe even less.

And we won’t even talk about journalists on the topic of firearms, where their ignorance is positively Bidenesque.