The mainstream media is like an actor or athlete well past his prime who pathetically keeps trying to stay in the spotlight. From el gato malo at boriquagato.substack.com:
irrelevance begets desperate bids for attention
it seems as though every time one turns around some new and obstreperous take emerges from the rage mills of media. spend any time at all adjacent to it and one cannot help but be struck both by how utterly vapid the takes seem to have become but also how calculated to annoy and inflame.
events of great global moment transpire, and new york times weighs in with this:
describing this as “unserious” seems far too generous. this is ridiculous, it’s absurd. how literally any right thinking human could decide that “this was the important angle of this emerging story and we need to cover it!” lies beyond my ken.
this is obviously, even ostentatiously stupid, a chorus too far even for the monomaniacal one-note flutes of wokedom.
i have a theory about this: it’s not even agenda anymore. it’s desperation marketing, the last gasp of a dying dinosaur seeking to extract from desiccated fruit one last dreg of attention juice, a colicky child deciding that negative attention is better than no attention at all.
these are not even articles or headlines, they are drama, rage and derision bait cast forth into the fading vestiges of attention ecosphere, a tactic perhaps once fertile but that turns to poison in the emergent reputation economy.
Living in a social media virtue signal bubble will do that to ya.
My favorite is the Orwellian two contradictory thoughts at once.
On every newscast.