Friday 4 January 2019

BEYOND PARODY: "The Left's Top 25 Journalists"---The Daily Beast (Feb. 16, 2010)


    BEYOND PARODY: "The Left's Top 25 Journalists"---The Daily Beast (Feb. 16, 2010)

    A more perfect evocation of the pampered, unreal, image-obsessed, self-deceiving world of the lickspittles, chancers, and courtiers of the U.S. "liberal media" might have been written---maybe---by the Coen Brothers, or Armando Iannucci, or J. Swift. Personally, I think this is unimprovable satire.

    SELECTED HIGHLIGHTS:

    Jessica Valenti: "touted by some as the Gloria Steinem of her generation. Her writing has a conspicuous verve..."

    David Rieff: "...rich, sage prose... brooding, occasionally Messianic quality of his observations..."

    Eric Alterman: "....the seriousness with which many of his views are taken, as well as of his unflinching convictions." * 

    Katrina vanden Heuvel: "After all, what could be more mainstream than a weekly column for The Washington Post (whose editorial page editor recently hired Marc Thiessen, of the Bush administration)? She is a fixture, too, on CNN and MSNBC, where she plays a thoughtful foil to more boisterous commentators." 

    Christiane Amanpour: "...she takes us on eye-opening excursions to such places as Iran, Greece, and Haiti, all the while pricking American insularity in that elegantly stern way of hers."

    Rachel Maddow: "Maddow rocketed to something approaching cult status in the last year of the Bush administration, with her blunt, cultural-guerrilla methods offering a lift to the spirits in those weary, demoralized times. The question everyone now asks is: How effective can her subversive shtick be with Obama—her man, as it were—in the White House?" 

    Frank Rich: "...His approach to political commentary—one that he shares with Peggy Noonan, on the right—is to treat it as theater, or drama, for review. It is an eye-catching method, when expertly deployed." 

    Arianna Huffington: "...the HuffPost is Ground Zero, Mecca, the primordial cookie jar, for liberal news junkies. Ms. Huffington likes to describe herself as a 'curator,' and her formula—a mix of original and excerpted content, along with sassy, partisan commentary..."

    Jon Stewart: "Why is Jon Stewart No. 1? Because no one can match his reach, and his daily impact on the 25-40 demographic (which put its man in the White House). Because he invariably asks tougher questions than much of the 'mainstream' media. Because we don’t see Paul Krugman going on Fox to do battle, head-to-head, with Bill O’Reilly. Because he will make fun of Obama when Obama needs to be made fun of. And because he has, with his humor and intelligence, captured better than anyone the hypocrisy and absurdity of our media and politics." 


    ad nauseam.... 

    https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-lefts-top-25-journalists?ref=scroll 

    * Here's Alterman, eight years after this blowjob piece, taking the hatchet to a real journalist: 

    "The left was very excited about WikiLeaks and excited about the fact that things that governments had traditionally kept secret were no longer going to be kept secret. It seemed to be part of this whole new wave of 'nothing is secret any more in the age of the Internet.' … It's true that Julian Assange used to be a lot more popular before SOMEBODY undermined American democracy with the help of, uh, the Russians, and gave us this President who is destroying democracy in the United States and threatening the entire world. I don't see Assange as a VICTIM any more, I see Assange as someone who helped to victimize American democracy. And if Julian Assange is being demonized for that, then count me among his demonizers."[smirks] 


    https://morrisseybreen.blogspot.com/2018/11/newsweek-employed-spy-explains-to-us.html

    http://members5.boardhost.com/xxxxx/msg/1546669692.html

No comments:

Post a Comment