Hos before Joes

There’s been a lot of talk in the navel-gazing media about the fact that the New York Times is partnering with Buzzfeed to cover the conventions later this summer. Here’s what I don’t get with all the condescension towards Buzzfeed and Gawker: in what world is having your work featured beside Honey Badger mash-ups and side-boob shots more damaging to your journalistic reputation than kissing up to Joe Scarborough and Hugh Hewitt and Laura Ingraham? All these serious journalist motherfuckers (Tapper, Fineman, Halperin, Allen, etc.) are chuckling along with all manner of radio and morning tv scumbags in order to promote their “work”. A little LOL cat page-view whoring between stories seems pretty harmless in comparison, no?

And it’s probably one or the other. People watch Morning Joe because there’s not much else on at that time of day. Same for reading the WaPo and non-Krugman NYT editorials. No one goes looking for that shit, it just shows up on their tv or on their doorstep because of some failure of the so-called free market. If you don’t have the luxury of having your babble shoved down the throat of the public by fiat media, you have to attract attention somehow. People like LOL cats and soft-core porn and cute pet pictures and profanity. Honestly, enjoying those things is a lot more healthy than enjoying an episode of “Meet The Press”.

In a similar vein, mistermix and freddie recently pointed out that paid opinion writing will go away partly because “there’s an army of people who will do it for free, and honestly some of the ones who do it for free are better than any who do it for pay”. Part of what makes most paid pundits so bad is that they are so constricted in what they can do and say: they can’t post pictures, they can’t really tell jokes, they can’t use profanity, they can’t criticize their Galtian pay-masters. So what do they to stay “interesting”? A lot of it is facile contrarianism along the lines of “Everyone thinks recycling is better than throwing all our shit in the river, but if you look beyond the conventional wisdom of our hippie overlords, you may be surprised to learn…”

Wouldn’t it be less intellectually compromising to use profanity or LOL cat every now and then?

via Balloon Juice http://www.balloon-juice.com/2012/06/20/hos-before-joes/