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Journalism
Politico Fails to Meet Payroll
Stop USAID payments and Politico fails to meet payroll? Apparently the withholding of that payable in the USAID line item had surprising urgency for those employed by Politico. From Benny Johnson on X:
🚨 This is the biggest scandal in news media history:
No employee at Politico got paid yesterday. First time ever the company missed a pay period. This is a crisis.
Now we learn Politico — a “news company” — which spent the last 10 years trying to destroy the MAGA Movement was… pic.twitter.com/DwHqEp6gjp
— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) February 5, 2025
Quote of the Day: Travel Writability
The Zephyr’s timetable is engineered for thrills: it’s nearly midnight by the time you pass into Nebraska, so you sleep through the Great Plains, provided you can sleep at all. But to locate the sublime in a darkened tallgrass prairie bookended here and there by flour mills is what separates the real romantics from the wannabes. I watch it pass, forehead pressed against the window.
– Meaghan Garvey, “Passengers,” County Highway vol. 2, no. 4 (January-February 2025)
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Because I love to do it
And now, the Inevitable Substack. It seemed a natural step when my column was dragged to back of the barn like Old Yeller. I’ll show them! I’ll start a Substack and I’ll have a million friends and then they’ll be sorry! (Hot tears, runs to tree house, spends a sullen hour shooting caps.)
You know, they could be right. There could be no place, or at least no great demand, for the American humorous essay anymore. You’ll find examples in the New Yorker, but they rarely produce something I think is integral to the “humorous essay,” and that’s “actual laughter.” Not to disparage the authors – although obviously I just did – but I get the sense that they labored on them for a long time, honing and carving and polishing. I understand that S. J. Perelman was like that. I suspect that Fran Lebowitz would go a month without writing anything and then write a paragraph and go back to hanging around cafes and look vaguely disapproving.
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Mumbling, incoherent and confused… but enough about our debate experience. Let’s talk about the mess in Atlanta at the earliest Presidential Debate on record. It was President v President and the media was not happy with Joe Biden’s performance.
We cover the other news of the week and touch on a new development in the MMTLP saga.
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Mark Steyn Back in Court
— Mark Steyn (@MarkSteynOnline) June 20, 2024
Above is a short video statement from Mark in England.
Giving War Another Chance
Not really – this is just my way of saying I am rereading P.J. O’Rourke’s 1992 book Give War A Chance: Eyewitness Accounts of Mankind’s Struggle Against Tyranny, Injustice, and Alcohol-Free Beer. I read it shortly after it came out, and found it excellent. Almost a third of a century later, I am pleased to report that it still is. There are, however, quite a few details that have become dated. (It also has entire themes which have disappeared. Lee Iacocca?)
Since O’Rourke made it clear that these pieces were journalism, and since he more than most journalists would admit that such product is perishable, it may be unfair of me to point out how much of his “news” got old. Of course it did. Still, his observations at the end of the Cold War are as good a place as any to begin a review of the world we find ourselves in now. 1992 wasn’t that long ago.
Journalistic Ethics: Part I
Note: This post was prompted by fellow member @bryangstephens, with whom I have had an on-going discussion spread over a vast number of unrelated threads concerning the nature of the press, the First Amendment and their role in American politics.
Between the Civil War and the Great Depression, virtually every decent-sized American city had at least two newspapers. In addition to the popular press, many communities also had papers of ethnic or racial focus. Some of those papers, such as the Pittsburgh Courier, became influential outside of their areas of ownership and became important voices nationally. The Courier’s Wendell Smith was instrumental in helping Branch Rickey break baseball’s color barrier with the elevation of Jackie Robinson to the Brooklyn Dodgers.