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We don’t tend to do location work on this show, but when a major news event happens in the city where one of our hosts live, we get a up-close and personal view. And when that host is James Lileks and Minneapolis, the amount of detail, insight, and thoughtfulness could fill a dozen podcasts. James describes what the last few days have been like, and where he thinks his city is heading. But that’s not all we’ve got for you. We’ve got the NYT’s Bari Weiss on Joe Rogan, podcasting, and why our medium in now a major media platform (it’s very meta conversation). Then, obscure law professor and fast food aficionado John Yoo stops by to school us on platforms versus publishers (guess what Ricochet is?), that pesky section 230, and why Twitter probably should not be fact checking the President.
Music from this week’s show: My City of Ruins by Bruce Springsteen
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This is actually 498.
Damn auto-fill in got me again. Thanks and fixed.
I think Bari Weiss misrepresented or at least mis-stated the conservative position – and Trump’s position, for that matter – on something like Section 230. The issue is not wanting “increased (government) regulation” in a way it’s just the opposite: Section 230 is in effect “regulation” that protects businesses like Twitter from being responsible for their behavior. So eliminating or at least “reforming” Section 230 is DE-regulation.
And I think Rob mis-interprets the relative audiences of Joe Rogan and “Morning” Joe. The nearly 200 million downloads of Joe Rogan per month, are not of a single “show.” And they’re not 200 million different people. That number could even be multiplying people who listen to part of a “show” on their phone, another part in their car, another part at home…
But at minimum, if Joe Rogan has X “shows” per month, then to arrive at 200 million total, that means each “show” is downloaded about 200,000,000/X times.
Meanwhile, if “Morning” Joe has an audience of 10 million, that’s 10 million PER SHOW. And the overall number could be higher, with people coming in and going out during the course of a show. If there are at least 20 weekdays per month, at 10 million per, that’s also 200 million total “downloads” for “Morning” Joe, per month.
Rob also doesn’t seem to realize that Biden and Trump both saying Section 230 should be revoked or heavily modified, don’t mean the same thing.
If Morning Joe ever tops 10M per show the world would have to be coming to an end. At 6am it pulls in a little over 1/10th of that. And in the coveted “demo” Rogan is doing much better.
Well I just used the numbers mentioned on the show. Wasn’t it Rob who said “Morning” Joe has an audience of 10 million? Maybe I mis-heard.
Whoever was messing with stuff on their desk or whatever, near the end, needed to stop, or click “mute.”
On Minneapolis, though I understand the threat of police officers getting mobbed or jumped, protection against violence and basic crimes is the most basic and universal responsibility of governments. It is the most fundamental tenet of the social contract. Where police aren’t policing, government ceases to merit obedience and loyalty.
Hopefully, the police commissioner or sheriffs have appealed to the national guard or state troopers for backup to reestablish universal protection. If they can’t have officers as spread out and isolated, at least they can have officers respond in larger groups to reported incidents. If mobs attempt to endanger even larger groups, that insurrection must be put down by one level or another.
Ceding areas to violence, theft, and vandalism cannot be an option. Democrats around the country have a habit of excusing destructive mobs. If a state refuses to protect its citizens at every level, doesn’t the Department of Justice have a role? Isn’t that the Left’s explicit position when teaching Civil Rights histories?
Prayers for your city.
Peter wants Ricochet’s standards lowered?
Challenge accepted!
Gee, liked the music at the end, but was that a call to violence? Would that be allowed on Twitter?
PITy the man who made that challenge.
As for news media, it is not necessary to choose between openly biased media and media that at least attempt objectivity. There is room for both. A return to something like the big three networks is not only unlikely but unacceptable.
More fruitful questions might be: What is lacking that could be provided? Why has it not already been provided? What incentives or structures might promote honesty and charity in public discourse while maintaining freedom for unreasonable expression?
The primary problems I see are uncritical reception of media by many people and lack of calm, considerate crosstalk between opposed groups.
I suppose a Ricochet version of Twitter is possible — subscription locked participation but publicly visible. No conservative group will catch up to Google anytime soon. Facebook is easy pickings.
Sharyl Attkisson was well regarded as a straight shooting investigative reporter, but ended up parting ways with CBS. I believe CBS didn’t particularly like the same level of scrutiny applied to Obama as to Republicans.
Whatever the reasons, she points out the importance of the past principle that news and opinions need to be kept separate. Sadly one of the three reasons she gives Why No One Trusts the Mainstream Media is that this line has often been blurred or even removed.
I agree with @aaronmiller that we shouldn’t accept a false dilemma of all or nothing. Let opinions be as clearly partisan as they wish to be. But we should be able to trust that news reporting and other reporting of the facts of what has happened is not, for example, selectively editing videos of William Barr to support making him seem to be saying the exact opposite of what he actually said. Ditto for other numerous examples.
How A String Of Deceptively Edited Videos Highlight The Media’s Misinformation Problem
If you care about accuracy, you should care that millions of people were misinformed by major networks last week.
By Emily Jashinsky
MAY 14, 2020
When government forced the breakup of the telephone monopoly (which allowed for competition, which was beneficial to consumers), one feature that was preserved was the ability to communicate between people served by different providers.
If you bought your phone and/or service from X, you could still make phone calls with other people who are served by Y or Z.
That eliminates the problem faced, for example, by Google when it tried to compete with Facebook. If you want to communicate with people who are on Facebook, you couldn’t do that if you were using Google’s product and they were not. If you want to get the tweets of famous people A, B, and C, and cannot receive them on NewTwitterProvider, that becomes a deal breaker that makes it fail.
Imagine trying to start a new car company if you had to provide a new independent set of roads for your cars to run on.
The key to successful competition is standardized protocols and guaranteed interoperability.
Did you know this about George Floyd?
EXCERPT:
The rest of the country knows George Floyd from several minutes of cell phone footage captured during his final hours. But in Houston’s Third Ward, they know Floyd for how he lived for decades—a mentor to a generation of young men and a “person of peace” ushering ministries into the area.
Before moving to Minneapolis for a job opportunity through a Christian work program, the 46-year-old spent almost his entire life in the historically black Third Ward, where he was called “Big Floyd” and regarded as an “OG,” a de-facto community leader and elder statesmen, his ministry partners say.
Floyd spoke of breaking the cycle of violence he saw among young people and used his influence to bring outside ministries to the area to do discipleship and outreach, particularly in the Cuney Homes housing project, locally known as “the Bricks.”
“George Floyd was a person of peace sent from the Lord that helped the gospel go forward in a place that I never lived in,” said Patrick PT Ngwolo, pastor of Resurrection Houston, which held services at Cuney.
[The article continues at…]
George Floyd Left a Gospel Legacy in Houston
As a person of peace, “Big Floyd” opened up ministry opportunities in the Third Ward housing projects.
KATE SHELLNUTT
MAY 28, 2020
Apparently CNN in Atlanta has been attacked and the White House has been on lock down for an hour.
But I am not surprised. I was predicting this would happen months ago.
You cant keep millions of people on lockdown for months and not think they would explode.
This is the trigger on the Pandemic rage.
It was entirely predictable and preventable.
The meme is already out there that if there’s not a huge outbreak of coronavirus cases in Minneapolis-St. Paul in the next two weeks due to the lack of safe distancing, all lockdowns should be ended and people should be allowed to return to normal lives (for those whose places of work haven’t been burned down).
Is it really a surprise that someone who hates the President can’t understand that what he was doing was removing government protection, because the platform quit being neutral?
I completely agree with this. The curve was smashed. You can’t change the number of casualties under the curve. That is up to the vaccine guys.
Would we trade some medical problems for this? Of course we would. We would trade a ton of medical problems for this. Every policy decision is like that.
Compound economic destruction because we didn’t open up two, three, or four weeks ago.
I also need to add right here that champagne socialism is very bad for black people in Minnesota. Worst educational disparities. 50th. Worst racial housing affordability, again 50th in the nation. They waste all kinds of money on NGOs and it does absolutely nothing, except engender corruption and waste.
That’s assuming the virus was already prevalent enough in particular Minneapolis areas to guarantee a handful of infected people among the crowds. I don’t know which of these areas is relevant, but some of them only report a single case of COVID-19 so far.
If anybody thinks Walter Cronkite was “fair” in his reporting or anybody else in that day, I’ve got several bridges to sell you. I do think we need to return to the days when media admitted their bias. You read both takes and somewhere in the middle lies the truth and you can make that decision for yourself. I agree with James about local media covering local news. I wish that would happen. Even on our TV news we tend to get very little local news.
Seems like every episode, one of those lads is trying to do other work, and the noise is distracting.
Paul Harvey
You’re ooooooooolllldddd!
This guy is really smart.
James could institute mandatory Bejeweled play during the podcast to focus the fidgeting.
Not quite the fifty that Rob said, but close.
James sounded (understandably) very stressed. To James and people elsewhere seeing this happening now – stay safe, and take care.
Excellent Federalist article, unfortunately one like it could be written every week for most of my life yet Bari seems hesitant to admit it, these aren’t opinions, changing quotes is outright lying and it’s been going on since the 60s.