Comments | agilebrit: Dear @nytimes: I suppose it's too much to ask for you to get your heads out of your asses.

agilebrit

Dear @nytimes: I suppose it's too much to ask for you to get your heads out of your asses.

Dec 26, 2016 10:26

In a story today about Trump's press room, the nation's birdcage liner, oh, wait, I mean, "Newspaper of Record," the New York Times, said:

Mr. Trump’s unconventional, sometimes hostile, relationship with the news media and his penchant for communicating through unfiltered Twitter posts threaten to upend a decades-old Washington tradition that ( Read more... )

rants, politics

Comments 10

selenite December 26 2016, 21:26:30 UTC

I can see the direct connection. Trump can do national speeches straight to whitehouse.gov/video and the press gets no ad revenue at all. They're already in a death spiral. This will accelerate it.

Oh, man. Twitter's already looking for a buyer. Imagine if Trump bought it?

agilebrit December 27 2016, 04:26:29 UTC

I would LOVE if Trump bought Twitter. Maybe then it would have actual free speech for everyone, not just leftists. #freenero

I didn't even think of the money angle, but you're absolutely right.

fenchurche December 27 2016, 04:21:01 UTC

Oh yeah... I've been pondering the same things, every time I read another complaint.

agilebrit December 27 2016, 04:30:32 UTC

The hypocrisy is breathtaking. "OMG! Protocol! Tradition! ...except for these ones that we want to toss b/c they might favor Trump!"

It's hilarious watching them flail around because they can't control this guy. He is not afraid of them, and they find that terrifying. And I say, It's about time a Republican grew a damn spine.

baron_waste December 27 2016, 04:38:25 UTC

I'm me, and I approve of this message!

agilebrit December 27 2016, 05:00:52 UTC

"...hinder the press's role as a conduit." Well, shit, I hope so. I'm super tired of their version of events and don't particularly need their kind of "conduit."

“The World of the 21st Century.” baron_waste December 27 2016, 05:37:05 UTC

don't particularly need their kind of "conduit."

And that, of course, is the real foundation of their complaint - as you say, their role as gatekeepers of information is being superceded. They're being increasingly disregarded, becoming irrelevant, and they don't like it!

A friend of mine was describing how this was working for the world of SF/F fandom - the litigation-appointed commissars of Correct Thought, the “gatekeepers” whose nod you had to get to be published, have lost their monopoly on publishing and are seeing everyone else simply push past them now, leaving them squawking and demanding and ruling a dwindling flock of starlings.

“Information wants to be free,” as the old hacker saying goes. So do people.

Re: “The World of the 21st Century.” werewolf_hacker December 27 2016, 23:58:34 UTC

Well, LJ is being stupid (the last code push borked the site; way to go, guys) and I can only see comments when I'm either logged into Ben's journal (probably because it's a CSS style), or logged out completely, so that's awesome.

Anyway, yeah, it's interesting how the gatekeepers in SFF are trying to grip the genre tighter only to see it slipping through their fingers. Baen, I believe, was the first to really, really embrace the new e-reader tech, and they've done the Free Library for as long as I can remember.

It doesn't help that the New York publishing houses live in a sort of echo chamber of political correctness and seem to think that pushing check-box message fic onto us is the way to go, when in reality people who read for entertainment really do not like being preached at. And they wonder why they're bleeding readers.

garnigal January 2 2017, 15:01:56 UTC

Hey, I've been meaning to ask you (with the forewarning that I'm extremely left-wing and Canadian) what you personally expect to see / benefit from in Trump's presidency. I'm not asking to start a fight, just to get the other side of the story, since most of the people around me are also centrist or left-leaning and Canadian.

agilebrit January 2 2017, 17:36:03 UTC

Personally, I don't really expect to benefit at all from a Trump presidency. For me and my family, it will probably be status quo. We did perfectly well under every previous administration (because we are sensible with our money and make enough to be quite comfortable), and I don't think that will change. He might lower taxes. That would be nice. I won't hold my breath. (In my ideal world, we scrap the current tax system entirely and start from scratch, but I'll never get my ideal world. :p)

For the country, however--that's a different story. I sincerely hope he keeps his promise to stop the hemorrhaging at our border. And while I'm not confident that he's actually read the Constitution, I'm fairly certain he doesn't despise it and view it as an obstacle the way Hillary seems to--especially the 2nd Amendment. I'm hoping that he will appoint judges that won't pull their opinions out of thin air based on what they think is "right" rather than what the law actually says, because that is not their job. That, too, would be nice. I would ( ... )