Last night, CNN attempted to cover the contentious events in Ferguson, Mo., including the announcement that police officer Darren Wilson would not be indicted for killing a black teenager named Michael Brown and the heated protests which followed. What the most trusted brand in American journalism ended up covering, however, was itself.
I really like Kim Kardashian. I usually have nothing but disdain for celebrities, or celebrities in training. There is not a thing less interesting, or useful in the world, than an "artist" of dubious talent who has risen to fleeting fame because of sex connections, family connections, or money connections. But I think Kim is great. Here's why: She asks nothing of her fans. She's not all like: Download my new .mp3! Or: Sit through my new three-hour movie about the end of earth and how we all have to eat corn now! She hawks no talent. She knows what her best asset is, and she plays it up. She has a truly remarkable butt, so she showed it naked on the cover of Paper. Why go through the trouble of being a "singer" or an "actress" when you can just be a butt? Kim knows.
As the New Republic celebrates its 100th birthday, how are we best to understand the magazine's century of ostentatious chin-stroking? As an attempt to declare by fiat a consensus politics for a nation of divided interests and purposes? An expression of the fundamental conservatism that underlies liberalism? A performance of whiteness?
USA Today media columnist and lazy gadfly Michael Wolff has finally weighed in on BuzzFeed’s report about an Uber executive’s inflammatory comments at a private dinner attended by dozens of journalists. Wolff is quite unpleased with the minor role he played in embarrassing the $18 billion car-sharing company.
Lloyd Grove, on the Daily Beast, in a sort of irony/empathy juggling act, wrote about Washington Post columnist, contributing editor for The Atlantic, New York Times bestselling author, and "CNN Presenter" Fareed Zakaria, host of Fareed Zakaria GPS on Sundays on CNN (check your local listings) and the trouble he's in for his plagiarizing of all kinds of material, from martini recipes to unimportant stuff, and how "pathetically uncredentialed, no-account bloggers who go by the ridiculous Twitter handles @Blippoblappo and @Crushingbort" are bringing possible ruination down upon the "[i]mperially slim and darkly handsome, possessed of an insinuating charm and a cultured manner of speech that recalls the British Raj" Zakaria, also known to Mr. Grove as "America's most celebrated public intellectual."
The president of a Florida college that serves more than ten thousand students says he does not believe that his own students should be entitled to report on things that happen at their own school. Why is this man in the field of education?
Arianna Huffington, the editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post, routinely meddles with the work of HuffPost reporters who criticize her friends. According to a new report in Capital New York, the Greek-American multi-millionaire recently picked up an even worse habit: Suspending reporters who write negative but otherwise completely factual articles about any of her pals.
Here is something that Democrats and Republicans agree on, besides the fact that Ebola is coming and we are all going to die: According to a new poll of political polarization and media habits of regular folk by the Pew Research Center, BuzzFeed is the least trusted news source in media, behind the Rush Limbaugh Show.
