cars posted:Another place where Posting fails me is trying to mock CNN Underscored, CNN's entire front-page section of servile infomercials groveling at the feet of consumer industry, as dwindling viewership and near-universal ad-block destroy even its half-hearted posture at independence from its sponsors. Fawning and toadying beyond not just parody but even plain old sarcasm
Is this just their version of NYT's Wirecutter?
dimashq posted:18 pieces of outdoor furniture under $500 that actually look expensive.
One thing i DO remember about NYT is how clearly these sources have begun to tell on themselves as no longer shaping public consciousness. Like.. people post stories from newspaper and news channel web sites nowadays and comment, "Wow, these articles must be intentionally incendiary, because they seem to be written only for a tiny proportion of the population with a huge amount of money, they just sound insane to everyone else, that must mean they're secretly WRITTEN for everyone else to get clicks." And it's like... maybe SOME of those stories ARE written as bait...? But most of them CAN'T be.
The vast majority of those articles are simply written for the only people who are likely even to SEE the average story like that, much less read through the text and find the "click bait" details. These "big time" news sources can't even hope for the average story on home-buying, etc., to escape into the wild anymore. The "content" is aimed squarely at the new readership, smaller and better-off but mostly unwilling to pay extra for what they know is simply a showy, feel-good bonus of disposable wealth.
The "big" news sites' advertising reflects that demotion in the world of capital, the demolition of the "news" market by the Internet, and the sort of "surplus dependence" that "news" now has on both private advertisers... same in a lot of ways as their increased dependence on imperialist propagandists, a transition from ostensible partnership in deception, for the supposed common good of keeping the public "properly" informed, to something more like thinly-veiled subjugation. (This is also one reason why the current "leftist" fantasy about finance news containing the Hidden Masonic Truths of Earth is so clownish; nowadays, finance news exists mostly as a means for better-connected wealth to fool the types who have to read a news story to know how "their" stocks are doing.)
So, like: CNN Underscored has the same business model as Kinja's fake "deal of the day" stories, where CNN no doubt gets paid some flat sub-prime-advertisement fee to "feature" the product, but they only make money on the story appearing on the front page when some chump clicks through and actually buys a $499 deck chair that cost the seller $20 and the economy-of-scale manufacturer $2 in labor and wages. This is part of what I mean by how pathetic it is. Today, advertisers know (thanks to contemporary metrics pioneered by Google) that a huge amount of the target audience never sees their ads, so they can leverage that into more or less forcing CNN to work for ad money on commission.
There's little evidence that ETIM exists; the people who have carried out terrorist attacks, eg the 2014 stabbing in Kunming were caught and prosecuted. The 'extremism' that the Chinese govt is fighting consists of men growing beards according to their own sentencing documents.
— Alison Killing (@alisonkilling) July 22, 2021
dimashq posted:18 pieces of outdoor furniture under $500 that actually look expensive.
aerdil im pretty angry at you for making me go on that site again... wont be ok for a while......
cars posted:dimashq posted:18 pieces of outdoor furniture under $500 that actually look expensive.
One thing i DO remember about NYT is how clearly these sources have begun to tell on themselves as no longer shaping public consciousness. Like.. people post stories from newspaper and news channel web sites nowadays and comment, "Wow, these articles must be intentionally incendiary, because they seem to be written only for a tiny proportion of the population with a huge amount of money, they just sound insane to everyone else, that must mean they're secretly WRITTEN for everyone else to get clicks." And it's like... maybe SOME of those stories ARE written as bait...? But most of them CAN'T be.
The vast majority of those articles are simply written for the only people who are likely even to SEE the average story like that, much less read through the text and find the "click bait" details. These "big time" news sources can't even hope for the average story on home-buying, etc.,
Edited by dimashq ()
Similarly, Jessie Yeung and Nectar Gan are propagandists worth watching. Yeung and Gan are two Hong Kong anti-Beijing writers that were vacuumed up as CNN's top writers on China. Lately, they've been deployed regularly to write smear stories on Beijing's prosecution of celebrity rapists and Chinese news sources' harsh criticism of the entertainment industry for coddling them. Yeung and Gan's job is to try to make Beijing look bad in the eyes of CNN's dwindling Democrat audience by first acknowledging these prosecutions and criticisms—since people online with any interest in Yeung and Gan's articles can't help but notice that China's taking action here and the Chinese press is in full support—then lie about China, claiming that the prosecutions and criticisms are "deflections" or whatever and hoping (with a reasonable chance of fulfilling that hope) that their own readers won't actually read the articles they're lying about.
cars posted:and hoping (with a reasonable chance of fulfilling that hope) that their own readers won't actually read the articles they're lying about.
i think that's actually the central pillar of news propaganda now: misconstrue the article's contents (that no one will read) in the headline (that people will read.) the news knows we just scroll past and through everything, the strategies for curating that are known and efficacious. it hits us all psychologically in our impressions of the news even for things we don't engage with, and it gives insurance against being caught lying because you can just dissimulate about the content being technically correct.
cars posted:whatever "Insider dot com" is supposed to be, it just reposts its own lone story on some random topic 50 times in a row, and the only reason anyone pays attention is because Twitter auto-promotes it to "Trending" whether anyone's "engaging" or not. That gives its top tweet, out of 50 tweets about that same story, something like 1K or 2K likes automatically because clicking on the "Trending" button, instead of taking you to a "trend" list of a bunch of tweets on the topic like it usually does, instead takes you to a page that's nothing but "Insider dot com" tweets linking back to the same story.
Then suddenly every now and then "Insider dot com" farts out some insane anti-China propaganda story, some fake anti-Beijing "movement" from the creep fash gang in Hong Kong or whatever. And suddenly that's on Trending, a link straight to 50 tweets about it from that one site, even though it has the least "engagement" of any of the site's stories. Alphabet squad shit.
Eventually "Insider dot com" will be revealed as a fed cut-out, Reader's Digest-style
cars posted:this is the guy in charge of "Insider dot com"
Henry McKelvey Blodget... from the kind of money that gives you a drip name like that one... Philip Exeter Academy, Yale degree, did everything right, used insider trading to earn a fortune in the stock market... then went on the chopping block over the Internet-stock crash as part of Eliot Spitzer's rise to national prominence... and got banned from securities trading for the rest of his life.
Then, Henry McKelvey Blodget built up Business Insider as a crooked talking head on CNBC, youve probably heard of that one, i mean, if you have a Brand, best to stick to it, right??... and now, well, "Business Insider" becomes just "Insider dot com" and it's doing stories on every topic under the sun with no real focus, getting pimped on Twitter for everything it posts and retweets 50 times, even though it's exactly the same sort of understaffed content mill as a hundred others on there...
But... turns out "Insider dot com" is especially focused on glowing up CIA shit, fake NGO-backed "movements" in designated U.S.-enemy countries... and Twitter automatically treats those as "trending" stories... even when they're not actually "trending".... and posts like 50-large "tweet storms" from this one content mill site in a special little box, so it's always linked right next to the most popular shit on the site at any given moment.... wow whoa......
the author, a "pianist and composer formerly at Yale and Bard conservatories" manages to a) prove he knows less about music than 8-11 year olds, who Pat Metheny correctly describes as already "intrinsically" knowing kenny g's music sucks, and b) defend an arch-capitalist who's profited millions from being a talented marketer who happens to play the sax.
don't read it. don't even think about reading someone's bad opinion about someone's good opinion about someone's bad muzac
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/01/kenny-g-gorelick-jazz-blues-criticism-analysis-music
What is the difference between the “minimalism” of Kenny G and that of Reich, other than the fact that one is beloved by New Yorker readers and the other is not?
under Biden there are toy shortages, hoarding, profiteering, and christmas is canceled
pogfan1996 posted:american parents buy 40% of the worlds toys, it’s nuts
to be fair this is because parents in the prosperous "Asian Tigers" instead purchase large plastic numerals and mathematical symbols, classified as foodstuffs under WTO agreement, to pile on top of their children in the wintertime "Ritual of Chüd"
pogfan1996 posted:american parents buy 40% of the worlds toys, it’s nuts
what fraction of that is purchased for use by actual children