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Member's Off-site Blogs
the view from the other side of the news...
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Last Wednesday, I broke the news to Heather Cox Richardson that she was the most successful individual author of a paid publication on the breakout newsletter platform Substack.
Early that morning, she had posted that day’s installment of “Letters From an American” to Facebook, quickly garnering more than 50,000 reactions and then, at 2:14 a.m., she emailed it to about 350,000 people. She summarized, as she always does, the events of the day, and her 1,120 words covered a bipartisan vote on a spending measure, President Trump’s surprise attack on that bill, and a wave of presidential pardons. Her voice was, as it always is, calm, at a slight distance from the moment: “Normally, pardons go through the Justice Department, reviewed by the pardon attorney there, but the president has the right to act without consulting the Department of Justice,” she wrote. “He has done so.”
The news of her ranking seemed to startle Dr. Richardson, who in her day job is a professor of 19th century American history at Boston College. The Substack leader board, a subject of fascination among media insiders, is a long way from her life on a Maine peninsula — particularly as the pandemic has ended her commute — that seems drawn from the era she studies. On our Zoom chat, she sat under a portrait that appeared as if it could be her in period costume, but is, in fact, her great-great-grandmother, who lived in the same fishing village, population a bit over 600.
...
Many of those newly energized Americans are women around Dr. Richardson’s age, 58, and they form the bulk of her audience. She’s writing for people who want to leave an article feeling “smarter not dumber,” she says, and who don’t want to learn about the events of the day through the panicked channels of cable news and Twitter, but calmly situated in the long sweep of American history and values.
Read more:
- By Gus Leonisky at 13 Mar 2021 - 9:53am
- Gus Leonisky's blog
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a view from a little catholic boy...
by Matthew Walther
...
If you have ever visited a local library or were taught English in a public high school (especially in rural America) at any point in the last three or so decades, you will be familiar with the tendency I have in mind. The old lady liberal is a woman in her sixties or seventies. She wears wonderful baggy sweaters and odd jewelry that would probably get her accused of “cultural appropriation” in any other circles. She is an enthusiastic reader of the New York Times, even though it arrives a day late. She has an old-fashioned aspirational view of high culture and encourages teenagers to read Cervantes and Joyce and to listen to jazz CDs. She is a great baker, a grammatical prescriptivist, and a stickler for politeness. She is far more likely than the average liberal to be religious; often she is among the few remaining pillars of her local mainline Protestant congregation. She loathes what is sometimes called “safety-ism” and believes that even very young children are capable of riding their bicycles or visiting the mom and pop supermarket without adult supervision.
In the nineties she was cool on the Clintons, Goosebumps, and standardized testing; during the Bush and Obama years she consistently opposed the Patriot Act, the Iraq war, and privatization of the Postal Service. In recent years she has probably changed her mind about vaccines, though she privately maintains that it was no bad thing when chickenpox was a rite of passage. The old lady liberal was an opponent of Big Tech avant la lettre, and indeed her views on most subjects could probably be summed up as opposition to everything Big—Big Ag, Big Pharma, Big Education, Big Defense, and so on. She holds, in other words, opinions that would be agreeable to many readers of this website.
Though I do not share all of their views, I have always been inordinately fond of old lady liberals. This is true not least because they were the first adults with whom I ever had conversations about books. There must be hundreds of thousands of other Americans of whom this is also true, and it is dreary to think what will happen when these genial old women are replaced by Teach For America scolds whose idea of reading is graphic “novels.”
Read more:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/why-liberalism-really-failed/
Matthew Walther is editor of The Lamp (a Catholic conservative magazine) and a contributing editor at The American Conservative.
So much to say about this crap... It's crap, isn't it? Or am I mistaken?
First, blaming little old ladies for the failure of "liberalism" is like blaming the said old ladies for being run over by a truck on a pedestrian crossing. The truck drivers of course are the Donalds but mostly the Joe Bidens and Obamas, who have been driving recklessly the ideologies of "liberalism" as if it was a 70-tons Sherman tank — with the help of the Pentagon and the CIA, and the NSA. We shall explore the failure of liberalism in more details than this in the future — if failure was not deliberate to prevent "too much freedom" in the ranks... People's freedom is a poison to governments...
uncle rupe's culture...
News Corp’s dirty laundry has been aired in a day of extraordinary Senate hearings, with former employees accusing the media giant of spiking public interest journalism, a toxic workplace culture, and sexist reporting.
More than 74 years of combined experience at News Corp was on display in emotional testimony before the Senate inquiry into media diversity on Friday, as former staff exposed how the Murdoch empire’s dominance warps public perception and perpetuates stereotypes.
Anthony Klan, an investigative journalist formerly employed at The Australian, told senators that editors spiked a story about retail super funds illegally siphoning off members’ money, claiming they pulled him into a meeting with banking executives, who were major advertisers at the masthead.
“He who pays the piper calls the tune, and that’s exactly what was going on,” he said.
Mr Klan, who worked at News Corp for almost 15 years, left the company in the lead up to the 2019 election, saying The Australian’s award-winning newsroom was “unrecognisable” from its former self.
The level of unethical behaviour … was extremely high,’’ he said.Anna Rogers, a Queensland-based photojournalist who worked at News Corp for 29 years, delivered a scathing indictment of the company’s “toxic workplace culture”, claiming editors directed sexist coverage requiring her to snap “yummy mummies” and “pretty backpackers”.
“The lack of diversity in media ownership has allowed News Corp to descend from being a reputable news organisation with a safe and supportive workplace … to a place where women are considered as pigs in lipstick with a toxic work culture,” Ms Rogers told senators.
Read more:
https://thenewdaily.com.au/news/national/2021/03/13/news-corp-senate-media-diversity/
Read from top.
See also:
"the media heist" — a theatre play by uncle rupe...and plenty more on this site...