You may have seen the news that just two days after the auction sale of Gawker Media in bankruptcy, the company’s flagship site itself announced it will cease operations next week. That’s jarring news on many fronts. I discussed some of them here in Tuesday’s post about the importance of independent media. But there’s another aspect of this that’s worth addressing.
First, let me say I don’t know really anything about Gawker’s internal revenue data. So as it applies to Gawker, what I’m about to write is just an educated hunch. But in general terms what I’m going to describe is definitely true. I know it from long experience in the industry. And it’s worth knowing as a reader as you think about media, why publications you read do what they do and so forth.
With today’s big news that the Justice Department that its ending its use of private prisons, I wanted to re-up our break out story on the private prisons industry. A great piece on an important topic.
A GOP memo to Republican members of all the county election boards in North Carolina, obtained by the Raleigh News and Observer via a public records request, reveals everything you suspected about GOP motivations in pushing for voting restrictions, including voter ID laws. It’s not surprising, but it should still shock the conscience. Give this a read.
Vin Weber talked to TPM’s Lauren Fox about the Trump campaign “shake-up” and captures where things stands today: “Look, we are in a terrible position. The Republican Party has made a mistake of historic proportion and when you do that, you find yourself in a place with no good solutions.”
A few days ago the Trump camp started pushing the idea that Hillary Clinton was “America’s Merkel”, a reference to longserving German Chancellor Angela Merkel, by many measures one of the more successful European politicians of the post-war era. Trump even personally started pushing the Twitter hashtag “#AmericasMerkel. When I started seeing this my first thought was, “How many Americans do they think have even heard of Angela Merkel, let alone see her as some awful figure in a way that tying her to Clinton would send chills down people’s spines?” For better or worse, Putin is super high profile. Netanyahu is high profile. For your average American? Merkel is not high profile.
This morning I had a bit of time before I read the news about the latest surreal turn in the Trump campaign. And in that bit of time, I had one of those moments when I was completely wrapped and thankful for the never-ending stream of insight, humor, tips and more we all get here from TPM Readers. Particularly it was this email from TPM Reader ME, a childhood immigrant from the USSR/Russia. ME much more artfully and ably discusses something I was trying to capture in my post yesterday on Russian defense doctrine and Fox News, specifically how in trying to duplicate or capture things we don’t really understand we can create caricature cartoon versions of them which bare a superficial similarity, capture the most visible elements but yet miss the real picture entirely. From ME …
Through the years I’ve written numerous e-mails to this address, most of them likely less insightful than I thought at the time. However as a Russian immigrant (I’m sure one of many who has written to you) I felt inspired to throw more on the pile.
I want to draw some parallels between the modern Russian propaganda that you liken to Fox News, and the Soviet propaganda of yesteryear.