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Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: Tucker gone bye-bye [1]

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Date: 2023-04-25  

Max Tani of Semafor takes note of some “erratic” management decisions that Rupert Murdoch has made lately.

Some moves, like Emma Tucker’s takeover of the Journal, have been painfully slowly. But the sudden moves, the endless leaks, and the general sense of an out-of-control train has also raised questions in the middle and top ranks of the company about the elder Murdoch’s state of mind, temperament, and what the changes suggest about the path forward for the media empire he built. “There’s a long list of pretty drastic steps from him this year,” one person familiar with the details of today’s firing told Semafor. “People asking questions about whether an octogenarian should exert influence over the country should also ask whether a nonagenarian should exert influence over America’s most powerful media conglomerate." [...] Even small details about Murdoch’s recent behavior have been somewhat perplexing. I was surprised when, after finding his email in the Dominion discovery documents earlier this year, the News Corp CEO seemed willing to respond to questions on the record. He gamely responded to several queries I had about the television show Succession and Elon Musk’s stewardship of Twitter. Charlie Warzel of The Atlantic wonders if Carlson will become the next Alex Jones.

Carlson’s show premiered just a few days after the 2016 elections, and was immediately focused on stoking a culture war. According to The New York Times, when his show was elevated to the 8 p.m. slot in 2017, the host had his producers begin looking for small, local news stories “that were sometimes ‘really weird’ and often inaccurate but tapped into viewers’ fears of a trampled-on American culture.” The decision to highlight niche stories—about refugees, petty crime, DACA recipients, college-campus activism, and companies going “woke”—night after night made viewers feel as if their way of life was under an unrelenting assault by mainstream media, the left, and big business. Carlson used such examples to construct a case for his audience in favor of the white-supremacist “Great Replacement” theory, much to the delight of the country’s most infamous bigots. The Times described this tactic as creating “an apocalyptic worldview”—a strategy that few have perfected better than Jones. On his marathon daily broadcasts, Jones is famous for shuffling through mountains of printed-out news articles, cherry-picking random facts from local news stories—he was, for example, among the first media figures to campaign against drag-queen story hours—and either embellishing them or twisting them to fit into one of his long-running conspiracy theories. Similarly, the Infowars website is a hodgepodge of racist aggregated stories misrepresenting local reporting to trigger outrage. When the local news stories dried up, Jones sent his staffers out to manufacture controversies to stoke the apocalyptic flames for a hungry audience. In a tell-all essay, Joshua Owens, a former Infowars staffer who grew disillusioned with Jones’s lies, detailed the process of having to scramble to find controversies to report on and making news up when that failed. [...] Carlson’s most vile conspiracy theorizing—around COVID vaccines, white replacement, and the notion that January 6 was a peaceful protest—are the most indelible examples of his Jones-ification. But just as important and insidious is the way that Carlson packaged his propaganda. Like Infowars, Carlson was frequently absurdist in a way that delighted his fans and trolled critics. He branched out from the one-hour cable-news format with a series of original programming on the streaming platform Fox Nation. With titles such as Blown Away: The People vs. Wind Power, The UFO Files, and Cattle Mutilations, these subscriber-only offerings appear nearly indistinguishable from the direct-to-video Infowars documentaries that Jones became famous for in his early-internet days. The most viral of Carlson’s originals was an episode called The End of Men, whose promo featured a nude man bathing his testicles in ultraviolet light while Also Sprach Zarathustra plays. (You might remember the song from the opening of 2001: A Space Odyssey.)

Rex Huppke of USA Today, anticipating President Joe Biden’s announcement that he will seek a second term in the presidency, thinks that President Biden’s age shouldn’t be a big issue once the electorate gets a look at what the Republicans are offering,

Much will be made of Biden’s age, and while it’s an understandable concern, you need only look to the likely slate of Republican presidential candidates to see why it shouldn’t matter. The GOP front-runner is former President Donald Trump, who at 76 is not an avatar for youthful vigor. He was recently indicted on 34 counts of falsifying business records. He’s facing a civil trial involving a rape allegation that starts Tuesday in Manhattan, along with an array of other criminal investigations. Oh, and he still denies the outcome of the 2020 presidential election and fomented an attack on the U.S. Capitol. [...] The reality is this: Anyone not named Donald Trump will have to survive the wrath of Trump, and will have to kowtow to MAGA enthusiasts who wouldn’t know the word “moderate” if it burst out of the Bud Light cans they just ran over with their trucks. That’s not a recipe for winning over independents, suburban women or really anyone who isn’t already a diehard Trump loyalist. And without bringing in new voters, a GOP presidential candidate can’t win. Biden being up in years would be a bigger issue for Democrats if the Republican Party didn’t presently have the vibe of an abandoned garbage barge surrounded by angry seagulls.

Peter Bergen of CNN notes that in a new book, “Lessons from the Covid War,” the 45th President of the United States is referred to as a “comorbidity” with COVID-19.

A problem in the US government’s early response was the lack of effective tests for the virus during the first months of the pandemic. By contrast, South Korea, better prepared for the emergency, had tens of thousands of tests running daily by mid-February 2020, according to the report. The report found that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) – despite its name suggesting that it is at the forefront of preventing the spread of disease – didn’t do operational pandemic preparedness, but instead acts as a quasi-academic institution that collects and analyzes data after an incident has happened. In a chilling finding, the report says when it came to tracking Covid-19 cases in the United States, researchers at The Atlantic magazine’s Covid Tracking Project did a better job in real-time than the CDC did. Compounding the problem at the federal level was President Trump, who, as is well known, continuously played down the threat posed by the virus and refused to wear a mask when masking was one of the few tools that prevented the spread of the virus before vaccines. By April 2020, Trump had decided that Covid wasn’t much worse than the flu, and he wanted to “reopen” the economy as he was “deep into his reelection campaign,” according to the report. As a result, the Covid Crisis Group concluded that “Trump was a co-morbidity” with Covid. Comorbidity is a medical term meaning that a patient suffers from two or more chronic diseases simultaneously.

Sounds right, unfortunately.

George Wright of BBC News reports that some time this week, India will surpass China become the most populated country in the world.

India will overtake China to become the most populous country in the world by the end of this week, the United Nations has said. India's population is expected to reach 1,425,775,850 people by the end of April, the new data shows. A different UN body last week predicted that India would overtake China by the middle of this year. The Asian nations have accounted for more than a third of the global population for over 70 years. "China will soon cede its long-held status as the world's most populous country," the UN's Department of Economic and Social Affairs (DESA) said in a statement. It added that "due to the uncertainty associated with estimating and projecting populations, the specific date on which India is expected to surpass China in population size is approximate and subject to revision".

Finally today, Louisa Lim writes for The New York Times about the erasure and revision of memory and history in Hong Kong.

Revisionism — with its ancillary altering or obliteration of memory — is an act of repression. It’s the same playbook China used after violently crushing the 1989 pro-democracy demonstrations in Beijing. Then, state-induced amnesia was imposed gradually. At first the government churned out propaganda that labeled those protests as a counterrevolutionary rebellion that had to be suppressed. But over the years, the state slowly excised all public memory of its killings. In Hong Kong the silence has set in much more quickly. The gagging of dissenting voices and editing of the past has happened at warp speed, mirroring the blink-and-you-miss-it modern news cycle. This has its own logic; the faster the blanket of silence is thrown over Hong Kong, the less time there is for criticism to take root, and the faster the next phase of transformation — whatever that may be — can be introduced. The cycle of unmaking accelerates. I worked in Hong Kong’s once-cacophonous newsrooms and covered its boisterous protest rallies. Now most Hong Kong journalists I know have fallen silent. Some are in jail, some are in exile, and some no longer write, as no publications are left that will publish them. After a draconian national security law was imposed on Hong Kong in 2020, at least 12 news outlets closed down, including the popular, pro-democracy Apple Daily. Its founder, Jimmy Lai, could face life in prison on national security charges, and six of its executives have pleaded guilty to conspiracy to collude with foreign forces, a vague charge introduced with the new security law. Some of the shuttered outlets pulled their archives from the internet. This is how history is erased, both virtually and literally.

In late 2019, I fell in love with a couple of the English language Hong Kong newspapers/websites and especially the South China Morning Post. I still peak at SCMP everyone once in a while but it’s simply not the same.

Have the best possible day, everyone.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/4/25/2165728/-Abbreviated-Pundit-Roundup-Tucker-gone-bye-bye

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