We’ve noted repeatedly how the primary problem with U.S. media and journalism often isn’t the actual journalists, or even the sloppy automation being used to cut corners; it’s the terrible, trust fund brunchlords that fail upwards into positions of power. The kind of owners and managers who, through malice or sheer incompetence, turn the outlets they oversee into either outright propaganda mills (Newsweek), or money-burning, purposeless mush (Vice, Buzzfeed, The Messenger, etc., etc.)
Very often these collapses are framed with the narrative that doing journalism online somehow simply can’t be profitable; something quickly disproven every time a group of journalists go off to start their own media venture without a useless executive getting outsized compensation and setting money on fire (see: 404 Media and countless other successful worker-owned journalistic ventures).
Of course these kinds of real journalistic outlets still have to scrap and fight for every nickel. At the same time, there’s just an unlimited amount of money available if you want to participate in the right wing grievance propaganda engagement economy, telling white young males that all of their very worst instincts are correct (see: Rogan, Taibbi, Rufo, Greenwald, Tracey, Tate, Peterson, etc. etc. etc. etc.).
One key player in this far right delusion farm, failed Presidential opportunist Vivek Ramaswamy, recently tried to ramp up his own make believe efforts to “fix journalism.” He did so by purchasing an 8 percent stake in what’s left of Buzzfeed after it basically gave up on trying to do journalism last year.
Ramaswamy’s demands are silly toddler gibberish, demanding that the outlet pivot to video, and hire such intellectual heavyweights as Tucker Carlson and Aaron Rodgers:
“Mr. Ramaswamy is pushing BuzzFeed to add three new members to its board of directors, to hone its focus on audio and video content and to embrace “greater diversity of thought,” according to a copy of his letter shared with The New York Times.”
By “greater diversity of thought,” he means pushing facts-optional right wing grievance porn and propaganda pretending to be journalism, in a bid to further distract the public from issues of substance, and fill American heads with pudding.
But it sounds like Ramaswamy couldn’t even do that successfully. For one thing, Buzzfeed simply isn’t relevant as a news company any longer. Gone is the real journalism peppered between cutesy listicles, replaced mostly with mindless engagement bullshit. For another, Buzzfeed CEO Jonah Peretti (and affiliates) still hold 96 percent of the Class B stock, giving them 50 times voting rights of Ramaswamy.
So as Elizabeth Lopatto at The Verge notes, Ramaswamy is either trying to goose and then sell his stock, or is engaging in a hollow and performative PR exercise where he can pretend that he’s “fixing liberal media.” Or both. The entire venture is utterly purposeless and meaningless:
“You’ve picked Buzzfeed because the shares are cheap, and because you have a grudge against a historically liberal outlet. It doesn’t matter that Buzzfeed News no longer exists — you’re still mad that it famously published the Steele dossier and you want to replace a once-respected, Pulitzer-winning brand with a half-assed “creators” plan starring Tucker Carlson and Aaron Rodgers. Really piss on your enemies’ graves, right, babe?”
While Ramaswamy’s bid is purely decorative, it, of course, was treated as a very serious effort to “fix journalism” by other pseudo-news outlets like the NY Post, The Hill, and Fox Business. It’s part of the broader right wing delusion that the real problem with U.S. journalism isn’t that it’s improperly financed and broadly mismanaged by raging incompetents, but that it’s not dedicated enough to coddling wealth and power. Or telling terrible, ignorant people exactly what they want to hear.
Of course none of this is any dumber than what happens in the U.S. media sector every day, as the Vice bankruptcy or the $50 million dollar Messenger implosion so aptly illustrated. U.S. journalism isn’t just dying, the corpses of what remains are being abused by terrible, wealthy puppeteers with no ideas and nothing of substance to contribute (see the postmortem abuse of Newsweek or Sports Illustrated), and in that sense Vivek fits right in.
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