AP News might not be allowed at the White House, but they’re not cowed:
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Here’s one example from this piece: Last week, Abundance co-author Ezra Klein went viral on social media. In a widely shared video clip from Jon Stewart’s podcast, Klein described the maddeningly bureaucratic process for deploying rural broadband funding under the Biden administration’s bipartisan infrastructure bill — a procedure so cumbersome that barely any of the entities seeking these grants have even finished the application process, years after the bill’s passage.
The anecdote hit hard — Stewart groaned and cursed as Klein elegantly demonstrated the central thesis of his book, Abundance: Red tape and overregulation, allegedly the outgrowth of progressives’ obsession with process over outcomes, have become primary drivers of scarcity in America. Boosted by Fox News, Elon Musk, and thousands of retweets, the soundbite was the kind of fable of inefficient liberal government that Ronald Reagan told throughout the 1980s.
There was just one problem with the story’s premise: It is demonstrably false.
The Kafkaesque nature of Biden’s broadband application process was not, in fact, the result of “everything-bagel liberalism,” pressure from doctrinaire leftists, or Democratic politicians’ penchant for governing through checklists, which Klein and his co-author, Derek Thompson, frame in Abundance as the key obstacles to housing security, decarbonization, and other critical 21st century needs.
Rather, this burdensome procedure was created at the insistence of vote-withholding Republican senators and their cable industry donors — companies seeking to block funding to upstarts that might challenge their regional telecom monopolies or force them to provide affordable prices for broadband. After they loaded up the funding legislation with a Byzantine process, telecom giants and GOP-led states — not protocol-obsessed lefties or overly rigid bureaucrats — then manufactured a monthslong fight over what constitutes “affordable” rates, delaying quick funding for the build-out.
There are lessons to draw from this failure — for instance, Democrats’ unrequited pursuit of bipartisanship can lead them to undermine their legislative initiatives. But the story Klein shared absolutely doesn’t support the thrust of Abundance or the themes of the wider Abundance movement.
In fact, the takeaway from the broadband tale is that the biggest obstacles to efficiency and abundance are often corporate power and its corrupting influence on our politics — factors typically downplayed or unmentioned in the Abundance Discourse.
Censoring such topics from the conversation may get Klein and Thompson platformed by large media outlets, praise from bankrolled politicians, and ever-more book sales, but it also fortifies a narrative that lets corporate power continue to create the very scarcity that Abundance laments.
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I don’t know who this guy is, but I love him. If the NYT or WaPo had any integrity, he’d be running their editorial boards:
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She definitely deserves props, but CNBC is mainstream media, so that’s a weird thing to tack on the end.
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Honestly if you were a media person with the ability to ask questions of the demented manbaby why wouldn’t you trigger him? Every single time? No point in asking him questions to find out things. He just says whatever is in his silly little head right then and there.
Better off getting him to display his (lack of) character rather than interpreting his gushing torrent of diarrhoea into sensible ordered thoughts as they normally do.
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I gather they wouldn’t in order to maintain access, and possibly, their jobs. I’d be surprised if, given Tramp’s anger at her “nastiness,” she’s ever allowed to ask him another question. I suspect she may well be forbidden from ever being in the same room with him again.
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Do it once. Get something.
Maintain access, get nothing.
Access “journalism” will end journalism.
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I hope it doesn’t. Being able to ask the president or his pressroom puppet questions in person isn’t the only way to do reporting.
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He was told by his producers to talk about this on air, so he did:
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I was surprised his producers wanted him to talk about, but I see that’s an NBC owned station, not a Sinclair owned station, so that makes sense.
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Let me see. What would protect journalists from being murdered? Some kind of air defence system, a kind of “Armoured Dome” if you will, over Gaza.
Where more journalists are being killed that at any time since World War Two.
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This article talks about how a major news source has developed a secure messaging system for whistleblowers and is making the coding open source for others’ benefit. It’s about mitigating the danger to journalists’ sources, not the journalists themselves.
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Joy Reid covers how actions taken by the regime are changing the US (and the history of progress being destroyed to enrich the privileged few):
I was also glad to see her featuring Amber Ruffin!
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This video from Belle was interesting, because of how she highlighted how bias influences what people hear when listening to her reading of the Declaration of Independence:
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I’m going to post this here, because while this isn’t a traditional journalist, I like seeing things like this. Nando is a B or C list YouTuber who covers comic book movies and comics and some other pop culture stuff, but mostly comic book movies. And his channel isn’t huge. His main channel has 300k subscribers. But, he normally does not get into politics, other than the normal kind of political messaging you find in comics. But he doesn’t make content specifically about politics. But he saw something happen that he thinks is bad, and he’s speaking up about it. We need more of that.
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