Archive for the ‘media’ Category

Journalism’s “extinction event” will lead to new and better choices for news

Posted: February 4, 2024 by John Ruberry in blogs, business, culture, internet/free speech, media, News/opinion, opinion/news
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By John Ruberry

Big News is having a bad time of it. Paul Farhi, who accepted a buyout from the Washington Post, asked in the Atlantic–a magazine that is propped up by billionaire Laurene Powell Jobs–“Is American Journalism Headed Toward an ‘Extinction-Level Event?'”

With massive layoffs not only at the Post, which is owned by Jeff Bezos, but also the Los Angeles Times–and with Sports Illustrated being probably as dead as the Detroit Lions’ Super Bowl dreams–the answer may be a loud “Yes.” 

Meanwhile, in Democrat-controlled Illinois, the Illinois Local Journalism Task Force, created by legislation in 2021, is betting on the dinosaurs, that is, traditional media. Last week, the task force issued its recommendations for journalism in the Prairie State.

“Its proposals are mostly about getting taxpayers to pony up and putting government in control,” Mark Glennon says in Wirepoints, “[with] no mention of journalism’s own failures.”

Indeed, there are many failures. The glaringly obvious one–unless you work in mainstream media–is that journalists are pushing a narrative to score love from the 20 percent of the population who are far-leftists. Even in Illinois, a blue state, there are not many ultra lefties–they might make up 25 percent of the populace here.

Among the recommendations from the tax force include a whole slew of tax credits for local news sources, including for subscriptions, businesses who advertise with them, as well as for local news providers hiring reporters.

Every one of the recommendations from the task force are wretched ideas that I could eviscerate easily one by one, but to save time, I’ll move on. But not yet. Besides these tax credits, the task force recommends exempting local news sources from Illinois’ corporate income tax. 

Some states have no corporate income tax.

News should be a mass market product, not a niche offering, but the liberals in charge have turned it into that. Again, I’ll be brief. Most Americans–and yes, most Illinoisans–believe there are only two genders, and most had doubts about the COVID propaganda of 2020-21. And most of them are fed up with the lamestream media minimizing the ongoing crisis with rampant crime.

Yeah, I get it, the internet has hurt local news providers. But they didn’t adapt. The same with Big News.

Let’s talk about extinction events. Real ones. Extinction is usually portrayed as mass death, yet it’s also a mass life event. 

Following the Permian-Triassic mass extinction, the lystrosaurus, a runt buck-toothed freak reptile, thrived, along with many other emergent species. Soon, geologically speaking that is, came the dinosaurs. After the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event, different small animals, mammals and birds among them–as well as fungus–prospered.

There’s never been more media–or more information–than there is now. Print newspapers are sometimes called dinosaur media.  I believe they should always be named as such. Among the new media are of course blogs such as this one, YouTube and Rumble video channels, streaming services, podcasts, and so much more. A consumer of information is now faced with a daunting challenge. Because finding enough time to sift through all of the choices–let alone absorb all of them–is impossible. 

Last Thursday, Chicago Tribune reporters held a one-day strike against its owner, Alden Capital, a hedge fund firm. “We often say, ‘Newspapers are not dying, they’re being killed,'” Gregory Pratt, a committed left-wing Trib journalist, told WGN-TV. 

Wrong, Pratt. Newspapers are being killed because journalists are emitting an unpopular product and looking down on their customers.

Let’s return to the Illinois Local Journalism Task Force. 

In its rancid report there is a map of Illinois. Counties with few media choices are marked in that map in different shades of red. One of those is McHenry, which is northwest of Chicago. I know of two great news sites reporting about McHenry County: Cal Skinner’s McHenry County Blog and the Lake and McHenry County Scanner–a suburban answer to the phenomenally successful CWB Chicago. I’m certain that the task force didn’t include these sites in their elitist media tally. 

Another fabulous Illinois news source is the aforementioned Wirepoints.

Big creatures usually don’t survive natural mass extinction events. Small ones, nimble animals, find opportunities in an altered world.

Remember, lystrosaurus made way for larger and grander beasts, such as the Tyrannosaurus rex. Today’s blog may become tomorrow’s News Corp–the parent company of Fox News, Dow Jones, HarperCollins, and so many more.

Humans will always crave information–it’s in our DNA–it is just a matter of how it’s delivered to us. We’ve come a very long away from when the evening news was a caveman squatting in front of a bonfire telling whoever was sitting in front of him how that day’s hunt went. If that prehistoric anchorman delivered fake news–“I killed six mammoths today with my bare hands!”–his audience simply walked away. Kind of like what consumers of Big News are doing now.

The dinosaur media–and the Illinois Journalism Task Force–doesn’t get it.

John Ruberry blogs regularly from the Chicago area at Marathon Pundit.

The Sincerest Form of Flattery of Don Surber so Mini Linkfest plus Thoughts

Posted: January 27, 2024 by datechguy in baseball, blogs, business, crime, dynasty baseball, economy, gaming, Israel, Israel vs Hamas, media, medicine, nfl, online gaming, Sports, the courts, Uncategorized
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I have a lot of little things to say but not enough for an under the Fedora Day so today we’re going to give Don Surber the sincerest from of flattery and imitate his Saturday Link Fest with a few other thoughts:

First at Stacy McCain’s site we have a story about how thanks to a family squabble an iconic business will close:

The litigation later forced the family to change the name of its original location to Tony and Nick’s Steaks in 2022.
Anthony Jr.’s two sons — Anthony III and Michael, who were also employed at the sandwich empire — followed him out the door, taking copies of the company’s financial records with them and turned them over to federal investigators.
Those documents revealed that Lucidonio Sr. and Nicholas Lucidonio hid the success of their business from tax collectors by keeping two sets of books almost from the day the sandwich shop opened.

While one might have an opinion of members of an Italian (Sicilian?) family turning in another member of their family to the feds may I humbly point out that if they weren’t cooking the books it wouldn’t be an issue.

As my Sicilian parents who owned business taught me young, “Always pay the government first because they’re the only ones who can take from you before you go to court.”

2nd: Was at the bank today figured it would be an easy time since I needed to convert three $20 bills into two 10’s six 5’s and ten ones so I can make change if people at St Cecilia’s church want to buy tickets to the WQPH 89.3 FM Shrove Tuesday Brunch on the 13th (Details here). I figured it would take about 30 seconds invoving:

  • Opening the draw
  • Counting the bills
  • Giving them to me

Not anymore. Now a machine is involved so instead the teller has to

  • Take the last four of my social
  • Feeding my bills into the reader
  • Do tons of typing into the computer
  • Wait for the machine to spit out the bills when the typing is done
  • Print a receipt for the bills
  • Give me the bills and receipt

Machines don’t make everything easier

3rd: Over at Pirates Cove Mr. Teach notices climate folks trying to link “climate change” to ancient plagues. to wit:

While modern medicine has advanced considerably since the time of the Romans, this data offers insights into how diseases might change in our own changing climate. “Within the scope of the current climate change it is of major importance to understand the links between climate and human health and we unfortunately do not understand these links as well as we would like,” Zonneveld said. “Investigating the resilience of ancient societies to past climate change and relationships between past climate change and the occurrence of infectious disease might give us better insight into these relationships and the climate change induced challenges we are facing today.

He Quips:

One would have thought that an empire that could conquer so much of the known world, invent formalized sanitation, arches, pioneered early medical tools, concrete, the first bound book, and so much more, would have known not to use fossil fuels, hair dryers, ice makers, and plastics

It never ceases to amaze me that tens of millions have absolute faith in the never ending predictions of doom to come in 30 years when my own local forecast for Sunday has changed three times in the last 72 hours.

4th: I’m told the Doctor that I’ve had for the last 30-40 years or so is about to retire. Baring a major accident/incident before July I will likely not see him again.

This means I will likely have to get a new doc who doesn’t know me or my family or my past. This is normal but I’m not looking forward to it. If there was one thing I had no doubt about with my old doc it’s that he cared if I lived or died. Given what we’ve seen from the medical profession the last few years it will be very hard to get that impression from a stranger.

Of course as I’m in the back nine it more a question of what do I want to die from because in the end I have to die of something.

5th: The New Neo has some thoughts about the Jean Carroll defamation case and the type of precedent it sets:

I don’t think lawsuits like this one should be actionable, whether they be against Trump or anyone else. It should not be legally actionable defamation to say your accuser is lying about you and that you’re not sexually attracted to her. Nor was Trump ever found criminally liable for raping her, because the statute of limitations had run out by the time she made her accusations. I doubt her rape case would have held up in a criminal court anyway – unless it was a court composed of jurors or a judge who hated the defendant.

I predict that once leftists and left leaning institutions like universities are charged with defamation for insisting on their innocence in cases and have judgements made against them the injustice of this will suddenly become clear to the left.

Unexpectedly of course.

6th: If anyone is interested we have some openings in both the 1972 and the 1997 league for Dynasty Baseball.

If you’re up to it and have an interest give me a shout because the window for all of this is closing.

7th: Since I quoted Don Surber for the title of this post it behooves me to mention an interesting twist to the old “learn to code” crowd:

ITEM 14: What the nation needs is coders who learn to mine.

CNBC reported last month, “The U.S. is running out of miners. More than half the nation’s mining workforce, about 221,000 workers, is expected to retire by 2029, according to the Society for Mining, Metallurgy & Exploration, and the number of candidates willing to fill those slots is shrinking.”

Smart people are urging and/or putting their kids into trade schools where basic “manly” skills are taught as it’s becoming increasingly clear that the American left has basically evolved into the passengers of the B Ark of the Golgafrinchan fleet

8th: Since we mentioned the need for coal jobs it’s worth noting more layoffs of Journalists: First this week at the LA Times (Via Legal Insurrection):

As a general rule, most people are sympathetic when they hear about others who have lost their jobs due to layoffs, company closings, and the like.

But in the case of the now-former employees of the Los Angeles Times, that sympathy is in short supply among conservatives and others who were frequent targets of the paper’s agenda-driven news and opinion divisions.

On Sunday, Legal Insurrection reported that the left coast newspaper had announced that staff cutbacks were imminent, with around 100 people set to be let go. In response, unionized employees staged a one-day walkout and demanded, among other things, “to swap traditional seniority protections for those related to diversi

And now at Business Insider via Ed Driscoll at Instapundit who notes the irony in his shot chaser format:

IT’S TIME TO ADMIT THE SHUFFLEBOARD TOURNAMENTS ON THE TITANIC ARE THRIVING:

Shot: It’s time to admit the economy is thriving.

—Business Insider, December 31st.

Chaser::

I look forward to the plethora of articles from those journalists remaining insisting that the economy is better than ever. Perhaps AI can write them at the LA Times and Business Insider.

The NFL league championships are this week and from the NFC we are guaranteed a great story of overcoming adversity no matter who wins, either Detroit FINALLY making it to the Superbowl with a rejected QB or San Francisco making it led by the very last pick in the draft born the year Brady was picked and drafted 63 places later than him (262nd).

In the east you have Lamar Jackson the pre-emptive MVP facing Patrick Mahomes who now has made the AFC title game in his first six seasons as a starter. Comparisons to Tom Brady and questions if he will beat Brady’s six titles and ten Superbowl appearances are already flying but in the end no matter what he achieves when people ask who was better the record will show that when facing Tom Brady in the AFC Championship game or the Superbowl he was 0-2 against a Tom Brady at age 40 or over.

10th and last at Elder of Ziyon which is a must visit during the Israel Hamas war they note a rather amazing phenom at the UN, collective memory loss:

Q: Given the UN’s big role in Gaza, UNRWA, has there ever been any indication to the UN that tunnels are being built under the city?

UN: Not to us. I mean… it seems to me that all this infrastructure was built in a highly secretive way. I mean, I see it just as an observer… To think that the UN had any understanding of what was… any information about those operations, I think, is… No is clearly the answer to that.

This is even though the UN has admitted in previous years that tunnels were found underneath their own schools. 

In fact, former UNRWA Gaza director Matthias Schmale admitted that it is a “safe assumption” there were extensive tunnels under Gaza, in a 2021 interview:

If it wasn’t for the fact that Hogan’s Heroes was a fictional show I’d swear that the UN was recruiting heavily from descendants of the guards at Luft Stalag 13 for their uncanny ability to know nothing and see nothing.

Cue Schultz:

Chicago mainstream media ignores rumors that Mayor Brandon Johnson has suffered panic attacks

Posted: January 21, 2024 by John Ruberry in crime, culture, immigration, media, News/opinion, opinion/news, politics
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By John Ruberry

There are a couple of good ways to feel the pulse of what is going in politically in Chicago–and they both involve John Kass, a former Chicago Tribune columnist. You can read his new columns at JohnKassNews.com and you can listen to his Chicago Way podcast.

In his most recent podcast, Kass’ guest was longtime Chicago television reporter, Anita Padilla, who now reports for the Florida Voice. They speak freely about current events, something that was hard for them do to when they worked in the legacy media.

Chicago’s mayor, leftist and Chicago Teachers Union product, Brandon Mayor, was discussed. It was Padilla who brought up a topic that the local mainstream media won’t touch–rumors that Johnson, who was sworn into office last spring–has suffered panic attacks since becoming mayor.

“Because sources told me–two sources–told me that he has been in the hospital for these panic attacks,” Padilla told Kass. “And he is stressed out because this is a big, big job for him.”

Kass replied, “He wasn’t ready for it.” Padilla immediately responded back, “He’s not ready for it, he’s not ready for it. He’s not a leader.”

In October on JohnKassNews, Kass discussed the Johnson panic attack speculation.

The rumors flying through City Hall from sources are that Johnson has suffered at least two episodes that are being described by some as “panic attacks.” I’m not a doctor. I wouldn’t know what to prescribe. But I do know this: as Johnson continues to panic, speculation is growing about a replacement if he can’t do the job.

He’s proven he can’t do the job.

And Kass appears to be right. The local legacy media quickly moved on after it was revealed that, as the Chicago Sun-Times reported, that Johnson “unwittingly” signed an extension of a $10 million contract with ShotSpotter, a gunshot detection company. On the campaign trail, Johnson vowed to cancel that deal.

The speculation about, well, the speculation of Johnson’s panic attacks centers on the migrant crisis. Chicago is a sanctuary city, although America’s third-largest city has not been an able sanctuary host.

A 2,000-person migrant tent city on the Southwest Side–a project Johnson championed–was vehemently opposed by neighborhood residents. Citing environmental concerns, Gov. JB Pritzker pulled the plug on the camp last month–a rare instance when I supported an official action of his–but after the city spent nearly $1 million on it. This summer, many migrants were sleeping at police stations and inside O’Hare Airport terminals.

Two weeks after the migrant tent city was cancelled, a five-year-old Venezuelan boy died at a migrant shelter, an old warehouse, also on the Southwest Side. The boy’s cause of death has not been determined, but conditions in the shelter, which the Johnson administration had been aware of since October, were horrid. Third World-like. Among the problems in the old warehouse were cockroach infestation, exposed piping with raw sewage, not enough bathrooms, and widespread illness.

Johnson will soon have even more to panic about. Crime was the biggest issue of last year’s mayoral campaign. Voters chose to ramp up Johnson’s predecessor’s failed approach to tackle the “root causes” of crime, rather than fighting criminals. Delayed until last September because of a court challenge, Illinois’ no-cash bail SAFE T-Act is finally in effect. Johnson scored a lucky break on that litigation, because the Chicago crime rate usually goes down, along with the temperatures, when summer ends. But the full effect of the pro-criminal SAFE T-Act probably won’t be felt until spring, when those crime rates go back up and Chicago’s career criminals will be emboldened, if they aren’t already, with the belief that crime does pay, even if you are arrested.

And there is now a migrant crime wave in Chicago and the suburbs, although for the most part, the mainstream media is ignoring it.

And this summer, in a foolish move by the Democratic National Committee, the city of Chicago, and the state of Illinois, the Democratic National Convention will convene in Chicago. Many expect violent protests and yes, riots. Which led the Chicago Contrarian to remark on X, “If @ChicagosMayor is experiencing panic attacks over illegals flooding Chicago, one wonders what kind of hysterical meltdown he will suffer when confronted with the maelstrom of rage and rioting the DNC will bring.”

Such a “maelstrom” could end up as a morbid morph of the George Floyd riots of 2022 and the DNC outrage of 1968.

And the “panic” could be spreading to Johnson’s staff. Last week a Bloomberg reporter, Ian Kullgren, was jostled by someone in the mayor’s inner circle. ”Unbelievable, “Kulgren posted on X, ” A staffer for @ChicagosMayor just physically shoved me for trying to ask the mayor a question. 1st time in 15 years as a reporter I’ve had anything like this happen.”

Let’s Go Brandon.

John Ruberry regularly blogs at Marathon Pundit.

WQPH 89.3 First Annual Shrove Tuesday Brunch Feb 13th 2024

Posted: January 21, 2024 by datechguy in catholic, catholic devotions, Church doctrine, media
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WQPH 89.3 FM Shirley/Fitchburg MA an EWTN Catholic Radio Station will be holding our 1st Annual Shrove Tuesday Brunch on Tuesday February 13th (the feast of the Holy Face of Jesus) at Slattery’s Restaurant 106 Lunenburg St, Fitchburg, MA 01420-4466 (978 342 8880) from 10:30 AM to 1:30 PM.

Enjoy a tasty brunch with your local WQPH show hosts (including yours truly who hosts Your Prayer Intentions Saturdays at Noon and Midnight as we prepare together for our Lenten Journey together while helping WQPH (Queen of Perpetual Help) continue to bring you the daily mass, the daily rosary and all our shows to help spread and maintain our Catholic Faith.

Tickets are $45 but only $40 if purchased by before February 4th. 

If you can’t go yourself consider sponsoring a member of the Clergy (Put “Clergy” in the subject line) or someone who might not be able to afford a ticket (Put “Sponsor” in the subject line) to come and share our brunch with us.

You can get tickets or sponsor someone to attend in several ways:

WQPH 89.3 FM
PO Box 589
Medford MA 02155

In all cases above in the subject line put

  • “Tickets” if you are buying tickets for yourself.
  • “Sponsor” if you wish to sponsor someone else to attend.
  • “Clergy” if you wish to buy a ticket for a local Priest, Nun or Deacon to attend.

Hope to see you there.

SPECIAL MATCHING OPPERTUNITY: WQPH has a donor who is offering to match $200 donations unrelated to this event. If you donate $200 to the station our sponsoring donor will match it

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