The Frankish Reich

I get that, and it's why I find it so disappointing that most news programming these days preaches to the choir of their own demographic/followers. Most of that is really, really boring unless you're interested in having your existing biases confirmed. Rachel Maddow is no doubt smart and prepared, but very long-winded and boring in her presentation. She took over Keith Olbermann's old slot - he was a blowhard, but an entertainer. Same with Fox: O'Reilly did what Hannity does but with some entertainment value. I watched both of those guys semi-regularly at one time, but you'll never turn me into a regular Maddow/Hannity watcher. The "narrow-casting" has reached a new level, and of course that's even more pronounced when it comes to social media.

I think we're all Nichers here to some extent. After all, we get a lot of football niche news by coming to a football fan forum ...

1. The Musk-eteers: This is a fast-growing, mostly male group who feed off Twitter, podcasts (especially "All-In" and Joe Rogan), and follow independent reporters, led by Bari Weiss, through social media or newsletters. *** 3. TikTok kids: This is where most kids get most of their information about the world and hot news topics. They scroll, fast and furious, through pictures and microbursts of information — and trust people most parents have never heard of. Think MrBeast, Addison Rae and Zach King. *** 5. Right-wing grandpas: Senior citizens, especially men, still flock to Fox News — especially in prime time, and especially around popular personalities. They would have been big Rush Limbaugh fans back in the '90s. 6. MAGA mind melders: The new conservative news ecosystem would seem like a distant planet to anyone whose habits were formed pre-Trump. People like Charlie Kirk (massive because he's multiplatform), Jack Posobiec and Mike Cernovich are dominant voices. Then there are folks who are taken seriously only in Trumpworld (Laura Loomer, Alex Bruesewitz), but can really move the needle there. No one rivals Tucker Carlson with the base, even without his Fox News platform. Don Jr. is second, with his massive X, Facebook and Instagram engagement. "He's the meme lord of the right," a MAGA insider told us. Steve Bannon's WarRoom remains a juggernaut. Breitbart's Matt Boyle is a go-to newsbreaker on the right. Plus there's a potent crew of video clip guys. 7. Liberal warriors: Think of Rachel Maddow as patron saint of this bloc. Hence her sky-high ratings. This crowd feeds daily off The New York Times (especially opinion pieces) and prestige magazines (especially The Atlantic and The New Yorker). They once were addicted to Twitter but left, or lessened their dependency, after Musk turned it into X. Elite power-consumers: This is the Axios base. These are mainly college-educated, ambitious professionals — we estimate 25 million-45 million nationally — who seek out news near-daily, partly for passion and partly for professional enhancement. This group is most likely to overlap with other bubbles and lap up "Morning Joe." These power-users are huge fans of newsletters, which in some respects mimic in shrunken form newspapers: a beginning and end, punctuated with pictures and visuals. LinkedIn is a hot, if still small, pipeline for content. 8. Elite power-consumers: This is the Axios base. These are mainly college-educated, ambitious professionals — we estimate 25 million-45 million nationally — who seek out news near-daily, partly for passion and partly for professional enhancement. This group is most likely to overlap with other bubbles and lap up "Morning Joe." These power-users are huge fans of newsletters, which in some respects mimic in shrunken form newspapers: a beginning and end, punctuated with pictures and visuals. LinkedIn is a hot, if still small, pipeline for content. 9. The financiers: This is the base of The Wall Street Journal, CNBC (especially "Squawk Box") and DealBook, the newsletter by New York Times and "Squawk" star Andrew Ross Sorkin. Lots of rich, white, older East Coast or big-city professionals live here. https://www.axios.com/2024/03/25/news-media-filter-bubble-different-realities (I didn't paste certain categories that seem pretty rare around here) Do you recognize yourself here? I think I'm a mix of the about 50% category 8, 30% category 9, 20% category 7. I do get more than my fair share of MAGA Mind Melders, Fox Grandpas, and Musk-eteers second hand, by reading posts here, but I read those more like an Anthropologist on Mars.

My oh my, how things change when the shoe is on the other foot, Tarheel friend. Trump signed an order banning Tik Tok as a security threat. Obviously he thought the President had the power to do that. Now? "Please don't give the power I already thought I already had lest a different President uses it ..." Meanwhile, The WSJ nails it. https://www.wsj.com/articles/honey-we-shrunk-the-gop-majority-house-republicans-55506c32?mod=opinion_lead_pos3 Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s motion Friday to oust Mr. Johnson as Speaker exposes the deception behind the coup against Mr. McCarthy. After we criticized that October coup as destructive and self-serving, Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz wrote us a letter saying that in electing Mr. Johnson the GOP now had a real conservative as leader. So what’s wrong with Mr. Johnson now? Apparently because he’s not willing to indulge kamikaze acts like shutting down the government, Mr. Johnson is a sellout too. Conservatives have long had a strong anti-Washington impulse, which is useful given the federal government’s relentless drive to expand its own power. But breaking that drive, and rolling back that power, requires calculation and often incremental gains. All the more so in a divided government. The posers of the House GOP remind us of a comment by former Sen. Jim DeMint that he’d rather have 30 Senators who agreed with him than a Republican majority. Congratulations to Mr. DeMint. The current House GOP is close to realizing his ambition.

The gist. Not the jest. Gotta love when morons post moronic things in which they accuse others of behaving moronically.

I think we just found QAnon again ^^^

Couldn't have said it better myself.

Funny ... he's never at a loss for words. I mean, even Jimmy Kimmel's performance at the Oscars got a scathing, real-time review. Is Truth Social having connectivity issues? The silence is deafening: https://www.foxnews.com/politics/trump-silent-biden-signs-1-2-trillion-spending-bill-gop-infighting

You mean Russia invading Ukraine is how World War III might have started? Imagine this (lack of) logic being applied to the other prominent conflict: Gaza/Hamas vs. Israel. The comment would be "Israel bombing Gaza ... is this how World War III starts?"

Said by someone of such fragile sexuality and gender identity that the poorly-timed exhibition of a rainbow flag in his youth might very well have turned him gay (if he isn't already; no judgements!), gender neutral, trans, or who knows what else.

If this kind of thing had been in place in Buffalo schools in the 1960s, I have no doubt NC Bills would be a trans woman today.

Irv exhibiting a new-found patience that will no doubt serve him well in his senior years.

Godless Trumpunist, spending Palm Sunday like some kind of Roman Centurion policing allegiance to his Orange Caesar ...

⬆️ Another Paranoid Man, no doubt also in a Cheap Sh!t Suit. It's Palm Sunday. Shouldn't he be in church playing Pilate, instead of posting a barrage of inane comments in every single thread?

Paranoid Man in a Cheap-Sh!t Suit.

Somewhere way back in the double digits of these pages you'll find my long-winded, carbon dioxide-emitting (but only when read allowed) but nevertheless genteel take on climate change and the impact of carbon emissions. You'll find it remarkably open-minded and balanced but still somehow unconvincing to this audience. Hey, just ask and I'll recreate it for you! (that's o.k., I'll wait)

HA HA HA HA HA. So the idiot MTGs and Boeberts (and yes, their orange master) get their comeuppance. First Ken Buck shanks Boebert, now Gallagher (a true, not MAGA conservative and one of our best in Congress) gets his revenge. Maybe try, umm, governing instead of making a damn fool of yourself?

Well played. I would have felt insulted but the "genteel" made it all better.

Another stupid cross-post from Tarheel in which some other Kelly vaguely threatens civil war.

Hold on a sec ... aren't we talking about the budget the MAGA-LED REPUBLICAN HOUSE just passed?

Isn't there some dedicated Ray Epps board somewhere for Tarheel to cross post his same old "news" in multiple topics, like he just did here. Reminder: No. One. Cares.

That would make sense if we weren't talking about $4.5 million. I know Ohtani's interpreter must be one of the best paid interpreters in the world, but this is way beyond any interpreter's resources. If the bookie extended credit, well, that was no doubt with the expectation that Ohtani himself was good for it ... whether Ohtani was in the loop or not.

Chinese group, so I'm guessing knockoff counterfeit Canada Goose. But still ... folks I know who work in this field tell me every single new arrival has a smartphone.

Same state so how could their governor complain? And here I was thinking that the Hunt family seemed like the rare wholesome, decent type of owners. Let them go to Oakland.

Well maybe the response would've been just as bad. Who knows. But not as comically bad. That was a Trump Special.