“As [right-wing dirty trickster Steve] Bannon famously once said, ‘The real opposition is the media, and the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.’
“Such a strategy is not primarily dependent on the quality and credibility of the shit; it’s the flooding part that’s the most important.
“Last month, Matt Gertz, of Media Matters for America, noted, in a piece jumping off Bannon’s quote, that because the ‘newshole’ — newspaper pages, broadcast segments, and so forth — is finite, you can game it if you can pump out more toxicity than there’s room to report.
“‘Trump and his allies have overwhelmed the system,’ Gertz wrote. ‘There’s just too much shit.’”
—Jon Alsop, freelancer, “Flooding the zone with the New York Post,” Columbia Journalism Review, Oct. 19, 2020. (Thanks to alert WORDster Mark Larson)
• Editorial Comment: With all the, um, “news content” being generated by these people, Pence’s housefly can’t be far.
What Scares Us? Check out the October issue of Senior News, Things That Go Bump in the Night. On newsstands everywhere. (Or should be.)
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“I don’t think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.” —Tom Stoppard
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