Thread by @bansisharma

1. Profiting From Boredom
Here's the truth about the non-story story about #convingtoncatholic School boys. Absolutely nothing really noteworthy happened. Certainly nothing that the nation would have been ill served being ignorant of, if @CNN had not sensationalized it.

2. Nobody got hurt. Nobody so much as lifted a finger. People talked trash, people chanted, people jumped up and down, somebody beat a drum and sang, a lot of people got confused, and after a while the whole thing petered out into what should have been oblivion.

3. But then it was a slow news or no news day. The previous day's news (the Buzzfeed fiasco) had blown up in the faces of Fake News merchants, and realizing there was no more milk in that carton, they needed a fresh egg in their face to keep the show interesting.

4. @CNN saw an opportunity to create some sensational news and they grabbed it. They had the whole 2 hour videotape. How could they not? It was on twitter. I re-tweeted it myself, and even I had seen most of it. It is unthinkable @CNN had not.

5. But there was more money to be made by first coming out with a snippet accompanied with outrageous editorializing that would fit the preconceived notions of @CNN viewership, create some serious doxxing potential to sensationalize it further, then interview Phillips, and so on.

6. Next day, @CNN would fill out additional programming hours releasing more snippets under the heading, "New evidence has emerged which shows the story is more nuanced." Nuanced my eye. New evidence, my foot.

7. Imagine that. Two to three days of countless hours of programming, countless articles in major newspapers and magazines, countless rebuttals, social media posts, and so on. Keep in mind this just about the cheapest way for TV networks to fill their programming schedule.

8. It costs next to nothing. Quality programming costs an arm and a leg. How much do you think they paid Nathan Phillips compared to what they would have had to spend if they were to produce some quality programming. Journalists and columnists have similar incentives.

9. No journalist has to get out in the cold to cover news. They can just watch a videotape and bloviate endlessly about it. Columnists under contract, like Max Boot, can regurgitate tirelessly the same old bile about MAGA hats and Trumpism. No need to think up new material.

10. Enough said. It's nothing more than crass economics of the new business model that has figured out how to make outrageous amounts of money from the fact that a prosperous nation has too many people with too many leisure hours and they are bored.

11. Throw some ideological red meat in the arena every single day and reel in the easy money. And if some innocents get hurt along the way, well that's their bad luck. Media gods can't be too bothered about that.

12. Media gods can always expiate their sins by running some high falutin' segments about Climate Change and expressing their sincere and noble interest in 'saving the planet' for future generations, current inhabitants be damned.

The End

See. @CNN will milk the teats off this cow.

https://twitter.com/CNN/status/1087923144957009923

David Brooks pens a good column that falls short in recognizing how diabolically poorly the MSM outlets have behaved in this sorry episode. He places way too much emphasis on social media and not enough on the motives of the traditional media. 1/2
nytimes.com/2019/01/21/opi…

Still, Brooks gets this part mostly right, although I don't believe his semi-apologia for the mainstream media. Mainstream media is far more complicit, perhaps even the primary driver of, the cultural rot that seems to be setting in. It won't happen without their complicity. 2/2