Workin’ for the Weekend #31: Moynihan on DeSantis’s ‘Truth’

Also: Megyn Kelly clips, barky Biden malarkey, and Super Bowl Second Sunday

Special thanks to the many of you who have signed up to be paying subscribers over the past three weeks! Besides gaining entrée to the Internet’s best comments section and accepting our undying (or maybe it’s dying?) gratitude, you now can witness our monthly Second Sunday podcasts live and heckle us in real time. We’ve used various platforms for these events (Twitch, Zoom, etc.), and we tend to give precise coordinates a bit on the, ah, last-minute side. But! As referenced on Episode #394, the next scheduled Second Sunday comes tomorrow, as does the Super Bowl, so we’ll probably schedule the thing around noon ET. Stay tuned….

* What the hell was Moynihan doing with Ron DeSantis down in Florida? Well, let’s let the dreaded MSM describe it: “Gov. DeSantis’ ‘defamation’ roundtable rehashes grievances with national media,” “DeSantis floats bill making it easier to sue news outlets,” “DeSantis echoes Trump in latest offense against the media,” and—straight to the point, New York Times!—“Ron DeSantis Wants to Roll Back Press Freedom.” Ol’ Hollywood wasn’t there to agree with the guvnah’s take on New York Times v. Sullivan (on account of he doesn’t), but rather to add some contextual commentary about the media business, about our old friend Len Downie, and about the role of narrative in warping basic facts. Here’s a clip, c/o Busty:

Andrew Wimsatt 🖐 @ajwimsatt

Here is @mcmoynihan talking about narrative journalism and related topics from: youtu.be/OukekOgN6zM

From FloridaPolitics.com:

Moynihan, a journalistic veteran who is now on Substack, noted the “media” is an “enormous thing” and the “incentives are completely wrong,” especially in the age of the internet with visible metrics for “which stories did best.”

“Young people who know almost nothing” are “ideologically motivated,” he said, driving the coverage in ways that didn’t happen before.

“What happened to Nick (Sandmann) wouldn’t have happened 20 years ago,” he said.

From the governor’s own press release:

Michael Moynihan is co-host of the Fifth Column Podcast and a former national correspondent for Vice News with other experiences working at The Daily Beast and Newsweek. He was also a resident fellow of the free-market think tank Timbro in Sweden, where he lived and wrote articles about politics in the country, contributing to Swedish-language publications.

“I think that we have to start by focusing on how screwed up the business model of the media is,” said Michael Moynihan. “When I started in media, the internet was a thing, but it wasn’t what drove the new cycle. In a single newspaper, no one knew what articles did best, they only knew how many papers were sold, but now all of that has changed. Media bias is a lot worse because of the repetitiveness and the narrative — push the narrative and facts be damned.”

And here’s the whole roundtable:

* We did that Megyn Kelly thang on Tuesday, talking about the fun Chinese balloon, some Tom Brady beefcake, migrants in New York City, Leonardo DiCaprio’s flouting of The French Rule, the racial politics of Tyre Nichols’s killing, Madonna’s new face, Don Lemon’s latest meltdown, and Jamie Kirchick’s Armie Hammer story. Here’s the full episode:

* Speaking of Kirchick (#55, #347), this week our favorite Lavender Mafiosi also went on the great Smoke ‘Em If You Got ‘Em pod, hosted by pals Sarah Hepola (#354) and Nancy Rommelmann (#79, #198, #203). Here’s Jamie’s aforementioned epic mic-drop on Russia Today:

* I did my usual pre-State of the Union spelunking through the bully-pulpit archives for Reason, landing on JFK in 1963, Richard Nixon in 1971, and Jimmy Carter in 1979 as the closest analogues to Joe Biden going into 2023. My postgame analysis was a tad less cheery than most: “The State of Our Union Sucks.”

* Super bizarre sideswipe attack on us this week in Splice Today by longtime D.C. libertarian-world gossip Bruce Majors, in column attacking Cato Institute immigration specialist Alex Nowrasteh (#303):

Nowrasteh isn’t alone in pushing open borders, not just for an ideal libertarian society, but for the U.S. right now. Recently this advocacy is tied to a need to criticize Donald Trump’s policies. Libertarian “Never Trumpism” had become so deranged, usually among people in the consultant class whose job prospects (in their minds) depend on fitting in with “liberal” mainstream media and think tanks. The libertarian podcast The Fifth Column became a self-parody during the Trump presidency as journalist Michael Moynihan (usually insightful) predicted the complete collapse, prosecution, and imprisonment of Trump within two weeks in almost every episode of the show for years.

Not in the consultant class, not trying to fit in with the liberal media, not filled with Trump-demise predictions and not for open borders, but other than that you nailed it, Bruce.

Our ending song comes from a fella whose Album of the Year Grammy apparently caused some sort of kerf(l)uffle, but I’m here to tell you it’s some of my favorite dumb pop in a long time: