Yeah. Even NPR and PBS are slowly going down the #$buzzfeed hole. The world didn't die screaming it died hashtagging trying to make a #scream.

I suspect that sometime in the past 5 years there was a hiring spree among media giants to help "market to today's youth". So they gathered as many up and coming non-journalists who could simply share a bunch of crazy links and say "hey look and comment on this!" so the company could espouse that they have moved from the newsprint age to the "digital age".

Agreed with all of the above, but don't act like it isn't the most wonderful thing ever.

Also ISIS has been having the same sort of youth-hiring movement, and I fully anticipate some very flomo beheadings in the next few years.

wow
so allah
much execute

Because Sharia.

YOJO!

They don't have to be pretend to be journalists anymore, which must be really liberating. Just think of all the energy they used to put into a profession they weren't talented or motivated enough to perform properly.

The press has always been garbage, it just changed into a different form of garbage.

If I remember right, PBS has had a conservative/neoliberal majority amongst their corporate sponsors for a decade or two now, that can't have done them much good. But even before that, way back in the early 80s they did that multipart, factually dubious documentary that was essentially a propaganda piece for Milton Friedman and the Chicago School in general. And let's not forget that they absolutely pioneered the kind of pseudoscience fluff that's pretty much the standard on "educational" networks now. The biggest difference between Ghost Hunters type stuff and what PBS was doing in the late 70s is that they had Leonard Nimoy.

SolRo, didn't you give me a bunch of shit for saying something similar?
Oh, of course you did.

Also no matter what that looks like the least fun gay pride parade ever.

I was down town during Pride this year and all I saw was a few furries in tails and a guy in a bear costume (that I don't think was actually a fursuit, I think he was probably involved with some kind of bear float or something) in the CVS. Admittedly it was still early in the day but shit, I remember Pride being total fucking chaos by noon a decade ago. I blame Web 2.0.

I do appreciate the contributions by Captain Bringdown at 5:00, however.

I don't know, she brings "parody" up as a possibility but she, the reporterad the TERRORISM EXPERT all seem to agree that parody isn't the most likely.

Well, the video is dead now so I guess we no longer have a way of confirming this, but neither she nor the Terrorism Expert ever said that this was anything more than a parody. Her talk with The Terrorism Expert was just to pad out the segment, fishing for topics to discuss, and TE himself was adequately vague and non-committal at all times. Basically, they were following the Sarkeesian Method: "generate discussion" by making lots of innuendos, while avoiding any concrete, falsifiable statements or policy recommendations.

IIRC, the two of them kicked around a number of scenarios, like "is this meant to be a joke referencing ISIS' policy of murdering gays?" At one point she suggests that the Stasi should follow flag-man home and detain him for questioning, but that's as far as it goes. This segment is extremely paranoid, to be sure - the thrust being that ISIS exists, ISIS is scary, accept domestic authoritarianism to save yourself from ISIS - but no more so than your usual news segment, and again, at no point does anyone suggest that ISIS was at the Pride March, or that ISIS'd infiltrated The Gays (a group which CNN's corporate owners are usually pretty fond of),