The media has learned absolutely nothing since 2016.

by Therese Odell, posted in Uncategorized

It’s a Wednesday. It’s 20 days until Election Day — unless you live somewhere with early voting, in which case TODAY is Election Day. Get out there and vote!

I dare you to not watch this repeatedly:

Political Crap

So, I woke up this morning to three different stories involving the press that have me IRRITATED. Looks like President FAKE NEWS’s team has been hard at work in the past couple of days, concocting a bunch of bullshit to feed the media, and the media, THE GODDAMNED IDIOTS, are eating it all up.

STORY NUMBER ONE: After refusing to participate in a virtual town hall, because he’s a big fucking infant who throws tantrums when he doesn’t get his way, President Full Diaper was rewarded by NBC with his own town hall to be held at the same time Joe Biden will be holding a town hall on ABC.

What the actual fuck, NBC? I don’t have a problem with NBC hosting a town hall with the President, but they should have refused to do it at the same time Joe Biden’s is taking place, if only so that the American people could watch both and be fully informed. This is just President Malignant Narcissist’s attempt to 1. distract from Biden and then 2. claim that his town hall had better ratings — even if it didn’t.

GODDAMMIT, NBC.

STORY NUMBER TWO: Axios ran a piece about how Joe Biden has answered fewer questions from the press which reads as if it was written by Kayleigh McEnany herself. The gist of the piece is that Biden has not been hit with hard questions by the press and isn’t being transparent with them, especially as compared to The Liar in Chief.

Let’s back up here for a second to explain what is really happening. Political media loves a horse race, and with Joe Biden out ahead of President Deplorable in the polls by double digits, they needed to find something, anything to write about regarding Biden. So when Biden sidestepped — and continues to sidestep — questions about possibly adding justices to the Supreme Court if he’s elected (instead of just saying, “Well, that’s all a hypothetical at this point. Let’s see what happens with Judge Coney Barrett’s nomination and the election before we talk about what might happen down the road.), the media latched onto this as if it’s equal to any — ANY — of the insane rantings coming out of the infected White House.

So then the Trump campaign saw that the press was latching onto this non-story, and drafted this press release that Axios just published in its entirety without once giving it any real context. Because both sides, yadda yadda yadda. Yeah, Biden hasn’t fielded as many questions as the President of the United States who is a raving lunatic who provides endless sound bites that feed the perpetually ravenous maw that is 24-hour news. I WONDER WHY. But also, President Alternative Facts does nothing but lie and repeat disinformation at every turn. How is that somehow better than Biden avoiding answering hypotheticals?

Additionally, the piece makes this crazy claim:

“Biden also has mostly gotten off easy on Medicare for All, police funding, Pentagon spending, fracking, reparations for African Americans, the Green New Deal and his support for the 1994 crime bill.”

Has he?

I mean, maybe what the Trumpie was getting at is when they wrote, “Biden also has mostly gotten off easy” on these issues is that people and the press aren’t OUTRAGED by Biden’s perfectly normal and defensible positions on these issues, but that seems like a Trump campaign problem, not a Joe Biden problem to me.

STORY NUMBER THREE — And this one is a DOOZY: Rudy Giuliani and Steve Bannon have delivered their “October Surprise” in the form of a New York Post story that claims a “smoking-gun email” has been discovered PROVING that Hunter Biden did … something … with Ukraine … and Burisma … and look, I don’t even know, and honestly can’t follow the story,  because I am not neck-deep in Fox News conspiracy theories. The best I can glean, the “scandal” is that Hunter offered to introduce a Ukrainian businessman to his father? And from what the Biden campaign has said, such a meeting never happened? Am I wrong for missing the story here?

More reputable journalists are saying that what the story is alledging doesn’t line up with known facts. This is a great explainer on what the story alleges, and why it’s crap and most certainly Russian disinformation.

In fact, it’s so filled with lies, Facebook is trying to slow its spread:

But what is infuriating about this is not that the Trump campaign is pushing more of Giuliani’s unhinged Ukraine conspiracies in one of Rupert Murdoch’s media properties — this was entirely expected from them. No, what is infuriating is that some real media sites, like The New York Times, Bloomberg News, and Politico were treating this story as if it’s anything but complete bullshit. Fucking Maggie Haberman out here breathlessly tweeting the story this morning:

But let’s talk about that quote Haberman pulled for one second. The way these emails made their way to the Post according to the story was that:

The computer was dropped off at a repair shop in Biden’s home state of Delaware in April 2019, according to the store’s owner.

The customer who brought in the water-damaged MacBook Pro for repair never paid for the service or retrieved it or a hard drive on which its contents were stored, according to the shop owner, who said he tried repeatedly to contact the client.

The shop owner couldn’t positively identify the customer as Hunter Biden, but said the laptop bore a sticker from the Beau Biden Foundation, named after Hunter’s late brother and former Delaware attorney general.

Photos of a Delaware federal subpoena given to The Post show that both the computer and hard drive were seized by the FBI in December, after the shop’s owner says he alerted the feds to their existence.

But before turning over the gear, the shop owner says, he made a copy of the hard drive and later gave it to former Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s lawyer, Robert Costello.

Steve Bannon, former adviser to President Trump, told The Post about the existence of the hard drive in late September and Giuliani provided The Post with a copy of it on Sunday.

As Pajiba puts it:

I mean, you couldn’t cook up a story more absurd than, “Hunter Biden takes computer in for repair, computer shop owner notifies FBI of contents on hard drive but keeps a copy, and then hands it over to Steve Bannon and Rudy Giuliani, and all the intel seems to support baseless conspiracy theories that Rudy Giuliani has been promoting for over a year.” If there was something in the hard drives worth investigating, wouldn’t the FBI had done that? Also, is there not some sort of law against computer repair shop owners inspecting the contents of hard drives and making copies of them? Not for nothing, but also: Do people still drop their computers off at computer repair shops? This whole scheme sounds more lamebrained than a Jacob Wohl press conference.

And you would think that such a story would set off alarm bells at serious media outlets before they started setting their hair on fire and amplifying it without doing their own GODDAMNED FACT-CHECKING. But apparently, THEY LEARNED NOTHING FROM 2016 AND HERE WE ARE AGAIN, WITH ANOTHER BULLSHIT EMAIL STORY 20 DAYS BEFORE THE ELECTION.

AND THAT’S WHY I AM IRRITATED. DO BETTER, MEDIA.

Going Viral

Shark Tanks‘ Kevin O’Leary thinks that you don’t really need a $1,200 stimulus check. There are still 12.6 million people out of work right now.

76 Days, a documentary about how the people of Wuhan struggled in the first days of the pandemic, has been bought by MTV.

I wrote another thing about TV in the time of Corona.

The Los Angeles Comic-Con has been canceled after all. Surprise.

All Other TV News

I’m hurrying through this post to get to The Bachelorette, so all of that discussion will be held over there. BUT. Unrelated to this season, that slut-shaming asshole Luke Parker, or as I called him, “Shower Jesus,” has been ordered by a court to pay The Bachelorette‘s production company $100,000 for violating his contract with them. Apparently, he made a bunch of unauthorized media appearances and talked shit about the show and now here we are. GOOD.

If there’s only one contestant left, do they need to have Final Jeopardy at all?

Janelle Monae is performing a virtual concert in celebration of the season finale of Lovecraft Country on Monday. More information is at Lovecraftsanctum.com.

Here’s a piece about Pedro Pascal and The Mandalorian and Baby Yoda and all I can think about is the fact that Pedro Pascal lived in San Antonio the same time I did when we were both kids.

I know I keep talking about Bly Manor, but more stuff keeps coming out. Here’s a piece with Mike Flanagan talking dolls, ghost rules, and the meaning of that last shot, which, by the way, is a gut punch — in a good way.

Renewals

  • Craftopia has been renewed for a second season on HBO Max.

Cancellations

  •  

In Development

  • A Fried Green Tomatoes series starring Reba McEntire is being developed at NBC.
  • Night Books, a family movie starring Krysten Ritter, Winslow Fegley, And Lidya Jewett has been set at Netflix.
  • Karma’s World, an animated children’s series from Ludacris, has been ordered at Netflix.
  • Adult Material has been picked up by HBO Max.

Casting News

Mark Your Calendars

  • The Mandalorian will return on Disney+ on October 30.
  • Hillbilly Elegy will premiere on Netflix on November 24.
  • This Is Us will return on NBC on October 27.

  • Firefly Lane will debut on Netflix soon.
  • The Boulet Brothers’ Dragula: Resurrection premieres on Shudder on October 20.

R.I.P.

Herbert Kretzmer, Lyricist of Les Miserables

WATCH THIS

The Amazing Race: TV is so weird this year. The Amazing Race was supposed to premiere last summer, but, like The Bachelorette, that had to be scrapped. So enjoy the new season now — it’s the most foreign travel any of us will be doing for a while. Season premiere. 8 p.m., CBS

The Real Housewives of Orange County: The ladies are shocked by Elizabeth’s unconventional relationship in the season premiere. 8 p.m., Bravo

The Con: This new documentary series is about people who get taken in by cons. Series premiere. 9 p.m., ABC

The 2020 Billboard Music Awards: Music prizes. 7 p.m., NBC

Late Night:

  • Jimmy Kimmel Live: John Cusack, Leslie Jones, Woodkid
  • The Daily Show: The Daily Social Distancing Show
  • Watch What Happens Live: Shannon Storms Beador, Jana Kramer

WEDS. 7:00 7:30 8:00 8:30 9:00 9:30
ABC Coco The Con
(new)
CBS Big Brother
(new)		 The Amazing Race
(new)		 S.W.A.T.
(repeat)
CW Devils
(new)		 Coroner
(new)		 Local
FOX The Masked Singer
(new)		 I Can See Your Voice
(new)		 News/Local
NBC The Billboard Music Awards
(live)

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