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The Daily Beast is indeed a strange animal. Like some kind of editorial haven for sloughed-off media pseudo-personalities, Tina Brown's resurrection project proves you no longer need to know what the hell you're talking about to be published, as long as you stick to populism. Meghan McCain, for example, would like you to know the election killed her libido.
Like your cousin up in Hyannis Port who insists he's not a racist because his caddy is black, McCain assures us that she in fact does "have many friends who openly voted for Barack Obama (many of them also didn’t)," and this is not The Issue. Indeed, she confides in us the complete existential schism that American democracy has opened up within her: "I have become something I used to despise: people who let politics dictate his or her attraction to someone." Well put.
Are her quibbles completely inaccessible? Of course. Do they bear conspicuous similarity to the 1998 Disney classic, My Date With the President's Daughter, starring the brother from Boy Meets World? They do. But that McCain has this audience at all is symptomatic of the Daily Beast's issue at large: Its disposable content mill churns out mealy-mouthed commentary with more emphasis on the supposed luminary who's writing it than on actual message. Am I supposed to be impressed that they got Pat O'Brien, mustachioed and nasal entertainment reporter, to defend Jimmy Fallon's nascent late-night career? What could the take-away be in a post edgily titled "Is God Evil?" (Spoiler: Yes. Religion is divisive).
The sadness that pervades the site is not Meghan McCain's closeted racism or newfound asexuality (she is unattracted to anyone who voted at all!), but that this editorial model is most likely the future of journalism. Incidentally, The Daily Beast's moniker comes from the fictitious paper of record in Evelyn Waugh's Scoop
Permalink » | by Max Lakin
We like bacon—it's super tasty (especially the thick strips they serve at Peter Luger's). But apparently there are some people who, well, really like bacon. Chief among them has got to be the guy who is eating nothing but bacon for this entire month (and, yes, he's still at it). He's not alone, though: bacon has exploded onto the web.
It's been a long time since John Lennon famously declared on March 4, 1966: "Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. I do not know what will go first, rock and roll or Christianity…We're more popular than Jesus now." Long enough that now we have the tools to test its truth.
Full article » | by Jake Rake
Recently, Mike Wilson garnered his 15 million pageviews of internet fame when he chronicled his exit from a burning airplane on the social microblogging site twitter. If there’s anything twitterers love to tweet about its twitter itself, and so Wilson’s act of citizen journalism (because other journalists aren’t citizens?) was replayed and retweeted ad infinitum, creating an echo chamber of self-congratulations. The mainstream press, for its part, was unsure how to react to this development and possible threat. Some highlighted the twitter aspect of the story, some ignored it, and the AP, somehow, did both. Below, Gelf presents our Twitter-style account of the event and the reaction to it in reverse chronological order.
Once again, the top search term in America (at least according to the flawed lists compiled by search engines like Yahoo!) is "Britney Spears." What does that tell us about America? Not much that we don't already know. But a new site that mashes up data from the Google search API with information from the US Census is quite revealing.
As Gelf has recently documented, Sarah Palin is the latest in a long list of well-known people to dismiss bloggers as basement-dwelling malcontents. She told Greta Van Susteren of Fox News, "I'm going to characterize them as those bloggers in their parents' basement just talking garbage" (is it necessary to include [sic] when the speaker is Sarah Palin, or, is it just implied by this point?). Not surprisingly, the bloggers struck back.
To celebrate the by-now-probably-evil company's tenth anniversary, Google has recreated its search engine from January 2001. For those of you who have forgotten the halcyon days of the pre-9/11 world, the Dow was still above 10,000, "social networking" had little to do with the internet, and George W. Bush wanted to pursue a "humble" foreign policy. Though we're hardly the first to try it, Gelf decided to look up some current search terms in Google's wayback machine.
Blogger Stryde Hax has exposed an age scandal involving the Chinese Olympic women's (or should it be girl's?) gymnastics team by cleverly hacking into search engines like Google and Baidu. It sounds like a neat little triumph for citizen journalism, and it kind of is—Hax managed to uncover the gymnasts' real ages—or at least the ages the government had previously assigned them—using tools available to anyone with a brain and an internet connection. But his work wasn't exactly original.
The Montauk Monster, that bloated, seemingly decomposing corpse of some creature that washed up on a Montauk, Long Island, beach last month, has been getting a lot of attention recently—perhaps too much attention when there are decidedly more important things going on, like simultaneous wars and the return of $2 Starbucks after 2 p.m. So why is a certain part of the online world abuzz about "Monty"? It's the pageviews, stupid.
Full article » | by Max Lakin
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