Elon Gives Me an "Absolutely," Journalists Have a Threesome in Congress, Lab Leak Coverup Unravels, & Tucker Outrages with J6 Video
This Week in Media - Friday, March 10, 2023
Well that was quite a week. It finished off (sorry for the pun) with Rep. Sylvia Garcia (D-Texas) asking journalists Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger if they were in “some kind of threesome” with Bari Weiss. Actually that’s not quite true. For me, the week finished with Elon Musk chiming in on my lab leak reporting. So how on earth did it start?
News at The Burning Telegraph 🔥
+ A new TBR milestone: Elon Musk (yes, that Elon Musk) chimed in on my reporting for Tablet Magazine in a piece called “Treason at the Science Journals” on how science journals were corrupted by the science establishment on matters related to Covid. “Absolutely",” Musk wrote in response to a tweet of my piece by Dr. Jay Bhattachrya, the Stanford scientist who urged the US not to go full-lockdown. The piece tells a dark, somewhat tragic tale. We need science and we need journalism, so we really need science journalism. But what I show – and apparently with Elon agrees with – is that we currently don’t have it.
+ I wrote earlier in the week for Unherd, “Can Britain Resist AI Communism,” about why calls by Tony Blair for the UK to create a “sovereign AI” are not only misguided, but miss the point. What the UK, and countries like it, really needs is a robust venture capital ecosystem that will draw top entrepreneurs to make use of AI. What we don’t need, or want, is government at the wheel.
The Week’s Headlines
Now for some notable moments in media. As mentioned we had:
A bizarre spectacle in Congress (I suppose I could just say Congress) where Rep. Garcia asks a chuckling
and what this Substack thing is and sagely supposes it’s a website of some kind before asking of Taibbi and Shellenberger are part of a “threesome” with Bari Weiss of the . Congresswoman! The exchange was part of a just-as-weird hearing where politicians on the left side of the aisle excoriated the two journalists for not wanting to reveal their sources. Hmmm.The week kicked off, or exploded, with outrage in response to Tucker Carlson airing footage of January 6 showing “QAnon Shaman” being escorted through the Capitol building and onto the Senate floor. Sen. Schumer called for Carlson to be whatever the journalistic equivalent of disbarred is. The political inversion on journalism continues as not so long ago Dems were champions of not just a free but an inviolable press and Republicans were all about governmental powers. How the times have flippened.
Media Winners & Losers
Week’s Media Winner: That’s easy: Substack won this one with free brand advertising (via Garcia’s threesome) that your head of PR can only dream of.
Week’s Media Loser: The science media, which is throwing intellectual haymakers at the public on Covid, rather than being transparent (and, one can dream, contrite).
Till Next Week
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