Reporting On Reporters Reporting On Reporters Reporting

It’s turkeys all the way down

By

Friday, reporters broadcasting live on MSNBC and CNN entered the apartment of the presumed San Bernardino shooters and either “rummaged” or “swarmed” through it, depending on whether you prefer to see them as bargain-hunting grannies or voracious locusts. “Swarmed” wins the Google News count by quite a bit. Media Twitter was shocked (shocked!) at such undignified behavior, and certainly MSNBC airing unredacted shots of Farook’s mother’s ID and social security card seemed like it was a little much. There was nothing newsworthy in the apartment, however, so the story immediately swallowed its own tail and became about whether they should have gone in or whether we should have watched. Or, in CNN’s case, how much more responsible and restrained their vultures are compared to MSNBC’s vultures. As of press time, no one had explained why picking through an empty apartment was worse than what everybody did in Newtown.

Today in Guns: The New York Times ran an editorial on its front page arguing for extremely slight restrictions on the most unnecessary and indefensible kinds of guns, along with a media news story about the New York Times running a front page editorial, but not a story reporting on the reporting about the editorial1. To prove that all gun owners are not maniacs, right wing caricature and name conservationist Erick Erickson literally shot holes in the newspaper:

Someone please take Erickson aside and explain to him… you know what? Never mind. Also, we learned, to our dismay, that Jerry Falwell managed to spawn, and these Nevada toddlers are wondering where their guns are.

Ijeoma Oluo really hated Spike Lee’s new movie, “Chi-Raq.” Tabs Contributing Editor Bijan Stephen hit the strip club with Killer Mike. Matt Lubchansky imagined a peaceful future far away from any Takes. Today in snake law. Today in boob odor. Max Read explicated the Halpert: ¯\(°_o)/¯ and John Herrman switched from looking at the platforms to looking at what is happening to our former platform-feeders. It doesn’t matter if you don’t care about basketball, Steph Curry is something entirely else. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a voluntary household surveillance device taking orders from your TV–forever.

Intern José is here to tell us what’s “on fleek” so let’s watch him whip/nae nae.

TODAY’S INTERN TAB, by JOSÉ DÍAZ ROHENA

Caitlin White, writing for Brooklyn Magazine about that awful Vice “First Date” interview with Carly Rae Jepsen, is Mad As Hell. To most of us, it’s pretty obvious that treating an interview subject like a potential lay is ill advised and generally demeaning. But to many, it’s apparently not, which is probably why White seethes at even having to have the conversation.

The above is an assemblage of takes. I don’t typically see recording discussed on a technical level outside of TapeOp and Sound On Sound, so it was really nice to see this little thing on vocal comping that didn’t make it seem totally lame.

Repackaging Black Culture and selling it at a markup is a practice that I thought we had perfected—but we can actually do so much better! Now, Black teens make the coolest viral content and corporations profit from it. The game is rigged (then: via intellectual property law; now: via terms of service agreements) so they never own their creation in the first place. The piece reads like a depressing addendum to last year’s New Yorker article on the rise of YouTube and Vine celebrities. Where does your content come from? It might be better to imagine than to know.

Lol what if late capitalism is just the ongoing conversion of authentic subcultural resistance directly into advertising?

Today’s Longread: I don’t like longreads and you (or I?) may not agree with all of this but Alexandra Kimball’s “Unpregnant: The silent, secret grief of miscarriage” is a hell of a piece of writing.

Today’s Song: Run The Jewels, “Oh My Darling (Don’t Cry)“

~That tab boy life about to be repealed~

Today in Tabs tried hard to keep today shorter than last week’s sprawling mess, I hope you appreciated it. Long or short, we’re always on Fast Company and in your email but, like vampires, you have to invite us in. Did you know you can reply to this email? You can!

  1. I guess that’s what this is. ↩

[Photos: Flickr users Roger H. Goun, Art Comments, Anders Lejczak]


Fast Company , Read Full Story

(102)