It's media discovery day here at the Daily Meme. What's being discovered? The story of the day is of course Nevada rancher and public property thief Cliven Bundy, who, to the surprise of pretty much nobody, turns out to be a stone-cold racist. When a guy holding a press conference starts a sentence with, "I want to tell you one more thing I know about the Negro," the clever reporter starts writing. And so does a right-wing hero fall from his perch. Bundy will now disappear from Fox News, where he was getting round-the-clock coverage.
Bundy's greatest media advocate has been Sean Hannity, who has gotten into an ugly/funny back-and-forth with Jon Stewart over the issue. We assume that with this latest development, Hannity will apologize for ever promoting Bundy, and apologize sincerely to Stewart. And that Stewart will not gloat about it at all.
As Jamelle Bouie notes, Bundy's ideas aren't really all that unfamiliar: "In short, the only difference between Bundy and a whole host of conservatives is that the renegade rancher isn't sophisticated enough to couch his nonsense in soundbites and euphemism. Or, if Bundy has anything to say about 'the negro,' he learned it from the conservative movement."
One conservative radio host agrees: all Bundy needs, says Dana Loesch, is some media training. "I hope no one is surprised that an old man rancher isn't media trained to express himself perfectly." Indeed, what he should have said was "My African-American friends really had it good when they were slaves." Doesn't that sound better?
Let's move on. To some people, the idea of net neutrality-that all content on the web should be treated equally-sounded like a commie plot. But that'll be coming to an end, as the FCC has announced that it's writing new regulations allowing Internet service providers like Comcast to divide the web into a fast lane for big companies like Netflix that pay extra to the ISPs, and a slow lane for everyone else. Which sounds great, doesn't it?
All those millions of people Republicans keep telling us "lost" their coverage because of the Affordable Care Act? Jonathan Cohn explains a new study showing that the individual health insurance market was always incredibly volatile, with people moving in and out and changing plans constantly. The news media, upon discovering this, will no doubt move to correct their prior coverage.
Hillary Clinton has discovered that cable news is full of trivia and manufactured conflict. "People book onto the shows, political figures, commentators who will be controversial who will be provocative because it's a good show. You might not learn anything but you might be entertained and I think that's just become an unfortunate pattern that I wish could be broken," she told an audience at the University of Connecticut. You don't say! You might want to alert your press secretary of this development, in case he's been hibernating for the past 15 years.
