Between preparing for the trial of Jizz Tsarnaev and covering the deaths of former Boston Mayor Tom Menino and the gubernatorial campaign of Attorney General Martha Coakley, we haven’t brought you a traditional Media Farm in a month. You know, one of those piñata round-ups of generally rancid news, from the viral to the arcane and obscure, which we enjoy pummeling the way we would Joe Scarborough if he walked into our office. Before that thought catapults us into a masturbatory conniption fit, let’s catch up on some of the gore we missed over the past however many …
DOG SHIT
First and foremost, in case you’re a big animal-hating goon and missed it, a puppy from the Boston Police Department got more ink than any BPD beatings or killings of unarmed suspects ever have. Among the original headlines from top news organizations: “Adorable Puppy Wears Boston Police Department Bulletproof Vest” (NBC News); “Puppy Wearing Bulletproof Vest Melts the Internet” (whosay.com), and “This Boston Police K-9 Puppy Is Melting Hearts Across The Internet” (inquisitr.com). Locally, investigative powerhouse Boston.com was all over the story, delivering a throbbing swab doused with their trademark insider wisdom titled, “Puppy in Boston Police Department Bulletproof Vest Melts Internet.”
SECOND THOUGHT
Remember how First Look Media and the guy who founded eBay were going to save journalism? Well, their plan has changed, and now they aren’t. Following the departure of major acquisition Matt Taibbi, who had joined the futuristic platform along with the only other journalists on Earth who are doing anything besides making lists about cat boners, things are looking slower than ever as the seemingly wasteful First Look teeters on the border of punchline and irrelevance. We did, however, find it cute how their subsidiary site The Intercept broke the ugly details about Taibbi’s departure. It’s enough to save them for now, although the tens of millions of dollars they’ve blown should have been the only safety net they ever needed.
BEN MEZRICH AND AARON SORKIN ARE FULL OF CRAP
There’s a guy, he calls himself a nonfiction writer. Thing is, he actually makes shit up. His name is Ben Mezrich, and he’s responsible for a number of fabulist best-sellers including The Accidental Billionaires, which purports to be about the founding of Facebook. Then there’s this other guy, Aaron Sorkin. Unlike the hack-tacular Mezrich, a fraudulent ass with no actual purpose, Sorkin seeks didactic ends through his reckless rewriting of history, as he did with The Social Network, a movie based on Mezrich’s manure. Nevertheless, as less gullible folks have suspected for some time, the film is hardly realer than Star Wars. As Facebook Founder Mark Zuckerberg said in a recent Q&A at Facebook headquarters: “They just kind of made up a bunch of stuff.” He goes on …
The reality is that writing code and building a product is not a glamorous enough thing to make a movie about. A lot of the stuff they probably had to embellish and make up. If they were really making a movie, it would’ve just been me at a computer coding for two hours straight. And these people want to make money …
I haven’t met the writer of the movie. I met [Jesse Eisenberg] once. They went out of their way in the movie to try to get some interesting details correct, like [the] design of [the] office, but with overarching plot about why we’re building Facebook or how we did it, they just kind of made up a bunch of stuff that I found kind of hurtful. I take our mission really seriously. We’re here not to just build a company, but to help connect the world and help people connect to people they love …
One important piece of context is the woman I’m married to, who I’ve been dating for 10 years, I was dating her before starting Facebook. If somehow I was trying to create Facebook to find more women, that probably wouldn’t have gone over well in my relationship. There were glaring things made up about movie that made it hard for me to take seriously. But we had some fun with it. We knew everyone at Facebook was gonna want to see it. So we actually took the whole company to go see it the day it came out.
LYNCH MOB
Props to Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo for noticing the latest (albeit there are many on any given day) shameless fumble and clumsy recovery by the blogging chimpanzees at Breitbart.com. As he noted in a Sunday blog post …
On Saturday Breitbart published an exclusive pointing out that President Obama’s Attorney General nominee Loretta Lynch was part of the team that defended President Clinton during the Whitewater investigation—not a bad little scooplet. Only it wasn’t the same Loretta Lynch, which kind of takes the punch out of the story.
Marshall goes on to explain how Breitbart.com had the balls to keep the story posted with a correction at the end, which essentially says that everything the reader just consumed is entirely false. Come to think of it, sounds like a postscript they should stamp on every item on any site affiliated with Andrew Breitbart or his stinking corpse.
SHORT SHORTS
- In the wake of NPR slashing three members from its environmental reporting team, Think Progress smacked the low-talkers for making such cuts in the face of climate crises galore. On the bright size, the Dig now has as many people working on the issue as National Public Radio.
- John Oliver took state legislatures, including ours right here in Mass, to town in a recent bombshell rant on his HBO show. Great stuff, though depressing considering how much more popular Oliver’s past hit on net neutrality, the most boring issue imaginable, was compared with his hit on state officials.
- Comedian Hannibal Burress is going around telling everyone that Bill Cosby is a “rapist,” leading to a lot of people saying, “Huh, I didn’t know anything about that,” and consulting Google. Like you’re about to do right now.
[Media Farm is wrangled by DigBoston News + Features Editor Chris Faraone]
FURTHER READING
MEDIA FARM: A FIELD GUIDE FOR REPORTERS PREPARING FOR THE TSARNAEV TRIAL
MEDIA FARM: A FINAL TOM MENINO ROUNDUP FOR GOOD MEASURE
MEDIA FARM: THIS COMPANY IS BAD FOR YOUR EARS
Dig Staff means this article was a collaborative effort. Teamwork, as we like to call it.
