Fox News has suspended Andrew Napolitano for claiming that British intelligence wiretapped Trump Tower at Obama’s request. The Blaze has suspended Tomi Lahren after she went on The View last week and called pro-lifers hypocrites. Now we’ve got another suspension.
Independent Journalism Review has suspended Chief Content Officer Benny Johnson for assigning a story suggesting a connection between former President Obama’s visit to Hawaii and a judge there blocking President Trump’s travel ban—even though it was baseless…
It’s not the first time Johnson, a meme star, had had ethics problems. In 2014, BuzzFeed fired him as its viral politics editor after the site found “41 instances of sentences of phrases copied word for word from other sites.”
Three high-profile suspensions in the past 24 hours. That seems like a lot, right?
I have no idea why any of them did what they did, but all three infractions happened in the course of the same pursuit: filling the 24/7 news cycle. Feeding the beast.
We need instant analysis of every single thing that happens, every minute of every day. We need new “content” constantly. And if anybody stops to take a minute and think about what they’re saying, everybody else moves on to the next soundbite. The next manufactured outrage.
Exhausting, ain’t it?
I’m as guilty as anybody else, of course. I’d like to think I wouldn’t make the same mistakes any of those three have made, but who knows? The beast must feed.