Category — old shitty media

Typical: old dogs, new tricks.

Consider this post the rolled up newspaper that’s used to swat a dog across its snout after the pooch takes a shit in the middle of the kitchen floor. This time the kitchen floor is the interweb. And the steaming, coiled, noxious piece of shit is the first ever Presidential Twitter debate — which features no presidential candidates.

Nope. Just some Obama and McCain staffers armed with Treos (couldn’t even get iPhones –not even the old ones!) are participating in a four-day online debate. Moderated by some professor of tech and culture and O.G. Wonkette/new editor at Radar Ana Marie Cox.

As you all know, Tweets can only be 140 characters long. Here’s a sample response to John McCain’s intern about his fiscal plan:

Priorities:1) $ for R&D>>tax breaks for hedge fund managers;2) S&T ed. programs>>tax breaks for oil companies

Do you hear that? That’s the sound of my soul screaming. I know folks are trying in earnest to get some cutting edge fusion going with the presidential election and social media but this type of trash misses the point entirely. Much like the youtube debates, having staff serve as gatekeepers to mediate content subverts the entire point of social media. It’s about being instant, spontaneous, and accessible.

Nothing about filming a talking snowman or having some intern text message you about universal health care enriches the political process. It’s just a ham handed exercise in repackaging. The word wide web really does provide a grassroots challenge to both establishment politics and mainstream media — but not when it’s so cheaply used. The smartest baby boomer I know said this about the rise of New Media in politics

Authentic Web-driven power surfaces most dramatically when online communities exercise collective accountability over institutions and individuals that were once invulnerable to instantaneous public reaction and feedback.

Put another way — in a 140 characters or less:

“If you claim to be a social media expert and you only use social media to talk about social media… you’re no expert.” Tim Siedell via Twitter.

related: FAILURE.

A piece in the Boston Phoenix describes the tension between old-line sportswriters (that’s them!) and bloggers (that’s us!). I’m not sure how the photographer was able to catch such a wildly spontaneous moment on film, but kudos! This exactly what I’m doing right now – eXxXxxXtremme BLOGGING!!!11 Its so *~KrZy!!!*~

Wicked Visual Metaphor Broseph!!

One sure sign that Obama is the man to beat this fall is the ridiculous rumor mill that has revved up and started churning out crap, such as the “revelation” that somewhere there’s an audio tape of would-be First Lady Michelle Obama ranting angrily about “Whitey”. We’re pretty sure that, should such a tape actually exist, there would have been a collective orgasm from the right-wing blogosphere that could be heard ’round the world. We doubt it could be kept secret for 30 seconds.

This rumor is like a game of Telephone and keeps changing and getting more incredible with each iteration. The people rumored to have been joining her have run the gamut from plausible (Jeremiah Wright) to doubtful (Louis Farrakhan) to hallucinatorily impossible (Malcom X).

There’s a plausible theory going around, that everyone is getting all het up over a tape in which Michelle Obama is criticizing Bush by saying “Why’d he put us in Iraq for no reason?”, etc., and it’s being misrepresented as “Whitey”. Which makes sense, because saying “Whitey put us in Iraq for no reason” doesn’t even make grammatical sense. Michelle Obama went to Princeton University and Harvard Law School. She’s not the fucking Hulk. “Whitey let New Orleans drown! MICHELLE SMASH!”

And then there’s this:

We figured the fist-pound was just an affectionate gesture of solidarity and triumph.  Well, color us naïve; it’s obviously some kind of coded hand signal for, at the very least, BLACK POWER!. Or possibly OMGTERRORISM!.

White people are crazy.

What is this strange feeling we’re experiencing? Is it… respect? …for Chris Matthews??

Last week while speaking to the Israeli Knesset, Dear Leader made a typically retarded statement in which he compared Obama’s desire to talk with Iran before we resort to invasion and carpet-bombing to Neville Chamberlain turning over Austria and the Sudentenland to Hitler. If we may cram a little English in with the history: That’s “diplomacy”. “Appeasement” is giving a dictator half of Czechoslovakia so he won’t invade Poland. You’re welcome!

Ignorance of both recent history and basic language skills didn’t stop the usual right-wing water-carriers from taking up the meme of appeasement and regurgitating it all over the airwaves. Bush gave them their talking points and they have a job to do, damn it!

In this recent clip from Hardball, watch Chris Matthews take time out from asking Hill if her vagina would keep her from being an effective Commander-in-Chief to nail Kevin James but good. He hammers away at him for several minutes while James hysterically splutters the same ineffective non-answers ad nauseum (”It all goes back to appeasement! It’s the exact same thing! It legitimized and energized!”), before he finally cracks and admits he has no idea what he’s talking about.

The worst thing about Kevin James is how patently manufactured his “conservative outrage” is. It’s obvious he doesn’t give a fuck about politics; being a right-wing talking head is the closest thing to huckstering snake oil to local rubes from the back of a covered wagon as you can get in the 21st century. We’ve seen better acting on infomercials for “painless” hair-removal systems playing at 3 o’clock in the morning.

Yesterday the internets exploded with this clip of Insider Edition-era Bill O’Reilly–beloved pundit, writer of both terrible non-fiction and terrible fiction, and noted pervert–having a meltdown over what appears to be ignorance of the phrase “play us out”. Apparently Bill was alseep when they taught that phrase in journalism school, and also has never watched any television journalism, including his own show, ever.

Watch Bill’s hair at 1:06, where it seems to become so frightened at his violent tirade that it appears to be attempting to crawl off his scalp and go hide.

Poor Bill. It’s not easy living your life on teevee, warts and all. Let’s send him a conciliatory falafel basket.

Mauren Dowd extends the worst metaphor ever and proceeds to beat it like a second place derby winner. I can’t believe this is the strongest female voice that the Times can offer. From her colum:

Hillary Clinton may not be a great natural politician, but traveling across the country on her own Bus Named Desire, she has crawled through glass to get the role right. She showed again with her squeaker win in Indiana that for many white working-class men, she is The Man — more tenacious and less concerned with the judgments of the tony set, economists and editorial writers…

Dowd gushes over Clinton’s shrewd ability to play dirty like the rest of the boys. She emasculates Obama for his tepid, awkward stumbling through Indiana’s coffee shops and gas stations. According to the increasingly irrelevant Dowd, Clinton “lacerates” while Obama “accommodates.” Simple, right?

[Read more →]

In the wake of the Miley Cyrus bared-shoulder scandal, a member of ONTD took it upon themselves to compile 14 years’ worth of Annie Leibowitz covers for Vanity Fair’s annual “Hollywood Issue”. That’s a whole lot of powdered skin, awkward poses, and facial expressions that bespeak either ennui or a powerful need to fart. You be the judge.

The covers are fold-outs, meaning the left third of each image is actually what a potential buyer sees on the cover. Jezebel sees a racial bias in them, because a majority of the actors of color are pushed off to the right two-thirds. I’m sure that’s not an accident, any more than the fact that when men and women are both in the shot, the women have on average about 96% less clothing than the men.

Of course, the funniest thing about going back over a decade and a half of so-called “It” actors and actresses is the schadenfreude that comes with realizing how many of them totally fizzled out. Wait, so people really thought Monica Potter was going to be the Next Big Thing? Wow, people were stupid in the ’90s.

This graphic escaped from bondage, taught itslef to read, and wrote its memoirs

The graphic at left was thrown onto the screen, requesting viewer opinions. I can tell you what the average Fox and Friends viewer opinion is:  HILLARY KILLED VINCE FOSTER AND OBAMA IS A SECRET MUSLIM. Anyway, that’s not the point.

The point is that the Douglas in the Lincoln/Douglas debates was Stephen Douglas, noted slavery enthusiast and historical footnote. The debates, of which there were seven in all, were largely about slavery. But Fox seems to have confused him with Frederick Douglass, who was an escaped slave and prominent abolitionist. We’re pretty sure he was on the same side of the issue as The Great Emancipator.

Fox News has a long and storied history of having graphics that make as much sense as Chinese instructions for flying the Space Shuttle that have been run through Babelfish, like that time they said page-stalking Mark Foley was a Democrat. In the interests of giving their PAs more time to go out back and smoke blunts, here are some other Douglases they might want to use for future graphics:

• Michael Douglas. He’s not the President, but he played one on the teevee!
• James Douglas, Governor of Vancouver Island.
• Archibald Douglas, 5th Duke of Douglas.
• Buster Douglas, American heavyweight boxer.
• The Douglas Squirrel, why the hell not, it makes as much sense as Frederick fucking Douglass.

Arugula got into Yale on his daddy’s connections and money, skated through with gentlemen’s Cs, and avoided Vietnam. Oh wait, that was the current president.

If voting for someone based on their taste in alcoholic beverages and salad ingredients is what we’re all going to do, someone with a taste for absinthe and bitter endive better step up. We here at Hey Be Us have exotic and eclectic tastes.

What happens if one ingests arugula and beer at the same time? Does it make your small intestine a red organ and your large intestine a blue organ, and do they start arguing about abortion?

I’ve always liked Leibowitz. I like her for the same reason I like David LaChapelle. I’m a fan of celebrities, I’m seduced by their personas, and I get kick from seeing beautiful portraits of those personas perfectly captured or creatively re-imagined.

But this? This is all she could come up with for Miley Cyrus? Tarted up, tussled, and topless? This is a tween star who has built her career being squeaky clean goofy girl—-not on on implicit sexuality like Britney or Chrisitina did (that’s why the Rolling Stone spread wasn’t nearly as appalling because, right or wrong, initially Britney was about being a coquettish Lolita.)

Sexualizing young girls ain’t nothing new, but for Leibowitz and the increasingly irrelevant Vanity Fair to justify this boring, uninspired, tawdry, and exploitive image as “unintentional” and “misunderstood” is outrageous. Her bare breasts wrapped in a virginal white satin sheet was just an spontaneous decision by a particularly keen eyed prop dude on the set? Are you fucking kidding me? Don’t bullshit. It was clear what all parties we’re trying to do, sell more issues, create more buzz by stripping down a teenager and making it looked like she just emerged from some sexual encounter. Simply put : it’s unnecessary, deeply cynical, and totally uncreative.

Our favorite jewy confection of fashion and sex SJP finally responded to Maxim declaring her the unsexiest woman alive.

“It’s so brutal in a way, so filled with rage and anger.”

And it is brutal. From Maxim:

“How the hell did this Barbaro-faced broad manage to be the least sexy woman in a group of very unsexy women and still star on a show with ’sex’ in the title? Pull your skirt down, Secretariat, we´d rather ride Chris Noth.”

Well, I’d rather wipe my ass with a chainsaw than with a copy of Maxim magazine. Hustler is more enlightened about women than Maxim and has better writing (see their piece on Naughty School Girl Carwash! It puts Tom Wolfe to shame).

First off, SJP is awesome because she made a career out of being the dorky drama girl on Square Pegs. Then she went on to produce one the most brilliant, invigorating and advanced dramas about female sexuality in the history of TV. She’s self-effacing with pitch-perfect comedic timing and she turned me on to Oscar De La Renta. Jessica Alba made Good Luck Chuck. There. SJP wins and you can chuck on my nuts, Maxim.

Some fun facts about about the lamest cum-rag mag around after the jump. [Read more →]

Newspapers are ruining facebook.

Steve Rhodes writes for Chicago Magazine and founded The Beachwood Reporter, and this past week he augmented his prolific curriculum vitae with one ranting message to all his facebook friends hollering at them for shoving their shitty newspaper articles and useless marketing materials in his face:

“This is my personal page where I like to keep track of friends and acquaintances, not a place of commerce. I do not appreciate being used. It’s pathetic.”

He threatened to de-friend all the “newspaper people who are ruining facebook for everyone,” and generally got a cramp in his damn-hooligans muscle over his inability to manage the facebook news feed.

As many times as we’ve talked about the olds and the facebook generation and their inability to play nice, we’ve never had to hand it to grandpa before. All you new media douchebags who keep sharing your crappy content on The Facebook, quit pissing off Steve Rhodes! Unless you’re sharing a post from our site. Then it’s cool.

If you’ve offended Steve Rhodes, you should totes facebook chat him to apologize

Via Gawker