Voltaire
“The biographer at work,” Janet Malcolm writes, “is like the professional burglar, breaking into a house, rifling through certain drawers that he has good reason to think contain the jewelry and money, and triumphantly bearing his loot away.” Malcolm’s book The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath & Ted Hughes (reissued by Granta in 2020) insists that writers and readers of biography are equally guilty of “voyeurism and busybodyism”: they tiptoe down the corridor together and gaze through the keyhole. The apparatus of serious scholarship in a literary biography is simply a veneer that lends respectability to the snooping.
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Reddit’s rules
“The_Donald” has been banned by Reddit, the social networking and message board site. In fact, Reddit is banning about 2,000 subreddits including “The_Donald” — an online community of nearly 800,000 dedicated to supporting President Trump.
The reason for the ban? Steve Huffman, Reddit’s chief executive, said, “Reddit is a place for community and belonging, not for attacking people. ‘The_Donald’ has been in violation of that.”
CNN’s Kaya Yurieff writes that “The_Donald” users often share racist, misogynistic, homophobic and conspiracy content. That includes spreading the infamous PizzaGate conspiracy, which falsely accused Hillary Clinton and others of running a child sex trafficking ring out of a pizza parlor in Washington, D.C.
Huffman said Reddit tried to work with “The_Donald” over the years to avoid banning them altogether, but “The_Donald” kept breaking the rules.
Meanwhile, the streaming website Twitch temporarily suspended Trump’s account on Monday, also citing hateful content. The New York Times’ Kellen Browning wrote, “One stream was of a rebroadcasted 2015 campaign event in which Mr. Trump made comments about Mexico sending drugs, crime and rapists over the border. The other was of his recent rally in Tulsa, Okla., where he talked about a ‘very tough hombre’ breaking into a woman’s house at 1 a.m.”
More bans
In a day of bans, YouTube got into the act, as well. It banned several well-known far-right figures, including white nationalist leader Richard Spencer, former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard David Duke and internet personality Stefan Molyneux.
In a statement, YouTube said, “We have strict policies prohibiting hate speech on YouTube, and terminate any channel that repeatedly or egregiously violates those policies. After updating our guidelines to better address supremacist content, we saw a 5x spike in video removals and have terminated over 25,000 channels for violating our hate speech policies.”
No more bites at the Apple
(John
Nacion/STAR MAX)
The New York Times has pulled out of its partnership with Apple News. Times articles will no longer appear on the curated Apple News feed.
The New York Times’ Kellen Browning and Jack Nicas reported that, in a memo to Times’ employees, Times chief operating officer Meredith Kopit Levien wrote, “Core to a healthy model between The Times and the platforms is a direct path for sending those readers back into our environments, where we control the presentation of our report, the relationships with our readers and the nature of our business rules. Our relationship with Apple News does not fit within these parameters.”
Browning and Nicas note that the Times is one of the first media organizations to pull out of Apple News and that “Apple had given it little in the way of direct relationships with readers and little control over the business. It said it hoped to instead drive readers directly to its own website and mobile app so that it could ‘fund quality journalism.’”
In a statement, the Times said, “We are committed to providing the more than 125 million people who use Apple News with the most trusted information and will continue to do so through our collaboration with thousands of publishers.”
In an analysis for Nieman Lab, Ken Doctor wrote, “On its own, that may seem like just one more move in the chess game between major news companies and the platforms. But it could also be an indication of a more geologic movement. Will the rest of 2020 bring tectonic shifts in platforms’ power over news — or just a few more small tremors?”
Levien told Doctor, “It’s time to re-examine all of our relationships with the big platforms.”
Media tidbits
New
Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell, who is scheduled to appear on an MSNBC special
tonight. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)
- Chris Hayes will host a virtual town hall special about race tonight at 8 p.m. Eastern on MSNBC. “All in America: The Front Lines of Change” will feature a panel of Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey and New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell.
- It has been known for a while that Will Cain was leaving ESPN for Fox News. Now we know what his new gig will be. Cain has been named co-host of “Fox & Friends Weekend.” Cain, who wrapped up his last day at ESPN last week, will join co-hosts Jedediah Bila and Pete Hegseth starting Aug. 15.
- New York Post sports media columnist Andrew Marchand reports that former NFL star Keyshawn Johnson will join ESPN morning radio, perhaps later this summer. But it isn’t known yet if Johnson will join the current radio duo of Trey Wingo and Mike Golic or if he will be a part of another show. It seems unlikely that both Golic and Wingo are going to stay. Marchand also continues to write that Mike Greenberg, who hosts the ESPN TV show “Get Up,” could end up returning to radio with an early afternoon slot.
- Fox Sports and the U.S. Golf Association have ended their 12-year, $1.2 billion TV agreement with seven years left on the deal. That means NBC will again take over the men’s U.S. Open. This year’s event, typically held in June, has been pushed back to September because of the coronavirus. Many golf fans will be happy with this news because many felt Fox Sports did a subpar job with golf. That was true the first year, but the network seemed to gather momentum and had become quite competent at covering the few events it produced each year.
Hot type
- Incredible work by The New York Times’ Mike Baker, Jennifer Valentino-DeVries, Manny Fernandez and Michael LaForgia with “Three Words. 70 Cases. The Tragic History of ‘I Can’t Breathe.’”
- New York Times media columnist Ben Smith wrote about Washington Post editor Marty Baron, but the most interesting part of his column was that legendary Post journalist Bob Woodward was going to disclose that Brett Kavanaugh was an anonymous source in a book he wrote in 1999 about Watergate and its legacy.
- The New Yorker’s Jeffrey Toobin with “Why the Mueller Investigation Failed.”
