X vs AXIOS
The AXIOS CEO has a temper tantrum in broad daylight. I saw it on X, the real media now.
the mavens of the melting mediaplex are big mad. they are mad because the days of “only those who buy ink by the barrel get to speak” are gone. they are mad because they have lost their way and lost their audience.1
— el gato malo
It’s very satisfying to watch the legacy media meltdown as they become more and more irrelevant. National Press Club honoree, Jim VandeHei, recently melted in broad daylight. Jim is CEO of Axios, a news outlet that describes itself as “Smart, efficient news worthy of your time, attention, and trust.” Jimbo is upset because we’re not finding his news worthy:
Everything we do is under fire. Elon Musk sits on Twitter everyday or X today, saying like, “We are the media. You are the media.” My message to Elon Musk is bullshit! You’re not the media. You having a blue checkmark, a Twitter handle and 300 words of cleverness doesn’t make you a reporter….Being a reporter is hard. Really hard. You have to care. You have to do the hard work. You have to get up everyday and say I want to get to the closest approximation of the truth without any fear and without any favoritism. You don’t do that by popping off on Twitter. You don’t do that by having an opinion. You do it by doing the hard work.2
You’re damn right you’re under fire. You have finally been exposed to a much larger percentage of the population and they don’t trust you. Not anymore. I really doubt that you’ll ever be able to get that trust back. Just close up shop and learn to code….oh, forgot, AIs are coding now….hmmm….learn to vacuum maybe….oh, wait….AI bots are doing that too….maybe just move to the desert and open a lemonade stand. You can call it VandeHei Industries.
Legacy Media is losing and they know it. They’re losing because they have not been doing the hard work of being real journalists and real reporters who search for the truth and it has finally caught up to them. Their interest is in narratives, not reality, and they have shown favoritism and obvious, obvious bias for the last eight years and much longer before.
So now Jimbo is whining and crying like a little boy who doesn’t get dessert because he repeatedly punched his sister, then lied about it, then punched her again, then lied about it again, punched her again, lied again, until finally he got caught. He’s angry at his sister for tattling on him, because she’s the one who did this to him—it’s all her fault that he punched her.
Morning Joe and his crew started clapping after VandeHei’s contrived tirade. Morning Joe’s Mika Brzezinski, who called Trump a Hitler lover, who called MAGA fascists, claps for this? Hilarious. Clearly they didn’t really believe any of what they said because they went off to meet with Trump. If you really believe Trump is Hitler…you don’t go meet with Hitler. You don’t try appease all the fascists you’ve been denigrating for years.
Now their woke audience is seeing the light and leaving their show in droves. Joe’s brainwashed audience still believes Trump is Hitler and can’t understand why their two champions of justice and democracy would want to meet with him. It may be the first rational thought they’ve ever had.
This is Mika Brzezinski on Morning Joe not too long ago:
As important as Trump’s fascism is and is the lead story everyday, his cozying up to dictators, his obsession with Hitler that has now come out. What he has said about our veterans and what he wants to do with the military against his political adversaries. It’s all huge news. This is the future that we’re looking at in the next Trump term if there is one, but this is what voters know right know, that he is killing us….These headlines and very good reporting by the way that shouldn’t be questioned by idiots, about what Trump has said about Hitler, that’s incredibly important to know…3[emphasis mine]
That right there is some stellar reporting. Total truth without any favoritism, bias or lying.
For my part, I don’t consider myself a reporter or a journalist, I’m just a father and husband trying to save the world, but there are plenty of people on Twitter/X and Substack who qualify, who do the hard work of journalism and reporting.
VandeHei is having a tantrum because X’s army of truth seekers is exposing the lies of fake journalists. He’s not used to that. They used to be able to say whatever they wanted with very few news outlets challenging their bullshit.
Jimmy doesn’t like the nobodies, the regular citizens and the real journalists challenging his elitist ass. Maybe learn this lesson, Jimbo:
Being a trained journalist doesn’t make you right. Being right, makes you right.
Some journalists think their various degrees give them a handle on the truth that the rest of us cannot possibly have, when the reality is, as we have learned these last eight years, that not being schooled as a journalist is more often than not a good thing.
I’ll take 300 words of truth from a trucker on X over any Ivy League journalist getting paid to spew 10,000 words of narrative in The New York Times.
Hey Axios. Hey New York Times. Hey legacy news.
You’re not the media now.
We're, each of us, a medium who is essential to broadcasting reality.
I think that Axios is the exception that proves the rule. They are a fairly new company. And they are doing their best to do real, fact-based reporting. But the market for it is gone. Liberals are not looking for real, fact-based reporting in name-brand media. Conservatives are not looking for real, fact-based reporting in name-brand media. So, his "let's do this right and people will come" isn't selling well to very many people.
Axios' real question should be whether Bari Weiss, Jim Kunstler, Naomi Wolf, Matt Taibbi, and Joe Rogan have lost their minds; or if they kept their minds and found themselves unwelcome in name-brand media and so set off for places to do journalism in peace..