X and free speech is completely killing the legacy media, along with other uncontrolled people doing things like podcasts or even just posting videos of happenings. The legacy media lost all credibility over the last decade. NPR has never been a viable media, it would fail just as fast as Air America did if it wasn’t tax-funded. They also lied about their whole funding scheme for decades, calling it “member supported” and discounting that the CPB funnels tax money to individual broadcasters, which constitutes most of their funding. It’s just deceptive accounting that allowed them to make the “member supported” claim.
I only write on a closed group dedicated to local politics and our posts covering mundane council and school board matters while offering political opinion commentary often get WAY more engagement than many of our local newspaper and TV news articles do. I even have several long-time, prominent Maine journalists as eager readers, who cannot express any support publicly out of fear of employment loss.
I’m just small potatoes compared to someone like DataRepublican on X, who is being Bettlejuiced by members of Congress to apply her data analyst skills to create sophisticated tools that track sophisticated funding schemes.
I’m more of a commentator than a journalist/reporter, but I try not to publish anything I’m not 100 percent able to back up, including academic citations if I get into anything history-related. I’m guessing that’s why so many history professors have shown up in my “suggested friends” list lately. Creeping my page!
There’s a guy on X called theunquirer who is doing some good citizen journalism in Maine surrounding public schools and local businesses as well. He’s the guy who made the call to Planet Fitness to confirm that it’s okay to wave your cock around in the women’s locker room. Lots of parents are sending him photos of materials given to kids, all kinds of gay and trans stuff that we were all assured “wasn’t happening” in public schools.
When the “real” news won’t inform the public that “it’s happening” after telling us “it’s not happening” for years, only citizen journalists can, and X is the main catalyst for it now. I don’t think anyone in Lewiston was writing about the actual student body composition at LPS as a point of concern until I started going on about how 1/3 of the students speaking a combined 42 languages places impossible demands on the institution and the city itself. I learned that and other information like it by watching school board meetings.
Heck, the superintendent didn’t even know how many languages were spoken. His first answer was 36, which was then corrected to 42. He just got a huge raise and a contract that was renewed two or three years earlier than it needed to be. It pays to play ball with the woke political leadership.
The truth is coming to the surface whether these lying crooks want it to or not. There’s just too many of us who can point it out in a variety of ways, then deal with any of the trolls, grifters, ideologues, or insufferable contrarians who come along with their predictable tactics.
It’s been a fun hobby! I’m still hoping for the excitement of some of my readers following through on their threats to me, but no luck so far.