The End of Big J

Greetings, Dear Reader,

If you’ve been reading me for a while, you know that I use the phrase “big J Journalism” somewhat derisively. It describes the high-horse clutchers of pearls in journalism’s ivory towers. The CNNers and NYTers. WaPo’s editorial board. The LA Times. The Boston Globe. MSNBC, NBC and the monolithic, multiheaded conglomerate blob of visual media that extends upwards from them. Stephen Colbert -> 60 Minutes -> CBS -> and then Paramount, which as it still fumbles to produce a responsive streaming service nearly 20 years after Netflix, hopes to merge with Skydance to become an even more incomprehensible media blob.

And what would the inverse be? Little j journalism? 

Me and all my friends. We live in the woods. We ambush their booze carts. We spring traps on their tax collectors. There are no corporate buffets in the woods. In little j, we keep only what we kill. To them, we are the constant murderous buzzing in the air they can’t quite locate. 

Until they’ve been stung.

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THE END OF BIG J

There are only so many times you can be stung before grim reality starts to set in.

Two absolute whoppers came just this past week. And still, they’re lying to themselves (and to their audiences).

First, Stephen Colbert was cancelled. Big J desperately wanted the public to believe that Paramount, which owns CBS, which owns “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” fired Colbert because he was critical of CBS settling a lawsuit with Trump. They also told us it was very probable there was yet another conspiracy involved: That Paramount nuked Colbert in order to grease the gears of an incoming merger before Trump’s FCC.

While there’s no doubt these soulless corporate twats will use any bit of leverage they can get to close the deal – to include parading Colbert’s head around – a few simple facts stand in the way of the narrative. First, they didn’t just nuke Colbert. They nuked the whole brand. The show, which has been on the air for 30 years, is over as of May.

Since the cancellation, Puck News broke that Colbert cost the company $100 million to produce and only returned $60 million on investment. You don’t need a fancy degree to do the math.

In almost the same breath, Paramount inked a deal with the creators of South Park to pay them $1.5 billion for their next season. That’s roughly $1.2 million a produced minute for creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker.

Their most recent viral clip to promote the season depicts Donald Trump in a homosexual relationship with Lucifer.

So there goes that Colbert conspiracy theory, eh?

Wrong. You’re still almost certain to keep hearing it in the coming weeks.

Which brings me to the other whopper: We now know with utter certainty that Barack Obama, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, former CIA Director John Brennan, and former FBI Director James Comey cooked intelligence and then disseminated it to Big J in order to build the case that Donald Trump was possibly/probably/almost certainly a Russian plant.

This is the story that New York Times Executive Editor Dean Baquet says he “built his newsroom to cover,” and we just found out it was exactly that, a story, like the Three Little Bears or Goldilocks.

Matt Taibbi called the conspiracy “the sequel to the WMD affairs.” For those too young to remember, Bush administration officials famously pointed to New York Times coverage they had planted themselves as evidence Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. In that case, as in this one, top officials cooked intelligence despite the protests of rank-and-file analysts.

“We don’t have direct information that Putin wanted to get Trump elected,” two unnamed analysts pleaded with Brennan.

Still, the day Obama convened his conspiracy council to direct them to look for evidence, the story leaked to major papers.

Taibbi said this was akin to reporting results before you’d even “done the homework assignment.”

Even more insidious was the suppression of relevant information. Initial intelligence assessments had concluded that Russia had gotten a hold of internal Democrat communications characterizing Hillary Clinton’s mental state as “intensified psycho-emotional problems, including uncontrolled fits of anger, aggression and cheerfulness.” Clinton, according to these communications, was on a regimen of “heavy tranquilizers” that apparently did nothing to abate her being “obsessed with a thirst for power.”

That is some downright disturbing sh*t. Putin had it in October. He could have ruined her. If he wanted Trump to be elected, if he indeed was “colluding” with Trump, how can we only be hearing about this now?

Will Big J apologize for getting any of this wrong? Will they give back their awards? Will they own up?

Chief National Affairs Correspondent for CNN Jeff Zeleny summed it up best, I think.

After spending nearly ten years and likely tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars covering the Russia collusion story, now that it’s imploding in the most spectacular fashion imaginable, Zeleny says “this is hardly information we should be repeating and spending much more time on.”

You mean the truth, Jeff?

And after all this who got it right? Little j did. My friends in their rudimentary woodland hideouts.

Nearly every story of consequence in the last ten years has been properly reported by often underpaid, nameless, non-celebrity journos at independent outlets.

From COVID origins to sex changes for kids to calling bullsh*t on the hilarious concept of Donald Trump the KGB super spy. From Hunter Biden’s laptop to the post-George Floyd rollback of law enforcement to immigration. The first people actually asking questions about Biden’s health were not corporate Big J stooges – who insisted we look the other way – they were independent media.

They’ll never be sorry, Dear Reader. They’ll never apologize. But the economics of their empires are slowly becoming absurd.

It cost the Daily Caller, for example, a fraction of the resources to aggressively and accurately cover the flaws in the Russiagate story. Same with Biden’s mental acuity. Same with COVID origins.

Lesley Stahl of CBS’s 60 Minutes famously told Donald Trump the laptop story “couldn’t be verified.”

A week later, we were the first to confirm beyond a shadow of a doubt that the email at the center of the Hunter Biden laptop story was real. I think it cost the brand about $200 in gas and at least one drive-thru purchase.

Meanwhile, Stahl’s salary is $1.8 million, which likely far outpaces the entire payroll of my newsroom.

On that note, I recently asked ChatGPT to guestimate the margins between Conan O’Brien’s podcast and Stephen Colbert’s network show. O’Brien used to do network late night, so I figured it would be an interesting comparison. How had the transition to a more niche, independent format worked for him?

Well, we all know Colbert’s margins are negative. Obrien? 70-90% margins.

Even if the bot is flawed – and it is – you can tell just by watching that podcasts cost much less to produce per episode. (Also, O’Brien doesn’t bother producing entire episodes dooming over Trump or, while we’re on the subject, lying about major national news.)

They won’t be sorry as they sink into the abyss. A few of them might come to their senses and even find lifeboats. They might make it in the woods with us. Megyn Kelly certainly did. Tucker likewise.

Meanwhile, Dear Reader, I have to say I’m sorry.

I’m sorry we couldn’t interrupt the toll these fugazi media narratives took on the country. The destructive force this storm of bullsh*t has wrought upon us is literally incalculable. Academia, the intelligence community, the media, the federal government, even local governments, nearly all of it is corrupt and needs to be reformed.

The least I can promise is we’ll do our best to rectify it.

And if we see their taxman making his way to your village, just look to us and know he’ll never make it.

AUTHOR

Geoffrey Ingersoll

Editor at Large

WHAT I’M READING

Things are looking better.

Conservatives Are Having Their Greatest Week In Culture Since Trump Trounced Kamala

Can’t come soon enough.

Trump Admin Trying To Wave Goodbye To Propaganda Effort Across America’s Parks, Historic Sites

Don’t bite the hand.

California Dems Reportedly Scrambling To Find Buyer For Refinery After Running Owner Out Of Town

EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

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