Bulwark versus bull work
I try to see my folks every Friday. My dad doesn’t say much. Last Friday, he said, “I liked getting your email. I read it every morning when I woke up.” In that moment, I felt bad I stopped. So...
Every day, Bo Sacks sends three stories to the 50,000 media people who read his newsletter. He’s a pretty terrific guy and featured my stuff many times. One of the stories paired my UHF column from the other day with a story about Twitter being in the shitter.
Stories like this Twitter one is why I gave up. Joe Mandese wrote it. I know Joe Mandese. He’s a good guy and he heads editorial for Media Post — a good site. But he’s happy to write a dumb piece on the value of Twitter. He says it’s worth about $6B. Down $38B from the $44B Elon Musk paid for it. He did no analysis. He quoted the status quo. And, the status quo didn’t do any analysis either. They all rarely on a font of hearsay to spout crap that they spew all too easily.
To make his asinine point, Joe finds dumb supportive quotes, like, “The hasty abandonment of a globally recognized name, without a clear migration plan, has had disastrous consequences, alienating key stakeholders and eroding the brand’s core strengths. This is reflected in the brand’s weaker scores in the familiarity, reputation, and recommendation metrics of Brand Finance’s research.”
Hasty abandonment… puh-lease. That completely ignores Musk used Twitter’s content to create XAi/Grok which raised $6B in late May and is valued at $20B+ — and growing. And, speaking of growing, Twitter’s use is at an all-time high. I wrote about that months ago. No one else has. Creating an AI from content is a long-vision move that — two years in — people still don’t see or choose to ignore.
But there are enough idiots out there. People who can’t or won’t see. And Joe can find them. He surfaced this stat that Twitter is no longer in the Media Top-50 sites. Which is true. But irrelevant. That makes the point that — despite this being an election year AND easily the strangest one ever AND people are piling into X to chat about — advertisers who have sawdust for brains won’t put ads there. Which, really, says more about the slant of ad agencies and their clients than Musk and his people platform.
To make sure they obfuscate the story being about the value of Twitter as platform, the chart that kicks off the story argues that the brand, “Twitter,” has lost most of its luster. Quote, Twitter/X brand valuations, in billions, unquote. It shows a simple bar chart which useful idiots can drop into PowerPoint presentations to carry this bucket of undrinkable water to other useful idiots who will act on this – and excuse me for using the word – data. Musk mothballed the name Twitter a year ago. He has wrestled with the platform’s own users to stop using the name in favor of X. So, yeah, the value of the brand, “Twitter” is in tatters. Joe links the decline to a lack of content moderation. This canard exists even as all the other ducks have flown south for the winter. Twitter has better content moderation now than when Dorsey’s crew actively shut down true stories in concert with the government and the federales. It’s easily better than completely opaque content moderation at Telegram and WhatsApp. It’s way better than Meta’s social social platforms – Facebook and Instagram – that did the government’s bidding. Let’s not even get started on TikTok or broadcast networks.
It would be easy to say that the media has it in for Musk. And, so, they have it in for Twitter or X or whatever Musk plans to call it next week. But it’s bigger than that. The people who seem to run media propagate this garbage for the lemmings who do media. But Joe is too small to care about this. There’s a force above Joe that gets Joe to do this.
I’ve written one story (or maybe it was two) for Joe that ran in Media Post but he doesn’t want me writing there. They don’t like editorial from people who run companies. Ditto, Michele Manafy who runs content for Digital Content Next. No tech people allowed. Both of these outlets reach large numbers of publishers and media insiders. They’re both considered high-quality sources. I see in the way they do business a want to ensure the narrative they prefer. That narrative is, at best, cockeyed. At worst, it’s wrong by design. Either way, they perpetuate the dumbification of all people in media.
The other day, you asked me why I quit writing. It’s this. The gatekeepers keep the masses stupid. So the gatekeepers don’t want me. And the masses don’t agree with me. There’s a good chance I’m wrong. But my gut says I’m not. And gut is ripped from pushing a big rock up a big hill for 422 days.