Looking through the history of Ms. Brown’s career – Tatler, Vanity Fair, New Yorker, Talk — it’s hard to resist the suspicion that Newsbeast (or whatever the resultant hybrid is called) will be mainly about celebrities, both as subjects and as writers. The investors can expect to lose a crapload of cash in the process. The New Yorker reportedly lost $42 million in three years (1995-97) under Ms. Brown’s editorship. Talk lost an impressive $80 million during its two-year existence. Whatever else you might say about Tina Brown, she’s undeniably brilliant at convincing investors to lose money on her projects.
Brown’s business model is obviously the same as Arianna Huffington’s: An updated online version of the old reliable pump-and-dump. Carve out a slice of online readership, then sell those “eyes” to some larger entity.
Arianna sold HuffPo to AOL. To whom will Tina sell Newsbeast?
You want to invest in a New Media project? Just hit my tip jar.
Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich, speaking on a Tuesday conference call held to respond to his controversial comments about Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget, said that he didn’t go into his interview with NBC’s David Gregory “hostile enough” and should have pushed back more forcefully against the “gotcha” questions the host asked.
But he argued that this controversy, which many have argued spells the end of his candidacy, will be fixed in a matter of days, and he likened his experiences to Ronald Reagan’s.
“Every once and awhile there’s going to be a problem, and you gotta spend three or four days fixing it,” he said. “If you go back and look at Ronald Reagan’s record, the opening week of the campaign in Sept. 1980, they didn’t have a very good week. And they had to go back and fix it. This happens occasionally. The trick is to relax, look at it, try to figure out what happened, and keep moving.”
Gingrich said he should have been better prepared for the “adversarial nature” of “Meet the Press.”
“I didn’t go in there quite hostile enough, because it didn’t occur to me going in that you’d have a series of setups,” Gingrich said. “This wasn’t me randomly saying things. These were very deliberate efforts to pick fights.”
Newt didn’t realize David Gregory was going to play “gotcha”? Hello? But the comparison with Reagan is a bit much. The 24/7 New Media environment — including cable TV, talk radio and the blogosphere — didn’t exist in 1980.
This is where Newt’s long, long political record works against him. Leave aside the ex-wives and the half-million-dollar Tiffany’s account. That’s just a distraction. The fact is, Newt has a record to defend, he’s opined on a variety of topics during TV appearances and speeches, and his difficulty in meeting Gregory’s “gotcha” attacks exposes that vulnerability. And if he thinks he can bamboozle Republican voters, he’ll get more of what he got in the “Rebuke in Dubuque“:
I sent him money, I called his campaign office and talked to his staffers, I was on his email list. It was my first realization that from that moment on … NO politics were local. What happened in that district “somewhere in NY” could potentially mark a point in time when the tide turned and the Every Man could make a significant impact.
And I remember how enraged I was when Newt Gingrich mocked us. Tried to destroy Doug’s candidacy. Endorsed and praised and supported that abomination of a women. Not once. Not a couple of times. For weeks. And he … was “on our side.”
As I have argued, the Hoffman campaign actually did “mark a point in time when the tide turned.” That’s why, on Election Night 2010, in Boca Raton, Florida, I walked outside of Allen West’s victory party and placed a call to Doug Hoffman.
Those of us who were involved in the NY-23 — and that includes a lot of our blog readers here who gave money to Hoffman — knew we were in the middle of a crucial moment. And the fact that Hoffman lost didn’t change that. What was important was the fight, and the fighter who had the guts to tell the clueless GOP establishment to go to hell.
Watching MSNBC is fun from an anthropological perspective. This is the kind of stuff that liberals believe. This is how their minds work. Here is Chris Matthews accusing Republicans and the Tea Party of hate:
” ‘Some people think that when you called Obama the food stamp president, you know, that has a racial connotation.’ Really? Isn’t that interesting?
“Well, some people think, Mr. Gregory, that your question has a racial connotation. Not just race-baiting, but prejudice, because apparently now it is the official position of ‘Meet the Press’ that if you’re on food stamps, you’re black. I just wanted to clarify that point, because otherwise the question makes no sense. Or, that a majority of the people are on food stamps are black, which is not true. And yet that is the inference. Well, why would Mr. Gregory make that inference? Sure he’s not prejudiced? Why would he do that?”
I’d asked around to see if someone had video of the full speech that Herman Cain gave this past weekend at the Georgia State Republican Party Convention in Macon. Thanks to Omega Six for finding it:
We are now just a week away from the special election in New York’s 26th District, and our Syracuse-area friend The Lonely Conservative reports:
The Tea Party Express showed up in the Rochester, NY area [Monday] to officially endorse Jane Corwin in the NY26 special election. They also denounced the fake Tea Party candidate Jack Davis.
State and local Tea Party activists joined with Amy Kremer of the Tea Party Express, who said: “Jack Davis is no more ‘Tea Party’ than Barack Obama. . . . Jack Davis is a phony who has run three times as a Democrat and has endorsed and supported Nancy Pelosi and Charlie Rangel.”
It is perhaps necessary to make mention of what should be obvious: The liberal media are trying to elect the Democrat, Kathy Hochul, by hyping Crazy Jack so that they can claim a Democrat win in NY-26 as a repudiation of the GOP’s conservative agenda. The New York Times:
Mr. Davis’s ascension comes as a race that had once seemed a certain Republican victory has become fiercely competitive because of a House Republican plan that calls for overhauling Medicare.
Read the whole thing, even thought it tells only part of the story, and tells it from a biased viewpoint. It’s bad that Paul Ryan has to defend himself against Newt Gingrich without Ryan also being scapegoate for the dysfunctional condition of the New York GOP establishment. However, if Democrats and the media (but I repeat myself) can trick enough idiots into voting for Crazy Jack, that result will be headlined as evidence that the Paul Ryan budget plan is a political liability for Republicans.
The real question that will be decided May 24, however, is how many idiots there are in NY-26, besides Jack Davis and David Bellavia.
According to David Gregory of NBC News, it is “coded racially-tinged language” to mention the increased use of food stamps under President Obama’s economic agenda:
“You want to be a country that creates food stamps, in which case frankly Obama’s is an enormous success. The most successful food stamp president in American history. Or do you want to be a country that creates paychecks?”
— Newt Gingrich
Unfortunately for David Gregory, the facts are on Newt’s side:
Aleister at American Glob: “That’s not racism, it’s poverty. It’s families who work and own homes but can’t afford food or gas. It’s people who want to work but have no job prospects. . . . It sucks and Obama owns it.”
UPDATE: Et tu, Joan Walsh? Why is it that so many liberals can’t tell the difference between “poor” and “black”?
Tina Brown, empress of the recently merged Newsweek/Daily Beast, tells Joe Pompeo of Yahoo that her operation will be profitable at some point “in the next two to three years.”
