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The Jaundiced Eyeball

Columns

The Pseudo Bowl of Politics
September 29, 2016
Like most revered American public traditions, presidential debates are jury-rigged miasmas. True, Monday’s feverishly hyped Hofstra University rhetorical slugfest between Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton and Republican Lord of Destruction Donald Trump didn’t ...

Lies of the Times
September 22, 2016
Sit up and take notice, monitors of plain speech in our elite journalistic discourse: the New York Times has at long last elected to call a lie a lie, at least as far as Donald Trump is concerned. What prompted this long-overdue linguistic breakthrough was the barking, bigoted ...

Fairly Unbalanced
September 15, 2016
Never do our media savants look more blatantly biased than when they’re trying to wave off complaints about how they shape, and distort, the critical flow of political information. A case in point: New York Times public editor Liz Spayd’s absurdly complacent recent ...

The Fabled and Enabled
September 08, 2016
We interrupt the cloddish accumulation of campaign effluvia to bring you Nick Bilton’s epic anatomy of the downfall of Theranos, the smoke-and-mirrors Silicon Valley startup that was allegedly poised to revolutionize the diagnosis and treatment of disease. Its very name said ...

Shillable Hours
September 01, 2016
In a development that has surprised no one, it appears that Corey Lewandowski—the former head of the Trump campaign who was cashiered at the insistence of the candidate’s children earlier this summer—remains a paid consultant of the rampaging bigoted ego atop ...

The Media Con Job
August 25, 2016
A curious outbreak of truth-telling seems to be seizing our right-wing media. In this most deranging campaign season of our postmodern political lives, the specter of Donald Trump—billionaire tribune of the forgotten white working class—has sent some of our most notable ...

Enemy of the PayPal
August 18, 2016
The financial unwinding of Gawker Media’s tawdry tour through the justice system landed on an oddly anticlimactic note this week: Univision, the Spanish-language TV network that has been aggressively colonizing the digital mediasphere, picked up the bankrupt web empire for ...

Treacherous Waters
July 28, 2016
All right, then—America’s own major-party-anointed oligarch has officially urged Russian cyberspies to hack State Department communications. And his underlying political rationale is enough to give M.C. Escher a throbbing migraine: Hillary Clinton is guilty of grave, if ...

Roger, Over and Out
July 20, 2016
It’s certainly not in character for the corporate chieftains at Fox News to keep mum during the marquee action at a Republican Nation Convention. It’s a bit like having ESPN’s Chris Berman contain himself during a home-run derby—or Bravo TV reality impresario Andy Cohen ...

Power Players
July 14, 2016
Just as Al Gore was once described (by Michael Kinsley) as “an old person’s idea of a young person” so is Mike Allen a corporate account executive’s idea of a politics reporter. Or, to put things in the argot to which both he and his power-elite ...

New Conventions in Corruption
July 07, 2016
One persistent truth has held fast amid the ceaseless, unpredictable tumult of Campaign ’16: our corporate media has been utterly flummoxed by it all. Why, the pundit class wails in chorus, are American voters so goddamn angry all the time? Why can’t they make with the ...

The Political Class Struggles
June 30, 2016
“Elite opinion” is admittedly a baggy construct—whose opinion? which elite?—but thanks to the weird convulsions of Campaign 2016, we’ve been granted a precious opportunity to behold it in all its lush and fulsome glory. Seemingly as one, the lead institutions of ...