media


Box Office Bombs   Recently updated !

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I still haven’t returned to going to the movies. Mostly due to never being a fan of crowded theaters even before COVID. But maybe if the numbers are low and the edibles are just right, I’ll get tickets to see Dune Part II.

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Scab Scripts

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The Writers’ Guild of America declared a strike early Tuesday after the executive side of the entertainment business refused to negotiate their modest demands. A lot has changed since the last writers’ strike in 2007, especially how media is consumed and compensated.

Netflix’s red envelopes were the big new thing back then, and now they’re a relic young people think coexisted with BETAMAX. Yet pay, residuals, and benefits are still stuck in that ancient time before we had to manage a dozen or so streaming logins.

All of these studios are making profits, just not enough to satisfy Wall Street’s maw. So they’re screwing writers and nickel-and-diming their subscribers by canceling shows and memory-holing their back catalogs to save a few cents on residuals, all to squeeze out more dividends and stock buybacks.

Joe “Union Guy” Biden broke a rail strike so the economy wouldn’t take a hit. If this writers’ strike goes on long enough to harm the studios’ bottom lines, I’m sure he’ll find a way to intervene.

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Media Perverts

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I’ve been closely following the news and news commentary for a quarter century now and drawing cartoons about it almost as long. Sick freaks from the top down to the lowly cartoonist at bottom.

Quitting Twitter has spared me from catching a lot of the worst takes people rage share, and it’s been a marked improvement on my quality of life. Yet somehow I still see the worst offenders when they cross over to the more earnest folks over on Mastodon.

I drew myself in better shape than my last self-insert and you’ll just have to trust me that it’s accurate.

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Fox News’s Deposition Bloopers

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Evidence collected during discovery in Dominion’s defamation suit against Fox News  clearly shows they’re the propaganda arm of the Republican party. So has the last several decades of its existence, but mainstream media continued to pretend they’re a real news outlet.

Murdoch usually settles so this stuff gets buried in NDAs, but this piece by Amanda Marcotte gives an explanation for why he’s letting all this dirty laundry go out to the public.

Cable carriages fees continue to prop up Murdoch’s media empire, and I’m part of the problem. While I was drawing this, I was using my cable subscription to watch a Bruins game. At least the win soothed my conscience for a couple minutes.

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Transphobic Times

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The New York Times’s obsessive and biased coverage of trans people has helped foment the recent rapid rise in anti-trans legislation and violence. It is so bad, a group of current and former NYT contributors composed a reasoned letter addressing their concerns and naturally it’s more well written than anything I could write here. I added my name as one of the 1,000+ signatories, along with over 20,000+ readers.

As the letter points out, this is nothing new for the New York Times. They’ve always preferred the view from nowhere, when not bending over backwards to appease a right-wing that wants them dead.

Another example of their awful judgement is that they published my cartoons for five years. If I was still cashing their checks, I’d probably be let go after sending a rough draft of this for copyediting.

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Intro to Political “Science”

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So all the narratives about the Republican midterm wave the media were hankering for sort of fizzled. Now we have another squeaker where the balance of fascism/not fascism is still up in the air days after the election.

Horse race and both sides coverage have been part of political pundits’ schtick since forever, but it’s especially galling when pointing out the actual stances of candidates is now considered “too political” and beneath the geniuses who pretend to be objective observers of our crumbling republic.

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CNN’s New Roster of Rogues

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Cable news has been garbage forever, but now CNN in angling to be a Fox News clone. Outside of breaking national news, these channels are only watched by shut-ins and DC insiders who leave this garbage on as background noise every day, poisoning their brains (and our government) in the process.

Says the cartoonist who leaves Twitter open on another monitor the entire time he was drawing this.

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Alex Jones’ Nonlitigable Conspiracy Hole

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Alex Jones lost his defamation case and owes the families of Sandy Hook victims $45 million for saying they’re faking. There were a bunch of shenanigans during the trial. People who breathe the same air as you and me watch him and take him seriously, making him rich enough to probably use appeals and bankruptcy court to continue entertaining them for years to come.

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