Countdown
A 20% off preorder discount for OWNED (out tomorrow!) and some interviews.
Hello! It’s Monday, February 3, and we are one day out from the release of Owned: How Tech Billionaires on the Right Bought the Loudest Voices on the Left.
So! If you were waiting to preorder, you can today at the Hachette site only with the code OWNED20 for 20% off. Click the link, follow the QR code below—this only lasts through the end of Monday.
The book has been getting a lot of press. Here’s a sample—
I spoke to Salon’s Andrew O’Hehir about liberal and left drift during the Obama years
There's a moment, and this is quoting Glenn, when he’s talking about how his friendship with Rachel Maddow fell apart, and he says, "I thought we believed the same things, and then she just became this establishment voice for this kind of state power, War on Terror stuff, as long as as it was the Democrats doing it." I think there's a lot of truth to that. I understand that frustration, just as I understand Matt’s frustration in "Hate Inc." when he talks about how Maddow and MSNBC are damaging to their audiences.
But where they both start to lose me is that if you're going to say that MSNBC is as damaging as Fox, I'm going to need to see more evidence for that. Because with Fox, I mean, it’s about the audience. If you're radicalizing the audience of Fox News, the results are going to be a lot worse than if you radicalize a liberal audience, quite frankly. So if you line those two up and make a parallel comparison, the way that Taibbi does explicitly in “Hate Inc.,” and like both Glenn and Matt did for a long time — before they both came to this conclusion that, actually, the big problem is the Democrats — I think you're kind of playing yourself at that point. You’re not really thinking clearly.
For WAMC, an NPR affiliate, I chatted with Josh Landes about how Russiagate laid the foundation for a split
In 2016 when Trump came into office and promised to blow everything up, the response of Democrats and many of their allies in the Democrat, liberal aligned media was to say that he a threat to this international and national order that, for a long time, hadn't been working in the ways that had been promised, and that in a lot of in a lot of cases, media figures who had opposed that order and opposed that when it was under Bush, and now were supporting it because it was under Obama, and now were saying that we needed to protect it. And so, there was a reaction to that, to say, this isn't the right way to oppose this guy, this isn't the right thing to do. But instead of it being, but we still have to keep our eye on the ball of what's really dangerous here, or, what's more dangerous here, they both took their preexisting contrarianism and this belief in liberals being more dangerous, and it just kind of became their entire politics.
And, audio only:
Molly Jong-Fast had me on Fast Politics
Doug Henwood and I talked tech titans
Thanks for reading! The book comes out tomorrow—I hope you check it out; please let me know what you think.