The Real New Real
Turns out Americans don’t like the fake. Turns out, they’ve had their fill. Turns out, authenticity is totally hot right now. Who’d have thunk it?
The generation raised on *Gilligan*, *Tattoo*, and *H.R. Pufnstuf* has finally had their fill of *Fantasy Island*.
We don’t like to be scolded, lectured, or lied to—something the legacy media has been doing to us for, well, ever, but it became really hard to ignore around 2016 or so. This is personally tough for me to admit, as I came up in legacy media and made a living there for most of my life. And yes, they do lie, they gaslight, and they exist entirely in an echo chamber both professionally and socially.
Is lying out of ignorance somehow excusable? For the most part, they honestly think they’re telling the truth. It’s not like they’re evil or something—just acting in what they believe is our best interest.
My wife and I left Tribeca in 1991 for the wilds of Montana. Probably the best decision we ever made together besides marrying each other, at least for me. You’d have to ask her yourself.
Getting out of Manhattan, where 6% of the population paid the income taxes for everyone else, was life-changing. Seeing the opening to *The Sopranos* in the rearview mirror was liberating.
Anyway, you get the picture. I probably should have given my bosses at Time/Life a heads-up before pulling up stakes, but they got over it. And I managed to keep making pictures for them until they rode off into the sunset themselves.
Sad, that. *Time* and *Life* and *Fortune*, the adults in the room, died. In doing so, they left children in charge—unchecked, running wild. And they did exactly what you’d expect: rags to riches and back to rags in three generations.
They all died in the early morning of November 6, 2024.
They lasted a good twenty years longer than they should have. Petulant little bastards that they were.
You knew they were toast, finally, when they swore that Joe Biden was "right as rain," sharper than ever, and then quickly flipped that narrative when it became clear to everyone that the opposite was true. Not only was Joe not right, but he was also putting the Democrats' reign in jeopardy.
This they could not allow to stand.
They did their best, but at some point, people decided to believe their own eyes rather than the words coming out of the paid political spokespersons playing anchormen on their TV screens.
Like sincerity, it’s really hard to fake authenticity, and these would-be (want-to-be?) actors failed the Burgundy test. We kind of gave them a pass when they were reinforcing our own biases, but towards the end, most of us had abandoned those biases ourselves.
Walter Cronkite, in an editorial premised with the admission that it was speculative, personal, and subjective, stated that the Vietnam War was mired in a stalemate, meaning it could not be won. In doing so, he set the stage for an American withdrawal that no politician or political party could overcome. The reason he had that power was because the public had no idea how he voted. They considered him an honest broker of the truth.
Cronkite kept his powder dry for the time when he needed it. His offspring in the media today are more concerned with telegraphing their virtue, which is not the same as virtue itself. And unlike the minions they talk down to in flyover country, they don’t know what "keeping your powder dry" means.
Whether you’re talking dinosaurs or the captured and scripted talking heads, nature finds a way.
Turns out the other celebrities couldn’t pull it off either. Well, at least they got paid. Queen Bey got $10 million for appearing without having to sing? The peasants were not amused. It’s supposed to be bread and circuses, and they got neither.
Without it, you’ve got nothing. People can see it. They know that the paid actor on the screen is not really a doctor or a political pundit. Heck, they know the political pundits aren’t really political pundits. They’ve always suspected they were being played, and now they know.
The smell test is real, and these players stink.
What do you think Walter Cronkite’s response would be to a politician—a person seeking a tremendous amount of power—if they asked him for the questions in advance, or to edit the interview in their favor, or limit the interviewer’s time?
That’s the importance of proper journalism. That’s what makes it powerful—something today’s “professionals” don’t understand, or worse, they understand this and try to warp the truth to manipulate their audience, who they believe is too stupid to understand their own world.
Somehow the only people who understand this today are the amateurs. Those unvetted merchants of misinformation, as the legacies attempt to smear them while calling for censorship… the fools that they are.
I’ll take a normal, unscripted conversation—something that takes an investment in my time to consume—over the lesser children of these lesser gods seeking to keep the rest of us in line.
Amen.