Friday, October 25, 2019

On Drudge Alternatives

Many of you will have read Irish's note that he had given up on the Drudge Report last weekend.  Me, too.  In the case of Drudge, he has been sliding into irrelevancy (by sliding to the left) for a while now.  I understand it was a business decision to move his main advertising revenue to a different provider and had something to do with his father's own website.  According to an article on Investment Watch, linked to by a Twitter comment to Mark Dice, also referenced on Irish (whew!):
 “He recently signed on with a Google affiliated company, which purchased Matt Drudge’s father’s website, RefDesk, as part of the deal.

“Frankly, I’m concerned this is the sole reason Drudge went mainstream and to the left: to satisfy his new advertising agency.

“The agency is called Granite Cubed. The timing of when all this went down is not a coincidence.
I had been noticing the slide to sounding like the usual media on Drudge for a while.  I started going to a place called Rantingly.  After some thinking about where I got the link, I believe it was a comment to a similar article on Stilton's Place.

Rantingly sort of looks like Drudge's layout, with some differences that are easy to get used to.  The right column is Twitter feeds from the conservative universe: the President, Dan Bongino, Candace Owens, Buck Sexton, Tom Fitton and more - in no particular order.  I suspect that changes with activity and how people react to them.  The left column is news stories for four or five screen heights, followed by links to another large block of good sites.  Give it a look.

The other issue that needs to be brought up is that Fox News Channel (FNC) has slipped left, too.  You may recall that over two years ago, we did a piece on the management changes at FNC and that the next generation taking over top management didn't attempt to hide the fact they wanted to kill the network.  Their only problem was they were frustrated that FNC was the goose the just kept laying golden eggs and funding the rest of their empire.
Back on 4/20, when I wrote that Bill O'Reilly's firing didn't bode well for the future of alternative voices on the news, I passed on that Rupert Murdoch's son, James, was apparently going to scuttle the channel.  He "regarded many of the people at Fox News as thuggish Neanderthals and said he was embarrassed to be in the same company with them".
In the Hollywood Reporter piece, James Murdoch is not in the least bit trying to disguise or hide the message that he wants to kill Fox News as we know it.
There's just no real alternative, at least that I can get.  Here's the thing: Fox News has never claimed to be conservative, they've just given air time to a few big-name conservative opinion pundits.  As far as I remember, and I've been watching since around 9/11, they've never used a motto claiming to be constitutionalists, libertarians, or conservatives; the motto has always been, "Fair and Balanced."  Someone's idea of good commentary came to be having two people on screen representing both sides in a debate and then have them talk over each other and bicker like four year olds, instead of waiting for the other guy to give their side.  It drives me nuts. There's a handful of pundits that I just won't listen to because I know they're just going to talk over the other guy.  I find I listen to FNC programs less and less every day.  If James Murdoch wanted to drive viewers away, it's working with me. 

I hear good things about One America News Network (OAN or OANN) and they could be better, but it seems the only way to get them is through AT&T or DirecTV. We cut the cable and switched to internet streaming about 18 months ago, and they're the only major streaming service that carries OAN.  There's a minor streaming service I'd never heard of that carries them but doesn't offer anything else that interests me, KlowdTV.

It seems to me to be a business opportunity.  Depending on broadly you want to define things, people are either oriented to prefer deciding what they want or oriented to prefer being controlled.  Sure that's broad brush, and there are people who describe themselves as "socially liberal but fiscally conservative" and other variants, but either you control your life or someone else does.  In comparison to the number of media outlets that represent that major dichotomy, instead of an equal mix, there are far more that represent the latter ("someone else" controls you) than the former.  The streaming service we use has 12 news channels, with only one, Fox News, putting forward any real conservative viewpoints. 



14 comments:

  1. I hit Ace of Spades and InstaPundit for most my political news.

    Also Tim Pool on YouTube is decent.

    Also, I think OAN(N) is also on the YouTubes.

    Just make sure you have an adblocker running when you watch the 'Tubes, use their bandwidth but don't watch the. :D

    ReplyDelete
  2. Fox has a successful business model. It thrives when CNN and MSNBC spew only hate for a smaller and smaller audience. Some of the Fox programming is more conservative, some more populist, but it's the only major media outlet that can claim to be fair (and "fair" is subjective) So they reap the rewards.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Why worry about streaming at all? Reading is faster, and OAN's website is well laid out.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Sound of palm slapping forehead and "D'oh!"

      Delete
    2. Us old fogies have a sad tendency to do everything the "old" way by default. For example, it took me forever to realize that texting is quicker and simpler than e-mail. But I will never submit to using a social media site for communications!

      OAN is my homepage, for what it's worth. They're basically a clone of the AP feed, but they balanced it out a bit.

      All that said, they are really on their knees today. Pages are taking minutes to load.

      Delete
  4. Lost on the dims, the "mainstream" media, and apparently the new management at Fox is the fact that Fox News was the only cable network where a relatively unbiased source of conservative news could be found (not always, but at least it was available). That fact alone drew millions of viewers who had abandoned CNN and the broadcast networks because of their one-sided reporting. Moving to the left will make Fox just another cable news outlet, and will make them indisgushable fro CNN, including ratings.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Check LibertyDaily (https://thelibertydaily.com/) and WhatFinder (https://www.whatfinger.com/) and EpochTimes (https://www.theepochtimes.com/)

    ReplyDelete
  6. I like everybody on Fox Business. But whenever somebody asks a question and then doesn't show the common courtesy of listening to the answer, I hit the Forward button and resume my scan of the channels. I recall O'Reilly saying he did this because they were failing to answer the question....bull!...he thought it was his job to "look out for the folks"...implicit in that thought is that the folks are too stupid to understand without his guidance. Good riddance. In a half hearted defense of Drudge I will say that he only provides links and its darn hard to find news stories that arent an attack on Trump and conservatives.

    ReplyDelete
  7. I don't watch Tv but I do make the internet rounds. WND, Whatafinger, Newsmax, Bad Blue, OANN, Citizen free press, Epoch times, Breitbart, and some of the blogs. My favorites are Whatafinger, Citizen free press, and CTH for a blog.

    ReplyDelete
  8. I hope Rantingly can continue to make a go of it, but realize it is one guy. Here's his fundraiser page: https://rantingly.com/1st-annual-rantingly-fundraiser/
    Don Surber had a post about Drudge alternatives: https://donsurber.blogspot.com/2019/10/post-drudge-conservative-news.html
    I'm always looking for portals that screen the millions of new pages every day down to something I want to see for news. The L-dotters at Lucianne cover all the lying fake news so that I don't have to, yet I can still know what the yap of the day is about.

    ReplyDelete
  9. We use a Roku for streaming and OAN news is available on it. I suspect you can find it on any of the streaming devices.

    ReplyDelete
  10. Breitbart News, Liberty Daily, Nat Review Online, WSJ, Daily Caller, Liberty Nation, Lucianne. Liberty Daily looks like Drudge but is unabashedly conservative.

    ReplyDelete
  11. I HATE you for turning me on to Rantingly! Now, I'm adding even more article to my "I'll NEVER read all of these" list.

    ReplyDelete