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The Media Will Survive Just Fine Without Trump

By Dustin Rowles | Politics | July 13, 2020 |

By Dustin Rowles | Politics | July 13, 2020 |

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We didn’t cover politics regularly here before 2015. I mean, we’ve always been a site with a heavy-handed political opinion, but we never wrote daily pieces about politics, or even weekly. We’ve never really had a staff that writes regularly about election politics (and we still don’t, outside of myself, Petr’s commie screeds, and the occasional one-offs from many of the other writers). We are, first and foremost, an entertainment site with a progressive political perspective.

Back in 2015, a good news cycle prior to Trump involved one of those Duggar kids, or rumors about Lee Pace and Richard Armitage, or a great Eva Green sex scene from Penny Dreadful. I just looked back at our top posts between July 2014 and July 2015 and there was not one single political post among them. We talked about Serial and Game of Thrones and Doctor Who/Steve Moffat, and Parks and Rec, and we made up science experiments comparing celebs with beards against those who do not. It was fun, although on some days, the news cycle could get very boring, and on those days, we’d have to get creative, and those were probably some of our best posts from that era. We talked about parenting, and Star Wars and Batman vs. Superman, and we wrote a lot of fun “seriously random lists,” which we have all but abandoned during the Trump presidency.

We don’t do “ratings,” but in terms of traffic, we’re up about 12 percent since then, which is mostly reflected not in the news cycle, but in the gradual accumulation of new readers year over year. All of which is to say: I don’t know about CNN or The New York Times, but holy sh*t, would we ever welcome a boring Biden presidency:

The media is creative. Obviously, we’re gonna pick the low-hanging fruit first, and the last four years has been nothing but low-hanging fruit. But the media also managed to survive those boring Obama years by getting creative, or by using Nancy Grace to beat 23 hours of news out of a missing white woman. Don’t you worry about the media, Trump. We’re industrious. We’ll figure it out. We’ll make fetch happen, if we have to. That is within our power (I mean, not Pajiba’s, but the media’s). Hell, the media made Donald Trump. The media can easily create another boogeyman.

I’m not worried about a post-Trump media. I look forward to the day when we’re not obsessed with a man who is obsessed with himself, and makes who decisions that affect the lives of millions of people based on spite and insecurity, or because someone else is more well liked than he is.

I mean, really: If we don’t listen to Fauci, who are we supposed to listen to? Chuck Woolery:

Hmmm. I wonder how things like this happen:

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I cannot wait for a boring Presidency, where over 130,000 people (so far) do not have to die needlessly. I’ve got a lot of Richard Armitage and Lee Pace fan-fic to share with the world!


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Dustin is the founder and co-owner of Pajiba. You may email him here, follow him on Twitter, or listen to his weekly TV podcast, Podjiba.


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