Jim VandeHei’s Captain Phillips Moment

For many movie fans, and also for the Meme Smart-ass community, the famous scene in the Tom Hanks movie Captain Phillips in which the lead character is faced with the dismal reality that Somali pirates have taken over the Maersk Alabama is one of the most iconic of all time.

Maybe Jim VandeHei, the head honcho at Axios, would like Tom Hanks to play him in a movie with a similar plot, at least from his perspective.

VandeHei is very, very displeased at the disruptive influence Elon Musk is having in American society, particularly with respect to the current challenging environment for the news media.

So much so that he publicly melted down over Musk’s statement that “you are the media now” to users of X, the formerly-constipated social media platform known as Twitter where Propaganda Press institutions used to compete for status as the most Orwellian practitioners of woke newspeak. X is no longer that platform: It is now a place where free speech is supported, and its user base is split almost exactly down the middle between left-leaners and right-leaners.

This is a shift that the former cool kids of Twitter do not like. And the Propaganda Press crowd who used to use Twitter as a tidy little echo chamber largely free from participation by shadow-banned, fact-checked, and de-platformed dissident voices are very unhappy with their frequent ratios at the hands of the deplorables.

The pirates are taking the bridge, and the Jim VandeHeis are no longer the captains.

Tom Hanks’s character bore the news a bit better than did VandeHei at a confab put on by the National Press Club…

Go and whine a little.

The funny thing about VandeHei’s anti-X rant is that a whole bunch of it is true — but that’s even more damaging to his cause than were he coming completely out of left field.

Is being a reporter hard? Well, being a good reporter is hard. That much is true.

But Propaganda Press institutions have generally run off all their good reporters. Most of those today are independent journalists who’ve been sacked from the legacy media organizations they used to work for.

Why? Because, to do that work means exposing corruption, waste, idiocy, incompetence, and criminality on both sides of the political aisle, and there are scant few reporters encouraged or even allowed to do such work anymore.

Those who do? They very often find a far friendlier and more inviting — and even sometimes more lucrative — existence basing their operations on X or other platforms for independent journalism (Substack, Rumble, Patreon, etc.) than they ever did in legacy corporate media newsrooms.

That’s what Musk meant when he told X users that they were the media now.

That and the fact that crowdsourcing stories on a platform like X will, over time, yield a larger body of information — much of it potentially false, to be sure — than will entrusting those stories to gatekeepers like Jim VandeHei with no backstop behind him.

VandeHei can rail against Musk and the other chatterers on X all he wants, but X and Musk aren’t the problem of the legacy corporate media for which he’s shilling.

X is simply gasoline being poured on a fire that already existed.

That fire is the immolation of their own credibility.

When the idiot Kamala Harris was instantly transformed from a shamefully incompetent and charisma-free vice president to a “brat” and “joyful” presidential nominee by institutions like Axios, the Washington Post, and MSNBC, it wasn’t even the worst example of propaganda taking the place of journalism we’ve seen. That award goes, even today, to the attempt to dismiss the Hunter Biden laptop story as Russian disinformation. It even places behind the legacy corporate press’ participation in the politicized public health bureaucracy’s efforts to weaponize COVID against both Donald Trump and the American public.

But Harris’s media elevation, which was repaid with a contemptuous denial of legitimate interviews and a total failure to provide candid campaign communication of any real stripe, was simply the straw that broke the camel’s back.

Mr. VandeHei, if you were truly reporters, your plaintive wails might serve your doomed cause. But nobody believes that about you anymore. When your industry slandered Trump as Hitler while giving the tyrannical Biden–Harris regime a free pass for the countless abuses they’ve perpetrated over the past four years, you deserve all of the opprobrium and diminution you’re receiving.

Nobody cares about your problems, and in fact, most relish in them.

I go back a while in this debate, as I’ve been doing The Hayride in Louisiana for a decade and a half. In fact, on Friday it’ll be exactly 15 years since the site first made its debut on the internet. And in all of that time, I’ve had a running battle with the local Propaganda Press, and particularly the Baton Rouge Advocate — a formerly somewhat respectable newspaper that has devolved into, essentially, a small tabloid supported by a web publication that survives on funding from left-wing NGO’s like the Ford and Kellogg Foundations.

I remember being part of a panel discussion that included one of the Advocate’s reporters, and I made a point about the legacy media’s totally inaccurate coverage of a particular issue, only to have the ink-stained wretch screech at me that “you’re in the media, too!”

I asked him if that was the case, why the Advocate had a policy of never including a link to anything posted at The Hayride when the site was referenced in the paper’s articles. He had nothing to say to that, and so I was able to proudly distance myself from the Propaganda Press.

We don’t have any NGO’s funding us at The Hayride. We have advertisers and readers who buy tickets and sponsorships to our events. Meaning that our audience keeps us afloat, which is something the Advocate can’t say.

And legacy corporate media newsrooms know that the same is true for them.

They know it. They might deny it. You can test that by asking them what they think of the idea of banning pharmaceutical ads on television, like every country on earth other than the U.S. and New Zealand do. That’s one of the things Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is talking about doing should he be confirmed as secretary of Health and Human Services, and you can bet your bottom dollar these sanctimonious scribes will fight him tooth and nail at his confirmation hearings.

They aren’t fooling a soul.

The game is over. The pirates have stormed the bridge, and Jim VandeHei and the rest of the “Fourth Estate” are no longer the captains.

The difference is that this isn’t Somalia. It’s actually a good thing that we are the media now. Maybe some truth will come out as a result.

READ MORE from Scott McKay:

Isn’t It Time for Jasmine Crockett to Shut Up?

Saving The Country With Russ Vought

Five Quick Things: Trump’s Cabinet Picks Are a Political Sea Change

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