On quashing one’s editorial board.

Since I’m reawakening my blog anyway, what the heck; I’ll rant a bit.

Mastadon has been blowing up lately about the respective owners of the Los Angeles Times and Washington Post stopping their editorial boards from endorsing vice president Kamala Harris for president. The Times was even gonna do a whole series leading up to it, called “The Case Against Trump,” no doubt explaining in detail why former president Donald Trump is senile and evil. But owner Patrick Soon-Shiong shut it down. Three editorial board members have quit in protest—editor Marial Garza, and writers Karin Klein and Robert Greene.

The Mastodon posts have largely been about how awful it is that these feckless billionares are interfering with free speech, and speculating the owners are probably doing it because they’re either Trump supporters, or expect him to win… and if he’s gonna go full fascist on everybody (and he can now that the Supreme Court has removed the guardrails), they wanna remain standing as he vengefully retaliates against all the media that previously opposed him.

I actually don’t think it’s that. I don’t think politics are the motivator so much as the money is. “Follow the money,” remember? And according to the money, editorial boards and political endorsements are bad for business. If your paper endorses Trump, it’s not the fear that Trump’s coming to getcha; it’s the fear Trump fans, and they are legion, will pull all their advertising.

Same with endorsing Trump: Harris fans will pull all their advertising. Same with endorsing a proposition which certain big businesses oppose: They’ll pull their advertising. Editorial opinions have a cost, and while the editorial boards might think that cost is totally worth it, ’cause free speech, the billionaire who actually owns the newspaper, who’s already agitated by the fact print media is a dying industry, might decide it’s way cheaper to keep all the advertisers… and get the editorial board to resign in protest, and that way he doesn’t have to pay ’em severance.

And if he happens to also be a Trump supporter, that’s just a bonus.

Putting the stuff back up.

I started this blog decades ago. (Yep, it’s been decades now.) But for a good long time I left it dormant, ’cause I was busy with other things. I did most of my blogging on The Christ Almighty Blog; I still do. Didn’t want this blog distracting from that!

But every once in a while I wanted to dig through old things I’ve written, and since I took everything down from here, I hopped on Internet Archive, which has backed up all those years of blogging. Even when I kinda didn’t want them to. I wanted to retract or edit or update things; one of the great things about blogging is it’s not like print, and you can do that! But Internet Archive wants to archive everything, and did. Oh well.

Anyway this past week Internet Archive was attacked by hackers, and most of the site has been offline. Not all of it; its Wayback Machine, with all those archived webpages, including my old blogs, are still around. Still, it’s just a reminder of how ephemeral web content can be. All it takes is one server going down… and its backup, and its other backup, and maybe a few other redundant backups. Or the company which is hosting the backups.

So I decided to start putting it back. Which is gonna take me a while. But in the very little spare time I have, why not.