Real Time with Bill Maher (HBO) - 5/10/24

[Simeon Salus]

7. Bill's rules of thumb for trying to follow the news in our modern age

1. If the headlines in your preferred news outlet routinely feature words like "shreds", "destroys", "pummels", or "bashes", your outlet is a partisan piece of shit (either that or you're reading a Batman comic). Ditto with "obliterates", "roasts", "annihilates", and "owns".

2. Any news source that quotes "the internet" or writes "Twitter says" are a bunch of hacks too lazy to do journalism. You can pretend you wrote a piece on the zeitgeist, but what you really did was look on your phone and quote the three angriest people with the most time on their hands.

3. If your news outlet consistently reduces everything in the world to who the president in America is, get rid of it.

4. Once the news became a profit division of media companies, they stopped being in the news business and started being in the audience stroking business. The goal is no longer to inform opinion, it's to stoke them.

5. Never trust the initial reports. The media cares way more about being first than being right. They love a scoop, but it's always a scoop of shit, because it always turns out to be wrong.