Media Bits and Bytes - He Said/She Said edition

Ta-ta, Twitter; Faux News war pig; Megyn Kelly without tears; Kochs spook Jane Meyer; Drug ad backlash; The new Birth of a Nation

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Good-bye to All That Twitter

By Annie Lowrey and Abraham Riesman
January 19, 2016
New York Magazine

Taking a break, stepping back, or giving up is a ritual that must be nearly as old as Twitter itself. And users' lack of interest or even outright distaste for the service has become a problem for the company, with people spending less time on it and overall user growth stalling. A Deutsche Bank survey of former users pulled in complaints about redundancy, information inundation, and a lack of filtering, which Twitter is tackling with features like its Moments tab and nonchronological tweet displays. But the problems with the addictive, enigmatic service run deep.

The Rise and Fall of a Fox News Fraud

By Reeves Wiedeman
January 26, 2016
Rolling Stone

Simmons had made guest appearances on Fox more than a hundred times as a "former CIA operative," and certainly looked the part: white mustache, neck bulging out of his dress shirt, a handshake "so hard, he can crush you with it," as one Fox host put it. Beyond offering his expertise as an intelligence officer, he had become particularly adept at serving up hawkish red meat to the network's audience. "We could end this in a week," he went on, suggesting that the United States run "thousands of sorties" against ISIS. "They would all be dead."
But according to prosecutors, Simmons was living a lie. Last October, the government charged him with multiple counts of fraud, saying he had never worked for the CIA at all. Prosecutors alleged that Simmons used his supposed intelligence experience not only to secure time on Fox and an audience with Rumsfeld, but also to obtain work with defense contractors, including deployment to a military base in Afghanistan.


Megyn Kelly Is Not a Hero

By Isaac Chotiner
January 28, 2016
Slate

No one deserves physical threats or misogynist attacks, both of which seem to be in the repertoire of a disturbingly high number of Trump supporters. But Megyn Kelly is no hero. Despite her reputation as being something approaching fair and balanced, as Willa Paskin noted in Slate, she is far from a liberal’s dream anchor. She may be less conservative than O’Reilly and Sean Hannity, and less obviously partisan, too. But her show, as much as any show on Fox, is powered by racial resentment and fearmongering. Indeed, if there is any irony to the attacks from Trump and his supporters, it lies in the fact that Kelly spends a good deal of her time riling up the same passions that Trump has.
A good chunk of Kelly’s program consists of stories about urban protests, “black-on-white” crime, and all the scary problems facing white America. Her approach to the Black Lives Matter movement has been to call it “obviously beyond the bounds of decency,” and to instead present it as a danger to police. When protests in Baltimore became a national story, Kelly’s fearmongering reached new heights, with bold graphics and “deep concern” about the threat the protests represented to average (white) Americans.

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What Happened to Jane Mayer When She Wrote About the Koch Brothers
By Jim Dwyer
January 26, 2016
New York Times

Out of the blue in the fall of 2010, a blogger asked Jane Mayer, a writer with The New Yorker, how she felt about the private investigator who was digging into her background. Ms. Mayer thought the idea was a joke, she said this week. At a Christmas party a few months later, she ran into a former reporter who had been asked about helping with an investigation into another reporter on behalf of two conservative billionaires.
As it happened, Ms. Mayer had published a major story in the magazine that August about the brothers David and Charles Koch, and their role in cultivating the power of the Tea Party movement in 2010. Using a network of nonprofits and other donors, they had provided essential financial support for the political voices that have held sway in Republican politics since 2011. Her new book “Dark Money” chronicles the vast sums of money from the Koch brothers and other wealthy conservatives that have helped shape public dialogue in opposition to Democratic positions on climate change, the Affordable Care Act and tax policy.
Ms. Mayer began to take the rumored investigation seriously when she heard from her New Yorker editor that she was going to be accused — falsely — of plagiarism, stealing the work of other writers.

Pushback on Drug Ads

By Roger Collier
January 19, 2016
CMAJ

According to Dr. Ryan Gray, US television viewers are bombarded with messages that lead many to believe they are suffering from health problems they don't actually have. They then visit their doctors and demand the brand-name drugs they saw in ads. And if a doctor doesn't comply — well, there is always another doctor.
"The presence of ads is getting in the way of the doctor–patient relationship," says Gray.
On Nov. 17, 2015, the AMA called for a ban on direct-to-consumer advertising of prescription drugs and medical devices. According to the association's statement, the billions of dollars spent on marketing by pharmaceutical companies fuels "escalating drug prices" and "inflates demand for new and more expensive drugs, even when these drugs may not be appropriate."


Sundance: Why Nate Parker Chose Fox Searchlight Over Netflix for 'The Birth of a Nation'

by Rebecca Ford, Tatiana Siegel
January 26, 2016
Hollywood Reporter

The Sundance audience gave the slave-rebellion drama "The Birth of A Nation" an extended standing ovation, which was followed by mostly enthusiastic reviews. By the next morning, Fox Searchlight had plunked down a jaw-dropping $17.5 million for worldwide rights to the film, the biggest sale in the fest's history. It also marks the largest sum ever paid for a finished movie at any festival, including Cannes, Berlin and Toronto.
For director Nate Parker, who started writing the script for the Nat Turner drama seven years ago, he knew something special was happening when he took the stage to introduce the film Monday night. In a rare Sundance moment, the audience gave him a standing ovation before a single image had played onscreen.