Matisyahu's Blog

On the road to recovery by spending today at home and while at home I was watching a great interview over on YouTube – it is great to see an ecosystem that is building particularly when it comes to one with centre left to left wing unafraid of calling a spade a spade vs in the past with the obsession about decorum and presentation over substance.

It is great to see that the sort of independent/non-traditional media ecosystem is building on the centre left to left wing. It is ging to be a long uphill slog given that millionaires and billionaires aren’t exactly going to give money to independent media which advocate changes to a system that they benefit from. With that in mind, it is probably for the best that slow organic growth will result in an audience that stays around for the long term because there is a tendency that fast growth can result in an audience that doesn’t hang around for the long term.

With that being said, what is also needed is an ecosystem that moves beyond commentary to include in depth reporting – Democracy Now does a good job but ideally there needs to a single organisation that can bring together freelance journalists together so that resources can be pooled. You’d think that after Washington Post published 16 negative articles in 24 hours about Bernie Sanders that maybe the centre left and the left wing would realise that they have very few friends (if any at all) in the establishment media but I guess it is a situation of ‘better late than never’.

When it comes to politicians, it is amazing how bad so many of them are – continuously having to be briefed about subject matter that they should be fluent in such as Kamala Harris getting frustrated about not being briefed about healthcare before an interview. With all due respects, if you’re getting into politics it is because you’re wanting to make the world a better place and I would assume if that is your goal then you should be sleeping, eating and working on policy. The idea of a politician having the distinction of being called a ‘policy wonk’ makes me wonder why the heck are all the other politicians are there to do if they’re not engaged in crafting policy. No one expects fine granular details but you should be able to talk off the cuff at a macro level regarding what you want to do for healthcare or any other area that interviewer wishes to ask you about.