I do not think it means what you think it means.
This is so fucking adorable I could plotz.
We had the makings of just such an "independent media" decades
ago.
It was the Liberal blogosphere.
We saw through the legacy media's toxic addiction to the "Both Sides"
lie. We warned -- very clearly, every day -- exactly where the poisonous
combination of escalating conservative-media lies and racism, coupled with
obstinate legacy-media Both Siderist denialism, was going to lead.
And all of those warnings were routinely slandered and dismissed by the likes
of Longwell, Kristol and all the rest of them until it was far, far too
late. After all, we were just Dirty Fucking Hippies.
Funny thing about the term Dirty Fucking Hippies, which was coined, I believe
by Atrios/Duncan Black sometime during the early aughts. This would have
been during roughly the same period that Sarah Longwell was working for the
Conservative Intercollegiate Studies Institute, and Bloody Bill Kristol was
pimping the shit out of Bush's Iraq Debacle, promising it would all be over in
a matter of weeks, and calling anyone who opposed it a clueless libtard
traitor.
Y'know, the Good Old Days.
The point of “Dirty Fucking Hippies” wasn't the profanity: it was the sarcasm.
It was how Beltway pundits and journalists portrayed the online left precisely
because bloggers could say things establishment media figures refused to say.
In fact, it could get you fired. From Sarah Boxer, in
The New York Review,
February 2008:
Bloggers give new, Web-inflected meanings to old words. A “troll” on the
Web is someone who posts provocative things just to cause an outcry.
“Astroturfing” is creating a fake grassroots movement. Bloggers also
sprinkle their blogs with expressions like WTF (translation: “What the
fuck?”), lol (laugh out loud), and meh (a verbal shrug). They willfully
misspell—like “teh” for “the.” They call the Internet “the internets,”
cutely following George W. Bush’s slip. If people wrote like this for
publication, they’d be fired.
And, indeed, there is a term for getting canned because of your blog:
“dooced,” named for the blogger Dooce, now a stay-at-home-mother (SAHM)
or, as she puts it, a “Shit Ass Ho Motherfucker,” who got fired for
blogging about her employer.
Bloggers challenged mainstream-media gatekeeping and the way the media had
become an insulated, self-satisfied cult of performative "objectivity".
It's Jay Rosen's "view from nowhere". And starting during the Bush years, Liberal bloggers treated
profanity as evidence that they were not performing objectivity for elite
approval.
Which sure sounds a fuck of a lot like the makings of an "independent media"
to me.
And of course, during all that time, Longwell, Kristol and all the rest of
them never objected to the corrosive Both Siderism of the legacy media,
because that corrosive Both Siderism always tilted the playing field heavily
in favor of the Right. It still does. And so only now, when the same
Both Siderism is no longer reliably serving their side, do Longwell, Kristol
and all the rest of them seem to have discovered that there's something
wrong.
But it's the word "inadvertently" that makes it art.
As you might know, The Bulwark runs live-read ads for
The New York Times, and were running live-read ads for
The Washington Post right up until pundits like Jennifer Rubin began
fleeing the place. Their rapid growth has depended almost entirely on
MSNBC (now MS NOW) promoting their business and their employees practically
every single day since it was founded in 2019, plus regular appearances on NPR
and that bastion of Both Siderism, the Sunday Shows. And, of
course, by maintaining at least a cordial relationship with the legacy
media. A small sample:
The Washington Post (May 2024):
"The Bulwark finds a sweet spot in the center-right"
Vanity Fair (2025)
"How The Bulwark Is Thriving in a New Trump Era"
Semafor (2025)
"Washington Post economics columnist moves to The Bulwark"
Which is no surprise given that the Trump origin myth that Never Trumpers have
been peddling since day one: that Trump came outta nowhere and somehow
hypnotized 77 million voters and virtually every elected Republican into
becoming fascists. Isn't that weird?
That story is ever so much more congenial to the Both Siderist bubble the
lords and ladies of the legacy media live in than the actual history of the
modern GOP that Liberals are always yapping about.
So why go out of your way to piss off institutions who you wish to speak
kindly of your business and your brand new book?
Hence the word "inadvertently".
But we Dirty Fucking Hippies know better.
Oh yes, we fucking well do.
I Am The Liberal Media
