I think the bigger scandal is that the media lied about it, and social media tried to ban talking about it.
Also, I 100% agree with boydster.
I didn't believe it.
It sounded really weird. Like, who just drops a laptop off at a repair shop then never picks it up? Especially when you have company secrets on it? Hunter isn't a teenager. Then they would have had to break into it (unless Hunter had no god damn password) and... yeah. It all sounded too stupid to be reality.
But apparently, reality it was. And I'm just sad that I had higher expectations of reality.
It's a great example of why we need journalists that will relentlessly chase after the truth, instead of chasing after clicks and views.
Jon Stewart made a great point on the latest episode of his new show. He was talking about journalism, journalists, and had a couple industry insiders sitting in with him, and said something interesting to the journalist that was on the panel. She (the journalist) had made the argument that the way they choose what stories to promote is driven in large part by ratings. We're talking minute-by-minute ratings, no exaggeration, I'm pretty sure they referred to them as the "minute by minutes" that will say things like "people started tuning out in droves at 5:53pm, we were telling [insert whatever] story to wrap up the hour, we're not wrapping on that story again" - that's just one example, but it's ratings data that is literally that granular and they make decisions based on it.
Anyway, he responded to her by saying that when he was given the opportunity to do The Daily Show, they at first told him they were going to have him talking about pop culture kind of stuff. And he responded by saying they should let him do what he wants to do, and if it tanks, they can either just fire him or he'll start doing the show the way they want. And as it turns out, people really gravitated to the show exactly as he wanted to present it, despite there not being much for ratings data available at the time to support the fact that people would tune into a shithole channel like Comedy Central to watch a comedian riff on serious issues in news and politics. They created that audience by just making the show they thought needed to be made, and people showed up. Lots of people. And it was a giant success.
His point being, naturally, that journalists should actually do real, hard hitting, in depth news pieces over issues that need that kind of reporting and stop leaving it to comedians like him to shine the light in hard-to-see places. Look how many people watched him, and now watch John Oliver, and all the awards both of those shows have racked up, and it sounds like a compelling argument. I'd love to see the big news media platforms give their journalists the leeway to do the kind of stories that comedians are instead doing for them. They are in the perfect setting to bring the appropriate amount of gravitas and sobriety to big stories that may have some nuance needing to be communicated.
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