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Jim Friedlich's avatar

Another savvy column, Dick. I found the DeSantis campaign launch event especially disturbing. Elon Musk described “the legacy media” as “something like five editors of newspapers…a tiny elite cabal” & Twitter’s mission in part to dis-intermediate America’s leading major news organizations and in so doing to save us all: “Twitter was expensive,” says Musk, but “free speech is priceless…”

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Michael Fitzgerald's avatar

How long before "That was insane, sorry" becomes the apology of choice for the power set? But I digress from the point of this trenchant column. You have hit on a tension in journalism made worse by the attention economy--we extol people for reasons that often turn out to be eclipsed by circumstance, but when people are consistent, their story doesn't change much, making it hard to engage readers with something new about them. Also, readers can become uncomfortable when comparing themselves to the person, what Tracy Kidder and Dick Todd called "the problem of goodness." A note on Gates: at least in his tech days, he would attribute his success in part to luck (in part).

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