re: #217 Wendell Zurkowitz ((slave to the waffle light))

We live in the age of the New Media Reality, where #TrendingOnTwitter is a news item in itself because it’s easier to have an unpaid intern trawl the web for stories than to actually pay reporters to go out and cover stories.

This hoax has been trending (off and on) on Twitter for over a month. And even now, the media only seem to be taking it on sufferance, an “optics” piece because any time they try to claim that the whole thing is “credible,” a corporate lawyer clears his throat and shakes his head. They’re so desperately grasping at straws that they’re now entertaining conspiracy theories about NDAs and other complaints that were spirited away to the University of Delaware the moment Biden left the Senate.

Or, to put it in a more digestible form, “Pentagon UFOs” was trending the other day. It was a flash-in-the-pan story, most media outlets treating it more as a joke than a serious story. “The media are talking about it” doesn’t mean much more than the media are filling airtime with whatever they can get their hands on.