
The fall of Salon.com - morgante
http://www.politico.com/media/story/2016/05/the-fall-of-saloncom-004551
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officialchicken
Politico reporting on Salon hoping for it's downfall... isn't that the
journalistic equivalent of dividing by zero without the Gawker constant (sqrt
-1) in the equation?

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rurban
To me Joan Walsh is the biggest culprit. Under her the PC cleansing began,
first with Charlie Tayler, then Stephanie Zacharek and many more. Gleen
Greenwald left, and there was nothing interesting anymore.

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mixmastamyk
Used to read salon, slate, and national review regularly.

As I became more disgusted in politics, and it began dumbing itself down
(fox/msnbc/facebook) more and more over the years, I no longer look at them.
Seems to be a waste of time, like watching a soap opera, with very little to
learn.

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danharaj
Do you think those publications became dumbed down, or did you come to
understand their viewpoints thoroughly enough that you no longer found them
stimulating?

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ArkyBeagle
Really good question, but I suspect both are happening.

Especially the Alternet pieces on Salon are just... what they are -
effectively low-grade propaganda.

There used to be intelligent writers, but these things seem to be mainly
preaching to the choir, of questionable provenance and least common
denominator.

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skrowl
"fall" implies they had credibility to begin with. I don't recall that ever
being the case, honestly. How long ago was that?

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michaelmcmillan
Salon is really where digital journalism goes to die. The level of dishonesty
displayed is really outrageous [1].

[1]: [https://www.samharris.org/blog/item/sam-harris-the-salon-
int...](https://www.samharris.org/blog/item/sam-harris-the-salon-interview)

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ArkyBeagle
Wow. Yikes. The deleted text is very significant.

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michaelmcmillan
This is just the tip of the iceberg. Continue down the rabbit hole if you want
to see how dishonest and malicious Islam apologists like Glenn Greenwald and
Reza Aslan are. Flabbergasting.

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g8oz
Strange they would censor that when the Salon piece that Harris is butt-hurt
about is quite well argued. They could've just run his comments and allowed
the writer to respond.

On another note reading that interview TIL that Harris is only a few degrees
removed from the more rabid Islamaphobes. He certainly builds on the amateur
dialectic of assuming that everything wrong with the Muslim world comes from
the Quran and Sunnah rather than a flawed jurisprudential discourse amongst
the ulema that offers vast possibilities for improvement.

"but if you had stood at the gates of Vienna in 1683, you could have not
helped but notice the civilizational problem of jihad." Gotta love that - the
West pillaged, enslaved and exploited half the world but it's some other folks
that have a problem with violence. Right. Maybe if Christianity had stopped
Christian nations from wars of expansion we'd have some valid basis of
comparison.

Good thing Harris is just preaching to his New Atheist choir (now powered by
50% more smugness!).

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Adaptive
I stopped reading after their horrific redesign a while back (it has since
gone through some other mediocre rework). It was so hamfisted and mirrored the
decay of content.

Back in the early days I read Salon regularly. It was such a huge
disappointment when things went off the rails.

