FIRE AND FURY

     Today, the Trump Administration announced that US factory orders had risen to their highest levels since before the 2008 Recession and that job cuts had reached their lowest levels since just before the 1992 Recession. Another two quarters of these kinds of reports, and we will be officially out of the recessionary period which began under Bush Jr. and continued throughout the Obama years.

      One would think that these announcements would be headlines; but the Corporate Media instead is focusing on a newly-published book, Fire and Fury by Michael Wolff. The tome is allegedly an expose of the Trump inner circle and it is all the rage in the effete drawing-rooms of the so-called Elite.

       Michael Wolff is, of course, a part of the Corporate Media himself. He writes for such deep journalistic publications as USA Today and Hollywood Insider. He's also affiliated with GQ; the media outlet which recently named Colin Kaepernick as its 'Man of the Year' and sponsored the now-defunct Keith Olbermann's Resistance. He formerly also worked for Vanity Fair. His net worth is reportedly around $12 million, pending the profits off his new book.

        With credentials like that, who can doubt the veracity of Wolff's reporting? Well, some of Wolff's own media cronies do. In 2004, Michelle Cottle wrote in The New Republic that Wolff's journalistic ethics were open to some question saying that he "fixates on culture, style, buzz, and money, money, money. The scenes in his columns aren't so much recreated as created outright; springing from Wolff's own imagination rather than from an actual knowledge of events." By 2018, of course, none of this was an impediment to journalism, but a decade ago---though while dominated by Liberals---newsmen did actually care about their reputations. 

        In 2010, Wolff was also peer-criticized by The Columbia Journalism Review for alleged bias in favor of Robert Murdoch during the infamous British phone-hacking scandal. Two years earlier, Wolff had written a flattering biography of Murdoch. Shortly after this bio was published, Wolff got a lucrative job heading the online version of The Industry Standard. That publication was owned by the late Patrick McGovern, a good friend of the Murdochs. 

       Wolff later took over Adweek, but was fired for unspecified reasons a year later. 

       There have already been accusations that Fire and Fury is nothing but a collection of libelous lies, and a few principals featured therein have actually taken legal action. Just as a side note: public figures rarely do this unless the lies and libels are fairly egregious. It's very probable that Fire and Fury's title will be a good prediction of its fate as a writing. If a betting man, I would lay odds that six weeks from now nobody will remember this book.

        But Wolff is likely to realize a significant profit in the meantime. Let's hope that he invests wisely, since the people whom he's criticizing are taking the economy upwards to new highs.