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Deion and Taylor got married. It was a low-key affair, by their standards. A few million of their closest friends.

Taylor’s bridesmaid was the indefatigable, impermeable, invaluable, impressive, Nikola Jokic, the best thing to come out of Serbia since that other Nikola whose name was unfortunately appropriated a century later for a vehicle that is self-driving and self-incinerating.  

After the wedding, the newlyweds rode off into the sunset in, you guessed it, a Tesla. They got as far as Ventura County before the juice gave out and the car caught fire.

OK, I made all that up. But I had you going, didn’t I? You clicked into this, and that’s the whole point of the carnival barker schtick that used to be called “journalism.”

So-called journalists have adopted the strategy of other leftists: By whatever means necessary. But while leftists are willing to employ whatever means are necessary, including baby beheadings, to achieve their goal of destroying Western so-called Civilization, journalists are willing to employ whatever means are necessary to achieve their grander goal of . . .

. . . clicks.

I base this on my own personal experience. For example, consider the “news” feed Google sends me, which I feel compelled to consider every morning, often before I even get out of bed. I didn’t ask for them to join me in bed in the morning but, like a late-night bar encounter, they just won’t go away.

The robotic terminators in Google’s AI department seem to “think” the most important things in the world to me, or at least the things I am most likely to click on, are Dieon, Taylor and Nikola. Every morning, they send me several articles on each.

I like to believe that I’m much more interested in William Blake and Milton Friedman, but Google’s AI department “thinks” otherwise.

So I get sent Deion and Taylor and Nicola, over and over and over. Sleepy and un-caffeinated, I obediently click on them. Google and its AI algorithms take that as proof that I’d like more of the same. So, they give me more of the same. And I click on them again.

Rinse, repeat

Their AI must “think” by now that I wake up with a hardon for all three of these folks. As if.

Clickbait is nothing new, though the media in which it is practiced is new. A century ago, we had “yellow journalism.” The expert was a New York newspaper owner named Joseph Pulitzer, now ironically known for being the namesake of the Pulitzer Prize for outstanding journalism.

Maybe that’s not ironic at all, given the recipients of the prize lately – such as people who reported breathlessly on Donald Trump’s purported collusion with the Russians.

On the other hand, give the Pulitzer Prize recipients credit for burying the Hunter Biden laptop story, which surely would have generated many clicks but was outside the political narrative of the newspapers they worked for. After all, these people have principles, of a sort.

Pulitzer’s talent for generating the 19^th century equivalent of clicks was noticed by a fellow on the other coast named William Randolf Hearst, who was a bad guy even though his use of his middle name suggests that he was. (That’s clever word play, not a typo, thank you very much.)

Aside from yellow journalism, Hearst is mostly known for owning a big faux castle and a granddaughter named Patti who invented something called Stockholm Syndrome where she got her picture taken holding a scary-looking b-(lower case)-lack gun given to her with no background check under the evil gun show loophole by domestic terrorists (and I don’t mean the kind that make a fuss at school board meetings) whose Lesbianese Liberation Army kidnapped her and so she was arrested and sent to prison.

Jimmy Carter commuted her sentence out of compassion and Bill Clinton pardoned her out of . . . well, you know. See, Lewinski, Monica.

But the neo-yellow journalists are far worse. Every news site has become a cache of click-bait. At the formerly great Wall Street Journal, the news is in the opinion pages and the opinions are in the news pages, and both are saturated with click-bait. At Fox News and CNN and the NYT, it’s just a joke. Some stories are laden with typos (not clever word play), others include gross grammatical errors, and all are designed not to inform, but to be clicked.

I would say modern journalists are whores, but at least whores run a mostly honest operation.

Meanwhile, there’s something interesting growing on the forest floor amongst the dead and rotting redwoods. The best journalism these days – the only true journalism – is sprouting at places like Substack with writers like Bari Weiss, Matt Taibbi, and a good friend of mine. Check it out.