September 25, 2013

The Way We Live Today: From Tweet to Meme in 14 Hours


The political branch of the intertubes today has been consumed by the question of whether the media is hopelessly biased because it treated Wendy Davis’ abortion filibuster more sympathetically than Ted Cruz’s kinda-buster on Obamacare. The whole fuss is so mind-crushingly inane that it’s enough to make one fear for the future of the human race, but still I’m curious: where did this meme get its start?

It apparently went mainstream in a Dylan Byers column posted today at 10:00 am. Dave Weigel says the meme was “codified” in a Tim Carney column posted a few minutes earlier at 9:44 am. Tom Kludt of TPM noted the invention of the meme an hour before that, at 8:57 am. He’s got tweets from Erick Erickson and Byron York from even earlier in the morning, and one from Richard Grenell late last night. But the earliest mention is from Laura Ingraham, who tweeted about this an hour before Grenell, at 8:20 pm last night.

But wait! Ingraham was retweeting Chad Seiter, who was responding to a dismissive tweet from Jennifer Rubin. Seiter’s tweet went up at 8:10 pm:

So as near as I can tell, that’s where it came from. A guy in Kentucky with 187 followers on Twitter got retweeted by Laura Ingraham, and by the next morning his tweet had morphed into a media bias meme that went viral. Congratulations, Chad! You won the internet today. Isn’t social media remarkable?

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

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Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

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