TONY OF ALL MEDIA

Raise your hand if you'd like to read another opinion piece about the 2020 presidential election. Anybody? Thought so. At this point, surely just about everything's been said and written that can be, and just about everybody, from both sides or neither side, seems prepared for a win, loss or, yes, even a draw. (One thing we all have in common: We'll all be glad when it's flipping done.) I don't cover politics, therefore I feel under no pressure to strain and persuade you that I am that nonexistent thing: free of bias. Nor do I even feel obligated to come off as fair or balanced. Such a quaint journalistic notion as trying to report without smirking, shaking one's head in disbelief or schadenfreude most definitely went the way of the blue dress, the housing bubble, the ascent of Pravda II: Fox News (which famously, laughingly appropriated the once-noble and meaningful standard of the newsman and newswoman, "Fair and Balanced," as its brand slogan, makin...

It's refreshing to know there's still a first time for things, especially things created by journalists.  In an unprecedented move, Time magazine has replaced its cover logo, instead urging readers in that familiar space and typeface to VOTE. The accompanying cover art, of a woman wearing a scarf to cover her nose and mouth, is by the estimable Shepard Fairey. Time's editor in chief and CEO Edward Felsenthal explains the decision to change up the cover this week: Few events will shape the world to come more than the result of the upcoming U.S. presidential election. ... To mark this historic moment, arguably as consequential a decision as any of us has ever made at the ballot box, we have for the first time in our nearly 100-year history replaced our logo on the cover of our U.S. edition with the imperative for all of us to exercise the right to vote. ... We stand at a rare moment, one that will separate history into before and after for generations. It is the kind of momen...

The Trump administration has followed through on a promised war against big tech, suing Google over alleged antitrust activities because its ad platform and search tool happen to be more popular by far than anybody else's. Eleven states joined the feds in the suit. "If the government does not enforce the antitrust laws to enable competition," the deputy attorney general said in a lofty statement this morning, "we could lose the next wave of innovation ... and Americans may never get to see the next Google." I am about as sure that this is about advancing innovation as I am that it's just coincidence the 11 states also suing happen to be red states, and that the lawsuit was filed exactly 2 weeks before Election Day.  As CNET reports , the DOJ's action was controversial even within the department: "Some of the attorneys were concerned the aggressive timeline ... was to ensure the Trump administration gets credit for taking on a big tech company."...

MSNBC's Steve Kornacki makes us want to believe. But should we? Why do we (meaning we in the media) continue to put so much stock in polls? As journalist Linda Ellerbee wrote in her excellent and inexplicably out-of-print memoir "And So It Goes: Adventures in Television" back in the 80s, "Ask yourself: If polling is so accurate, then why are there so many companies doing it?"  Two weeks ahead of Election Day, virtually every poll shows Biden beating Trump in terms of the popular vote. Meanwhile, the dreaded swing states (that is, the only places in this "democracy" where your vote seems to actually make a difference) continue to swing wildly. In other words, remember 2016? Let's not break out the bubbly quite yet.  Check out what Munr Kazmir writes in Medium's Dialogue & Discourse: Polling is not reality. The polls showing Biden polling higher than Donald Trump, which are giving Democrats a dangerous dose of overconfidence, are often based...

This week's issue of The New Yorker features, by way of a review of the book "She Come by It Natural: Dolly Parton and the Women Who Lived Her Songs" by Sarah Smarsh, yet another highbrow attempt to divine deeper meaning from the simple pleasure that is Ms. Parton (although there is nothing simple about  her ). As Susan Sontag once said regarding art criticism, some things should be allowed to simply exist. Dolly — a national treasure and kick-ass woman who speaks for herself, through her charity, her humanity and, of course, her own words and music — is one of those things that need not be analyzed to death by a bunch of overeducated, pseudo-intellectual city folk. Kindly leave her out of your cerebral circle jerk.

Senator Kamala Harris: brains, beauty and, most importantly, decency. Not trying to take away your health insurance, or invalidate your marriage, or kill your parents from COVID, or destroy your faith in our leaders and institutions. In other words: Vote right, dumbasses.  (read the full story at Elle Magazine)

(via Men's Health)

In "news more predictable than the plot of a Dane Cook movie" news, branding agency MBLM (pronounced "Emblem") is out with its "Brand Intimacy Study 2020," revealing that the hottest brands of the pandemic in terms of consumers' usage of and emotional attachment to them are, in descending order (drumroll): Zoom, Purell and Netflix.  The study was based on a survey of 3,000 consumers in the U.S. in late summer who shared their opinions of and experiences with 100 brands across 10 sectors. The full study will be released Oct. 7.  The popularity of Zoom, Purell and Netflix may be a no-brainer, as are greater sales of stuff like home workout equipment, jigsaw puzzles and, last but certainly not least, booze. Then there are all those products (paper goods, disinfectant spray) that flew off the shelves because of the mass hoarding of all you selfish bastards. But our being largely shut in the last six months has also led to a curious run on a number of othe...

According to legend and lore, journalists are the type to rush to the scene of a car crash with the hope of interviewing the man splattered on the road before he draws his next breath (or before his or her competition at the newspaper or TV station arrives on the scene), or to knock on the door of some lady who just lost her baby in a fire, demanding to know how she FEELS. Cliches like "hard-bitten" and "world-weary" are tossed around; personally, I find "ruthless" and "heartless" more accurate.  I have been a working journalist, I am proud to say, for more than 30 years, but have never been one to enjoy visiting a nursing home that just exploded to count the dead old people scattered on the lawn. (Covering blazing nursing homes was just one of the luxuries of my first job out of j-school, at a local TV station. I left there after a couple of years, realizing it probably wasn't normal or healthy to require an entire bottle of bourbon to get t...

Walmart plans to hire 20,000 employees to fulfill online orders this holiday season In a previous life, I visited "CBS This Morning" to chat with Norah O'Donnell and Gayle King about how Christmas commercials are airing earlier and earlier. The reason was simple, I explained: because research showed at the time that 40 percent of Americans do at least some of their holiday shopping before Halloween — which is why, even though everybody always claims to hate it when stores put out their Christmas decorations and marketers run ads featuring Santa during October, they will continue to do so, forever and ever, amen. The beast that is retail must be fed when it is hungry, after all — and never has that been truer than in this awful year, with Covid wreaking havoc on the sector and major retailers from Neiman Marcus to Century21 going bankrupt. As Ad Age recently reported , the Christmas-before-Halloween trend has only accelerated in 2020, with holiday promotions from retailer...