Enjoy this bizarre, spacey, amateurish Breitbart interview with Sean Spicer

Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2017/02/10/enjoy-this-bizarre-spacey-am.html

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All the production values of a small-town city council meeting right there.

But hey, at least they found the light switch.

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This has to be an Eric Andre sketch

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I mean, there’s so much to marvel at:

  • The awful framing (all three angles!).
  • The terrible lighting.
  • The terrible sound.
  • The (wonderful) awkward pause at the start.

I don’t understand how people watch stuff like this and think it’s acceptable or good- it’s a bit like when I have to listen to 45 say something and I think “Who listened to that and thought it made sense?” It’s just beyond me.

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I don’t think this is what Jay Rosen had in mind when he advised the media to Send the Interns.

Oh yes it is. Crappy production values, awkward silences, badly-rehearsed questions. This is just the treatment Spicer deserves - it’s just a surprise to see it coming from Breitbart, who have something of a stake in legitimizing the administration.

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I mean, if I’m putting a video of my cat on Instagram, I will edit out the 10 seconds at the beginning where I’m trying to get his attention. My 113 followers deserve at least that minimal amount of care.

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Is there an alt-version of the word “enjoy” that I don’t know about? /s

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This guy has been a working journalist for over a decade in conservative outlets…

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This is probably a tangent, but humor me…

A few years back, part of my wife’s job had her dealing with small clinics in a solidly red state. Among the myriad of things she would do would help standardize their intake forms ahead of rolling out the EMR.

Never would they have an electronic version of the paperwork. More than likely it was a photocopy of a photocopy of a form that had originally been drafted in Excel with the requisite three or four typefaces.

So she would pull out one of her stock forms and put on their logo(which I often ended up cleaning up since - again - no electronic version existed) and tweak what ever site specific things were needed and suddenly they had intake paperwork that looked “professional”

At best, most of the people who would be handing out the paperwork didn’t care. In one instance, they went back to using their old illegible form because “it looked more homey and inviting” than the ones my wife put together - those were too “corporate looking” for a small town clinic.

I don’t know. Maybe professionalism is too “Corporate” and amature hour is “good-enough”

Shrug.

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FTFY.

I’m all for substance over style, but sometimes I feel like for a certain brand of conservative media, crappy production values is kind of a badge of honor. Not like them slick libruls.

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Damn, I’m having gamergate flashbacks. Remember the sarkeesian effect, and the two utterly untalented wastes of human flesh that did it? Whatever the hell happened to them?

(don’t worry, the YT link is just a fake director’s commentary)

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exactly the point I think I was making in my rambling.

Polished and professional is to be looked down on.

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This deGrasse Tyson quote is a variation on the old Soviet joke “Well, it works in practice, now we need to find a way to make it work in theory” (meaning of course political theory.)

This is the modern Republican party exactly.

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Yes, but it should look genuine. More casual, granted, but genuine. The interviewer looks scared to death, and Spicer looks overdressed. And it’s one thing for it to look casual, but not to the point of distraction (sound, camera angles.) They should just do a two shot and let the topic speak for itself. Instead it’s like someone actually tried to implement their Film School 101 course and failed. As Cory says, it’s hilarious and awful.

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I think you’re on to something.

It’s as though the presence of polish and poise serves as a reminder of how little of that they themselves possess. The skills present act as an insult to those without skill.

So when Obama spoke eloquently, some (significant) portion of the populace took that eloquence as an insult to those that don’t have any.
It’s like the gays always having to rub your face in it. /s

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Scenario and result: “Hey, Dad, can I interview you for my Civics class AND my Film Production class at the same time?”

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Who knew that it would be the conservatives that would bring about the nightmarish future of Harrison Bergeron?

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I made it 29 seconds in and could not take any more.

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Obviously, his concern for technical production values matches his concern for the journalistic mission of seeking out the facts.

They’re supposed hallmarks of “elitism”, so it stands to reason that the Know-Nothings would reject them. For a long time The GOP establishment was able to pander to the base with a (polished and professional) ersatz version of homespun and DIY amateurism, but these new alt-right guys are just BS-shovelling clowns fortunate enough to have a voter base that gobbles it up.

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