PERRY: Irony is a dish best served bold to critics of the mainstream media

You don’t have to be a journalist to appreciate the luscious taste of irony.

Outside of the world of noodgey copy editors, sarcastic reporters and endlessly skeptical editors, the rest of the planet, too, enjoys a good dose of “you’ve got to be kidding.”

I’m unsure whether it’s because Mercury is in Gatorade or if it’s just the heat, or the pull of the August moon, but the social-mediaverse and headlines have been rife with double-takes.

Here are some of my favorite recent treats:

Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Carpetbagville, is always worth a wince. This week, she posted a selfie to Xwitter, or whatever it’s called now, standing next to Florida GOP Congressperson Matt Gaetz on Primary Tuesday Day in that state.

“Watching the numbers come in with my Congressional bestie!!” Boebert yelled through multiple exclamation marks as Gaetz looked into the lens. There appears to be no one but the two of them in Gaetz’ Florida beachy flat, on Election Night. Where most candidates attend election events as “the numbers come in,” Gaetzy and his bestie are apparently stuck with  themselves.

It would be remiss not to point out that Boy Bestie is under investigation by the GOP controlled House Ethics Committee for a long list of accusations. The panel stated in June it was determining whether Gaetz “engaged in sexual misconduct and illicit drug use, accepted improper gifts, dispensed special privileges and favors to individuals with whom he had a personal relationship, and sought to obstruct government investigations of his conduct,” according to Associated Press story cites.

Girl Bestie is not under House ethics investigation for her public prurience last year during a Beetlejuice show at the Denver Center for Performing Arts. Boebert and her one-night bestie got tossed out of the theater because she kept vaping and making sounds like she was singing and generally being Boebertine in her behavior.

It wasn’t until a few days after she was forced out of the show — where she threatened theater employees with a “do you know who I am” on the way out the door — that 9News got the inside theater video tape of Boebert repeatedly reaching for something she must have kept dropping in her date’s crotch. That must have been tricky to pull off while he played motorboat on her mammary glands, all during the show, until they got kicked out.

Both GOP congressional candidates repeatedly focus their messages and their mission on the Good Lord and a return to real family values.

Sometimes, the irony doesn’t come in just smirks and snorts. Elon Musk sends it in what old geezer journalists like me used to call “muffin chokers.”

It was a tip of the hat to usually page-one stories that were so bizarre or heinous that the poor guy in his kitchen reading the morning paper over breakfast would proverbially aspirate his or her morning muffin while reading the headline or lede.

Musk tosses this stuff out on his Xhitter social media machine with assembly line frequency.

“Citizen journalism from actual domain experts and people actually on the ground is much faster, more accurate and has less bias than the legacy media!” Musk Xtwirted last week.

He’s been on a roll with slamming “legacy media” as nothing but propaganda.

This from a guy who fancies himself a “citizen journalist” telling the world the truth about things like:

“Population is collapsing rapidly,” Musk Twarted on Aug.9, referring to some nations with a sliding birth rate.

Meanwhile, in another part of the realityverse, the world population topped 8 billion last year, increasing every year it’s been counted since the early 1900s.

This is Musk’s idea of truth in citizen journalism on social media.

“Kamala is quite literally a communist,” he Xhurted on Aug. 7. His observation was based on another Xtra user who pointed out that she said “communistic” things like “equity” and “equality.”

This was about the same time that Musk and Xhitter filed a lawsuit against former advertisers that bailed from the platform after Musk commandeered it, creating a boycott.

“I strongly encourage any company who has been systematically boycotted by advertisers to file a lawsuit,” Musk wrote on Aug. 6.

This from a guy who has convinced himself that Xhatter is all and only about free speech.

“A reminder that free speech in America is special and we need to do everything possible to preserve it,” He wrote on Aug. 17.

That’s “free speech for me but not for thee,” if you think you should be able to take your advertiser dollars elsewhere when the publisher pisses you off.

Punching at the media even comes from within the media, kind of.

Case in point here is Douglas County’s Heidi Ganahl, who was once a CU regent and then GOP candidate for Colorado governor in the last election.

Ganahl did, and does, slam the mainstream media for what she says is endless liberal bias.

She really began complaining about that when the mainstream media kept asking her if she believed Trump’s “Big Lie” about his 2020 election being stolen. The questioning got more persistent when she added a publicly out election denier to her gubernatorial ticket as lieutenant governor.

“Colorado voters deserve the FULL truth, not what the media chooses to edit in order to satisfy their narrative,” she said about two years ago on her Xphitter feed after a 9News interview quoted her saying what she said.

So she started her own “media company” a few months ago, The Rocky Mountain Voice, to forever end bias in the legacy media. Most of the website is scrapes from the area’s legacy media.

“Colorado is at a pivotal moment in time,” Ganahl wrote in January. “It’s never been more critical than now to get real, unbiased news from a reliable source.”

Here are few recent unbiased original headlines and stories from her Rocky Mountain Voice unbiased reporters:
• Rep. Boebert: ‘It’s now truly MAGA vs. Marxism’ in presidential race

• Who is Harris’ VP candidate Tim Walz? A far Left radical, Trump campaign says

• ‘The Kamala Crash’: Trump terms market selloff as ‘preview’ of world without him in the White House

• ‘We must protect our kids’: Lundberg calls for ‘all hands on deck’ to help get initiatives to the ballot

• What’s on my ballot? A look at how voters might determine true primary pro-gun supporters

Sounds like “fair and balanced” to me. But what do I know? I’m just an old skeptical reporter.

 Follow @EditorDavePerry on BlueSky, Threads, Mastodon, Twitter and Facebook or reach him at 303-750-7555 or dperry@SentinelColorado.com