Bold reporting here from The Messenger, aka The Hill 2.0: A Starbucks location in Los Angeles removed their tables and chairs and switched to takeout-only because too many scumbags were lingering there harassing employees and other customers. Their source is former NBC Universal Senior Executive Mike Sington who tweeted about the change on… April 27th, 2023.
Just stopped at the Starbucks in Studio City, California. Discovered they’ve eliminated all indoor seating. I asked, “why?”, and they told me “because of incidents of crime, and the safety of our employees”. Very sad. pic.twitter.com/yL1q3Zjoxk
— Mike Sington (@MikeSington) April 27, 2023
They also cite a story from Fox affiliate KTTV published on May 24th with some follow up and quotes from an city council member who represents the Studio City neighborhood. And the Messenger got a statement separate from Starbucks that was almost verbatim the same statement KTTV. So it’s not like they didn’t do any “reporting.” So the story was “fresh,” kind of.
That said, what the fuck? How did these assholes manage to raise $50 million only to publish this aggregated shit? What the hell kind of “investor” sees this and thinks it was money well spent?
Yes, the Messenger has some original reporting. Their home page leads with an interview with DCCC Chairwoman Suzan DelBene. They got at least several Target retail employees to confirm they were ordered to take down the in-store Pride displays. That’s not nothing, even if it’s obviously still short of real investigative and/or highly-sourced reporting from NBC, the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Daily Beast, the Texas Tribune, the Wall Street Journal, so on and so forth.
Which raises the question of why the hell they would want to dilute the presence of such okay-quality stuff with this bullshit filler based primarily on a random guy’s tweet from a month ago. There’s nothing wrong with aggregating. Even the top-tier outlets aggregate reporting from each other. Aggregating news reported elsewhere is approximately 99.9 percent of what we do here at National Zero because we’re two guys running a no-budget downstream newsfeed. But if it’s not something important delivered fast as humanly and technologically possible, if it’s not entertaining or outrageous or funny, if it’s not something we can’t apply our own wacky, sarcastic spin, or some combination of the above, then we’re not going to cover it. A fucking Starbucks in Los Angeles removing its tables and chairs a month ago because crime does not meet that criteria.
Anyway, we look forward the comments from our handful of remaining MAGA trolls accusing us of sour grapes and butthurt over this rant because the Messenger raised $50 million while National Zero nags readers for PayPal donations. Guilty. What we’re not expecting however is for any of them to enthusiastically endorse the Messenger or even try to defend it, save for a half-assed “Well it’s important to point out the failures of liberal cities”-type non-contribution to the discussion.