Alec Baldwin deactivated his Twitter account yesterday after he unleashed an epithet-laden Twitter rant against Daily Mail reporter George Stark, who erroneously reported that Mr. Baldwin’s pregnant wife, Hilaria, had tweeted during James Gandolfini’s funeral. The Twitter outburst was picked up by many media outlets for the homophobic and generally abusive tone.
Today, Mr. Baldwin talked to Gothamist to clear up the charges or semi-apologize or whatever. In the process, the actor offered a string of media criticism.
Here are our favorites from his extensive talk with Gothamist:
Maybe he just expects too much from the media.
What you realize is that’s the world that we live in. We live in a world where there’s no journalism anymore. I mean trained, I don’t expect everybody writing for Gothamist or The New York Times…even The New York Times I don’t expect those people to all be coming out of Columbia per se, but I expect them to make some attempt to get it right, which you can almost never count on anymore.
The outlet no longer matters. It’s just Mr. Baldwin, driving traffic to sites. And for what? It doesn’t even make a real difference in the scheme of things.
All this energy goes into these things, and for what? If I serve on Twitter as an aggregator, if I take a piece off the internet and say “read this piece from The New York Times about fracking, read this article on Slate about fracking, or Mother Jones” or wherever it might be, it doesn’t matter what the venue is, The Washington Post, anything, if I aggregate that material a la Huffington Post and I shoot that out to the people, do you think I’m really changing anybody’s mind?
Bypassing the “mainstream media” is just not worth all the trouble.
Twitter began for me as a way to bypass the mainstream media and talk directly to my audience and say, “hey here’s a show I’m doing, here’s something I’m doing.” But I realized it’s something I’m not really… it certainly isn’t worth the trouble.
The “Andrew Sullivans of the world” (who took the actor to task for his gay slurs) just rely on controversy.
The one thing I wanna say is, the Andrew Sullivans of the world, this is what they rely on. They rely on people that make missteps that they can castigate people for and beat their drums over.
Maybe the problem is Andrew Sullivan.
And honestly I say this to you genuinely, if Sullivan’s saying I’m guilty of a prosecutable offense, if he reads into what I said and sees that I was calling on someone to do this because he was gay, I feel sorry for someone. He’s not very smart if that’s what he said.
Mr. Baldwin is done.
What I realize is in that media echo chamber thing, I just want out. I just don’t wanna deal with it anymore.
