“Reports of the legacy media’s demise have not been exaggerated. Trump broke American journalism; and it is likely to get worse as power and influence shifts toward platforms that honor algorithms more than truth,” writes Charlie Sykes. For reasons that none of us who live in plain, unvarnished reality could discern, the mainstream media chose to sanewash all of Donald Trump’s lies. From the beginning. Now, perforce, they have to report the plain facts. Except now, it’s too late. Now we’re in for another four-year haul. May God help us. But I doubt that He will, because God’s biggest gift to us is free will. We can choose to create a paradise, or a living Hell or anything in between. We have chosen this election cycle to choose the unthinkable. Less than a week from Election Day, the lies are starting to be exposed. Wait for the Wall Street Journal headline to come up in this video, because it is a doozy.
Hey, MAGA. How does it feel to be in the #FAFO stage? pic.twitter.com/Mg7STbsaR4
— 💙🌒September🌕Rayne🌘💙 (@Lippyaddiction) November 11, 2024
Isn’t that something? “Executives say Americans, not foreign countries, will pay the tariffs.” Like this is NEWS? Like it hasn’t always been precisely this way? But hey, when you’re used to sanewashing Trump’s bullshit then I guess you have to start back on the road to reality somehow. Baby steps, right?
What has happened to the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, in particular, has been shocking. The Journal has always had a Republican slant editorially, but that said, they did some first class journalism. They got the facts right. The Journal broke the Stormy Daniels story, you may recall. But Trump broke their backs because the choice was a stark and binary one: You either report accurately what Trump is saying and doing, OR, you come up with some watered down, milquetoast narrative, so that you won’t lose access to him. The best description I heard of Trump’s impact on media was from the Dallas Morning News, in 2016. They said, “It’s like trying to photocopy a document an inch thick, made of cardboard. The machine simply wasn’t built for that and so of course it breaks.” And lo, so it came to pass.
In the end, the corporate need for access and corporate greed won out over ethics in journalism. That is not the fault of journalists, that is the fault of ownership and management. The bottom was hit last week when the Times wrote, “Trump Assails Liz Cheney and Imagines “Guns Shooting At Her.” Matt Drudge wrote the truth, “Trump Calls For Cheney’s Execution.” It is a sad and sorry day when Matt Drudge is a more reliable chronicler of the day’s events than the Grey Lady herself, the “paper of record” for the United States.
I do not pretend to know what is going to happen to the legacy media. That is part of our collective cultural wreckage, stemming from the fact that a shrinking Republican party decided to select a liar and a lunatic as their standard bearer. That decision got a great many balls in motion and we’re still waiting to see how and where they fall, like some Bizarro World graph of a molecule never before seen. Trump created a new element in politics and guess what? It’s the equivalent of plutonium, unstable as hell, and you and I are going to watch things blow up.
Democracy Dies In Darkness, we are assured by the Washington Post. And they have watched the darkness fall because the mainstream media has never reported accurately on Donald Trump. This started back in 2015. His outrages were normalized and pushed and pulled into a political model, rather than simply reporting, “This guy is batshit. He has no business running for president of the United States.”
The media system was never built for such a creature as Trump, who broke it and then got right-wing media percolating into an industry all its own. And that’s who the people who voted for Trump listened to.
And now, you, me, the mainstream media, anybody who knows the truth, is watching positively asinine headlines from one of the pillars of journalism, the Wall Street Journal, explain that yes, Virginia, the consumer pays the tariff, the cost is passed down to them. And Donald Trump lied his orange ass off, and the mainstream media didn’t sound the clarion call and call him out on it then and there.
Better late than never? I guess we’re going to find out. Because there is no turning back now. If Trump does in fact implement his plans — you know those plans that were going to cause us “temporary hardship” — people will find out how tariffs work. And a lot of other things. Musk is half right about the temporary hardship.
If elected, Trump has vowed to put Musk in charge of a “government efficiency commission,” which would identify supposedly wasteful programs that should be eliminated or slashed. During a telephone town hall last Friday, Musk said his commission’s work would “necessarily involve some temporary hardship.”
Well, okay. We’re here now and we’re ready for the *temporary hardship.* I’ve got my freezer stocked and all kinds of dried beans and what have you and I always stockpile lots of toilet paper, tissues, and the like, after the COVID debacle taught me that lesson, that simple commodities can become precious ones if supply chains get interrupted.
But MAGA is not ready for the temporary hardship. They actually believe their cult leader. They think that he’s got some sure fire jimcrack way of cutting through all the government tape, and that for unexplained reasons, nobody else has figured out how simple it is, other than Trump. So that’s what MAGA has bet the farm on, doing things Trump’s way, and living in a perfect society.
Trump has promised MAGA a “golden age.” They’re going to find themselves in the same boat as prospectors, who finding pyrite and thinking it was gold, found themselves — having gone through their money and come up with nothing. Banking on a fantasy of sudden riches.
We don’t know what’s coming but we do know it will be memorable. A fascinating chapter in the history of this country is about to be written. And you are there, as Edward R. Murrow used to intone from London. Yes. We are here. May God help us.
Your reference to, and to quote “… Trump broke American journalism; and it is likely to get worse as power and influence shifts toward platforms that honor algorithms more than truth,” writes Charlie Sykes …” in a sense this positively acknowledging that Trump wants America to put Trump first in that Trump thinks he has a mandate to install and secure a ‘less American America’. Why? F*ck answering that. Just resist! Resist! Resist! this blight; this cancer. Conquer it!
I’m already looking at sending flowers to the mainstream media, because at this point I am thinking that mainstream journalism has died. Nobody can handle the real truth anymore and it’s painful to see and hear. I only get my news from a very little bit of CNN, and here. I can’t stand anything else anymore. Nothing can be trusted.
On a completely different note, thanks for the reminder of getting dry goods. My focus has been too narrow amd there are definitely other things we need to get before it’s too late.
Temporary hardship? Temporary, my ass. It’s going to be like that famous rabbit who keeps going and going and …..
Well Susan, maybe a “little bit of CNN” but I suggest bigger bits of MSNBC too. Lawrence O’Donnell has long been a beacon of journalistic integrity, and you should check out his broadcasts before Trump’s media Gestapo comes for him. Same for Nicolle Wallace, Rachel Maddow, Chris Hayes, Ari Melber and Joy Reid. There are still actual journalists, with real standards of decency and truthtelling, in mainstream media, well worth looking for. The rot is on the Right and in the boardrooms.
I agree with Jarvis Wellesley 100%
The media wanted that disaster back in office because THEY make money and their owners get bigger tax cuts. So why report the truth now??? I’m baffled. But, report the truth they did. At least this one time. A part of me is getting some very tiny satisfaction over the magat tears that are starting and will become like the giant faucet tyrant says Canada has. But we will all suffer. I’m trying to buy enough to get through some of the hardship. Otherwise it will be belt tightening. Our financial advisor congratulated us on doing such a good job getting to where we are financially. He said we can go into retirement and do everything we planned. Not now. It may or not all be gone in short order but there won’t be enough left to be worth much and I don’t plan on a decent retirement after breaking our bodies, destroying our health working so hard to get here. But the maga tears…delicious!!! Cry harder magats! Cry harder!
Medias touch as a couple of great videos. One has a song about cost of egg and the other is explaining how magats are waking up, very slowly, to the fact that tariffs hurt people. Bot funny and very sad. Too little far too late. But the song is most excellent, as is the singer’s comments after the song. Worth looking into. Maybe you all already have.
Search engine companies are reporting the #1 search right now is “what are tariffs?” 🤪 Yah, ‘Murricans, way to go! Trying to get the number off that bus after Trump already threw you under it!! 🤬
NOW they search.
damndamndamn damn ignorant fools.
The Fourth Estate, owned by one-percenters, shirked their duties and their integrity in exchange for profiteering off of Donald Trump’s traitorous ass, effective June 16, 2015.
Not one televised news organization provided the information American citizens needed in order to shut him down.
Donald Trump has a VERY long history of bankruptcy as a business modality, dozens of lost lawsuits and settlements; he’s an adjudicated rapist; there are over twenty-four ADDITIONAL credible accusations of sexual harassment, assault, and rape against him, including the rape of a thirteen-year-old girl. He’s got 34 felony convictions; he and the Federalist Society packed SCOTUS with MAGA sycophants; the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025’s regressive policies are projected to cost the American people immense pain and suffering, and they do not care if Donald Trump’s around or not – they have JD Vance, who is fully prepared and invested in pushing those policies.
Donald Trump is also a shit negotiator. He and Mike Pompeo orchestrated the shitshow in Afghanistan, by “negotiating” with the TALIBAN, not the Afghanistan government, repatriating 5,000 VERIFIED terrorists AND returning millions of dollars – to the Taliban.
He’s a racist, sexist, xenophobic, antisemitic, anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant, asshole who owes Putin gawd-only-knows what, and who aspires to be a despot.
This won’t end well.
Trump couldn’t pass a junior high American history class (at least in my Catholic girl’s school), so he likely doesn’t understand ?how’s tariffs work. But his advisors do. My stomach started hurting after he appointed Miller.