That’s right, here’s another segment on politics. If you are easily enraged and/or possess bad opinions, you should probably stop reading now. I have more interesting content elsewhere and upcoming.
Sometimes I like to think about the various ways our media failed to convince people that Trump was a bastard. It shouldn’t have been hard. The shit that guy was spewing daily should have tipped off a lot more decent people that something very wrong was happening to our nation. I suppose it is more than possible that a lot of decent people are also closeted shit eaters, but you also have legitimately thoughtful people tolerating an idiot. I think a primary cause of the wide scale Trump blindness was the simple fact that the majority of people don’t read the news. A lot of people don’t really watch the news either, and your weekday morning TV newscasts just aren’t going to report on anything that isn’t a major press conference or a crime.
Keeping up with the government with your standard news programming is like trying to read a book under a white strobe light. Anyway, when people do watch the news, it’s probably Fox News’s opinion programming. To most Americans, Tucker Carlson is the news. Last I checked, his show was the highest rated on television, clocking in at over 4 million viewers last June (go check Forbes). Fox News played long segments of Trump speaking as little as possible, for obvious reasons. If you try to extend Trump’s pithy sound clips, you reveal nonsense. The “Sleepy Joe” memes that buzzed around the 2020 election would irk me because just two minutes of hearing Trump speak reveals a level of dementia that made my own poor grandmother (god rest her soul) sound like she was giving a college lecture.
The main thing I want to stress in this post is that America’s disenfranchisement from strong journalism is not accidental. It’s tactical. Smart politicians have been picking away at the public perception of journalists for decades, and we are starting to reap the fruits of this effort. Vast news deserts are spreading across the nation, where local reporting is dead and only national level news is available. People start to drink up the Fox News/CNN Koolaid and lose sight of reality. This is great for politicians, who don’t have to sweat about investigative journalists revealing their dealings. The drop in revenue to real reporting institutions like the NY Times means that they have less funds to field journalists abroad. This is really bad for wartime newsgathering, because it’s freaking expensive to send independent journalists into the battlefield. During the Iraq war, resources were so low that a government program to send journalists with platoons was devised. In theory, the journalists could be tactically shielded from illegal, unethical, or bad-optics movements overseas. Imagine Vietnam without cameras! Well, we are still shooting people across the Atlantic and nobody really talks about it, so I suppose it’s working.
I could write a really substantial analysis here filled with facts and citations, but I’m more interested in bashing Trump. You might remember (or probably don’t) the failed 60 Minutes interview that Trump had with Lesley Stahl. During that interview, Stahl reminds Trump of a thing he said to her in response to a question about his use of the term “fake news.” Trump apparently said:
“I need to discredit you [the media] so that when you say negative things about me, no one will believe you.”
Beloved president Nixon once famously declared, “The press is the enemy.” The scary thing is that Nixon got axed for breaking the law, but modern politicians increasingly walk free from criminal and unethical activity. Trump committed Watergates like it was his job, and no amount of journalistic outrage stopped him.
Journalist bashing is old. Even good old Teddy dedicated a long speech to complaining about the “muckrakers,” the investigative journalists revealing the maladies of meatpacking, the monopolization of oil, and political bosses. In high school, we are taught that Woodrow Wilson was the happy go lucky WWI president that wanted to unite the world in his League of Nations. We don’t learn that his Seditions Act of 1918 allowed him to silence any piece of media that represented the government in a bad light. Straight censorship of the press. Don’t get me started on the 1950s.
The disaster scenario that Trump’s largely unpunished term represents is one in which the press’s role as the people’s watchdog ceases to be meaningful. The institution of journalism crashes into a heap of smarmy assholes running opinion shows and sensational reports on violent crime. Of course, good journalism is far from dead. I’d like to end this rant as I always do, by encouraging you to seek out informed news outlets and turn off Twitter. When grandpa starts huffing about the latest Fox News scandal, kindly remind him that too much TV will turn his brain to mush.
A functioning Democracy needs journalists! I fear a lot of Trumpies don’t actually give a shit about Democracy so long as they can wield some power over others.