Vichy Media Über Alles
We Know They’re Lying Cuz Their Lips Are Moving
This is gonna sound strange, but I don’t blame Elon Musk or Donald Trump that much for our predicament. They want what any hungry rich narcissist wants: More. They're mentally unbalanced and we didn't do enough to stop it; on some level that's on us, not the world that regularly shits these shallow husks. I certainly blame Mitch McConnell who amassed enough power to do the easiest thing and then used that power to pass the buck. But I don’t even blame that hollow suppository that much.
Those PoS were spawned by the system turned rancid. A system too cowed to call out Russian plants. Too compromised to resist GOP obstructionism. Too chummy to call Tech Bros by the villain name we used to employ, Private Equity.
In the American political system, the people are represented by two separate, not equally malevolent parties, one a compromised, self-neutered fair-weather friend of the vulnerable, women and guilty white people, the other a shell corporation for rapacious narcissistic self-dealers with little outward capacity for empathy or patience for personal consequences, and an endless appetite of outwardly weaponized self-hate.
We are the human check on their behavior, the rest of us in concert with those who watch their behavior, the media. (Most of us have other things to do.) That’s all the media exists for – to report to the people. They aren’t really even supposed to be about entertainment, outside the fact that innately curious human beings in a community are interested in safeguarding themselves and their neighbors. It's a tool for self-rule now perverted to protect oppression. Good job, media!
Which is an overly elaborate way of saying, we made the press, and now they’ve gone and prostituted themselves, betraying the people for the attentions of a sugar daddy. Their ostensible job is to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted, not suck off the wealthy and provide agitprop rationales for immoral unethical behavior. They've failed spectacularly.
The Press is Working How Its Owners Want
Sadly, our press has been captured, and their betrayal is far more egregious than that of political actors whose entire raison d'être is serving wealthy shareholders/donors, as opposed to the stakeholders who put them in office. The hope is that there are enough competing interests to keep them honest, but in a highly concentrated, heavily monopolized, cartel-friendly environs such sympathetic feedback loops never appear.
(It is often forgotten that one of the leading reasons we broke up trusts and monopolies after the war was that we discovered many had no loyalty to our country, in fact even offering preferable terms to the Nazis while enjoying the freedom of the United States.)
Once owned by families whose reputation was intertwined with the paper's, they're now owned by large corporations on which they are a small rounding error. They're keep around because controlling the news is worth far more than it costs to operate, a sort of loss-leader for authoritarianism, inasmuch as a denuded press aren't much use to anyone, a clear bit of addition by subtraction by the oligarchs.
The press has moved from the people’s watchdog to the wealthy lap hound, trading exposé for public relations and compromising the public’s understanding of present circumstances. To be clear, the press has always been an inconstant mate.
They hid stuff for presidents in the past, such as Kennedy’s improprieties, FDR’s lameness, Reagan’s dementia, etc. This slow slide that began with Vietnam and turned into the embedded units of Iraq and finally the Trump Pentagon's hand-selected press pool. Not like the Washington DC Press Pool hasn't seemed toothless enough, standing by while Trump attacks women reporters as pigs and assailing their personal character. (With colleagues like that, who needs enemies?)
Regulatory Capture of the Media
For context, we need to understand the primacy of capturing regulators in most industries. The revolving door governs so much of policy in much the same way there are still job applications but more people are hired because of who they know.
Hiring former regulators not only offers key insight and personal connections, but the recruitment process may be like a dowry judging from Yale study which found companies enjoying benefits before the person is hired. It’s how lobbying works as well, and why legislative staff will work so hard for so little pay – because they can monetize that experience in the future.
There was obviously a time, back when oligarchs William Heart and Joseph Pulitzer each owned newspapers and used them to launder their politics and attack their enemies, during the era of yellow journalism. The growth of local newspapers after the WWII (which after its initial boom were one of the collateral costs of the move to a suburban population), helped shepherd in a new age.
But even then we had selective coverage. Eventually, we got Donna Rice and the negative-partisanship, moralist attacks from the right, which has in the intervening seventy years proven to be a poisonous nest of pedophiles and abusers with serious projection issues. Who were they to point fingers?
In the eighties there began to emerge a leftist critique that the media favored the status quo and selectively gatekept what kind of views were heard. This was met by the even louder adoption of the same line of critique, but from the right. In March a German study looked at how left-leaning reporters tend to overcorrect, and right-wingers tend to protect their brand by not taking a side, prizing "a rarefied objectivity that means not taking sides, no matter who is correct." Such backbone and bald-faced asymmetry, especially available to those whose party lies serially.
(No need to discuss how most of the right’s moves are just accusing the other side of the same behavior. So get women closer to equal rights, and we’re against men. Try to ameliorate slavery and we’re accused of discriminating against whites. Any kind of remediation is impossible when those standing for the status quo holler loud enough, apparently.)
Control Their Info, Control Their Minds
The emergence of Fox News as a completely made-up counter-narrative psy-op in the same way as Tokyo Rose essentially created a straw man pretext of “you’re not covering our side” in the working-the-refs fight, which at least as a pretext, they won. The press lets Fox set the right set the news agenda and framing much of the time.
If you aren’t familiar with framing, I would encourage you to check out George Lakoff, who has been arguing for decades that the way you design your arguments is key to getting them across, and noting how Republicans take advantage of cognitive biases in much the same way marketers do. Their approach is to use emotional arguments that get people riled up to overpower the rational part that presumably would go, “oh yeah, the conservative movement is religious cult backed by billionaires, attacking the social safety net to make the lower classes a cheaper labor input and incapable of imagining a better life for themselves, meekly submitting to their dominion. They’re convinced of their innate superiority, or God wouldn’t have given them so much money.”
I will abstain from going into systems of government derived from money versus moistened bints distributing swords, and or their similarities.
The press has been in steady decline since the nineties, when newspapers went from margins in excess of 20% to losing money, but never made proper plans to address the situation, perishing before Craigslist like hair metal bands confronting Nirvana. They simply had no answer, and cut the talent to cut costs, trashing their value proposition for better (momentary) profitability, catalyzing the death spiral.
At this point, I can’t justify reading the New York Times or Washington Post, let alone pay for it. If you must, I encourage you to use this library link, so the Times never makes any money from you.
Why, you might ask, that will bankrupt them or what-not. Yeah, I know. I would rather those reporters find other employers and that the corrupt forces of Executive Editor Joe Kahn and Nepo Publisher-Empty Accomplishment Egoist, AG Sulzberger be given more money for their shamelessly bad decisions (attack Harvard’s first black woman president, at behest of private equity hounds like noted asshole Bill Ackman, whose wife is a far worse plaigirist, or their trans coverage, or their Trump coverage, or their Gaza coverage etal.)
Between the rich elitist owners sympathetic to our revolt of the billionaires, the reporters willing to compromise their ethics to sit at the table with other elites, cultivating access and a taste for wealth, and the politicians currying favor from the same in the aftermath of Citizens United super-charging the auction of policy and power, a super-coalition emerged that threatens the viability of the media in the modern age and presents an existential risk to the world's largest democracy
To be clear, I think the hunger for truth remains. The knowledge remains, in our guts, that we’re being lied to and fucked for the amusement of the wealthy, for whom their disdain is part of the joy of being rich. They won, and only frustrated fears of class war prevent them from more openly mocking the other 99%.
I trust they understand the sentiment is not only mutual but amplified in multiples they only hear from their broker. Because the inconveniences of the wealthy are nothing with the travails of the people and their pale weak-stomach phony bravado won’t prevail because the rich aren’t very tough nor very communal. Their first impulse is to save themselves and the people will literally divide and conquer. (How soon? Don't ask.) Nor do they understand the meaning of the phrase, "enough is enough."
My feeling is the current press must pay the same prices as these authoritarian agitators for egging them on. There are several ways they do it.
- Stenography. Perhaps the most egregious offense is the total surrender of their role as an informer to be a repeater station for the lies of power. “We aren’t lying, we’re merely repeating what they say,” they protest. “Uncritically,” I add. The press isn’t here to repeat what the orifices of power belch out. That’s what the press flacks do. The reporters are the people’s representatives in the parsing of this information because we can’t do it all ourselves.
This is an object lesson for the media because a lot of bright people are starting outlets for their perspectives because smart ones are so rare out there and the media is abandoning words for video. I suspect that will be another brick in their decline.
(People like to get information reading because it’s a lot denser than an audio conversation or video, though at least an audio can be listened to while otherwise engaged. I suspect podcasts and blogs of some sort, perhaps in a garden together, like on Substack, will replace news and dying social media. Gatekeepers will return for their curation skills.) - Both Sides. Just an exasperating tendency in the modern mainstream media to conflate both sides as equally valid, like stenography, again surrendering any critical aspect of the actual news itself. They mostly do this by turning everything into a sporting contest where one side is ahead. But this is life, not a sport with refs, enforcing shared rules over an essentially limited pool of participants. Arguments can have valid points on both sides without those points being equally weighty.
Imagine being in the Emergency Room and watching the nurse weigh the person with the broken arm against your gaping chest wound from a Dick Cheney misfire. Yes they both are accidents, but one is definitely of a different categoric urgency and diminishing those differences to sell an inaccurate narrative is the heart of public relations, not news-gathering.
- Context-Free. You ever heard that chestnut, “if you haven’t heard it, it’s new to you”? It’s kinda true, but also a huge lie. Nothing is going to make silent movies, urinal stalls or wearing white sheets novel. Without the context to appreciate how history returns to familiar refrains we’re doomed to repeat the same mistakes, which now appears to be why the press was corrupted in this enterprise. There’s nothing new about nazis, nationalism or misogyny that ignoring its history won’t help. I remember reading NYTimes editor Dean Baquet in a discussion explaining that being first with the story was more important than context, “we have to leave that to someone else.” I starting screaming at the kitchen table I was so irate.
Context is the very heart of information. Without it you have nothing, and carefully circumscribing the context – like not mentioning key facts (is this the 39th or 40th time Trump has promised a deal in a few days), is akin to lying. - Wait for the Book. Increasingly the chase for a big book payday has led reporters to hold off on telling the public important information that could’ve catalyzed collective action, such as recently when it came out that JD Vance agitated for the imposition of the Insurrection Act in Minnesota to crackdown on constitutionally protected speech and assembly. That’s not serving the public, it’s ratfucking us and figuring we’ll probably survive to buy the book. Jake Tapper, I'm also looking at your weak shit.
- Sanewashing / Normalizing. Daniel Moynihan in 1992 coined a powerful idea in an op-ed about "defining deviancy down." He cited Emile Durkheim in noting that there is a tendency to respond to deviancy by lowering the standards. This is very much our media's approach to Trump, continually losing interest in scandals and treating outrageous corruption as Tuesday, because, of course it is. This moving of our societal redlines because it's exhausting to report the same thing every day is a way of raising the temperature on the boiling Americans a degree at a time.
- Murc’s Law. This is arguably the most pernicious inasmuch as it passes unremarked. It notes the media tendency to assume Democrats are the only ones with agency in politics, scrutinizing them obsessively, even demanding accounting for statements from the entire breadth of the coalition, while Republican actions are treated as forces of nature and the statements of even the president can be elided away with a simple, “sorry, didn’t see/read it,” and then ignoring the interlocutor.
This asymmetric stance has turned the media into the enemy of the people. They heard Trump diminish them with the moniker and instead of taking umbrage, took it as their new assignment, currying favor like cliquish high schoolers with low self-esteem and gymnastic spines. Nobody presently in the mainstream media (with a single handful of MSNBC waivers) should ever work in news again. Tell them TMZ is hiring.
If the media won’t safeguard our freedom, we need to find those that will. Increasingly it's independent operators, but as this progresses and more become there are alternatives, I suspect we will see the modern media channels go the way of radio.
There are still people listening to radio, just like there are still people going to the movies, but I suspect the media, like Clear Channel, er, I Heart Radio execs and cinema owners can read the writing on the wall, and they don’t need a journalist for that.
"Thanks for cutting our throats asshole, get to the back of the line." Fortunately, while the scope will take a minute to replace, having people actually passionate about the news brings us much closer to a worthwhile product than a bunch of Heathers high on status. Other countries have English-speaking news; time to drop the parochialism for a better product. (For example, I read TheGuardian.com.)
It’s called creative destruction – and it’s the idea that for other things to grow, and let’s be clear, grow fast, the tall dead trees sucking up sun they no longer can use must be felled. Presently they’re so far up the wealthy’s ass, they have no idea they’re smothering, though the exterior appendages have long-since withered and died.
All hail the still-incipient news kings, whoever they prove to be. May the old MSM kings rest in piss. We must establish new standards for news organizations, and eliminate the profit motive and corporate ownership (read: conflict of interest) from the media in order to get good information, similar and related to the need to get money out of politics.
