Wednesday open thread: Will no one think of the mass media?!

 

There's a reason I have yet to leave Twitter, and why, in fact, I returned to active posting, if not as much as I used to. I don't engage with trolls and bots. They're not worth the time. But the great and the good like NPR's David Folkenflik? Yes, they deserve every amount of grief they get for takes like this.

Here is the thread to which Folkenflik was responding, from media critic Jeff Jarvis. Jarvis' basic thesis is that the media is broken, and its demands to be treated as the funnel through which information flows to voters is undeserved and untenable. The press for decades has slowly surrendered its role as the fourth estate which holds the powerful to account. While Donald Trump has been descending into dementia for the past two years, the press has ignored that fact, instead focusing on President Joe Biden's cognitive abilities. And, again, this began when Pres. Biden took away the media's shiny war toy of Afghanistan. After that unforgivable act, and the opprobrium and dishonesty with which the press reported on the evacuation, never mentioning that this withdrawal had been negotiated by its darling Trump, Pres. Biden never recovered. The media was now on a warpath against him. (Ironic, yes.)

Now this same press is demanding that Vice President Kamala Harris conduct a press conference, sit down with the major organs of the Beltway media, jump through all the hoops which they made Pres. Biden jump through, in a cruel taunt.

However, VP Harris is doing none of that. And while Pres. Biden's eschewing of the Tiffany networks and newspapers sealed his doom, the same isn't happening to her. As Jarvis states:

In a subsequent tweet:

VP Harris isn't "avoiding" the press. She and her team have simply come to the conclusion that speaking to it in the way it wants to be spoken to brings them no benefit. They won't report on policy, but on cosmetics. They won't inform, but try to grab headlines. The press is no longer in the news business, but the infotainment business.

There are still great journalists doing great work. But now you find them in places like ProPublica. You find them on Substack, as with Dan Rather. You find them on YouTube with citizen journalists. The legacy media is relying on faded glamor and credibility. It has torched all of its credibility over the past decades, as merger after merger creates a media landscape in which profit, not public service, is the first consideration.

Folkenflik doth protest too much. In the comments, he tries to be reasonable and say, "Hey, I criticize the media, too!" But his initial response to Jarvis was nothing more than the usual ass-covering, exalting the media's sanctity as the final arbiter of truth. Those days are gone. No one owes an ounce of deference to our media. When Donald Trump was calling it "the enemy of the people", it crawled supinely to him over and over again, like gimps wallowing in pleasure at the punishment meted out by Mistress Donald. If the media had done its purported job in 2016, Trump would have lost. But it took the candy of Wikileaks and the DNC emails and drew its long-term vendetta against Hillary Clinton to its final conclusion. They dystopia through which we're living is in large part due to the legacy press. And we won't forget.

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