Fascist evil and its media enablers
That should be the headline in the Paper of Record, and every other news outlet in this country. But it's not.
Yesterday, Terry Moran, a correspondent with ABC News, did not have his contract renewed because of a post he made on Twitter where he called Stephen Miller a racist piece of shit. (My words. He was more circumspect.) This is the same Disney-owned ABC which made a settlement with the Wretch. There is no getting around it: He has cowed the media into obedience, for pennies on the dollar.
Meanwhile, here in LA, a CNN crew was "not-arrested", but escorted out of a protest zone by troops "for their safety".
If, say, France were undergoing what we are in the United States, our media would be braying about "democratic norms" and "chaos". Instead? It is a lickspittle to power. Jake Tapper is still on his jihad against former president Joe Biden, thinking that his narrative of decline is the most important story happening right now.
The media wanted this. It may not have been good for America, but it was great for their shareholders. Which is why if shit really gets bad, I don't care what happens to them. They have abdicated their role in our democracy.
On Bluesky last week, I was singing the praises of that old New York City ink-stained wretch, Jimmy Breslin. He did not go to journalism school. Hell, he didn't even graduate from Long Island University. But his column in the New York Daily News was appointment reading for your humble bloglord. He skewered the rich and powerful fearlessly. He skewered his own newspaper many a time. He began his career in journalism as a copyboy. That is a far cry from the demands of journalism school graduates. He explored his city, from the grubbiest streets to the most rarified of cocktail parties. But he knew what his role was. It was to speak truth to power. It wasn't to take stenography. It wasn't to take a press release, rewrite it a bit, and present it as his own work. Writers like him, and Pete Hamill, and Mike Royko, and Jack Anderson simply don't exist any longer. Or, they do. I'd like to think I and Trevor are in that mold. But there's no way we'd ever get jobs at any modern newspaper. We don't have the degrees. We don't have the obeisance to power.
Our media is pernicious to our democracy. Rather than being a tribune of the people, of holding the powerful to account, our media only does so when Democrats are in charge. When Republicans rule, they shrug, throw up their hands, and ask, "How can you report on nature?" Republicans have no agency. They just are. One can only observe, not critique. How can you assail a veritable Act of God? No, one must only look on in wonderment and stupefaction.
We will win. We will destroy and defeat these fascists. And when we do, we have to have hard conversations. Is our Constitution fit for purpose? The Framers did not predict a man like the Wretch ascending to power. And the first two amendments in our Bill of Rights have fallen to corruption. Money is not speech. Guns can be regulated. We have gone through the looking glass, and there is no going back. We must have a revolution; not of the kind that Bernie Sanders jabbers about, but one where we again work to perfect the union. Media conglomerates cannot be allowed to own our news. We must put paid to A.J. Liebling's too-on-the-nose saw: Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one. The press as a function of a democratic polity is too important to leave to the mercies of predatory capitalism. It is up to us to press play on the next step of human political and cultural evolution.