Humpday open thread: Can we talk about the Fourth Estate?

 

What can one say except this?

This piece is of a piece with, well, Trevor's piece from Monday. One would think that our vaunted Tribunes of the People wouldn't gloat so much. But no. Kaitlin just came right out and said it. They love Donald Trump. He's their meal ticket. He's the chaos agent which allows them to fill those 168 hours a week with content on their channels and websites. They get to act like serious defenders of freedom, legends and heroes in their own minds.

Shit like this is why the mass media is in freefall. How can a news consumer trust organizations which care only about their own bottom lines? These organizations abuse the protections afforded it under the First Amendment. They are supposed to inform the voters, laying out facts without fear or favor. But what they crave is spectacle. Without that, their profits decline precipitously. Of course, the cruel irony is that news consumers know the jig is up. They see what the tribunes have done; far from being the people's voice, they are nothing but part of the same corrupt pantomime, a backscratchers convention. Republicans give the media the show it not only craves, but finds indispensable to its business model. Without a steady stream of outrage, CNN, MSNBC, Fox, and the major newspapers would wither and die. Or, I should say, die more quickly; their model is a loser, and this injection of adrenaline from a second Trump regime is nothing but a delay of the inevitable.

Yes, Collins interviews well. But it's all an act. She and her paisans need Trump. Without him, they would have to report on boring governance, and they have lost the ability to do that. This is why they turned against Joe Biden as soon as he assumed office. They lost all their book deals. President Biden's White House didn't leak and give them juicy scoops. Pres. Biden himself did not hide his disdain for them. Neither did Kamala Harris. When Vice President Harris elevated content creators at the convention, the legacy media knew that a Harris Administration would be even worse for them than Pres. Biden's. Sure, Republicans call them enemies of the people. But it's all a show. Republicans and the media logroll each other. They laugh it up at Georgetown and Upper East Side cocktail parties. They sneer at the hoi polloi they are supposed to serve. 

Of all the people whom I hold in opprobrium, I hold the media in the most contempt. I scorn them because they have turned what should be a vocation into nothing but a sinecure. They are nothing but pettifogging careerists interested only in the next chance. They are confidence tricksters with expensive degrees. They are unfit to stand next to journalistic lights like Jimmy Breslin and Mike Royko, who learned their trade from the ground up, not in theoretical graduate school classes. They would gladly document their own trip to the concentration camp, as long as they received clicks and likes. Journalists the world over risk their lives to expose truths the powerful prefer hidden; more than a few lose their lives. And our vaunted press corps meekly assumes the position for "access". It's shameful, and they deserve none of the protections for which ancestors have fought and died.

This is your open thread.