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Posted by Proud Establishment Dem

As Rome Burns, The Fourth Estate Smiles

 


First off, it's quite telling that CNN's Kaitlan Collins is doing The Joe Rogan podcast.

But, I digress. Because it's not to whom Kaitlan is speaking but the message she is conveying. And that message is something we've long known:

Today's press loves them some Donald Trump.

They don't love him as a person, obviously. He treats them like shit. After all, it was none other than Kaitlan Collins herself who was publicly scolded by Trump on February 3rd for asking questions about Jeffrey Epstein. But Collins and her ilk don't mind the occasional reprimand if it keeps them in His Majesty's good graces. He is accessible, as Collins has shared. Always willing to take questions, even if they are shouted at him. Never mind that Trump is a malignant narcissist who enjoys nothing better than having all the attention on him. No, you see, he makes himself available to the press and that makes him a-okay in their book.

If the past decade has taught us anything, it's that our media failed us when we needed them most. When the most dangerous man ever to run for higher office enter the scene in 2015, the media had countless opportunities to bury him before he ever got started. The housing discrimination lawsuit. The use of undocumented labor. The six bankruptcies. Stiffing hundreds of contractors. Trump University. The two dozen rape and sexual assault allegations. A single one of these would have completely derailed a major party presidential candidate in previous election cycles. Hell, we lost Howard Dean because of an akward scream in 2004. But with Trump it was different. With Trump there was so much there that our media not only chose to ignore a single thing, they chose to ignore it all.

Because, as Michelle Wolf pointed out at the 2018 White House Correspondents' Dinner, the media could profit off of Trump in a way they couldn't with Democratic presidents like Barack Obama and later Joe Biden. Trump was a loose cannon but more than that he was an uncensored stream of consciousness, the likes of which had never even been close to the White House before. Not only did he answer shouted questions from journalists like Kaitlin Collins but he used social media in a way that had never been done before. All of a sudden, journalists didn't have to bide their time waiting for a sound bite that could, and likely would, be used out of context for clickbait headlines. Instead, they had unhinged rants from the so-called leader of the free world via 3 AM Twitter messages. In a landscape where consumer engagement is the most critical piece of the business model, American media had a goldmine in Donald Trump and they weren't about to let him go.

Yet it was the American people who let Trump go in November of 2020, much to the chagrin of the American media. Competency returned to the White House and with it came a professionalism that was absent from the previous administration. Joe Biden wasn't going to answer shouted questions or sit down for an in-depth piece with The New York Times. Press Secretaries Jen Psaki and later Karine Jean-Pierre weren't going to stand up and intentionally lie to the American people. There were no leaks and political infighting that were hallmarks of the Trump Administration. The Biden-Harris Administration had a job to do and that job was to restore the confidence of the American people and global leaders after four years of chaos and confusion. This meant Democrats holding the line and passing significant legislation to help the country recover better than any other from the effects of the global pandemic. Yet while that was all well and good for the American people, it wasn't what our media had experienced with the previous administration. Competence was boring and boring meant fewer book deals and TV interviews for an America media that began to complain about Joe Biden's perceived hostility towards them. Biden knew the truth that kept many journalists up at night: press conferences and sit-down interviews that nothing to do with how effective a presidential administration could be. Because of this, our media had a vendetta against Joe Biden and those in his administration. They were, quite simply, bad for business.

So when Joe Biden struggled during his debate against Donald Trump, it was knives out. The media, largely ignored for three-and-a-half years, saw blood in the water. A weakened Joe Biden meant renewed hope for their guy, Donald Trump. Never mind that Trump was now a 34-count felon with even more baggage than the first time he ran. He was back in the mix. A second Trump presidential term was every major jouranlist's wet dream. It was bringing the crazy back, but with this time even more unhinged derangement. Sure, people would be killed. Innocent families would be made to suffer. Excessive jobs would be lost. Soldiers would needless die in foreign wars. But the ratings, man, the ratings! Think about how many more journalists could see tell-all books in 2029. Think about all those shouted questions that Trump would answer with an unintelligible or irate response. Think about the newsbreaking social media posts on Truth Social in the wee hours of the morning. All that was missing from the Biden Adminstration would be back in full force with Trump. Business, specfically the business of access journalism, would be back in all its glory. 

Kaitlan Collins isn't alone in her views. We've seen the White House Press Corps bend the knee to Donald Trump time and time again since he got re-elected. Trump has consistently berated reporters, especially women of color, but there has been no shows of solidarity against his increasing misogynoir aimed at those who dare to challenge him in a public setting. While members of the press might privately recoil when one of their own is called "piggy" on Air Force One, publicly they do nothing to stand up for any of their colleagues. These journalists don't have to submit themselves to this kind of abuse yet they choose to do it because they know that being in the room with Trump will lead to a treasure trove of clickbait sound bites. Sure, the President of the United States might call you an idiot to your face. But in answering your shouted question, he has made himself accessible, and that in itself makes it all worthwhile.

Historians will look back on this time period and ask how we got here. The answer will be complex. There was the reaction to the country's first Black president, the misogyny and sexism that caused millions of Democrats to not vote for Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris, the coordinated misinformation campaign by Russia and other bad state actors, and the Horseshoe Left with its unnatural obsessions swith Bernie Sanders, Gaza, and AIPAC among others. But at the forefront of this chapter will be the complete abdication of the basic responsibility entrusted to our Fourth Estate. At a time when the country needed our media to accept and acknowledge the rising threat of facism, it instead chose to buddy up to a wannabe dictator in order to get as close to the source of the chaos as possible. Rather than raise alarm bells of this man and his army of authoritarians, our media chose instead to downplay the danger so that it could capture some deranged sound bites that could immediately make it into the next day's headlines. When it came time to decide which side they were on when fascism arrived on American shores, our media went all in with the fascists because they were the ones who better helped their business model. 

Democracy didn't die in darkness as The Washington Post warned. Democracy held on, barely. What did expire was a free and independent media that held accountable those in power. From traditional print media to news networks, the list of those that willingly bent the knee for Donald Trump is longer than a CVS receipt. They did so out of fear; not out of fear of Donald Trump's wrath but of fear of losing business and upsetting their multimillionaire corporate owners. They stayed in the room not out of principle but out of profit. They needed to be there not to question the insanity of the words being spoken by the leader of the free world but to report them back to their audience, allowing their consumers to hear firsthand just how batshit crazy this man actually is. Never was there a serious editorial asking for him to resign. Never was there a serious article calling into question his health. Never was there any sort of pushback from any media at a time when we had the most dangerous man in history occupy the Oval Office. Instead, what we had was an army of Kaitlan Collinses, all simply happy to be in the room where our modern-day Nero made decree after decree, each one more ludicrous than the last. 

But at least our Nero is generous enough to answer your shouted questions.

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