There are still individual journalists at some of the large media outlets doing good work (as you called out) but for several years now I’ve been unable to stomach the ‘both sidism’ or outright support for the slide we’re seeing. Having canceled my subscription to both the NYT and WaPo 2 years ago I now support a dozen independent journalists and a smattering of other sources like the Guardian, ProPublica, MoJo, TNR and others.
Consolidation of oligarch’s ownership of our newspapers seems to preclude a return to anything like independent journalism for them. Smaller sources like the ones I see mean a smaller audience, and this just helps the truth to fracture along readership lines.
The big papers have lost me, and I don’t know who they’ve held on to. But I no longer feel we see the same reality.
I have family in Cincinnati and visit occasionally, and at least some of them would agree with you (the ones not watching Fox). I understanding the Enquirer has become a shell of what it used to be, more like a ‘grocery store tabloid’, one has said.
The same has happened in San Francisco which is now effectively a one-newspaper town. I was a critic of the Chronicle when the De Young family owned it (for 134 years), but that was a golden era of journalism in retrospect. Under Hearst ownership, it, too, has shrunk to little more than an emaciated grocery store tabloid in which local trivia fills the front page while vital national and international news carried by wire services is buried in the rear. Virtually all columnists are gone and I hear that the newsroom is all but empty now.
The Irish Times is the newspaper of record for Ireland and reminds me of what great journalism is and can do to keep a nation informed and democracy alive.
“I disagree with those who have suggested that news organizations such as mine should cast aside neutrality and directly oppose his reelection.” Of utmost importance is journalistic independence, he has frequently said.
This comment is absolutely absurd and irresponsible. Journalistic independence? These clowns continue to ignore the fact that Trump and his regime do not care about journalistic independence and want the current crop of traditional journalists replaced by more FOX News style propaganda. And many outlets are obliging. See Bari F’in Weiss as the head of CBS News. That’s a clown show. By covering him with kid gloves they are helping him realize that goal and they’re too stubborn to change or even notice it. Their soft coverage will be the death of all of them if they don’t change. This regime has already captured the WaPo and CBS News. Again, comments like this show how much trouble we are in.
To many though Margaret, including me, being "disappointed" isn't enough.
You and other good folks like you - folks who have been and are in positions of authority yet somehow still retain integrity - almost assuredly know enough about folks like Kahn, A.G., & Jeff Bezos to be *seriously* damaging to them. To my mind, it's long past time to pull the trigger on that metaphorical gun and metaphorically shoot folks like them in the leg - or the crotch.
The arbiters of journalism were warned. They not only did they do nothing. They actively fought against doing anything, in part, because they didn't and still haven't personally felt the pain.
So? Make them feel the pain in ways they cannot ignore, so that they finally act in the correct fashion to fight these fascist monsters.
And if they still don't come around? Well, they shoot horses dead for less. If some info would come out that would suddenly force Kahn, or even A.G., to step down & shoot dead their professional careers, I'm sure someone else will be put into the roles they now hold. The Washington Post has had lots of turmoil, but none of that has truly hit Bezos personally. If it did, he - or his investors - might actually find a few grains of integrity and do the correct things.
I'd rather we weren't in this predicament. I'm not in any way being flippant or enjoying this. Living through competitive authoritarianism was NOT on my list of things I wanted to do in this life. But thanks in large part to the people who couldn't be bothered to do the hard things - like A.G. & Bezos - we're here. So my give-a-damn is somewhat busted when it comes to being polite to and about people like them.
Of course, I've been saying similar for roughly 20 years to try to prevent the current reality, and it clearly wasn't enough.
That said, no one can say honestly we weren't warned.
*I* warned people.
Solid piece Margaret. Just wish it'd come a lot sooner.
There is a grim karma in Trump's latest "enemies list," which includes the Washington Post. Jeff Bezos, this is what your groveling bought you. Was it really worth it? Are you ashamed? Well, no, you're probably too busy looking for a city to rent for your first anniversary party. (Try Vegas, they really need the business).
Ok so these big boys are sorely compromised but surely there are some still solid news organizations who haven’t been bought out by the big, ugly boys and girls who just want to play house with each other’s egos. Who would you recommend we go to?
You bemoan the corporate media’s lapse into stenography, but stenography would be a marked improvement over much of the coverage we get, where Trump’s open, explicit racism is described as “a long-held fascination with genetics,” to quote one example. The active euphemism and sanewashing are rampant.
Great column. Two days ago, in commenting upon on Lulu Garcia-Navarro's infuriating interview with Manchin, Flake, and Smith, I referred to Manchin as a "a morally defective quisling". The NYTIMES refused to run it. Proves your point.
It will be a long journey out of the last ten years. When a country willingly accepts fascism, the moral blight is immense and the failure of guardian institutions from the press to the churches to the financial institutions won’t be cleaned up quickly, neatly or perhaps ever. The first step though, and one I fear won’t be taken, is an admission of those failures, an identification of capitulation and criminal (paying a bribe is as much of a crime as taking one) and civil liability (recouping the monetary losses to the USA caused by constitutional violations, as well as private lawsuits for fraud and violations of statutes. There will be a strong effort to “move forward” led by the capitulators in the corporate press, law and tech bros orbits. There will be a call for leadership by venerable men, like Merrick Garland, to help sort out our institutions with slow walking tut tuts. There will be great praise for the resiliency of our “democracy“ in defeating Trumpism for a term or two. But there will be no recognition that Trumpism is just the latest manifestation of white supremacy, anti-intellectualism, and antiscience superstitions that have hindered the American dream since its founding. Instead of this half baked establishment chorus, we must tear down Trump‘s ballroom, Mar-a-Lago garden, and “arc“ as well as change (not reform) the Supreme Court and attack the corporate press, not only verbally, but through any trust laws, and uses of those same laws to take on the oligarchy. Only then there will be a beginning and a renewal.
Thank you! I agree with so much you say. And yet, I struggle with the thought of how to divide our collective energy, as I feel we will need virtually every bit of it to deal with the disintegration of the climate and the economy. We need to do our utmost to help all (including ourselves) who will be severely impacted by the crises on these fronts, crises which are already showing their very serious teeth to those paying attention.
A mission statement seems like such a simple idea, and yet I think that’s absolutely what’s needed at the largest media companies, (if it’s not written by ChatGPT, lol)
One of the biggest differences I’ve noticed in reading my favorite journalists on Substack compared to columnists in a newspaper, is that independent journalists report more on what’s actually happening on the ground. The big organizations’ coverage always seems “produced.” And as we watch one merger after another, it’s clear that informing the public is no longer the objective.
Thank you for all your efforts, Margaret, to keep us informed and hold the media to account. I appreciate your work very much.
I wish you would post more often. I'm 75 and living on fumes, but I still have the fire of freedom that my family fought for in 1916 Dublin.
I would subscribe, but, like the rest of America, I am broke.
For 50 years I worked in journalism (at Publishers Weekly and IrishCentral.com) and ended up writing books about long-dead Irish revolutionaries (mostly Michael Collins) and I just don't understand what is going on in this once great country.
It's not neutrality to leave context out of stories that the president is in serious decline and the country is not a democracy anymore. It's not neutrality to write headlines that minimize or misdirect what is really happening. We need more news leaders like Katharine Graham. She understood when a President was a threat and wasn't afraid to publish stories about it. Reporters need to report and publishers need to let them.
"The GOP is a neo-fascist movement but the MSM will continue to try to define them within the U.S. democratic tradition even as they openly demonstrate their contempt for it and refuse to be constrained within its normative processes".
The writing was on the wall back then but we're a complacent country in general and no institution is more complacent that the mainstream political media.
As for Kahn's and Sulzberger's 'traditional impartiality', it only exists in their dogmatic self-mythology. In reality, the legacy media has been serving up asymmetrical coverage biasing the right and their authoritarian leanings for at least 50 years. And they've been pandering to the right-wing base for all that time as well.
The failure of the political MSM didn't begin when Trump came down the escalator, just as the GOP didn't suddenly become fascist when he entered the scene. The character of both those institutions was well established decades before. The Trump years merely fully exposed what was already there.
I certainly agree that the media has failed, and continues to fail, to cover Trump properly. I was struck by something Maria Ressa wrote in her book "How to Stand Up to a Dictator" (p. 72),
"A good journalist doesn't look for balance-as when, say, a world leader commits a war crime or outright lies to his or her citizenry-because that would create a false equivalence. When a journalist confronts the powerful, it is easier to write it in a "balanced" way. But that's a coward's way out. A good journalist, for example, would not give equal time and space to known climate deniers and climate change scientists.
Good journalists lean on the side of evidence, on incontrovertible facts.
Good journalism is a professional discipline and judgement exercised by the entire newsroom operating under a strong standards and ethics manual. It means having the courage to report the evidence even if it gets you in trouble with the powers that be. The words impartiality and balance are dangerous when used outside this context, often hijacked by those with vested interests. "
Agreed. Where is the follow-up to the dismantling of USAID? That’s costing lives and hurting the US diplomatically and eventually if not immediately economically as well. That’s just one example. Every one of this administration’s acts has consequences.
Legacy Media has utterly failed to cover MAGA because they constantly repeat their talking points and don't call them lies. They also allow them to come on shows and lie. They fail to gasp that every gop policy stems from an echo chamber that is fabricated to worship the billionaires as somehow divine and demonize the poor as somehow deserving of punishment.
“Three years after 9/11, we, as a country, were still under the influence of that trauma, and we, as a newspaper were not immune. It was not a kind of patriotic rapture. It was an acute sense that the world was a dangerous place.”
The world wasn’t a dangerous place before 9-11? It quite obviously was, just for different people than us. Responding to the event so reflexively—indeed, obediently—was effectively indistinguishable from “patriotic rapture”.
And look what Biller Keller’s NYT did precisely in those three years after 9-11: they gave us Judith Miller.
The regime-adjacent capitulation from the major media is not a departure. It’s just the regime that’s different. Those publishers and editors are fundamentally agnostic about the form of government we live under. The guiding principle with them is deference to power.
Other than being an avid consumer, I have little expertise in journalism. However as a government lawyer, one stunning failure is the lack of coverage of the corruption on the Supreme Court. There was some coverage of Thomas and Alito's shocking grifting but much more is known about Robert's corruption and the ties the GOP appointees have to Leonard Leo and Project 25. There is a long term and very deliberate plan to turn this country into a Christian oligarchy. I can't recommend highly enough Lisa Graves' recent book Without Precedent: How Chief Justice Roberts and his Accomplices Rewrote the Constitution as Dismantled Our Rights.
I am aware of the extent of that corruption, but no thanks to the Times or the Post. I am familiar with it because of the work of ProPublica and various legal commentators.
The Podcast Strict Scrutiny--with three female law professors from Michigan, NYU an Penn-- has excellent (and very snarky in a good way that make you laugh while you're seething) coverage of the Supreme Court's corruption, highly recommend. And Leah Litman, one of the hosts, has a book out Lawless that also covers the court's corruption.
“The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.” - Frederick Douglass
The media has been bought…or rather, purchased.
It is up to citizen journalism to fill the void. There’s much of that here on Substack, but there’s not yet enough critical mass for it to gain much traction.
I don't know how we will return to a model where there is a large entity, with the resources to actually investigate and report, without it being at risk to intimidation by this regime or other actors.
It's why I still try to subscribe to the remaining voices I can, like The Guardian and ProPublica. But I'm fortunate that I can do this, how many can?
Thank you for trying again to articulate what so many of us see, but find difficult to express.
I think the quote from Khan may point to the disingenuous stance legacy media are taking.
“To say that the threats (to) democracy are so great that the media is going to abandon its central role as a source of impartial information to help people vote … that’s essentially saying that the news media should become a propaganda arm.”
So, the **central role** of American journalism is merely to help people vote? What if that right itself is under threat on multiple fronts? Might that not, then, be major news?
Extreme partisan gerrymandering, prison gerrymandering, systematic immigrant imprisonment and deportation from large cities (affects the census, therefore affects representation), the purchase of a major voting machine company by a former R election official, the attempts to collect unredacted voter info from state governments (could be used for intimidation) — is there not a responsibility to move beyond reporting separate news stories to note any patterns such as which party is overwhelmingly taking these actions? That’s not propaganda, that’s factual info that helps us to decide how to vote — and not reporting it may make our future votes meaningless.
And what about our other rights? Are there patterns of behavior indicating threats to them as well? Armed occupation of cities and masked thugs who assault and abduct whoever they choose without warrant — any threat to rights there, and any pattern regarding which party may be behind it? Again, not propaganda but critically important news.
In honor of Rob Reiner, let me suggest that “I do not think propaganda means what you think it means.”
The Founders didn't want *Congress* abridging freedom of the press, but they didn't foresee a time when freedom of the press would be abridged by consolidation of the news media under corporate ownership. We USians don't talk nearly enough about economic power, about its capacity -- and, these days, its eager willingness -- to hamstring and corrupt democratic institutions. From the corporate tax cuts of the Reagan years through the Citizens United decision (2010) and up to the present day, Big Money has had carte blanche to undermine democracy, and thanks to the racism, sexism, and general ignorance of a big chunk of the electorate, it has had more than enough votes to pull it off.
One reason the Guardian gets it is that it's based in the UK, where (as in Europe more generally) awareness of economic power is front and center. The European democracies have labor parties and/or social democratic parties. Not the U.S. The "big tent" Democratic Party does its damn best to marginalize anyone who talks about economic inequality or, gods forbid, uses the s-word (socialism), even when it's prefixed by "democratic." The labor movement did likewise for many decades, but that didn't save it from being gutted by the arch-capitalists of the Reagan administration and its successors.
There are still individual journalists at some of the large media outlets doing good work (as you called out) but for several years now I’ve been unable to stomach the ‘both sidism’ or outright support for the slide we’re seeing. Having canceled my subscription to both the NYT and WaPo 2 years ago I now support a dozen independent journalists and a smattering of other sources like the Guardian, ProPublica, MoJo, TNR and others.
Consolidation of oligarch’s ownership of our newspapers seems to preclude a return to anything like independent journalism for them. Smaller sources like the ones I see mean a smaller audience, and this just helps the truth to fracture along readership lines.
The big papers have lost me, and I don’t know who they’ve held on to. But I no longer feel we see the same reality.
You are in good company, with those feelings.
I have done the same, including some local media in Minneapolis.
You are lucky, Minneapolis has strong local media. I live in Cincinnati and it feels like a news desert.
I have family in Cincinnati and visit occasionally, and at least some of them would agree with you (the ones not watching Fox). I understanding the Enquirer has become a shell of what it used to be, more like a ‘grocery store tabloid’, one has said.
The same has happened in San Francisco which is now effectively a one-newspaper town. I was a critic of the Chronicle when the De Young family owned it (for 134 years), but that was a golden era of journalism in retrospect. Under Hearst ownership, it, too, has shrunk to little more than an emaciated grocery store tabloid in which local trivia fills the front page while vital national and international news carried by wire services is buried in the rear. Virtually all columnists are gone and I hear that the newsroom is all but empty now.
The Irish Times is the newspaper of record for Ireland and reminds me of what great journalism is and can do to keep a nation informed and democracy alive.
Yep, I agree 👍.
“I disagree with those who have suggested that news organizations such as mine should cast aside neutrality and directly oppose his reelection.” Of utmost importance is journalistic independence, he has frequently said.
This comment is absolutely absurd and irresponsible. Journalistic independence? These clowns continue to ignore the fact that Trump and his regime do not care about journalistic independence and want the current crop of traditional journalists replaced by more FOX News style propaganda. And many outlets are obliging. See Bari F’in Weiss as the head of CBS News. That’s a clown show. By covering him with kid gloves they are helping him realize that goal and they’re too stubborn to change or even notice it. Their soft coverage will be the death of all of them if they don’t change. This regime has already captured the WaPo and CBS News. Again, comments like this show how much trouble we are in.
I was disappointed, to say the least.
To many though Margaret, including me, being "disappointed" isn't enough.
You and other good folks like you - folks who have been and are in positions of authority yet somehow still retain integrity - almost assuredly know enough about folks like Kahn, A.G., & Jeff Bezos to be *seriously* damaging to them. To my mind, it's long past time to pull the trigger on that metaphorical gun and metaphorically shoot folks like them in the leg - or the crotch.
The arbiters of journalism were warned. They not only did they do nothing. They actively fought against doing anything, in part, because they didn't and still haven't personally felt the pain.
So? Make them feel the pain in ways they cannot ignore, so that they finally act in the correct fashion to fight these fascist monsters.
And if they still don't come around? Well, they shoot horses dead for less. If some info would come out that would suddenly force Kahn, or even A.G., to step down & shoot dead their professional careers, I'm sure someone else will be put into the roles they now hold. The Washington Post has had lots of turmoil, but none of that has truly hit Bezos personally. If it did, he - or his investors - might actually find a few grains of integrity and do the correct things.
I'd rather we weren't in this predicament. I'm not in any way being flippant or enjoying this. Living through competitive authoritarianism was NOT on my list of things I wanted to do in this life. But thanks in large part to the people who couldn't be bothered to do the hard things - like A.G. & Bezos - we're here. So my give-a-damn is somewhat busted when it comes to being polite to and about people like them.
Of course, I've been saying similar for roughly 20 years to try to prevent the current reality, and it clearly wasn't enough.
That said, no one can say honestly we weren't warned.
*I* warned people.
Solid piece Margaret. Just wish it'd come a lot sooner.
There is a grim karma in Trump's latest "enemies list," which includes the Washington Post. Jeff Bezos, this is what your groveling bought you. Was it really worth it? Are you ashamed? Well, no, you're probably too busy looking for a city to rent for your first anniversary party. (Try Vegas, they really need the business).
Kahn and Sulzberger, to name two of many, are arrogant and hidebound—not an encouraging pairing especially when both are also unimaginative.
They realize it. They're lying outright.
Ok so these big boys are sorely compromised but surely there are some still solid news organizations who haven’t been bought out by the big, ugly boys and girls who just want to play house with each other’s egos. Who would you recommend we go to?
You bemoan the corporate media’s lapse into stenography, but stenography would be a marked improvement over much of the coverage we get, where Trump’s open, explicit racism is described as “a long-held fascination with genetics,” to quote one example. The active euphemism and sanewashing are rampant.
That was a low point, for sure.
Great column. Two days ago, in commenting upon on Lulu Garcia-Navarro's infuriating interview with Manchin, Flake, and Smith, I referred to Manchin as a "a morally defective quisling". The NYTIMES refused to run it. Proves your point.
Facts are facts!
It will be a long journey out of the last ten years. When a country willingly accepts fascism, the moral blight is immense and the failure of guardian institutions from the press to the churches to the financial institutions won’t be cleaned up quickly, neatly or perhaps ever. The first step though, and one I fear won’t be taken, is an admission of those failures, an identification of capitulation and criminal (paying a bribe is as much of a crime as taking one) and civil liability (recouping the monetary losses to the USA caused by constitutional violations, as well as private lawsuits for fraud and violations of statutes. There will be a strong effort to “move forward” led by the capitulators in the corporate press, law and tech bros orbits. There will be a call for leadership by venerable men, like Merrick Garland, to help sort out our institutions with slow walking tut tuts. There will be great praise for the resiliency of our “democracy“ in defeating Trumpism for a term or two. But there will be no recognition that Trumpism is just the latest manifestation of white supremacy, anti-intellectualism, and antiscience superstitions that have hindered the American dream since its founding. Instead of this half baked establishment chorus, we must tear down Trump‘s ballroom, Mar-a-Lago garden, and “arc“ as well as change (not reform) the Supreme Court and attack the corporate press, not only verbally, but through any trust laws, and uses of those same laws to take on the oligarchy. Only then there will be a beginning and a renewal.
Thank you! I agree with so much you say. And yet, I struggle with the thought of how to divide our collective energy, as I feel we will need virtually every bit of it to deal with the disintegration of the climate and the economy. We need to do our utmost to help all (including ourselves) who will be severely impacted by the crises on these fronts, crises which are already showing their very serious teeth to those paying attention.
A mission statement seems like such a simple idea, and yet I think that’s absolutely what’s needed at the largest media companies, (if it’s not written by ChatGPT, lol)
One of the biggest differences I’ve noticed in reading my favorite journalists on Substack compared to columnists in a newspaper, is that independent journalists report more on what’s actually happening on the ground. The big organizations’ coverage always seems “produced.” And as we watch one merger after another, it’s clear that informing the public is no longer the objective.
Thank you for all your efforts, Margaret, to keep us informed and hold the media to account. I appreciate your work very much.
I appreciate this, Yvonne.
Margaret,
I look forward to your weekly email.
I wish you would post more often. I'm 75 and living on fumes, but I still have the fire of freedom that my family fought for in 1916 Dublin.
I would subscribe, but, like the rest of America, I am broke.
For 50 years I worked in journalism (at Publishers Weekly and IrishCentral.com) and ended up writing books about long-dead Irish revolutionaries (mostly Michael Collins) and I just don't understand what is going on in this once great country.
Keep up your good work and God bless.
Slan,
Dermot
Will keep in mind. Hang in there and thanks for reading.
It's not neutrality to leave context out of stories that the president is in serious decline and the country is not a democracy anymore. It's not neutrality to write headlines that minimize or misdirect what is really happening. We need more news leaders like Katharine Graham. She understood when a President was a threat and wasn't afraid to publish stories about it. Reporters need to report and publishers need to let them.
I first tweeted this out in 2020:
"The GOP is a neo-fascist movement but the MSM will continue to try to define them within the U.S. democratic tradition even as they openly demonstrate their contempt for it and refuse to be constrained within its normative processes".
The writing was on the wall back then but we're a complacent country in general and no institution is more complacent that the mainstream political media.
As for Kahn's and Sulzberger's 'traditional impartiality', it only exists in their dogmatic self-mythology. In reality, the legacy media has been serving up asymmetrical coverage biasing the right and their authoritarian leanings for at least 50 years. And they've been pandering to the right-wing base for all that time as well.
The failure of the political MSM didn't begin when Trump came down the escalator, just as the GOP didn't suddenly become fascist when he entered the scene. The character of both those institutions was well established decades before. The Trump years merely fully exposed what was already there.
The tweet- prescient. But that was when I was still hopeful that decency would rise to dominate.
I certainly agree that the media has failed, and continues to fail, to cover Trump properly. I was struck by something Maria Ressa wrote in her book "How to Stand Up to a Dictator" (p. 72),
"A good journalist doesn't look for balance-as when, say, a world leader commits a war crime or outright lies to his or her citizenry-because that would create a false equivalence. When a journalist confronts the powerful, it is easier to write it in a "balanced" way. But that's a coward's way out. A good journalist, for example, would not give equal time and space to known climate deniers and climate change scientists.
Good journalists lean on the side of evidence, on incontrovertible facts.
Good journalism is a professional discipline and judgement exercised by the entire newsroom operating under a strong standards and ethics manual. It means having the courage to report the evidence even if it gets you in trouble with the powers that be. The words impartiality and balance are dangerous when used outside this context, often hijacked by those with vested interests. "
Agreed. Where is the follow-up to the dismantling of USAID? That’s costing lives and hurting the US diplomatically and eventually if not immediately economically as well. That’s just one example. Every one of this administration’s acts has consequences.
Legacy Media has utterly failed to cover MAGA because they constantly repeat their talking points and don't call them lies. They also allow them to come on shows and lie. They fail to gasp that every gop policy stems from an echo chamber that is fabricated to worship the billionaires as somehow divine and demonize the poor as somehow deserving of punishment.
The Bill Keller quote is predictably inane:
“Three years after 9/11, we, as a country, were still under the influence of that trauma, and we, as a newspaper were not immune. It was not a kind of patriotic rapture. It was an acute sense that the world was a dangerous place.”
The world wasn’t a dangerous place before 9-11? It quite obviously was, just for different people than us. Responding to the event so reflexively—indeed, obediently—was effectively indistinguishable from “patriotic rapture”.
And look what Biller Keller’s NYT did precisely in those three years after 9-11: they gave us Judith Miller.
The regime-adjacent capitulation from the major media is not a departure. It’s just the regime that’s different. Those publishers and editors are fundamentally agnostic about the form of government we live under. The guiding principle with them is deference to power.
Other than being an avid consumer, I have little expertise in journalism. However as a government lawyer, one stunning failure is the lack of coverage of the corruption on the Supreme Court. There was some coverage of Thomas and Alito's shocking grifting but much more is known about Robert's corruption and the ties the GOP appointees have to Leonard Leo and Project 25. There is a long term and very deliberate plan to turn this country into a Christian oligarchy. I can't recommend highly enough Lisa Graves' recent book Without Precedent: How Chief Justice Roberts and his Accomplices Rewrote the Constitution as Dismantled Our Rights.
Thank you for the recommendation!
I am aware of the extent of that corruption, but no thanks to the Times or the Post. I am familiar with it because of the work of ProPublica and various legal commentators.
The Podcast Strict Scrutiny--with three female law professors from Michigan, NYU an Penn-- has excellent (and very snarky in a good way that make you laugh while you're seething) coverage of the Supreme Court's corruption, highly recommend. And Leah Litman, one of the hosts, has a book out Lawless that also covers the court's corruption.
“The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.” - Frederick Douglass
The media has been bought…or rather, purchased.
It is up to citizen journalism to fill the void. There’s much of that here on Substack, but there’s not yet enough critical mass for it to gain much traction.
Also, most independent journalists don’t have the horsepower to do major investigative projects.
I don't know how we will return to a model where there is a large entity, with the resources to actually investigate and report, without it being at risk to intimidation by this regime or other actors.
It's why I still try to subscribe to the remaining voices I can, like The Guardian and ProPublica. But I'm fortunate that I can do this, how many can?
True, but I’m not sure “the little guys” care as much about facts as “feel” …
Thank you for trying again to articulate what so many of us see, but find difficult to express.
I think the quote from Khan may point to the disingenuous stance legacy media are taking.
“To say that the threats (to) democracy are so great that the media is going to abandon its central role as a source of impartial information to help people vote … that’s essentially saying that the news media should become a propaganda arm.”
So, the **central role** of American journalism is merely to help people vote? What if that right itself is under threat on multiple fronts? Might that not, then, be major news?
Extreme partisan gerrymandering, prison gerrymandering, systematic immigrant imprisonment and deportation from large cities (affects the census, therefore affects representation), the purchase of a major voting machine company by a former R election official, the attempts to collect unredacted voter info from state governments (could be used for intimidation) — is there not a responsibility to move beyond reporting separate news stories to note any patterns such as which party is overwhelmingly taking these actions? That’s not propaganda, that’s factual info that helps us to decide how to vote — and not reporting it may make our future votes meaningless.
And what about our other rights? Are there patterns of behavior indicating threats to them as well? Armed occupation of cities and masked thugs who assault and abduct whoever they choose without warrant — any threat to rights there, and any pattern regarding which party may be behind it? Again, not propaganda but critically important news.
In honor of Rob Reiner, let me suggest that “I do not think propaganda means what you think it means.”
Thanks, Kathy, and yes on Reiner.
Thank you- awesome.
The Founders didn't want *Congress* abridging freedom of the press, but they didn't foresee a time when freedom of the press would be abridged by consolidation of the news media under corporate ownership. We USians don't talk nearly enough about economic power, about its capacity -- and, these days, its eager willingness -- to hamstring and corrupt democratic institutions. From the corporate tax cuts of the Reagan years through the Citizens United decision (2010) and up to the present day, Big Money has had carte blanche to undermine democracy, and thanks to the racism, sexism, and general ignorance of a big chunk of the electorate, it has had more than enough votes to pull it off.
One reason the Guardian gets it is that it's based in the UK, where (as in Europe more generally) awareness of economic power is front and center. The European democracies have labor parties and/or social democratic parties. Not the U.S. The "big tent" Democratic Party does its damn best to marginalize anyone who talks about economic inequality or, gods forbid, uses the s-word (socialism), even when it's prefixed by "democratic." The labor movement did likewise for many decades, but that didn't save it from being gutted by the arch-capitalists of the Reagan administration and its successors.