To watch the media clean up after Fox News. Since they weren’t forced to make public apologies by Dominion, it’s right back to business as usual. Like, why is a Fox “news” correspondent (whose main job it is to ask asshole questions so they can clip it for later) in the White House press pool? Why, why, why?
There have always been climbers in journalism. (I blame Woodward and Bernstein, who made themselves the story.) You’d be surprised that many of my colleagues from way back when are now working for the national media, and some of them clawed their way up in ways that ranged from unethical to humiliating.
I’ve said this so many times: The main factor driving bad journalism is that bad journalists are not focused on delivering to the actual public, but to the inner circles of the media. Is it for the New York bureaus? The hiring authorities? If you’re doing it right, you clearly have your mind set on serving the actual citizenry.
I can think of a few off the top of my head. Julia Ainsley. Annie Lowrey. Jacob Soboroff. David Farenthold. Notice none of them have their own shows — which is good, because they wouldn’t be doing actual journalism if they spent all their time in the green room, schmoozing political celebrities. And because they’re off somewhere, doing their jobs, you might not have heard of them. (I will say that, a lot of the time, MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle does a pretty good job. You can tell she works her own sources, unlike many talking heads whose content is handed to them by their producers.)
Anyway, in the Before Times, when it suddenly became treasonous to question a questionable war, we watched how badly journalists in general dealt with pressure. They hopped to and prominently wore their American flag pins on the air, and took everything the Bush Administration presented to them as fact. To this day, most of them can’t make their mouths move to make sounds that would indicate skepticism about Shock And Awe, which you may remember involved bombing the living crap out of densely populated civilian centers.
(I try not to watch Nicolle Wallace, because she invariably twists herself in knots comparing Trump tactics to the ethical pinnacle that was the Bush Administration, and I get flashbacks. Not to mention knowing how many of the Trump scum got their start working for Shrub!)
I remember during the war when blogs became suddenly popular, because a lot of you sensed you could not believe everything you were told. But the media worked hard to stamp us out, and here we are.
And so it goes.
