Ah! In the old(er) world we infer here, speciation took eons. My * idea* is that in the modern world with exponentially increasing access to information, this age old process has been accelerated beyond any time frame an evolutionary biologist would even consider. The guy at the T-shirt printing shop next door told me , “ I would never #$&k a ‘republican’. Wow! I thought, “ man , here we go , the fork in the road of the evolution of Homo sapiens is right before me”. 😳
The interesting thing is that the core of the Trump base are the folks that were left behind. The working man so to speak. Now they are the deplorables. When did it become fashionable to make fun of the the unfortunate? this is 18th century French aristocracy thinking at work
In the minds of the Laptop Class, aka Professional Managerial Class (PMC), the only good workers are the ones who belong to unions that donate to Democrats. The rest of them are misguided and uneducated.
By uneducated, they really mean uncredentialed. The big difference between a plumber and a digital marketing specialist is that various AI and machine-learning tools aren't going to make the plumber's job obsolete any time soon. But that digital marketing specialist making $85,000 per year to plug ads into Google and Facebook is going to get nuked because they're just a middle-man between the content production team and the ads interface.
The digital marketing manager becomes redundant once the content manager can take approved ads and tell the AI "Target females 18-25 who fall into shopping categories x, y, and z. Max spend is $0.17 per click with a total budget of $15,000 for this ad group. Email me a daily report on performance. If no clicks are generated, increase max spend to $0.21 per click." You get the idea.
As another example, when Musk took over Twitter they lost almost 80% of the existing staff either due to firing them or having them quit in protest. Turned out that 80% were mostly useless people who didn't run the servers, develop features, and punch code to make sure everything worked. I'm going to paraphrase Musk's answer to how they managed to stay afloat despite such a massive loss of human capital "It turns out that you don't actually need that many people to run Twitter if you're not trying to run a huge activist organization."
Good correction. The Democrats love public unions because they can negotiate for buying more union votes with taxpayer money. This is how Democrats have utterly captured the federal administrative state.
These Democrat bureaucrats grease the skids when Democrats are in the white house, and they lock up the brakes when a Republican is in the white house.
I am a free speech absolutist. I think the remedy to misinformation is more speech. Substack is a good example today of that remedy. However, I think the mainstream media is largely broken with respect to what the founders and our Bill of Rights intended with respect to the current state of the media... and including Big Tech that operates as publishers and not platforms.
For media to be what it supposed to be, journalists and news reporters need to be diverse in views, committed to objectivity in reporting, and should be independent with editorial control focused only on truth and facts... and not censorship for any other reason. Unfortunately the corporate consolidation of media has turned it into a tool for the corporatist cabal to manipulate public views and opinions at the same time that our education system populated the writing pools with too many upper-class, status seeking Theory clones.
The education system is a mess of radical leftist indoctrination, but there are signs that the people have had it and are working to fix the problems. I think this trend will accelerate as the virtual signaling benefits fall away and the status-seekers and social justice profiteers pivot to an anti-Theory position for reasons that it provides more profit and status. For example, we see 28 year old Coleman Hughes rising from his book attacking DEI, and Robin DiAngelo or Ibram Kendi falling from grace and being labeled neo-racists.
It is the corporate consolidated ownership of media that I think needs public policy. Today three multi-trillion dollar asset companies: Blackrock, Vanguard and State Street, together own a controlling interest in 80% of the mainstream media. And they own shares of each other. Then there are next tier investment corporations that are more minor shareholders, but own shares of Blackrock, Vanguard and State Street.... and those three own shares of the next tier financial industry corporations.
The bottom line is that Wall Street owns the mainstream media, and Wall Street is directing the mainstream media to report what is good for Wall Street. This includes influencing the electorate toward a political outcome that is better for Wall Street.
The same is true for Big Tech.
We need new anti-trust laws to break up this cross ownership corporatist cabal. The idea with freedom of the press was that it would always be majority independent and not captured and controlled to support an agenda other than delivering news and information to keep the people informed of the truth and facts.
Agree with your opening paragraphs , but your lack of understanding of Wall Street is made clear by the inaccuracies of many of the reasons that lead you to conclude that they are the bogeyman in this case. One obvious example is that no one except the fund investors themselves essentially own Vanguard, there is no cross ownership possible because Vanguard was converted by the investment giant and early advocate of index investing as essentially a not for profit entity. ( The merits of which are a discussion for another time and place. ) Perhaps you view that as a small point, but it is a glaring inaccuracy obvious to all informed investors. There is plenty to criticize about Wall Street , including horrible governance and promoting the incredibly stupid and counterproductive climate change madness under the ESG rubric, but IMHO. media concentration is due to many economic factors completely separate any sub rosa WS agenda. If you want to criticize the Wokeness of WS and many major publicly owned large corporations, the best book addressing these concerns is THE DICTATORSHIP OF WOKE CAPITAL. I highly recommend it as well researched and containing much interesting analysis and valuable data
Pints. It is written by a good friend who has spent decades commenting on and earning of the consequences of this trend in his newsletters.
Just Google the top shareholders of all the media and tech companies and large corporations, then Google the top shareholders of Blackrock, Vanguard and State Street, JP Morgan Chase, etc. Next Google the board members of these companies. Woke is a tool, including the lie of climate crisis, to deconstruct the existing global economy led by the US, to replace it with a global collectivist corporatocracy. You think Bill Gates pushing synthetic meet isn’t for the pre-bet advantage supported by this media ownership?
The Laptop Class doesn't believe in free speech, or most of the bill of rights for that matter.
Free speech leaves too much room for people to have different opinions from the Laptop Class, who rely on "experts" to back up all their preconceived notions of a perfect society.
Things get messy when the proles get to have a say in how their cities, states, and country are run. You might end up with policies that actually cater to the working-class, rather than to loyal welfare voters and upper-middle-class parasites.
Yeah, leave it to the experts to run your life. You don't really need to have free speech because your opinion isn't valuable if you don't have an expensive degree. It's very reminiscent of real-life communism, perhaps with the exception that people aren't required to work anymore.
What's the point of being an official priest of the Cathedral and not being able to lock a witch in the pillory and pelt her with garbage? Any fool can drive a fancy car to a fancy house and have money in the bank, but to be able to disguise your sadism as virtue, cloak it in political blather, and unleash it (on TV no less!) and be rewarded and appluaded—now, this is a rare thrill a peasant will never know!
Brad has hit most of the nails on the head here—Soviet America has a new and shinier Pravda with hotter spokesmodels and cooler graphics—but there's one thing I always wonder when I gaze upon our media clerisy: where does one score this mandatory accessory, "moral clarity"? If I went to J-school and graduated do I get to fold my diploma into a priest's collar? From which Mt. Sinai did these priests and prophets get their sacred tablets from?
I'm inclined to quote Exodus and repeat what the Israelites said when they were getting sick of that guy Moses, who seemed to think he was God's gift but got them lost in the desert:
Could you imagine thinking so low of another human being and feel justified, because without a doubt, you think you're so superior its unnecessary to understand their inferiors?
Apparently 30% of the American public feels this way.
Second paragraph is perfect - and the message that needs to be shoved in front of everybody around the world, from the second they open their eyes to when they close them at the end of the day.
The lack of curiosity, to say nothing of interest, in other people is going to be the death of civilization.
My daughter teases me about talking to anybody I run into during the course of the day. I repeat to her what my dad used to say when I said the same thing to him: "You're alone in the ground for a lo-o-o-o-ong time..."
Why are the spokesexperts of the Left-wing managerial class so fucking ugly and obnoxious? Are there any goddamn straight men in that parade of over credentialed whores?
Excellent post mortem, if heartbreaking. I miss journalism! I also wonder if the advent of the news-comedy genre, John Stewart's Daily Show in particular, didn't add to the rot. He's a late boomer but his influence on Millennials in my circles was profound. Snark replaced argument and anything resembling an earnest search for truth became cringe. Neither his post modern cynicism for the masses or the Maddow style outrage machine are the free press our founders were counting on. Good night and good luck.
This is an excellent obituary for the mainstream news and current affairs industry. But there is perhaps some grim comfort to be had in reminding ourselves that our "sacred airwaves" has always been delusional. 'The News' has always been a bogus concept where, for example, some murders incite months of agonising and outrage whilst others not even a mention. 'The News' has always been the natural territory of the uncurious....people seduced by the vanity that you can know what's 'really important' just by (in the old pre-internet days) switching on 'The News' for half an hour. Now you get the same narrow, tendentious crap on a permanent loop 24/7.
The great irony (tragedy in fact for our culture) is that paradoxically it is the college 'educated' avid news consumers of 'high end' (NYT, WP and Guardian) stuff end up having an even more distorted picture than those lower down the social scale with their tabloids. Thus it is that, in my country, the BBC has been pumping out its 'impartial' news grift for 60+ years to a credulous 'educated' public and thereby it has been a much more powerful political force in Britain than all the politicians put together.
It is an interesting thing to observe how the Laptop Class "elites" have such delusional views of what the working-class and middle-class wants. They could just ask, but that would require listening to the opinions and statements of icky proles, who might strongly disagree with the "highly-educated" viewpoints of the Laptop Class.
Here in Chicago, the executive editor of one of the 2 major papers, the Sun-Times, conducted a “town hall” to get input from the public on what stories should lead the news. She said she is planning more of these, in the interest of saving our democracy.
So now the news is governed by “please tell me what I can put out there as clickbait”. Of course newspaper publishing has always been a business, and must attract customers to survive, but this seems lame. I wouldn’t want to get my news from a paper so clearly pandering for readers.
Polls show that public trust in media has plummeted, and this is part of the reason why. Nobody trusts desperate people to be fair and unbiased.
Addendum- newspapers used to try to entice readers with special reports, human interest stories, in-depth features, and the like. They didn’t try to do it by slanting the actual news so blatantly.
......"unhinged eschatologists".....very nice, spot on! But really, Nicole Wallace's "sacred airwaves" thing has to be in contention for the most unintentionally hilarious news bit of the year, or the decade, which is about how long it's been since I've attempted to watch any of the talking heads.....
By democracy, they mean only the opinions and preferences of the upper-middle-class and above Laptop Class/Professional Managerial Class should be taken into account when it comes to government policies.
All this wouldn’t be so grim, if, on occasion, those people pretending to be reporters would sometimes turn & wink at their audiences, like their counterparts in Pro Wrestling.
As a sidebar to this, RFK Jr.’s retort on CNN to who is the greatest threat to democracy at present will further demonize his election chance among the “Holy”. He should out Trump Trump if he wants a solid chance to win & say directly what’s on his mind always. If there’s anyone now who’s as “Great a Threat to Democracy” as Trump, now we have second devil. With his strong Liberal leanings, he’s likely to siphon a considerable number of voters away from Biden & the the Pharasees are screaming from every news media platform they own.
Great summary. One other point that I heard Taibbi raise was the fact that due to overall declining revenues (ads are dying) and the inability to make up that loss with direct subscriptions, they also are running on far lower operating revenues than in the distant past. And with that, they can’t hire as many quality journalists to actually dig in to and present real stories so we see this cut and paste of idiotic drivel that mirrors across the publications as you’ve mentioned. Probably also even harder if you have to pay top dogs like Maddow Hollywood salaries which leaves table scraps for the journalists who are actually investigating.
In today’s “America this week” they reviewed RFK’s visit to CNN. I just reflect on the fact that because of everything your article covers we have a son of a Kennedy (not a cousin, an actual son of one of our Democratic heroes) who was not permitted to run a Democratic ticket.
When I was a young kid in the 1970s, my dad used to watch what I called the ‘fighting show’ on Sundays. It was the McNeil-Lehrer News Hour, PBS I think? Anyway, I think news and the culture would be in a much better place if the media had stuck with vigorous debate like that. Podcasts do that sometimes, but it’s just so fragmented now too few people are really aware of all sides of an issue. To our detriment.
Is it really true that Wapo lost 200k subscribers or is it propaganda perpetrated by NPR? Hard to believe that many subscriber’s would care that much. I think the claim is dubious at best. They probably made it up by multiplying claims of unsubscribing by hour on Twitter by the time passed since the non endorsement announced on Twitter.
In the hinterlands of flyover country nobody cares and Trump prevails. Make America Great Again! Fuck the Washington Post!
This was a truly great essay. I am hoping independent journalism will continue to grow. I am hoping the media keeps overstepping to the point of insanity so their lies can be called out quicker and with more force. Pre-Musk X, if you called out lies, you were shadow banned or removed altogether. It won't be as easy to lie with more and more powerful people finally opening their eyes. I hope.
If ya'll need convincing whether we're heading for civil war or speciation, just ask a Leftist to explain why folks vote for Trump.
It's enlightening. Give it a shot, it's really entertaining....and hopeless.
Ah! In the old(er) world we infer here, speciation took eons. My * idea* is that in the modern world with exponentially increasing access to information, this age old process has been accelerated beyond any time frame an evolutionary biologist would even consider. The guy at the T-shirt printing shop next door told me , “ I would never #$&k a ‘republican’. Wow! I thought, “ man , here we go , the fork in the road of the evolution of Homo sapiens is right before me”. 😳
It's happening fast!...;)
A thousand years from now TDS will be the explanation for homosapiens speciation.
It's as if we've been separated by mountains or sea, like old world monkeys.
I'm sure all Republican women just breathed a huge sigh of relief.
The interesting thing is that the core of the Trump base are the folks that were left behind. The working man so to speak. Now they are the deplorables. When did it become fashionable to make fun of the the unfortunate? this is 18th century French aristocracy thinking at work
In the minds of the Laptop Class, aka Professional Managerial Class (PMC), the only good workers are the ones who belong to unions that donate to Democrats. The rest of them are misguided and uneducated.
By uneducated, they really mean uncredentialed. The big difference between a plumber and a digital marketing specialist is that various AI and machine-learning tools aren't going to make the plumber's job obsolete any time soon. But that digital marketing specialist making $85,000 per year to plug ads into Google and Facebook is going to get nuked because they're just a middle-man between the content production team and the ads interface.
The digital marketing manager becomes redundant once the content manager can take approved ads and tell the AI "Target females 18-25 who fall into shopping categories x, y, and z. Max spend is $0.17 per click with a total budget of $15,000 for this ad group. Email me a daily report on performance. If no clicks are generated, increase max spend to $0.21 per click." You get the idea.
As another example, when Musk took over Twitter they lost almost 80% of the existing staff either due to firing them or having them quit in protest. Turned out that 80% were mostly useless people who didn't run the servers, develop features, and punch code to make sure everything worked. I'm going to paraphrase Musk's answer to how they managed to stay afloat despite such a massive loss of human capital "It turns out that you don't actually need that many people to run Twitter if you're not trying to run a huge activist organization."
So you're saying that doing yoga, holding a meeting, having lunch, relaxing on the rooftop terrace isn't essential to running Twitter?
One minor edit. "Public unions". They don t much care for the private unions either. (Though the leadership is still mostly in their pockets.)
Good correction. The Democrats love public unions because they can negotiate for buying more union votes with taxpayer money. This is how Democrats have utterly captured the federal administrative state.
These Democrat bureaucrats grease the skids when Democrats are in the white house, and they lock up the brakes when a Republican is in the white house.
Public unions have to be abolished.
I do all the time. They tell me that I am just stuck in a cult of personality... I love and worship Trump, that is why.
I am a free speech absolutist. I think the remedy to misinformation is more speech. Substack is a good example today of that remedy. However, I think the mainstream media is largely broken with respect to what the founders and our Bill of Rights intended with respect to the current state of the media... and including Big Tech that operates as publishers and not platforms.
For media to be what it supposed to be, journalists and news reporters need to be diverse in views, committed to objectivity in reporting, and should be independent with editorial control focused only on truth and facts... and not censorship for any other reason. Unfortunately the corporate consolidation of media has turned it into a tool for the corporatist cabal to manipulate public views and opinions at the same time that our education system populated the writing pools with too many upper-class, status seeking Theory clones.
The education system is a mess of radical leftist indoctrination, but there are signs that the people have had it and are working to fix the problems. I think this trend will accelerate as the virtual signaling benefits fall away and the status-seekers and social justice profiteers pivot to an anti-Theory position for reasons that it provides more profit and status. For example, we see 28 year old Coleman Hughes rising from his book attacking DEI, and Robin DiAngelo or Ibram Kendi falling from grace and being labeled neo-racists.
It is the corporate consolidated ownership of media that I think needs public policy. Today three multi-trillion dollar asset companies: Blackrock, Vanguard and State Street, together own a controlling interest in 80% of the mainstream media. And they own shares of each other. Then there are next tier investment corporations that are more minor shareholders, but own shares of Blackrock, Vanguard and State Street.... and those three own shares of the next tier financial industry corporations.
The bottom line is that Wall Street owns the mainstream media, and Wall Street is directing the mainstream media to report what is good for Wall Street. This includes influencing the electorate toward a political outcome that is better for Wall Street.
The same is true for Big Tech.
We need new anti-trust laws to break up this cross ownership corporatist cabal. The idea with freedom of the press was that it would always be majority independent and not captured and controlled to support an agenda other than delivering news and information to keep the people informed of the truth and facts.
Agree with your opening paragraphs , but your lack of understanding of Wall Street is made clear by the inaccuracies of many of the reasons that lead you to conclude that they are the bogeyman in this case. One obvious example is that no one except the fund investors themselves essentially own Vanguard, there is no cross ownership possible because Vanguard was converted by the investment giant and early advocate of index investing as essentially a not for profit entity. ( The merits of which are a discussion for another time and place. ) Perhaps you view that as a small point, but it is a glaring inaccuracy obvious to all informed investors. There is plenty to criticize about Wall Street , including horrible governance and promoting the incredibly stupid and counterproductive climate change madness under the ESG rubric, but IMHO. media concentration is due to many economic factors completely separate any sub rosa WS agenda. If you want to criticize the Wokeness of WS and many major publicly owned large corporations, the best book addressing these concerns is THE DICTATORSHIP OF WOKE CAPITAL. I highly recommend it as well researched and containing much interesting analysis and valuable data
Pints. It is written by a good friend who has spent decades commenting on and earning of the consequences of this trend in his newsletters.
Just Google the top shareholders of all the media and tech companies and large corporations, then Google the top shareholders of Blackrock, Vanguard and State Street, JP Morgan Chase, etc. Next Google the board members of these companies. Woke is a tool, including the lie of climate crisis, to deconstruct the existing global economy led by the US, to replace it with a global collectivist corporatocracy. You think Bill Gates pushing synthetic meet isn’t for the pre-bet advantage supported by this media ownership?
Very well said
The Laptop Class doesn't believe in free speech, or most of the bill of rights for that matter.
Free speech leaves too much room for people to have different opinions from the Laptop Class, who rely on "experts" to back up all their preconceived notions of a perfect society.
Things get messy when the proles get to have a say in how their cities, states, and country are run. You might end up with policies that actually cater to the working-class, rather than to loyal welfare voters and upper-middle-class parasites.
Yeah, leave it to the experts to run your life. You don't really need to have free speech because your opinion isn't valuable if you don't have an expensive degree. It's very reminiscent of real-life communism, perhaps with the exception that people aren't required to work anymore.
What's the point of being an official priest of the Cathedral and not being able to lock a witch in the pillory and pelt her with garbage? Any fool can drive a fancy car to a fancy house and have money in the bank, but to be able to disguise your sadism as virtue, cloak it in political blather, and unleash it (on TV no less!) and be rewarded and appluaded—now, this is a rare thrill a peasant will never know!
Brad has hit most of the nails on the head here—Soviet America has a new and shinier Pravda with hotter spokesmodels and cooler graphics—but there's one thing I always wonder when I gaze upon our media clerisy: where does one score this mandatory accessory, "moral clarity"? If I went to J-school and graduated do I get to fold my diploma into a priest's collar? From which Mt. Sinai did these priests and prophets get their sacred tablets from?
I'm inclined to quote Exodus and repeat what the Israelites said when they were getting sick of that guy Moses, who seemed to think he was God's gift but got them lost in the desert:
"Who made thee a prince and a judge over us?"
"Hotter spokesmodels and graphics"! Nice.
Could you imagine thinking so low of another human being and feel justified, because without a doubt, you think you're so superior its unnecessary to understand their inferiors?
Apparently 30% of the American public feels this way.
It'll take some hard times to change that
Second paragraph is perfect - and the message that needs to be shoved in front of everybody around the world, from the second they open their eyes to when they close them at the end of the day.
The lack of curiosity, to say nothing of interest, in other people is going to be the death of civilization.
My daughter teases me about talking to anybody I run into during the course of the day. I repeat to her what my dad used to say when I said the same thing to him: "You're alone in the ground for a lo-o-o-o-ong time..."
as i said above - their thinking mimics the 18th century French aristocracy.
I do love the comment about the diploma being used as a Roman (fixed it for you CP) collar.
Have to admit Moses had to deal with a lot of whiners
Why are the spokesexperts of the Left-wing managerial class so fucking ugly and obnoxious? Are there any goddamn straight men in that parade of over credentialed whores?
Excellent post mortem, if heartbreaking. I miss journalism! I also wonder if the advent of the news-comedy genre, John Stewart's Daily Show in particular, didn't add to the rot. He's a late boomer but his influence on Millennials in my circles was profound. Snark replaced argument and anything resembling an earnest search for truth became cringe. Neither his post modern cynicism for the masses or the Maddow style outrage machine are the free press our founders were counting on. Good night and good luck.
This is an excellent obituary for the mainstream news and current affairs industry. But there is perhaps some grim comfort to be had in reminding ourselves that our "sacred airwaves" has always been delusional. 'The News' has always been a bogus concept where, for example, some murders incite months of agonising and outrage whilst others not even a mention. 'The News' has always been the natural territory of the uncurious....people seduced by the vanity that you can know what's 'really important' just by (in the old pre-internet days) switching on 'The News' for half an hour. Now you get the same narrow, tendentious crap on a permanent loop 24/7.
The great irony (tragedy in fact for our culture) is that paradoxically it is the college 'educated' avid news consumers of 'high end' (NYT, WP and Guardian) stuff end up having an even more distorted picture than those lower down the social scale with their tabloids. Thus it is that, in my country, the BBC has been pumping out its 'impartial' news grift for 60+ years to a credulous 'educated' public and thereby it has been a much more powerful political force in Britain than all the politicians put together.
It is an interesting thing to observe how the Laptop Class "elites" have such delusional views of what the working-class and middle-class wants. They could just ask, but that would require listening to the opinions and statements of icky proles, who might strongly disagree with the "highly-educated" viewpoints of the Laptop Class.
Why would they ask? They know better what's good for them.
Here in Chicago, the executive editor of one of the 2 major papers, the Sun-Times, conducted a “town hall” to get input from the public on what stories should lead the news. She said she is planning more of these, in the interest of saving our democracy.
So now the news is governed by “please tell me what I can put out there as clickbait”. Of course newspaper publishing has always been a business, and must attract customers to survive, but this seems lame. I wouldn’t want to get my news from a paper so clearly pandering for readers.
Polls show that public trust in media has plummeted, and this is part of the reason why. Nobody trusts desperate people to be fair and unbiased.
Addendum- newspapers used to try to entice readers with special reports, human interest stories, in-depth features, and the like. They didn’t try to do it by slanting the actual news so blatantly.
......"unhinged eschatologists".....very nice, spot on! But really, Nicole Wallace's "sacred airwaves" thing has to be in contention for the most unintentionally hilarious news bit of the year, or the decade, which is about how long it's been since I've attempted to watch any of the talking heads.....
I find it ironic that the party that shrieks about a danger to democracy spends all its time trying to deny voters any choice
By democracy, they mean only the opinions and preferences of the upper-middle-class and above Laptop Class/Professional Managerial Class should be taken into account when it comes to government policies.
All this wouldn’t be so grim, if, on occasion, those people pretending to be reporters would sometimes turn & wink at their audiences, like their counterparts in Pro Wrestling.
As a sidebar to this, RFK Jr.’s retort on CNN to who is the greatest threat to democracy at present will further demonize his election chance among the “Holy”. He should out Trump Trump if he wants a solid chance to win & say directly what’s on his mind always. If there’s anyone now who’s as “Great a Threat to Democracy” as Trump, now we have second devil. With his strong Liberal leanings, he’s likely to siphon a considerable number of voters away from Biden & the the Pharasees are screaming from every news media platform they own.
Great summary. One other point that I heard Taibbi raise was the fact that due to overall declining revenues (ads are dying) and the inability to make up that loss with direct subscriptions, they also are running on far lower operating revenues than in the distant past. And with that, they can’t hire as many quality journalists to actually dig in to and present real stories so we see this cut and paste of idiotic drivel that mirrors across the publications as you’ve mentioned. Probably also even harder if you have to pay top dogs like Maddow Hollywood salaries which leaves table scraps for the journalists who are actually investigating.
In today’s “America this week” they reviewed RFK’s visit to CNN. I just reflect on the fact that because of everything your article covers we have a son of a Kennedy (not a cousin, an actual son of one of our Democratic heroes) who was not permitted to run a Democratic ticket.
It’s bonkers.
When I was a young kid in the 1970s, my dad used to watch what I called the ‘fighting show’ on Sundays. It was the McNeil-Lehrer News Hour, PBS I think? Anyway, I think news and the culture would be in a much better place if the media had stuck with vigorous debate like that. Podcasts do that sometimes, but it’s just so fragmented now too few people are really aware of all sides of an issue. To our detriment.
Chris Hayes has the nation's most punchable face.
Is it really true that Wapo lost 200k subscribers or is it propaganda perpetrated by NPR? Hard to believe that many subscriber’s would care that much. I think the claim is dubious at best. They probably made it up by multiplying claims of unsubscribing by hour on Twitter by the time passed since the non endorsement announced on Twitter.
In the hinterlands of flyover country nobody cares and Trump prevails. Make America Great Again! Fuck the Washington Post!
Not sure if it's true, but I've seen it reported by several outlets now. 🤷
That means it’s bullshit!
Chris Hayes is aiming for the Highest Priest.
This was a truly great essay. I am hoping independent journalism will continue to grow. I am hoping the media keeps overstepping to the point of insanity so their lies can be called out quicker and with more force. Pre-Musk X, if you called out lies, you were shadow banned or removed altogether. It won't be as easy to lie with more and more powerful people finally opening their eyes. I hope.