Yesterday, the great columnist John Kass wrote an article about the coverage of the Biden Administration. If you haven’t read it yet, you should. He is on point. He’s right about the new journalism.
The old journalism business model has collapsed. The new greasy journalism model is here. A new crop of new editors shake like reeds at the march of the newspaper union Bolsheviks–for example, my old Tribune– in league with the cadre of hard-left politicos determined to see Chicago and other big cities fall and leaving victims of violent crime without a voice. A few decent journalists remain, but most anyone with any credibility has left corporate legacy journalism in Chicago to the harpies that despoil it.
And Woodward and Bernstein? They’re dust in the wind now, as dusty as memories from the old Washington establishment Gridiron Club dinner where reporters wore white tie and tails and bowed to potentates wearing sashes. I’ve worn the monkey suit and have attended that dinner. You’ll see evidence of the primping. And see newspaper bosses preening, and journalists singing show-tunes and ditties–at the Gridiron and the White House Correspondent’s Dinner–to entertain their political masters whom they served as guardians of the Washington establishment.
Objectivity is a thing of the past. Advocacy is here. Turns out, the mainstream press is advocating some pretty radical left-wing ideas that Pravda and the official Chinese Communist Party press would feel comfortable with.
I will never forget a debate party I went to in 2004. I was leaving the party and riding an elevator with a journalism professor from Northwestern. He said, “Wouldn’t it be better if only people like you and I could vote.” Of course, the Democrats decided to try and harvest every vote and used mail-in balloting to corrupt the voting process.
For those of us that were paying attention, we knew Biden, Inc. existed prior to him becoming President. The Hunter Biden laptop, and Tony Bobolinski, were enough evidence. If the news media didn’t squash that story, Trump still would be President even with the Covid debacle.
Covid was the Democrat’s way to turn a crisis into a strategy. The bureaucracy wanted it too.
I wonder what it will take for people who voted for Biden to turn on Biden. When I think about Watergate, it was really Tennessee Senator Howard Baker who told President Nixon he didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of surviving. It was only then that Nixon decided to resign.
The American people had finally turned on Nixon. The people who voted for him turned. Republicans were summarily trounced in succeeding elections and it took a totally inept President Carter and a really crummy economy to turn things around.
Even today, with an economy that isn’t that great, the left-wing American news media tries to cover up the truth. The recession wasn’t a recession. When data comes out, it’s spun. There is literally no objectivity and critical thinking being executed by many journalists.
My intuition says that journalists don’t wake up. They dig their hole deeper. Why? Because psychologically, they can’t get out of the web they have spun for themselves. Since they are advocates, they have set up a win/lose situation. They have to win and they use all kinds of superfluous ideas to justify themselves which keeps them in a box.
Who is today’s Senator Howard Baker?
It can’t be Senator Manchin or Senator Sinema. They don’t have credibility with the bulk of the Democratic Party. It won’t be a newly elected Senator. Who then could it be?
Battle lines have been drawn so American people have thrown in with each side. It will be hard to get them to switch for the same psychological reasons that journalists won’t wake up. Even if Republicans show beyond a shadow of a doubt that Biden has used his political office to enrich his own family, only a minority of people will wake up and smell the coffee. Is it enough to change internal polls that the scales of power will turn hard to the Republicans similar to what happened with Watergate?
That’s the only way someone credible whispers in Joe’s ear. He resigns, Kamela becomes President for a year or so and then they replace her with Gavin Newsome.
I think that the Democrats believe they can win with any candidate if Trump is the Republican nominee and they might be right. That’s why there is a 24/7 news cycle to keep Trump in the news. Other Republican candidates need to figure out how to prick that bubble.
Even with all the Biden corruption and the hard left-wing ideas being promoted by the mainstream Democratic Party, I know reasonable people who would vote for Biden over Trump. This is why I think “No Labels” hurts Trump more than it hurts the Democrats. For what it’s worth, the No Labels party really are elite Democrats that think they are significantly smarter than you.
Psychological constructs are very hard to overcome. The walls are like a prison sometimes. Fortresses have been built over time in the US. It will be hard to tear them down.
I hope that DeSantis starts to run a better campaign. He has to graduate from an anti woke focus to actual governance. It’s odd that he doesn’t have a coherent message because he has a better series of accomplishments than Trump. He was right on every issue; schools, COVID, lockdowns and woke. I hope he is not this cycles Scott Walker.
The popcorn eating part of me wants Trump to win. I hope he cleans house in the FBI and DOJ. I don’t think he will win though. I am in PA and doubt he will take the state. I would vote for him if nominated. I don’t see anyone else other than he and DeSantis. Vivek would be a great VP for either.
The lying becomes easier after the first one, and then it becomes a force of nature--it just continues by habit, first by omission, then by commission.
When reporters filed copy by answering the 5-Ws (who, what, where, when, why) were replaced with "journalists" filing stories informing the reader what to think and what will happen next, the "news" became agenda-driven propaganda.
The business model for newspapers, such as the NYT, changed on the introduction of cable TV, then the internet eroded their oligopoly position. Newspapers lost advertising revenues as their base of local revenues (auto dealers, department & other retail) shifted to cable TV. Then the internet brought the hammer down as Craig's List became the predominant site for want-ads.
While I've not checked the data recently, pre-COVID, the newspaper industry had half the revenues (and half the employees) as compared to 20 years earlier (pre-9/11). And of course, this is the era when the internet, as a communications medium, became ubiquitous. Which effectively means the newspaper oligopoly is dead, as their distribution format became the internet.
With so many options competing for eyeballs, while the available time for viewing is a strict constraint, it's no wonder so-called news programming resembles scripted entertainment--because it is!
I stopped reading the NYT during the 2000 election campaign when I couldn't harbor the agenda-driven propaganda any longer--surely it had been proceeding in that direction for more than a decade. I can remember debating and discussing the contrast between the NYT and the WSJ in the '80s. And that was probably akin to concluding that the facts and the truth were somewhere in-between, as a split-the-difference compromise, given the sparsity of alternative sources.
I had a very small part in the Netscape IPO--it was my first on-air appearance on CNBC as an analyst. The curious thing about the IPO, probably not widely known, was that Netscape's chairman, Jim Clark, induced many newspaper chains, e.g., Knight-Ridder, Hearst, et al., to invest in a preferred stock round just prior to the IPO. He told them, you're going to need to know about this software/technology. Even with Clark's urging, they didn't or couldn't grasp the significance. And here we are, a bit like Henry Ford's assembly line changed the industry landscape forever.