Index

Failure of the Press

How do we hold honest discussions as a society in the absence of an honest media?

The media in the USA is no longer capable of doing the job that our constitution-writing forefathers envisioned. Those gentleman saw a the media of the day - fractured and fragmented - as capable of keeping the government honest BECAUSE of their fragmented nature. The various news sheets would also keep each other honest, so that at the end of the day the truth would be out, and at some point people would decide which to read based on the quality of the content.

The “originalists” on the SCOTUS and in the badly misnamed Federalist Society have absolutely no comprehension of this. It is only one of many things they are clueless on, however. For instance, they seem to think that we should go back to slavery because the founding fathers had slaves. Apparently everything that has happened since the writing of the original Constitution is meaningless to them. They even are selective about which of the Constitutional amendments we call the Bill of Rights are meaningful, let alone the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments.

Nowadays, the classical media - newspapers and their broadcast follow-ons - are directly controlled by a handful of corporate entities, representing two or at most three points of view. The only real interest their corporate parents have is making money, and in the current MBA-driven environment, that means as close to zero real reporting as they can get away with. After all, reporting costs money that could otherwise be in corporate billionaire’s pockets.

What we call the blogosphere is now the equivalent of what our forefathers thought of as the press, except that the ownership and editorial control of newspapers and broadcast media is and always has been required to be mostly visible, where there are no such requirements on blogs and social media posts. Facebook and its ilk have discovered this the hard way, where thousands of accounts that supposedly were posting independently were in fact nothing but robotic echo boxes, repeating misinformation from only a couple of sources. The fascists have taken advantage of this to drown out any facts that happen to be in the mix with large and loud lies, repeated millions of times - the fox news effect writ large.

We are fortunate to have a few real news organizations still left. The fascists have done their best to discredit and shut these down, but there are a few of us still out here that like real news and facts. Even the “retired” Dan Rather has kept his hand in play with his Steady extended blog, which (of course) has kept him under concerted attack from the fake news organizations of the fright wing.

None of this is a new idea - see here, here and here for examples. I write stuff like this when I get fed up with orange cult Twitter idiots and faux noise lies, and have to spit back at the fascists that promote those lies. The only thing that is going to fix the problem is to improve the knowledge and expectations of the public, so that the fascists and their fellow lunatics can no longer get away with spouting their insanity. This requires something called real education. The fascists have been successfully fighting against it as long as I can remember - at least since Nixon, who realized that his worst enemies long-term were the intellectuals. Intellectuals are still the last hope against a complete fascist takeover.

Dominion, the voting machine company that started a dozen lawsuits over the orange cult’s false claims, gave me some hope that they might actually kick the fake news monster where it would hurt, but they had almost zero effect on the noise level - the lies keep getting louder and more extreme. Even when they show their true fascism like Tucker Carlson is doing right now, it doesn’t faze their freaky followers.

There is not a lot of hope left for those of us who would like to see a functioning democracy (based on laws, not bullshit) exist here in the former United States. The longer this abscess festers on the body politic, the less chance we have of ever becoming a functioning democracy again.