Our Broken Media

I have one more comment on our broken politics and then I’ll get back to dog and waterfall pics. I would like to get one big gripe off my chest and then I’ll 🤐. It’s long and unedited, sorry!—but the dog needs her walk. 

Possibly the most dysfunctional component of elective politics and governance is the U.S. media, and I mean the mainstream media (WaPo, NYT, CNN, WSJ, the legacy networks, PBS/NPR). They were ill-prepared to handle a modern GOP that was willing to lie openly and shatter norms. That’s a forgivable error—no one had the antibodies to fight those pathologies initially. But over the past 20 years, their coping strategy has been stupid, blind, and arrogant—and substantially led to the cycle of disinformation. 

The media, going all the way back to Watergate, has absorbed the message that politicians are corrupt self-dealers. They hold politicians in contempt simply for performing their job. This was very different than an earlier generation, which valorized the politicians who pulled us out of a depression and defeated Hitler and later put men on the moon and advanced civil rights. Politicians seemed to be agents of change and goodness (at least some of them) and competent at their jobs. 

Since watergate and especially the mass insanity of the GOP, journalists have self-righteously taken the position that politicians are uniformly corrupt and incompetent. The examples of this are legion, but most obviously in the way the media report that “Congress” did x, when in fact there were very specific actors working to achieve very specific ends WITHIN Congress. In the face of this supposed industry-wide rot, journalists routinely set themselves up as moral arbiters, who speak truth to the people. The media have had so many failures since 2000 it’s hard to remember them all,  but through it all they retain their haughty self-regard and project their own dysfunction back out on the people they cover. They didn’t do shitty journalism and listen to obvious hucksters post-9/11, “politicians” deceived them. They didn’t massively overhype Clinton’s faults and underplay Trump’s, Hillary was dumb and ran an incompetent campaign. Etc etc. 

We just had a perfect example of this failure with the Biden transition. What happened, both Biden stepping down and Dems uniting around Harris, was 100% predictable. Indeed, the rally-around-Kamala response was the *only* way it could have played out. I understood this instantly and by the day following the debate had mentioned it to a number of people. But the media, having absolutely mistaken their charge—to understand and report what was happening rather than mindlessly attacking politicians—spent three weeks grossly misreporting. 

Politics is the acquisition and exercise of power. That’s it. It’s true in dictatorships, monarchies, and democracies. It is as true as saying basketball is about scoring the most points. If you don’t understand that scoring the most points is the goal of the game, you will misreport what is happening when you watch it. 

The Democratic Party wants to win the presidency. Politicians who have spent decades appealing to voters (power acquisition) understood what a delicate situation they were in. If Biden stepped down, there was only one person 14 million people had voted for. For decades, the parties have understood that undermining the will of the voters is *terrible* for power-acquisition. Harris is, additionally, the person Joe Biden—the candidate who received the most votes in history—selected FOR THIS PRECISE SITUATION.  She is a Black woman in a party in which voters are majority women and nonwhite (or nearly so). For Party insiders to replace her with anyone else, especially a White man, would have caused literally riots within the party. Of course the Ds were going to back Kamala. 

The media’s interest in the election is both to expose the corruption of the politicians they cover and hold in contempt, and to drive clicks. So for three weeks every one platformed the idea that if Biden stepped down, we’d get some kind very ugly, damaging “blitz primary” that would as always put Dems in their place. They were so blind to the actual politics at hand that they were incapable of understanding where the interests of the Democratic Party lay. The NYT, in a chef’s kiss moment, invited Aaron Sorkin to write an op-ed in which he suggested Dems run Mitt Romney. In the past two days, as Ds sensibly supported Harris and moved immediately into, you know, running for president, the media’s disappointment and frustration at the lack of drama was palpable. (The continued to blame the Ds for being “undemocratic,” with no evidence and dumb, self-contradicting rationale.)

The media are, to quote a terrible show, not serious people. They are failing on the most basic level of functional journalism, which is actually understanding the subject they’re reporting on and providing accurate information to their readers. They are so lost in their own petty grievances and self-righteousness they haven’t the vaguest clue how American politics function. In an age with deep fakes and AI video and TikTok lies and Russian bots, having a helpless mainstream media is, let’s say, not ideal.