Self-Evident Truths

I never even knew who Dan Froomkin was during the 2000s and 2010s, so that tells you how much of a media critic I am. I've vaguely known his name for a while, first on Twitter and now on BlueSky, and that he runs a site called PressWatch.

This post from yesterday is a must-read. It's focused on the New York Times and its executive editor, but I think it's fair to extend his main bullet list beyond the Times to much of the mainstream media:

What are those seminal truths that supply essential context to the daily news report? Here’s my list:

• That the United States has become an authoritarian state, with armed soldiers on city streets; immigrant neighbors abducted and disappeared by masked agents; the state seizing stakes of companies; political opponents targeted with criminal probes; educational institutions extorted into obedience; media organizations paying tribute to the ruler. This is reality.
• That Trump is personally deranged and debilitated. That he operates almost entirely in a bubble world of lies and fantasies. That he makes things up, is misled by his staff, and often doesn’t know what they are doing.
• That white Christian nationalism and virulent racism are primary drivers in this administration.
• That misinformation and lies are not coincidental to the Trump agenda, they are essential to it.
• That Trump is engaged in a massively corrupt scheme to enrich himself, his family, and his oligarch friends.
• That Trump is leading what is effectively a criminal enterprise – openly violating the law at almost every turn.
• That the Trump administration is systemically diminishing hard-fought civil and human rights for women, for immigrants, for brown people, and for trans people.
• That the Republican Party of the past no longer exists. It is no longer serious or credible.
• That the nation’s historic checks and balances, through the separation of powers, have collapsed.
• That the federal government – especially the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security – has been so weaponized against Trump’s political opponents that nothing it says can be trusted without evidence.
• That Trump’s cruelty and racism have been fully embraced by the MAGA movement and by federal agents terrorizing and abducting immigrants.

These are not things to hint at or to allude to in the occasional news analysis. These are the central realities of almost everything that is happening in our political sphere. It is crucial to openly acknowledge them – repeatedly — to accurately describe what is going on. 

The fact that mainstream media, including the Times, treat these points as somehow "one side" of a both-sides story, rather than clearly true undermines their credibility with the readers/viewers they have left and doesn't gain them anything with deluded Fox News viewers. 

Speaking of deluded Fox News viewers, Heather Cox Richardson's post from yesterday describes a recent academic paper. It found that while the economy is most salient to voters, when push comes to shove,

cable [news] emphasizes culture because it “attracts viewers who would otherwise not watch news,” and attracts more viewers than an outlet can find by poaching viewers from other networks that emphasize economic issues. Cable channels have an incentive to produce culture war content, which in turn influences politics, as “constituencies more exposed to cable news assign greater importance to cultural issues, and politicians respond by supplying more cultural ads.” 

 Ugh.