Three Stories About How Legacy Media Has Failed Us
There were a few stories over the last few days that I thought they needed to be shared.
This piece is by someone whose Substack is called Critical Resistance. We don’t know who the person is. But it is clear as I’ve been reading their posts that they have a lot of experience and inside information.
Really important in terms of who Stephen Miller is and how we can neutralize him.
This Chris Hedges piece lays out perfectly how journalists and academics capitulated to Trumpism long before Trump entered politics or there was a name to what is happening.
This is the subhead to the piece: “The corporate coup d'état and collapse of American democracy began long before Trump. He is simply snuffing out what remains.”
Share widely.
And Jessica Valenti is (once again) shocked that the legacy media is so horrible at fact checking - or thinking - that they are falling for the ruse that the Justice Department is defending mifepristone by fighting to dismiss a case brought by Kansas, Missouri and Idaho to ban the abortion drug.
What the Trump administration is really doing, Velenti writes, is trying to establish that states can’t sue the FDA. So when the FDA does ban mifepristone, blue states won’t be able to contest it.
When I started out as a journalist, I worked with experienced reporters and editors who would check every fact, ask questions I hadn’t thought of, and complain that organizations wanted us to just print their press releases.
Now, we have a media that not only prints press releases, but copies stories they see on social media or on news sites with less credibility. And most of the editors have been laid off. All that fact-checking and context takes time, which this news cycle does not afford us.
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Thanks especially for introducing me to CRITICAL RESISTANCE. I already have too much to read, but this one is clearly crucial.
Chris Hedges I read only sporadically, but people who think that this all began with Trump make me crazy. I came of political age in 1968. Now it's easy enough to see that it was underway then, with the backlash to the civil rights advances of the 1960s, but it was hard to avoid once Reagan came along. Well, not hard *enough* to avoid, because millions upon millions of "us" managed to do just that. And now, as I keep saying, here we are.