I know that some readers think I'm too hard on the American media in the second Trump presidency, or at least that I attribute what might be simply institutional incompetence, as willful collaboration with a fascist regime. In my experience, people who've communicated this idea to me tend to be exposed to a wider variety of media and particular more progressive leaning outlets, and thus have less exposure to what I would call mainstream corporate media in America; a spectrum that would include Fox News, the New York Times, the Washington Post, ABC, NBC, and CNN, the LA Times, most large newspapers attached to a major urban center, and with say Reuters and the AP sitting together just outside that circle. Given the nature of my writing, I *have* had the misfortune of consuming a lot of Trump regime coverage in corporate media and let me tell you, things are not going well in our beloved "free press" establishment.
None of which is to imply that every story is covered poorly, in a way that helps the fascist Trump regime far too often to be accidental, every time. But overall there has been a consistent pattern of minimization, a refusal to call fascist things fascist, and a bizarre desire to "translate Trump" even when he's saying blatantly clear and obvious nazi shit, into something that makes sense within a more traditional American political framework; a great example occurred just today when many US corporate media outlets immediately connected Trump's unhinged white nationalist conspiracy bullshit about white South African "refugees" to sporadic reports of farm violence in that country, even though Der Leader expressly mentioned white "genocide" to promote a nazi conspiracy theory as justifying facts.
Sometimes this minimization and Trump translating is subtle, sometimes it's so blatant it makes you want to put your fist through your monitor; or maybe I have anger management problems, who can really say? For an example of the later kind of story, let's turn to this short blog-style post on The Defector for the most easy to agree with piece of media criticism you will ever read:
NYT Reporter: It’s Not Corruption Unless The Envelope Says “Bribe” On It
"Ah. OK. It's not corruption until one of the parties says to the other, on record, "Hey, how about doing some corruption together, illegally?" and the other one says, "Ah yes, the famous explicit quid pro quo, forbidden by law! Let's do one of those," and the first guy says, "I would like one official act, please, in direct exchange for the money in this burlap sack with a dollar sign on it," and the second guy draws him up an itemized receipt listing the official acts corruptly obtained and their individual prices plus sales tax. Got it."
Forgive me for spoiling the payoff, but the post is so concise you should probably just read it for yourself. In case you refuse however, the author points out that both Trump's memecoin bribery scheme, and his plan to accept the "donation" of a $400M jet from the government of Qatar are clear and obvious examples of corruption. As you can see in the thread above, which is about corruption, I wrote up both scandals so obviously I agree. Furthermore both Albert Burneko and I know *you* agree because Trump is making no effort to hide the obvious corruption.
You know who doesn't agree? New York Times Reporter Eric Lipton, who argues on Bluesky that this is merely "potential corruption" because we have no idea if Trump is going to give memecoin buyers or the Qatari government anything back in exchange for these clear bribes. No, really; this is a guy who has been a professional mainstream media minion for thirty plus fucking years, and he's online chiding people for calling Trump obviously corrupt, while Trump engages in obvious corruption. *This* my friends, is the mainstream media that covers Downmarket Mussolini every single day, and this is a pretty good (albeit hilariously pathetic) example of how much of that coverage goes.
I've been producing mainstream media criticism for a very long time, and I'm sympathetic to the idea that I don't give these folks enough credit when they periodically stop spewing propaganda for wealth and power, and actually engage in sporadic acts of journalism. But this media? In this political moment? Is so full of soulless hack bootlickers, that it almost doesn't seem worth the bother to criticize them for not doing a job they clearly never set out to do; namely journalism.
#Fascism #Trump #Media #MediaCriticism #NewYorkTimes #Corruption #MemeCoin #Qatar #Jet #EricLipton #Collaboration #Journalism #CorporateMedia #Apologia
