Rebuilding the republic

Photo by Hartono Creative Studio on Unsplash

I don’t know that the United States is quite as dysfunctional as it seems, in part because I exist in a particular bubble that’s very focused on politics. I mean, it’s my job, so I don’t have a choice.

Still, we do have some serious divisiveness here, and part of the reason for that is that our media has done such a universally terrible job of accurately informing the general public. They’ve taken their responsibilities of passing information onto the people and decided that means they’re the arbiter of what the public gets to hear.

I’ve generally argued that this is, to be fair, fine and well in a free society, but there’s an inherent obligation to make it clear that you’re biased, so everyone knows to filter accordingly. Rush Limbaugh was biased, told everyone he was biased and which way he was biased, and accumulated a fanbase and legacy the likes of which someone like me could only dream of. He had every right to be biased.

But the truth of the matter is that our press is broken. While the new media exists and challenges the status quo to a profound degree, the mainstream media is where most people get their news, and the new media is largely dismissed as being too partisan to be taken seriously…unless you agree with them.

To be fair, I do it too. Your corroborating article is from Slate? Oh, excuse me while I laugh myself into a hernia.

The issue, though, is that the mainstream media is little different than Slate or The New Republic.

And, for a change, we’ve got a president who will call them on it.

The exchange turned even more tense when Trump slammed the media and accused Welker and the press of displaying bias against him. “Your elections in this country, we’re like a third world country,” Trump fumed. “Your elections are crooked and you’re crooked and Meet the Press is crooked, so as ABC and CBS and CNN — you one-sided crooked network. So let’s call it quits because I’ve had enough. Thank you darling, have a good time.”

Welker replied, “”Mr. President, please. Please, I traveled all the way to Wisconsin. I sat in the rain with you for an hour on and off in the rain—”

“And I’ve given you enough time,” Trump interjected. “You ought to straighten out your press because a country can never be great with a dishonest press.”

That’s a solid mic drop in my book, because the president is absolutely correct. There are times when Trump should be called out, just as there are times when every president should. He’s not a saint, for crying out loud. He’s done things I don’t agree with.

Trump continues to sit down with the media, despite knowing how dishonest they are, because it’s part of the job. He’d spent an hour with the interview, and he’d simply had enough.

David Catron, writing at The American Spectator, discussed the media and its collusion with the Democrats on both Eric Swalwell’s failings as a human being and Joe Biden’s failing cognitive ability, and how it’s becoming more and more explicit that those who consider themselves journalists think it’s more important to advance political narratives than to tell the truth.

Right now, CBS News is undergoing some interesting turbulence. Bari Weiss, as editor-in-chief of CBS News, is cleaning house. 60 Minutes is now short their talking haircut in Scott Pelley, and Pelley has been going on and on about how terrible it is. In fact, he said it was just like having your spouse murdered.

Yes, really.

Pelley, who commented something along the lines of “some journalist I am” by not seeing his firing coming, didn’t seem to realize that his not even knowing who Bari Weiss was, despite her accomplishments, was even more indicative of his professional failings.

However, while Pelley is lamenting his firing and whining to every reporter with a microphone, the truth of the matter is that he’s a classic example of the problem with 60 Minutes.

Here on Substack, Jonathon Leaf wrote about his personal experiences relating to Pelley’s so-called journalism. Pelley produced a glowing puff-piece treating attorney Steven Donziger's legal jihad against Chevron as a case of a righteous man taking on the evil corporation. The truth, which later came out in a court case against Donzinger, was very different. Chevron was trying to do everything right, and Donzinger pulled every shady trick in the book to try to not just make things worse, but put the blame on the oil company.

This is something that Pelley probably should have discovered during his own investigation, but he didn’t. That’s probably because villainizing Chevron is a time-honored journalistic tradition, and since it advanced the narrative for the left, he saw no need to actually do work.

Pelley, though, was supposedly at the height of his career. He had decades of experience to know how to do the job, and he started well before the current trend of actively denying the imperative of trying to be impartial came into vogue. He’s evidence that this is deep-seated in the industry as a whole.

And that’s a problem, because our nation relies on a press that provides them accurate information. That’s the whole point of the First Amendment’s freedom of the press clause. People need to be informed, including about things the government doesn’t want you to know about, but also about everything else. We need accurate information from our media, otherwise people can’t make an informed decision on candidates and issues.

Take Graham Platner, for example. (Seriously, please take him.)

Before his Senate run, he was a nobody. However, he hired a really good Democratic PR firm that got his name out and about everywhere, not just in Maine, but in the nation, all before the campaign really got going. It happened, though, with the help of a compliant media that was eager to advance a socialist “working man” who wasn’t really a working man in any real sense, and that same media is tripping over itself to continue to be compliant.

The New York Times and its “catch and kill” story about Platner’s abusive past is ample evidence of that.

Through everything, the media has tried to downplay every scandal, despite there being so many as to be troubling in and of itself, and for what? To unseat milquetoast Susan Collins? She’s barely a Republican, and they act like she’s the antichrist and needs to be removed, so they’re propping up the Nazi masturbation enthusiast.

Until we can get a media that will try to inform the public in an accurate and mostly unbiased manner. Pelley, for example, blasted Weiss for wanting his reporting to include that Renee Good drove toward federal agents in Minneapolis. He was outraged, but it’s the simple truth.

Without a functioning media that informs the public, we’re never going to find anything approaching common ground.

Then again, as I said on Friday, I don’t want common ground anymore. I don’t even want to co-exist with these people in the same nation, because there’s only so much bias that accounts for what we’re seeing.

But before we can move on and hopefully push the insane to the fringes where they belong, we have to have some kind of press that isn’t playing games with the future of the republic. When we get that, we can rebuild this republic into something even greater.

Or, if we don’t, we may not have it much longer.

“A republic, if you can keep it.” Well, I don’t know that we can unless things take a drastic change, and the media should be the first step.

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