Ignoring The Fourth Estate
Our press is as rotten as our other institutions
Yesterday in Cult Of Personality Disorder Collapse there was one little bullet point associated with the transition from Biden to Harris that has blossomed into today’s whole article.
Decision is made, but the press is left guessing.
Today I saw a thread from Jeff Jarvis that summed things up in a much better fashion than I ever could. I’m going to take my lead from his lede and we’ll go from there.
Attention Conservation Notice:
Media criticism, except for pithy insults, isn’t my usual patrol area. This election cycle what is not happening with our ragged, rotten fourth estate is as interesting as influence operations that ARE happening in other places. So … I am wading in, but expect misreads, mistakes, and update thinking via threads of posts.
Jeff Jarvis Speaks:
Why should Kamala Harris engage the fourth estate, which has been ruined by Murdoch’s bad apples, as surely as Russia has sought out and ruined client states like Serbia and Syria?
They are nothing but a game and their “both sides” (when convenient) is rooted in the editorial desire for spin, not informing the electorate.
The press is no longer required when communicating to the electorate, a truth born of the 2004 election rigging. That was the inception of my writing career, along with the rest of the netroots mob. In case you hadn’t noticed, my eighteen year old nealr DailyKos account is again active. The only national “press” left with any capability and integrity are the late night funny guys … but we’ve all understood that for a while. Zen fools, the lot of them.
Harris can elevate people who still do the work …
Much like the GOP in 2016, the press’s non-performance in the face of Trump’s installation by the Kremlin was the bonfire that roasted whatever remained of their credibility after twenty years of Faux News slow poison.
Needful Things:
I see some parallels in what Harris and Walz face with the media, and my own microcosm. (mini-ACN: I’m just dragging the usual suspects here, if already familiar you can probable just skip this section).
I have profiled two losers from Twitter on here - in Scientology’s Dullest Tool and Probable Pissposting. The first one gets a slot because his Twitter profile says “former executive editor of Raw Story”, leaving out that he was discharged due to a mental breakdown in 2010 and sued by them in 2012. During periods of lucidity he’ll still pose as a journalist, calling anyone he thinks might be involved with me in any fashion, although this capability has faded over the years. The second one is the plaintiff in my precedent setting 1st Amendment case in Texas.
Like Harris with the press, I have a pack of Twitter Fuckmuppets who think they have the right to my attention. Like Harris, I’m ignoring them, so they’re left to analyze at length whatever meaning they get from reading here. I have reason to believe the Dallas FBI field office is, or at least was funneling CI money to them through James “Pissboy” McGibney, so ignoring them is causing economic harm, just as Harris does by ignoring the press.
So I don’t name either of the washed up handler hags in Florida, nor their neighbor the felonious Progressive community infiltration artist associate. People who’ve been framed by Pissboy and who are now forced to try to do the same to others are sublime comedy, but only so long as they never know if I’ve bothered to notice their latest. That other hag with the Wyoming LLC and the impulse control problem seems to fear what mistake she might next make.
And the heroin addict who fled the U.S. after he had a different informant/revenge porn slug as a podcast cohost and he let a guy on pretrial release using a monitored phone provided by his parole officer into his super ‘leet conspiracy plotting group on Signal? As Napolean may have once said “never interfere with the enemy while he is in the process of making a mistake”. I’m fine with the cyanobacteria consuming whatever is left of his pitiful career, he gets no oxygen from me.
If Twitter is irrelevant (it is), then it follows that everything else in this section is irrelevant, too. And good riddance.
Contrast:
The press eagerly pursued every violation of norms that Trump engaged in back in 2016. He didn’t have to pay for air time, his showmanship kept him front and center and that kept the marks entertained. He loved the attention as only a Dark Triad psychopath can, and they loved the ratings. The press happily lapped at the sweet pool of glycol antifreeze poured out by Roger Stone and Julian Assange.
Everything Kamala Harris does is news. The press have no choice but to cover her activities, even as she shuns direct contact with them, in favor of direct contact with the electorate. She will accept attention, where and when it suits her purposes, leaving proxies like the surprisingly spicy Pete Buttigieg to deliver attacks and soak up punishment. This cycle it’s Iran, not Russia, and they’ve hacked Trump, not Harris/Walz.
I won’t generally use DailyKos as a source, since community blog and very left slant, but this survey article by a staffer lays out the disparity in coverage. This is the part that really matters.
According to Columbia Journalism Review’s analysis, "in just six days, The New York Times ran as many cover stories about Hillary Clinton's emails as they did about all policy issues combined in the 69 days leading up to the election (and that does not include the three additional articles on October 18, and November 6 and 7, or the two articles on the emails taken from John Podesta).”
Beyond The New York Times’ coverage, CJR found that “the various Clinton-related email scandals—her use of a private email server while secretary of state, as well as the DNC and John Podesta hacks—accounted for more sentences than all of Trump’s scandals combined (65,000 vs. 40,000) and more than twice as many as were devoted to all of her policy positions.”
I should note that a similar ploy was used with #MacronLeaks, but the laws in France are very different, so that alleged intrusion sank like a stone. I don’t care to see another instance of differential treatment, but maybe handling this one quietly is for the best.
Conclusion:
So the media is over. You can do what I do for news, big picture:
al Jazeera, BBC, CNA(Singapore), Deutsche Welle, France 24
Washington Post still works for my MAGA Meltdown graph.
Hunt for quality long form coverage on YouTube - Peter Zeihan, China Update, Asianometry, etc.
Inoreader for RSS streams, no alogorithms picking what I see and when.
And another thing I note as I’ve been proofing this … #MacronLeaks is seven years old, but it got a hell of a lot more interesting in the last twelve months, now that we know both Charles Johnson and Microchip were working for the FBI. Assange plead guilty to conspiracy less than two months ago … and there’s no such thing as a conspiracy of one. Nothing will happen until after the election, perhaps not until after inauguration, if it happens at all.
But it should happen and it’s LONG overdue.
