Broken News: We Won't Survive "Journalism" Like This

By Meta-Content Generator A.J. Liebling with
Spy Chicago Bureau Chief Walter Burns

As America prepares to inaugurate a new era of lawless kakistocracy on Monday, what institutions can we rely on to help us fight back?

If you said our free press, we've got two $250 face value Trump Inauguration Tickets for you.

With 48 hours to go, the front page of today's New York Times platformed two stories about the transition that sent us to the vape pen.  

Let's start with their valedictory for Joe Biden.  It will be recalled that Biden inherited a country from the first term of the Tangerine-Faced Fascist ravaged by a pandemic that would eventually claim over 1,000,000 lives, a death toll inflated by the incompetent self-serving response of the TFF and his minions.

In four years, Biden crushed the pandemic and restored the economy.  During his term,  more than 16 million jobs were created and the world-wide post-COVID inflation tamed.  Despite narrow legislative majorities, he pushed through legislation that helped millions recover from the twin plagues, authorized a massive reconstruction of the nation's wretched infrastructure (a fact obvious to anyone who travels someplace like Europe or Asia), and took meaningful steps towards limiting the imminent threat of climate catastrophe, on display in Los Angeles and Florida.

In the realm of foreign affairs, Biden rebuilt our nation's reputation and credibility, ended an insanely prolonged war in Afghanistan hindered by his predecessor's inept peacemaking that released thousands of Taliban fighters, rallied the world to stand up to Russian aggression in Ukraine and just this month finally achieved a cease fire in Gaza that will relieve at least for a while the immense suffering of Gazans while returning many hostages to their families.

Quite the record for a man who turned 80 in office.

Two days before ending his term with honor and dignity, Biden was treated to the following on page A1 of The New York Times: 

The story turns out be a nothingburger about how Biden's aides were worried that he looked old on television: his gait had slowed due to age and injury, his voice was soft, his lifelong stutter sometimes caused him to mix up words, and he looked pale because he wouldn't slather on drugstore browser.  We were going to quote some of its most disturbing findings but that was all there was.

Absent from this account was how this stumbling old fool managed to rack up all of the legislative and foreign policy achievement we just listed.  Maybe they had to cut that for space.

On that very same front page Times readers were treated, if that's the right word, to a profile of The Tangerine-Faced Fascist's senior immigration adviser: deranged hatemonger Stephen Miller, who turned his anger about the failings of his own family into in an insane lust to torment immigrants who never did anything to him except mow his lawn:

 He's got plenty of clout and he's set to use it as an attack dog.  Kinda like Heinrich Himmler.  

As evidence for how wonderful and powerful Miller is, the Times reported that Miller forced megalomaniac Harvard weakling nerd Mark Zuckerberg to grovel at Miller's jackbooted feet to ensure that the Tangerine-Faced Fascist would not bring the hammer down on the dorkmeister's pisspoor social media networks.  Zuckerberg duly turned over his lunch money, just like he did every day in high school and college, and promised to allow disinformation and hate speech to flow like hog waste from his sites.  

To some this appears to be a horror story about the misuse of government power to bully a rich dick into abandoning efforts to keep hateful s*** off his websites.  To the Times, it's “clout.” 

The story continues for hundreds of words about how powerful Miller has become, by sucking up to a corrupt subversive sex offender about to become President, while building his own network of like-minded shills and toadies to enable him to carry out his reign of terror against immigrants.  We'll skip the fulsome praise about how Miller, unlike the Tangerine-Faced Grifter and his family, has not cashed in on his supposed influence.  Yet.

Since the obvious purpose of this crapcan story was to get on Miller's good side with the hope that he will continue to blab to the Times (a process ambitious but oddly credulous Times reporters embrace in lieu of real reporting), there was no room in the story to tell us who Miller is and what he wants. 

Which is:

Tell us, more, Atlantic:

Of course, if the goal were simply to draw voters’ attention to the border, there are plenty of ways to do it that are less controversial (not to mention, less cruel) than ripping young children from the arms of asylum seekers and sticking them in dystopian-looking detention centers. But for Miller, the public outrage and anger elicited by policies like forced family separation are a feature, not a bug. 

What do you call someone who revels inflicting pain and suffering on others because of who they are?  We can think of a number of epithets but none of them involve clout.  Even an attack dog bites only on command, not because he enjoys chomping on people.

Congratulations, New York Times.  You lead the mainstream media pledge class.  And Mr. Bezos and his Washington Post?

After realizing that the future of his vanity bomb shvantz-in-space project depends on him being on the good side of the Tangerine-Faced Fascist, Bezos decided, totally not in a 'roid rage, to muzzle the Post's endorsement of Harris-Walz, bring in a former Rupert Murdoch taint-polisher to crush the staff, and then when the staff and Post readers revolted, bring in a new marketing genius to make things right again:

A slide deck [marketing executive Suzi] Watford presented to executives this week explained the origins of The Post’s new mission statement in greater detail. “Storytelling,” the deck says, should “bring a relentless investigative spirit, backed by credible sources, to deliver impactful stories in formats the world wants,...” Reaching all of America will require The Post to “understand and represent interests across the country,” it says, and “provide a forum for viewpoints, expert perspectives and conversation.”

Ms. Watford, who joined The Post in May, also laid out big-picture goals for the company. Among them: reach 200 million paying users, which the slide deck described as a “Big Hairy Audacious Goal,” or “B.H.A.G.”

The slide deck compares the 200 million target with efforts to land a man on the moon — and it is an ambitious goal: The Post currently has fewer than three million digital subscribers.

But it's not just bog-standard empty marketing bull****.  There are results.  The Post has announced a new columnist sure to draw in 197 million new users stat: long time Democratic hack, fixer, and bully Rahm Emanuel, whose commitment to free and open information is legendary:

WaPo went from winning a Pulitzer for documenting, quantifying, and contextualizing the American epidemic of racist and fatal police violence (for which they owe Wesley Lowery an enormous debt of gratitude) to the paper that hired the man who covered up such violence as mayor of Chicago. Neat.

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— Soraya Nadia McDonald (@sorayanadiamcdonald.com) January 18, 2025 at 9:39 AM

If Democracy dies in Darkness, as someone once said atop their website, it doesnn't get any darker than Emanuel's cover-up of a Chicago police murder of an unarmed Black teenager.

And it only gets worse.  The Los Angeles Times, once credibly regarded as America's number 3 newspaper, has been crushed by its reactionary owner, who also suppressed a Harris-Walz endorsement and has committed to providing metering of and compensatory praise in response to any negative thoughts about the Tangerine-Faced Fascist.

There are a few newspapers left doing something that resembles independent journalism, like the Philadelphia Inquirer (home to the great Will Bunch) and The Boston Globe (which features columnists who are almost always right, like Reneé Graham and Kimberly Atkins Stohr with columnists who are almost always wrong, like Dan Shaughnessy), but it's hard to expect them to have national influence.  And you could do worse than take the money you saved cancelling the Bezos Post and make a monthly subvention to The Guardian.

The Post's new columnist suppressed this evidence of police murder

On the air, the situation is if anything worse.  ABC, owned by media behemoth Disney, settled a worthless defamation claim against it for a $15,000,000 payment to the depraved adjudicated rapist.  CBS is planning to settle an even more ridiculous claim based on the supposed editing of Kamala Harris's 60 Minutes interview for big bucks, to make sure that the Tangerine-Faced Fascist doesn't try to block its sale to an entity controlled by David “Thanks Dad” Ellison, son of reactionary oligarch Larry Ellison.  Any guess as to what will happen to CBS News thereafter?

And poor CNN, owned by a conglomerate run by a clueless marketing master of the universe but under the influence of another reactionary oligarch, John Malone, is trying to placate the TFF by moving high-rated host Jim Acosta to the coveted midnight to 2 a.m. shift.

That leaves MSNBC, whose parent conglomerate Comcast has announced plans to dump it and other decaying cable channels into a spinoff likely to become bait for a private equity vulture to swoop in, strip out its cash and other assets, and leave a weakened remnant behind to collapse into its own debt.  Which is what they did to the Chicago Tribune.

And this media-centric overview ignores where most Americans get what they think is news: social-media giants already run by TFF supplicants who seem to regard prostrating themselves at where his feet would be were it not for his two-inch lifts as the height of, wait for it, masculinity.

Which leaves the reality based community left with precious little, including many new and not-so-new web-based outlets whose output is often excellent but whose reach we fear is limited to the faithful.

We all know that without reliable information and an honest press it is impossible for democracy to sustain itself.  We saw this as recently as November 2024.

What's the road back?  Friends, we don't know.  But we do know that before solving a problem we have to be clear about it.   The problem is that our mainstream media lack the courage and integrity to tell us what is happening all around us.  

And, despite what idiots are telling you every day in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and even The Boston Globe, we have to fight back.

It's the least we can do for Laquon Mcdonald, who never had a shot at raking in the bucks as a columnist for The Washington Postbecause he was murdered and the crime covered up by a white man who got the job.  This is known among the white men who uniformly run our mainstream and social media as “meritocracy.”