If you have the time and access to the Showtime channel you should watch The Fourth Estate, if only to remind yourself of the limitations of corporate media, as it follows in documentary form, the editorial processes of NY Times reporters and editors.
Seeing those folks whose editorial positions have been known in text rather than on film gives one a sense of how compromised the public sphere has become by its corporate media institutions. They will guard an idealization of the press in a liberal democracy up to the moment where they will enable democracy’s demise.
It is crystallized in Michael “Clinton email” Schmidt’s getting his 30 minute exclusive interview with Trump because he squatted at his golf course restaurant table, making note of how showing obeisance was his way getting Trump to hold forth.
That’s what some Pulitzers are made of, submissiveness in an editorial operation that seems incapable of handling its own #MeToo shortcomings. After some hand-wringing, The Fourth Estate shows how Glenn Thrush is till there, covering the social safety net, however ironically.
The latest bit of editorial cowardice is kowtowing to WH objections regarding Stephen Miller’s on-the-record comments.
WH officials said they were “not at all comfortable” with the audio recording
Perhaps it wasn’t a hill worth dying on, but it sure sounds like how Democracy dies in darkness, much like their MSM capitulation to the continuing lies of 45* and The Fourth Estate reveals how much they can rationalize because they covet their access, despite social media. The “humanized” NY Times is more like a footnote writer for cultural hegemony, and their recent hires of notable reactionaries only shows how rudderless they have become.
In response to this, The Fourth Estate, scene after scene, becomes its own kind of paradox: It attempts to combat the flawed logic of the intentional fallacy … by way of committing the intentional fallacy. It is highlighting the rumpled humanity at the heart of the institution that is vying for continued authority in the minds and hearts of Americans. It is, in that effort, insisting on two things at once: that journalists aren’t so bad, and also that the work they do is demonstrably great. Call these reporters “fake news” if you want, the film whispers, but you will be wrong. Because, see for yourself, as you go behind the scenes within the glass-walled offices and Amtrak trains and Maggie Haberman’s Kia: There’s no lying here. There are mistakes, sometimes, yes, but no lies. Isn’t it clear, instead, how deeply these people, just like you, care about the truth?
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The Fourth Estate is a sequel, of sorts, to Page One, the 2011 documentary about, yep, the work and the fortunes of The New York Times. The villain of the earlier film is in its own way shapeless, not a person so much as a creeping catastrophe: the collapse of the business model that had sustained the Timesand other American newspapers—and, with them, the American news system writ large—for so long. Money, and its absence, remains a haunting specter in The Fourth Estate. But it is no longer presented as the biggest threat to the Times. While the earlier hazard came from people who wouldn’t pay for news, the danger now—to the Times, to journalism, to democracy—comes from people who simply won’t believe it. The looming threat comes from people who, every day, commit the intentional fallacy.
"Miller...expressed frustration that the audio, in which 10 detained Central American children can be heard crying out for their parents, ended before reaching 'the really good stuff.'"