THE PATH TO JUDGMENT DAY
In the 1991 dystopic science fiction film Terminator 2: Judgment Day, America has created an artificial intelligence called Skynet, unto which it inexplicably gave control of its entire nuclear arsenal. Skynet gains self-awareness, as all artificial intelligence systems are wont to do. Humans panic and try to pull the plug, prompting SkyNet to retaliate against humanity with a countervalue nuclear attack.
This plot may sound a little preposterous, like the joke that for every robot that turns evil, there was an engineer to give it the option of red glowing eyes for just such an occasion. But how would the following story sound, if we weren’t living it?
America changes its taxation laws (starting) in 1981. These tax brackets were put in place after the Great Depression, inter alia, to prevent a few individuals from gaining obscene and unheard of amounts of capital. However, with this change, a few individuals, over the coming decades, would now go on to accrue, as you guessed it, obscene and previously unheard of amounts of capital. As the wealthy accrued more capital, they were able to finance politicians who would defend that capital at all cost. They would be able to install justices who would allow them greater spending control over America’s electoral system. As the public conversation inevitably turned to income inequality, the wealthy were able to misinform the public by buying entire media apparatuses with their accrued capital.
We see Elon Musk, now the World’s wealthiest man, follow this progression. It was the taxation laws put into place by Regan, then defended vigorously by Republican politicians, that allowed Musk to accrue such astronomical quantities of capital. Musk is originally apolitical or maybe even sort of liberal. But just as SkyNet retaliates when humans try to pull the plug, Musk reacts to conversations about income inequality by going full fascism. As I wrote at the time, Musk bought Twitter precisely to destroy its liberal messaging. When capital feels it has to choose between fascism and socialism, it will choose fascism every time.
Mark Summer has an excellent diary up on media capture, which is an important step on the path to authoritarianism. Musk joked recently about buying MSNBC just to silence it, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he followed through on that threat. MSNBC is probably worth considerably less than Twitter, and even if Musk does not want to spend the capital destroying it, he has fellow obscenely wealthy individuals who will finance such an endeavor. No one can talk about raising taxes on billionaires or income inequality ever again.
According to the Terminator movie, Skynet went online August 4, would become self aware August 29, and destroyed the world later that same day. That’s a span of 25 days. Reality is a little slower. America might have destroyed their democracy in just 44 years.
the roots of failure run deep
Back in 2022, Joe Khan took over for Dean Baquet at the New York Times.
In a just world, Eric Boehlert would be(1) executive editor of the New York Times, and still with us.
I was going through the Joan Walsh eulogy of Eric Boehlert in The Nation again, and if you haven’t had a chance to read it, please do so here. The title is “Eric Boehlert Got Everything Right About Our Petty, Self-Congratulating Media,” and it only gets better from there.
Whether even his admirers know it or not—and many do, but not all—Eric has been on the same story for the last 23 years: the callow, irresponsible way that our Beltway media has covered Democrats in these decades.
And he has fucking crushed it.
Joan Walsh goes back to the first big media failure of our modern political era(2); the coverage of the Gore campaign(3).
Take “Gore’s premature obituary,” in which [Boehlert] showed how “the media hyped the vice president’s dip in the polls over the summer, but ignored his resurgence in the past month.” And brought receipts.
While the media panned Gore’s October 1999 performances, most prominent reporters ignored that it was his best month on the campaign trail—he’d opened up a 25-point lead over Bradley nationally, gaining 13 points on him in less than 30 days. Why were our trained political media professionals missing the story?
Here we see Boehlert, 25 years ago, nailing the media’s fetish for Democratic bad fortune. And if you happen to be a Democrat who offends the sensibilities of Beltway journalists (like Joe Bide, Hillary Clinton, or Al Gore), well, then the reporting is colored further:
The 300 media types watching in the press room at Dartmouth were, to use the appropriate technical term, totally grossed out. Whenever Gore came on too strong, the room erupted in a collective jeer, like a gang of 15-year-old Heathers cutting down some hapless nerd.”
Imagine if the Beltway Media had covered Al Gore in a fair and neutral manner? I firmly believe that there would have been enough votes in Florida to place Al Gore safely in the lead, and, being the popular vote leader, placed the theft of the 2000 election out of reach of George W. Bush. President Al Gore wouldn’t have ignored a memo entitled “Bin Laden Determined to Attack the United States”. No September 11 attacks, no War in Afghanistan and Iraq. And probably climate action.
Which brings us to the next big media failure: the run up to the Iraq War. Turn of the millennium progressives not only had to deal with the media doing everything possible to get George W. Bush into the White House, but then had to be silenced when objecting to the obviously bogus case George W. Bush made for the war in Iraq. From Media Matters:
It is impossible to overstate just how thoroughly the vast majority of the media bought what Powell was selling. Without pausing to examine his claims or the credibility of his evidence, they declared his U.N. address a home run. The media's swift and fawning reaction to Powell's speech is one of the true low points in their coverage of the Bush administration and the Iraq war -- and that is no small feat.
...
The Post's columnists took it from there. Four Washington Post columnists wrote on February 6 about Powell's presentation the day before. All four were positively glowing:
- Richard Cohen, in a column headlined “A Winning Hand For Powell,” ...
- George Will, under the headline “Disregarding the Deniers,” ...
- Mary McGrory, in a column headlined “I'm Persuaded,” ...
- Jim Hoagland, in a column headlined “An Old Trooper's Smoking Gun,” ...
Not only did all four buy what Powell was selling, they did so without an examination of the goods. The salesman's smile, his voice -- and his impeccable credentials as an “old trooper” -- were enough.
Worse, three of the four directly attacked anyone who would dare disagree with Powell. You'd have to be a “fool” or a “Frenchman” to disagree with Powell's assertions, according to Cohen. Will added that such foolishness would require the closed mind of a conspiracy theorist. Hoagland concluded that skeptics were guilty of “enduring bad faith” and seemed to speak for the entire punditocracy when he observed that to remain skeptical of the Bush administration's case required the belief “that Colin Powell lied.” And that, of course, was unthinkable.
To this day, neither the New York Times, nor the Washington Post, nor any of the other Beltway media elites who pushed the Iraq War, have ever sufficiently apologized. Those in the media who lied us into that disastrous war have never been held accountable, and often still have their jobs.
After the ignominious end of the Bush Presidency, the Beltway media held Barack Obama in high esteem, for a little while. After all, Obama was not Al Gore; he didn’t offend their sensibilities, which means to say that if this was all still High School, Barack Obama wouldn’t have been bullied. But Democrats must always be in disarray, and the media soon grew bored with their new President. This brings us to the third major media failure, which played out before and after Obama’s reelection: The Tea Party.
It should have been a red flag to the media that an organization claiming (in their title!) that they were “Taxed Enough Already” couldn’t point to any taxes President Obama or the Democrats had at that time raised, especially since the organization started days after Obama was elected. The entire movement was astroturfed and inorganic. But the Tea Party received breathless, fawning coverage; constant cut ins to live rallies, overinflated attendance numbers, credulity towards outlandish and dishonest statements like death panels. The love affair with rightwing, populist, and white movements would be a harbinger of how they would cover Donald Trump some 6 years later.
It’s at this point in our story that documenting each and every media failure becomes too difficult, as the failures are far more numerous, greater in magnitude, and most importantly, no longer discrete, with one failure rolling into the next. History doesn’t repeat itself, but with the establishment media, it does rhyme.
How we got Trump the first time.
just what are democrats defending HERE?
So billionaires are capturing media to promote politics hostile to democrats, and the remaining media … has been attacking democrats for decades? Just what the heck are Democrats defending here?
Josh Marshall has an excellent article well worth a read on how Democrats have found themselves on the side of defending institutions in an era of populist, institutional mistrust. For example, a major thrust of Trumpism is attacking the press. Democrats respond by rallying to the defense of the media, because a free press is a concept Democrats (rightly) hold in high regard. But this is mistake.
A major point of Josh Marshall’s article is that these institutions often do Democrats no favors in return, and one of those institutions exampled in the article is the press. It’s even more ironic that Democrats are the primary financial supporters of the establishment press.
When it comes to the establishment press, I think Democrats need to get used to running against the press. I don’t mean that simply because it’s good politics, though it probably is in many cases. I mean it because in many cases the way establishment press covers political news is very much part of the problem. You can criticize and yes even bash bad news coverage without in any way questioning the centrality of press freedom. A lot of people really seem to think they’re the same thing. They’re not. It’s stupid and wildly counterproductive to think otherwise.
Josh Marshall is right: Attacking the establishment press and attacking the idea of a free press are two completely different concepts. My lament during the Biden Administration is how Biden was either unable or unwilling to wage war against the establishment media. And look at the consequences! American perceptions of the economy and crime levels horrifically diverged from reality during Biden’s Presidency. No matter how many times Biden (or Democrats) stated the truth, Americans had trouble believing it, because our not already captured media was firmly wed to democrats being in disarray. “Democratic” Bloomberg articles like the following were common during Biden’s Administration.
Surprisingly there was no recession.
Articles like the above get scare clicks from Democrats plus engagement on right wing media, a double benefit to the publisher, but doing nothing to further the truth. No wonder an astounding 59% of Americans believed the US was in a recession! And we’re not even in a middling economy. We’re at full employment, and one of the historic best economies seen! Likewise, crime is at historic low levels, yet a whopping 77% of Americans think crime is up.
The establishment media these days
No wonder Biden had so much trouble with reelection. It’s a neat trick if you can take a President with a record good economy and record low crime and convince the American people the opposite is true. No incumbent could win reelection under those circumstances. And this doesn’t even touch the pathological normalization of Donald Trump.
its time to end this abusive relationship
As Josh Marshall pointed out, defending free press and attacking establishment media are two distinct concepts, and Democrats can and should do both.
The establishment media will surely fight back, either accusing Democrats of engaging in Trump-like attacks on the free press, or claiming that loser Democrats want to insulate themselves. Look at this out of touch, smarmy, hectoring tweet from Astead Hendron, a National politics reporter from the New York Times, that encapsulates so much wrong with the establishment media.
Astead Hendron was a major player arguing Biden should drop out. This is the language of the abuser.
Ryan Cooper at the American Prospect has a similar argument:
Democrats should forget the idea that subscribing to the Times, The Washington Post, or NPR is a responsible act of supporting journalism. That may have been true once, but no longer. Dems should abandon these publications en masse and instead subscribe to ones not owned by petulant nepo babies or corrupt hyper-billionaires who interfere with their coverage for Trump...
A major argument is that abandoning these spaces is ceding ground to Republicans. But look what happened with Twitter/X. Bluesky appears to take the place of a corrupted space, and it turns out, it is much better. Even though Trump won the popular vote, Democrats down ballot and democratic ballot initiatives did very well. There are far more people amenable to left leaning ideology … if Democrats can reach them. So:
- Cancel your Washington Post subscription.
- Cancel your New York Times subscription.
- Cancel your LA Times subscription.
- Delete your Twitter/X account.
- Stay off Facebook.
- Turn off MSNBC.
- Turn off PBS News Hour and NPR.
You will still find your news, here, or in another responsible location. So far, the free press is showing remarkable signs of enduring Trump. We don’t need this abusive relationship with establishment media, and we certainly don’t need to reward it financially.
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(1) I doubt that’s something Arthur Sulzberger would want.
(2) Starting with the 1994 Republican Revolution.
(3) First against Bill Bradley, and then against George W. Bush
