A Thing I Wrote 14 Years Ago

The Black Hole where the press used to be 

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You probably have your own list that you can bullet-point at parties, and there’s certainly some overlap, but let’s take a breath and look at the overall picture these individual crimes pointillistically create.

What do they have in common?

A fuck-you contempt for democracy that is truly breathtaking, but that’s no surprise.

A tantrum-throwing derision for fact and causality rarely found outside of DT sufferers, sociopaths and four-year-olds, but that’s no surprise.

An unbroken string of scandals breaking now almost daily over life-and-death issues, any one of which would have resulted in a knee-jerk reflex launching of yet another Special Prosecutor investigation had it involved anyone named “Clinton”, but Republicans of the modern age are either Elmer Gantry or whore and hypocrites of the First Water, so that’s no surprise.

No, the biggest surprise – the wheelman for this vast, criminal enterprise – the one that they’ll be studying in the history books a century from now is the complete and utter failure of the American Press at virtually every level. That’s the one for which I must admit I was unprepared.

In my own Capra-colored way, I always assumed that buried deep in the machinery of our Fourth Estate was a rectifyer that would kick in when we found ourselves up against it. Something in the DNA that would let at least a few of them rise up and take on the Enemy especially when that Enemy took up residence in the White House.

But they didn't. The went down quietly, easily. With no struggle at all they laid down their arms and became capitulators, these spineless Sunshine Journalists who were so slavering seven short years ago.

Remember? Such a ravening wolfpack they were before Rove learned how deeply cowardly and easily cowed they are. Back when they were pounding the shit out of the Clinton Administration so unremittingly. Fairly sometimes, unfairly much more often, but relentlessly. Daily. Sometimes hourly.

And for the last five years...nothing. An article here, an editorial there but in the end...nothing.

A few toadies I could understand, and you can't really count the Limbaughs and Foxes and CNNs of the world who are, of course, simply propagandists not really media in any sense of the word. But whatever happened to all the rest?

Saying that they are gutless for a whole cornucopia of reasons is correct but insufficient. That doesn’t get at the details.

Why? Why, specifically, is this happening? This passes mere incompetence and laziness by light years. Has every single reporter on the national stage been topped on film by Jeffy Gannon? Have they all been caught on video making the beast with two backs with goats and children?

Does anyone out there have any contact with the working press who could perhaps shed some clear light on why Journalism is so abruptly and thoroughly dead?

This is a Total News Embargo on anything negative having anything to do with the Administration taken to such an absurdly lap-doggish extreme that the gargantuan abyss where the Press used to be is practically screaming.

How bad is it? Well, what do you think future generations will make of the fact that with little more than publicly available video clips and clever writing, John Stewart makes better ratings and tell more pure truth in any given four minutes of what is clearly labeled "Fake News" than the Empires of Mainstream Media can manage with a multi-billion dollar budget, a global infrastructure, and a 100,000 Klieg lights, satellites and pairs of hands?

There is nothing in modern history short of the collapse of the Soviet Union with which I can compare it for the scope and speed at which the implosion came, and in the great halls and palaces of Big Media we are left only with trivia and circuses. They have fallen, and they are never coming back.

Viewed within its own context, this self-inflicted crime against democracy is more insidious and more poisonous than any frontal assault any terrorist group could possibly mount.

But viewed against the scrim of the all-out press gangbang that ran 24/7/365 during the Clinton Presidency this lethal, deliberate and conspicuous conspiracy of silence is without a doubt the Story of the Decade.

Maybe of Story of the Century.

Would that there was a Free Press who would report it.

Fourteen years ago.

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