You Fool! As If It Matters How Journalism Falls Down.

As the loot-and-scoot newspaper apocalypse (from Vanity Fair) --

The Hedge Fund Vampire That Bleeds Newspapers Dry Now Has the Chicago Tribune by the Throat

-- rolls merrily along --

The @chicagotribune is losing music critic @gregkot, higher ed reporter/editor @rhodes_dawn, movies/tv editor @CarmelCarrillo, editorial writer @AndreaHanis and sports editor @Timbannon to buyouts. All ace journalists. More losses coming. We need an owner who cares about Chicago.

— Gregory Pratt (@royalpratt) February 6, 2020

-- out here in Real Murrica, it's clear that the last, few newspapers still extant believe their best chance for survival is to keep their heads down, give up any pretense of doing journalism, and hang on like grim death to their octogenarian Republican subscriber base by sticking to the Both Sides Do It style-book regardless of the facts.

For example, in this extended exercise in false equivalence, ahistoric doubletalk and outright lying, all carefully calibrated to not offend anyone or take an honest position on anything, the Editorial Board of my local, dying Gatehouse Media rag would like you to believe that, now that all this impeachment nonsense is behind us, Congress needs to get back to doing the people's business.

Editorial: Time for Congress to get back to the people’s business

You might not have liked the outcome or the process, or perhaps you thought the whole thing was a waste of time from the beginning. It doesn’t matter.

Yes, according to the State Journal-Register's editorial board, standing athwart the rising tide of out-and-proud Republican fascism and shouting "Stop!" is somehow not the people's business and does not matter.  Instead...

The impeachment trial, for all its flaws, is over.

Maybe impeachment was a necessary civics lesson that exposed voters to important arguments over the scope of presidential authority and the constitutional separation of powers. And it certainly lifted the curtain on the president’s behavior.

In any case, it’s time to move on. Congress and the executive branch must now get back to the people’s business.

That beep-beep-beep you hear is the Both Sides Do It bullshit wagon backing up to dump a big, steaming load right in your lap.

In a more-normal election year you’d think you’d see politicians working party lines on important legislation that provided a platform to campaign on back home.

However, the new normal is ... who the heck knows? The political landscape has changed, and the divide between elected officials has grown.

We’ve reached the point that the two sides of our great political divide no longer assume the other side is capable of operating in good faith. When that happens, civility goes up in flames, compromise becomes impossible, and the people’s business is buried beneath an avalanche of mutual recriminations.

Fun Fact:  Republicans spent eight straight years relentlessly obstructing and slandering Barack Obama, and telling him to go pound sand every time he reached out to them in the spirit of civility and compromise.  Then they elected to King of the Birthers.

You can’t run a democracy that way.

This it true.  However, what the SJ-R conspicuously leaves out is that wrecking our democracy is just fine with Republicans.  In fact, it's been their plan all along

And that’s too bad because there are issues affecting just about every American that have been neglected for far too long.

Health care, for instance...

There appears to be little desire to do anything with the Affordable Care Act — Repeal? Replace? Amend? — or any other measure to increase access and lower the cost of health care for millions of Americans.

Wow.

Just let this sink in.

This is how my local rag sums up most titanic domestic public policy battle in decades.  A battle defined by Democrats willing to losing seats and burn political capital to give more Americans affordable health care, and Republicans working ferociously to take health care away from millions of Americans -- and celebrating with a beer bust in the Rose Garden when they thought they had succeeded -- just because they hated the black guy.

Furthermore, my local rag is so desperate to toe the Both Siderist corporate line that they are willing to blithely ignore the fact that Donald Trump has been been openly lying through his teeth about health care since he began running for president in 2015.  Promising over and over again that "soon" or in "two weeks" he would reveal some amazing plan that would cover everybody and cost a fraction of what health cares costs now.

For example, this:

Despite what you hear in the press, healthcare is coming along great. We are talking to many groups and it will end in a beautiful picture!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 9, 2017

And this:

Trump vows 'insurance for everybody' in Obamacare replacement plan. 

And this from October, 2016:

And this:

Trump vows 'phenomenal' new health care plan

In an exclusive interview with ABC News, President Donald Trump declared he would be announcing a “phenomenal” new health care plan within the next two months, and said health care would be a priority leading up to his 2020 re-election campaign.

And this:

Trump betraying all his health care promises is the biggest Trump scandal of all

And just this month:

Trump Promised to Protect Medicare. That’s Not What He Said Two Weeks Ago.

I am not a newspaper.  I have neither research department nor interns.  And yet armed with only WiFi, Google, a beat-up laptop and the love of Jesus in my pretty blue eyes, it took less than an hour for your 'umbel scrivener to look up dozens of examples like these while no hint of the grotesque disparity between Democratic positions on this policy (actually helping people to not die and/or go medically bankrupt) and the Republican position on everything (do not care fuck all about anything except guns, federally-mandated childbearing, massive corporate tax cuts and packing the courts with prepubescent wingnut judges) managed to find its way into the the published opinions of the editors of my local Gatehouse rag.

Instead, we get this:

These are just two examples of issues that should have bipartisan solutions, yet both Democrats and Republicans are more interested in claiming political victories than they are coming up with practical solutions to Americans’ problems...

And this:

It’s clear most Americans are fed up. The most recent polling data from January 2020 puts the approval rating of Congress at 23%. That low number shouldn’t come as a surprise — after all, an awful lot of us fall somewhere in the great middle.

And this:

It’s up to us voters to demand more, and better, from the people we elect. Less partisanship and more production from the political class. Less showmanship and more substance. Less brass and more class.

You know what we mean. Now, let’s show the politicians we’re serious.

All of which dutifully ignores the fact that (as one disreputable local wag pointed out) for two out of the last three years, the entire federal government was 100% in the hands of the Republican Party during which time they were free to pass an infrastructure bill or an early childhood education bill or a "Give Every MAGA Meathead a Free Pony" bill or any other bill they damn well pleased.  They would've sailed through both houses and President Stupid would've signed it and showed it off on teevee like a two year old who has learned to go boom-boom in the potty like a big boy.

It also dutifully ignores the very dirty business the Republican Party has been up to since the Democrats took control of one half of one branch of the federal government just over one year ago:

House Democrats have passed nearly 400 bills. Trump and Republicans are ignoring them.

Legislative paralysis gripped Capitol Hill well before impeachment started.

...
This has led to House Democrats decrying McConnell’s so-called “legislative graveyard,” a moniker the Senate majority leader has proudly adopted. McConnell calls himself the “grim reaper” of Democratic legislation he derides as socialist, but many of the bills that never see the Senate floor are bipartisan issues, like a universal background check bill, net neutrality, and reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act.

“From raising the minimum wage to ensuring equal pay, we have passed legislation to raise wages. And we have passed legislation to protect and expand health coverage and bring down prescription drug prices,” House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer said in a statement to Vox. “We continue to urge Senator McConnell to take up our bills, many of which are bipartisan.”

McConnell is focused on transforming the federal judiciary instead, with the Senate confirming over 150 of Trump’s nominees to the federal bench. And he has refused to bring Democratic bills to the Senate floor in part to protect vulnerable Republican senators from having to take tough votes that could divide the GOP ahead of the 2020 election. Still, some Senate Republicans fear inaction could make them just as vulnerable...

So why does my local newspaper choose to humiliate itself by conspicuously ignoring these sorts of widely-known and publicly available facts over and over again?

Because my local newspaper is dying.  And everyone in town knows it.   And instead of looking that fate in the eye and using what time they have left to report on the murder of American democracy by the GOP with brio and professionalism, they have elected cower in the closet, bartering away the last of their dignity to appease their vulture capitalist bosses and their decrepit fascist readers.

Which is, in sum, the tragedy of American journalism.

Because the fall has finally come.

And when the fall is all that's left, it matters a great deal how you face it.

Behold, a Tip Jar!