"To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle." -- George Orwell
Friends, readers, MAGA trolls, lend me your ears; I come to praise Margaret Sullivan, not to bury her. Truly, hers has been one of the most prominent voices of sanity during the parlous times, so what I offer here is a friendly "Yes, and..." to her newsletter, not a snotty, "No, but..."
Also, if any of some of the second half of this post sounds familiar, it's because I am borrowing it from an episode of the Professional Left podcast which my wife and I have been doing every week for the past 15 years.
Ms. Sullivan begins her newsletter praising Jamelle Bouie, and rightly so:
Jamelle Bouie gets it. The New York Times columnist wrote something a few days ago that stood out to me because it was so directly stated and so horrifyingly correct.
She then laces into the Washington Post's Jason Willick as a textbook example of how godawful Big Journalism has become:
But Bouie’s sense of alarm, well founded as it is, is strangely rare in Big Journalism these days.
Witness, for example, a piece last week by Jason Willick, a regular opinion columnist at the Washington Post, who wrote something titled “Save the panic over Trump’s ‘power grabs.’ It might be needed later.”
Calm down, Willick counseled, mocking the idea that a coup is underway, and concludes that, instead of having what he calls a “meltdown,” everyone should just wait and see. Why? Because, he argues, casting Trump and Musk’s early moves as a constitutional crisis “will diminish the force of such warnings if they are needed.”
Willick was appropriately blasted in the reader-comments section: “This sycophantic, willfully delusional apologia for the dismantling of the American republic and the shredding of the constitution … is contemptible sophistry of the very worst kind,” said one. Read Willick’s column, if you have the stomach, and judge for yourself; here’s a gift link.
Again, no argument here. Three cheers and all that. And her call to action is right there in her newsletter's headline:
We need righteous indignation and truth-telling, not complacency
The tone, in media and politics, is far too restrained for our current emergency
And there is where I get a little baffled and more than a little exhausted at her failure to recognize that there are already a lot of such media outlets who have been actively doing what Ms. Sullivan says needs to be done for decades and, for the most part, have been either ignored or mocked or treated as pariahs by Big Journalism even as Big Journalism conspicuously failed us over and over again, and the pariahs got it mostly right over and over again.
For example, Daily Kos started as an upstart independent media thingie back in 2000, and it still is.
Daily Kos spun off Steve Gilliard's News Blog, which remained an upstart independent media thingie until Steve passed away in 2007. In 2005, my blog was spun off from Steve's and I've been an upstart independent media thingie for going on 20 years now.
My wife, Blue Gal, started blogging in 2004 and has been an outstanding upstart independent media person ever since.
Crooks and Liars launched in 2004 as well and has been a beacon of clear, consistent Liberal news coverage. And if contrarian means going against the mob, Crooks and Liars has been a contrarian all along.
Digby's Hullabaloo. Bob Cesca. The Brad Blog. First-Draft. Martin Longman at Progress Pond, Show Me Progress. Mock Paper Scissors, No More Mister Nice Blog. The Field Negro, The Rectification of Names, Lawyers, Guns & Money, Only Sky, Slacktivist, Free Thought Blogs, The Rude Pundit.
And all of the Liberal bloggers we feature at Mike's Blog Roundup.
Along the way, some of our merry band have died. Some have quit. And some have lost their mind. But there remains a large corps of battle-hardened veterans who have been at this since back during the days when questioning Dubya's military and economic genius marked you as a Murrica-hating, terrorist-loving laughingstock, and the only headlines Donald Trump was making were of the trash celebrity gossip variety like this in Vanity Fair:
TRUMP FAMILY VALUES
Once on the brink of losing his gaudy empire, Donald Trump is about to take his casinos public in a sale that he figures will net him billions. Joining him in his comeback are new bride Marla Maples and baby daughter Tiffany. For Trump, getting to the altar was as difficult as any of his financial maneuvers. With his parents telling him to go back to Ivana, and Marla setting deadlines, only Marla's mother kept the course of love running smooth. EDWARD KLEIN joins the re-emerging mogul as he prepares for the deals of his life
Turns our, those righteously indignant and truth-tellers Ms. Sullivan is looking for have been here the whole time!
So, given that the present crisis was tailor-made for a battalion of skilled, salty communication who have long memories, steamer-trunks full of receipts and can write at speed, how is it that veteran Liberal bloggers and podcasters by-and-large continue to be ignored and dismissed?
Because of gravity. Because of the tidal forces of politics and of the media marketplace.
See, from one angle, the story of the crisis we are in is actually pretty simple. It is the story of the Right pandering to the rage and paranoia of the Republican party base and turning tens of millions of Americans into reprogrammable meatbags. It is the story of the laziness and timidity of "independents" and "Centrists" who do not want to be asked to pick a fucking side already. It is the story of Big Journalism which doesn't want to alienate its paying customers and advertisers by talking about the stupidity and fascism of the Right and the laziness and political torpor and cowardice of the Center.
Add to that the fact that while trafficking in fascist propaganda is easy and it pays extremely well, and trafficking in mindless Both Siderist codswallop is easy it pays extremely well, and slagging Liberals is easy and it pays extremely well, writing with clearly and accurately about our present crisis and how we got here means getting up every day and writing of the about the derangement of the Right, the pusillanimity of the Center, the treachery of the turncoats and the complicity of the media.
And writing about the derangement of the Right, the pusillanimity of the Center, the treachery of the turncoats and the complicity of the media ain't easy, and it almost certainly means you will never be making more than a small and precarious living out of your tip jar for the rest of your professional life.
5 comments:
No shoutout to Billmon's Whiskey Bar? Damn he was good.
I have this vague sense that Billmon spun off Daily Kos, or possibly the other way around in revoise. Kind've like how Paul Raymond Honeycomb couldn't remember whether he was the one to discover Wallace Stevens or Stevens discovered him, but considered that either way, "the possibilities are fructifying." (Stevens, of course, is remembered only by serious poetry nerds such as Your Humble Narrator and like Droogiwoog, but that's still more people who remember Honeycomb, or have even, again like yr. Corresp., encountered his essay "The Theory and Practice of Bardic Verse: notations on the hums of Pooh" in Frederick C. Crews' 1963 freshman English casebook The Pooh Perplex.)
Hear! Hear!
I fondly remember Mad Mike's America, where I was a guest writer from 2013 to 2020.
Meanwhile on the edge of small government GOP startling the outer rim of the Big daddy with his his spanking belt in hand.
GOP congressmen make the rounds on the TV to settle us nervous ninnies. Reassuring us their will be pain for us. That it is going to hurt them more than us.
And the need for us to just shut up and take it.
Because how else does a congressional representative handle his non representation.
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