The mainstream media is full of incompetent idiots

Let’s get right to it …

Too many journalists who occupy, or spend their professional lives orbiting the newsrooms of our mainstream media are incompetent, and most likely working in their important jobs for all the wrong reasons.

Worse yet, most of the leaders of these newsrooms are either bought-off corporate tools or dangerous innocents, who have absolutely no idea what they are doing in their crucial jobs, while the end of life as we know it hinges in large part on their ability to sound the alarms and let the world know what is at stake this year.

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I am sadly not wrong about this.

At a time when we’ve never needed fair, hard-hitting coverage of the fascist Republican Party’s attack on our Democracy more, our journalists are catastrophically failing us, and the Fourth Estate as a whole is facing a crisis in confidence from the American public that might ultimately lead to its extinction.

The decline of the press and their inability to do the most basic thing in the news business — identify and cover the biggest stories of the day — has hit extreme levels.

How else do you explain the dangerous and shoddy coverage of the most ominous internal threat to the United States of America since the Civil War: the end of our Democracy.

How is it after watching and listening to the anti-American deviant, Donald Trump, and his pathetic minions in the Republican Party recklessly comport themselves can our media forget that one of the first things to go under fascist, authoritarian regimes is their right to conduct their business freely?

These people are inches from losing their professional freedoms because in large part of their blinding incompetence, and we are THIS close to losing our Democracy forever because they seemingly haven’t even gotten as far as identifying this very real threat to us, and their livelihood.

It boggles the mind, and as a veteran of nearly 30 years in newsrooms, 16 of those years in leadership, I am absolutely disgusted.

How DARE they.

Ever since the fatal election of the racist, soulless Trump in 2016, the press has come under fire for how they helped enable one of the darkest days in American history.

This is not breaking news.

Many members of the working press have since acknowledged their mistakes in the run-up to that election. Their failure to call a lie a lie and a racist a racist, for instance, helped normalize the savage, Trump.

Their nonstop coverage of his unhinged, heinous rallies where he insulted the disabled, and our war veterans, and failure to easily draw the stark distinctions between him and the accomplished, decent woman he was running against was journalistic malpractice.

Many of them told us they learned their lesson, and if Trump, or something like him, ever ran again they would be ready.

If only.

They have actually gotten worse.

The examples are many but let’s take a look this past weekend for just one sample of their massive incompetence these days.

Consider what happened on Meet the Press Sunday. This news program used to be the shining example of nonpartisan, hard-hitting journalism. Power was called into account on a weekly basis.

Now it is a complete mess that has no sense of itself. It’s where politicians eagerly go to recite their party’s talking points, and slap back hard at any host who dares to interrupt them.

On Sunday’s episode of ineptitude, Meet the Press host Kristen Walker was interviewing Elise Stefanik, the House Republican chairwoman.

Stefanik is currently steeped in warped, dark MAGA propaganda. Like many woman in her party, she is strutting down every runway she can find, to see if maybe, just maybe she can catch the vulgar Trump’s bloodshot eye, and have the honor of being his ceremonial whipping-girl on his fascist ticket.

It’s disgusting.

Sure as hell, it took Stefanik no time at all to do her Radical Right routine of telling one known lie after another. The doe-eyed Welker tried to politely nudge her back in her lane, before Stefanik knocked her off the road altogether, and took control of the wheel.

Stefanik: “We will see if this (2024 election) is a legal and valid election.”

Welker: “Will you only commit to certifying the results (of the election) if former President Trump wins? Does that mean only if former President Trump wins?”

Stefanik: “No, it means if they’re constitutional. What we saw in 2020 was unconstitutional circumventing of the Constitution, not going through state legislators when it comes to changing election law.”

I mean, holy shit. In other words, if the election doesn’t work out for us democratically, we’ll just once again move onto some hard-core lawbreaking to change minds.

Short of hitting back with facts, Welker should have just ended the interview about nine times, but didn’t.

Instead, Stefanik just kept backing up and running over her, and was going completely unchallenged when she vomited that the convicted attackers of our Democracy were actually “January 6 hostages" and should be pardoned.

Excuse me?

What in the hell is going on here?

Welker and Meet the Press aren’t the lone offenders of course. The New York Times and The Washington Post can spend three days reporting on completely unreliable polls they paid to conduct, while Trump spends his time literally telling all us “vermin” the new and creative ideas he has come up with for burning everything to the ground around him.

Those newspapers barely even take a sniff at the madman’s unhinged plan of attack, and instead spend their editorial resources wondering how he is polling in some diner in Pennsylvania.

Last month, while Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was on Capitol Hill literally begging for help while his country fights against our shared enemy, Vladimir Putin, the radical right-wing Heritage Foundation decided it was a good time to fly in one of Putin’s greatest allies, Hungary’s leader, Viktor Orbán, for talks with unspecified Republican members of Congress.

You couldn’t ask for a more stark juxtaposition of what the two parties stand for than that. You also couldn’t ask for a better example of how little the press cares for the subject of our Democracy.

Orbán’s visit barely got a sniff in the mainstream media.

Ironically, we only know of this meeting thanks to some tremendous reporting from outside the mainstream media’s toxic bubble by the The Guardian.

In their story about this fascist confab, The Guardian illuminated that:

Hungary has been portrayed by conservative media as an anti-“woke” paradise and model for the United States. Some far-right Republicans, such as Kari Lake and Paul Gosar, said they would like to see the “Hungarian model” transplanted to the US, especially when it comes to immigration and family policies. CPAC went to Hungary for the second time this year, and former Fox News host Tucker Carlson shot multiple episodes in Hungary touting Orbán policies.
Orbán has returned the favour by lavishing praising Trump … The Hungarian prime minister has criticized the multiple federal indictments against the former US president and called the judicial procedure a “very communist methodology” in a recent interview with Carlson.

So on December 11, while Democrats were trying to rally support for Ukraine, Republicans in Congress were meeting behind closed doors with a Hungarian dictator, Tucker Carlson bestie, and close Putin ally.

So, I say again: What in the hell is going on here?

I am sympathetic to a point to the argument that the corporate overlords who own too large a percentage of our major media companies are squeezing budgets, and worse, trying to dictate editorial policy in their newsrooms.

I know this is a popular theory, but it doesn’t explain why the alleged journalists who populate these places put up with that. Have they no shame?

I know scores of damn good journalists who were forced out of the business because of the death of newspapers over the past couple of decades, and the ever-shrinking opportunities to apply their journalistic expertise elsewhere.

There’s not one of them I talk to, however, who can believe what they are seeing with the pathetic coverage a majority of the press is giving to our threat to Democracy. There’s not one of them who wouldn’t have walked out the door and sounded the alarm if they had been ordered by management to ignore this threat.

So I’m back to where I started.

I now believe the media’s appalling treatment of the attack on our Democracy is a simple matter of incompetence, and/or lack of guts on the part of too many in the journalism field. Welker’s display on Sunday was the best example you’ll ever see of both.

What are these so-called journalists doing in their editorial meetings each day when they are discussing the news?

Why haven’t they setup Democracy Desks that do nothing but cover the greatest threat to America in 160 years? Why aren’t they breaking down and detailing what is at stake if, God forbid, our Democracy is overrun by a fascist leader who will never leave office and starts jailing them if they don’t toe the party line?

You’ll find some phenomenal reporting on this subject in places like The Atlantic, but we need more than monthly deep dives into this attack if we hope to survive it.

I never thought I’d type this, but the only place I feel I can get accurate reporting these days is when a natural disaster is threatening America. If a hurricane is bearing down on the United States, you can count on mass pandemonium, and all-hands-on-deck treatment in all these newsrooms.

It’s a bit much, but at least there is some real urgency in the way they approach these looming disasters.

They can’t wait to report on all the gory possibilities if we take a direct hit by one of these storms. They remind us what we need to do to be prepared, and where we can go to get help if necessary.

They make sure we understand the stakes.

They do this because they want to protect their readers and viewers. They do this because people are vulnerable. They do this because they never want to be accused of ignoring such an ominous threat. They do this because they know people are watching, and there is some real money to be made ...

If only they were smart enough to approach the catastrophic threat to our Democracy with the same sense of responsibility and vigor.

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D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. Follow @EarlofEnough and on his website.