The press chokes on its own dead weight while America burns

The news was chilling Tuesday, as the beleaguered citizens of the United States of America continued to be buffeted by the icy blast of fascism blowing hard off of Capitol Hill.

An anonymous official in the U.S. Postal Service has alleged that the agency is aiding the Trump Administration’s stepped up attacks on America as it seeks to dismantle voting ahead of this November’s make-or-break elections, which will determine if the 250-year-old country falls under authoritarian rule.

This latest breaking news is bolstering the most significant and horrific timeline in this country since the Civil War. There can be no more dire occurrence than the President of the United States using his enormous power against the people he is supposed to work for by battering the bedrock of our democracy: the sanctity of our vote.

By assaulting mail-in voting like he has so many women, Donald Trump is making it clearer than he has since January 6, 2021, when he called for an attack on America ahead of the certification of the 2020 vote he lost, that he intends to see to it the people of this country have no say in how they are governed (ruled) going forward.

Given what I see are irrefutable facts buttressing Trump’s treason, let’s take a look at how three of the nation’s leading newspapers and print services handled this jarring news Tuesday. Here are the lede paragraphs accompanying their reporting of Trump’s ongoing attack on November’s vote. I also remind you, because you seldom see this much-needed context in most reporting, that Trump is a convicted felon, who has lied tens of thousands of times to the American people:

-ASSOCIATED PRESS: The U.S. Postal Service is poised to launch a hastily built, error-riddled computer system that could jeopardize the process of mail voting relied upon by one-third of all voters, according to a whistleblower statement released Tuesday by Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal.

-THE NEW YORK TIMES: A U.S. Postal Service official has alleged that the agency is moving forward with a “secretive, rushed” effort to carry out President Trump’s order exerting federal control over mail voting, despite a court order blocking those plans.

-THE WASHINGTON POST: An anonymous federal official warned in a disclosure to Congress that a rushed and insufficiently tested U.S. Postal Service system could prevent large numbers of Americans from receiving mail ballots this fall if courts approve President Donald Trump’s plans for the midterm elections.

Now I respectfully ask that you take another look at my lede to this piece. Try to be objective, and tell me which one of the four offerings most accurately reflect the gravity of this moment in America?

An anonymous official in the U.S. Postal Service has alleged that the agency is aiding the Trump Administration’s stepped up attacks on America as it seeks to dismantle voting ahead of this November’s make-or-break elections, which could determine if the 250-year-old country falls under authoritarian rule.

I render all three of the offerings from those news services as accurate, but also completely inadequate in addressing this worrisome situation.

I continue to contend that all three of these journalistic institutions once again failed miserably to alert their readership of the danger Americans are facing, and the stakes of Trump’s repeated anti-America actions. And isn’t it odd how similar the ledes to their stories are? To be clear: I am not contending that they are working in unison to minimize this enormous news, but I do think there is a malaise and incompetence across almost the entirety of our corporate media that is crushing them under their own dead weight, and regular readers will know it is impossible for me to process how this is happening.

(And, yes, I do understand that crooked ownership in many of these places is to blame. CBS News for instance, is completely dead as a trusted journalistic outpost, which is almost too sad to type. Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post is still occasionally capable of turning around important work, but it has been undermined by grievous editorial decisions that have badly damaged its credibility.)

This attack on our vote and our country is well into its 11th year eliminating even a shadow of a doubt that this hasn’t been a planned and coordinated assault on our country right from the start. Even before his improbable win in 2016, Trump let it be known that if he were to lose he wouldn’t concede, and contend that the vote was “fixed” against him.

Even after winning that election but losing the popular tally by almost three million votes, Trump put together a ridiculous, costly commission that was chartered to search out voter fraud that would proved he had actually won a majority of the vote.

The commission found nothing, of course, saying, “There’s no real evidence of it anywhere.”

Since coming on the scene, Trump has done everything in his power to diminish people’s greatest power in a Democracy: their vote.

It continues to just blow my mind how shoddily our national media is failing us in this terrifying moment of need. Make no mistake about it: We are smack in the middle of a national emergency right now, and these incompetent, dangerous fools continue to treat it all as if one of the two major parties setting fire to our national elections is some normal part of the political game.

It is not. Here is what is:

AN ATTACK ON AMERICA.

I could also stand to hear more from the opposition party on an hourly basis framing these anti-American actions. Because make no mistake about it: Nothing is more anti-American than attacking a citizen’s right to vote.

If Trump, with the support of his bought-off radical right Supreme Court and repugnant subservient party are allowed to get away with this, WE ARE DONE.

OVER.

Trump will be a convicted felon, serial liar, and America’s first king, and not even the press will be able to normalize that, because he will be busy rounding them up, and jailing them.

I am past tired of screaming my head off about this, but my God, man, what can they possibly be seeing as they report this ongoing assault that I (we) aren’t???

We have never been here before. We have never had a president openly attacking our vote and our country. This alone makes it gigantic news by definition.

And just for good measure, I ducked into the 24/7 TV news that I generally can’t stand, and while there was some reporting on this latest attack in two of those places — MSNOW snd CNN — neither gave the enormous story the heft it deserves.

The Fox Propaganda Service was ignoring it best I could tell, and still going on about Joe Biden. No, I’m not kidding.

Why aren’t the onscreen chyrons at the other two places screaming this:

REPUBLICAN ATTACK ON AMERICA

I watched PBS with my dinner to see what kind of treatment they were giving this hair-raising story, and they were predictably even-keeled, because why get too upset at the possibility of being yanked off the air for good in three months?

Seriously … why not start reporting the dire consequences we face if Trump outright kills the vote, as he has shown us in action and words he intends to do? Don’t Americans deserve to see this kind of hard-hitting reporting?

Republicans are now employing our Postal Service to act against us, recklessly gerrymandering, tampering with voter rolls, closing voting locations, threatening to place military members at our polling places, attacking poll workers, and doing everything they possibly can to diminish the credibility of our vote.

They are enemies of America, plain and simple, and for the life of me I don’t understand why it is so hard to report that.

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. You can find all his work here.