The media learned all the wrong lessons from 2024 -- Chauncey DeVega - Salon

[erronis]

https://www.salon.com/2025/03/28/the-media-learned-all-the-lessons-from-2024/

Why the press is ramping up its acts of anticipatory obedience to the Trump regime

This includes a very good set of excerpts from by Solnit, Froomkin, Kuttner, Snyder, and others. Please read the article.

There are annual conferences where medical professionals and other experts discuss the deaths and illnesses of historic figures through the lens of modern medicine. At some point in the future, historians, political scientists, journalists and other experts will convene to discuss and debate the Age of Trump and how the “world’s greatest democracy” succumbed to autocracy and authoritarianism. The role of the mainstream news media is sure to be prominently featured in any political autopsy.

During the 2024 election, the American mainstream news media continued to practice its obsolete norms of “fairness,” “balance,” “objectivity,” and “neutrality.” Coverage remained steadfastly focused on “bothsidesism,” an obsession with the polls and the “horserace,” and inside the Beltway gossip rather than critical coverage of Trump’s campaign and his MAGA authoritarian populist movement. As an institution, the news media did not treat Donald Trump’s chances of victory over the Democrats in the 2024 election with the seriousness and alarm it merited. The result was to normalize and minimize the existential harm that Trump’s return to power would cause the nation.

In this future political autopsy, media scholar Jay Rosen’s advice and warning to the American news media to emphasize “Not the odds, but the stakes” in its coverage of the Age of Trump will be written in bold or repeatedly underlined.

. . .

Donald Trump and his MAGA movement are quickly consolidating their power. The American news media is almost out of time to learn new habits and norms by being brave defenders of democracy and freedom. The American news media is now facing an existential collective action problem, where to paraphrase Benjamin Franklin, they need to work together or be defeated alone. The future of America’s news media is clear: If they continue with their bad culture and acts of anticipatory obedience, they will become de facto ministries of state propaganda that are owned by the autocrat and his friends and allies, like in Orban’s Hungary or Putin’s Russia.

Thanks to bumbles for sending me this article!

[unblock]

1. Same for (fill in the year)

[snot]

2. "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"

– Upton Sinclair, “I, Candidate for Governor, and How I Got Licked" (1934).

Already – for at least a couple of decades – at least 96% of traditional media worldwide has been owned by just 6 megacorporations whose interests do not coincide with yours and mine and who have made a career in the MSM nearly impossible for those trying to report truths inconvenient to TPTB. The internet has by now also suffered considerable consolidation.

This trend vastly accelerated following the Telecom Act of 1996, which repealed restrictions on the consolidation of media ownership.

If you want more reliable news, I recommend picking a few incidents such as the 2003 invasion of Iraq and research which journalists and media organizations were for and against it. Then dump the ones who were proved wrong and follow the ones that were pushed out of the MSM for being right.

(Best to pick events like the 2003 invasion, which happened long enough ago for the truth to have come out.)

[erronis]

3. That's an excellent way of finding trustworthy news sources -- what did they say then vs. now.

I'm sure there are some web sites that have done that type of long-term analyses. Any leads?

[snot]

5. I'm afraid some of my answers won't be popular here, but

one journalist whose work I greatly respect is Chris Hedges. He was the NYT Bureau Chief for the Middle East for some years, speaks Arabic fluently, and was pushed out of the NYT for criticizing the 2003 invasion of Iraq at a college commencement speach. Before being pushed out, he also covered the Yugoslav war for the NYT... He's quite brilliant, has won a Pulitzer and written numerous books, is buddies with Chomsky, and teaches in a prison, among many other accomplishments.

Unfortunately, a lot of the journalists with the best records are at least as disenchanted with the Dem party as they are with the MSM and so are not well-regarded here at DU; but if you can tolerate/discount their anger at the Dem establishment, I do also like Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald.

Taibbi lived in the USSR during the 1990s and speaks Russian, and his insight into matters relating to Russia is valuable; he also really dug into the causes of the Great Financial Crisis in 2008, and imho was just about the only reporter who accurately described the role of credit derivatives (the losses attributable to which vastly dwarfed those from mortgage-backed securities alone). I think Taibbi also did tremendous service in his analysis of the Twitter files, which revealed the extent to which the government was pressuring Twitter (among other platforms) to censor true as well as false information (I practice I consider to be ultimately self-defeating as well as illegal).

Before becoming a journalist, Glenn Greenwald was a lawyer specializing in Constitutional law; so I particularly appreciate his analyses of legal issues – e.g., untangling the nuances and actual effects of court decisions, legislation, & other legal matters.

[harumph]

6. Taibbi is/was a smart guy - but I think he was "got to."

For his recent stances I no longer trust him.

[snot]

7. Are there specific facts

that he's gotten wrong? (Evidence appreciated. Or evidence of how he might have been "got to." )

[harumph]

8. Here's an interesting article on that subject

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/matt-taibbi-why-republican-trump-left-wing.html

[snot]

9. This is one take on Taibbi's views

(which are somewhat oversimplified and cherry-picked in the article – I'll put that down to a need for brevity), but it says absolutely nothing about Taibbi having "been got to," which to me implies that he's been at least indirectlly bought out or pressured to say things he doesn't genuinely believe, rather than that he merely holds opinions that aren't to the liking of DNC leadership.

I see Taibbi as a hard-core Bernie-type liberal who also happens to prize free speech and privacy rights as well as being extremely concerned with issues such as the wealth and income gaps and the kinds of corruption and social decay that such concentrations of economic power tend to produce.

To the extent that establishment Democrats have abandoned their traditional positions on those issues, I have to say my own views are close to Taibbi's.

[Uncle Joe]

4. They were willing to take the risk of the firebreak being oiled with commercial dollars allowing the fire to spread

because they couldn't see the forest for the trees.

(snip)

As Robert Kuttner asks at The American Prospect, “where are the firebreaks?” that should be slowing down and stopping the Trump administration and its forces as they rampage against American democracy and society. The firebreak that is the American news media (the Fourth Estate) against Trump’s assaults on democracy, the rule of law and the Constitution has not been effective.

(snip)

https://www.salon.com/2025/03/28/the-media-learned-all-the-lessons-from-2024/

Thanks for the thread erronis