Sorry. My title is misleading. The mafia has more honor and dignity than the American news media.
Darn it. I have a book deadline. I should be working on that instead. Only Mike sent me this article last night telling me that it was so goofy I’d have to fisk it. And damn it, he was right. This is one of the most pretentious articles I’ve ever read. I’m actually in awe of what a piece of shit this guy is. As usual the original is in italics and my response is in bold.
It’s from here: https://archive.is/vrFAY#selection-361.0-683.204
Washington Post public editor: the powerful have realized they don’t need the Post
Correction. Nobody needs the Post.
OCTOBER 20, 2020
I’m actually bummed I missed this back in October, but at the time I was too busy writing about things like Crackhead McStripperbang (aka Hunter Biden) being a complete piece of shit taking massive bribes from Communist China, because illustrious news publications like the Washington Post weren’t covering that story for baffling and inexplicable reasons.
THIS MONTH we learned that Tesla, a $400 billion public company run by one of the richest people in the world, has done away with its media relations department—effectively formalizing an informal policy of ignoring reporters.
Now marvel as this reporter provides a perfect illustration of why everyone should follow Elon Musk’s lead in ignoring reporters.
Though we should all be grateful for the chance to hear less about Tesla,
Behold his Power Snark!
we should also recognize this for what it is: one more glaring data point showing that powerful people no longer think they need the mainstream press,
It isn’t just the rich and powerful. Everybody should ignore you lying ass bastards.
especially critical and ethical outlets like the Washington Post.
Hahahahahhahhaahhahahahaaaa
ahaahaha aahahahhhaaa
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snort.
Oh shit. Wait. He’s serious?
This presents a problem.
For you.
Because the mainstream press still needs powerful people—quite literally, in the case of the Post, as it’s owned by the world’s richest man, Jeff Bezos, who is no fonder of difficult stories about his companies than any other billionaire.
Our wannabe Bond villain boss is better than yours! (sorta like how vote by mail is great for you peasants, but not secure enough for Amazon!)
We are living through a historic, technology-fueled shift in the balance of power between the media and its subjects.
Personally, I prefer the word citizen.
The subjects are winning.
Good. Because you guys suck at your job. You deserve to fail.
The internet in general—and social media platforms in particular—have destroyed one of the media’s most important sources of power: being the only place that could offer access to an audience.
Insert Jeremy Clarkson “Oh no.. anyways” meme here, because this entire article is some tone-deaf reporter lamenting the fact that reporters no longer hold an absolute monopoly on information, even though it’s their own damned fault that nobody trusts them anymore.
When Musk can say whatever he wants to 40 million Twitter followers at any time with no filter, it is little surprise that he does not feel compelled to listen to unpleasant questions from some reporter who wants to know why he busts unions and wildly accuses people of pedophilia.
Jeff Bezos’ union busting is fine however, and the accusations of pedophilia don’t seem so wild when they keep coming true… Hmmm… How much glowing praise did the WaPo heap on the “principled conservatives” at the Lincoln Project back when they were useful for getting democrats elected? Oh wait, that was before the election. NOW they’re pedophiles!
As journalists, we all view this as a horrifying assault on the public’s right to know
-whatever we want them to
and on our own status as brave defenders of the public good.
This motherfucker is a self-licking ice cream cone.
There’s a lot of lies packed into that one line. Swap out “public good” for “DNC good”. Their defense is painfully lopsided in that it only protects the left. And the only time they’re brave is when they’re crushing the little guy. Oh look, that teenager smiled wrong. We’d better ruin his life.
And that is all true, for what it’s worth.
The words of a liar ain’t worth shit.
But this is about power.
Indeed. Except you are missing the point as to why yours is waning.
We need to take some back, lest the rich and powerful run away from one of the last forces restraining them.
That ship done sailed. The media is only powerful as long as the public trusts them. You blew that, and you have no one to blame but yourselves. The rich and powerful on the left already get a pass from you anyway. At most you might give them some mild chiding, but then you’re back to running interference for them.
Because journalism, particularly at the highest level, is about raw power.
That’s your problem right there. It should be about telling the TRUTH. You gave up being journalists to become cheerleaders for one group of political elites. You don’t tell the truth, you spin whatever narrative the cabal of connected want you to. And as your use to the elite tapers off, they are happy for you to fade into irrelevance and obscurity. Reap your fucking whirlwind.
It is about bringing important people to heel, on behalf of the public.
Quit lying. The only “important people’ you bring to heel are the ones your masters want you to. You do nothing but make excuses for the important people on your side, no matter how egregious their sins. You are attack dogs for the left. Nothing more. Don’t try and cloak your bully bullshit in fake righteousness.
Politicians and officials and business leaders don’t want to talk to the press, subjecting themselves to the possibility of being made to look bad; they do it because they have always felt they had no choice.
Because you guys don’t tell the truth. You twist reality to suit your whims. You’re the masters of “so what you are saying is (insert complete nonsense here)” and fucking over whoever you want with near total impunity. You’re utterly fucking useless and getting worse at an accelerating rate. Just when America thinks you can’t get any lower, you keep digging.
I do however love how you keep saying “politicians” like we’re gullible enough to think that you treat them all the same. The only democrats you bring the heat on are the ones who have strayed from the narrative and need to be punished, or the ones who have used up their usefulness who can be safely tossed under the bus. The rest of the democrats you cover for the most flagrant crimes so hard it would make Joseph Goebbels blush.
Not that the republicans don’t suck too, but we’ve all seen how you only praise them when they’re convenient to your goals, but then trash them when they’re not. Like squishy Mitt Romney is a principled statesman when he’s screwing over his fellow republicans, but he was a woman and dog hating maniac who was gonna put us all back in chains right before that. And the problem is that republicans like that are gullible enough to keep kissing your ass in the hopes that the media will say nice things about them.
They felt that way because papers like the Post could offer the carrot of great exposure to those who needed it, but also, always, the stick of negative coverage to those who spurned it.
So the Post is basically a mafia guy standing in your business saying “it’s a real nice place you’ve got here, it’d be a real shame if something bad were to happen to it”. And then if you don’t pay your protection, they trash your place. Accurate.
There is nothing devious or ignoble about this; a powerful press, for all its flaws, is good for democracy, and tends to promote equality by holding the big shots in check.
That assumes you are doing your actual job and telling the public the truth. Instead, you do the opposite. Your propaganda isn’t helping democracy, it’s destroying it. Or as would be revealed a few months after this mealy-mouthed article was written, they were “fortifying” democracy.
The denial of “devious” is interesting, because you fucks are like the dictionary definition. You’re slanted and biased on your best day. On your worst you’re outright liars. You hammer some points while ignoring the ones that make your chosen look bad. And in an article talking about how it sucks you don’t get to bully as many people as you used to, you’ve got the fucking audacity to say that it’s not “devious”?
Anyone who has ever negotiated to land a contentious interview with a famous person knows that you only get those interviews when your subject fears what will happen if they don’t do the interview.
I can confirm this is true, and I’m only a little bit famous. When I’ve done interviews with the mainstream lefty media about a controversial subject it was only because I knew if I didn’t they’d just publish whatever bullshit they felt like. I felt like I needed to get my side out there. So then I’d do an hour-long interview so that they could still get everything ass backwards, quote one sentence from me and ten from my detractors parroting whatever the agreed upon lefty narrative was. So that was fucking useful.
Today, that fear is disappearing.
Fantastic. Only bullies want people to live in fear. You corrupt losers shouldn’t be feared, you should be mocked. Most of you are shit tier writers and your hot takes are vapid nonsense. The sooner you end up bankrupt and unemployed the sooner your rotting institutions can be replaced by actual journalists.
We all need to figure out what to do about that.
Maybe you could try telling the truth? Maybe you could investigate and expose issues regardless of political affiliation? Maybe if you did this for a while you could earn the public’s trust, and then you would actually matter again.
Naw. That sounds like work.
Trump’s incredible accumulation of power in the face of countless well-documented scandal stories is a proof of concept that will surely be used by smarter characters in the future.
Here’s a perfect example and our intrepid reporter is too dense or dishonest to grasp. All the public hears for years is Trump, Trump, Trump, even though while he wrote this there was a scandal story involving Joe Biden accumulating piles of bribe money through his family. Places like WaPo actively squashed the story, while BigTech labeled everything about it Fake News and kicked independent journalists off the internet. A couple of months later when it could no longer sway an election it magically turned into Real News, but our remarkably incurious mainstream reporters are happy to let it languish in obscurity.
The Washington Post and its competitors—the elite level of national news,
Lol
the places that have traditionally set the agenda—
The fact you think that’s a good thing is telling. Your job is to report. Not to “set agendas”.
are the most vulnerable to this shift.
That’s because you’re only valuable if the public trusts you. But in your obvious public fellating of the DNC you threw that away. You’re only useful to the cabal of elitists when you can produce results. As you slide into irrelevance they’ll just use Big Tech instead, and you have no one to blame but yourself.
They are the relatively small portion of the media that is able to command both access and editorial independence.
Seeing the boot licking WaPo bark about “independence” while actual independent journalists routinely get deplatformed and demonetized is amusing. You can tell what they fear by who they try to silence.
Politicians feel that they must deal with the Post, but the Post still feels like it can say what it wants, critical or otherwise.
We all know that’s a lie. I feel like I’m getting repetitive in my Fisking here, but that’s because this article is basically the reporter whining about the same points over and over again.
That state of affairs, which has been taken for granted for decades, is evaporating.
You saying that actually gives me a little bit of hope for America. You took it for granted. The public got wise to your scam. You coasted on the rep of your predecessors, thinking that you could milk that goodwill while you blatantly covered for your friends. Except the well is dry, asshole.
Donald Trump, unfortunately, looms large in this.
That’s because he lives rent free in your heads.
His imperviousness to the usual blows from the press was evident five years ago.
The single best thing Trump did was show half the country that the only way to deal with you dishonest twerps is to say damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead. We all know that you’re just going to lie and make shit up no matter what, so we might as well just get it over with. If nobody believes you, why should we care what you say about us?
Now, insert obligatory Orange Man Bad story here:
(One of my colleagues at Gawker got so exasperated with Ted Cruz’s accusation that the media was sitting on secret Trump scandals during the Republican primary that, in 2016, he wrote a story listing the many scandalous Trump stories we had already published—to no effect—with the headline, “Ted Cruz, Please Help Us, We Have No Idea How to Stop Donald Trump.”) It turns out that being utterly shameless and muttering the words “Fake News” nonstop, while having an entire right-wing media ecosystem amplify your message, really works. Trump himself, a pure creature of the New York tabloids, is too vain and dumb to realize that he could probably ignore the normal elite press altogether. But his incredible accumulation of power in the face of countless well-documented scandal stories in the Post and the New York Times and elsewhere—stories that would have brought down earlier presidents—is a proof of concept that will surely be used by smarter characters in the future.
I’m pretty sure this editor stuck that utterly pointless and boring story in because they have a word count requirement of Orange Man Bad for every single thing they’ve written for the last four years. These goofy bastards still haven’t realized that Trump isn’t the disease, he was a symptom.
Our intrepid reporter also left out the part about how the media gave Trump insane amounts more coverage than the other republican candidates during the primary because they were dumb enough to think that Trump would be the easiest one for their anointed Saint Hillary (She Who Was Without Scandal) to beat. How’d that work out for you dorks?
The question for the Post is: What are you gonna do about it?
Learn to code.
When the fear that was instilled in generations of politicians by Watergate wears off,
Will you morons ever quit fapping to Watergate? That was almost 50 years ago. During the ensuing decades you’ve managed to ignore a bunch of democrat scandals that are way fucking worse, and you quisling fucksticks are still patting yourselves on the back for exposing Watergate? You say Watergate, and America says “what have you done for me lately?” The answer is NOTHING.
You are pathetic.
and the federal government becomes ever more populated by officials who have discovered that no matter how meticulous David Fahrenthold’s reporting is, it won’t move the needle that much on entrenched public opinion?
Unfortunately for you, your credibility is ruined. Half the country knows you’re perpetually full of shit. The other half knows too, but they pretend you’re honest because they think your propaganda helps their team. The scary part is even when you occasionally tell the truth, you’ve got such a history of dishonesty that the knee jerk assumption is you’re lying about that too. This country has reached the point where all of the institutions we traditionally trust for information have turned out to be untrustworthy. That’s a recipe for disaster.
When the full flowering of the social-media age turns even the most prestigious papers into just another mid-sized Facebook page struggling to catch up to the reach of Dan Bongino?
It already has. You’re just too stupid to realize it.
I must admit I do not know the answer.
You do, you’re just too cowardly to admit it. That would require humility and introspection, traits which are rare among our self-proclaimed intellectual and moral superiors.
Naw. The problem can’t be you. It’s us. We “subjects” are supposed believe whatever you say, and comply with your demands out of fear of your wrathful word.
All I know is that there is only one way the press maintains its power in society: By metaphorically putting the heads of powerful people on pikes.
Except we all know none of those heads will belong to useful democrats.
Hell, we just had a scandal far worse than Watergate and the result was one fed getting a year of probation. Where were all the heads on pikes, Mr. Big Talk?
We all know who those severed heads will belong to. It’ll be regular people who got out of line. It’ll be the regular dude who questioned a democrat politician. It’ll be the teenager who “smirked”.
You chickenshits give a pass to powerful democrats up to their eyeballs in fraud, bribes, scandals, and corruption, but you’ll fucking crush regular Americans who don’t toe your arbitrary line.
Because you’re bullies, and bullies are cowards.
If the Post and all the other respectable media outlets lose their ability to do that, powerful people will, by extension, stop caring what the well-informed segment of the public thinks.
I don’t even have a funny response to you at this point because as you have self-righteously gone on and on, I’ve become increasingly disgusted. You’re nothing but propaganda shills wearing a rotting corpse, play acting at being reporters.
Democracy dies in dumbness.
And you’re the one who dug the grave.