EDITORIAL: Some Current Factors Of Interest in U.S. Media

This is not one of those editorials where “We” tell you who to vote for, what policies to support, who’s lying today, or who to hate and how much. The ‘we’ here is lowercase and not advocating anything but some enhanced appreciation of what’s going on in the media right now and how to see it more clearly.

Two things are different from what they were just a few weeks ago. Most importantly, the Democrat campaigns for the 2020 presidential nomination are fully underway and gathering steam. There are twenty of them now, facing a challenge similar to the one the GOP faced in 2016. What does this mean to the consumer of mainstream establishment news media (that is, the MSM)? You’re going to start seeing articles that are critical of individual Democrat candidates. It will be possible to mistake this unusual occurrence for a renewed sense of press objectivity and diligence in the wake of the MSM embarrassments surrounding the Mueller investigation and its anticlimactic report.

But that would be a mistake, primarily because it might cause us to miss the fun part of what’s happening here. What’s going on is a process by which we can determine which candidates are being favored or opposed within the demographic served by the outlet in question.

As Mencken used to say, “All journalism is yellow journalism.” Maybe it wasn’t Mencken who said that. Maybe it was me. But who cares? It’s more true than most of what he did say. The point is that an era has come to an end, one which will someday be studied as a comical anomaly in the history of news reporting. The era of reporting as the “Profession Of Journalism” was launched in 1972, with the re-election of Richard Nixon. Then two young reporters at the Washington Post — who wanted to Save the World by speaking truth to power, comforting the afflicted while afflicting the comfortable, and destroying the lives and careers of the people they disagreed with politically — changed the public image of their trade for close to half a century. They made it cool to be a ‘journalist,’ previously thought of as wage-slave parasites on the pain of accident and murder victims, memorable sartorially for not removing their hats indoors or washing their cheap shirts very often.

They also changed their trade from mostly sleazy muckraking, understood as such by newspaper customers, to some kind of life aspiration by those who desired a glamorous and esteemed profession that didn’t involve going to law or medical school or getting some other advanced degree that required you to know something serious in serious detail. Instead they could go to The Columbia School Of Journalism (or like institutions at Northwestern, U. Missouri, etc), and get an advanced degree in having political views, good intentions for the faceless millions below their own station in life, and a few rote rules and skills in the low art of character assassination that sounds like factual reporting. Reporting. A word that ceased to have much meaning from that time to this.

With a truly chaotic and wide open race for the Democrat nomination in full swing, the various news outlets which “report” on them are returning to a very old model of what a newspaper or magazine was always known to be: a partisan political editorial machine that also covered real crimes, natural disasters, and something called “sports” (Don’t worry about it — long dead, fully converted to political grist by journalists in the 21st Century). Many of them named themselves after the political party they were aligned/in bed with.

Big cities usually had two major dailies squared off like prizefighters, one in the morning corner, the other in the evening corner — The Big City Democrat and The Big City Republican, to go all inventive on you. The paper of whichever party was out of power would cover the current city administration like real reporters, looking for payoffs and kickbacks and union shenanigans and even the mayor’s girlfriends, all for the sacred accepted purpose of selling newspapers. The opposition paper would attack the spurious charges against an honest and statesmanlike administration, and they provided the only coverage anywhere of what you could call the “good news,” cats safely extracted from trees and old ladies helped across the street.  In both cases, the editorials and feature columnists were one-sided, scorchingly and openly partisan. Readers knew where they stood. If they got fed up with the yellow journalism of The Republican, they could cancel it and subscribe to The Democrat.

Television News started killing this system and the newspapers who made a living from it. People like Edward R. Murrow, Walter Cronkite, and Peter Jennings were telegenic and attractive, and epithets automatically attached themselves to them — hard-hitting, avuncular, movie star looks, whatever. And they all were looking to appear objective because the ad sales they were working for had to come from great big companies, not the mom and pop businesses of just one Big City. People stopped needing newspapers as much. They stopped buying them in growing quantities. TV spread to the cities too, and the local TV journalists discovered that it was better to come across like Cronkite or Jennings instead of Jimmy Breslin or Jack Anderson.

Then the Sixties, Assassinations, Woodstock, and Watergate. The objectivity pretense took over, now used to (try to) conceal a very deep and intricate partisanship so-called journalists really did misconstrue as “saving the world.”

All of which led to the journalistic clusterf*** that has gorged the gullets of the MSM since Trump — the original Big City pol reincarnated — appeared out of nowhere in 2016 and attacked the whole saving the world mentality head on. He knew who they were, what they had come from. They hated him for this more than anything else and they set out, more or less in concert, to destroy him. Which failed.

The Mueller nonsense is the other factor that’s making things different now. Some are still fighting that fight with their sad fusillades of Parthian shots, but most know they need to find a new winner in the save the world party in order to return to a comfortable and unafflicted life.

But they are not, never have been, as unified as the save the world crowd like to appear. Saving the world from the evil “ them” is an easy mission and it conceals differences. Now this specific publication is going to have to find and help one specific candidate out of the twenty and ride her or him or it back to the easy life. So, suddenly, you will find one publication after another publishing very journalistic looking investigations into the policies, personal backgrounds, and shady political affiliations of people they pretty much approved in every way only a few short weeks ago. This will be fun to watch. Attack will be the watchword of the day, because not one of the 20 has any real credentials for the job of president. Therefore, all the promotion of Savior X will have to be accomplished by destroying the others in the race.

They also hope, as a secondary objective, that this will make them look much more like the real newspapermen of the past, who are in fact all stone cold dead.

Look for who is backing which horse, and much of the seeming confusion in MSM coverage will dissolve to refreshing entertainment. Keep a scorecard if you like. Don’t feel sorry for the ones who will be torn apart in the process. Politics has always been like sausage making, probably best not looked at too closely. Was that something Mencken said too? Can’t remember.

As a final note, because it can’t be ignored—the Trump sniping will continue of course. At this point it’s a nervous tic they can’t help. A good rule of thumb is to look at just how deeply the real lede of a Trump story is buried in the published copy and how little it probably has to do with the headline.

Signed,

The Editor
The InstaPunk Times