CT Blue

I’ve been reading the Political Animal blog for years, and I generally agree with them, but I’m not sure about this particular piece.

Political blogging was born in the Bush years, peaked under Obama, and mostly died in the Trump Era. The decline is partly explained by the mainstream media adopting some of blogging’s strongest features and hiring some of its talent—think Ezra Klein and Greg Sargent. But the most important factor is that straight journalists finally internalized that it’s part of their job to tell the reader when they’re being lied to.

…

A good example of this admirable adoption of blogging sensibilities can be found in Washington Post reporter Josh Dawsey’s coverage of Trump’s Thanksgiving appearance from a diminutive desk in the Diplomatic Room of the White House, where he took questions for the first time since he lost the November 3 election.

Trump said he planned to continue to make claims of fraud about the results and said, without evidence, that Biden could not have won close to 80 million votes. His legal team has been widely mocked — and has lost almost every claim in every state, as officials certify results for Biden.

I try to imagine what it would have been like in 2002-03 if the Washington Post had written, “Bush said he planned to invade Iraq and said, without evidence, that Saddam Hussein was developing nuclear weapons. His foreign policy team has been widely mocked­­ – and the United Nations inspectors have contradicted almost every claim as they’ve scoured the country in vain looking for weapons of mass destruction.”

Not that I was ever in the big time, but I’ve been blogging since 2005, and I think what really destroyed, or at least reduced the reach of, blogging, was Twitter. That’s a shame, in my humble opinion, because it is a format that encourages simplistic thinking, confined as it is to a certain number of characters.

I don’t think that journalists have “internalized that it’s part of their job to tell the reader when they’re being lied to”. The very words “lie” or “liar” are still very much verboten. In the very limited case of Trump, it’s true that the euphemisms are getting more direct. I think they now feel that they can let loose on Trump, because he’s on his way out the door, and they have probably always disliked him. But he is not the only liar out there. Make a list of every Republican in the Senate. Now, attempt to strike out the names of every one that is not a liar. Funny how your list doesn’t shrink much, if at all. Mitch McConnell is the most high profile of those liars, but it is doubtful we will see stories in the mainstream about him that are even as direct as that cited in the Political Animal piece.

Come January 20th the press will be anxious to retreat to a Republican biased both siderism. If Biden tries to get the funding we need to get the economy on track, Republicans will spout tropes about the deficit, and the press will not recall that the deficit didn’t matter at all during the Trump crime spree, when it was increased in order to shovel money towards the rich. Pointing out the hypocrisy will be the job of the bloggers and non-mainstream tweeters. The media will very much want to get back to normal, and normal means never calling out a Republican liar, though it’s okay to imply that a Democrat is a liar, even when he’s not. See, Gore, Al.

I hope I’m wrong, but I doubt it.

Notice: Not that many are likely to care, but comments are not working on this blog at the moment. I’ll be putting this notice on posts until I get the problem cleared up. That will involve attempting to contact someone at my web hosting service, which is both time consuming and aggravating in the extreme, so I’ve been putting it off until I have a few hours I can spend on hold waiting for someone to talk to me.