THREAD: Thoughts on why the MSM “can’t handle the truth" (occasioned by Sen. Kennedy’s appearance on MTP today, and the ensuing calls for MSM to deny a platform to politicians parroting Russian propaganda).
There is a structural problem w/ how MSM reports on the Trump catastrophe and the GOP’s capitulation to Trump. If MSM’s reporting was premised, correctly, on an acknowledgment that one of our two ‘parties of government’ has been captured
by a renegade operative who systematically subverts the Constitution while conducting in plain sight a breathtaking crime spree, the MSM would be cast adrift from all known points of reference in American politics.
It would require acknowledging the very disorienting fact that we no longer have two ‘mainstream’ parties operating in a traditional, Constitutionally oriented context. We now have only one of these;
the other is an increasingly sinister and extremist movement that appears to be consciously in the service of at least one, and perhaps several, foreign dictators, and that is hell bent on personal enrichment.
The extremist movement masquerading as the GOP has enthusiastically endorsed, and collaborated in, a range of crimes and ethical breaches that put it far outside the American political tradition. But, for the MSM, in that strange land beyond the Pale, "there dragons be."
I believe the MSM fundamentally fails to comprehend our current situation. To do so wd force them to make an intellectual and emotional leap into the unknown. NYT, WaPo, WSJ, LATimes, major cable networks, etc. are just not up to recognizing, and reporting, the jarring reality:
that the 2-party drive shaft of our political system has broken. That the GOP in its current incarnation can't be trusted to govern in the national interest. That very little we’ve ever thought or believed about our politics currently applies. That we are on terra incognita.
In this sui generis moment, the MSM will continue to indulge the comforting illusion that we still have two parties, each with a fair and natural claim to be heard.
That stance will continue to dictate that chancers, cultists and liars like Sen. Kennedy are no more disadvantaged in their access to the national discourse than were his predecessors in a dramatically different GOP.
All of which is to say that, beyond the obvious commercial and First Amendment considerations weighed by MSM in making publishing decisions, my feeling is that we suffer, above all, from senior editors’ personal inability to fathom what has happened, and fashion a response to it.
They will continue to act “as if” the GOP retains vestiges of its previous identity, and that the 'real' GOP is only on temporary leave and will re-emerge in due course. In so doing, they will continue to fail to fashion a new journalism that responds to the new reality. END.
