Donald Trump is out; but he leaves behind as a legacy a broken system of media. Across four years of panics and manias, the press morphed into something grotesque. A new business model emerged: it grabs eyeballs with hyped-up bombshell story after bombshell story, often based on nothing more than inference and anonymously-sourced rumour
That legacy isn't Trump's. Claiming it is plays into the self-serving liberal meme that everything was wonderful until this monster and Russian asset came along out of the blue and wrecked everything. As we all know, western corporate and state media was grotesque long before Trump. And what was most grotesque was not these particular aberrations but the fact that it served and continues to serve as a weapon of deceit, distraction and propaganda in the service of power, class war and empire. The abandonment of the last shreds of credibility under Trump is just one more, inevitable step that tracks, not with particular presidents, but with wealth concentration, in a long descent in which his contribution is comparatively minor.
My other criticism is that the succession of images is way too fast to even read the headlines provided as examples of Taibbi's critique, so why even bother with them? Still, some good information.
Responses
« Back to index | View thread »