VDH: The News as We Once Knew It Is Dead.
An embargoed and bankrupt Iran is teetering on the brink. Its international terrorist appendages, including Hezbollah, are broke.
China is increasingly being ostracized by much of the world.
The U.S. has cut its carbon emissions, often at a rate superior to those nations still adhering to the Paris climate accord targets.
Cross-border illegal immigration has been reduced, according to many metrics.
ISIS was bombed into near dissolution. Moderate regimes in the Middle East are ascendant; radical cliques like Hamas and al-Qaeda are not.
More NATO members are meeting their commitments. The alliance’s aggregate defense investments are way up.
Is any of that considered news? Not really.
Instead, every three or four days the public is fed a series of fantasy “bombshells” much like the daily hysterias of the Robert Mueller investigation into alleged collusion between the Trump team and Russia — a two-year, media-hyped dud.
In recent weeks the media warned us that Trump was dismantling the Post Office to disrupt mail-in balloting.
Trump, we are told, has decided never to concede his sure loss in November and might have to be forcibly removed, perhaps by the military.
We read that Trump defiled the memory of fallen American soldiers in cemeteries abroad. We are lectured that Trump supposedly never took COVID-19 seriously.
All of these stories were either demonstrably untrue, were supported only by anonymous sources, or were the sensationalism of authors hawking books.
Yet such concocted melodramas will continue each week up to Election Day, while fundamental geostrategic shifts abroad brought about by American diplomacy will by intent go unnoticed.
The news as we once understood it is dead.
Well yes, but it’s been dead for well over a decade. In 2008, PJM alumnus Michael Malone wrote at ABC News(!): Media’s Presidential Bias and Decline.
Why? I think I know, because had my life taken a different path, I could have been one: Picture yourself in your 50s in a job where you’ve spent 30 years working your way to the top, to the cockpit of power … only to discover that you’re presiding over a dying industry. The Internet and alternative media are stealing your readers, your advertisers and your top young talent. Many of your peers shrewdly took golden parachutes and disappeared. Your job doesn’t have anywhere near the power and influence it did when your started your climb. The Newspaper Guild is too weak to protect you any more, and there is a very good chance you’ll lose your job before you cross that finish line, 10 years hence, of retirement and a pension.
In other words, you are facing career catastrophe — and desperate times call for desperate measures. Even if you have to risk everything on a single Hail Mary play. Even if you have to compromise the principles that got you here. After all, newspapers and network news are doomed anyway — all that counts is keeping them on life support until you can retire.
And then the opportunity presents itself — an attractive young candidate whose politics likely matches yours, but more important, he offers the prospect of a transformed Washington with the power to fix everything that has gone wrong in your career.
With luck, this monolithic, single-party government will crush the alternative media via a revived fairness doctrine, re-invigorate unions by getting rid of secret votes, and just maybe be beholden to people like you in the traditional media for getting it there.
And besides, you tell yourself, it’s all for the good of the country …
See also: the career arc of James Bennet, late of the New York Times, who was such a true believer that he bought into the Sarah Palin clip art myth, before his woke underlings came for his scalp: The Day the New York Times Redefined ‘Liberal’ as ‘Closed-minded Outrage Mob.’