Media watch: ‘Unethical’ Trump-Era Coverage
“A growing number of journalists are taking a hard look” at Trump-era reporting and “concluding that, yes, corporate media behaved terribly,” cheers Becket Adams at the Washington Examiner. “There may be hope yet for this industry.” One: the Columbia Journalism Review’s “decisive four-part takedown of the press’s mishandling of the Trump White House, including their slipshod and oftentimes unethical promotion of the ‘Russian collusion’ narrative.” Two: Matt Taibbi’s “similarly damning report revealing that a go-to ‘source’ for the legacy media’s coverage of online Russian disinformation” (Hamilton 68) “is, in fact, an outright propaganda machine,” though the press, a “supposed bulwark of truth and democracy,” didn’t even pause “to question” whether its source’s “ ‘data’ points were accurate.”
Conservative: Our ‘Willful Blindness’ Problem
Many “problems in this country” stem from “our tendency to see what we want to see, instead of what is actually there,” laments National Review’s Jim Geraghty. Democrats especially “rarely recognize when they’ve screwed up” since “significant portions of our media environment define their mission as telling you, ‘Here’s what’s going on, and here’s why it shows that Democrats are good and why Republicans are bad.’ ” So Republicans “know what’s being discussed in the mainstream media” while Dems “don’t encounter conservative media unless they deliberately seek it out.” Yet “it’s in everyone’s interest to have the full picture, not just a carefully cropped and airbrushed image designed to convince you that one political party contains the good guys and the other contains the bad guys.”
Debt watch: America Held Hostage by Spending
Dems are painting Republicans “as terrorists holding the country hostage” in the debt-ceiling debate, but “if anything is being held hostage, it’s America’s future,” warns Ingrid Jacques at USA Today. The president won’t “entertain any discussion about compromise or spending cuts,” though “in two years, Biden has approved nearly $5 trillion in deficit spending.” If spending keeps at this pace, Congress must either “borrow or raise taxes – leaving less money in the private sector. That leads to other economic ills, such as job cuts.” So make the spenders defend $2-trillion-a-year deficits as Social Security heads to bankruptcy. But the pols “are more concerned with shaming their political opponents and less with actually addressing these entrenched shortfalls.”
Culture desk: The Best of Us
“Our collective yearning to live in a society where we rely on and trust one another,” argues Rob Henderson at The Free Press, explains why “The Last of Us” on HBO “is such a hit.” Today it’s “considered bizarre simply to ring your neighbor’s door to ask for salt or flour,” but the show depicts “a nearly two-decade romance in the midst of an apocalypse” founded on “choosing to trust” a stranger. Yes, “Americans have been slowly descending into dysfunction and alienation” amid “the decline of organized religion, the breakdown of the family, and, of course, the recent lockdowns.” But “dependence is how we come to know who we can truly count on. It is only in times of dire need that we learn this.”
From the left: Too Much Ado ’Bout Balloon
The Chinese-balloon affair, grumbles Racket’s Matt Taibbi, “speaks directly to our leaders’ new dependence on government-by-panic,” ending “in Kubrickian spoof, with one unsmiling official after another lining up to declare victory over a balloon. And nobody thought it was odd.” The F-22 is “one of the most expensive weapons ever built, costing taxpayers $334 million per plane”; “that this celebrated super-weapon got its first air-to-air victory shooting down a f - - king balloon is as perfect a demonstration of the pitiful mindset of modern American leaders as could be conceived.” It’s of a piece with all the “attacks on our democracy” that really weren’t. “The real crisis is the loss of public faith in government,” yet “the bottomless well of panic narratives” ensures “people aren’t calm, happy, and free to assess world events with a sober, independent mind.”
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board