The American media has become deeply silly in a time of unprecedented danger

Donald Trump does not believe in freedom of speech or the freedom of the press at an American, constitutional, ethical, moral, philosophical, legal level — or really any level at all.

He disdains the concept.

Yet, never once has he ever been subjected to any type of serious questioning by the American media around his obvious views.

He is like the southern segregationist on a 10-year press tour of northern cities, and no one has thought to ask him a single philosophical question about race.

How can that be? How did that happen?

Donald Trump feeds off media corruption like a cockroach grows fat on filth.

It is his power source.

America’s political, media and business elites will not stop America from becoming a banana republic.

In fact, they are profiting mightily from it. Anybody who thinks that America’s media executives aren’t cheering for Trump to drive ratings gold in a dying mine for one last reality season of American politics hasn’t been paying attention.

The result of all of this is a crisis that is building towards a terrible end.

Democracy, pluralism, truthfulness, civil liberties, rights and America deserve defense from its enemies.

There are many of them.

Fox News is home base. It is inexorably linked to MAGA, and to the Trump regime.

The brazen misconduct at Fox News is incredible.

The network is a grotesquerie that has managed to destabilize American society to satisfy the rapacious greed of Rupert Murdoch.

McKay Coppins, the legendary The Atlantic chronicler of power, makes clear in his latest work what Rupert’s legacy will be one day: good riddance.

Fox News is synonymous with insanity and lying.

Fox News is America’s Chernobyl, serving up a toxic stew of insanity, malice, grievance, fear and misinformation to sate the appetite of its whipped up audience.

It casts a very large shadow over American culture. It has damaged the domestic tranquility of the nearly 250-year-old American union in a singular way.

Fox News has destroyed the truth and reality for many millions of American adults.

In fact, its assault on truth has caused a national crisis by triggering a societal catastrophe.

Millions of Americans don’t know what is real.

They’ve been duped, conned and swindled — only they aren’t mad at the conman, they’re mad at everyone else.

That’s the con. It is remarkable.

A few weeks from now, the media world will gather in a Washington, DC, ballroom for the White House Correspondents’ Dinner and a weekend of brunching, schmoozing and networking.

Fox News will be there.

Fox News is a member of the club, and remains in good standing.

Fox is in business with the ownership of NBC, ABC, and CBS because their parent companies carry Fox News.

What does that mean? It means that it renders the entire evening corrupt. What began as a dinner celebrating the First Amendment has become a looking glass into the world of media corruption. It explains the collapse of trust in media that is as severe a crisis as the collapse of trust in government and the political system.

The cynicism is astounding. Rupert Murdoch’s bet is that his audience is too hornswoggled to believe that they have been abused by the lies.

Therefore, he will keep lying, lest the audience become angry about reality. The Fox audience isn’t actually an audience at all.

They are activists in a political party built around lying, and keen to impose its alternate reality on the country so that it can exercise power.

This is what the coming together of money and power looks like.

It is a disgusting sight that yields to a dangerous reality if it is allowed to settle and harden under an umbrella of fear.

How can the White House press corps that counts Fox News as its most watched member demand that AP be allowed back into the Oval Office because of the First Amendment?

Fox News is the indispensable media partner of the Trump government.

Sean Hannity is the Dinah Shore of the MAGA movement, the genial explainer of insanity and framer of MAGA doctrines into comprehensible idiocy for the average Fox viewer. The Fox viewer needs to know who to be angry at so that they may feed their grievances, which never run low, no matter how often they’re fed.

Fox News is the pipeline to becoming a Trump cabinet secretary.

Fox News is MAGA and MAGA is Fox News. NewsMax could be the new Fox News, if Fox News lies down with the globalists.

Get it?

Joe and Mika bent the knee.

Disney and ABC News bent the knee.

Paramount/CBS executives bent the knee, and are going to bend it some more.

The Washington Post has self-immolated alongside the LA Times. The Associated Press is locked out of the Oval Office and can’t catch a flight on Air Force One because they won’t change the name of the 400-year-old Gulf of Mexico because of Trump’s imperial whim.

The resplendences of stupidity, venality and gross incompetence that led to this moment of pettiness — during which the First Amendment must be defended against Trump’s malice on bad ground picked by the stupidity of AP’s corrupt and incompetent leadership — is an important part of the situation at hand.

Let me introduce you to Julie Pace, the Washington insider and practitioner of access journalism and power sniffing, whose only real competitor in the information broker business is The New York Times’ Maggie Haberman.

She is a past president of the White House Correspondents’ Association, and officially the executive editor of The Associated Press.

She, along with her colleague Darlene Superville, is also the author of “Jill: A Biography of the First Lady,” which sold just 2,500 copies in its first 18 months. They were feted at all of the best DC book parties, where the whole ‘Brat Pack’ of reporters gather night after night in rituals of self-importance and congratulation.

“Jill,” of course, had no market demand whatsoever, but that wasn’t the point of the book.

The book was a bribe of sorts, paid out by a third-party with an interest in attracting other better authors, who can sell books on the back of the access and the prestige that can be purchased by flattering power with hagiographies that pervert the plain meaning of the word ‘journalism.’

The subject gets glowing coverage, and the reporters get a license for access so long as they stay in line.

The trade is direct and perfectly understood in the transactional world of Washington, DC, power journalism.

It is a quid pro quo built on the back of dreadful prose.

When Jill Biden was leading the great gaslighting and cover-up that shouted down any mention of President Biden’s incapacities and unfitness to serve, the Julie Pace-led AP became an active participant in the ruse.

What good did the access to Joe Biden do?

They weren’t remotely interested in reporting what was happening. After all, the heroic Jill Biden was Julie Pace’s de facto business partner.

Julie Pace was deeply invested in maintaining access and relevance — mostly for herself — at the expense of the public trust.

Here is a perfect illustration around what broke in Washington, DC, journalism, and why the reputations of the most storied brands in American media are in tatters.

Again, first principles.

The United States of America is the most complex society in world history.

Among the most important foundational principles of American society is the First Amendment, which establishes the inviolate American birthrights of the freedoms of speech, religion, assembly and the press.

The free press is fundamental toward the functioning of any democratic form of government, but like the powerful institutions it covers, the media is also prone to the vices that produce corruption.

The American media is profoundly broken. The collapse of local newspapers and television coverage at a local level has allowed for impostors like George Santos to con their way through an election without fear of investigation or scrutiny, even though his district is in The New York Times’ backyard.

At a national level, the overwhelming majority of the US political media has become economically dependent on their political partners. It is a symbiotic relationship that has spawned a vast “access economy.”

There are many islands of integrity that hold the line against the access tsunami, but the waters are continuing to rise. They are not immune to its waves, but have been able to break their momentum.

“60 Minutes” has not been perfect over 55 years, but it has been pretty close. PBS “Frontline” has claim to being the best investigative journalism series in the world. My criticisms are not directed towards journalism and journalists, but rather, the hollow facsimiles that have arisen in their place. These days demand high standards.

Oftentimes, it is helpful to be able to look back on events freed from the passions of the moment.

Sometimes reflection can bring new insights.

I appeared on ‘Morning Joe’ on June 18, 2015, two days after Donald Trump announced his presidential campaign.

The Washington, DC, conventional wisdom was that Donald Trump was a clown and a joke.

This was a moment in time that existed before a single Republican official elected to federal office endorsed Donald Trump. In fact, it occurred before Lindsey Graham said that the Republican Party would be destroyed by Trump.

This was a moment in time when the only television show in America that understood Donald Trump was for real — and the conventional wisdom was wrong — was ‘Morning Joe.’ Click here to watch the conversation from that day almost 10 years ago.

Three years later, Donald Trump was the president of the United States, and by 2018 he had profoundly transformed the American media.

The president of the White House Correspondents’ Association that year was Margaret Talev of Bloomberg News.

She would be scandalized by her invitation of the comedian Michelle Wolf, and bullied into defending the integrity of the White House press secretary, who is one of the most prolific liars in American history by sheer volume of lying.

Why didn’t anybody in the White House Correspondents Association understand the exigent circumstances of the moment?

The spirit of the First Amendment was being assaulted by the White House after an event that celebrated speaking truth to power under the umbrella and genius of the First Amendment.

Here is the statement that was released by the White House Correspondents’ Association, following Wolf’s performance at the annual dinner, which has become a parody of itself:

Last night’s program was meant to offer a unifying message about our common commitment to a vigorous and free press while honoring civility, great reporting and scholarship winners, not to divide people.

When it convenes each year, the White House Correspondents’ Dinner offers a brief respite to the annual Davos WEF confab, and takes its place as the most out-of-touch place on Earth.

When Talev introduced Michelle Wolf, the introduction was both telling and jarring.

Talev spoke to the room not as a journalist, but rather as a Washington elite talking to a room full of Washington power brokers.

When she introduced Wolf, she opined that Washington, DC, journalists had missed the rise of Trump, and that the room might be well-served by hearing from an outsider, such as Wolf.

It is important to remember that the crowd of the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in 2018 was filled with uniformed military brass, lobbyists, CEOs, cabinet secretaries, governors, members of Congress, and the executive suites of the largest American media companies.

When Talev addressed them, her speech was that of a provisional mayor addressing her community.

She searched for unity, and in the end, what the evening proved was that the American media is irredeemably broken.

The statement following the dinner was a reaction to the outrage of Matt Schlapp, the corrupt lobbyist and disgraced leader of the American fascist wack pack known as CPAC.

This story from The New York Times, which covers Schlapp’s building outrage over Sarah Huckabee Sanders being called out for lying, while being chauffeured to the exclusive MSNBC afterparty, is both beyond belief and ridicule.

The fraudulence and corruption is the game.

It pays very well.

Julie Pace has been a foremost practitioner of the game, but has made her submissions in the usual manner.

Donald Trump isn’t interested in 256 pages of dreck about Melania. What Melania cares about is what Jeff Bezos is giving her — $28 million — for her documentary. She doesn’t look like she reads a lot of political biographies about First Ladies given the whole Rose Garden incident.

What Donald Trump cares about is submission. The Julie Pace-led AP picked a stupid fight over the stupidest issue imaginable, forgetting completely the first rule of stupid, which is that it can’t be fixed.

Second, arguing over stupidity from a position of weakness makes the subordinate party look both weak and stupid.

Third, Julie Pace walked right into Donald Trump’s trap, contradicted the AP decision with multiple contradictory applications of precedent, and then made a threat about defending the First Amendment that hangs empty in the air. It is a debacle.

Now, the AP is faced with the following choices. All of them are terrible for the free media and the American people:

1. The AP can capitulate to the bullying, which will guarantee more, and call it the Gulf of America. Doing so now will shatter their credibility.

2. The AP can sue the president.

3. The AP can accept being locked out of the Oval Office and being kept off of Air Force One.

Those are the options.

The second option will ensure complete hostility from the menacing and vengeful Trump White House, which has picked and steered this fight, and left the AP in the same position in which Custer found himself, which is surrounded.

The second option is the only option. All of the TV lawyers and Twitter prosecutors who think this is a great case to test the boundaries of the First Amendment against the White House have obviously learned absolutely nothing from the fatuous Trump prosecutions that helped bring him back to power.

The American media — more than anything else — has become deeply silly in a time of unprecedented danger.

Julie Pace is a perfect example of how unserious and silly people have broken the America media. In her case, she is like the captain of the Titanic, only she sunk the AP.

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