Faithless Publishers
Yellow journalism promoting partisan hacks
In decline for two generations, newsprint media is now in what appears to be the actively dying stage. It has turned to yellow journalism for clickbait revenue and deceitful OpEd’s. What was once fair and balanced has sold out to its cash register so that it can gasp its last—just a few more breaths.
For cause, sales plummet faster than a speeding bullet. The stalwarts, the New York Times and the Washington Post promote biases too obvious. Their views have become extremely unbalanced, trying to drum up conflicts through one-siderisms.
Once a thriving industry able to attract advertising dollars due to broad readership, the newsprint industry has died. It is now propped up by billionaires who use it to extract its last abilities to promote their own causes.
From Robert Hubbell’s newsletter, I quote the following:
The NYT’s Monday edition included a guest essay by Rich Lowry entitled, Trump Can Win on Character. (Accessible to all.) The headline suggests that Trump's character should allow him to win the 2024 presidential election. However, instead of addressing Trump’s character, the essay attacks Kamala Harris’s character by claiming that she is “too weak” to be president. Lowry writes,
Ms. Harris was too weak to win the Democratic primary contest that year. She was too weak to keep from telling the left practically everything it wanted to hear when she ran in 2019. . . . She has jettisoned myriad positions since 2019 and 2020 without explanation because she is a shape-shifting opportunist who can and will change on almost anything when politically convenient.
What Lowry describes are alleged political weaknesses—not character weaknesses. It is a silly argument. If Lowry doesn’t like Kamala Harris’s political positions, he can say so. But to claim those are “character” issues is beneath Lowry and the NYT.
What Lowry fails to mention in an essay asserting that Trump can “win on character” is that Trump has been civilly adjudicated to be a sexual abuser, that he has been convicted of 34 felony counts of fraud, that he led an attempted coup, that he tried to bribe Ukraine, that he cheated on all three of his wives, that he has been indicted for unlawfully retaining defense secret documents, and that Robert Mueller found evidence that Trump obstructed justice on numerous occasions (just to name a few of Trump's character issues).
So, in a guest essay that the Times promoted as being about Trump's “character,” the one thing the guest essayist did not address was Trump's character. That is the very definition of bad faith.
The Times is entitled to make its opinion pages available to a diversity of viewpoints—event those views held in bad faith, like Mr. Lowry’s. But when the Times opens its editorial pages to opinions that are objectively, demonstrably false and misleading, the Times should be viewed as approving of those opinions. No responsible editorial board would platform such views unless it believed they were held in good faith and belonged within the realm of public discourse.
The editors and publishers at the Times are apparently angry with Kamala Harris because she will not bend her knee to the NYT’s exalted view of its place in the media universe—just as the Times was angry at Joe Biden for the same perceived offense.
Having published an essay in the Times titled “Trump can win on character,” we can conclude without reservation that the Times is an unserious newspaper. In fact, it is a joke—and its reporting should be treated as such until its publisher and editors cease their irresponsible behavior.
Today’s rags coddle rightwing authoritarian Donald Trump and his neo-Nazi weirdos. In that, newspapers join a cadre of sleazy politicians similarly seeking authoritarian power through the same deceitfulness—not for profit, but for power.
For almost a decade these “elected propagandists” have twisted the truth and proffered lies and disinformation to grab the headlines and sway the minds of our republic. Those partisan hacks rose in unison to speak with neo-Nazi tongues, to cloak their vile intentions, and to conflate an alternative conservative reality by projecting false victimization to gather those needing to feel persecuted. That is many.
The elected have abetted an insurrection. To this minute, they are trying to put the powerful Insurrection Act in the hands of the chief traitor, insurrectionist Donald Trump. These neo-Nazis weirdos, elected in gerrymandered red states, are an abomination.
The elected scattered while the House was ransacked, but returned to Trump’s fold for self-serving power grabs.
Of those elected and fomenting dissent, I am talking about Jim Jordan, Jim Comer, Mitch McConnell, Tom Cotton, Elise Stefanik, Paul Gosar, Kristi Noem, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Rand Paul, Tommy Tuberville, Lauren Boebert, Lindsey Graham, Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, Matt Gaetz et al. They have screamed and streamed the twisted truth and blatant lies with cynicism, idiocy, incompetence, bad faith, and carnival-barking arrogance.
Together, they are the elected apostles of a conman, one convicted of fraud and adjudicated a sexual predator. The elected apostles bend their knee to, as Lindsey kneels before, a demagogue that is the most traitorous, criminal, and faithless ex-president in American history.
I can neither find a way to respect these elect, nor gather a means to admire their flock. Likewise these particular newspapers have earned our ire. Lastly, we gave the newest crop of robber Barons, Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg, and Altman. We have done this before. Time to recall Teddy Roosevelt, or find someone like him.
I unsubscribed from both the NYT and Wash-Post (and would hve also included the the LA Times), and now support The Contrarian, Substack, MSNBC/Rachel Maddow, Heather Cox Richardson, Joyce Vance et al. Thank you for your thoughts and courage to speak out about the "crumbling media" ala Biden.