As the left-wing Media Matters for America buckles under the weight of a delightfully crushing defamation lawsuit brought by Elon Musk — hope he wins! — it’s probably a good time for that trash outlet’s deep-pocket donors to consider spending their money elsewhere; not just because MMFA is a satanic organization that employs a bunch of otherwise unskilled dopes, but because so much of what was formerly known as “media reporting” is now simply more censorship and suppression of right-wingers, which is exactly what MMFA does.
Politico on Friday ran a lengthy article about Tucker Carlson featuring this revealing quote by the Washington Post’s Erik Wemple: “I wrote about him when he was at Fox News for the simple reason that Tucker had bosses,” said Wemple. “And those bosses weren’t accountable. They weren’t really journalists, as we discovered in the Dominion suit. But they were sensitive to criticism, and my role as a media critic was to play all this stuff out and seek accountability from Fox and seek explanations from Fox.”
In other words, Wemple, a “media reporter” who has been around Washington forever and who was once Carlson’s most dedicated viewer, was only interested in writing about the show host so long as it was possible to get him fired. Now that Carlson is self-employed and featured on a platform that’s decidedly against information suppression and censorship (thanks, Elon), Wemple doesn’t see the point. It’s not that Carlson has less influence on the national discourse or has switched professions to something outside of Wemple’s purview — it’s that Wemple can no longer hope to pressure bosses at Fox to cave to his nagging.
Similarly, a media reporter at CNN dedicated an embarrassing amount of time this week reaching out to Ticketmaster and event venues for comment on their participation in a national tour Carlson is scheduled to begin in the coming days. The CNNer wrote that he got no response from anyone (that’s how important he is), but he let his freak flag fly anyway. “How can any decent person not only participate in enabling Carlson’s poisoning of the public discourse,” he wrote, “but also justify profiting off of his hateful rhetoric in the process?”
To recap, a prominent news personality watched by millions is doing a few live events and someone at CNN made it his mission to get them all canceled.
Yes, “media reporting” is now that retarded.
I used to do media reporting, back when the point was to bring transparency to an industry that provides none of it while simultaneously demanding all of it from others. At its ideal, media reporting was a reality check on other high-profile journalists, TV people and newsroom editors, a helpful reminder that they weren’t above criticism, ridicule, or the possibility of being exposed. It could be as serious as challenging a news organization for failing to implement its own standards, like I did in 2014 when the Associated Press was referring to Michael Brown as a “teen,” despite the fact that he was a legal adult. Or, it could be as petty as highlighting the mockery a news anchor was receiving on social media, like I did when NBC’s Chuck Todd inadvertently tweeted a close-up photo of his crotch.
That was a wildly fun time, but it’s not what “media reporters” do anymore. Now they’re only moved to check on their peers if it’s to admonish them for failing to properly muzzle anyone who doesn’t vote Democrat.
To wit, the media news site Mediaite last week posted a video chat with Democrat ABC News anchor and former Clinton White House official George Stephanopoulos, wherein the host and Stephanopoulos bemoaned the difficulty their peers have in doing live TV interviews with Donald Trump. Spoiler: the supposed challenge isn’t that Trump is a lousy guest, it’s that he doesn’t shrivel into a mummified fetus every time some corny TV anchor calls him a liar.
“It’s going to be a challenge for those who are [moderating] the debate in June,” said Stephanopoulos. “I mean, I think it’s journalistic malpractice to do a live interview with President Trump on television.”
Can’t do it live. That would run the risk of viewers seeing and hearing something that the media didn’t approve. If “media reporting” was still a thing, the story here would be about journalists and news anchors making themselves the arbiters of what ideas and arguments the public is allowed to hear from a former and likely future president, with questions like: Who are you to decide that? What qualifies you to determine what’s safe for the public to know? Since live televised Trump appearances still attract ratings, doesn’t that mean there’s a sizable audience that wants to hear what he has to say without you clearing his every word?
That’s not the point of “media reporting” anymore. It’s only another arm of the sprawling anti-information, pro-censorship regime that has rendered Media Matters obsolete.
