A few weeks back, a dear friend of mine mentioned that while I maintain I am an independent voter, I have been leaning to the left too much in my views. I thought to myself, maybe I should do self-reflection and see if I am missing something and expand my horizons. I took a few weeks off from writing and decided just to watch the 2024 election play out and see what I could discover about our elections. There are several things that caught my attention, but I wanted to start with this, the hatred of our news media and or free press.
The first thing to say about the disdain currently directed at the mainstream media is that they worked hard to earn it. They’ve done so by failing, repeatedly, determinedly, spectacularly to do their job, which is to maintain their independence, inform the electorate, and speak truth to power. There is no good guy in this scenario, whichever news channel you watch, CNN, MSNBC, Fox, Newsmax are all guilty and the gibberish they put out is doing a disservice to the American people.
It is stunning to watch these media outlets lack of fortitude in covering these two parties. They have had no self-reflection, no willingness to think through how irresponsible and reckless so much of our mainstream press and so many of our journalists have been and continue to be”. The media continues to pursue the appearance of fairness and balance by treating the true and the false, the normal and the outrageous, as equally valid and by normalizing Republicans response to every ridiculous statement that comes out their candidate’s mouth. It took social media to enlighten people on the dangers of rightwing Project 2025, folks on there did an excellent job of giving out the facts on this disastrous initiative. The media just glossed over it and rarely ever mentions it. I’ve been listen to the right bellow about election fraud for four years without a shred of evidence. Finally, after four years of this bullshit, Joe Rogan, yeah Joe Rogan ask former President Trump to release his evidence on this topic. Trump gave his usual word salad and produced nothing, four years and the first guy to ask a follow-up question about this topic is Joe Rogan. Mind-numbing!
The left-wing media is just as complacent. Kamala Harris was basically bestowed the democratic nomination for president without any debate or election process, the news media was silent on this. The Biden Administration passed 5 different bills, some of them bi-partisan agreements including the CHIPS Act, an infrastructure bill and the inflation reduction act. Most people don’t have any idea how effective these bills have been, know why, because we had to talk about Hunter Biden’s laptop or whatever goddamn social issue was the flavor of the day!
There is only one industry that is specifically protected — or even mentioned — by the Framers in the Constitution. It’s not the defense industry, the transportation business, or even banking, all necessary to our nation’s existence: Exclusively, it’s the press.
The Founders and Framers did this because they explicitly believed that a free and independent press was a prerequisite to a functioning democratic republic. That it was as essential as a functioning legislative, executive, or judicial branch of government. None of those three could truly be held to account when they crept or bolted toward upending democracy without a press explicitly defending our form of government itself.
Donald Trump has called the press, “the enemy within”, a dangerous rhetoric. Trump, his MAGA movement, and Project 2025 represent an explicit threat to American democracy.
From the founding of our republic, the power of the press to call out anti-democratic behavior has been a firewall, protecting our form of government. It is their job. Hopefully, somebody will tell The New York Times, CNN, MSNBC, Fox and other major media.