I am certainly not one of those who cry bitter tears that The Donald is destroying the credibility of our respected and reliable News Media.
I don’t respect them at all and they are reliable only in their bootlicking obsequious sycophancy.
Charles P. Pierce, a man with a natural thesaurus as good as my own, explains-
There Is So Much Wrong With This Sentence in The New York Times
by Charles P. Pierce, Esquire
Aug 29, 2017
There is so much wrong with this one sentence from The New York Times on Tuesday morning that it may be the single wrongest sentence in the history of wrongness, and of sentences.
Hurricane Harvey was the rarest of disasters to strike during the Trump presidency — a maelstrom not of Mr. Trump’s making, and one that offers him an opportunity to recapture some of the unifying power of his office he has squandered in recent weeks.
When in the name of god has this president* demonstrated the power to unify anything except division and anger? “Recapture” implies that he had it in the first place, or that he’s shown any indication that he ever wanted it. In the immortal words of the late Muddy Waters, you can’t spend what you ain’t got and you can’t lose what you never had.
The lifeboat phrase there, of course, is when Glenn Thrush places this “unifying power” in his office, rather than in the president* himself. Again, however, this particular occupant of the office has demonstrated right from his inaugural address that, even if he believed in the power of his office to unify, he wouldn’t know where to look for it. In that particular event, he’d be a guy who tried to turn on the lights of his office with the taps in the bathroom sink. But this most recent appeal for the vaunted presidential “pivot,” which is likely to prove as vain as all the other ones have been, demonstrates a phenomenon common to many political observers besides Glenn Thrush, and a phenomenon that did not begin with elevation of this particular president*.
This is how Ronald Reagan skated on the crimes of the Iran-Contra affair. In Mark Hertsgaard’s study of the press in the Reagan era, On Bended Knee, Ben Bradlee, the hero editor of Watergate, says flatly that another “failed presidency” would be disastrous, and that Katherine Graham, the hero publisher of Watergate, “called for a retreat” in her newspaper’s aggressiveness in the wake of Watergate and the rise of the Reagan Administration. You can see this at work as well in The New York Times’s decision to bury the story of the George W. Bush administration’s illegal surveillance program so as “not to affect” the 2004 election, even though that is precisely what that sort of story is supposed to do.
This is more than mere deference to power. A lot of institutions are powerful but still subject to an aggressive press and a skeptical public. But the presidency has grown to the point where a failed president shakes the comfort zone down to its foundations. Too many people want a unifying Daddy in the White House so much that, if a president is not up to the job, those people will create that unifying Daddy out of shoddy material and wishful thinking.
Stockton-
Journalism is not a profession or a trade. It is a cheap catch-all for fuckoffs and misfits— a false doorway to the backside of life, a filthy piss-ridden little hole nailed off by the building inspector, but just deep enough for a wino to curl up from the sidewalk and masturbate like a chimp in a zoo-cage.