Birdbrains in the press complain

The Bezos Post and the rest of the media blew it by not standing up for Trump's rights

Paul Farhi, a Pulitzered galley slave at the Jeff Bezos Post is crying over the public’s treatment of the media. People are expecting the media to follow the same laws everyone else does, he complained in a piece for The Atlantic, “The Media Are Getting Easier to Push Around.”

He began his piece, “Until a few months ago, the tiny town of Atmore, Alabama, was perhaps best known for the glitzy casino-and-hotel complex on its northern border and its proximity to the prison where the state carries out executions. Then Stephen Billy decided to pick a fight with the hometown newspaper, the Atmore News. In October, the paper published a story, based on an anonymous leak, revealing that Billy, the county’s district attorney, was conducting a grand jury investigation into possible financial fraud by the local school system. Shortly thereafter, Billy charged the paper’s publisher, 73-year-old Sherry Digmon, and its only reporter, 69-year-old Don Fletcher, with violating a state secrecy law. Digmon and Fletcher were cuffed by deputies they’d known for years and charged with felonies that could land them in the local prison for up to three years on each count. They maintained they’d merely reported news of importance.”

So Digmon and Fletcher tipped off possible targets of a grand jury investigation. Their ages — 73 and 69, respectively — are the only identification given other than their jobs. Fahri wants everyone to believe they are just pop and granny doing their jobs.

I might work up some sympathy if only Fahri’s galley — the Bezos Post — had objected to the ridiculous length of sentences given the J6 defendants just for being inside the Capitol. The Bezos Post was gentle as a lamb — and a silent one, too. But Fahri and his fellow scribes rooted for the government going after others, not them. Now the government goes after them and they want help fending off the government.

(Did I say Fahri worked on the Bezos galley? I meant dinghy because Bezos paid twice as much for his yacht than he did the paper. He still got fleeced by the Graham family as he is stuck losing about $100 million a year to keep the paper alive.)

Don’t just take my word on the J6 sentencing being outrageously unfair.

Politico reported, “A federal appeals court panel ruled Friday that Jan. 6 defendants who obstructed Congress’ work had their sentences improperly lengthened by judges who determined that they had interfered with the ‘administration of justice.’”

Congress was not administering justice. It was holding a routine vote on accepting the Electoral College’s vote on the presidency and vice presidency.

Here’s the thing about the First Amendment that media mob overlook. The amendment does not simply cover a free press. It covers freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom to peacefully protest and freedom to petition the government for grievances as well. When it comes to the First Amendment, we must be one for all and all for one. The media has spent most of my life attacking churches and conservatives. Pardon us while we sit on our hands. We need to warm them because it got cold and lonely out there when our rights were trampled.

In his piece, Fahri cited a few cases similar to his first example, and then he turned his column into an attack on conservatives. He wrote:

The alarming rate of official actions against the news media can’t be divorced from the hostile climate that surrounds reporting these days. Donald Trump has infamously referred to journalists as “enemies of the people”; his acolytes have gone even further, such as when Marjorie Taylor Greene called for journalists to be “held accountable — even jailed — for what they did to Trump and our great country.” Tech titans are also publicly hostile to the press; Elon Musk attacks the media while arguing that people should use his platform to do unpaid citizen journalism. Rhetoric like that isn’t likely to inspire a great deal of respect for the Fourth Estate. “Local authorities seem to have gotten the message that they can get away with this,” Trevor Timm, the Press Freedom Foundation’s executive director, told me.

Excuse me but Fahri said nothing about the FBI arresting reporter Scott Baker for covering the J6 protest. Fahri loves fascism. If he didn’t, do you think Bezos would keep him on the job?

The media is getting kicked around? Not hard enough to knock any sense into their practitioners.

Fahri and his fellow featherheads in the Fourth Estate cheered when Twitter canceled Trump’s account. Their tedious TDS argument was well, it was a private company censoring him, not the government, so that’s OK.

Wrong.

It turned out the government paid Twitter and similar social media companies to censor Trump and his supporters.

The media also has a bad habit of going after kids such as Nicholas Sandmann. The latest to get bullied was Holden Armenta, 9.

Benny Johnson tweeted some good news, “Deadspin is a fake news media company that falsely accused a 9-year-old boy of wearing blackface at a Chiefs game.

“In response, the boy’s family is now suing them to hell for defamation.

“Today, Deadspin was forced to lay off their entire staff and sell the company.

“Fake News is the enemy of the people.

“FAFO.”

The media conspired to elect Biden by suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop scandal and by refusing to consider any evidence of an election fix. Somehow Trump went from 62 million votes in 2016 to 75 million in 2020 — a record rise for an incumbent president — and lost the election, but no one in the press seems to find that odd.

The media was ticked because Trump beat them once. They had thrown out any pretense for objectivity when Republicans nominated Donald Trump in 2016. The New York Times announced its abandonment of this principle on its Front Page on August 7, 2016, in a story, “Trump Is Testing the Norms of Objectivity in Journalism.”

He tested them all right, and the media failed miserably.

NYT’s fair-haired boy Jim Rutenberg whose research seemed to consist of talking to Carolyn Ryan, The New York Times’s senior editor for politics, wrote the media manifesto. He made excuse after excuse after excuse for turning the news media into a propaganda machine.

Rutenberg ended his piece, “As Ms. Ryan put it to me, Mr. Trump’s candidacy is ‘extraordinary and precedent-shattering’ and ‘to pretend otherwise is to be disingenuous with readers.’

“It would also be an abdication of political journalism’s most solemn duty: to ferret out what the candidates will be like in the most powerful office in the world.

“It may not always seem fair to Mr. Trump or his supporters. But journalism shouldn’t measure itself against any one campaign’s definition of fairness. It is journalism’s job to be true to the readers and viewers, and true to the facts, in a way that will stand up to history’s judgment. To do anything less would be untenable.”

Rutenberg is wrong. The solemn duty of those in the news trade is to tell the truth. They ain’t and we no longer care about their little stories and their melodramatic problems. The failure of the press to maintain its credibility makes reporters the Kakapos of the birdbrain world.

HummingbirdsPlus.org said, “The Kakapo is a flightless parrot native to New Zealand. Despite their endearing appearance, Kakapos have earned a reputation for being rather dim-witted due to their lack of natural predator awareness. This, combined with their inability to fly, has made them vulnerable to extinction.”

There are only 247 Kakapos left. The layoffs at news organizations work similarly.

This exchange on Twitter is a great example of the Kakapovian state of journalism. The Hill tweeted, “Special counsel Robert Hur's transcript shows nuance of the Beau Biden exchange as it now paints a more fulsome picture of the exchange between Biden and Hur during an interview last October.”

Andrea Widburg replied, “The state of the media today. Fulsome doesn’t meant more full. It means overwhelmingly flattering or complimentary — like the media’s factually disconnected praise for Biden.”

Caa-caa and poo are a good way of describing media output these days. People notice.

In his piece, Fahri wrote, “The public’s general antipathy toward the press is spelled out in Gallup’s annual survey of trust in the news media. The percentage of people expressing trust in news reporting last year fell to the lowest level since Gallup began asking the question in 1972. Self-described Republicans traditionally have had the highest mistrust of the press, but that sentiment has lately been increasing among Democrats and independents too.”

Newsrooms that once cheered the fall of Nixon — done in by Mark Felt, the man he passed over as FBI director — now cheer the persecution of President Trump, who was Watergated (spied on) by the FBI on behalf of Obama.

Why should any freedom-loving American support such fascists? And so we walk away. With us go the advertisers. Newspapers, cable channels and news web sites are dying.

Newspapers are vanity press for their billionaire owners. Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire said, “Whoever you are — I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.”

Then the doctor walks her away to the loony bin. The press has been in its loony bin for a while.

On Monday, the LA Times shut down its press as it will be printed instead by a smaller rival, an indignity suffered as its billionaire benefactor tries to reduce his annual losses. The press was opened in 1990. The story said the paper’s revenues were $3.7 billion ($3,700 million) in 1991.

Revenues were $780 million last year, a drop of nearly 80%.

Newspapers are not the only ones tanking. The cable channels are cutting back. Forbes reported, “in 2023 there were only three cable networks that sustained an average audience above one million viewers, compared to five in 2022. By comparison, in 2013 there were 19 cable networks that averaged over one million viewers.”

The new streaming services that were supposed to replace cable also are cutting back. Yahoo reported, “streaming profitability still has a long way to go, with virtually all media companies (with the exception of Netflix) losing money on that business. The bottom line: more job cuts.”

Thank goodness Netflix is safe. Without Netflix, who will re-make all those historic films replacing white folks with black people? I am so looking forward to Kevin Hart as Hitler in a remake of Downfall.

There are myriad reasons, of course, for the downfall of the media but the biggest one is a near-total loss of credibility. Fahri and his fellow travelers just gave it away and why? To stop Trump? It reminds me of the queen in Snow White who gave up her own beauty and became an old lady just to give Snow a poisoned apple in a failed attempt to bring her down. And so the media relinquished its respected reputation just to bring The Donald down.

The people who work in the media overwhelmingly may be idiots but this colossal loss of respect and customers is too big and blatant not to be by design. The streams of lies get people to disbelieve everything they read or hear. Widespread distrust is poisonous to a society. Cui bono? Who benefits from a poisoned society?

The short answer is the same people who benefit from having tens of millions of people invade through our southern border. The money Bezos lost on his Washington Post is less than 1% of his total wealth. He is quite aware of what he is doing.

Maybe Fahri sees it. Maybe he does not. But the way you win respect for your rights is not by demanding them in a whiny piece in The Atlantic. Protecting the rights — no, fighting for the rights — of others you dislike is the only way to protect yourself when the government comes for your rights.