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this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2025
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It’s access journalism. Trump is just more overt about it, but each admin does it. Biden staffers refused to field questions around his acuity, Trump tried to kick out the AP from the White House Press Pool for running actual news instead of fellating him, Obama’s admin refused to honestly talk about the growing drone war, the Bush jr team chided any ‘where WMD’ reporters, Clinton…
If you say mean things or are critical of your subject, they tend to remember that and don’t volunteer information to your outlet - costing your boss exclusives and headlines, and thus ad revenue. I’m pretty sure ~~Ted~~ Rafael Cruz is never going to sit down for a 1:1 with Tucker Carlson again after he got the steel chair. White supremacist shitbag as Carlson may be, he actually did a journalism, didn’t let Cruz lie, and challenged him on the topic, and Cruz was shown to be lacking.
There is no actual journalism to be found among the main headlines, just repackaged press releases and barebones reporting devoid of context that might actually inform readers. Find an investigative reporter that deals with a topic/region you care about and follow their SubStack, or wade into Telegram and filter out the propaganda as you are able.
I remember watching a 60 Minutes episode from the mid-2000s about government corruption and embezzlement of oil wealth by the ruling family of Equatorial Guinea, and how American oil companies facilitated this corruption. They interviewed a representative of an American oil industry group and confronted him about whether it was ethical to keep doing business with a dictator knowing that the billions in oil money was going straight into the pocket of a corrupt autocrat and his family to fund lavish spending sprees in Paris and mansions in America while the people of Equatorial Guinea starved in some of the poorest and worst living standards in the world. Of course, the industry rep claimed that it was ethical, and the reporters got kicked out of Equatorial Guinea and harassed by local security forces.
But that's the kind of fearless reporting that just doesn't get done any more. It's cheaper to just have people in the newsroom write clickbait articles about what local political figures are yapping about on Bluesky than to send people to create that sort of high-quality journalism. And there's no chance that any oil industry representative would ever agree to that sort of interview now. At most, they would just have their PR division write a two-paragraph statement.
Agree wholeheartedly. It’s why I hold the term ‘journalist’ as an honorific, and don’t apply that to easily 95% of the people who work in news media. Reporter, sure. But a journalist speaks truth to power, knowing that that power figure may retaliate. A real journalist risks being assassinated with a car bomb for investigating a global money laundering ring, not invitations to state banquets, or ‘embedded live’ with government troops whilst accepting the censor.
Like I said, find a journalist with a good SubStack and support the news and analysis you find valuable. Find somewhere that tells you the what and the why, instead of a story.
It goes back even further. Look at how much the media worked to cover up FDR's polio.