The Media’s Worthlessness
By 
I maintain that the focus of people here and on Bluesky about the New York Times is misplaced. The media has never been good. It’s owned by billionaires, the one group in this country that operates according to its class interest. And the media world is so hopelessly fragmented that even Fox doesn’t matter–young conservatives don’t watch Grandpa Hannity with their grandpa. They have their podcasts and YouTube channels and other things that we don’t even know about. But that doesn’t mean the media has been good in dealing with Trump. It’s been terrible and deserves to be called out over it, even if it probably doesn’t matter much one way or the other. Dan Froomkin:
The top story of the moment is the one story that our most influential newsrooms won’t touch: That the United State has become an authoritarian state.
At some point, the evidence becomes overwhelming — and we have reached that point. The frog in the metaphorical pot of water has boiled to death.
Armed soldiers patrol the streets of the nation’s capital, with more cities apparently to come. Immigrants who have done nobody any harm are abducted and disappeared by masked agents. The state is seizing stakes of national companies. Election integrity is under attack. Political opponents are targeted with criminal probes. Federal judges’ orders are ignored. Educational institutions are extorted into obedience. Key functions of the government are politicized and degraded. Expertise and science are devalued. Trump speaks of serving an unconstitutional third term. Media organizations are paying tribute to the ruler.
Most significantly, perhaps, there are no guardrails anymore. No one inside the executive branch will tell Trump no. No one in in the ruling party in Congress will tell him no. The right-wing majority of the Supreme Court won’t tell him no.
And our dominant media institutions won’t call him out.
Rather, they obscure reality under a haze of incremental stories, each one presented as if what is going on is fairly normal. As if it’s just politics.
Every outrage is just one more thing Trump has done, rather than the ever-mounting evidence of a corrupt dictatorship.
The coverage is a play-by-play as the burners click upward, rather than a check to see if the frog is still alive, which it is not.
The closest the New York Times newsroom will come to telling readers the truth, for instance, is to say that Trump is “promoting an aura of authoritarian nationalism,” or that certain actions “increasingly remind scholars of the way authoritarian leaders in other countries” behave.
The Washington Post will quote critics accusing Trump of “authoritarian overreach,” and protesters calling him “fascist,” but leaves even the most obvious conclusions to the readers to make themselves.
The Associated Press sometimes levels with its audience. It has published some exemplary articles recently, including “Trump moves to use the levers of presidential power to help his party in the 2026 midterms” and “Trump ran on a promise of revenge. He’s making good on it.” But the day-to-day coverage gives no indication of the breakdown of democracy.
Can’t argue with his damning of these institutions. Can’t argue with his analysis that the United States is not a democracy anymore either.