The worthless Washington media
The worthless Washington media by Ryan Cooper
The U.S. is a rotten basketcase of a nation, with an ancient and constantly backfiring Constitution, a severe case of declining empire neurosis, and an executive branch shot through with criminals and scam artists.
The elite press corps of the imperial capital plays an important part in our government's corruption, as was on vivid display once more with the tired charade of the White House Correspondents' Dinner this weekend. Comedian Michelle Wolf did what political comedians are supposed to do — use jokes to cut through the comfortable hypocrisy and expose some unpleasant truths, namely that the Trump administration is full of disgustingly amoral cretins. Much of the assembled crowd of bigshot reporters then played their part, performing scandalized outrage in defense of the corrupt regime.
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I was a bit curious to see if things would change this time, as Trump is not even bothering to hide how he is using the presidency to enrich himself, multiple former administration and campaign officials are under indictment or have pleaded guilty to serious crimes, and Trump himself is constantly whipping up psychotic anti-media hatred. Indeed, during the dinner itself, Trump was lambasting the media at a rally: "Is this better than that phony Washington White House Correspondents' Dinner? Is this more fun?" (The crowd roared.)
But no. When Wolf launched a few mild zingers at Sarah Huckabee Sanders and Kellyanne Conway — saying that Sanders' "smoky eye" makeup was made from "burnt facts," speculating about how to get Conway trapped under a tree, and attacking CNN for profiting off the Trump presidency — most of the elite D.C. press leaped to their defense. CNN's Chris Cillizza said Wolf was bullying Sanders. MSNBC's Mika Brzezinski tweeted that Wolf's makeup joke was "Link to tweet
" target="_blank">deplorable." The New York Times' Maggie Haberman wrote that it was "Link to tweet
" target="_blank">impressive" that Sanders didn't walk out. "Being mean isn't funny," whined Politico Playbook. "It's mean." Mike Allen, the dean of D.C.'s political journalists and (not coincidentally) an extraordinarily ethically compromised person himself, announced: "Media hands Trump big, embarrassing win."
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Let's be frank here: The basic job of Sanders and Conway is to lie and dissemble on behalf of a corrupt president who has taken vicious media-baiting far beyond the Spiro Agnew level. They do it nearly every time they open their mouths. That it is possible to react to these mild insults outside of this overtly and personally threatening context is final confirmation that the above journalists are not capable of perceiving the reality of the American state, much less how they are enabling it. As Alex Pareene once noted, "These people practice a form of corruption in which the corrupt individual literally cannot understand why anyone wouldn't consider him or her a stalwart and productive member of society."
more: http://theweek.com/articles/770441/worthless-washington-media
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