FREAKOUT: ‘Mainstream’ Media Brought ‘Plastic Sporks’ to Trump/Fox Knife Fight for Democracy

It Los Angeles TimesI am freaking out. Lorraine Ali, TV critic (formerly of Newsweek) sounded the alarm Wednesday under the headline “The crisis of democracy is a media crisis. And the mainstream press is losing”!

Ali laments that a right-wing media exists…and that somehow Facebook is a part of it:

This long-term chaos reached its peak in 2021.Fox News is the social media giant Facebook, and there are a number of other hard-right outlets.Fear of uncertainty was what they enjoyed, creating doubts among their supporters about the outcome of the election, vaccines and alarming wakingness. Sesame Street. Toxic entertainment for toxic times, still in demand, even after their showy champion lost the White House.

In Ali’s fantasy world, Fox is toxically opinionated, and the ‘traditional” news media are worthless and weak:

The comparatively traditional news media — Beltway reporters, network nightly news, morning shows, Sunday programs — This was a fight between poison-tipped knives and plastic sporks.

The D.C. media was depleted due to the fact that they had been covering an endless stream of hell since 2016, but it is fair. The president of the United States and an arm of the press that supported violence made disinformation, i.e. they were unable to prove it.

Do not panic. Conservative media has “promoted violence” Like Kyle Rittenhouse’s self defense? Conservative media supported the Jan 6 rioting. Do we believe this? Los Angeles Times Did they not provide sympathy coverage for the 2020 riots that occurred in Los Angeles? They did. Ali kept dreaming of his fantasies. 

Who can blame them for breathing a sigh of relief when Joe Biden’s presidential win promised them a respite of politics as usual. So as they reverted to politics-as-sportsball storylines …. the The new, undiscovered war against America was the ongoing assault on our democracy[n] media.We no longer need to worry about what happens when one of two-party systems becomes extremist and takes over a large portion of the media.

Meet the Press host Chuck Todd, ABC’s World News Tonight anchor David Muir, CNN+ newcomer Chris Wallace and other respected TV reporters and commentators who forged their careers in the Before Times continue to play by the rules of good journalism: Be truthful, impartial and respectful of others’ points of view.

Is it possible that ABC and NBC are “impartial” today? What is the way Ali could have overlooked the endless hours of news reports promoting “voting right” and labeling Republicans “Jim Crow 2.0” because they advocate simple voter IDs at the polls? Ali does not get MSNBC and CNN on her television. She ended:

After an overwhelming year, in a challenging-in-the-best-of-times business, it might seem harsh to blame the old-school press forNot assembling pieces into a warning siren to our government system. But it isn’t enough to hope that 2022 will magically offer solutions to either our media crisis or our democratic one. This will take swift, forceful changes. Otherwise, the joke’s on us.

Ali’s suggestion is that the Left suggests what they often suggest: that if “swift, forceful change is not achieved” — for example, removing news stations from “hard-right”, cable networks? Otherwise, “democracy is in a bubble.” It is possible to have democracy and leaveist victory.