They Still Don't Get It

And they never will, until ownership of the press is taken away from the rich.  We've come to expect things like this from the New York Times:


" Last year, Russian agents stole thousands of emails from Hillary Clinton’s campaign and published them via WikiLeaks. The dominant feature of the emails was their ordinariness.

They contained no evidence of lawbreaking, major hypocrisy or tawdry scandal. Even the worst revelation — a Democratic official and CNN contributor fed a town hall question to the campaign in advance — qualified as small beer. Ronald Reagan’s 1980 campaign engaged in much more consequential debate skulduggery.

Despite the mundane quality of the Clinton emails, the media covered them as a profound revelation. The tone often suggested a big investigative scoop. But this was no scoop. It was material stolen by a hostile foreign government, posted for all to see, and it was only occasionally revealing. It deserved some coverage, but far less.

The overhyped coverage of the hacked emails was the media’s worst mistake in 2016"

And there, in that last sentence, is the big lie.  Because what the media did was not a mistake; or if so it is a mistake they make every damned day, and a mistake that always works to the benefit of Republicans.  We expect no more from the New York Times, which has been collaborating with Republicans at least since the 2000 election to destroy the chances of Democratic candidates, and which is going to deny its culpability to its dying day, but I really do resent having to hear the same thing from as allegedly astute a left wing commentator as Digby:


"The French view is much more mature than the sophomoric approach the US media has always taken when it comes to gleefully reporting every juicy piece of gossip the right feeds them about certain politicians the press has decided need a good hazing. In two recent cases, 2000 and 2016, they ended up putting this country on the road to perdition with their obsessive, immature group think."

It is long past the time when it is okay to lie about this.  The mainstream press is not a bunch of gleeful gossips.  They are not "sophomoric." They exist to further Republicans and destroy Democrats; i.e. to turn this country into an oligarchic dictatorship which works for the sole benefit of rich people, the owners of the "free press" being prime examples.  They are not acting like junior high school mean girls, and they are not merely getting carried away by unsourced stories.  I repeat what I have said so many times: the mainstream press are not the Republicans' dupes; they are their collaborators.  They are doing what they are paid to do, which is, in light of the grotesque inability of any Republican to act in an honorable manner and think of the good of the country, to find some meaningless issue about Democrats and pound away at it and pound away at it until the public forgets all about the corruption and even treason of Republicans, and learns their lesson, which is to hate the vicious stereotypes of Democratic leaders that the press is paid to promote.

And how astute are you, Digby, if you haven't figured that out, after all these years?

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