Remember #Benghazi and the wall-to-wall coverage that got? The endless hearings in Congress. The talking heads on Fox News streaming coverage of an absolute travesty of an American policy failure?
I remember. You remember. It seems now that this may have been an inoculation to a later revealed truth: the mainstream media was never on the side of the people and was always in the tank for powerful multinational corporations. “News entertainment” media conceived, constructed, and catapulted a seemingly rock-solid narrative into living rooms across the country that the Democratic presidency of Barack Obama was at the helm of an absolute catastrophic failure of governance and an immorally corrupt cover-up.
All the while, the drumbeat against the “lamestream media” was the co-narrative cemented into the Republican playbook as default setting de jour. That co-narrative lay in place the challenge to the Left: when we (the GOP) are in control and use this same corporate powerhouse apparatus to push out our own agenda, denigrate these same networks at your own peril. We now find ourselves in a media landscape owned by the ever corruptible (and fewer by the day) billionaire class who care nothing for facts.
We said, “No, no, we will not call out these media entertainment networks as bearing false witness; it’s just that the Republicans are making so much noise that it is profitable to cover them.” We reasoned away that the money must be in it, and that this is just the fair ‘both sides’ work of American media.
Ah, how wrong we were. Now we see that the mask is off. There is no attempt to hide how in the tank these entertainment networks are for the Republican Party. Concern over the apparently invalid status of President Joe Biden was the subject of countless network segments and even books by talking heads. Such is not the case for President Trump. Oh, no. There’s no concern of any magnitude.