At its ideal, media reporting was a reality check on other high-profile journalists, TV people and newsroom editors.
As the left-wing Media Matters for America buckles under the weight of a delightfully crushing defamation lawsuit brought by Elon Musk — hope he wins! — it’s probably a good time for that trash outlet’s deep-pocket donors to consider spending their money elsewhere; not just because MMFA is a satanic organization that employs a bunch of otherwise unskilled dopes, but because so much of what was formerly known as “media reporting” is now simply more censorship and suppression of right-wingers, which is exactly what MMFA does.
Politico on Friday ran a lengthy article about Tucker Carlson featuring this revealing quote by the Washington Post’s Erik Wemple: “I wrote about him when he was at Fox News for the simple reason that Tucker had bosses,” said Wemple. “And those bosses weren’t accountable. They weren’t really journalists, as we discovered in the Dominion suit. But they were sensitive to criticism, and my role as a media critic was to play all this stuff out and seek accountability from Fox and seek explanations from Fox.”
In other words, Wemple, a “media reporter” who has been around Washington forever and who was once Carlson’s most dedicated viewer, was only interested in writing about the show host so long as it was possible to get him fired. Now that Carlson is self-employed and featured on a platform that’s decidedly against information suppression and censorship (thanks, Elon), Wemple doesn’t see the point. It’s not that Carlson has less influence on the national discourse or has switched professions to something outside of Wemple’s purview — it’s that Wemple can no longer hope to pressure bosses at Fox to cave to his nagging.
Similarly, a media reporter at CNN dedicated an embarrassing amount of time this week reaching out to Ticketmaster and event venues for comment on their participation in a national tour Carlson is scheduled to begin in the coming days. The CNNer wrote that he got no response from anyone (that’s how important he is), but he let his freak flag fly anyway. “How can any decent person not only participate in enabling Carlson’s poisoning of the public discourse,” he wrote, “but also justify profiting off of his hateful rhetoric in the process?”
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