Let me start with some steps back. It was last year that I started seeing on my commonest homepage (msn.com) repeated reports that Aldi was either going out of business, or closing all of its US stores. And according to the reports, this was going to happen by the end of 2022. Well, no, there's absolutely no evidence of weakness, and that's where I shop. As best I can tell, I have a lot of company.
Similarly, when Russia began its assault on the Ukraine, there were various stories about Putin, and how he was either demented, otherwise ill, or something, and there were coup plots in the works against him, and one report said he had three months to live. Also last year. Um, no.
If we go way, way back, we can remember how the W administration lied and scammed the public, and Congress(!), into believing Iraq had WMD (and had anything remotely to do with 9/11), and the media didn't adequately fact check this. Much more recently, George Santos got himself elected to the US House of Representatives by telling lie after lie, also not fact checked by the media.
Right now, there's repeated polling of someone regarding which Republican candidate has their confidence for the presidential election a year and a half from now. Donnie Trump is sinking faster and faster in every way, except in these polls, where he reportedly maintains an overpowering advantage over the second most supported candidate (Ronnie DeSantis), and the others are straggling. Trump, by the way, was very low in the pack in 2015 or 2016, too, but he became the nominee. So, either a lot of people changed their minds, or the polling was wrong. Or the reports were wrong.
I've sort of given up trying to find reliable news anywhere. Except NPR. Or I had given up. And then came The Lever. And The Intercept. These are online sources, and I consider them very highly reliable. I will admit that they both seem, in what they report and how they report it, to be left wing, but I do not see this as evidence of bias. First of all, both of them, and particularly The Lever, are essentially very hard on Joe Biden, and, to a lesser extent, Pete Buttigieg, and second, I think a left slant is correct. It represents both reality and what the public wants. If a right slant was correct, the right wouldn't be working so hard, bending and breaking so many rules, gerrymandering in the most tortured ways, spending so much money, and corrupting the system to impose on the public what the public doesn't want. People would just see the fundamental truth of the right's positions, and give them lots of support. You don't need me to remind you that Reagan's "voodoo" "Reaganomics" was nonsense, that W sort of squeaked out a victory with a minority of the popular vote, and only because his Florida governor brother and a sympathetic Supreme Court stopped the vote-counting before W lost, and that Trump lost the popular vote both times he ran. Americans simply don't want to buy what the right is selling.
The Lever (they're funded by the public -- their listeners -- and I donate to them) has a written column every day or most days, and it has interviews and "podcasts" once or twice a week. Today is one of those "podcast" days. In the introduction to the "podcast" (I don't actually know what the term "podcast" means, or why they call interviews "podcasts"), the founder of The Lever, David Sirota, is getting ready to interview someone named Boots Riley, and he used the term that is the title of this post.
"Corporate media" did not, in my memory of it, always produce "inane bullshit." But it does now. No one would ever have said that about Walter Cronkite, or Peter Jennings, or any of many of them. Frankly, apart from sources like The Lever and The Intercept, I wouldn't know where to go for news that's reliably true, unless I just assumed that all left-seeming wing sources are more than likely reliably true. But if it was that pure and simple, Chris Cuomo and Don Lemon wouldn't get kicked off of MSNBC.
So, I don't know what to tell you. If you're content with your partisan "news," I guess you'll stick with it. (Is Rush Limbaugh even still alive? I think Alex Jones has been booted. Roger Ailes was kicked out, then died, and little Tuckie-boy Carlson was also booted. What a trouble it is when you tell so many lies that you cost your employer hundreds of millions of dollars.) On the other side, I think people are still more or less content with Rachel Maddow, although I find her style very annoying, and I can picture the rest of the left wing crowd, although I don't watch them. I couldn't name them.
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