Dear Corporate Media: This Situation is Your Fault

Cowardice in mainstream media outlets has led to a situation where one party has become increasingly unhinged and off the rails. That same party wants to abolish honest reporting entirely.

When professional liar, fraudster, and all around terrible person Rupert Murdoch decided to move from Australia to the United States to manage his growing toxic media empire, it signaled the beginning of the end of honest journalism in America as we know it.

Murdoch has always been on the unethical side of things, which includes a scandal involving his company News of the World hacking phones to gather information, bribing police officers, and using its influence unethically just to get stories. Murdoch is also the man who, as the founder of News Corp, brought Fox News to life.

The popularity of Fox News lying to the public while its employees engaged in sexual harassment and other terrible behavior led to other conservative media outlets having a go at lying to the public for fun and profit. These include, but are not limited to, Newsmax, New York Post, One America Network, as well as a host of smaller outlets such as Granite Grok in New Hampshire, which reads like angry vomit.

When their audience was saturated with conservative lies, influencers turned to Russia to make their money. Many of them were either unprofitable or sought to make more of a profit than they were already making.

Conservative propaganda gradually took hold in major media organizations, many of which are owned by rich, Trump-supporting individuals. Those individuals, such as Jeff Bezos, owner of the Washington Post, had a moment of cowardice when he decided to quash an endorsement of Kamala Harris from the paper’s editorial board. Instead, a humor columnist had to write it. When I attempted to access the endorsement article, it was a behind a paywall with a flash sale; thousands of people had by then canceled their Post subscription.

In order to combat the lies, one must tell the truth. To do so gives a reporter the appearance of either being on the left or not having enough courage to be on the left. Murdoch and others like him have polarized America’s media environment so much that a dichotomy between truth and fiction has risen, one which, as a reporter, I reject as being false.

Truth has more than one or two sides. There are often multiple sides to the truth. In the 2024 presidential election, however, there is at least one truth which remains clear regardless of all the sanewashing major media outlets have done to try and make a disrespectful man appear perfectly respectable. That is: if Donald Trump gets elected a second time, he will do all in his power to become a dictator.

For him, being a dictator means abolishing as many forms of independent media as he can. He has talked about pulling the broadcast licenses of major news networks whose members dare to fact check him. Control of information is as important to him as it is to other dictators such as Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong Un, Victor Orban, and Xi Jingping.

Major media outlets who have not found the courage to call out Trump for what he’s doing and what he has done work against their own interests. Donald Trump, based on his own statements, which may themselves be lies, has always expressed hatred of the media. Two of Project 2025’s many goals are to defund PBS and NPR.

The cowards at the Washington Post, and the fools at the New York Times who have spent most of the year criticizing Biden and Harris while supporting Trump, shouldn’t expect their organizations to remain intact if Trump wins- which he most likely will not.

As is the case in most toxic companies, upper management takes a large share of the blame. Management in large media companies have decided obeying the boss is more important following their own moral standard. Theirs is a viewpoint similar to that which Trump holds; authority is more important than honesty.

Reporters at those organizations have also been cowards. It gives me no pleasure to say this, but as someone who has been reporting locally for five years, I’ve seen too many friends and colleagues face the moment with bewilderment and bafflement. They don’t quite know what to do with a situation in which a psychotic unhinged sociopath tells lies every time he opens his mouth.

Their inaction, arising from genuinely not knowing what it is they’re supposed to do, gives them the appearance of being cowards. They see their coworkers embracing Trumpism for the sake of a paycheck, as many German citizens embraced Nazism in the same manner. They don’t revolt, or go on strike, or develop competing platforms in their own markets. The most they’re willing to do is resign in protest while the corporate machine rolls on.

Their resignations only serve to hasten the transformation of once respectable news organizations into political propaganda machines. Putting a black square in a newspaper only matters to those who read it, which in the case of the Washington Post, is a diminishing audience.

The mainstream media is also guilty of being reticent to use the correct terminology when speaking about Trump. He’s been a fascist all of his life, yet it’s only been recently that the term has been accepted into mainstream discourse once a general who served under Trump used that word.

In August 2022, President Biden called MAGA philosophy “semi-fascism” in a moment of cowardice that didn’t really meet the moment. Previously, Trump had supported racist rioters at Charlottesville, mobilized a group of white nationalists to attack Congress, stole classified documents, sexually assaulted women and minors, defrauded the state of New York out of tax money, and committed every possible crime he could think of on his way to the top.

Biden failed to meet the moment, just as America’s mainstream media has. Meeting the moment, in this case, means calling Donald Trump and his supporters what they are: fascists. I founded this newsletter / blog in early August, months before the word entered our current discourse.

Now, fascist might undersell just how terrible Trump and his legion of loyal fools might really be. If someone is worse than all fascists from history, as Trump is, what word can be used to describe him?

Whatever word it ends up being should not be something mainstream media should hesitate to use. And, if reporters on the ground find themselves stifled from using the terminology they feel is accurate, it will take more than resignations and black squares in newspapers to change a media culture which has allowed, even encouraged, the rise of con man who wants to destroy them.