The Legacy Press Are Exactly The Fucking Scumbags We Thought They Were

We need a free press. This is not what that looks like.

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President Elon Musk is waging war on the United States government with the aid of the authors of Project 2025. It’s the largest scandal in American history and the gravest constitutional crisis since the Civil War. The legacy press, however, is very busy watching the puppet Donald Trump wave shiny objects they know are not nearly as important.

LOOK AT ME! LOOK AT ME!

Will tariffs hurt the economy? Sure. Will they hurt the economy even a fraction as much if some rabid ideologue or idiot kid who hasn’t even graduated college crashes the entire US Treasury computer system controlling 6 TRILLION fucking dollars in payments? The fuck it will.

Elon Musk did not pick these people for their competence. He picked them for their willingness to do whatever they’re told to do. And if it all blows up? Well, the goal is to kill the federal government anyway so who gives a shit?

Now, the legacy press knows this is happening. They keep mentioning it in passing and then moving on to much more important things like Donald Trump threatening Panama again. Very important. Very serious.

But the most serious attack on the rule of law in our lifetimes just doesn’t seem to be front-page news for some reason. It’s almost like the legacy press is, I dunno…collaborating with the Trump regime to dismantle the United States government.

It’s really important to understand that this is deliberate. By reporting on the coup without actually calling it one or putting any real muscle behind the reporting, the legacy press is downplaying the severity of the attack. Never forget for one second that these are the people who wrote over one HUNDRED fucking articles about Joe Biden’s age in just THREE fucking days last summer.

They’ve written maybe a dozen stories about this attack so far and none of them have been headline news.

By making it just a minor story buried under MUCH MORE IMPORTANT NEWS, the press is telling the public that this is nothing to really pay attention to. Look over there. Follow the shiny object Trump is waving.

The legacy press decides what the narrative is and they are choosing to make this story disappear by hiding it in plain sight.

They’re exactly the fucking scumbags we thought they were all along.

Last week, Paul Krugman spilled the tea on why he left the New York Times. Mind you, Krugman is a Nobel Prize-winning economist who is (was) immensely popular with the readers of the Times. A real newspaper would do anything ANYTHING to keep him on. Instead, they all but fired him:

In September 2024 my newsletter was suddenly suspended by the Times. The only reason I was given was “a problem of cadence”: according to the Times, I was writing too often. I don’t know why this was considered a problem, since my newsletter was never intended to be published as part of the regular paper. Moreover, it had proved to be popular with a number of readers.

As someone who has worked in the news/publishing business for the last 15 years, I can tell you definitively that in no universe is there such a thing as “too much content” from one of your most popular writers. The phrase “too much content” when your readership is in the millions is an oxymoron.

Driftglass on the Professional Left Podcast made the salient point that while Krugman was very popular with the Times’ audience of The Poors like you and me, he was NOT popular with the Times’ REAL audience: The .01%. Krugman kept telling them their greed was harming the country and they don’t like to be told they’re the bad guy. Therefore, Krugman had to shut his fucking mouth, thank you very much.

It gets worse:

Also in 2024, the editing of my regular columns went from light touch to extremely intrusive. I went from one level of editing to three, with an immediate editor and his superior both weighing in on the column, and sometimes doing substantial rewrites before it went to copy. These rewrites almost invariably involved toning down, introducing unnecessary qualifiers, and, as I saw it, false equivalence. I would rewrite the rewrites to restore the essence of my original argument. But as I told Charles Kaiser, I began to feel that I was putting more effort—especially emotional energy—into fixing editorial damage than I was into writing the original articles. And the end result of the back and forth often felt flat and colorless.

I’ve had articles “fixed” where the end result was the literal opposite of what I originally wrote. It was infuriating and I’m just some schmuck at a keyboard with a lot of angry opinions. I can’t imagine what that was like for Paul Krugman who has written several books and did I mention he has a Nobel Prize in Economics?

Last week, we also found out that CNN told its anchors not to mention Trump is a twice-impeached convicted felon during coverage of the inauguration. They also forced out Jim Acosta because he wouldn’t stop telling Republicans that they were fascist liars.

My personal favorite was this article from the Columbia Journalism Review in which White House reporters could barely contain their glee at the return of Trump:

But for a surprising number of people on the daily White House beat, that concern is mixed with another, more privately expressed emotion: relief at finally being rid of the Joe Biden press operation.

“I think it’s important for people to understand the context, that we’re coming out of four years of Biden and things haven’t been great,” one White House print reporter told CJR. “There’ve been fewer eyeballs on the press briefings and less attention than under Trump, so people just don’t understand some of the very frustrating things that we’ve dealt with and that we hope are going to be rolled back.”

Translation: Biden was boooooring. He wouldn’t give them the access and gaffes and scandal they desperately crave. They had to report boring news. Not sensational shiny objects. How are they supposed to get book deals? How are they supposed to win awards? Where’s the excitement?!

I’ve been saying this since the 2020 election but, holy fuck, to just have them come out and admit is even more vile than I imagined. Some small part of my mind imagines the grim satisfaction I’ll have when Trump has the Proud Boys line up the White House press room against the wall and shoots them. “Is that enough excitement for you, you stupid fucks?”

So the legacy press has utterly and completely failed us on every level. Those who are not openly complicit are so blinded by their own greed and self-interest they refuse to acknowledge that their job is not to be “exciting” but to report on what is actually happening and to safeguard democracy.¹ And not for nothing, reporting on a coup is pretty fucking exciting, no? But decades of treating Republicans as “normal” no matter what they do has been ingrained on a genetic level in the legacy press.

This is why I’ve been telling people to cancel their subscriptions to the NYT, the Washington Post, definitely tell the LA Times to go fuck itself. Politico is owned by a pro-Trump scumbag. The Hill has been propaganda for years. CNN is bending the knee. If Rachel Maddow isn’t fired by MSNBC by the summer, it will be a miracle.

Find independent media to support. Your hometown papers. Local newsletters. Local news stations that haven’t been consumed by Sinclair. Journalists who have been driven out of the media by billionaire owners. Substacks and newsletters like this one.²

Rachel Maddow got into this on Monday’s show. The oligarchs want to destroy the press because control of the media means they can create whatever reality they want. That’s why Musk bought Twitter. That’s why Zuckerberg “suddenly” discovered he loves free speech that unleashes right-wing hate. That’s why Jeff Bezos is quietly neutering the Washington Post and Patrick Soon-Shiong is smothering the LA Times. It’s why Google has declared the United States a “sensitive country” whose information needs to be curtailed according to the dictates of the Dear Leader.

We need a free press and that means we need to put our money behind the outlets that will not cower in fear before the fascists. And when this is over, the collaborators must be held to account for poisoning our national dialogue for profit. Propaganda is not free speech and those who work to destroy this country need to be removed if we are to survive as a country.

There are 272 days until the first Blue Wave and it starts in Virginia, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania.

The legacy media has abandoned us in favor of sucking up to oligarchs and fascism. Find voices you trust (other than me) and subscribe where you can. Independent voices like the Opinionated Ogre will be needed in the coming days and we will require your support. This newsletter is free but for $5 a month or just $50 a year, you can keep the lights on.

1. If you legitimately think safeguarding democracy means “taking sides” and that’s a problem when one side is literally openly fascist, you’re not a journalist. You’re a fucking stenographer. Delete your account and find a new career.

2. But not JUST this one. Remember, anyone who tells you to only trust them as a news source cannot be trusted at all. The right and the alt-left have been doing this for years and look at the brainwashed imbeciles their audiences have turned into.