10
votes
Slow news is good news
Link information
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- Authors
- Monika Bauerlein, Clara Jeffery, Marianne Szegedy-Maszak, Pema Levy, Madison Pauly, Hannah Levintova, Graham Readfearn, Abigail Weinberg, Dan Friedman, Ari Berman
- Published
- Jun 4 2021
- Word count
- 3865 words
This is a request to support Mother Jones, but just as importantly it is about the importance of independent, non-profit journalism. The decline in support for quality journalism didn’t start with Trump, and it won’t end as his spotlight dims.
Indeed, Trump was as much a symptom of journalistic collapse as he was a perpetrator. I doubt he'd have managed to squeak into office if it wasn't for the hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars in free airtime he got from for-profit news corporations trying to capitalize on what rapidly became the self fulfilling prophecy of his ability to attract attention. Not to mention the hugely disproportionate focus on comparatively minor Clinton scandals to avoid the appearance of bias, and try to hold on to conservative viewers. That led to a hell of a lot of false equivalency thinking.
It also led to a lot of progressives thinking that neither candidate would be acceptable. I never thought Trump and Clinton were anything close to comparably bad. But a younger, more naive teaearlgraycold refused to vote for Clinton. In hindsight I can't see a Hillary presidency being much different from a Biden one - and I voted for Joe.