Our Epic Media Failure

Today, Speaker of the non-House Mike Johnson was ask about SNAP benefits not being paid out by the federal gov’t.

His answer, of course, was a blatant lie. Yet not one “journalist” asked the easiest and most obvious follow up question, so I’ll phrase it for them.

“Mr. Speaker. That’s just not true. How do you square your purported Christian beliefs with your constant lying?”

At the same press conference, Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins was asked essentially the same question:

Again, no pushback on a blatant lie (not only a blatant lie, but a nonsensical one as well (why would you need contingency funds if the program is already funded?)

As a former candidate for office, nothing frustrated me more than reporters/journalists who a) didn’t do their job by holding power to account with critical questions (including of me as a candidate) and b) unbelievably, were not aware of their protections under the 1st Amendment and why they existed (sadly, more often true than not).

People reading this are by definition more informed than the vast majority of U.S. citizens. It’s the vast politically ignorant masses (sounds elitist, but, again, empirically true based on my 1st person experience) who our current media are shortchanging and, yes, to whom they are doing political injustice.

There’s an old saying that “You don’t pick a fight with someone who buys ink by the barrel.” Nonetheless, I spend a fair amount of time contacting my local and regional media trying to help them understand the importance of holding power to account and the reason they have 1A protections.

My conclusion: we need to do everything we can to support independent news media and to help create, as I alluded to in my post from the other day, a sustainable media ecosystem supportive of progressive policy/people with the ability to reach a broad swath of the public.

A tall order, sure, but as Ben Franklin, said at the close of the Constitutional Convention of 1787 when asked what form of gov’t they had devised, a monarchy or a republic, “A republic, if you can keep it.”