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- Why The Media is failing
Hey everybody - today is my birthday and my gift to myself is to take a day off from perusing the news.
That being said, I would recommend everyone read this column by Margaret Sullivan, former ombudsman for the NY Times. She writes on media, and this column hits home on our current situation.
Three prominent academics released a study last week whose findings are both shocking and unsurprising.
Their article, published in Foreign Affairs, is titled “The Price of American Authoritarianism.”
The takeaway is that in less than a year — this very year — the United States has moved swiftly from democracy to a form of authoritarianism.
…
“Many Americans still do not view the Trump administration’s behavior as a major departure from the practices of previous U.S. administrations,” they wrote. That’s dangerous in itself; and one reason for it is a media that’s been determinedly mired in its old ways.
Amid America’s fall, the news media has largely failed to meet the moment.
Journalists (with a few exceptions) are mostly documenting what’s happening and applying the same old journalistic techniques and traditions to the vastly different situation. There are minor adjustments but very little sense of the five-alarm fire.
Read it all.
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