Anyone who has been surprised by the Trump/Musk messy divorce has not been paying attention. When it comes to egos and narcissism bigger than the Solar System, I remind you of the immortal words of Connor McLeod in “Highlander” – “there can only be one.” It is the clash of the titanic egos. It is diet coke, McDonald’s, and adultery versus ketamine, rocket fuel, and polygamy. Diet Coke is going to win this one. The reason is simple. Trump is a corrupt, dishonest, foul-mouthed, inattentive, mean-spirited, and spiteful old man. Musk is fucking weird. More people have personal familiarity with some of Trumps inadequacies. Musk is fucking weird.
There are a few things driving my opinion on this. Trump no longer needs Musk’s money. Moreover Trump is one vengeful vindictive SOB and he has been practicing for far longer than Musk. With the image of a sport made by combining professional wrestling with mud wrestling, my money on this one is on Trump.
I thought our Secretary of Education, Mrs. Amway, was particularly awful in her latest testimony before Congress. While the Trump appointees are indeed setting a pretty low bar for performance in this area, I think Mrs. McMahon was particularly execrable. She really knows nothing about her Department nor much about what it is supposed to do.
This is the funny stuff. The rest of what is going on in Washington is very unfunny. I happened to stream CNN’s live from Broadway broadcast of George Clooney’s “Good Night and Good Luck”, the story of Edward R Murrow’s incisive evisceration of Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s.
I found two things particularly dispiriting: First, the fact that, after almost 70 years, we are still a country where a significant chunk of the population can idolize a lying, amoral, cheating demagogue and grant him power in Washington. If you have not seen this, you really should. Very well done.
Second, the stark comparison between having a journalist with enough following and strength not only to stand up to power, but to set in motion (or meaningfully accelerate) the majority of the people and the politicians to take a step back and look at what was really happening. We do not have that today. We lost it when we lost Murrow, Kalb, and Cronkite, and their ilk who demanded quality of facts and had the backbone to pursue the actual truth. Yeah, we had little peeks at the past with the New York Times publishing the Pentagon Papers, the Washington Post’s Woodward and Bernstein proving Nixon was indeed a crook, and again a while later with the Boston Globe’s Baron, Robinson, and Garabedian exposing the Catholic Church’s complicity in covering up child abuse.
Flash forward to today. The former paragons of “within the Beltway” journalism have fallen from grace in a big way. The Gray Lady, The New York Times, uses the Hamas Ministries to source their articles and employees members of Hamas as reporters. The Washington Post, now owned by Jeff Bezos, refuses for the first time to endorse a Presidential candidate in order to not anger Donald Trump. Rupert Murdoch turned the Wall Street Journal’s editorial pages into a partisan mouthpiece. Murdoch creating an entire wing of the Republican party in the guise of a news network while calling its mostly political reporting “Fair and Balanced.” Mariel Garza, editorials editor for the Los Angeles Times, resigned (along with many of her staff) when its billionaire owner quashed the paper’s endorsement of Kamala Harris due to their fear of Trump.
And on and on ad nauseam. This is a far cry from Murrow or Cronkite, or the newspapers of old. There is a huge chasm between today and the past as recounted above.
Sure there have always been “partisan” papers. William Randolph Hearst is reputed to have helped engineer the Spanish-American War. Henry Ford published The Dearborn Independent, a rag dedicated to antisemitism. When I moved to my current city, the dominate paper was known as a “Republican” paper – they endorsed Hillary Clinton in 2016 – the first time in 100 years that they endorsed a Democrat.
And of course there have always been politicians willing to lie, cheat and steal and then deny it until presented with irrefutable facts.
But with all that, there were still papers (and radio, and TV) reporters and newsrooms dedicated to truth backed by the owners and willing to take on the powers that be. Not much anymore and certainly not from the “greatest” newspapers and newsrooms we counted on in the past.
We are not better off. In fact, we are much worse off, more divided, and less informed. That is not progress, it is regression.
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